Joe Rogan and Brendan Schaub react to Francis Ngannou’s first-round KO of Curtis Blaydes

UFC color commentator Joe Rogan was not on duty for Saturday’s UFC Beijing broadcast, and instead hosted one of his popular Fight Companion podcasts for the card, alongside his friends Brendan Schaub, Bryan Callen and Eddie Bravo.

As you can probably imagine, the whole gang was quite impressed by the UFC Beijing main event, which saw former UFC heavyweight title challenger Francis Ngannou rebound from losses to Stipe Miocic and Derrick Lewis with a thunderous, first-round knockout of streaking American wrestler Curtis Blaydes.

Here’s what Joe Rogan and company had to say about the fight.

https://youtu.be/d7eQcuBRnYA?t=5625

“I don’t think it was an early stoppage. It looks like it was almost an early stoppage, and then they let it go on, and then it was a decent stoppage,” Joe Rogan said, giving the stoppage his seal of approval. “Didn’t it seem like at the beginning they were going to stop it [earlier]?”

“The level of standup between then — I mean Curtis Blaydes is a good standup fighter but a really good wrestler,” Rogan added, discussing the pair’s varying skillsets. “His wrestling stats are some of the best in the heavyweight division ever.”

One of Brendan Schaub’s first thoughts was how tough this loss is going to be for Curtis Blaydes to swallow. The American did, after all, fly across the planet only to lose in less than a minute.

“Can you imagine being Curtis Blaydes right now? You took that plane for 20 hours to get knocked out in 45 seconds? The worst,” Schaub said. “The worst.”

“Good for Ngannou to get back on track — I wasn’t crazy about the fight for him,” he added

Interestingly, the group eventually got talking about Francis Ngannou’s last fight: a decision defeat to Derrick Lewis. While this fight was expected to be a barnburner, it went down as perhaps the worst bout of the year, as neither fighter threw anything notable in the way of offense.

Despite the fact that this fight was extremely forgettable, both Rogan and Schaub expressed interest in seeing the pair fight again.

“It was the squeakiest of squeaky margins for Derrick to win because nothing really happened,” Joe Rogan said. “We were talking about that fight like ‘holy shit, it’s going to be bombs away.’”

“I would love to see them go at it again actually,” Brendan Schaub replied.

“I would love to see that,” Rogan concluded.

This article first appeared on BJPENN.COM on 11/25/2018.