- CarlCX
- Dec 14, 2003
-
|
This card's pretty bleak, but Jéssica Andrade is there, so by god, you'd better watch it.
CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 47: BUT HERE IT GOES AGAIN
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 18TH FROM THE FORBIDDEN SHADOWS OF THE UFC APEX IN LAS VEGAS, NEVADA
PRELIMS 1 PM PST/4 PM EST VIA ESPN+ | MAIN CARD 4 PM PST/7 PM EST VIA ESPN+
I wrote this last November for Lemos/Rodriguez.
Much like Grasso/Araújo last month, this is another card that was supposed to have a big main event--in this case, undefeated fighters and potential title contenders Bryce Mitchell and Movsar Evloev--but it got scratched thanks to injury, and the UFC decided to, once again, move a women's fight they had never intended to main or even co-main into the top spot with virtually nothing supporting or advertising it. It irritates me to complain about this, because I want more top spots for women in the UFC. I just wish they happened because they actually chose to put them on and promote them as opposed to deciding they just don't give enough of a gently caress about a card to bother and letting women have the scraps. You don't get an advertising blitz, you don't get promotional appearances, you don't get a UFC Embedded on the loving Youtube channel, but hey: You get to share a main card with Chase Sherman.
Women make up roughly 25% of the Ultimate Fighting Championship roster. There were 42 UFC events in 2022, 6 of them were main evented by women, and 2 of those main events were co-mains that got bumped up on short notice after men were either hurt or rescheduled. The women got 14% of the main events for the year, but that's only because of booking errors--it was supposed to be 9%.
In January, this card was announced as UFC Fight Night: Vera vs Sandhagen, with a co-main event featuring former title challenger Taila Santos against rising challenger Erin Blanchfield. Two weeks before the event Vera and Sandhagen were moved to late March for no given reason, promoting Santos vs Blanchfield to the main. One week before the fight Santos pulled out when her coaches couldn't get working visas.
So now, on one week's notice, your main event and almost certain title eliminator is Erin Blanchfield, the #10 fighter in the division, against Jéssica Andrade, the #3 fighter in the division, who two fights ago won top contendership at 115 pounds, then went back to 125, won, and used her post-fight interview to call for a 115-pound title shot, which she is now delaying to take this late-notice fight against an opponent nowhere near title contention at the weight class she just said she wanted to leave.
Their co-main event is between two unranked light-heavyweights coming off losses and the card underneath them is one of the worst the UFC has ever assembled.
I love the UFC, but I loving hate the UFC.
yeah, i wasn't kidding.
MAIN EVENT: WHOSE WEIGHT CLASS IS IT ANYWAY
WOMEN'S FLYWEIGHT: Jéssica Andrade (24-9, #3) vs Erin Blanchfield (10-1, #10)
And the worst part is, it's a fantastic fight!
Jéssica Andrade is the wrecking ball of women's mixed martial arts, to the point that her nickname, Bate Estaca, very literally means Pile Driver. At 5'2" she's one of the smallest women in the sport--she's fought at a size and reach disadvantage in all but one of her 33 professional fights--and she has violent, dominant stoppage victories over contenders and champions not just in every women's division in the UFC, but even bigger ones outside. Larissa Pacheco, the current #1 woman at 155 pounds in the Professional Fighters League, was in the UFC back in 2014 getting choked out by future 115-pound champion Andrade in one round. That's her thing. She doesn't just beat people, she destroys them.
And she destroys people who don't get destroyed. Larissa Pacheco had never lost before Jéssica Andrade surgically disabled her neck. Karolina Kowalkiewicz went five rounds with and at some points outstruck the best in the world, Joanna Jędrzejczyk; a few fights later Andrade flatlined her in two minutes. Katlyn Chookagian, the seemingly constant flyweight top contender, has been stopped only twice in her career: Once by the greatest women's flyweight of all time, Valentina Shevchenko, who had to chip her down over three rounds and force a referee's stoppage because she simply couldn't get out of a disadvantageous position, and once by Jéssica Andrade, who punched her in the body so hard she dropped into the fetal position. Rose Namajunas is a two-time strawweight champion with seven title fights under her belt who's faced down some of the most fearsome strikers in the sport's history, and only once in her career has she been knocked out, and that was Jéssica Andrade deadlifting her and dropping her on her god damned skull.
In the last year alone she did it at two different weight classes. After taking most of a year off and two years away from the weight class, Andrade returned to 115 pounds back in April, fought the 11-1 top contender Amanda Lemos, and effortlessly choked her out--standing--in one round. After a mid-year injury derailed her plans she returned again just last month, this time against one of the top contenders at 125 pounds in Lauren Murphy, and she outstruck her so badly that even the blood-drinking mixed martial arts fanbase got angry at her corner for not throwing in the towel.
It's been almost four years since Jéssica Andrade held a title, but it only took her nine months to get into pole position for two separate championship fights. And now she's putting them at risk against Erin Blanchfield, a newcomer who's never even fought a top ten opponent in her entire life, and a lot of people think Blanchfield is actually going to win, and by god, they could be right.
Because Erin Blanchfield is one of the UFC's most interesting contenders at any division. She walked into the company as Invicta's top flyweight contender, a 5-1 fighter whose only loss was a controversial split decision to fellow Invicta contender turned perfect UFC flyweight prospect Tracy Cortez, and proceeded to run up a 4-0 record of devastatingly one-sided victories in just fourteen months. Yet, somehow, despite this path of destruction she's left in her wake, Erin Blanchfield is now a potential title contender almost no one outside of hardcore fans has even heard of. How?
Let's ask Carl from last November again.
Hey, guess what: It's a relevant, interesting, exciting women's fight! With ranking implications and one of the most-hyped women's fighters in the entire UFC!! In the middle of the prelims!!! I WILL NEVER STOP COMPLAINING ABOUT THIS PHENOMENON.
"Never" never ends. Erin Blanchfield is 4-0 in the UFC and every one of those four fights has been on the prelims. Not the cool, primetime prelims, either. Two fights ago she was curtain-jerking as the first fight of the night. One fight ago, despite facing "Meatball" Molly McCann, quite possibly the most-publicized women's fighter of the year, she was third from the top of the prelims--just slightly more important than Andre Petroski, but not nearly as important as Ryan Spann.
Despite having one of the longest winning streaks in her division, the average UFC fan has never heard of Erin Blanchfield, the main event contender who is fighting for a title shot.
And that's a shame, because she's loving great. She hasn't just won her four UFC bouts, she's dominated almost every second of them. Her ability to switch abruptly from power punches and headkicks to driving takedowns and clinch assaults has left her opponents completely incapable of adjusting to her attacks. She scored a rare 30-25 victory over Sarah Alpar after crushing her in the standup and grappling alike, she ragdolled the exceptionally tough Miranda Maverick, she faced down the always-game JJ Aldrich, dropped her and choked her out in just two rounds, and in her last fight, facing down the runaway momentum of the woman they call Meatball, she ran through her effortlessly, outstruck her 93-7 and tore her arm off in three and a half minutes.
Everyone who's paid attention knows how good Erin Blanchfield can be, and everyone who's watched her wants to know how far she can go. But shooting from #10 in the rankings to fighting one of the best women's fighters of all time is about as far as one can conceivably jump in search of a trial by fire. Everyone knows Jéssica Andrade can be a champion. Erin Blanchfield is fighting to prove she can, too.
But this is a tough matchup for her--not just in terms of record, but style. It would be deeply unfair to Erin Blanchfield to say she succeeds by physicality, her technique both striking and grappling is very good, but it's also very pressure-focused. Her slinging headkicks, her hard crosses, all of her attacks serve to get her into close range where her clinch assaults and takedowns allow her to take over. This is, arguably, a very bad idea against Jéssica Andrade, who does her best striking in the pocket and is strong enough to compact someone's skull with one hand. There are only two fighters who've successfully beaten Andrade in the pocket: Valentina Shevchenko, who was able to take her down and break her face with elbows, and Weili Zhang, the only person to ever brutalize her.
Everyone else has kept her at arm's reach. The long jabs of Rose Namajunas, the in-and-out combos of Joanna Jędrzejczyk and the driving takedowns of Raquel Pennington were all gameplans centered around hurting her while staying as far away from danger as possible. If this fight is about testing Erin Blanchfield, that test is multiple choice. Does she stick to her traditional strengths, even though they're also Andrade's? Does she play to Andrade's distance-based weaknesses even though it's out of her own comfort zone?
Or does she cement herself as a contender and run through her like she's run through everyone else?
JÉSSICA ANDRADE BY SUBMISSION. It's not that I don't believe in Erin Blanchfield; it's that I really believe in Jéssica Andrade. So much of Blanchfield's core offense comes at Andrade's strongest ranges and I cannot help seeing a slightly tired Blanchfield getting choked out going for a takedown in the back half of the fight.
CO-MAIN EVENT: NO, REALLY, THIS IS THE CO-MAIN EVENT
LIGHT-HEAVYWEIGHT: Zac Pauga (5-1) vs Jordan Wright (12-4 (1))
When the UFC broke into the mainstream on the backs of Chuck Liddell, Randy Couture and The Ultimate Fighter back in 2005, the concept of oversaturation was practically aspirational to a fight-starved fanbase. The UFC promoted five cards in 2004, in 2005 it doubled to ten, 2006 saw a dramatic rise to eighteen, and it wouldn't hit twenty until 2008. That was the first time I really remember fan complaints about the constancy of UFC events leading to a watered-down product, and in hindsight, with co-main events featuring then-top guys like Brandon Vera, Mike Swick and Frankie Edgar, it's pretty funny.
The UFC's output has more than doubled since then. It's more notable when a week passes without an event. Some of those cards feature assembled talent unlike anything the sport has seen.
Some of them do not.
This is a co-main event between the runner-up for the last season of The Ultimate Fighter and a 2-4 fighter on a three-fight streak of getting violently finished. I will let you decide for yourself which side of the great coin of fate this card occup--it's Not. This is Not. This is, to paraphrase Al Iaquinta, a great co-main event on loving Pluto.
I cannot tell you how well the last two seasons of The Ultimate Fighter did, because the UFC moved them completely onto ESPN+'s streaming platforms from which no metrics ever emerge. I can tell you the last time TUF was on television it averaged just about 140,000 viewers per episode, which, in the annals of cable television in 2018, put it around #140 in the top 150 cable shows of a given week--above Colin Cowherd and below programming luminaries like the NFL Network's Fantasy Football Assistance show. And by god, ALL of them got wiped off the face of the Earth by heavy hitters like Hallmark's #130-ranked Hero Dog Awards of 2018. In 2023, as a streaming exclusive on a service everyone seems to use at best begrudgingly, I cannot imagine it's doing better rather than worse.
"Carl," I hear you saying, "this sounds a lot like you're reading Showbuzzdaily ratings reports from half a decade ago instead of talking about this fight." To which I would say: Yes. Of loving course I am. How else do I ward off the existential despair of light-heavyweight?
Zac Pauga was a heavyweight on a heavyweight season of The Ultimate Fighter: Heavyweights and he's not actually a heavyweight. His entire career up until TUF took place at 205 pounds, he jumped at the chance to do TUF and have a few fights in the house without cutting weight, and after fighting his way through the Nyle Bartlings of the world he achieved his dream of getting knocked out cold by a slow-motion punch from a heavyweight who only sort of has functioning knees. At 5-1, turning 35 a week after this fight and with his best victory being a choice between either a guy who washed out of the UFC's middleweight division or a guy who went on to be defeated by the champion of Nebraska Bradan "Lunchbox" Erdman, Zac "The Ripper" Pauga is, truly, the future of the light-heavyweight division.
But don't sleep on "The Beverly Hills Ninja" Jordan Wright, a man so bent on his pop culture bonafides that his career is equal parts tribute to Dragon Ball Z and Chris Farley. Wright, too, is so thoroughly the future of the light-heavyweight division that this is his first fight at it in almost three years. He popped into the UFC as a last-minute replacement against the notoriously unsuccessful Ike Villanueva, but dropped right back down to his native middleweight, where he promptly went 1-3, having been just thoroughly shellacked by everyone save Jamie "The Night Wolf" Pickett, who was, in fairness, still getting over the heartbreak of not making the Mortal Kombat X roster. Wright's down three fights in a row, every one of them was a brutal stoppage, and in an attempt to rescue his career he's solving this by moving up to a weight class where everyone has twenty more pounds of punching power, so he can be, truly, the future of the light-heavyweight division.
Which, in fairness, is actually a pretty solid career move. Light-heavyweight is a particularly iffy division and it's rife for exploitation from faster, more technically sound fighters.
Is Jordan Wright that fighter? Probably not. ZAC PAUGA BY TKO. Jordan has a very quick, in-and-out darting style, but he doesn't actually carry a lot of power. His two UFC striking victories have come from Travis Browne in-the-pocket elbows and, perhaps most damningly, the aforementioned Ike Villanueva fight where he hit Villanueva flush with a spinning heel kick to the head followed by ten knees in the clinch, and Ike, who would ultimately be knocked out more traditionally in four of his five other UFC bouts, was actually completely fine and was prevented from fighting only because his eyebrow was gone. Pauga has solid hands when he actually uses them, and given Wright's love of darting into range, he's getting pasted sooner or later.
MAIN CARD: VINCE MCMAHON JUST LOSING HIS poo poo OVER GARY STRYDOM, BUT IN MMA
HEAVYWEIGHT: Josh Parisian (15-5) vs Jamal Pogues (9-3)
This may be the meanest thing I have ever said about a pair of fighters: This is a battle between two fighters who had to win on Dana White's Contender Series twice to get UFC contracts, because the first time around they were so insufficiently impressive that the habitually blood-drinking Dana White who thought Greg Hardy and a slap fighting championship were good ideas looked at these big, wrestling-deficient heavyweight strikers, his favorite genre not just of fighter but human, and went "ehh, maybe not."
It's not Josh Parisian's fault that someone taught him spinning was faster than walking. He won his first Contender Series appearance in 2018 by spamming more spinning attacks than an Eddy Gordo main, which earned him a shot on The Ultimate Fighter rather than the UFC itself, and after getting knocked out in the first round of competition he was thrown out on the street. He returned to the Contender Series in 2020 and once again scored a knockout victory, and only then, at last, was he allowed past the golden gates of the UFC, where he's racked up a 2-2 record. Which doesn't seem that bad on paper! Unfortunately, those two victories were
- A split decision against the 0-3 Roque Martinez that 85% of media outlets scored against him, and
- A TKO against Alan Baudot, an 0-3 (1) heavyweight who's never beaten a heavyweight in his career, in a fight that saw Parisian get mauled in the first round and win only because both fighters were too exhausted to move anymore
It's not a great list! He didn't look great in them! And that's probably why, despite this being fifth fight in the UFC, he's facing a debuting Jamal "The Stormtrooper" Pogues, who apparently didn't get the memo that stormtroopers are bad. Pogues is, in some ways, a tragic tale about the realities of the mixed martial market. When he made his first appearance on the Contender Series in 2019 he was a light-heavyweight pressure-wrestler, but Dana White took one look at the man shooting single-leg takedowns and grinding out decisions, wrinkled his nose, and banished him to the feeder leagues, where he went 1-1 before disappearing for most of the pandemic. Two years later he returned to the Contender Series, this time as a heavyweight who foreswore his grappling arts in favor of throwing poorly-aimed jabs for fifteen minutes, but by god, that's what Dana wanted.
Pogues said he was going back to light-heavyweight, but this booking would seem to disagree. Still: He can definitely throw jabs, and he's more than CAPABLE of shooting a takedown. I do not have a great deal of faith in Josh Parisian. He struggles with striking, he struggles with wrestling, even when he wins a fight he looks like he's about to drop from sheer exhaustion, and when we saw him last year he got outgrappled by a heavyweight who was once violently thrown into a moat by this man:
JAMAL POGUES BY TKO.
LIGHT-HEAVYWEIGHT: William Knight (11-4) vs Marcin Prachnio (15-6)
William Knight has fallen on difficult times. The first year of his UFC tenure was fairly promising, a 3-1 run through the light-heavyweight division that established him as a powerful if slightly limited wrestleboxer--that limitation in large part coming from his almost comically musclebound 5'10" body. On one hand: Great look, clearly working for him, and I'm sure it makes taking people down a little easier. On the other: When you're the shortest light-heavyweight in the company and you miss weight by 13 pounds, even in a short-notice fight, that becomes the only thing anyone will ever remember you for again. The last year of Knight's career was the aforementioned weight miss, the largest in UFC history, which presaged an outwrestling loss to Maxim Grishin, followed by an even less advisable trip up to the heavyweight division, where fellow divisional part-timer Devin Clark knocked him out in the third round. Knight's two in the hole and could desperately use a win.
Marcin Prachnio is a perpetual enigma. He's a legitimately talented striker who was at one point the #1 contender for ONE Championship, the second-biggest mixed martial arts organization in the world, and in one of the most damning things ever said about the cruelty of differential competition, he joined the UFC in 2018 and was immediately knocked out in one round by the eldritch beast himself, Sam Alvey, in what might well be the final stoppage of his career. Prachnio has gone on to a 2-4 record in the UFC, with one of those wins coming against, yet again, Ike Villanueva, and the other the forever hot-and-cold Khalil Rountree. After ten months on the shelf he returned against former PFL champion Philipe Lins this past April--remember him, we'll come back to him later--and looked solid in the first round before getting more or less mauled in the second and third.
That fight feels like a bellwether for this one. Prachnio's successes come from keeping people at the end of his many, many kicks, but the UFC has demonstrated his persistent problems with pressure. William Knight does not want to stay at range with you because he can't. His torso is too broad for his arms to move in straight lines. Having seen Prachnio lose clinch battles with fighters who wouldn't make Lou Ferrigno gently ask if everything was okay at home, this does not seem like a difficult call. WILLIAM KNIGHT BY DECISION.
LIGHTWEIGHT: Jim Miller (35-16 (1)) vs Alexander Hernandez (13-6)
I have been ride or die on Jim Miller for almost fifteen goddamn years now, and that's a weird, weird sentence. Jim Miller has been doing this for so god damned long his first on-the-map performance, and his UFC debut, involved choking out David Baron, a French grappler who'd just scored a huge upset win over an all-time great in Hayato "Mach" Sakurai over in Pride's sub-brand, Bushido, and statistically speaking, 60% of the people reading this have no loving idea who or what any of those things were. David Baron's retirement fight was almost a decade ago! Georges St-Pierre's entire UFC tenure lasted twenty-two fights; Jim Miller is making the cagewalk for his forty-loving-first. UFC 100 was main-evented by Brock Lesnar in 2009, UFC 200 was main-evented by Miesha Tate in 2016 and UFC 300 will probably be main-evented by Sean O'Malley in 2024: Jim Miller fought on both of the former two and has sworn he'll be on the third, and his ability to persist across those incredibly disparate eras of the sport is a testament to just how goddamn tough he is and how quickly he will choke you to death if you give him a chance.
Alexander "The Great Ape" Hernandez may finally be up against the wall. Hernandez came into the UFC with a lot of hype back in 2018, and he set that hype on fire by taking on the incredibly tough Beneil Dariush as a last-minute replacement and knocking him out cold in less than a minute, then followed it up by pitching a shut-out against the then-streaking Olivier Aubin-Mercier. It was a sensational debut year for a 10-1 prospect. And since said year he is 3-5 and has not been able to string together a back-to-back win. Donald Cerrone knocked him out, Drew Dober knocked him out, just two months ago Hernandez tried an experimental drop to 145 pounds and got knocked out on his feet by Billy Quarantillo for his trouble. In 2023, Alexander Hernandez is a question mark: An undeniably talented fighter with fast, powerful hands, strong counter-wrestling and enough composure to use them for about a round before things begin to fall apart.
For Jim Miller, this is just another bout in the world tour of the UFC's greatest veteran. For Alexander Hernandez, this is a test to see if he has anything left in the tank. And it's not a great one for him. Miller's tough, scrappy refusal to go away has been a staple of his style across three separate decades of competition. Given the tendency Hernandez has to struggle with fights that get out of the first round--and how much harder it is for Hernandez to work his bullying, overwhelming gameplan against someone as big and seasoned as Miller--this seems fated to end poorly for him. JIM MILLER BY SUBMISSION.
PRELIMS: HOW LOW THE ST. PREUX DOTH FLOW
WOMEN'S BANTAMWEIGHT: Lina Länsberg (10-7, #12) vs Mayra Bueno Silva (9-2-1, #14)
Last April, when Lina Länsberg returned from her pandemic hiatus, I noted how unfortunate a statement it was about women's bantamweight that a fighter who hasn't competed since 2020 and hadn't won since 2019 could still be ranked as the #11 fighter in the world. At the end of 2022, Lina had fought, and lost, two more times. This has dropped her to a catastrophically low #12.
Women's rankings are forever a mystery. Lina "Elbow Queen" Länsberg is, in all likelihood, on her way out. The UFC brought her in as a warm body for Cris Cyborg back in 2016 and after seven years she's 4-6, with three of those losses coming in her last three fights which at this point span the entirety of the last three years. The nickname isn't for show: Her gameplan revolves around elbowing the crap out of her opponents, be it in clinch range or from full guard. Failing that, she tends to falter. Mayra Bueno Silva, the artist also known as "Sheetara," is coming off a particularly strange night at the office. She's an absolute monster of a grappler with three submission wins in the UFC--four if you count the ninja choke she used to get her contract on the Contender Series--but her last fight, instead of being a showcase, wound up being a controversial anticlimax. As she so often has, Silva snatched an armbar from bottom position and scored a submission victory in barely over a minute, at which point her very confused opponent Stephanie Egger claimed not to have tapped out, and in fact there was no video showing her tapping out, nor did she give any verbal indication of submitting. The referee had to poll the judges, and Ron McCarthy, son of Big John and a judge who would months later score the great Paddy Pimblett robbery of 2022, swore he saw her invisible tapout, leaving Mayra with an exceedingly dissatisfying win.
So this is the UFC helping her right the ship. Lina is an incredibly tough fighter who has never once been submitted in her seventeen-fight career, but she's also never faced anyone with jiu-jitsu as aggressively dangerous as Silva's, and her proclivity for armbars is custom-made to mess up Lina's full-guard elbow game. MAYRA BUENO SILVA BY SUBMISSION.
FEATHERWEIGHT: Jamall Emmers (18-6) vs Khusein Askhabov (23-0)
It's time to open the mystery box again. Jamall Emmers is a known quantity, at this point, having been in three UFC fights since his 2020 debut, but the promise he displayed in that debut, going to a close split decision loss against burgeoning hype train Giga Chikadze, hasn't quite panned out. He wrestled his way to an underwhelming victory over Vince Cachero, who retired one fight later, had to pull out of a fight after his opponent had already entered the cage because his back wouldn't stop spasming uncontrollably, returned half a year later only to get heel hooked in two minutes, and that's been it for a year and a half. Khusein "Nohcho" Askhabov is a great big question mark of a fighter. On one hand, he's one of the top prospects out of Russia, an undefeated champion at two weight classes who's well-regarded by teammates at big camps like Tiger Muay Thai and American Top Team and there's video footage enough to see his vicious leg kicks, driving takedowns and elbow-heavy top game in action. On the other: As a Russian regional fighter, most of his opponents weren't much competition at all, to the point that in his last fight, which was the 23rd of his career, he faced a 3-0 fighter who had never competed against anyone with a single win to their name. Even more mysteriously, that was also Askhabov's last fight for three years. He's been in limbo, waiting on the UFC, since March 3rd of 2020.
What do you do with that, exactly? On paper Askhabov is more than a match for Emmers, but Emmers is also the stiffest test of his career and Askhabov hasn't fought in three years, and hasn't fought a real competitive test since Stan Lee walked the Earth. I'm still going with KHUSEIN ASKHABOV BY DECISION, because his speed on the feet and his counter-grappling seem legitimate, but boy, anything could happen here.
LIGHT-HEAVYWEIGHT: Ovince St. Preux (26-16) vs Philipe Lins (15-5)
It's sad to see Ovince St. Preux down here. St. Preux was a mainstay of the light-heavyweight's top ten for most of a decade, a perennial contender who crushed a number of former champions, went the distance with Jon Jones and holds victories over top contenders like Corey Anderson, and now he bounces between heavyweight and light-heavyweight on a whim and doesn't get a lot of success at either. His best win in the last six years was an atomizing knockout over Alonzo Menifield in 2020; otherwise you have to choose between a 2022 decision over the retiring ghost of Shogun, a 2019 submission over middleweight Michał Oleksiejczuk, or a 2018 armbar over Tyson Pedro. Philipe Lins is, at this point, a full-time non-fighthaver. He was unable to follow up his PFL heavyweight championship win in 2018 thanks to an arm injury, he was snatched up by the UFC in 2020, he lost two fights in six weeks, and in the nearly three years since he has pulled out of seven fights and competed in only one, a victorious effort against an overmatched Marcin Prachnio. This is the third time across two years Lins has been meant to fight Ovince St. Preux, and I am not convinced the forces of the universe won't crash an asteroid into the Apex arena to keep it from happening one more time.
All of that said: PHILIPE LINS BY TKO. OSP has long punches, solid kicks to the body and more than enough counter-wrestling to shut down anyone on a good day; OSP also hasn't had a lot of good days for a long while. When last we saw him, he barely scraped by a Shogun whose bones are filled with sawdust. Philipe Lins barely competes thanks to the corrupting influences of evil wizards, but when he does, he's a solid, aggressive, physically powerful fighter who mauls opponents in the clinch. Unless OSP can catch him with one of his trademark shovel hooks on his way in, he's getting pinned to the fence and punched apart.
LIGHTWEIGHT: Nazim Sadykhov (7-1) vs Evan Elder (7-1)
Nazim Sadykhov is the latest prospect out of LAW MMA, the Longo-Weidman school born out of the end of the love story that was Serra-Longo, the house where dreams were built. Sadykhov cut his teeth out in the wastelands of Fury FC, meaning, like essentially everyone, at this point, he's a Contender Series baby, having won his contract by showing his dedication to the stand-and-bang arts back in August and scored a knockout. Evan Elder is another I-wasn't-even-supposed-to-be-here story: He was a top competitor for the Shamrock Fighting Championships, and would have kept up his regional development were it not for his willingness to step into a UFC fight against Preston Parsons, who is not Parker Porter, on three days' notice an entire weight class up. Unsurprisingly, Elder lost.
Will he look better with a full training camp? Almost certainly, but more than that, he'll look better with an opponent who likes to stand and trade. Sadykhov won his Contender Series bout, but he relied on a lot of head movement rather than pure evasion for his striking defense, and respectfully, his head movement got him clipped a fair bit. EVAN ELDER BY DECISION.
WELTERWEIGHT: AJ Fletcher (9-2) vs Themba Gorimbo (10-3)
Hey, international prospects who didn't come from the Contender Series! What a loving concept! AJ Fletcher, of course, is not one of them: He entered the UFC as a 9-0 prospect with a Contender Series win and promptly got rolled twice in 2022. His fights have a sort of predictable rhythm to them: He'll win one round per fight, sometimes through his power punching and sometimes through his power wrestling, but immediately afterward he'll gas out and spend the rest of the bout unable to mount significant offense. Themba "The Answer" Gorimbo is the fighter with all the press, this time out: A welterweight champion from South Africa's Extreme Fighting Championship and a top contender for Fury FC before the UFC finally snatched him up. Gorimbo's a very offensively-minded fighter, prone to swinging heavy body kicks and wide haymakers, but his athleticism lets him turn the corner on sharp double-leg takedowns when called for and his six submission wins are a testament to his grappling credentials.
But despite the hype Gorimbo is an underdog here, and it's not hard to see why. Fletcher is a big step up in competition and a fighter who hung with hardcases like Matt Semelsberger and Ange Loosa for fifteen minutes without getting finished. Gorimbo's bottom game is dangerous, but Fletcher's a seasoned grappler with an equally dangerous top game. I'm ultimately siding with AJ FLETCHER BY SUBMISSION, but I'd like to be wrong, it'd be a lot more fun if Gorimbo won.
FLYWEIGHT: Juancamilo Ronderos (4-1) vs Clayton Carpenter (6-0)
Sometimes the UFC just kind of lets crimes happen. Back in May of 2021, David Dvořák, the #11 flyweight in the world, lost his #12 ranked opponent just one day before the card, and instead of doing the responsible thing and cancelling the fight, the UFC tapped Juancamilo Ronderoes, a 4-0 fighter whose entire career took place within the hallowed walls of WARRIOR XTREME CAGEFIGHTING'S WARRIOR WEDNESDAYS, to face the eleventh-best flyweight on the planet. This may shock you: He got choked out in two minutes. "But Carl," I assume you are saying, "it was a late replacement, what do you expect?" Here's the thing: They already had him under contract for a Contender Series bout. In their ideal circumstances he was going to get thrown in the deep end of the flyweight division after just one more fight anyway, because god drat it, we need warm bodies because for some reason we spent three years trying to kick everyone out of flyweight so we could close the division and now we suddenly have ground to make up. "Concrete" Clayton Carpenter, which is one of the biggest wastes of a nickname opportunity I've ever seen, is what Ronderos very nearly was: A 5-0 rookie who got a Contender Series bout in 2022, won, and is now trying to wade into one of the most dangerous oceans in the fight game. Except he's not, because he gets to fight Ronderos instead. Do you see how this works? This, what you're seeing now, is the future. Demetrious Johnson, Kyoji Horiguchi, Jarred Brooks, Bokang Masayune and Dustin Ortiz are all out there being some of the best flyweights in the world outside of the UFC, but it's okay, because we have rookies with a half-dozen fights if you're lucky fighting each other for $10k a pop, and they are already becoming the norm.
Brands are the poison in our veins and we are doomed to decay to the tune of a thousand commercial jingles. CLAYTON CARPENTER BY DECISION. Eat fresh.
Prelims begin in half an hour.
|
#
?
Feb 18, 2023 21:30
