- CarlCX
- Dec 14, 2003
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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 WARNING
Honestly, 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.
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.
It is time for British. Everyone root against them.
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Mar 16, 2023 02:02
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