Let's start with the actual sporting event, because apparently nobody saw it. Rico Verhoeven, the longtime Glory heavyweight kickboxing king, walked into what was reportedly only his 2nd pro boxing match and stopped Oleksandr Usyk — the unified, undisputed, pound-for-pound darling of boxing — late in the 11th round. That's the kind of result that should have broken sports Twitter into pieces. Instead it barely registered, and Dave Portnoy is as confused as the rest of us trying to piece it together after the fact.
Portnoy trying to confirm the basic facts of the upset in real time.
I didn’t even know this fight was happening. This was this guy Rico’s 2nd professional boxing match? He was a kickboxer before? And he was beatinf Usyk and they stopped it basically after the bell in the 11th? Am I getting this all correct? I’m confused.
If you've followed Usyk's run — the Joshua wins, the Fury wins, the cruiserweight-to-heavyweight clean sweep — you know how absurd this sounds on paper. A kickboxer crossing codes and stopping the best heavyweight on earth in his 2nd pro fight isn't supposed to happen. The fact that it ended near the bell in the 11th, with Verhoeven reportedly ahead, only makes the story weirder. And yet the feeds were drowning in something else entirely.
Portnoy admitting the algorithm fed him hours of Manziel-Menery and almost nothing of the actual fight.
It’s a really sad state of affairs or a sad commentary on my social media algorithm or maybe a sad commentary on me that I saw way more about the Manziel/Menery circus which I could give two fucks about than this actual fight. I gotta get better or something
That's the real indictment here. A genuine heavyweight upset got swallowed whole by the Johnny Manziel celebrity-MMA spectacle against Mark Menery, which by all accounts went exactly how you'd expect a former Heisman winner taking on a podcaster to go. John Rich, for one, was not mad about it.
John Rich shrugging and admitting Johnny Football ground-and-pounding a podcaster was, in fact, decent content.
I didn’t hate watching Johnny Football ground and pound a podcaster. Celebrity MMA is alright
And that's where we are in 2026. The biggest boxing upset in years gets buried because Johnny Football is out here doing cage work for content. Celebrity combat sports has officially become more algorithm-friendly than the real thing, and the people running heavyweight boxing should probably take that personally. Rico Verhoeven just authored one of the wildest crossover stories the sport has ever seen, and half the audience didn't even know the bell rang.