The first fight is the centrepiece, and the round data is more nuanced than 'KO R3'. For five minutes the short-notice debutant was the better fighter: Costa out-landed Albazi 11-9 and stuffed all three of his takedown attempts. Then a counter right cross dropped Costa in Round 2 and the fight changed shape — 4:24 of closed-guard top control, 18 of 29 significant strikes landed to Costa's 1 of 9, 12 of 20 ground strikes. In Round 3 Albazi mixed front kicks with a timed double-leg on a Costa entry, Costa got back up, and an uppercut dropped him again; the stoppage came at 2:13. What it proved is that Albazi's counters beat Costa's entries and that, once hurt and pinned, Costa had no answer — the pattern every later Costa loss repeated. What it did not prove is that Albazi beats him at range. Costa was booked 24 days out, after Brandon Royval withdrew with a broken wrist, and 64 days after a LUX title fight. The market priced a mismatch at −425 to −525, and it was a real contest until one right hand landed.
The case against Albazi is not the two losses — Moreno and Horiguchi are among the best flyweights in the world. It is the shape of his numbers. His striking differential went from +1.07 significant strikes per minute over his first four UFC fights to −2.80 over his last three; his takedown accuracy from 50% to about 10%; his submission attempts to zero since June 2023. Along the way he was diagnosed with supraventricular tachycardia after the Kara-France fight and had heart surgery, had neck surgery in 2024 after the injury that cost him the first Moreno date, and was not medically cleared for an August 2025 main event against Tatsuro Taira. Every one of those facts could be behind him. He did go 15 minutes with Horiguchi, though he was rocked twice and bloodied doing it. None of the numbers since 2023 show the fighter who stopped Costa. The counter-case has to be stated honestly: his decline was measured entirely against ranked opponents (#3, #2, #8), and Costa is unranked. Against unranked UFC opponents Albazi is 4-0 and out-landed all four, Costa included. How much of the decline is health and age, and how much is opposition, is the single biggest question in the projection, and the opposition split points toward opposition.
Costa has changed in the other direction. He entered the UFC as a jiu-jitsu fighter who could strike and is now a striker who uses jiu-jitsu to finish: four UFC knockouts, one rear-naked choke from a back take after a hurt Durden turned away. He is 5-2 since the first fight, but the record hides a split. The five men he beat never took him down (0 of 13) and held him for 32 seconds combined. The three who beat him — Albazi, Erceg by decision, Coria by third-round TKO — each landed a takedown and controlled him for 15:41 between them. Neither man is a real takedown wrestler at UFC level (8 of 32 and 4 of 15), so ground time comes from knockdowns and fence clinches. That makes the first clean knockdown, or the first long clinch, the most important event in the fight: whoever wins it gets the position, the control time and the finishing chances that follow. Costa's knockdown rate is about three times Albazi's, 0.88 to 0.30 — but Albazi's only UFC knockdowns have come against Costa, and in the 12:13 they have shared Costa has never put him down.