- CarlCX
- Dec 14, 2003
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It is Max Holloway fight time, god drat it.
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:
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.
Of course, that also means we've never seen him lose. There's no tape of Arnold Allen's crippling weaknesses or losing performances. Does that mean he's a complete enough fighter to beat Calvin Kattar, a man we've seen get trounced multiple times?
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.
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.
It's not even remotely subtle, and I'm less angry these days about the fact that they do it than I am that they don't even try to cover it up.
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.
Prelims in half an hour. Why this starts at half hours this week, I do not know.
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Apr 15, 2023 01:10
pfl is real weird with this one 
