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Counting Yoel Romero out of getting another crack at the UFC middleweight championship might be a silly idea, at least according to Mike Brown.

The former WEC featherweight champion and current coach at American Top Team in Coconut Creek, Fla. envisions Romero (13-5 MMA, 9-4 UFC) challenging for the title once again.

Romero recently lost a close decision to champion Israel Adesanya in the main event of UFC 248. It was an uneventful contest where both fighters took heat from fans due to the bout’s anti-climactic nature, which promised to be an entertaining affair in the lead-up to the event.

Much of the narrative and talk leaving UFC 248 in March was how that was likely the last time Romero fought for gold. The decorated wrestler turned 43 this year, he’s failed to win title (both interim and regular versions) on multiple occasions, and he’s now 1-4 in his past five UFC outings.

Yet Brown, who worked with Romero for the first time in preparation for the Adesanya fight, will not discard the idea of another title shot for “The Soldier of God.”

“He’s the greatest athlete Ive ever seen, (even) at this age,” Brown told MMA Junkie. “What he can do with his body is incredible, I’ve never seen anything like it: speed, reaction time, agility. I mean, he’s in his 40s and his reaction time is incredible, the speed is incredible, his coordination is incredible.

“The more I see guys like him, the more I realize what a terrible athlete I am. I can’t imagine what he was like when he was 30 or 25. It must have been unbelievable. I know he’s a world champion in wrestling and this is so difficult, wrestling is so deep and so many people are competing for the same title, it’s very competitive. He got a very late start in MMA and he’s done some amazing things.

“You have to worry about time catches up to everybody, but right now – how he looks in the gym and what he can do – I mean, I definitely see him getting back to the title.”

Romero said before his title fight with Adesanya that he plans to fight for another decade. Brown doesn’t know if that’s possible, but he also didn’t imagine a fighter performing the way Romero does in the gym at 43.

“I don’t know about that, but I mean I can’t believe he looks like de does right now,” Brown said. “You don’t know when things are going to change, but right now, he can beat anybody in the world. On any night he’s as good as anybody. He was right there that night. That night, when it came down to the scorecards – even though it was a boring fight, people didn’t like it – but in my head I thought he had done enough in those rounds to win.

“Watching it live, the leg kicks didn’t feel like enough. To me, it felt like Adesanya was on the run more or maybe in danger of getting finished more. I mean you can’t always see the angles if the punches are landing or not, but Yoel would attack and Adesanya was stumbling around, maybe the punches were missing, but its hard to tell sometimes. But from the outside I thought he had won. But again I knew they were close again, so I didn’t know how the judges had scored it, but if I were scoring it I’d say he had won three of those rounds, but again, I knew they were close enough to argue either way.”

Brown believes Romero did enough to win the belt that March night in Las Vegas. Some of the criticism on Romero’s performance was that he needed to do more than Adesanya since he was the challenger and not the champ.

Brown couldn’t disagree more with that type of thinking.

“I feel like people think that when you’re the challenger you have to do this, you have to do that, but you’re just in a fight,” Brown explained. “You’re reacting to moment-to-moment action as it comes to you.

“You’re not thinking, ‘I’m the challenger, I need to get him,’ you’re just solving the puzzle that’s in front of you, I’ve never liked that mentality. You have to score the round. You can’t say, ‘You have to beat the champion convincingly,’ no, you have to beat him, thats it – especially these world-class athletes. It’s not easy to finish these guys, to hurt these guys.”