- CarlCX
- Dec 14, 2003
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We are ending this weekend in style, but we lost two prelims so start time was delayed.
CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 57: THE THRONE NOBODY WANTS
SATURDAY, MAY 6 FROM THE PRUDENTIAL CENTER IN NEWARK, NEW JERSEY
EARLY PRELIMS 3 PM PST/6 EST VIA ESPN+ | PRELIMS 5 PM PST/8 EST VIA ESPN | MAIN CARD 7 PM PST/10 EST VIA PAY-PER-VIEW
What do you do when you find yourself in a hallway with two doors and you know, for a fact, that you don't want to open either of them?
The UFC's really been in a mood to book its championships into a corner lately, and the bantamweight division has suffered more than most, and somehow, our answer to the "What do you do with a struggling championship and a champion with an uncertain future?" question has turned out to be "Go get a milk crate for Henry Cejudo."
I used to really like Aljamain Sterling. I used to really like Henry Cejudo! And now Aljamain is wishy-washy about his future, way too eager to cape for bad causes and spends way too much time tweeting about freeing Andrew Tate, and Henry Cejudo has always been a company scab who will sell out everything about himself if it makes him money and/or gives him more time to do photoshoots for Ramzan Kadyrov or post about how he thinks gay people are gross.
I know people who watch sports without giving a single poo poo about what fighters, athletes or coaches think about politics or culture or society, and I envy them deeply. And I don't even mean that in a 'this is a backhanded compliment that exists to make me seem wiser and more caring by comparison' sort of way. I don't think a single thing about my life has been improved by knowing Henry Cejudo's a weirdo bigot, nor does it do a thing for anyone reading this to have it restated.
But all we can do is be who we are and say what we feel, and by god, if that means being mad all the time while watching my favorite sport, that just makes me all the more American.
did i not click on some of them by mistake, or did i do it just to mess with you
MAIN EVENT: CRINGE COMEDY
 BANTAMWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP: Aljamain Sterling (22-3, Champion) vs Henry Cejudo (16-2, NR)
As a rule I hate it anytime a fighter ends years of retirement and goes straight into title contention, but after months of this matchup bothering me I've found a peace with this fight, and it's that, if we're being honest with ourselves, this may not be the championship fight the bantamweight division needs, but it is the fight it deserves.
We went over this in brief last week:
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.
We're looping time together here. The car crash that ended the bantamweight title's lineage three years ago is still haunting its intersection, and we can't escape it until we clear the wreckage. And the real kick in the pants is our grand prize, should we all survive this phantasmal process, is the guaranteed ending of the bantamweight championship lineage--again! Because neither the champion nor contender want to keep it.
The UFC has paved over this particularly terrible part of its history, but back in 2017 Demetrious "Mighty Mouse" Johnson wasn't just the flyweight champion of the world, he was the most dominant champion in UFC history. The most title defenses, the best fighting skills. He was the kind of champion who armbarred world jiu-jitsu champions, knocked out Olympic gold medalists and chucked human beings through the air only to submit them before they hit the ground, just because he could. And the company hated him. The UFC openly sabotaged the flyweight division during his reign, releasing winning competitors if they refused to move up to bantamweight and threatening to fire Johnson and simply take his belt away if he didn't start taking cross-divisional superfights.
And then they got lucky. Henry Cejudo, one of the sport's most opportunistic fighters, had failed in his first title bid and became the aforementioned gold medalist victim back in 2016, losing his undefeated streak in the process. But two wins was enough to get him a 2018 rematch, and despite being outstruck he just barely squeaked a controversial split decision past Mighty Mouse, ending one of the greatest title reigns in the history of combat sports. The change was instant: Henry Cejudo immediately established himself as a company man who was willing and eager to have the superfights the UFC wanted and openly noted his lack of caring about the future of flyweight in interviews, and Demetrious Johnson was traded to ONE Fighting Championship in exchange for Ben Askren and a ham sandwich.
But that opportunism struck again. After years of pressing Johnson to move up to 135 pounds to fight bantamweight champion TJ Dillashaw, the UFC changed its tone and, twisting the knife, had Dillashaw drop to flyweight to challenge Cejudo. The Dillashaw who showed up for their fight was visibly drained by the process, was knocked out almost immediately, and was then discovered to have only (barely) made weight by abusing performance-enhancing drugs, forcing him to abdicate his belt. Suddenly, Henry Cejudo hadn't just defeated the bantamweight champion--there WAS no bantamweight champion. Which meant nothing could stop him from fighting Marlon Moraes for the vacant title.
While there's no way he could have known this, the universe enabled him one more time. Marlon Moraes was one of the best bantamweights on the planet--but his time, abruptly, was up. After years as one of the best in the sport, Marlon would lose to Cejudo, win a very controversial split decision over José Aldo, and lose his next six straight fights--by knockout. Henry Cejudo fought one of the best bantamweights in the sport just one moment before all of his years of built-up credibility vanished. It was an unquestionable bantamweight win, and Cejudo was an unquestionable two-division champion.
But Cejudo wanted his. After one defense of his bantamweight championship, Cejudo decided to pull a power move by unexpectedly retiring in the middle of his post-fight interview, claiming he'd accomplished everything he wanted and he was done unless the UFC wanted to pay him big money for big money matches.
Having apparently not learned anything from the circumstances that brought the championship into his home, it came as little surprise to anyone but Cejudo when the UFC just sort of shrugged at him. There were new bantamweight and flyweight champions six weeks later. The double-champion was forgotten shockingly quickly. But that opportunistic streak didn't go anywhere, and the moment it became clear the UFC was stuck with a champion they didn't want, they got in touch with Henry Cejudo and made a deal.
Because the UFC absolutely does not want Aljamain Sterling. They never have. Aljo entered the UFC as an undefeated regional champion, and rather than fast-tracking him or even matching him with ranked, relevant fighters, they gave him years of nothing. Debuting fighters, Ultimate Fighter washouts, aging WEC veterans--and when Sterling finally faltered, despite losing only razor-close decisions that could easily have gone the other way, he went to the back of the line. When the UFC finally did promote him, it was so he could fight their aforementioned shiny new toy, Marlon Moraes. And when Moraes knocked Sterling out cold, they sent him all the way back down the ladder.
He had to win four more fights to get anywhere near the rankings. He had to take one of the best fighters on the planet in Cory Sandhagen, a man who'd never been close to getting finished and has been no closer since, and choke him the gently caress out in ninety seconds to force the UFC to give him his god damned title shot.
At which point the champion illegally kneed him in the face and disqualified his own championship away. Somehow, despite the extremely clear cause-and-effect on display--break the rules, hurt your opponent, lose the fight--it was agreed upon by a wide swath of the mixed martial arts fanbase that Petr Yan was the victim, and Aljamain Sterling, the 20-3 veteran with ten years as a professional fighter, was, in fact, a whiny coward.
Aljmain beating Petr Yan in a rematch changed virtually nothing, because he dared to grapple and control him on the floor without successfully finishing him, which, as we know, is morally wrong. Nor did it help when the UFC decided he had to defend his title against a preemptively crippled TJ Dillashaw no one wanted to see fight in the first place. And now they're trying to supplant him with a rerun from the Conor McGregor salad days.
Aljamain Sterling is tired. He's been fighting for more than a decade--almost a decade and a half, if you count his amateur years--and it took three tries to climb the mountain, and once he got there, all he found was ridicule. It's his fault Petr Yan cheated got himself disqualified, it's his fault he had injuries to rehab, it's his fault the UFC wanted TJ Dillashaw in a title fight and it's somehow still his fault Dillashaw walked into a world championship match with one functioning arm. He's done. He's done with the fans, he's done with the weight cut, and he's done watching his buddy Merab Dvalishvili crush an entire division when he can't get a championship match. If Sterling wins, he's abdicating the throne so Merab can take over: He has at most one more championship match in him, and then he's going up to featherweight.
But the rerun doesn't want to go back, either. Henry Cejudo has made it abundantly clear that he has no designs on becoming a reigning bantamweight champion and facing down the division: He is openly using this opportunity to come back, rocket into the spotlight by beating Sterling, and use that abrupt prominence to jump up to 145 pounds so he can challenge Alexander Volkanovski and return to retirement, this time as the UFC's first-ever triple-champion.
It's one of the best weight classes in any combat sport in the world. And no one wants to keep it. No matter what, the championship is on borrowed time. So who gets to play Musical Chairs with the throne?
Who knows. No, seriously. The oddsmakers largely have this fight as a pure pick 'em, and I get why. Aljamain Sterling is bigger and stronger, but his striking has always been loose and visibly uncomfortable, where Henry Cejudo had become a very efficient puncher by the end of his career. Cejudo is obviously a better wrestler, but he struggled with the counter-grappling of smaller, more orthodox fighters, and Sterling is one of the most creative, dangerous grapplers in the sport. Henry Cejudo also hasn't fought in three loving years. The gap is real, and as always, it begs questions. Will he have improved in his time off, or will he have degenerated? Has he trained well enough to deal with a threat like Sterling, or will ring rust cost him in the grappling?
I can tell you that Cejudo winning would be a lot funnier, and I've come to expect the funniest thing is generally, somehow, more likely to happen. But I'm going with ALJAMAIN STERLING BY SUBMISSION. Maybe I think Cejudo's aggression and overconfidence will get him in trouble, the same way it almost did against Marlon and Dominick Cruz before he retired. Maybe I think Sterling continues to be underrated, and his ability to find back control against a pressure-wrestler will pay dividends. Maybe I just want revenge for Mighty Mouse.
CO-MAIN EVENT: THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME
WELTERWEIGHT: Belal Muhammad (22-3 (1), #4) vs Gilbert Burns (22-5, #5)
I hate this. I hate this! This is an absolutely fantastic fight between two absolutely fantastic fighters who have a perfect reason to fight each other, and I hate this. And I hate hating it!
Because both of these guys rule. Belal Muhammad has worked his absolute rear end off to get here. After seven years in the UFC he is only now, finally, getting his roses, and all it took was making a bunch of very, very good competitors look terrible. Muhammad had a very tough start in the UFC--he made his debut in 2016, went 1-2, got knocked out by Vicente Luque and looked doomed to be lost in the shuffle--and thus he made the decision to just sort of stop losing fights. Since February of 2017 Muhammad is 12-1 (1): One loss to Geoff Neal back in 2019, who was on the cusp of title contention just a few months ago, and one No Contest against now-champion Leon Edwards, who managed to gouge Belal's eye shut.
In those same six years he mauled prospective golden boy Chance Rencountre, choked out Takashi Sato, outwrestled Demian Maia and Stephen Thompson, and even avenged his loss to Luque. And the UFC was still so uninterested in using him for anything important that they had him fight down in the rankings against Sean Brady, the undefeated, 15-0 prospect destroyer. Belal promptly sent a message to the UFC by beating the gently caress out of him. Brady's undefeated streak ended with 40 unanswered punches to the face. Belal's meaning was clear: I'm The Guy. Four straight wins over solid competition, nine fights without a loss, the case for contendership was more than clear.
But it didn't matter.
Gilbert Burns, in turn, was trying to justify his climb back up the mountain. Burns had been in the UFC even longer, having started as a late injury replacement all the way back in 2014--and then spent years as a lightweight. His fantastic grappling credentials and his hard-nosed style weren't enough to overcome the shark tank of the 155-pound division nor the degree to which cutting to lightweight took the energy out of him, and he was largely forgotten in the annals of the weight class.
And then he decided to just stop cutting as much and bulk up closer to his natural size at welterweight. And, shockingly, in a lesson I wish the sport would learn: It went really, really well. Gilbert immediately scratched out a four-fight winning streak, and--stop me if this is a wild, crazy concept--impressively winning four fights in a row at the weight class wound up being enough to get him a title shot. He almost won, too, dropping Kamaru Usman in the first round and putting him in the worst danger of his title reign up to that point, but ultimately, he couldn't make it work. He went on to rout Stephen Thompson, give Khamzat Chimaev three rounds of absolute hell, and easily defeat Neil Magny, which is a real solid resume for potential contendership.
But that didn't matter, either.
Last March, Leon Edwards retained his welterweight championship and officially ended the Kamaru Usman era. But the big story the day before the fight wasn't either of them--it was the surprise reveal that Colby Covington was the championship backup fighter in case one of them got injured. Before the event was over, the UFC had tried as hard as possible to flag Colby as the natural #1 contender, and by the time the post-fight presser was over, Dana had made it clear he saw Colby not just as the top guy in the division, but somehow, insanely, as a rightful champion who was only denied the belt due to Usman's existence, meaning with Usman out of the picture, it was his match to take.
Colby Covington hasn't fought in more than a year. His only victories in the last three years are over Tyron Woodley, who was cut from the UFC just a few months later on a four-fight losing streak, and Jorge Masvidal, one of the least deserving, most astroturfed contenders in company history. And, funnily enough, Jorge was about to fight again--against Gilbert Burns, who was putting his top spot at risk against Masvidal, who hadn't won a fight since 2019. It was made clear that if Jorge won, a title shot was in his future, and if Gilbert won, well, that'd be really nice for him.
Belal Muhammad didn't even get that much. Belal Muhammad was slated to fight yet another contender in Shavkat Rakhmonov sometime this summer, in the UFC's constantly recurring hope that someone they actually like will solve the Belal Muhammad problem. It didn't matter that the fans poo poo all over the announcement, it didn't matter that Leon Edwards openly called it ridiculous and cited Muhammad as the obvious top contender.
I wish I could tell you that it mattered now. But it still doesn't. Colby Covingon is almost assuredly getting his championship match this summer. It's currently expected for July, meaning by the time he gets his shot at the title, Colby won't have fought in sixteen months and his last victory over currently ranked competition will be more than five years old.
And this fight, between the two actual top contenders in the division?
It was made on three weeks' notice, as a last-minute replacement for the lightweight fight between Charles Oliveira and Beneil Dariush that was supposed to co-main this pay-per-view.
This is a fantastic fight. It's an incredibly important fight. It will be a fascinating fight to watch.
But either of these men could, and arguably should, have been fighting for the championship. And instead, we're here, where Colby Covington rolls off the couch into a title fight he earned by doing nothing and the rightful #1 contender and the next-closest guy have to fight each other with almost no time to prepare because it's the only way the company will even consider giving them a shot.
This is a great sport. I love this sport. But as I find myself saying an awful lot: gently caress this sport.
I cannot help feeling this is a very difficult ask for Belal. He's incredibly tough, but his forward-pressure approach tends to get him stung. Typically this works out for him anyway, half due to his fantastic chin and half due to his wrestling, which lets him force opponents out of their comfort zones and into his. Unfortunately: This is Gilbert Burns. Half of what allows Gilbert Burns to throw nuclear-bomb level punches is his complete and utter lack of concern about being taken down. Even Khamzat Chimaev, one of the best, most aggressive grapplers in the sport, noped right out of Gilbert's guard after all of a minute on the ground.
Belal showed off improved boxing in the Sean Brady fight, but it wasn't so improved that he didn't still get clipped repeatedly, and getting clipped by Gilbert Burns is hazardous to your health. That said: Belal is, I think, a smarter fighter than Burns. The awareness of his advantages tends to leave Burns less organized in his approaches to fighting, whereas Belal has also repeatedly proven his complete and total willingness to fight slow, intellectual, neutralizing strategies. Belal throwing out leg kicks, jabs and wall-clinches for fifteen minutes is wholly feasible.
I almost always wind up picking these fights with my gut. My gut has about a 40% success rate recently, and I already let it pick the main event. So we're going with BELAL MUHAMMAD BY DECISION. Take that, intuition.
MAIN CARD: GRACIE RULES
WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT: Jéssica Andrade (24-10, #4) vs Xiaonan Yan (16-3 (1), #6)
Poor Jéssica Andrade. Jéssica demonstrated just how quickly someone can go from a massively hyped title contender to an afterthought, and it all stems from a refusal to focus on a single goal. Between 2016 and 2020, Andrade was one of the most feared strawweight competitors in the world and cemented her place in the division's history after winning its championship by deadlifting Rose Namajunas and dropping her on her god damned head. But then she lost the belt, and lost her contendership, and decided to go up to flyweight and lose there, too. And that began a very strange couple years where Andrade was ranked at both strawweight and flyweight, and bounced back and forth knocking off contenders at either, all while seemingly uncertain which belt she was going to go for--and then it wound up not mattering, as Erin Blanchfield buzzsawed through her this past February, stopping her 125-pound bid cold in its tracks. Without focusing on a weight class, Andrade couldn't even focus on an opponent.
Xiaonan Yan has been nothing but focus. Her 14-fight unbeaten streak came to an end thanks to Carla Esparza and her dastardly wrestling offense in 2021, and Yan took nearly an entire year off to improve her skills, shifting her camp from the UFC's facilities in Shanghai to the Team Alpha Male compound in Sacramento, California, all in the name of improving her wrestling and grappling defense. Her return fight was an impossibly close split decision loss to top contender Marina Rodriguez--it could very easily have gone the other way--but the UFC's attempt to make a stepping stone of her backfired. Promotional darling Mackenzie Dern had a much tougher time taking down the improved Xiaonan Yan, ultimately completing only 2 of her 11 takedown attempts, and Yan landed more significant strikes in four of their five rounds, and this time, the close decision went her way. And now, despite being 1 for her last 3, she's still at the precipice of the top five and has a shot at contendership with just one solidly made argument.
But it's going to be a tough argument to make. Yan is an extremely tough fighter and a hell of a brawler in her own right, but Andrade is a berserker who, whether it was wise to do so or not, has consistently been demonstrating her ability to walk through strikes from bigger, stronger fighters at a bigger, stronger weight class. Yan doesn't have the wrestling offense of a Blanchfield or the versatile striking of a Namajunas. Her strengths come from fighting toe-to-toe. And there are very, very few women I would pick toe-to-toe against the Piledriver. JÉSSICA ANDRADE BY DECISION.
FEATHERWEIGHT: Movsar Evloev (16-0, #10) vs Diego Lopes (21-5, NR)
Boy, this fight has gone through the wringer. Initially, Bryce Mitchell was going to have a wrestlefest with Jonathan Pearce to determine who the true wrestling prospect was at featherweight. Pearce got injured, so the fight became Mitchell vs Movsar Evloev, the undefeated Russian star teetering on the precipice of contendership after dominating Hakeem Dawodu and Dan Ige in his last two fights. And then, the morning of the 2nd, Mitchell was pulled thanks to an undisclosed injury, leaving Evleov sans opponent just four days before the fight. So now, it's the #10 ranked Movsar Evloev vs the unranked, newly-signed injury replacement Diego Lopes.
A lot of people on the internet are celebrating, citing Lopes as a diamond in the rough and an immediate threat to the division. Having spent time watching his fights: I'm skeptical. Much is made of his 21-5 record and his 19 stoppages, but like so many regional competitors, when you look up the competition he's finishing, some of the luster fades. His last victory was against the 11-11 Angel Rodriguez, who threw wild hooks and naked leg kicks the whole fight; before that it was the 10-10 Kenneth Glenn who's been getting knocked out regularly for a decade. It's only a few fights ago that Lopes was padding his career against the 1-3 and 0-0 rookies of the sport. The only times in recent memory we've seen him fight top-tier competition involved him losing.
It doesn't mean he'll lose again. He's a big, 5'11" featherweight with an extremely aggressive style and everything to gain, and when you're talking about fighters with just days to prepare for one another, anything can happen. But Movsar's defense is extremely sound and his wrestling even moreso, and stepping up to this level when he was struggling with the wrestling games of some of those aforementioned regional journeymen doesn't give me a lot of faith in Lopes. MOVSAR EVLOEV BY SUBMISSION.
FEATHERWEIGHT: Kron Gracie (5-1) vs Charles Jourdain (13-6-1)
Do you remember that Kron Gracie existed? Do you remember that people were excited about him once upon a time? It's been almost four years and statistically speaking there's a good chance you have no loving idea what I'm talking about, so let's recap! The Gracie family are the godfathers of modern mixed martial arts and directly responsible for the creation of the UFC itself, and their massive tree of grapplers spanned the entire world of combat sports from the mid-90s to the late 2000s--which is just about when the sport caught up enough that their grappling-over-everything approach started getting them visibly hosed up by modern fighters. Where once Gracies roamed the combat sports world like an endless legion, by the end of the 2010s, only a few were still actively trying to compete.
But the one people were most excited about was Kron. Aside from simply being a world-class grappler, Kron was young, athletic, and most importantly seemed to understand that a functional knowledge of striking was necessary for modern mixed martial arts success. He was in Japan fighting for Rizin during its opening week, and within a year he was 4-0, having submitted real legends like Hideo Tokoro and Tatsuya Kawajiri. When he joined the UFC in 2019 and choked out Alex Caceres in two minutes, people had high hopes for his future. And then he fought Cub Swanson and got the crap beaten out of him. Cub danced around him, peppered him with almost everything he threw, and came away with an exceedingly obvious 30-27 shutout of a decision. And Kron, proving himself finally, truly worthy of the Gracie name, responded by pitching a fit about unfair judging, declaring himself the unequivocal winner, and leaving the sport to focus on jiu-jitsu.
"Air" Charles Jourdain did not turn pro until two years after Kron's debut, and that's still been enough time to accrue more than three times his fighting experience. Almost half of Jourdain's career happened during Kron's retirement tantrum. He's had three narrow, contentious decisions go against him in the last three years, and his response has been to try to punch the next guy even harder. He's an extremely tough, extremely talented fighter who's been held back primarily by his own occasional recklessness. His willingness to throw caution to the wind gets him touched up by tighter fighters, and his aggressive grappling attacks get him picked off by faster grapplers.
One of those things is very much not a problem here. The other is more concerning. Jourdain's a fine grappler in his own right, but Kron Gracie is not someone you should test yourself against. If Jourdain has tightened up his game enough to stick, move and force Kron to chase him like he did to Swanson, this should be an easy night at the office. Every time he engages in the grappling, his chances lower drastically. CHARLES JOURDAIN BY DECISION but I'll be tense the whole time.
PRELIMS: NOTHING BUT PUNCHING
LIGHTWEIGHT: Drew Dober (26-11 (1), #14) vs Matt Frevola (10-3-1, NR)
The divisional label on this fight may say lightweight, but make no mistake: This is loving Violenceweight.
After nearly a decade of grinding, Drew Dober is finally getting somewhere in the UFC. When you go back to his older fights where he was a little more reserved, the improvement he's displayed over the last five years is obvious, and it's paid off in his record: His only losses in his last twelve fights came against the current champion, the rightful #1 contender, and Brad Riddell, who was really something before he broke down to the point of going on hiatus from the sport. Dober's on a three-fight knockout streak, and it's a damned impressive one, having culminated last December with his clean knockout of defensive master Bobby Green--a feat previously accomplished only by Dustin Poirier. Matt Frevola's UFC career got off to a less than memorable 2-3-1 start, which wasn't at all aided by COVID, injuries and just plain bad luck leaving him unable to fight more than once a year in 2020 and 2021, but he started turning it around in 2022 by absolutely flattening two undefeated lightweight prospects in Genaro Valdéz and Ottman Azaitar with first-round knockouts. He, too, appears to be trying to make up for lost time, and he, too, has visibly changed his ways from the more carefully metered all-around attacks of his youth in favor of trying to take your god damned head off.
This fight promises so much potential punching that I cannot help fearing it will ultimately disappoint; that both men will be so aware of their respective knockout power that we'll get fifteen minutes of tentative jabbing and clinching. But I hope not. I hope this is the symphony of beautiful violence it should be, and I hope the redemption story goes on for another year. DREW DOBER BY TKO.
LIGHT-HEAVYWEIGHT: Kennedy Nzechukwu (11-3) vs Devin Clark (14-7)
You know, Kennedy Nzechukwu was in a main event the last time we saw him. Sure, he wasn't SUPPOSED to be, but hell, at worst, he was in a co-main event. And he won! He kicked the poo poo out of Ion Cuțelaba and became just the second man to ever knock him out! And now he's fighting Devin Clark, who is 2 for his last 5 and one of those losses is, in fact, a loss to Cuțelaba, on the prelims. I know the light-heavyweight division is actively on fire at the moment and literally nothing makes sense, but I cannot help feeling you could try just a little bit harder. Nzechukwu has been looking steadily better and he wasn't even that bad in the first place--sometimes awkward and iffy at using his range, but that was still enough to win most of his UFC fights, and frankly, his last decision loss to Nicolae Negumereanu probably should've been a win. Devin Clark has just been struggling for more or less his entire UFC tenure; in 15 fights he's only managed two back to back wins, and one of those times was all the way back in 2017. He's a wrestleboxer, but his wrestling and boxing just aren't that great.
And he's fighting a much, much larger opponent who's looked steadily better at dealing with his kinds of threats as of late. I think the no-back-to-back-wins streak is going to continue. KENNEDY NZECHUKWU BY SUBMISSION.
WELTERWEIGHT: Khaos Williams (13-3) vs Rolando Bedoya (14-1)
This is a divisionally baffling fight. Kalinn Williams, aka Khaos, aka The Oxfighter, is a scary loving bruiser of a fighter who's sort of orbiting the periphery of the top fifteen at welterweight. He doesn't belong there just yet--he got turned away by Michel Pereira and Randy Brown--but the Brown fight was extremely close, and he gave Pereira a hell of a fight, and with his ridiculous knockout power and willingness to swing for the fences, he's only ever a single hook away from a number by his name. Rolando Bedoya, by contrast, is an interim welterweight champion out of the regional scene in Peru who is making his UFC debut here. And I...don't really know why. He didn't touch the Contender Series, he hasn't been beating particularly notable competition, he hasn't even been particularly active--he's only had three fights since 2018. And, to be frank, he doesn't look great! He's got a really fast, pawing left hook, but he's sort of flatfooted, he's got real bad defensive instincts, and he gets stung constantly.
Which is fine, and even worth a trip to the UFC to see how he does anyway, but throwing him in with a guy who's realistically in the top twenty in the world sure does seem like a weird choice. KHAOS WILLIAMS BY TKO.
WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT: Marina Rodriguez (16-2-2, #5) vs Virna Jandiroba (18-3, #9)
What's that? Is it a women's fight with contendership ramifications buried in the prelims? It is! Am I going to complain about it? Only if I can break through the chunky crust of exhaustion the sport has erected around my heart!
Marina Rodriguez is the #5 goddamn strawweight in the world, and until this past November, there was a solid argument to be made that she was undefeated. Her crisp boxing, her smart defense and her willingness to get punches in and get the gently caress out of dodge made her a huge pain for any woman in the division, but--as defensive fighting always does--it made her a judging liability. She was stuck with draws against Randa Markos and Cynthia Calvillo which could easily have been victories, and she took a split decision loss to Carla Esparza that probably SHOULD have been a victory. But there was nothing questionable about her getting knocked silly by Amanda Lemos in her last fight. Virna Jandiroba is a tougher story--the kind of tough where you draw Carla Esparza for your UFC debut and get very non-controversially wrestled into paste. Jandiroba's proven to be a dangerous fighter, both in power and in quick, crushing grappling attacks, and no one has managed to finish her or even come particularly close. But she's barely been able to string two wins together against the UFC's level of competition, and she's fighting to escape the orbit of the top ten gatekeeper that she's been steadily falling into over the last three years.
In other words: It's someone who could be fighting for the title with one solid win against someone who's been perennially stuck at the bottom of the top ten, in a division that's recently blown itself wide open and has a rush for contendership. Which is, of course, way less important than Kron Gracie's first fight in four years. Or the UFC debut of Rolando Bedoya. Or--wait, isn't there a women's strawweight contendership match prominently featured on the main card next week? Why is that getting the spotlight?
Oh. Mackenzie Dern's in it.
Funny how that keeps working.
MARINA RODRIGUEZ BY DECISION.
PRELIMS: YESTERDAY'S SPEEDBUMPS
HEAVYWEIGHT: Parker Porter (13-8) vs Braxton Smith (5-1)
HEAVYWEIGHTS! You knew they had to be here somewhere. Our old friend Parker Porter is back just two and a half months after getting knocked flat by Justin Tafa in a single minute, which, man, that just doesn't seem like enough time to recover from a potential concussion but I'm not a doctor, I suppose. Parker Porter's UFC career feels like it's on borrowed time--he's not terrible, but he's not noticeably great at anything except being willing to march forward. He gets beaten by the good fighters he fights, and his best victories are against people like Chase Sherman.
Chase...Sherman.
NO. He's not even in this fight. Of course he's going to come up, he's in the UFC, I refuse to be haunted by Chase Sherman yet again just because he's fighting his current UFC peers. That's completely loving normal. Leave me alone.
Fortunately for me, we're safe now, because Porter's opponent isn't even from the UFC. Braxon "The Beautiful Monster" Smith is, much like Porter, a compact, 5'11" heavyweight made of pure mass and punching power. You can watch his entire fighting career in about six minutes and it unfolds exactly the way you've already correctly assumed it does: A stocky guy throwing his body forward and winging wild punches until his opponent falls over, and because it's regional heavyweight, it always works. He's got five wins in a row, all of them were first-round knockouts, and at heavyweight, that's enough. Although there's a weird gap in his career, because his only loss came from his very first fight back in 2014, and he didn't fight again for eight more years. Who could have scared him so badly in his debut match that he left the sport for almost a decade? Who c--oh, no.
No.
NO.
I'm done. I can't. PARKER PORTER BY DECISION. I have to go.
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Ikram Aliskerov (13-1) vs Phil Hawes (12-4)
This is, potentially, a very interesting fight. Ikram Aliskerov is one of the lost Dagestani superstars--possibly from lack of direct connection to the Nurmagomedovi--but he, his stiff punches and his fantastic wrestling have made him a standout in the middle-eastern fight scene for years, and he'd still be undefeated had he not run into some 4-0 guy named Khamzat Chimaev back in 2019. And even then, he was doing an admirable job of blocking Khamzat's takedowns and sticking him with punches right up until, you know, he died. Phil "No Hype" Hawes, who I am deeply, deeply sad is no longer nicknamed Megatron, is trying to spoil Aliskerov's UFC debut and right his own ship. Hawes spent most of the last two years getting bounced out of the rankings--after a great first three fights in the UFC he got knocked out by Chris Curtis and Roman Dolidze, although he did put a downright uncomfortable beating on Deron Winn between the two losses. Hawes is very tough, very strong and enough of a wrestler in his own right to have the rare perfect takedown defense record in the UFC--but then, only one of his opponents actually tried to take him down.
We know Aliskerov can get knocked out by a sufficiently scary striker, and we know Hawes is scary as hell when he lays his hands on someone. This fight is more or less just a question of if you believe Ikram Aliskerov's Dagestani wrestling can break Hawes' defense and force the fight to the floor. And the answer's almost certainly yes, but honestly? I'm pretty bored about it. PHIL HAWES BY TKO. Let's have some more comedy in our MMA today.
FLYWEIGHT: Zhalgas Zhumagulov (14-8) vs Rafael Estevam (11-0)
Zhalgas Zhumagulov deserves an awful lot better. His 1-5 UFC record looks dismal on paper, but two of those fights--his two most recent losses--were split decisions he unquestionably should have won, and his UFC debut against Raulian Paiva was, itself, an ultra-close decision 3/4 of the media scored for him. In a better world Zhalgas would be 4-2 in the UFC, 17-5 overall, and ranked in the top fifteen. But we live here, where he's welcoming undefeated prospect, Contender Series winner, and former flyweight champion of Brazil's FATALITY ARENA, Rafael "Macapá" Estevam, to the UFC. And Estevam's good. He's more offensively-oriented than most flyweight competitors, which is presumably what put him on the UFC's radar in the first place, but he's a solid, all-around fighter, like virtually any flyweight, and is just as comfortable winging punches as driving all the way across the cage to finish a takedown.
ZHALGAS ZHUMAGULOV BY DECISION. I want to think Zhumagulov's defense is going to neutralize a lot of Estevam's best offense, but if I'm really being honest, I just want Zhalgas to win a loving fight. He deserves it.
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Joseph Holmes (8-3) vs Claudio Ribeiro (10-3)
This is what we call a 'figuring out how to cut our losses' fight. Joseph Holmes and Claudio Ribeiro were both well-heralded Contender Series victors for very different reasons--in Holmes' case it was his reputation as an enormous, 6'4" middleweight with trees for arms who choked out almost everyone he fought, and in Ribeiro's, it was his 100% knockout rate, thanks in no small part to his old-school throwback tendency to wing punches like he was swinging a lunchbox from his hip on his way to work. But Holmes has gone 1-2 in the UFC, getting soundly outgrappled and finished for the first time in his career by "The Iron Turtle" Jun Yong Park back in October, and Ribeiro made his debut this past January only to get starched by Abdul Razak Alhassan in five and a half minutes.
It's okay to lose. The UFC's fine with losing. It's when you lose at the things they thought you were good at--clinch grappling and wild brawls--that they start to get wary. JOSEPH HOLMES BY SUBMISSION. Ribeiro's lunchbox punches are going to get him clinched up, and unlike Park, he doesn't have the judo base to stop it.
BANTAMWEIGHT: Daniel Santos (10-2) vs Johnny Munoz Jr. (12-2)
Sometimes the UFC picks a fight to start a card just because they think it'll be fun. This should, realistically, be fun. Daniel "Willycat" Santos is a Charles Oliveira training partner, one of the last Chute Boxers left standing, and a representative of the true meaning of mixed martial arts: Devoting years of your life to learning and practicing historically proven techniques so you can throw them out the window and throw endless arrays of spinning poo poo. Johnny Munoz Jr. is the slightly more confused stylist of the two--he's much more of a grappler by trade, with solid takedowns and an aggressive choke game, but he likes to lead with his head on the feet and get stuck in brawls, which often go very poorly for him. All martial arts modernity is about rejecting the past and blazing your own trail, and sometimes you make those trails by spinning in circles, and sometimes you do it by jumping guillotines.
JOHNNY MUNOZ JR BY DECISION. This should be frenetic but I still think the wrestling takes it in the end.
Broadcast begins in about twenty minutes.
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May 6, 2023 04:16
