JRE MMA Show #183 with Rico Verhoeven
13 claims didn't hold up. False, distorted, or one-sided. Unverified claims don't count against it.
Enough got stretched that you'll want the sources open.
Claim by claim(20 claims flagged)
Glory kickboxing matches are scored by five judges.
Neither of them claimed to know. Joe asks "what do they have, four or five?" and the guest answers "five, I believe." That is two people guessing out loud, and the same exchange produced a second row on this episode.
There are very few American champions in MMA.
This overstates things. As of now roughly a third of UFC's champions, including Justin Gaethje, Sean Strickland and Kayla Harrison, are American, which is actually the single biggest national group among current title holders. So calling it 'very few' doesn't match how the champions actually break down, even though Americans no longer dominate the sport the way they once did.
Alex Pereira was the biggest star in the sport of kickboxing.
There is real substance here. Pereira held two Glory titles at the same time, a first for the promotion, and became one of kickboxing's most recognizable names before moving to the UFC. But calling him definitively the single biggest star skips over other massive draws like Rico Verhoeven, who anchored Glory's heavyweight division for over a decade, so this is more a one-sided opinion than a settled fact.
The WBC interim champion is Ajit Kabya.
The name in this row came out of a mangled caption of a fighter's name spoken in passing. Marking it false corrects the captions rather than the speaker, so the row is withdrawn.
Glory kickboxing uses five judges to score matches.
Neither of them claimed to know. Joe asks "what do they have, four or five?" and the guest answers "five, I believe." That is two people guessing out loud, and this row duplicates another one from the same exchange.
Francis Ngannou approached Rico Verhoeven about an MMA fight weeks before his professional boxing match against Alexander Usyk.
There's truth to this. Verhoeven really did turn down a big money fight tied to Ngannou shortly before his May 2026 boxing match with Usyk, choosing to keep his word on the Usyk fight instead. But the offer came through Jake Paul's promotion company, not from Ngannou personally reaching out to him.
Deontay Wilder is the greatest one-punch knockout artist in the history of the sport.
Wilder really is one of the hardest punchers boxing has seen, with a knockout rate near 96 percent, the highest ever for a heavyweight champion, plus multiple knockout of the year awards. But 'the greatest one-punch knockout artist in history' is a subjective superlative, and plenty of boxing historians would put names like George Foreman or Earnie Shavers in that same conversation. It's a widely repeated opinion, not a provable fact.
The heavyweight division in boxing is always where the most money is generated.
That's not right as a blanket statement. The biggest grossing fight in boxing history is Mayweather vs Pacquiao from 2015, a welterweight bout that pulled in over 600 million dollars, more than any heavyweight fight has ever made. The money follows the biggest stars and stakes, not automatically the heavyweight division.
The guest performs a full-body strength and conditioning workout three times per week consisting of 40 total reps per exercise with 30-second rest intervals between sets.
There's a real training structure behind this, but the rep count is inflated. Verhoeven's strength work really is three full body sessions a week with 30 second rest between exercises, which matches. But the reps per exercise are reported as 20 to 24, not 40.
The guest appeared in the movies Den of Thieves, Den of Thieves 2, and Road House.
The guest is listing his own acting credits when Joe asks how many movies he has done. Marking a man false about the films he appeared in is not a fact check anybody asked for.
Tom Aspinall has had two eye surgeries since his fight with Ciryl Gane.
There's truth here, but the count is short. Aspinall did need surgery after Gane's eye pokes, but by mid-2026 he'd had three total procedures, one on his left eye and two on his right, not two.
Ciryl Gane has a history of eye-poking opponents in fights.
Gane did poke Tom Aspinall in both eyes at UFC 321 in October 2025, ending that fight in a no contest, so there's something real here. But calling it a history overstates it, that's the one documented eye poke incident on his record, not a repeated pattern.
Ciryl Gane has been finished by Jon Jones and Francis Ngannou.
Half right. Jon Jones really did finish Gane, by guillotine choke submission in the first round at UFC 285. But Gane's loss to Francis Ngannou went the distance, a five round unanimous decision rather than a finish.
The population of the Netherlands is between 60 and 70 million people.
Joe asked how many people live in Holland and the guest fired back "60, 70 million" with a laugh, and then both of them immediately called it a small country. It was a throwaway line, not a population estimate, so it is not something to correct him on.
Professional fighters can only compete at their prime for approximately nine years.
The duration of an athlete's prime in combat sports is highly subjective and varies significantly based on individual recovery, weight class, and damage sustained. There is no universally established scientific consensus that fixes a professional fighter's prime to exactly nine years.
Conor McGregor took a full year off from MMA to prepare for his boxing match against Floyd Mayweather.
McGregor did step away from MMA to make the Mayweather fight happen, but it wasn't a full year. His last fight was UFC 205 in November 2016 and the Mayweather bout was in August 2017, so the gap was closer to nine months.
Ian Garry suffered a knee injury from an oblique kick during his fight against Shavkat Rakhmonov.
This has it backwards. It was Shavkat Rakhmonov, not Ian Garry, who came out of that fight hurt. Rakhmonov carried a knee problem into the bout that got worse over the five rounds and eventually needed surgery, and Garry was the one landing kicks to the leg, not the one injured by them.
The guest is the greatest heavyweight kickboxer of all time.
This is Joe paying the guest a compliment as the episode ends, and the guest thanking him for it. Greatest of all time is an opinion, and this one was offered as praise rather than as a claim.
Kickboxing is the second most popular sport in the Netherlands after soccer.
Soccer really is the most popular sport in the Netherlands, but the next most popular sports by participation are field hockey and volleyball, not kickboxing. The Dutch dominate kickboxing at the elite competitive level, but that's a different thing from it being the second most played sport nationally.
Medical consensus has shifted to conclude that there is no benefit to surgically removing the meniscus compared to stitching it.
There's a real shift here, but it's overstated. Research does show that repairing a torn meniscus is generally better for long term knee health than removing it, since removal raises arthritis risk down the road. But meniscectomy still has faster recovery and remains the better option for certain tear types and patients, so it's not accurate to say there's no benefit to removal at all.
All of this ran on its own. The claims got pulled out of the transcript, then checked against live sources.
This can get things wrong. Follow the sources and decide for yourself.
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JRE drops four or five episodes a week. We check every one and send a short note with the Jamie Meter and the claims that didn't hold up.