Could Patchy Mix be the best fighter the UFC has ever snapped up from the Bellator roster?

When Eddie Alvarez first came to the UFC in 2014, he arrived with a lot of fanfare. He’d already had a “Fight of the Year” candidate with Michael Chandler a year earlier, and then there was the rematch in which he won back Bellator’s lightweight title. That he overcame his debut loss against Donald Cerrone to become the UFC’s lightweight champion in 2016 still makes him one of the best, if not the best, Bellator fighters to crossover to the UFC.

Since then, we’ve seen a lot of good ones. Chandler himself came over in 2021. Cris Cyborg won the women’s featherweight title in the UFC, even if it was a ghost town. Alexander Volkov made an M-1 pitstop before quietly slipping into the UFC’s heavyweight ranks, and he’s had a very solid career, never straying far from contention.

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Lately, names like Michael “Venom” Page, Patricio Pitbull and Aaron Pico have made their way to the UFC, carrying varying degrees of threat and promise.

But on Saturday night, at UFC 316 in Newark, the fighter coming over thinks he might be the best of them all.

That fighter is Patchy Mix.

“When you really, truly look at it, I’m one round removed from being 21-0 right now,” Mix says. “I am a three-time Bellator world champion and I’m coming over at 20 wins, one loss, with an 80% finish rate. I finished 15 people, and not to mention I was 11-0 as an amateur. So I’ve won 31 of 32 fights. Not one guy that came over has done that, except maybe Justin Gaethje. He had credentials. He was 17-0 coming over from WSOF.”

Clearly the 31-year-old Mix has thought about this. He’s thought about the leap for a long time. He’s thought about the kind of waves he could make in one of the UFC’s deeper divisions, against the kinds of fighters who take the hog’s share of attention, all while he’s languished in the darker theater.

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It’s why, as he gets set to fight Mario Bautista on Saturday night’s UFC 316 pay-per-view, he sees it more like the veteran Bautista is heading for the buzz saw rather than vice-versa.

“Let’s put it like this,” Mix says. “I fought five championship world title fights in a row, five-round fights. Not a lot of guys get 25-minute fights to begin with, but I fought five main event, 25-minute fights in a row.”

Here he gives that a second to sink in.

“I’ve won all five of them,” he says. “Those are my last five fights. So I think that [Bautista’s] the one taking a step up, while I’m just taking a step up in the promotional aspect, moving from … let’s say the second-best league to the first-best league. The UFC is the premier league, so the main focus for me is staying calm and not letting the lights and all this — the attention, the fame of it — get to me. I’m just too grounded to let it, so my main thing is stay calm, stay focused and stay laser accurate. And that’s taking out Mario Bautista on Saturday. That’s bringing him to the floor, and that’s submitting him.”

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Mix doesn’t lack confidence. He’s won seven fights in a row, and he’s not only been vocal about what he’s going to do to guys in the past, he’s backed it all up. His two-part series with Magomed Magomedov showed that he has mettle, even as Magomedov pushed him through five rounds in Paris in his last Bellator fight. He knocked out Raufeon Stots with a wicked knee, and he submitted Sergio Pettis to unify the title 18 months ago.

He has done everything to distinguish himself as one of the best bantamweights in the world except prove it against the guys who compete within the eight walls of the UFC Octagon.

“I might not be the biggest name that has come over, but on paper I truly feel I’m the best-credentialed guy that has ever come over and I’m in my prime and I’m young,” he says. “So that’s the intrigue I feel. Everyone will know on Saturday just how dangerous and serious I am.”

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There is a lot for UFC fans to discover about Mix. He had a hardscrabble life in upstate New York growing up, just outside of Buffalo, where he says he fought as a kid to make ends meet. Fighting was a means to get what he needed. It was also a means to settle any disputes, of which there were many.

It was when he learned to refocus that edge that he started to — perhaps unwittingly at first — head toward becoming a martial artist.

“Wrestling was the only thing I ever knew when I was a kid, and I was raised by my mom and I was the youngest,” Mix says. “So I always had a chip on my shoulder, and I always settled everything with beating people up and s***. I don’t know why. It’s just in my nature. I’ve been fighting since I’ve been a kid, and I’ve been beating people up since I’ve been a kid.

“To be honest with you, I don’t know why … but I’ve channeled that now in my adult life to do it as a profession. It’s like it’s probably one of my most grateful things I have.”

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Mix’s only loss came against Juan Archuleta during the pandemic (a close fight in which two judges had it 48-47). Since then? He’s gone scorched earth, winning every fight, some of them — like the Stots fight — in resounding fashion.

And now he’s in the UFC. From a fan’s perspective, having Mix in the mix is fun. Not only does the partition come down for matchups that would’ve been impossible to make before, but he has experience with the most tyrannical bantamweight on the UFC’s roster, champion Merab Dvalishvili, who defends his title in Saturday night’s main event. Mix has rolled with Merab at Xtreme Couture, where he hubs his training camps.

“He’s rolled around with me,” Mix says, as a correction. “That’s how we should put it. Because I’m the high-level black belt in this situation. Like, if we said, ‘wrestled around,’ that would be different …”

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Not only has Merab rolled around with Mix, so has Khamzat Chimaev, Belal Muhammad, Dan Ige, Yaroslav Amosov and Julian Erosa — all of whom the much smaller Mix has grappled indistinguishably. It’s the kind of thing that makes fighting Bautista, in what might be the highest-profile fight of Mix’s career, feel a little less daunting,

And given his credentials as the reigning Bellator champion, the meritocracy will get very subjective if he smokes Bautista in his debut. Can he leapfrog the field and end up in a title shot if everything breaks just right? Any chance he could be next for his buddy, Merab?

If that’s the case, he says he wouldn’t hesitate.

“It’s just business, man,” Mix says. “We got to fight. I’d fight my own brother for that belt. That 12 pounds of gold is separating me from everything that I’ve ever wanted in my life. I could have security for my entire family for the rest of their lives and my kids’ kids. So that belt carries a lot of weight. It’s much more than the 12 pounds that’s on the shoulder.

“And I want it more than anything now that I’m here. I’d go through anything to get it.”