- CarlCX
- Dec 14, 2003
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The demon is gone, and an old hero is riding out onto the field to see if it is safe.
CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 28: RESCHEDULED FOR YOUR CONVENIENCE
PRELIMS 1:30 PM PST/3:30 PM EST VIA ESPN+ | MAIN CARD 4:00 PM PST/7:00 PM EST VIA ESPN+
It's a crazy time for the UFC's bantamweight division, with an unexpected champion in Aljamain Sterling, a murderer's row of contenders in TJ Dillashaw, José Aldo and Cory Sandhagen and some very interesting rising prospects in Marlon Vera and arguable GOAT Dominick Cruz! There's a lot of great matchups you could make with those! But they want Sean O'Malley to fight for the championship, so instead, you've got this, alongside a card full of fights that got rescheduled for various reasons, so there's gonna be a lot of self-quoting this time around. Welcome to a card that is low on divisional relevance but high on fights that should be fun.
i tried to make my own and hated my first three attempts, not sure what i'm doing yet
MAIN EVENT: FANCY FOOTWORK
BANTAMWEIGHT: Marlon Vera (21-7-1, #5) vs Dominick Cruz (24-3, #8)
A few months ago when Chito Vera was matched up with Rob Font, I wrote this:
quote:
I think Marlon Vera will wind up taking the decision. Font is very, very good, and he has the boxing to keep Vera at the end of his jab and stick-and-move him all night, but for one, Vera's chin is made of loving granite and he's going to have trouble hurting him enough to back him off, and for two, Font has trouble adapting under pressure and Vera is built to pressure people into making mistakes. I think it'll be close, but Vera will wind up the more effective striker in the end. And then he can figure out what the hell to do about the top five.
For once, my analysis of a fight was spot-on. Yay! Unfortunately, my analysis of the UFC's matchmaking was not. I thought, given the strange car-crash situation at the top of the division, the UFC would welcome someone like Vera, a charismatic rising star with a ton of credibility and several marquee performances, and throw him into the mix with a #4 Cory Sandhagen or a #6 Merab Dvalishvili. I thought, at worst, the UFC would use his success to give human weed furby Sean O'Malley his much-ballyhooed rematch against Vera as a co-main event somewhere.
Instead, Sean O'Malley, the #13 fighter who has yet to defeat anyone even in the top 25, is jumping the entire division and facing #1 Petr Yan in a premiere pay-per-view fight months from now that should he somehow win will guarantee him a title shot. And Marlon Vera, the man who crushed O'Malley and went on the hottest streak of his career, is fighting the perennially maybe-retired #8 Dominick Cruz on a free TV card that, as of four days before showtime, the UFC has still not finalized a schedule.
Brock Lesnar got a championship bout after one match. Bob Sapp fought Kiyoshi Tamura with a 150-pound weight differential. Loving mixed martial arts means dreaming of the sport it could be while accepting the bullshit it is.
This is not to poo poo on Dominick Cruz. When you talk about the greatest bantamweight mixed martial artists of all time, Dominick Cruz is a first-ballot candidate. When he began competing his weight class didn't even exist in America, so he went and became one of the best 140-150 pound fighters he could instead. Between his debut in 2005 and 2016 he went an absolutely staggering 21-1 while consistently fighting the top contenders the world had to offer--from the early World Extreme Cagefighting days of Joseph Benavidez and Scott Jorgensen to the modern era of Demetrious Johnson and TJ Dillashaw--and he beat every single one of them. His one loss came against fellow hall of famer Urijah Faber and he proceeded to dominantly avenge that loss twice. He was virtually undefeated, he was a world champion in the WEC and the UFC's inaugural bantamweight champion after their merger, he is in fact a rare two-time UFC champion. He has, unequivocally, one of the best resumes in the history of the sport.
So why is he a #8 afterthought fighting to hang onto top ten status on barely-marketed television cards?
Dominick Cruz's worst enemy is, and has always been, Dominick Cruz. Or rather: Dominick Cruz's tendons. Cruz has one of the most eclectic styles you'll see in the sport, fighting in wild, darting, circling attacks with absolutely exhausting footwork and cutting hooks mixed with power wrestling. In 2008 he was fighting using angles no one else in the sport had thought of, and in 2022 he's still at the top of the heap. Unfortunately: His body is not. He may have been the inaugural UFC bantamweight champion, but he also lost the belt in a hospital bed after tearing his ACL and, while rehabbing from his body rejecting his replacement ACL, he tore his groin. Three years later he returned, easily won a comeback fight, declared he was back for the belt he never lost, and immediately went back on the shelf for nearly two more years after tearing his other ACL.
But then he came back again! And he DID win his belt back! And then he finally lost a fight to tragic flash in the pan Cody Garbrandt. Much later, he'd admit he was injured during his training camp and could barely walk. And then he broke his arm and missed another year. And then he tore his shoulder apart while sparring. By the time he finally came back again he hadn't fought in nearly four years and was fighting the best bantamweight in the world in Henry Cejudo: He was knocked out in two rounds and wouldn't fight again until nearly a year later.
Dominick Cruz, make no mistake, is one of the best fighters in the world. Dominick Cruz is also turning 38 in March and already has cadaver transplants more than a decade old. He's only managed three fights since 2016, and while the latter two were hard-fought victories over very legitimate competition in Casey Kenney and Pedro Munhoz, it's impossible not to see every modern fight in his career as yet another medical check-up. Are his knees working? Can he still move like he used to? Is this the time he finally falls apart?
How well can he handle Marlon Vera marching him down and punching him in the face?
Presuming everyone arrives at the fight with working limbs: I think it's a really interesting matchup. Dominick Cruz is by no means a weak striker, but his focus has always centered far more on movement and countering than squaring up and hurting people, and Marlon Vera walked through power punches from José Aldo. Cruz's evasion and wrestling are his best weapons here, and his success is dependent on how well he can get Chito to chase him--which, make no mistake, he will--only to turn the corner and take him down when he tries to plant and throw. He is entirely capable of tossing Marlon down and holding top position for an entire round.
That said: I don't think he will. For one, we've seen his corner-turning in his last two fights, and it does seem to be on a bit of a decline, and for two, believe it or not, this is the first fight Dominick Cruz will have had in twelve years that sees him fighting against a height, reach and size disadvantage. For once, he will be fighting against someone trying to pick him off as he enters. And one of the unsung cornerstones of Dominick Cruz's style is his capacity for responding to being hit by immediately retaliating and firing back before his opponents can even think about following up. It even disarmed TJ Dillashaw, one of the best combination strikers in the sport. Marlon Vera doesn't get backed off when you hit him.
Marlon Vera doesn't even back off when you hit him one hundred times more than he hits you. He hits back, and he hits back much, much harder, and he keeps doing it until you fall down.
Over the course of five rounds, Marlon Vera gets a TKO and the biggest win of his career.
CO-MAIN EVENT: THE FAST PUSH
 FEATHERWEIGHT: David Onama (10-1) vs Nate Landwehr (15-4)
It feels as though sometimes the UFC can't tell if they're promoting someone or punishing them.
David Onama has been given no small amount of hype during his as-yet brief UFC tenure. When his debut was announced last October, head coach and UFC veteran James Krause pushed him as an honest to god future champion. But unlike some of its potential prospects, the UFC wasn't interested in a gimme fight: He got Mason Jones, a Cage Warriors champion and a hot prospect out of Wales. Onama lost but impressed in the process, so the UFC followed that with Gabriel Benítez, a bit of a softer target, and when Onama blew him out in one round, they swung right back the other way with another top prospect in Austin Lingo--or they tried to. Lingo withdrew and was replaced at the last minute by Garrett Armfield, an overmatched fighter Onama had already beaten once as an amateur.
And apparently the UFC is upset that he got a tune-up match, because that professional fight where a professional fighter hit him 29 times was just barely four weeks ago and now he's co-main eventing a fight card against Nate Landwehr.
Nate Landwehr is a deceptively good fighter. It's easy to look at a 2-2 UFC record and feel unimpressed, but his two losses were monstrous knees thrown by two exceedingly hot-and-cold fighters in Herbert Burns and Julian Erosa, and his two wins were thoroughly impressive victories over extremely tough competition in Darren Elkins and Ľudovít Klein. Klein, an extremely accomplished technical striker, got brutalized by Landwehr badly enough that he had to panic-shoot for takedowns and ultimately got choked out for his troubles; Elkins, one of the UFC's most battle-tested brawlers, got out-brawled so badly that Landwehr made a point out of fighting him one-handed, jabbing him with his left while holding his right behind his back.
This should, in theory, be a very winnable fight for David Onama. He's got great, fast hands and combinations, he's got a sizable reach and power advantage, and the downside of Landwehr's brawling style is his eagerness to engage and generally get clocked in the face if it means getting to return fire. He's good at rolling back to just the edge of striking range and absorbing the very end of a punch so he can counter, but Onama's got a lot more pop to his punches than most of Landwehr's opponents, and getting cross counters is a lot tougher when you have to negotiate half a foot of extra space to do it.
So: David Onama by TKO. But Landwehr's an extremely tough guy and four weeks is not a lot of time to recover or prepare, and at this level of competition, fights with that kind of turnaround always concern me.
MAIN CARD: FUNCTIONALLY IDENTICAL TO PRELIMS
WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT: Yazmin Jauregui (8-0) vs Iasmin Lucindo (13-4)
This is getting featured over Lupita Godinez and Ode' Osbourne? I mean, okay, I guess.
Evaluating regional fighters can be tough, and preemptively evaluating regional women's fighters, with respect to everyone at every level who does this incredibly difficult, unforgiving sport, is a fool's errand. Put together, Yasmin and Iasmin have a combined 21 victories across their regional careers: Ten of them were against fighters with 0 wins. Just last year, Iasmin was fighting her 15th and 16th career bouts against people who were 2-1-2 and 1-2 respectively. Yazmin's last victory, the one that put her on Dana White's radar, was against the now 8-9 Stephanie Frausto; she was 8-7 at the time.
Women's MMA is great and I am deeply, thoroughly happy to see it continuing to grow, but it is still very much in a difficult growth phase. And maybe it will continue to be. Maybe some things aren't phases so much as endemic conditions. The very first MMA division was heavyweight, and it's 2022, and it's still so thin that you have cases where some dude named Vanilla Gorilla beats some 2-4 dude named Big Daddy at Island Fights, a fight series which is not held on an island, and the brass say "Hey, that Chase Sherman's going places."
Which is to say: Both of these fighters, on tape, look like a lot of other raw prospects you've seen before. Yazmin Jauregui came out of Tijuana, has been hand-picked by Brendan Moreno as a future strawweight champion, is almost certainly the top women's fighter out of the Mexican regional scene and her ability to throw a dozen punches in a row without stopping to breathe is inspiring, but they're the 1-2-3 Bethe Correia flurries that work best on people who don't know what defense is. Iasmin Lucindo began kickboxing at 13 after seeing her relatives suffer domestic abuse, but her fighting style is largely grappling-focused, intent on charging people, grabbing bodylocks and whipping them down to the canvas. On one hand, Lucindo's beaten a former UFC fighter; on the other that fighter was Sarah Frota, who washed out of the company in two fights.
I hope they both excel. I hope they both have long, stellar careers and prove themselves to be thoroughly talented fighters with worlds of potential ahead of them. At 23 and 20 respectively, they definitely have the time. But there's no way to test the real depths of their skills without seeing how they fare outside of the very small ponds of places like Combate and Samurai Fight House.
As it stands, I think Iasmin is going to be able to take Yazmin down. Keeping her there is another story. Over enough time I think Yazmin's going to accumulate more damage on the feet than Iasmin will do on the ground. Yazmin Jauregui by decision.
LIGHT-HEAVYWEIGHT: Devin Clark (13-6) vs Azamat Murzakanov (11-0)
It's a battle of the small guys of the division. Devin Clark actually had a moment of perfect peace in his last time out where he decided to simply embrace not cutting weight and fight at heavyweight, but he's made the rational decision to drop back down to 205 being as he's 6' even. Then again, he's also been in the UFC since 2016 and has a 6-6 record at the division to show for it, so maybe bigger would've been better. But then, Devin Clark's gameplan revolves largely around physicality. In most of his victories, he pecks away with leg kicks and shoots blast doubles to either force his opponents down or back into the cage, where he can hit them from the pocket--in his last fight he obliterated William Knight with hooks and elbows from point-blank range. He does not want to fight you at a distance.
And that's a problem he won't have here. Fun fact: At 71" Azamat Murzakanov, who fights at light-heavyweight, is below the 72" average reach--of the lightweight division. Despite this, he's an undefeated knockout monster. His reach disadvantage was tested in a UFC debut this past March that saw him fighting Tafon "Da Don" Nchukwi, who at 77" had half a foot of range on him, and after being outstruck for two straight rounds Murzakanov abruptly murdered him with a left hook and a flying knee, because sure, why not. This proved three things: He's very tough, he's very hittable, and he can flatline you given a single chance.
He stands a very good chance of doing it again. Murzakanov is both a skilled wrestler and an incredibly physically dense human; power wrestling isn't going to work as well for Clark as it has in the past, nor are his leg kicks going to bear a lot of fruit. This is going to come down to closer engagement, and Murzakanov has the murderous power advantage there. Azamat Murzakanov by KO.
WOMEN'S BANTAMWEIGHT: Ariane Lipski (14-7) vs Priscila Cachoeira (11-4)
This was reschedueld after being last-minute scratched from last week's card on account of Lipski not being medically cleared to compete after a weight miss. According to her team, this happened because she had COVID during her training camp. But now it's a week later, so everything's fine, right?
This loving sport. Here's Carl from last week:
Past Carl posted:
This could actually be fun. It's a fight between people nicknamed "Queen of Violence" and "Zombie Girl," so by god, I hope it's fun.
Lipski was the Women's Flyweight champion of Poland's Konfrontacja Sztuk Walki, better known as that one federation where Mariusz Pudzianowski would come out to fight on top of a tank. Her style can be best described as "I want to never stop hitting you," sometimes to her active detriment; multiple fights have seen her get taken down and, rather than focusing on sweeping, posturing or threatening with a submission, she would just throw hacking elbows from the bottom that would certainly not feel good, but ultimately do nothing to stop her opponents from beating her senseless. She's 3-4 in the UFC and every one of those four losses has come from fighters planting her on her back and making her pay for her hubris.
Which is presumably she she's fighting Priscila Cachoeira who, in seven UFC fights, has attempted three takedowns and completed precisely one of them. Cachoeira does not want to grapple, she wants to hit you in the head. She will do it with her hands, and if you are too close, she will do it with her elbows. She has won fights she should have lost by Leonard Garciaing as hard as possible in the vicinity of her opponent's face and successfully convincing the judges that she was pulling ahead by sheer, animal fury.
Both fighters are stand and bang weirdoes. Hopefully, that means this is an insane fist-slinging battle and not two scared strikers trying to outgrapple each other to get a tricky advantage. Either way, Ariane Lipski wins a decision.
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Gerald Meerschaert (34-15) vs Bruno Silva (22-7)
Poor GM3. Gerald Meerschaert was considered a genuinely intriguing prospect when he joined the UFC back in 2016--a terrible weight to put around anyone who lost a fight to Sam Alvey--and after half a decade and sixteen fights with the company, the impassioned wrestleboxer is most famous for announcing Khamzat Chimaev's potential to the world after getting knocked out by him in one punch. Meerschaert was on his way back to the light with three inspiring come-from-behind victories in a row, but his hopes of actual top-fifteen consideration were dashed this past April when Krzysztof Jotko put a distressingly thorough beating on him.
And then, there's Bruno Silva. "Blindado" followed up becoming the middleweight champion of Russia's M-1 by immediately dumping the belt in a trashcan and signing with the UFC, and within a very fast-paced six months he was 3-0, with all three victories coming by knockout thanks to a combination of defensive jiu-jitsu and extremely fast hands. Unfortunately, the UFC had bigger fish to fry: Silva was the chosen victim for their successful experiment in divisional leapfrogging, the kickboxing sensation Alex Pereira, whose size, strength and striking advantages Silva simply could not overcome.
But that's not the fight that concerns me, here. What concerns me is Silva's second UFC bout, where he spent two rounds getting repeatedly thrown to the ground by a bigger, stronger wrestler in Andrew Sanchez. Geralt Meerschaert can be very awkward and slow, but his wrestling and grappling credentials are very real. His big weakness here, of course, is the way he tends to deal with punches as though he is moving underwater. Bruno Silva is very, very capable of negating the wrestling advantage by simply charging forward and punching Gerald in the face seventeen times before he has made it halfway across the cage.
But in my heart, I know only love, and I cannot help but love Gerald Meerschaert*. Gerald Meerschaert wrestles his way to a decision, even though he probably won't.
*I wrote this and then I looked at his twitter just to put myself through the inevitable disappointment. Prediction remains; love revoked.
PRELIMS: THE HARD WAY DOWN
CATCHWEIGHT, 120 LBS: Angela Hill (13-12, #13 at Women's Strawweight) vs Lupita Godinez (8-2)
And here, in our featured prelim, we have the fight that will make everyone sad.
When Angela Hill fought back in May, I wrote this:
Past Carl posted:
Angela "Overkill" Hill is one of the internet's favorite fighters and consequently it sucks that her fights are often kind of heartbreaking. Her muay thai is good, her grappling is good, her command of range is good, but her tendency to be a little too patient and her willingness to fight off her back foot both pair far too well with the capacity for pressure fighters to exploit her and the capacity of judges to not know poo poo about fighting.
It was true then and it is true now. There are five fights in Angela Hill's UFC tenure that could, and in some cases objectively should, have been judged in her favor. There's a parallel universe very close to ours where Angela Hill is 18-7 and had one of the longest winning streaks at strawweight, and along with her charisma and her fanbase could easily have been a top contender.
But we live on Earth-52, where Superman has dumb lines on his outfit and Angela Hill is fighting not to be 13-13, 1 for her last 7 and almost certainly cut from the UFC. And unfortunately: She's fighting Lupita Godinez. "Loopy" made a name for herself by becoming the first woman in UFC history to fight on back-to-back cards just one week apart from each other--the second of which she lost, because that's actually a terrible idea as a general rule, but hey, she tried. She does not want to engage in your striking battle: She wants to wrestle you to death, and she's very good at it. She will slam you, she will throw you, she will pin you down in the clinch and uppercut you just to distract you long enough to both slam and throw you again.
And Angela Hill, I am afraid, gets taken down a lot.
Lupita Godinez wrestles her way to a wide decision. See you back in Invicta, Angie.
HEAVYWEIGHT: Łukasz Brzeski (8-1-1 (1)) vs Martin Buday (10-1)
It's not just trashweight, baby, it's eurotrashweight. Łukasz "The Bull" Brzeski was the heavyweight star of Poland's Babilon MMA before, as everyone inevitably does, coming over for the Contender Series. He won a hard-fought submission victory, then promptly failed a drug test for everyone's favorite women's infertility treatment/doping agent, clomiphene. His nine-month suspension ended in June and now he's back to do what he does, which is crash into the clinch and try really hard to get leg-reap takedowns so he can slowly work his way to a rear naked choke.
Martin "Badys" Buday may be remembered from his somewhat unfortunate UFC debut this past April, which saw him dominate the fan-beloved Chris "Beastboy" Barnett only for the fight to end early on a technical decision after an inadvertent elbow to the back of the head left Barnett unable to continue. Buday, the former champion of Slovakia's wonderfully bluntly-named OKTAGON, fights like a Slovak Cain Velasquez--which is to say that he wants to jab his way into the clinch against the fence and pummel people until they fall down, rather than that he wants to shoot people on a freeway and then get his gym to sell merchandise about how Martin Buday should be above the law because he's good at punching people.
So it's a clinch fight, and I'm going with Buday. Brzeski's a lot less defensively sound; he regularly eats punches on his way in and he gets overpowered and reversed regularly. Buday's clinical, he's got volume punching and he's also ridiculously loving strong. Martin Buday by TKO.
WOMEN'S FLYWEIGHT: Cynthia Calvillo (9-4-1, #12) vs Nina Nunes (10-7, #9 at Women's Strawweight)
This fight was actually supposed to happen last month, and got pulled just before the fights started thanks to a stomach virus. To recap: If you have a stomach virus you get a month, if you have COVID you get a week. Thanks, UFC. This was a main card bout when it was originally scheduled, so enjoy way more words than would usually get written for a prelim:
Past Carl posted:
Women's MMA gets a lot of undeserved criticism, but the weight classes having depth issues is unfortunately not one of them, and it's showcased distressingly well here, as a Cynthia Calvillo who's 1 for her last 5, on a three-fight losing streak and hasn't won since 2020 vs a Nina Nunes who has only fought three times in the last four years, whose last victory was December of 2018 and who has in fact never competed at this weight class is, somehow, still a top ten match at women's flyweight.
Cynthia Calvillo was a force at women's strawweight. She went 8-1-1 at 115 lbs, with her only blemishes coming in the form of a loss to former and current champ Carla Esparza and a draw to top contender Marina Rodriguez. Her blitzing punches, her chin and heart, her aggressive wrestling and her stifling grappling and ground and pound made her an easy titlist--or would have, were it not for the fact that she couldn't consistently make the weight. At first it was coming in three pounds over against Poliana Botelho, then two fights later it was a whopping five-pound miss against Rodriguez, and it was off to 125 by managerial mandate.
And flyweight has not been kind to her. She couldn't compete with Katlyn Chookagian's size and reach, she couldn't compete with Jéssica Andrade's power, and she was so battered after just two rounds against Andrea Lee that her corner had to stop the fight for her. Calvillo is not unaware of this, and has repeatedly discussed returning to strawweight, but, well, we're here. Maybe she still can't make the weight, maybe the opportunities aren't there; Cynthia Calvillo is still stranded at a class where she just doesn't belong.
Fortunately, her opponent doesn't know if she does, either. Nina Nunes is also a lifelong strawweight with seven years of fights in the division, but her 4-4 UFC record is a touch spottier--particularly as only one of her opponents, the embattled Angela Hill, is still in the UFC, and two of them retired from the sport altogether shortly after their fights. Nina's greatest strength is also her greatest weakness: She's an all-around fighter with a solidly balanced skillset, which has gotten her worked by fighters with more physicality or more specialized gameplans. But she's never been an easy out, and has in fact been stopped only once in her career after getting thoroughly outgrappled by Mackenzie Dern.
There are a couple x-factors here, though. For one, this is Nina's first attempt at making flyweight, and moving up a weight class is always difficult. For two, this will be Nina's first fight away from American Top Team. After a fairly successful decade under Dan Lambert's umbrella, Nina and her wife Amanda Nunes bid farewell to their longtime camp in favor of starting their own, self-managed Lioness Studio. On one hand, greater focus and freedom in which coaches you personally bring in is a big plus, and Nina's still working with a bunch of her old ATT buddies in her off-time. On the other hand, leaving for a smaller pond camp is a never-fight-a-land-war-in-Asia level of common MMA career killers.
Cynthia Calvillo wins a decision. There's too much working against Nunes here. Her best success comes from mixing up ranged counterstriking and up-close wrestling, and I'm not convinced Calvillo isn't the better wrestler, or that Nunes will be able to implement her preferred striking gameplans with Calvillo's aggressive style.
LIGHTWEIGHT: Gabriel Benitez (20-10) vs Charlie Ontiveros (11-8)
Welcome to your housecleaning fight. Gabriel "Moggly" Benitez is actually nearly a decade into his UFC tenure, having started out as a competitor on TUF: Latin America back in 2014, but after a promising start he's found himself stuck at an even 6-6 in the company--and unfortunately, that includes being 1 for his last 5. You have to go back to 2018 to get a second win for the man. He's a fun, unpredictable fighter to watch--sometimes he comes out ultra-technical and moving behind triple jabs, sometimes he spams kicks, sometimes he knocks a man out by slamming him out of an armbar--but he's lost a step as he's entered his mid-thirties and the baseline of the division seems to have caught up to him.
"The American Bad Boy" Charlie Ontiveros is the more traditional story of a career risk that didn't pan out. A career welterweight, Ontiveros made his UFC debut on three days' notice--at middleweight--against one of the UFC's most dangerous fighters in Kevin Holland. It was a gutsy choice that saw him get immediately destroyed and slammed on his head so hard it briefly paralyzed him. Also, he only got paid $14k. And then he failed a drug test and got suspended for half a year fined $2250. When he came back a full year later, it was at lightweight--30 pounds below his UFC debut--and his esoteric striking (who comes out throwing axe kicks right off the bat?) and accurate power punches did not stop him from getting wrestled and ground and pounded until his face broke.
It's almost a full year later again. Charlie Ontiveros should, in theory, finally have all of the advantages he wants. He's fast, he's accurate, he hits like a truck and he's enormous for the weight class--he's a 6'2" lightweight fighting a 5'8" guy moving up from featherweight. Ontiveros has nearly negative takedown defense, and Benítez has what it takes to drag him to the ground, but the speed of his punches early in the fight and the clear decline in Gabriel's chin makes me think this one's going to be a short fight. Charlie Ontiveros finally gets his UFC KO.
WELTERWEIGHT: Jason Witt (19-8) vs Josh Quinlan (5-0 (1))
Our first fight of the night is our last rescheduling of the night. This was originally supposed to happen last week, but got postponed when Josh Quinlan tested positive for a trace amount of turinabol, the most fun of steroids. This is a recurring problem for him, as you will see in, once again, the poo poo I wrote last week:
Past Carl posted:
This is, I am sorry to say, a sacrificial fight. Jason Witt's UFC career has been one of constant yo-yoing: Get knocked out by Takashi Sato, submit Cole Williams, get bricked by Matt Semelsberger, barely scrape by Bryan Barberena, get dropped again by Philip Rowe. The like factor: He gets hurt on the feet, like, a lot. Even in his victory over Barberena he got savaged by strikes and nearly finished. Josh Quinlan, by contrast, is Dana White's new Contender Series baby who scored three of his five wins by punch-based knockout, and it would have been four of six had his Contender Series win not been taken away after he pissed hot for drostanolone.
Witt's not a bad fighter, but he's absolutely the kind of fighter who would be more successful were he willing to stick to his grappling bonafides rather than engaging in wild brawls as MMA has successfully hypnotized everyone into doing over the last few years. He's going to wind up doing it again here, and it's going to cost him. Josh Quinlan by TKO.
FLYWEIGHT: Ode' Osbourne (11-4) vs Tyson Nam (20-12-1)
The UFC sees promise in Ode', and they're correct to do so. A flyweight who somehow has a 26-second knockout win at featherweight, Osbourne, while like most flyweights good at everything, is a particularly dangerous striker. This is thanks as much to his timing and accuracy as his remarkably high 72" reach, making this the only time in UFC history there's been a flyweight on a UFC card with longer reach than a light-heavyweight on that same card. And the UFC wants punch-based fireworks, which is why he's matched up with Tyson Nam, one of the best hot-and-cold strikers in the sport. Nam is a 16-year veteran of the sport who went toe to toe with Sergio Pettis, traded punches with Kai Kara-France, and is the only man in the sport--in a history that included fights with Demetrious Johnson, Joseph Benavidez and Kyoji Horiguchi--to knock out former #1 flyweight Ali Bagautinov. He's a striking threat to anyone in the division.
That said: Ode' Osbourne wins a decision. Osbourne is very good at using his reach to force people to charge on him and catching them as they do, and he's recently shown a lot of improvement mixing wrestling into his strikes to keep opponents uncomfortable. Nam's big weakness is chasing, straightforward footwork, and Osbourne's in a good place to exploit it.
BANTAMWEIGHT: Youssef Zalal (10-5) vs Da'Mon Blackshear (12-4)
More than a test of skills, this is a battle of awesome loving names. "The Moroccan Devil" Youssef Zalal is, in all likelihood, fighting to keep his job. Like so many featherweight, Zalal is an extremely talented fighter, as quick with spinning kicks as he is single-legs and arm triangles, but his focus on aggression has seen him on the wrong end of jabs, body shots and takedowns in his last three fights and now he's fighting to save his job. Unsurprisingly, the UFC is using him as a prospect testing ground. Da'Mon "Da Monster" Blackshear is Jackson-Wink's big bantamweight prospect, a regional champ with CFFC whose only loss in years was against Bellator standout Danny Sabatello. Blackshear's a remarkably quick fighter with a laser beam of a right hand and one of the coolest highlights I've ever seen, simultaneously landing a flying knee and transitioning into a mid-flight back take to get a choke.
It's real cool. But his frantic pace and speed lead to some control issues, and if Zalal commits wholly to controlling the pace of the fight, he could take Blackshear out of his game. I'm still going with Da'Mon Blackshear by decision, though. Zalal likes his own wild attacks too much and I don't think he'll be able to out-speed Blackshear.
Prelims begin 50-60 minutes from this post.
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Aug 13, 2022 20:40
