Jones beat the person who was the top ranked heavyweight in the UFC. No one was calling him a bum until Jones put him away. Even
on Sherdog, a plurality of voters picked Gane to win (45% to 41%, with 14% having no opinion):
So let's not act like we all knew Jones was given the "easiest possible matchup" and the win means nothing. Gane is a good fighter. Before the fight, most people here expected him to win. Jones is just that good.
I think Gane is an excellent fighter still to this day. It doesn't change the fact that he was the guy who lost to the previous champion and had a single win over Tai Tuivasa since then.
I never said he was an easy match up at all.
When Gane was thrown in there with a single win since losing, Pavlovich had the exact same last 2 wins as Cyril but was on a 5 fight win streak.
It's short term planning by the UFC. They threw Gane in there against Jones and he got destroyed. They then capitulated to Jones and gave him Stipe in a fight with both planning to retire, then they threw 2 guys on massive streaks against each other for a short notice interim belt because Jones wants to take Stipes legacy without having to fight 3 dangerous HWs to get the title defence record. Now they have a surprising star in Tom Aspinall and they want to shelf him for a retiring Jones.
The UFC does this all the time. They can't build stars unless they are undefeated and they keep stalling out divisions for stupid fights.
HW is semi dead for 8-12 months when you have a young guy willing to fight and defend.
LHW is semi dead with us waiting on Hill to be healthy. Alex has beat Jan and Jiri and we can move on from the ill advised interim type belt for Hill.
MW they are pushing Khamzat for some unknown reason (who can't fight in the US) when it's finally opened up with Strickland beating Izzy.
WW has been stalled for ages whilst Colby gets another shot with no ranked wins.
LW champ has only fought 1 top 5 fighter in his division.
FW champ just got wasted on a pointless short notice LW fight, when they could have used an actual LW and saved that rematch.
BW has a clear contender being skipped with a great story as the training partner of the champ who just lost the belt.
FW is the only division with a good match up by rankings.
None of this is a stab against Gane's skills at all. He never should have been the one to fight Jones, but his skillset was known at the time and that lack of ground game was there to be exploited by Jones.