Joe Rogan Says Tai Tuivasa May Survive a Cut in a Shallow Division
Joe Rogan told Sean Sharaf that fighting hard at heavyweight can be enough to stay in the UFC, and he used that idea on Tai Tuivasa. The exchange is from JRE MMA Show #186, released October 1, less than two weeks after Tuivasa dropped an eighth straight fight.
Rogan put the roster math on the depth of the division rather than on a win. “If you fight hard as a heavyweight, you have a very good chance they won’t cut you,” Rogan said. “Because the heavyweight division is insanely shallow. It’s really shallow.”
“I really hope they don’t cut Ty,” Sharaf said. “I saw him fight. He put up a f***ing tough fight, man.” The UFC has not announced a release, so the conversation on the podcast was about a possibility, not a decision already made.
Rogan agreed with the effort and still did not like the pattern. “Oh, he fought so well. He fought so hard,” he said, before adding that Tuivasa is “fun, but I hate seeing that guy keep taking all these punches.” He then counted the streak out loud. “Like, he’s had seven losses in a row, now eight.”
That eighth loss came on September 19 at UFC 331 in Los Angeles. Robelis Despaigne beat Tuivasa by split decision at Crypto.com Arena, with two judges scoring it 29-28 for Despaigne and one scoring it 29-28 for Tuivasa. Despaigne took him down repeatedly and landed hard shots on the ground, and Tuivasa was bleeding by the end of a fight that went the full 15 minutes.
The result left Tuivasa at 14-11 and 8-11 in the UFC. His last win was a second-round knockout of Derrick Lewis in February 2022. The losses since then have come against Ciryl Gane, Sergei Pavlovich, Alexander Volkov, Marcin Tybura, Jairzinho Rozenstruik, Tallison Teixeira, Louie Sutherland, and now Despaigne.
Sharaf had a personal stake in the name. On the same episode he said he had been booked to fight Tuivasa, then pulled out of that camp after his nose was broken, and went on to knock out Gable Steveson in 12 seconds on the same UFC 331 card. He used Tuivasa as the example of a fighter trying to find one win before the streak ends the run.
“And that’s the thing, like, you just wanna go out on top,” Sharaf said. “Everyone’s just like, oh, let me just f***ing win one. I just wanna win one. I just wanna, like, Tony Ferguson.” Tony Ferguson is the fighter Tuivasa tied. Ferguson also lost eight UFC fights in a row before leaving the promotion in 2024, and Bloody Elbow noted the shared mark after UFC 331.
Rogan’s “jeez” covered the quality of some of those losses, not a call for a release. Three of the recent defeats, against Rozenstruik, Teixeira, and Sutherland, went to decision, and the Despaigne fight was close enough for a split. The earlier part of the streak included stoppages by Gane, Pavlovich, Volkov, and Tybura.
Nothing in the clip settles the roster question. Rogan’s case for keeping Tuivasa is the same case he made for hard-fighting heavyweights in general: the division is thin, and a fighter who still makes a fight can be harder to replace than the record suggests. Whether the UFC treats an eight-fight skid that way is a decision the promotion had not announced when the episode came out.
