Are we ready to believe in Stipe Miocic yet? And if not, will breaking a record really matter?

It took a little less than two-and-a-half minutes and a couple of right hands, and just like that, Stipe Miocic had joined an illustrious but dangerous club. The current UFC heavyweight champion has now successfully defended his title twice in a row.

One more and he becomes a part of history, the only man to defend the belt three consecutive times. That would make him arguably the greatest heavyweight in UFC history, which would be cool if only you could get him to care about it.

After taking his revenge on Junior Dos Santos (18-5 MMA, 12-4 UFC) in Saturday’s UFC 211 pay-per-view headliner in Dallas, Miocic (17-2 MMA, 11-2 UFC) showed up at the post-fight press conference seemingly just to drive home how unimportant it was to him to be the man who breaks the least impressive and yet most treacherous record in UFC title history.

“I really don’t care,” Miocic said. “I mean, yeah, if I keep winning, I’ll break history. Big deal. I’m just going to keep winning. I like winning. It’s fun. I like being called champ, especially.”

That about sums up Miocic’s title reign. Some heavyweight champs are terrifying individuals, glowering giants who stomp their way through the division with all the grace and manners of an invading Visigoth. That’s a relatively easy thing for both fans and promoters to understand. That’s what they expect, to some extent.

So when a guy rolls in like a 250-pound version of Dennis the Menace, acting like the best thing about being heavyweight champ is getting to hang out with basketball stars, it’s tough to know what to make of him. Isn’t he supposed to be the baddest man on the planet? Why does he just seem happy to be here?

That’s our problem, not Miocic’s. It’s a problem of expectations, but also one driven by recent history. Anyone who’s been following this sport for any length of time knows not to get too attached to the UFC heavyweight champ. Bad things happen to them, and usually pretty quickly.

They run face-first into someone’s right hand. They get hurt. They get sick. They catch a minivan to the femur or they decide they’d rather battle the UFC in court than wait around for the next contender. Usually it doesn’t take that long.

The man who would break that cycle must have to be some sort of messiah. So we told ourselves, anyway. He’d be the one foretold by prophecy, the fighter who could defend that belt a whopping three times – or, dare we even hope for it, possibly more.

A guy like that, you expect to know him when you see him. What you don’t expect is for him to remain blissfully indifferent to whether or not he even is the guy.

And yet here we are, with Miocic stacking up wins and strolling obliviously toward history, showing no signs that he’s interested in changing to suit our concept of what a great heavyweight should be.

It’s funny, we had all these other heavyweight champs who fit the mold, but what they were missing was the magic number of wins. Then you have Miocic, who seems like he could very easily wind up with the requisite wins, and the only complaint is that he doesn’t fit the mold.

Or maybe it’s something else. Maybe it’s that, after years of feeling like heavyweights are flipping a coin when they fling leather at each other’s heads, breaking the record would feel less like a historic validation and more like a string of good luck.

Maybe, in the absence of a personality strong enough to convince us that he’s a fighter of destiny, we’re inclined to treat him as the first guy to come up with an improbable but not impossible streak of throwing coins that all come up heads.

Of course, that’s a question for the future, since Miocic hasn’t broken any records yet. He’s tied the mark, sure. He’s done what Randy Couture and Brock Lesnar did before him, but then so did Tim Sylvia.

The good thing about shrugging his way into UFC history is that at least you know he won’t be awed by the power of the moment. The problem is, if you do it all while telling us that it’s no big deal, you might accidentally get us to agree with you.

For more on UFC 211, check out the UFC Events section of the site.