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If you want to revisit the genuinely fantastic UFC 300, go back to April here. Congratulations, it's May. We made it through the best event the UFC has put on in years, which means baby, it's all downhill for awhile. Enjoy your Rodrigo Nascimento main event, suckers. The UFC's still catching its breath, PFL's got a month before the next phase of its season and ONE isn't an MMA organization anymore, so we've got four events this month. (There IS a ONE event with MMA on it this month, but it's 3 out of 11 fights and the most high-profile one is Akbar Abdullaev vs Halil Amir, and I just can't.) This month's title courtesy of Buschmaki. If this is your first time here you should stop and say hi so we know it's not just the same couple dozen of us cussing each other out all the time, but you may want to start with The General Q&A Thread for the basic gist of mixed martial arts. Yes, I'm still doing the new one. If you want to talk about MMA or combat sports events that aren't included in this breakdown: Please do. In a world of Road FC and Rizin events that don't actually air in America and the WBC threatening to rank Jake Paul, there's space for everything. And if there's an event you want to make a GDT for, go right ahead, just make sure to link it here so everyone sees it and basks in the joy of violence. THIS MONTH'S PUNCHSPORTS EVENTS 
IS THERE ANY NEWS  AKEBONO TARŌ - MAY 8, 1969 - APRIL 11, 2024 Sumo has never really penetrated the western market outside of its status as kind of an absurdist joke. There are numerous--correct--arguments about how shortchanged it gets in the international eye compared to other combat sports, and how overlooked even the best sumo wrestlers are by large swaths of the world. It's a testament to just how good Akebono Tarō was that virtually anyone with even a passing awareness of sumo still knew who he was, and it's a testament to just how far his career spanned the combat sports spectrum that so many people who've never given a single gently caress about sumo still did too. I, personally, am not nearly enough of an expert in sumo to properly eulogize his career in the sport. I only barely understand the ranking structure and I still regularly get sekiwake and komusubi mixed up. But Akebono was enough of a standout in the sport that you can google his name and get exhaustive lists of his accomplishments in the sport from mainstream publications that have never eulogized a sumo wrestler before and may never do so again. He broke the glass ceiling preventing foreigners from reaching the top of the sumo ranks, he won eleven championships, he overcame multiple knee and back injuries to wrestle for thirteen years. When he finally quit he was still drat near the face of the entire sport, and that made him way too valuable to lose--so he moved into kickboxing and mixed martial arts. Two things are true. For one: Akebono was not good at fighting. He was an amazing sumo wrestler, but as it turns out, trying to participate in combat sports you've never trained for in your mid-thirties after a lifetime of crippling injuries is very, very difficult. Akebono went 1-8 as a kickboxer, and his one victory was over Nobuaki Kakuda, who was a real-life Seidokeikan black belt! But he was also a referee, judge and executive producer for K-1 Kickboxing, and was responsible for both fixing fights for K-1 and taking the fall whenever they got too blatant about it. Akebono moved to mixed martial arts and went 0-3 at that, too. He wasn't great! And he was also one of the greatest draws the sport ever saw, and in a generation of Japanese MMA whose initial pro-wrestling draws had largely retired, he helped prop up the entire industry. His first-ever kickboxing fight with fellow special attraction Bob Sapp attracted fifty-four million viewers. Every fight he had, even in loss, was a big loving deal, to the point that during the rise of Rizin in 2015, despite having been retired for nine years, they still brought Akebono back for one more exhibition with Sapp and it still gathered international interest. And that's three separate sports, and it still only covers half of his career. He was a professional record for more than a decade! He won a half-dozen championships in All Japan Pro Wrestling and held its top title, the same one that belonged to people like Mitsuharu Misawa, for more than a year! He was somehow both a giant monster comedy attraction in Nobuhiko Takada's disco nightmare promotion Hustle and a participant at a loving WrestleMania! He did everything, across multiple continents, sports and disciplines, and while he may not have been the best at all of it, he was one of the most beloved. Which does a little to soften the blow of dying at 54, which is far, far too young. It's not exactly a secret that sumo wrestler die young--there's an average drop of around 20 years off the expected lifespan thanks to the health consequences of participation--but Akebono's health issues were very public, and he very publicly suffered more than most, and at least that suffering has ended. He leaves behind a sumo record of 654-232-181, a kickboxing record of 1-8, an MMA record of 0-4, and a shootboxing-exhibitions-against-Bob-Sapp record of 0-1.  Also, Gary Shaw died on April 11. He was a boxing and mixed martial arts promoter whom a lot of people only semi-accurately credit with the rise of Women's Mixed Martial Arts. A number of those women, most notably Julie Kedzie, will be happy to inform you this also involved chronically underpaying them, sexually harassing them, and threatening their careers if they didn't play ball. He was a very notable boxing promoter and the reason we got EliteXC in the mixed martial arts space, and it would be dishonest to pretend he doesn't deserve note. That is also the end of the complimentary things I have to say about him. I hope his family is okay.  The UFC also used the press around UFC 300 to introduce its brand new fight gloves, which are, of course, not actually making their promotional debut until UFC 302 in June. After years and years of fighters, managers, trainers, doctors and anyone with a soul begging the company to redesign their gloves to reduce eyepokes, the new gloves, uh, don't really do much about it except have slightly different flex in their fingers. But they do come in a new urine-gold color for champions, and, most importantly, every single pair of gloves will have have microchips in them so they can AUTHENTICATE ON THE BLOCKCHAIN when you sell them. That's right: We couldn't really fix the eyepoke problem, but our gloves are integrated with cryptocurrency now. WHERE ELSE CAN I TALK TO LIKE-MINDED PEOPLE ABOUT VIOLENCE? Any of the following hangouts:
DO WE HAVE OTHER COMMUNAL THREADS? So many.
WHERE ELSE DOES FIGHT CHAT EXIST? Our community output has grown enough that we've got a few other places things get posted:
 Disclaimer: These are unofficial offsites, somethingawful's rules and liability do not extend to them, and complaining about discord stuff is still offsite drama posting
CarlCX fucked around with this message at 22:55 on May 1, 2024 |
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WHAT HAPPENED IN APRIL As April began, so did the 2024 season in the Professional Fighters League. PFL 1 kicked off on April 4, bringing with it the Heavyweight and Women's Flyweight divisions. Down at Women's Flyweight, Kana Watanabe took a 3-point decision over Shanna Young and Liz Carmouche got a 3-point nod over Juliana Velasquez, but finishes are what matter, so Jena Bishop's armbar over Chelsea Hackett, Taila Santos' rear naked choke on Ilara Joanne and Dakota Ditcheva's TKO of Lisa Mauldin put them at the top of the bracket. In the big boy division, Sergei Bilostenniy got a 3-point decision over Blagoy Ivanov, Dennis Goltsov's third-round TKO of Linton Vassell got him 4 points, Daniel James and Oleg Popov both got 5-point stoppages over Marcelo Golm and Steve Mowry respectively, and Valentin Moldavsky topped the bracket with a 6-point stoppage against Ante Delija. God, this system is silly. But not nearly as silly as ONE Championship. April 6 brought us ONE Fight Night 21: Eersel vs Nicolas, which had about thirty-two weight or hydration misses and was, as always, such a mixture of things that I feel unqualified for most of it. Like, look. You read this. You've seen the breadth of my academic expertise. Do you trust me to tell you about Dedduanglek Tded99? If so: Tell me why. But the Ruotolo brothers won submission matches again, and Ben Tynan knocked out Duke Didier, and Alexis Nicolas won the Lightweight Kickboxing Championship from Regian Eersel, the only man to hold it, so that's neat. The UFC's month started later that day with UFC Fight Night: Allen vs Curtis 2, which was a deeply cursed card that lost its main event, lost two fights, had a half-dozen replacements and saw four fighters miss weight. On your prelims: Nora Cornolle knocked out Melissa Mullins, César Almeida TKOed Dylan Budka, Jean Matsumoto choked out Dan Argueta, Victor Hugo got a decision over Pedro Falcăo, Norma Dumont defeated a returning Germaine de Randamie, Łukasz Brzeski won a truly awful Heavyweight fight with Valter Walker, and Alex Morono narrowly outworked Court McGee. Your main card had one finish, and it was Ignacio Bahamondes kicking Christos Giagos in the drat head, and it was pretty great. Otherwise: Charlie Campbell got a decision over Trevor Peek, Chepe Mariscal scored a narrow decision over Morgan Charričre, and Damon Jackson won a decision over Alexander Hernandez that absolutely should have been unanimous, and was split through what was either judging malfeasance or incompetence. Your co-main event saw a short-notice Chris Curtis putting Brendan Allen through absolute hell, but Allen ultimately won a real close split decision, after which he demanded a title shot for being the #14 guy in the division. PFL 2 on April 12 brought us the start of their Lightweight and Light Heavyweight brackets, which were a good mixture of fun and hilarious. Down at Lightweight, last-minute substitution Elvin Espinoza upset Bellator gatekeeper Adam Piccolotti by knocking him out with a flying knee, Gadzhi Rabadanov took a decision against Solomon Renfro, Brent Primus smothered and choked out Bruno Miranda, Michael Dufort choked out Mads Burnell, and Clay Collard had an all-out brawl with Patricky Pitbull that ended in a standing TKO after Patricky ate about twenty unanswered shots, which his corner is still very, very mad about. Up at 205 pounds, Dovletdzhan Yagshimuradov knocked out Jakob Nedoh, your friend and mine Antônio Carlos Júnior choked out Simon Biyong, Josh Silveira got an upset over Sadibou Sy after Sy dislocated his thumb ninety seconds into their fight, Rob Wilkinson crushed Tom Breese in about a minute, and in your main event, Impa Kasanganay knocked out Alex Polizzi in three and a half minutes. But then, we got the big one. UFC 300 came to us on April 13, and after a lot of doubts and a very public scramble to find a main event the card was still the best the UFC had assembled in years, and it delivered on every bit of its promise. On your early prelims, Deiveson Figueiredo choked out Cody Garbrandt, Bobby Green battered Jim Miller to a decision, Jéssica Andrade got a narrow split over Marina Rodriguez, and Jalin Turner almost knocked out Renato Moicano, but he chose to walk away instead of following him to the ground and Moicano made him pay for it with a TKO in the second round. On your regular-flavor prelims: Diego Lopes became the first man in the UFC to finish Sodiq Yusuff after TKOing him in just ninety seconds, Kayla Harrison made her successful corporate debut by ragdolling and strangling Holly Holm, Aljamain Sterling outwrestled a seemingly frozen Calvin Kattar, and Jiří Procházka lost almost all of two and a half rounds against Aleksandar Rakić only to knock him out anyway. On your main card, Bo Nickal had a little trouble with Cody Brundage but still submitted him in the second round, Arman Tsarukyan had a hell of a fight with Charles Oliveira and came away with a split decision and Max Holloway ran an absolute clinic on Justin Gaethje and, in what will live on in highlights forever, knocked him completely cold with one second left in the fight. In your co-main event, Zhang Weili overcame both surprising competition and some referee controversy to retain her title over Yan Xiaonan--debatable choking her unconscious in the first round and scoring enough on her to justify a TKO in the second. And in your main event, after a solid month and a half of Jamahal Hill telling everyone they were stupid for thinking Alex Pereira was better than him at anything, Pereira pretty effortlessly knocked him out in one round to notch his first successful defense of the Light Heavyweight Championship. April 19 ended the first phase of the 2024 PFL season with PFL 3. The Welterweights and Featherweights took the stage, and for the most part, they delivered. Down at Featherweight: Timur Khizriev shut out Brett Johns, Ádám Borics outworked Enrique Barzola and Kai Kamaka III took a close call over Bubba Jenkins, but Gabriel Alves Braga and Brendan Loughnane both scored first-round knockouts over Justin Gonzalez and Pedro Carvalho respectively, meaning they top the standings with 6 point. Up at 170, Don Madge and Murad Ramazanov both scored first-round rear naked chokes, Goiti Yamauchi got a decision over Neiman Gracie, Shamil Musaev got a second-round knockout over Logan Storley, and in the main event, Magomed Umalatov won a back-and-forth decision against Andrey Koreshkov. The UFC's month closed out with April 27's UFC on ESPN: Nicolau vs Rizin pulled curtains down for the month on April 29 with Rizin 46. It was one of their more restrained cards in awhile, which is something to be said for a card with a mystery opponent on it. Your undercard saw Ryo Takagi knocking out Taisei Nishitani, Ilkhom Nazimov pounding out Sora Yamamoto, a real weird bareknuckle fight in which Japanese kickboxing champion Tatsuki Shinotsuka fought MR. X, a surprise opponent who turned out to be American Justyn Martinez, who has a professional record of 0-4 (1), so congratulations, Viktor Kolesnik outworked Yoshiki Nakahara, and Noah "Blackpanther" Bey beat Yusaku Inoue. In your main attractions: Kazuma Kuramoto managed a split decision over Ji Yong Yang, the 17-2-1 star Makoto Shinryu somehow managed to triumph over the 4-2 Jung Hyun Lee, Soo Chul Kim knocked out Taichi Nakajima and hopefully finally got his Nintendo Switch, Shinobu Ota took a decision over former champion Juntarou Ushiku, and in your main event, 24 year-old Chihiro Suzuki retained the Rizin Featherweight Championship after pounding out 21-year veteran Masanori Kanehara in one round. WHAT'S COMING IN MAY After a slightly more eventful month, May has a relatively sedate 4 events.* *I am not including PFL MENA and you can't make me. We kick off on May 4 with UFC 301: Pantoja vs Erceg. It's the UFC's first trip to Rio in almost a year and a half, and they're rolling out the international warfare carpet for it. Alessandro Costa vs Kevin Borjas! Ismael Bonfim vs Vinc Pichel! Mauricio Ruffy vs Jamie Mullarkey, the former of whom I have definitely paid attention to. Joaquim Silva vs Drakkar Klose should rule, Elves Brener vs Myktybek Orolbai should rule, Karolina Kowalkiewicz vs Iasmin Lucindo should rule, Jack Shore vs Joanderson Brito should rule, and Jean Silva vs William Gomis will be either very short or very unfortunate. On your main card: Paul Craig vs Caio Borralho, Michel Pereira vs Ihor Potieria, Anthony Smith vs Vitor Petrino, a potentially deeply depressing matchup between Jonathan Martinez and an unretiring José Aldo, and in your main event, Alexandre Pantoja defends the Flyweight Championship against, uh, Steve Erceg. Sure. May 11 brings us UFC on ESPN: Lewis vs Nascimento. Honestly: It's not too bad. It's not great, but boy, we've had worse. JJ Aldrich vs Veronica Hardy is a fascinating style clash, Alex Caceres vs Sean Woodson is a definitive sink-or-swim moment for Woodson, who's been on the precipice of mattering for years, Tabatha Ricci vs Tecia Pennington (née Torres) should be neat, Waldo Cortes-Acosta vs Robelis Despaigne has the potential to be the funniest Heavyweight fight in years, Chase Hooper vs Viacheslav Borschchev is almost certainly going to be a wrestling grind that will make me sad, Terrance McKinney vs Esteban Ribovics is exactly as much of a Terrance McKinney fight as you can possibly get, and Alonzo Menifield vs Carlos Ulberg will, for better or worse, give us a 205-pound prospect, god help us all. But Joaquin Buckley vs Nursulton Ruziboev is a great co-main, and Derrick Lewis is still Derrick Lewis, so there is, as ever, the possibility that his fight with Rodrigo Nascimento could be twenty seconds long and beautiful. Six days later, Friday fights bring us the boon of Bellator Champions Series 2: Mix vs Magomedov 2, with the Bellatour taking us to the Accor Arena in Paris. The undercard is, for once, pretty compact: A couple local-love fights like Asaël Adjoudj vs Bruno Fontes and Yves Landu vs Jonas Bilharinho, but otherwise, it's not too bad. Aspen Ladd vs Ekaterina SHakalova, Imamshafi Aliev vs Mike Shipmkan, Mansour Barnaoui vs Yusuke Yachi, Thibault Gouti vs Archie Colgan, Slim Trabelsi vs Louis Southerland and Gregory Babene vs Costello van Steenis are all a pretty decent time. The top of the card, while good, has fallen apart a little on its way to the airport. French superstar Cédric Doumbé was booked into a great fight with longtime veteran Derek Anderson, but Anderson got hit by a drat car and has to heal a foot injury, so in his place we have Jaleel Willis, who is still good, but not quite as exciting. Your main event between Usman Nurmagomedov and Alexandr Shabliy fell apart, so your new main is Patchy Mix defending the Bellator Bantamweight Championship in a rematch with Magomed Magomedov. And, as with all things, we return to the Apex to end the month. May 18 brings us UFC Fight Night: Barboza vs Murphy. It is, uh, less great, but there's still some good stuff on it. Abus Magomedov vs Warlley Alves, Piera Rodriguez vs Ariane Carnelossi, Adrian Yanes vs Vinicius Salvador, Luana Pinheiro vs Angela Hill and Alatengheili vs Kleydson Rodrigues are some real potential highlights. Oumar Sy vs Rodolfo Bellato, Khaos Williams vs Carlston Harris and Tamires Vidal vs Melissa Gatto are also happening, but that's okay. Themba Gorimbo will hopefully be fun. Your main event sees Edson Barboza face Lerone Murphy, because disposing of two straight prospects wasn't enough, so the UFC needs to try one more time to get a big prospect over using his corpse.
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May 1, 2024 20:28
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CURRENT UFC CHAMPIONS Heavyweight Champion, 265 lbs   Jon Jones - 27-1 (1), 0 DefensesVery few things in combat sports reach the crossroads of awe-inspiring and unfathomably frustrating as Jon Jones. In 2020, Jon Jones notched the third defense of his second light-heavyweight championship reign after an exceedingly contentious decision against Dominick Reyes, only to abdicate the title because the UFC wasn't paying him enough, and he was bored of 205 pounds and wanted to move up to heavyweight like he'd been planning to for nearly a decade, and he needed more time to cement his place as not just one of the sport's greatest pound-for-pound fighters, but one of its biggest pound-for-pound pains in the rear end. On September 23, 2021, Jon Jones was inducted into the UFC Hall of Fame; on September 24, 2021, he was arrested (for the fifth time!) after his daughter called the police on him for beating her mother, during which he antagonized the police and, inexplicably, headbutted a police car. Because this is Jon Jones, of course, the primary charges were dropped, he paid $750 for the hood of the police cruiser, and got a stern warning to stay out of trouble, young man, because there is a money-powered reality-distorting field around Jon Jones whereby nothing matters. After a year of rumors, and after the unconscionable firing of heavyweight champion Francis Ngannou, the UFC gleefully announced Jon Jones vs Ciryl Gane to fill the vacant heavyweight throne. Did it matter to the matchmaking that there were more deserving candidates? Of course not, because it's Jon Jones: He deserves the spot for his earlier success. Did it matter to his public appearances that when last we saw him he was arrested for beating his fiancee? Of course not, because it's Jon Jones: He was, if anything, more up his own rear end with self-righteousness than ever before. Did it matter to the fight that he hadn't competed in more than three years and looked terrible at the time? Of course not, because it's Jon loving Jones. Ciryl Gane looked too nervous to use footwork let alone throw anything, and he should have been, as Jones effortlessly threw him to the canvas and choked him out in two minutes. The longest-running, most dominant and yet most persistently annoying show in mixed martial arts is back. And in the most predictable thing possible, some bullshit happened, he got injured, he's going to be gone for at least eight months, and the UFC is not only not stripping him of the title like they've done to everyone else, they've already gotten out ahead of themselves and made clear that when he comes back, he will be fighting Stipe Miocic, not whoever the interim champion is at the time. Funny, that. Interim Heavyweight Champion   Tom Aspinall - 14-3, 0 DefensesThe UFC's Heavyweight division got itself into a weird spot in 2007. Randy Couture was the rightful, reigning, defending champion, but he and the UFC had a dispute that stretched out more than a year. The UFC couldn't strip him--it would have made it easier for him to get out of his contract--so they made an interim title. By the time Randy came back they had already made big plans for him and Brock Lesnar, but the interim title had gotten wrapped up in The Ultimate Fighter 8 (jesus christ) and it, too, had to be defended, meaning there were two championships being defended simultaneously: The Undisputed Championship, which was the 'real' belt despite being held by a guy trying to leave the company and contended for by someone with only two victories in the sport, and the Interim Championship, which was being fought over by the actual, legitimate top contenders. At UFC 295 on November 11th, 2023, Tom Aspinall, the rightful #4 contender, fought Sergei Pavlovich, the rightful #2 contender, for a new interim championship. And he won. On two weeks' notice! Aspinall's been one of the most promising heavyweight prospects in the world for years, his only loss in the UFC came from his knee tearing itself apart fifteen seconds into a fight, and he went toe-to-toe with one of the scariest punchers in the history of the sport and knocked him flat in just barely over a minute. He is, indisputably, the real deal. And now he gets to be the interim champion of a Heavyweight division in which the real champion, Jon Jones, is going to be out injured well into next year and, the UFC has made clear, will be returning to defend his title against Stipe Miocic, who by that time will have been on the shelf for 3+ years and will be going on 42. So congratulations, Tom. You're the real Heavyweight champion. I hope you get some credit for it. Light-Heavyweight Champion, 205 lbs   Alex Pereira - 10-2, 1 DefenseConflicting things can be simultaneously true in this sport. It is true that Alex Pereira was brought into the UFC as a 3-1 rookie based on his history as a kickboxer rather than his accomplishments in the sport. It is true that he was fast-tracked to a title shot against the primary focus of that history, megastar Israel Adesanya, after beating just three fighters, none of whom had any hope of testing his grappling. It is also true that he rendered that discourse ultimately irrelevant by not just beating but stopping Adesanya in his title shot anyway, in the process becoming the fastest Middleweight to go from debut to champion since Anderson Silva. It was more or less an open secret that he wasn't going to stay there: Being bigger than most Heavyweights in the UFC, the weight cut to 185 was always a short-term thing. Luckily for the UFC, he got knocked out by Adesanya and gave him the title right back on his way up to 205. Once again, he got fast-tracked, this time by happenstance. A split decision victory over Jan Błachowicz made Pereira a top five contender, and when Jamahal Hill was forced to vacate his title thanks to an ankle injury--and the previous champion, Jiří Procházka, was back from his own title vacation and injury--Pereira was slotted right back into championship place. They met at UFC 295 on November 11th, and after two back-and-forth rounds, Pereira punished a Jiří who dared to grapple by elbowing his skull until he briefly stopped moving. The commentary and audience thought it was an early stoppage, but Jiří Procházka didn't, so gently caress 'em. It is true that Alex Pereira has fought seven UFC fights without having to fight an actual grappler, and that was an intentional choice by matchmaking. It is true that getting the chance to win championships in two weight classes within just two years and seven fights in the UFC is not a thing that happens to most fighters. But it is unavoidably true that Alex Pereira is a two-division champion and no one can take it away from him. After none of the UFC's other ideas worked out, Alex Pereira vs Jamahal Hill became the main event of UFC 300, and after weeks of talking endless rafts of poo poo, Hill got knocked out in the first round. Alex Pereira is the first man to successfully defend the Light Heavyweight championship against a Light Heavyweight fighter since February of 2020. Middleweight Champion, 185 lbs   Dricus du Plessis - 21-2, 0 DefensesMiddleweight's loving wild, man. Generally when a belt changes hands repeatedly in a short period of time you can blame injuries and strippings and title vacations, but recent history has simply been a case study in how goddamn weird things can get at 185 pounds. As of this writing (February 1, 2024) we've had five separate Middleweight champions in less than fifteen months. Divisional king Israel Adesanya dropped the belt to his nemesis Alex Pereira, Adesanya dropped Pereira himself in an immediate rematch, and in one of 2023's bigger upsets, Adesanya lost his belt to human exclusion zone Sean Strickland. But that shot, initially, didn't belong to him: It belonged to Dricus du Plessis. Dricus joined the UFC in 2020 as one of the international scene's best prospects--a two-division champion in his native South Africa's Extreme Fighting Championship, a Welterweight champion in Poland's Konfrontacja Sztuk Walki, and a finishing machine who'd never gone to a decision in his life. The spotlight of the UFC gave him two new reputations: For one, as an exceptionally awkward-looking fighter who could appear shaky and exhausted and still easily knock anyone out, and for two, as a guy with real uncomfortable feelings about his homeland. Shortly after his debut Dricus du Plessis began making comments about becoming the first "real" African champion in the UFC, citing the way fighters like Kamaru Usman, Israel Adesanya and Francis Ngannou had left the country, and, boy, there's just no way to get around the topic that isn't gross as hell. But du Plessis knocked #1 contender Robert Whittaker dead, so it didn't matter. He was in pole position. And then he lost it, because he wanted more than a month to prepare for a world championship fight and the UFC decided that just wouldn't fly. A fully-trained du Plessis stepped into the cage against his replacement and now-champion Sean Strickland on January 20 at UFC 297, and after a close fight and a split decision, du Plessis brought the belt back to South Africa just like he promised. The UFC would really like to make good on their initial du Plessis/Adesanya plans, but we'll see if they can work it out. Welterweight Champion, 170 lbs   Leon Edwards - 22-3 (1), 2 DefensesIt took half a decade to get the world to notice, but everyone sees Leon Edwards now. "Rocky" came from the kind of circumstances sports movies are made of--a poor kid from Jamaica who moved to England, lost his father to gang violence, nearly lost himself to it as a teenager and found a healthy outlet for his anger in mixed martial arts. Edwards made his debut in 2011 as a prime example of the modern generation of fighter, cross-trained from the beginning in every discipline, and in just three years he was the welterweight champion of Britain and off to the UFC. Entering 2016, Leon had suffered the first true loss of his career--he was 10-3, but one of those losses was a DQ for an illegal blow and the other a coinflip decision that could easily have gone either way--at the hands of the newly-crowned Ultimate Fighter 21 winner, Kamaru Usman, making his debut as an official UFC competitor. It took ten fights without a loss for Leon to get his rematch. The UFC seemed especially resistant to his title contendership, pushing him down in favor of the ostensibly more marketable UK star in Darren Till and booking him against numerous other contenders and gatekeepers while repeatedly elevating less deserving fighters to the championship. He wouldn't have gotten it at all, in fact, had Jorge Masvidal not gotten arrested. On August 20, the UFC acquiesced and granted the clear #1 contender his shot at the championship, and at revenge against Kamaru Usman--and after getting dominated for three and a half out of five rounds, with the commentators openly opining on the likelihood that he had given up, with just fifty-six seconds left in the fight, Edwards uncorked a headkick that shocked the world and knocked Kamaru Usman out for the first time in his career. The rubber match was inevitable, and once again, Edwards opened as an underdog, and once again, he proved everyone wrong. Instead of a last-minute comeback Leon simply shut Usman down for the majority of the fight, stuffing eleven of his takedown attempts, outstriking him in four out of five rounds and landing an absolutely wild 75% of his strikes in the process. It was an incredible performance against one of the greatest welterweights of all time, marred only by Leon losing a point for fence grabs. The decision was unquestionably his, and now legitimized as the champion of the world, Leon found himself dealing with the UFC's bullshit insistence that his first defense came not against the top contender, but rather, the UFC's favorite bigot, Colby Covington. Edwards dominated him and sent him away 4-1, finally ending the bullshit. At which point he, immediately, brought the bullshit back by talking down a fight with #1 contender Belal Muhammad, after naming him repeatedly as the man he should be fighting instead of Colby. Lightweight Champion, 155 lbs   Islam Makhachev - 25-1, 2 DefensesDestiny has come. When Islam Makhachev made his UFC debut in 2015, Khabib Nurmagomedov, considered by most to be the #1 contender and soon to be the best in the world, swore up and down that Makhachev, not him, would be the best lightweight champion of all time. Coming from him, the praise made sense: Khabib and Islam have trained together since they were children growing up and learning to wrestle in Makhachkala. Islam learned under Khabib's father, trained with Khabib's team and even made the pilgrimage to America to join Khabib at the American Kickboxing Academy. And then, two matches into his UFC tenure, Islam got knocked the gently caress out in the first round by the little-known Adriano Martins, who hasn't won a fight in the six years since. Even as Makhachev racked up wins, the memory of his loss and his wrestling-heavy approach to his fights let people cast doubts on him. Sure, he's good--but he lost, so he's not as good as Khabib. Islam Makhachev, as his trainer tells it, never wanted to be Khabib. He loves fighting, but he doesn't love the spectacle or the glory or the attention. So when, after ten straight wins, Makhachev was picked to challenge Charles Oliveira for the vacant title he never truly lost, a lot of folks just weren't quite sure what to think. Sure, he was an incredible wrestler, but Charles Oliveira is a submission wizard, and sure, he's on a ten-fight streak, but he hasn't fought a single person actually IN the top ten, and Oliveira represents a huge, dangerous step up as a man who's been destroying some of the most accomplished lightweights in the sport's history. Analyst opinion was split right down the middle; the fight, as it turned out, was nowhere near that competitive, and the only analyst who was entirely correct was Khabib. Islam demolished the former champion, outstriking him, taking him down at will, controlling him in the grappling, and ultimately dropping him with punches and choking him out in the second round. His first defense was a different story. Islam faced featherweight champion Alexander Volkanovski at UFC 284 on February 12th in a rare best-of-the-best, champion vs champion match, and this time, his team's prediction of domination was thoroughly incorrect: It was a pitched battle that ended with Makhachev visibly exhausted and Volkanovski pounding on his face. Islam took an extremely close decision and the divisions will remain separate, but his aura of invulnerability has been thoroughly punctured. Or, at least, it was. In one of those funny moments of sport deterioration, his title defense against Charles Oliveira got scratched thanks to Oliveira busting his eyebrow in training, and on less than two weeks' notice the UFC ran Makhachev/Volkanovski 2, and with no hype, no marketing and no time to prepare, a visibly depleted Volkanovski got dropped by a headkick in the first round. Having now abruptly vanquished his rival, Islam Makhachev is...calling out the winner of the Leon Edwards vs Colby Covington welterweight title bout. God dammit. Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs   Ilia Topuria - 15-0, 0 DefensesThe king is dead, long live the king. Everyone paying attention knew Ilia Topuria was a special sort of prospect all the way back in 2020, but it wasn't until he destroyed Ryan Hall that the rest of the world noticed. A man who is equal parts German, Georgian and Spanish, Topuria established himself immediately as a force to be reckoned with: An undefeated wrecking machine with a strong wrestling game, a thoroughly solid grappling game, and the combination of terrifying knockout power and the sheer confidence to use it that can only come from having never lost a fight. Which was tested, thoroughly, when Topuria went up to Lightweight on short notice, fought a man in Jai Herbert who was half a foot taller than him, nearly got knocked out twice, and proceeded to recover, regroup, and fold Herbert in half with a punch in the second round. Suddenly, his prospect status was proven. Not only was he good, he was capable of dealing with adversity. Within the year he'd become the first (non-exhibition) fighter to ever beat Bryce Mitchell after ragdolling him and choking him out, and by the end of 2023 he'd dominated Josh Emmett, proving both his place at the top of the Featherweight contendership ladder and his ability to go five full rounds without falling over. His ascension couldn't have come at a better time. Alexander Volkanovski, one of the greatest champions in UFC history, was finally beginning to show signs of wear--somewhat unfairly, as those signs came from an incredibly inadvisable last-minute fill-in 155-pound fight against Islam Makhachev--but getting knocked out is getting knocked out, and when you've only been beaten once in a decade, getting knocked out in one round makes people ask difficult questions about your age, longevity, and durability. When Volk and Ilia met at UFC 298 on February 17, almost every question people had was, in fact, answered. Can Volk outwork Topuria? Absolutely; he won the first round handily and was dancing around him. Can Ilia keep himself in check? Completely; knowing just how good Volk was, Ilia was uncharacteristically patient and measured and didn't get himself in any real trouble in the first round while he figured out what he wanted to do. Can Alexander Volkanovski stand up to Ilia Topuria's punching power? Buddy: No one can. Three and a half minutes into the second round Topuria successfully trapped Volkanovski against the cage with his footwork, and one combination later, Volkanovski was on the floor. Ilia Topuria's destiny has come. He's the Featherweight champion. And he has, of course, already sworn to try to become a double champion within his next two fights. Bantamweight Champion, 135 lbs  Sean O'Malley - 18-1 (1), 1 DefensesThe house always wins. I have spent years being mad about Sean O'Malley. Very few people get the red carpet rolled out for them without having some other previous success to draw on, but Dana White seemingly hand-selected Sean O'Malley as The Guy back in 2017 when he won a contract on the second-ever episode of the Contender Series, and from the second he first stepped into the octagon, he was treated like a Big loving Deal. His matchmaking was favorable, his marketing was endless, and even when he hosed up--getting his leg broken against Andre Soukhamthath, pissing hot for ostarine and missing a year, getting knocked out by Marlon Vera--the UFC was there to pick him up and keep pushing him up the ladder. He went from fighting regional fighters and flyweights to a top ten matchup, and when that match ended with him poking out Pedro Munhoz's eye, he was catapulted into a title eliminator against the #1-ranked Petr Yan, and when he got one of the year's worst decisions against Yan, he was allowed to sit on his hands for almost a year to wait for a title shot against a champion who was given three months and no injury recovery time to prepare. Is it fair for me to dislike Sean O'Malley for decisions the UFC made? Absolutely not, and I don't blame him for them whatsoever. Fortunately for me, Sean O'Malley also has a great love of making public hot takes like "here's my power ranking of my female coworkers by how fuckable I think they are" and "publicly avowed rapist Andrew Tate is a great guy I want to co-promote and advertise with" and "convicted child molester Tekashi69 is my homeboy" and "I have an open relationship with my wife where I get to bang other people but she doesn't because I'm the man" that make me feel deeply, thoroughly at peace with disliking him for other reasons. But none of that means he isn't a hell of a fighter or he didn't absolutely loving flatten Aljamain Sterling with a picture-perfect counterpunch in their title fight. Did he deserve the shot? Not even a little. Did he prove he belongs at the top? Undeniably. However much of a shithead he may be, he's the champion of the goddamn world. Just in case his status as a marketing favorite had not been made abundantly clear, the UFC announced he will have his first title defense not in a rematch with Sterling, or a meeting with top contender Merab Dvalishvili, or even a bout with the streaking Cory Sandhagen, but--of course--a rematch with Marlon "Chito" Vera, the #6 contender on a one-fight win streak who knocked O'Malley out back in 2020. O'Malley dominated him, won a clear shut-out, and then called out Ilia Topuria, because weight classes are for chumps. Flyweight Champion, 125 lbs  Alexandre Pantoja - 27-5, 1 DefenseSometimes, you just have someone's number. Brandon Moreno spent years fighting through a quadrilogy with Deiveson Figueiredo, and unfortunately for him, he had another trilogy waiting for him the second it was over. Alexandre "The Cannibal" Pantoja was Moreno's personal bogeyman, a man who'd fought and beaten him twice. But one of those fights was an exhibition on The Ultimate Fighter, and the other was against a Moreno with five less years of evolution and growth. Surely, a third fight in 2023 would be different. And it was--unlike the previous, one-sided dominations it was a fight-of-the-year candidate that took both men to their limit and led to a split decision--but its ending was not. Alexander Pantoja scored a third victory over Moreno, and with it, after sixteen years of competition, he finally became the clear, unequivocal best in the god damned world. Which was made even more poignant when he used his post-fight interview to ask if his absentee father was proud of him--and was made even more irritating when he also revealed that despite having eleven fights in the UFC at the time, he was paid so little that he'd been part-timing as a Doordash driver just to make ends meet right up until 2022. The idea that one of the absolute best fighters on the planet, after years and nearly a dozen fights in the world's biggest, most profitable fighting organization, would need to take on a gig-economy job to make money is outright offensive, and in a better world, it would have launched a furor. In this one, all we can do is be happy he's got the belt and will, hopefully, make some actual loving money. His first title defense came against Brandon "Raw Dawg" Royval as the co-main event to UFC 296 on December 16th, and it was a wild affair with a couple scary moments, but Pantoja emerged victorious and notched the first successful defense of the title in three years. His next contender is, in all likelihood, the winner of the Brandon Moreno/Amir Albazi fight this February--or it would have been, until Albazi got injured. The UFC promoted a Moreno/Royval 2 showdown in hopes of scoring a Moreno rematch, but Royval won, so the UFC decided to forget the whole goddamn thing and book Pantoja against the #10-ranked Steve Erceg on May 4. Sure. Whatever. Women's Bantamweight, 135 lbs  Raquel Pennington - 16-8, 0 DefensesThe throne is once again full. Amanda Nunes left a gaping void in the world of women's mixed martial arts when she retired last Summer, and it took the UFC seven months to do something about it. The Women's Featherweight title? That's just gone, man. The patient could not be resuscitated. There's still life in Women's Bantamweight, though, and with Nunes gone and Julianna Peńa injured, there was only one sensible match to make. Raquel Pennington should have gotten her title shot more than a year ago. "Rocky" is one of the UFC's longest-tenured women, at this point--her debut came more than a decade ago as a runner-up on The Ultimate Fighter 18 (jesus christ)--and the millstone weighing down her championship aspirations was the fact that more than five years ago she had a title fight, and it saw Amanda Nunes just beat her to a pulp. Despite being on the division's longest winning streak at the start of 2023, this loss was commonly cited as reason enough to deny Pennington the shot, and given that she's a generally affable, no-nonsense fighter with a grinding wrestling style, she is, categorically, the UFC's least favorite kind of person, which meant getting passed up over and over and having to settle for serving as a backup challenger for Irene Aldana--whom Pennington had already beaten. But with the top prospects out and Aldana having just gotten beaten even worse by Nunes than Raquel had, there was nowhere left for the company to hide. Mayra Bueno Silva had established herself as one of the division's most dangerous fighters after tearing apart Lina Länsberg's knee and nearly popping Holly Holm's skull out of her head with a ninja choke, and there were quite a few hoping she'd stop Pennington in her tracks when the two met at UFC 297 on January 20, but they were gratifyingly incorrect. Pennington outwrestled Silva, escaped her submission attempts, outstruck her 265 to 96, and finally, on a night where the UFC loudly celebrated bigotry, sexism and homophobia, took the belt home to her wife. Raquel's the first post-Nunes champion, and godspeed to her. The UFC is almost certainly waiting to see if either Peńa gets healthy or the newly-signed Kayla Harrison beats Holly Holm to figure out what's next for Raquel. Women's Flyweight, 125 lbs   Alexa Grasso - 16-3-1, 1 Defense, Sort OfEvery once in awhile someone gets to shock the combat sports world, and in 2023, it's Alexa Grasso. The UFC has been high on Grasso since she left Invicta for her company debut back in 2016--she's been one of the most consistently featured fighters in ANY women's division, be it her time at strawweight or her move up to flyweight--but her two bids at the top of the mountain at 115 pounds met with disaster, once in Tatiana Suarez handing her the only stoppage loss of her career and once in Carla Esparza outwrestling her to a decision, and watching her manhandled by 115-pound fighters left the world doubting her 125-pound chances. But thanks to her solid boxing and her ever-improving ground game she ran up a four-fight winning streak, and when the UFC announced that she'd be taking on divisional queen and one of the greatest of all time in Valentina Shevchenko, the collective fan reaction was a unanimous "sure, okay," because Valentina disposing of people was a generally accepted phenomenon and she needed a warm body. The first round was a slight surprise, with Grasso stinging Shevchenko on the feet, but as so often happens, by the fourth round Valentina had taken over the fight, was ahead on every judge's scorecard and looked poised to cruise to her eighth title defense. And then, she was struck down by the bane of the sport: Spinning poo poo. Backed into the fence, Shevchenko did what she does entirely too often--a spinning back kick--and in the half-second she was turned away Grasso leapt to her back, dragged her to the floor, and became the first person to ever submit Valentina Shevchenko. Alexa Grasso, after years of work, is the Women's Flyweight Champion of the World. A rematch was inevitable, and it came at UFC Noche on September 16th, and, like everything does, it ended in controversy. After an incredibly close fight that the media had split almost cleanly down the middle, the judges ruled the contest a split draw. Which wouldn't be crazy--were it not for said draw hinging on Mike Bell, who is typically one of MMA's most reliable judges, giving Grasso a completely, utterly inexplicable and inexcusable 10-8 score in the final round, without which Valentina Shevchenko would have won a split decision. So Grasso did not win, in the end, but she did defend her title, technically. But good news: Were running it back again. Grasso and Shevchenko are the coaches of The Ultimate Fighter 32 (jesus christ), so this Summer, its fight #3. Women's Strawweight, 115 lbs   Zhang Weili - 25-3, 2 DefensesAre you really surprised? There's a long tradition of underestimating unlikely champions in mixed martial arts, particularly when they're not the fan-friendliest in style or personality, from Michael Bisping to Frankie Edgar, only to have those demeaned champions remind the world that they didn't reach the peak of their divisions by mistake. Many of the wise, studied scribes of the sport warned the foolish masses against assuming the same about Women's Strawweight Champion Carla Esparza: She was no pushover, they said, and Zhang will have real trouble. And then, come fight day, we unwashed masses pulled them from their ivory towers and forced them to run in the streets amongst the mud and filth so they, too, could feel the unburdened joy of being, because Zhang Weili, as basically every fan had assumed, did, in fact, beat the absolute tar out of Carla. It wasn't particularly close: Carla got outlanded 37-6, hurt several times on the feet, and choked out just a minute into the second round. The inexplicable, season-long Cookie Monster subplot is over, Zhang Weili is now a two-time world champion, and things are back as they should be. What comes next, however, is tricky. Carla was blown out, so a rematch is out of the question. Rose Namajunas, the only person in the UFC to beat Weili, is a likely candidate--but after her disastrous performance against Carla, it remains to be seen how much faith the UFC has in her. Jéssica Andrade has a claim, but she's splitting time between 115 and 125, and probably needs to pick a weight class if she wants a shot. So the UFC solved the problem by picking Amanda Lemos. In a surprise to no one, Zhang absolutely dominated Lemos, outstriking her 296-29, smashing her to the tune of multiple 10-8 rounds, and winning a very, very wide decision. The next step was a China vs China championship showdown against Yan Xiaonan at UFC 300, and Yan did better than some expected--which is to say she won a round while also arguably getting choked out once and TKOed once, and ultimately, Zhang took a lopsided decision again.
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 ONE Heavyweight Champion, 265 lbs   Anatoly Malykhin - 14-0, 0 DefensesONE Light Heavyweight Champion, 225 lbs  Anatoly Malykhin - 14-0, 0 DefensesONE Middleweight Champion, 205 lbs  Anatoly Malykhin - 14-0, 0 DefensesNothing is real, and we are all a part of the great dream. Anatoly Malykhin, a Master of Sport and international champion wrestler, took to MMA in 2016. Five years later, at the tender professional age of 8-0, he was in ONE. Two fights later, he was the interim Heavyweight champion. ONE's mixed martial arts divisions have always been slim at best and ephemeral at worst, but above 185 pounds, the air got real, real thin. Arjan Bhullar, the actual 265-pound champion, was having contractual issues with ONE and didn't want to fight. In another universe, Malykhin fought other Heavyweights and carried the torch for ONE's big boys. In this one, he dropped to 225 pounds in 2022 and just beat the absolute poo poo out of double-champ Reinier de Ridder, taking his title in the process. But he was still the 265-pound champion, and he still wanted to unify the belts, and thus, in June of 2023, he mauled a finally-present Bhullar to become the undisputed Heavyweight champion. In another universe, he defended either of these titles, lending credibility to ONE's divisional depth. In this universe, ONE didn't have any divisional depth, and thus, on March 1, 2024, Anatoly dropped to 205 pounds to, once again, beat the poo poo out of now single-champ Reinier de Ridder. ONE immediately began astroturfing as much marketing as they could behind the idea of having the first major triple champion in mixed martial arts history, and like all good marketing, that is, technically, true. But he got there by beating the same guy twice, once at a weight class recognized by no other major organization on Earth, and now rules over three divisions with almost no one in them. Anatoly Malykhin is a legitimately good fighter, but it's a shame there's no one who can help him prove it. ONE Welterweight Champion, 185 lbs   Christian Lee - 17-4, 0 DefensesONE Lightweight Champion, 170 lbs  Christian Lee - 17-4, 0 DefensesIt took three tries, but by god, Chatri gets what Chatri wants. Christian Lee, the male half of the first family of ONE Championship and its homegrown golden boy, was very mad about losing his lightweight championship in a controversial decision to Ok Rae Yoon last year. He demanded the decision be reviewed and overturned and his championship reinstated. Unsurprisingly: This did not happen. After months of complaining and just shy of a year of waiting, the two had their long-awaited rematch and Lee left nothing to chance, knocking Yoon out in six minutes to reclaim his belt. Having finally retrieved his title, Lee, being a responsible champion, proceeded to immediately challenge ONE'S 185-pound champion, Kiamrian Abbasov, for his title, a move that was definitely in no way influenced by ONE's repeated attempts to get his sister Angela Lee double-champion status. Fortunately for Christian, Abbasov horribly botched his weight cut: He came in overweight, lost his title on the scale, and was visibly depleted in the fight. Which is particularly lucky, because Abbasov beat Lee senseless in the first round to the point that a standing TKO would not have been an unreasonable stoppage. But whether from his failed weight cut or simply from punching himself out, Abbasov was exhausted by the second round, and Lee mounted a gutsy comeback and ultimately stopped him with ground-and-pound in the fourth round. After three attempts, ONE has succeeded in getting two belts on a Lee. Unfortunately, it was followed by tragedy. After the passing of his younger sister Victoria, Christian took the whole of the year to, understandably, grieve. ONE planned his comeback for February of 2024, but, y'know, that clearly did not happen. ONE Featherweight Champion, 155 lbs  Tang Kai - 16-2, 1 DefenseTang Kai has been flying under the radar for some time, and in hindsight, that was clearly a mistake. He made his professional debut as a 20 year-old collegiate wrestler and won a rookie featherweight tournament in China's WBK (after investigating, we THINK it's World Battle Kings), but his stylistic limitations became apparent when he moved up to Kunlun Fight--and stopped fighting rookies. Dominant decision losses to ACA standout Bekhruz "Ong Bak" Zukurov and Road to UFC runner-up Asikeerbai Jinensibieke made Kai's weaknesses too apparent to ignore, and he made the tough call to commit to his dream, pack up his life, and move away from home to start training with real fight camps, most notably Shanghai's Dragon Gym and Phuket's legendary Tiger Muay Thai. It's worked out quite well: He hasn't lost a fight in five years. Three knockout wins in China's Rebel FC got ONE's attention, and since debuting with the organization in 2019, Kai has soundly defeated everyone in his path. He claims his wrestling base makes him impossible to take down and he proves it by using it almost entirely defensively, vastly preferring to bludgeon his opponents on his feet. His fight against Thanh Le, while blistering and difficult, was proof: He evaded every takedown attempt, widely outstruck him, dropped him with punches and leg kicks alike, and took the belt he's held for two years. And then, absolutely nothing else happened. It took ONE almost a full year to book another match for Tang Kai, and it was just an instant rematch with Thanh Le with no fanfare, and it was delayed by eight full months thanks to an injury. So after more than a year and a half without a fight, Tang Kai finally fought Thanh Le again, and this time, he knocked him out in three rounds. Congratulations, Tang Kai: You are back at square one. ONE Bantamweight Champion, 145 lbs  Fabricio Andrade - 9-2 (1), 0 DefensesThe second time was the charm. When Fabricio "Wonder Boy" Andrade joined ONE Championship back in 2020 he was a virtual unknown in the mixed martial arts world, a 20-3 kickboxer but only a 3-2 mixed martial artist who'd been fighting out in the regional circuit of China. His association with Tiger Muay Thai put him on ONE's radar, and his visible striking skills despite being just 21 at the time made him interesting enough for a developmental contract. Said contract proceeded to develop into Andrade going on a five-fight winning streak that only got more dominant as he met tougher competition, and three straight first-round knockouts punched his ticket to the championship picture. His first appearance in the spotlight, unfortunately, went a touch awry. First, bantamweight champion John Lineker lost his title on the scale after missing weight, meaning only Andrade was eligible to become champion, and he was well on his way to doing so before hitting Lineker with an errant strike to the groin so hard it shattered his cup, and with the fight not yet halfway complete, it had to be rendered a No Contest. It took four months to get to the rematch, and it was much more closely contested, but after four rounds Lineker threw in the towel, his face having been punched too swollen to continue. Fabricio Andrade is 25 and a world goddamn champion. He promptly skipped away from MMA completely and faced Jonathan Haggerty for ONE's Featherweight Kickboxing Championship on November 3rd, where he was immediately destroyed. Haggerty wants an MMA fight next. ONE Flyweight Champion, 135 lbs  Demetrious Johnson - 31-4-1, 0 DefensesThe king has returned. Demetrious Johnson's 2019 debut with ONE Championship was essentially scandalous. "Mighty Mouse" had long been a fan favorite of the lighter weight classes, a 5'3" combat machine who had been going the distance with world champions like Kid Yamamoto and Dominick Cruz while still working a day job in a warehouse, but it was only in 2012 when he dedicated himself to mixed martial arts as his full-time job that he became a star. He won the UFC's flyweight tournament and became its inaugural champion, and his talents are the reason a division that has existed for a decade has only had five champions--three of whom came in the last two years after he left. By 2018, Johnson had one of the longest winning streaks in the UFC, was the all-time recordholder for championship defenses in the UFC and had recorded some of the most outstanding finishes in the history of the UFC. By 2019, he was out of the company. Johnson and the UFC never got along--or, to be blunt, Johnson was one of the few publicly calling the UFC out on its bullshit. When he won the flyweight title and became a world champion while only getting paid $23k/23k he let it be known, when the UFC cut sponsorship money in the Reebok era he noted the raw deal it gave the fighters, and when Dana White tried to force him to take fights up at bantamweight by threatening to kill the flyweight division if he didn't, he told the world. After Henry Cejudo beat him in a razor-close coinflip decision and took the bargaining leverage of his championship away, it was over in a heartbeat. Dana White personally disliked him enough that he traded him to ONE Championship in exchange for their welterweight champion, Ben Askren. Johnson proceeded to immediately win ONE's flyweight grand prix, but took the first stoppage loss of his entire career in his shot at Adriano Moraes and his world championship and engendered a thousand MMA thinkpieces about if his time as a top fighter was over. A year and a half later, he got his rematch, and on August 27 at ONE on Prime Video 1 he returned the favor, handing Moraes his own first stoppage loss after knocking him out with a flying knee. The trilogy match was inevitable, and on May 5th, Johnson beat Moraes by a comprehensive decision, ending the story--and maybe his career. He says he's not sure if he's coming back yet. Fingers crossed. ONE Strawweight Champion, 125 lbs   Joshua Pacio - 22-4, 0 DefensesIt's been a difficult couple of years for Joshua Pacio. "The Passion" stands as a true veteran of ONE Championship, having made his debut--and his first, unsuccessful attempt at winning the Strawweight title--all the way back in 2016. Pacio established himself as both a fan favorite and a solid promotional favorite for the company, and when he lost his second bid for the title against Yosuke Saruta in 2019, ONE, in a trick they'd become very friendly with over the years, gave him an instant rematch anyway. Pacio knocked Saruta out in the rematch and became easily the greatest 125-pound champion in ONE history, ultimately defending the title three times--including a trilogy match against Saruta. By 2022, Pacio was a crown jewel for ONE's lineup. Which is when he promptly got wrestled into paste by UFC cast-off Jarred Brooks. Rather than having him defend the title, ONE booked Brooks into grappling matches, and in the meantime Pacio fought and defeated undefeated prospect Mansur Malachiev to earn himself a rematch. Multiple delays ensued, but on March 1, the Brooks/Pacio rematch finally came. Fifty-six seconds in, Pacio attempted a standing kimura on Brooks, who hoisted him off the ground, suplexed him, and knocked him out. Unfortunately, this was a problem. Under ONE's ruleset, slams that land headfirst are illegal. ONE has been regularly criticized for this--less for the rule itself as for ONE's tendency to selectively enforce the rule, using it to benefit fighters they would like to succeed. ONE, of course, denies this vehemently. However you draw your own conclusions, at the end of the day Jarred Brooks was disqualified, and thus, by DQ, Joshua Pacio is now a three-time Strawweight champion. He almost immediately announced he has torn his ACL and is out for the next year. Congratulations. ONE Women's Strawweight Champion, 125 lbs  Xiong Jing Nan - 18-2, 7 DefensesXiong Jing Nan dreamed of lifting weights. She'd enjoyed sports as a child, and when China started its national push for Olympic supremacy she began training heavily in hope of joining the national weightlifting team. But then she met aspirants for its boxing team and fell in love with the idea of living out a martial arts movie and getting to hit people for fun and profit and she never looked back. She turned pro in 2014 and immediately became a standout, going 9-1 in China's Kunlun Fight promotion with wins across three separate weight classes. What made her truly dangerous wasn't one-punch power, but the ability to break her opponents with constant pressure striking, scoring TKOs with combinations stretched out across dozens of consecutive, unending strikes. The story was no different when she moved to ONE in 2017, and she was strawweight champion within two fights. ONE's women's MMA divisions have been its most stable, each having had exactly one champion, and they were so dominant that they inevitably had to fight each other--and, hilariously, traded wins back and forth in the process. 115 lbs champion Angela Lee went up to 125 to challenge for Xiong Jing Nan's belt but Nan stopped her with body kicks in the fifth round, and half a year later Nan dropped down to 115 to challenge for Lee's belt only for Lee to choke her out with twelve seconds left in the fight. Xiong has notched three successful title defenses since, which set her up for her greatest challenger yet: Angela Lee, again, apparently. Despite ONE's best attempts, Xiong successfully defended her title against Lee again, nearly finishing her in the first round and ultimately winning a decision. An entire 364 days later, she had her next fight: A special rules match, with MMA gloves but only punches and no takedowns or clinching allowed, against Muay Thai champion Nat "Wondergirl" Jaroonsak. Half a year later, her next fight was finally announced, and it is, of course, defending her title against ONE postergirl Stamp Fairtex as the company attempts, once again, to make a double champ at Xiong Jing Nan's expense. Why are we even pretending anymore. ONE Women's Atomweight Champion, 115 lbs   Stamp Fairtex - 10-2, 0 DefensesIt was slightly awkward when Seo Hee Ham and Stamp Fairtex were booked to meet at ONE Fight Night 14 in an interim atomweight title match, given the longstanding rumors of Angela Lee's retirement, and boy, it didn't get any less weird when ONE, which clearly knew what was going on, had Angela Lee announce that retirement just minutes before said match, which was promptly changed to an undisputed championship bout. But that's just part of how ONE rolls, as is their blatant attempts at favoritism, and boy, Stamp Fairtex is their most successful case study thus far. ONE signed her back in 2017 as a Muay Thai stadium champion, and within one fight in ONE she was their Atomweight Kickboxing Champion, and within two fights she was their Atomweight Muay Thai champion. Is this a statement about how quickly they push people they want or how thin their divisions can be? The answer, as always, is Yes. But none of that stopped Stamp from being really loving good at fighting, and as she transitioned to mixed martial arts she ran up a great record--with the sole exception of a two-fight series with Alyona Rassohyna, where she tapped out in the first and attempted to deny it, then won a real close split decision in an immediate rematch. ONE did not feel the need to book a rubber match, for some odd reason. Stamp won the 2021 Atomweight Grand Prix, got her shot at Angela Lee, and got choked out for her troubles, but a year and two wins later, she was good to go for another championship showdown. It wasn't easy--Seo Hee Ham dropped Stamp in the second round and, for some mysterious reason, when recapping the round, ONE chose to highlight Stamp's offense and not show it--but she stopped Ham with body shots in the third round, and in doing so became not just the undisputed champion, but the first person to ever actually knock Ham out in a fight. (Before you say it: No, Ayaka Hamasaki doesn't count, that was a corner stoppage.) ONE has their new star, and she's a hell of a striker. Her first defense will come against Denise Zamboanga on June 7, and--win or lose, apparently--she is also booked to fight Xiong Jing Nan in a (maybe?) champ-champ affair in September. Christ alive.  Rizin Lightweight Champion, 156 lbs  Roberto de Souza - 16-3, 2 DefensesRoberto "Satoshi" de Souza is trying to become the new Gegard Mousasi. On April 17 he had the chance to avenge the only loss of his career, a half-knockout half-injury against "Hollywood" Johnny Case back in 2019, and he succeeded in emphatic fashion, climbing Case's back, locking him in an inverted triangle choke and eventually forcing an armbar. He's now 14-1 and inarguably one of the best lightweights outside of the UFC, but unlike most of the other fighters to bear that title, he has made it clear he has no interest in changing that. Where the A.J. McKees and Michael Chandlers of the world want to test free agency and notoriety, Roberto de Souza is happy in Japan, both because his Rizin pay is fairly lucrative and his entire family jiu-jitsu business is based in the country. This is admirable, but it's also a little unfortunate: Rizin really only has around a dozen lightweights under contract, and "Satoshi" has already beaten a third of them. He may be waiting for a Spike Carlyle or a Luiz Gustavo to work their way into contention, but the Rizin ranks hold few surprises for him at this point. It was thus of particular interest when the main event for the New Year's Eve Bellator x Rizin card was announced as Roberto de Souza vs AJ McKee--a test of where Souza ranks with the rest of the world's competition. Unfortunately for him and Rizin, the answer was "under them." He positionally threatened McKee and was able to land some solid strikes in the final round, but was otherwise controlled and lost a decision. On May 6th, Satoshi beat Spike Carlyle in a fantastic fight--but it was a non-title fight, because Japanese promoters are still real scared of their own belts. Satoshi fought Patricky Pitbull at Bellator x Rizin 2 on July 29th--in another non-title fight, naturally--and took the first definitive beating of his career, getting utterly outclassed and ultimately stopped on leg kicks in three rounds. He fought Keita Nakamura at Rizin Landmark 9 on March 23 and put in one of the best performances of his career, battering K-Taro to a TKO in just 1:43--but because this is Japanese MMA it was, of course, a non-title fight, so it doesn't count as a title defense. Rizin Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs   Chihiro Suzuki - 13-3 (1), 1 DefenseChihiro Suzuki has had a very fortunate year. Suzuki rose to Rizin's notice not through MMA, but after winning Japan's KNOCK OUT Super Lightweight Kickboxing championship. He made his Rizin debut six months later--and got knocked out in twenty seconds. He spent the next two and a half years simultaneously rounding out his MMA game and annually defending his kickboxing gold, and by 2023, he was one of Rizin's top Featherweight contenders, more than ready for his shot at Kleber Koike Erbst's Rizin championship. And--he got armbarred in three minutes. However, hilariously enough, Erbst lost his belt on the scale after missing weight, meaning the title was vacant and the fight, by Rizin rules, was a No Contest, so Suzuki didn't even technically lose. He then proceeded to get the biggest break of his career. At Bellator x Rizin 2 on July 30th, 2023, despite having just lost a five-round fight to Sergio Pettis a month prior, Patrício Pitbull was thrown onto the card against Suzuki on four days' notice--and Suzuki not only beat him, he became the first person to ever knock out Bellator's GOAT. Rizin immediately booked Suzuki in against new champion Vugar Keramov for their debut in Keramov's home country of Azerbaijan, and Keramov looked poised and powerful and was in the process of ragdolling Suzuki like he does everyone else--and Suzuki caught him with an upkick on the jaw and punched him the rest of the way out from his goddamn back. Chihiro Suzuki, you are Rizin's new star. Hold onto it as long as you can and pray they don't book a Kleber rematch. He defended his title for the first time at Rizin 46 on April 29 by stopping Masanori Kanehara in one round. Rizin Bantamweight Champion, 135 lbs  Kai Asakura - 21-4, 0 DefensesRizin's Bantamweight title is snakebitten as hell, and, somehow, so is Kai Asakura. Kyoji Horiguchi was the first man to win it back in 2018, and a year later he gave it up, having been too injured to compete--in part thanks to fighting while injured and being defeated by, in fact, Kai Asakura, but only in a non-title fight. Asakura was a lock and a favorite to win the vacant belt that December--so he got immediately knocked out by Manel Kape. Manel Kape left Rizin for the UFC, leaving the belt once again vacant, and Kai won it after knocking out Hiromasa Ougikubo, meaning Kai was not only the champion, but he also got his rematch with Kyoji Horiguchi--only this time, Kai was defending his belt, and could finally show Horiguchi it wasn't a fluke! And then Horiguchi knocked him out in three minutes, and then the belt went into torpor for two whole years, after which Horiguchi gave it up to go be a Flyweight instead. Luckily, Rizin knew this was coming, so they booked a Bantamweight Grand Prix to crown a successor, with the explicit intention of crowning Kai Asakura. And he made it to the finals! Where he got revenge-stomped by Hiromasa Ougikubo, who then went on to lose badly to former Bellator champion Juan Archuleta, who became Rizin's first American titleholder. Archuleta was oddly at home in the pomp and circumstance of JMMA, and he promised big things for his future, and then he came into his New Year's Eve match sick, missed weight by six pounds, lost his belt on the scale, and thanks to Rizin's rules, was left with a fight where not only was he ineligible to win the title, he was ineligible to win the fight. And as sick as he was, he probably shouldn't have fought anyway! But he did, and Asakura dropped him in two rounds. Thus, for the second time, Kai Asakura is the best Bantamweight in Japan. I beg him not to walk under any dangling pianos. Rizin Flyweight Champion, 125 lbs  Kyoji Horiguchi - 32-5 (1), 0 DefensesWell, this was a long time coming. Before Rizin even existed, Kyoji Horiguchi was the consensus #2 Flyweight fighter on the planet. He'd won Shooto's 125-pound title, he'd come to America half to face the best in the world and half because Japan's MMA scene was in a real, real bad place at the time, and by mid-2015, he was 15-1 and ready to fight for a world championship. Unfortunately, said championship was held by Demetrious "Mighty Mouse" Johnson, the best Flyweight of all time. Johnson dealt Kyoji his second-ever loss and first-ever stoppage, and it stopped Horiguchi's dream of being the best, but it also opened him up to becoming a star. A year later he was out of the UFC, back home in Japan, and, immediately, one of Rizin's top attractions. But Rizin didn't have a 125-pound division--so he settled for just winning is 135-pound belt instead. When Rizin began cross-promoting with Bellator, he went and took their belt, too, just for good measure. But his strength of schedule and his own injuries caught up with him: He ultimately vacated both belts without ever recording a title defense. By the time he came back in 2021, things had changed. He'd been knocked out for the first time in Kai Asakura back in 2019, but he was fighting hurt and on short notice, so that was excused. When Sergio Pettis knocked him out in his 2021 return fight, it was a warning; when Patchy Mix dominated him in his first match in the Bellator Grand Prix of 2022, it was a sign. Horiguchi needed to be back at 125. Bellator opened a Flyweight division more or less just for him, and at Bellator x Rizin 2 in the summer of 2023, Horiguchi faced Rizin star Makoto "Shinryu" Takahashi to crown the company's inaugural champion--and the fight ended in a No Contest after Horiguchi poked Shinryu in the eye twenty-five seconds into the first round. And then Bellator got sold and stopped operating as an independent entity. Whoops! Rizin decided to just make the goddamn belt themselves, and on New Year's Eve of 2023, Horiguchi and Takahashi had their rematch, and this time, Horiguchi choked him out. Eight years after his first attempt, Kyoji Horiguchi has a Flyweight world championship. His first act as a 125-pound champion? Taking a June 9 fight against Sergio Pettis at 135 pounds. Rizin Women's Super Atomweight Championship, 108 lbs  Seika Izawa - 13-0, 1 DefenseAll hail the new queen. After years of reigning as Japan's best atomweight, the legendary Ayaka Hamasaki fell not once but twice to the rookie Seika Izawa. A 24 year-old who was pushed into judo as a child by a frustrated mother who was tired of her constant fighting with her brothers, Izawa discovered a love for grappling that led her to win junior championships in judo, wrestling and sumo alike. She would still be pursuing judo had the pandemic not shut down much of its competitive scene, but fortunately, mixed martial arts is a terrible sport run by monsters who don't care about things like deadly diseases, which made it a tempting professional prospect. Four months after her formal MMA training began Izawa was winning fights in DEEP, less than a year after that she was DEEP's strawweight champion, and one year later she was dominating one of the best women's fighters in history on Rizin's New Year's Eve special. As Japanese organizations tend to do, frustratingly, the fight was a non-title affair, meaning Izawa had to come back and do it again on April 17. After a scary moment where Hamasaki almost stole an armbar, Izawa resumed her wrestling domination and formally took Rizin's atomweight championship. As entirely fresh blood, the world of Rizin's talent is open to her--but that also means she's got a real, real big target on her back. Rizin's Superatomweight Grand Prix was both a big coming-out party for Izawa and a series of opportunities to look shockingly mortal: She had a fair bit of trouble with Anastasiya Svetkivska in the semifinals before ultimately submitting her, but her berth in the finals against former rival Si Woo Park proved the toughest fight of her career, ending in a split decision victory she easily could have lost. Seika was supposed to face Miyuu Yamamoto at Rizin 42, but after Yamamoto had to pull out with an injury, Izawa was instead scheduled to face...the last person Yamamoto beat, the 5-3 Suwanan Boonsorn, at DEEP Jewels 41 on July 28. Izawa choked her out, shockingly. It took more than an entire year, but Izawa finally had a title defense against the 8-4 grappler Claire Lopez, and Izawa scored the fastest championship victory in Rizin history, choking her out in just barely one minute. Seika scored one more win on New Year's Eve, choking out Miyuu Yamamoto in her retirement bout, and while it was an honor, it does sort of emphasize the problem with Seika's position. She's unquestionably the best Atomweight in the world, but the last real top fighter she faced was more than a year ago. Will Rizin bring her real competition, or are they trying to simply build a star? And what IS real competition at Atomweight? She choked out Si Yoon Park at DEEP JEWELS 44 to add yet another win and belt to her credit, but the Rizin title wasn't on the line, so she's still only got the one defense.
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May 1, 2024 20:28
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THE BELLATOR CHAMPIONSHIP GRAVEYARD Bellator Heavyweight Champion, 265 lbs  Ryan Bader - 31-8 (1), 3 DefensesRyan Bader is the greatest Bellator Heavyweight Champion of all time, and on a dairy farm somewhere in Wisconsin, Cole Konrad feels a pang of regret. Bader made his name as the winner of The Ultimate Fighter: Nogueira vs Mir all the way back in 2008, but his UFC career proved to be one of Sisyphean torment and humiliation that included, somehow, impossibly, being the only man to lose a UFC fight to Tito Ortiz during his last six years in the company. Bader left for free agency and Bellator in 2016 and became its light-heavyweight champion on his first night with the organization, and just two years later he became its first-ever simultaneous double-champion after knocking out the legendary Fedor Emelianenko and taking the heavyweight title. Bader would go on to lose his 205-pound crown, but Fedor never forgot his 35-second drubbing at the American wrestler's hands, and for his retirement fight, he demanded a rematch. Thus it was that the entire mixed martial arts community watched with bated breath as on February 4th, 2023, Fedor Emelianenko walked into the cage one last time and promptly got the absolute crap beaten out of him again. Ryan Bader remains undefeated at heavyweight. He was to defend his title against Linton Vassell at Bellator's series finale-sounding Bellator 300, but Vassell got injured and, as Bader himself put it in a reddit post, Viacom is done with Bellator and didn't want to pay for a replacement. Ryan Bader is the best heavyweight champion outside of the UFC, and it's anyone's guess if he'll still be champion of anything by January. He also, unfortunately, got his poo poo completely wrecked by Renan Ferreira in thirty seconds, making him the one and only Bellator fighter to lose at PFL vs Bellator. Bellator Light-Heavyweight Champion, 205 lbs  Corey Anderson - 18-6 (1), 0 DefensesCorey Anderson has been passed over by the sport so many times, but now, finally, his day has come. His success as a college wrestler led him to Ben Askren, and Ben Askren actually tricked him into trying mixed martial arts, and getting outsmarted by Ben Askren might still be the worst loss of his career. Anderson burst into the UFC as the champion of The Ultimate Fighter 19 back in 2014, and as a big, strong, undefeated 5-0 wrestler, he looked like a genuine championship threat. He was, of course, immediately knocked out by Gian Villante, and if you do not know or remnember who that is: That's the point. This sort of derailing became the story of Anderson's career, and by 2017 he had been knocked out twice in a row and was considering retirement. Instead, he launched into a fantastic, four-fight winning streak that included effortlessly destroying the UFC's big hype project Johnny Walker, giving Anderson a #5 ranking and a title eliminator against Jan Błachowicz, whom he'd beaten back in 2015. Unfortunately, this time Jan knocked him out--and despite being 4 for his last 5 and unequivocally one of the best 205-pound fighters in the world, the UFC released him because they didn't want to market a wrestler. Anderson went to Bellator, joined the 2021 Light Heavyweight Grand Prix, knocked out Ryan Bader in less than a minute and made it to the tournament final against reignning, Bellator-undefeated champion Vadim Nemkov--and he almost won. But at 4:55 of the third round, an inadvertent headbutt busted Nemkov's eye, and a doctor ruled him unable to continue. If the fight had lasted five more seconds it would have gone to a technical decision, and Anderson would have won the $1 million tournament purse and his first world championship. Instead, he got nothing, and Nemkov beat him in a rematch seven months later. It took a year and a half and Nemkov's own move up to Heavyweight for Anderson to get another chance, but at the first-ever PFL-owned Bellator Champions Series event on March 22, 2024, Corey Anderson wrestled Karl Moore for five excruciating rounds and won that god damned belt. His future as a titleholder will depend on PFL's commitment to the Bellator brand. Bellator Middleweight Champion, 185 lbs  Johnny Eblen - 15-0, 2 DefensesThere's an old combat sports tradition whereby a champion isn't really a champion until they defend their title. Gegard Mousasi has been established as the best middleweight outside the UFC that, despite the one-sided nature of their fight, Johnny Eblen's victory over him was treated as an aberration rather than the passing of a torch. It didn't matter that Eblen was undefeated, widely considered one of the absolute best by his cohort at American Top Team or that he'd dropped Mousasi on his face with his bare hands, the world needed verification. On February 4th at Bellator 290, they got it. Fedor Emelianenko's team was intending to pull one big, beautiful night of success out of the ether for their leader's retirement fight, but it was not to be: Vadim Nemkov had to pull out of the card thanks to an injury, Fedor himself was crushed for the second time by heavyweight champion Ryan Bader, and middleweight hopeful Anatoly Tokov was competitive for the first couple of rounds but was subsequently washed out by Eblen's overwhelming assault. Johnny Eblen is a defending champion now, and as things always seem to go, the conversation changed overnight from his being overrated to his being better than everyone in the UFC. This mindset only grew again after Bellator 299 on September 23rd, as Eblen faced Fabian Edwards, knocked him out in the third round, and nearly got into a post-fight brawl with his brother, UFC champion Leon Edwards. Eblen admits he has no idea what his future is or if Bellator will still be around, but he's considering a move to light-heavyweight with Vadim Nemkov leaving the division wide open. Eblen had a scare against Impa Kasanganay but ultimately won his PFL vs Bellator bout. Bellator Welterweight Champion, 170 lbs   Jason Jackson - 18-4, 0 DefensesGetting in right before the buzzer is one of the best times to get in. Jason Jackson does not win any points for having "The rear end-Kicking Machine" for a nickname, but his successes speak for themselves. Jackson actually had two run-ins with the UFC early in his career--since he got his start training with the short-lived Blackzilians team, he was part of The Ultimate Fighter 21 (jesus christ): American Top Team vs Blackzilians, where he was choked out in the second round. He didn't get invited to the UFC, but two years later he was on the third episode of the Contender Series, which saw him spend the first round mostly cage-clinching before breaking his ankle out of nowhere twenty seconds into the second round. He was in Bellator a couple years later losing a decision to Ed Ruth, and that was about the point the world decided to ignore him. As it turns out: A mistake. His path through Bellator was slow--to the point that he's only had one fight a year for the last three years--but by this year he was on a six-fight winning streak and a sensible opponent for Yaroslav Amosov. Very few people gave him a chance, but having not knocked anyone out since mid-2018, absolutely no one expected him to knock Amosov, the best Welterweight outside of the UFC, the gently caress out in the third round. Jason Jackson is, officially, the Bellator Welterweight Champion. He defended Bellator's honor by kicking Ray Cooper III's leg in half at PFL vs Bellator, and he'll make the first defense of his title against Ramazan Kurmagomedov on June 22. Bellator Lightweight Champion, 155 lbs   Usman Nurmagomedov - 17-0 (1), 2 DefensesIf there's a single, developing throughline of mixed martial arts in 2022, it's the growing power of the Dagestani wrestling brigade. Abdulmanap Nurmagomedov built an army of ultra-grapplers, and after his passing the American Kickboxing Academy's Javier Mendez and Adulmanap's son and protege, the now-retired Khabib Nurmagomedov, unleashed them on the world. Usman, Khabib's cousin (as well as the younger brother of Umar Nurmagomedov, undefeated and ranked UFC bantamweight), took to Bellator in April of 2021 and proceeded to burn an undefeated path through the Manny Muros and Patrik Pietiläe of the world. His style was a little more eclectic--lots of spinning kicks, lots of stick-and-move jabs and stomps to the leg--but the resemblance became uncanny once he inevitably, and easily, ragdolled his opponents to the canvas and generally choked them out in short order thereafter. When he was announced as the #1 contender to Bellator's lightweight title, I was somewhat miffed: He hadn't beaten any top contenders, Bellator had already held a title eliminator and it was won in a crushing thirty-second knockout by Tofiq Musayev, the whole thing smacked of a pathetic attempt to glom onto some of Khabib's mainstream attention. I at no point said that he wouldn't very, very easily win. At Bellator 288 on November 18th, Usman very, very easily won, defeating Patricky "Pitbull" Freire at every aspect of the game and leaving him sans both his championship and one eyebrow. Usman's first fight as champion was both a defense and an entry into the first round of Bellator's Lightweight Grand Prix on March 3rd at Bellator 292, where he met, crushed, and retired former UFC champion Benson Henderson, handing him just the third submission loss of a 17-year, 42-fight career. He faced fellow tournament semifinalist Brent Primus at Bellator 300 on October 7th, and it was as one-sided and yet uneventful as you can imagine. Until Usman failed his drug test. Bellator says it was for medication rather than PEDs and thus he won't be stripped, but the fight's a No Contest and they need a rematch, which seems awfully selective. And then the company got bought, so it was all forgotten anyway. He'll now face Alexander Shabliy on May 17. Bellator Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs  Patrício Pitbull - 36-7, 2 DefensesPatrício Pitbull had a weird goddamn 2023. Pitbull has long been the GOAT of Bellator, sometimes to the company's open chagrin--there were definitely times they would have vastly preferred a Pat Curran or a Michael Chandler to carry their banner, and Patrício had this unfortunate habit of not just beating them but making them look like poo poo. By mid-2021, he was Bellator's dual featherweight and lightweight champion, he was on a seven-fight win streak, and he was a finalist in their Featherweight Grand Prix. And then undefeated rising star A.J. McKee dropped him and choked him out in two minutes. Bellator, clearly, felt they had hit the jackpot and were going to be riding the McKee train for some time, as by their rematch ten months later, McKee was the centerpiece of all of their advertising. It was somewhat awkward when, as he had done to so many before, Patrício took him to a victorious decision that made McKee kind of look like poo poo, neutralizing his offense in the clinch, jabbing under his range, and grinding away the clock. Bellator pushed for a trilogy, but McKee, pissed off, tired of cutting weight and worried about having it happen all over again, declined and moved up to lightweight. Instead of a big-money rematch, Patrício was left to face top contender Ádám Borics, and the match, while hard-fought, was not particularly entertaining or memorable. Pitbull's next fight was the rare cross-promotional bout, facing Rizin's featherweight champion Kleber Koike Erbst on the New Year's Eve Bellator x Rizin special. It was the only fight on the card that wasn't particularly competitive: He shut Kleber down completely and won a wide decision. There is only one featherweight king outside the UFC--and it's one who had a two-fight losing streak, with one of those fights being a bantamweight loss to Sergio Pettis and the other a lightweight knockout to Chihiro Suzuki that he took on four days' notice, because MMA is silly. Pitbull did, however, become the first Bellator champion to canonically defend a title under their new PFL ownership: He fought Jeremy Kennedy at Bellator Champions Series 1 on March 22 and mauled him in three rounds. Bellator Bantamweight Champion, 135 lbs  Patchy Mix - 19-1, 0 DefensesIt took a long goddamn time, but Patchy Mix is finally getting the credit he deserves. Fans had already singled out Patchy as a uniquely talented fighter by 2019, when he signed to Bellator as the 10-0 King of the Cage Bantamweight Champion who'd submitted almost everyone he faced, but it wasn't really until he choked out Yuki Motoya at Bellator's first co-promotion with Rizin that people really paid attention. Which was unfortunate, because his next fight was a shot at Juan Archuleta for the vacant Bellator Bantamweight Championship and Archuleta schooled him on their feet, ending both Mix's title hopes and his undefeated streak. It didn't help matters when, two fights later, he blew his weight cut for a big Dublin match against James Gallagher. But Mix kept winning, and when he entered the Bantamweight Grand Prix and promptly stormed the bracket by beating Kyoji Horiguchi and choking out Magomed Magomedov, suddenly, people paid attention again. When he fought interim champion Raufeon Stots and knocked him out cold with a knee in less than a minute and a half, people began wondering if maybe he was the real champion and Sergio Pettis, who'd been out for a year and a half and returned to a vanity fight with Patrício Pitbull, wasn't the fake. The two met at Bellator 301 on November 17th, and Mix left no doubt: He outwrestled Pettis and choked him out in the second round. Patchy Mix is, finally, the undisputed Bellator Bantamweight Champion. He'll defend his title against Magomed Magomedov on May 17. Bellator Women's Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs  Cris Cyborg - 27-2 (1), 5 DefensesYup. It's 2024 and Cris Cyborg is still out there. For those who don't know, Cris Cyborg was the canonical women's featherweight fighter, a Muay Thai wrecking machine who didn't just beat but brutalized essentially all of her opponents, including ex-Star Wars Gina Carano, and her popularity as a destroyer of humans is the only real reason women's featherweight even exists as a division, to the point that the UFC added it when she was the only actual fighter at the weight class they employed. She was 20-1 (1) when she passed the torch to Amanda Nunes, who slew her in just fifty-one seconds. She took one more fight in the UFC to complete her contract, but left for Bellator almost immediately afterward with uncharacteristic cooperation from the UFC itself--after all, they'd gotten what they wanted out of her. Her first Bellator fight was a one-sided destruction of their featherweight champion, and she's defended it three times since. At this point in Cyborg's career the problem isn't her or her fighting or her age, but simply that there's no one in Bellator for her to fight--after just five fights she's already hitting rematches, having just recorded her second one-sided bludgeoning of a very game but outmatched Arlene Blencowe. Cyborg decided her next fight would be a boxing match, and on September 25 she faced Simone da Silva, a jobber to the stars coming off twelve straight losses who had been knocked out just one month prior. Undeterred, she had her second boxing match on the undercard of December 10ths Crawford/Avanesyan card, taking a unanimous decision over Gabrielle Gabanator Holloway, who is 6-6 in MMA and 0-3 in boxing. After a year and a half of inactivity, Cris Cyborg returned to MMA to defend her title against Cat Zingano at Bellator 300 on October 7th. It lasted four minutes. Cyborg has been open and public about her lack of communication with PFL, and despite being one of Bellator's biggest names, those fences do not appear to be mending. Bellator Women's Flyweight Champion, 125 lbs  Liz Carmouche - 21-7, 3 DefensesIt took more than a decade and some controversy, but Liz Carmouche got her flowers. "Girl-Rilla" was just as present a figure in establishing women's MMA in the mainstream, but she's the most consistently forgotten because she was the losing fighter in all of those establishing moments. She was a challenger for the early, pre-fame Strikeforce Women's Bantamweight Championship, and was winning on the scorecards before Marloes Coenen choked her out. She was a central part of the inaugural Invicta FC card, and was planned as a title contender before the big show came calling. She became one half of the first women's fight in UFC history, and at one point had Ronda Rousey in a nearly destiny-defying neck crank, but was ultimately submitted in the first round. She's one of two women to ever defeat Valentina Shevchenko, but when given a second chance at the now-UFC champion Shevchenko, she fell short. Despite her powerful wrestling and submission skills, she was eternally denied the top of the mountain. So it was both particularly appropriate and particularly cruel when she finally won a championship on April 22, 2022--in a way that displeased everybody. Standing champion Juliana Velasquez was winning on every scorecard, but Liz Carmouche got her in the crucifix position and landed a number of, respectfully, small elbows, but referee Mike Beltran called a TKO to the immediate chagrin of the entirely safe ex-champion. The controversy made a rematch all but mandatory, and it took Bellator most of the year to do it, but the two met in the cage to run it back at Bellator 289 on December 9, and this time there was no controversy, as Velasquez submitted to an armbar two rounds in. The weirdness didn't stop there: Liz's next title defense against Deanna Bennett also hit the skids, as Bennett missed weight and was thus ineligible to win the championship. Carmouche put it on the line anyway, and fortunately, she choked Bennett out in the fourth round. She defended her title against Ilima-Lei Macfarlane at Bellator 300 on October 7th, and it was one of those fights where friends don't really want to hurt each other--until Ilima got kicked enough that her leg collapsed in the fifth round. Her status as champion is questionable, though--of all Bellator's titleholders, Liz is the only one taking part in this year's PFL season. At PFL 1 on April 4 she beat Juliana Velasquez for the third time. Good job.
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May 1, 2024 20:28
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And to continue the discussion from the end of the last thread:Digital Jedi posted:And that fight? Brian Ortega I feel like Ilia Topuria's completely reckless and insane self-belief is a huge part of what makes him so successful as a fighter, but it's also what got him to take the Jai Herbert fight that almost ended his streak and when he crashes to Earth it is going to be explosive.
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May 1, 2024 20:31
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when Ilia loses he can just retire to be the bad guy in a John Wick movie
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May 1, 2024 20:58
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Alaois posted:when Ilia loses he can just retire to be the bad guy in a John Wick movie That's probably his most viable way to actually be the highest paid athlete, if the thing he is being paid for isn't the athletics.
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May 1, 2024 21:04
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CarlCX posted:Alex Pereira is the first man to successfully defend the Light Heavyweight championship against a Light Heavyweight fighter since February of 2020. loving LOL
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May 1, 2024 21:59
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kensei posted:loving LOL That's in big part the weird injury poo poo though right? First Jiri tears his shoulder in the jungle or some poo poo and then Hill tears something in his leg while playing basketball, right?
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May 1, 2024 22:20
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Brut posted:That's in big part the weird injury poo poo though right? First Jiri tears his shoulder in the jungle or some poo poo and then Hill tears something in his leg while playing basketball, right? Probably but that doesn't make it any less hilarious to me
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May 1, 2024 22:22
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kensei posted:Probably but that doesn't make it any less hilarious to me Fair enough. Jiri should be next up for the title shot right? Wait no, Ankalaev I guess? Not sure what's going on with him these days, he always seemed to have mindset problems.
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May 1, 2024 22:27
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quote:taking the fall whenever they got too blatant about it. Sapp moved to mixed martial arts and went 0-3 at that, too. Just a thing at the end of one of the paragraphs about akebono Great write-up about him though 
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May 1, 2024 22:44
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MAX
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May 1, 2024 22:50
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Is ufc301 the worst numbered card ever?
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May 1, 2024 22:55
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ilmucche posted:Just a thing at the end of one of the paragraphs about akebono There is always, always something. Thank you again. Brut posted:That's in big part the weird injury poo poo though right? First Jiri tears his shoulder in the jungle or some poo poo and then Hill tears something in his leg while playing basketball, right? It's a combination of the injuries, the bad timing, the belt hot potato, and the UFC deciding Jan's big title challenger needed to be Izzy, who, to date, has not competed at the weight class again.
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May 1, 2024 22:56
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CarlCX posted:It's a combination of the injuries, the bad timing, the belt hot potato, and the UFC deciding Jan's big title challenger needed to be Izzy, who, to date, has not competed at the weight class again. Yeah Izzy going up was also pretty stupid, it makes sense for someone like Pereira who looks like he just stepped in from walking the sahara when he's weighing in, but afaik izzy said he walks around at like 195~ cagliostr0 posted:Is ufc301 the worst numbered card ever?
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May 1, 2024 23:00
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Brut posted:Going back how far? I'm sure you can find worse somewhere between 1 and 50. I'm terms of fight quality you are probably right but those early cards had novelty and prurient interest that this doesn't. It really feels like a apex fight night grew legs and stole a number on its break for freedom.
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May 1, 2024 23:32
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cagliostr0 posted:I'm terms of fight quality you are probably right but those early cards had novelty and prurient interest that this doesn't. So I wrote that without actually looking at the card at all, now that I am: First, remember that this is in Brazil, and every single fight all the way down the card is Brazilian vs non-Brazilian, so we've got a fun little gimmick. Now the fights? The main event is loving great, flyweight rules (when it's not a 9th consecutive rematch), I'm all for flyweight PPV main events. I'd watch Jose Aldo fight anyone, but in this case I'm watching Jose Aldo fight a dude who has 2 leg kick TKOs in his last 3 fights. Anthony Smith should retire, I think UFC thinks so too since they've got him fighting an undefeated Vitor. Pereira and Potieria are both very fun to watch, this fight has no chance to be boring. Craig vs Borralho might end up being a grappling fight but I still think it's gonna be great. So...4 out of 5 good fights on the main card, and the 5th is basically an execution, seems normal to me. The prelims uhhh, they're free. Seriously though the crowd is gonna make this card good, I have faith in uh vai morrer
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May 1, 2024 23:53
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cagliostr0 posted:Is ufc301 the worst numbered card ever? 279 was definitely worse on paper. 289 and 293 were probably on par with this one. this is a weak card, but it doesn't look superlatively bad
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May 2, 2024 00:20
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On the topic of UFC 301: CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 100: HAVE NO FEARS, WE'VE GOT STORIES FOR YEARS  SATURDAY, MAY 4 FROM THE FARMASI ARENA IN RIO DE JANEIRO EARLY PRELIMS 3 PM PDT / 6 PM EDT | PRELIMS 5 PM / 8 PM | MAIN CARD 7 PM / 10 PM I try not to talk about myself too much in these things, but we're gonna break from format a little bit this week and get personal, because god drat, we've been through one hundred of these already. We can have a personal week once every two and a half years. Christ, two and a half years. The first official writeup I did was for Calvin Kattar vs Giga Chikadze, the UFC's first card of 2022. That's really recent! 27 months shouldn't feel like it was all that long ago! But there were twenty fighters on that card and ten of them have already been cut, and boy, if that isn't a testament to just how fast the sport moves these days. Or, hell, how fast the world does. It's outright passe at this point to pull a Norman Mailer and talk about combat sports as a way of symbolizing or tracking social change--which is admittedly pretty funny given how deeply culturally intertwined they've been with the rise of an awful lot of awful things over the last twenty years--but I don't think we really need to do it, anyway. I know multiple friends who've had to flee multiple countries and I would bet that's an insanely common sentence these days. No one's unaware of just how bad things have been. It's been a rough two years. COVID, health problems, losing pets, losing family (these two categories, realistically, are the same), the travails of time that wear away at us all. But it has, in some ways, been two of the better years of my life. I got engaged to my favorite human being. I learned to get my writing out of Google Docs folders no one will ever see. I promised I would do this silly, passionate thing, and through hospitals and plane trips and at one point having to type around holes in my fingers after breaking up a dog fight, I have somehow made it through one hundred of these without missing any. I know a number of people--including some readers--who have found it progressively harder to enjoy or even watch the UFC thanks to their gleeful participation in some of the worst politics on Earth. In conversation with good brother Marching Powder last Summer, I made a flippant comment that's stayed in the back of my head ever since as a sort of mission statement: CarlCX posted:As the UFC has drifted even further to the right and become an out-and-out platform for total bullshit, it has made me more determined to stick around. I'm not ceding the space of this sport to some of the worst motherfuckers on the planet just because they got louder and more desperate. I was renting UFC on VHS before Dana White was here and I'll still be watching the day after he wakes up in Hell. However much I complain--and however much more I am certain to as we continue down the slide to a one-company world of mixed martial arts--I do, still, love this sport, and half of the point of doing this was to stay connected to the part of me that does. For however much honest cynicism I dispense on a weekly basis, if you are reading this, I hope there is a part of that love that resonates with you, too. And if you are reading this: Thank you for reading this. Learning that this helps anyone follow or care about the sport remains as stunning and motivating as it did the first time someone said it to me, and by the time I say hello again in late 2026, I hope I have not let you down. Here's to a hundred more.  you can hear the crowd chants already MAIN EVENT: THE FLYWEIGHT SITUATION, PART TWO  FLYWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP: Alexandre Pantoja (27-5, Champion) vs Steve Erceg (12-1, #10)Believe it or not, this is the first time in the history of the UFC we have back-to-back Flyweight main events. Last June's Kara-France vs Albazi was the UFC's first Flyweight main event in 30 months, and now we're blessed with a veritable cornucopia of small-man fight times. It's a golden age for the Flyweight division, and things have never been better. Which is why the champion with a single title defense is skipping everyone else in the top ten and fighting its lowest ranked person. Alexandre Pantoja, to be fair, does not make it easy. He already beat Manel Kape, Alex Perez, Brandon Moreno and Brandon Royval--twice, in fact, because he truly hates Brandons. (It's technically three for Moreno, but that gets into existential territory about how real fights on The Ultimate Fighter are.) The only people with victories over Pantoja in the entirety of the last decade are Askar Askarov, who left the UFC of his own accord just two fights later, Deiveson Figueiredo, who's now chasing a 135-pound title fight, and Dustin Ortiz, who despite being one of the division's best fighters was cut from the UFC in 2019 back when they were planning on deleting Flyweight altogether. He doesn't have many unvanquished enemies left. and it mostly involves the negated status of every other potential contender. But there's been a lot of discussion about the idea that this fight is the best the UFC can realistically do given the rankings. If you go down the ladder, it goes something like this:
But Steve Erceg? Now that's a haircut you can set your watch to. I know I just did a list, but we have to do another one, because the Steve Erceg journey through the UFC is some wonderfully silly poo poo:
Except: I'm cool with it. Should Matheus Nicolau have been pulled from his Apex main event for a better title challenger? Probably. Would Muhammad Mokaev have been a more popular, more deserving title contender? Definitely. Am I mad about it? As much as I feel like I probably should be--no. Not even a little. Goddamn near every single Flyweight championship fight for years has been a rematch. Henry Cejudo won the title in a rematch. Deiveson Figueiredo won the title in a rematch. He spent most of his title reign trading back and forth in three separate rematches with Brandon Moreno. Alexandre Pantoja won his belt in a rematch with Brandon Moreno and defended it in a rematch with Brandon Royval. Are the 'the UFC had no choice' arguments sound? God, no. They're the UFC, they can do whatever they want. They could have scheduled the next 125-pound championship match anytime, with any one of a number of more deserving contenders. They got José loving Aldo for the co-main event of this pay-per-view. Getting Steve Erceg a title shot was a choice, not a necessity. Is it worth getting mad over? If you're Muhammad Mokaev: Definitely. You should probably be furious. If you're a fan? It's fine, man. There are a lot of cases of divisional injustice and preferential treatment to get mad about, and with Dustin Poirier about to get a championship fight next month lord knows we're going to talk about it, but all things being considered? Flyweight could use some new blood, the #7 guy getting passed up for the #10 guy isn't a particularly broad injustice, and on the mass spectrum of the UFC's matchmaking sins, It's Fine. And, helpfully, it's a really interesting fight. Alexandre Pantoja is an amazing fighter, but it's hard to miss his tendency to work behind his chin. He was actually outstruck in all of his last four victories, but his willingness to walk through punches to land his own--or, more commonly, to get his opponents on the floor where he can use his ridiculously dangerous grappling game--won him those fights anyway. Steve Erceg has shown off some exceptionally sound boxing in his fights thus far. When Erceg was first booked against Dvořák, even though I picked against him, I commented on his ability to sneak left hooks into extremely tight spaces, and that's been a money punch for him in the UFC and is, in fact, the punch that got him this fight. But his reliance on it has also gotten him in real trouble. Alessandro Costa gave Erceg hell, and the first time Erceg really hurt Matt Schnell he got entirely too excited about it and nearly got flattened for his troubles. Erceg knows how dangerous his offense is, but the urgency with which he pursues it overrides his defensive instincts. When he's pecking away at range, he's extremely sound; when he closes in, he gets hurt. Or, more commonly, grappled. Steve's very good at getting up and reversing positions, but he still gets into those positions, and Pantoja is all about dangerous positions. He hurts people up close, he grapples people out of offensive attempts and when he gets them where he wants them, he's very, very hard to stop. If Erceg wins this fight it'll be by either jab-and-jogging Pantoja or flattening him in five minutes; if Pantoja wins, it's by dragging Erceg through hell. ALEXANDRE PANTOJA BY SUBMISSION feels more likely. CO-MAIN EVENT: CONTRACTUALLY OBLIGATORY BANTAMWEIGHT: Jonathan Martinez (19-4, #13) vs José Aldo (31-8, NR)There are a number of alternate universes in which I love this fight. It's José Aldo! He's back! The greatest Featherweight of all time is back in mixed martial arts, we should all be celebrating! And then you realize he's 37, and he's fighting one of the best Bantamweights in the company, and he doesn't even really want to be here. In a rare moment of honesty in the mixed martial arts business, in the lead-up to this event, Aldo very openly discussed the fight happening thanks to the greatest of combat sports traditions: Contractual Obligations. He very publicly retired from MMA two years ago after losing to Merab Dvalishvili and he spent all of 2023 taking boxing fights in an attempt to build his way to one of those rare-yet-present big-money MMA/boxing crossover bouts. But he still has one fight left on his UFC contract, and as long as that's true, any one of those big-money fights is legally problematic--as is, say, potentially angling for a payday from the Professional Fighters League while they still have money to throw around. So he's back. Which doesn't have to be that bad, honestly. Even if it's a one-off, José Aldo is an absolute legend of the sport and having a one-night-only return in his hometown is a great way to add one more piece to one of MMA's greatest legacies. Which is when you learn that this was supposed to be a legacy vs legacy fight between Aldo and Dominick Cruz, but Cruz--try to be shocked--had an undisclosed medical issue during his camp. But, hey: What about Henry Cejudo, he's still here! Or maybe Chito Vera? Cody Garbrandt? A rematch with Cub loving Swanson, just for one last touch of WEC memorabilia? It's funny, because a year and a half ago I didn't just say the same things about Frankie Edgar, I said it about an awful lot of the same people: CarlCX posted:Frankie Edgar is riding into the sunset. And in a better sport, a better world, his retirement fight would be an event: A battle of legends against Dominick Cruz, a clash of diminished but still popular champions against Cody Garbrandt, one last gritty veteran war against Jim Miller. Can we do better this time? Can a motherfucker get a real retirement match? Nope! Sorry. Best we can do is Jonathan Martinez. I'm a big fan of Jonathan Martinez. I'm a sucker for a journeyman-who-breaks-from-the-pack story, and Martinez going from a 4-3 fighter having persistent weight cutting issues to a top-fifteen fighter on a six-fight winning streak? That's real, real hard to beat. Doing it by just leg kicking the poo poo out of a whole bunch of people? That's a fighter grabbing directly for my heart. The "Dragon" who was struggling with Andre Ewell and getting dropped by Davey Grant feels a whole world away from the fighter who took on one of Bantamweight's biggest punchers in Adrian Yanez and had him whiffing on almost 75% of his strikes. Hell, thanks to the same leg kicks that took out Yanez, Martinez is one of just three men to ever knock out our last-paragraph buddy Cub Swanson. The first man to do it? José Aldo. There's a school of thought that trying to trade leg kicks with Aldo, one of the sport's most devastating haters of leg bones, is a terrible idea. But multiple fighters have had a whole lot of success against Aldo by battering his legs, half to keep him from sitting down on his own offensive kicking game, half to capitalize on Aldo's largely successful late-career self-reinvention as a boxer. Martinez has considerable power and accuracy in his hands too, but his kicks are his most reliable weapon. Is using them on Aldo a strategic error? Honestly? I don't think so. I don't think it's because Aldo's markedly worse than he used to be, either. Unlike most folks in his position, he still looked like a contender when he retired from the sport--the worst thing you can say about him is he got swamped by Merab Dvalishvili, who does that to goddamn near everyone on the planet. Aldo is still extremely dangerous, and a lapse in judgment or timing for Martinez could get him smoked in seconds. But whether it's having one foot out the door on the sport already, or a particular faith in Martinez and his leg-kicking game, or simply a lingering distaste for Aldo's Minions sleepover party with Jair Bolsonaro, I'm going with my gut and picking JONATHAN MARTINEZ BY DECISION. MAIN CARD: THE WILD LIFE OF IGGY POTS LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Anthony Smith (37-19, #10) vs Vitor Petrino (11-0, #15) Welcome to your most-likely-to-be-depressing fight of the night. Five years ago, Anthony Smith was the #3-ranked Light Heavyweight on the planet fighting Jon Jones in a pay-per-view main event. Since that night he's 4-6, he's had teeth removed from his head by fists, and he's been knocked out twice in his last four fights. In 2021, Anthony Smith fought Ryan Spann, dominated him, dropped him and choked him out in a single round. They had a rematch this past September, just shy of two years later, and Smith won again, but this time it was a skin-of-his-teeth split decision that could have easily gone the other way. There are two ways to look at this: Either you believe Ryan Spann has improved by leaps and bounds, which his current three-fight losing streak would seem to impeach, or you believe that Anthony Smith, who is passing his mid-thirties, has been fighting for almost twenty years and holds 56 fights' worth of wear and tear, has started to degenerate as a fighter. People have always underrated Smith thanks to his record, but in a division of specialists, he's always been a solid all-around competitor: Solid jabs, solid leg kicks, surprisingly dangerous grappling and the wisdom to effectively mix them together. But the glue holding them together was his ability to out-tough his opponents, and unfortunately, you can only be so tough for so long when the wolves are at your door. I do not know what Vitor Petrino's fursona is, but if anything, this fight is the UFC's attempt to find out. Petrino's drat near the precise ideal of how the UFC wants to do business these days: They got a big, scary muscleman on the Contender Series as an undefeated almost-all-finishes wrecking machine, he walked into the UFC with his record intact, he took three fights in 2023 like a good company man and won them all, and now, just five months in, he's already on his second fight of 2024. He's a big finishing machine and the future of the division and already the #15 guy in the company! Of course, the first guy he beat went 0-4 and got released and the last guy he beat is the now-retired Tyson "The Last Man To Get Finished By Shogun" Pedro, but gently caress, it's Light Heavyweight, how much can you really ask for. On one hand: I'm a lot more impressed by Vitor now that we've seen him go deeper into fights. Barnstormers with quick finishes aren't very rare at 205 pounds; complete fighters who can handle striking and grappling for fifteen minutes are. On the other: Being the only man in Anton Turkalj's UFC record not to finish him? That's not a great sign. Dropping a round to Tyson Pedro and having to wrestle him for dear life to make it to the bell? When your reputation as a Contender Series Alumnus was built around being a human wrecking ball, that's really not a great sign. And yet: VITOR PETRINO BY TKO. As disrespectful as it feels to say Tyson Pedro will fare better against a man than Anthony Smith, at this stage in his career, I don't think it's unwarranted. There are ways for him to win, here; Petrino had a lot of trouble with Pedro's leg kicks and they're one of Smith's specialties, and Petrino's overaggressive style could get him reversed by Smith's continually underrated grappling. But I just don't have faith in Smith's ability to avoid Petrino's power for fifteen minutes. MIDDLEWEIGHT: Michel Pereira (30-11 (2)) vs Ihor Potieria (21-5)This wasn't intended to be a squash match, and both men were initially booked into better-suited fights, but sometimes things simply work out in favor of chaos. Michel Pereira has found his home. "Demolidor" was still very talented and dangerous as a Welterweight, but cutting that much weight left him visibly drained--and sometimes it kept him from reaching the class at all. After losing out on a high-profile matchup with Stephen Thompson thanks to a botched weight cut, Pereira made the move to 185 pounds at the end of 2023, and after knocking out Andre Petroski and choking out Michał Oleksiejczuk in just barely over one minute apiece, it was clearly the right choice. He's bigger, he's somehow actually faster, and he's been able to use that newfound physicality to really string his attacks together in ways that previously escaped him. He was originally going to have a stiffer test tonight against fellow multifaceted striking standout Makhmud Muradov, but thanks to our old friend the staph infection, he couldn't make it. In his place: Ihor Potieria. Ol' Iggy Pots has been through a real goddamn weird path in the UFC. He did the Contender Series thing, joined the roster looking like a killing machine on a half-decade-long winning streak, and was immediately immolated by Nicolae Negumereanu. And then, somehow, he became the man chosen to retire a legend of the sport in Maurício Rua in front of an extremely sad Rio de Janeiro crowd. And then he got knocked the gently caress out twice in a row, and then he dropped to 185 pounds in an attempt to save his UFC career, and he won--but only after failing to actually make the weight in the first place. As his followup performance, he was supposed to fight in Saudi Arabia next month against the undefeated Russian sensation Shara Magomedov, a man who tends to fight only in places that aren't concerned about licensing a fighter with one eye. But this fight needed to be rescued, so here we are. This is, pretty unequivocally, a gimme fight for Pereira. Ihor hits hard when he connects, but he's also a little too wild, a little too aggressive, and a little too prone to getting his poo poo completely hosed up by people who can throw straight punches. MICHEL PEREIRA BY TKO. MIDDLEWEIGHT: Paul Craig (17-7-1, #13) vs Caio Borralho (15-1 (1), #14) I almost gave this fight special recognition for its potential in achieving mixed martial comedy. Paul "Bearjew" Craig is a man so easily memed that you're compelled to write his nickname every time you refer to him. He punches like a boxer in the pre-Queensbury era, he gets cracked in nearly every fight he has and he loses large parts of the fights he wins, and yet, somehow, he's been ranked at the top of two different weight classes. His guard game has broken a dozen dreams. But his run as a 185-pound contender hit a speedbump last November when Brendan Allen completely shut him down. There's only room for one grungy, underrated grappler at Middleweight, and it is not Paul "Bearjew" Craig. There is absolutely nothing underrated about Caio Borralho's grappling. Despite being one of Brazil's better prospects, "The Natural" inexplicably had to win two separate Contender Series fights in twenty-one days to get his UFC contract, and since then, it's been smooth sailing. He's taken down and outgrappled five men in a row, he's developed some solid striking to round out his game, and until his last fight with Abus Magomedov, he'd been drat near perfect in the organization. He still won, of course, but Magomedov was the first man in the UFC Caio failed to take down, and some of Magomedov's kicks gave him a fair bit of trouble. Caio took over in the back half of the fight, but how much of that was Caio wearing him down and how much was Magomedov's persistent problems with cardio is up for debate. But, uh, that's not going to be much of a problem in this fight. I don't think the grappling in this fight is as cut-and-dry as it might seem--Caio may be a technically better grappler than Brendan Allen, but Allen's creativity and flow are the real stars of his game--but I don't think it matters, because this fight really doesn't have to go to the ground anyway. Caio can jab Craig all night, and he probably will. CAIO BORRALHO BY DECISION. PRELIMS: JOJO BRITO AND THE LUCINDO THEORY FEATHERWEIGHT: Joanderson Brito (16-3-1) vs Jack Shore (17-1)This is flavor country, for me. It's fitting he's here, because Joanderson Brito was on that aforementioned Kattar/Chikadze card that started me down this terrible path, which means I've been straight-up in the tank for him for one hundred UFC events and have no intention of stopping. His striking is vicious and powerful, his grappling is crushing, and his choke game is opportunistic and fast as hell, which Jonathan Pearce found out the hard way during Brito's most recent fight this past November when, in the course of about a minute, Pearce taunted Brito from top position to do something about Pearce holding him down, Brito promptly sprang to his knees, wrapped up Pearce's neck and choked him out, and then, to celebrate, he pulled a Derrick Lewis and took off his pants. Jack Shore is just trying to keep his career on the drat rails. He was the undefeated Bantamweight champion of Cage Warriors when he joined the UFC back in 2019, but between COVID, health issues and just plain bad luck with his opponents, he's only managed six fights across the last five years. Between losing his undefeated streak to Ricky Simón and busting the poo poo out of his knee in 2022, Shore decided to take his Welsh fighting arts up ten pounds to Featherweight. He looked great in his debut at the class last year after strangling Makwan Amirkhani, but in fairness, Makwan Amirkhani has fallen on some pretty hard goddamn times lately. If you have read any of these, you know I'm picking Brito. This could, however, be a dangerous fight for him. Brito's a fantastic fighter, but he's also a frontrunner who likes imposing his gameplan on his enemies. Jonathan Pearce demonstrated how taking that ability away from Brito can hurt him, Bill Algeo showed how to use Brito's pace against him and gradually take him apart, and Jack Shore's offensive wrestling and pocket striking could work just as well into Brito's high-pressure game. That said, I ain't gettin' off my boat. JOANDERSON BRITO BY SUBMISSION. WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT: Karolina Kowalkiewicz (16-7, #13) vs Iasmin Lucindo (15-5, NR) The Karolina Kowalkiewicz comeback has been one of the best MMA stories in years. Karolina was an early standout in the then-nascent Strawweight division back in 2015 as an undefeated top contender who outworked everyone she fought. And then she went 3 for 9 and became one of the precious few fighters to ever drop five in a row in the UFC, let alone doing so without getting released. The entire MMA world more or less gave up on Karolina, and in hindsight, the competition she was facing really speaks for itself. Only one of the seven women who've defeated Karolina was not either a UFC champion, a former challenger for a world championship, or, through beating her, would go on to become one of those challengers. Karolina's four-fight comeback winning streak has been wonderful to watch, but it has also been against women at the periphery of the top fifteen. Iasmin Lucindo does not in any way break this pattern, but the UFC has real hopes that, eventually, she will. They put a lot of marketing hype behind the big Yazmin/Iasmin war of 2022 when Yazmin Jauregui beat Lucindo in the rare mutual UFC debut fight, and Lucindo's been winning ever since: First a decision over Brogan Walker, the runner-up of The Ultimate Fighter 30 (jesus christ), then a submission over Polyana Viana. Her swarming strikes and her surprisingly crushing top game have driven her success in the division, even if she eats a foot to the face here and there during her pursuit of those takedowns. Iasmin's a big favorite here, half because people have not forgotten Karolina's lean years, half because Karolina even at her best tends to be a reactive fighter, and Iasmin's drowning pace is tailor-made to keep her from mounting any meaningful offense. But I have also seen Karolina take advantage of overaggressive ground assaults with her own underrated back-takes, and god dammit, I want an upset. KAROLINA KOWALKIEWICZ BY SUBMISSION. LIGHTWEIGHT: Elves Brener (16-3) vs Myktybek Orolbai (12-1-1) My sins have come to force me to apologize. Elves Brener and Myktybek Orolbai are both fighters who wound up in unexpected-replacement situations, and in both cases I underestimated them, and in both cases I was wrong. Elves Brener, the veteran of no less than the PREDADOR FIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP, took a formerly-ranked Lightweight in Guram Kutateladze, went to war with him for three rounds and punched his lights out with two minutes to spare. Myktybek Orolbai, who had already fought just three weeks prior to his UFC debut, took a fill-in fight against the knockout artist Uroš Medić, and despite getting his brain rattled in the first round he threw Medić around like a sack of flour and cranked his neckbones into submission in the second. Brener's followup knockout over Kaynan Kruschewsky means his power isn't just a fluke and his ability to atomize people with single punches is a problem for the division; Orolbai is getting his first chance at a fully-trained, fully-scheduled fight, meaning he's either going to look even better, or he's no longer going to be a total mystery and Brener's going to know to play the-floor-is-lava against him. The odds favor Orolbai, and I agree. I don't think he'll be able to pretzel Brener the way he did Medić--Brener's no slouch as a grappler himself--but I do think he'll control the fight. MYKTYBEK OROLBAI BY DECISION. FEATHERWEIGHT: Jean Silva (12-2) vs William Gomis (13-2) It's testing time. Jean Silva came off the Contender Series as a member of the same Fight Nerds team that brought Caio Borralho to the UFC, but where Borralho is a technically sound if anticlimactic grappler, Silva is a wildly swinging punching machine who knocks out drat near everyone he fights. Which is the world's favorite kind of guy! Unfortunately, he has fought a lot of bums. In his twelfth fight he beat a 4-0 guy, in his thirteenth he made a 9-9 guy quit in the first round, and in his UFC debut, he fought poor Westin Wilson, who might be the single biggest sacrificial lamb the company has brought to the big show since CM Punk. Was it a great knockout? Sure. Was it against tough competition? Not really. William Gomis has been dealing with stiffer competition, but despite being a French fighter on a six-year winning streak and thus right in the UFC's preferable marketing mold, they just haven't really wanted to invest in him. His fights were the kind of anticlimactic and slow they dislike, and if you can't trust a European talent to go out of their way to finish people to their own strategic detriment, what's the point? Gomis, hearing the complaints, decided to fix them in the only honorable way possible: In his last fight out he stopped Yanis Ghemmouri with a third-round TKO. He did it, of course, by kicking him in the groin and getting away with it because no referee can agree on what is or isn't a shot to the cup, but hey, a win's a win, right? I don't think this is a good fight for Silva. He can go three rounds, as we saw on the Contender Series, but his best performances come from barnstorming. Not only is Gomis a very patient and defensively sound fighter, he's also got almost half a foot and 4" of reach on Silva and he's very comfortable sliding out of the way, throwing out kicks, and, y'know, punting you in the junk. WILLIAM GOMIS BY DECISION after making Silva chase him for three rounds. EARLY PRELIMS: LAST SEASON'S FIGHTS LIGHTWEIGHT: Joaquim Silva (13-4) vs Drakkar Klose (14-2-1) Joaquim Silva's had a weird goddamn career lately. Three fights ago he was sending the 0-5 (1) Jesse Ronson out of the UFC midway through a preliminary card, two fights ago he was co-main eventing against current top contender Arman Tsarukyan and at one point he drat near knocked him out and came inches away from turning the entire rankings upside down, and one fight later he was struggling with Clay Guida. And now, after two straight high-profile fights--one of which he won!--he's all the way down on the prelims again, because some fighters are not looked upon by management as fighters, but rather, matchmaking puzzle pieces. Drakkar Klose is a hell of a puzzle piece. He's been around the UFC since 2017, he's only got two losses in his entire career and they were to white-hot fighters in Beneil Dariush and the now-forgotten David Teymur, and he still feels like an only partially-known quantity for the division because he just can't stay consistently present. He missed two years for COVID between 2020 and 2022, he came back, won two fights and then went right back on the shelf for a year and a half thanks to an ACL injury, and this past December he finally walked back into the UFC, took on a real stiff fighter in Joe Solecki, and knocked him out by simply picking him up and slamming him on the side of his loving skull. Silva's a scary fighter in his own right, and I could talk about his striking power vs Klose's defensive technique, but as a much simpler rule, I do not pick against anyone who bodyslammed someone to death in their last fight. DRAKKAR KLOSE BY DECISION. LIGHTWEIGHT: Mauricio Ruffy (9-1) vs Jamie Mullarkey (17-7) Every once in awhile I fail to live up to my own intellectual standards and do the stupid American thing of laughing at a foreign name, but in this case I feel less bad about it because I don't think 'Mauricio Ruffy' is a silly name, I think it's just extremely fun to say. Even if you're not doing the Portuguese R-as-H thing. Both ways work. It's a gem. But Mauricio makes me nervous, man. On one hand he comes from the greatest mixed martial arts background there is--being a huge anime nerd, in his case for One Piece--on the other, he really likes that mummy-stance fighting style where he keeps his arms out in front of him and his chin completely upright, and it already got him knocked out once by Manoel Sousa (who the UFC really, really should've gotten), and I cannot help thinking a dude like Jamie Mullarkey, who has been doing this for a decade and has proven himself to be both tough as poo poo and a big-punching chaos elemental in his own right, will be able to find that target too. Mullarkey's an underdog here because he's gotten knocked out twice in his last three fights, and that is, in fairness, a great reason to doubt someone! But he's also not that far removed from wrestling Jalin Turner and I think people are chiseling his epitaph just a touch early. JAMIE MULLARKEY BY TKO. WOMEN'S FLYWEIGHT: Dione Barbosa (6-2) vs Ernesta Kareckaite (5-0-1) If you look into the mirror in a darkened room and say "STYLES MAKE FIGHTS" five times, this fight materializes and you get to watch it. Both of these women are making their debuts after victories on the Contender Series, but where Barbosa, as a dyed-in-the-wool grappler, won hers by snatching an armbar from the bottom and looking pretty good in the process, Kareckaite, a kickboxer, had a big brawl with "Crispy" Carli Judice and narrowly squeaked out a split decision, meaning she falls into the "didn't look great, but did look Fun" category the UFC is really trying to pursue these days. On paper, Barbosa's career is bizarre: In just her third fight she beat the already 9-3 Karine Silva, who's now in the UFC's top fifteen, but one fight later she got knocked out by Josiane Nunes, who should be a Featherweight, and proceeded to get routed by Jena Bishop, who's now one of the PFL's better up-and-coming contenders. Ernesta's just sort of present. Three of her six career victories came against people who'd never won a fight, and the three times she's fought people with commensurate experience she's managed a draw and two split decisions. This by no means makes her a bad fighter, but it does make her an unproven one, and it continues to call into question a UFC that's trying its damnedest to get Ernesta Kareckaites into the roster while letting go of Jennifers Maia and Tailas Santosi. DIONE BARBOSA BY SUBMISSION. I am a man of bias and in near-pure striker vs grappler matchups I will always bias towards the grapplers and then get really mad and grumpy when they lose anyway. LIGHTWEIGHT: Ismael Bonfim (19-4) vs Vinc Pichel (14-3) Reruns! This fight was supposed to happen six goddamn months ago on the Jailton Almeida vs Derrick Lewis card, but Bonfim blew his weight cut by half an entire weight class and Pichel, incensed at his unprofessionalism, refused to let the fight go on. I don't know why it took half a year to reschedule the fight, but we're here, so take it away, Wayback Machine. CarlCX posted:LIGHTWEIGHT: Ismael Bonfim (19-4) vs Vinc Pichel (14-3) FLYWEIGHT: Alessandro Costa (13-4) vs Kevin Borjas (9-2)I am mad about this fight. It's not because the fight is bad: This could easily wind up being the best fight on the card. Alessandro Costa hasn't had a boring fight yet in his three-fight UFC tenure and in two of those three fights he gave much higher-ranked, well-regarded opponents hell, and Kevin Borjas is a best bout machine who had a fantastic fight with a future contender in Joshua Van in his UFC debut. They may both be fighting to get on the winning side of things, but the skills are more than present and both men have a ton of upside. I am not mad at this fight because of its fighters, I am mad because the world of UFC matchmaking is still so inherently screwy that Alessandro Costa's last fight was against Steve Erceg, the guy main-eventing this pay-per-view, and with only one additional fight separating the two, Erceg is in a title fight and Costa is curtain-jerking the show. It's like a living example of how meaningless the matchmaking can be and writing about it is like staring into the sun. ALESSANDRO COSTA BY DECISION. Happy one hundred episodes, everyone.
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May 2, 2024 01:05
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god drat you all weren't kidding. that's an insane card. if they didn't get Aldo out of retirement, that'd be like one of those Mighty Mouse Fight Night cards they had him on in like Topeka or something. Steve Erceg sounds like a Mortal Kombat developer they'd name a character out of. I'm definitely just collapsing Noob Saibot (Tobias Boon IIRC?) and Ermac into one thing, but still.
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May 2, 2024 02:25
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Is Myktybek Orolbai that Superman villain who can only be defeated by saying his name backwards??
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May 2, 2024 03:12
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LobsterMobster posted:Is Myktybek Orolbai that Superman villain who can only be defeated by saying his name backwards?? No but the dude has 6 knockouts 5 submissions and 2 decisions (1 of which is his only loss), and he's got a cool hat. The fighter who beat him in late 2020 is still undefeated.
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May 2, 2024 04:46
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quote:In a rare moment of honesty in the mixed martial arts business, in the lead-up to this event, Aldo very openly discussed the fight happening thanks to the greatest of combat sports traditions: Contractual Obligations. He very publicly retired from MMA two years ago after losing to Merab Dvalishvili and he spent all of 2023 taking boxing fights in an attempt to build his way to one of those rare-yet-present big-money MMA/boxing crossover bouts. But he still has one fight left on his UFC contract, and as long as that's true, any one of those big-money fights is legally problematic
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May 2, 2024 05:23
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https://twitter.com/MMA_CASUALS_/status/1785783331604307980
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May 2, 2024 20:22
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hahahahaha holy poo poo
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May 2, 2024 20:39
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Merab loving owns.
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May 3, 2024 00:45
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UFC needs more fighters like Merab
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May 3, 2024 02:24
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Tsarukyan got fined 20%/31k for this https://twitter.com/HappyPunch/status/1779346357699940700
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May 3, 2024 05:55
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Unperson_47 posted:UFC needs more fighters like Merab I bet the UFC would disagree with you. I don't.
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May 3, 2024 06:13
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kimbo305 posted:Tsarukyan got fined 20%/31k for this
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May 3, 2024 06:21
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if pantoja wins and calls out o'malley im gonna fuckin lose it lol
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May 3, 2024 06:22
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merab wtf lmao. the guy is hilarious
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May 3, 2024 10:51
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https://twitter.com/jonnybones/status/1786349837916524769?s=46&t=QsNA80BEJzWfrru4lTTDQg The Snowball King
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May 3, 2024 13:34
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ONE Friday fights! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ILCk2GMlko
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May 3, 2024 13:42
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CarlCX posted:However much I complain--and however much more I am certain to as we continue down the slide to a one-company world of mixed martial arts--I do, still, love this sport, and half of the point of doing this was to stay connected to the part of me that does. For however much honest cynicism I dispense on a weekly basis, if you are reading this, I hope there is a part of that love that resonates with you, too.  Your write-ups are always as informative as they are deeply entertaining, and they along with these threads help remind me that there are plenty of UFC fans who don't make me despair for the present and future of society.
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May 3, 2024 13:45
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Lid posted:https://twitter.com/jonnybones/status/1786349837916524769?s=46&t=QsNA80BEJzWfrru4lTTDQg Jon Jones would rather fight a guy that can get to middleweight? Well I never.
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May 3, 2024 13:51
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Someone gave Gomis a broken scale or something, he came in 3 pounds under and looks shaky as hell https://twitter.com/arielhelwani/status/1786376503770353792?t=Zr59i9Fo1eyUlqspf31fMQ&s=19
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May 3, 2024 14:13
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TheKingslayer posted:Jon Jones would rather fight a guy that can get to middleweight? Well I never. And can't grapple.
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May 3, 2024 14:23
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