If Demetrious Johnson really wants to make history next, he might need some help

There were moments during Saturday’s UFC on FOX 24 main event when it almost didn’t seem fair. Lots of moments, actually. Maybe even the majority of the moments.

UFC flyweight champion Demetrious Johnson dismantled Wilson Reis with a surgical efficiency in the network-televised headliner at Sprint Center in Kansas City, Mo. He took apart the head, then body, then finally the arm, which convinced the more sentient parts of the challenger to admit he’d been beaten.

And there it was, Johnson’s 10th straight successful title defense, this one about as close to flawless as a professional fighter can get. How is he supposed to top this? When you’ve cleaned out your division with a series of impressively one-sided wins over increasingly outmatched opponents like Reis (22-7 MMA, 6-3 UFC), what do you do for an encore?

Here’s where Johnson (26-2-1 MMA, 14-1-1 UFC) is in a uniquely difficult situation. A dominant champion in almost any other weight class has at least two available options when he runs out of contenders to smash in his own division. He can go up a division to prove his greatness against bigger, stronger opponents, or he can starve himself down a weight class to pick on someone smaller.

But Johnson’s already in the lightest division the UFC has, so dropping weight isn’t an option. He’s also already tried life as a bantamweight, and it didn’t go so great.

That’s not to say that Johnson was lost at 135 pounds, back before the UFC gave him a weight class of his own to dominate. He lost all of twice in five years as a bantamweight, and one of those came against then-UFC champion Dominick Cruz, one of the greatest bantamweights in MMA history.

Still, that may have been all the proof Johnson needed in order to understand that weight classes exist for a reason. He was merely very good at 135 pounds; he’s the best there ever was just 10 pounds down the road. So now what?

According to Johnson, it’s history. On Saturday he tied former UFC middleweight champ Anderson Silva’s record for consecutive title defenses. Now he wants to break it.

But if the UFC is forced to pull another warm body at random from the flyweight ranks, I think we all know how it will go. The more Johnson wins, the less impressive the competition seems to get, in large part because the UFC has to reach further and further down the list to find someone he hasn’t beaten yet. Etching his name into MMA history is a noble enough goal, but eventually this becomes a game of diminishing returns.

That could be where current UFC bantamweight champion Cody Garbrandt comes in. He’s talked up a potential fight with Johnson lately, even throwing around the idea of dropping to flyweight to meet Johnson on his own terms.

It’s ambitious talk for a guy who has yet to defend the title he just won in December. It also might be the one thing that could make Johnson’s attempt at a record-breaking title defense seem truly historic, and not just routine.

Johnson’s problem, insofar as he has one, springs from his greatest strength: his consistency.

Every few months for nearly five years now, he’s showed up and done exactly the same thing, with no apparent regard for the man on the other side of the cage. No letdowns. No bad nights. No performances that even hinted at the possibility he may have gotten complacent in training camp. He’s the MMA version of chess-playing robot that never makes the wrong move.

But when that consistency starts to look too much like predictability, it seems less impressive. People get bored. Even the historic achievement seems inevitable.

What Johnson needs more than anything now is a new kind of challenge. Even if – maybe especially if – it comes in the form of one that he wasn’t quite up for the last time he tried it.

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