Jiri Prochaska is proud to share the Octagon with Khalil Rountree.
The two popular light heavyweights clashed in a must-see match at UFC 320 earlier this month. After Rountree won the first two rounds, Prochaska scored a break in round three, but this led to a severe beating that resulted in Rountree being called out.
Due to the damage inflicted by Prochaska, Rountree was rescued from the Octagon and missed the official decision to be announced. Prochaska did not have a chance to speak with Rountree after the match, so she was asked to send a message to the recent title challenger.
“The first thing I want to say to Khalil is thank you,” Prochaska told MMA Fighting. “Thank you for a great match. Thank you. Because every time you share a cage with some opponent, he’s your teacher as well, because he teaches you how to overcome him, how to overcome his attacks, how to learn, how to get better. Because that’s what we do. … I’m sharpening him, he’s sharpening me.
“That’s the whole point of fighting, to get better, to get better as a person, and to find a way to overcome someone, even yourself, with your performance, to be better with your performance, to be better than your opponent. … I’m grateful to him, especially to him, for sharing the same cage with him, because there weren’t many opponents as dynamic and tough as him.”
Prochaska is currently 2-0 in 2025, including a knockout win over former champion Jamahal Hill at UFC 311 in January.
‘The BJP’ hopes this win puts him in a position to fight for the light heavyweight title next, whether it’s against Alex Pereira or someone else, but Prochaska, who rewatched the fight, was less than thrilled with what he saw before the third round.
“I thought about (what this win meant). For me, this was a failure to show what I had really worked for,” Prochaska said. “I just watched that game, and I don’t want to say I hate my performance, but I will say that I was better than what I showed. I was a lot better and I really worked hard to show my improvement, to show what I’ve been working on. My timing on the counters was a lot better, and I was a lot better with the spacing and movement between us.”
“But in the end, I had to go back to basics. Hard work, thorough hunting, and just hard work. Hard work alone beats Khalil (a fighter like). Nothing else. Just corner him. That’s the last thing you want to do in sparring or in a fight, because it’s the last thing you want to do, and it’s such a (high) risk to do it. So this was like the last option for me. And after two rounds, that’s what I wanted to do. Tactically (something good happened), find a good strategy to finish it, to get him, to find some preparation for Khalil.I really needed it because it was the final round.I had to finish him by knockout.
“(The only possibility) was to win by knockout, so I’m glad we found a way to do that.”
Prochaska is hoping to avenge her two losses to Pereira and considers it a “dream” scenario. That’s why I was cageside watching Pereira’s lopsided stoppage victory over Magomed Ankalaev in the main event of UFC 320.
Of course, his 80-second knockout victory over his rival likely earned Pereira an A grade, but the hard-working Prochaska graded his performance to a more stringent standard.
“(I give it) a C,” Prochaska said. “Because C is neither good nor bad. It might be a little bad, but eventually you’ll find a way. So that’s C.”