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What will cause the heavyweight title to stay vacant this time? This poll is closed. |
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|---|---|---|---|
| Jon Jones goes on a pre-fight bender in Vegas |
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3 | 8.11% |
| Jon Jones goes on a post-fight bender in Vegas |
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1 | 2.70% |
| Jon Jones goes on a mid-fight bender in Vegas |
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4 | 10.81% |
| Jon Jones tests positive for supercocaine, which USADA spends the next three months pretending is normal |
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18 | 48.65% |
| A well-fought majority draw |
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1 | 2.70% |
| No Contest on account of simultaneous dick kicks |
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10 | 27.03% |
| Total: | 37 votes | ||
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Do you want to go back to the month we all hoped Alexander Volkanovski would win? Defend takedowns to get back to February here. Welcome to a busy loving month. We've got six (MMA) championship fights, we've got nine cards, we've got a new season of The Ultimate Fighter taping, and we've all got to deal with Jon Jones and his bullshit all over again. Strap in because traffic accidents are 45% less likely to kill you if you're wearing your seat belt and let's finish this road trip together. This month's title was a joint production of LobsterMobster and Shumagorath. 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  During February, news broke that the UFC had completed an internal review and decided it was just being too kind to its fighters, so they've decided to make their contracts even worse. Under the new contracts fighters waive the right to sue the UFC over their contracts, either individually or as a class-action, in favor of corporately-friendly private arbitration. Coincidentally, having just lost heavyweight champion Francis Ngannou to a contract expiration, the UFC has reinstituted their old policy of adding six months to a contract every time a fighter declines a match, and the previous five-year limit on contract length can now be extended based on medical suspensions, periods of injury or anything the UFC decided to argue counts in, y'know, a privately arbitrated proceeding the public will never get to see. As I say every month: gently caress this sport.  God help us, he's back. After a three-year retirement, former flyweight and bantamweight champion Henry Cejudo is returning to competition and is jumping straight into a bantamweight championship fight against Aljamain Sterling at UFC 288 on May 6th.  Conor McGregor, who is coaching the upcoming season of The Ultimate Fighter against future opponent Michael Chandler, arrived for taping and reportedly demanded multiple contestants be kicked off the show to make room for his SBG Ireland training partners. The UFC neither confirmed nor denied this, but multiple fighters, most notably Chris Curtis and Kris Moutinho, corroborated it on social media. When Dana White was asked for comment on the story during a pre-fight media scrum for Krylov vs Spann, he replied, and this is a quote, "I have no idea. Who gives a poo poo?" The level of importance and respect is truly inspiring.  Tenshin Nasukawa, the world's greatest kickboxing alien, passed all his boxing tests (this isn't a funny rejoinder, in Japan you have to actually pass a written test and successfully spar three rounds in front of officials) and is officially a professional boxer. He'll make his debut on April 8th against the 12-4-1 Yuki Yonaha, currently ranked as the #4 bantamweight in Japan. It will be broadcast on Amazon Prime. I hope he wins, but also, I kind of hope he loses, because boy, I'd like to see him kick more people before I die.  After a solid six months of constant, ceaseless evangelizing of the power, beauty and runaway success sure to come to his Dana White's Power Slap, after boasting about its future as a powerhouse of sports and the rumored plans to sell the show's season finale as a pay-per-view and after mortgaging what last smidges of credibility he had remaining to popularize the worst sport on the planet, we have the world's verdict on slapfighting: The ratings were garbage, the public hated it, and the season finale, instead of a much-vaunted pay-per-view, will now be broadcast for free on Rumble, the unfathomably lovely ultra right-wing youtube alternative best known for not just platforming but celebrating Donald Trump, Alex Jones, Tulsi Gabbard, Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Tate. There has never been a more apt partnership. MONTHLY RETIREMENT CORNER  This one's been a long time coming. Grab a snack: We need to talk about Fedor. Fedor Emelianenko's legacy in the sport is a point of contention in the mixed martial arts fanbase. Everyone has their own take on it, and I am no different, so it's important to establish things that are, objectively, true. Between his debut in mid-2000 and his fall from grace a decade and 33 fights later, Fedor was, essentially, undefeated in mixed martial arts. There's only one blemish in the first ten years of his career, and it was due to a cut caused by an illegal elbow in a format where one competitor absolutely had to advance to the next stage of a tournament. In the rest of that ten-year period he won Pride's heavyweight championship, defended it three times, defeated the consensus #2 heavyweight in the world twice, stopped four different former UFC heavyweight champions and took part in some of the most memorable fights in heavyweight history. But anyone who sticks around in the sport too long inevitably suffers. Shortly after joining the American b-league Strikeforce, Fedor's streak wasn't just broken, but shattered. He went from a decade of dominance to getting finished three times in a row--and the third was a first-round knockout at the hands of career middleweight Dan Henderson. Fedor would return to Russia, fight a few gimme fights and retire, only to come out of retirement three years later and try for one last relevant run as a fighter in his forties. That run somewhat further damaged his legacy, as while he did pick up a few more wins, he was also repeatedly knocked silly by top competition. And it's the "top competition" phrase that brings us to the contentious part of the retrospective. Fedor's undefeated run, while legendary, was also deeply uneven. For every truly competitive top-contender fight he took Pride matched him against a professional wrestler, or an aging, popular but unranked veteran, or worse. In August of 2005, Fedor fought the biggest fight in the world at the time, a showdown against legitimate #2, 16-2-2 heavyweight Mirko Cro Cop; in his next fight that December, Fedor fought Zuluzinho, the obese, 6'7", 5-0 joke who'd only had one real fight in his career. When Fedor moved to America, and began facing consistent top competition for the first time in his career, he, shockingly, began losing. Even his un-retirement comeback isn't immune: He won six fights and lost three, but all three of his losses were against top competition, four of his six wins were thoroughly pointless mismatches, and one of them was a fight that saw him get essentially knocked out in the first round, only to be openly protected by the referee and somehow wind up winning a decision from judges who were assigned by the Russian MMA Union, the president of which at the time was, uh, Fedor Emelianenko. And this, even more than his record, is the real problem with the legacy of Fedor: Everything around him. From the basics, like the fans who hold him up as a shining example of the sport who would beat any and everyone in any era even though he already tried it and didn't, to the abstracts, like three different MMA organizations actively harming themselves and in two cases hastening their own demise in their desperately expensive attempts to make him the centerpiece of their companies, to the outright uncomfortable, like his brother the convicted rapist, ultra-right-wing neo-nazis like Roman Zentsov with whom he shared camps for years, his management's history of deeply weird racism against fighters they deemed too savagely Brazilian or notably Slavic, and his role both in boosting Vladimir Putin's international image as a paragon of badass masculinity and an apologist for the repeated invasion of Ukraine. I think Fedor was unequivocally the best heavyweight of the 2000s. I think any UFC champion after 2010 would have made him look silly. I think Fedor was right to know his worth and not give into the UFC's lovely contracts, and his example there is one fighters should follow; I think it also harmed his legacy, but not as much as repeatedly losing in the UFC would have, and I think, at some level, he knew that, too. I think his combination of speed, power, striking and grappling was a revelation back in his prime; I think there are heavyweights in Pride he never fought who would have given him a lot of trouble. I think I enjoyed watching him fight, but I'm going to enjoy the Fedor story being over more. I think if he ever comes out of retirement again it will be the biggest mistake of his life not involving siding with horrible authoritarians over vulnerable people. Fedor Emelianenko officially retires, hopefully for good, at 40-7 (1).  The world of women's mixed martial arts is still very small, and while she never reached the top, Lina Länsberg earned her place in its records. Long before she tried MMA, Lina was one of and sometimes the singular best Muay Thai kickboxer in the world at her weight class. She went to the world championships of Muay Thai for five consecutive years between 2007 and 2012, and she came away with two gold medals, two silver medals and one bronze. The community nicknamed her "Elbow Queen" because, while she was proficient with all of the eight limbs of Muay Thai, she delighted particularly in destroying people with just those two. After her second gold medal, she decided to move on and try a bigger, more lucrative combat sport. And like so many, it was going very well until it wasn't. She went 6-1 competing in Sweden, Denmark and Jordan, but once she reached the UFC and began fighting some of the best competition in the mixed martial world, things got rocky. Over her seven years with the company she would record back to back wins only once: Otherwise it was win one, lose one, right up until the four-fight losing streak that culminated on February 18th, 2023, with Mayra Bueno Silva handing her the first and only submission loss of her entire combat sports career. But that by no means makes it a bad career. She shared the ring with multiple world champions, she even beat one of them, she was ranked at Women's Bantamweight for most of a decade, and she was very, very rarely an easy fight for anyone. Twenty years of competition is more than enough. Lina retires at 37-11 in Muay Thai and 10-8 in mixed martial arts. 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
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WHAT HAPPENED IN FEBRUARY A very long day of combat sports began with Bellator 290: Bader vs Fedor 2 on February 4th. It was Bellator's debut on network television thanks to CBS, the channel that brought Young Sheldon up from the bowels of Hell, and like all MMA organizations, that debut was marked by terrible pacing, a lot of wrestling, and a big ol' anticlimax. Over the course of 11 pre AND postliminary bouts Nikita Mikhailov took a dodgy decision over Darrion Caldwell thanks to disagreements about what is and isn't effective grappling, Grant Neal scored a split decision over Karl Albrektsson (because Karl cut the afro off), Diana Avsaragova took a split over former champion Alejandra Lara, Henry Corrales outfought Akhmed Magomedov, Neiman Gracie outgrappled Dante Schiro, and in the rarest of birds, Steve Mowry and Ali Isaev had a someone's-0-must-go match where no one actually lost their undefeated record, as some truly lamentable heavyweight grappling ended in a draw. But Chris Gonzalez killed Max Rohskopf and Lorenz Larkin slept Mukhamed Berkhamov, so it was fine. The main card was three fights and each was exactly what you'd expect on the tin. Brennan Ward won out in a big, wild brawl over Sabah Homasi, Johnny Eblen retained his middleweight championship after embracing the grind against Anatoly Tokov, and in the main event, the entire world and its collective refusal to acknowledge reality gathered to see one last vintage Fedor Emelianenko heavyweight championship performance in his retirement bout and then a 46 year-old man got squashed into dust by defending champion Ryan Bader in two and a half minutes. We proceeded directly into a very late night with UFC Fight Night: Lewis vs Spivak, which started late in the evening for American fans because the card was initially intended for South Korea, but after plans failed, they elected to just hold the card as-is but out of the Apex in Las Vegas and at its original broadcast time. Business: It's weird. The prelims were a lot of fun, having been split: In the regular UFC portion, Tatsuro Taira continued his rise as Japan's most interesting stateside prospect by tapping Jesus Aguilar and Jun Yong Park ragdolled and choked out Dennis Tiuliulin, and in the rest, the finals of last year's East Asian talent search tournament Road to UFC saw South Korea take two prizes, with Hyun Sung Park winning the flyweight tournament and Jeong Yeong Lee scraping a split decision to win at featherweight; Japan took bantamweight, with solid-gold prospect Rinya Nakamura destroying his opponent in thirty seconds, and Anshul Jubli won the lightweight tournament for India. The main card was considerably less fun. Adam Fugitt started it off well by upsetting Yusaku Kinoshita, pounding him out for a first-round TKO, but returning hero Doo Ho Choi fought a deeply underwhelming fight with Kyle Nelson that was ultimately scored a deeply underwhelming majority draw thanks to a point deduction for an unintentional headbutt, Marcin Tybura won a very uneventful heavyweight decision against Blagoy Ivanov, Devin Clark outfought Da Un Jung to a shut-out decision, and in the main event, the collapse of Derrick Lewis continued, as Sergey Spivac effortlessly ragdolled him a half-dozen times and choked him out in the first round. Next week brought the exceedingly rare superfight: UFC 284: Makhachev vs Volkanovski on February 12th. It was a hell of a card, anchored by a rabidly energetic Australian crowd, and managed to hit just about every note a fight card can. The prelims got off to a start with one of the worst decisions of the year helping Elves Brenner beat Zubaira Tukhugov, but Blake Bilder outfought Shane Young, Loma Lookboonmee destroyed Elise Reed, Jack Jenkins won an extremely fun fight against Don Shainis, Jamie Mullarkey ran a clinic on Francisco Prado, Kleydson Rodrigues blitzed Shannon Ross in under a minute and hit him with a jumping, spinning rear end to the face in the process, Joshua Culibao choked out Melsik Baghdasaryan and Modestas Bukauskas spoiled Tyson Pedro's UFC comeback by fighting him to a decision. The main card started equally hilariously, with Jimmy Crute and Alonzo Menifield fighting to a draw in one of the most gloriously sloppy fights in memory, followed by Justin Tafa knocking out an uncharacteristically flailing Parker Porter in a minute, and then rising star Jack Della Maddalena punched his ticket to a ranked opponent after absolutely running through a historically difficult opponent in Randy Brown. In the co-main event, Yair Rodríguez won the interim featherweight championship after choking out Josh Emmett, who executed a truly baffling gameplan involving letting Yair kick him to death. The main event was an absolutely incredible bout and the rare superfight to live up to the name, as featherweight champion Alexander Volkanovski gave lightweight champion Islam Makhachev everything he could handle, but Makhachev ultimately won an incredibly close decision. The weight classes will remain separate. February 18th saw the arrival of UFC Fight Night: Andrade vs Blanchfield, a cursed card that left the fields fallow. Originally Vera vs Sandhagen before that fight was postponed for no reason, then Blanchfield vs Taila Santos before Santos pulled out after her coaches had visa trouble, Jéssica Andrade stepped in a week before the card to save its main event, despite having vowed to return to 115 pounds after her last fight. The preliminary fights were quite good, with newcomer Clayton Carpenter looking great, AJ Fletcher outgrappling a promising Themba Gorimbo, Philipe Lins getting the fight with Ovince Saint Preux he'd been chasing for years and knocking him cold in under a minute, Jamall Emmers outfighting Khusein Askhabov, Mayra Bueno Silva becoming the first woman to submit Lina Länsberg and Nazim Sadykhov winning a fantastic fight with Evan Elder after cutting his eyebrow off. The main card had a good start, as Alexander Hernandez and Jim Miller put on a great fight, but the middle was one of the darkest hours in UFC programming. Marcin Prachnio pecked at the leg of an almost completely immobile William Knight in one of the single worst performances in mixed martial arts history, Jamal Pogues and Josh Parisian had an eventless slog of a heavyweight bout, and Zauc Pauga and Jordan Wright combined to land almost nothing in fifteen minutes at light-heavyweight. But the main event was a fantastic moment of prospect realization, as Erin Blanchfield outboxed Jéssica Andrade in the first round with quick, straight counterpunching before taking her down early in the second round and choking her out about fifteen seconds later. A long final weekend of MMA began with ONE Fight Night 7: Lineker vs Andrade 2 on February 24th, ONE's attempt to fill its bantamweight vacancy and avenge is failed main event from last October. By ONE's typical high-octane standards it was a bit more of a sedate affair--Françesco Xhaja beat Andrei Stoica in a fairly uneventful kickboxing match, Danielle Kelly went through a couple tough spots but ultimately beat Ayaka Miura by decision in a submission grappling contest, flyweight grand prix finalist Danny Kingad beat Eko Roni Saputra by decision, Saemapetch Fairtex out-kickboxed Zhang Chenglong by decision, and Martin Nguyen beat last-minute double-injury replacement Leonardo Casotti, also, uh, by decision. The co-main event was consequently abruptly shocking, as Tawanchai P.K.Saenchai retained the Featherweight Muay Thai Championship by stopping Jamal Yusupov with a single leg kick in forty-nine seconds, and the main event was, unsurprisingly, a war. Fabrício Andrade dominated John Lineker back in October only to lose his chance at a championship after breaking Lineker's cup, but expectations of a similar domination were thrown out the window quickly as a much more prepared Lineker went to war. Andrade survived some monstrous shots and wobbled Lineker a couple times himself, and by the fourth round Lineker was beaten, swollen and exhausted. In a rare moment of sanity Lineker and his corner elected to call the fight off before the fifth round could begin, making Fabrício Andrade the new ONE Bantamweight MMA Champion. Bellator closed its month off with Bellator 291: Amosov vs Storley 2 on February 25th. As their latest in an endless series of desperate attempts to chip off the Irish fanbase for themselves, it was a Dublin card and thus had 13 god damned preliminary fights, many of which were between random Irish fighters meant to appeal to local fans with incredibly Irish names like "Richie Smullen" and "Darragh Kelly" whom even in victory there's a good chance you'll never see again, but there were still some highlights: Jena Bishop outfought Elina Kallionidou, Norbert Novenyi scored the rare "the referee is tired of you falling down" TKO over Andy Manzolo, Oleg Popov won an extremely heavyweight decision against Gokhan Saricam, Mike Shipman dominated Charlie Ward and Karl Moore outworked Maciej Różański. The main card was a better start for Ireland, as Ciaran Clarke and Sinead Kavanagh beat their respective jobbers (although Kavanagh had a lot of trouble with Janay Harding and nearly lost the decision), but Bellator's top Irish star Peter Queally got crushed by Bryce Logan and the co-main event saw Jeremy Kennedy outworking Pedro Carvalho. The main event was, for once, actually a big deal. Yaroslav Amosov, after being out for a year fighting a goddamn war, came back to reunify Bellator's welterweight championship against Logan Storley, a man who'd taken him to a split decision back in 2020, but on this night Amosov beat him from pillar to post, wobbling him repeatedly, winning the wrestling war and taking a shutout decision. And the month itself concluded that evening on UFC Fight Night: WHAT'S COMING IN MARCH The MMA year has finally reached cruising speed, which also means if you want to watch all of March's events legally, it will cost you at least $200. Thanks, UFC price increases! March is going to hit the ground running: UFC 285: Jones vs Gane hits us on March 4th, and it's a doozy. The UFC has chosen to put its promotional future back in the hands of Jon Jones, and by god, we're all along for the ride. There are a few prospect showcases on the prelims--Tabatha Ricci vs Jesse Penne, Cameron Saaiman vs Mana Martinez, Ian Garry vs Song Kenan, Viviane Araújo vs Amanda Ribas, Derek Brunson vs Dricus du Plessis--but this is very much a main-card card. Bo Nickal makes his inexplicably long-awaited UFC debut against Jamie Pickett, Geoff Neal faces Shavkat Rakhmonov to determine the one true welterweight prospect, Valentina Shevchenko defends the UFC Women's Flyweight Championship against the always-game Alexa Grasso, and in the main event, after cutting the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world, the UFC looks to fill its last title vacancy as Jon Jones finally makes good on a decade-long promise and moves up to the heavyweight division, where he will face former interim champion Ciryl Gane to crown a new, definitely not in any way thoroughly disputed, kingpin, and start a new championship lineage over the 30-year legacy the UFC chose to sever. Bellator takes the stage six days later with Bellator 292: Nurmagomedov vs Henderson on March 10th. As is tradition the preliminaries are an endless march of madness, but for every Theo Haig or Wladmir Gouvea on the card, there's a highlight: Islam Mamedov is back in action against Shamil Nikaev, Khalid Murtazaliev is facing Tony Johnson, Julius Anglickas is having a consonant battle against Dovletdzhan Yagshimuradov, Keri Taylor-Melendez continues her rise up the Bellator ranks against Bruna Ellen, and on-and-off fighter Érik Pérez faces Enrique Barzola. There are only four fights on the main card, but they're pretty loving solid. Michael "Venom" Page, having been beaten by mutliple men in his own weight class, is back to facing dramatically smaller competition in former featherweight Goiti Yamauchi, Valentin Moldavsky battles Linton Vassell to see who gets a rematch with Ryan Bader, Tofiq Musayev fights Alexander Shabily to potentially grasp lightweight contendership, and in your main event, lightweight champion Usman Nurmagomedov attempts the first defense of his title against UFC champion Benson Henderson, who is, somehow, a championship contender in 2023. We slide back to the UFC a day later for UFC Fight Night: Yan vs Dvalishvili on March 11th. This is the UFC catching its breath in an otherwise busy month and the result is a card that's a little low on name power, but there's still some good stuff in there. Tyson Nam and Bruno Gustavo da Silva are going to have a knockout contest, "Violence Queen" Ariane Lipski meets the unstoppable force JJ Aldrich, Victor Henry and Tony Gravely are going to do bad things to each other, Guido Cannetti attempts to continue his late-career renaissance against Mario Bautista, Said Nurmagomedov faces down Jonathan Martinez, living legend Raphael Assunção meets Davey Grant, and heavyweights do something stupid to each other when Karl Williams fights Łukasz Brzeski. On the main card, Vitor Petrino meets Anton Turkalj, Ricardo Ramos fights Austin Lingo, Alexander Volkov and Alexander Romanov fight to see who has to change their first name, Ryan Spann and Nikita Krylov run back their previously scheduled contest, and in your main event, former champion Petr Yan, who is now 1 for his last 4, faces Merab Dvalishvili to see who stays on-deck as a contender. Invicta is back for the month a few days later, thanks to Invicta FC 52: Machado vs McCormack. I don't know that it was intentional, but it's a big ol' international special. Colombia's Sayury Canon meets America's Amanda Macioce, New York's own Fatima Kline fights Russian rookie Natasha Kuziutina, my hometown girl Amber Leibrock meets recent UFC cast-off Ramona Pascual from Hong Kong, a rare battle of Mexican mixed martial artists sees "Monster" Montserrat Rendon face Maria Jose Favela, fighting Finn Minna Grusander faces Ireland's Shauna Bannon, Polish strawweight Karolina Wójcik battles Brazil's Ediana Silva, and in your main event, Rio de Janeiro's champion Valesca "Tina Black" Machado defends her strawweight championship against SBG Ireland's own Danni "Mac" McCormack. And then it's Muay Thai time again. ONE Friday Fights 9: Eersel vs Sinsamut 2 hits two days later on March 17th, and honestly, I think I should probably just stop listing these. There's one every weekend, there will be for the forseeable future, ONE doesn't even bother posting most of the match listings until a couple days before the cards happen--this is the only one listed for March even though there are two more scheduled for the month, BEFORE this card's week, with no official match listings. Hell, I'm writing this sentence on February 17th, earlier today Friday Fights 5 happened and its card wasn't announced until the 15th, and Friday Fights 6 is booked for next week on the 24th and ONE doesn't even list the card on its own website, let alone have any fights announced for it. I'm glad they're trying to bring attention to Muay Thai, and the fights themselves rule as Muay Thai fights tend to, but the promotion isn't even half-assed, it's quarter-assed. Regian Eersel is defending the welterweight Muay Thai championship against Sinsmut Klinmee. It's a rematch of their last fight in October. Have fun. We get the rare second UFC pay-per-view in a single month on March 18th, UFC 286: Edwards vs Usman 3. A British champion means we are, of course, going back to London, which means we have, of course, a card stuffed to the gills with marketable UK fighters. Your prelims include Chris Duncan vs Omar Morales, Jennifer Maia vs Casey O'Neill, Juliana Miller against Veronica Macedo, Malcolm Gordon vs Jake Hadley, Jai Herbert vs Ľudovít Klein, Muhammad Mokaev vs Jafel Filho and Jack Shore vs Makwan Amirkhani. The main card is, in all likelihood, going to be hilarious. Endless wrestler Marvin Vettori is facing Roman Dolidze, Gunnar Nelson will try to out-stoic Daniel Rodriguez, Joanne Wood is hunting for her first win in two years against last year's London-card victim Luana Carolina, Justin Gaethje and Rafael Fiziev are going to figuratively (but maybe literally) kick the poo poo out of each other, and your main event is a rematch of 2022's most shocking knockout: The rubber match between UFC Welterweight Champion Leon Edwards and, for the first time in three years, challenger Kamaru Usman. ONE rounds out its month with ONE Fight Night 8: Bhullar vs Malykhin on March 25th. This card is a Frankenstein's Monster of previously attempted and forcibly rescheduled bouts. Itsuki Hirata, former atomweight contender, faces down one of the best atomweights of all time, Hamderlei Silva herself, Seo Hee Ham. Allycia Rodrigues, the atomweight Muay Thai champion, comes back from injury to reunify the title against interim champion Janet Todd. Superlek Kiatmuu9 puts his flyweight kickboxing championship on the line against superstar Rodtang Jitmuangnon, recently returned from learning to be a monk. And the main event--booked for at least the third and possibly fourth time, and by god, hopefully this one sticks--is the long-awaited heavyweight title unification bout between standing champion Arjan Bhullar, who won the belt just shy of two years ago and has yet to fight again, and double-champion Anatoly Malykhin, who has been so impatient he knocked a Dutchman out about it. The UFC's month comes to a close later that evening with UFC on ESPN: Vera vs Sandhagen. This inexplicably-rescheduled February Fight anchors a card that--like, it's not BAD, but it sure is weird. You've got some real serious prospect fights like Trevin Giles vs Preston Parsons and C.J. Vergara vs Daniel da Silva and Alex Perez vs Manel Kape on the prelims, but then Andrea Lee and Maycee Barber are on the main card alongside Chidi Njokuani vs Albert Duraev and Alex Caceres vs Nate Landwehr. Irene Aldana and Raquel Pennington have a fight that could genuinely have title eliminator consequences at women's bantamweight, but it's booked under Holly Holm vs Yana Santos (née Kunitskaya), despite neither having a win in years. The main event is, of course, a loving barnburner, as Marlon Vera will face #3 bantamweight Cory Sandhagen in an incredibly interesting fight. And we end the month on Bellastor 293: Golm vs James which, respectfully, is kind of a big ol' stinker. There are twelve prelims and you've heard of very few people on any of them--Sullivan Cauley vs Luke Trainer, Joey Davis vs Jeff Creighton, Pam Sorenson vs Sara Collins and Lance Gibson Jr. vs Vladimir Tokov are your big name bouts--and the main card really isn't much better. Rustam Khabilov, who has not fought since leaving the UFC in 2019, meets a 1-for-his-last-3 Jaleel Willis, former titlist John Salter tries for his first victory in two and a half years against relative Bellator injury replacement Aaron Jeffery, despite having been Bellator's top contender for like three years already "Alpha" Cat Zingano continues waiting out her title shot by facing Leah McCourt, and in your main event, the more-idle-than-active Marcelo Golm meets Daniel James, because, uh, they're heavyweights.
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CURRENT UFC CHAMPIONS Heavyweight Champion, 265 lbs   VACANT - The destination of your favorite artistThere is a hole in the hearts of man where nothing but vice and greed can survive, and from that hole, Vacant finds purchase. We had exactly one month in the last seven that saw no title vacancies in the UFC and those days looked to finally, mercifully, be over, but thanks to corporate mismanagement Vacant went up from light-heavyweight to heavyweight without missing a beat. After two solid years of contractual friction between the UFC and its undisputed heavyweight champion Francis Ngannou, the dam broke. Francis Ngannou's side of the story, which seems likely, was the UFC's refusal to accept his desire for health insurance, sponsorship rights, a fighter advocate and the chance to pursue boxing superfights the way Conor McGregor did. Dana White's side of the story, which seems less likely, is the 17-3 Francis Ngannou who beat five UFC champions is scared of fighting real competition and doesn't have it in him anymore. Either way, as it always does, the money won: On January 14th, during the post-fight press for Strickland/Imavov, Dana announced Ngannou had been stripped of his title and released from the company. The UFC, which is a very smart company, is pinning the future of the heavyweight championship on a March 4th, UFC 285 showdown between the man they already tried to use to scab Ngannou once, Ciryl Gane, and the only man who has somehow been stripped of or vacated a championship belt more times than he's held one, Jon Jones. The UFC, because they are jerks, made sure to emphasize that the new champion would be the undisputed champion, because there is absolutely nothing disputable about cutting your victorious heavyweight champion and replacing him with either the last guy he soundly defeated or a fighter making their heavyweight debut. MMA: It's never not silly. I'll see you again in the April Punchsport Report when the belt is still vacant because Jon Jones crashed his car into an elementary school the day before the fight. Light-Heavyweight Champion, 205 lbs   Jamahal Hill - 12-1 (1), 0 DefensesThe dread prophecy has been fulfilled: After five years Dana White's Contender Series has produced a UFC champion, and all it took was the complete and utter collapse of a division. After half of the light-heavyweight top ten retired or left the UFC in the span of just two years the division scrambled for a new frontrunner, and after Jan Błachowicz, Glover Teixeira and Jiří Procházka all won and lost the title in the space of just four fights and a draw between Błachowicz and Magomed Ankalaev failed to fill the throne, the division was left in dire straits, with half of the top ten ruled out through loss, draw or injury. So the UFC pulled the trigger, went past their own higher-ranked Anthony Smith, and booked #2 Glover Teixeira vs #7 Jamahal Hill for the vacant belt. It is, in many ways, Dana White's dream: Hill won his way to the UFC through the Contender Series in 2019, just a year and a half after his professional debut, he's a big, tall, American striker who doggedly pursues knockouts and he's a staunch company man to the point of getting in hot water on social media for brave stances like "my boss slapping his wife is fine" and "Andrew Tate is good, actually." A lot of people, myself included, picked Glover to submit Hill--the only blemish on his record (not counting the No Contest one of his victories was swapped for because he dared to smoke the devil weed) is a grotesque submission loss against Paul Craig and just one fight prior he'd struggled visibly with the grappling of Thiago Santos--but the Jamahal Hill who showed up against Glover Teixeira was massively improved, stuffing 15 of 17 takedown attempts and giving up only three and a half minutes of ground control across five rounds against one of the most feared top games in the sport. He wobbled but wasn't able to finish Glover, but he did batter and control him, and however many questions there are about how much he deserved the title shot itself, there are no questions about how much he deserved his 50-44 shutout victory. What happens from here, who knows. Jiří wants to fight for the title again this Spring but doctors aren't sure if he'll be ready, Jan and Ankalaev are in a tenuous position and Aleksandar Rakić is still injured. For the moment, Dana has his personal champion. 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? Nope! As predicted, rather than risking their kickboxer against any grapplers, the UFC is going back to the well of instant loving rematches with Pereira vs Adesanya 2 at UFC 287 on April 8, and rather than another contender waiting in the wings, they've started hyping a superfight--I cannot use the term loosely enough--between Pereira and light-heavyweight champion Jamahal Hill if Pereira wins. Divisions: They're not real. 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. The rubber match was more or less inevitable, and will go down this month at UFC 286 on March 18th. Lightweight Champion, 155 lbs   Islam Makhachev - 24-1, 1 DefenseDestiny 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. His first defense was a different story. Islam faced featherweight champion Alexander Volkanovski at UFC 284 on February 12th in a rare best-of-the-best, champion vs champion match, and this time, his team's prediction of domination was thoroughly incorrect: It was a pitched battle that ended with Makhachev visibly exhausted and Volkanovski pounding on his face. Islam took an extremely close decision and the divisions will remain separate, but his aura of invulnerability has been thoroughly punctured. Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs   Alexander Volkanovski - 25-2, 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. At UFC 284 on February 12th, in front of a rabid hometown crowd, Volkanovski gave Islam the fight of his life and was smashing him by the end of the final round--but it wasn't quite enough, and he lost a close, but unanimous, decision. He got the moral victory of going toe to toe with the heavier champion, but it cost him his winning streak. What happens next is in flux. Yair Rodríguez is the interim champion and title unification looms, but Volkanovski, incensed at how close he came, is clamoring for a rematch. Interim Featherweight Champion   Yair Rodríguez - 15-3 (1), 0 DefensesIt's been a long, strange trip for Yair Rodríguez. "El Pantera" was just 21 when he first appeared on UFC television and barely 22 when he won The Ultimate Fighter: Latin America, making him explicitly the UFC's great hope for breaking into the Mexican market. The reasoning wasn't hard to see: Yair's Taekwondo background gave him a fighting style unlike anyone else in the UFC, one that mixed attacks at odd angles with wild varieties of kicks. When he knocked out Andre Fili with a jumping switch kick, the world abruptly took notice and the UFC started giving him main events. And then, as they do, things fell apart. He took his first UFC loss to Frankie Edgar in 2017 and was fired and quickly rehired shortly thereafter as part of the UFC's attempt at strongarming him into accepting fights, and then he almost lost a fight against Chan-sung Jung only to knock him out with a blind, reverse, upwards elbow in the very last second of the fight, and then he fought Jeremy Stephens twice in two months after an eyepoke ended their first bout in just fifteen seconds, and then he disappeared for two years thanks to a USADA suspension--not for testing positive for drugs, but for insufficiently updating his address in their smartphone app. In November of 2021 Yair took the second loss of his career in a fight against Max Holloway, and, oddly, that loss boosted him higher than his previous win--the world had expected Holloway to blow him out, and instead Yair gave him an incredible fight and very nearly won, proving he'd matured far more than people gave him credit for. And through that bout he got a title eliminator against Brian Ortega, which--ended in one round when Ortega's shoulder popped out while they were grappling. Through yet another freak occurrence, Yair found himself fighting for the interim featherweight title against Josh Emmett, who, himself, was there largely through chance, and Yair battered and submitted him in two rounds to etch his name in the has-an-asterisk side of the history books. And now, befitting his always-weird circumstances, the interim champion has to wait to see if the completely healthy, actively competing undisputed champion is going to unify the titles or wait for another shot at the lightweight title instead. 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. It's not getting any less weird, either: His next title defense was announced for UFC 288 on May 6th, where he will face a returning Henry Cejudo. Flyweight Champion, 125 lbs   Brandon Moreno - 21-6-2, 0 DefensesThe war is over. Brandon Moreno has one hell of a career arc in the UFC. He was brought in as part of 2016's The Ultimate Fighter: Tournament of Champions, where he represented Arizona's World Fighting Federation as its flyweight titleholder, only to get eliminated in the first round by Alexandre Pantoja. The UFC kept him on, but cut him two years later despite a 3-2 record after two consecutive losses to future Bellator champ Sergio Pettis and, once again, Alexandre Pantoja. He was backo in the UFC just one year later, and just one year after that he was fighting Deiveson Figueiredo, the man the entire world thought was the new unbeatable flyweight king, for the UFC championship. Their feud became the first thing to make the UFC give a poo poo about the flyweight division in years, and as the UFC does, it showed it by re-running it over and over. In December of 2020, Moreno fought Figueiredo to a shocking draw--primarily because Figueiredo was docked a point for groin strikes. An instant rematch was ordered for June of 2021, and this time, a Moreno who'd learned and adjusted to Figueiredo's power and timing outfought him, dropping him with jabs and choking him out in three rounds. The UFC decided to roll the dice again, seeing the fight as insufficiently determinative given their previous bout, and booked the two against each other again in January of 2022, and this time it was Figueiredo who had made the necessary adjustments, dropping Moreno three times en route to a unanimous decision victory. With the series now 1-1-1, the UFC, of course, needed a closing chapter. The fourth fight was originally booked for the summer, but a hand injury forced Figueiredo out and led to an interim title fight between Moreno and top contender Kai Kara-France instead, but destiny would not be denied, as Moreno exploded Kai's liver with a kick, handing him his first knockout loss in a decade. The final chapter, an unprecedented Figueiredo/Moreno 4, was rebooked for January 2023 as a title unification match--and because the gods of violence love jokes, the concluding fight ended on a doctor's stoppage. It SHOULDN'T be controversial, as the stoppage only happened because Moreno punched Figueiredo in the god damned eye so hard it was left swollen completely shut within a round, but Figueiredo's inability to tell he hadn't been poked, the confusion of the commentary team, and a partisan Brazilian crowd so angry Moreno had to be rushed backstage while being pelted with cups and garbage all conspired to make the fight seem somehow invalid. In the end, it didn't matter anyway; after the fight was over Deiveson Figueiredo announced he was leaving the 125-pound weight class and moving up to bantamweight because the cut was ruining his life. The longest series in UFC history is over, Brandon Moreno stopped the scariest flyweight on the planet twice, and he is, at last, the undisputed champion of the world. 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. So Manon Fiorot is currently not booked to fight anyone, and Alexa Grasso, despite being ranked four spots lower, is going to fight Valentina for the championship at UFC 285 on March 4th. 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.
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Mar 1, 2023 19:58
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NOTABLE CHAMPIONS ACROSS THE WORLD Bellator Heavyweight Champion, 265 lbs  Ryan Bader - 31-7 (1), 3 DefensesRyan Bader is the greatest Bellator Heavyweight Champion of all time, and on a dairy farm somewhere in Wisconsin, Cole Konrad feels a pang of regret. Bader made his name as the winner of The Ultimate Fighter: Nogueira vs Mir all the way back in 2008, but his UFC career proved to be one of Sisyphean torment and humiliation that included, somehow, impossibly, being the only man to lose a UFC fight to Tito Ortiz during his last six years in the company. Bader left for free agency and Bellator in 2016 and became its light-heavyweight champion on his first night with the organization, and just two years later he became its first-ever simultaneous double-champion after knocking out the legendary Fedor Emelianenko and taking the heavyweight title. Bader would go on to lose his 205-pound crown, but Fedor never forgot his 35-second drubbing at the American wrestler's hands, and for his retirement fight, he demanded a rematch. Thus it was that the entire mixed martial arts community watched with bated breath as on February 4th, 2023, Fedor Emelianenko walked into the cage one last time and promptly got the absolute crap beaten out of him again. Ryan Bader remains undefeated at heavyweight. Who comes next, we'll have to see. 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. The future is uncertain. Bellator Middleweight Champion, 185 lbs  Johnny Eblen - 13-0, 1 DefensesThere's an old combat sports tradition whereby a champion isn't really a champion until they defend their title. Gegard Mousasi has been established as the best middleweight outside the UFC that, despite the one-sided nature of their fight, Johnny Eblen's victory over him was treated as an aberration rather than the passing of a torch. It didn't matter that Eblen was undefeated, widely considered one of the absolute best by his cohort at American Top Team or that he'd dropped Mousasi on his face with his bare hands, the world needed verification. On February 4th at Bellator 290, they got it. Fedor Emelianenko's team was intending to pull one big, beautiful night of success out of the ether for their leader's retirement fight, but it was not to be: Vadim Nemkov had to pull out of the card thanks to an injury, Fedor himself was crushed for the second time by heavyweight champion Ryan Bader, and middleweight hopeful Anatoly Tokov was competitive for the first couple of rounds but was subsequently washed out by Eblen's overwhelming assault. Johnny Eblen is a defending champion now, and as things always seem to go, the conversation changed overnight from his being overrated to his being better than everyone in the UFC. Nuance escapes our fanbase. Eblen will likely see the winner of May's showdown between Gegard Mousasi and Fabian Edwards this Fall. Bellator Welterweight Champion, 170 lbs   Yaroslav Amosov - 27-0, 1 DefenseThere may not be a fighter alive who's had a tougher year than Yaroslav Amosov. Bellator picking Amosov up in 2018 was an obvious choice: He was already a world champion in Sambo and an MMA champion in Russia, already 19-0 with 17 finishes, and already being talked up by his training partners as quite possibly the best welterweight in the world. By 2021 he'd run up a six-fight winning streak in Bellator and earned a shot at world champion Douglas Lima, and he didn't waste a second of it, dominating Lima in every round. His success far outstripped his fame, but a scheduled title defense against superstar Michael "Venom" Page in May of 2022 promised to finally give him the spotlight. That, obviously, did not happen. In the wake of Russia's invasion of his homeland Ukraine Amosov returned home to evacuate his family and, once they had passed the border, notified Bellator he was pulling out of the fight and fighting in the war. Six months later, having liberated his home city of Irpin, he posted video of his troop returning to his mother's home to retrieve his Bellator championship belt, which he'd kept hidden in a closet. Amosov's return bout, a title unification against interim champion Logan Storley, was announced for February 25th, just barely one year after the invasion began, and after a year and a half not just away from competition but actively fighting in a war, there were many questions about how much like his old self Amosov could realistically look. As it turned out: He looked even better. When they'd first fought back in 2020, Storley gave Amosov all he could handle and the fight came down to a split decision; in 2023, Amosov wiped the floor with him, repeatedly hurting him standing and winning the entirety of the wrestling war. His home may still be in crisis, but Yaroslav Amosov is, at least, back on his throne. 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 an army of ultra-grapplers, and after his passing the American Kickboxing Academy's Javier Mendez and Adulmanap's son and protege, the now-retired Khabib Nurmagomedov, unleashed them on the world. 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. Next up for him is not just a challenger, but a field: Bellator's Lightweight Grand Prix for 2023 kicks off on March 3rd at Bellator 292, where he'll be both defending his belt and fighting for the next round against former UFC champion Benson Henderson. 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 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, 2022. 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, got admonished for his crimes. On April 22nd at Bellator 295, Raufeon Stots will once again put his interim title on the line in the grand prix final against 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. 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. 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, other than, uh, use her instagram account to call for a military coup of her home country in the hopes of restoring fascism to power? 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. 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. 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 that he has another, stable championship, ONE is taking its third swing at the constantly-rescheduled heavyweight championship unification match. Bhullar vs Malykhin has been booked, yet again, for ONE Fight Night 8 on March 24th. Keep your fingers loving crossed. 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 sole 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 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 not 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. Unfortunately, it was followed by tragedy. With the death of his 18 year-old sister and fellow ONE competitor Victoria Lee, the future of the entire Lee fighting family is both up in the air and the last possible thing that could matter at this moment in time. For now, they have to grieve. 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  Fabricio Andrade - 9-2 (1), 0 DefensesThe second time was the charm. When Fabricio "Wonder Boy" Andrade joined ONE Championship back in 2020 he was a virtual unknown in the mixed martial arts world, a 20-3 kickboxer but only a 3-2 mixed martial artist who'd been fighting out in the regional circuit of China. His association with Tiger Muay Thai put him on ONE's radar, and his visible striking skills despite being just 21 at the time made him interesting enough for a developmental contract. Said contract proceeded to develop into Andrade going on a five-fight winning streak that only got more dominant as he met tougher competition, and three straight first-round knockouts punched his ticket to the championship picture. His first appearance in the spotlight, unfortunately, went a touch awry. First, bantamweight champion John Lineker lost his title on the scale after missing weight, meaning only Andrade was eligible to become champion, and he was well on his way to doing so before hitting Lineker with an errant strike to the groin so hard it shattered his cup, and with the fight not yet halfway complete, it had to be rendered a No Contest. It took four months to get to the rematch, and it was much more closely contested, but after four rounds Lineker threw in the towel, his face having been punched too swollen to continue. Fabricio Andrade is 25 and a world goddamn champion. 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. 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. In the wake of her 18 year-old sister Victoria's tragic passing, Angela and the rest of the Lee family have shut down their gym and are focusing on much more important things than fighting.  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 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 them. Trouble is: He's not fighting at flyweight, he's fighting at bantamweight, and it's finally 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. 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 2-3 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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Fozzy The Bear posted:Oh, because its BLACK history month, its "dark times"? My vision was clouded by my joy at slap fighting almost being over Pwny_Xpress posted:We were rooting for Volko? I always thought his attitude after the Holloway decisions were bitch made and I've disliked him since I personally always liked him but there was definitely a 50/50 split between people here who liked and hated him after the Holloway fights, but then some people switched over because of the way he gritted out the subs against Ortega and beat him insensible for it, and some more people switched over because of how he completely shut Holloway down in their last fight, and practically everyone was pro-Volkanovski against Islam because rooting for underdogs is cool. Also in news: 
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Mar 1, 2023 23:03
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I think champions going up in weight to fight other champions is hard to justify in general if you care about divisional matchmaking, and the thing that makes it better is their having sufficiently dominated their field of contenders such that there isn't anything to accomplish at their primary weight class for a period of time. People felt iffy about Izzy challenging Jan because at that point he'd only defended the belt twice, one of those defenses was the extremely weird Romero fight, and he hadn't fought Cannonier or given Whittaker his extremely well-earned rematch. By contrast, Volkanovski had four defenses, the last three were absurdly definitive, and until Yair beat Emmett (and if Allen beats Holloway) no one in the entire top ten had a real claim to a shot. The acceptability hinges on how many questions the fans feel the champion has left unanswered. In the case of Jon Jones, his justification for a heavyweight title shot is his light-heavyweight greatness, but he's only actually fought two people currently in the entire light-heavyweight top fifteen, one of those fights was four years ago, and the other was against the #11 guy in the division who's on a four-fight losing streak and he arguably won. There's nothing BUT questions about how Jones would do against the light-heavyweight division right now, and that makes the proposition feel worse. Also he's a dickhead.
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Mar 2, 2023 08:38
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so, funny story about jones/gane predictions, CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 49: THE DEFINITION OF INSANITY  SATURDAY, MARCH 4TH FROM THE T-MOBILE ARENA IN PARADISE, NEVADA EARLY PRELIMS 2:30 PM PST/5:30 PM EST VIA ESPN+ | PRELIMS 5:00 PM PST/8:00 PM EST VIA ESPN+ | MAIN CARD 7:00 PM PST/10:00 PM EST VIA PAY-PER-VIEW The UFC heavyweight championship is the oldest extant major championship in mixed martial arts. The lineage of numerous mixed martial arts organizations run through it, from Strikeforce to Pride to Pancrase and even the ancient days of the Lumax Cup. For all of the numerous travails of the heavyweight division, it has existed as the sport's most enduring standard; a living link not just to the origins of the sport, but the offshoots it created around the world. At the start of this year the UFC dumped it in the trash because Francis Ngannou wanted healthcare and a boxing match. The UFC has spent weeks pointedly, emphatically referring to Jones and Gane as being for the undisputed heavyweight championship of the world. It is an attempt to proactively rewrite history. This is the most disputed heavyweight championship belt in mixed martial arts history. In 2008 a group of businessmen, sports agents and Russian managers welded some diamonds to a dinner plate, called it the World Alliance of Mixed Martial Arts championship, wrapped it around Fedor and called it the new top heavyweight title in the sport. That was still better than this. We're entering a new era of the sport, whether we like it or not. Come with me on this trip through Hell.  your featured prelim is the unintentionally suggestive cody garbrandt sadness hour MAIN EVENT: SOMEHOW, PALPATINE RETURNED HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP: Jon Jones (26-1 (1), NR) vs Ciryl Gane (11-1, #1) Let us be unequivocal: This fight is large and momentous, and it also loving sucks. We live in a world of nuance where both things can be true. Jon Jones is one of the most important fighters of all time. He's the best light-heavyweight in history by miles and the arguments for including him in the pound-for-pound greatest lists, while often irritating, aren't without merit. He's been talking about moving up to the heavyweight division for an entire decade, and even back in 2013, the idea piqued interest. Ciryl Gane is one of the best heavyweight strikers in the history of mixed martial arts. He walked into the UFC as a 3-0 rookie and was fighting for the world championship two years later. He's only lost once across two combat sports and a decade of competition, and in a game as zero-sum as heavyweight, that's an achievement. Jon Jones is also a light-heavyweight. You cannot actually call him a heavyweight fighter until the bell actually rings to begin this fight, because he has never set foot in the weight class. His heavyweight record isn't even 0-0, it's just a piece of broken database code that reads NULL. Ciryl Gane is a fantastic heavyweight, even as the scab who participated in the most thoroughly ludicrous interim championship fight in company history, and he has every claim to a championship opportunity. He also got trucked by the actual, legitimate world champion a year ago. This is a fight to crown a heavyweight champion in a division that already has a heavyweight champion. Instead of that champion, who will now wind up boxing in Britain or joining the Professional Fighters League or some other thorough injustice, this fight is between the man he handily defeated and a man who's never touched the weight class--or any other weight class, as he hasn't fought at all for three loving years--and one of them, one way or another, will be in the rankings next week as the greatest heavyweight on the planet. And it's exhausting. And if there's a single adjective to sum up the totality of the Jon Jones experience, "exhausting" might be the best. There's a growing movement in MMA's social circles--mostly among his fans and ardent defenders of the UFC--that holds it's unfair to talk about Jon Jones for his many, many personal failings, as doing so gets in the way of what really matters: His contributions to the sport. Whatever happens in the rest of his life is irrelevant to the annals of combat sports, and all we should see fit to comment on, it is said, are his innumerable victories. Some, including Jones himself, would even like several of those sins stricken from the public record altogether. They're not relevant, and it's unfair to bring them up. Motherfucker, I didn't bring them up, Jon Jones did. If he didn't want people dovetailing discussion of his personal crises into his professional record, maybe he shouldn't have kept getting stripped of world championships because he couldn't stop doing bad poo poo all of the time. You can't talk about his record without talking about his record because they're the same loving record. If you count interim championships, there have been 19 titles stripped from their champions in the history of the UFC. Jon Jones is three of them. 16% of all title strippings in the 30-year history of the company are Jon Jones-shaped, and that doesn't even include his dumping his title belt in the trash three years ago. But there have also been reams of things written about the man. If you're reading this, statistically, you don't need me to tell you about his cocaine bust or his car crashes. You don't need me to tell you about his multiple positive drug tests, or the process of watching very serious drug testers explain that Jon Jones might continue to test positive for small amounts of steroids for the rest of his career and that was actually perfectly normal and fine. You almost certainly don't need me to tell you about his being one of the biggest assholes and hypocrites in the sport, a proud snitch covering up his own habits, a man who once paused in the middle of answering an interview question about his love for his family to hit on a waitress, a man who assaulted a hostess, assaulted his wife, got two DUIs and got away with all of it. It's fine. We don't need to talk about it. His fans want to just talk about his record: We can just talk about his record. But that, too, is less flattering than it might seem. Let's be clear: Jon Jones is one of the baddest motherfuckers on the planet. However I may be about to demean his victories, his having gone virtually undefeated for eleven years is one of the most incredible accomplishments in the sport. Here's the thing with being that good for that long, though: Most of those incredible accomplishments are almost a decade old. Defeating eight world champions in 900 days? That's an insane thing to do. Practically unheard of. But it happened between 2010 and 2012. The last truly impressive performance Jon Jones had was knocking out Daniel Cormier in 2017, and thanks to his lust for turinabol, that fight technically didn't even happen. So what were the last five fights of his career that did, in fact, happen?
But if that's the present of Jon Jones, what does Ciryl Gane look like now that he's finally lost? It's difficult to recalibrate after seeing Ciryl Gane get ragdolled by Francis Ngannou. Which is patently unfair. Gane isn't just 11-1, he's outstruck every opponent he's had in the UFC--including, hilariously enough, Francis Ngannou. Despite being a striker who ostensibly should have a striker's vulnerabilities, no one outside of Francis Ngannou has ever taken him down. In his run up to title contention Gane destroyed a former UFC champion in Junior dos Santos, dominated a championship kickboxer in Jairzinho Rozenstruik, outworked a great pressure fighter in Alexander Volkov and handed Derrick Lewis the most one-sided beating of his life. Even in the wake of his championship defeat, Gane has looked good. He did outstrike Francis Ngannou while they were on their feet, he did threaten him with a heel hook in the final round of their fight, and he did rebound from his loss by beating just seventeen shades of poo poo out of Tai Tuivasa in September of last year. Even when Tai's super-powered brawling cracked Gane and dropped him to the canvas, Gane was back on his feet in seconds, recovered, composed, and nearly dropping Tai with body shots before finishing him in the next round after battering him liberally in the face. That's the difference with Gane. I used the phrase "technical striker" to describe him, but in the history of heavyweight mixed martial arts, "technical striker" has been a deeply abused phrase. It's been used to compliment fighters who happened to be able to throw basic boxing combinations, or consistently land leg kicks, or, sometimes, even just periodically throw a jab. Ciryl Gane is, definitionally, an actual technical striker. He works behind strikes at every angle, he strings punches and kicks together seamlessly, he times out the rhythm of his opponents and breaks them down with jabs, he often wins striking battles by footwork alone. He's only been hurt on the feet once in his entire UFC tenure, it took one of the hardest punchers in the division to do it, and Gane's defensive instincts are honed well enough that he was back in control of the striking exchanges immediately. In theory, that's a problem for Jon Jones. The greatest struggles he's had in his career came from long, rangy strikers who could cut through his massive 84" reach and force him to shell up. And every one of those strikers was less skilled--and considerably smaller--than Ciryl Gane. Jones has never had to contend with this level of expertise, nor an opponent who's just, plainly, as loving huge as he is. But Gane hasn't had to contend with a wrestler like Jon. We're only one fight removed from watching Gane struggle with the wrestling of Francis Ngannou, which, while surprising, was inherently raw and more based on power and timing than technique. Jon Jones does not have this problem. Jon Jones takes down championship wrestlers. If you're Ciryl Gane, and arguably your most valuable weapons are your kicks, you're suddenly very aware of the fact that one caught kick could easily lead to a takedown that costs you a round, if not the entire fight. Of course, that, too, presupposes that Jon Jones still looks like Jon Jones. Not only has Jon Jones not looked great in a long while, not only has Jon Jones not had a fight in three years, but we've never seen Jon Jones at heavyweight, and the condition he shows up in will deeply inform his success. Did he intelligently, gradually pack on muscle to improve his power and explosiveness? Or is he carrying extra weight that's just going to slow him down and make him gas out faster? After a three-year layoff that sees the Jon Jones of 2023 entering his mid-thirties, will he still look good at all? And that's the most irritating part of every Jon Jones fight. I can say all of these things; all of these things are correct; it's totally possible they'll be completely irrelevant. A Jon Jones fan will listen to them and reply "yeah, but he's Jon Jones," and irritatingly, they might have a god damned point. As much as his reach and cardio and horrifying knee-kicks, adaptability is one of the greatest weapons in his arsenal. Even in the Dominick Reyes fight that I believe he lost, Jones picked up his game and won the championship rounds. Unless he packed on a bunch of muscle and finds after three rounds he can't breathe anymore. CIRYL GANE BY TKO. Look, it's a Jon Jones fight. Anything can happen, up to and including the fight never actually starting because Jones shot up a Vegas nightclub after the weigh-ins. If Jones can consistently catch Gane's kicks, or get inside and force him to fight at length in the clinch, Gane's in trouble. But Gane's control of range, Jones' historical trouble with anyone who can outbox him and the reality of having to fight a heavyweight who hits as hard as a heavyweight can for the first time make me desperately, desperately hope that finally, once and for all, we get to see Jon Jones eat poo poo. Jon Jones hasn't learned from a single mistake in his life and I'm hoping he'll continue that practice here. Please don't gently caress it up, Ciryl. CO-MAIN EVENT: THE LAURYN HILL ALBUM THAT NEVER CAME OUT WOMEN'S FLYWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP: Valentina Shevchenko (23-3, Champion) vs Alexa Grasso (15-3, #6) And then, on the topic of the mixed martial arts fanbase and its centering of What Have You Done For Me Lately as a core belief, we have Valentina Shevchenko. Valentina's last fight was a title defense against Taila Santos in June. Let me take you back to a younger, more innocent Carl: CarlCX posted:It would be deeply disrespectful to say Taila Santos cannot win this fight. She's a very capable fighter with notable skills. Her trips and throws out of the clinch are solid. Her top game may not always produce finishes, but her control is very difficult to break. Joanne Wood's chin can attest to the power she carries when she connects cleanly, and in twenty bouts, no one's managed to stop her. She's tough as nails. To once again quote Past Carl: CarlCX posted:Where names like Anderson Silva and Matt Hughes get free-associated with immaculate striking or wrestling, Valentina Shevchenko is cursed by being known not so much for her skills as for the massive loving chasm between her skills and those of her competitors. And she almost lost her last fight. When you've been dominating the opposition for years, almost losing has an effect on your popular perception you have to measure in the Richter scale. After years of effortlessly transitioning between hammering people on the feet and mauling them on the ground, entire thinkpieces were written and rewritten about Valentina Shevchenko's chances against the growing legion of power grapplers in her division like Santos, or Erin Blanchfield, or even the returning Tatiana Suarez. So the UFC decided to make all of them irrelevant and have her face boxing specialist Alexa Grasso. In some ways, it's kind of a baffling choice. Manon Fiorot won an openly-advertised title eliminator and is ranked #1, Taila Santos very nearly beat the champion and is ranked #2, Jéssica Andrade had just completed a successful return and was ranked #3. Alexa Grasso has actually lost a place in the rankings since this fight was announced: Erin Blanchfield's victory over Andrade propelled her to #3, dropped Andrade to #4 and kicked Katlyn Chookagian into #5. Alexa Grasso is getting a title shot from her demoted position as #6. Alexa Grasso has, in fact, never fought anyone in the top five. It's one of those fun tricks you can do when your rankings are not, strictly speaking, real. Last March, Grasso was #9 and fighting the #7 ranked Joanne Wood; after defeating her, Grasso was #5. And if it were anyone other than Alexa Grasso, that'd all be weird. With her, it makes a surprising amount of sense. To dig back into Past Carl: CarlCX posted:I complain on a weekly basis about how poorly the UFC gets visibility on its fighters. I will almost assuredly do it later on this very card. Alexa Grasso is an extremely notable exception. In nine UFC fights across just under six years, despite never reaching a championship match, Alexa Grasso has only been on the undercard once, which you cannot say about nearly any other woman at either of her UFC divisions. Even current champion Carla Esparza was back on the undercard a few fights before her title victory. Grasso's opponent tonight, Viviane Araújo, was booked on one of the most cursed UFC cards of all time, Overeem vs Sakai, which saw so many injury and COVID pullouts that it wound up being a single, seven-fight televised special with no undercard and Araújo was still booked on just the second fight of the night. Alexa Grasso once missed weight AND won a tepid split decision, two things the UFC loathes above all else, and she was still co-main eventing the next card. If the UFC promoted everyone as well as they promoted her the sport could be very, very different. But, hey: They did it right this time, and while it took a few more years than they anticipated, we're here. Alexa Grasso has a shot at the most dominant champion in women's mixed martial arts. And she's a +500 underdog. And that's probably fair. Alexa Grasso is a very good fighter. She might have the best pure boxing technique in women's mixed martial arts and the last several years have seen marked improvements in her leg kicks, her clinch control and her defensive grappling. But those skills are all thoroughly aided by her ability to keep opponents stuck on the end of her fists. Valentina Shevchenko is, still, one of the most multifaceted strikers the division has ever seen. Grasso may have better hands, but she doesn't have better shins, elbows or knees, nor the ability to mix them up. Moreover, while her takedown defense may be improved, it's still not great: Maycee Barber and Viviane Araújo both got her to the floor and spent multiple minutes controlling her. Can Grasso make this fight competitive? Absolutely. The more she sticks and moves with the jab, the more she dictates the distance and forces Shevchenko to engage in a prolonged boxing match rather than finding her rhythm with kicks, let alone landing clinch trips, the better she will do. Will she manage it for five rounds? Probably not. VALENTINA SHEVCHENKO BY DECISION. MAIN CARD: THE ONRUSHING FUTURE  WELTERWEIGHT: Geoff Neal (15-4, #7) vs Shavkat Rakhmonov (16-0, #10)This is the poo poo I'm here for. Get the gently caress out of here with your historically important heavyweight championship fights, I'm here for welterweight contendership. Geoff Neal was the fourth person ever offered a contract through the Contender Series, and he was one of the show's biggest success stories, an almost immediate welterweight standout with a five-fight UFC streak that included four devastating stoppages and an extremely well-aging decision over Belal Muhammad. Unfortunately, like so many prospects, he was dashed on the jagged cliffside that is Stephen "Wonderboy" Thompson, getting completely shut out on the scorecards by Thompson's striking expertise and outworked by Neil Magny immediately thereafter. There were some fears that Neal would slip into the gatekeeper vortex, but a close decision over Santiago Ponzinibbio put him back on the upswing and becoming the first man to ever knock out global violence king Vicente Luque propelled him to the highest ranking of his life. Suddenly, Geoff Neal is within reach of a title shot. But he's gotta defend his spot against Shavkat Rakhmonov, and boy, that's a big loving ask. I know I've quoted my past writeups a whole bunch today, but I'm gonna do it again, because a point about Shavkat Rakhmonov needs emphasizing. CarlCX posted:He's never been taken down, he's excellent at both maintaining range and stringing together combinations, he's dropped his last two opponents with spinning wheel kicks to the goddamn head between effective wrestling and grappling exchanges. Shavkat Rakhmonov has dropped all three of his UFC opponents en route to finishing them and he's done it by landing a grand total of 47 significant strikes in three fights. That translates to just about one knockdown per every dozen significant strikes landed. I cannot begin to tell you how batshit of a statistic that is. Rakhmonov's a -500 favorite, and that, too, is a measure of expectation. We haven't seen him struggle in a fight--NO one has seen him struggle in a fight--because he simply hasn't. He hasn't just won every fight in his professional career, he's never even made it to a third round. It's already difficult to imagine him in trouble, and it's particularly difficult to imagine that trouble coming from Geoff Neal, a man who struggled heavily with the same Neil Magny Shavkat balled up and chucked into a dumpster. Neal's by no means defenseless here. As most of the division can attest, he's got dangerous hands and reasonable counter-wrestling. But unless he surprises Shavkat by swarming him early or he lures Shavkat into prolonged boxing exchanges, this fight seems destined to end on the ground. SHAVKAT RAKHMONOV BY SUBMISSION. LIGHTWEIGHT: Mateusz Gamrot (21-2 (1), #7) vs Jalin Turner (13-5, #10)This fight was a late addition to the card, but boy, it's an interesting one. Mateusz Gamrot was poised to be one of the next big things up until a few months ago. A champion in his native Poland, an inexhaustible grappler, a man who had torn off Jeremy Stephens' arm in sixty seconds, faced defeat only once in a split decision against the masterful Guram Kutateladze, run up a four-fight win streak and joined the top ten of the lightweight shark tank after winning one of 2022's best fights against Arman Tsarukyan, Gamrot was ending 2022 with an incredible amount of momentum. And then he met the constantly underrated Beneil Dariush and got humbled, missing 15 out of 19 takedown attempts, managing an average of just 30 seconds of control for the four he landed, and getting outstruck almost two to one in the process. There was no split-decision asterisk: Gamrot had truly failed the biggest test of his career. Jalin Turner is his path back to the top. Turner, a giant 6'3" lightweight with a reach advantage over almost everyone in the division, was supposed to have a big, silly striking battle with fellow tall brawler Dan Hooker, but a hand injury forced him out and Gamrot was the only ranked lightweight willing to risk the fight on two weeks' notice. Make no mistake: It's a big loving risk. Jalin Turner is a killing machine. He has yet to win a fight by decision, because every time he wins he does it by either knocking an opponent loopy with punches and kicks from a mile away or wrapping them up and choking them out. He hits hard, he's great at intercepting opponents on their way in, and only three of those eighteen opponents have managed to survive past the second round against him. Here's the thing, though: All three of them beat him. Every time Turner's been taken into deep waters, he's drowned. His style kind of depends on it. He throws so much into his strikes that it's hard to have anything left if they don't get the job done. And against a living energizer bunny like Gamrot, that's a big problem. This is a Turner's top-ten test, and it's going to be remarkably hard to pass. MATEUSZ GAMROT BY DECISION. MIDDLEWEIGHT: Bo Nickal (3-0) vs Jamie Pickett (13-8) Remember how I waxed rhapsodic about Alexa Grasso and good, decent promotion? This is the opposite. This is the thing we're getting a lot more often nowadays. Bo Nickal had official MMA management and agented representation before he even started training, thanks to his being one of the most decorated amateur wrestlers of the last decade, a three-time NCAA champion, three-time Big Ten champion, one-time national champion and one-time world champion. When he finally left wrestling behind to focus on MMA his record was 120-3, and he'd beaten the only two people to make him lose. His road to the UFC is a sign of exactly how silly their promotional game has become. He was invited to the Contender Series in August of last year, won his fight by submission in one minute without taking a single punch, and was denied a contract anyway because, as Dana White said, he was too inexperienced--despite Dana White having invited him to compete on the show where you win contracts. He was, instead, booked to show up on the Contender Series again six weeks later, where he once again won by submission in a single minute, and magically, one month and one fight later, Dana no longer objected to his joining the UFC. Jamie Pickett was hand-picked as his opponent for a pay-per-view debut back in December, but Nickal had to pull out with an injury. Rather than replace him or rebook Pickett, they simply told him to wait three more months. This is, of course, because Pickett is here to lose. "The Night Wolf" is a 2-4 UFC fighter who actually needed three attempts at the Contender Series to get a contract, and he has been pointedly, and repeatedly, outwrestled by much, much less accomplished wrestlers. The UFC kept him this long specifically so he could get wrestled into nothingness by Bo Nickal, who they absolutely see as a future star. But at the same time--I can't really complain about the matchmaking, can I? Bo Nickal may be a super-wrestler, but he's also 3-0. It's not like he spent a lot of time honing his craft on the amateur circuit, either; his entire amateur career was two fights in six weeks. Most 3-0 fighters are taking on rookies in smoky barrooms. This fight may be a softball for Bo, but it's also, still, a 3-0 rookie with less than a year of mixed martial arts experience taking on a twenty-one fight veteran who's been in combat sports since 2008. It's a squash match, but if you're carrying out squash matches at this point in your career, you're still pretty loving impressive. BO NICKAL BY SUBMISSION. PRELIMS: PICKING UP THE PIECES BANTAMWEIGHT: Cody Garbrandt (12-5) vs Trevin Jones (13-9 (1)) How low the mighty. In 2016, Cody Garbrandt was the most exciting fighter on the planet. He was an undefeated 10-0, he had ridiculous power in his hands for a bantamweight, and he'd just ended the eight undefeated years of bantamweight GOAT Dominick Cruz's run by not just beating him but humiliating him, dropping him repeatedly and very literally dancing in front of him, wresting away his bantamweight world championship in the process. If you weren't watching at the time, it is impossible to overstate how shocking and exciting Garbrandt's rise was. And it's matched only by the sheer velocity of his fall from grace. Garbrandt has dropped five of his last six fights, and four of those losses were violent, definitive knockouts. He even tried to take refuge by dropping to flyweight, only to eat the fastest knockout loss of his career. He was intended to fight Julio Arce here, but an injury and a replacement means he's now facing the embattled "5 Star" Trevin Jones. Trevin was a late-injury replacement signing for the UFC, and he shocked them by knocking top prospect Timur Valiev the gently caress out--a huge win that was immediately taken away because he dared to smoke marijuana. He scored another knockout in his next fight, but it's all been downhill from there: Three straight losses, none of which were particularly competitive. Jones has powerful striking, solid wrestling and a hell of a chin, but he's been unable to put those skills back together in quite some time, and after so many losses in a row, it's tough to get your mind back into the fight game--especially when you're fighting on a month's notice. But he's also fighting Cody Garbrandt, who's got a 5" reach disadvantage, a string of brutal knockout losses, and a tendency to never, ever keep his chin covered. If Garbrandt lands, he can knock out anyone in the division and probably the next two above him. But TREVIN JONES BY KNOCKOUT is just too easy to see happening again. MIDDLEWEIGHT: Derek Brunson (23-8, #5) vs Dricus du Plessis (18-2, #10)Derek Brunson was so goddamn close, man. 2022 saw the third time eternal contender Derek Brunson got ejected from the title picture. In 2016 his five-fight streak was ended by Robert Whittaker, his 2018 comeback ended thanks to Jacare Souza, and after putting together another five victories he was felled, once again, by the vicious elbows of Jared Cannonier. Brunson's one of the best middleweights in the sport's history--no, really, come back, I mean it, he's been in the top ten for basically an entire decade and his only losses in that time came from champions or #1 contenders, that poo poo's not easy. His long punches and power wrestling are deceptively good and have made fools of many a man, and everyone who's underestimated him has paid dearly. But Dricus du Plessis is a puzzling fighter. It's hard to say this without feeling like I am insulting the man, so I want to be clear that the following is a compliment: He is remarkably adept at looking terrible and somehow still completely winning fights. He'll spam leg kicks and get repeatedly countered, he'll blitz wildly forward and get torn up on entry, and even while winning striking exchanges he eats fists upside the head. The two times we've seen him reach the third round of a fight, he's looked exhausted. And he wins anyway, and I cannot overstate how impressive that is. He's so determined in his approach to fighting that his appearance of weakness becomes itself a strength, allowing him to draw opponents in only to overwhelm them and drown them in offense. This fight is remarkably difficult to predict. Brunson has the wrestling offense to shut du Plessis down, but du Plessis has proved remarkably difficult to keep down, and unlike du Plessis, when Brunson gets tired, he's cooked, and at 39 his gas tank isn't getting any better. I still think we'll see DEREK BRUNSON BY DECISION, but that's dependent on his ability to manhandle du Plessis while staying away from his blitzes. If he can't keep du Plessis either down or away from him, it's going to get ugly. WOMEN'S FLYWEIGHT: Viviane Araújo (11-4, #8) vs Amanda Ribas (11-3, #15) And here, we have the battle of the contenders that never were. Viviane Araújo has some solid all-around talents, but her bread and butter is positional control grappling. She has, in fact, managed only one finish in the UFC, a shock big-right-hand knockout of Talita Bernardo in her debut back in 2019. Everything else has been variations on fighting to a decision. But she's also made it through the UFC without ever getting stopped herself, and arguably, she beat neverending top contender Katlyn Chookagian only to get boned out of a decision because we now live in a judging hellworld where landing a few right hands outweighs holding mount and threatening submissions for half the round. But Viviane's last fight against Alexa Grasso was the first time in her UFC tenure that she's been shut out, going 2 for 10 on her takedowns and getting outboxed all night. So the company is giving her a fight to determine the best fighter who maybe beat Katlyn Chookagian only to not get the decision. Here's the thing: Amanda Ribas is a strawweight. She's 5'3", she's lightly built, her gameplan revolves around outworking and outspeeding her opponents, and the UFC has been slightly mad at her ever since she foiled their plans by ending Mackenzie Dern's undefeated streak. Her knockout loss to Marina Rodriguez was an unfortunate way to lose the hope of title contendership, but boy, when she took that flyweight fight with Chookagian I was deeply hoping it would be temporary, but no, she's staying at 125 pounds, I guess, where she's the second-smallest woman in the division and every single fight puts her at a stark disadvantage. That said: AMANDA RIBAS BY DECISION. We just saw Viviane get controlled by a faster, sharper boxer, and Ribas is every bit both of those things all over again. Ribas should be able to outwork her for fifteen minutes. MIDDLEWEIGHT: Julian Marquez (9-3) vs Marc-André Barriault (14-6 (1)) At UFC 258 back in 2021, Julian Marquez scored a really neat anaconda choke, used his post-fight interview to ask Miley Cyrus out on a date, and when Miley Cyrus, who is famously down for bad ideas, gave him the slightest bit of attention, he immediately fumbled the bag by telling her to get his name (temporarily) tattooed on her body. For the crime of being a huge idiot "The Cuban Missile Crisis" was cursed by the violence gods to miss the next full year of his career thanks to health issues, and when he finally came back last June, he was immediately punched out by Gregory Rodrigues. Marc-André Barriault is, like, barely hanging on, but that's how it's always been. He lost his first three UFC fights, he lost his first win thanks to a positive drug test for ostarine, he managed to string two victories together and then he got flattened in sixteen seconds by Chidi Njokuani. It's been back and forth since: He choked out Jordan Wright, he got choked out by Anthony Hernandez. Does his back-and-forth record mean he'll win this fight? Are his abrupt chokes better than Julian's abrupt chokes? Does this fight mean the birth of a new contender? Or is this just the middle of middleweight, a swirling void into which talent is thrown when the UFC has nothing else to do with them, so they can roll around and try stuff they saw in the gym a couple times and maybe scrape an extra win together so the UFC knows who to feed to Leonard Kickman, the next big Contender Series middleweight winner who says something racist enough that Dana thinks he can make money? You decide. JULIAN MARQUEZ BY SUBMISSION. EARLY PRELIMS: FILING YOUR FORMS IN DUPLICATE WELTERWEIGHT: Ian Garry (10-0) vs Song Kenan (18-6)It's rubber-meets-the-road time for the UFC's big Conor McGregor cloning experiment. Ian "The Future" Garry, the only McGregor successor so blatant as to just straight up quote his post-fight promos in place of his own, has been getting a drip-feed of favorable matches for the last year and a half as the UFC has tried to build him up to relevant competition. Song Kenan is, somehow, both. He's Garry's first UFC opponent with a winning record under its banner, he's a tough, powerful striker with hands heavy enough to match Garry's knockout power, and he's got enough of a jab to disrupt the 'I'm just going to walk you down and kill you' gameplan Garry tends to favor. He also got knocked the gently caress out two years ago and hasn't competed since. Song could win. He's dangerous. But the UFC is banking on both the likelihood that Song will engage Garry in the kind of fight he's best at and the likelihood that after two years of nothingness Song will be just rusty enough to get dusted. And they're probably right. IAN GARRY BY TKO. BANTAMWEIGHT: Cameron Saaiman (7-0) vs Mana Martinez (10-3) I had Cameron Saaiman picked to easily win his UFC debut back in December; he wound up in the toughest fight of his life and scraped a last-minute standing TKO together to save himself from what was probably going to be a draw. Was that stage fright, or are there just levels to this game and Steven "Obi Won Shinobi The Pillow" Koslow is higher level than anyone thought? I hope we never have to find out, because every time I type his nickname it takes two minutes off of my life. But Saaiman proved he could gut out a hard, scrappy brawl, which is probably why the UFC was eager to toss him in with Mana Martinez, whose 2-1 success with the company has come entirely from split decisions thanks to equally memorably scrappy brawling. The solemn hope is they'll get three rounds of wild facepunching. I'm not convinced. Mana was a little warier in his last fight--which is good, that's a sign of maturing and bodes well for his future--and I'm choosing to arbitrarily believe Saaiman's going to look less nervous, half because he got his debut out of the way and half because he's not fighting a power wrestler anymore. CAMERON SAAIMAN BY DECISION. WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT: Jessica Penne (14-6) vs Tabatha Ricci (7-1) I feel like we're nearing the end of the Jessica Penne story. Just six fights ago she was fighting for the strawweight championship and lasting three (one-sided) rounds with the best in the world: In the time since she is 2-4, and that encompassed a four-year layoff followed by two fights followed by another year of injuries. Her fight last July was her first in almost twelve months, and against a last-minute replacement in Emily Ducote, a smaller fighter who would go on to get outworked by a 50/50 Angela Hill, Penne got beaten so badly she limped out of the cage on one functional leg with one functional eye. She's incredibly tough, she's got a ton of heart, but she also turned 40 this year. The good news for her is Tabatha Ricci is a much less fearsome striker; the bad news is she's one of the best grapplers in the division. One fight ago Ricci was walking through the offense of Polyana Viana, herself a power puncher and by no means a bad grappler, and taking her and controlling her at will. Ricci's grappling also makes her good at stifling offense by spamming kicks, as she has no fear of them getting her taken down. It's been almost a decade since Jessica Penne was submitted, but TABATHA RICCI BY SUBMISSION seems likely. BANTAMWEIGHT: Farid Basharat (9-0) vs Da'Mon Blackshear (12-4-1) We're entering a bold new era of brothers in the UFC, and Farid Basharat is the latest beneficiary but also a demonstration of its biggest problem: He and his brother Javid are basically the same fighter. They both got their contracts through the Contender Series, they're both very smart, quick strikers who like to circle away, peck with jabs and leg kicks to break their opponents down and close to either uncork straights or dive on single-legs, and they're both undefeated career bantamweights fighting in the UFC's bantamweight division. So I am, admittedly, not sure what the endgame is here. It's not like one of them is better suited for a different weight class, they're separated by less than an inch of height, so is the master plan that they beat every bantamweight in the world other than each other, cut the world championship in half and reign as co-champions like Laycool did in the WWE? Either way, he's probably going to beat Da'Mon Blackshear, who made his UFC debut last year as a heralded prospect and regional champion which still only got him the chance to jump on a card as a late injury replacement, put in a good two rounds against Youssef Zalal, and then got beaten so badly in the final round that he got stuck with a draw. I don't necessarily hold that against him--Zalal's tough and coming in late is always hard--but Blackshear's aggression and quick, jumping attacks, which served him well on the regional scene, were already problematic against a grappler like Zalal. Against a counterstriker like Farid, it graduates to outright liability. FARID BASHARAT BY DECISION. LIGHTWEIGHT: Loik Radzhabov (16-4-1) vs Esteban Ribovics (11-0) I gotta tell you, this fight ticks all my boxes. Is Esteban Ribovics yet another Contender Series winner who clearly has all-around skills and chose to ignore them in favor of charging across the cage to throw hands while not protecting himself whatsoever? You bet. Did he get picked up by the UFC's talent scouts because he fought for Samurai Fight House, the record padding factory that put his 9-0 record against a guy who was 6-5? You're god drat right he did. Is his opponent Loik Radzhabov a credible fighter who despite multiple accomplishments only got booked on the card thanks to the need for a last-minute injury replacement? gently caress yes he is. Did Loik almost win the Professional Fighters League Lightweight Championship in 2021, only to get outfought until he gassed out thanks to Anthony Pettis destroyer Raush Manfio, leading to Loik going to the Khabib-inflated Eagle FC just a few months before it died? One hundred percent. Is the UFC hoping their fun brawler beats the Tajikistani wrestler? Absolutely. Am I going to pick that way? You'll have to loving kill me first. LOIK RADZHABOV BY DECISION.
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Mar 3, 2023 00:56
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i really need to finish my templating for graphics to replace the loving wikipedia graphics
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Mar 3, 2023 01:31
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Brut posted:Still waiting for a few more people at the weighins including both main event fighters but Gane typically weighs in at 247~ and I'm assuming Jones also can't possibly miss weight, so really the wait is for Neal, Araujo, Garry, Martinez and Blackshear. 124.5 for both co-main fighters. tell the man what he's won https://twitter.com/mmafighting/status/1631728281799073817
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Mar 3, 2023 20:02
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BlindSite posted:Writing off Jon Jones strength against anyone is folly. He's literally been stronger where and when it counts than everyone he's fought and the worst place to fight Jones is at his kicking range where he's just going to gently caress up your legs and interupt your timing. Allow me to counterpoint with a brief powerpoint presentation about the last time Jon fought someone who forced him to work at range      
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Mar 3, 2023 23:23
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Lucasar posted:This is where the exclusivity deals with Reebok and Venum kind of show how shortsighted they are. If fighters could court their own deals with sponsors, UFC would merely need to stay the biggest MMA show in town and that exposure + star power would drive up sponsorship money for the fighters without costing UFC a thing. UFC would even benefit from this if you had somebody like Ngannou appearing in a Gatorade commercial or whatever it would work around to being a low-key UFC commercial that UFC got for free. The problem is it's not really about the money, the money is just the most visible symptom of the UFC's struggle to retain absolute control of its fighters. What Ngannou was asking for was basically what Conor McGregor got--the right to his own sponsorships and the ability to pursue a boxing superfight--and the UFC almost certainly made more money directly from Conor McGregor than any other fighter in their history. But they also had to give him concessions, negotiate with his people, deal with his retirement threats and keep him placated, because Conor McGregor had actual, honest to god leverage and was willing to use it. The UFC would've gotten a big-rear end payday just getting their cut of the Francis Ngannou/Tyson Fury superfight, but they don't care about that. They need the extra few million dollars less than they need to discourage fighters from thinking they have leverage. Sponsorships were the most basic form of leverage every fighter had. The more sponsorship money you got, the less you needed the UFC. Yeah, you would obviously prefer to stay, your sponsorships would be worth a lot less without them, but you weren't solely dependent on the UFC's penny-pay for your future. Getting rid of that was the first step on the road to a Dana White's Contender Series roster.
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Mar 4, 2023 19:17
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And if they'd just said 'yeah, sure' when Ngannou/Fury first became a talking point two years ago, that probably would've gotten them a bunch of press, a bunch of money AND made Francis happy enough that he didn't ask them for other (totally reasonable, it's horrifying we even have to talk about it) things.Radical 90s Wizard posted:How much do you all think this would change if Dana hypothetically were to uh, disappear? At this point, very little. Dana sucks as a human, but he's not a loose cannon running around doing poo poo. Endeavor keeps him employed despite his bullshit because this is what they want. If he was gone, they'd hire someone who does what he does, but politely and without the Nelk Boys photo ops. we probably wouldn't have had slap fighting, though, so that'd be cool
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Mar 4, 2023 21:34
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As far as I know we're still on, and so is the GDT. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4026210 Come solve the Jon Jones mystery.
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Mar 4, 2023 22:32
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Benson Cunningham posted:Heyyy I feel pretty good about this call. Brunson had some wrestling in round 1 go his way and traded for a little while, but was then just overpowered and blown out by the end of round 2. I still feel pretty good about my analysis, specifically this part: quote:Brunson has the wrestling offense to shut du Plessis down, but du Plessis has proved remarkably difficult to keep down, and unlike du Plessis, when Brunson gets tired, he's cooked, and at 39 his gas tank isn't getting any better. He was beating du Plessis easily in the first round both standing and on the floor, but the second that switch flipped and he got tired, he was just completely done. It was sad to watch. BlindSite posted:Lol Definitely don't feel good about this one, though. Jon looked better than he did in the Reyes fight so I'm glad heavyweight agrees with his mobility, but boy, Gane looked like absolute poo poo.
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Mar 5, 2023 07:13
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Also, man, I'm really happy for Alexa Grasso but if she gets past the rematch Erin Blanchfield is going to kill her.
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Mar 5, 2023 08:00
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Skjorte posted:Blades and possibly Aspinall (who's demonstrably dangerous and talented, and with some actual grappling in his back pocket, though he's way too untested in the wrestling department to know how he'd fare against Jones, not to mention coming off of his one knee exploding) could pose interesting challenges, though obviously they have very limited pay per view appeal. If I were a more conspiratorial man, I would say there are reasons Sergei Pavlovich was the alternate in case Gane or Jones could not fight, and that those reasons might be adjacent to why Blaydes is fighting Pavlovich next instead of getting a title shot.
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Mar 5, 2023 20:30
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Yeah, Jones planning to take him down and kill him was never in question, the question was what would happen when Gane made him work for it, and then Gane decided that instead of his attacks at angles or countering Jones coming in or pecking with leg kicks and taking his time he was going to a) footwork himself into the wall and repeatedly panic, b) throw jabs to the body, and c) throw loving Dan Henderson big right hands
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Mar 5, 2023 22:29
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Radical 90s Wizard posted:Wtf Derek Brunson? I dunno, Brunson's been around a decade and he's had six main events, I could see him clearing that. COPE 27 posted:I honestly don't understand how this works? Who is paying for his food, shelter, and training? Does he have a car? etc. Bo Nickal is a special case, his wrestling background and relative popularity meant he already had management and representation before he'd so much as put gloves on, so a lot of his stuff was covered in ways it normally wouldn't be for your average fighter. Generally speaking, you just work a day job and pray you get lucky. There's a reason goddamn near every fighter who thinks they have a shot begs for a performance bonus in their post-fight presser. Like, using another dude from this past weekend as an example: Geoff Neal was 8-2 when he won his contract on the Contender Series in 2017 and it still wasn't until four UFC fights and a $50k bonus later that he was financially able to quit his day job as a waiter at Texas Roadhouse, and he had to go back after the pandemic messed things up and the UFC wasn't booking him. And there's a chance that might have saved him from crippling lifetime debt, because in the middle of all of that he also got sepsis and almost died, and the UFC does not offer health insurance for things that weren't directly caused by fighting or training for a fight. So Geoff Neal, top ten welterweight in the world, has probably seen more financial benefit from his day job as a waiter for a loving steakhouse chain than his UFC career.
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Mar 6, 2023 06:48
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48 hours after the final vacant title on my monthly write-ups was filled and the saga of vacant could finally rest, Kyoji Horiguchi has apparently vacated the Rizin bantamweight title because he's only going to fight at 125 again. Vacant cannot be defeated and I shall never be free.
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Mar 6, 2023 19:06
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ilmucche posted:Which one upsets you more, the endless void that is vacant or the inescapable force of entropy that is chase sherman? Chase Sherman at least inspires me to new depths of artistic depravity I had exactly one joke to tell about Vacant, and I did it a year ago thinking "it's pretty great that this exceedingly rare and unusual thing happened when I started writing about this stuff!" and then there were three multi-month title vacancies in the UFC alone in like half a year and I still only have the one joke
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Mar 6, 2023 22:13
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Shumagorath posted:I used to have a frame of Hobbes saying "I want you to hit me as hard as you can" to Calvin and it's killing me that I can't find it right now. 
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Mar 7, 2023 05:59
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kron tarnished the gracie traditions by learning the absolute slightest bit of striking fundamentals so he has to earn back his family credibility by finding things to be really dumb about
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Mar 8, 2023 00:13
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CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 50: REAPPROACHING NORMALCY SATURDAY, MARCH 11TH FROM THE THEATER AT VIRGIN HOTELS IN PARADISE, NEVADA PRELIMS 12:00 PM PST/3:00 PM EST VIA ESPN+ | MAIN CARD 3:00 PM PST/6:00 PM EST VIA ESPN+ Why on Earth did someone shred the poster? There's a weird sort of neutrality with the Fight Night cards this month. We have the very, very rare three pay-per-views in five events--Jones vs Gane last week, Edwards vs Usman 3 next week, and Pereira vs Adesanya 2 opening up April--and sandwiched between them are a pair of bantamweight-led cards that, in a season of inexplicable matchups and Contender Series pushes and old champions coming back after years on the shelf, are just plain 'put the adjacent contenders against each other' events. And that's not bad! I'm not complaining. It's just bizarre in context. It's like watching a loved one pause between schizophrenic episodes to have a pleasantly lucid discussion about current events and the latest episode of Star Trek before returning to their monologue about how reruns don't exist because the government secretly reshoots every television show that's more than ten years old with perfect lookalikes so they can add modernized propaganda to it. So come with me and let's enjoy the times of peace while they last.  i got tired of waiting for wikipedia to update MAIN EVENT: ROUND ONE OF AN UNOFFICIAL TOURNAMENT BANTAMWEIGHT: Petr Yan (16-4, #2) vs Merab Dvalishvili (15-4, #3) It's surprisingly difficult to discuss the bantamweight contendership scene without feeling as though I am describing the combat sports equivalent of the wealth inequality problem. Bantamweight is absolutely spoiled for contenders right now. Petr Yan is a former champion who took the current champion to his limit, Merab Dvalishvili is a crushing pressure fighter on an eight-fight winning streak, Marlon Vera is a fan favorite with huge momentum who just knocked out the greatest bantamweight of all time, Cory Sandhagen is a remarkable talent whose only losses have come against world champions. Even the lower half of the ranks have surging, streaking fighters like Ricky Simón, Umar Nurmagomedov and Chris Gutierrez on their way up. But they are, of course, not the people getting title shots. TJ Dillashaw, with one win in four years, got a title shot. Henry Cejudo, who retired three years ago, is getting the next title shot. And Sean O'Malley, who went from #13 to #1 in one fight after favorable matchmaking and a terrible decision? You better believe there's a reason every contender except O'Malley is about to fight one another. This fight between the #2 and #3 contenders is just two weeks before Marlon Vera and Cory Sandhagen, the #4 and #5 contenders, fight each other. And I would all but promise you that the winner of each fight will wind up fighting one another later this year in a title eliminator on the same pay-per-view where Sean O'Malley finally gets his shot at whoever's left standing after Sterling vs Cejudo. It's hard. It's hard to enjoy an amazing division that is absolutely spoiled for talent when its focal point is still the bullshit. But the fights are good, and the fighters are good, and if we want to have any chance of enjoying life amidst the teeming wastes of the present then by god, so must we be. Having said all of that: There's a pretty good chance this fight winds up not being a lot of fun. Petr Yan is a great fighter. He's good at everything, from crisp boxing to well-placed kicks to clinch trips, and he remains one of the most dangerous fighters in the entire division. He's also one for his last four. Some of this requires considerable asterisks--he was soundly beating Aljamain Sterling in their first fight before he stupidly got himself disqualified and he absolutely beat Sean O'Malley back in October, regardless of what the judges said--but there was nothing disqualifying about the grappling clinic Sterling ran on him in their rematch. Sterling laid out a blueprint on how to break down Yan's posture, control his footwork and use constant, suffocating grappling pressure to keep him from mounting any offense. The fight ultimately went to a split decision--another reminder of the ever-worsening crisis we're seeing in judging no longer having any idea what the gently caress to do about grappling that assuredly has nothing to do with Dana White and Scott Coker throwing public tantrums when their preferred fan-friendly strikers get double-legged to death--but that was largely because Sterling was too goddamn tired to maintain the assault during the championship rounds. The first three rounds of constant aggression and an ever-present wrestling threat took Yan's tools away and kept him from mustering offense, and by the time he collected himself, it was already too late. And now he has to fight Merab Dvalishvili, who has even heavier pressure and even better cardio, and whose primary training partner and source of tactical advice for the fight is, uh, Aljamain Sterling. There's this tendency in mixed martial arts to underrate wrestlers. It's something of a circular process: Wrestlers get less finishes, fans care less about wrestlers, the promotion puts less push behind wrestlers, no one cares enough to bet on wrestlers, oddsmakers turn wrestlers into betting underdogs. It's a testament to how much faith people have in Merab Dvalishvili's grappling pressure that despite having finished only one man in his ten fights in the UFC he's been a betting favorite in his last eight bouts--even directly following the one and only submission loss of his career. And that's a great case in point, as in the one and only submission loss of his career, Merab was not, in fact, submitted. He won two and a half rounds against Ricky Simón only to get sucked into a guillotine choke in the final thirty seconds of the fight, but despite making it to the bell and responding to the referee and doctors said doctors wanted him to lay down, which was, somehow, ruled by the referee as a sign that he had been choked out, resulting in his being retroactively ruled to have been unconscious. In fact, in his UFC debut just prior to that, he outstruck Frankie Saenz 104-66, took him down eleven times and spent more than half of the fight controlling him on the floor, but lost a split decision anyway because, once again, judges hate grappling now. There's a reasonable argument to be made that Merab and his wrestling should be 10-0 in the UFC, and that Merab Dvalishvili has not truly lost a fight since 2014, when he was 1-1. But we do not live in that world. We live in this one, where wrestling doesn't count and athletic commissions don't accept appeals. So Merab had to build his way back up, and after retiring José Aldo last August by agonizingly grinding him into the cage wall for thirteen minutes he earned his undeniable position as a contender. Which, in some ways, makes this a perfect fight for the unanswered questions about both men. Petr Yan is a tremendous talent with a killer highlight reel, but we just saw him get stifled by a superior grappler. Merab Dvalishvili is an unstoppable force who can and will wrestle for days on end, but his rise to the top came on the heels of fading legends like Aldo and Marlon Moraes, and he needs to show he can beat a top contender of the present. It's the first fight Merab's had in almost five years where he's a betting underdog. While I am, as always, prepared to be disappointed by my faith in grappling: I disagree. Merab isn't the grappler Aljamain Sterling is--he's more bread and butter, less creative, less flexible--but he's indefatigable. We've seen Merab in trouble thanks to the aforementioned Marlon Moraes, and while half-conscious and stumbling over himself, he still wrestled Moraes to the ground and was breaking his face with elbows seconds later. In that same timeframe we've seen Yan get visibly frustrated by aggressive grappling, and his clinch-trip reversals are going to be very, very hard to work on a wrestler as solid as Merab. If Yan can't hurt him enough to keep him off his goddamn legs, he's getting wrestled all night. MERAB DVALISHVILI BY DECISION. CO-MAIN EVENT: NO, AMERICA, MOLDOVA AND RUSSIA ARE NOT THE SAME COUNTRY HEAVYWEIGHT: Alexander Volkov (35-10, #8) vs Alexandr Romanov (16-1, #13) Hey, you know that one division? The one where everything's bad all the time and the champion just got fired for wanting healthcare and a 205-pound guy who'd been on the shelf for three years just effortlessly dumpstered the #1 fighter in the UFC? Let's go back there. It seems fine. Alexander Volkov, you Larry Bird-looking motherfucker. "Drago" came into the UFC back in 2016 as a once-champion in Bellator who'd fallen out of favor after being shamefully wrestled by Cheick Kongo, and he had all the makings of a hot new heavyweight contender, including spending 14:30 of a 15-minute fight beating the crap out of Derrick Lewis, before learning the hard way that it does not take very long at all for Derrick Lewis to knock you out. Since then, the professional life of Volkov has been a constant, back and forth slingshot of glorious victory and tragic defeat. Beat up Greg Hardy, get wrestled by Curtis Blaydes. Knock out Alistair Overeem, get outstruck by Ciryl Gane. Defeat Marcin Tybura? Get submitted for the first time in twelve years thanks to Tom Aspinall. Volkov just can't seem to hold onto momentum, which is ironic, because maintaining a steady pace is his entire fight style. He moves faster than most heavyweights and he throws slightly more volume than most heavyweights, but unlike his peers in the premier facepunching division, he doesn't blitz. Even when he staggers his opponents and closes in to swarm them, it's less of a traditional, wildly swinging wasplike death-swarm and more of a group of politely buzzing bumblebees who just happen to be checking to see if Walt Harris is still conscious. This is a key to his success, and the reason he's only been finished five times in forty-five fights, which is frankly nuts by the standards of heavyweight, but it's also a hindrance, as his lack of adaptability gets him punished. And that could be problematic, because punishing is Alexandr Romanov's entire gameplan. Like, his only gameplan. "King Kong" does not want to strike with you. He does not want to trade notes on the finer points of kickboxing techniques. He wants to lift you, like so many sacks of meat, and hurl you to the floor where he can take out years of compartmentalized anger on your face and body. There's a maneuver in grappling called the forearm choke. It's as simple as it sounds--you put your forearm on your opponent's throat and press down until they tap out or expire--and it fell out of fashion in the early days of mixed martial arts because, for the most part, you can counter it through the advanced technique known as 'turning your head'. It fell out of fashion after the early days of mixed martial arts because it generally didn't work on people who knew the basics of grappling. But there are two problems: For one, this is the heavyweight division, and for two, Alexandr Romanov is Large. This submission technique was thought lost to the late 90s alongside grunge music, Lisa Frank and the ability to credibly believe in compassionate conservatism, but Alexandr Romanov has dragged it out of the dark and somehow scored three wins with it in the modern era. And it was this kind of large man berserker energy that led to the UFC signing him as an undefeated 11-0 prospect. And it was going great, and he was an undefeated 16-0, right up until last August. Romanov had already encountered trouble in his fight with Juan Espino, where he visibly gassed and was likely en route to losing a decision until an errant groin strike and some screwy technical judging saved him, but it was unfortunate gatekeeper Marcin Tybura that finally ended his streak when Romanov, unable to finish Tybura in the first round, looked more or less exhausted for the remaining ten minutes and was summarily outboxed. Which makes the algebra on this fight pretty simple. Romanov is a big, powerful wrestle-brawler, he wants to push you into the fence, dump you and crush you, and if he can't do that within five minutes, he's in trouble. Alexander Volkov is a well-rounded fighter with a generally decent counter-wrestling game (aside from getting trucked a dozen times by Curtis Blaydes, who does that to almost everybody), but he has trouble with people who can sprint through his pace, and Romanov will throw everything he has at you as soon as he possibly can. If this fight ends in the first round, it's almost certainly because Romanov's physicality won the day and he tossed Volkov on his head and pounded him out. But ALEXANDER VOLKOV BY TKO seems much more likely. Romanov's cardio isn't a new problem, it's been this way for years, and I don't think he's going to be able to pull a first-round mauling out against Volkov the way Tom Aspinall did. I think two rounds in Volkov is picking Romanov apart while he flails at him on the feet and three rounds in Volkov is putting him down. MAIN CARD: MAD DOGS AND PLEASUREMEN CATCHWEIGHT, 215 POUNDS: Nikita Krylov (29-9, #6 at 205) vs Ryan Spann (21-7, #9 at 205) Hey, remember when the UFC swore to you that this was a really big, important main event light-heavyweight fight two weeks ago right up until it was cancelled midway through the card due to a stomach ailment? It's not a main event anymore, it's not even a co-main event, it's not even five rounds, and it's not even actually being contested at light-heavyweight! Welcome to this 215-pound catchweight fight, for some goddamn reason. As always, since the UFC is running a re-run, I will, too. Here's the relevant portion of what I had to say two weeks ago, minus the extraneous ranting about divisional matchmaking: CarlCX posted:Ryan Spann, as a matter of fact, is very tall! 6'5"! Wow! If he were any taller, I'd have to stretch my legs just to type this sentence. And his height is very important, because until recently, it was the primary identifying feature of his career. "Superman" made his first corporate-umbrella appearance on just the third-ever episode of the Contender Series back in 2017, where, unfortunately, he was knocked out in fifteen seconds by Karl Roberson, who would go on to fight most of his UFC career at middleweight. Three bouts in the Legacy Fighting Alliance and one year later he got another shot, and this time he succeeded, choking out Emiliano Sordi, who, uh, was actually also a middleweight. gently caress. FEATHERWEIGHT: Ricardo Ramos (16-4) vs Austin Lingo (9-1) The last time Ricardo Ramos fought, I wrote this: CarlCX posted:But I'm here, my friends, to tell you that there is a dark side: The Bad Meta. Neutral flying knees. Ill-advised guillotine jumps. And the greatest, most widespread scourge of all: Random spinning kicks. You know drat well you didn't time or even really aim it, you know it's not going to land, but god drat it, you've been taking your striking classes seriously and you want people to know. Will it work again this week? Probably! Austin Lingo has been out of action with injuries since last we saw him in mid-2021, but even though his march-forward-through-hell-to-punch-you style won him the night against Luis Saldaña, he took a boatload of damage from the numerous punches and kicks he was quietly accepting as the consequences of his approach. And that included eating three crushing spinning back kicks to the gut. And one fight before that, against Jacob Kilburn, he got dropped by a spinning backfist. This is the problem with the straightforward approach: When you're constantly on a forward trajectory, it gets real easy for your opponents to figure out where you're going to be and exactly how much time they have to majestically pirouette before they boot you in your chest. I just don't think it's a good fight for Lingo. He's an extremely tough man, he's never been stopped, and his dogged style could easily tire out a wild striker like Ramos, but his porous defense and his critical weakness to spinning poo poo seems likely to get him hurt. RICARDO RAMOS BY TKO. BANTAMWEIGHT: Said Nurmagomedov (17-2, #14) vs Jonathan Martinez (17-4, NR) Here, we have the battle of men who had real, real good 2022s. Said Nurmagomedov, as media is obligated to note every single time he fights, is a Nurmagomedov from Dagestan who is a wrestler, but he is not, in fact, part of the Khabib Nurmagomedov wrestling dynasty. That does not make him any less of a bad dude. Injuries and visa issues kept him from being as active as he would've liked to be, and then between an upset loss to Raoni Barcelos and a year-and-a-half-long layoff thanks to the pandemic he lost enough momentum that the world just sort of forgot about him. Which is presumably why he spent all of 2022 kicking everyone's rear end. He choked out Cody Stamann in under a minute, he outfought violence king Douglas Silva de Andrade, and he outwrestled championship grappler Saidyokub Kakhramonov in two rounds. Suddenly, Said Nurmagomedov is 6-1 in the UFC, on a four-fight winning streak, ranked in the top fifteen, and has more momentum than almost anyone else in the bantamweight division. Except, as it happens, Jonathan "Dragon" Martinez. Martinez joined the UFC back in 2018 as a last-minute injury replacement for Andre Soukhamthath (who will go down in history for the shame of being the man who could have ended the Sean O'Malley Experience before it started only to ultimately lose because he didn't realize he should kick a man hopping on one leg in his one remaining leg) and proceeded to spend the next three years completely lost in the shuffle, another striking-centric fighter trading wins over lower-tier fighters and getting repeatedly bounced by higher-ranked standouts like the now-released Andre Ewell and Davey Grant. Much like Said, it wasn't until a 2021 win and an incredibly busy 2022 that Martinez got himself on the map: He outfought Zviad Lazishvili, outstruck Alejandro Perez, won a tentative but definitive decision over Vince Morales and took advantage of a spotlight co-main event by wrecking fallen superstar Cub Swanson with a leg kick TKO. So it's a battle of the four-fight streaks. Someone's four shall gain no more. I think Martinez is a bit underrated--particularly by me, who picked Cub to beat him--and his surprising wrestling game is a part of that. But he also got taken down by an injured Cub Swanson, and he's been having periodic trouble with the cut to 135 pounds, and I, generally-speaking, have trouble not seeing Said snagging a choke. SAID NURMAGOMEDOV BY SUBMISSION. Martinez gets a bunch of his offense from his kicks, and those are going to be a very tricky liability for him in this fight, because every kick is an opportunity for Said to catch it and move into the clinch. LIGHT-HEAVYWEIGHT: Vitor Petrino (7-0) vs Anton Turkalj (8-1) Hey, look, it's big dumb Contender Series time again. If you've been reading these for any length of time you can almost certainly finish this sentence without my help, but let's sing it together anyway: Vitor Petrino is a big, brawly fighter who likes to throw giant winging hooks from outer space and eschews grappling and wrestling in favor of standing and banging for his pay. Almost his entire career was fought against the regional Brazilian record-padding services that had him fighting dudes with records like 0-6 and 1-17, but he did knock out UFC veteran Gadzhimurad Antigulov, which isn't nothing. Unfortunately, his Contender Series win also saw him getting visibly tired and dropping his hands after all of a round and a half of competition, and his knockout victory came because his opponent--whom he'd already knocked out once in his first professional fight--threw a wildly inaccurate spinning backfist that saw him just turning in a circle in front of Petrino and silently begging to be put out of his misery. Anton Turkalj is also a Contender Series winner, and also a former sacrificial lamb who was fed to currently-rising Jailton Almeida as a last-minute injury replacement. And we could talk about these things. But the same way I am obligated to remind you about Said Nurmagomedov's actual family background every time he fights, I am obligated to remind you, every time Anton Turkalj fights, that he willingly goes by the moniker The Pleasure Man and willingly posed for this picture:  But he also knows how to grapple at least a little, and Vitor managed to get outgrappled three times in seven minutes on the Contender Series, so gently caress it, why not. ANTON TURKALJ BY SUBMISSION. Wow me, Pleasure Man. PRELIMS: THERE'S JUST SO MANY BANTAMWEIGHTS HEAVYWEIGHT: Łukasz Brzeski (8-2-1 (1)) vs Karl Williams (7-1) Life has not gone according to Łukasz Brzeski's plans. "The Bull" was a big, traditional heavyweight brawler of a main event attraction in his native Poland's Babilon MMA when the UFC came calling back in 2021 with a Contender Series offer. And he won! Until he tested positive for that most common and often mistakenly used of nutritional supplements, clomiphene, the women's fertility drug that doubles as a steroid masking agent. The UFC shrugged and gave him a contract because he's a heavyweight so gently caress it, and after a year's suspension he was finally ready for his big debut against Martin Buday, where he outlanded him in every round, outstruck him 124-66, and lost a split decision anyway. Karl Williams was a light-heavyweight up until last September, and he'd even picked up a win on the Professional Fighters League's Challenger Series, but they're no less bloodthirsty than the UFC is, so his proclivity for slowly wrestling decisions out of people did not get him picked up for the next season. The now-heavyweight Williams was brought onto the Contender Series as an opponent for the more knockout-oriented Jimmy Lawson, but after he, too, fell victim to the long, slow death that is top position wrestling, the UFC apparently made some kind of clerical error and signed Williams despite his love of takedowns. There are arguments to be made both ways, here. Williams has a surprising amount of speed and drive on his takedowns for a heavyweight, which is probably because he isn't one, but his wrestling IS his defense against striking and it's seen him get his chin checked by speedier opponents, and Brzeski has decent hand speed for a large man. If you go back far enough in Brzeski's career you'll find tape on him getting outwrestled back in Babilon, but that was also almost four years ago. A lot can change in that time. But I still believe in the golden rule of mixed martial arts: Wrestling Ruins Everything Around Me. KARL WILLIAMS BY DECISION. BANTAMWEIGHT: Raphael Assunção (27-9) vs Davey Grant (12-6) Raphael Assunção was considering retirement last October. He was just past 40, he was on a four-fight slide, he got knocked out twice in a row, he went from being a possible title contender to a +400 underdog against Victor "La Mangosta" Henry--the implications were just as hard to miss as the likelihood Henry would put Assunção out to pasture. At the time, I had some very detailed technical analysis to offer: CarlCX posted:Tough poo poo. I am mad with power and I deny all of you. Raphael Assunção by decision. What the gently caress was that? RAPHAEL ASSUNÇÃO BY DECISION. MIDDLEWEIGHT: Sedriques Dumas (7-0) vs Josh Fremd (9-4) I know we need to talk about this fight, and we will, in a minute, but I need to get something off my chest first. I've been haunted by Sedriques Dumas since last July, when first I saw the picture used to head his Tapology page.  There was just something about it--the dry black and white, the expression on his face, the people in the background, the centralized perspective--that made the slight, vague oddities of the picture resonate with something in my brain, but try as I might, I couldn't figure out what. I came back to it for this writeup and stared at it for a solid five minutes before it finally clicked.  Sedriques Dumas is the warden of the Overlook Hotel that is our hellish sport. And lest you think it's cruel to compare him to an alcoholic with a domestic abuse problem, it should be noted that:
And I wish I believed in his capacity to win, here, but he spent his entire fight with Anthony Hernandez repeatedly shoving his neck into guillotine positions and almost getting choked out for it, and then he did it again against Tresean Gore and DID get choked out for it, and boy, I just don't see that changing against a guy who can choke him out at heretofore unseen angles. SEDRIQUES DUMAS BY SUBMISSION. BANTAMWEIGHT: Mario Bautista (11-2) vs Guido Cannetti (10-6) This is Mario Bautista's eighth fight in the UFC. You may feel immediately disinclined to believe me, but it's true. He fought Cory Sandhagen, choked out Brian Kelleher, struck down Miles Johns with a flying knee and absolutely mauled Benito Lopez in his last appearance back in November. And I bet you could not possibly place his face in your head right now. I couldn't, and I've already written about the man twice. This is in some part because, despite a genuinely impressive 5-2 record in the shark tank that is the bantamweight division, he has never been off the prelims. Not once. The UFC decided Vinicius Moreira, Gabriel Silva, Juan Adams, Aalon Cruz, Alan Baudot, Cody Durden and Shanna Young were better investments of their marketing dollars than the bantamweight killing people with flying knees and triangle armbars who's won three performance bonuses. And he still isn't! He's got three wins in a row and he's still on the goddamn prelims because he's less interesting to the UFC than THE PLEASURE MAN. And he's even got a fun, stupid opponent. I wrote a career obituary for Guido "Ninja" Cannetti one year ago, as he was a 43 year-old with a 2-5 record in the UFC--2-7, if you count The Ultimate Fighter--and not just on a three-fight losing streak, but a three-fight losing streak that started in 2018. To find tape on Guido's only other UFC win you had to go all the way back to 2015's Rousey vs Correia, a card where nearly 75% of its participants are now retired from mixed martial arts. After watching Kris Moutinho walk through hundreds of Sean O'Malley punches, Cannetti seemed like the UFC's attempt to make it up to him with a gimme fight. And then Cannetti dusted him in two minutes. And then he submitted Randy Costa with a floating rear naked choke in one minute. And suddenly, Guido Cannetti is a thing again. But god forbid they get booked higher than Josh Fremd. MARIO BAUTISTA BY SUBMISSION. I think Cannetti's dedication to orthodox technique is serving him well in his age, but I also don't think there's anything he does better or faster than Bautista does, and unlike Moutinho, Bautista isn't going to stand in front of him and wait to get hit. WOMEN'S FLYWEIGHT: JJ Aldrich (11-5) vs Ariane Lipski (14-8) Here, we have the battle of prospects that should have been. Hopes were sky-high for both of these women when they signed with the UFC--which always baffled me a little in JJ Aldrich's case, if I'm being entirely honest, not out of any distaste for her whatsoever, but because I just didn't understand the level of expectation placed upon a 3-1 rookie who'd already gotten choked off The Ultimate Fighter. I distinctly remember smart 2016 fans talking about Aldrich as a future champion. And somehow that hype never entirely dissipated, even as she proceeded to never actually get there. Juliana Lima took away her debut, Maycee Barber ended her first winning streak and Erin Blanchfield finished off her second. Aldrich is by no means bad: She's a very good, gritty fighter with not just decent striking and wrestling but the rare ability to effectively chain them together and cardio enough to still be walking women down and diving on their legs three rounds into a fight. But she just hasn't been able to turn the corner and beat the upper echelons of the division. Ariane Lipski has had an unfortunately more traditional path through the company. The "Queen of Violence" was a highly-regarded pickup for the company back in 2019 as the reigning and twice-defending Women's Flyweight Champion of Poland's Konfrontacja Sztuk Walki (why yes, I will take any excuse to type that, thank you) with knockouts and submissions over international champions and even UFC veterans. And then she actually got here and, like a lot of regional champions, proceeded to flounder in the talent pool. Lipski's 3-5 after four years, and one of those victories came against Mandy Böhm, who's 0-2 and likely fighting to prevent a pink slip this May, and another was double-last-minute injury replacement Isabela de Pádua, who was a strawweight fighting up a weight class on 24 hours' notice who proceeded to test positive for steroids and get kicked out of the company. The optics: They're not great. It's not that Lipski's bad either, she's not, but her striking keeps getting beaten out by better strikers and her grappling gets her lost against better grapplers. It's probably happening here, too. Lipski's hands are sharper than Aldrich's, but her ability to deal with sustained grappling assaults is a hindrance and Aldrich has made a career out of pushing people down. JJ ALDRICH BY DECISION. BANTAMWEIGHT: Tony Gravely (23-8) vs Victor Henry (22-6) And now, various forms of violence. Tony Gravely is one of my favorite living spirits of destruction, a 5'5" wrestleboxer who throws leaping shovel hooks and hipside uppercuts and dump takedowns and will, most of the time, get kind of tired and frustrated if that doesn't work. He is so committed to this gameplan that I secretly root for him to lose fights. It isn't because I don't want him to win--I do--but I also want him to get released in the hopes that ONE Championship picks him up and books the Tony Gravely vs John Lineker all-violence spectacular that will herald the end of all things. Victor Henry hopped into the UFC in 2021 on ten days' notice based on his success in Japan's Rizin and DEEP, upset Raoni Barcelos, and was supposed to have been catapulted into notoriety after the UFC gave him what they thought was the dying ghost of the aforementioned Raphael Assunção to feast on. And then Assunção bullied him for two rounds and took away his hype train, and poor La Mangosta is back at square one, fighting his way back into the rankings from the outside. But he's got a real good shot here. Tony Gravely is a deathly motherfucker who could knock a brick wall unconscious if he hit it the right way, but he's also a big, charging brute who tires himself out chasing opponents around the cage. Henry's got the wrestling and grappling defense to cope with his takedowns and enough of a kicking game to pick at him until he gets winded and spends a round charging his super meter back up. VICTOR HENRY BY DECISION as long as he doesn't walk into something silly. FLYWEIGHT: Tyson Nam (21-12-1, #15) vs Bruno Silva (12-5-2 (1), NR) Gather around, kids, it's time for Carl Complains About Flyweight Booking again! In one corner, we have Tyson Nam! He's the #15 ranked flyweight in the world and despite fighting at 125 pounds has 13 wins by devastating knockout! He's 3 for his last 4, the only loss in that run is a real close split decision to top-ten ranked Matt Schnell, and in his last fight he punched Ode' Osbourne straight out of the goddamn air so hard it made Osbourne do a Dark Souls dodge-roll on his way towards losing consciousness. We haven't seen Bruno "Bulldog" Silva in almost two years, and that was coming off of a very unfortunate start to his UFC tenure that saw him eat three losses in a row (one of which became a No Contest thanks to a failed drug test), but in the present day he's on a two-fight winning streak and both of those wins were violent knockouts that saw him drop his opponents face-first with horrifyingly precise right crosses. In other words: This is the thing the UFC says it wants! Complaints about the flyweight division's booking are always redirected to conversations about its lack of fan-friendliness, but here we have two hard-punching strikers with knockouts in every one of their UFC victories who even both won Knockout of the Night in their last appearances. It's even a top fifteen fight with ranking implications. And they are...second from the bottom of the prelims. They're actually lower on the card than they were before they got bonuses for their outstanding knockout victories. They're less promotionally important than Austin Lingo, the 40th best featherweight in the company. And I like Austin Lingo. That's by no means Austin Lingo's fault. Austin Lingo rules. But what the gently caress are we doing here? TYSON NAM BY TKO. WELTERWEIGHT: Carlston Harris (17-5) vs Jared Gooden (22-8) Carlston Harris has had a bad year. His five-fight winning streak came to an end last February thanks to Shavkat Rakhmonov, his grand return this February wound up not happening thanks to Ramiz Brahimaj getting injured, and a week out from this bout his scheduled opponent Abubakar Nurmagomedov got sick and left him once again lost on the island of loneliness. But lo and behold, a hero: Jared "NiteTrain" Gooden, stepping in from the shadows to take the fight just 72 hours before primetime. The last time we saw Gooden was when he got drummed out of the UFC back in 2021 after going 1-3. As it turns out, his career since then has been loving bizarre. He beat former contender Curtis Millender after Millender broke his leg and collapsed on a leg kick, he got knocked cold by the inexplicably released Impa Kasanganay, he beat Doug Usher after Usher somehow broke his own hand punching Gooden in the chest, and he beat Damarques Jackson when Jackson got so tired and hurt that he knocked himself down throwing a haymaker. It's the kind of bizarre poo poo that happens on the regional scene, but hey: It got Gooden back to the mothership. And I hope he enjoys it, 'cause it's probably not gonna last long. Carlston Harris is a genuinely decent fighter whose only UFC loss thus far was to one of the best competitors on the planet. He's got a loopy but effective jab and a pretty dangerous submission game, and he spent the last month training for a fighter in Abubakar Nurmagomedov who's a stiffer challenge than Jared Gooden, and we can say this scientifically, because two years ago Abubakar Nurmagomedov beat Jared Gooden. CARLSTON HARRIS BY SUBMISSION.
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Mar 9, 2023 02:14
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Jiri got his #1 contendership by killing Dominick Reyes with a spinning reverse elbow.
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Mar 10, 2023 06:16
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previously, in FebruaryCarlCX posted:
https://twitter.com/RodDelCampo/status/1634213364250337280
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Mar 10, 2023 22:03
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https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4026716 We are back to the GDT for Yan/Dvalishvili, starting in half an hour. Miss wrestling at your own peril.
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Mar 11, 2023 20:33
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The UFC crowned a new top bantamweight contender today with a history-breaking statistical performance and their twitter and instagram feeds are dozens of clips from Power Slap.
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Mar 12, 2023 07:40
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DoombatINC posted:I wonder how long the white power slap hour can astroturf itself into relevancy and what the total damage will end up being - the marketing blitz felt like good money after bad before the show even aired, now we're at the "faking twitter engagement from ham-and-eggers and abandoned accounts" stage and its only the second (?) episode Oh no, my friend. That was the big glitzy season finale. They were astroturfing fake engagement to pretend people watched its championship blowoff.
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Mar 13, 2023 08:35
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blue footed boobie posted:The season finale had the shows worst-yet ratings. It’s over. Dana White's response to this has been to say Power Slap's new home is out-and-out shithead internet zone Rumble, which is their new Spike TV. The Rumble stream, which is free on the internet, peaked at just about 195,000 viewers, which is 30,000 lower than the TV season finale did.
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Mar 13, 2023 09:48
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Fozzy The Bear posted:gently caress, I guess they win. There is no were I can go to avoid people talking about slap league. I get the frustration, because it loving sucks, but a central point of these threads is the world around the sport. It's why last month's thread opened with a Victoria Lee eulogy and a Phil Baroni murder report. Dana White is so personally invested in Power Slap that he diverted the UFC's marketing dollars, social media, color commentators and even its loving bespoke home arena to all focus on it. It, and how much it loving sucks, are news, and it just had its big finale and was an enormous commercial failure, so not only are we going to talk about how stupid it was, we're going to dance on its idiot grave, because a handful of people going "boy, this terrible thing that's so terrible it got bumped down to one of the only video platforms still willing to host loving Infowars sure was terrible" isn't likely to do them any favors but it does communally feel pretty great. If Power Slap being a topic of discussion for its incredibly forseeable failure bugs you, I get that. Come back in a couple days when everyone's focused on Kamaru Usman's many muscles. But if you angrypost more Power Slap stuff I'm gonna probe you.
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Mar 13, 2023 19:46
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Fozzy The Bear posted:That's a poo poo rule, you can talk about slap league as long as you are negative about it? It wasn't about you posting positively about it, it was about you extremely clearly getting mad about it and reverting into repeatedly posting about the the thing you didn't want to post about because it was somehow going to translate into owning the thread. I was kinda hoping to get you to take a step back and take a breath instead. Fozzy The Bear posted:Give me 3 days But okay. Hope you feel better. Beeswax posted:I highly doubt we're forced to address anything ITT. It is entirely possible not to push the keys necessary to post about the white power slap thing I mean, your view isn't wrong either. It does suck. This is somehow one of the dumbest things to happen around one of the dumbest sports in history. But it did happen, and it did take up UFC cycles, and just like "power slap sucks and I don't want to hear about it" is a valid take multiple people here have, "power slap sucks and I want to be glad it failed" is a valid take multiple people here have. I'm personally glad to celebrate its demise, but having had said celebration, we can move on.
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Mar 13, 2023 21:51
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Hey, remember when Alistair Overeem returned to kickboxing last year and beat up Badr Hari? Please prepare yourself before you read the next part of this post because it may shock and astound you https://twitter.com/Beyond_Kick/status/1635714886540853263
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Mar 14, 2023 19:58
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CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 51: FITTING THE CROWN SATURDAY, MARCH 18TH FROM THE O2 ARENA IN LONDON, ENGLAND  EARLY START TIME WARNING | EARLY PRELIMS 10:00 AM PST/1:00 PM EST VIA ESPN+ | PRELIMS 12:00 PM PST/3:00 PM EST | MAIN CARD 2:00 PM PST/5:00 PM EST VIA PAY-PER-VIEW | EARLY START TIME WARNINGHonestly, do you know how refreshing it is to have a UK card that isn't just about Paddy Pimblett? That's almost worth the price of admission alone. We have made it to the rematch. One of the biggest championship upsets of 2022 must be relitigated, an unexpected trilogy must be completed, a marathon of leg destruction must take place, and by god, Bryan Barberena must march again. This is oddly light on desperate courting of the British fanbase for a London card, but maybe that's what you get away with when you actually have a national champion.  barberena is just hanging onto main cards as hard as he possibly can MAIN EVENT: YOU'VE GOT TO BE SURE WELTERWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP: Leon Edwards (20-3 (1), Champion) vs Kamaru Usman (20-2, #1) The Ultimate Fighting Championship spent the last five years desperately chasing a new UK star in the hopes of rebuilding their massive mounds of McGregor money. They chewed through Darren Till, destroyed Tom Aspinall's ligaments, murdered Molly McCann and as we speak have pushed Paddy Pimblett off a ledge and are praying he will Wile E. Coyote his way to the other side before he realizes there's no ground under his feet. Their desperate urge to crown a British contender somehow continually overlooked that they already had one. Leon Edwards deserved a title shot years before he got one. He had the longest winning streak in the division aside from the champion himself, his only loss in half a decade was to said champion, and he was, it bears repeating, British. But he wasn't the right kind of British, and he really liked fighting to decisions, and it was far, far more important that Colby Covington and Jorge Masvidal get multiple title shots based on their incredible victories over nobody. Leon Edwards wasn't supposed to get his shot. Dana White would pay lip service to his status as a top contender and then book him against Khamzat Chimaev, or Belal Muhammad, or Nate loving Diaz. When he finally did get his shot, it wasn't intentional: The UFC was planning Kamaru Usman vs Colby Covington 3, with Leon Edwards vs Jorge Masvidal as a title eliminator. We came precipitously close to Kamaru Usman's welterweight title reign being three defenses apiece against Colby and Jorge, and were saved from that terrible reality not by smarter heads prevailing, or a drive for UK promotion, but by Jorge suckerpunching Colby outside of a steakhouse and leaving both of them stuck in legal and medical limbo for the entirety of the next year. But for one night, the sport worked the way it was supposed to. The champion fought the top contender. This really shouldn't be a rare moment, but in this day and age, you take it where you can get it. This, at the time, was my call. CarlCX posted:If Leon Edwards is going to win this fight, it's happening in the first two and a half rounds. Unless he's radically altered the way he prepares both physically and mentally, by the midway point of the fight he's going to be falling off, and Kamaru Usman has shown a willingness to get even more intense in championship rounds, as Colby Covington's jaw can attest. It was almost correct. Leon Edwards did shock Kamaru Usman out of the gate, and Leon Edwards did almost choke him out before the first round was over, and Leon Edwards did proceed to get beaten around the cage for the next three and a half rounds to the point that the commentary team was talking openly about his penchant for giving up and simply doing what he needed to do to wait for the fight to end. And then he kicked the undisputed champion of the world in the head. The UFC's welterweight division has always been one of its most popular and most prestigious. Even back in the days of genuine promotional competition between the UFC and Pride FC, while debate raged about who had the better heavyweights, light-heavyweights, middleweights, lightweights--no one questioned the welterweights. It stood, and has continued to stand, head and shoulders above its peers. Some of this is the longterm impact of promotional competition--welterweight champions and standouts from Shooto, Pride, World Extreme Cagefighting, Strikeforce, Bellator and ONE Championship have all rotated into the UFC over the years and every single one has been subsumed by the welterweight waves. But just as much is divisional stability. One of the oldest acid tests in combat sports is that of the Champion vs the Real Champion: The idea that simply winning a world championship isn't enough, you have to defend it. That divides further into the Real Champion vs the Great Champion: It's all well and good to defend the title and prove yourself, but to really etch your name in the history books as a king or queen, you have to have a reign. Winning a belt is hard; keeping a belt is harder; having a title reign is drat near impossible. Most champions don't manage it. 33% of middleweight and light-heavyweight champions manage it. Heavyweight barely scrapes 20%. But every welterweight champion who ever successfully defended their title went on to have a reign that lasted years. Every one. From the first champion in Pat Miletich, to the dominant breakout star Matt Hughes--twice!--to the legendary reign of Georges St-Pierre, to the brief but incredible run of Robbie Lawler, to the divisive yet accomplished Tyron Woodley. Kamaru Usman's five-fight, three-and-a-half-year reign was just as high on that list as anyone's. Even with the UFC's incessant booking and rebooking of their favorites, his talents and his prowess were undeniable. Between his skillful wrestling, his powerful punches, his solid cardio and his uncanny ability to adjust to his opponents and stop whatever they were finding success with, he carved out one of the greatest legacies not just in the welterweight division, but the sport. He has the welterweight division's second-longest title reign. He's tied for the second-most defenses in in a welterweight title reign. He has the second-longest winning streak in UFC history. And it all ended in a single second when, just one minute away from recording his historic sixth title defense, Leon Edwards kicked him in the head. I know fan opinion tends to swing towards big, wild brawls, but fights like Usman/Edwards 2 are my absolute favorite: The kind where everything that could possibly happen does, in fact, happen. We saw Leon shock Usman with his inexplicably underrated clinch grappling and throw him straight into full mount. We saw Leon dance out of the way of takedowns and force the champion to fight out of his own comfort zone. We saw Usman adjust to that comfort zone and begin liberally battering Edwards around the cage. We saw Usman figure out and defuse Leon's takedown defense and begin punishing and exhausting him on the ground like he has everyone else in the division. We saw a challenger spend fifteen minutes baiting a trap just to land one, single strike. And we saw Kamaru Usman, for the first time in nine years and nineteen fights, lose. That is my personal mark of championship mettle. I understand the many differing standpoints on how many defenses are required to determine legitimacy, but with respect to the greater combat sports community, you will have to pry Real World Champion Matt "The Terra" Serra from my dead loving fingertips. The real test of a champion, to me, is the ability to adjust under pressure and display such a mastery not just of your skills but of your own mind and body as a martial artist that you can reach the end of your gameplan and, very quickly, come up with a new one. It's an incredibly rare thing. It's rare beyond measure to see a championship-level fight where both men, the two best in the world, are repeatedly doing it to one another, forcing the other to adapt, back and forth, until the moment things end. It's rare to see fighters show absolutely everything they have in one single contest. And it makes it real tricky to predict what's going to happen when they have to do it again. Kamaru Usman, despite having just gotten knocked the gently caress out, is a pretty solid favorite to win this rematch. It makes perfect sense on paper. They've fought twice, Usman won the first fight handily and won 75% of the second. He was fifty-six seconds away from beating Edwards by another wide margin and shutting the door on his title hopes permanently before Leon managed to shove his foot into the doorframe. It is, of course, eyebrow-raising every time a fighter knocks their opponent out and is an underdog to them in a rematch: Edwards kept Usman from hurting him too badly or threatening a finish, he spent half a fight gradually gauging Usman's timing, and when Edwards found his moment he destroyed the champion with a single shot. So your brain begins searching for a compelling narrative, but they've both got one. Leon Edwards is the outright classical sports story, a street kid who was almost consumed by gang violence saved by the unruly discipline of martial arts, climbing the ranks as a constantly unheralded and underappreciated contender no one really believed in until the moment he was, suddenly, the best in the world; he's so thoroughly on the nose he's literally nicknamed Rocky. Kamaru Usman immigrated from Nigeria as a child, faced and overcame every cultural and financial barrier Texas could put in front of him, joined the wrestling team as a skinny teenager and became an NCAA champion, shifted away from the Olympics thanks to knee injuries and promptly became one of the greatest fighters in the history of mixed martial arts instead. But that, too, raises doubts. Kamaru Usman has been fighting for a decade and competing for almost two. His mixed martial arts career started because his body was too injured to continue wrestling. He came into the sport with his knees already on the way out. His path of destruction has been long, but a product of that longevity is his fighting at the highest possible levels of competition while staring down his 36th birthday this May. He's had surgery on his knees, his hands and his feet. Even his legendary cardio was fading in his last fight against Colby Covington. Which is all relevant, if indirectly, to losing your title. Everything you do as a champion counts, and every bit of lost focus is a killer. A single lapsed moment was enough to end Usman's chance at tying the biggest record in mixed martial arts. How many of those moments slip because your body just refuses to work the way it used to? And how dismissive is it of Leon Edwards that, much like Amanda Nunes and Julianna Peña last year, so much discussion of this rematch is based less on his efforts and more on Usman's failings? They're wildly different scenarios. Kamaru Usman didn't walk in with a terrible gameplan, he didn't gas out in two rounds, he didn't charge facefirst into right hands. He was carefully, calculatedly winning just the way he always has until Leon Edwards surgically defused him. Nothing about that kick was based in luck. Nothing about Leon yanking Usman to the floor and forcing him to fight for his life against a rear naked choke in the first round was a fluke. His takedown defense, counter-wrestling and striking expertise had nothing to do with Usman's possible physical decline and everything to do with how hard he'd prepared for that moment. He had a plan and it worked. But if he hadn't landed that one kick, he only had fifty seconds to come up with a new plan before he was lost to history forever. There's no prediction for this fight that isn't disrespectful to someone. Either you don't believe in Leon Edwards and his place on the throne or you don't believe in Kamaru Usman and his ability to keep going. Either you believe in the three rounds Kamaru Usman spent treating Leon Edwards just like every other opponent he's ever crushed or you believe in the two rounds Leon Edwards spent nearly killing him. They're the two best welterweights in the world. If you watched their championship fight, you already know everything about them. All you can do is go with your gut. KAMARU USMAN BY DECISION. CO-MAIN EVENT: THIS TOWN AIN'T BIG ENOUGH FOR FOUR FUNCTIONAL LEGS LIGHTWEIGHT: Justin Gaethje (23-4, #3) vs Rafael Fiziev (12-1, #6)In the totally accurate words of Nathan Hale (or Joseph Addison, depending): What a pity it is that we can but fracture only a single tibia or fibula for our country. Barring something insane happening, this fight is the point in that martial arts movie you like where the smart technical master has to fight the inexplicably good drunk guy and it's going to loving rule. Justin Gaethje has been a human highlight reel since long before his days in the UFC. He was a champion on the regional circuit, he was a champion with the World Series of Fighting, and he was so thoroughly covered by his must-see-TV reputation that the UFC actually deigned to poach a talent directly rather than making him go through The Ultimate Fighter or the about-to-debut Contender Series. They saw this wild-eyed all-brawling all-the-time guy who was breaking people with leg kicks and punching UFC veterans flat and knew, without a doubt, that they needed him on television. But the biggest part of his reputation is all thanks to his being essentially blind. His huge leg kicks, his murderous hooks, his hard-nosed, straightforward style: Aside from his personal addiction to the art of violence, it all came from his being so visually disabled--20/60 in one eye, 20/200 in the other--that his best hope for victory, he realized, was always going to involve beelining right to the vaguely people-shaped blurs in his vision and swinging his limbs at them in every conceivable direction until they fell over. And it worked! Except for the parts where he was just as hittable as his opponents, which was perfectly fine right up until the moment he entered the UFC. Michael Johnson almost knocked him out in his debut; Eddie Alvarez and Dustin Poirier finished the job in his next two fights. After six years and eighteen victories, Justin Gaethje was suddenly 1-2 in the big show and looked like he might be a flash in the pan. So Justin did a crazy thing: He got better. The Justin Gaethje that showed up in his next four fights was a different man altogether: Still vicious, still violent, but exhibiting a level of control he'd never demonstrated before. He went from memorable, back-and-forth brawls to annihilating his opponents in a single round, and his crowning achievement was a title eliminator against pre-crisis, 12-wins-in-a-row Tony Ferguson. What was anticipated to be an amazing back and forth brawl wound up being a horrifyingly one-sided destruction of the UFC's highest-rated #1 contender, with Gaethje slipping most of Tony's strikes, evading his worst weapons, and returning fire with a level of accuracy and patience he'd never shown before. By the end of the match Gaethje had landed an astonishing 72% of his strikes, Ferguson's face was broken and his career still hasn't recovered from the beating. Justin Gaethje wasn't just the #1 contender, he looked like he might have finally evolved into the most dangerous lightweight on the planet. And then, he...didn't. There isn't really a better way to state it. His championship bout with Khabib Nurmagomedov may have been doomed regardless of his striking prowess, but his next two fights against Michael Chandler and Charles Oliveira saw a return to his wild, brawling style of old, and it cost him dearly. He beat Chandler, but almost got knocked out multiple times, and going recklessly after Oliveira got him dropped and choked out in a single round. He got two bites at the apple, and both times he came up empty. Over this same period of time, Rafael Fiziev climbed all the way up the drat ladder, and he did it the hard way. As a championship Muay Thai kickboxer, an undefeated 6-0 mixed martial artist and a believable striker the UFC could count on to avoid all signs of being infected by wrestling, "Ataman" was a no-brainer of a pickup for the lightweight division and a lot of hardcore fans hand-picked him as the UFC's next big prospect. The UFC wanted to show Fiziev off, so they gave him a fellow striker, Magomed Mustafaev, who was coming off two and a half years on the shelf. The UFC wanted it to look good, but they were also hoping Fiziev would clean up the ring rust on Mustafaev's face with his fists. As with all best-laid plans of marketing, Mustafaev promptly immolated Fiziev with a spinning wheel kick in ninety seconds. The hype train jumped the tracks before it could even leave the station. And in a way, that worked out for the best, because it meant Rafael got to start from the bottom. Alex White was solid but unranked competition: Fiziev cruised to a decision. Marc Diakiese was a smart, multifaceted fighter forever on the verge of a ranking: Fiziev easily outstruck him for two straight rounds and went home with a winning streak. Renato Moicano was his stiffest test since Mustafaev, a solid striker with a dangerous ground game: Fiziev stuffed his takedowns with ease, dumped him with throws, and shut him off in one round after punching him three times in a single second. The train, after some careful maintenance, was back on schedule. And it rolled right the gently caress into the top fifteen. A fight with defensive mastermind Bobby Green showcased Fiziev's timing, poise and expertise--and his recurring problem with winning two rounds and getting hosed up in the third--and a fight-of-the-night engagement with brawler Brad Riddell saw him avenge his loss to Mustafaev in spirit by recording his own wheel kick knockout, righting the cosmic balance of things with beautiful symmetry. His real test came last July against former lightweight champion Rafael dos Anjos, one of the best all-around fighters in divisional history and a man who, in thirty-three UFC bouts, had only been knocked out twice. Fiziev became the third, outfighting him over four rounds before dropping him in the fifth. He made it this far. Now it's final exam time. I'm not going to remotely beat around the bush, here: RAFAEL FIZIEV BY TKO. I love Gaethje's fighting, but I loved the fighting he was doing before his championship fights a lot more. Rafael Fiziev is a faster, tighter, more technical striker, and a Justin Gaethje who'd spent the last three years continuing his journey towards being defensively sound and mastering counter-sniping would be tailor-made to give him fits. But the renewed brawler Gaethje who's shown up in his last three appearances is going to get his sweeping hooks and leg kicks countered all night. This should be a great fight while it lasts, but unless Justin's back on his booklearning, he's going to get eaten up. MAIN CARD: ITALIAN/ROMAN SEPARATISM WELTERWEIGHT: Gunnar Nelson (18-5-1) vs Bryan Barberena (18-9) Gunnar Nelson cannot keep an opponent for his loving life. In his last fight before his hiatus he was supposed to meet Thiago Alves and wound up with Gilbert Burns, in his return to competition last March he was scheduled against Claudio Silva and got stuck with Takashi Sato, and here, tonight, he was supposed to meet the rankings-adjacent Daniel Rodriguez, and thanks to one more injury replacement, he's got Bryan goddamn Barberena instead. And, in a way, that slots perfectly into his career. "Gunni" has always been a fighter without an explicit home, be it in his style or in the rankings. He's known for his grappling--13 of his 18 wins came through submission--but his martial arts history started with karate. He's been a relevant welterweight fighter in the UFC for more than a decade, but he's only barely, and briefly, cracked the periphery of the top ten. Seven of his nine UFC wins came through submission and he's only been finished once in his career, and it took one of the division's biggest punchers and an eyepoke to do it. He went twelve years without a single back-to-back loss in his career, and then, the moment it happened, he went home to Iceland for a three-year vacation. There is, by contrast, absolutely nothing mysterious about Bryan "Bam Bam" Barberena. A single look at him will tell you virtually everything you need to know. He's got five fight of the night awards in his UFC tenure, and they're all thanks to his absolute, unwavering dedication to the fine art of brawling his face off. He can wrestle, he can grapple--he just doesn't want to. He wants to punch you until you fall into the cage so he can punch you even more. And, honestly: It's worked pretty loving well. At 9-7 Barberena's dangerously close to being a dreaded 50:50 fighter in the UFC, but he's also one of its most consistently dangerous fighters. Even when fighting out of his depth, he's a threat. He dropped Vicente Luque, he busted Colby Covington's face, and he was seconds away from knocking out current champion Leon Edwards after crumpling him with an uppercut. Unfortunately--he still lost those fights. Even Barberena's current notoreity is built on a three-fight run against failed experiment Darian Weeks, and a razor-close decision against a constantly retiring Matt Brown, and a TKO over the dying embers of Robbie Lawler's soul. Any hopes for a run at the top ten were dashed this past December when Rafael dos Anjos cut through him and choked him out in two rounds, as a reminder that you can't outbrawl someone who's good enough to throw you down and outgrapple you. And boy, that's not a great trait to have when you're stepping in against one of the division's best grapplers on short notice. Gunnar Nelson is very evasive and defensively sound, and he is very, very good at choking people, and as much as I adore Bryan Barberena's staunch refusal to ever stop hitting people in the face, GUNNAR NELSON BY SUBMISSION seems more like a spoiler than a prediction. WOMEN'S FLYWEIGHT: Jennifer Maia (20-9-1, #8) vs Casey O'Neill (9-0, #12) It's pass/fail time, baby. Jennifer Maia is one of those cases where being consistently at the top of your division makes you look worse than you are. 20-9-1 isn't a great record, and 5-5 in the UFC looks especially bad on paper, but those five losses came against two top contenders and two world champions, one of whom, Valentina Shevchenko, is one of the greatest female fighters of all time. For everyone else, Maia's combination of deceptively dangerous striking and extremely openly dangerous jiu-jitsu has been too much to compete with. But when you stay on top without actually reaching the top, you become a promotional stepping stone. Casey O'Neill is one of the UFC's favorite up-and-coming stars, and they're feeding her as many notable fighters as they can. In 2021 it was Antonina Shevchenko, at the time on the worst slide of her career, in 2022 it was historical fan favorite Roxanne Modaferri in the latter's retirement bout, and now, a year later, it's Jennifer Maia, title contender turned gatekeeper. And it's an eminently winnable fight, but an extremely educational test. Casey O'Neill is every bit a ground specialist. Three of her four UFC victories came from taking her opponents down and destroying them, and the only time she couldn't was her aforementioned fight with Roxy where, unable to secure the takedown, she simply battered her on the feet. O'Neill's speed in the standup is a huge advantage, and could be her saving grace here. If she can't get Maia down--or if she makes the strategically sensible choice to avoid her ground game altogether--she's going to need to stick, dart and move. But she's got the speed, she's got the strength, and she's got almost half a foot of reach on Maia. She should be able to pull it off, and if she can't, it's a real good thing she finds out now rather than when Manon Fiorot is caving her head in. Still: CASEY O'NEILL BY DECISION. MIDDLEWEIGHT: Marvin Vettori (18-5-1, #4) vs Roman Dolidze (12-1, #9)The House of Savoy must be fought over one more time. "The Italian Dream" Marvin Vettori has had a path through the UFC that can be best summarized as genuinely, truly hilarious. What should have been fairly routine career as a talented if unspectacular bread-and-butter wrestleboxer was diverted into fame thanks to the combined powers of comedy and denial. Vettori went on a five-fight winning streak after losing to a then-little-known Israel Adesanya, but one judge had--somehow--given him two rounds in their fight, rendering it a split decision, which Vettori touted as proof that he was the true middleweight champion. Through a combination of incessant blathering, hotel lobby livestream confrontations and wearing his shorts backwards without realizing it, Marvin Vettori talked himself into a title fight with Adesanya--which he lost, completely and utterly, which, of course, he swore was also bullshit and proof that he was still the champion. And then he attempted to prove it by fighting Paulo Costa in a fight that wound up taking place at light-heavyweight, and then he got beat to gently caress by Robert Whittaker and for once in his career admitted he'd been bested and needed to improve--and then to make up for choosing sanity he turned his twitter account into a direct line for complaining about liberal satanism and the need to free political prisoner Andrew Tate. So life is going great. Roman "The Caucasian" Dolidze, meanwhile, has emerged as the dark horse of the middleweight division. His opening year in the UFC didn't inspire much confidence--a victory over the 0-4 washout Khadis Ibragimov, a split decision against the 14-8 John Allan, a close loss to Trevin Giles--but over the next year and a half, he abruptly found his rhythm. After showing some disappointing fight IQ he stopped abandoning successful weapons in his fight and began aggressively moving between long and short-ranged striking attacks, he demonstrated enough confidence in his chin to blank out the incredibly dangerous Phil Hawes in just four minutes, and in the biggest victory of his career, he became just the fourth man in sixteen UFC fights to stop Jack Hermansson, and he did it by revealing an incredibly tricky ground game, turning an already-rare calf slicer submission into a straight-up professional wrestling STF, which he used to hold Hermansson facedown and helpless while he punched him in the head twenty goddamn times. Which makes this fight extremely interesting. Not only is this a top five match in a division that having recently had a title change is currently wide open, it's a fascinating style clash. Marvin Vettori is as conventional as fighters get. He wants to charge into you, he wants to throw hundreds of punches at you, and he wants to take you down so you cannot stop him from throwing hundreds of punches at you. He accomplishes this largely by just damning the torpedoes and walking through strikes to get into his desired position. Roman Dolidze wants to catch people with hooks and kicks, butcher them in the clinch, and, if need be, turn them into a pretzel on the ground. It's opportunism vs force. On one hand, I think Vettori's total lack of care for the offense coming at him has already cost him in fights before, and it's just a matter of time before it costs him in a much more dramatic fashion. On the other hand, I think Roman Dolidze, while inconsistent, is underrated and more dangerous than people even now give him credit for. And on the third hand, I would really, really like to see Vettori eat poo poo. So: ROMAN DOLIDZE BY TKO. PRELIMS: MR. FINLAND VS MR. WALES FEATHERWEIGHT: Jack Shore (16-1, #15 at Bantamweight) vs Makwan Amirkhani (17-8, NR) It is a battle of past vs future. Jack Shore, the best fighter out of Wales, was considered a pretty hot prospect as a contender: Undefeated at 16-0, 5-fight winning streak in the endless death ocean that is the bantamweight division, an all-around style held together by a good power-wrestling game and no immediately appreciable weaknesses! Until it turned out his weakness was shorter, bemulleted men. His undefeated streak ended last July thanks to Ricky Simón, who dominated him, dropped him and choked him out in just two rounds. Shore reacted with a slight sense of relief--he was very tired of cutting to bantamweight, and getting bounced out of his contendership journey gave him the green light to move up to featherweight. And the UFC is welcoming him with one of their fallen international idols. Makwan Amirkhani, the artist known as "Mr. Finland," was one of the company's hottest prospects back in 2016, a 13-2 wrecking machine, adept at both striking and grappling, who was destroying men with flying knees and rear naked chokes alike. And then he lost to Arnold Allen. And then he started barely scraping by the Jason Knights of the world. And then he got knocked out for the first time in his career. And now it's 2023, Mr. Finland is approaching his mid-thirties, he's 1 for his last 5 (which involved choking a man unconscious in front of his cancer-stricken father, who was in attendance to watch him fight for the first time) and he hasn't scored back-to-back wins in almost four years. He's still a dangerous grappler who is more than capable of catching Shore off-guard if he gets sloppy, and the first introduction to a higher weight class is always dangerous, but the fight was made for a reason. Shore's power and wrestling are a bad matchup for Amirkhani in his current state. JACK SHORE BY TKO. LIGHTWEIGHT: Chris Duncan (9-1) vs Omar Morales (11-3) What's this? Is it a Contender Series striker making their UFC debut against a losing UFC fighter on the verge of getting cut who just got knocked out in their last fight? Boy, that happens an awful lot! That's so weird, that this is happening again! This is actually career head trauma artist Chris Duncan's second shot, as his first Contender Series was also his first professional loss, when Slava Claus himself Viacheslav Borschchev sent him back to the British regionals after knocking him cold in two rounds. It took exactly one win--a victory over the 6-4 Jonathan Carlos--for Uncle Dana to decide to give the kid another try. And it almost went exactly the same goddamn way, as Duncan managed to get knocked down three times in ninety seconds before throwing a right as his opponent was running in for the kill, securing himself his shot at the UFC. And that shot was supposed to be against Michal Figlak, a slightly stiffer bit of competition, but he was fairly quickly replaced with Omar "Venezuelan Fighter" Morales, whose nickname is a testament to how, as a man from Venezuela, he must struggle endlessly against himself to find his truth, and we salute his journey towards violent, country-specific enlightenment. He also, I am made to understand, 'hits people.' He hits people, in fact, in almost exactly the same way Duncan does: Leading with his head, making almost no attempt to guard himself from return fire, and punching until someone stops moving. It's a Contender Series mirror match, and I fear the very near future where the UFC is a hall of mirrors whose every reflection is a wild brawler desperately hoping to get a viral knockout. Flip a coin and curse it in midair for judging your life without providing you a real answer. OMAR MORALES BY TKO. LIGHTWEIGHT: Sam Patterson (10-1-1) vs Yanal Ashmoz (6-0) See? I can't. I can't with this poo poo. Who is Sam Patterson? He, too, is a UK-based Contender Series winner who got hurt twice and dropped once en route to a submission victory because he's a loving 6'3" lightweight and as a man too tall for his own division is drawn towards the gravitic pull of the Moon, a field from which he cannot escape. That and he, like 3/4 of Contender Series winners including the one we just talked about, has adapted evolutionarily to the new meta of the sport, which is 'the best way to make money is to march forward fully upright with very little defense and jump on every finishing opportunity I can.' And it's not his fault! Sam Patterson isn't a bad fighter, he's young and talented and he's got some real neat, tricky submission chains! But for christ's sake, he's the exact kind of fighter the Contender Series factory-produces, to the point that he is, now, the third Contender Series winner to join the UFC who uses "The Future" as a nickname. So he's fighting Yanal "Red Fox" Ashmoz, a prospect with a deeply befuddling career. He got his start fighting massively more experienced competition out in the Israeli regionals, then retired from the sport for four years only to resurface in 2021 as part of the fight scene on America's east coast, and then he vanished and resurfaced again a year later in a bid for a contract on the Professional Fighters League Challenger Series where he won but failed to do so in a sufficiently exciting way to win a contract, and now, twelve months to the day of his last fight, he's making his UFC debut--as a 5'9" fighter giving up half a foot of height and drat near a foot of reach. And Ashmoz is pretty good, too. He's got some powerful leg kicks, he's got some decent takedowns, he's no slouch. But he's also going to have to get on a loving stepladder to hit Patterson in the head, and his wrestling is tailor-made to fall into Patterson's many, many tall-man lanky-arm guillotine setups. It's almost like they planned it this way. SAM PATTERSON BY SUBMISSION. FLYWEIGHT: Muhammad Mokaev (8-0 (1), #12) vs Jafel Filho (14-2, NR) Muhammad Mokaev went on one of the UFC's more successful prospect journeys last year, storming the company and racking up three impressive victories in just seven months thanks to his top-class wrestling and incredibly aggressive jiu-jitsu. None of those victories, however impressive, were over ranked competition. But after beating Malcolm Gordon last October, Mokaev made it to #15. One week later, he was #14. A month later, he was no longer ranked. One month after that, he was #12. And now, as the #12 flyweight in the world, rather than anyone ranked above him, he is facing the debuting Contender Series winner Jafel "Pastor" Filho, a man who, until said win back in September, had not actually fought at flyweight since 2017. Jafel Filho's Contender Series win came against Roybert "The Unbroken" Echeverria, whose undefeated 7-0 record looked good until you realized those 7 fighters had a combined record of 22-48, and 12 of those 22 wins came from one loving guy. Jafel, who just five fights ago was inexplicably battering a debuting rookie, is now fighting for a top fifteen spot against a guy who has never defeated a ranked fighter. Does this seem weird to you, Jafel?  It's fine. Really? I dunno, it's kind of m--  It's fine. MUHAMMAD MOKAEV BY SUBMISSION. EARLY PRELIMS: LERONE, LEROY, LUANA, ĽUDOVIT FEATHERWEIGHT: Lerone Murphy (11-0-1) vs Gabriel Santos (10-0)This, here, is an interesting one. Lerone "The Miracle" Murphy was a real impressive-looking featherweight prospect not too long ago: Undefeated, strong as hell, able to outfight violence elementals like Douglas Silva de Andrade and grappling talents like Makwan Amirkhani, and as an undefeated fighter with a three-fight UFC streak and two violent knockouts in the process, he had all the earmarks of a future contender. And then, like so many rising prospects, he vanished off the face of the Earth thanks to injuries, bad timing, and bad luck. He's only managed one fight in the last 26 months, and said fight was already a year and a half ago. The UFC isn't giving him an easy comeback, either: Gabriel Santos is one of the best young prospects out of Brazil, an undefeated killer of a champion out of the Legacy Fighting Alliance who's achieved the rare glory of becoming more impressive through nearly losing. His time in the LA saw him almost get beaten by a greater level of challenge, and instead, he staged great comeback wins by kicking people in the goddamn head or punching their liver until they couldn't move anymore. Hey, you know where neither of these guys came from? The Contender Series! How crazy the concept of picking up really talented fighters from the top of the regional mixed martial arts scene, almost as though it was always meant to work this way. Ring rust is going to be a real factor here, and I'm leaning towards GABRIEL SANTOS BY DECISION. MIDDLEWEIGHT: Christian Leroy Duncan (7-0) vs Duško Todorović (12-3)Fun fact: As the reigning, defending middleweight champion of Britain's Cage Warriors, Christian Leroy Duncan was scheduled to defend his title against MMA's most constantly recurring cosmic punching bag, Jesse "JT Money" Taylor, at this year's big British New Year's bash, only for good ol' JT Dollar Sign to successfully train, arrive, weigh in, and promptly get hit and concussed by a loving car while walking back to his hotel. Duncan, as is the fate of all regional champs, got called in by the UFC and immediately flipped his belt in the trash to go up to the big show. And that's where our old buddy Duško "Thunder" Todorović comes in. Duško's had a busy couple of years, managing the entirety of a six-fight UFC tenure in just 24 months, but it hasn't gone great; at 3-3, he's carrying the dreaded 50/50 record, and the UFC knows it because they've been putting him up against their big prospects rather than building him up. First it was Chidi Njokuani, who destroyed him, and previously it was Jordan Wright, who he ground-and-pounded into the dirt, and now it's a big new British striker whose last two wins were violent, spinning, flying knockouts. This should be interesting. Duncan's a very real prospect with quick, dangerous and unusually mobile striking, but he also, as a British striker, is wrestling-deficient. You only have to go one fight back in his career to find him struggling with a persistent wrestling assault, and Todorović is an extremely persistent wrestler. If Duncan can stay on his feet, or at least get back to them before he suffers any damage, he's inevitably going to get a knockout. But watching him struggle with the best wrestling the Cote d'Ivoire had to offer does not give me a great deal of hope. DUŠKO TODOROVIĆ BY TKO. FLYWEIGHT: Jake Hadley (9-1) vs Malcolm Gordon (14-6) Jake Hadley was one of the biggest "why is the Contender Series such bullshit" fixtures of a couple years ago, thanks to an episode where Hadley hosed around before the show, missed weight for his fight AND dared to be a wrestler who fights like a wrestler, and yet, despite breaking all the rules Dana White normally cares about, he overruled everyone and signed him anyway, because boy, there's just some inexplicable x-factor about this white British guy who keeps saying lovely stuff to people that means he's going to be a superstar. And then he promptly lost his UFC debut and was given an 0-2 guy with wrestling deficiencies as a tune-up. And now, as a step up, it's Malcolm "X" Gordon, a a fighter who's also got a losing record in the UFC, and has also been taken down in every UFC fight (except the one where he was knocked out in 44 seconds), and who, in fact, was last seen this past October when he was used as...a stepping stone fighter for Muhammad Mokaev, an entirely different promotionally hyped British wrestling prospect. It's funny how this works. That said, this is my upset pick for the card, apparently. Malcolm Gordon gets wrestled, but he's also a very good counter-grappler and he recovered from a half-dozen takedowns against Mokaev, who is one of the most dynamic wrestlers in the flyweight division, before getting instead submitted from the bottom during a scramble. He's got a great jab, he's very good at reversing bad positions, and a guy like Hadley who has a more orthodox wrestling attack than a Mokaev or Amir Albazi could have trouble trying to keep him down and getting touched up between attempts. MALCOLM GORDON BY DECISION. WOMEN'S FLYWEIGHT: Joanne Wood (15-8) vs Luana Carolina (8-3) Poor Joanne Wood. "JoJo" was a fan favorite all the way back in the 2014 season of The Ultimate Fighter that inaugurated the Women's Strawweight division, through a combination of her kickboxing, her submission game, and her the general American fascination and perplexion with the Scottish accent. (Don't let us give you any poo poo about it, no region of our country is any more comprehensible.) She fell short in the semifinal round, and unfortunately, that's come to characterize her entire UFC career: Too good to lose to the lower echelons at strawweight and flyweight, but unable to get past the top half of the division, and that has turned her into one of the most notable gatekeepers in the sport. She's 2 for her last 7, and all five of the women who beat her were fighting for the championship within two fights. But she's 7-8 in the company, just slid past 37 and has openly acknowledged her career only has another year or two left, and the UFC is trying to get the most out of her while they can. Thus: Luana "Dread" Carolina. Luana's had her own rocky road through the company and is fighting to stay positive here, as a loss would drop her to the dreaded 3-3. She came through the Contender Series during its Brazilian excursion in 2018, which means, of course, that in six fights under the corporate umbrella she's attempted exactly one takedown, for which she was, assuredly, given a scolding. She wants to punch people and she's very good at it; her two UFC losses came because Ariane Lipski tore her leg in half during a scramble and Molly McCann proved to be a harder, heavier puncher. I like JoJo. I've enjoyed her fighting for almost a decade, at this point. I think there are plenty of ways for her to win this fight: She's a better wrestler, she's a dangerous grappler, and she's got long enough kicks to keep Carolina away. Even with her worsening record, she's still only losing to the top contenders of her division. Having said all of that: She's also getting slower, and she's getting manhandled more often, and the likelihood that Luana puts enough of a punch on her chin to stun her and muscles her around while she's hurt feels entirely too real to ignore. LUANA CAROLINA BY SUBMISSION. LIGHTWEIGHT: Jai Herbert (12-4) vs Ľudovít Klein (19-4)Jai Herbert had an unfortunate time in the UFC, and I have enjoyed it deeply. Some of it is an appreciation for the UFC's British expansionism getting set back. Some of it is because even though he is a very fun fighter to watch, with his lanky 6'1"-at-lightweight body and his focus on long, terrifying punching power, the people he has repeatedly lost to were some of my favorite people in the company. Some of it is because Ilia Topuria jumping up a weight class on short notice, fighting a power striker half a foot taller than him and knocking him flat is objectively hilarious. But mostly, it's because I actively, truly resent having to type the nickname "The Black Country Banger" multiple times a year. And this fight puts me in a difficult position, because once again, Ľudovít Klein is one of my favorite underrated UFC fighters, and once again, Ľudovít Klein is a career featherweight who only went up to 155 pounds last year and is, much like Topuria, fighting with a disadvantage of half a foot of height and reach. Klein's a smart, clean striker with some of the best fundamentals in the lightweight division, but he's also fighting the biggest physical disadvantages of his career. But I make this vow to you: I am unwilling to pick a fight for Jai Herbert. I have nothing but respect for the man. He's a very good fighter, he's an incredibly dangerous striker, he even seems like a nice guy by the standards of mixed martial artists. I genuinely hope for his success. But the phrase "Black Country Banger" has an effect on my brain I can describe only as Chase Shermanesque. It grates its way down my temporal lobe. Jai Herbert could be on a fourteen-fight winning streak and about to do battle against a 54 year-old Clay Guida and the moment I was reminded of his nickname I would still reflexively mash the button that makes the parakeet in my head peck Guida's picture. Good luck, Jai. I'm sorry I cannot jain you on your Jaiourney. ĽUDOVÍT KLEIN BY DECISION. WOMEN'S FLYWEIGHT: Veronica Hardy (6-4-1) vs Juliana Miller (3-1) Veronica Hardy has had a deeply unpleasant time in the mixed martial arts spotlight. (Longer-term fans will remember her as Veronica Macedo; she married Dan Hardy last year.) She joined the UFC back in 2016 as one of the youngest fighters on the roster and an undefeated 5-0-1 grappler with a great deal of jiu-jitsu hype under her figurative and literal belt. She was promptly knocked out in her debut, spent a year and a half on the shelf and proceeded to get repeatedly outfought and outgrappled before scoring her sole victory with a shock, one-minute armbar--but then she began withdrawing from fights again thanks to odd, severe headaches, and after an ill-advised 2020 return that saw her dominated by the 1-0 Bea Malecki, which is, respectfully, a bad sign, she realized she was having post-concussion syndrome and retired. So, having won a single fight in the last seven years thanks in part to persistent brain problems, she is, of course, coming back to try again, because you can't be a fighter without an at least partial disregard for your body. Juliana "Killer" Miller won her contract through the last season of the now thoroughly outmoded The Ultimate Fighter, the same show that gifted us with Mohammed Usman and Zac Pauga, where she succeeded thanks to her ultra-aggressive, dive-on-opportunities grappling attacks, her flak-field volume striking, and her ability to keep fighting at full pace after her opponents have already gotten tired. In other words: She's a Diaz in training. It's real hard to pick anything but JULIANA MILLER BY SUBMISSION, here. Veronica was already faltering against competition she couldn't easily outgrapple half a decade ago, and that was before concussion, retirement and three years on the shelf. As always, that kind of layoff is inherently unpredictable, and it's very possible that healing her body and brain and taking time to rebuild herself could lead to a better, faster, stronger Veronica Hardy who's ready to drag another grappler into her wheelhouse--but it's just as possible that she comes back worse off than when she left, and despite her relative inexperience, Miller is too tough and persistent a fighter, and too tricky a grappler, to come back against if you're not fully prepared.
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Mar 16, 2023 00:59
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well this explains why historically great guy sean strickland has been posting 1993's best jokes about 'fellas is it gayer to suck off a guy or get sucked off by a guy' for the last 48 hours It is horseshit that he had to come out this way and it also sucks that he has to do it in the middle of, y'know, the james krause betting scandal he's under investigation for.
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Mar 17, 2023 20:05
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TheKingslayer posted:Since I didn't notice it posted in the thread, I thought it was kind of interesting and slightly hosed that Colby was the backup fighter for the title fight tomorrow and when asked about it at the presser Leon and Kamaru apparently didn't know that at all. Belal Muhammad has making it pretty publicly clear how bullshit it is that he a) wasn't even approached about being the title backup and b) had asked for a matchup with Colby at this specific show and was told no, only for it to turn out the UFC was trying to get Colby in the title picture again without even telling anyone.
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Mar 18, 2023 00:10
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I guess the UFC set up their fight timing expecting something to fall through and nothing did, because the schedule suddenly has prelims starting at 9:30 instead of 10, which is about five minutes from now. So: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4027131 Back to the GDT we go.
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Mar 18, 2023 17:24
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Man, when I wrote the drat thing ESPN's schedule said 10, so I blame ESPN.
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Mar 18, 2023 17:40
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For one, that was a real weird card, for two, I think 3/15 is officially the worst I've ever done, for three, what the gently caress was that judging, and for four, it is shameless to the point of being funny again how loving hard the UFC tries to shove Colby down everyone's throat.
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Mar 19, 2023 01:36
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Digital Jedi posted:https://twitter.com/mma_kings/status/1637254964480290817?s=20 They've had such a killer welterweight division for the last half decade and they just keep driving it into the loving dirt because Dana loves Colby and Jorge
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Mar 19, 2023 02:17
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Belal has eaten so much poo poo for the UFC and their reward is he has to fight Shavkat now.
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Mar 19, 2023 02:53
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