The first big knockout of the 2025 came from Jacobe Smith, a fighter fresh off the Contender Series, who blasted a left hand through the head of Preston Parsons at a UFC Fight Night on Jan. 11. We say “through” because the shot was so clean that, well, it was like the proverbial hot knife through butter. In fact, that left hand just kind of kept going, as if Parsons’ head wasn’t even its final destination.

Six long months later, Smith is finally making his return to action at UFC 317, where he’ll face Niko Price on Saturday night’s preliminary card. That punch to kick off the year, it turns out, was money. Smith finds himself as much as an 25-to-1 favorite on BetMGM over a foe with nine times as many fights in the UFC.

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And if you talk to “Cobe,” as he’s known, you get the idea that he’s one of the best-kept secrets in the welterweight division.

“I understand what [Price] is and I understand my capabilities,” Smith says, “and if you know me — if you’ve followed me through my wrestling career — I could wrestle a trash-ass opponent or the No. 1 guy in the country, and either one of those matches could be close. It’s more so focusing on me and what I want to do — and once I figure that out, it ain’t no stopping me.”

Confident? Maybe, but bursting at the seams might be more like it. Smith is anxious for fans to see what Vegas already knows — which is that he’s a dark horse to make some serious noise in a division already teeming with contenders.

To understand that dark horse status, you have to work backward.

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Smith lives in Crandall, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. He trains at Fortis MMA, which is half an hour from his house, and near enough to his combat roots, as he was a standout collegiate wrestler at Oklahoma State University. It was his wrestling buddy (and former Bellator fighter) Kyle Crutchmer who introduced Smith to Daniel Cormier, a fellow OSU Cowboy.

The two became fast friends.

Smith has trained with Cormier and the likes of Khabib Nurmagomedov up in California whenever he can. At one point he was even signed to fight in Nurmagomedov’s Eagle FC, but the pandemic prevented him from ever debuting. Still, he has raced out to a 10-0 professional MMA record, including two wins thus far under the UFC umbrella, one of which came on the aforementioned Contender Series. The wrestling pedigree is in his back pocket.

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But the hands might be the difference-makers.

Those hands, he says, came from training with his older brother, Lonnie Wilson, who was a Golden Gloves boxing champion. It was hang or be hung.

“He was three or four years older than me, too” he says. “And my daddy was so hype, he was always, ‘Get your ass up, let’s train.’ I’m like, dude, I don’t train.”

This is where we work backward some more to understand where Smith is now. Smith’s father was a football player who was drafted by the Oakland Raiders, and his mother was a volleyball player in the Junior Olympics. Athletes all around him, but Smith didn’t train because he couldn’t. At least not until he was around 12 or so. He was born with asthma. It was so severe that the doctors told him he wouldn’t be able to compete.

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“I couldn’t walk up the stairs to go to my room as a kid a lot because it would f*** me up,” he says. “My parents didn’t know what to do. I was in the hospital pretty much my whole life, couldn’t breathe. I remember being a kid and times were so hard that I would — I knew how to make myself go unconscious because I couldn’t breathe in my normal state. So I knew how to basically put myself to sleep. And once I grew out of that, my body was just so conditioned to the hard life that this regular fighting was easy.”

It was a gradual escalation from losing his breath just walking up the steps to getting to the point where he could run. Then he could hang with other kids in sports. Then he could box with his brother. Then he could find the wind to begin distinguishing himself as an athlete.

“I started with football, and I did track, and then wrestling was the Christmas season and that was pretty much the last one of that year,” he says. “But I did everything. As soon as the doctors released me, I tried football track, soccer, basketball and wrestling. And wrestling was what I fell in love with.”

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These days Smith sees his early struggles with asthma as a silver lining to his supreme conditioning. He says it “calloused” him up to where he’s “five or 10 steps ahead” of the field.

It’s been a wild ride going from not being able to breathe as a kid to outlasting opponents on wrestling mats. His path was hard enough that he sees professional MMA as almost a reprieve.

“Wrestling is way harder,” he says. “It is just way more high-maintenance due to every weekend I’m making weight, every weekend I’m cutting that weight and cutting my body, depleting it.

“But outside of that, I feel like I’ve mastered fighting to a sense, where I can put that pressure on people without them being able to put it back on me. My biggest obstacle is dodging the strikes before I get into where I want to get. My instincts are f***ing fire.”

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Confident? Maybe, but carrying a chip on his shoulder might be more like it. That knockout that he scored on Parsons — a thing of pure and violent beauty — didn’t come with a bonus, after all.

“No sir, it didn’t,” he says. “I feel like that, I mean, first knockout of the year, 2025, I was the first knockout on the card, and they gave it to the other person [Cesar Almeida]. I watched the card back and everything — it should have been me, but nobody looked as skilled as me. Everybody else was sloppy.”

This weekend is another chance. Price has shown a propensity to stand in the pocket and trade. For a long stretch he was a feast-or-famine fighter. The opportunity will be there for Smith, who is close to showing up on the welterweight radar.

Should he do to Price what he did to Parsons, people might be talking about the dark horse, Jacobe Smith.

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“I’m so used to being looked over and not given what I deserve, that I don’t care what it is,” Smith says. “I could take the hardest route. Nobody ain’t going to be able to do nothing with me. I say you throw me one of them Russians and see if their wrestling can stick up with mine or if I got to rely on that.

“But I don’t think any of these regular strikers are going to have anything for me. These regular jiu-jitsu guys aren’t going to have nothing for me because I manage my energy so well. You ain’t going to catch me gassed or f***ing struggling for something that I need, because I’m ahead of the curve.”