Today marks a historic occasion for the UFC and the mixed martial arts world.
As the UFC Roster Watch Twitter account confirmed, fighter Donald Cerrone was officially removed from the UFC roster.
It doesn’t come as any surprise as Donald laid down his cowboy hat and placed his UFC gloves on top of the octagon’s center after his loss at UFC 276.
Let’s send off Donald into retirement by remembering his long career and the hype he was able to generate over some of his biggest fights.
UFC Fight Night 139: Mike Perry Vs. Donald Cerrone
Donald has had many challenges over his career and plenty of war losses to go with it.
Entering into this fight with Mike Perry, Donald was coming off a loss to Leon Edwards.
Around this time, many began doubting Cowboy’s ability to keep competing at such a high level. At the time, Leon Edwards was an up-and-comer.
But Donald proved his doubters wrong after slugging it out with Mike and securing a verbal submission close to the end of the very first round.
During fight week and during the event, online searches for Donald Cerrone grew by a whopping 1992% and soared to 144,400 searches.
There was clearly plenty of excitement to see if Cowboy could silence the naysayers for this matchup.
UFC 246: Conor McGregor Vs. Donald Cerrone
Undoubtedly the Cowboy’s biggest event of his career was meeting The Notorious one at UFC 246.
Donald was unfortunately defeated by Conor in just 40 seconds but landed himself the biggest paycheck of his entire career.
As the noise of Conor McGregor’s belated return was being hyped up from all angles, in late November, Brett Okamoto broke the news that Donald Cerrone would be his next opponent.
Comparing the week before the announcement and the week of the announcement, online search volumes for Donald Cerrone grew by 1394%!
And the hype didn’t stop there.
By fight week for UFC 246, online searches for Donald Cerrone grew by another 488%.
The noise around the event was so electric, considering McGregor’s swift knockout, that the searches kept surging highly even after the event as searches grew another 47.5% reaching 687,500 searches globally.
