UFC 162 Results: Recapping the Bonuses from Silva vs. Weidman Fight Card

UFC 162 went down Saturday night from Las Vegas, Nevada. At the end of the evening, there was a new middleweight champion, as Chris Weidman upset longtime belt holder and pound-for-pound kingpin Anderson Silva to begin a new and strange era not only for the division, but also for the UFC and the sport of MMA as a whole.

Weidman captured the title thanks to a knockout victory at 1:18 of the second round, when he caught a taunting Silva with a hard left hook. Weidman secured the stoppage with ground strikes, but Silva appeared unconscious at the moment he first hit the canvas, and as such, the fight was ruled a knockout.

In the wake of the watershed main event, it probably will not come as a surprise that the UFC handed Weidman a $50,000 bonus check for Knockout of the Night. It was certainly a sweet capper for Weidman (10-0), who at age 29 is the first new UFC middleweight champion in nearly seven years. Silva originally captured the belt from Rich Franklin in 2006.

Because there were no submission wins on the evening, the UFC instead distributed bonuses for two Fight of the Night winners, meaning four fighters received $50,000 bonus checks on top of their normal fighter pay.

Every Fight of the Night bonus winner hailed from the featherweight division. In the first, former lightweight champion Frankie Edgar, fighting for only the second time at the 145-pound division, took a unanimous-decision victory over up-and-comer Charles Oliveira.

The other FOTN bonus winners were Cub Swanson and Dennis Siver. Swanson defeated Siver by TKO in the third round and, in the process, may have vaulted himself to the very top of the 145-pound division.

Also on the main card, middleweight Tim Kennedy defeated fellow UFC newcomer Roger Gracie by unanimous decision, and middleweight Mark Munoz took a decision over Tim Boetsch.