- CarlCX
- Dec 14, 2003
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CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 40: THE DECONSTRUCTION OF FALLING STARS
PRELIMS 4 PM PST/7 PM EST | MAIN CARD 7 PM PST/10 PM EST
The year is almost over, my friends. There's only three UFCs to go, and then we're free, you and I, for the deeply discomforting month-long break so everyone can enjoy the holidays and Facility Operations can refill the cocaine dispensers in the c-suite conference rooms. We're kicking off the month with an intellectual exploration of how many fighters the UFC doesn't think can cut it anymore will dutifully kick over and die so less shopworn fighters with more marketing upside can diablerize them and become more popular through their blood. So pour yourself a glass of smoking bishop and get excited for Clay Guida, 'cause we're getting the gently caress out of 2022 and some of these folks ain't coming with us.
you can't spell eryk anders without 'why'
MAIN EVENT: WONDERBOYS 2 MEN
WELTERWEIGHT: Stephen Thompson (16-6-1, #6) vs Kevin Holland (23-8 (1), NR)
There's a certain mystique to karate, so much so that dozens of martial arts across the world are to this day mistakenly lumped in with it. The average westerner does not know the difference between Karate and Kung Fu. The average westerner doesn't know Karate and Kung Fu aren't even styles so much as umbrella terms. (Disclaimer: I have no idea if the average citizen of anywhere does; as an extremely average westerner, I can speak only for us.) Even now, the terms are more likely to evoke images of Ralph Macchio and Ryu than Mas Ōyama or Andy Hug. The UFC, the centerpiece of the endless marketing engine that was the Gracie family, was born out of the attempt to demystify martial arts and separate the realities of combat from celluloid fiction. Karateka, Taekwondo practitioners and even the Count Dantes and Ashida Kims of the world were all equally helpless while being violently strangled on the floor.
But over the years, a funny thing happened. As mixed martial arts settled into a house style--two cups of wrestling, two cups of jiu-jitsu, take a few kickboxing classes and fight on national television for $500 in the morning--that mystique Royce and Rickson Gracie had strangled out of the sport began to slowly trickle back in. The more homogenized and universal styles became, the more people outside of those styles stood out. Suddenly, fighters whose styles who were adapting the old ways to a modern era became rare and intriguing. Georges St-Pierre is remembered today for his wrestling and his boxing, but when he first broke out as a superstar of the sport, it was by virtue of his black belt in Kyokushin Karate and his powerful, unusual kicking game. Lyoto Machida slowly gained momentum in Brazil and Japan before exploding into the mainstream thanks to his traditional karate style.
And the thing where he drank his own urine. Because, y'know. Karate mystique.
They were fresh and exciting and unique for a sport that had gotten so used to everyone looking, sounding and fighting alike. Machida's darting attacks and quick, intercepting counters were so unusual for his time that people largely overlooked how frustratingly low-volume he was the rest of the time. When he won the light-heavyweight championship, Joe Rogan famously declared it the beginning of the Machida era, and it didn't feel like hyperbole. After six years in the sport he was 15-0, the best fighter in the world, and had seemingly barely faced adversity at all. He felt like a riddle no one knew how to solve--like the original promise of martial arts mystique.
His era lasted less than a year. He would go on to lose three--debatably four--of his next five fights.
Because mixed martial arts moves loving fast, and the same forces that conspire to let the forgotten styles of yesteryear imbue the sport with incorrectly abandoned techniques also conspire to help other fighters figure out fresh new ways to approach those styles and punch them in the goddamn face. The lesson is the same as it always was: Evolve or die.
So stop me if you've heard this one before: There was a really talented, really impressive, unusually traditionalist karate fighter who took his weight division by storm, battered nearly everyone he faced and seemed like an inevitable champion, and now he might not work here anymore.
It's hard to properly place Stephen "Wonderboy" Thompson in time if you weren't there for his rise. His was the kind of story that serves as both an incredibly impressive testament to dedication and an existentially disconcerting thought experiment in how much of a life in martial arts starts in child abuse: His father, a former kickboxer and karateka who'd won the coveted TOUGHEST MAN IN SOUTH CAROLINA combat competition before retiring to teach, started Stephen's training when he was three. Wonderboy went on to success as an undefeated championship kickboxer and, much more importantly, the #1 fighter of Chuck Norris's grappling-is-for-sissies WORLD COMBAT LEAGUE, the kickboxing organization that aimed to take over from the UFC and instead died after two years when its first season was such a rollicking success that the Versus Network, purveyors of high-class sporting events like Arena Football, Professional Bullriding and Mountain West Conference Basketball, cited it as their fourth-most successful programming.
But while the product may have been the pits, the talent within it was real. The WCL turned out a score of champions in boxing, kickboxing and mixed martial arts alike, and Stephen Thompson was by far the UFC's best pickup from its bones. Aside from becoming yet another rosy-cheeked prospect dashed on the rock that was Matt Brown, Thompson won eight of his first nine UFC fights, and he won them by karateing the poo poo out of people. Question mark kicks, perfect punching counters, even a knockout victory over a then little-known guy named Robert Whittaker. When Thompson met the recently-unseated welterweight champion Johny Hendricks and executed him in a single round with a spinning kick to the body, the world--and Dana White--were convinced the time had come for another superstar karate champion.
It...didn't quite work out that way. Thompson went on to have two back-to-back championship fights against the (unfairly) maligned welterweight champion, Tyron Woodley, but the fights served only to sour the audience further on the champion and leave them thoroughly confused about Thompson, as both men barely engaged, with Thompson managing to fall just short of two significant strikes landed per minute--across fifty full minutes of combat. Their first fight was the extremely rare championship draw and their second was an incredibly close majority-decision defeat, but the UFC was far more bothered by his disappointing performance than how close he came to gold.
And his career suffered for it. For the next four years, Thompson was put on prospect duty. Instead of climbing the ladder back to contention, he was busted down to serving as a stepping stone for people the UFC wanted to push. Jorge Masvidal, Darren Till, even former lightweight champion Anthony Pettis made his welterweight debut against Thompson. When he finally put together two back-to-back wins over streaking contenders Vicente Luque and Geoff Neal, the UFC laughed off the idea of a title shot and instead put him right back in with Gilbert Burns and Belal Muhammad.
But that's the game, and at the end of the day, Stephen Thompson's strict adherence to the karate-kickboxing background that brought him so much success is far more of an albatross around his neck than the UFC's matchmakers. When you cannot adjust a style that's been captured at the highest level of the sport for a decade, people are going to figure you out, and when you realize you're turning 40 next year, the shock of new eating you alive becomes that much more inevitable.
Kevin Holland desperately wants to be that shock. Let me self-indulgently quote myself from three months ago, from a writeup for a fight that never actually happened:
Kevin Holland might have the most ridiculous strength of schedule of any recent UFC prospect. Between winning on the Contender Series, pissing off Dana White by being too much of a loudmouth (come on, man) and joining the UFC shortly after anyway as a late replacement, Kevin Holland has been with the company for just four years, and in that time he's had 15 fights--this one is his 16th--and has fought four different world championship contenders. He was good at middleweight until he met all of the people who can wrestle, and as a dyed-in-the-wool wild-eyed striker, he decided to move down to welterweight, the division where all the wrestlers live. Eventually, this could be a problem. But the UFC's aware of it and is deliberately avoiding matching Holland against any of them, so for now, whee!
I had noted on many occasions--just like above!--that Holland's decision to leave the wrestling of the middleweight division behind for the much harder wrestling of the welterweight division was destined for ruin, but I had envisioned it coming at the hands of a long, slow grind against a Sean Brady or a Michael Chiesa. Khamzat Chimaev is a wrestler, but he's not a grinder, he's a bulldozer. Holland was wrenched off his feet two seconds into the bout, and after thirty more he'd been entirely spatially inverted twice. In two minutes, he was tapping out. And in three weeks, he was retired from the sport.
For twenty-four hours.
He retired on October 4th and he unretired on October 5th to announce this fight. Crisis of faith? Publicity stunt? Last-minute attempt to play chicken with the UFC to get a better payday? Deep-seated desire to get attention on the internet? The world may never know. But it worked, and Holland got the big marquee striker vs striker matchup he'd been seeking for two straight years--the one he was supposed to have back in September before the cruel hand of fate chucked a waterbottle at someone's head and forced him into a trash compactor. Kevin Holland is by no means a stupid man. He just got a wrestling lesson and he knows how many wrestlers are sprinkled throughout the top fifteen at 170 pounds. Now, he gets a shot at the top five without having to face a single one of them. No Neil Magny clinches, no Shavkat Rakhmonov chokes, no being physically forced to remember Belal Muhammad's name. Just his fists and an aging karateka who hasn't completed a takedown since Barack Obama was in office.
So it's two men and only the ancient art of kickpunching between them. Who will be the better kickpuncher?
Let me be clear: Stephen Thompson, 39 or no, is an exceptionally dangerous fighter. His flashy kicks get all the credit for his success, but his hands are a severely underrated quantity. Most of his memorable finishes, even that screw-kick knockout over Johny Hendricks I referenced earlier, were set up by quick, sharp counterpunching. He's powerful, he's accurate, and even at this stage in his career he's blisteringly quick.
But the thing he's not great with is pressure. Thompson is 3 for his last 9, and that's not just a reflection of greater competition, but of the way people have learned to exploit his counter-heavy style. Fighters who force him to come forward only to counter him, like Anthony Pettis did, or fighters who go right into his face and deny him the space to move and counter, like Gilbert Burns did. Kevin Holland is not only a very solid pressure fighter with devastating striking power, he's the first UFC fighter Thompson's ever fought who holds a size advantage against him. His distance weapons, by far the best part of his arsenal, will be coming up half a foot short. And Holland will be sticking punches through his guard and pursuing him the whole time.
I like Wonderboy. He's been a ranked welterweight standby for most of the entire last decade. But the UFC is gunning for a changing of the guard here, and they're going to get it. Kevin Holland by TKO.
CO-MAIN EVENT: TOURING THE RETIREMENT CIRCUIT
 WELTERWEIGHT: Rafael dos Anjos (31-14, #7 at Lightweight) vs Bryan Barberena (18-8, NR)
You know those moments where you find yourself repeatedly inspecting a piece of food in your refrigerator because it seems to be just on the borderline of going bad, but it might still be edible and you're not sure that you want to waste it?
Rafael dos Anjos is one of my favorite fighters of all time. This fight is the UFC's way of checking to see if he's grown mold.
Honestly, it'd be understandable. RDA's UFC tenure has been absolutely preposterous. This is his fourteenth straight year in the company, this fight will leave him tied with Demian Maia for the fifth-most bouts in UFC history at a staggering 33, and virtually every single one of them has been against a top contender. You have to go all the way back to June of 2014 to find the last time dos Anjos was matched against an unranked opponent. That's eighteen god damned fights ago.
His power, his volume and his ability to switch between combination striking and crushing top-game grappling have kept him vital far longer than virtually all of his peers--which is even crazier when you remember that even as the sport trended towards bigger and stronger competitors in every weight class dos Anjos, who at 5'8" was below-average for the lightweight division even back in his prime and is now tied for second-shortest in the division, moved up to welterweight and proceeded to dominate people like Robbie Lawler who just a year prior had reigned as champion.
Rafael dos Anjos won his UFC championship in March of 2015. Out of the twenty-nine other people ranked at lightweight and welterweight at that time there are exactly five who are still active where they were ranked. Everyone else left their weight class or retired outright. dos Anjos has never stopped being ranked and he's never stopped fighting killers.
And everyone was fine with that until his last fight, when Rafael Fiziev knocked him out. There's no shame in getting knocked out by Rafael Fiziev; he's one of the best strikers in the entire sport. But a central part of the dos Anjos longevity is his chin. In all of those dozens of championship-level bouts, in thirty-one prior UFC appearances, dos Anjos had only been knocked out twice, and it took an almost comical level of violence to do it: Jeremy Stephens took him out in 2008 with an uppercut so big it would've felled a heavyweight and Eddie Alvarez wrested the lightweight title away from him in 2016 and he had to hit him with essentially a thirty-strike combination to do it, and when the referee stepped in dos Anjos didn't look concussed so much as disappointed in himself.
Two knockouts in a decade and a half. (Before anyone asks: No, Clay Guida doesn't count, injuries aren't knockouts.) The moment that durability seemed potentially cracked, the conversation shifted from "Is Rafael dos Anjos still a contender?" to "Should Rafael dos Anjos retire?" The UFC has assigned their own personal Randy Orton: Legend Killer to answer that question.
Bryan "Bam Bam" Barberena has hung around the UFC for eight years, and every one of those years has been a struggle. Some part of this is his style: He's the kind of scrappy, never-tiring brawler that feels in some ways like a throwback to the mid-2000s boom era of mixed martial arts, where toughness and ferocity let wild haymakers and lax defense succeed. But another part is the curse Dana White laid at his feet when he dared to end the undefeated streak of the UFC's perfect golden child, Sage Northcutt. With one side of his mouth Dana cried to the heavens that Sage had strep throat and it wasn't his fault; with the other, he hissed to Sean Shelby and the other UFC matchmakers to drive that motherfucker Barberena into the ground.
And it showed! In his first three UFC fights Barberena fought the relatively untested Joe Ellenberger, Chad Laprise and the aforementioned human action figure Northcutt; in the four that followed The Unforgivable Sin he faced TUF winner Warlley Alves, TUF finalist Joe Proctor and future welterweight champions Colby Covington and Leon Edwards. It was a massive step up in competition, but it was also where Barberena gained the reputation that made him an underdog favorite--he was so loving scrappy that even when visibly outclassed, he could make people fear for their lives. He lost to Warlley Alves, but he was killing him in the third round. He got wrestled to death by Colby Covington, but he was only ever on the mat for seconds and every time they were on their feet he was jabbing him in the face. He goddamn near knocked Leon Edwards cold with an uppercut and turned him into a wrestler on the spot.
It redeemed him in the UFC's eyes as a creator of must-watch fights, but it also doomed him through expectation. When you're a brawler, the world expects you to brawl, and when you're brawling with Vicente Luque and Randy Brown, you're going to get hurt. Barberena went half a decade without recording back-to-back UFC wins; the competition was too stiff and your main power source being tenacity only gets you so far. By 2021 Barberena had a 6-6 record in the company, he'd just been wrestled to death by Jason Witt all over again, and no one had a Bryan Barberena career resurgence penned in for 2022.
And yet, we're here at the end of 2022, and Barberena's on the best winning streak of his career, and he's competing for a potential berth in the top 15 at welterweight against one of the greatest fighters in history. What changed? Did he shore up his offense and defense? Is he a new man?
I do not want to take away from Bryan Barberena's talents. I have been a huge fan of his for years. But his newfound success is less about any change in him as a fighter and more about the UFC deciding to appoint him as their new organizational Charon, here to usher fighters on the verge of ending their UFC tenures towards oblivion. He's won five fights since 2018. The first three were Jake Ellenberger, a potential title contender back in 2012 who retired immediately after their bout, Anthony Ivy, who was cut from the UFC immediately, hasn't won a fight since and is now a handsome 8-7, and Darian Weeks, who went 0-3 in the UFC and was released less than a year later. The last two--the big, signature wins that got him the spotlight--came against Matt Brown, who was on his second retirement after his first back in 2017, and former champion Robbie Lawler, who had entered the north side of 40, lost four straight and was saved from five only by a deeply shameful bout with a Nick Diaz who visibly wanted to be anywhere else on Earth.
To put it bluntly: Barberena's the retirement man. After almost a decade the UFC figured out the best way to use him: Throwing his ferocity against fighters who are too road-worn to deal with it. Brown couldn't, Lawler couldn't, and now, we are forced to ask if Rafael dos Anjos, a man who was just knocked out by a 5'8" kickboxer, can deal with the pressure of 6' welterweight Bryan Barberena.
And boy, I'll tell you, I really want to say yes. Unlike the Browns and Lawlers of the world, even in his defeats, dos Anjos has looked vital and recognizable. He handed Renato Moicano the worst beating of his career just nine months ago, and while he was defeated by Fiziev back in July, he stayed competitive with one of the sport's best strikers for four straight rounds. He doesn't seem to have faded as much as people fear. But Barberena is, on paper, a difficult match for him even in his prime. He's arguably even more of a swarming pressure fighter, he's a much larger, stronger opponent, and he's dealt with much stiffer wrestling threats. The only people who've been able to go toe-to-toe with Bryan Barberena are superior technical strikers or stronger, crazier brawlers.
Rafael dos Anjos has been breaking people with his pace for almost twenty years. Can he do it to someone who outpaces him?
Going out on a limb, here: Rafael dos Anjos by submission. I don't know that RDA can stop Barberena with strikes; he's too goddamn tough and he's never, ever going to wilt. But I do think he can hurt him, and unlike Barberena's other opponents, he's going to be able to jump on him and strangle him given the chance. But as I said when I wrote about the Lawler fight and also perilously picked against Barberena:
But make no mistake: There is a high sadness quotient potential in this fight.
MAIN CARD: THE SMALLEST OF MEN AND THE BIGGEST OF FISTS
FLYWEIGHT: Matheus Nicolau (18-2-1, #6) vs Matt Schnell (16-7, #7)
Flyweight is the division of the damned and lost. Despite being inhabited by some of the best fighters on the planet, and despite having the highest possible ratio of quality to chaff, the weight class has been thoroughly mistreated because Dana White doesn't like short people to the extent of repeatedly threatening to cut "Mighty Mouse" Demetrious Johnson, the most dominant champion in mixed martial arts history, and close the entire division. Even now, with flyweight the hottest it's ever been, they're so thoroughly ignored by the UFC that the division hasn't had a card-headlining bout in two years. Women's featherweight, a weight class that does not exist, has managed a main event more recently than the flyweight division.
I'm not choosing this fight to arbitrarily complain; the UFC's complete lack of give-a-gently caress about flyweight directly informs the trajectory both of these fighters have taken.
Matheus Nicolau is unquestionably one of the best flyweights on the planet. He was already one of the best when he joined the UFC for The Ultimate Fighter Brazil in 2015, where he was forced to fight up an entire class at bantamweight, still made it to the penultimate round, and still won a UFC contract anyway. But he made the fateful decision to drop back to his home class and was thus competing at 125 pounds when Mighty Mouse hit the skids with UFC brass, and became a pawn in the greater war on 125 pounds. In 2018 he took a loss to Dustin Ortiz, his first loss in the UFC and his first loss anywhere in six years. He was immediately cut from the company, despite being 3-1.
(Fun fact: Dustin Ortiz, coming off said dramatic, highlight-reel headkick knockout of a highly-credible flyweight? They tried to fire him too. He was one of the many flyweight competitors they called and told they were willing to just let go despite having a fight left on his contract. He told them to book him so he could complete his contract the right way, he made peanuts to lose to Joseph Benavidez, and that was the end of his UFC tenure.)
Having done everything they asked and been a good soldier, Nicolau went right back to the regional scene and right back to choking people out. And two years later, in the middle of COVID, the UFC decided it actually needed flyweight after all and phoned him up asking if he'd be interested in coming back for a whopping, generous salary increase: Instead of the $20,000 per fight pittance he was getting before, they were bumping him up to $24,000, baby.
So now Nicolau's been back in the UFC for a year and a half and he's 3-0 again. In that same period of time, Matt Schnell has been booked for eleven fights and only four of them have happened.
Schnell, who I will acknowledge in this sentence goes by the nickname "Danger" but will thereafter refuse to reference because I am in my thirties, was signed as part of the one true push the UFC ever gave the flyweight division: The Ultimate Fighter 24, a tournament pulling in every regional flyweight champion they could find with the promise of a title shot for the winner. Schnell was the champion of Legacy FC, a feeder league who after five years of promotion have seen 83% of their 58 separate championship reigns end with the beltholder peacing out for greener pastures, so he was a natural fit. He was choked out just two rounds in and proceeded to get knocked out in his next two UFC fights, but his frenetic brawling style pleased the overlords, so he was permitted to stay.
He spent the next few years establishing himself as a divisional gatekeeper--tough and slick enough to choke out the lower end of the ranks, but repeatedly and often violently ejected from the top ten. And then the UFC booked him to fight Alex Perez, but Perez pulled out for reasons that were never clarified, so instead Schnell fought and lost to Rogério Bontorin. So they booked him to fight Alex Perez again, and Perez pulled out with an injury. So they booked him to fight Alex Perez again, but the fight timing didn't work out and it got scratched. So they booked him to fight Alex Perez again, but this time both men botched their weight cuts, with Perez coming in just slightly too heavy and a doctor refusing to even let Schnell proceed. So they booked him to fight Alex Perez again, but this time Perez came in a full three pounds outside the weight division and Schnell turned down the fight out of sheer frustration.
A year. A full year of the UFC doggedly attempting to book the same fight, despite having a full flyweight roster available, in clear violation of the laws of god and man alike, and all they could think to do was try again, over and over. After wasting a year of his prime chasing Alex Perez, Schnell went right back to what he'd always done: Getting hosed up by top contenders but being too much for the bottom of the division.
And this is the best and worst part of flyweight. On one hand, everyone's good at everything, so you can really focus on the human stories of the fighters. On the other, everyone's good at everything, so everyone feels deeply similar. Is there enough of a talent gap between these two fighters to trigger the glass ceiling that seems to squash Schnell on a non-Alex-Perez-involved annual basis?
Yeah, probably. Matheus Nicolau by decision. Both men have issues with metering their output, but Schnell likes to get sloppy and go into berserker brawls, and Nicolau's made money picking people off in mid-charge. It's on the ground where Schnell becomes a real danger, so don't be surprised if this fight is Nicolau pecking at him, goading him into charges and hurting him for them while avoiding prolonged grappling engagements.
HEAVYWEIGHT: Tai Tuivasa (15-4, #4) vs Sergei Pavlovich (16-1, #5)
Oh, heavyweight. When you swing, you swing hard in so many unfortunate ways.
Ten months ago, Tai Tuivasa was on top of the world. He had a five-fight winning streak, he'd knocked out everyone put in front of him, he'd had the all-too-rare opportunity to punch Greg Hardy in the face and he'd just notched the biggest win of his career by going face to face with Derrick Lewis, the biggest puncher in UFC heavyweight history, and beating him at his own horrifically violent game. The tippy-top of the heavyweight division became a conversation between exactly five people: Francis Ngannou, the world champion knockout artist, Ciryl Gane, one of the cleanest striking technicians the division has ever seen, Stipe Miocic, the greatest UFC heavyweight champion of all time, Jon Jones, arguably the best fighter on the planet, and Tai Tuivasa, the big happy brawling guy who drinks beer out of a shoe.
It was a little too on the nose, and when reality reasserted itself, it was not kind. Tai got his shot at Ciryl Gane, and he made the most of it--even stunning Gane once and threatening to upend the world one more time--but for the most part, it was the more predictable future of Gane effortlessly taking him apart. He finally dropped in the third round, having been outstruck 110 to 29. The Tank Abbott Curse lives, and its ceiling is real. And everyone who fights Tai Tuivasa is trying to prove that they, themselves, are not, in fact, Tank Abbott.
Sergei Pavlovich does not want to be Tank Abbott. He's a huge, hulking man with freakishly long arms that have distressingly powerful hamhocks loosely attached to their stumps. He's ex-military, he's a Combat Sambo champion, and he probably would have been in title contention already had it not been for a career-derailing layoff. Towards the end of 2019 he vanished, plagued by injuries and international visa issues, and it took two and a half years to straighten everything out and get him back on a UFC card.
Two and a half years typically isn't enough to see that much divisional shift--unless you had something crazy happen like, say, the two previous heavyweight champions effectively retiring, and the new heavyweight champion effectively quit the sport over fighter pay, and half of the entire top 15 washed out because it's heavyweight and everything is terrible. Pavlovich was back in March of 2022 and he picked up right where he left off, blitzing people and easily crushing them in a single round because he hits like a loving freight train. Time is immaterial.
Sergei Pavlovich by TKO. This is by no means an unwinnable fight for Tai. He can take a punch and he hits like a motherfucker and Sergei's best offense comes from blitzing in and hoping he connects before the other guy does, which is exactly the way Tai's nuked multiple opponents. But Pavlovich does it much faster, and much more accurately, and he has the ability to hit people in said blitzes while he's still thirty feet away from them. If Tai can keep Pavlovich at the end of his kicks and control the timing of his blitzes, he could catch him and end him. If Pavlovich dictates the pace, Tai's dead in a round.
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Jack Hermansson (23-7, #8) vs Roman Dolidze (11-1, NR)
Don't worry, we're out of the hugely interesting stuff, no more word marathons. Jack Hermansson is still stuck in amber. He's been at the lower end of the middleweight top ten since 2018: Too good to get knocked off the ladder, unable to get over the hump represented by the true athletic and technical masters of the game. Or Sean Strickland, apparently. That's slightly more distressing. Hermansson gets the quietly backhanded praise: He's an Extremely Solid Fighter. Good chin, good conditioning, good striking, good grappling--but no great, singular standout traits. Bigger strikers, bigger wrestlers, more tenacious fighters--they all tend to give him trouble.
Which is why the UFC's been trying to turn him into fodder. He was supposed to fight Derek Brunson tonight, but an injury forced him out and left Roman Dolidze to take his place--and it's kind of a big, difficult change in opponent. Derek Brunson is about 30% kickboxer and 70% wrestler, a man who's happy to exchange until he wants or needs to shoot a blast double. Roman Dolidze is a positional control fighter. He wants to manage distance with leg kicks, cut opponents off until they get stuck against the fence, and tee off in the clinch until they stop moving altogether. Under normal circumstances I'd favor Hermansson's sound, bread-and-butter style over Dolidze's kick approaches and berserker clinch rages, but two weeks is a very short amount of time to make such a rapid adjustment.
And Hermansson's trouble with pressure makes me afraid for him here. His boxing should be enough to keep Dolidze on his toes and out of range, but the kind of power Dolidze can bring down on his head is a long challenge on short notice. Roman Dolidze gets the upset TKO.
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Eryk Anders (14-7 (1)) vs Kyle Daukaus (11-3 (1))
No. I already wrote about Eryk Anders this year. I refuse. I'm gonna turn this one over to my intern.
There is an Andershole in your mind.
There is no fight here. There never has been, and never will be again. This is going to be the fifteenth Eryk Anders fight in the UFC. You have, almost certainly, seen at least several. Do you remember a single one? Do you have any recollection of the time around them, the cards on which they took place? Do you even remember the where and when of them? Do you even remember yourself?
Eryk Anders has poisoned your mind. He isn't a fighter, he is a shapeless, formless thing, an assassin of space and time. He appears and all of existence around him warps to become empty and immemorable. He's done this for years. Princes and peasants alike have been erased by the influence of the Andershole. Lyoto Machida fell into it and was picked up by long-distance sensors in some rimworld hellhole named Bellator.
It doesn't matter what Kyle Daukaus does, or who he is. You won't remember anything that happens here. You'll perceive only shadow-shapes, flits of what seems like motion while disembodied voices scream about athleticism and Foot-ball, and twenty minutes later you'll snap to attention, bleeding from the ear, not knowing where you were or why you came.
Kyle Daukaus will win a decision. But no one will know.
PRELIMS: HALF OF THESE PEOPLE WERE HEADLINING FIGHT NIGHTS A DECADE AGO
WELTERWEIGHT: Niko Price (15-5 (2)) vs Philip Rowe (9-3)
Niko Price has had a long, strange trip through the UFC. When you roll it out, it's honestly kind of absurd:
- Makes his debut by retiring Brandon Thatch, a guy the whole world once thought of as an inevitable champion
- Nearly gets knocked out by Alex Morono, then knocks him out cold at the literal last nanosecond of the round only to lose the victory because he smoked weed
- Becomes the only UFC fighter to win multiple fights by TKO thanks to strikes from the bottom, knocking out James Vick with an upkick and Randy Brown by hammerfisting him to death from a supine position
- Would have won a high-profile fight against Donald Cerrone, but he a) lost a point for repeatedly poking him in the eyes, rendering the fight a draw, and b) make it irrelevant when he tested positive for marijuana again
He's never not been a weird loving fighter to follow, and he's never not been incredibly talented, hard-hitting and dangerous, and he's never not been inconsistent as poo poo thanks to his shaky defense, his wrestling deficiencies, and his deep and abiding love for weed. "The Fresh Prince" Philip Rowe is a sort of Jekyll and Hyde case. He's a huge, 6'3" welterweight with an incredible 80.5" reach, and unlike most tall fighters he knows how to use it and comes out moving, sticking out jabs and leg kicks and keeping opponents willfully at bay--until the first time he gets hit. Then he immediately chucks all of that poo poo out the window and turns into a brawler. He's 2-1 in the UFC, so to some extent it's working for him, but the degree to which his defense slips is always concerning.
It's just hard to pick Niko Price fights, man. He's one of the most dangerous fighters in the sport but he gets blown up every other fight, and even his victories tend to come from being in trouble. Rowe, meanwhile, has looked good as long as his opponent can't grab him and wrestle him to death. Philip Rowe by decision, but I would not bet on Niko Price fights.
WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT: Angela Hill (14-12, #12) vs Emily Ducote (12-6, #13)
Oh, Angie. Every time you think Angela Hill is done, she finds a way to pull it out. After three straight losses, her last fight with the rising wrestling star Lupita Godinez seemed like an execution, but through guillotine threats, counter-wrestling and the stiff jabs and combinations she's made a trademark of her kickboxing-heavy style, Hill pulled out a close but unanimous decision and saved herself from certain professional death. And that means it's right back to the scary prospect mines outside of town. Emily "Gordinha" Ducote is still a UFC rookie. She was picked up after winning and successfully defending Invicta FC's strawweight championship, and the UFC threw her in the deep end by matching her against the very tough, very capable, former #1 contender Jessica Penne--and Ducote blew her out of the water, outstriking her nearly 2:1, staving off 8 takedown attempts, and leaving her bloody and beaten.
But this is a very tough sophomore match for her. Angie's a very good technical striker, she is very good at using her distance, and her chin is exceptionally solid, which has carried her through many a brawl in her career. But her style and its low-output, high-counter style tends to deeply displease the judges. I'm not sure that Ducote has gun enough to drop Angie, but her furious volume is going to be a big, big problem if the fight makes it to the scorecards. Emily Ducote by decision.
LIGHTWEIGHT: Clay Guida (37-22) vs Scott Holtzman (14-5)
It is 2006. I am watching an oddly Australopithecine man named Clay Guida wrestle "Pretty Boy" Justin James. It's Clay's sixth fight in eight months. He's choking him unconscious on top of an advertisement for Mickey's Malt Liquor, and no one is helping. There is a war in Iraq and nothing is okay. It is 2009. All of my hair is gone, and Clay Guida is being murdered by Kenny "Ken-Flo" Florian with one of the best two-one combos I've ever seen. I have learned things about the depths of racism in my country I did not know, and more than a decade later, I will realize that there were twenty-two UFC fighters on this card and Guida is the last one left. It is 2018. Charles "Do Bronx" Oliveira will be a champion soon, but that begins tonight, strangling the life out of a Clay Guida who is old enough now that the sight of him evokes an uncomfortable nostalgia. It carries the musty smell of dead years. It is 2022. Clay Guida is fighting Scott "Hot Sauce" Holtzman. Three fights ago, Holtzman fought a fellow ancient nostalgia act in Jim Miller, only to be inexplicably rocketed into repeatedly meeting, and being destroyed by, fighters in the top ten. There has never been a number by his name. The world feels colder and crueler than I can ever recall, and as my finger touches the extra-worn W on my keyboard, I Wonder if Clay Guida, one of the most popular and enduring fighters in promotional history, ever got close to clearing six figures for a fight. I am standing beside myself, wondering why I ask questions I know the answers to. But I wonder all the same.
It is 2030. Several countries are underwater and President Marjorie Taylor-Greene has just signed legislation mandating the incarceration of anyone who acknowledges the grammatical necessity of pronouns. Clay Guida is fighting Odie "The Real G" Jonathan on the undercard of UFC Fight Night: O'Malley vs A Dog. As I use my two remaining teeth to consume my nutrient paste, I wonder if I'm more surprised that the dog got licensed or that Guida is still fighting despite all his joints being replaced with balsa wood. I am crying, and I will never understand why.
Clay Guida by decision.
LIGHTWEIGHT: Michael Johnson (20-18) vs Marc Diakiese (16-5)
There was some kind of polar inversion with these fighters. When Michael Johnson joined The Ultimate Fighter: GSP vs Koscheck back in 2010, he was GSP's first pick on the back of his reputation as one of the best JUCO wrestlers in the country. He fought behind his hands, but his wrestling was the stiffest weapon in his arsenal, always there to take opponents out of their comfort zone and rhythm. And then he knocked out Dustin Poirier, and his style changed to the point that he's completed one takedown in the last five and a half years. Marc Diakiese was brought into the fold thanks to his reputation as a British knockout artist, a genre the UFC desperately wants to corner, and his wrestling was always quietly present, but was used sparingly--a tool to keep people from getting complacent while he tried to hurt them. And then he lost a bunch of fights, racked up a grand UFC record of 5-5, and decided he didn't want to be a 50/50 fighter anymore. In his first ten UFC appearances, Diakiese recorded a total of 16 takedowns. In his two fights just this year, he's managed 19.
And it's not going to work out as well for him here. He's not going to be able to outwrestle Michael Johnson the way he's been ragdolling his opponents as of late, so he's going to have to return to striking. And that's where things always get screwy with Michael Johnson fights. Sometimes he looks like the fighter who destroyed one of the best lightweight punchers of all time; sometimes he looks like he'd rather be anywhere else on the planet. It's always a coin flip. But with Diakiese's preferred weapon of the moment defanged, I'm still going with Michael Johnson by decision.
FEATHERWEIGHT: Darren Elkins (27-10) vs Jonathan Pearce (13-4)
See, this is the depressing kind of veterancy fight. Darren Elkins made his name on the most damning of qualities: Being Extremely Tough. You don't actually want to Be Extremely Tough in combat sports, because if you've Been Extremely Tough, it means you've gotten the poo poo kicked out of you so viciously that people took notice and were quietly impressed you could get beat up so much without falling over. That's a good trait to HAVE, but it gets progressively less good when people notice it. Elkins has made it such a core part of his identity that people don't even remember his grinding wrestling attacks anymore, they just remember the beatings he suffered. This is, unfortunately, going to be another one of those. As much as I hate Jonathan Pearce--not through any fault of the man himself, I know nothing about his personality or politics, I just have an involuntary reaction of loathing for the "JSP" nickname, it's like naming your band Eight Inch Nails--he's better at everything Elkins does save getting punched in the face. He's a bigger, faster, stronger wrestler and he's got tighter, straighter striking, with the grappling defense to keep Elkins from hulking up and crushing him after he takes enough damage to fill his super meter.
Of course, Pearce also got dropped and pounded out by Joe Lauzon, so anything's possible. But the theme of the night is attempted changings of the guard, and I don't think this'll be different. Jonathan Pearce by decision.
WOMEN'S FLYWEIGHT: Tracy Cortez (10-1, #13) vs Amanda Ribas (11-3, #9)
Hey, would you look at that, it's time for your regularly scheduled episode of Carl Gets Mad About Women's Divisions Getting poo poo On.
Tracy Cortez is a rising, promising prospect. Like so many of the best women's fighters on the planet she slid right over after a stint in Invicta FC, beat the then-undefeated wrecking machine Mariya Agapova on the Contender Series, went UP a weight class to bantamweight for her first two UFC fights and dropped right back down afterward. She's a perfect 5-0 under the UFC's umbrella, with the only friction in her run thus far coming from a split decision victory over Justine Kish after an iffy weight cut. She's outstruck and outgrappled every opponent she's faced, and is in prime position for an actual top ten test.
Amanda Ribas is one of the best women the UFC has. An aggressive striker and grappler alike who ended Mackenzie Dern's undefeated streak and armbarred Paige VanZant out of mixed martial arts altogether, Ribas has been a standout contender at women's flyweight for years. Her only stumbles in the UFC came from her brief stint at strawweight, where the weight cut and a striking disadvantage got her knocked out by Marina Rodriguez, and her last fight, an exceptionally close split decision loss to essentially permanent #1 contender Katlyn Chookagian.
Both of these women are very, very good. Both could easily be fighting for a championship belt within a couple of fights. Which is why they're four fights from the bottom on a Fight Night card at the start of the least violent month of the year, crammed into a fifteen-fight block with no hype. Slightly more important than Natan Levy, but by god, not nearly as important as Darren loving Elkins.
Cortez is very defensively sound, but Ribas hits harder and has a touch more aggression. I'm still going Amanda Ribas by decision but this could easily be the closest fight on the card. Please stop making me write about how bad you are at advertising these things. I'm so tired.
LIGHTWEIGHT: Natan Levy (7-1) vs Genaro Valdéz (10-1)
This fight is going to be furious and silly. Both of these men joined the UFC as Contender Series children with undefeated records and both lost aggressively hilarious promotional debuts. Levy turned in a barnburner of a performance against Rafa Garcia, one that saw him swinging so hard and wild that he repeatedly knocked himself down; Genaro Valdéz, an ultra-brawler out of Mexico, had one of the wildest one-round fights in UFC history against Matt Frevola, with seven knockdowns scored between the two men in just 3:15. (The UFC only officially recognizes 4 knockdowns in the fight: They are wrong.) Of course, both men LOST those fights. Levy came back with a hard-fought victory over Mike "Please Google My Name Responsibly" Breeden; this is Genaro's first appearance since his loss.
And it's hard to see it being anything but a giant brawl. Levy showed a little more strategy in his last fight, but that strategy still involved large amounts of swinging haymakers and praying, and Valdéz, well, he barely ever gets out of the first round, one way or another. His response to getting knocked down was to try his best to knock the other guy down harder. This is almost certainly a game of conkers, and it took one of the biggest punchers in the division to put Genaro down, but he also expends energy so quickly that Levy will be able to make him pay for it once his first salvo ends. Natan Levy by decision.
FEATHERWEIGHT: Francis Marshall (6-0) vs Marcelo Rojo (16-8)
We almost made it through an entire UFC card without a "Contender Series winner makes their debut on someone's corpse" bout, but we just weren't quite lucky enough. Francis "The Fire" Marshall--who made me feel incredibly old while doing fight research because as a 23 year-old he had instagram pictures from a decade ago as a literal child--won his way into the UFC this past August through what can be best described as performance art regarding the modern martial arts aesthetic of being perfectly blended and utterly featureless. Marcelo Rojo is one of those unfortunate, misplaced puzzle pieces that gets picked up along the way, tapped as a late replacement for a fight that never happened and entitled to the standard three-fight contract anyhow. He got knocked out by Charles Jourdain, he got tapped out by Kyler Phillips, and now the UFC's hoping they can feed him to the new guy.
And they probably can. It's not without risk, Rojo's got a solid puncher's chance, but he suffers from control problems on the ground and Marshall is a solid, athletic guy we're doomed to see a million of over the next fifteen years. Francis Marshall by decision.
WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT: Yazmin Jauregui (9-0) vs Istela Nunes (6-3)
This should be fun. Yazmin Jauregui and Iasmin Lucindo had a fun UFC debut this past summer, but Yazmin's high-volume, 219-strike output netted her the decision and thus she now gets the glory of curtain-jerking while they see if she's worth investing real marketing dollars into. Istela Nunes has had a less helpful run of things. The UFC picked her up in late 2018 after a semi-successful trip over in ONE Championship, but injuries and COVID kept Nunes grounded for more than three years, and when she finally made her UFC debut, she was immediately dashed on the rocks of more powerful grapplers.
But that shouldn't be her problem here. Jauregui and Nunes are both strikers, with Nunes slightly favoring heavy kicks and Jauregui favoring combination boxing. Neither is a one-hit dynamo. In the long run, though, Yazmin's volume and the quickness of her right cross make me concerned for Nunes' tendency to come forward behind kicks that could easily get countered. Yazmin Jauregui by decision.
Prelims in fifteen minutes. Be there, or alternatively: Don't.
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Dec 3, 2022 01:40
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