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Who should get the next welterweight title shot? This poll is closed. |
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|---|---|---|---|
| Colby Covington |
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2 | 3.51% |
| Belal Muhammad |
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17 | 29.82% |
| Shavkat Rakhmonov |
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3 | 5.26% |
| Matt Serra |
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26 | 45.61% |
| Marius Zaromskis |
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4 | 7.02% |
| Ben Quadrinaros |
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5 | 8.77% |
| Total: | 57 votes | ||
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Do you want to remember a time when we had hope for a Jon Jonesless future? Return to March here. Welcome to April: Time is no longer on our side. Mixed martial arts always takes a little while to wake up in the new year, but it is fully awake now. The UFC is back to four events a month, Bellator's throwing double-headers, Rizin's finally kicking off their year and the PFL is starting its season with three straight weeks of semi-memorable violence. We have multiple events almost every week and, on the 21st-22nd, a truly unconscionable four events in two days. Buckle up. This month's title brought to us by Tweak. 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  IURI LAPICUS - 10/22/1995 - 3/20/2023 Iuri Lapicus died in a motorcycle accident on March 20th. It's a little tough to say goodbye because it felt like we didn't really get much of a chance to say hello. Lapicus was already on his ninth year of mixed martial arts despite being only 27 years old, but most of the world only became aware of him after his debut in ONE championship. His 2020 upset of Marat Gafurov put him on the lightweight map, but he rapidly receded from the limelight after dropping his next three fights--most famously including a clusterfuck on ONE's big American debut on TNT when Eddie Alvarez was disqualified for rabbit-punching him. And it's hard to say more than that, because despite a decade's worth of combat and eight years of instagram posts, Iuri never really left that much out there. He did rare interviews, he would every once in awhile post a picture of himself on vacation or with his brother, but he kept his personal life personal. Somewhat morbidly, his only real public posts in the last several months that weren't professional were excited pictures and videos of his new motorcycle--which would, eventually, be in the accident that killed him. It's a tragedy he's gone so senselessly, it's a tragedy he's gone so young, and it's a tragedy we'll never get a chance to know him better both as a fighter and a person. He leaves behind a 14-2 (1) record and a lot of heartbroken training partners.  Oh, good, it's this dumb rear end in a top hat again. In what in hindsight really should not have been a surprise, the UFC trotted out Colby Covington as the backup for March's welterweight championship match and immediately set about making it adamantly clear that he was the #1 contender to the title. This made a lot of people mad, given his complete lack of schedule or, indeed, his having not fought a single contender, to the point that welterweight champion Leon Edwards has publicly stated his refusal to face Colby. That said, the UFC has already gotten true #1 contender Belal Muhammad to back down, so, unfortunately, the fight seems like an inevitability.  Oh, good, it's this dumb rear end in a top hat again. Because he has to be the protagonist of mixed martial arts even while not actually participating, a lot of March was dominated by the Conor McGregor press cycle. This time around, it's because despite currently coaching on The Ultimate Fighter against Michael Chandler, and despite being expected to face Chandler in a fight this August or September, Conor still hasn't been tested by USADA, the US Anti-Doping Agency, which handles all the UFC's drug testing. Which is bad, because according to USADA's rules, an athlete has to be tested for a minimum of six months before they can compete. So now it's a Thing. USADA is intimating they'll need Conor to play ball, Conor is intimating USADA should go to hell, and the UFC is intimating they'll exercise their ability to exempt fighters if they really want to. What's the point of a drug testing policy you can make convenient exceptions for? That's a very good question.  After the success of 2022's pan-Asian talent scouting tournament, the Road to UFC is opening up again for 2023. They're boasting an even greater array of participants from a greater array of countries, but have yet to detail who or where. The opening round is scheduled for May 27-28, so they'd better figure it out fast. MONTHLY RETIREMENT CORNER  "Smooth" Benson Henderson called it a career this March, and this has provoked equal amounts of grief and relief. Benson Henderson is, unequivocally, one of the most accomplished lightweights in the history of mixed martial arts. Back when World Extreme Cagefighting was a lightweight crucible he ran it with ease, choking out goddamn near everyone in the division and becoming the second-to-last man to hold its championship. He lost it to Anthony Pettis in what would be both an all-time classic of a contest and the very last fight of the WEC's existence, but unlike Pettis he rolled straight into the UFC as a top contender and, within a year, a champion. Benson Henderson is, in fact, tied for the most title defenses in lightweight history alongside BJ Penn and Khabib Nurmagomedov, in a run that saw him beat Frankie Edgar, Nate Diaz and Gilbert Melendez, and even after losing his UFC title--fittingly enough, once again, to Anthony Pettis--he went on to beat people like Jorge Masvidal and Patricio Pitbull, challenge for three different Bellator championships, and have what is, by any measure, one of the better lightweight careers the sport has seen. At least, according to two out of three judges on any given night. Benson got the nickname "Bendo" partially as a riff on his flexibility--beating a Nate Diaz grapple by doing the splits remains an all-time MMA highlight--but mostly as a reference to all-time hall of famer Dan "Hendo" Henderson who, before he was known for the deadliest right hand in the sport, was mainly remembered for getting some of the most-derided decision victories in Pride. Benson may have beaten an entire generation of lightweights, but a lot of those victories were real contentious split decisions and people are still mad about them to this day. 3/4 of media outlets scored his first title defense against Frankie Edgar for Edgar, half scored his final defense against Gilbert Melendez for the Strikeforce champ, a whopping 80% of the media scored his first post-championship performance for Josh Thomson, but Benson walked away with every one of those pivotal fights, and that reputation followed him. Even in his later years in Bellator he was scoring contentious decisions. It soured the fanbase on him, and it soured the perception of his career. And while I cannot say I think the judging in all of those fights was fair, I can say the degree to which it's sullied his reputation as an all-timer is decidedly unfair. Benson was so ahead of the curve that some of the things he was doing, most famously his love of calf kicks, were so unusual as to be perceived as errors in his style at the time and would in the years that followed become staples of the sport. He beat up Nate Diaz before it was cool, he made every Strikeforce fan furious, he managed victories over a half-dozen world champions, and in a career spanning three decades at the toughest division in mixed martial arts he was only stopped five times in forty-two fights. He fought with toothpicks hidden in his mouth, he was cloyingly earnest about Jesus, and he lost by submission only three times in his career: Once in his rookie year, once exactly midway through his career, and one last time in his retirement fight. Judges or no, it was a hell of a run. He leaves the sport at 30-12.  We're not done saying goodbye to WEC veterans just yet, though. Raphael Assunção also called it quits after a submission loss this month, and in doing so ended one of the most irritatingly underrated careers in the sport. One of the most common trivia questions for hardcore MMA fans is "who's the best fighter to never win a world championship," but Raphael Assunção is, almost unquestionably, the best fighter to never even get a chance to win a world championship. Assunção was a complete fighter back when the sport didn't even know what jabs were. Between his amateur debut in 2003 and his retirement twenty god damned years later he fought, was competitive against and in most cases beat three different generations of mixed martial artists across three different weight classes, with his gritty chin, his black belt jiu-jitsu and the sheer difficulty nearly everyone had at just keeping him loving down. And his record shows just how well it worked. Jorge Masvidal, Joe Lauzon, Issei Tamura, Pedro Munhoz, Bryan Caraway, TJ Dillashaw, Rob Front, Marlon Moraes, even current champion Aljamain goddamn Sterling--he beat all of them. When he dropped down to the bantamweight division in 2011 he went on a seven-fight winning streak that, in a sign of what the UFC thought of his style, took place almost entirely on the prelims, and culminated not in a title shot, but in a rematch with TJ Dillashaw. He was too gritty, he was too boring, he was too old, and the UFC never quite shook off the sense that he was just a stepping stone fighter. But by 2019, he was. After losing just five of his first thirty-two fights, as with anyone who stays in the sport too long, Assunção hit the unfortunate combination of reaching his late thirties and still fighting the best of the best. Four straight losses led to the awareness that retirement loomed, and while he turned back the clock with a genuinely impressive thrashing of Victor Henry last year, after getting choked out by Davey Grant on March 11th, it was time. His career ended where the UFC ensured it lived: On the prelims. He leaves the sport at 28-10.  A long time ago I wrote that one of the greatest curses of combat sports is being defined by the coolest thing that happened to you, whether it was giving or receiving. David Branch, much to his personal chagrin, spent most of his career being defined by a 2010 UFC debut where Gerald "Hurricane" Harris knocked him out with what was basically a professional wrestling spinebuster, which is, admittedly, pretty cool. But maybe not as cool as the run he went on after the UFC released him. In the mid-2010s, there were three canonical middleweight champions: Robert Whittaker, who had reigned over the UFC during its troubled Bisping period, Gegard Mousasi, who had killed most of the UFC's middleweight division before leaving for Bellator, and David Branch. Branch was there for the beginning of the World Series of Fighting--now known as the Professional Fighters League, several acquisitions later--and he quickly became one of its kingpins, taking its inaugural middleweight tournament and defending his crown for a year before jumping up to light-heavyweight, winning ITS inaugural tournament, and taking that belt home with him, too. What's more, he became one of the only double-champions in history to fulfill the promise of bouncing between the two divisions, defending both in alternating fights. All told, he went on a ten-fight winning streak with the WSOF, and when the UFC picked him up again in 2017 he was seen as a potential game-changer for its middleweight division. Which...did not happen. He went 2-3 in his second UFC run. Hilariously, one of the two was a violent knockout of soon-to-be 205-pound #1 contender Thiago Santos, but after getting trounced three times and pissing hot for an ersatz form of human growth hormone that saw him suspended through mid-2021, the UFC let him go. He went to Russia for one more fight, but after getting choked out he decided to serve the rest of his suspension in peace, and after an attempt at fighting for ONE Championship ended with his not being medically cleared, he looked at his new life in his forties and decided it was time to move on. Which is the right decision, because even with that last UFC slide, David Branch still had a hell of a career. He beat title contenders, he beat world champions, and while he never reached the top of the mountain, but he never stopped climbing the drat thing. He leaves the sport at 22-7.  Steven "Ocho" Peterson surprised people by laying down the gloves after his loss to Lucas Alexander on March 25th, and some of that surprise was a retirement at his relatively young 32, and some was simply that people didn't know who the hell he was. Peterson was brought to the UFC's attention as an early participant on the Contender Series, and he had the unfortunate luck of having a journeyman's level of success in a time of oversaturation. He fought in the UFC for five goddamn years and ran up a record that included a knockout of the night and a fight of the night, but as someone who obsessively follows this sport, if you asked me to name the guy he knocked out off the top of my head, I would have stared blankly into space. Maybe it's a testament to where the sport is now, or maybe it's a testament to Peterson's career. It's hard to make UFC memories when you're 3-5. But he was a good fighter, and he stuck around awhile, and he deserves his recognition, and my favorite retirements are the ones where people get out young and healthy so they can enjoy the rest of their lives. He leaves the sport at 19-11.  On the very last day of the month, John Salter decided to head off to the retirement home. Salter is one of the very few people the UFC ever invested in early in their career, and he might be a bit of a cautionary tale as to why they don't do it more often. When Salter turned pro in 2009 he was already an intercollegiate wrestling champion, a multi-time North American Grappling Association champion and an amateur MMA champion, which is presumably why the UFC decided it was a good idea to sign him back in 2010 when he was only 4-0 and have him fight guys with almost ten times his experience. He went 1-2, the 1 was a leg injury, he was released in less than a year and he never came back to the UFC. But he carved out a hell of a run on the b-leagues. He cleaned up on the regional circuit, he joined Bellator in 2015 and over the next eight years he beat everyone who wasn't an active or future middleweight champion. He was never the best, but he was a Bellator contender for most of a decade and he picked up wins over current UFC fighters like Chidi Njokuani and Dustin Jacoby on his way up, and that's a big ask for anyone. He leaves the sport at 18-6, and he even got to leave on a win. 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 MARCH The mixed martial month began with UFC 285: Jones vs Gane on March 4th, which wound up being a night of surprises both welcome and unwanted. On the early prelims Loik Radzhabov and Farid Basharat won their UFC debuts, Tabatha Ricci became the first woman to submit Jessica Penne in a decade, Cameron Saaiman once again repeatedly fouled his opponent into a point deduction but won anyway, and Ian Garry overcame an early scare to knock out Song Kenan. On the on-time prelims, Marc-Andre Barriault knocked out Julian Marquez, Amanda Ribas outfought Viviane Araujo, Dricus du Plessis stopped and possibly retired Derek Brunson, and Cody Garbrandt made his latest comeback with an incredibly uneventful decision over Trevin Jones. The main card was five straight fights of crazy poo poo. Bo Nickal won his UFC debut, but only after the referee missed him kneeing Jamie Pickett in the groin. Mateusz Gamrot, on a week and a half's notice, just barely outworked Jalin Turner despite getting repeatedly stung. Shavkat Rakhmonov fought a war against Geoff Neal and wound up getting the very rare standing rear naked choke in the third round. Alexa Grasso ended one of the UFC's longest title reigns, upsetting Valentina Shevchenko with a comeback submission in the fourth round. The main event saw Jon Jones meeting Ciryl Gane for the vacant heavyweight championship, and after ten years of theorycrafting, after Gane's entire career of being elusive and tricky, the fight was two minutes long and saw Gane throw all of nine strikes before getting immediately taken down and guillotined. Jon Jones is the heavyweight champion. Hell is real. Bellator was up next with an unusually short card in Bellator 292: Nurmagomedov vs Henderson on March 10th. Preliminary fighters you've never heard of like Theo Haig, Laird Anderson and Dovietdzhan Yagshimuradov won solid fights, Khalid Murtazaliev continued his winning ways, Josh Hill squeaked past Cass Bell and Enrique Barzola dominated Érik Pérez. The main card was four fights, but each was simple and definitive. Michael "Venom" Page, fresh off his loss to Logan Storley, was given a fight that was simultaneosuly a reasonably matched piece of competition in Bellator's welterweight division and a bout against career featherweight half a foot shorter than him who's been at 170 pounds for less than a year, Goiti Yamauchi, because Bellator's welterweight division is more of a suggestion. Page broke his kneecap with one kick in twenty-six seconds. Linton Vassell punched his ticket to a heavyweight title shot after knocking out Valentin Moldavsky in three minutes. Alexander Shabily made himself a new top contender at lightweight after dropping Tofiq Musayev with a kick to the body. And in the main event, Usman Nurmagomedov handed Benson Henderson the final loss of his career, dropping him and choking him out in just two and a half minutes to both defend the Bellator lightweight championship and lead Benson to retire. The UFC came back the next day with March 11th's UFC Fight Night: Yan vs Dvalishvili. Down in the preliminary card, Carlston Harris outworked late replacement Jared Gooden, Bruno Silva choked out Tyson Nam, Ariane Lipski made a comeback against JJ Aldrich, Victor Henry swarmed Tony Gravely to a close decision, Josh Fremd made everyone happy by choking out Contender Series prospect and domestic violence enthusiast Sedriques Dumas, Davey Grant overcame a two-and-a-half-round deficit to choke out a retiring Raphael Assunção and Karl Williams wrestled the crap out of a visibly frustrated Łukasz Brzeski. Up on the main card, Vitor Petrino scored a decision victory over Anton "The Pleasure Man" Turkalj, Mario Bautista choked out Guido Cannetti, Jonathan Martinez managed to scrape a decision over Said Nurmagomedov that could best be described as 'kind of sketchy,' Nikita Krylov strangled Ryan Spann and Alexander Volkov destroyed Alexandr Romanov. The main event saw a dismissive Petr Yan get absolutely drowned by Merab Dvalishvili, who never once let him breathe, breaking the UFC's previous takedown attempts-in-a-fight record of 34 with 49 and outstriking Yan 202-87 en route to a shutout decision victory. And then Invicta brightened our doorsteps with their bimonthly check-in thanks to March 15th's Invicta FC 52: Machado vs McCormack. Kendra McIntyre won the rookie showcase by successfully beating Diana Sanchez in her professional debut, Colombia's Sayury Cannon beat Amanda Macioce, Fatima Kline outfought Olympic medalist judoka Natasha Kuziutina, Mayra Cantuária secured the first finish in an Invicta fight since last November by choking out Calie Cutler, Shauna Bannon began a good night for Ireland by dominating Minna Grusander, and former EFC champion Karolina Wójcik just barely scraped past Ediana Silva. The main event was a surprising if lengthy affair, as strawweight champion Valesca "Tina Black" Machado dominated the first round and dropped Danni McCormack twice, only for McCormack to gather herself and spend the next four straight rounds embracing the grind, forcing Machado into the cage and simply overwhelming her with takedown attempts and short punches until she couldn't muster a lick of return fire. Tina Black's championship reign ended on her first defense, and Danni McCormack is your new Invicta FC Strawweight World Champion. The UFC's penultimate event for the month, UFC 286: Edwards vs Usman 3, came and went on March 18th. It was, figuratively and literally, brutal. The early preliminary fights saw Veronica Hardy return from a three-year layoff and dominate Juliana Miller, Jai Herbert go to a draw with Ľudovít Klein and Joanne Wood and Lerone Murphy both score split decision victories; on the more painful side of things, Jake Hadley gutpunched a Malcolm Gordon who was reportedly pissing liver tissue before the fight and Christian Leroy Duncan made a successful UFC debut when Duško Todorović's leg spontaneously imploded while pivoting for a throw. The regular-flavor prelims weren't any more merciful: Muhammad Mokaev overcame having his knee hyperextended by a kneebar to submit Jafel Filho, Yanal Ashmoz scored an upset knockout over Sam Patterson, Chris Duncan scraped a split decision over Omar Morales, and Jack Shore put Makwan Amirkhani out to pasture with a rear naked choke. The main card started out as a slog but ended well. Marvin Vettori scored a lackluster and pretty questionable decision over Roman Dolidze, Jennifer Maia outfought Casey O'Neill and then accused her of greasing, Gunnar Nelson pretty easily submitted Bryan Barberena, and in the co-main event, Justin Gaethje overcame getting repeatedly hurt to win a majority decision over Rafael Fiziev. The main event was the much-anticipated ending of a welterweight trilogy, and it was both interesting and thoroughly messy. Leon Edwards fouled Kamaru Usman enough that he sacrificed one point and arguably should have lost another, but his takedown defense, leg kicks and striking in the pocket still got him a majority decision and the first welterweight championship defense of his career. ONE took the stage for ONE Fight Night 8: Superlek vs Williams on March 25th. It got repeatedly cut down by circumstance, having been initially billed as the repeatedly delayed heavyweight championship unification match between Arjan Bhullar and Anatoly Malykhin, and the replacement main event, a superfight between kickboxing champion Superlek Kiatmuu9 and Muay Thai champion Rodtang Jitmuangnon, was spiked just days before the event thanks to Rodtang getting injured. The eventual card was, unfortunately, pretty underwhelming. Tammi Musumeci and Bianca Basilio had an uneventful grappling match, Iman Barlow, Keiyo Yamakita, Aslanbek Zikreev and Seo Hee Ham won lackluster decisions, and Akbar Abdullaev, Zhang Peimian and Eddie Abasolo tried to pull the event up with their respective wins. The co-main event wound up being the more interesting fight of the night, as Women's Atomweight Muay Thai champion Allycia Rodrigues, coming off a layoff of nearly three years, reunified her title with a decision over interim champion Janet Todd. The main was, well, perfunctory: Superlek was pitted against Danial "Mini T" Williams, who was taking the fight on two days' notice, in his first kickboxing appearance in two years, a full class above his typical weight. Unsurprisingly, he was knocked out in two rounds. The UFC's March ended on March 25th's UFC on ESPN: Vera vs Sandhagen, which was an absurdly cursed card. Already something of an afterthought by typical UFC standards, by showtime injuries had driven the card down to 11 fights and the potential fight of the night, Manel Kape vs the unfathomably snakebitten Alex Perez, was cancelled midway through the program, making it the UFC's shortest card since...last month, when the same goddamn thing happened. On the prelims, Victor Altamirano and C.J. Vergara won very fun if kind of sloppy flyweight fights, Trevin Giles scraped a split decision away from Preston Parsons, and Lucas Alexander dominated a retiring Steven Peterson. On the main card, Daniel Pineda choked out Tucker Lutz, Albert Duraev managed an exceedingly close split decision against Chidi Njokuani, Maycee Barber got an equally close call over Andrea Lee, and Nate Landwehr rounded them out by crushing Austin Lingo. Your co-main event saw Holly Holm decide to simple wrestle Yana Santos for three rounds, which almost endeared her to me until she used her post-fight interview to say some real dumb poo poo about right-wing groomer rhetoric, and in the main event, Marlon "Chito" Vera's championship dreams came to an end after Cory Sandhagen shut him out of their fight almost completely. Somehow, the the judges still turned it, too, into a split decision; luckily, Sandhagen still won. And our month came to an end with Bellator 293: Golm vs James on March 31st. I already get miffed anytime I have to alter these writeups on the last day of the month thanks to how long they take to proofread and edit, and I would like to give Bellator my additional thanks for making me do so for what might be, on paper, the worst card they've promoted. A field of thousands of preliminary fights yielded Randi Field beating Ashley "Smashley" Cummins, Vladimir Tokov ending the undefeated streak of Lance Gibson Jr., Sara Collins taking out Pam Sorenson with a scarf hold, Mike Hamel headkicking Nick Browne and Rakim Cleveland choking out Christian Edwards.; Your main card was equally low: Luke Trainer choked out Sullivan Cauley and Archie Colgan punched out Justin Montalvo, then longtime middleweight gatekeeper John Salter derailed one last prospect in Aaron Jeffrey before immediately announcing his retirement, and Cat Zingano just barely made it past Leah McCourt to maintain her top contendership in the assuredly real Women's Featherweight division. Up in your main event, Bellator's #5 heavyweight Marcelo Golm fought Daniel James, who was main eventing after exactly one single Bellator win because heavyweight is stupid, and James proceeded to knock Golm out with a Mortal Kombat uppercut in three rounds, because heavyweight being stupid is both an insult and a compliment. WHAT'S COMING IN APRIL The martial arts year is hitting cruising speed and we are all going to begin holding on for dear life. After three months of licking their Bellator-induced wounds, Rizin is finally kicking off their 2023 with Rizin 41: Osaka on April 1st. In a strange reversal of style, this event is considerably more focused on kickboxing while their MMA stars are largely being held back for the typically-smaller Landmark event later in the month. The night opens with four kickboxing fights featuring people like Shin Sakurai and Yuto Miwa that most will never have heard of, the middle of the card returns to mixed martial arts with some familiar faces like Sho Patrick Usami, Yusaku Nakamura and everyone's favorite Rizin loser, Mehman Mamedov. The top of the card sees a veteran battle between Kiichi Kunimoto and Keita Nakamura, former Pancrase champion Daichi Kitakata vs Makoto Takahashi and Vugar Karamov vs Yoshinori Horie. But the main event pops us back into kickboxing, where Ryusei Ashizawa will try to get back on the winning path against your friend and mine, Kouzi. But they're not the only ones getting out of bed that day. The Professional Fighters League is ready for their 2023 season, and it starts with PFL 1: Loughnane vs Moraes. Week one focuses on the featherweights and light-heavyweights, with five fights in the former and six in the latter. The prelims are primarily notable for the debut of UFC cast-off Impa Kasanganay and returning-from-hiatus South Korean featherweight Sung Bin Jo; your main card sees Chris Wade vs Bubba Junkins, Movlid Khaybulaev vs Ryoji Kudo, newly-released UFC fighter Krzysztof Jotko meeting Will Fleury and former title competitor Thiago Santos facing 2022 PFL champion Rob Wilkinson. Your main event is what will very likely be a very depressing matchup between 2022 PFL featherweight champion Brendan Loughnane and Marlon Moraes, who hasn't won a fight since 2019, retired, unretired, debuted for PFL last year and got knocked out by Sheymon Moraes, who, somehow, is not competing in this season. With the UFC taking a week off, PFL gets to go twice. April 7th brings us PFL 2: Goltsov vs De Castro. This week brings us the opening rounds for Women's Featherweight and Heavyweight, and also one single amateur bout at lightweight for some strange reason. In your former bracket: Maris Moknatkina vs Yoko Higashi, Amanda Leve vs Karolina Sobek, Martina Jindrova vs Amber Leibrock, Olena Kolesnyk vs Aspen Ladd, and because women apparently don't deserve to be off the prelims, only one fight made it onto the main card: 2022 lightweight champion Larissa Pacheco vs Julia Budd. At heavyweight, we've got the debut of Michal Andryszak, Marcelo Nunes vs Maurice Greene, Renan Ferreira vs Rizvan Kuniev, Bruno Cappelozza vs Matheus Scheffel, and since 2022 champion Ante Delija is injured, he's been replaced by Denis Goltsov against Yorgan De Castro. The next day, April 8th, the UFC is back with UFC 287: Pereira vs Adesanya 2. Or 3. Or 4, depending on how you're counting them. On your early prelims: Jacqueline Amorim debuts against a struggling Sam Hughes, Shayilan Nuerdanbieke is back for Steve Garcia, Ignacio Bahamondes meets Nikolas Motta, Cynthia Calvillo faces Lupita Godinez and Gerald Meerschaert fights Joe Pyfer. Up on ESPN: Chris Barnett and my man Chase Sherman do heavyweight battle, Michelle Waterson-Gomez fights Luana Pinheiro, Michael Chiesa meets Li Jingliang, and Kelvin Gastelum faces Chris Curtis. Despite the number of fights there that could be up top, your main card opener is Raul Rosas Jr. facing Christian Rodriguez, followed by Kevin Holland vs Santiago Ponzinibbio, Rob Font vs Adrian Yanez, and a co-main event featuring Gilbert Burns and Jorge Masvidal, much to my chagrin. Your main event is, of course, Alex Pereira looking to run his series against Israel Adesanya up to astronomical blowout levels by defending his middleweight championship. PFL ends its first phase the following week with PFL 3: Aubin-Mercier vs Burgos on April 14th. This night's for the Lightweights and Welterweights: The first group gets Clay Collard (ON THE drat PRELIMS) vs Yamato Nishikawa, Abdul-Aziz Abdulvakhabov vs Ashmed Amir, Raush Manfio vs Alexander Martinez and Natan Schulte vs Stevie Ray, and the second group gets Magomed Umalatov vs Dilano Taylor, Carlos Leal vs David Zawada, Magomed Magomedkerimov vs Don Madge, Shane Mitchell vs a mystery opponent and 2022 champ Sadibou Sy vs Jarrah Al-Silawi. Your main event is also a lightweight tilt, as 2022 champ Olivier Aubin-Mercier welcomes the rare ranked UFC competitor released more or less by mistake, Shane Burgos, to the PFL. The UFC is back on ESPN the next day for UFC on ESPN: Holloway vs Allen. It's a big, long card: Joselyne Edwards vs Lucie Pudilova, Lando Vannata vs Daniel Zellhuber, Aaron Phillips vs Gastón Bolaños, Br--honestly, is there any real utility value in me listing all of these? I wonder each month if anyone reads these for these actual event descriptions, or if anyone who actually wants to know what's on the card wouldn't just click through instead to see it in a much more digestible view. Let me know, I guess. Uh, Bruna Brasil vs Denise Gomes, Brandon Royval vs Matheus Nicolau (HALFWAY DOWN THE GOD DAMNED PRELIMS), Zak Cummings vs Ed Herman, Gillian Robertson vs Piera Rodriguez, and Clay Guida vs Rafa Garcia. Your main card is a little low on ranked importance, but the banger potential is high. Bill Algeo vs TJ Brown will probably rule, Pedro Munhoz vs Chris Gutierrez will probably rule, Ion Cutelaba vs Tanner Boser will, well, probably be very funny, and Dustin Jacoby vs Azamat Murzakanov is anybody's guess. Your co-main is the deeply embattled Edson Barboza vs Billy Quarantillo, and in your main event, Arnold Allen finally gets his top-level test when he faces former champion Max Holloway. A long, four-fight weekend begins on April 21st with Bellator 294: Carmouche vs Bennett 2. Bellator likes to run Hawaiian double-headers with one short card, and this is that short card. You've still got your traditional prelims, but for once it's a short five fights and it's populated by people Bellator fans will recognize, like Anthony Adams, Tyrell Fortune, Killys Mota and Alex Polizzi. Your main card sees Levan Chokheli meet Michael Lombardo, Danny Sabatello tries to get back to winning against Marcos Breno, Arlene Blencowe welcomes Sara McMann to both Bellator and the featherweight division, and Timothy Johnson and Said Sowma will probably clinch a lot. Your main event sees Liz Carmouche defending her no-longer-disputed Women's Flyweight Championship against DeAnna Bennett, whom she choked out back in 2020. April 22nd brings us three events in one day, and I rolled a die and it told me to pick ONE Fight Night 9: Nong-O vs Haggerty first. You've got three Muay Thai bouts, with Han Zihao vs Asa Ten Pow, Ferrari Fairtex vs Felipe Lobo and Black Panther vs Jacob Smith, and you've got six MMA bouts: Jhanlo Mark Sangiao vs Matias Farinelli, Meng Bo vs Dayane Cardoso, Isi Fitikefu vs Valmir da Silva, Denice Zamboanga vs Julie Mezabarba, Bokang Masunyane vs Hiroba Minowa and Halil Amir vs Maurice Abevi. Your main event sees Bantamweight Muay Thai champion Nong-O Gaiyanghadao defend his belt against British champion and former ONE Flyweight Muay Thai champion Jonathan Haggerty. Second up, it's Bellator 295: Stots vs Mix. This is the traditionally longer Bellator card, and it shows, with nine preliminary fights that feature a bunch of people you absolutely do not know, followed by a top-card featuring Sumiko Inaba vs Veta Arteaga, Kai Kamaka III vs Adlio Edwards, Yancy Medeiros vs Charlie Leary and Mads Burnell vs Justin Gonzales. Your main card's a barnburner, though. Kyoji Horiguchi returns to American flyweight to meet the debuting Ray Borg, Aaron Pico tries to get back to winning against Otto Rodriguez, Ilima-Lei Macfarlane fightgs a possible title eliminator against Kana Watanabe, and in your main event, Raufeon Stots both defends his interim bantamweight championship and fights the final of the Bantamweight Grand Prix against Patchy Mix. Finally, our marathon day ends with UFC Fight Night: Pavlovich vs Blaydes. It's, respectfully, a big, weird card. Your prelims: Brady Hiestand vs Danaa Batgerel, Priscila Cachoeira vs Karine Silva, Francis Marshall vs William Gomis, Mohammad Usman vs Junior Tafa which will be hilarious, Rafael Estevam vs Carlos Candelario, Karol Rosa vs Norma Dumont, Rani Yahya vs Montel Jackson and Ricky Glenn vs Christos Giagos, which is a featured prelim headliner if ever I've seen one. But don't stop the train, because we're opening up the main card with the star power of Iasmin Lucindo vs Brogan Walker-Sanchez, followed by Bobby Green against recent robbery victim Jared Gordon, Jeremiah Wells vs Matthew Semelsberger, Brad Tavares vs Bruno Silva and Song Yadong vs Ricky Simon. And after all of that weirdness, your main event on this otherwise low-key fight night is...arguably a fight to determine the actual best heavyweight in the UFC and inarguably a fight to determine the rightful #1 heavyweight contender, as Sergei Pavlovich faces Curtis Blaydes. All's quiet until the next weekend, with Rizin Landmark 5 on April 29th. Weirdly, despite Landmark being Rizin's b-tier label, this is a bigger, more international and more contender-laden card than their big-brand show for the month, with international points of interest like Callyu Gibrainn fighting Mikio Ueda, long-running veterans like Masanori Kanehara in action, former top contender Johnny Case welcoming Ali Abdulkhalikov to the ring, Kanna Asakura AND Rena Kubota both getting hopeful victories, goddamn Tsuyoshi Sudario facing superheavyweight Roque Martinez, Koji Takeda fighting streaking Luiz Gustavo, and Yutaka Saito facing Ren Hiramoto. Your main event is Rizin running a revenge fight, as perennial fly in their ointment Juntaro Ushiku faces favored son Mikuru Asakura, last seen getting crushed by Floyd Mayweather Jr. And finally, mercifully, our long months ends with that evening's UFC Fight Night: Tsarukyan vs Moicano. The UFC's weird-rear end cards for the month don't let up at all--you've got things like the weight classless Chelsea Chandler vs the impossible-to-prove-exists Danyelle Wolf, Journey Newson vs Brian Kelleher, Cody Brundage vs Rodolfo Vieira, all kinds of matchups that only really make sense if you think of it as the UFC trying to cut away some of their losses. Your big fights for the night inclkude Michael Oleksiejczuk vs Caio Borralho, Emily Ducote vs Polyana Viana, Marcos Rogerio de Lima vs Waldo Cortes-Acosta, and our main event, Arman Tsarukyan vs Renato Moicano.
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Apr 1, 2023 18:17
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CURRENT UFC CHAMPIONS Heavyweight Champion, 265 lbs   Jon Jones - 27-1 (1), 0 DefensesVery few things in combat sports reach the crossroads of awe-inspiring and unfathomably frustrating as Jon Jones. In 2020, Jon Jones notched the third defense of his second light-heavyweight championship reign after an exceedingly contentious decision against Dominick Reyes, only to abdicate the title because the UFC wasn't paying him enough, and he was bored of 205 pounds and wanted to move up to heavyweight like he'd been planning to for nearly a decade, and he needed more time to cement his place as not just one of the sport's greatest pound-for-pound fighters, but one of its biggest pound-for-pound pains in the rear end. On September 23, 2021, Jon Jones was inducted into the UFC Hall of Fame; on September 24, 2021, he was arrested (for the fifth time!) after his daughter called the police on him for beating her mother, during which he antagonized the police and, inexplicably, headbutted a police car. Because this is Jon Jones, of course, the primary charges were dropped, he paid $750 for the hood of the police cruiser, and got a stern warning to stay out of trouble, young man, because there is a money-powered reality-distorting field around Jon Jones whereby nothing matters. After a year of rumors, and after the unconscionable firing of heavyweight champion Francis Ngannou, the UFC gleefully announced Jon Jones vs Ciryl Gane to fill the vacant heavyweight throne. Did it matter to the matchmaking that there were more deserving candidates? Of course not, because it's Jon Jones: He deserves the spot for his earlier success. Did it matter to his public appearances that when last we saw him he was arrested for beating his fiancee? Of course not, because it's Jon Jones: He was, if anything, more up his own rear end with self-righteousness than ever before. Did it matter to the fight that he hadn't competed in more than three years and looked terrible at the time? Of course not, because it's Jon loving Jones. Ciryl Gane looked too nervous to use footwork let alone throw anything, and he should have been, as Jones effortlessly threw him to the canvas and choked him out in two minutes. The longest-running, most dominant and yet most persistently annoying show in mixed martial arts is back. Jon Jones is your heavyweight champion, and we are all damned. He's theoretically fighting Stipe Miocic next, but honestly, who the hell knows. 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 - 21-3 (1), 1 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 inevitable, and once again, Edwards opened as an underdog, and once again, he proved everyone wrong. Instead of a last-minute comeback Leon simply shut Usman down for the majority of the fight, stuffing eleven of his takedown attempts, outstriking him in four out of five rounds and landing an absolutely wild 75% of his strikes in the process. It was an incredible performance against one of the greatest welterweights of all time, marred only by Leon losing a point for fence grabs. The decision was unquestionably his, and now legitimized as the champion of the world, Leon's first move is...getting into a big, public spat with the UFC, because instead of any of the working contenders of the division Dana White is demanding he defend the belt against Colby Covington. Fantastic. 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  Alexa Grasso - 16-3, 0 DefensesEvery once in awhile someone gets to shock the combat sports world, and in 2023, it's Alexa Grasso. The UFC has been high on Grasso since she left Invicta for her company debut back in 2016--she's been one of the most consistently featured fighters in ANY women's division, be it her time at strawweight or her move up to flyweight--but her two bids at the top of the mountain at 115 pounds met with disaster, once in Tatiana Suarez handing her the only stoppage loss of her career and once in Carla Esparza outwrestling her to a decision, and watching her manhandled by 115-pound fighters left the world doubting her 125-pound chances. But thanks to her solid boxing and her ever-improving ground game she ran up a four-fight winning streak, and when the UFC announced that she'd be taking on divisional queen and one of the greatest of all time in Valentina Shevchenko, the collective fan reaction was a unanimous "sure, okay," because Valentina disposing of people was a generally accepted phenomenon and she needed a warm body. The first round was a slight surprise, with Grasso stinging Shevchenko on the feet, but as so often happens, by the fourth round Valentina had taken over the fight, was ahead on every judge's scorecard and looked poised to cruise to her her eighth title defense. And then, she was struck down by the bane of the sport: Spinning poo poo. Backed into the fence, Shevchenko did what she does entirely too often--a spinning back kick--and in the half-second she was turned away Grasso leapt to her back, dragged her to the floor, and became the first person to ever submit Valentina Shevchenko. Alexa Grasso, after years of work, is the Women's Flyweight Champion of the World. But after six undefeated years and the longest women's title reign in UFC history (not counting Women's Featherweight which, as we all know, is Not Real), a rematch with Shevchenko later this year seems inevitable. 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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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 an undisclosed injury saw him pulled from the card; the fight is now scheduled for Bellator 297 on June 16th. 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 - 17-0, 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. Usman's first fight as champion was both a defense and an entry into the first round of Bellator's Lightweight Grand Prix on March 3rd at Bellator 292, where he met, crushed, and retired former UFC champion Benson Henderson, handing him just the third submission loss of a 17-year, 42-fight career. He'll be waiting for the winner of May 12's tilt between Mansour Barnaoui and Brent Primus. 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. And now, on June 16th, he'll be facing Sergio Pettis in an attempt to claim a third divisional championship. 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 was out long enough that Bellator crowned an interim champion and held the entirety of a Bantamweight Grand Prix, which wound up being one of their more successful and highly-lauded tournaments in quite awhile, so of course, when they announced Sergio would be returning on June 16th, months after the tournament's conclusion, they also announced that he would be fighting...Patrício Pitbull, who is trying to become a three-class champion. Thanks, Bellator. Bellator Interim Bantamweight Champion  Raufeon Stots - 19-1, 1 DefenseRaufeon Stots did not waste his opportunity. 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 2023 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. After his undisputed championship victory, ONE took its third swing at the constantly-rescheduled heavyweight championship unification match. Bhullar vs Malykhin was booked, yet again, for ONE Fight Night 8 on March 24th, and yet again, it fell apart. They want to try for the fourth time this summer. 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 move forward. He'll be facing Tye Ruotolo in a grappling match on May 5th, because ONE is silly. 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. He'll be facing Spike Carlyle--in a non-title match, because, after all, this is Japan--on May 6th. 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   VACANT - The unavoidable doom of everything you loveTHAT'S RIGHT, MOTHERFUCKERS. You thought Vacant was done? VACANT IS NEVER DONE. On March 5, 2023, just one single day after Jon Jones closed the door on the long, multi-national title reign of Vacant, God opened a window. Kyoji Horiguchi, who has long struggled with feeling undersized at the 135-pound bantamweight division, announced he was moving back to the 125-pound flyweight division for good, and that he could not in good conscience hold onto a championship he could not defend. Fundamentally, admittedly, it barely makes a difference to Rizin--he won the bantamweight championship back in 2018 and, because Japanese MMA hates ever putting its treasured champions at risk, despite having five Rizin fights in the time since his championship victory he'd only actually defended the title once, and that was in a rematch with Kai Asakura, who'd knocked him out a year earlier in, of course, a non-title fight. Horiguchi will be fighting Ray Borg at flyweight in Bellator on April 22nd, and Rizin is supposedly spinning up a flyweight championship for later this year, but no one knows what's going to happen with any of Rizin's championships, quite frankly. So Vacant will sit in his new apartment in Japan and wait, at peace, with his shiny new toy, confident that no matter what happens, he will always have a throne somewhere in this sport. 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. But before that, she’ll face Miyuu Yamamoto in a non-title fight on May 6th.
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Apr 1, 2023 18:18
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Tatiana Suarez being back in the mix changes things up considerably, too. Going to be real interesting to see how they matchmake her into the mix. Also, it's only the first of the month and April is already ruined. https://twitter.com/mma_orbit/status/1642312601768951809
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Apr 2, 2023 07:25
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I am not adding WWE champions to the thread intro.
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Apr 2, 2023 22:24
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intrusive thought 
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Apr 3, 2023 22:52
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https://twitter.com/MMAJunkie/status/1643373417930936323 Anthony Smith vs Johnny Walker, which is a top 5 fight (jesus christ light-heavyweight), has been demoted to co-main event in favor of your new main event, #9 heavyweight Jairzinho Rozenstruik vs #12 heavyweight Jailton Almeida. Anthony Smith was supposed to fight Jamahal Hill, and then the fight was taken away from him with no notice on live television so Hill could get a title shot despite being ranked lower than him, and they made it up to Smith with a main event, and now he doesn't get the main event. Also, Almeida/Rozenstruik is happening in a live arena in front of people buying tickets and Curtis Blaydes vs Sergei Pavlovich for #1 contendership is happening three weeks earlier in the Apex in front of nobody.
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Apr 4, 2023 23:46
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top marks.
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Apr 5, 2023 07:50
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CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 53: OKAY, BEST OF SEVEN SATURDAY, APRIL 8TH FROM THE MIAMI-DADE ARENA IN FLORIDA EARLY PRELIMS 3 PM PST/6 PM EST VIA ESPN+ | PRELIMS 5 PM PST/8 PM EST VIA ESPN+ | MAIN CARD 7 PM PST/10 PM EST VIA PAY-PER-VIEW So, anything interesting happen in your week? It feels deeply bizarre to return to business as normal just a couple days after news broke that the Ultimate Fighting Championship is merging with World Wrestling Entertainment in the true and final victory of rich combat sports jerks over responsibility or decency, but the wailing and gnashing of teeth about getting professional wrestling's peanut butter in mixed martial arts' chocolate feels like a case of fans forgetting the old ways. Mixed martial arts came from professional wrestling. Professional wrestling came from martial arts. Martial arts came from wrestling. We are all of the same primordial ooze, none of us would exist without the other, and our industries will be inextricably linked until we all burn to ash in the super-embers of our exploding sun. But boy, is it appropriate that we're starting this new era with the most professional wrestling-rear end storyline the UFC has going right now.  so many fighters were so upset about who did and did not get on the main card MAIN EVENT: HAUNTED BY A FREIGHT TRAIN  MIDDLEWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP: Alex Pereira (7-1, Champion) vs Israel Adesanya (23-2, #1)Imagine, for a moment, that you are Israel Adesanya. You're a multi-time kickboxing champion who's only lost by close decisions, and even then only twice, and you knock out almost everyone you face. You're dabbling in MMA, you're undefeated, and you're successful to the point that MMA fans who pride themselves on being obsessively in the know are already talking about your UFC future. You are, categorically, hot poo poo. And then this one guy beats you. It's a decision, but it's a loss. It's your only loss in the middle of what would otherwise be nineteen straight victories. It irritates you. You're splitting your time more and more between kickboxing and mixed martial arts these days, so a little slipping is understandable. When you lose out on a Glory Kickboxing world championship, well, that's unfortunate, but again: It's a decision. They happen. You can't even be that mad: You're already in contact with the UFC, you know your time in kickboxing is coming to an end. But you want one more fight. You want revenge. But then that one guy beats you again. You had him hurt, you might even have gotten a standing TKO were it mixed martial arts, but it's kickboxing, so he survives a standing eight count, rallies, and knocks you out cold. You end your kickboxing career on your back. And it sticks in your brain, and you never forget. But you do move on. You're a mixed martial artist now, and, shockingly quickly, one of the best. The UFC puts their full marketing weight behind you and you deliver sterling performances in every outing not involving strange Italian men who wear their clothing backwards. In less than a year, you're the #1 contender; in two, you're the undisputed champion of the world. By three you're about to challenge for a title at a second weight class, and by four you may not have succeeded, but you made a good accounting for yourself, and you've got the second-most title defenses in middleweight history. You've cleaned out most of the division. You are, indisputably, the best fighter it's seen since Anderson Silva--who you beat. You're the champion. You're the face of Puma shoes. The world is your oyster. But there's this one guy. CarlCX posted:Everyone who fights Adesanya is looking to defuse him. Robert Whittaker wanted to use his wrestling to stifle his counters and his movement, Jared Cannonier wanted to force him into the pocket and land up close, Marvin Vettori wanted to defeat him with psychic warfare and wearing his shorts backwards. The UFC booked this fight both for you and against you. They fast-tracked Alex Pereira to the championship because they felt there was money in it--both the story of his role as the one guy to ever unequivocally beat you, as a matter of revenge for you, the athlete, and as a matter of carefully ducking the legion of wrestlers and grapplers and Robert Whittakers in the top ten in favor of an all-kickboxing affair. You spend the entire run-up to the fight talking about how glad you are that he's in your world, how you're going to show him how much you've evolved, how kickboxing referees and standing eight counts won't save him this time. You're right. Aside from a close second round where he gets you discombobulated with a headkick, you're in control of the fight. You're taking him down, you're controlling him in the clinch, you're outlanding him, you're stinging him with right hands. You've made this place your home, and the ghosts of the past have no hold over you here. You're dancing on the train tracks all the way to a fifth round, firmly in the lead on every scorecard, with three minutes to freedom. And then a left hand hits you. And another. And suddenly you're bent over against the fence staring at the floor, eating hooks, and a man in a black shirt is holding onto you and waving your world championship away. And he's giving it to that one loving guy. And there's no smoking gun for your championship loss. You didn't throw an ill-advised Chris Weidman spinning wheel kick, or have a Lyoto Machida off night, or execute an incomprehensible Rose Namajunas strategy. You fought a good fight. You did what you planned to do. You were minutes away from putting Alex Pereira in your rear-view mirror for the rest of your life. Was it his footwork backing you into the fence repeatedly? Was it the body shots keeping you from watching out for the left hook? Was it just a lapse in concentration? Or are ghosts real, and you're just haunted by a specter that won't ever let you go? There are a thousand reasons you should win this fight. You almost won the first one. You were the more complete fighter, by far. You had him hurt on multiple occasions. You're still so much more of a star than he is that this entire narrative is written from your perspective, rather than the guy who beat you. It's Your Belt. It's Your Division. He doesn't even want it; he and his coach are already talking about challenging for the light-heavyweight championship you failed to win after he beats you again. He took your title and your division and your chin and now he wants to take your god damned legacy. This should be the moment you exorcise your demons and remind the world why you're the best. Why hauntings and curses are fiction and nothing is real but our fists. It should be. But you just can't shake the feeling that maybe it's not. You can't shake the feeling that you haven't excelled in rematches, period. That people seem to figure you out just a little better each time. You cannot shake that we've been telling ourselves ghost stories aren't real for millennia, and somehow, we just can't stop being afraid of the past. ALEX PEREIRA BY TKO. CO-MAIN EVENT: SNIPERS WAITING ON DANA WHITE'S SIGNAL TO TAKE OUT GILBERT'S KNEECAPSWELTERWEIGHT: Gilbert Burns (21-5, #5) vs Jorge Masvidal (35-16, #11) Boy, I really hate this fight. It's not that the fight, itself, will be bad. It's probably going to be fun as hell. Masvidal's a good striker with underrated ground defense and Burns is an incredibly talented grappler who uses his confidence on the ground to let himself throw giant haymakers on the feet. This is virtually guaranteed to provide fireworks. But you can't really talk about the fight without talking about the context of the fight. Jorge Masvidal is the #11 welterweight on the planet. He has exactly one victory over a currently active UFC fighter, and it was Michael Chiesa, and it was at a different weight class, and it was just three months shy of an entire decade ago. Jorge Masvidal has not won a UFC fight since 2019. and that was against the unranked Nate Diaz, and it earned him two consecutive title shots. The UFC was, in fact, trying to book Masvidal into a title eliminator against Leon Edwards last year, and likely would have succeeded were it not for his assault charges with Colby Covington outside of the cage. And now Masvidal's in the periphery of the divisional rankings, and he's getting a shot at the top five. And you can bet your rear end that if he beats Burns, who has been fighting the top ten of the division for the last four years, Masvidal is getting the next crack at the championship. And you can bet a similar quantity of rear end Burns is not getting the same treatment. He spent the last full year and a half calling out Colby Covington while fighting Khamzat loving Chimaev, the scariest prospect in the sport, and instead he gets to defend his position against Jorge Masvidal while Colby is getting the next title shot based on his year-old victory against...Jorge Masvidal. Welterweight is an absolutely incredible division and the shambles the UFC has made of its booking will never stop infuriating me. The greater conversation around these booking choices always winds up orbiting the same idea: You go where the money is. Masvidal and Covington are draws, therefore it's justifiable to prioritize them. This has always felt deeply silly to me, because believing it necessitates believing being a draw is an inborn trait, and that Joe Rogan and Dana White are the David Attenboroughs of mixed martial arts, peering through the reeds at Paddy Pimblett and Sean O'Malley grazing majestically in the brush and cooing, "There it is, the secretive fan connection x-factor," as opposed to the company harnessing the power of a multi-billion dollar marketing empire to ensure you cannot follow the sport without hearing about a certain subset of people they would really like you to pay them $80 to see. Draws are made. Some are made more easily than others, but each one was carefully cultivated and managed. The UFC chose to advertise Jorge Masvidal assaulting Leon Edwards backstage rather than punishing him. Nothing is accidental or incidental but the outcomes of the fights. The UFC is most certainly hoping the outcome of this fight is Masvidal dropping Burns and giving them another season of Street Jesus hype packages. Are they going to get what they want? Probably not--but boy, I'm not as sure as I'd like to be. Gilbert Burns punches like a truck crashing into a train, and he has no fear of walking into fire, because most of his opponents do not hit nearly as hard as he does and very few of them are willing to take him down to stop him. Khamzat Chimaev has outgrappled everyone he's faced in the UFC (that he didn't knock out in twenty seconds instead), and he spent all of one minute on the ground with Burns before nearly getting his arm broken and immediately deciding to stay standing for the rest of the fight, even though it meant getting repeatedly cracked in the mouth. But Khamzat also hit him. A lot. And Khamzat Chimaev is not a particularly tricky striker. Jorge Masvidal is. Gilbert Burns is so used to marching opponents down with a casual disregard for their power that he lets himself get caught on a regular basis, and unlike Neil Magny or Stephen Thompson, Jorge's defensive grappling is solid enough that he was able to fend off Demian Maia for fifteen minutes. Jorge's woodchipper clinch attacks do not help matters. I'm still giving it to GILBERT BURNS BY DECISION, because I think he's the better all-around fighter, and I have faith in his ability to keep Masvidal alternating between defending punches and takedowns for three rounds. But--even if it's most likely just nihilistic fear--I cannot shake a sinking feeling. MAIN CARD: THE NEW KID, HE'S GOT MONEY / THE MONEY I DESERVE BANTAMWEIGHT: Rob Font (19-6, #6) vs Adrian Yanez (16-3, #12) Rob Font is in an unfortunate spot. He's been one of the ten best bantamweights in the world for half a decade, but he's also been firmly ensconced in the dreaded position of the gatekeeper: Good enough to jab circles around the lower half of the division, not good enough to get past the Raphael Assunçãos and Pedro Munhozi of the world. But after seven years in the UFC, it's only in the past twelve months that he's ever lost two back to back fights--and what's worse, lost them by simply getting outfought. José Aldo gave him a lesson in levels in 2021 and almost exactly one year ago Font put together a solid performance against Marlon Vera, outlanding him easily--and losing a wide decision anyway, because he couldn't stop getting nearly knocked out in every single round. Font's grip on the top ten has never looked more tenuous, and the wolves have come to the door. Adrian Yanez looks like a hell of a wolf. His Contender Series knockout of DRAGON HOUSE CHAMPION Brady Huang got him to the big show, and he rifled off five wins in just a year and a half--four of which were hilariously violent knockouts. His best-aging win is a decision over Davey Grant (which is a split, but it really, really shouldn't have been), but by far his most satisfying win--and the one that got him over with the fans--was last year's first-round knockout of Tony Kelley, one of the few fighters to make a big enough rear end of himself that even the UFC decided he wasn't worth it. It's a showcase of the best aspects of Adrian's fight game: Obscenely fast hands, quick combinations, and one of the slickest, most consistent left hooks to the body I've seen in mixed martial arts. But this is a big jump in competition. Rob Font isn't just an extremely solid boxer, he's got fantastic recovery. Aldo and Chito are two of the division's hardest hitters, and Font got wobbled a half-dozen times between the two fights, but he stayed up and survived every scare. Those kinds of beatings don't come without a cost, though, and the more Font's chin gets chipped away, the more likely it becomes that an Adrian Yanez reaps the benefits of the cracks other men put in it for him. I think we're going to see the passing of a torch. ADRIAN YANEZ BY TKO. Font outboxing Yanez and keeping him on the perimeter of a jab would by no means surprise me, but neither would Yanez putting him down. WELTERWEIGHT: Kevin Holland (23-9 (1)) vs Santiago Ponzinibbio (29-6)Welcome to the war of the almost-weres. Kevin Holland was one of the stars of the UFC's pandemic era, a constantly busy fighter taking five bouts a year and making his way from unknown prospect to top ten contender in an eyeblink thanks to massive reach, ferocious striking and a surprising offensive grappling game. But, as so often becomes the case, 'twas wrestling that slayed the beast. Derek Brunson and Marvin Vettori double-legged Holland out of the middleweight division, and his 2022 turn to welterweight got off to a strong start only to get brutally stopped in its tracks, once in a two-minute grappling clinic thanks to Khamzat Chimaev and once last December, as despite putting on a fight-of-the-year candidate with Stephen Thompson, he wound up on the receiving end of the worst beating, and first TKO loss, of his career. Santiago Ponzinibbio was right on the cusp of a title shot back in 2018, only for a series of progressively more terrifying medical issues to threaten not just his career, but his life. It took two and a half years for him to fully recover and return to the sport, and most people have spent that return wondering if he did, in fact, fully recover. Li Jingliang ruined his comeback party by knocking him out, he beat Miguel Baeza but not before absorbing an entire round of punishment, he wound up on the wrong side of split decision losses to Geoff Neal and Michel Pereira, and even in his knockout victory over Alex Morono last December he was en route to a decision loss before making a third-round comeback. His jab is still sharp and his power is still there, but his chin, and the striking talent he's up against, aren't what they used to be. This most likely will not be a better night for him, either. Ponzinibbio's best weapon is his jab, but it's real difficult to effectively jab someone with an 8" reach advantage, and after watching him struggle with the power of Alex Morono and Geoff Neal, his prospects against Kevin Holland seem slim. Holland's weakness is and has always been wrestling, and Ponzinibbio does have a surprising takedown game, and I hope for his sake he uses it judiciously. But I can't help seeing KEVIN HOLLAND BY TKO. BANTAMWEIGHT: Raul Rosas Jr. (7-0) vs Christian Rodriguez (8-1) It wouldn't be a modern card without a promotionally favored blood sacrifice. Raul Rosas Jr. is Dana White's pet project of 2022, a chain-wrestling power-grappler who won a fight on the Contender Series last September only to be told he'd have to wait a few months because, as a 17 year-old and thus not a legal adult, the UFC couldn't actually sign him. But by December, it was completely kosher. They threw one of their statistically worst fighters in Jay Perrin at him, and Rosas dutifully rolled him up into a pretzel and choked him out in three minutes. This may shock you, but the UFC is trying to do it again. Christian "CeeRod" Rodriguez, who was apparently nicknamed by the same Scottish witch coven that cursed Kenny Florian, also won a Contender Series bout back in 2021, only for the UFC to pass on him on account of missing weight by three pounds, which mysteriously was completely fine when the suspiciously British Jake Hadley did it. Rodriguez got picked up as a last-minute injury replacement instead, and now the UFC's stuck with him. Coincidentally, Christian Rodriguez has been repeatedly taken down in all three of his fights under the UFC's corporate banner, even his submission victory over Joshua Weems last year. How deeply odd that the UFC would pit their hyped wrestler-grappler against a guy who gets taken down a lot who they also didn't really want under contract in the first place. What a strange set of coincidences live at the core of our sport. RAUL ROSAS JR. BY SUBMISSION. PRELIMS: WE COULD HAVE HAD IT ALL MIDDLEWEIGHT: Kelvin Gastelum (17-8 (1), #15) vs Chris Curtis (30-9, #14) Nothing makes me feel my age as a mixed martial arts fan the way Kelvin Gastelum does. When I think of Kelvin Gastelum I still think of the promising young prospect with fluid boxing and speedy wrestling who feels like a sure-thing world champion one day--and then I remember that his UFC debut was eleven god damned years ago. Kelvin Gastelum is 11-8 in the UFC and 10 of the people he beat are now retired from the sport altogether. Even his "he looked kind of good!" title shot against Israel Adesanya turns four years old this month. Kelvin Gastelum was one of the best prospects in the world at welterweight, and then dubstep came and went, and now he's 1 for his last 6 at middleweight and all the new rap music people like makes me feel bored and sleepy. And Chris Curtis is here to pick the bones. His run of unexpected underdog victories by way of I Will Bludgeon You With My Fists came to an end after a lackluster loss to Jack Hermansson last summer, but after knocking Joaquin Buckley out this past December he's back on the winning path. But here, Curtis is in the particularly weird position of both having the most high-profile fight of his career and also, arguably, having the least to gain in victory. Beating Gastelum would mean Curtis showing his ability to beat someone who hung in there with Israel Adesanya and Robert Whittaker--but he's already ranked higher than Gastelum, he's already got better recent victories than Gastelum, and at this point in their respective careers, his value is primarily in name. Which is a terrible thing to say about a guy who just went five rounds with Robert Whittaker two years ago! Kelvin Gastelum isn't bad! He just hasn't looked good in a very long time. His last truly impressive performance was all the way back in 2017. I'd love a Kelvin Gastelum return to form, but none of his power, range or skillset issues at middleweight have changed, and he's only gotten older, and he's only looked worse, and now he's fighting a huge power puncher who's never been taken down in the UFC. For a faltering fighter who's shaking off two years of ring rust, it's a big ask. CHRIS CURTIS BY DECISION. WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT: Michelle Waterson-Gomez (18-10, #10) vs Luana Pinheiro (10-1, #15) One of the cruelest parts of combat sports is how little space there is to fall off. Michelle Waterson-Gomez has been at the top ten of both atomweight and strawweight for an entire decade, but the price of that greatness is getting stuck amidst everyone else who's just as great as you are. After barely losing in her entire career, Michelle's 1 for her last 5, and all four of those losses were to #1 contenders, and the one victory was an incredibly narrow decision over Angela Hill, the Holy Saint of Getting hosed Over By Judges. And now Waterson-Gomez is 37 and staring down a fifth loss in as many years, but this one would see her finally out of the top ten and quite possibly out of a career. Because Luana Pinheiro hasn't exactly distinguished herself as a big strawweight standout. She's 2-0 in the UFC, but the first of those victories came thanks to a first-round disqualification and the second was a drag-out brawl with Sam Hughes, who is tough, gritty, and also 2-4 in the company. We've barely even seen Pinheiro fight in the UFC, neither performance was great, and thanks to injuries and poor timing, she's been on the shelf for the last year and a half. Her swarming punches and heavy leg kicks are still dangerous regardless of how long she's been gone, but she's never had to land them on someone as fast or skilled as Waterson-Gomez. But she's still a betting favorite, because--y'know, it's hard to shake being 1 for your last 5. It's hard to shake being associated with getting repeatedly beaten up. MICHELLE WATERSON-GOMEZ BY DECISION still feels accurate to me--Pinheiro's cardio and aggression tend to falter and Michelle's real hard to put away--but the chance of sadness here is very, very high. MIDDLEWEIGHT: Gerald Meerschaert (35-15) vs Joseph Pyfer (10-2) Gerald Meerschaert refuses to go away. He's going on seven years in the UFC, and try as he might, he gets the crap beaten out of him in every other fight, but by god, he keeps choking people out over and over and over. In his last three victories, Meerschaert has been taken down, elbowed, stumbled or all-out dropped, but every time he's gotten up, and every time he's swung exhausted yet inexplicably effective punches, and every time, he has wound up getting a submission victory, because the true heart of martial arts is comedy. And nothing is funnier than a guy unironically nicknamed "Bodybagz" in real life. Joseph Pyfer made it through the Contender Series last year--his second try, as the first time around in 2020 Dustin Stoltzfus broke his arm--and was given one of the biggest gimme fights in UFC history for his promotional debut, meeting the much smaller, much less successful, 0-3 repeated knockout victim Alen Amedovski, whom Pyfer dutifully punched out in one round. So the UFC is following it by giving him the closest thing the middleweight division will ever get to a Jim Miller. I do not believe in Bodybagz. GERALD MEERSCHAERT BY SUBMISSION. HEAVYWEIGHT: Karl Williams (8-1) vs Chase Sherman (16-11) My disappointment is immeasurable and yet utterly perfect. Until one week ago this was a heavyweight clash between Chase Sherman, the closest thing I have to a true spiritual antagonist in life, and Chris Barnett, a 5'9" superheavyweight who does spinning wheel kicks. No one has inspired me to greater depths of artistic despair and passion than Chase Sherman, and I had thought for a full month about just how to truly exemplify my feelings on this madness-inducing matchup. There are Discord logs about my intention to force myself into a dissociative fugue state until I'd created a poetic epic in the style of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea about the true depths of heavyweight and its power to crush dreams. But the world is more artistic than I am. My writing is unnecessary. Industry is consuming the humanities, the Great Salt Lake is running dry, and our heavyweight dreams died before they could be born. Karl Williams is filling in for Chris Barnett. He doesn't do spinning wheel kicks. He shoots takedowns. There is no glory to be had in this battle. This is not a place of honor. The marlin was eaten long before we got back to port, and we don't even get to keep the skull. Chase Sherman's second UFC tenure will end not in an outstanding display of mixed martial comedy, but in the endless double-leg takedowns of a man who has no mind for mercy. We could not ask for more. Nothing could be so precise to our cause. Heavyweight is a potter's field, an Omelas paved atop Yuki Nakai's suffering, and we are, one and all, damned by it. We are Chase Sherman, and we are no more. KARL WILLIAMS BY DECISION. The rest is silence. EARLY PRELIMS: THE WRESTLING CLASSIC WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT: Cynthia Calvillo (9-5-1, #15) vs Lupita Godinez (8-3, NR) We haven't had a truly unequivocal pink slip fight in a bit, but boy, this is it. Cynthia Calvillo is an ultra-solid fighter who was a seemingly permanent contender at the strawweight division, but in 2020 she shifted up to 125 pounds and paid for it. After four straight losses she's back down to her home weight class, but if she takes another loss tonight that's five in a row, and that's a certain kiss of UFC death. "Loopy" Lupita Godinez was tearing her way up the strawweight charts with her inexhaustible chain-wrestling assaults until she was dashed on the jagged rocks of Angela Hill last year, who, channeling her deep Street Fighter fandom, pulled a Zangief and outwrestled her. Godinez is the kind of fighter who will chain takedowns into takedowns into other, different takedowns, but she's shown the ability to maintain the pace for fifteen minutes, which is deeply unusual. And she'll have to do it here, too. Cynthia Calvillo is a very strong counter-wrestler, and it took grapplers like Pearl Gonzalez and wrestlers like Carla Esparza to drag her down. Godinez may or may not be able to double-leg her successfully. But I'm pretty sure she'll be able to drown her in wrestling attempts before Calvillo can get enough return fire off to make a difference. LUPITA GODINEZ BY DECISION. CATCHWEIGHT, 160 LBS: Trey Ogden (16-5) vs Ignacio Bahamondes (13-4) The last time we were about to have a Trey Ogden fight it was two weeks ago, and I wrote this: CarlCX posted:Over this same period of time, Trey "Samurai Ghost" Ogden, who clawed his way up the regional scene, got picked out as a last minute replacement against Jordan Leavitt, where he wound up on the wrong end of a split decision, and the UFC rewarded him by trying to feed him to another Contender Series promotional favorite, Daniel Zellhuber. Ogden won--so now he's fighting another, different Contender Series baby they're trying to build up with wins on the early preliminaries of a forgettable fight card, and Daniel Zellhuber has a nice, comfortable striking matchup against the widely beloved Lando Vannata on the undercard of a Max Holloway main event next month. This poo poo? It sucks. I am so very tired. IGNACIO BAHAMONDES BY DECISION. FEATHERWEIGHT: Steve Garcia (13-5) vs Shayilan Nuerdanbieke (39-10) We're here to have a fight between two guys coming off wildly unexpected circumstances. When last we saw Steve "Mean Machine" Garcia, he was scoring a big upset by not just defeating but beating the absolute brakes off one-time promotional wunderkind Chase "The Dream" Hooper, dropping him with punches four times in ninety seconds before Herb Dean decided Hooper was too young for permanent brain damage. Shayilan Nuerdanbieke had the dubious honor of being an unwitting part in one of 2022's biggest MMA scandals, facing Darrick Minner in the fight where Minner's leg imploded after barely a minute, only for it to arise that Minner's injury may have been leaked by his own coach as part of the biggest gambling scandal mixed martial arts has seen in a quarter-century. One of these is somewhat more relevant to this fight than the other. Garcia's a much bigger, meaner fighter than Shayilan, and the wrestle-boxing approach that keeps Shayilan vital is going to be much tougher to get working on Garcia. STEVE GARCIA BY TKO. WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT: Sam Hughes (7-5) vs Jaqueline Amorim (6-0) Our night is opening with another great evaluation of regional talent. Sam Hughes is 2-4 in the UFC, and her success has come from her ability to wrestle the crap out of her opponents. If she can double-leg you repeatedly, she'll have a good night. If she can't, she will get visibly frustrated while repeatedly eating jabs to the face. Jaqueline Amorim is, refreshingly, taking the traditional route to the UFC: Trading a prominent regional championship for a contract. After winning and defending the Women's Strawweight Championship out at the Legacy Fighting Alliance, she's bringing an undefeated record, replete with six straight finishes, to the big show. Of course, her best opponent was either 3-1-1 or 4-3, because regional competition at the lower weight classes for women is still, respectfully, not great. But her wrestling exists, and her grappling chops and no-gi tournament performances are very real, and that gives me great pause about Sam's chances of outwrestling her for three rounds. JAQUELINE AMORIM BY DECISION.
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Apr 5, 2023 19:09
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Masvidal is a middling fighter who sometimes overperforms, and Burns is a good fighter who sometimes underperforms, and that's MMA comedy's favorite combination. Unless Burns nukes him in ninety seconds, it could get real tense.
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Apr 6, 2023 19:19
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Hey, who likes completely unnecessary re-rematches https://twitter.com/aaronbronsteter/status/1644442615419396101
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Apr 7, 2023 21:53
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I think Pennington's argument is the best, and I note that Julianna Pena got her initial, victorious title shot on the strength of a single victory, and that victory was a submission over Sara McMann, who was 1 for her last 3 and said 1 was her first victory since February of 2017.
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Apr 7, 2023 23:40
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I would be very wary of tying the B-league ecosystem to the financial health of PFL or ONE.
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Apr 8, 2023 20:22
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https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4029316&pagenumber=1#lastpost Head on back to the GDT for Pereira/Izzy 2, prelims begin in half an hour.
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Apr 8, 2023 22:33
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Shumagorath posted:Have the EA UFC games demonstrated the worst cover curse across all their sports franchises? I need a break from this week's card writeup so let's look at this whole loving history.
So basically, don't be on video game covers, it's bad for you and may have killed Charles Lewis. I also have no loving idea what Mark Kerr was doing on a UFC game cover in 2002 when his last UFC appearance was in 1997.
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Apr 12, 2023 02:42
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CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 54: THE NEW CLASS SATURDAY, APRIL 15TH FROM THE T-MOBILE CENTER IN KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI PRELIMS 2:30 PM PST/5:30 PM EST VIA ESPN+ | MAIN CARD 5:30 PM PST/8:30 PM EST VIA ESPN If there's a single prevailing theme to this card, it's an attempt to eat the old and nourish the new. In an ideal situation, promoting a mixed martial arts organization means aggressively pursuing and supporting fighters you believe have the potential to be champions while maintaining a healthy divisional structure beneath them, because it gives fans other fighters to get invested in, it gives fighters a ladder to climb, and it makes clear who is, and isn't, a reliable main event talent. But sometimes fighters get stuck. Sometimes you have people who just refuse to lose enough to leave the company, or worse, fighters who are good enough to trash all of your commercial prospects but just not good enough to be on top. It's a good problem to have, because it means you have multiple marketable talents who can maintain fan interest in a division when its champion is unavailable--but it's still a problem, and over a long enough period of time, you have to try to solve it. Max Holloway, Edson Barboza, Ion Cuțelaba and Pedro Munhoz have become problems. Tonight, the UFC tries to solve them.  ed loving herman, i swear MAIN EVENT: FINAL EXAM FEATHERWEIGHT: Max Holloway (23-7, #2) vs Arnold Allen (19-1, #4)With as much respect as possible to interim featherweight champion Yair Rodríguez, this is a fight to determine the actual #2 featherweight in the UFC, and it's hard not to feel as though that position carries something of a curse. For a very, very long time the UFC's featherweight division was a one-man show, and that man was José Aldo. He was indisputably the greatest featherweight on the planet, and were it not for sharing his prime with folks like Georges St-Pierre and Demetrious Johnson, he would have been indisputably the pound-for-pound greatest fighter on the planet. It took the biggest tidal wave in the sport's history in Conor McGregor to finally unseat Aldo, and even then, Conor immediately hosed off and left the featherweight division behind, meaning Aldo could simply pick up where he left off. And that's not how mixed martial arts works. Eras need successors. Max Holloway was that successor. He was the heir apparent to Aldo: A fast, strong, charismatic wrecking machine, ridiculously tough, incredibly well-rounded, and entirely friendly for the UFC's marketing machine. The company immediately lined their advertising ducks up behind Max Holloway, pinning their dollars on his must-see performances and his ten-fight winning streak, and he justified every erg of effort by becoming the man who truly dethroned the greatest of all time. Conor's win was entirely valid, but it was also a single, thirteen-second knockout and left fans with unanswered questions. There were no questions left after Max Holloway won two consecutive wars against José Aldo. He fought the best featherweight of all time, he took everything he had, and he knocked him out twice in a row. Max Holloway was the man on the throne. Max Holloway was the best 145-pound fighter in the world. For about ten minutes. It's brutally unfair. It took Max seventeen fights in the UFC to get that championship belt around his waist, and after three featherweight bouts, it was gone. All that marketing money went right down the drain as an unheralded guy named Alexander Volkanovski proceeded to unceremoniously take his crown before Max could truly enjoy it. It was close--close enough that the UFC jumped at the chance for an instant rematch, which was even closer--but Max still came up short, and a third bite at the apple in 2022 saw Max take the most one-sided loss of his career. The chosen torchbearer is 0-3 against the actual champion. When you lose three fights to someone in two and a half years, it's very, very hard to get another shot at them. And that's unfortunate for the UFC, because Max Holloway just keeps beating the poo poo out of everyone else in the division. When he was still champ he stopped Brian Ortega, in 2021 he handed Calvin Kattar the worst beating of his life, and at the very end of that year he beat the aforementioned Yair Rodríguez, who currently has gold around his waist in the UFC's attempt to quietly move on from Max. Because no matter how much they like you, and how much they marketed you, if you've proven you can't win the title but you can beat everyone else who might, you're no longer a prospect, you're a Problem. Arnold Allen is the UFC's second attempt at solving that problem. And boy, it's a tall order, and most irritatingly, even with Allen ranked--deservingly!--as the #4 fighter in the world at 145 pounds, we still, somehow, do not have a real idea of how he looks against top ten competition. And it's not his fault, because by god, he's been trying as hard as he can. But his schedule just hasn't worked out. Arnold Allen is an undefeated 10-0 in the UFC, but those ten fights stretch all the way back to mid-2015. With the exception of 2019 and 2022, he's only managed a cagewalk once per year. And that's robbed him of a number of opportunities to prove himself against some of the best in the world. He was supposed to fight Mirsad Bektić during the latter's own 10-fight undefeated streak back in 2016, he was supposed to fight top prospect Enrique Barzola back in 2018, he was supposed to fight interim championship contender Josh Emmett back in 2020. But all of those opportunities fell through, leaving his record strewn with Alan Omers and Makwan Amirkhanis, or worse, fighters like Yaotzin Meza, Jordan Rinaldi, Nik Lentz and Gilbert Melendez who were once some of the toughest competition in the world, but were now a single fight away from retirement. For once, this isn't promotional malfeasance. This isn't one of my usual complaints abount favorable matchmaking or the marketing machine. The UFC hasn't done Arnold Allen any favors and he's tried hard to fight the best in the world--he just keeps getting boned by the universe. Nor has he had a wholly easy path! Sodiq Yusuff is very, very tough, and Allen dealt him his only UFC loss. Dan Hooker is an extremely talented fighter, and Allen dusted him in one round. His skills as an all-around fighter are impressive, and his victories are by no means unnotable. He just hasn't been tested the way the #4 fighter in the world should be. He got his shot last October when he was pitted against perennial contender Calvin Kattar, and at the time, I wrote this: CarlCX posted:It's not Arnold Allen's fault rankings have become utterly meaningless, nor is it a reflection on his skills as a fighter. But it's important to understand just how ludicrous his path to the top has been, because only in doing so can you understand how Arnold Allen, top ten fighter and eight-year UFC veteran, can still feel like such a question mark: His schedule has been so loose, and his competition so weirdly scattered across time and space, that real tests of his skill have felt few and farbetween. In all of his fights, defeating Sodiq Yusuff--being the ONLY man in the UFC to defeat Sodiq Yusuff--is the one and only example we have of Arnold Allen fighting active, ranked divisional competition. Unfortunately: We didn't get a real answer to that question. Allen looked good in the first round, he was outlanding Kattar and controlling the pace, but with twenty-five seconds left in the round Kattar threw a very silly flying knee and suffered a very silly leg injury, and because mixed martial arts is a very silly sport, his very silly corner still sent him out for a very silly second round where he ate one leg kick and immediately collapsed to spend a full year and a half on the shelf while he gets his ACL repaired. Once again, just to be clear: It's not Arnold Allen's fault. He's not doing anything wrong. He chose to fight one of the toughest guys in his division, and he was doing quite well, and then the opportunity to continue doing well was abruptly taken away from him. The universe does not want to give him a goddamn thing, to the point that now that he's fighting the second-best featherweight in the world, even in a best-case scenario, he's still only in the batter's circle--because Yair has the interim title, and the first crack at the real thing, meaning whoever wins this fight is still going to be, at best, second in line. Unless, of course, Max Holloway derails another prospect. So, uh. MAX HOLLOWAY'S GONNA WIN A DECISION AND DERAIL ANOTHER PROSPECT. Arnold Allen is a very, very good fighter. He's got great all-around skills, no immediately perceptible weaknesses, and some hellacious striking on the inside. But his successes come in large part thanks to his ability to use those skills to keep opponents from getting comfortable--interrupting their rhythm with leg kicks, countering their lunges with hooks, using his wrestling to force clinches, anything to dictate his own pace to fights. Max Holloway is so goddamn hard to dictate a pace to that only one featherweight has done it in the last ten years, and it just happened to be the greatest featherweight alive, and it took him three tries to do it by anything but the skin of his teeth. The Volkanovski gameplan is a blueprint for Allen to follow if he wants to win. The leg kicks and the counters are crucial. But Arnold Allen has never had to fight someone who can smother him with hundreds of goddamn punches if he needs to. If Allen wins, I think it's going to be by knockout, and I think we're going to have to have some uncomfortable conversations about if Max's chin has finally cracked. But if he doesn't close the show, I have intense trouble seeing him winning by decision. CO-MAIN EVENT: GETTING WHAT YOU WANT FEATHERWEIGHT: Edson Barboza (22-11, #14) vs Billy Quarantillo (17-4, NR)Poor, poor Edson Barboza. Edson is nearing thirteen straight years as one of the most scintillating strikers in the sport with one of the UFC's greatest highlight reels, but that highlight reel is, unfortunately, getting very, very old. He froze Dan Hooker with body punches! That was almost half a decade ago. He killed Beneil Dariush with a flying knee! That was March of 2017. That world-famous wheel kick that took out Terry Etim? That was more than eleven years ago. The Muay Thai mastery that once put him on the map has been his professional undoing--after establishing himself as one of the most dangerous fighters in the sport, over the last six years, he's gone a deeply depressing 3 for his last 10. To be fair: Two of those were extremely shaky split decisions that almost assuredly should have gone the other way. To be equally fair: Before those decisions he was getting crushed by Kevin Lee and Justin Gaethje, and since those decisions he's been knocked out by Giga Chikadze and brutalized by Bryce Mitchell. If this sounds like the UFC isn't doing him any favors, you are extremely astute. Barboza made headlines in 2020 when he asked the UFC to release him for not keeping him active or paying him enough, and this got him a contract he was happier with, but it also put him on murderer's row. He got a tough brawl with Shane Burgos, he got two top prospects the UFC was glad to see destroy him, and he was supposed to march his way to the guillotine against absolute killer Ilia Topuria last October and was saved only by a knee injury. And now it's Billy Quarantillo's turn. Billy's established himself as one of the UFC's favorite archetypes: The leave-nothing-behind brawler. In seven fights with the UFC--eight if you count the 2019 Contender Series win that got him his contract--Quarantillo has never failed to land triple-digit strikes on an opponent. Sometimes he wins and cracks an opponent over and over until they break, sometimes he loses and gets outclassed by a higher-ranked fighter, but no one has left the cage with him unaware they were just in a big loving fight. To beat him, you have to be able to beat his pressure, his jabs, and his outright unwillingness to let you hit him without hitting you back twice. But that "gets outclassed" thing has been a recurring theme in his career. Sometimes it's forsworn champion Saul Rogers outpointing him on The Ultimate Fighter, sometimes it's Michel Quiñones headkicking him out of the main event in the Florida regionals, sometimes it's Shane Burgos proving to him that he can be out-pressured, too. Quarantillo's an incredible brawler, but here's the thing: Brawlers don't typically make it to the top. The style's inevitably violent returns tend to cap its practitioners (disclaimer: heavyweight not included) at the periphery of the rankings. As the Arrogant Worms tried to warn us all the way back in 1994 after watching Zane Frazier fail to win UFC 1, having fun is bad for you. Billy Quarantillo is tough as hell, but he's not invulnerable. He's been stumbled and wobbled in multiple fights, and the one knockout loss of his entire career came thanks to a boot to the head, and boy, it's hard not to think about that when Edson Barboza is involved. We have, of course, also seen Barboza get repeatedly hosed up in very recent memory--but those losses came against top competition. Is Billy Quarantillo destined to be top competition? Is Edson Barboza's time in the sun over? How sad are we all prepared to be? No. Not yet. I still believe in love, and I still believe in kicking a motherfucker in his god damned chest. EDSON BARBOZA BY TKO. We've seen Quarantillo's style get him in trouble before, and against someone as vicious as Barboza, I want to believe it will be too much. I pray I am not blinded by memories of the yesteryear's wheel kicks. MAIN CARD: AGING WOODWORKERS LIGHT-HEAVYWEIGHT: Dustin Jacoby (18-6-1, #13) vs Azamat Murzakanov (12-0, #15)Well, this should be fun. Dustin Jacoby has been around the sport for a long time--his MMA debut was all the way back in 2010--but it's only in the last few years that he's started to get somewhere, thanks half to his maturation as a fighter and half to the eternal shambles of the light-heavyweight division. His kickboxing background, his boxing combinations and his being one of the rare fighters who actually knows how to use reach and distance have led to an undefeated three-year run at 205 pounds--or they would have, were it not for our ever-invasive judges, who inexplicably ruled against him in his last fight against Khalil Rountree Jr, despite 90% of media scores going his way. Some part of it was Rountree catching him with heavy punches in the third, some part of it is Jacoby's technical assault sometimes fails to impress, but the biggest part, as ever, is the constant existential hatred judges feel for you, individually. Azamat Murzakanov does not hate you. But he does hate losing, which is why he has tried very hard not to do it. "The Professional" has managed to win his first twelve straight fights, and ten of those twelve have come by some form of horrifyingly violent stoppage, and that's particularly surprising when you remember that he's 5'10" and has a shorter reach than all but one welterweight fighter in the UFC. (And that's Rafael dos Anjos, who's only sort of a welterweight.) And this showed in his UFC debut against the taller, rangier Tafon Nchukwi, who beat him liberally around the cage before Murzakanov crushed him in the final round, which was simultaneously incredibly impressive and also presaged Azamat's potential forthcoming doom. Fighting UFC-level competition, size starts to matter. And Jacoby is taller, longer, and a better striker than Tafon. If Murzakanov can get in on Jacoby--or if he elects to forego his own real strengths and just try to wrestle Jacoby for three rounds--he's got a great chance. But anything else results in his getting picked apart and, eventually, stopped. DUSTIN JACOBY BY TKO. LIGHT-HEAVYWEIGHT: Ion Cuțelaba (16-9-1 (1)) vs Tanner Boser (20-9-1) This has the potential to be incredibly dumb, and I mean that as a compliment. Just four years ago Ion Cuțelaba was a 205-pound prospect with a memorable berserker style, a crushing top game and enough power to almost knock Glover Teixeira dead. His subsequent slide has been as drastic as it is hilarious. He got stung by Magomed Ankalaev and played possum, but played possum so well that a referee thought he was out on his feet and called the fight off in the first round. He campaigned for an immediate rematch, spent an entire year getting it postponed thanks to COVID-19, and upon finally receiving it, he was knocked out, once again, in the first round. He proceeded to 10-8 Dustin Jacoby only to gas and get beat into a draw, scored multiple 10-8 rounds against Devin Clark only to get nearly finished in the last thirty seconds of the fight, and spent 2022 getting repeatedly thrown into a dumpster by the lower top 15, including an impromptu, last-minute main event against Kennedy Nzechukwu where he--you guessed it--outwrestled him for a round, only to get obliterated in the second. Tanner Boser is making a desperate attempt to escape the gravitational pull of the heavyweight division. He emerged as a fun Canadian prospect back in 2019, but the hype pretty quickly died. Getting outstruck by Ciryl Gane? No shame in that. Getting outstruck by 2020-era Andrei Arlovski? Slightly worse for your prospects. Getting neutralized and repeatedly stung by 5'10" human brick Ilir Latifi? That puts a bit of a bullet in your championship dreams. After one last comprehensive outwrestling at the hands of Rodrigo Nascimento last September Boser made the difficult call to stop eating poutine, leave the heavyweight division behind, and move to the far more credible, far more professional light-heavyweight division, where the world champion is either a cosplay samurai or a Contender Series winner and half of the top ten are very strong grapplers. So you've got one ex-heavyweight trying to carry his heavyweight chaos energy into a lower division who cannot stop getting taken down and one light-heavyweight on a three-fight losing streak who 10-8s everyone with wrestling but gasses out after a round and a half. To be clear: Ion Cuțelaba has done nothing but lose violently for the last three fights, Tanner Boser has only lost by split decision in the last two and a half years, and Cuțelaba is, still, the betting favorite. And I just can't pick against that kind of comedy. ION CUȚELABA BY TKO. BANTAMWEIGHT: Pedro Munhoz (19-7 (2), #9) vs Chris Gutierrez (19-3-2, #13) It's a battle of fighters I am mad at, even though neither fighter is to blame for their sins. Pedro Munhoz has been up at the bantamweight top ten for the last half-decade, but those five years have been a rollercoaster. His striking, his attacks to the body and his conditioning all make him a threat to anyone in the division, but said threat has stayed permanently contained to the bottom half of the rankings; barely able to get screwed out of a decision win against Frankie Edgar, unable to put any effective offense on greats like José Aldo or Dominick Cruz. But he's on trial here for his true sin: Not stopping Sean O'Malley when he had the chance. Munhoz was the UFC's chosen springboard for everyone's least favorite living sack of lawn trimmings, but after just one round of leg kicks O'Malley gouged his eye and the fight went to a No Contest. O'Malley, of course, was immediately catapulted to the top of the division for fouling the poo poo out of Munhoz, and Munhoz, of course, is defending his position against a guy who's barely in the top fifteen. Chris Gutierrez deserves a great deal of respect. He hasn't lost a fight since 2018, and I only have to use that kind of bullshit hedging language because he was somehow also screwed out of a clear decision victory and into a draw against Cody Durden three years ago. He kicked the legs out from under Vince Morales, he outfought Felipe Colares, and he handed the ridiculously tough Danaa Batgerel his only knockout loss after dropping him with a spinning backfist. But he, too, is on trial for the greatest of all crimes: Allowing himself to be a state-sanctioned executioner. Frankie Edgar announced his intention to retire after one more fight last year, and instead of matching him with another all-timer or giving him a soft target to go out on, the UFC put him in front of Gutierrez, and Gutierrez did his duty and crushed him in two minutes. It's not his fault! It's not. He did the only thing he could do. He just also happens to have cursed the next ten generations of his children to walk the Earth knowing no comfort or pity. Sometimes these things happen in combat sports. But that will not stop a CHRIS GUTIERREZ BY DECISION victory. Munhoz's best weapons are his kicks and his jabs, and respectfully, I think Gutierrez is better at both. He isn't as technical as Aldo or as evasive as Cruz, but he's the same kind of straightforward orthodox striker Munhoz is, only bigger, faster, stronger and younger, and boy, that's a bad combination. LIGHTWEIGHT: Clay Guida (38-22) vs Rafa García (15-3) Clay Guida's last fight was a retirement fight, and Clay Guida was not the one retiring. Clay Guida is going to be 42 this year. The first time Clay Guida had a professional mixed martial arts fight, the world's top-grossing movie was the first Pirates of the Caribbean film. Clay Guida's career predates the wide adoption of broadband internet. Someone, somewhere, used a free America Online CD in their candy-colored iMac to download a bootlegged RealPlayer video of Clay Guida fighting Dennis "The Pirahna" Davis at MMA MEXICO: DAY TWO, because Clay Guida was fighting back in the days that it made sense to name a mixed martial arts event for the entire country in which it took place. And he's still here. He's still here, wrestling people, and we all have to live with that. We could have stopped it. We didn't. And now we are damned to the Carpenter by the consequences of our inaction. The UFC would like to cash in on him as much as is possible. They wanted Mark Madsen to beat him, they wanted Leo Santos to beat him, they wanted Claudio Puelles to beat him, and by god, they want Rafa García to beat him. Rafa jumped to the UFC after a 12-0 run as the lightweight champion of Combate Americas, and the UFC is always eager for potential stars for the Mexican market, but then he dropped his first two fights and they gave up. But then he won two, so they cared again! But then he lost to eternal spoiler Drakkar Klose, so the UFC truly, officially gave up and decided to feed Rafa to their newest signee from the even more lucrative Chinese market, Maheshate, a knockout artist half a foot bigger than him. And despite having his entire scalp ripped open, Rafa outworked him on the feet, wrestled the poo poo out of him, and ended his hype train before it could start. So now it's his turn to get the Clay Guida push. RAFA GARCÍA BY DECISION. Rafa's got the much sharper boxing and he's too good at wrestling for Guida's old-school wrestleboxing to give him much trouble. PRELIMS: BUILT SOLELY TO INFURIATE ME FEATHERWEIGHT: Bill Algeo (16-7) vs TJ Brown (17-9) It's time for prospects in precarious positions. Bill "Senor Perfecto" Algeo and his rough, gritty striking had a difficult back-and-forth entry into the UFC, dropping repeated fights in his first two years with the company before finally having a breakout year in 2022, where he scored an upset victory over the debuting Joanderson Brito and overcame some scary grappling sequences to put a hellacious beating on Herbert Burns. But that momentum came to a screeching halt in September, when Andre Fili kicked him in the head repeatedly and took a still surprisingly close decision. Over a nearly identical period of time, "Downtown" TJ Brown and his kicking-and-grappling gameplans had a nearly identical path--he lost his first two appearances, he won his next two, and his momentum got immediately shut down by a stronger, more seasoned fighter, as Shayilan Nuerdanbieke ground Brown down for two rounds. Brown's already made a winning comeback by choking out the similarly debuting Erik Silva this past December, but we won't hold that against him. It's two guys who are 3-3 in the UFC, and one of them is dropping into negative numbers. BILL ALGEO BY DECISION. Brown's a stronger wrestler than Herbert Burns, but I'm not convinced he's a better grappler, and Algeo most definitely has a striking, size and strength advantage. FLYWEIGHT: Brandon Royval (14-6, #4) vs Matheus Nicolau (19-2-1, #5)Come on, man. Come on.  At least once a month I have some kind of conniption about an ostensibly important fight being buried in the middle of the prelims, and boy, this sure is one of the absolute worst. Brandon Royval is an incredible, aggressive fighter who has earned Fight of the Night in 50% of his UFC fights, and his only losses in the company came against world champion Brandon Moreno and Alexandre Pantoja, one of the only men who ever beat him. Matheus Nicolau might be an even more complete fighter than he is, he's 7-1 in the UFC, he has victories across multiple weight classes and he hasn't lost a fight since 2018. With former champion Deiveson Figueiredo leaving the division, the winner of this fight is the de facto #3 flyweight in the company. At absolute worst, they'll be one fight away from a shot at the championship of the world, and with the constant threat of injuries and reschedulings, it's entirely plausible this fight, itself, could be a title eliminator. It is second from the top of the preliminary fights. The #3 flyweight ranking in the world is visibly less important than Bill Algeo, and is, at best, only mildly more important than an Ed Herman fight. And now, instead of telling you about these two fascinating fighters and their immense skills, I have spent this entire block of text angry about this division's chronic mistreatment, which will never, ever change. When one of these men is inevitably fighting for a championship belt their lack of fan interest will inevitably be used as evidence of why the flyweight division does not draw, and I will reach down into my own esophagus, stretch my diaphragm like a bowstring, and vibrate it at just the right frequency to shatter the tapestry of reality itself, in the hopes that we will all be transported to a better reality where the UFC is run by Dave Meltzer and Demetrious Johnson has held his championship belt for twenty uninterrupted years. MATHEUS NICOLAU BY DECISION. LIGHT-HEAVYWEIGHT: Ed Herman (24-15 (1)) vs Zak Cummings (24-7) Are we here to suffer? Is the Earth a place of light and joy, or is it a crucible built to fill our hearts with pitch? I was commenting on Clay Guida's age in the sport just a few paragraphs ago, but Ed Herman's been in the UFC even longer. His first UFC appearance was in June of 2006--or February, if you count The Ultimate Fighter--and he's turning 43 this year, and only three of his 24 UFC opponents are still in the company and even they are questioning retirement, and he's only managed three fights in the last four years, and, truly, I do not know why we're here, or if I mean that in the general philosophical sense or the specific-to-this-fight sense. Is it so he can evaluate an up-and-coming prospect? Christ alive, no! Zak Cummings has been in the UFC for more than a decade, and he is turning 39 this year, and he hasn't had a fight in almost three years, and most of his opponents are out of the company, too! The dark secret of life is we ascribe all meaning in reverse. The things that happen to us can only gain narrative once they are known quantities. We learn and grow from our trauma by naming and containing it. But "that which does not kill you makes you stronger" is one of the greatest lies in human history. Many things hurt and sap you, many traumas leave you shaken in ways you can never truly leave behind. You do not heal; you change. We can hope that this 2023 Ed Herman fight offers us all a chance to change. We have to hope that we can change. Ed Herman cannot. ZAK CUMMINGS BY DECISION. WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT: Piera Rodriguez (9-0) vs Gillian Robertson (11-7) Boy, this is an intriguingly gutsy matchup for the UFC. Piera "La Fiera" Rodriguez was a Contender Series pickup for the UFC back in 2021, an undefeated prospect who'd just come off winning the Women's Strawweight Championship for the Legacy Fighting Alliance, and her UFC debut in 2022 saw her off to an excellent start, picking up two hard-fought decision victories over scrappy wrestlers Kay Hansen and Sam Hughes with stiff jabs and unexpected takedown offense. But she only scored 29-28 victories, because each fight also saw her get outgrappled and put in danger by superior jiu-jitsu assaults that forced her to disengage entirely for fear of getting swept and submitted. The UFC apparently wants to see if she's improved, because boy, Gillian Robertson is about as tough as it gets in terms of testing your grappling defense. One of the most underrated jiu-jitsu artists in women's mixed martial arts--which is pretty crazy given that every single one of her victories comes from grappling the poo poo out of people--Robertson is unfortunately also uncomfortably close to a 50/50 record, because her standup has never come along the way her grappling has, and anyone she can't take down takes her apart instead. Piera definitely has the striking chops to outwork Robertson on the feet. Her tendency to use her wrestling to space out her striking is an instinct she'll have to carefully avoid here, because any time she's on the ground, she's at risk of very abruptly losing this fight. I'm still sticking with PIERA RODRIGUEZ BY DECISION, as she's smart enough to avoid ground engagements, but if she gets stuck on the floor, she's in trouble. LIGHTWEIGHT: Lando Vannata (12-6-2) vs Daniel Zellhuber (12-1)Let's go back to the more peaceful days of three weeks ago. CarlCX posted:Trey "Samurai Ghost" Ogden, who clawed his way up the regional scene, got picked out as a last minute replacement against Jordan Leavitt, where he wound up on the wrong end of a split decision, and the UFC rewarded him by trying to feed him to another Contender Series promotional favorite, Daniel Zellhuber. Ogden won--so now he's fighting another, different Contender Series baby they're trying to build up with wins on the early preliminaries of a forgettable fight card, and Daniel Zellhuber has a nice, comfortable striking matchup against the widely beloved Lando Vannata on the undercard of a Max Holloway main event next month. We have arrived at the prophecied fight. Daniel Zellhuber got into the UFC after going 12-0 including his Contender Series win, and Trey Ogden was supposed to be a stepping stone for a camera-friendly 6'1" 23 year-old striker from Mexico, and instead, Zellhuber looked a bit lost and confused dealing with Ogden's scrappy striking and interspersed takedown attempts and lost his undefeated hype train in his debut match. The UFC has learned from this mistake by having Zellhuber fight a) a striker and b) a loving featherweight. "Groovy" Lando Vannata joined the UFC as a late replacement and nearly shocked the world by dropping Tony Ferguson at the height of his powers twice before getting choked out, and he followed that up with a stunning wheelkick knockout over John Makdessi, and the mixed martial arts world was waiting on pins and needles for an incredible new lightweight striking phenomenon. Unfortunately, those fights were seven years ago and everyone's still waiting. Lando has fallen into one of the most damning of all fighter categories: The guy whose training partners regularly say 'boy, if he fought like he does in training he'd be unstoppable' about but who cannot keep it together in the cage. In those seven years he's been in the UFC Vannata has not managed a single back to back win. Even if he beats Zellhuber here, he's still only righting the ship after a loss--for the fifth time. I think the last of my belief in Lando was beaten out of me when Charles Jourdain floored him last year. He's jumping back up a weight class to fight a much bigger striker with a half-foot of reach on him and unlike Trey Ogden he's not going to be able to bother him with sheer physicality. This fight should be a very fun striking exhibition, but I am afraid it is also going to be ultimately one-sided. DANIEL ZELLHUBER BY DECISION. WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT: Bruna Brasil (8-2-1) vs Denise Gomes (6-2) The problem with the neverending flow of Contender Series winners is it's very, very easy for Dana to get bored of his newest toys. Denise Gomes won her way into the UFC in August of 2022, made her debut less than a month later--which should probably be illegal--and was immediately and thoroughly outfought by Muay Thai maven Loma Lookboonmee, at which point Gomes went right back into the mothballs for almost eight months. Bruna Brasil won her own Contender contract less than a month after Gomes did--but she did it with an impressive kickboxing-champion performance and a violent headkick knockout, so the UFC decided to wait patiently for a chance to make her look good. Denise Gomes: I am sorry you are in the make-them-look-good position now, but that's what the UFC sees in you. Gomes had one fight where she got repeatedly hurt by a superior kickboxer and dumped to the floor with Muay Thai clinch trips, and the UFC is following that up by booking her against another superior kickboxer with her own set of clinch trip highlights, except Brasil has a better record than Loma and she's also a lot loving bigger. If there's a point of worry for Brasil in this fight, it's her hands--her kicks are very, very good, but she gets loose with her punches and that leaves openings for fighters like Gomes who will blitz through openings. Still: BRUNA BRASIL BY TKO. BANTAMWEIGHT: Gaston Bolaños (6-3) vs Aaron Phillips (12-4) This is just an intensely bizarre fight on paper. Gaston Bolaños--who is nicknamed "The Dreamkiller" which I absolutely refuse to believe he did not give to himself while listening to a Sisters of Mercy album--spent 2017-2022 fighting for Bellator, where he was 6-3 and picked up a reputation for ending people with spinning poo poo. But he was also picked up as part of their short-lived Bellator Kickboxing promotion, and once that fell through Bellator began booking him so intermittently that he could only get one fight in three years, and said fight involved four different opponents before it finally happened, and when he left for the UFC, Bellator made no attempt to stop him. Aaron "The Dragon" Philips, which is just some real Pitbull-level nicknaming work, joined the UFC back in 2014, lost two fights, got released, went right back to the regionals, got re-signed as a last-minute injury replacement thanks to his 2019 victory in the inaugural event of Texas' annual COWBOYS VS CAJUNS event, was immediately wrestled and choked out by top prospect Jack Shore, and, uh, that's it. Philips went right back on the shelf and we haven't seen him in just shy of three years. To recap: A Bellator kickboxer with one fight in the last three years is making his UFC debut against a two-tenure UFC competitor we haven't seen since July of 2020. I'm honestly more curious about how and why this fight came together this way than I am by the fight itself, but Bolaños is a striker who is visibly uncomfortable on the ground and Philips knows how to wrestle. AARON PHILIPS BY SUBMISSION, I GUESS? WOMEN'S BANTAMWEIGHT: Joselyne Edwards (12-4) vs Lucie Pudilová (14-7) We're opening the card with the elemental home of all mixed martial arts: Striker vs grappler. Joselyne "La Pantera" Edwards is a volume striker who still hasn't actually stopped or really hurt anyone that badly after five UFC fights, but she does very effectively throw up flak fields of punches and leg kicks, and it makes it very difficult for anyone to get in on her to do damage at all, let alone really hurt her. She's only fallen victim to chain-wrestlers who are able to keep her on the canvas for fifteen consecutive minutes. That is, in theory, the plan for Lucie Pudilová, but in practice it's an awfully tough ask. Lucie is on her second UFC tenure, having been released in 2020 after four consecutive losses and brought back just last year, but she seems stuck in that unfortunate middlespace where she's too good for the regional scene but struggles against international competition. Her success is tied solely to her ability to effectively ground and grapple her opponents, but her method of getting there is the tried and true official takedown of women's MMA, the good ol' harai goshi headlock-and-throw-for-dear-life technique. Striking gets her in trouble, failed takedowns get her in trouble, and generally speaking, fighting people with decent records gets her in trouble. She is, almost certainly, in trouble. If she can wrap Edwards up on the fence she's got a chance at dragging her to the floor, but she's going to be eating punches and kicks the whole way there, and Edwards has had much more trouble with traditional single and double-leg wrestling attacks than clinch throws. JOSELYNE EDWARDS BY DECISION seems like a safe enough bet that Pudilová being the betting favorite mystifies me, which means I'm probably very, very wrong.
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Apr 12, 2023 21:29
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https://www.mmamania.com/2023/4/12/23680295/ufc-deiveson-figueiredo-shoots-down-rob-font-callout-commits-three-more-fights-flyweight-ufc Deiveson Figueiredo has changed his mind about leaving the flyweight division and wants to fight the winner of Moreno/Pantoja. I loving give up.
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Apr 13, 2023 00:48
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https://twitter.com/mma_kings/status/1646616954126336003 Well, there goes our streak of good main events. Wonder if they can get anyone to fight Tsarukyan on two weeks' notice.
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Apr 13, 2023 22:09
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Sam Alvey should keep fighting because it keeps him distracted from his real life pastime of plotting how to kidnap children so their actual family members can't get custody of them.
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Apr 14, 2023 22:33
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https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4029826&pagenumber=1#post531205653 It is Max Holloway fight day, get loving hype. Return to the GDT for prelims in half an hour.
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Apr 15, 2023 21:56
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The Fight Pass events are also a little more cut up and excise some interview bits, some music etc., so the Pride DVDs are a little better for actually reliving those events. I would have bid on it myself but I already bought them when they came out because I am a huge nerd/know what quality is.
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Apr 17, 2023 18:33
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Gramps posted:I would love to hear who everyone really likes watching these days so I can get back into it a bit. I had no idea who Volk was when I saw him win the title. That should tell you how much less I watch MMA since I had a kid 13 goddamn years ago. Not nearly as much time for trying to take the Pro Posting Championships title as I had back when I was in every martial arts thread on here every loving day. So yeah. Who is awesome, and what fights are coming up that I should clear my schedule for? The industry things that matter in single sentences:
The fighters who rule:
The next couple weekends of events are in the okay-to-middling category, UFC 288 on May 6th should be a lot of fun, and the UFC on ABC card on the 13th is basically loaded with network-television-friendly fights. CommonShore posted:Max is great to watch. Volkanovski too. Also this. If you want an essay to read on the toilet, there are previews of each event here typically on Wednesdays.
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Apr 18, 2023 03:15
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Also on the topic of this week's card being a little meh, we can now downgrade it from "meh" to "dire" because it just lost its co-main event: https://twitter.com/aaronbronsteter/status/1648152888647069696
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Apr 18, 2023 03:36
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CarlCX posted:Also on the topic of this week's card being a little meh, we can now downgrade it from "meh" to "dire" because it just lost its co-main event: so hey, about this https://twitter.com/ArmanUfc/status/1648164996365578241 So the UFC COULD have maintained that card's main event and had a great and interesting fight between two top ten fighters in Dariush and Tsarukyan, but they didn't, for reasons.
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Apr 18, 2023 19:12
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chaleski posted:Looks like we have another Askar Mozharov on our hands, although this guy's record is much worse lmao. He's fighting one of the guys from Korean Zombie's camp so let's see how that goes So I saw this report this morning and it 100% deserves the scorn, I'm not saying it doesn't and I hope this is as embarrassing for them as Mozharov was, but it also leaves me wondering where people are drawing the line on what does and doesn't constitute record padding, because there's a loving ton of it that just kind of gets ignored. Like, if you look at this weekend's UFC card alone,
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Apr 18, 2023 20:37
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On the topic of upcoming fight cards: CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 55: CHASING CARS  SATURDAY, APRIL 22ND FROM THE TREACHEROUS DARKNESS OF THE UFC APEX ARENA PRELIMS 1 PM PST/4 PM EST VIA ESPN+ | MAIN CARD 4 PM PST/7 PM EST VIA ESPN+ This is the seventh time Curtis Blaydes has main-evented a UFC card. You would think, after seven main events and a 5-2 overall main event record, he would not be stuck pulling empty arena matches, but the sport marches on. Mixed martial arts cards can be good, interesting, or both. When they're both, the sport is at its best. This card is, respectfully, not very interesting. It was already only barely holding on when it still had its co-main event, but now that it's lost it and has only one truly ranked fight on a 12-fight card, things have gotten a bit more dire. That does not mean the card will not be fun; there are some fights with a high entertainment potential. But boy, it'd be nice if things occasionally mattered.  it's sort of like looking at a mcdonalds value menu MAIN EVENT: MUSICAL CHAIRS, BUT THE VICTROLA IS BROKEN HEAVYWEIGHT: Sergei Pavlovich (17-1, #3) vs Curtis Blaydes (17-3 (1), #4)This is a big fight. This is an important fight. But we're going to not talk about this fight for a few minutes, because I need you to understand the yawning void of horror this fight represents, and to do that, we have to talk around it. Just over two years ago, Francis Ngannou won the UFC World Heavyweight Championship. It was the culmination of a truly incredible six-year run that had seen him score some of the most memorable knockouts in the company's history and put two #1 contenders and six world champions in the ground along the way. His rise to the throne was the stuff of legends, and with the belt around his waist, the UFC had their most marketable heavyweight champion since Brock Lesnar almost a decade and a half earlier. They, of course, immediately got lovely in contract negotiations with him, attempted to kneecap him with an interim championship just four months after his title victory, smeared him constantly, and when push came to shove, they made a public spectacle out of firing him, declaring him a coward, and immediately erasing his legacy, noting in big, bold letters in their marketing copy that the winner of their upcoming Jon Jones vs Ciryl Gane fight, despite consisting of a man who'd never fought at heavyweight and the last man Francis Ngannou defeated, would be the Undisputed World Heavyweight Champion. Jon Jones, in that way Jon Jones does, made the heavyweight division immediately look stupid, as world championship kickboxer and striking marvel Ciryl Gane was so visibly nervous and stressed that he tripped over his own feet, walked himself into the fence, threw a big sloppy overhand and was submitted almost instantaneously. THE UNDISPUTED CHAMPION, the UFC crowed, LONG MAY HE REIGN. STIPE MIOCIC HASN'T FOUGHT IN MORE THAN TWO YEARS, AND NGANNOU BEAT HIM, TOO, BUT HE'S GOING TO FIGHT JON NEXT AND AFTER JON BEATS HIM WE'LL FINALLY HAVE THE GREATEST HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPION OF ALL TIME. Jon Jones vs Stipe Miocic is currently scheduled for July. This week, Jon Jones started wondering aloud on his Twitter account about how awesome it would be to beat Stipe and immediately retire. This is heavyweight. I need you to understand that this is the true face of heavyweight mixed martial arts. The sport wants you to think it's Fedor Emelianenko and Stipe Miocic and well-honed athletes at the highest level of the sport carving legacies through sheer merit and will. But it's not, and it never has been. Heavyweight has always been a tidepool of madness and promotional malfeasance, more Zuluzinho than Nogueira, more Lesnar than Arlovski. The throne is not a prize, it is a curse, and we cannot keep ourselves from grasping for it because we are damned by our very nature. And our main event is both a truly important match that could easily determine the next champion of the world and the greatest testament to the shambles of this division. Sergei Pavlovich is the UFC's attempt to get a do-over on Francis Ngannou, only slightly smaller, less likely to ask for a better contract, and Russian. He's a 6'3" wrecking machine who's only lost once in his life, and that was a real tough UFC debut against Alistair Overeem, who even in his dotage remains one of the best heavyweights in the sport. Aside from that it's been nothing but victories, and all but three of those victories were violent, crushing knockouts, and every single one of those knockouts came in the first round. Pavlovich's six UFC fights put together last just about thirteen minutes, and four and a half of those came from the Overeem loss. Everyone else gets punched in the face and falls over dead. And he might have already been there waiting for the division's precipitous collapse had it not been for two and a half years of his career going down the drain. Between COVID-19, injuries and visa issues Pavlovich missed out on the entirety of 2020 and 2021, and with it, cracks at top contenders like Ciryl Gane and Tom Aspinall, and when Pavlovich finally resurfaced in 2022 he had to start from the bottom again. Which proved to be no problem whatsoever: At the start of the year he was a barely-ranked #15 who hadn't fought in almost 900 days, and by the end of the year he'd destroyed Shamil Abdurakhimov, Derrick Lewis and Tai Tuivasa and was the #3 heavyweight on the planet. But he wasn't in the title fight. Curtis "Razor" Blaydes was looked at as a future champion when he joined the UFC as a 5-0 prospect all the way back in 2016. His power, his athleticism and his background as a national JuCo wrestling champion had the kinds of fans who pride themselves on actually watching regional events tapping him as a prospect to watch--a 6'4" monster with 80" reach who could shoot power doubles like a middleweight and elbow anyone's face open given a couple minutes to try. The world was his oyster. Unfortunately, his debut was against this little-known guy named Francis Ngannou, and that became the archetype that has haunted his entire UFC tenure. Let us be clear: Curtis Blaydes is one of the best heavyweights on the entire planet. He's 12-3 in the UFC, and he's crushed multiple world champions. But his title hopes were nearly infinitesimal as long as Ngannou was around. Two of his three losses involved Ngannou stopping him, and the third, in permanent proof the heavyweight division has a sense of humor, was Ngannou-lite Derrick Lewis launching Blaydes into orbit with a single uppercut. This is, and has always been, the albatross around his neck. Big, powerful brawlers have been his kryptonite. Everyone else, however, has been prey. He makes talented kickboxers look like amateurs and he outgrapples beasts like Aleksei Oleinik and he punches out the Chris Daukauses of the world and in his last fight he even demonstrated advanced telekinesis by making Tom Aspinall's leg spontaneously explode after just fifteen seconds. By the turn of the year he was on a three-fight streak, indisputably in the top five, and unquestionably a top contender. But he wasn't in the title fight, either. Just under four weeks from now the UFC will be promoting UFC on ABC 4, their first card on network television in ten months. It's a big spectacle in front of a massive television audience and will be held at the Spectrum Arena in Charlotte, North Carolina, which seats up to twenty thousand people. The card's main event is a showdown between Jairzinho Rozenstruik, the #9-ranked heavyweight who's lost three of his last five fights, one of which was a lopsided decision to Curtis Blaydes, and Jailton Almeida, the #12-ranked Contender Series project who's only fought one ranked opponent at heavyweight, and it was Shamil Abdurakhimov, the same man Sergei Pavlovich crushed in one round. Almeida and Rozenstruik get one of the UFC's only network television berths for the entire year and a screaming audience of thousands. Sergei Pavlovich and Curtis Blaydes, who are arguably fighting to determine who the UFC's actual best heavyweight really is, are fighting on an internet card at the Apex arena in front of a couple hundred people. Do you see how this works? Do you grasp the true emptiness of this realm? These men are two of the exceedingly rare heavyweights who can be called Really Good Fighters and they are doing battle in front of nobody to justify a shot at a championship that is given by near-executive fiat that, this summer, is most likely going to get tossed in the garbage for the second time in less than a year, all while big marketing pushes are given to less experienced, less credible, and most importantly, less expensive fighters beneath them. Would you be surprised if Jailton Almeida and Tom Aspinall were fighting for the UFC title by the end of the year, and if so: Why? It's a fantastic fight between two fantastic fighters, and it pains me to see it because I have so little faith it will pay off for them. But we are all captive passengers on the UFC's boat and they're certainly not showing any signs that they are slowing, so all we can do is watch and hope. Which is what I'll be doing, because boy, I like Curtis Blaydes a lot more than I like Sergei Pavlovich, but this fight seems tailor-made for Blaydes to lose badly. Big brawlers have been the source of his repeated failures, and Pavlovich is, at worst, the second-most dangerous brawler Blaydes has faced in his career. We have, on the other hand, seen Pavlovich taken down--fairly handily--by Alistair Overeem, and the second he was on his back, he was cooked. Blaydes is a much, much better wrestler than anyone Sergei has had to deal with, and he's only had to deal with one single takedown attempt in the five years since the Overeem fight, and if Blaydes gets in on Pavlovich, he could take him for a ride pretty easily. But half the problem with Blaydes and brawlers is Blaydes himself. Francis Ngannou dropped Blaydes when he stepped forward unguarded, and Lewis uppercutted his jaw off when Blaydes threw himself headfirst at his hand hunting for a takedown. There's something about zero-sum, no-room-for-error fights that trips him up, and he finds ways to let opponents get the most obvious openings they could want. And that's a dangerous flaw to have against a guy like Pavlovich who can drop you with a single punch from any position. There are plenty of ways for Blaydes to win this fight. He's the far better wrestler and grappler, he's got heavier, more accurate kicks, and he's got a gas tank, which is the best possible weapon against a blitzer who hasn't seen a second round since 2017. If Blaydes can keep his distance, time his entries and counter the blitzes with takedowns, he could ragdoll Sergei and break his face at his leisure. But that requires Blaydes not making the single-second mistakes he's been making for years. And as much as I have wanted UFC Champion Curtis Blaydes, I cannot see those mistakes not coming back to haunt him one more time. SERGEI PAVLOVICH BY KO. CO-MAIN EVENT: WAIT, REALLY? MIDDLEWEIGHT: Brad Tavares (19-7) vs Bruno Silva (22-8)Funny story: I'm a day behind this week, and last night I finished up my writing for the main event at two in the morning, thought about continuing, and ultimately decided to leave the co-main event for today in the hopes of getting some sleep. Which turned out to be a wise call, because the co-main event doesn't exist anymore! This afternoon, news broke that the UFC was moving the matchup between Yadong Song and Ricky Simón from tonight's co-main event to the just plain main event for the ill-fated card on April 29th, which was supposed to see Arman Tsarukyan and Renato Moicano fight before Moicano got injured. Hell of a fight! Not really a great main event in terms of name value, but that fight becoming a five-rounder is worth it. But it does mean that we're a little depleted on name value as far as tonight goes, because, boy, Brad Tavares and Bruno Silva, huh? It's not that the fight itself is bad. This should be a loving barnburner. Brad Tavares is an underrated fighter in the history of the UFC, but he deserves his roses--he's just entering his fourteenth year in the UFC after losing out on the season of The Ultimate Fighter that gave us Court McGee and Kris McCray, he's gone the distance with Yoel Romero and Israel Adesanya, and just last year he lost a surprisingly close decision to potential title contender Dricus Du Plessis, nearly knocking him out repeatedly in the process. This is the Brad Tavares promise: He's always tougher than you think he is, he always hits harder than you think he does, and he's never not conditioned to fight you for three full rounds. But that's never gotten him into actual contention, and a big part of that is his dogged insistence on reactivity. Tavares is a deeply successful brawler, but he drags said brawling out in response to fighters attempting to aggressively pursue him. If you're a Du Plessis or an Akhmedov who's going to get in his face and swing haymakers, Brad's going to meet you in the pocket fist-first, and he may still lose, but you will get hurt in the process. It's the Adesanyas and Shahbazyans of the world who keep their own distance and rhythm and force Tavares to walk into fire that give him fits and get him crowned with headkicks. Fortunately for him, that is not Bruno Silva's game. "Blindado" joined the UFC in 2021 as the middleweight champion of Russia's M-1 and one of the most successful, punch-heavy knockout artists outside the UFC, and upon entering the big show he made good on the investment by immediately scoring three more knockouts in a row. His speed, his ferocity and his brutal power were exactly what the UFC's marketing department wanted out of a middleweight contender. Unfortunately, said department also had Alex Pereira to puff up, and good as Silva was, he was no match for Pereira. Which isn't anything to be ashamed of! There's nothing at all wrong with getting outstruck by a kickboxing world champion. But then Silva got dropped by Gerald Meerschaert. And that's a little worse. The striking differential between Alex Pereira, one of the sport's best kickboxers, and Gerald Meerschaert, a submission grappler who even on a good day punches like a tired submariner trying to force his fists through a school of jellyfish, is vast. And Bruno Silva fought Alex Pereira for three rounds and came out standing and unbroken, but he got hurt repeatedly by Gerald, and was ultimately dropped facefirst to the canvas after Meerschaert stood in front of him for multiple seconds with one fist cocked only to, shockingly, punch him with it. The sport is mystifying. For the entirety of my Extremely Serious Internet Writing Career I have always analyzed fights as though fighters will play to their greatest strengths and protect their weaknesses, and I very rarely take into account things like "What if Valentina Shevchenko decides to throw spinning kicks at nothing," or "What if Bruno Silva stares blankly at an angry man approaching him with a sign in one hand that reads 'I Am Going To Punch You In The Chin'?" It's easier to think of these things as occurring in a vacuum. It's easier to analyze who fighters could be rather than analyzing out, given their foibles, who they actually will be on a moment to moment basis. Which is why I'm almost always wrong. And I probably will be again! BRAD TAVARES BY DECISION. Bruno's got the punching power to put Tavares down, but the style that gets him in position is a high-risk, high-reward one, and Tavares is fast, tough, and more than capable of kicking Bruno's legs out from under him on the outside and hurting him on the inside. The more Bruno brawls, the better Brad will be. MAIN CARD: NON-APOLOGIES LIGHTWEIGHT: Bobby Green (29-14-1) vs Jared Gordon (19-6) For years, Bobby "King" Green was one of my favorite fighters on the planet. Truly good, active defense is unfathomably rare in mixed martial arts, and Green's capacity for slipping and parrying strikes was second to none. Unfortunately, judges hate defense, so he constantly lost decisions he very much should have won. Between 2018 and 2021 Green went 4-3 in the UFC, but it should have been a clean 7-0 sweep, and the lack of appreciation for defensive tactics will always be a stain on the sport. But since 2021, three things have changed: Bobby Green finally started getting outstruck thanks to the advent of fighters like Rafael Fiziev, Bobby Green finally started getting finished again thanks to the wrestling of Islam Makhachev and the power of Drew Dober, and Bobby Green started using his social media to advocate for Andrew Tate. So now he's on a losing streak, and he's constantly considering retirement, and, in by far the most devastating hit to his career possible, I don't like him anymore. Jared Gordon is currently more popular than he's ever been in his career, and it's because he got completely boned. After a back-and-forth run in the UFC that saw Gordon repeatedly winning enough fights to be relevant but not to be ranked, the company decided the best possible use for him was as a stepping stone for their inexplicable favorite promotional project, Paddy Pimblett. Gordon proceeded to outstrike Pimblett in two out of three rounds, stuff every one of his takedown attempts and repeatedly take Pimblett down and soundly outgrapple him instead. A truly stunning 96% of media outlets scored the exceedingly clear fight for Gordon--and in what would go down as easily the worst decision of 2022, Pimblett didn't just win, he won unanimously. It remains one of the most baffling decisions I have seen, and in a just world, it would have been appealed, reviewed, and thrown out like the garbage it was. But this is mixed martial arts. So Paddy Pimblett is going to get a nice, big, visible fight when he returns at the end of this year, and Jared Gordon is fighting one of the trickiest players in the game midway through a random television card. It's funny how this happens. Here's the good news for him, though: He's fighting the one and only person judges like even less than they like him. However: BOBBY GREEN BY DECISION. Jared's got hands, but he doesn't have Drew Dober hands. He relies on speed, counters and the threat posed by his wrestling, but Bobby Green's faster and slicker on the feet and he's real good at using the fence to get out of takedown attempts. Gordon's success here is going to depend on getting Green stuck fighting in the clinch, but he'll have to catch him first. WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT: Iasmin Lucindo (13-5) vs Brogan Walker-Sanchez (7-3) This is one of those fights that makes me think about the UFC's seemingly spiteful matchmaking and marketing more than the fight itself, but luckily both of these women have exactly one actual UFC fight, so we can cover them at the same time. We've seen Iasmin Lucindo in the UFC exactly once. She was picked out of the regional scene where she was dutifully clinch-tripping and ground-and-pounding fighters with no experience whatsoever, and the UFC put her in the great Iasmin vs Yazmin war of 2022, where she went to war with Yazmin Jauregui in a great back-and-forth battle that still wound up a clear decision for Yazmin. Brogan Walker had a pair of fights on the most recent season of The Ultimate Fighter that demonstrated her capacity for distance fighting mixed with occasional Muay Thai clinch attacks and a deep love of winning decisions, but her only actual UFC fight came in the tournament finale, where Juliana "Killer" Miller took her down, controlled her and ultimately pounded her out. Yazmin Jauregui, for her victory, was given a curtain-jerking prelim spot against an unknown Istela Nunes. Juliana Miller, for her victory, was given a curtain-jerking prelim spot against a Veronica Hardy who hadn't fought in three years. Iasmin and Brogan, the two women they defeated, are now fighting each other midway through the main card of a televised fight night with a big heavyweight main event. I don't really know what the UFC's intention for fighters is anymore. The single central rule of combat sports is beating someone gets you promoted over them. If the basic concept of winning is no longer sufficient, what are we even doing anymore? It's silly. But not as silly as my assumption that things matter. BROGAN WALKER-SANCHEZ BY DECISION. Iasmin's ground threats aren't going to be enough. WELTERWEIGHT: Jeremiah Wells (11-2-1) vs Matt Semelsberger (11-4)Oh, we've got potential to be in flavor country here. Jeremiah Wells had the misfortune of joining the UFC during the COVID era, which made actually getting fights very difficult, but while it took two and a half years to get his first three fights in the books, he's done a hell of a job, choking out kickboxing prospect Mike "Blood Diamond" Matheta, pounding out the thoroughly underrated Warlley Alves, and becoming the first man in 32 fights and sixteen years to knock Court McGee unconscious--and he did it with one goddamn punch. Carlos Condit, Santiago Ponzinibbio and Robert Whittaker couldn't do it, but Jeremiah Wells did. His awareness of his range and power is nightmarish. But Matt Semelsberger is right behind him. He's been much busier, as this'll be his eighth UFC fight since mid-2020, and he's already had a couple setbacks, having been outfought by Khaos Williams and Alex Morono--but even in those fights he spent the third round piecing up his tired and somewhat shellshocked opponents, and that's Semelsberger in a nutshell. He's an incredibly tough, aggressive fighter with a murderous right hand and a solid wrestling game to back up his striking, and he's coming off the highest-profile victory of his career, having absolutely demolished a surging Jake Matthews, dropping him once per round (and somehow still losing a round, because Judges) and utterly outclassing him. It's a big-punching power fight. Semelsberger is the more patient fighter and definitely has better wrestling in his back pocket, and the size advantage to use it, but Wells is the even harder hitter and he's got a much better kicking game, and leg kicks have been a source of continual consternation for Semi. But Wells is also used to his fights ending fairly quickly, and Semelsberger is a guy with so much gas in his tank that after losing two rounds he'll batter his opponents in the third. I'm leaning towards MATT SEMELSBERGER BY DECISION. Wells can put anyone in the ground if he cracks them, but Semelsberger's ability to suffocate him in the clinch and counter his charges should keep him from landing the home run. PRELIMS: GET YOUR YAHYAS LIGHTWEIGHT: Ricky Glenn (22-6-2) vs Christos Giagos (19-10) Ricky Glenn's career is a real weird one. His resume reads like a who's-who of the previous generation of 145-155 pound standouts--Myles Jury, Dennis Bermudez, Evan Dunham, Lance Palmer, Georgi Karakhanyan--but he's been a missing piece of the modern puzzle thanks to injuries, COVID, and bad timing. He was supposed to fight big current names like Drew Dober and Arnold Allen, but his fights kept getting scratched, and now it's mid-2023 and he's only actually made it out to the cage three times in the last half-decade, and they were one win, one loss and one draw, and the last one was a year and a half ago, and each time he demonstrates a great capacity for angry punchmanning and an unfortunate capacity for getting taken down while making angry faces. So he's fighting against the most classical of American styles: Angry wrestleboxing. Christos Giagos is currently fighting to keep his second UFC tenure alive--he was actually in the company all the way back in 2014 only to get released within a year, but after a solid regional run he made his way back and is only now, once again, trying to avert the dreaded three consecutive losses. Giagos has two fighting modes: Slinging 1-2s and cage-clinching single-legs. He will occasionally toss a flying knee in for good measure, but he's at his best when he can effectively pressure people by forcing them to alternate defending takedowns and boxing. He stands a pretty solid chance at it here, too. Wrestling pressure has been Glenn's continual undoing, Giagos is real solid at it, and Glenn's got years of rust to shake off. CHRISTOS GIAGOS BY DECISION. BANTAMWEIGHT: Rani Yahya (28-10-1) vs Montel Jackson (12-2) Christ almighty, Rani Yahya. If you're a veteran fan who's thinking "Wait, like the Rani Yahya who fought in the WEC back in 2010?" the answer is yes. If you're an old-school fan who's thinking "Wait, like the Rani Yahya who fought in K-1 HERO'S back in 2006?" the answer is still yes. If you're a primordial fan who's thinking "Wait, like the Rani Yahya who was winning jiu-jitsu championships back in the 90s?" the answer is still loving yes. Rani Yahya has been grappling people for so long that all but five of his thirty-eight opponents no longer compete in mixed martial arts and several are dead. His striking has never been better than perfunctory and he turned 38 in December, but by god, he's still a grappling threat to anyone in the sport, he's 13-4 in the UFC, and the last time he lost by stoppage was almost fourteen years ago. Montel "Quik" Jackson is a veteran himself at this point, having come into the UFC during the second season of the Contender Series back in 2018--and if you're wondering if Contender Series fighters becoming aging UFC veterans fills me with ennui, you're very astute--and his 6-2 record with the company really isn't anything to sneeze at, particularly given those two losses were to Ricky Simón, who's one of the ten best at the weight class, and Brett Johns, who was let go on a two-fight winning streak because the UFC didn't want to barter with Bellator. Jackson's another in the long line of wrestleboxers, he's got a great jab-to-pump-hook combo he gets almost everyone with at least once, and he's a quick, solid wrestler. Is he going to win this fight? Almost definitely. Montel Jackson is almost a decade younger, almost half a foot taller, has almost 8" of reach and has a sizable wrestling advantage. Am I going to not pick Rani Yahya? gently caress you. RANI YAHYA BY SUBMISSION. My winning percentage is always low, let it at least be low out of love. WOMEN'S FEATHERWEIGHT: Karol Rosa (16-4, #9 at Women's Bantamweight) vs Norma Dumont (8-2, #13 at Women's Bantamweight) It's time for another magical adventure through the least real weight class in the UFC. I want to be clear when I complain about things like this: None of my complaints are with the fighters. Karol Rosa is a bad motherfucker with a solid wrestling game and losses to some of the best female fighters on the planet; Norma Dumont is a bad motherfucker who will make a crowd furious with her for jabbing and jogging, which I adore, and she arguably should be on a five-fight winning streak. But women's featherweight still doesn't exist, and its nonexistence forces the UFC into really awkward positions--such as ranking Rosa as one of the ten best bantamweights on the planet, despite her best victory being Lina Länsberg, and ranking Dumont as one of the fifteen best bantamweights on the planet, despite Dumont having never actually weighed in at bantamweight in the UFC. Or booking Rosa, who's fought at 135 for her entire career, against the best active women's 145er in the company. Or that Dumont, said 145er, is coming off a victory against Danyelle Wolf, who made it into the UFC with a total record of 1-0. Or that Amanda Nunes hasn't defended the championship in more than two years, has no plans to, and has been talking about retiring in the near future. Will she defend the title again before she does? Will the title even exist if she retires with it? Will the division? All of it is a problem, and none of it really matters. NORMA DUMONT BY DECISION. Rosa's a strong wrestler but she's a strong wrestler against people who fight at flyweight and I'm not sure she'll get the grappling going against Dumont's jab. HEAVYWEIGHT: Mohammed Usman (8-2) vs Junior Tafa (4-0) It's a brother battle, baby. In one corner you have Mohammed Usman, the larger but younger brother of Kamaru, who won the last season of The Ultimate Fighter after barely scraping by two rookies and knocking out a heavyweight who was actually a light-heavyweight whom we've recently learned can barely beat a middleweight. His knees only kind of work, his offensive output is two connected strikes per minute, and he entered his mid-thirties earlier this month. In the other corner you have Junior Tafa, the larger but younger brother of Justin, who was supposed to make his UFC debut back in February, but the fight was announced, he lost his opponent, he got a replacement and then he pulled out with an injury all in the space of 72 hours. He's a moderately successful heavyweight kickboxer and he's undefeated in mixed martial arts, but his four-fight record consists of a guy who lost to a lightweight, a guy who lost to a welterweight, a chef, and a sumo wrestler. This is the future of the heavyweight division. Drink it in. On one hand, Mohammed's got the strength and wrestling to take him down, on the other, his shots come in slow motion and Junior has looked capable of defending wrestling, but on the third, robot hand, Junior's wrestling defense has been tested mainly by no one. I'm assuming Usman will shoot a very, very slow takedown, and it's going to work anyway, and that's probably going to be the fight. MOHAMMED USMAN BY TKO. FEATHERWEIGHT: Francis Marshall (7-0) vs William Gomis (11-2) On a week that the media is enjoying talking about the act of fighters padding their records by fighting subpar competition on their way up, it's worth noting that the 5-0 record Francis "The Fire" Marshall had when he was tapped for the Contender Series came against competition with a combined record of 38-38, and the man Marshall beat for his UFC contract, Connor Matthews, who was also 5-0, got there through fighters with a combined record of 19-115. (Why, yes, Jay Ellis was involved.) Records are fake, but skills aren't, and Marshall's are present if shaky. He likes to stand, he is oft known to bang, he has a tendency to bounce out of stance a lot but he's been gradually improving it, and he won his UFC debut last December by punching out Marcelo Rojo, which isn't nothing. William "Jaguar" Gomis hopped aboard the UFC as a local talent for their Parisian debut last September, where they were hoping he would engage in a fun striking match with fellow kickboxer Jarno Errens, and Gomis instead called upon Forbidden French Wrestling and proceeded to win so uneventfully that a judge actually pulled out the absurdly rare "Nobody Wins" 10-10 round. There's some hope here that the wrestling skills will cancel each other out and we'll get a punchathon, but realistically, Marshall is the better wrestler and Gomis is the better striker, and we know how I vote in these circumstances. FRANCIS MARSHALL BY DECISION. WOMEN'S FLYWEIGHT: Priscila Cachoeira (12-4) vs Karine Silva (15-4) Priscila Cachoeira's UFC career is deeply bizarre. She missed her UFC debut thanks to visa problems, wound up instead debuting against Valentina Shevchenko and eating the most one-sided beating in company history (seriously, the striking differential was 230 to 3), wound up taking three straight losses and got suspended after testing positive for diuretics, somehow didn't get fired and instead scored back to back knockout victories over Shana Dobson and Gina Mazany, two of the least successful fighters in UFC history, but between those fights she scratched a fight after botching a weight cut, and then in her return match she missed weight, got easily choked out by Gillian Robertson and repeatedly tried to break the hold by gouging Robertson's eyes, somehow STILL didn't get fired, won one of the worst decisions of the year against Ji Yeon Kim, and punched out a visibly ill Ariane Lipski. It's a loving rollercoaster, and I to this day have no idea how she's gotten away with half of the poo poo she has. "Killer" Karine Silva is comparatively new and boring: 2021 Contender Series winner, one of the top-ranked women's bantamweights in Brazil, veteran of the Parana-based KATANA FIGHT organization that brought us fighters like Johnny Walker and Anderson dos Santos, grappling stylist with some good submissions but an iffy gas tank. She guillotined Chinese champion Qihui Yan for her contract (after Yan basically dove headfirst into it) and scored a much more surprising D'Arce choke victory in her UFC debut against Poliana Botelho after dropping her with a shock right hand. I was skeptical of Karine in her debut, and I'm still skeptical, but boy, I believe in her a lot more than I do Cachoeira. KARINE SILVA BY SUBMISSION. BANTAMWEIGHT: Batgerel Danaa (12-4) vs Brady Hiestand (6-2) Batgerel Danaa was one of the many pickups the UFC made during its 2018-2019 raid of the Chinese mixed martial arts scene, and in hindsight, it may have been prophetic that he lost his debut. Danaa's hard-nosed, fists-forward style served him well for a couple years--he scored three consecutive first-round knockouts and made a name for himself as an underestimated bantamweight prospect--but the moment the UFC turned the dial up on his competition he fell apart, knocked out by Chris Gutierrez and picked apart by Kyung Ho Kang. He's facing down a third consecutive loss, and the UFC is attempting to capitalize by feeding him to 2021's The Ultimate Fighter runner-up, Brady "Bam-Bam" Hiestand. Hiestand is a truly incredible example of record padding: When he was picked out for TUF he was 5-1, but his one loss was to the 9-5 Chad Anheliger and his four wins were against opponents with a truly incredible combined record of 0-24, and half of those losses were just one dude. This isn't to say Hiestand is without merit as a fighter: He's got some real frenetic wrestling and will pursue takedowns relentlessly, even if he tires himself out doing it. Danaa isn't a bad wrestler, and Hiestand has a real tendency to walk into right hands, so I do not feel confident about this, but: BRADY HIESTAND BY DECISION. It's entirely plausible Hiestand gets popped coming in and this fight ends early, but I think Hiestand overwhelming him with wrestling is more likely.
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Apr 19, 2023 19:37
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AndyElusive posted:Man, CarlCX. Your breakdowns are the best and I worry there will come a day when this gay comedy forum shutters and we'll never see your card analysis ever again. I will never allow my terrible analysis to die, and as others said, though I barely link it because I hate making things easy, even if Jeffrey gets tired of all of this the Substack will go on, so you can always get 'em e-mailed. BrotherJayne posted:reading his card writeups while doing my tap, and trying to figure out which of his picks are just spite is a friday tradition Week by week, more and more, the answer is slowly becoming "all of them" Also, hope is dead: https://twitter.com/bellatorpr/status/1649448505407307778
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Apr 21, 2023 17:41
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it was in fact weight management issues for Borg, according to Bellator Also I almost felt bad being that mean to Priscila Cachoeira even though she kind of deserves it, and she has helped me feel better by missing weight by 5 pounds.
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Apr 21, 2023 18:53
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Intel&Sebastian posted:Holy poo poo TKZ fought for the title last year? Good to see you again and yeah this fight is super depressing. CommonShore posted:Anyone know where I can see something from the moicano finish So enjoy this instead! https://twitter.com/Conexion_MMA/status/1404720307156533248
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Apr 22, 2023 00:37
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Liz Carmouche rules, Jonathan Haggerty punched a man a lot, and I hope Kyoji Horiguchi got to eat a nice meal. Also as a forewarning, thanks to the various fight cancellations (we're down to 11!) the UFC now starts a half hour later at 1:30. In case you're afraid of missing Brady Hiestand.
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Apr 22, 2023 10:02
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blue footed boobie posted:That dude totally didn’t want to fight and Nate just grabbed him and choked him out. yeah the entire internet going "209 motherfucker 209" over footage of trained fighter Nate Diaz choking out and concrete-dropping a man who is very visibly making the universal sign of 'I do not want to fight you' sure is one of those reminders of why I never got into the Diaz fanbase
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Apr 22, 2023 17:17
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https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4030363&pagenumber=1#post531369525 Back to the GDT for Pavlovich/Blaydes. 30 minutes to prelims.
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Apr 22, 2023 21:03
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Curtis Blaydes will never fight for a championship, Ryan Garcia will never recover, and Danny Sabatello will get another shot at a Bellator belt before Raufeon Stots does.
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Apr 23, 2023 06:02
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Some part of this is also the context of the illegal blow. A spinning elbow isn't an attack that would be inherently illegal in almost any circumstance, but a lot of the things we see semi-regularly--groin kicks, grounded knees, kicks while an opponent is grounded--are at best done as misguided weapons and at worst done without regard for the rules period. In Green's case he was trying to do something legal but he did it by turning himself into a skull torpedo, so, y'know, no one to blame but himself. Unrelatedly, here's my personal annoyance hot take re: Patchy Mix, which has nothing to do with him doing anything wrong or that knockout not being badass as gently caress: If an interim championship is around long enough to get defended it's deeply silly and if an interim championship is around long enough to get defended multiple times and passed around to different people it's loving stupid.
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Apr 23, 2023 19:03
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Pretty much, yeah. Like I said last time, slap fighting is unfortunately tied to the UFC and when there's something relevant it's worth discussing, but barely-mobile retiree Tim Sylvia slapping Inaction Bronson for ten bucks in the stockroom of a Costco is just depressing. Also, while working on next month's thread/this week's writeup and generally looking forward, the next couple months of UFC are kind of loving dire. Your next nine main events, as of now, are:
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Apr 24, 2023 08:05
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On the topic of lamentable inevitability: https://twitter.com/MMAFightingSM/status/1650617690971840512
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Apr 24, 2023 23:10
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Also as long as we're going through all the depressing poo poo today: The coroner's report came out and "Stephan Bonnar died from heart problems" line was either a respectful cover or misunderstanding, he ODed on fentanyl.
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Apr 25, 2023 01:07
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 Hey, everybody. It's time for another MMA thread communal feedback session. Slap fighting! The way we talk about it is a recurring problem we gotta solve. There are two undeniable truths:
That means we might be stuck with slap fighting being connected to the sport for awhile. And that means we gotta figure out how to deal with it and the various feelings about how we handle it. I know there is a contingent that would like to make discussion of slap fighting verboten altogether. I get it, and it's an option, but I personally disagree with it because, as said, the UFC has made slap fighting a personal corporate mission and it's ignoring an unfortunately present part of the corporate reality of MMA to not talk about it. There's also a sub-argument about if we talk about it only when it's explicitly connected to the UFC, but I think that one's also difficult to expect out of people, because in a thread where we all acknowledge MMA is hard enough to keep track of that we don't always know who has or hasn't even fought in the UFC before I don't know how realistically we can expect people to know what is or isn't the UFC-branded slap fighting extravaganza. So, realistically, I think we have four options. 1: Just Post. It is what it is, if you don't like it don't talk about it, start a new conversation so we move on. This is obviously how I've been treating it until now, but it bums some folks out and makes them want to post less, which kind of takes the point out of this being a community and I don't want that. 2: No. No slap fighting stuff in PSP under any circumstances. The problem comes up too often and we don't want any part of it whatsoever. 3: Don't Show Me That poo poo. We accept slap discussion is unfortunately part of the MMA world, but no more video clips of poor idiots getting CTE slapped into them for the cost of a sandwich. Some people have gone out of their way to block that poo poo out and don't want to see it in the MMA thread, and that's not invalid. 4: Quarantine Zone. Slap stuff is banned from the thread altogether and we start a lifeboat thread that people can do whatever they want with. This solves the problem in this thread, but it has the con of, well, we have a thread devoted to slapfighting in the subforum now, and boy, that sucks. Obviously if people have other ideas those are welcome, but I think this encapsulates the things people have brought up here in the thread, and over on the discord, and in private to me over the last half year we've been graced by loving slap fighting becoming a part of the collective combat sports consciousness. I'm personally a proponent of keeping discussion but banning clips. I think it's still too unfortunately tied to the sport to ignore in our thread about the sport, but while I am maybe too grossly desensitized to care personally, enough people have talked about how much they hate opening the thread and seeing slap fighting when they try to otherwise ignore it that I think asking not to have it jump out at them when they come to see what's up with Kyoji Horiguchi is a reasonable measure. But I would rather we try to have a communal consensus on this rather than me or Brut just saying This Is What We're Doing. So: What does everyone want to do with Dana White's personal attempt to make all of our lives worse?
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Apr 25, 2023 21:03
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 16:25 |
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Fozzy The Bear posted:My main issue with White Power Slap, is that its not MMA, its not even kickboxing. Its the same with wrestling chat. I remember like a year or two after Rhonda left for wrestling, someone posted a news article or video of her in WWF, and there was major uproar in the thread about how she left mma and that wrestling shouldn't be in this thread. Other UFC side projects don't mean its MMA. Didn't Dana try to start a surfing show? That shouldn't be posted here either. Mekchu posted:slapfighting isn't mma, and the only link to it is A) the UFC's idiotic president trying to make it a thing and B) some despearte as gently caress ex fighters are doing it because they can't get cleared by a commissions for an actual sport I get the rationale here, but I don't think the situations are analogous. The UFC basically didn't advertise Ultimate Surfer, it wasn't branded for them, it wasn't boosted by the company, it didn't share any resources with the company itself, and it wasn't even remotely adjacent to combat sports. Arguably BECAUSE of this failure, the UFC tied itself into Power Slap so hard that they marketed it constantly through the UFC itself. UFC talent presents and commentates it, the UFC went out of its way trying to get ex-UFC fighters to compete on it, they got a TV deal to promote it the exact way they did TUF back in the day. The UFC kicked itself out of its own bespoke arena so Power Slap could use it. Its name is literally Dana White's Power Slap. If the argument is "the only link Power Slap has to the UFC is the UFC's president and marketing and people and branding being all over it," that's not really a great argument for it not being related to the UFC, and being related to the UFC is, unfortunately, being related to MMA. It is 100% fine to not care about slap fighting or want to know what's going on with Power Slap. I don't! But I do care about the industry, and objectively, slap fighting is a matter of consequence in the industry. This thread has always delved into topics like bullshit matchmaking, slanted marketing, corporate favoritism, fighter pay, fighter safety and fighter bargaining rights, long before I was the one making them, and Power Slap touches all of those problems. Its existence at all, in the way they have chosen for it to exist, is an active drain on the time and resources the UFC could have spent on its own fighters and cards, and its attempts to use UFC's personalities, resources and credibility to springboard it into the mainstream were odious not just because slap fighting is dogshit, but because if it had succeeded, it would have been very, very bad for the sport in terms of what the UFC learned it could get away with to sell people talent, and just how cheaply and easily supplemental product could be made. And we know this is how they looked at it, because MMA fighters who were approached to participate in Power Slap were offered a fraction of what they made fighting for the UFC. Like, it's one thing to say "power slap isn't MMA," but it's another to say "power slap isn't relevant to the MMA industry." That's just objectively not true. But that's also why, when I did post poo poo about Power Slap, it was about the marketing, the ratings, the failures: That's the stuff that's relevant to MMA. I didn't loving pay attention to the actual fighting. I know nothing about it, who was on it or who won, because it's loving slap fighting and who could possibly care. If anyone actually had wanted to talk about the ins and outs of slap fighting and what happened on this week's exciting episode of Hand Men, I would've asked them to make a thread to discuss it in detail with anyone who wanted to as opposed to putting it here. All of that being said: Fozzy The Bear posted:Now Ronda left many years ago, so maybe the mood of our posters have changed, and this is more of a general chat thread, and not a MMA thread. IDK. I think this is a bigger thing than it's getting credit for in the greater conversation. This is also just kind of how things have gone, and it's why I care about us finding some kind of consensus on this people are at least nominally okay with. When we had to worry about wrestleposting and Brock/Ronda crossovers and etc., we also had hundreds of posters making hundreds of posts a day over hundreds of pages a month across multiple threads. There was enough foot traffic that derails were an actual problem for anyone trying to actually keep track of conversation, let alone news. We have the opposite problem now. When someone posts slap fighting, it's going to become the conversation because that's just the volume of posting we have. At this point we've compressed the entirety of combat sports other than boxing and sumo into a single thread, there are a couple dozen of us and we get twentyish pages on a good month. We barely even need GDTs most weeks, we just do it because it's mildly more organized, and most of the B-league event posts are like three people. And that's a part of the algebra in situations like this. I, personally, think we have so little traffic in general that I'm in favor of posting whatever the gently caress in combat sports or its adjacent news that seems germane to the thread, whether it's gross industry news, Marching Powder's old thread paleontology or random MMA shitposting, because things have compressed so much that anything interesting enough to talk about is probably worth talking about, and that's why rather than relitigating slapfighting when it comes up I would rather people just post stuff they'd rather be talking about. But the community BEING this small these days also means it's more important than it used to be that it's a community we actually want to loving be in. If the mere mention of Power Slap's existence is enough to disincline people from the thread, that's a thing we should try to figure out.
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Apr 26, 2023 03:50
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