It’s a painfully unavoidable fact that the human nose was simply not designed with fighting in mind, especially not Mixed Martial Arts where this fleshy, protruding, exposed appendage runs the risk of coming into violent contact with everything from fists and shins through to knees and elbows during the course of a fight.
As such, some of the most visually disturbing injuries fighters have ever suffered in the cage have been due to nose breaks, and we’ll prove it in this article as we look at ten of the nastiest nasal injuries in MMA history.
Rich Franklin vs. Anderson Silva
Rich Franklin became the unfortunate victim of perhaps the most infamous nose-rearrangement in the history of the UFC on the night that Anderson Silva began his long reign as the middleweight champion of the world.
Up until that point Franklin had been the dominant force in the division and one of the UFC’s most popular stars, having only lost once in his 24 fight career and racked up two successful defenses of his title heading into this fight.
However, Silva would quickly prove that he was on a completely different level to everyone else in the division by putting on a muay thai clinic against Franklin early in the fight, delivering huge knees from the Thai clinch to batter Franklin’s exposed body and then head, leaving him with a brutally broken nose that would result in a KO finish less than three minutes into the first round.
Frankin was a tough customer though and despite his nose now pointing in a whole new direction, he had surgery, regrouped and fought his way back to a rematch with the champion a year later, only to again have his nose broken en-route to a second round TKO defeat, leaving it permanently damaged.
