- CarlCX
- Dec 14, 2003
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Yeah, this one's a little light. But what else could anyone possibly do on a nice, warm Saturday afternoon?
CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 56: WE'RE DOING WHAT WE CAN, OKAY
SATURDAY, APRIL 29 FROM THE BLOOD-DRENCHED TRENCHES OF THE UFC APEX ARENA
PRELIMS 1:30 PM PST/4:30 PM EST VIA ESPN+ | MAIN CARD 4 PM PST/7 PM EST VIA ESPN+
If you don't recognize most of the people on this card: That's okay. After going big for most of the last couple months--three title eliminators, three championship fights, Jon goddamn Jones--the UFC is ready to crawl back into its treestump and take a bit of a breather.
With the exception of next week's bantamweight title bout between Aljamain Sterling and Henry Cejudo (and maybe June's Josh Emmett vs Ilia Topuria, provided you don't see it as a foregone conclusion), the next nine straight UFC cards are scraping pretty hard for main events. Your scheduled main events over the next 69 days include the public marketing execution of Jairzinho Rozenstruik vs Jailton Almeida, the inexplicable treading of water that is Raquel Pennington vs Irene Aldana 2, the deeply peripheral middleweight woes of Jack Hermansson vs Brendan Allen, the half-rear end in a top hat half-unranked Sean Strickland vs Abusupiyan Magomedov, and the what-the-hell-are-we-even-doing Amanda Nunes vs Julianna Peña 3.
And it all starts this week with a deeply cursed card that wasn't even very good before its main event collapsed, and then three of its fights got pulled the week of the card, and then another fight got changed literally seconds before I was going to post this, and at some point we just all accepted that this is how things work, now.
when i started writing this i wrote 'by the time this event happens 30% of these fights will have changed again' and we have in fact had four more yoinks
MAIN EVENT: PURPOSE IN SEARCH OF MEANING
 BANTAMWEIGHT: Yadong Song (19-7-1 (1), #8) vs Ricky Simón (20-3, #10)
The entire bantamweight division is hanging on by its fingertips. Despite the 135-pound class providing some of the UFC's best fights (and fighters) ever since its inception back in 2010, the top of the ranks have been stuck in a sort of unending purgatory for most of that time.
Dominick Cruz was the best in the world, but he was completely incapable of staying healthy and active. Renan Barão was a dominant interim champion for years, but barely 100 days after the UFC promoted him to undisputed champion he was crushed by the new wave. TJ Dillashaw was amazing, but it took three failed attempts before he finally solidified his reign by beating Barão again, and a few months later, Dominick Cruz came back from retirement and took the belt away immediately--and then Cruz lost the belt in under a year to Cody Garbrandt, a machine made specifically to defeat him--and then Garbrandt was destroyed by Dillashaw, who once again spent an entire reign chasing a rematch only to drop to flyweight for a superfight, get shitcanned in thirty seconds, and lose his belt over a drug test. Henry Cejudo, the 125-pounder who beat him, stepped up and took the 135-pound title--only to retire and vacate it within a year.
An entire generation of bantamweight fighters had grown in the background over the course of all of this madness, and with the juggling quadrumvirate of Cruz, Garbrandt, Dillashaw and Cejudo out of the picture, that generation could finally step up. Petr Yan, an absurdly dominant fighter and a bantamweight wrecking machine, had punched his way up the ranks and secured the title some had been expecting him to win for years. A young, vital fighter held the belt, and he had a number of young, vital challengers, and the division could finally shake off its troubles and reach the heights it had always promised.
And then, in his first defense, Yan became the first fighter to ever lose their championship by disqualification.
The fanbase hated new champion Aljamain Sterling, and it did not help when he spent the year recovering from injuries--nor did it help when he beat Yan in the rematch by split decision. But at last, at least, it was over, and Sterling could defend against those other great fighters in his generation!
The UFC decided the #1 contender was TJ Dillashaw again. He came into the fight without publicly disclosing an injury and his shoulder came out of its socket within a minute. He retired shortly afterward.
Well, gently caress. That sucked. But it's over! Except it's not. Despite having between one and three credible #1 contenders, the UFC decided Aljamain will defend his title against Henry Cejudo, who is coming out of retirement and rolling right into a title fight.
And if Cejudo wins, he's vowed to immediately ignore the title to move up to 145 pounds and challenge Alexander Volkanovski.
And if Aljamain wins, he says he is, at most, defending the title one more time before moving up to 145 pounds so his friend Merab Dvalishvili can take over the division.
It's an incredible division. It has incredible talent. But the only stability it has ever known has come from its rock-solid midcard, and that midcard doesn't typically get to step into the spotlight. It wasn't supposed to here, either--tonight's main event was supposed to be a lightweight tilt between Arman Tsarukyan and Renato Moicano, but Moicano busted a wheel and the UFC didn't like any of his potential replacements.
So last week's co-main event is this week's main event. It's a fringe top ten fight, and the only ranked fight on this entire card. And it's fortunate that it's getting five rounds now instead of three, because it has the potential to loving rule.
Yadong Song is one of the extremely rare fighters who's had more success in the UFC than he did on the regional circuit. Song was one of the company's first pickups when they raided China's Kunlun Fight and WLF WARS federations for talent they could use to expand into the Chinese market, and he was, by the region's standards, a little bit of a journeyman. His 11-5 was by no means a bad record, but six of those victories were against rookies and his encounters with internationally notable talents tended to end with him on the losing side. When he made his UFC debut in 2017, no one really expected much from him.
But boy, he sure has exceeded those non-expectations. He's 8-2-1 in the UFC--there's a slightly shaky draw against Cody Stamann right in the middle--but in that time he's distinguished himself as one of the most deceptively dangerous punchers in the bantamweight division, with power enough in his hands to knock out fighters like Felipe Arantes and Julio Arce who pointedly do not get knocked out by people. Marlon Vera, one of the best bantamweights on the planet, is 10-3 over his last five years in the UFC, and the only three men who beat him are Cory Sandhagen, at worst the third best bantamweight in the company, José Aldo, one of the best fighters in history at any weight class, and Yadong Song.
But that hasn't been quite enough to get him to the top. Song's run into trouble three times in his tenure: Once against Cody Stamann, who wrestled him effectively enough that he probably should have gotten the win, once against Kyler Phillips, who followed Stamann's blueprint and DID get the win, and once against Cory Sandhagen, who decided that, being Cory goddamn Sandhagen, he was just going to walk through fire and trade with him, and after four hard-fought rounds the fight was stopped because Song's left eyebrow had been cleanly bisected and his orbital socket was broken.
Song, to be clear, wanted to keep fighting, and was very angry the decision was taken away from him. He would later admit he could barely see, but that did not deter his feeling that he could have punched Sandhagen some more.
Which is the precise kind of crazy bullshit fighter mentality that Ricky Simón excels at. Ricky's come a long way in a fairly short amount of time--he only turned pro in 2014, he was fighting for regional championships two years later, and he was on the first season of the Contender Series after just three, where the UFC wisely decided to sign "Slow" Mike Rodriguez instead of him. But he was a Legacy Fighting Alliance champion in short order, and every regional title is a UFC contract waiting to happen. And--in one of the most bizarre finishes the sport has seen--his UFC debut saw him hand current #1 contender Merab Dvalishvili his one and only loss in the company, after Dvalishvili was retroactively ruled to have been unconscious from a Ricky Simón guillotine choke at the end of their fight.
It's still one of the strangest endings to a fight I've ever seen, and I continue to respectfully but thoroughly disagree with the call, but even if you interpret it as a victory for Merab, it made clear the two central tenets of the Ricky Simón thesis statement: Even after being controlled for 14:30 of a 15:00 fight he will never stop trying to finish you, and given a single moment's opening, even if you're the best fighter in the world, he can and will find a way to do it. It was great! It started a three-fight UFC winning streak and made Ricky one of the most promising young prospects in the sport.
Right up until 2019, when a 40 year-old Urijah Faber rolled off the couch after three years of retirement, straightened the No Shirt, No Shoes, No Problem sign hanging above his door, and knocked Ricky Simón dead in forty-five seconds.
It's rough. It's rough to try to get your momentum back after something like that happens. Imagine Kamaru Usman's rise to the title being cut off abruptly by the year 2006's top welterweight Jon Fitch coming out of retirement and knocking him out--and if that seems temporally iffy to you, please realize that Urijah Faber's mixed martial arts debut was barely a year after Fitch's. A loss to Rob Font in his next fight kept Simón down, but after that particularly difficult year, he got his brawl-and-choke style back together and put together a five-fight winning streak that's carried him since 2020 and has included exorcising his WEC-induced demons by knocking out Raphael Assunção and beating back a prospect looking to take his spot by choking out the undefeated Jack Shore.
And now he wants to finally make good on his promise as a prospect. It took years to get it back, but he's in the top ten and he wants to get into contention--especially since the championship, one way or another, is about to be a wide-open target again. Ricky wants to finally break into contendership orbit; Song wants to get his momentum back so he can get another shot at the top.
The two of them combined make for a stylistically fascinating fight. Yadong Song can knock anyone in the division out if he lands cleanly--Cory Sandhagen has been in the cage with Marlon Moraes, TJ Dillashaw and Petr Yan without getting too loopy and Song still had him wobbled a couple times--but he can get too brawly for his own good, and his aggression is a problem against people with strong wrestling games. Ricky Simón fights with a level of pace and pressure very few people on the planet can handle, he averages four takedowns a fight and he's more than happy to take double-digit attempts to get there, but his own face-forward attitude gets him cracked, and with a puncher like Song, it's hard not to relive Faber dropping Ricky with one shot.
I also cannot help wondering how much of a difference 25 minutes makes over 15. Ricky is famously well-conditioned, he can and will go for twenty-five minutes without losing his pace, but lasting against wrestlers has always been difficult for Song, and managing his energy for three rounds of powerful counterpunching seems like a much better deal than fighting off five rounds of takedowns.
At the end of the day, I'm going with my gut. RICKY SIMÓN BY DECISION. Song could spark him at any moment, but Ricky's pressure and Song's historic trouble with persistent wrestling threats make this one seem most likely to be a painful ground-and-pound clinic.
CO-MAIN EVENT: LOAD THE SPACESHIP WITH THE ROCKET FUEL
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Caio Borralho (13-1 (1)) vs Michał Oleksiejczuk (18-5 (1))
If there's one massive advantage to the Contender Series, it's making it preemptively clear who the UFC sees as its marketing darlings. But sometimes those choices are sort of befuddling, and with all respect to a grappler I enjoy watching quite a bit, Caio Borralho is one of the more baffling folks the UFC has put on their rocketship.
In a company that de-emphasizes grappling and decisions more and more every week, Caio "The Natural" Borralho is a lifelong jiu-jitsu practitioner whose record has twice as many decisions as submissions, and even they appeared to have doubts as it actually took him two stints on the Philosophically Uncomfortable Gladiator Show for them to give Caio his contract--but once they did, he immediately became one of the most-featured fighters of the UFC's 2022. This fight is only Caio's fourth in the UFC, but it is already his third co-main event, despite his turning in the kind of grapple-fest decisions the UFC typically frowns on.
What's even more interesting, though, is that on paper, his trajectory of opponents has actually gotten steadily gentler. He made his debut against undefeated and fellow debuting Contender Series winner Gadzhi Omargadzhiev--who Caio arguably should've lost to by disqualification after pulling a Petr Yan and illegally kneeing his face off--and then it was noted non-grappler Armen Petrosyan, who Caio easily outwrestled but landed only twelve significant strikes and zero submission attempts on, and then it was Makhmud Muradov, who was coming off a submission loss to Gerald goddamn Meerschaert yet who Borralho still couldn't put away.
On one hand: Michał Oleksiejczuk is definitionally a better on-paper challenge than Muradov, as he's coming off two straight wins and both were violent first-round knockouts. On the other: Those victories were over Cody Brundage, who is just narrowly not 1-3 in the UFC, and the Grinning Beast At The End Of All Things, Sam Alvey, owner of the longest winless streak in UFC history. Before that he was barely scraping by Modestas Bukauskas, and getting ragdolled by Jimmy Crute, and, somehow, getting outgrappled by Dustin Jacoby.
And by god, Michał deserves better. His was the fist that ended the inexplicable reign of Smilin' Sam. We should not be diminishing the man, we should be building shrines to him on the borders of civilization as a sign to everything past our comprehension of existence that despite our constant need to tear apart the most marginalized in our society, we can learn from our mistakes, and we can correct them.
But when the UFC has a guy they keep pushing who outgrapples everyone he fights, and they say "What if we have him fight the guy who got lengthily outclinched and outwrestled by the championship kickboxer who shoots one takedown a year," the intended result is not subtle, nor is the likelihood that they'll get what they want.
CAIO BORRALHO BY DECISION. Keep hoping for that money train to come in, I guess.
MAIN CARD: DECIDING ONCE AND FOR ALL IF JIU-JITSU IS REAL
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Cody Brundage (8-3) vs Rodolfo Vieira (8-2)
Speak of the devil! Cody Brundage got knocked silly on the Contender Series back in 2020 by living dianabol golem William Knight, but one last-minute injury-replacement contract later and he was UFC-bound anyway. And it...has only sort of worked out for him. He got outwrestled by Nick Maximov and he was more or less dead against Dalcha Lungiambula before Dalcha inexplicably stopped knocking him out to throw himself headfirst into a guillotine choke, but there was nothing questionable about Brundage knocking Tresean Gore out cold last summer with a gorgeous right hand. Unfortunately, he was just as definitively punched cold by the aforementioned Michał Oleksiejczuk in December. So now Brundage is 2-2 in the UFC and visibly troubled by power strikers and super-wrestlers.
Which is why it's extra-funny that he's fighting Rodolfo Vieira, who is none of those things. Vieira came into the UFC with an enormous amount of hype--and it was widely deserved, as Vieira was one of the best heavyweight Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioners in the world, a four-time international champion and one-time ADCC champion among the laundry list of brilliant grappling accomplishments in his career. And then he made it to the UFC, and after one fight he was getting exhaustedly choked out by an embattled middleweight named Fluffy. Rodolfo, for all his grappling expertise, hit the wall so many grapplers have before him. When he's fighting someone he can outwrestle--a Dustin Stoltzfus or a Saparbeg Safarov--he's confident and strong and capable. When he's fighting an Anthony Hernandez or a Chris Curtis, he looks lost and tired and winds up going a truly incredible 0 for 20 on takedown attempts.
Which is where this one gets interesting. Brundage has been hitting people harder for considerably longer, but the lynchpin of his boxing is his wrestling and if he shoots on Vieira he's losing the fight within seconds. But it's also real hard to see Vieira being able to manhandle Brundage to the ground. Which means this is almost certainly going to be a tentative boxing match, and by god, I favor CODY BRUNDAGE BY DECISION.
FEATHERWEIGHT: Julian Erosa (28-10) vs Fernando Padilla (14-4)
Poor Julian "Juicy J" Erosa just cannot stay on track. He came into the UFC on a three-fight win streak behind fantastic headkick knockouts only to drop three in a row and get fired immediately, he was back in the company as a last-minute injury replacement just a few months later and turned that into two brutal executions of well-regarded prospects Sean Woodson and Nate Landwehr, and then he immediately lost all of that momentum after Seung Woo Choi flatlined him in a minute. But he got it back! He fought and scraped and pulled out the three best wins of his career, including a genuinely impressive victory over the absurdly tough Hakeem Dawodu! And then he got loving flatlined in one round again, this time by Alex "Bruce Leeroy" Caceres, who had somehow not knocked anyone out before that point after twelve years in the UFC.
And that exceedingly weird career isn't getting any more normal. Fernando Padilla actually signed with the UFC back in early 2021, but as a Mexican fighter, visa issues have kept him on the shelf for almost two full years. Which is particularly bad, because his momentum as a regional featherweight prospect hit the skids in 2019 when COVID happened--and he wound up on the shelf for almost two MORE full years. Now it's 2023, and Padilla's only had two fights in the last four years, and the nearest one was 23 1/2 months ago. So I can tell you Fernando Padilla was a somewhat celebrated regional prospect with a solid all-around game--but that was goddamn years ago.
And Julian Erosa is a really hard fighter to come back against. Erosa's overaggression gets him in trouble on a regular basis, but he stays that overaggressive because he lands wild poo poo and wraps his ankles around skulls on a regular basis. Padilla's going to have to work out his ring rust very quickly, or he's going to be in trouble. JULIAN EROSA BY DECISION.
HEAVYWEIGHT: Waldo Cortes-Acosta (9-0) vs Marcos Rogério de Lima (20-8-1)
SALSA. BOY. Waldo Cortes-Acosta, aside from having simultaneously the best and worst nickname in the sport, is the UFC's new heavyweight striking phenom! He was A BOXER, they say! Sure, he was 6-4 and almost everyone he beat was either a rookie or a 6-16 jobber, but he BOXED! Sure, he couldn't knock out Jared Vanderaa and he lost a round to Chase god damned Sherman, but he's LARGE and he PUNCHES PEOPLE! Don't you understand the money in this man? No one at heavyweight can punch people! gently caress Francis Ngannou, we've got SALSA BOY.
Marcos Rogério de Lima properly observes the traditions of heavyweight by alternating between looking good and terrible. He got choked out by a Stefan Struve who was on the precipice of retirement, but he hosed up Adam Wieczorek. He lost to a forearm choke in the 21st century, somehow, but he punched the poo poo out of Ben Rothwell in thirty seconds. He couldn't deal with the clinch grappling of Blagoy Ivanov, but last October he dropped Andrei Arlovski and choked him out three times faster than Tom Aspinall did.
But Salsa Boy can punch people. He can punch people. And it's heavyweight, so he more than has the power to punch out Marcos. But there are certain lines I will not cross in this sport, and by god, if you can hit Chase Sherman 149 times and not actually knock him down, let alone out, I refuse to believe in you. MARCOS ROGÉRIO DE LIMA BY SUBMISSION.
WELTERWEIGHT: Josh Quinlan (6-0 (1)) vs Trey Waters (7-1)
Remember that whole thing about the Contender Series laying bare promotional favorites? Josh "Bushido" Quinlan technically didn't win his Contender Series debut, because his 47-second knockout was overturned after he failed a drug test for steroids, but the UFC signed him anyway and booked him a sacrificial opponent, Jason Witt, who gets knocked out a bunch--and then the fight had to be pushed back, because Josh Quinlan failed another drug test for steroids. But he won by knockout, unsurprisingly, and despite being 2 for 2 on failed piss tests, we're right back here again. Quinlan was supposed to fight a step up in competition in Ange Loosa, but thanks to a Loosa injury he's instead fighting UFC newcomer and Contender Series loser Trey "The Truth" Waters, who is a loving 6'5" welterweight, which feels like it should be illegal. Waters is a tough dude with a good record on paper, but like so many, almost all of his victories came against rookies or jobbers--his professional debut was against the now 1-15 Ramon Butts--and in his first shot at the bigtime, he was outclassed and submitted by Gabriel Bonfim.
Is doing a bunch of steroids part of the code of bushido? Is cutting to 170 pounds when you're taller than all but five of the UFC's heavyweights truthful? Is half a foot of reach going to be enough to make a difference in the striking? Probably not, because boy, Trey Waters really likes to leave his head straight up and open without guarding at all. JOSH QUINLAN BY TKO, but you can flip a coin as to if it becomes a No Contest in the next 30 days.
PRELIMS: HAILEY COWAN'S ETERNAL WAIT
HEAVYWEIGHT: Martin Buday (11-1) vs Jake Collier (13-8)
It's heavyweight time again already, and there's a good chance it's time to say a heavyweight farewell. But not to Martin Buday. The Slovakian Randy Couture dirty-boxing throwback is riding a two-fight win streak in the UFC--sort of. In his debut last April he beat Chris Barnett, but it was by a technical decision after Buday hit him with an illegal elbow straight to the brainstem and Barnett couldn't continue, which somehow didn't even warrant a point deduction. Buday sought to redeem himself four months later against Łukasz Brzeski, and his lumbering, brawling style won--but it was by a split decision almost the entire media gave to Brzeski, who outstruck him 2:1. Jake Collier is the man on the chopping block tonight, unfortunately. After spending eight years recording alternating wins and losses in the UFC, he finally, in 2022, took his first back-to-back losses in the company in a weird mirrored inverse of Buday's schedule--first Collier lost a split decision to Andrei Arlovski that 100% of media scores thought Collier should have taken, and then he got knocked out by Buday's victim Chris Barnett.
So it's not fair, but at the end of the day, Collier is one for his last four and facing the possibility of three straight losses. That is decidedly not where you want to be as a heavyweight. Unfortunately: MARTIN BUDAY BY DECISION. Collier hasn't knocked anyone out in seven years, and that was back when he was a 185-pound middleweight, and he's not going to have a good time trying to wrestle Buday. He gets marched down and punched to a judges' call, I'm afraid.
FLYWEIGHT: Cody Durden (14-4-1) vs Charles Johnson (13-4)
It's time for everyone's favorite fascism-enabling flyweight, Cody Durden! When last we saw Durden he had rebounded from getting wadded up and thrown in a dumpster by Muhammad Mokaev and was on a two-fight winning streak, except those wins came against UFC washout JP Buys and the one-and-done regional injury replacement Carlos Mota. Durden's wrestling is still sharp and his striking is still dangerous, but boy, it's easier to be dangerous when your opponents are used to fighting guys who are 5-8. Charles "InnerG" Johnson hopped into the UFC to fight Mokaev last July, but he's also wound up a 2-2 fighter with the company--and one of those is a split decision to Zhalgas Zhumagulov that really shouldn't have gone his way. Johnson's biggest strength is an adaptable, all-around gameplan with stiff boxing and great defense--he still has yet to be stopped--but that adaptability also tends to leave him reacting to his opponents rather than trying to dictate fights.
But that should still be just fine, here. His boxing is crisper than Durden's, he's bigger and hits faster and harder than Durden, and he's dealt with heavier top games than Durden's. CHARLES JOHNSON BY DECISION.
WOMEN'S BANTAMWEIGHT: Stephanie Egger (8-3) vs Irina Alekseeva (4-1)
I don't think the UFC has any goddamn idea what to do with Stephanie Egger. They brought her in as a serious competitor on the strength of her grappling expertise but she lost to top-fifteen-ranked Tracy Cortez, so they shifted to trying to feed her to fighters they liked, but she easily submitted Shanna Young and Jessica-Rose Clark, so they put her back into serious contention only for her to lose to Mayra Bueno Silva in a submission no one caught on video that only went down on the record books because a judge swears he saw it, so they sent her up to featherweight and tried to job her out to the marketable fighters again only for Egger to just beat the poo poo out of and eventually choke out newcomer Ailin Perez. And now she's fighting...Irina "Russian Ronda" Alekseeva, a national champion in judo and sambo with only five fights to her name, and they were across three different weight classes, and she's only beaten one fighter with a winning record and that record is now 7-5 and almost all of HER wins were over jobbers (except for punching the poo poo out of the current 115-pound champion of Invicta!), and, just, I don't know, man.
I don't know. How can I know what the UFC doesn't know? Alekseeva's only got one fight in the last year and a half, and it was at a different weight class, and she missed weight for it, and her striking looked kind of terrible, and she had a ton of trouble controlling someone she visibly dwarfed, and that fighter she struggled with went on to get knocked the gently caress out by a 5'1" strawweight. Egger's a grappler, of course, so she's going to be contending with Alekseeva's biggest strengths, but I just don't see Russian Ronda doing much better than Ronda Ronda currently is. STEPHANIE EGGER BY DECISION.
CATCHWEIGHT, 140 LBS: Journey Newson (10-4) vs Marcus McGhee (6-1)
Fun fact: I was just about to post this whole goddamn writeup when word suddenly broke that this match had been altered, and because it's me, and I am silly, I could not live with myself if I gave you outdated information. THE WORLD NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT MARCUS MCGHEE.
Journey Newson is having a very bad time, and this fight has abruptly become his lucky break. He joined the UFC as an injury replacement back in 2019, he immediately lost, his comeback victory wound up being banished to No Contestland because he dared to smoke marijuana, and his awkward style has gotten him three extremely one-sided losses. He'd be out of the company already were it not for a single mid-May victory over Fernie Garcia, which he barely scraped out, and he was supposed to fight Brian Kelleher here, who, realistically, was going to make him look very silly. But Kelleher is out, and with just three days to go, Newson is now facing Michigan's Marcus "The Maniac" McGhee, the latest winner of the last-minute-replacement-contract sweepstakes. McGhee is somehow both fairly new to the sport and an old loving veteran--he turned pro in 2020, but his first amateur fight was all the way back in 2012. He stands, he bangs, and all six of his victories have been punchocentric knockouts, and that's a real impressive stat until you look at his competition--fighters who are 8-9, 4-5, 7-5, 6-6, 0-2 and 1-3, and almost all of those wins were against people who are even worse. The one time he lost is, coincidentally, the one time he fought a guy with a good record.
Does that alone mean McGhee's going to lose? Definitely not. In fact, Newson might be one of the best possible opponents he could get. McGhee fights like a guy who's been fighting lower-tier regional opponents: Hits like a truck, throws caution to the wind to pursue his striking, but pays almost no attention to defense and gets way too aggressive for his own good. Newson can wrestle, but he doesn't do it a lot, and Randy Costa already proved Newson doesn't always pull back from strikes quickly enough for his own good. Week-of replacements are always a crapshoot. It's hard to adjust to new opponents if you're used to training for specific ones, and a hungry regional fighter who's going to charge forward trying to take your head off becomes a lot more dangerous when you haven't spent time preparing for them.
But McGhee also isn't getting much time to prepare for a more well-rounded kind of fighter than the guys he's been loving with for his entire career, and watching him get taken down and stunned by some of them, I'm still going with JOURNEY NEWSON BY DECISION. But you can never rule out chaos.
WOMEN'S BANTAMWEIGHT: Hailey Cowan (7-2) vs Jamey-Lyn Horth (5-0)
Hailey Cowan has not been able to catch a god drat break. She got her Contender Series contract on the rare split decision the boss didn't hate, but her attempt to actually fight in the UFC has been repeatedly cursed by the universe. One day before she was scheduled to fight Ailin Perez this past February, Cowan was banished to the hospital after an ovarian cyst ruptured, pushing it back a month. Two days before THAT fight was to happen, her opponent Tamires Vidal was forced out with her own medical issues, pushing the fight back, once again, an entire month. So now--fingers crossed--we're just a few days out from her finally making her debut, but this time it's against Jamey-Lyn Horth, who was the flyweight champion of the Legacy Fighting Alliance a year and a half ago, which is when she, too, had her last professional fight thanks to the universe making GBS threads on her at random. Horth was intended to fight on the Contender Series in 2019, but as a Canadian, the considerably more stringent Trump administration decided she was insufficiently internationally notable and turned down her visa application. So she returned to the regional scene and was supposed to defend her LFA title last year--but after being rescheduled all year, her fight was scratched after her opponent, Sabina Mazo, broke her leg two weeks before the card.
In a lot of ways, it's a mirror match. Both like to crash the clinch and force takedowns, both like to work from top position, and both have been waiting just a bit too long for their official debuts. Cowan's probably got a slight edge at the wrestling, Horth's a little more active in the clinch, but this is probably just coming down to who winds up outscrambling the other after the inevitable clinch takedown attempts. JAMIE-LYN HORTH BY DECISION is a lot funnier to me, after the UFC's repeated attempts to get Cowan on a card.
Prelims begin in 30.
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Apr 29, 2023 21:03
