Former No. 1 contender Gabriel Gonzaga had an equally impressive performance. Facing off with former All-American wrestler Josh Hendricks, Gonzaga scored a powerful first round knockout, needing just 61 seconds.

Pulling out of clinch, Gonzaga reared back and crushed Hendricks with a shot to the chin. Hendricks crashed to the mat and Gonzaga made sure he stayed there, landing one more punch before the fight was called.

“I want a title shot, and next time I’m going to get the belt,” Gonzaga said.

Welterweight Dustin Hazelett added to his personal highlight reel of submission finishes with a beautiful arm bar victory over Tamdan McCrory. Showing the flowing transitions that mark the true art of MMA, Hazelett trapped McCrory with an omoplata shoulder lock, then hyperextended his arm into the submission. In his last fight in June, he scored another armbar submission, but that time went from taking Burkman’s back into a rolling arm bar.

Aaron Riley returned to the UFC after almost three years away with a unanimous decision win in a throwdown slugfest with Jorge Gurgel.

The two lightweights unloaded their offensive arsenals in the last fight before the television portion of the card went live, but it was Riley who got the better of the exchanges, mixing up leg kicks, head kicks and strikes to strong effect.

Riley had his best success in the third, when he landed a head kick and followed up with a flurry that hurt Gurgel but couldn’t finish him. It was the second straight loss for the Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt Gurgel, who despite his grappling proficiency almost always prefers to strike.

Lightweight Jeremy Stephens got back on the winning side of the ledger scoring a devastating third-round TKO over the debuting Rafael Dos Anjos. After a spirited grappling match dominated the first two rounds, Stephens put an end to things quickly in the third.

With Dos Anjos’ back to the cage, Stephens wound up with an uppercut and connected right on the point of his opponent’s chin. Dos Anjos crashed to the canvas and Stephens pounced, adding a few unanswered strikes before the referee called a stop to the action. The shot electrified the crowd, which reacted to every subsequent replay.

“I’ve been working on that uppercut all week for [defense against the shot],” Stephens said after. “Hermes Franca told me to throw it a couple seconds before I threw it.”

“I threw everything I had in that punch,” he said.

Dos Anjos lay prone for a few seconds, but walked off under his own power.

In other preliminaries matches, welterweight Matt Brown defeated Ryan Thomas by arm bar submission, and lightweight Mark Bocek had a dominant win, finishing Alvin Robinson with a rear naked choke in the third round.

Event awards
The UFC gave out $60,000 bonus awards for the following performances:
Fight of the Night: Riley and Gurgel
Knockout of the night: Stephens
Submission of the night: Hazelett

Other notes
The 14,272 fans in attendance made up the fourth-biggest gate in the UFC's history, generating $4.8 million. The only events that drew more money were 2006's UFC 66 (Chuck Liddell vs. Tito Ortiz), which drew $5.4 million, UFC 83 (Georges St. Pierre vs. Matt Serra) at $5.1 million, and UFC 79 (Georges St. Pierre vs. Matt Hughes and Wanderlei Silva vs. Chuck Liddell) which drew $5 million.