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How will the light-heavyweight title somehow stay vacant again? This poll is closed. |
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|---|---|---|---|
| Another split draw |
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6 | 17.65% |
| Glover Teixeira pulls out citing old man hips |
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9 | 26.47% |
| Jamahal Hill gets TKOed during his weight cut by way of Bathtub |
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9 | 26.47% |
| Fight cancelled when Jiří Procházka throws a dolly at the fighter bus |
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10 | 29.41% |
| Total: | 34 votes | ||
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https://twitter.com/FullContactMTWF/status/1607127968031309825 Do you miss the nostalgia of 2022? Are you craving yesteryear's styles of parachute pants and doing the Charleston? Time travel back to December here.  It's the dawn of a new year. Thank you for coming along on the beginning of another twelve months of one of the best, dumbest non-sports in the world, although it will thankfully always be better than slap fighting. As has been the sport's tradition for some time we're in for a January that's both sleepy and congested--there are only two UFCs and five major events this month, but all five of them are happening in one seven-day period. Good luck! This year's inaugural thread title is brought to us by, of course, Tito Ortiz. If this is your first time here you should stop and say hi so we know it's not just the same couple dozen of us cussing each other out all the time, but you may want to start with The General Q&A Thread for the basic gist of mixed martial arts. Yes, I'm still doing the new one. If you want to talk about MMA or combat sports events that aren't included in this breakdown: Please do. In a world of Road FC and Rizin events that don't actually air in America and the WBC threatening to rank Jake Paul, there's space for everything. And if there's an event you want to make a GDT for, go right ahead, just make sure to link it here so everyone sees it and basks in the joy of violence. THIS MONTH'S PUNCHSPORTS EVENTS 
IS THERE ANY NEWS  STEPHAN BONNAR - 4/4/1977 - 12/22/2022 The world didn't find out about it until almost a week later, but Stephan Bonnar died on December 22, 2022, and boy, it's hosed up. It's hard to be a fan of the sport in the modern era and not be at least partially aware of Stephan Bonnar's career. He was a lifelong martial artist, an early believer in cross-training and a finalist on the original Ultimate Fighter tournament. His finale fight with Forrest Griffin has been mythologized a bit by the company as the saving grace of the UFC and the sport, and that's not exactly true--Spike had already greenlit a second season of the show, the UFC was already booked for more TV cards, life would have gone on--but the fight's afterburner effect on the sport's mainstreaming was very, very real. And it was big enough that it overshadowed the entirety of his career. Which isn't really fair, because Stephan Bonnar was a hell of a fighter. In twenty-four fights across just over a decade, outside of a contrversial cut stoppage thanks to a headbutt, he was only ever defeated by world champions. He took Forrest Griffin to the limit twice, he gave a rookie Jon Jones hell, and he was only truly stopped once in his entire career and it took Anderson goddamn Silva to do it. He should, by all rights, be a legend of the sport. But it's hard to not remember stories for their endings. He fought Anderson Silva on a month's notice, but he tested positive for drostanolone and retired in the shadows. He had an ill-advised Bellator revival just to lose to Tito Ortiz. He tried professional wrestling and showed up in TNA but kept injuring himself. He spiraled into addiction in his personal life, got arrested for DUIs and public disturbances, and was publicly visible mainly for video rants about COVID being a hoax and why no one would give him more pain pills. And that's the thing that makes these deaths all the more tragic: The need for help was plain and obvious. Dying of heart failure as a world-class athlete at 45 is not a thing that should happen, and it begs anger--at the UFC for not taking care of its legends, at Bonnar himself for playing chicken with life-destroying diseases, at the sport as a whole for the continual reminder that there's no retirement plan for fighters. It's a rough loving life and when you look at the alumni of TUF 1--two dead too young, two fighting far past their prime, half of them broke--it's impossible not to want the sport to do better. Stephan Bonnar leaves behind a 15-9 fight record, a UFC hall of fame ring, a widow, and a son named Griffin in tribute to the other half of his most famous fight. https://twitter.com/MMAJunkie/status/1605880983231791105 On the topic of the UFC's money-grubbing, pay-per-view prices have once again risen. Starting with this month's 283, every pay-per-view will now cost $79.99. Ask yourself if you would have paid eighty dollars for Colby Covington vs Jorge Masvidal and adjust your plans accordingly. https://twitter.com/MMAJunkie/status/1608285937020112896 Tatiana Suarez was loving up the entire Women's Strawweight Division and was pegged by almost everyone as a future champion up until a series of neck and knee injuries put her on the shelf for three and a half god damned years. Presuming she does make it into the cage this time, the big question will be how she's held up after so many injuries and so much time off, but if she's anything like her old self, it could immediately shake up the title picture. https://twitter.com/MMAJunkie/status/1607898909216772096 Also in women's MMA news: Sara McMann, Olympic silver medalist and one-time UFC Women's Bantamweight title challenger, is going to Bellator to round out their featherweight division. The UFC didn't release her, exactly--her planned bout with Aspen Ladd was the last on her contract and when Ladd failed to make weight and was medically ruled out, the UFC decided to not fight McMann's contract having been fulfilled. Good luck to her and her inevitable campaign to get a Cyborg fight. https://twitter.com/PFLMMA/status/1604854071940227074 The PFL Challenger Series is back. Just like last year, the talent-scout competition will be airing every Friday at 9 PM EST on FuboTV, with eight planned episodes. If you want to see some regional competition and you're bored on Friday nights, you know where to go. MONTHLY RETIREMENT CORNER  TJ Dillashaw called it a career on December 5, 2022. It's a weird ending to a weird career--at one point Dillashaw seemed like an absolute lock for greatest-of-all-time conversations regarding the bantamweight division and was a sure-thing hall of famer, and then he tested positive for EPO, got knocked out by Henry Cejudo, served a two-year drug suspension, barely scraped by Cory Sandhagen and lost to Aljamain Sterling because his shoulder refused to stay in its socket. And now he's retired. I have to be clear: I'm biased on this one. TJ Dillashaw's career-defining upset destruction of Renan Barão is one of my favorite fights of all time, and almost nine years later it still stands as one of the prettiest displays of striking in MMA history. I have an affection for the man's work and it would be dishonest to say it doesn't impact my opinion of him. But the total torpedoing of Dillashaw's career has always felt profoundly weird. As far as public allocution goes, his crimes were a) doing PEDs, b) being a dick in sparring and c) making Urijah Faber sad. And I'm all for calling people out for hurting people in sparring and sneaking PEDs into their creatine, but that's also most people in the sport, and I've never been able to shake the feeling that Dillashaw's reputation for villainy was in some part scapegoating. But he still concussed Chris Holdsworth in training, so gently caress 'im. TJ Dillashaw retires at 17-5 as a two-time UFC bantamweight champion.  Brandon "The Truth" Vera retired in the cage after a first-round knockout loss to Amir Aliakbari on December 3rd, and if you started following MMA anytime in the last decade and a half, you will have no idea that he was, at one point, the single hottest prospect in the sport. When the UFC was blowing up into the mainstream, Brandon Vera was one of its most-hyped phenomenons. The heavyweight division in 2006 was still the land of awkward giants and lumbering brawlers, and then you had Brandon Vera, a fast, svelte kickboxer who wasn't just beating everyone placed in front of him but making them look like they weren't even playing the same sport. When he knocked out former champion Frank Mir in just over one minute he established himself as the next heavyweight contender--which he insisted he would follow by becoming the first man to hold the heavyweight and light-heavyweight titles at the same time, a claim that was, at the time, surprisingly feasible. Instead, he became the first man to show the new mainstream audience just how badly contract negotiations could go. Unable to come to terms on money for his title fight, the UFC elected to simply remove Vera from contendership, freeze him for a year and replace him with Randy Couture, and when Vera finally compromised, a return to contendership eluded him. He lost decisions he arguably should've won--Tim Sylvia, Keith Jardine, Randy Couture--and could, potentially, have made it back to contendership were it not for those failings. But by 2010 Jon Jones had arrived, and he ended Vera's title hopes by cracking his skull with an elbow, and he was simply never the same. He left the UFC in 2013 and moved to the nascent ONE Championship, where he within two fights was the heavyweight champion he'd always dreamed of being--but it was against opponents like Hideki "Shrek" Sekine and Mauro Cerilli. Aung La Nsang knocked him out of his double-champion hopes, Arjan Bhullar took his heavyweight title, and Amir Aliakbari took his last fight, and that is the end of a career that once seemed poised to be legendary. Vera retires at 16-10 (1).  December 3rd also saw the swan song of Scott "Hot Sauce" Holtzman. It feels profoundly unfair to write a eulogy for Scott Holtzman's career under multiple-time champions and title contenders, but that is, in its way, also a summation of his career. Holtzman entered the UFC in 2015 as the undefeated lightweight champion of the XTREME FIGHTING CHAMPIONSHIPS, but over seven years in the company he ultimately became a gatekeeper. Everyone he lost to was a top talent--the worst blemish on his career was Nik Lentz, which is nothing to sneeze at--but the fights were the kind of one-sided affairs, and eventually outright knockouts, that make it clear a fighter isn't destined for the top fifteen. And there's nothing wrong with that! Not every career is a championship career, and it's damned impressive to be such an effective crusher of the up-and-coming ranks that you hang out in the biggest company in the sport for most of a decade. He had a winning record in the UFC, he knocked a man cold on the undercard of Khabib vs Conor, he won a Fight of the Night award and defeated a legend in Jim Miller. He wanted to go out on a win, but he got a hard-fought, split decision loss to another legend in Clay Guida instead, and hey--that's better than BJ Penn did. Scott Holtzman retires at 14-6. Have a nice future, Hot Sauce. WHERE ELSE CAN I TALK TO LIKE-MINDED PEOPLE ABOUT VIOLENCE? Any of the following hangouts:
DO WE HAVE OTHER COMMUNAL THREADS? So many.
WHERE ELSE DOES FIGHT CHAT EXIST? Our community output has grown enough that we've got a few other places things get posted:
 Disclaimer: These are unofficial offsites, somethingawful's rules and liability do not extend to them, and complaining about discord stuff is still offsite drama posting
CarlCX fucked around with this message at 09:40 on Jan 22, 2023 |
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WHAT HAPPENED IN DECEMBER The month kicked off with ONE on Prime Video 5: de Ridder vs Malykhin on the 2nd. ONE was running a bit out of steam as the year wound down, and it wasn't helped by the Muay Thai Lightweight Championship getting bumped from this card to January. Denice Zamboanga took a split decision over Heqin Lin, Oumar "Reug Reug" Kane won a very slow wrestling decision against Zhasur Mirzamukhamedov, the Ruotolo brothers took grappling victories again, with Tye wristlocking Marat Gafurov and Kade taking a decision victory to retain his Lightweight Grappling Championship over Matheus Gabriel, Edson Marques knocked out Eduard Folayang, Lowen Tynanes took a split decision over Dae Sung Park, and Jackie Buntan beat up Amber Kitchen in a Muay Thai bout. Oh, and the much-ballyhooed debut of KSW champion Roberto Soldić ended in a no-contest after he took a knee to the junk. The main event was both the biggest and most seemingly inevitable story: ONE put arguably their most-hyped fighter, double champion Reinier de Ridder, up against interim heavyweight champion Anatoly Malykhin. de Ridder, as both an exceptional grappler and an undefeated fighter, had been cited as proof they had the best talent. To be clear, there's no shame in losing, and there's especially no shame in losing to someone who fights a weight class up from you. But de Ridder looked absolutely lost, with no visible gameplan or an idea how to defend against things like "being punched," and lost both his undefeated streak, his Light-Heavyweight championship, and his hype train after getting knocked out in the first round. ONE's year ended later that day (or the following morning, depending on your time zone) with ONE 164: Pacio vs Brooks. A longer and more kickboxing-heavy card ensued, with the highlights being Tagir Khalilov's knockout of Chorfah Tor.Sangtiannoi and ONE's Flyweight Muay Thai Grand Prix ending with Superlek Kiatmuu9 taking an extremely close decision over Panpayak Jitmuangnon. The MMA side of things was a mixture of fun, silly and sad. Chinese champion Meng Bo, who is 20-6, destroyed Jenelyn Olsim, who is 6-4, Jeremy Pacatiw choked out Tial Thang and Hu Yong knocked out Geje Eustaquio. In the penultimate MMA bout, one of MMA's best what-if pieces of performance comedy finally came to an end, as Amir Aliakbari ground-and-pounded out the 45 year-old breakout MMA star of 2006 Brandon Vera, who promptly tearfully retired, and in the main event, rescheduled from six months prior, Jarred Brooks ground out Joshua Pacio with uneventful but dominant wrestling to claim ONE's Strawweight Championship. The UFC's punctuated month began the evening of December 3rd with UFC on ESPN: Thompson vs Holland, which wound up massively overdelivering. On the prelims: Yazmin Jauregui continued her growth as a prospect by overcoming an early knockdown to destroy Istela Nunes, Francis Marshall knocked out Marcelo Rojo, Natan Levy won an incredible, high-paced brawl with Genaro Valdèz, Jonathan Pearce outclassed and busted up Darren Elkins but could not finish him, Michael Johnson turned in a solid performance to best Marc Diakiese, Clay Guida won a decision over the retiring Scott Holtzman, and Angela Hill turned away Emily Ducote with a dominant decision. The main card was just hilariously violent. Philip Rowe had an incredible back-and-forth fight with his eventual knockout victim Niko Price, Eryk Anders made his contractually obligated one good performance per decade and knocked out Kyle Daukaus, Roman Dolidze upset Jack Hermansson after pinning him to the mat with a calf slicer so he couldn't escape getting his head caved in, Sergei Pavlovich disposed of Tai Tuivasa in just fifty-four seconds, Matheus Nicolau knocked out Matt Schnell with what I can only refer to as teleportation punches, and in the co-main event, Rafael dos Anjos easily outgrappled Bryan Barberena and choked him out in the second round. The main event was an absolute fight of the year contender, as Stephen "Wonderboy" Thompson and Kevin Holland engaged in an incredibly fun, incredibly well-matched karate vs kung fu battle that started with Holland in the driver's seat and ended with Wonderboy wearing him down and forcing a corner stoppage before the final round could begin. December 9th kicked off Bellator's big month with their last home event of the year, Bellator 289: Stots vs Sabatello. The prelims, while still pretty difficult to follow unless you're a particularly hardcore kind of fan, were a touch better than Bellator's typical fare: Cass Bell eked out a victory over Jared Scoggins, Michael Lombard and Christian Echols both knocked their opponents cold, UFC cast-off Kai Kamaka III scored his first stoppage victory in eight years Cody Law couldn't get past Cris Lencioni, Jaleel Willis dominated Kyle Crutchmer, and Ilara Joanne narrowly beat one-time title contender Denise Kielholtz. The main card was short, but important. First, undefeated muscle golem Dalton Rosta pushed himself into Bellator's middleweight top five by grounding out Anthony Adams. Second, Patchy Mix became the first finalist in Bellator's Bantamweight Grand Prix by choking Magomed Magomedov compeltely unconscious. Third, Liz Carmouche ended the controversy regarding her somewhat questionable Women's Flyweight Championship victory over Juliana Velasquez by rematching her and armbarring her in two rounds. And finally, in a main event that determined both the second Bantamweight Grand Prix finalist and the current Interim Bantamweight Champion, after months of some of the most irritating and yet abjectly boring trash talk, Danny Sabatello turned in a positively Volkmannesque performance by wrestling Stots for five rounds without ever attempting a submission or even really trying to hit him all that much, and Stots, who was repeatedly smacking him all night, won a split decision (that exceptionally should not have been split) and retained his title. The last UFC pay-per-view of the year came with UFC 282: Błachowicz vs. Ankalaevon December 10th, which is one of the most incredibly cursed cards in mixed martial arts history. The main event fell apart two weeks out, multiple fights were scratched, poor Ovince Saint Preux had three separate opponents drop out, and when it finally took off with duct tape on its engines the thing still managed to impress with how ultimately messed up it was. But before its ignoble end, it was fun as gently caress, with all but the final two fights going to finishes. Cameron Saaiman entered the UFC with a comeback knockout, T.J. Brown and Billy Quarantillo righted their losing streaks with impressive finishes, Chris Curtis and Edmen Shahbazyan knocked out ultimately overmatched opponents, Jairzinho Rozenstruik crushed Chris Daukaus in twenty seconds, and 18 year-old Raul Rosas Jr. successfully joined the UFC by cranking Jay Perrin's face off. The first three fights of the main card were also absolute barnburners. Ilia Topuria fought huge rear end in a top hat Bryce Mitchell and managed to punch him silly, ragdoll the superior wrestler and choke him out in two rounds, Dricus du Plessis had a great back-and-forth with Darren Till that ended in a decision-averting half-rear-naked-choke-half-neck-crank submission, and Santiago Ponzinibbio, down two and a half rounds against late replacement Alex Morono, scored a huge right hand and his first UFC stoppage victory in four years. And then, after all of that fun, things got really, really stupid. First, a co-main event showdown between the UFC's posterboy Paddy Pimblett and the sacrificial lamb Jared Gordon resulted in Gordon outstriking and outwrestling Pimblett, winning 23 out of 24 media scorecards and somehow still losing a unanimous decision so gross that even the thoroughly pro-Paddy audience that had booed Jared all night got kind of uncomfortable about it. Second, in a main event to fill the abruptly vacant light-heavyweight throne, Jan Błachowicz and Magomed Ankalaev had a back-and-forth war, with both men breaking their faces, Jan nearly getting multiple leg kick TKOs and Ankalaev gritting his way through it to make a fantastic comeback and take an even clearer decision that media scorecards unanimously gave him--and the judges scored it a split draw. No winner. No champion. Dana White blamed both men for being boring, because he is a piece of poo poo. What a great event ruined by a horrible, souring ending. And the UFC's year came to an ignoble end with December 17th's UFC Fight Night: Cannonier vs Strickland. It was a card the UFC seemingly threw together without a lot of thought--top ten fights on the curtain-jerking prelims, prospects eating each other alive, Sean Strickland somehow in another main event--and it felt like it, with a whole bunch of fights going somewhat unremarkably. On the prelims: Sergey Morozov wrestled Journey Newson to death, Manel Kape beat the poo poo out of David Dvořák but still took a decision, Rinat Fakhretdinov, Rafa García managed to upset Maheshate despite having one of his arteries severed by an elbow, Said Nurmagomedov choked out Saidyokub Kakhramonov, Matthew Semelsberger ended the short-lived Jake Matthews hype train, and Cory McKenna took a very clinchy decision over Cheyenne Vlismas. The main card was much more violent, at least at first. Michał Oleksiejczuk overcame three minutes of being wrestled by Cody Brundage, swept him and pounded him unconscious in about fifteen seconds, Drew Dober got picked apart by Bobby Green for two and a half rounds only to pin him to the fence with a combination that culminated in a vicious knockout punch, Alex Caceres scored the first KO of his fourteen-year career with a beautiful headkick over Julian Erosa, and Amir Albazi, a top ten featherweight on a four-fight UFC streak, unsurprisingly knocked out Alessandro Costa, a last-minute regional replacement who'd never fought internationally before. The co-main event, which really could have used two more rounds, was a technically fascinating bout between Arman Tsarukyan and Damir Ismagulov, with Tsarukyan's power wrestling and fast positional changes overcoming Ismagulov's defense and ultimately ending his 19-fight unbeaten streak by decision. The main event, which really could have used two less rounds, was a middleweight bout between Jared Cannonier and Sean Strickland that you can't exactly call disappointing because anyone not drinking the Kool-Aid knew exactly what it was going to be, but boy, commentary sure did spend twenty-five straight minutes talking about how Sean Strickland is a twisted psychopathic violence machine who's going to be spurred into action any second now while he quietly shadowboxed a Jared Cannonier who was visibly tentative and still did enough to beat him. Cannonier won a split decision, it really should've been unanimous, but no one could possibly care enough about the fight to be mad. But the world of Japanese MMA always brings down the curtain on the year, and 2022 ended with the biggest New Year's Eve special in a long time: Rizin 40: Rizin X Bellator. Presented as two separate cards for very strange branding reasons, the undercard--Rizin 40--was an absolute slaughterhouse, with eight out of ten fights ending in violent stoppages, including Sho Patrick Usami's demolition of Beynoah, Johnny Case's 36-second knockout of Nobumitsu Osawa, Yuki Motoya's upset victory against the just-released-from-the-UFC Rogério Bontorin, John Dodson's effortless destruction of living legend Hideo Tokoro, Junior Tafa's ninety-second punchout of Sudario and Naoki Inoue's submission victory over Kenta Takizawa. The headliner was the end of Rizin's Women's Super Atomweight Grand Prix, as reigning queen Seika Izawa had a razor-close rematch with her previous toughest challenge, Si Woo Park, and just barely scraped out a split decision. And then it was time for the fireworks factory: The five-fight main card, pitching a series of co-promotional dream matches pitting the best of Bellator against the best of Rizin to see which promotion was really the king of the b-leagues. And this was a lesson in why companies should fear co-promotion, because on the biggest, holiest day of the Japanese MMA calendar, Bellator pitched a 5-0 shutout on their home turf. Gadzhi Rabadanov outfought an extremely game Koji Takeda, Juan Archuleta got all he could handle from Soo Chul Kim but still took a split decision, Kyoji Horiguchi repeatedly almost knocked out Hiromasa Ougikubo but had to settle for the judges, Bellator GOAT Patricio Pitbull took the broadest decision of the night by completely shutting out Kleber Koike Erbst, and in the main event, AJ McKee beat back an outmatched but extremely game Roberto de Souza. Great night, great experiment: Probably not the ending Rizin wanted for their year. WHAT'S COMING IN JANUARY MMA has developed a January tradition of starting the year at a slow, sleepy cadence, and 2023 is only slightly different. Much like last January, there are only five events this month; unlike last January, all five are crammed into one seven-day period. You have to wait until January 14th for the month's fights to start, but they start with a double-header. I flipped a coin to decide which to list first and I came up with ONE on Prime Video 6: Superbon vs Allazov. ONE has been doing a good job of really mixing up their martial arts on their Prime video cards thus far, giving new viewers a soft balance of MMA, striking and grappling. They extremely do not give a crap about that anymore. There are nine fights on this card, five of them are either kickboxing or muay thai and a sixth is a mixed-rules half-MMA half-kickboxing bout. There's one grappling match and two MMA prelims and that's all you're getting. In your MMA bouts, former middleweight and light-heavyweight champion Aung La Nsang meets Fan Rong and strawweight Lito Adiwang meeds Mansur Malachiev; Muay Thai bouts include Ekaterine Vandaryeva vs Anna Jaroonsak and Liam Harrison vs Pongsiri P.K.Saenchaimuaythaigym, and despite being ONE's Muay Thai champion, Rodtang is fighting in a kickboxing bout against Daniel Puertas. Stamp Fairtex and Anissa Meksen will face each other in the aforementioned mixed rules bout, which will alternate rounds between Muay Thai and MMA rulesets. Your championship tripleheader is Mikey Musumeci defending his flyweight submission championship against Sayan Khertek, Ilias Ennahachi defending the flyweight kickboxing title against Superlek Kiatmuu9, and Superbon defending the featherweight kickboxing title against Chingiz Allazov, a match that has been rescheduled three goddamn times. Also happening that day is the beginning of the UFC's year, UFC Fight Night: Imavov vs Gastelum. There's very little name power on the card, but the talent is extremely solid: Javid Basharat is back in action against Mateus Mendonça, Abdul Razak Alhassan is fighting for his job against Claudio Ribeiro, Umar Nurmagomedov and Raoni Barcelos will fight to close in on a ranking, Punahele Soriano and Roman Kopylov will hit each other in the head very hard, Jarno Errens and David Onama are going to play punchies and it should be a good time. The closest thing the card has to names are clustered up at the top. On one hand, the tragically fallen Dan Ige is now fighting to defend his job against the surprisingly streaking Damon Jackson; on the other, the recently-surging Ketlen Vieira looks to get in the top ten by facing Raquel Pennington. Jimmy Flick is facing late replacement Charles "InnerG" Johnson and Allan Nascimento is battling Carlos Hernandez for our rare double flyweight fights. The co-main event was going to be an excellent matchup between Geoff Neal and Shavkat Rakhmonov, but Neal is injured and no one knows if Rakmanov is staying on the card yet. In the main event, Franco-Russo Nassourdine Imavov is jumping the line and facing Kelvin Gastelum, who is somehow still in the top fifteen despite having one victory in the last four years. Catch the fever! Invicta is up next on January 18th with Invicta FC 51: Tennant vs Bernardo. As Invicta's been doing a remarkably good job of recently it's a solid mixture of rookies, solid prospects and top talents, with some of those rookies getting the exceptional "we don't even have a picture" treatment in MMA databases across the internet. Tanya Nijjar vs Sayury Canon and Fatima Kline vs Laura Gallardo make up your rookie class for the night, Katie Saull vs Rayanne Amanda, Marisa Messer-Belenchia vs Elisandre Ferreira and Claire Guthrie vs Auttumn Norton form your prospect caste and Serena DeJesus vs Olga Rubin make your on-deck contender fight. The co-main event will fill the flyweight championship throne that's been empty since Karina Rodriguez left the company to join Bellator, with Kristina Williams facing Ketlen Souza; the main event sees defending bantamweight champion Taneisha Tennant trying to hold the house together against UFC alumnus Talita Bernardo. ONE's second event for the month comes on January 20th, and it's a bit different. Rather than the last six months of double-events with Prime cards and regular ONE cards, this is ONE at Lumpinee 1: Nong-O vs Ramazanov. Lumpinee is the center of Muay Thai and ONE's had their eyes on running events there for quite some time--they would very, very much like to make ONE's Muay Thai division one with the national and international consciousness of the sport, and doing that within Lumpinee is the philosophical and corporate dream. And thus, one month away from their first official Lumpinee event, they are taking it very seriously because there is, uh, one fight announced, and it's the main event, where Nong-O Gaiyanghadao will defend the ONE Muay Thai Bantamweight Championship against Alaverdi Ramazanov. And the MMA month ends early on January 21st with UFC 283: Teixeira vs Hill. A lot of things are falling on this card: The UFC's first trip to Rio since 2019, the retirement fight of the legendary Shogun Rua, the (hopeful) end of the flyweight quadrilogy that has been Figueiredo vs Moreno, and the UFC's second attempt in as many months to end the light-heavyweight championship vacancy. Being a Brazilian card, the whole thing's stacked with Brazilian vs Everyone Who Isn't Brazilian fights: Josiane Nunes vs Zarah Fairn Dos Santos (no, really, she's French), Warlley Alves vs Nicolas Dalby, Ismael Bonfim vs Terrance McKinney, Jailton Almeida vs Shamil Abdurakhimov, the list goes on and on. Your big bouts for the night are Brad Tavares vs Gregory Rodrigues, Thiago Moises vs Guram Kutateladze, Gilbert Burns vs Neil Magny, Jéssica Andrade vs Lauren Murphy, the aforementioned Maurício "Shogun" Rua retirement bout with Ihor Potieria, Deiveson Figueiredo and Brandon Moreno reunifying the flyweight title and settling their hash once and for goddamn all, and in the main event, Glover Teixeira fights the exceedingly unlikely Jamahal Hill to crown a new light-heavyweight champion.
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CURRENT UFC CHAMPIONS Heavyweight Champion, 265 lbs   Francis Ngannou - 17-3, 1 DefenseAfter getting dicked about by the UFC for most of 2021, Francis "The Predator" Ngannou met both the biggest challenge of his career and the nexus of his promotional challenges in the form of a championship unification match against heavyweight striking savant and (bullshit) interim champion Ciryl Gane. For all of his punching prowess, Ngannou found himself getting pretty soundly outstruck and on the road to a decision loss--and he adjusted by channeling Mark Coleman and repeatedly tossing Gane on his rear end with double-legs and powerslams. In what was somehow a simultaneously incredible and disappointing performance, Francis Ngannou won a unanimous decision, notched his first title defense, turned away his stiffest challenge, and went home with his future one great big question mark. He's made a lot of noise about going into boxing thanks to the UFC's refusal to stop paying him peanuts, but his contract situation is complicated by his standing as a champion, particularly as he's now had knee surgery to repair his ACL and MCL and will be sitting out the remainder of the year on medical leave, which could mean dealing with a contract freeze. It all depends on how lovely the UFC decides to be to him, but the best gauge for that is Dana White's auspicious absence at the post-fight belt ceremony and post-card press conference. In response, Francis Ngannou appeared with Tyson Fury after his high-profile destruction of Dillian Whyte and the two hyped a potential boxing vs MMA fight between them. This, of course, did not happen, and now Tyson Fury is fighting Derek Chisora because boxing loving sucks. Predictably, this has become a big, stupid thing. They were hoping to put more pressure on Ngannou by booking Jon Jones vs Stipe Miocic for an interim title on December 10, but Stipe wasn't dumb enough to do it for peanuts either. As of now, the UFC is HOPING to get Francis Ngannou vs Jon Jones together for UFC 285 on March 4, but they're still lowballing Ngannou. If they can't come to terms, it'll be Jones vs Curtis Blaydes. Or so they hope. Light-Heavyweight Champion, 205 lbs   VACANT - The shadow-face of despairHonestly, the Vacant parts of my write-up are my favorite gag I've ever done and I cannot believe we're still here. Jesus. Okay, so: In June of 2022, Jiří Procházka, the Czech Samurai, won a fight-of-the-year victory over Glover Teixeira, wresting the belt from the ludricrously tough but ultimately outgunned quadragenarian. Despite the definitive victory, the sheer quality of the bout led to the UFC booking them into a rematch for the end of the year. Tragedy struck: Jiří tore his shoulder apart in training, reportedly because his trainers tried to jam it back into place and made it worse. The UFC made the call for him to vacate the title, and Glover gleefully offered to rematch former champion Jan Błachowicz, but the UFC didn't want Glover vs Jan 2, they wanted Glover vs #3 contender Magomed Ankalaev. Glover wanted one month to prepare for Ankalaev, and the UFC told him to pound sand. The new main event of December 10th's UFC 282 became Jan Błachowicz vs Magomed Ankalaev for the vacant belt. It was a good, dramatic fight, with Jan nearly TKOing Ankalaev with leg kicks multiple times only for Ankalaev to make a huge comeback and thoroughly trash Jan on the ground, putting in a performance that every media outlet scored for him. And the judges, as they do, ruled the fight a split draw. No one won. No champion. Dana White, the delicate flower that he is, spent the post-fight press conference inexplicably making GBS threads all over Jan and Magomed for being boring and immediately announced that on January 21st, at UFC 283, when he originally wanted to fight in the first place, Glover Teixeira will battle the #7-ranked Jamahal Hill to once again fill the hole. Vacant merely laughs at the machinations of men. Middleweight Champion, 185 lbs   Alex Pereira - 7-1, 0 DefensesSometimes in this sport things that shouldn't really have happened wind up happening perfectly. Alex "Poatan" Pereira getting a title shot was ridiculous on its face: He was only 6-1, he'd only fought three UFC fights, he'd only fought one ranked fighter at all. It was the UFC's most blatant attempt to manufacture a title contender since Conor McGregor scored a comeback title fight after pulling a long-expired bag of Donald Cerrone from the back of the break room fridge. The UFC didn't even try to hide that Pereira was getting the shot solely because he'd beaten divisional kingpin and MMA superstar Israel Adesanya in kickboxing--twice. They ran highlights from an entirely different sport far, far more often than highlights from Pereira's UFC tenure during their monthslong attempt to hype up the title fight between the biggest and most consistent middleweight sensation since Anderson Silva and a mixed martial arts neophyte whose toughest test had been a guy who fought at 160 pounds for five years. Naysayers (like me!) said Pereira's lack of MMA experience would cost him when the fight inevitably turned to grappling, and it did: Israel Adesanya, noted non-wrestler, was able to repeatedly ground, control and almost submit Pereira. Naysayers (it's me again, being wrong!) said Pereira's untested MMA technique and staying power would cost him in a championship-level fight, and it did: Israel Adesanya stung him repeatedly, nearly knocked him out, and was cruising to a broad decision victory on all three scorecards. And then, with two and a half minutes left in a five-round fight, Pereira caught him sleeping, put a string of fists upside his head and battered him to a standing TKO. All of the problems in the world fall before the power of destiny. For the third time and in the second sport of their lives, Alex Pereira defeated Israel Adesanya. Is he going to have serious trouble the second he fights any of the very, very good wrestlers at the top fifteen in his division? Oh, absolutely. Is the UFC going to let him? Probably not! They sound like they want a rematch so as not to deal with Robert Whittaker double-legging him and choking him out in ninety seconds or something. Whatever the future holds, Alex Pereira goes down in history as one of the few to mantle the UFC and stand as the best middleweight in the sport. Welterweight Champion, 170 lbs   Leon Edwards - 20-3 (1), 0 DefensesIt took half a decade to get the world to notice, but everyone sees Leon Edwards now. "Rocky" came from the kind of circumstances sports movies are made of--a poor kid from Jamaica who moved to England, lost his father to gang violence, nearly lost himself to it as a teenager and found a healthy outlet for his anger in mixed martial arts. Edwards made his debut in 2011 as a prime example of the modern generation of fighter, cross-trained from the beginning in every discipline, and in just three years he was the welterweight champion of Britain and off to the UFC. Entering 2016, Leon had suffered the first true loss of his career--he was 10-3, but one of those losses was a DQ for an illegal blow and the other a coinflip decision that could easily have gone either way--at the hands of the newly-crowned Ultimate Fighter 21 winner, Kamaru Usman, making his debut as an official UFC competitor. It took ten fights without a loss for Leon to get his rematch. The UFC seemed especially resistant to his title contendership, pushing him down in favor of the ostensibly more marketable UK star in Darren Till and booking him against numerous other contenders and gatekeepers while repeatedly elevating less deserving fighters to the championship. He wouldn't have gotten it at all, in fact, had Jorge Masvidal not gotten arrested. On August 20, the UFC acquiesced and granted the clear #1 contender his shot at the championship, and at revenge against Kamaru Usman--and after getting dominated for three and a half out of five rounds, with the commentators openly opining on the likelihood that he had given up, with just fifty-six seconds left in the fight, Edwards uncorked a headkick that shocked the world and knocked Kamaru Usman out for the first time in his career. Holding onto the belt won't be easy--Dana White is foaming at the mouth for a Wembley Stadium rematch between the two to end their trilogy--but Leon Edwards is cemented into history as the man who killed the king, and for a beautiful moment, as the best welterweight on the planet. Lightweight Champion, 155 lbs   Islam Makhachev - 23-1, 0 DefensesDestiny has come. When Islam Makhachev made his UFC debut in 2015, Khabib Nurmagomedov, considered by most to be the #1 contender and soon to be the best in the world, swore up and down that Makhachev, not him, would be the best lightweight champion of all time. Coming from him, the praise made sense: Khabib and Islam have trained together since they were children growing up and learning to wrestle in Makhachkala. Islam learned under Khabib's father, trained with Khabib's team and even made the pilgrimage to America to join Khabib at the American Kickboxing Academy. And then, two matches into his UFC tenure, Islam got knocked the gently caress out in the first round by the little-known Adriano Martins, who hasn't won a fight in the six years since. Even as Makhachev racked up wins, the memory of his loss and his wrestling-heavy approach to his fights let people cast doubts on him. Sure, he's good--but he lost, so he's not as good as Khabib. Islam Makhachev, as his trainer tells it, never wanted to be Khabib. He loves fighting, but he doesn't love the spectacle or the glory or the attention. So when, after ten straight wins, Makhachev was picked to challenge Charles Oliveira for the vacant title he never truly lost, a lot of folks just weren't quite sure what to think. Sure, he was an incredible wrestler, but Charles Oliveira is a submission wizard, and sure, he's on a ten-fight streak, but he hasn't fought a single person actually IN the top ten, and Oliveira represents a huge, dangerous step up as a man who's been destroying some of the most accomplished lightweights in the sport's history. Analyst opinion was split right down the middle; the fight, as it turned out, was nowhere near that competitive, and the only analyst who was entirely correct was Khabib. Islam demolished the former champion, outstriking him, taking him down at will, controlling him in the grappling, and ultimately dropping him with punches and choking him out in the second round. The Charles Oliveira story is over, the Islam Makhachev era has begun. Unlike most new champions, there's no question about what's next for him: The UFC is intent on having him defend against featherweight champion and pound-for-pound great Alexander Volkanovski when they go to Perth, Australia for UFC 284 on February 12. Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs   Alexander Volkanovski - 25-1, 4 DefensesSometimes it takes a lot of work to convince people you're the best. Alexander Volkanovski's rise through mixed martial arts is the kind of thing reserved for the all-time greats of the sport: He lost once, in the fourth fight of his career--at welterweight--and that was nine years ago. He's won twenty-one straight fights since, defeating top talent from around the world before landing in the UFC and proceeding to dominate every fighter placed in his way. There was one, single weight placed around his career's ankle: Max Holloway. Holloway was the UFC's much-lauded and much-marketed featherweight champion while Volkanovski was on his way up, and even as a 20-1 dynamo, he was an underdog against the Hawaiian. Alex beat him--soundly--but because of Holloway's prior dominance, and because the UFC wanted to get the most for its marketing buck, they ordered an instant rematch. Alex won again, but this time it was by a very close split decision, and that left a vocal part of the fanbase even angrier and more certain Max was the real champion. Two years and two fights apiece later, Alex and Max met one last time on July 2, and Volkanovski beat every shade of hell out of Holloway, not just repeatedly wobbling and outstriking him but completely and utterly shutting him out of a fight for the very first time in his career. When the bell rang, there were no questions left: Alexander Volkanovski is the absolute, undisputed best featherweight in the UFC. And now, having more or less destroyed his division, he has his eye on the pound for pound ranks. Volkanovski called his shot at the lightweight title before Charles Oliveira and Islam Makhachev had even fought, and moments after Makhachev was victorious, Volkanovski was in the cage staring him down. Come February, he'll get his chance at all-time greatness, but Josh Emmett and Yair Rodríguez will be meeting that same night to crown an interim featherweight champion, so whether Volkanovski ends the night with one belt or two, he'll have business to attend to. Bantamweight Champion, 135 lbs   Aljamain Sterling - 22-3, 2 DefensesAljamain Sterling is the most simultaneously blessed and cursed fighter I've ever seen. A lifelong wrestler and grappler who started fighting at 19, Aljo took the long road to championship contention, dealing with setbacks and beating half the challengers the division had to offer before getting his shot at the seemingly unbeatable Petr Yan. He left their fight as the new, victorious champion, not because he had defeated Yan--he appeared to be on his way towards a loss--but because Yan had both illegally and outright intentionally kneed him in the head on the ground, resulting in the first-ever title change by way of disqualification. It took thirteen months for the inevitable rematch to materialize, and this time, Aljamain soundly outgrappled Yan and won fair and square--but the judges only gave him a split decision, which Dana White himself got pissy about, and the fanbase that already loved Yan and hated Sterling took it as carte blanche to poo poo on him all over again. Aljamain Sterling had the rare and coveted UFC title defense, and people hated him more than ever. The UFC itself made matters worse when, rather than booking the José Aldo title fight everyone wanted or giving Marlon Vera and his fan-favorite winning streak a shot, they tapped former champion and marketing favorite TJ Dillashaw as the top contender after winning one contentious split decision. Fans were split on whether Sterling would be able to outgrapple the accomplished wrestler, and Sterling made them all look extremely silly by catching a Dillashaw kick and immediately, easily ragdolling and controlling him thirty seconds into their fight. Unfortunately, seconds after that, Dillashaw dislocated his shoulder. Because everything is silly, Dillashaw was allowed to fight for a round and a half with one of his arms clearly not functioning, leading to Sterling getting a very easy ground-and-pound TKO in the second round, and after the fight Dillashaw immediately admitted that his shoulder had popped out dozens of times during camp, to the point that he had forewarned the referee of the injury before the fight so he wouldn't stop it immediately. If everything about that sentence sounds completely insane and backwards to you: Welcome to our fake idiot sport. Aljamain Sterling has three straight victories in championship fights, and through absolutely no fault of his own, most of the fanbase thinks none of them should count. Jesus wept. Flyweight Champion, 125 lbs  Deiveson Figueiredo - 21-2-1, 0 DefensesWe have come so far, and yet we are still where we were. On December 12, 2020, Deiveson Figueiredo shockingly went to a draw with heavy underdog Brandon Moreno. On June 12, 2021, Moreno even more shockingly dropped and choked him out, wrestling the flyweight championship from his hands. On January 22, 2022, the two met for the third time and the result was an instant fight of the year candidate that saw both men trade the advantage in striking, grappling and wrestling alike back and forth, but Figueiredo's smart adjustments from their second fight won him a razor-close but still unanimous decision and the return of the flyweight championship. And now, having fought each other three times in thirteen months and finally finished their trilogy, the next stop for new champion Deiveson Figueiredo was seemingly yet another fight with Moreno, this time in Mexico as a big money card. And then: Things fell apart. What at first seemed like an amicable rivalry turned sour when Figueiredo refused to fight Moreno again, citing what he saw as racist disrespect from his corner, and called instead for a fight with top contender Kai Kara-France, only to then say he needed time to rehabilitate hand injuries and couldn't take the fight until later in the year, and the UFC, ever the sensitive organization, responded by booking Moreno and Kara-France for an interim flyweight championship match on July 30 at UFC 277. Interim Flyweight Champion, 125 lbs   Brandon Moreno - 20-6-2, 0 DefensesAnd just like that, we're right back where we started. Moreno and Kara-France put on a furious two and a half back-and-forth rounds, but as he somehow does Moreno became only more vicious and found his combinations as the fight wore on. Four and a half minutes into the third round he stunned Kara-France with a spinning backfist and followed it with a charging liver kick that put him down for good and put gold back around Brandon's waist. Immediately following the fight, Moreno called Deiveson Figueiredo into the cage and attempted to bury the hatchet, and the two appeared to somewhat tensely reconcile enough to agree on the now entirely inevitable rematch. After months of radio silence, the inevitable quadrilogy fight was made official: Deiveson Figueiredo vs Brandon Moreno 4: The Search for More Money will take place during at UFC 283, the company's first event in Rio de Janeiro since 2019, on January 21. I say this as a fan of all three of their previous fights: Please, god, no more. Whatever happens, just let it go. Women's Featherweight, 145 lbs  Amanda Nunes - 22-5, 2 DefensesWomen's Bantamweight, 135 lbs  Amanda Nunes - 22-5, 0 DefensesThings are back as they should be. Up until December of 2021, Amanda Nunes was unquestionably the greatest women's mixed martial artist in history. She held and defended titles at both the signature class of Women's Bantamweight and the arguably real class of Women's Featherweight, and with her mixture of vicious power, aggressive grappling and solid conditioning, she defeated every UFC champion in the history of either class and, for good measure, Valentina Shevchenko, the ultra-dominant champion of Women's Flyweight, twice. What's more, she crushed most of them, taking on legends like Ronda Rousey and Cris Cyborg and knocking them dead in under a minute. Which is why it was something of a shock when she was choked out by unheralded journeywoman Julianna Peña. The abruptness of the ending to her streak, and the shockingly sloppy way she was taken out, left the fanbase both demanding a rematch and openly questioning how much of the loss was due to something being wrong with Nunes, rather than Julianna Peña doing something right, and opinions flew wildly regarding how close the second bout would be. Seven months and one season of The Ultimate Fighter later they met on July 30, and the answer was: Not even slightly. Amanda Nunes dumpstered Julianna Peña for five straight rounds, dropping her a half-dozen times and elbowing her face entirely open, and barring one touchy moment with an armbar, Peña was entirely shut out and lost a wide unanimous decision that included an incredibly rare 50-43 scorecard. Back on her throne, Amanda Nunes signaled her readiness to take a goddamn vacation for the first time in years while the UFC figures out where to go from here. Women's Flyweight, 125 lbs   Valentina Shevchenko - 23-3, 7 DefensesSometimes, when you've been untouchably atop your division for too long, any display of weakness seems like a loss. Sometimes, you might actually have lost. Valentina Shevchenko is a martial arts phenom: Multiple black belts, multiple Master of Sports degrees, dozens of kickboxing championships, hundreds of combined fights across all of her disciplines and twenty years of combat sports experience--by 34. Her most internationally popular achievement, of course, is her reign as the UFC Women's Flyweight Champion. She is, in fact, 12-2 in the UFC, and those only two losses came against Amanda Nunes, the champion of both 135 and 145, and the second was a split decision that could easily have gone the other way. This is what made it so shocking for people when the relatively unknown Taila Santos very nearly defeated her at UFC 275. Santos controlled Shevchenko on the ground, spend a good part of the fight in back mount and at one point nearly choked her out, but Valentina fought back and eked out a razor-close split decision victory that, as always, many people disagreed with. While the sport continues its ongoing struggle over what wrestling and positional control do and don't count for anymore, Valentina Shevchenko remains the queen of the hill. It was assumed--and at a couple points outright stated--that her next challenger would be the winner of UFC 280's battle between top contenders Manon Fiorot and Katlyn Chookagian, but despite Fiorot's victory, a number of people--bafflingly including Fiorot herself--called for her to have another fight before challenging for the belt. Which seems aggressively silly, because jesus christ, there's no one else for her to fight. The future is uncertain. Women's Strawweight, 115 lbs   Zhang Weili - 23-3, 0 DefensesAre you really surprised? There's a long tradition of underestimating unlikely champions in mixed martial arts, particularly when they're not the fan-friendliest in style or personality, from Michael Bisping to Frankie Edgar, only to have those demeaned champions remind the world that they didn't reach the peak of their divisions by mistake. Many of the wise, studied scribes of the sport warned the foolish masses against assuming the same about Women's Strawweight Champion Carla Esparza: She was no pushover, they said, and Zhang will have real trouble. And then, come fight day, we unwashed masses pulled them from their ivory towers and forced them to run in the streets amongst the mud and filth so they, too, could feel the unburdened joy of being, because Zhang Weili, as basically every fan had assumed, did, in fact, beat the absolute tar out of Carla. It wasn't particularly close: Carla got outlanded 37-6, hurt several times on the feet, and choked out just a minute into the second round. The inexplicable, season-long Cookie Monster subplot is over, Zhang Weili is now a two-time world champion, and things are back as they should be. What comes next, however, is tricky. Carla was blown out, so a rematch is out of the question. Rose Namajunas, the only person in the UFC to beat Weili, is a likely candidate--but after her disastrous performance against Carla, it remains to be seen how much faith the UFC has in her. Jéssica Andrade has a claim, but she's splitting time between 115 and 125, and probably needs to pick a weight class if she wants a shot. Amanda Lemos is on deck, but she could really use a marquee win first. The UFC is spoiled for almost-but-not-quite contenders: They just need to crown someone. CarlCX fucked around with this message at 19:12 on Jan 1, 2023 |
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ROGUES GALLERY: NOTABLE CHAMPIONS ACROSS THE WORLD Bellator Heavyweight Champion, 265 lbs  Ryan Bader - 30-7 (1), 2 DefensesNo, I will never stop hating on Ryan Bader. I know it's not fair. Objectively, the man's had a pretty great career--he's a huge, action-figure-looking wrestleboxing motherfucker who only ever lost to the best of the best (EXCEPT TITO ORTIZ), when he puts it together he's got some great knockouts to his name and he humiliated Fedor Emelianenko AND Matt Mitrione, which are both things I deeply adore. But Ryan Bader is Ryan Bader, and that is both his blessing and his curse, and the continual ire he gets from the MMA community for daring to exist in the way that he does is as responsible for his career resurgence as his fists. He followed his successful slow-motion nothing of a title defense back in January with an even slower, less eventful defense in his rematch with Cheick Kongo, which for bonus points was in front of a very partisan and very upset Parisian crowd who in no way appreciated his wrestling and his refusal to mix any offense into it. He recently signed a new Bellator deal that he intends to retire under and he's made clear he no longer has any intention of competing at light-heavyweight, and that opened the door for Scott Coker's early-2000s PRIDE nostalgia humiliation fetish to rear its ugly head once again. On February 4th at Bellator 290, Ryan Bader will defend his heavyweight title in a rematch against Fedor, who swears it will be the final bout of his career. When last they met in 2019, Bader knocked him out in thirty-five seconds. Whatever happens: It's going to be very, very funny. Bellator Light-Heavyweight Champion, 205 lbs   Vadim Nemkov - 16-2 (1), 3 DefensesBellator CEO Scott Coker has been complicating title reigns with tournaments for decades and he's not about to stop now. Vadim Nemkov won the Bellator Light-Heavyweight Championship from Ryan Bader in 2020, and his title reign was immediately wrapped up in the Light-Heavyweight Grand Prix that started the following year. Nemkov, a Fedor Emelianenko protege, former Spetsnaz operative and understated wrecking machine who hadn't lost a fight since his early-career days in Rizin back in 2016, continued his Bellator streak by handling the always-game Phil Davis and dealing with some trouble en route to submitting Julius Anglickas, but then the tournament came to a screeching halt. Bellator threw all its marketing cash at the ultimately ill-fated Bellator 277 in April of 2022, and a sizable chunk of that misfortune came from both its championship and tournament-final co-main event. Corey Anderson looked handily en route to defeating Nemkov, only to unintentionally headbutt him while diving in to throw a punch. The headbutt opened an uncloseable gash on Nemkov's brow--and it happened five seconds before round three would've ended and allowed the judges to score a technical decision. It would be seven full months before the final got its re-do, and this time, Nemkov avoided Anderson's wrestling and controlled the fight with distance strikes en route to a unanimous decision victory. It took nearly two years for Bellator to complete an eight-man tournament, but they did it, and Vadim Nemkov is still your world's champion. Nemkov was initially planned for a quick turnaround against Yoel Romero on February 4, but it was scratched just before New Year's for as-yet unstated reasons. The future is uncertain. Bellator Middleweight Champion, 185 lbs  Johnny Eblen - 12-0, 0 DefensesThe world did not see this one coming. Gegard Mousasi, widely considered the best middleweight outside of the UFC and arguably better than the majority of those inside, was a -260 favorite to retain his Bellator championship and cruise through his second straight year as a titleholder. And then he got punched in his god damned face. "The Human Cheat Code" Johnny "Diamond Hands" Eblen "Suffix Nickname" dropped Mousasi on his face with a hook out of nowhere just minutes into the fight, and that signalled the beginning not just of an upset but a five-round shut-out, as Eblen dominated Mousasi standing and grappling, earning both Bellator's middleweight championship and, for the first time in his career, his own Wikipedia page. Unsurprisingly, Eblen is a lifelong wrestler out of American Top Team, explaining the power hooks and power doubles alike, and unsurprisingly, Mousasi's achilles heel was a really good wrestler. After Vadim Nemkov was forced to pull out of Bellator 290 on February 4, Fedor's team wanted another of his proteges in a title fight for the night and they found their man in Anatoly Tokov, who's riding a 7-fight undefeated streak over a sedately-paced six-year run in Bellator. He'll fill the void for Eblen's first title defense. Bellator Welterweight Champion, 170 lbs   Yaroslav Amosov - 26-0, 0 DefensesYaroslav "Dynamo" Amosov is in that very strange place where he's simultaneously one of the most successful prospects in the sport and a fighter almost no one feels a need to pay attention to. He's a four-time world champion in sambo, he's undefeated in nearly a decade of mixed martial arts competition, he has a 26-0 record at just 28 years old and he dominated the very tough Douglas Lima to become the first Ukrainian MMA world champion (you came so close, Igor), and he has a total of 1,253 Twitter followers. Some of it is exposure--it probably doesn't help that Amosov was on Bellator's prelims just before his title eliminator--and some of it is a very tactical and sometimes control-centric style that does not lend itself well to attracting viewers, as seen in a 7-0 Bellator record with only two stoppages, one of which was a doctor's stoppage on cuts between rounds. The fact that he's a 26-0 world champion and is still mostly being looked at as a prospect is a testament to both the amount of talent he very clearly has and the way everyone's still kind of waiting for something big to happen to him, which, uh, also indicates where Bellator is in the pecking order of the collective MMA consciousness. Bellator had been planning to finally cash in on their many years of can-crushing by having Amosov defend his title against weirdo striker Michael "Venom" Page on May 13, but the small, unimportant matter of Russia loving invading his home country saw him stay in Ukraine and join the defense efforts. Having fought a war for nearly the entirety of the previous year, Amosov will make his return to competition on February 25th at Bellator 291 where he'll reunify the title with the guy they tapped to take on MVP in his stead. Bellator Interim Welterweight Champion  Logan Storley - 14-1, 0 DefensesStop me if you've heard this one before: A company books a massively-hyped international superstar striking specialist against an American wrestler and the result makes everyone really mad. Bellator has been salivating over the idea of getting a championship on British kickman Michael "Venom" Page for years, and with Amosov no longer available they thought the half-a-foot-shorter Logan Storley would be a good candidate, and shockingly, the 14-1 wrestler whose only loss was a split decision to Amosov himself proceeded to wrestle Page for about 2/3 of their 25-minute fight. He ultimately won a close split decision that should easily have been both broad and unanimous, and as always happens with this script, MVP wants an immediate rematch. Scott Coker, proving every promoter is just one piss-fit away from becoming Dana White, used the post-fight presser to complain about the judging and insist that Storley's choice to just wrestle "isn't MMA" and shouldn't have won him the decision. It's 2022 and it is still the wrestler's fault that their opponent can't wrestle. After a quiet half-year of twiddling his thumbs, Storley's going to be fighting to become the undisputed champion in a wrestler vs wrestler match for which the grinding will be enormous. Bellator Lightweight Champion, 155 lbs  Usman Nurmagomedov - 16-0, 0 DefensesIf there's a single, developing throughline of mixed martial arts in 2022, it's the growing power of the Dagestani wrestling brigade. Abdulmanap Nurmagomedov built himself an army of powerful ultra-wrestlers, and after his passing, the American Kickboxing Academy's Javier Mendez and his son and protege, the now-retired Khabib Nurmagomedov, unleashed them on the world in force. Usman, Khabib's cousin (as well as the younger brother of Umar Nurmagomedov, undefeated and ranked UFC bantamweight), took to Bellator in April of 2021 and proceeded to burn an undefeated path through the Manny Muros and Patrik Pietiläe of the world. His style was a little more eclectic--lots of spinning kicks, lots of stick-and-move jabs and stomps to the leg--but the resemblance became uncanny once he inevitably, and easily, ragdolled his opponents to the canvas and generally choked them out in short order thereafter. When he was announced as the #1 contender to Bellator's lightweight title, I was somewhat miffed: He hadn't beaten any top contenders, Bellator had already held a title eliminator and it was won in a crushing thirty-second knockout by Tofiq Musayev, the whole thing smacked of a pathetic attempt to glom onto some of Khabib's mainstream attention. I at no point said that he wouldn't very, very easily win. At Bellator 288 on November 18th, Usman very, very easily won, defeating Patricky "Pitbull" Freire at every aspect of the game and leaving him sans both his championship and one eyebrow. A Nurmagomedov holds Bellator gold. Who they send after him next remains to be seen. Bellator Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs  Patrício Pitbull - 35-5, 1 DefensePatrício Pitbull has had a weird goddamn year. Pitbull has long been the GOAT of Bellator, sometimes to the company's open chagrin--there were definitely times they would have vastly preferred a Pat Curran or, most particularly, a Michael Chandler to carry their banner, and Patrício had this unfortunate habit of not just beating them but making them look like poo poo. By mid-2021, he was Bellator's dual featherweight and lightweight champion, he was on a seven-fight win streak, and he was a finalist in their Featherweight Grand Prix. And then undefeated rising star A.J. McKee dropped him and choked him out in two minutes. Bellator, clearly, felt they had hit the jackpot and were going to be riding the McKee train for some time, as by their rematch ten months later, McKee was the centerpiece of all of their advertising. It was somewhat awkward when, as he had done to so many before, Patrício took him to a victorious decision that made McKee kind of look like poo poo, neutralizing his offense in the clinch, jabbing under his range, and grinding away the clock. Bellator pushed for a trilogy, but McKee, pissed off, tired of cutting weight and worried about having it happen all over again, declined and moved up to lightweight. Instead of a big-money rematch, Patrício was left to face top contender Ádám Borics, and the match, while hard-fought, was not particularly entertaining or memorable. Pitbull's next fight was the rare cross-promotional bout, facing Rizin's featherweight champion Kleber Koike Erbst on the New Year's Eve Bellator x Rizin special. It was the only fight on the card that wasn't particularly competitive: He shut Kleber down completely and won a wide decision. There is only one featherweight king outside the UFC. Bellator Bantamweight Champion, 135 lbs  Sergio Pettis - 22-5, 1 DefenseSo Sergio Pettis is good now, apparently. It's not that he was ever bad, exactly, it's that he was more or less forever in big brother Anthony's shadow. Sergio had a long five years in the UFC where he on several occasions seemed poised to break out into the top ranks and vie for a title, but he always managed to fall just short, building a strong win streak before getting controlled by Henry Cejudo, barely squeaking past Joe Benavidez only to get dominated by Jussier Formiga, moving up to 135 and getting shut down by Rob Font. He went to Bellator just a few months before his brother left for the PFL, and now, in a stunning turnaround, Sergio is the successful one in the family. He won Bellator's bantamweight championship in his third fight with the organization, and in the biggest fight of his career, an interpromotional match pitting his title against Rizin bantamweight champion (and former Bellator champion himself, who vacated due to injury) Kyoji Horiguchi, Pettis shocked the world by battling through four difficult rounds he was fairly clearly losing and knocking out the heavy favorite with a painfully pretty spinning backfist. Sergio Pettis is no longer an also-ran. Unfortunately, as these things always go, he followed this up by getting injured. He's out of this year's Grand Prix and his timetable for return is iffy enough that Bellator immediately booked an interim championship between Raufeon Stots and Juan Archuleta for Bellator 279 on April 23. Bellator Interim Bantamweight Champion  Raufeon Stots - 19-1, 1 DefenseHe did not waste the opportunity. Raufeon Stots has been looked on as a major bantamweight prospect for years: A two-time DII wrestling champion, a heavy-handed puncher and an exceptionally conditioned grappler with guidance from Roufusport, Jens Pulver and Kamaru Usman thanks to their shared alma mater who won his first regional title just two years into his career. He's 18-1 with his only loss coming via a shock 15-second knockout against one of the best in the world in Merab Dvalishvili. Stots stormed Bellator in 2019 and is on an unbeaten seven-fight streak with the organization, and when faced with both the entrance to his first grand prix, the stiffest competition of his career in former champion Juan Archuleta and the interim Bellator championship on the line, Stots did what some of the best in the world couldn't and knocked Archuleta out in the third round. After spending most of the year dealing with the constant presence of top contender and endless loudmouth Danny Sabatello, the two met in both the first defense of Stots' championship and the semifinal of the grand prix, and Stots took a split decision--and the decision being split instead of unanimous was so egregious that Doug Crosby, one of the worst judges in history, finally got admonished for his crimes. At some point in 2023, Stots will face the toughest test of his career: The tournament final, against fellow superstar Patchy Mix. Bellator Women's Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs  Cris Cyborg - 26-2 (1), 4 DefensesYup. It's 2022 and Cris Cyborg is still out there. For those who don't know, Cris Cyborg was the canonical women's featherweight fighter, a muay thai wrecking machine who didn't just beat but brutalized essentially all of her opponents, including ex-Star Wars Gina Carano, and her popularity as a destroyer of humans is the only real reason women's featherweight even exists as a division, to the point that the UFC added it when she was the only actual fighter at the weight class they employed. She was 20-1 (1) when she passed the torch to Amanda Nunes, who slew her in just fifty-one seconds. She took one more fight in the UFC to complete her contract, but left for Bellator almost immediately afterward with uncharacteristic cooperation from the UFC itself--after all, they'd gotten what they wanted out of her. Her first Bellator fight was a one-sided destruction of their featherweight champion, and she's defended it three times since. At this point in Cyborg's career the problem isn't her or her fighting or her age, but simply that there's no one in Bellator for her to fight--after just five fights she's already hitting rematches, having just recorded her second one-sided bludgeoning of a very game but outmatched Arlene Blencowe. Consequently, Cyborg decided her next fight would be a boxing match, and on September 25 she faced Simone da Silva, a jobber to the stars coming off twelve straight losses who had been knocked out just one month prior, so he was still technically suspended and Cyborg's win might not count. Cris Undeterred, she had her second boxing match on the undercard of December 10th’s Crawford/Avanesyan card, taking a unanimous decision over Gabrielle “Gabanator” Holloway, who is 6-6 in MMA and 0-3 in boxing. It's kind of tiring to watch the second-best women's featherweight in MMA history take repeated nothing boxing matches, but on the other hand, what on Earth is there better for her to do right now? Bellator Women's Flyweight Champion, 125 lbs  Liz Carmouche - 18-7, 1 DefenseIt took more than a decade and some controversy, but Liz Carmouche got her flowers. "Girl-Rilla" was just as present a figure in establishing women's MMA in the mainstream, but she's the most consistently forgotten because she was the losing fighter in all of those establishing moments. She was a challenger for the early, pre-fame Strikeforce Women's Bantamweight Championship, and was winning on the scorecards before Marloes Coenen choked her out. She was a central part of the inaugural Invicta FC card, and was planned as a title contender before the big show came calling. She became one half of the first women's fight in UFC history, and at one point had Ronda Rousey in a nearly destiny-defying neck crank, but was ultimately submitted in the first round. She's one of two women to ever defeat Valentina Shevchenko, but when given a second chance at the now-UFC champion Shevchenko, she fell short. Despite her powerful wrestling and submission skills, she was eternally denied the top of the mountain. So it was both particularly appropriate and particularly cruel when she finally won a championship on April 22, 2022--in a way that displeased everybody. Standing champion Juliana Velasquez was winning on every scorecard, but Liz Carmouche got her in the crucifix position and landed a number of, respectfully, small elbows, but referee Mike Beltran called a TKO to the immediate chagrin of the entirely safe ex-champion. The controversy made a rematch all but mandatory, and it took Bellator most of the year to do it, but the two met in the cage to run it back at Bellator 289 on December 9, and this time there was no controversy, as Velasquez submitted to an armbar two rounds in. Liz Carmouche, at last, is a world goddamn champion. It's worth noting that a) ONE uses different weight classes and b) ONE also has a dozenish various kickboxing champions, and for the moment, for sake of my sanity, we're just going to stick to the MMA champions. Maybe later we'll change this. FOR NOW: ONE Heavyweight Champion, 265 lbs   Arjan Bhullar - 11-1, 0 DefensesIt's Arjan Bhullar, the man ONE CEO Chatri Sityodtong swears is better than Francis Ngannou. Bhullar, the first Indian world champion in the sport, was a big deal as a wrestler in his native Canada, won multiple collegiate championships at heavyweight, took a Commonwealth Games championship and ultimately achieved his dream of representing Canada at the 2012 Olympics where he was eliminated in the first round. He made his MMA debut two years later as, you may have already guessed, predominantly a wrestler. He was picked up by the UFC in 2017 at 6-0, and had a respectable 3-1 record with the organization, but chose not to sign a new contract after feeling the UFC was lowballing him. He signed with the then-growing ONE Championship in 2019, won his debut fight, took a year and a half off for the pandemic and returned in May of 2021 to TKO the baddest heavyweight in ONE, its reigning champion of almost six years, the man, myth, legend and Truth, Brandon Vera. And then, much like Vera, he promptly refused to sign a new contract and sat out for a year so he could play hardball. Chatri publicly shat on him and his management and set up an interim championship. As of this writing, Arjan Bhullar has not fought since May 15, 2021, and has no fights announced for the immediate future. At this point it seems just as likely that he'll be stripped and released as booked. ONE Interim Heavyweight Champion   Anatoly Malykhin - 12-0, 0 DefensesONE Light Heavyweight Champion, 225 lbs  Anatoly Malykhin - 12-0, 0 DefensesIt was a very good, but very strange, 2022 for Anatoly Malykhin. With Bhullar out indefinitely, the undefeated Russian bruiser was placed in the driver's seat of the heavyweight division, and after quickly dispatching of an outmatched Kirill Grishenko, Malykhin took home an interim championship. ONE planned to reunify the championships fairly quickly, with Bhullar vs Malykhin tentatively planned for ONE's debut on Amazon Prime Video in August, but Bhullar needed more time to recover from his injury layoff. The match was finally, formally announced for ONE Championship 161 on September 29--and then, the day of the aforementioned Prime debut, Bhullar announced he was pulling out with another injury. The match was once again tentatively planned for December, but the two sides couldn't come to terms, and after ten months, ONE was tired of doing nothing with their big, angry punchman. The new announcement was even more surprising: Malykhin, while remaining the interim heavyweight champion, was also dropping down to light-heavyweight and challenging the undefeated double champ and promotional kingpin Reinier de Ridder. The result was quick and brutal, as Malykhin bludgeoned de Ridder to a bleakly one-sided first-round knockout. Now, Anatoly Malykhin is entering 2023 as a double champ, but his future is still a question mark; ONE doesn't even HAVE light-heavyweight rankings, and Arjan Bhullar remains AWOL. Anatoly Malykhin reigns in a kingdom of ONE. ONE Middleweight Champion, 205 lbs   Reinier de Ridder - 16-1, 2 DefensesThere's a long tradition of B-league hype in mixed martial arts. The hardcore fanbase chafes under both the total ubiquity of the UFC as a product and the way they set thesmelves up as the end-all be-all of the sport. As the B-leagues create dominant champions of their own, the fanbase inevitably rallies behind them as equal to, if not greater than, the UFC's equivalent titleholder, and further, as evidence of other companies having even better talent. And once or twice a generation, they're right! But most of the time, they're not. Fighters who destroy their B-league equivalents will commonly take a step outside their comfort zone and get immediately rolled by reality. Reinier de Ridder, more than any other competitor, was the popular argument for ONE's supremacy over the UFC: An undefeated ultra-grappler with belts at two divisions, one of which happened to be the UFC's permanently embattled light-heavyweight class. The remarkable ease with which he ragdolled and submitted his opponents, and the shaky nature of his UFC peers, led to wide exultation of his skills and regular comments from ONE CEO Chatri Sityodtong about his prospects against the best the world had to offer. It was consequently something of a bummer when he fought Anatoly Malykhin, the first opponent in years he didn't have a strength or grappling advantage over, and looked immediately lost when his takedown attempts did nothing. He had no visible striking defense to speak of and was ultimately, and distressingly easily, destroyed. The cycle has played out once again, the latest idol has lost, and now Reinier de Ridder will have to continue defending his singular middleweight championship. ONE Welterweight Champion, 185 lbs   Christian Lee - 17-4, 0 DefensesONE Lightweight Champion, 170 lbs  Christian Lee - 17-4, 0 DefensesIt took three tries, but by god, Chatri gets what Chatri wants. Christian Lee, the male half of the first family of ONE Championship and its homegrown golden boy, was very, very mad about losing his lightweight championship in a controversial decision to Ok Rae Yoon last year. He demanded the decision be reviewed and overturned and his championship reinstated. Unsurprisingly: This did not happen. After months of complaining and just shy of a year of waiting, the two had their long-awaited rematch and Lee left nothing to chance, knocking Yoon out in six minutes to reclaim his belt. Having finally retrieved his title, Lee, being a responsible champion, proceeded to immediately challenge ONE'S 185-pound champion, Kiamrian Abbasov, for his title, a move that was definitely in no way influenced by ONE's repeated attempts to get his sister Angela Lee double-champion status. Fortunately for Christian, Abbasov horribly botched his weight cut: He came in overweight, lost his title on the scale, and was visibly depleted in the fight. Which is particularly lucky, because Abbasov beat Lee senseless in the first round to the point that a standing TKO would by no means have been an unreasonable stoppage. But whether from his failed weight cut or simply from punching himself out, Abbasov was exhausted by the second round, and Lee mounted a gutsy comeback and ultimately stopped him with ground-and-pound in the fourth round. After three attempts, ONE has succeeded in getting two belts on a Lee. I'm sure that Conor McGregor money will come rolling in any day now. ONE Featherweight Champion, 155 lbs  Tang Kai - 15-2, 0 DefensesTang Kai has been flying under the radar for some time, and in hindsight, that was clearly a mistake. He made his professional debut as a 20 year-old collegiate wrestler and won a rookie featherweight tournament in China's WBK (after investigating, we THINK it's World Battle Kings), but his stylistic limitations became apparent when he moved up to Kunlun Fight--and stopped fighting rookies. Dominant decision losses to ACA standout Bekhruz "Ong Bak" Zukurov and Road to UFC runner-up Asikeerbai Jinensibieke made Kai's weaknesses too apparent to ignore, and he made the tough call to commit to his dream, pack up his life, and move away from home to start training with real fight camps, most notably Shanghai's Dragon Gym and Phuket's legendary Tiger Muay Thai. It's worked out quite well: He hasn't lost a fight in five years. Three knockout wins in China's Rebel FC got ONE's attention, and since debuting with the organization in 2019, Kai has soundly defeated everyone in his path. He claims his wrestling base makes him impossible to take down and he proves it by using it almost entirely defensively, vastly preferring to bludgeon his opponents on his feet. His fight against Thanh Le, while blistering and difficult, was proof: He evaded every takedown attempt, widely outstruck him, dropped him with punches and leg kicks alike, and took the belt he's held for two years. Tang Kai, at the beginning of ONE's worldwide invasion, is suddenly a very visible prospect: A power striker on a 10-fight winning streak and a champion in the world's most competitive weight class. The target on his back is very, very real. ONE Bantamweight Champion, 145 lbs  VACANT - The darkness that fills a dying heartIt's said that when God closes a door, they open a window. After six beautiful months, Vacant's reign as the UFC Lightweight Champion had to come to an end. But ONE Championship has made no bones about their intention of bringing competition to the world of mixed martial arts, and they were not about to let the soon-to-be hottest free agent in the sport slip through their fingers. Just two days before Islam Makhachev and Charles Oliveira fought to claim the empty throne, disaster struck across the globe: John Lineker's reign as ONE Bantamweight Champion ended after 223 days when he came in 3/4 of a pound over the 145-pound championship limit. He was stripped of his title and the following day's match proceeded with only his challenger, Fabrício Andrade, eligible to become champion. But the vengeful spirits that watch over mixed martial arts refuse to let a good opportunity go. The fight was back and forth in the first two rounds, but Lineker began to visible fade in the third thanks to his bad weight cut, Andrade's excellent work in punching his eye shut, and the size and reach differential that saw him getting repeatedly punished. Two and a half minutes into the round Andrade landed a knee to the body that left Lineker reeling, absorbing punishment and seemingly on the verge of the first TKO loss of his career, and sensing the ex-champion was on the ropes and this was his chance to become a hero Fabrício Andrade charged bravely forward, wound up, and landed a perfectly placed, sharply thrust knee on Lineker's balls. It hit so hard it shattered Lineker's cup and left the unbelievably tough man dry heaving into a bucket. The fight could not continue, which meant Fabrício Andrade could not win, which meant that once again, Vacant claimed a world championship. Never before in mixed martial arts history has someone won two championships in two major organizations in one year. Count yourself lucky to have lived at the same time as this generational superstar. Lineker and Camoes will run it back for ONE on Prime Video 7 on February 10th. ONE Flyweight Champion, 135 lbs  Demetrious Johnson - 31-4-1, 0 DefensesThe king has returned. Demetrious Johnson's 2019 debut with ONE Championship was essentially scandalous. "Mighty Mouse" had long been a fan favorite of the lighter weight classes, a 5'3" combat machine who had been going the distance with world champions like Kid Yamamoto and Dominick Cruz while still working a day job in a warehouse, but it was only in 2012 when he dedicated himself to mixed martial arts as his full-time job that he became a star. He won the UFC's flyweight tournament and became its inaugural champion, and his talents are the reason a division that has existed for a decade has only had five champions--three of whom came in the last two years after he left. By 2018, Johnson had one of the longest winning streaks in the UFC, was the all-time recordholder for championship defenses in the UFC and had recorded some of the most outstanding finishes in the history of the UFC. By 2019, he was out of the company. Johnson and the UFC never got along--or, to be blunt, Johnson was one of the few publicly calling the UFC out on its bullshit. When he won the flyweight title and became a world champion while only getting paid $23k/23k he let it be known, when the UFC cut sponsorship money in the Reebok era he noted the raw deal it gave the fighters, and when Dana White tried to force him to take fights up at bantamweight by threatening to kill the flyweight division if he didn't, he told the world. After Henry Cejudo beat him in a razor-close coinflip decision and took the bargaining leverage of his championship away, it was over in a heartbeat. Dana White personally disliked him enough that he traded him to ONE Championship in exchange for their welterweight champion, Ben Askren. Johnson proceeded to immediately win ONE's flyweight grand prix, but took the first stoppage loss of his entire career in his shot at Adriano Moraes and his world championship and engendered a thousand MMA thinkpieces about if his time as a top fighter was over. A year and a half later, he got his rematch, and on August 27 at ONE on Prime Video 1 he returned the favor, handing Moraes his own first stoppage loss after knocking him out with a flying knee. A trilogy rematch seems inevitable, but for the moment, having just turned 36, Mighty Mouse is a world champion in the second weight class of his career and shows no signs of slowing down. ONE Strawweight Champion, 125 lbs  Jarred Brooks - 20-2 (1), 0 DefensesJarred Brooks dealt with some crap on his way to a title. By 2017 he was one of the most-heralded flyweight prospects in the sport: An undefeated 13-0 multi-champion as an amateur, an undefeated 12-0 as a professional with fights across three separate weight classes, his heavy wrestling-and-grappling grinding style ground most of his opponents to dust. He took the moniker of "The Monkey God" thanks to his unorthodox striking and wrestling entries--when you're not afraid of grappling, you can get creative with the striking. And then he hit the UFC in 2017 and everything kind of went to hell. Three of his four UFC bouts went to split decision: A debut victory against Eric Shelton Brooks probably should've lost, a followup loss against future champion Deiveson Figueiredo Brooks probably should've won, an intervening bout where Brooks was easily dominating Jose Torres only to score the rare MMA own goal and knock himself out after smacking his head on the ground doing a big, showy slam, and a third and final split decision victory over Roberto Sanchez that really, really shouldn't have been split at all. And then the UFC cut him, despite being 2 and 2 and having gone the distance with the biggest new prospect in the division, because the UFC Doesn't Like Flyweights. So Brooks went over to Rizin, where he intended to build his way up as the next big foreign threat to top star Kyoji Horiguchi--and it was over in eleven seconds, after an inadvertant headbutt cut his opponent's eyebrow open and the blood-unfriendly Japanese network called a no-contest. His international comeback was further destroyed by COVID, and Brooks found himself iced for two straight years as he waited for the dust to settle. By November of 2021, he was making his long-delayed ONE debut; by June of 2022, he was 3-0 and the top contender. And then, of course, his title fight got delayed another six months thanks to an injury. On December 3rd, 2022, he finally got his long-belated shot at a major title, and shocking no one, he wrestled the poo poo out of Joshua Pacio for five straight rounds. Four years later than expected, Jarred Brooks has international gold. And because ONE's weight classes don't matter, he immediately called out 135-pound champ Demetrious Johnson. The future is bright. ONE Women's Strawweight Champion, 125 lbs  Xiong Jing Nan - 18-2, 7 DefensesXiong Jing Nan dreamed of lifting weights. She'd enjoyed sports as a child, and when China started its national push for Olympic supremacy she began training heavily in hope of joining the national weightlifting team. But then she met aspirants for its boxing team and fell in love with the idea of living out a martial arts movie and getting to hit people for fun and profit and she never looked back. She turned pro in 2014 and immediately became a standout, going 9-1 in China's Kunlun Fight promotion with wins across three separate weight classes. What made her truly dangerous wasn't one-punch power, but the ability to break her opponents with constant pressure striking, scoring TKOs with combinations stretched out across dozens of consecutive, unending strikes. The story was no different when she moved to ONE in 2017, and she was strawweight champion within two fights. ONE's women's MMA divisions have been its most stable, each having had exactly one champion, and they were so dominant that they inevitably had to fight each other--and, hilariously, traded wins back and forth in the process. 115 lbs champion Angela Lee went up to 125 to challenge for Xiong Jing Nan's belt but Nan stopped her with body kicks in the fifth round, and half a year later Nan dropped down to 115 to challenge for Lee's belt only for Lee to choke her out with twelve seconds left in the fight. Xiong has notched three successful title defenses since, which set her up for her greatest challenger yet: Angela Lee, again, apparently. Despite ONE's best attempts, Xiong successfully defended her title against Lee again, nearly finishing her in the first round and ultimately winning a decision. ONE Women's Atomweight Champion, 115 lbs  Angela Lee - 11-3, 5 DefensesAngela Lee is one of ONE's biggest stars and has been widely called its postergirl, and while the metrics may be debatable, she's an extremely solid choice. Her background is varied both culturally and martially: Born in Canada in a Singaporean-South Korean family made entirely of martial artists who all collectively moved to Hawaii when she was a child, she was not only training alongside them as a child, but training in multiple disciplines. By 15 she was a national Pankration champion, by 18 she had been signed by ONE before having a single professional fight, and by 20 she had two black belts and three defenses of ONE's atomweight championship. Lee is an extremely versatile fighter, capable of backing up her aggressive if sometimes loose striking with very solid defensive and offensive grappling, and her only two losses have come when fighting up a class at 125 pounds, against both its champion Xiong Jing Nan--whom she later choked out in a rematch at 115--and world jiu-jitsu champion Michelle Nicolini in a very, very close decision. Lee went on hiatus at the end of 2019 to have a baby and intended to be back by the end of 2020, but then the pandemic happened and she decided to use her cache within the company to just sit it out, making her arguably the smartest fighter in the world. ONE declined to make an interim championship, so she returned to competition this past March as a defending champion and main-evented the ONE X supercard against its atomweight queen in her absence, Stamp Fairtex, and notched her fifth title defense after choking her out in the second round. She got a trilogy fight with Nan on September 30, once again coming to her weight class and challenging for her title, but ultimately fell short and lost a decision.  Rizin Lightweight Champion, 156 lbs  Roberto de Souza - 14-2, 2 DefensesRoberto "Satoshi" de Souza is trying to become the new Gegard Mousasi. On April 17 he had the chance to avenge the only loss of his career, a half-knockout half-injury against "Hollywood" Johnny Case back in 2019, and he succeeded in emphatic fashion, climbing Case's back, locking him in an inverted triangle choke and eventually forcing an armbar. He's now 14-1 and inarguably one of the best lightweights outside of the UFC, but unlike most of the other fighters to bear that title, he has made it clear he has no interest in changing that. Where the A.J. McKees and Michael Chandlers of the world want to test free agency and notoriety, Roberto de Souza is happy in Japan, both because his Rizin pay is fairly lucrative and his entire family jiu-jitsu business is based in the country. This is admirable, but it's also a little unfortunate: Rizin really only has around a dozen lightweights under contract, and "Satoshi" has already beaten a third of them. He may be waiting for a Spike Carlyle or a Luiz Gustavo to work their way into contention, but the Rizin ranks hold few surprises for him at this point. It was thus of particular interest when the main event for the New Year's Eve Bellator x Rizin card was announced as Roberto de Souza vs AJ McKee--a test of where Souza ranks with the rest of the world's competition. Unfortunately for him and Rizin, the answer was "under them." He positionally threatened McKee and was able to land some solid strikes in the final round, but was otherwise controlled and lost a decision. Rizin Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs   Kleber Koike Erbst - 31-6-1, 0 DefensesRizin has found the solution to Japanese MMA's historical troubles with losing their championships to foreigners: Get Japanese foreigners. Kleber Koike Erbst, while born in São Paulo, moved to Japan as a fourteen year-old and, four years later, elected to stay behind and continue training in grappling and mixed martial arts while his parents returned home. He found community with the above-mentioned de Souza family, working odd jobs to fund his continuing study at their school in Iwata, and later that same year he began his career as a professional fighter. His rookie years were somewhat fraught: By his twenty-first birthday he was only 4-3-1 and his prospects seemed somewhat dim. As it turns out, aging into actual adulthood makes a loving difference, as in the following twelve years he has lost only two fights. One was a decision loss to Artur Sowiński, the champion of Poland's Konfrontacja Sztuk Walki federation, and he rematched and choked him out two years later; the other, Erbst's final KSW fight, was a loss to Mateusz Gamrot, who is currently the #8 fighter an entire weight class up in the UFC's lightweight rankings. Koike joined Rizin in 2020 and immediately snapped off a five-fight submission streak, leading to his challenging featherweight champion Juntarou Ushiku at Rizin 39 on October 23. It only took six and a half minutes for Erbst to submit Ushiku with his trademark triangle choke, making him, for the second time in his career, a world champion. Kleber had the shortest turnaround of all the Rizin talent competing at Bellator x Rizin, and the stiffest competition in the form of the legendary Patrício Pitbull, and that proved to be a bad combination. Erbst was unable to muster any effective striking or grappling and spent fifteen minutes getting calmly picked apart by one of the greatest fighters in the sport. Rizin Bantamweight Champion, 135 lbs  Kyoji Horiguchi - 31-5, 0 DefensesKyoji Horiguchi is going through a difficult time in his career. Horiguchi is, indisputably, one of the absolute best flyweights on the planet. He's an incredibly fast, powerful striker with very solid wrestling and aggressive grappling to back up his skills, and the streak of incredible knockouts and submissions on his record is a testament to his skills. Trouble is: He's not fighting at flyweight, he's fighting at bantamweight, and it's finally starting to become a problem. His half-decade unbeaten streak ended in 2019 thanks to a first-round upset loss against Kai Asakura, but Rizin rushing him back in mid-knee injury was blamed for that, especially when Kyoji starched Kai in a rematch the next year. And then he lost his Bellator bantamweight championship to Sergio Pettis after winning most of the fight only to walk into a spinning backfist. And now he's lost his berth in Bellator's bantamweight grand prix after just getting grappled to death by Patchy Mix, who, while very good at jiu-jitsu, also had the advantage of half a foot of height and reach on Horiguchi. He continues to be almost certainly the best fighter in Rizin, and inarguably Japan's best at flyweight AND bantamweight, but three years ago he was the nearly-undefeated champion of the two biggest b-leagues in the world simultaneously and now he's 1-3 in said three years and has a Rizin title he's never defended. Nothing best expresses how stuck in the middle he is as his participation on the Bellator x Rizin New Year's Eve special, where he represented Bellator, where he has a record of 1-2, against Rizin, where he has a record of 11-1, in a flyweight bout, which neither company has committed to promoting. He won, and fairly easily, but he remains a fighter without a home. Rizin Women's Super Atomweight Championship, 108 lbs  Seika Izawa - 9-0, 0 DefensesAll hail the new queen. After years of reigning as Japan's best atomweight, the legendary Ayaka Hamasaki fell not once but twice to the rookie Seika Izawa. A 24 year-old who was pushed into judo as a child by a frustrated mother who was tired of her constant fighting with her brothers, Izawa discovered a love for grappling that led her to win junior championships in judo, wrestling and sumo alike. She would still be pursuing judo had the pandemic not shut down much of its competitive scene, but fortunately, mixed martial arts is a terrible sport run by monsters who don't care about things like deadly diseases, which made it a tempting professional prospect. Four months after her formal MMA training began Izawa was winning fights in DEEP, less than a year after that she was DEEP's strawweight champion, and one year later she was dominating one of the best women's fighters in history on Rizin's New Year's Eve special. As Japanese organizations tend to do, frustratingly, the fight was a non-title affair, meaning Izawa had to come back and do it again on April 17. After a scary moment where Hamasaki almost stole an armbar, Izawa resumed her wrestling domination and formally took Rizin's atomweight championship. As entirely fresh blood, the world of Rizin's talent is open to her--but that also means she's got a real, real big target on her back. Rizin's Superatomweight Grand Prix was both a big coming-out party for Izawa and a series of opportunities to look shockingly mortal: She had a fair bit of trouble with Anastasiya Svetkivska in the semifinals before ultimately submitting her, but her berth in the finals against former rival Si Woo Park proved the toughest fight of her career, ending in a split decision victory she easily could have lost. Seika, in no mood to slow down, has called for a fight with Invicta's atomweight champion Jillian DeCoursey.
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Jan 1, 2023 18:32
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And finally, Boco just put a ton of work into this so reposting it for the new thread:Boco_T posted:Tape Delay Kickboxing 6 Woof. Welcome to January, everybody.
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Jan 1, 2023 18:33
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I take it back, we apparently need one more post because Damir Ismagulov posted this twenty minutes ago: https://twitter.com/Willbutreal/status/1609602594376421381 2023 is ten hours old and it already sucks.
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Jan 1, 2023 18:41
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LobsterMobster posted:2022 Round-Up Rodeo and Championship Breakdowns this is fantastic loving work, lobmob, thank you Also never forget moosin 
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Jan 2, 2023 08:54
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The fact that Dana already gave an interview going 'yup, that was awful, oh well' means he thinks the UFC is already done with it, and he is probably right.
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Jan 3, 2023 09:37
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Davros1 posted:https://twitter.com/bryanalvarez/status/1610687890107027457?t=fZiOCuhn6det2KpxSLA_Jg&s=19  sooooooo
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Jan 4, 2023 18:42
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Congratulations to Mike "The Truth" Jackson on his upcoming PFL main event.
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Jan 5, 2023 18:05
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We're one card into the year and we've already lost our first main and co-main events
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Jan 9, 2023 23:53
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who do you suppose has an advantage in a boxing match, the guy who went 12 rounds with Charlo and Canelo or 
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Jan 10, 2023 21:54
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Well, let's get this year loving started. CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 43: WE ARE GOING TO MAKE IT THROUGH THIS YEAR IF IT KILLS US  JANUARY 14, 2023 FROM THE DARK RECESSES OF THE APEX ARENA IN NEVADA PRELIMS 1:00 PM PST/4:00 PM EST VIA ESPN+ | MAIN CARD 4 PM PST/7 PM EST VIA ESPN+ quote:And we made it exactly 0 fight cards into the year before losing a co-main event to injury. The cards can't stay straight quote:The cards can't stay straight I wrote that 36 god damned hours ago. In that time, the main event for this card fell apart thanks to a Gastelum injury. Instead we now have a 5-round, 205-pound bout featuring Sean loving Strickland, the same boringly bigoted shitass who just put on a late ballot contender for least engaging main event of the year at the last UFC less than a month ago. Forget everything I said before. Hell is real and we have no choice but to go through it together.  you can really see the hole where the co-main event was supposed to be MAIN EVENT: TIME IS A FLAT, RACIST CIRCLE MIDDLEWEIGHT, BUT IT'S AT 205 POUNDS: Nassourdine Imavov (12-3, #12) vs Sean Strickland (25-5, #7) See, here's the thing: I like this sport. I really do. There's nothing on Earth like mixed martial arts. I may have enjoyed the four weeks free of these writeups from a "how much time do I have to make freezer food and play Morrowind this week" standpoint, but after the first week and a half or so, I missed it. The prospect of returning to Nassourdine Imavov vs Kelvin Gastelum was admittedly not the most exciting of main events to come back to, but it's MMA, and I had a palpable urge to ramble endlessly about the middleweight division, and how Gastelum is somehow still ranked, and the lasting legacy of Vitor Belfort. And then the co-main event fell through. And then the main event fell through. And then the UFC announced that the last card of 2022 never actually ended and you, and you, and especially you, were going to have to watch another 25 minutes of Sean Strickland. Sean "Has Not Had A Good Fight Since 2020" Strickland. Sean "I Reserve All Of My Energy For Cussing In The Last 15 Seconds Of Each Fight" Strickland. Sean "You Cannot Escape The Crushing Awareness That I Am What UFC Management Wants Out Of Its Roster And So Long As I Exist You Are Forever Damned To Repeat This Dance With Me" Strickland. So welcome to 2023, the first two months of which now include a hastily slapped together title fight with an ill-deserving Contender Series alumnus, a rebooked Derrick Lewis fight from November, a champion vs champion match that threatens to hold up multiple weight classes and five more rounds of Sean Strickland, because 2022 never actually ended, it just bent itself towards the light and expanded lengthwise into infinity. I love mixed martial arts. But she can be cruel. But arguably the person to whom this is least cruel is Nassourdine "The Russian Sniper" Imavov, which, buddy, please, adopt a temporary nickname that doesn't make me suck air through my teeth when I envision Bruce Buffer screaming it. Imavov has been trying to break into the UFC's top ten for almost two years, now, primarily by repeatedly chasing a matchup with the aforementioned Kelvin Gastelum only to have it snatched away. Intending to fight against a highly-ranked former world title contender and winding up defending against unranked Joaquin Buckley's kicks for fifteen minutes instead is something of a professional heartbreak. But Imavov has made the most of it. He's 4-1 in the UFC, and that sole blemish was a razor-close majority decision loss to Phil Hawes that saw Imavov nearly knocking him out multiple times in the third round. Nassourdine Imavov's greatest strength is not his well-roundedness, but his ability to seamlessly move between methods of attack, stringing combinations of leg kicks to clinch elbows to dump takedowns together to keep opponents from ever settling into offense against him. Phil Hawes, as you do in mixed martial arts, countered this thoughtful, innovative gameplan by being Very Strong. He injured Imavov's legs with kicks and brute-forced his compromised body to the fence and floor, because it's an awful lot harder to launch varied offense when you're constantly defending. But Imavov's continued to grow and improve, as his subsequent three-fight winning streak shows. He wrestled the poo poo out of Edmen Shahbazyan, he murdered Ian Heinisch, and he took a wild brawling hometown victory over the previously noted Joaquin Buckley. His jabs have gotten tighter, his ground game has gotten more vicious, and his wrestling defense has tightened considerably. Which made this fight interesting, as Kelvin Gastelum is one of the most fluid boxers and wrestlers in the division and presented a gatekeeper-testing challenge to all of Imavov's improvements. But we don't live in that substrate of reality. We live in the world where our years are bookended by Sean Strickland. It's such a desperately baffling matchmaking choice that I'm not even sure how to address this portion of the writeup. In the past I've revisited familiar topics by quoting my older pieces about the fighters in question, but this is very literally the same main event fighter from the last main event I wrote about. Nothing has changed in the last four weeks. Sean Strickland still sucks in exactly the same ways Sean Strickland sucked in December. He's still the kind of boor that will fight five rounds of nothing and then cuss up a storm and complain about judges despite having contributed nothing of value to the worlds of martial arts or entertainment given the biggest possible stage to do so. He's still the kind of rear end in a top hat who'll take something like Stephan Bonnar's untimely death and use it to rant on Instagram about how memorializing him is dumb because he was an addict and everyone who acts as though they care is being fake. He's still a blemish on the sport who after nine years and seventeen fights in the UFC has ramped up his public shithead act to cover up the fact that he's never managed to build a reputation for anything more than eking out decisions over fighters no one remembers. A dozen wins over nearly a decade and only three of those fighters are still actually in the UFC, and one of them is welterweight-rear end Court McGee. That's the thing: There is no Sean Strickland. No Sean Strickland can be proven to exist. The UFC would like you to believe in Sean Strickland the fighter, but when you watch his fights, the commentators who are excitedly jabbering about this cold-blooded killer just waiting to pounce are very clearly describing a man who isn't there, as opposed to the actual fighter in the cage who is tepidly jabbing and, once per lunar cycle, throwing a cross. The people doing the UFC's rankings would like you to believe in Sean Strickland the viable top ten middleweight contender, but Strickland has only fought three people in the entire top fifteen and he lost to two of them. Sean Strickland would desperately like you to believe in Sean Strickland the poo poo-talker who's just so controversial and offensive that you cannot help but hate him so much that you just have to see him fight, because by god, that's the only way you could possibly be interested in seeing him fight. But that creek is dry. There's nothing about Sean Strickland that is in any way remarkable anymore. His biggest strength is his ability to conserve energy strategically enough to jab for five rounds without stopping. He's a bland fighter, he's a nothing contender, and his attempts to be a prolific hatemiser are too familiar and too obvious to anyone who's spent more than five minutes on the internet and has thus been forcibly inured to the kind of racism, homophobia, transphobia and generalized rear end in a top hat bigotry every third person on Twitter already fluently speaks. Could he win? Sure. Jabbing and defending is still high-level MMA meta, because our sport is silly. Will he? I don't think so. Imavov's bigger, stronger, a more fluid and powerful striker, and a better grappler. Strickland's rare takedown attempts are unlikely to get him anywhere and his predictable jabbing is a liability against someone as positionally active as Imavov. It could be wishful thinking. It's entirely possible I just desperately want Sean Strickland to be as irrelevant to the sport as he is in my head. But hey: Let's manifest good things in 2023. Nassourdine Imavov by knockout. Please get therapy. CO-MAIN EVENT: DAN IGE'S FAVORITE VIDEO GAME IS RUNESCAPE FEATHERWEIGHT: Dan Ige (15-6, #13) vs Damon Jackson (22-4-1 (1), NR) This is a collision between rising and falling stars, and it's gonna be a little sad. Just three years ago most fans had Dan Ige pegged as a sure-thing title contender. His skills and his reputation carried the weight of the assumption extremely well: His striking was well-rounded and very defensively sound, his wrestling was quick and tricky, he was one of the first Contender Series winners, he was 13-2, and since stumbling in his UFC debut against Julio Arce he'd been on a two-year, six-fight tear that culminated in two extremely tight split decision victories over the highly-touted Mirsad Bektić and Edson Barboza. People expected great, great things. In hindsight, things are much less rosy. The early fighters in his streak were largely not long for the UFC, Mirsad Bektić retired just one fight later, and Edson Barboza, who arguably should have won their fight, was in his worst career slump. When Calvin Kattar ended his streak by outstriking him four rounds to one, the door shut firmly in Ige's face. He'd score a degree of redemption by knocking out Gavin Tucker, but after spending his entire career as a frontrunner, the next two years were one long trip to the back of the line. Ige's currently on a three-fight losing streak. None of those men are slouches--Chan Sung Jung is a first-ballot hall of famer, Josh Emmett is about to fight for the interim championship and Movsar Evloev is one of the hottest prospects in the sport--but top fifteen or no, three losses in a row hangs a big target on your back, and four is a death sentence. Damon Jackson's divisional relevance is a recent occurrence, but he's been struggling towards it for a very, very long time. Just one month after Dan Ige's professional mixed martial arts debut in 2014, a 9-0 Damon Jackson made his first appearance in the UFC. It wasn't time for him yet, unfortunately; he was choked out twice and taken to a draw (which would have been a loss, had his opponent not lost a point on fouls in the final round) before being unceremoniously cut. He returned to his home in the Legacy Fighting Alliance for another three years before making the jump to the Professional Fighters League for its second season--where he was promptly knocked out in ten seconds and never appeared again. He might never have made it back to the spotlight were it not for everyone's best friend, COVID-19. Dan Ige's old buddy Mirsad Bektić lost his dancing partner Eduardo Garagorri just before their fight, Damon Jackson was there to step in on 48 hours' notice, and after losing two rounds of wrestling to Mirsad, Damon snatched a guillotine in the third round for his first UFC victory just six years after his organizational debut. Like so many of his peers he'd get punched stupid by Ilia Topuria in short order, but since then he's been a force of violent clinch grappling. A four-fight win streak means he now, finally, has more wins in the UFC (5) than losses, draws or NCs (4). And it only took a little under a decade. As happens so often with former-contender-vs-rising-contender matches, it's hard not to read this fight as a referendum on how much Dan Ige has left in the tank. No one Ige has lost to is anything short of world-class, his only uncompetitive loss was against the undefeated Movsar Evloev and he's still a fast, talented wrestler and hit-and-run striker, all of which are talents that have given Damon Jackson fits. On the other hand, Jackson is the larger, stronger fighter, has an extremely solid chin and is more than willing to use it to bully his way into the clinch, where he is one of the most dangerous grapplers in the division. This is a question of which fighter you believe in more at this stage of their career. I'm biting the inside of my cheek and going with Damon Jackson by decision. MAIN CARD: I AM ASKING YOU TO PLEASE PROMOTE WOMEN'S FIGHTS IN 2023  MIDDLEWEIGHT: Punahele Soriano (9-2) vs Roman Kopylov (9-2)Welcome to your corporately mandated Stand And Bang fight of the night. Punahele Soriano was ironically a more well-rounded fighter before he joined the UFC. As far back as the 2019 Contender Series bout that earned him his contract, you can see his style is much more measured and versatile, with the persistent threat of takedowns and wrestling control complementing his heavy-handed boxing. The moment he got into the UFC proper, the message was clear: Knock that poo poo off, we're (barely) paying you to hit people. He completed three takedowns in his fifteen minutes on the Contender Series: In three years and five fights in the UFC, he's completed one. He is here to punch you, and punch you he shall, and the only people to stop him from doing so have been a more well-rounded striker in Brendan Allen and a dominating wrestler in Nick Maximov. Fortunately for him, Roman Kopylov is an angry Russian kickboxer who is openly allergic to groundwork. He was the middleweight champion of Russia's AMC Fight Nights Global before making the journey over to America, where, much like Soriano, he was immediately and repeatedly felled by fighters who dared to use the forbidden art known as Wrestling. Karl Roberson choked him out and Albert Duraev struck with him for a round before opting to take him down and elbow the poo poo out of his face. Kopylov was at risk of falling into the dreaded 0-3 hole in his one fight of 2022, but turned his fortunes around by battering the ever-tough Alessio Di Chirico, going back and forth with him for two rounds before turning his lights out with boxing cominations in the third. This is going to be a battle of power against versatility. Roman Kopylov is a more well-rounded striker than Soriano, with a gameplan that alternates quickly between quick combinations and stabbing kicks to the body, but he finishes people by wearing them down. Punahele Soriano shuts people off. He can kick, he can clinch, but his bread and butter is getting people in position to eat a big hook or a big uppercut so he can flatline them. Both fighters also meet in terms of having trouble maintaining pace--they've both flagged and looked tired in third rounds, although it hasn't stopped Kopylov from finding ways to win anyway. I can't help thinking Punahele's aggression will hurt him here. If he restrains himself and tries to counterpunch Kopylov he could catch him on his way in, but he tends to push forward behind his hands and walk his opponents down, and that approach could have him eating kicks to the body all night. Roman Kopylov by decision. WOMEN'S BANTAMWEIGHT: Ketlen Vieira (13-2, #2) vs Raquel Pennington (14-8, #5) We're only one card into the year and we've already hit my personal trifecta of irritants: hosed up main events, promotional approval of bigotry, and the chronic underbooking of women. Remember Julianna Peña's upset victory over Amanda Nunes? Remember their rematch and what it meant for the future of Nunes' career and the entire bantamweight division taking center stage as one of the biggest MMA stories of 2022? Remember the much-heralded 2021 return of Miesha Tate and her march to title contention the year before, and what all of these things, together, meant for the potentially intriguing future of Women's Bantamweight? Yeah. It led to this. This is almost mathematically certain to be a #1 contender's bout for the division. It's second from the bottom on a TV card. It is structurally less important to the UFC than Punahele Soriano attempting to become the 30th best middleweight in the company. Frankly, Ketlen Vieira should have a title shot already. The UFC gave her two main events in a row that they were quietly hoping she'd lose--first an attempt to rocket Miesha Tate to an instant title shot, then an ostensible title eliminator against Holly Holm--but Vieira took close decisions over the promotional favorite each time. That is, equally frankly, exactly why the UFC would rather throw roadblocks at her than give her the shot she deserves: She's a defensively-minded fighter, more likely to jab, jog and grapple for positional control than drop bombs. She's 7-2 in the UFC with exactly one finish, and it was all the way back in 2017. And it's that judging-unfriendly style that keeps derailing her. She beat Holly Holm and Miesha Tate, but she was numerically outstruck by both. She should, arguably, be on a four-fight winning streak right now, but dropped a decision to Yana Kunitskaya at the outset of 2021 that pushed her back down the ladder, and almost all media outlets scored that fight for her, and she was decidedly in control for the majority of it, but she also recorded a grand total of seven significant strikes in fifteen minutes. Ketlen Vieira is indisputably one of the best fighters on the planet, but even if you disregard the UFC's lust for knockouts it's difficult to feel invested in the championship prospects of someone who's scraping wins against people the champion threw in a dumpster. Raquel Pennington is a bit of a different story. "Rocky" was part of the UFC's early expansion into women's mixed martial arts, having made it to the semifinal round of The Ultimate Fighter 18 back in 2013, and it took her almost five years of struggling to work her way to a shot at the belt--a shot she won, fittingly to this breakdown, by dominating Miesha Tate and sending her into torpor for half a decade--and promptly took the worst beating of her career, including the one and only stoppage loss of her ten-year, 19-fight UFC tenure. (Fun fact: She told her corner she was done after the fourth round and they very responsibly sent her out for the fifth, whereupon she got slugged in the face twenty more times. Corners: Please stop doing this.) But after a couple years of aimlessly wandering in the woods, Pennington is back in the top ten on the strength of a four-fight winning streak. She beat up Marion Reneau, she beat up Pannie Kianzad, she went up to 145 pounds on short notice to choke out a then-surging Macy Chiasson and she gave Aspen Ladd what would ultimately be her last UFC bout. While it had to span across two weight classes, Pennington's on the longest winning streak in the top fifteen of the division. She is, in fact, on one of the only winning streaks in the division. As of now, there are exactly five fighters in the top fifteen with more than one consecutive victory: All four of the non-Pennington win streaks are exactly two fights apiece. In a way, it makes the UFC's reticence to advertise the weight class understandable: If almost no one in the top ranks is succeeding and a credible #1 contender fight can be held between one woman with only razor-close decisions and one woman who got crushed by the champion already, can you blame the UFC for not going out of their way to invest in them? To that I say: BACK TO BACK MAIN EVENTER SEAN STRICKLAND. You advertise with what you've loving got. These are the women who climbed the ladder. Treat them accordingly and maybe when one of them gets a crack at the championship the audience will actually give a poo poo. Raquel Pennington by decision. BANTAMWEIGHT: Umar Nurmagomedov (15-0, #11) vs Raoni Barcelos (17-3, NR)I'm real high on both of these guys, but one of them is on his way up and the other is, in all likelihood, on his way out. Umar Nurmagomedov, cousin of Khabib, is yet another in the line of Dagestani juggernaut ultra-grapplers. His chosen cross-class specialization was Kicking, which makes sense; where most fighters are sensibly afraid of throwing out too many kicks lest they get taken down and punished, Umar is so thoroughly confident in his grappling advantage that he'll march across the octagon whipping kicks at every range, because opponents know shooting on him could easily be a very, very big mistake. It's a sign of just how high expectations are for him that his inability to finish Nate Maness in his last appearance was considered a surprise--and Maness was 14-1, and Umar beat him so badly one judge scored the fight 30-25. The world is intensely aware just how good Nurmagomedov is. And so is Raoni Barcelos. Barcelos joined the UFC with a lot of hype back in 2018, and his five-fight winning streak--including a victory over Said Nurmagomedov, maybe the only Nurmagomedov in America NOT related to Khabib--had a lot of analysts throwing their lots in with his ferociously paced, high-amplitude style seeing him all the way to title contention. But he was outfought by the criminally underrated Timur Valiev, and upset on short notice by the thoroughly tricky Victor Henry, and suddenly, the hype was gone. He won his last fight by putting a hellacious beating on Trevin Jones, but Jones was himself on the way out of the company and elbowing him in the head seven hundred times didn't do much to repair Barcelos in the eyes of the fans. It's hard not to see this as the UFC trying to rub the remaining bits of his credibility off on Umar. Barcelos is struggling and going on 36, his athleticism-first style is going to start hitting diminishing returns, and even in his signed prime five years ago an elite grappler like Umar would've been a tough matchup for him. He's got an avenue to victory here--he still throws some absolutely vicious fastballs over the top and Umar's occasionally careless kicks leave openings--but the betting odds are thoroughly lopsided here, and unfortunately, they should be. Umar Nurmagomedov by submission. PRELIMS: OF BETTING SCANDALS AND CONTRACTUAL OBLIGATIONS MIDDLEWEIGHT: Claudio Ribeiro (10-2) vs Abdul Razak Alhassan (11-5)The Contender Series must feed. Abdul Razak Alhassan was 2016's most exciting new divisional judo-boxer, but he settled fairly quickly into exciting-but-unfortunate gatekeeper status and would be winless in the last four and a half years were it not for the seventeen-second headkick knockout of Alessio Di Chirico that rescued his UFC tenure--one he followed by immediately losing to Joaquin Buckley who had himself just been headkicked to death by Di Chirico, thus closing the great Headkick Trilogy of 2021. Claudio Ribeiro is the latest wild-eyed talent to come through Dana White's minimum wage tollbooth, a champion out of Brazil's Future Fighting Championships, which sounds impressive until you realize FFC is a can-crushing organization and his championship victory was a four and a half round struggle with the 24-21 KELLES ALBUQUERQUE. Watching Ribeiro's C-league footage feels like a throwback to the early 2000s of MMA: Fully planted leg kicks, haymakers thrown one after another all the way from the lower hip, and absolutely no defense, ever. It works for him--but how much of that function comes from his power and speed, and how much comes from fighting the 2-0 Jhony Gregoris of the world, is hard to tell. This should be an eminently winnable fight for Alhassan. He still hits like a truck, he's still a very durable fighter, and he's still, at the core of his style, a talented judoka who could whip Ribeiro to the floor if he really needed to. But Ribeiro is taller, rangier, younger, and has the kind of confidence behind his striking that can only come from having not yet been knocked the gently caress out. I'm still picking Abdul Razak Alhassan by TKO based on how hilariously open Ribeiro's guard is, but if he does land one of those big sweeping 1930s Charlie Chaplin punches it'll get ugly fast. LIGHTWEIGHT: Mateusz Rębecki (16-1) vs Nick Fiore (6-0) Boy, there's a real contrast in these two lightweight prospects. In one corner: Mateusz Rębecki, one of the most exciting fighters to come out of the fight scene in Poland, where he held and defended a regional championship for five straight fights before coming over to the Contender Series. There's no secret in his game--he's a short, stocky, Sherkesque monster who presses forward behind big hammer-throw punches and aims to bowl people over with power wrestling, because on the ground he's so god damned strong that he won his UFC contract by finishing a rear naked choke without actually being in any way behind his opponent. Rębecki was slated to make his UFC debut against noted striker Omar Morales, but thanks to a last-minute injury he's matched up with the also-debuting Nick Fiore. who should, in theory, be more than willing to welcome this gameplan as a Renzo Gracie black belt in jiu-jitsu and an undefeated 6-0 Combat Zone champion with a very, very confident ground game. Here's the problem: He hasn't actually fought anyone. Fiore's only met two fighters with winning records, and one of them, George "Lights Out" Sheppard, is 15-14 and hasn't won a fight since 2014. 1/3 of Fiore's entire professional mixed martial arts career is a pair of bouts against the most notorious jobber in the sport, Jay Ellis, who as of this writing is 16-106 (and recently took up boxing, where he's 0-5). Fiore's grappling is as legitimate as his competition isn't, but two months ago he was doing battle with the 5-20 Stephen Stengel in the event room of a Doubletree and now he's stepping up on two weeks' notice to fight the best lightweight in Poland at a UFC. I admire the poo poo out of his gumption and self-belief and salute the two other fights he'll get out of this after Mateusz Rębecki wins by KO. BANTAMWEIGHT: Javid Basharat (13-0) vs Mateus Mendonça (10-0) I think we may finally have hit critical mass on Contender Series babies. Traditionally, the first step after a Contender Series win is a favorable matchup that lets the UFC's brand new investment shine. But Mateus Mendonça punched his ticket to the big show just four months ago, and rather than a striking-deficient grappler he could get a cool knockout against or a fellow brawler he could have a slugfest with, the UFC is making him debut against Javid "The Snow Leopard" Basharat, one of the most interesting bantamweight prospects in the company and, on paper, one of the worst possible matchups for Mendonça. Basharat's two wins deep into the UFC already, and both of those victories were over stronger, scarier strikers and brawlers. Mateus Mendonça may have knockout power, but he doesn't have Tony Gravely gently caress You knockout power. It just doesn't seem like there are any great avenues to victory for him. His ground game isn't visibly better than Basharat's and his striking style is wide open to the same stick-and-move tactics that form the center of Basharat's entire identity as a fighter. Javid Basharat by decision. FLYWEIGHT: Allan Nascimento (19-6) vs Carlos Hernandez (8-1) Allan "Puro Osso" Nascimento has had a difficult time in the big leagues. He ran up a 16-3 record on the regional scene but fell just shy of success in his international debut, dropping a split decision to Yuki Motoya in Rizin. Two years later he was on the Contender Series, but Dana sent him home when he dropped another split decision, this time to Raulian Paiva. The UFC finally picked him up in 2021--and he lost his debut by, yet again, a split decision, this time to Tagir Ulanbekov. Nascimento is an extremely solid grappler with some extremely creative sweeps, but his shaky control gets him in a lot of trouble with judges. Carlos Hernandez would be in exactly the same boat, but the great judging coinflip has come up on his side. His Contender Series matchup in 2021 was an exceptionally close affair that saw his shaky striking and takedown defense ruthlessly exploited by former BAMMA champion Daniel Barez, who almost knocked him out and submitted him on multiple occasions, but Hernandez hung on, outlasted him and made him pay just enough to come away with a split. His UFC debut last February came against Victor Altamirano, and was similarly close--close enough that media scorecards were divided right down the middle--but once again, the split went Carlos's way. I would like to think this will be a very good grappling match, but I'm deeply afraid it will instead become two good grapplers choosing to awkwardly kickbox for fifteen minutes. For sake of my soul, I am choosing to believe in Puro Osso. Nascimento's grappling seems just a touch more seasoned, and if this fight does hit the ground, his sweep game could give Carlos fits. Allan Nascimento by decision, but if it goes to a split, god help us all. FEATHERWEIGHT: Nick Aguirre (7-0) vs Daniel Argueta (8-1) The swings in this sport are wild. Seven months ago, Daniel Argueta was making his UFC debut as a late replacement against Damon Jackson in what wound up being a proxy war between their respective fight camps. Now Damon Jackson is in the co-main event on the precipice of establishing himself as one of the best fighters in the entire world, and Argueta is third from the bottom of the prelims facing his own short-notice UFC debut. "Slick" Nick Aguirre is yet another in the long line of promisingly undefeated fighters who have exclusively fought regional all-stars like 4-3 Brandon "The Hand Grenade" Clawson, 2-2 Tyler DeHaven and everyone's favorite, 3-3 Shawn "The Brutal Noodle" Johnson. In his fifth professional bout Aguirre was battling Thomas Deleon, proud owner of 0 professional or amateur fights. Like so many regional talents, it's nigh-unto impossible to place Aguirre's skills because no one he's fought has posed a UFC-level test. His bread-and-butter wrestling and grappling are present and effective, and he's got a decent double-leg drive. Is that enough to stop a guy Damon Jackson couldn't submit? I have doubts. This is a very big ask on a very short schedule, and it's tough to see it going any way but Daniel Argueta by decision. FLYWEIGHT: Charles Johnson (12-3) vs Jimmy Flick (16-5) This fight has seen Circumstances. Jimmy "The Brick" Flick is already a weird outlier, an LFA champion turned Contender Series winner who made his UFC debut in 2020, hit a submission-of-the-year candidate flying triangle choke on extremely tough Cody Durden, and shortly thereafter, retired. He said fighting wasn't profitable, there was no retirement plan, and he couldn't escape the reality that he was ruining his body and future for nothing. But then he got divorced, had a mid-life crisis at 31, and decided to come back so his kids could be proud of him. Charles "InnerG" Johnson was not supposed to be here today. Flick's original opponent was the highly-ranked Jeff Molina, whose 3-0 UFC record placed this fight firmly at the cusp of a top fifteen ranking--but unfortunately, Molina is one of the star students of Glory MMA, the formerly successful gym that's now blackballed from the sport thanks to grand poobah James Krause's internationally devastating betting scandal. Johnson is in to save the day, just two months after winning a robbery of a split decision over Zhalgas Zhumagulov so exceptionally bad it made Zhumagulov up and quit the sport entirely. So how do you really call this? It's Jimmy Flick, who hasn't had a fight in more than two years, getting a late opponent shift to Charles Johnson, a guy who should be 0-2 in the UFC but is inexplicably loved by judges. I'm going with Jimmy Flick by decision because Johnson's shown multiple problems with stronger, better grapplers, but it's very, very rare that a fighter retires from the sport and comes back looking better rather than worse. WOMEN'S FLYWEIGHT: Priscila Cachoeira (12-4) vs Sijara Eubanks (7-7) It's real, real hard to overcome a bad start. "Zombie Girl" Priscila Cachoeira is 4 for her last 5 in the UFC, including three vicious knockouts (and one decision she really shouldn't have won), but no one really remembers her for those--they remember her three straight UFC debut losses, including a wildly irresponsible debut against Valentina Shevchenko that saw her outstruck 230-3. It's very hard for an MMA career to redefine itself after something as dramatic as a fight where you got beat at a 76:1 ratio, but by god, Cachoeira and her frantic brawling refuse to give up. Sijara "Sarj" Eubanks, too, knows what it's like to refuse to give up when you maybe probably should. She came to prominence after making it to the final round of The Ultimate Fighter 26, and was the odds favorite to win the final and become the inaugural UFC Women's Flyweight Champion--until her kidneys shut down while cutting weight and she was hospitalized. The half-decade since hasn't been much kinder; between ten scratched fights and struggles with weight that have seen her repeatedly bouncing between 125 and 135 where the competition is much harder to wrestle into a fine paste, Eubanks is one of the exceedingly rare owners of a 50/50 record to still be in the UFC. She's also in the roughest slump of her career, having managed just one victory in her last four bouts (over a woman who now fights at 115 pounds) and, in her most recent appearance, suffering the first stoppage loss of her career after Melissa Gatto shut her off with a kick to the liver. It's very tempting to read this fight as a swan song for Eubanks given the state of her career, but she's still one of the most powerful wrestlers in the division, and every single opponent who's attempted to take Priscila Cachoeira down has, eventually, succeeded. All Sijara needs is one solid shot per round, and she'll be able to grind Cachoeira down. Sijara Eubanks by decision and this story goes on for at least one more fight.
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Jan 11, 2023 18:58
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Thanks, y'all. It is nice to be back.Trillhouse posted:gently caress sean strickland, tell me about your morrowind build. you playin OpenMW or natty? openMW, I love Morrowind and Daggerfall but openMW and DFU give me ways to play them where they never, ever crash and by god I will never look back ilmucche posted:This confused the hell out of me because my first thought was "Didn't I watch Razak Al-Hassan's arm explode like 15 years ago? Is he competing under a full name now or something"? This gave me fits for like a year after Abdul's debut. MassRafTer posted:Never been more proud to be a UFC fan. Dana knows that him being punished would hurt others so he is proving how selfless and caring he is by refusing to be punished. The whole press conference is a masterclass in successfully being just a huge piece of poo poo. He's simultaneously open about how unacceptable it is and how no one should defend him and it was wrong and terrible, but also, the fact that you're asking about it is enough and there's no point in him facing consequences of any kind because it'd just hurt the fighters. Just the best self-dividing brain patterns.
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Jan 11, 2023 21:57
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 james krause is...probably actually hosed
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Jan 13, 2023 00:34
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LobsterMobster posted:lol, lmao my writeup for that fight was originally just one sentence that read "this doesn't matter because statistically speaking sijara eubanks won't make it to the fight" and then i decided that was too disrespectful
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Jan 13, 2023 19:22
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For threadreaders, head on back to the GDT for UFC in half an hourish, dead air due to fight cancellations pending.
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Jan 14, 2023 21:37
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https://twitter.com/mmafightingsm/status/1614379795995045893 that was fast
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Jan 14, 2023 23:11
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imagine, for a moment, that you had a terrifying yet eminently likable 6'4" heavyweight kickboxer with appeal in multiple international markets and a virtual guarantee of producing at least one mainstream-adored highlight-reel knockout per year, and all you had to do was pay him not like a schmuck, and you decided that actually, instead, the promotionally responsible choice is to bet on Jon Jones
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Jan 15, 2023 04:23
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If Chatri is not currently on a conference call offering to sell his own family to whatever shadowy figures are bankrolling ONE to send the money truck to Ngannou's house, he is no promoter at all.
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Jan 15, 2023 04:45
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This is the current content of my notes for next month's news section i am begging january to stop
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Jan 15, 2023 04:51
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kimbo305 posted:Oh, I was on my phone and assumed it was a big jumbotron on the outside of the stadium, not a big physical banner. Remember: Ariel Helwani wasn't blackballed from the UFC for criticizing them or talking about fighter pay or having weird interviews, but for leaking Brock Lesnar vs Mark Hunt at UFC 200 before Dana had the pleasure of announcing it. It's entirely likely they pulled it because Dana wanted to have his attention moment.
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Jan 15, 2023 05:29
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Bluedeanie posted:Request the mods edit the thread to include the following poll: oh, I have plans for next month, trust me
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Jan 15, 2023 07:59
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The Dana White believers are massing about it, but there's this ostensibly reasonable and neutral position of "of course the UFC doesn't want their champion boxing and getting obliterated by Tyson Fury, that would ruin him and keep him off the shelf for a year," and it's like, we literally did this, Mayweather making Conor look like the world's biggest goober did absolutely nothing to him but brought new eyes onto the sport and made the UFC a big cut of millions of dollars, and they already made an interim champ and froze him for a year because it was vaguely more convenient to their interests
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Jan 15, 2023 21:44
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Well, Rizin is no longer the only player in the Cards Not Airing Internationally game https://twitter.com/NicoSCMP/status/1614888715859656704 Kind of cuts the WE'RE TAKING LUMPINEE GLOBAL thing off at the knees when your main card is barred from broadcast.
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Jan 16, 2023 10:28
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there's deep MMA lore revolving around shogun and dogs 
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Jan 17, 2023 09:15
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Shogun has stated multiple times this is his retirement from the sport. Whether that means he's actually retiring or he's going to go get paid $100,000 to fight Chackle Van Hess in the main event of BKFC 17: Fist My Mouth, I cannot say.
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Jan 17, 2023 22:08
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Yeah, there are a million things wrong and irresponsible about BKFC, but they do, at least, have VC money marks and/or laundering operations that are getting prominent* fighters good money, most ex-UFC people who made the leap say they're getting exponentially more than the UFC was paying them. *preliminary fighters are getting like $2500 a pop because we still live in hell
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Jan 17, 2023 23:29
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let's keep the train rolling CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 44: FILLING A BOTTOMLESS GLASS  JANUARY 21, 2023 FROM THE JEUNESSE ARENA IN RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL PRELIMS 3:00 PM PST/6:00 PM EST VIA ESPN+ | MAIN CARD 7 PM PST/10 PM EST VIA PAY PER VIEW Once upon a time, this card was main-evented by the epic ending to the unprecedented Figueiredo/Moreno quadrilogy, maybe the best series in flyweight history and an incredible achievement in the history of mixed martial arts itself. It was going to be the first flyweight main event the UFC has promoted in more than two years. But then Dana White realized he could supplant them with LARGE MEN, so now, two of the greatest flyweights ever settling one of the best rivalries in the sport's history is the co-main event, and the guy who got murdered by a fighter named "Bearjew" a year and a half ago is in the main event. No matter how much fun the card looks like it's going to be, MMA never stops being incredibly frustrating to follow. Welcome to UFC 283.  they've changed the bout order on me three times since i started writing this i swear to god MAIN EVENT: AND ALL THAT COULD HAVE BEEN LIGHT-HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP: Glover Teixeira (33-8, #2) vs Jamahal Hill (11-1 (1), #7)One of my favorite endless rambling habits is grossly oversimplifying the quality of divisions. Heavyweight: Always bad. Lightweight: Always good! Flyweight: Always underappreciated. Women's Featherweight: Always fake. The light-heavyweight division is mercurial. At times it is the UFC's premiere weight class, home to some of the best fighters and biggest fights in the sport, leading the charge of mixed martial arts into the mainstream on the shoulders of men like Chuck Liddell and Forrest Griffin, ripe with incredibly competitive matchups between evenly-talented wrecking machines. Sometimes it's one of the most laughable things in the sport; a nonsensical fiefdom with uneven bouts, inexplicable title contention, most of the rankings on losing streaks, the top fighters missing in action and legendary champions getting humiliated by middleweights. But that's what sets light-heavyweight apart. Every other division ebbs and flows. Good years, bad years. Good champions, bad champions. Light-heavyweight does not care for temporality. Light-heavyweight lives under the shadow of a Faustian curse that makes it impossible to ever count on. Light-heavyweight, in the space of less than a year, can go from good to great to terrible. At the beginning of 2022, even for an aging curmudgeon like me, light-heavyweight was reaching an interesting place. Glover Teixeira had defied the odds and upset Jan Błachowicz to become the second-oldest UFC champion in history, and that left the division with a number of dangling possibilties. Jan himself was still a viable #1 contender, having only the one loss in the last several years. Striking wildman Jiří Procházka had taken the UFC by storm and emerged as an exciting, unpredictable challenger. Aleksandar Rakić was a compelling, technically masterful and virtually undefeated #3, with the equally promising Magomed Ankalaev right on his heels. Even the lower end of the ranks held promise: Dominick Reyes had looked decent in his fight with Jiří, Paul Craig had four impressive wins in a row, fresh talent like Jamahal Hill was just entering the spotlight--even fan favorite and multiple-time title threat Alexander Gustafsson was coming out of retirement to test the field. There's a world where all of those things worked out and light-heavyweight is on the cusp of entering a golden age of competition. This is not that world. Alexander Gustafsson was knocked out in barely a minute. Jamahal Hill dragged rear end in a main event with Thiago Santos and was going 50/50 with him before barely managing to drop the soon-to-be-released ex-middleweight. Paul Craig's winning streak ended unceremoniously under a Molly McCann fight. Dominick Reyes came back looking as though he'd forgotten everything about fighting and was flatlined in ninety seconds. Aleksandar Rakić's leg exploded in the cage, putting him on the shelf indefinitely. But in the midst of all of that terrible misfortune, a miracle happened. Glover Teixeira and Jiří Procházka had one of the best fights in UFC history, a back-and-forth battle that saw them batter each other brutally for nearly five full rounds before Jiří, the striker, choked out Glover, the grappler, taking his title and handing him the first submission loss of his career. It wasn't just an incredible fight or an incredible moment, it was a much-needed shot in the arm for the UFC's favorite division. There was a new champion, there was a hotly-anticipated rematch, and there were dozens of new fights to book. And then in November Jiří Procházka relinquished the title thanks to a shoulder injury. And then the UFC refused to let Glover and Jan have a rematch. And then the UFC's attempt to fill the vacancy, a bout between top contenders Jan Błachowicz and Magomed Ankalaev, ended in a draw and produced no champion. At the beginning of 2022, the light-heavyweight division was a silly but exciting place with lots of interesting possibilities. At the beginning of 2023 there's no champion, almost everyone in the top five is either injured or already failed to fight for the title and almost everyone in the bottom five is coming off of a loss. There are literally only two people who can fight for the vacant world championship. And they're a 43 year-old man who's been planning to retire for the last two years and a guy whose career-defining victory came against a fighter who would be cut from the UFC a month later. Let me be clear: I loving love Glover Teixeira. He's one of my favorite fighters. He's an incredibly tough, ridiculously scrappy sledgehammer of a human being who is simultaneously terrifying and comical. His wide, winging punches and old-man single-leg takedowns that appear to travel in slow motion have been memes in the mixed martial arts community for an entire decade, at this point, but they've persisted because they work. He outwrestles superior wrestlers, he outgrapples more athletic grapplers, and we're only six months removed from seeing him repeatedly come inches from knocking out the most feared striker in the division. And it all comes down to his dogged determination to control the pace of a fight. Much is made of his crushing top game and his punching power, but the trait that serves him best is an unshakable persistence. Glover Teixeira wants to move forward. Every piece of success he has, be it dragging people to the ground to break their face or swinging hooks in the pocket, comes from trusting his guard and his chin to get him to his desired range. He's so god damned good at it that after twenty-one years of being fundamentally the same fighter, despite hundreds of hours of tape to study, only the very best of the best have been able to stop him. That's the question at the center of this fight. We know how good Glover Teixeira can be. Exactly how good is Jamahal Hill? Because his career has made it somewhat hard to tell. Hill won his way to the UFC through the Contender Series three years ago, and two fights in his career came to a screeching halt and he got the first blemish of his career thanks to a No-Contest for partaking in that most nefarious and underhanded of performance-enhancing drugs, marijuana. He was back to his legally winning ways half a year later, but his 2021 started with the first actual loss of his career when he became the grand prize winner on Paul Craig's Would You Kindly Get In My Guard Variety Show and had his arm brutally snapped, earning him months of rehab and a trip back down the ladder. And he's recovered from that--kind of, sort of. He's on a three-fight knockout streak, but those knockouts were over #13 Jimmy Crute coming off almost a year's rehab for a leg injury, #10 Johnny Walker during the worst, 1 for his last 5 slump of his career, and #6 Thiago Santos, inexplicably ranked in the top ten despite also being 1 for his last 5 with his one win ALSO being against Johnny Walker, and a month later, Santos would be cut from the UFC entirely. The best indication of exactly how much the UFC believed in Jamahal Hill's title prospects is the fact that, before Jan vs Ankalaev blew up in their faces, Hill was scheduled to fight Anthony Smith for the #6 spot. Anthony Smith, who is ranked above Hill and perfectly healthy, found out he was no longer fighting while on-air as a UFC anchorman, because being a company man is for suckers. The theory of this bout is not subtle. Jamahal Hill is a big, booming striker with 79" arms and one-shot knockout power who came from Dana White's pet project of a contract farm. Glover Teixeira is 43, likes takedowns, and is barely a month removed from UFC management attempting to strongarm him because they don't think he's marketable. Thanks to bad luck and the UFC's own promotional inadequacy there's a gaping hole in the light-heavyweight rankings and an exceedingly rare chance to catapult a chosen favorite right onto the throne. Glover's been knocked silly by bigger, stronger, rangier strikers before, and the UFC is banking on the very clear likelihood that Hill could do it to him again. But we're one fight removed from watching Jamahal Hill struggle with the pressure game of Thiago Santos. Thiago Santos, lifelong kickboxer, took Jamahal Hill down six times. Thiago Santos had fourteen successful takedowns in twenty-four UFC fights: Just shy of half of them were scored against Jamahal Hill four and a half months ago. Glover is a better pressure fighter, a better wrestler, and a much better grappler, and he is, if anything, even more headstrong and forward-focused than Santos ever was. There are two avenues to victory for Hill here. In one, he lamps Glover on his way in and none of this matters. In the other, he follows the Jiří Procházka gameplan, survives until Glover is winded, and feasts on his corpse. But he's got to keep Glover from getting on top of him and punching his teeth out first, and by god, I believe in the old man too much to not want to see it happen. Glover Teixeira by submission. CO-MAIN EVENT: IT'S BEEN A LONG ROAD, GETTIN' FROM THERE TO HERE FLYWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP UNIFICATION: Deiveson Figueiredo (21-2-1, Champion) vs Brandon Moreno (20-6-2, Interim Champion)It is a testament to the UFC's exceedingly iffy matchmaking that we're here having this final fight in a quadrilogy between these two, and it is a testament to the incredible talents of both fighters that the notoriously prickly MMA fanbase (hi!), faced with the prospect of seeing this fight for the fourth time in 25 months, is primarily responding with a "y'know what? Sure. That's fine." And the biggest part of that--promotional malfeasance aside--is the ever-evolving story of the two fighters and the way they keep growing and adjusting to one another. Figueiredo vs Moreno III was one of the first bouts I covered, all the way back in episode loving 2, and at the time I was very conceptually upset and bored by it, and this was my conclusion: CarlCX posted:Is the UFC right to make this faux-rubber match? Is Deiveson Figueiredo going to get his belt back? Boy, what a thoroughly incorrect take that wound up being. I do still feel prickly about the instant trilogy match when the record of said trilogy was 0-1-1 and one of its participants was beaten and finished just one fight prior, but the fight justified its existence by displaying Figueiredo's ability to learn and adjust as well as Moreno had. Where Brandon Moreno turned their first rematch on its head by timing Figueiredo's blitzing charges and catching them with power jabs and clinch takedowns, Figueiredo took the second rematch by focusing on controlling the distance and using heavy leg kicks to force Moreno to come forward, where Figueiredo could snipe him with his back hand. And that's why, unlike the last time I wrote about these two, I can't really be mad. Yes, this series is still a bit of an indictment on the UFC's persistent lack of giving a gently caress about the flyweight division, and yes, Alexandre Pantoja really should have had a title fight by now, but for one, they did try to capitalize on the rise of City Kickboxing's big-punching little man Kai Kara-France and it's not their fault Brandon Moreno exploded his abdomen with a liver kick, and for two, this series has taken the two men who were already the best flyweight fighters in the world and visibly, demonstrably made them better, smarter, more dangerous competitors, and being able to watch that process unfold on a fight-by-fight basis has been fascinating. But as much as we all like to keep feeling fascination, this story needs to end. The division has held on with bated breath for two years, the series is 1-1-1, and one way or another, it will end today*. Who's going to win? Truthfully, I have no loving idea, and that's why the rematches have stayed vital. Figueiredo would almost certainly have won their first fight if he hadn't kicked Moreno in the junk. Moreno dominated and thrashed him immediately thereafter. Figueiredo responded by winning an extremely close decision. If you told me Moreno was going to come into this fight expertly navigating distance and chopping FIgueiredo down with kicks, I'd believe you. If you told me this fight was going to be a repeat of the last match and Figueiredo would once again edge Moreno out with power strikes, I would believe you. If you told me Brandon Moreno has been simulating the fight thousands of times over in his LEGO room and has figured out the precise way to do a Psycho Crusher in real life and will send Deiveson Figueiredo to King Kai's planet, I would still find that difficult to fully rule out. It's been three fights. We've already seen dozens of permutations of these two men finding ways to gain the advantage on each other. Anyone who purports to have the answer as to who will do better is lying, be it to you or themselves. At the end of the day this just comes down to who, after three fights, you believe in more. And I believe in Brandon Moreno. Deiveson Figueiredo's proven he's the harder striker and the bigger standup threat, but Moreno's adjustments have impressed me more and I think he'll cut through his gameplan one last time. If I were going to do it, I would be trying to exploit the ground game all over again. But I think these two know each other too well for a stoppage, at this point. Brandon Moreno by decision, and then may everyone take an extremely well-deserved bow and a vacation and never fight one another again. *If this fight ends in a draw or a no contest I will a) scream, b) run through the streets in a rage, and c) cover the slap fighting event. MAIN CARD: GET IN MY GUARD WELTERWEIGHT: Gilbert Burns (20-5, #5) vs Neil Magny (27-9, #12)There are cyclical conversations that come up for each generation of mixed martial arts; GOAT, best champ, biggest upset, etc. One of my favorites has always been "Who's the best fighter to never win a world championship?" It's easy to forget about everyone under the belt--especially in the modern age when multiple interim titles pop up every single year--but some of the best fighters in the sport just never quite mantle the mountain. Joseph Benavidez, Kenny Florian, Yoel Romero, Matt Lindland, Cat Zingano: Mixed martial arts is writ large with incredibly talented fighters who couldn't get past the absolute best of their generation. Gilbert Burns and Neil Magny are on a trajectory to become two of this generation's answers to the question. And they'd really, really like to change that. Gilbert Burns is one of the best case studies in how easily weight cutting can be detrimental. When he joined the UFC back in 2014 it was as a lightweight, and he was by no means unsuccessful, running up an 8-3 record at the weight class, but those three losses were the kind of one-sided drubbings that forcibly ensconce a fighter as well out of contendership, and when Dan Hooker knocked him out in half a round, it was clear something had to change. And a year later he was dropping people like loving rocks at welterweight. Turns out: When you're one of the world's best grapplers, you have no fear of the ground and you no longer have to cut weight, you can hit people really, really hard. At 155 pounds Gilbert was getting bullied by 5'6" people; at 170 pounds he dropped Kamaru Usman and Khamzat Chimaev. The differences between the two versions of the man are stark--but for how much closer he's gotten to the top, he still hasn't been able to crack it. After a round and a half of hell Usman controlled and ultimately finished him, and after a back-and-forth war, Khamzat outbrawled him. Burns is unquestionably one of the division's elite, but he's also staring down the back side of his thirties and finding himself frozen out of the championship picture. Neil Magny is in considerably more distressing straits. If Burns is fighting to break out of being an almost-champion, Magny is fighting to break out of being a gatekeeper. At one point in his career Magny was 12-3 in the UFC with victories over former champions like Johny Hendricks and future top contenders like Kelvin Gastelum, and everyone was sure with just a few small adjustments he was assured a future championship. And then Rafael dos Anjos moved up from lightweight and trounced him, and Santiago Ponzinibbio knocked him out, and Michael Chiesa pretzeled him for five rounds. Very few fighters have displayed ceilings as clear and pronounced as Magny's. He's capable of making great fighters look terrible, but he's just as capable of falling victim to the pressure himself. Never was this more clear than his outing last June against up-and-coming phenom Shavkat Rakhmonov, who seemingly effortlessly outstruck him, outwrestled him, and choked him out in just two rounds, marking the end of yet another Neil Magny comeback bid. Which begs the question: How many times can a fighter get knocked back down the ladder before the bottom of the ladder becomes their home? On paper, this is an eminently winnable fight for Neil Magny. He's half a foot taller, he's got a ridiculous 9" reach advantage, his cardio advantage is endless and he should be able to stick, move, and use his leverage to clinch and escape when Burns closes in. In practice, this is a terrible fight for Neil Magny. Gilbert Burns is an aggressive striker with rip-your-head-off power punches and absolutely no problem with Neil Magny's wrestling. Khamzat Chimaev, maybe the most aggressively talented grappler in the division, spent thirty seconds in Burns' guard before getting out and refusing to engage him in grappling again for fear of having his arms broken. Gilbert Burns by submission. Sorry, Neil. WOMEN'S FLYWEIGHT: Lauren Murphy (16-5, #4) vs Jéssica Andrade (23-9, #6)Lauren Murphy is, in a lot of ways, one of my ideal fighters. There are people with better technique and more rounded skillsets, but that does not matter. Lauren Murphy does not want to engage you in a brilliant, tactical battle. She wants to march forward and 1-2 you in the god damned face, and if you get too comfortable with that, she'll drop down for a single-leg so she can 1-2 you in the god damned face on the god damned floor. That's it. For almost thirteen years, that has been the Lauren Murphy gameplan. And it works. Since dropping to Women's Flyweight Murphy is 7-2, and those losses were against pre-crisis wrestler extraordinaire Sijara Eubanks and eternal champion Valentina Shevchenko, the only person to ever actually stop her. The last time we saw Lauren Murphy the UFC had made beautiful plans surrounding catapulting Miesha Tate to title contention by having her beat Murphy, but lo, the 1-2s came and left nothing but destruction in their wake. But she's getting Jéssica loving Andrade. If Lauren Murphy wants to walk 1-2s into you until the bell rings, Jéssica Andrade wants to lift your entire body into the sky and hurtle it into an active volcano. Karolina Kowalkiewicz had never been knocked out before; Jéssica Andrade turned her lights out in two minutes. Katlyn Chookagian, most of a foot taller, had barely even been bothered by the striking of her opponents; Jéssica Andrade punched a hole in her chest and took her out in one round. Rose Namajunas was a never-knocked-out world champion at the top of her game; Jéssica Andrade took her record and her title away by powerbombing her in real life. Since leaving Women's Bantamweight behind--a deeply silly weight class for a 5'1" fighter in the first place--Andrade has only been defeated by world champions. The truly frustrating part of being an Andrade fan isn't her fighting, it's her unwillingness to stick to a weight class. Two fights ago she dropped Cynthia Calvillo at Flyweight, last April she easily destroyed current top Strawweight contender Amanda Lemos, and instead of following up on that seemingly vulnerable title picture, she's back at Flyweight again. Will she win? Sure, probably! Jéssica Andrade by TKO after she rips Murphy's spine out like Sub-Zero. But after how hard she was trounced by Valentina Shevchenko less than two years ago I would really, really like to see Andrade re-dedicate herself to the 115-pound class. There's gold waiting for her. LIGHT-HEAVYWEIGHT: Paul Craig (16-5-1, #9) vs Johnny Walker (19-7, #12)That's right: It's an all-pissometer main card. But it's not because this fight is going to be good: It's because of the likelihood that it will be really, really funny. I've noted before that I struggle with certain aspects of critiquing fighters. Paul Craig makes it very easy on me, because statistically, his fights operate on a very simple binary: Is his opponent smart enough not to jump into his guard. Craig is 8-5-1 in the UFC, and with exactly two exceptions, every one of those eight victories happened because by hook or by crook Paul Craig wound up on his back, and his opponent was silly enough to try punching him. And no one is safe from this. Paul Craig has defeated half of each of the last two championship fights at light-heavyweight, Magomed Ankalaev and Jamahal Hill, simply because they decided to get on top of him on the ground whereupon he hosed up their whole lives with his submission offense. He lost his last fight against Volkan Oezdemir because Volkan was disciplined enough to simply get up and walk away every time he heard the siren song of the ground game. Johnny Walker is many things. He's an incredibly powerful striker who moves much faster than a 6'6" man should be able to. He's one of the most compelling derailed hype trains in the UFC, having run up three straight knockouts in less than three total minutes before getting punched out by career wrestler Corey Anderson. Near the end of 2019, people were theorycrafting ways Walker might well be the man to dethrone Jon Jones; at the outset of 2023 he's 2 for his last 6 and those 2 were the absolute fringe of the top fifteen. He can knock out anyone in the sport on any given day, be it with sweeping punches or hook kicks or flying knees, but he's also been gunshy ever since the Anderson fight, and it's cost him repeatedly. He's unquestionably a better, stronger, more dangerous striker than Paul Craig. He could knock him out easily. But that's not the question. The question is: Is Johnny Walker smart enough to not follow Paul Craig to the ground and get his poo poo broke? To which I say: He dislocated his shoulder during a post-fight celebration because he did The Worm too hard. Paul Craig by submission. PRELIMS: PRIDE NEVER DIE LIGHT-HEAVYWEIGHT: Maurício Rua (27-13-1) vs Ihor Potieria (18-3) Ihor Potieria by TKO. He's a big, scary blitzer and I don't think Rua will be able to take it. With that out of the way, let's talk about what really matters, because we're going long today. Maurício "Shogun" Rua is a legend of the goddamn sport. This is his retirement match, just over twenty years after his professional debut, and if you're a UFC fan who wasn't around for Japan's Pride Fighting Championships era you never got to see what made him really, truly special--and that's saying something, because he won the UFC championship. Back in the early 2000s there were two canonical megacamps in mixed martial arts: America's Miletich Fighting Systems, which was in the middle of turning out future hall of famers like Jens Pulver, Matt Hughes, Robbie Lawler and Tim Sylvia, and Brazil's Chute Boxe, which was fielding international superstars like Wanderlei Silva, Anderson Silva, Luiz Azeredo and Murilo "Ninja" Rua. Wanderlei may have been the top dog of the academy, but Ninja was a fan favorite unto himself, between the flying knees, aggressive hooks and insistence on fighting people who should've been multiple weight classes above him. He was beloved, but he only ever achieved mixed success. And he told all of his fans that if they liked him, they needed to wait until they got a chance to see his kid brother. Maurício--nicknamed Shogun supposedly because of his preferred brand of gi--made his Pride debut in 2003 and was a star almost instantaneously. Where Ninja struggled with his competition, Shogun ate them alive. It wasn't simply that he virtually always won, but that he won in a fashion so devastating his opponents seemed hopelessly outmatched. Quinton "Rampage" Jackson was one of Pride's scariest middleweights, a wrecking ball of a human being who'd destroyed everyone not named Wanderlei Silva and had even won Pride's single cross-promotion with the UFC by knocking out their top star Chuck Liddell: Shogun crushed him in five minutes, throwing jumping switch kicks and soccer kicks the whole way through. By the time the UFC acquired a dying Pride in 2007 Shogun was 12-1 in the company and its 2005 Middleweight Grand Prix champion, his sole loss having come from dislocating his own arm defending a takedown, and as the consensus #1 light-heavyweight outside the UFC, the world was on pins and needles waiting to see the long-awaited showdown between Shogun and the UFC's once-again champion and star, Chuck Liddell. They'd have to wait two more years. In May Chuck Liddell was unseated by old rival Quinton Jackson, and in September, Shogun made his UFC debut as a massive favorite against the struggling Ultimate Fighter 1 winner Forrest Griffin--and in one of the biggest upsets in mixed martial arts history, Griffin outfought, outlasted and outgrappled the best light-heavyweight in the world, choking him out with just fifteen seconds left in the bout. Shogun looked deeply diminished in the UFC. Theories abounded as to why: The hard schedule he'd had in Japan, the possibility that the UFC actually had the higher level of competition all along, the incredibly tough training style of Chute Boxe and how it prematurely aged fighters, and while Shogun has never failed a drug test in two decades of the sport, the UFC's industry standard drug testing as opposed to Pride openly encouraging fighters to take steroids didn't help. But Shogun knew he needed a change, and after the Griffin fight he made the difficult decision to leave Chute Boxe behind and open his own camp. Within two fights, Shogun had avenged his injury loss to Mark Coleman, destroyed an unfortunately aging and washed Chuck Liddell, and punched his ticket to a UFC championship match against Lyoto Machida--and after losing one of the more controversial decisions of the year, in a Dana White-ordered instant rematch, Shogun looked like the Shogun of the Pride days, knocking out the legendarily undefeated and nigh-unto untouchable Machida in just one round. After three years of waiting, the Pride fans had been rewarded for keeping the faith: The best light-heavyweight in Pride was finally, unquestionably, the best light-heavyweight in the world. And then, one fight later, Jon Jones effortlessly destroyed him and Shogun's days in the sun were over. He kept fighting--we're talking about his retirement match now, obviously--but he was never truly relevant again. He could still be a scintillating fighter to watch, and at one point had a pair of fight-of-the-year candidates against Dan Henderson, and that was the pigeonhole he found himself in, having good, impressive fights with fellow fading legends and occasionally disposing of the unranked Gian Villantes of the world, but getting dominated and finished by anyone currently relevant. In the twelve years between his loss to Jones and this retirement fight, Shogun owns exactly one win over ranked competition, and it's a poor hometown decision over Corey Anderson. Like so many before him and so many that will inevitably come after, Shogun should have stopped a long time ago. But before the aging career, before he was getting choked out by Chael Sonnen and appearing in internet memes where he was knocked out by flying skateboards, Shogun was a legend, and that record still very easily stands as one of the best in the sport's history. Before Jon Jones, Shogun was 19-4 with victories over nine world champions, and he did it before his thirtieth birthday. His career, even now, is an incredible achievement, and his retirement closes the book on one of the most incredible runs in the sport, and if he pops up in the Bareknuckle Fighting Championship in six months I will wail and gnash my teeth and begrudgingly watch it anyway. Because he's loving Shogun, and always will be. One last time: Pride never die. MIDDLEWEIGHT: Gregory Rodrigues (13-4) vs Brunno Ferreira (9-0) Poor Robocop. Gregory "Robocop" Rodrigues has built a reputation as a must-see fighter that far outstrips his mere year and a half in the UFC, but when you are so dedicated to the art of mercilessly walking opponents down and battering them insensible that you do it even when you're so busted up that your supratrochlear artery is sticking out of the gaping hole between your eyes, people take notice. This was supposed to be Rodrigues' shot at the bigtime, as he was slated to fight his first opponent with any name value in Brad Tavares, but Tavares pulled out just ten days before fight night. It is very, very hard to find fighters willing to take on as scary an opponent as Gregory Rodrigues on short notice, and it's damned near impossible to find anyone remotely close to a ranking. And that's when you import. The irritatingly alliterative Brunno Ferreira is the undefeated middleweight champion of Brazil's BIG SHOT MMA, and he won his UFC contract this past September with a violent first-round knockout, but his bread and butter, believe it or not, is wrestling. Ferreira is the rarest of breeds: A Brazilian Wrestleboxer. He'll brawl, he'll punch, he'll brawl and punch and punch, but he leads with his head and gets stung often for it, and he knows it, because what he really wants to do is scoop people up with single-legs, dump them on their backs, and punch them until candy comes out. And it's worked very well for him so far! It will not work very well for him here. Rodrigues is not only a much bigger, stronger man, he's a talented judoka who has yet to give up a single takedown in the UFC. Ferreira's going to start getting hit in the head very quickly, and he's going to shoot, and when he can't get the takedown he's going to get very tired very fast. Gregory Rodrigues by TKO. LIGHTWEIGHT: Thiago Moisés (16-6) vs Melquizael Costa (19-5)It's typically easy to overlook last-minute replacements, but this has secret banger potential. Guram Kutateladze was supposed to meet Thiago Moisés for a fringe-top-15 contest, but had to pull out thanks to a staph infection, and on a week and a half's notice, Melquizael Costa stepped up from the minor leagues. Which is impressive, because Thiago Moisés is serious business. He's struggled repeatedly with breaking into the rankings, but his combination of quick kicks and aggressive jiu-jitsu have kept him right on the cusp of getting a number by his name for more than four straight years. But Melquizael "Melk" Costa is no push-over. He's also an inspiring story about the power of both martial arts and nerd poo poo: Having faced ostracization since childhood thanks to his vitiligo, it wasn't until he picked up UFC Undisputed 3 for his Playstation 3 and learned about UFC bantamweight star Scott Jorgensen, who himself had vitiligo, that Melk's future clicked into place. Two years later Melk had his first professional fight, and nine years later he was Predador FC's featherweight champion, a Legacy Fighting Alliance main-eventer, and a bright dot on the radar of the UFC's talent scouts. Melk may be a relative unknown to the mainstream, but this is by no means a safe fight for Moisés. Costa's fast and tricky, he's got a very quick scrambling game and he manages to fit overhands and head kicks into very tight, unexpected spaces. Moisés should have a grappling advantage if he can get Melk on the floor, but that's by no means an easy task. In fact: Screw it, I've talked myself into the upset. Melquizael Costa by decision. WELTERWEIGHT: Gabriel Bonfim (13-0) vs Mounir Lazzez (11-2) It's striker vs grappler time, baby. Gabriel Bonfim is yet another in the endless line of shiny new Contender Series toys, an undefeated grappler out of Brazil whose record was of the distressing 'regional competition that's nigh-impossible to regard' variety up until he joined the Legacy Fighting Alliance a year and a half ago and was, within two fights, its welterweight champion. He's part of the breed of fighter that uses a total lack of fear of grappling as an excuse to wing wild punches, but as his ten submissions to three knockouts shows, they're a lot less effective than his chokes. And he knows it, because he pursues said chokes as hard as he can, and in one fight dragged a man to the ground by his neck to submit him. But he likes to get himself hit in the head a lot, and that's a real problem against Mounir "The Sniper" Lazzez. Lazzez is even more of a specialist than Bonfim, but in the opposite discipline: He's a championship kickboxer, all nine stoppage victories of his career have come through his strikes, and in his 2-1 UFC career he's outstruck Abdul Razak Alhassan and Ange Loosa, which is no small feat. Lazzez's combinations are quick and fluid, but maybe his best trait as a striker is his ability to snap headkicks into an opponent's face seemingly out of nowhere. That said, we've seen his style cost him: Warlley Alves looked at his striking advantages and technical know-how, replied "okay, but" and proceeded to just spam liver kicks into his side until he broke and fell over, which, y'know, is an approach. This fight is a pretty binary question of Can Gabriel Bonfim Get Him Down. Bonfim's got furious punches but they're not particularly clean or powerful, he just throws enough of them that some get through, and once opponents are hurt or at least flustered he virtually always finishes them on the ground. If he can get inside on Lazzez and drag him to the floor, he has a great chance. But his overaggression has gotten him hit on the way in by vastly inferior strikers, and this step up in competition is a big, big ask, and I'm choosing to be cynical. Mounir Lazzez by TKO. EARLY PRELIMS: PRINCESS NOTHING HEAVYWEIGHT: Shamil Abdurakhimov (20-7, #15) vs Jailton Almeida (17-2, NR) The time has come to test a new heavyweight prospect. Shamil Abdurakhimov has been hanging around the UFC for almost eight years, at this point, and up until mid-2019 he was a promising top ten heavyweight, a solidly mixed brawler and wrestler with power in his hands and feet, smart enough to wrestle Derrick Lewis, tough enough to last four rounds before getting blasted into unconsciousness. But the dawn of a new decade brought ruin. Shamil was suddenly plagued with career issues--injuries, visa problems, the outbreak of COVID--and that, his age and the rising tide of the division's top ten sunk him. Shamil's managed only three fights in almost four years, he was knocked out in all three of them, and he's suddenly in his forties and watching his prime disappear in the rear view mirror. And nothing excites a promotion like the chance to cannibalize an aging standard. Jailton Almeida is one of the UFC's favorite Contender Series pickups: An aggressive, 6'3" grappler who's competed in three weight divisions, from 185 to 220 pounds, and gleefully jumps between heavyweight and light-heavyweight submitting people wherever the UFC pays him to go. They've been TRYING to get him prominent fights--he was supposed to fight highly-touted wrestler Maxim Grishin on two separate occasions and this is actually the third attempt at booking tonight's Abdurakhimov match-up--but he's settled for quickly disposing of thoroughly overmatched replacements, making this arguably the first true test of his UFC tenure, a bout against a strong, experienced heavyweight who hasn't been submitted in eleven years. Having said all of that: He's a +625 underdog. Shamil Abdurakhimov's on a three-fight losing streak, and while there's no shame in getting pounded out by Curtis Blaydes or knocked out by Sergei Pavlovich, there's a little shame in losing a 10-8 round to Chris Daukaus. Jailton Almeida by submission. This should be the coming-out party the UFC's been hoping for. BANTAMWEIGHT: Luan Lacerda (12-1) vs Cody Stamann (20-5-1) You know, I've become so thoroughly haunted by the Contender Series that it makes me legitimately happy when a new fighter comes up who is neither a Contender Series baby nor a last-minute substitution, just a good, old-fashioned talent scouting. Luan Lacerda is a BJJ black belt out of Brazil's immortal supercamp Nova União, and he has some of the smartest, nastiest leglock sweeps I've seen in mixed martial arts. The man will give up bottom position, snag an ankle and have teleported behind his opponent and into a choke seconds later. This is potential bad news for Cody "The Spartan" Stamann, a man I wholly and freely admit a bias against on grounds that he saw 300 as a teenager and now he has a Molon Labe tattoo and a drastic misunderstanding of a society of pederast slavers who practiced ritual infanticide. Primarily, though, he's a wrestleboxer with a strong dependence on takedowns to implement his gameplans, and Said Nurmagomedov just demonstrated the potential dangers of doing this. Luan Lacerda by submission. LIGHTWEIGHT: Ismael Bonfim (18-3) vs Terrance McKinney (13-4) Brothers fighting on cards together rarely ends well. Ismael got his UFC contract on the same Contender Series episode as his above-mentioned brother Gabriel, but where Gabriel is a grappling specialist, Ismael is an all-around fighter who likes prolonged striking engagements. Unusually for mixed martial arts, he also heavily favors the shoulder roll for his boxing defense rather than the high guard or the general MMA defense known as 'running away.' But the UFC has given him a big loving ask for his debut: Terrance McKinney is a wrecking ball of a fighter, a tall, rangy lightweight with massive power in his hands and solid backup wrestling. McKinney would already be in the top fifteen conversation were it not for a wild if lamentable brawl that saw McKinney nearly knock out the legendarily tough Drew Dober twice before getting tired, getting wild, and getting caught. I'm very interested in Ismael's future in the UFC. He's a talented fighter and anyone ambitious enough to dip into tight, risky countering techniques in MMA is a fighter to watch. It's almost certainly going to catch him against a jump in competition this big and this abrupt. Terrance McKinney by TKO. WELTERWEIGHT: Warlley Alves (14-5) vs Nicolas Dalby (20-4-1 (2))This is the battle of the Men who Could Have Been. Warlley Alves is one of the great near-misses of the sport: Champion of The Ultimate Fighter Brazil 3, choker of Colby Covington before making Colby Covington look stupid was cool, the calibre of fighter who went the distance with Kamaru Usman, kicked Mounir Lazzez in half and punched Sultan Aliev straight out of the sport. But with all of those accomplishments, he hasn't been able to string back to back victories together since 2018. He has every necessary skill to be a contender, but like so many before him, he often falters under pressure. Nicolas Dalby is in the middle of his second swing at mattering. He joined the UFC in 2015, immediately upset Elizeu Zaleski dos Santos and went to a draw with the thoroughly hyped Darren Till, then faded away after two unranked losses. Three years of toil in the UK fight scene brought him back to the fold, but the Dalby of his late thirties is simultaneously a more dangerous and less consistent fighter, working behind more kicks than his old brawling style but also consistently giving up grappling positions in his haste to attack. But that doesn't make this any less of a coinflip. Both of these men are violent brawlers, both men have entire back catalogues of techniques they tend to ignore completely in favor of throwing caution to the wind and attacking, and both men are very difficult to finish. I'm ultimately falling on the side of Warlley Alves by decision but this is one of those fights where anything could, and possibly will, happen. WOMEN'S FEATHERWEIGHT: Josiane Nunes (9-1, #15 at Women's Bantamweight) vs Zarah Fairn dos Santos (6-4, Featherweight Doesn't Have Rankings) Hey, guess what, folks, it's time for another episode of Women's Rankings Are Insane. In one corner we have Josiane Nunes, who has exactly two bouts in the UFC: A 2021 bout at bantamweight against "Bad News Barbie" Bea Malecki and a 2022 featherweight tilt against Ramona Pascual. Malecki was 2-0 in the UFC, has not fought since, and had to start a gofundme because her pay was so low that she couldn't afford to keep training. On the back of this win, Nunes is ranked as the 15th best women's bantamweight in the world, despite having not competed at the weight class in years. Zarah Fairn is 0-2 in the UFC, with both fights having taken place at featherweight and both having ended in fairly effortless first-round stoppage losses. This makes her the #4 women's featherweight in the UFC, because there are exactly four women's featherweights in the UFC. Earlier in this writeup I said 5'1" was a silly height to fight at Women's Bantamweight. Josiane Nunes, at 5'2", fights one weight class higher than that and has actually competed even further up at 155 pounds. She is undefeated at both and her only career loss came to Taila Santos, who competes at 125 pounds. Zarah Fairn is the only fighter in this contest who has consistently stuck to the 145-pound featherweight class, and she has been rewarded with visible failure and, after this fight where Josiane Nunes is almost certainly going to tear her arms off and hit her with them, will probably be cut. The winner of this fight between a 1-0 featherweight and an 0-2 featherweight will determine the #2 featherweight, because the winner will be better than half the division. Mixed martial arts is cruel. Women's weight classes are basically suggestions and I hate it. Josiane Nunes by TKO. BANTAMWEIGHT: Saimon Oliveira (18-4) vs Daniel Marcos (13-0)Remember a few fights ago when I pitched a little nerd fit about people whose understanding of ancient Greek culture comes from the mind of Frank Miller during the days just before he began actively freebasing uncut racism? Daniel Marcos was the last bantamweight champion of a Peruvian mixed martial arts organization named 300 SPARTA. He was so heartbroken when it ceased operation that he didn't take a fight for three years, and only re-emerged on the Contender Series again this past September. Saimon Oliveira was a standout of much less coolly-named companies like Fight Club Slam, Sicario, Mack The Knife MMA (why yes, that WAS centrally involved in the Kinahan Cartel, why do you ask) and Pancrase, whatever the gently caress that is. I'm looking forward to this not in the sense that it will necessarily be a good fight, but in the sense that it will be the right kind of really, hilariously sloppy. Both fighters like to drive recklessly forward behind wild-eyed striking, with Marcos favoring looping punches and Oliveira liking flying knees and kicks, but Oliveira's grappling is considerably tighter once the ground gets involved. And I still haven't forgiven 300 SPARTA for being a much funnier version of my joke. Saimon Oliveira by decision.
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Jan 19, 2023 00:47
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Okay, sure, the slap fighting league is a huge boondoggle from both an ethics and quality standpoint, but the internet tells me Dana White is a great businessman and I'm sure he knows what he's doi
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Jan 20, 2023 01:37
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Foul Fowl posted:i don't understand who power slapping is for.  It's literally just him. Think about it this way: Dana White's favorite things are human suffering, controlling people, conspicuous consumption and telling critics they're wrong and stupid. Slap fighting gives him maximum human suffering with none of the time-consuming chaff of legitimacy or martial arts, slap fighters have even less opportunities than mixed martial artists and thus won't put up even the small token resistance UFC fighters do, the entire thing lets him blow millions of dollars of WME-derived money on dumb bullshit with his name all over it instead of the UFC's, and literally no one else likes slap fighting so he has an endless font of people to tell that they're wrong and he's right. Vince McMahon blew millions of dollars trying to launch the World Bodybuilding Federation because his personal fetish for his own brilliance and muscle striations was so great they convinced him the world just didn't realize how great it was. This is Dana's WBF. It's a product designed for one man.
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Jan 20, 2023 18:37
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Marching Powder posted:finally watched that white power slap festival and if you find that poo poo entertaining than gently caress you I wish thread title fields were longer.
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Jan 21, 2023 06:45
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The statements "MMA causes concussions and that's bad" and "slap fighting is garbage and it's rational to feel worse about it" are neither mutually exclusive nor even remotely hypocritical in concert with one another, and it's weird to cite the number of people participating in combat sports vs slap fighting as a balancing factor when half the reason people are disgusted by slap fighting is the astroturfed attempt to push it into the mainstream and make it more popular.blue footed boobie posted:You shouldn’t confuse the virtue signaling itt for genuine feelings people will act on. Also, I think the concept of critiquing "virtue signaling" is already inherently silly but it feels real, real weird to accuse people of it re: being grossed out by slap fighting, which is objectively gross.
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Jan 21, 2023 21:07
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blue footed boobie posted:I think you’re confusing complaining about virtue signaling with actually thinking something is okay. This thread has a bad habit off going through cycles where everyone has to announce that mma, the sport we all watch and are here to discuss, is evil, which is basically the definition of virus signaling. Now we’re going on for several pages about how slap fighting is bad and dumb (it is), and it’s getting tiresome. kimbo305 posted:I’ve received a concussion in a kickboxing match, one that more or less spelled the end of my willingness to compete, and I still teach kickboxing now. I stew over the ethics a lot. boobie, I feel like your point about the cyclical thread guilt-ponderance is also kind of answered in this point. Combat sports are pretty hosed up, both in the direct toll they take on their participants and the indirect toll through the culture and politics they tend to embrace, and the fact that we love and keep coming back to them anyway is a thing that, for some people, bears some recurring introspection and venting. I disagree that critiquing or even just feeling bad about a thing you enjoy, saying so, and continuing to enjoy it anyway is virtue signaling--it's just being a person with conflicting feelings on things. I do get being tired of the slapfighting discourse when said discourse is a pretty unequivocal "it's bad" and the conversation is just reiterating that it's bad, but there's also barely any MMA this month and the slap league that's been getting lovely hype for months only debuted two and a half days ago, so I dunno that expecting people not to ruminate on how much it sucks it is realistic. UFC 283 is going to overtake it in a few hours, but until then it is unfortunately the biggest thing happening in our industry this week. kimbo305 posted:My critique is of being able to enjoy fighting to the degree that I and others do — that our viewership has enabled a platform of legitimacy for the sport, and that then we have a much shorter horse from which to try to gatekeep slap fighting. Our pirated PPVs paid the abuser who’s trying to mainstream slap fighting. See, that I don't disagree with. We helped make Dana White: American Icon and this is an unfortunate byproduct of that, and it is important to keep that in mind. But for one, I don't think the culpability of individual fans and their comfort levels with slap fighting is worthy of dismissal because they like MMA, which had absolutely nothing to do with slap fighting until a few unfortunate months ago, and for two, I think there's a broad distance between saying we have some level of collective responsibility for our enjoyment of fighting enabling this dumb poo poo and saying someone should rethink being an MMA fan because seeing someone knocked out in slap fighting grossed them out when they enjoy people getting knocked out in MMA, because the contexts of those knockouts, their respective abilities to defend against them and the sports in which they occurred are so drastically different.
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Jan 21, 2023 21:55
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kimbo305 posted:From an “inevitably, you’re gonna get hurt from participating in this and you might not feel like it was with your labor” perspective, they’re much closer to each other than other sports without expected head contact. The deep visceral discomfort with seeing someone laid out like that — that can’t be canceled out by a more legitimate sport built on top of it. And I think this is a point of philosophical divergence. The context may not cancel out that visceral discomfort for you, but I don't think that's an inherently objective experience, the same way traditional boxing fans are cool with fighters getting punched again after knockdowns but disgusted by the sight of ground and pound and people wise enough to stay away from combat sports think we're all crazy for not turning and running away from people getting hurt for sport period. For whatever credit it's worth to the fanbase, we're seeing a slow but visible arc towards the slightest improvements in the way we think about fighter health, and I think that also informs this whole thing--when you look at stoppages from the mainstream breakout years they were much, much closer to 'punch until they stop moving no matter what' on average, and the decades of conversation about fighter safety and health have led to slightly better stoppages. Standing TKOs didn't really exist in MMA in the mid-2000s. That, too, is part of why slap fighting's reversion to 1990s toughman contest ethos is an outlier shock. But also, like. Before my brief life in training several of my friends were considering it, but no one in the group had ever been flat-out punched in the face and thus had no idea how they'd react to it and were pretty sure they needed to figure that out before knowing if it was worth pursuing, and because we were dumb kids, our solution to this was strapping on boxing gloves and trading a single hard jab to the face apiece. Some people were fine with it, some people had mixed reactions, and two friends cycled through about a dozen facial expressions in the five seconds after getting hit, went 'nope, not for me,' and never tried it again. Knockouts are knockouts, and "people getting knocked out is bad" is a very rational point of view, but when you get into what people do and don't find acceptable in their flavors of received knockouts, irrationality isn't that weird and I'm not sure we could enjoy combat sports period without at least some of it. Bluedeanie posted:The only thing hypocritical is that we are complaining about slapfighting and yet that is the very thing we are doing in this thread See, I think getting into the weirdness of our brains and how we deal with the nature of combat sports is fascinating, but if it's just grating the thread we can also knock it off and wait for Glover Teixeira to make us all sad.
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Jan 21, 2023 22:50
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https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4022219&pagenumber=1#lastpost The UFC abruptly moved the timeslot up by half an hour, I guess because no fights got cancelled, so head to the GDT, UFC 283 prelims have begun.
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Jan 21, 2023 23:38
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kimbo305 posted:Lol, real convenient litmus test. for the record, the 15-minute beating Lauren Murphy took bothers me an awful lot more than this did
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Jan 22, 2023 05:05
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Digital Jedi posted:Also, grats CarlCX for not being in last saved my rear end, gilbert That event was almost eight hours long and I am very tired. Jamahal Hill's improved his takedown defense an awful lot, and I'm real, real curious to see if the UFC rebooks the Anthony Smith fight, gives Blachowicz/Ankalaev another chance, or just embraces full chaos and books Johnny Walker part two or something.
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Jan 22, 2023 07:36
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On the topic of trauma and re: our conversation about exactly how gross the slap league is: https://twitter.com/lthomasnews/status/1617649870285967370
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Jan 23, 2023 23:56
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It would be nice if one of these stuck, and it would be nicer if we didn't have to keep waiting for him to do more, worse stuff.
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Jan 24, 2023 22:03
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