Photo by Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC

People like to talk about the hectic fight schedule of Donald “Cowboy” Cerrone, and rightly so. The dude scraps a lot—four times in 2014 alone, to be exact. Then there was his famous stretch of two fights in two weeks back in January of this year, which is about as busy as it gets. The thing is, Cowboy isn’t the only fighter on the UFC roster with a jam-packed calendar of competition. In the division above his lightweight home, for example, there’s Neil Magny, whose rapid fire fight schedule has garnered a little less attention, but is no less impressive.

To recount: Magny fought a whopping five times in 2014, which ties him with Roger Huerta for the most UFC fights ever in a calendar year. Better still, he won every single one of those bouts. First, he rattled off wins over Gasan Umalatov and Tim Means. Then he knocked out Rodrigo Goiana de Lima still in June, and finally, he closed out the year with wins over Alex Garcia and William “Patolino” Macario. To say he worked hard in 2014 would be a gross understatement.

Magny now looks to continue the trend by ringing in 2015 with a win over Osaka, Japan’s Kiichi Kunimoto at UFC Fight Night 60 on Valentine’s Day. If Magny is able to score the W against Kunimoto, he’s suddenly riding a six fight win streak. And while his recent opponents haven’t exactly been world beaters, those numbers speak for themselves. A sixth consecutive win will probably earn the New York native a shot at a top-rung welterweight opponent.

For awhile, it looked as though he might already have earned such an opportunity, as whispers of a Magny vs. Josh Koscheck bout surfaced in the tail end of 2014. Those rumours fizzled out when Koscheck was paired with Jake Ellenberger, and Magny was scheduled for a date with Kunimoto. And while Kunimoto is certainly a gamer, he might just be Magny’s final hurdle before getting in there with the top dogs at 170lbs.

It’s highly unlikely that Magny earns a bout with a top five fighter with a win over Kunimoto, but a six fight streak might just be enough to earn him an opponent like the resurgent Thiago Alves, the ever gritty Rick Story, the winner of UFC 184’s Koscheck vs. Ellenberger contest, or the winner of March’s Erick Silva vs. Ben Saunders contest. Any of these opponents would be a well-deserved test for him.

If Magny were to earn a victory over any one of these men, there’s a good chance he’d find himself on the precipice of the welterweight division’s vaunted top 10. Not bad at all for a guy who got knocked out by a swollen lightweight and UFC outcast in Mike Ricci on The Ultimate Fighter 16.

Of course, it’s hard to imagine Magny wearing UFC gold, or even cracking the divisional top five, but this guy has been surprising us non-stop since his first few fights in the UFC, when he looked like another good—but not great—TUF alumnus. As the owner of one of the welterweight division’s longest streaks, though, it’s clear that he’s been putting in the hours, and the height of his ceiling may just surprise us all.

On February 14, a well-placed punch by Kiichi Kunimoto could render all this talk premature. That’s certainly not outside the realm of possibility. More likely, however, is that UFC Fight Night 60 serves as Neil Magny’s coming out party. Yes, if the betting odds are correct, this Valentine’s Day fight card might mark the former TUF fighter’s final tango with mid-level competition, and send him hurtling into the top 15. How far he can go, should such a thing happen, is impossible to say, but just as he quietly constructed one of the better win streaks of 2014, Neil Magny might just crash through the ceiling we all originally set for him.

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