- CarlCX
- Dec 14, 2003
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Guess what: It's UFC time, maybe. A bunch of stuff is cancelled and there's only 11 fights on the card but the UFC says it's still happening in the same timeframe, so the broadcast begins in half an hour, but expect dead air.
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+
Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends. After four weeks of merriment, rest, and some of the darkest newsbreaks in MMA history, the violence mines are once again open for business. 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, the contendership's all messed up and the industry is run by horrible people, and god drat it, I still missed it and you. Let's start making it through 2023.
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 14, 2023 00:24
B League Preview Time! 
