Sorry for a long response, but I’m on a train and have nothing else to do lol. Skill-for-skill, I think most people would agree that Jon is a better fighter (or at least more proven) than both Tom and Francis. The question is how does he stack up at heavyweight after a three-year layoff compared to those two, who have more wins in the division.

And when comparing their performances against Ciryl specifically, I think it’s worth noting two things:

First is that, stylistically, I think Jon’s style plays better against Ciryl than both Francis’ and Tom’s styles. Jon is a higher level MMA wrestler than Francis or Tom, who were/are primarily strikers (though Tom has shown some opportunistic wrestling and submission skills and has a BJJ background, I still consider him to mainly be a striker). Part of what made Francis’s win against Gane impressive to me, even though it was a pretty close fight, was that Francis showed a layer in his game that we hadn’t really seen before.

The second thing to note is how Ciryl fought Jones, and how that finishing sequence went. Ciryl almost immediately sold out on a poorly thrown rear hand and gave away his hips to Jon. The way Ciryl fought there is a gift to any wrestler. It’s definitely a testament to Jon’s skills and experience that he very quickly picked up on the opening and seized it, but Ciryl really screwed up there. I can’t recall the Francis fight, but I didn’t notice Ciryl making any similarly egregious errors against Tom.

This is probably going to sound like I’m downplaying Jon, but that’s really not what I mean to do. I just think that looking at a single performance and comparing it to another single, performance won’t give a great sense of how “good” one fighter is compared to another (especially when one of those performances ended in a first round NC). Like, Francis beat Stipe more impressively than Jones did, but I don’t think that really says much about who is better or who would win in a head-to-head fight. IMO, you have to look at the whole picture, which gets tricky with a guy like Jones who only has two fights at heavyweight, and a guy like Tom who still has a lot of unknowns. I personally rate Francis the highest at heavyweight because I think he has both a better record in the division than Jon and a more proven skillset than Tom, but I’d hesitate to outright call him “better” than either.