- CarlCX
- Dec 14, 2003
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This card is probably not really starting at 1 PM. This card was supposed to start at 1 PM when it still had two whole more fights on it, and they're not happening anymore and they say it's still starting at 1 PM, which means they're almost certainly going to do that annoying thing where the broadcast starts at 1 and then a big "45 MINUTES UNTIL FIRST FIGHT" counter pops up or something. I wish they would just adjust the slot, but the UFC doesn't even publish their own finalized TV cards until like 4 days before they air, so maybe it's asking too much of them. Either way, decide for yourself how much you care about not missing Cameron VanCamp.
CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 32: DROWNING IN A SEA OF STATIC
PRELIMS 1:00 PM PST/4:00 PM EST VIA ESPN+ | MAIN CARD 4:00 PM PST/7:00 PM EST VIA ESPN+
Hey, remember those last two cards? Remember how they had big, interesting fights that helped crown top contenders and shake out divisions and tell amazing stories? Yeah, we're done with all that poo poo. This card is a war of attrition. There are 14 goddamn fights scheduled for this card, only two of them include ranked fighters, and one of those is a deeply buried Aspen Ladd prelim. Are you a bad enough dude to get emotionally invested in Aspen Ladd? Order two meals ahead of time and let's find out together.
a sea of names, each namier than the last
MAIN EVENT: PRODUCTION CREW ON THE SUGAR SHOW
BANTAMWEIGHT: Cory Sandhagen (14-4, #4) vs Yadong Song (19-6-1 (1), #10)
When MMA was breaking into the mainstream, the entire world of sports learned who Georges St-Pierre was. Even now, after essentially a decade of retirement, he's an internationally-beloved figure with numerous bookings, a fortune to his name, and four million Instagram followers hanging on every picture he posts of his dinosaur obsession.
Just six months after GSP's first fight, the second-best welterweight of their shared era, Jon Fitch, made his debut. Between his first UFC fight in 2005 and the end of 2010, Fitch went 13-1 in the UFC's welterweight division--with that one lonely loss being a complete and utter domination at St-Pierre's hands. When the sport was exploding, Fitch was without question the second-best welterweight in the world. That earned him so much status and prestige that the UFC unceremoniously let him go in 2013 despite having lost only one fight in the past year, his Instagram following is 35,000 people strong*, and his 2020 retirement fight in Bellator paid him a lofty $60,000.
*Do not, under any circumstances, follow or look at Jon Fitch's social media accounts. If you don't know why, just trust me.
Being second-best is a curse, and a central part of that curse is the understanding that more than one person can be The Best. In the UFC's Bantamweight division, Petr Yan has made it clear that he can beat Aljamain Sterling, and Aljamain Sterling has made it clear that he can beat Petr Yan. They could fight each other a dozen times and wind up with a dozen different outcomes.
But both men, definitively, can beat Cory Sandhagen. And that's a deeply, deeply unfortunate position to be in, because if you're too good to fall in the rankings, but just not good enough to be the champion, you become the UFC's favorite tool: The top-tier gatekeeper they get to pay $90k to fight main events against the fighters they would actually like to see succeed, while the fighters they really, truly care about, like Sean O'Malley, get to jump the rankings you've painstakingly clawed your way through altogether.
Cory Sandhagen is a major problem for the entirety of the Bantamweight division. He's a multiple-time World Kickboxing Association champion with some of the most varied attacks in the game. chaining together tight shots to the body with looping haymakers, slapping leg kicks and genuinely surprising amounts of flying knees. His work speaks for itself: He destroyed Marlon Moraes with a spinning wheel kick, he handed Frankie Edgar the worst loss of his career by starching him with a flying knee just 28 seconds into their bout, he went toe to toe with John goddamn Lineker and won. He fought Iuri Alcântara, a twenty-year veteran of the sport who in almost fifty fights that included multiple world champions and title contenders had never been knocked out; Sandhagen punched him in the head 104 times in six minutes.
Cory Sandhagen isn't good. He's great.
But he's not the best. He's 7-3 in the UFC, but those three losses hang heavy on his head. One of them is debatable--a title eliminator against former divisional kingpin TJ Dillashaw that resulted in a razor-close split decision loss that could easily have gone the other way--but his late-replacement interim title shot at Petr Yan was a much more definitive decision loss, and his fight with then-contender, now-champion Aljamain Sterling in 2020 was both the worst and only stoppage loss of Sandhagen's career, as Sterling effortlessly backpacked him and choked him out in just under ninety seconds.
And once you've lost to the top guys, you become the yardstick that determines which contenders deserve their shot.
Yadong Song, after a lot of hard work, has earned his chance at contendership. A childhood Sanda practitioner and a ten-year veteran of the sport, Song was a standout of the regional WLF and Kunlun Fight scene in China that's produced the near-entirety of the Chinese contingent in international mixed martial arts. "The Kung Fu Monkey" competed at Bantamweight, Featherweight and Lightweight interchangeably and ran up a resume of wins over future stars like current UFC prospect Alatengheili and Ok Rae Yoon--the man who just lost ONE Championship's 170 pound title.
That didn't stop when he joined the UFC in 2017, either, thanks in large part to a move to America that saw him join up with Team Alpha Male and hone his style into finely-crafted wrestleboxing. He debuted at 145, he dropped right back down to 135, he bounced wherever it was necessary. He even scored a victory over current #5 Marlon "Chito" Vera at 145 pounds before the two returned permanently to Bantamweight. Song would've been a top contender years ago were it not for two speedbumps--a majority draw against Cody Stamann that would've been a split decision victory were it not for an illegal knee and subsequent point deduction, and a unanimous decision loss against the deeply underrated Kyler Phillips.
So Song went to the back of the line. But he was about to jump it, thanks to the power of a falling star.
Yadong Song knocked out Julio Arce, which is a genuinely impressive victory for a guy as tough and talented as Arce, but it was the UFC's willing sacrifice of "Magic" Marlon Moraes that made his career. Moraes had at one point been the best bantamweight outside of the UFC, and his entry into the organization saw him rocket straight to a title shot--and then, as happens so often, he fell apart. By March of 2022 Moraes was riding three straight knockout losses, and mercilessly, the UFC sought to wring the last bits of name value out of him by, rather than a tune-up, giving him the newly-powerful, on-the-rise Yadong Song, who punched him out in just two minutes.
He knew what the UFC wanted and he gave it to them in spades. Sandhagen and Song both entered the upper echelons of the Bantamweight division by destroying Marlon Moraes. Now, they must destroy each other. Which Magic Killer will reign supreme?
Cory Sandhagen is a decent, -250ish betting favorite, and I get why. He's bigger, he's longer, and he's been tested against stiffer competition, and while Song's power and accuracy are genuinely terrifying, it's hard to watch someone absorb 170 strikes from Petr Yan without cracking and fear for their chin. It's hard not to map that fight entirely over this one, quite frankly. Yan is also a boxing-heavy fighter who mixes his striking with takedown threats. For most analysts, this fight poses a very basic question: Does Yadong Song have anything Petr Yan doesn't?
Which is brutally unfair, but not unfairly reductive. I think Song's power is still being underrated by most people, but Sandhagen's toughness isn't, nor is his ability to keep Song at bay with his kicks. If Yadong wins this fight, it's almost certainly because he was either able to chain his takedowns together effectively enough to neutralize Cory's movement, or Cory got too wild with his flying knees and got dropped for his recklessness. But Cory Sandhagen by decision is a solid bet.
CO-MAIN EVENT: NOT ACTUALLY ANNOUNCED YET, FOUR DAYS PRIOR TO THE EVENT
 MIDDLEWEIGHT: Chidi Njokuani (22-7 (1)) vs Gregory Rodrigues (12-4)
The co-main was SUPPOSED to be Sodiq Yusuff vs Giga Chikadze, but Chikadze pulled out a week before the event and the UFC never announced a replacement so I'm assuming we're just punting on Yusuff. Which is unfortunate, that fight was going to rule. Luckily, this fight, too, should rule, but in a much sillier way: Sheer stylistic opposition.
Chidi Njokuani, much like his older brother and WEC legend Anthony, has a fighting style that can best be described as being Distressingly Lengthy. When I write these fight descriptors I find myself only really including things like size and reach if they feel relevant to their respective fight, and being 6'3" with 80" of reach is relevant to every Chidi Njokuani fight. It's not just that Njokuani is incredibly rangy, but that he's exceptionally good at using that range, itself, as a weapon. His three fights under the UFC umbrella--including a Contender Series victory that saw him get kneed in the balls three times--have been a fantastic and sometimes disconcerting demonstration of this.
The all-too-common meme in MMA is how few fighters know how to fight tall. Stefan Struve had 85" of reach but liked clinching too much, Uriah Hall had 79.5" of reach but liked hooks and spinning kicks too much, Sergei Pavlovich, despite having the longest reach in the UFC (until Jon Jones comes back), likes throwing charging Mortal Kombat uppercuts. In truth, half of range management isn't just whether you know how to throw a jab, but what you do when you can't. Most fighters have a ranged repertoire and an up-close repertoire, and while they may bias more towards one than the other, it's inability to navigate the transitions between the two that really get them into trouble.
And that's where Chidi is at his scariest. It's not just that he hits like a truck at both ranges, it's how incredibly quickly he's able to adjust his attacks for range, and add or subtract range as necessary to accomplish what he wants to do. He bombs with 1-2s at range, he attacks people on their way in with body kicks, he throws himself into knees as they push into the clinch and he lands vicious elbows once they're inside. His destruction of Duško Todorović in his last fight came not just from elbows in the clinch, but from specifically pushing away to achieve just enough distance that he could fit a fully-wound elbow strike between them.
Describing Gregory "Robocop" Rodrigues, after all of that, feels almost as though I am insulting the man. This is, verbatim, what I said about him before his last appearance this past June:
Old Carl posted:
Gregory "Robocop" Rodrigues looks like he should not win fights. His footwork is plodding and flat, his spine is often nearly straight, he has virtually no head movement or defensive guard, he throws lots of arm punches, his takedowns are sloppy and his positional control is lousy. I have picked against Gregory Rodrigues in all three of his UFC fights to date on this assessment, and every time he has somehow won anyway. (Including his last fight, which was a not-great split decision he probably should have won.)
I did, in fact, learn my lesson and side with Robocop, and he did, in fact, become the first man to ever knock Julian Marquez out. In a more just world, Rodrigues would be 4-0 in the UFC right now, and watching the man fight, it's sometimes baffling to contemplate. He's loping and awkward and sometimes seems actively allergic to defense, but his offensive output is so suffocating that it doesn't matter. He will come forward and punch you in the head, and nothing you do will stop him from doing this. He will punch you into the fence, and he will punch you in the liver, and then he will elbow you a lot, and if you are still moving his programming will say GOTO 1 and he will start again from the top.
And it works! It looks like it really shouldn't, but it does! And a big part of that function is because Gregory Rodrigues is incredibly loving strong. He's got a solid judo background and it's always jarring to be reminded of it in mid-fight, as he'll be awkwardly plodding towards an opponent before clinching them against the cage, and abruptly, they will simply no longer be on their feet. He doesn't often need to shoot or fight for a strong clinch position: He's just strong and studied enough in his techniques to chuck people to the ground.
He's a fascinating fighter to watch. He's a fascinating fighter to learn to appreciate. All of that being said: One fight after learning to believe in him, I'm right back on my bullshit of assuming he's going to get creamed.
Gregory Rodrigues likes to succeed by absorbing punishment. He took 59 strikes from Jun Yong Park to land 75, he took 46 strikes from Duško Todorović to land 73, he took 128 strikes from Armen Petrosyan to land 61. Even in a dominating, three-minute knockout over Julian Marquez, he still ate thirteen shots to get it. His style centers around being willing to get hurt. And Chidi Njokuani is extremely capable of hurting him. Rodrigues is used to a size and reach advantage in most of his fights, but Njokuani can start bouncing punches and kicks off of him a half-foot before he's in range, and the kind of strikes Chidi throws aren't the kind Robocop's used to wading through.
His best chance in this fight involves getting Chidi on the floor, but not only will he be walking through fire to get there, he'll be dealing with someone who might actually have a strength and leverage advantage for the first time in his career. So, as afraid as I am of being the dumbass who underestimated Robocop again: Chidi Njokuani by TKO.
MAIN CARD: THE TANNER BOSER THERAPY GOFUNDME
FEATHERWEIGHT: Andre Fili (21-9 (1)) vs Bill Algeo (16-6)
This should be a very fun fight, but there's a decent chance it could also just be sad.
Andre Fili is one of the UFC's unsung veterans and by far one of its most journeyed gatekeepers. Team Alpha Male's most kick-happy fighter is coming up on ten years and 19 fights in the UFC, and across all of that time, he has only twice managed to string together two consecutive wins, and has never once lost two consecutive fights--which is a particularly wild record when you look at some of his competition. Max Holloway, Yair Rodríguez, Calvin Kattar, Sheymon Moraes, Charles Jourdain, Artem Lobov: Fili's fought them all. He has also, unfortunately, lost to most of them. He's almost never been an easy fight, and his striking variety and wrestling ability makes him a consistently complex challenge, but he's also been in the UFC since 2013 and never cracked the top fifteen.
Bill Algeo has been on a year-long campaign to start over. "Señor Perfecto" came into the UFC as a well-regarded regional champion, but he committed one of the worst sins of combat sports: He made a poor first impression. He lost his Contender Series fight to future PFL finalist Brendan Loughnane, he made his UFC debut a year later by losing to Ricardo Lamas in the latter's retirement fight, he just barely scraped by the to-be-immediately-released Spike Carlyle, and he got outfought by Ricardo Ramos immediately thereafter. A year into his UFC tenure he was 1-2 and 2/3 of his opponents weren't even with the company anymore, and Algeo was consigned to the heap of forgotten prospects. Was that fair?
Jesus, no. Ricardo Lamas is one of the toughest guys in the sport and Algeo took the fight against him with less than a week to prepare, Spike Carlyle is an insanely durable fighter who's now one fight away from a Bellator championship and the Ricardo Ramos fight was razor-close and could easily have gone either way. The UFC clearly had no faith in Algeo, as they attempted to feed him to an exciting, debuting prospect in Joanderson Brito, and Algeo shocked them (and me!) by beating him on the feet and ground alike. One total destruction of Herbert Burns later, and Algeo suddenly kind-of sort-of matters.
Two paragraphs ago I said Andre Fili has almost never been an easy fight. There's exactly one exception, and unfortunately, it's his most recent contest this past April where he was knocked out in forty seconds...by Joanderson Brito. As a general rule, I do not believe in MMA Math. Fighter A defeating Fighter B does not mean Fighter A will defeat someone Fighter B defeated. But typically, the skills on display aren't as directly comparable--the way Algeo was able to survive Brito's grappling, shut down his attempts and destroy him in the striking battle--and those fights being compared are spread across a matter of years, leaving a whole lot of time for fighters to learn and improve, as opposed to their being separated by just a few months.
Fili's kicking game is his best advantage here. Algeo's hands are too good to take chances on, and as someone who just survived and overcame multi-time BJJ champion Herbert Burns on the ground, his grappling is too solid to effectively wrestle him down. The aggression and the standup are going to be a lot to deal with, and at the end of the day, the no-two-consecutive-losses streak is finally coming to an end. Bill Algeo by decision.
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Alen Amedovski (8-3) vs Joseph Pyfer (9-2)
In my analysis for Holm vs Vieira back in the long-ago times of May, I wrote this about poor Alen Amedovski:
Old Carl posted:
Alan Amedovski, with respect, is someone the UFC is trying to get rid of. He was signed as a last-minute replacement for Krzysztof Jotko in 2019, he lost, badly, twice in a row, and he spent the subsequent two and a half years pulling out of fights. This is why his return to the sport is against someone with half a foot of height and reach on him.
His opponent that night, Joseph Holmes, knocked him out in sixty-four seconds. Apparently the UFC decided he was worth maintaining for future sacrifices, because rather than cutting him after the traditional three losses, they kept him around, secure in the knowledge that, truly, only he could do justice to the debut of the UFC's newest Contender Series baby, Joseph "Bodybagz" Pyfer. In terms of record, Pyfer isn't a bad match: Both guys are still relative rookies to the game, as despite having 17 wins between them, only 8 of those opponents had winning records, and Pyfer and Amedovski are both hard-punching knockout artists with multiple first-round stoppages.
But the devil is in the positioning. Alen Amedovski is 0-3 in the UFC and getting matched with yet another dangerous prospect. Joe Pyfer is so sufficiently up Dana White's alley that he got a second chance at the Contender Series after Dustin Stoltzfus broke his goddamn arm the first time around. Joe Pyfer is a heavy-handed 6'2" guy fighting someone who is, once again, at a giant size disadvantage. Joe Pyfer is making his UFC debut against a guy who's done nothing but lose in the organization.
The messaging is not subtle, nor are Pyfer's -400 odds. Joseph Pyfer by KO.
HEAVYWEIGHT: Tanner Boser (20-8-1) vs Rodrigo Nascimento (8-1 (1))
The heavyweight pendulum swings violently. Tanner "The Bulldozer" Boser had an awful lot of hype just two years ago, when he demonstrated the unprecedented heavyweight ability to perform fantastic acts known as "combinations" and strung two knockouts together. Honestly, at heavyweight, that's really all it takes. Rankings will never matter as much as cool knockouts at heavyweight. It's the nature of the beast. Unfortunately, Boser then proceeded to fail the Andrei Arlovski prospect test and get wrestled around by 5'10" Ilir Latifi, which sent him right to the back of the line. After taking out Ovince St. Preux in his "I'm too tired to cut weight anymore" career period and losing an entire year to injury and travel issues, and deciding his status as a 4-3 heavyweight means he's qualified to give interviews about how any fighter who needs a therapist is mentally weak and will lose, Boser is ready to resume his quest to barely scrape the top fifteen.
And standing in his way is Rodrigo Nascimento, the latest in a long legacy of Brazilian heavyweights who made it to the UFC and proceeded to have a very unfortunate time. Nascimento came into the UFC off a Contender Series win in 2019 and soared to a successful UFC debut after choking out Don'Tale Mayes to run his record up to a perfect 8-0. Unfortunately, he then ran into Chris "Hello I Am a Cop" Daukaus, who punched him out in under a minute, and after nearly an entire year on the shelf he fought French kickboxer Alan Baudot, and Nascimento won--except he didn't, because he hadn't disclosed his ritalin prescription to the athletic commission. The fight was scrubbed into a No Contest and he was suspended for yet another six months, and after getting injured and forcing another rescheduling for this fight, Nascimento is, once again, making a return after more than a year on the shelf.
So you're left with two formerly-hyped heavyweight prospects, both having been publicly derailed, neither having fought in more than a year, one struggling with ADHD he was too embarrassed to talk about, the other with pure toxic masculinity inflicted by getting outwrestled by the bridge troll from The Secret of Monkey Island. Who will reign supreme?
Tanner Boser by TKO. Here's the thing: Rodrigo Nascimento may have beaten Alan Baudot, but he spent the first round getting the crap beaten out of him. Alan Baudot has one real victory in the last half-decade and it was against an 0-5 fighter who competes at welterweight. Alan Baudot isn't very good. Getting beaten up by Alan Baudot isn't a good look. Being a heavyweight grappler who pulled mount on Alan Baudot is a very bad look. Nascimento has power, but he also has a dangling chin that gets touched an awful lot, and Tanner Boser is good at finding chins.
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Anthony Hernandez (9-2 (1)) vs Marc-André Barriault (14-5 (1))
Anthony Hernandez is on a mission to turn his luck around. He walked onto the Contender Series in 2018 as a Legacy Fighting Alliance champion at just 6-0, destroyed the very tough Jordan Wright in just 40 seconds, and had the win scrubbed, along with half a year of his career, after testing positive for that most pernicious of PEDs, marijuana. He went 1-2 in his first year in the UFC thanks to Markus Perez and Kevin Holland, then gave up another ten months thanks to COVID. He returned to the biggest win of his career, shocking the world by choking out multiple-time world jiu-jitsu champion Rodolfo Vieira, and promptly followed the momentum by injuring his hands and giving up another fourteen months. He returned this past April, lost two opponents in three weeks, and ultimately won an incredibly hard-fought battle with Josh Fremd. "Fluffy" has been in the UFC for almost four years, he's only had five fights, and he's desperate to stop giving up momentum every time he gets it.
Marc-André Barriault is in the same boat, his is just French-Canadian. The kung fu bro from Gatineau walked into the UFC as a double champion in Canada's biggest MMA promotion, TKO, owning both their Middleweight and Light-Heavyweight titles and carrying an 11-1 record defined primarily by violent knockouts, and the hype was very real. As happens so often: He promptly and repeatedly lost, faltering under the grappling and striking pressure of international competition and ultimately losing three fights in a row. He vowed a comeback in 2020 and looked briefly promising after knocking out Oskar Piechota--and then tested positive for ostarine, for which he was immediately suspended for the year. (Fun fact: Piechota would a few months later get flagged for GHRP-2, a form of human growth hormone, and was also suspended until two months ago, because everyone's on steroids.) Barriault seemed to have righted the ship and was riding two successful victories right up until this past February, when Chidi Njokuani crushed him in seconds. One would think getting violently knocked out would require a longer rest under concussion protocols, but he fought and won two months later, so who cares about anything, honestly.
This is, in all likelihood, a tough fight for Barriault. He hits hard and he's an aggressive grappler, but Hernandez hits harder, tires slower, and just two fights ago was shucking Rodolfo loving Vieira off of him. Anthony Hernandez by decision.
PRELIMS: WHERE WIKIPEDIA FEARS TO TREAD
FEATHERWEIGHT: Damon Jackson (21-4-1 (1)) vs Pat Sabatini (17-3)
This is an incredibly interesting fight and I can't believe it's on the loving prelims.
Seriously, it's a crime. Both dudes are extremely talented featherweights with nearly bulletproof UFC records--Sabatini is 4-0 and Jackson is 4-1, with that single loss coming against Ilia Topuria, who looks all to hell like a future champion--and both are grappling specialists to the point that in their combined 38 wins you'll only find 4 knockouts. What's more, they've each got their own style: Jackson is one of the best clinch grapplers in the UFC and has made an entire career out of backpacking, tripping and strangling people, while Sabatini is a much more traditional wrestling stylist, favoring deep shots and double-legs.
Of course, sometimes Jackson kicks people in the head and sometimes Sabatini tears a man's leg in half with a heel hook, so it's not as though they're in any way incapable of improvising. My instinct here is Pat Sabatini by decision, as Jackson does tend to tire a bit as fights go on and Sabatini's got a bit more power and athleticism to propel him, but I believe this is much closer than people think.
WELTERWEIGHT: Trevin Giles (14-4) vs Louis Cosce (7-1)
It's potential housecleaning time again, I'm afraid. Trevin Giles just started his sixth year in the UFC, and in that time he's gone 5-4. This is, already, not a great record; it gets worse when you realize only one of his wins is still with the company. And that's a deeply unfair criticism, because Giles is a good loving fighter. His takedown defense can be a little shaky, but he hits hard, he's got tight combinations in the pocket and he's a tough, tough out. At least, he was for most of his career. After going his entire career without ever being knocked out, his last two fights were one-sided shellackings that saw him punched out in minutes.
Louis Cosce, then, is a bit of a question mark. On the one hand, "The Monster" is a bad matchup for Giles on paper: He's got a history of taking people down and thrashing them with raw punching power. On the other, we still don't actually know Louis Cosce that well. He's 7-1, but only two of those fights were against fighters with winning records--he split those fights, winning one on the Contender Series and getting knocked out in the other during his UFC debut--and then, between COVID, injuries and scheduling problems, Cosce's done nothing but sit on the shelf for the last two years.
I'm still going with Orion Cosce by TKO, but it's very difficult to know how Giles will look after his second knockout or how Cosce will look after his long layoff. Anything could happen.
WOMEN'S BANTAMWEIGHT: Aspen Ladd (9-3, #7) vs Sara McMann (13-6, #8)
And here, buried in the precise middle of the preliminary fights, is the only other ranked fight on this card. No wonder Women's Bantamweight struggles. This is, somewhat esoterically, a mirror match broken across time. Both fighters are wrestleboxers; Ladd a little more box, McMann a little more wrestle. Both were at one point highly-regarded, undefeated prospects staring down the top of their division; for Ladd it was Germaine de Randamie, for McMann it was Ronda Rousey. Both had their undefeated streaks violently and one-sidedly ended by knockout in under a minute, barely scraped a win together afterward, disappeared from the sport for almost two years, and proceeded to get so ruthlessly dumpstered in subsequent fights that the MMA world discarded them as irrelevant.
But this is where the two diverge. Sara McMann already went through and came back from her downfall. Twice, in fact. She most recently defeated two prospects in Lina Lansberg and Karol Rosa and came a couple minutes away from defeating future champion Julianna Pena before getting choked out. Aspen Ladd is still in her slump. She hasn't won a fight since 2019. Which is even wilder when you realize Aspen Ladd is still in her athletic prime at 27, whereas seven days after this fight Sara McMann will celebrate her 42nd birthday.
And she'll have good things to celebrate: Sara McMann by decision. Ladd is in a bad spot here. She's had a lot of trouble with her output in her last two fights--against Norma Dumont she averaged a truly devastating five significant strikes landed per round--and a big part of that output trouble has come from her inability to implement the wrestling side of her skillset, the threat of which is central to forcing her opponents into vulnerability. Sara McMann is easily the best wrestler Ladd has ever faced. She's going to have an extremely difficult time staying on her own feet, let alone getting McMann off hers. Ladd winning this fight is going to mean carefully balancing landing punches while staying the gently caress away from inevitable takedown attempts, and with how much of her striking success comes from close range, it's a very difficult ask. Aspen Ladd missed weight again. Whoops.
WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT: Loma Lookboonmee (6-3) vs Denise Gomes (6-1)
Boy, this is a stiff prospect test. Loma Lookboonmee is one of the toughest strikers at Women's Strawweight, as you'd expect from a lifelong Muay Thai fighter with dozens of combat sports victories under her belt before she even thought about mixed martial arts, and her UFC tenure has been marked with difficulties. Angela Hill and Lupita Godinez both proved too much for her, but she put up fierce fights against them before losing narrow decisions. Denise Gomes, too, is a striking specialist, and her prospect status was somewhat deferred: She made her MMA debut in 2017--against a 6-3 fighter who would go on to be one of the best female fighters in Brazil, which seems like a bad way to start--and after getting knocked out, she took three and a half years off to train and improve before trying again. That break, plus some much more reasonable matchmaking, has worked out: She's 6-0 since 2021, she got a contract through the Contender Series less than a month ago, and she stepped into this fight with eleven days to prepare.
Gutsy! Also maybe unwise for someone who just six months ago was struggling with the striking prowess of Milana Dudieva. Gomes is a solid all-arounder, but a big part of her striking offense comes from moving forward behind low kicks and getting into clinch range, and those are both very difficult choices against Muay Thai specialists. Loma Lookboonmee by decision.
LIGHTWEIGHT: Trey Ogden (15-5) vs Daniel Zellhuber (12-0)
It's honestly kind of heartbreaking to see the fighters the UFC does not give a gently caress about. Trey Ogden has been fighting for eleven years, he's made it far enough in the sport to main event in the LFA, he made it to 15-4 and the UFC still didn't care about him until they needed him as a last-minute fill-in to fight Jordan Leavitt. And he tried! It was an incredibly close fight against a very good grappler with very little time to prepare, and Ogden still took it to a split decision. You could do things with Trey Ogden. There's potential there.
The UFC is instead booking him against Daniel Zellhuber, the undefeated Contender Series baby from Mexico who's also much larger, an even more dangerous grappler, and has half a foot of reach on him.
The sport is mean. Daniel Zellhuber by submission.
WOMEN'S FLYWEIGHT: Mariya Agapova (10-3) vs Gillian Robertson (10-7)
The best word for this fight is "unpredictable." Mariya Agapova is one of the most explosive, dangerous fighters in Women's MMA--for one round. She'll swing wildly, she'll push for high-amplitude takedowns, she'll jump on chokes, and she's finished champions this way. But almost always in one round. Under the UFC's banner, three out of four fights to go past the one-round mark have resulted in her getting dominated and most often finished. Maybe it's her gas tank, maybe it's composure, maybe it's just a coincidence of competition. Gillian Robertson is a much more direct fighter: She's a grappler. She grapples. She's a DANGEROUS grappler--just a couple fights ago she was choking Priscila Cachoeira unconscious, with no hooks or bodily leverage, while Cachoeira was trying to gouge her goddamn eyes out--but the one-dimensional nature of her attack makes her predictable. You never have to figure out what Gillian Robertson wants to do to you, you just have to be good enough to stop her.
I think Mariya Agapova is good enough to stop her for a round. After that, things get progressively more dire for her, and having lost two of her last three fights after being savaged on the ground by superior grapplers, there's an unfortunate pattern forming. If Agapova doesn't get Robertson out within a round, Gillian Robertson wins by submission.
BANTAMWEIGHT: Tony Gravely (23-7) vs Javid Basharat (12-0)
Tony Gravely cannot get off the prelims to save his life, and I truly do not understand why. He's only 4-2 in the endlessly competitive Bantamweight division, but every single one of those fights has been must-see television, and that's thanks in no small part to Gravely's existence as a violence elemental. In any position, vertical or horizontal, he is wholly and completely focused on how best to bludgeon his opponent to death, and that's worked just as much to his detriment: His two UFC losses came from being so focused on slamming Brett Johns around like a potato sack that he lost control of the technical grappling and from having so thoroughly punched Nate Maness into semiconsciousness that his recklessness led him to a cross-counter knockout loss. Gravely is all-violence, little control. Javid Basharat is, stylistically, the polar opposite. A technically skilled striker whose first fighting experience came from Tae Kwon Do, that ethos still informs the center of Basharat's fighting: Stick, move, and wait for opportunities to arise. Most of his wins come from punishing his opponents long enough to give him a chance at jumping on a choke, and most of his success comes from hitting them and getting right out of their range before they can hit him back.
Which is a very difficult gameplan to implement against a guy like Tony Gravely, who will walk through your strikes to hurt you. It is very hard to dissuade Gravely the way Basharat has managed to dissuade most of his opponents, and watching him cope with that level of violence for the first time is going to be a fascinating learning experience. Unfortunately, I think it's one of those learning-by-painful-example experiences. Tony Gravely by TKO.
LIGHTWEIGHT: Nikolas Motta (12-4) vs Cameron VanCamp (15-6-1)
I'm going to self-quote one last time. Back in February, Nikolas Motta made his UFC debut against living legend Jim Miller, and I described him thusly:
Old Carl posted:
I will fully confess to being in the tank for Jim Miller, as any responsible fan should be, but Motta is a decently-sized betting favorite in this fight as of this moment and I just don't really get it. Having watched a bunch of tape on Motta, he seems like a perfectly acceptable average: Average reach, average size, average power, average grappling, average takedown defense. I watched him drop a dozen punches directly down on the jaw of a prone, gassed regional fighter and not come anywhere close to putting him out.
Nikolas Motta got beaten up by Jim Miller that night, but funnily enough, he wasn't supposed to fight him. He was, at first--but Miller tested positive for COVID, and the UFC very quickly rebooked Motta against their newest regional last-minute-replacement signee, Cameron "Jumpman" VanCamp, a man who held not one, not two, but five aggressively silly regional welterweight championships, as the divisional ruler of Hardrock MMA, Colosseum Combat, the United Combat League, the B2 Fighting Series, and STRIKE HARD PRODUCTIONS, the company that brought you such stars of the sport as Homer Mangram and Justice Bumpus. Just as quickly, the fight was scratched, and now the UFC has unfinished business to attend to.
Here's the thing: Nikolas Motta is a more technically sound and more defensively well-rounded fighter than Cameron VanCamp. Here's the other thing: Nikolas Motta is 5'8" and Cameron VanCamp is 6'2". Motta's giving up a massive size disadvantage and no matter how allergic VanCamp is to things like head movement and defense, it's still very hard to punch someone in the head when they're a full floor above you. Cameron VanCamp by decision.
Prelims begin anywhere from 45 to 120 minutes after this post. Feel the excitement.
CarlCX fucked around with this message at 20:20 on Sep 17, 2022
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Sep 17, 2022 20:16
