- CarlCX
- Dec 14, 2003
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This is a morning card for network television because the UFC now rates a weekend Days Of Our Lives special for ABC.
CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 58: WE'RE ON A RIDE TO NOWHERE
SATURDAY, MAY 13 FROM THE SPECTRUM CENTER IN CHARLOTTE, NORTH CAROLINA
 EARLY START TIME WARNINGPRELIMS 8:30 AM PST/11:30 AM EST | MAIN CARD 12 PM PST/3 PM ESTEARLY START TIME WARNING
The UFC has always seemed sort of ambivalent about its network television shows.
They act like they're a big deal--and they are! Short of running fights for free on Youtube, network television is the biggest audience you can realistically get; the highest potential for the most eyes. When the UFC struck its first network television deal back in 2011 they made it a giant media event, paid enormous attention to it, and booked their heavyweight championship on it. Almost nine million people watched Junior dos Santos become the new champion of the world. It was a big loving deal.
And the next time they were on network television, they did, uh, Nate Diaz vs Jim Miller.
They made it the lightweight championship show for awhile, but even that fell to the wayside. When the UFC started promoting network television events on ABC in 2021 they packed them not with the most consequential fights, but with the fighters they wanted people to care about but knew they weren't quite yet ready to pay for. Calvin Kattar. Kevin Holland. Yair Rodríguez. Each time, slightly lesser. And each time, the network was just a bit less happy.
It's 2023. The UFC is back on network television. Their timeslot starts at 8:30 in the morning. And they really, really want you to decide you like Jailton Almeida.
i know this is where i put jokes, but something about this card just gives me ennui
MAIN EVENT: THESE SLIPPERY PEOPLE GONNA SEE YOU THROUGH
HEAVYWEIGHT: Jairzinho Rozenstruik (13-4, #9) vs Jailton Almeida (18-2, #12)
Organic matchmaking is one of the rare pleasures of combat sports. People coming up and down the rankings, people meeting each other while climbing the ladder in parallel, long-deserving #1 contenders, even just journeymen fighting each other thanks to complementary styles and fortuitous timing.
Or, to put it more simply: Mixed martial arts is as much about story as technique. Audiences want to be invested in fighters and companies want to create, cultivate and ultimately harvest that investment. Sometimes you get lucky and stories fall in your lap--say, a destitute Cameroonian immigrant who crushes everyone in his way and becomes the best heavyweight on the planet--but typically, promotions find themselves doing the razor-dance of marketing. Find the path forward for a fighter that tests them without being likely to derail them. Push, but don't push too hard, or the audience will catch on to the manipulation and reject it. Try to spread the attention around so you have multiple irons in the fire in case one or two get knocked cold.
A lot of fans have become a lot more vocal about their feelings of burnout with the UFC over the last few years. I think a sizable part of that is the complete burial of this theory of starmaking in favor of their modern ethos, which can be best summed up as "You will watch who we want you to watch, and additionally, gently caress you." The championship contenders are artificial, the divisional rankings are made up, and the promotional favorites are unavoidable. If you like Paddy Pimblett, or Sean O'Malley, or Colby Covington, or Mackenzie Dern, good news: This is the product for you. If you don't, the UFC does not really care. They don't actually need your money anymore. ESPN pays them whether you give a poo poo about their contenders or not.
Jairzinho Rozenstruik was, at one point, positioned as one of those contenders. As a championship kickboxer with tons of knockout power and no grappling offense to speak of he had the exact skillset the UFC salivates for in its heavyweights, and they supported their symbiotic relationship by feeding him a series of softer targets--the striking-deficient Junior Albini, the knockdown-prone Allen Crowder, the ever-chancy Andrei Arlovski--and when he passed his big test by scraping victory from the jaws of defeat and exploding Alistair Overeem's mouth with just four seconds left in their fight, the UFC knew Jairzinho Rozenstruik was for real. They booked a fantastic, organic matchup between their two biggest knockout strikers, Rozenstruik and Francis Ngannou, in a title eliminator that was sure to have lengthy fireworks.
And then Ngannou flatlined him in twenty seconds, and suddenly, the Jairzinho Rozenstruik experiment was over.
To be clear, they have by no means buried the man. He's stayed active and prominent as a heavyweight contender--which is the problem. There have been no further gimme fights for Jairzinho Rozenstruik. Junior dos Santos, Ciryl Gane, Curtis Blaydes, Alexander Volkov--he even fought Augusto Sakai during the very brief window in which Augusto Sakai looked like he might be a contender. It took three years for Rozenstruik to get a gimme fight, and that was perennial knockout victim Chris Daukaus during that inexplicable stretch of time where the UFC either desperately wanted him to succeed or truly, deeply hated him, and it was impossible to tell which.
Rozenstruik was only briefly a favorite toy. Once he got destroyed, the shine came off and the UFC moved on.
In 2023 the UFC's favorite heavyweight toy is Jailton Almeida, and it's sort of baffling.
Which isn't to say there's anything even remotely wrong with Jailton Almeida. He's a fantastic fighter. Chopping leg kicks, great takedowns, solid submission game. The confusion, and distaste, have absolutely nothing to do with the man himself and everything to do with the promotion, and, of course, his roots in the Contender Series.
"Malhadinho" walked into the bread-and-circuses show in 2021 as a 13-2 light-heavyweight who hadn't lost since 2018 and had never recorded a win by decision, and for whatever reason, despite their usual antipathy towards grappling, takedowns and fighters who don't speak English, Almeida had a jetpack strapped to him the second he entered the UFC. After the requisite debut jobber match, Almeida was put immediately in a position to hop the fence and enter the rankings. He was slated for light-heavyweight standout Maxim Grishin, and when that fell through, he was bumped up to heavyweight to fight Shamil Abdurakhimov, but injuries and bad timing left him fighting exceptionally outclassed replacement competition.
But the UFC never stopped the push, and after wiping the floor with both wide-eyed substitutions the UFC finally got Abdurakhimov into the cage and finally got Almeida in the rankings, as he outwrestled, outgrappled and submitted the #14 heavyweight in the world, which somehow, over time, led to Almeida at #12, because that's how rankings work. Almeida had proven he could hang with a grappler, and that's good, because heavyweight is chock-full of talented wrestlers and grapplers. Alexandr Romanov, Blagoy Ivanov, Marcin Tybura, Serghei Spivac--all of them were similarly hovering around the outer edge of the top ten, and all of them posed interesting challenges for this nascent contender.
So the UFC booked him against a kickboxer ranked higher than all of them who was once repeatedly taken down and controlled by a man who intentionally bunched up his fight shorts to make them look like a diaper.
Which is, of course, the point of all of this. Three weeks ago the top two heavyweight contenders in the UFC fought on an internet-only card in an empty arena with no fanfare. The winner took his post-fight interview in a sea of darkness and used his translator to ask a bunch of empty chairs for bonus pay since he knocked his opponent out. This week the UFC is making one of its incredibly rare appearances on network television with a crowd of thousands, and the fighter it has chosen to put front and center isn't the #2-ranked heavyweight knockout artist, or the possible next contenders for the women's strawweight championship, or the June-scheduled on-deck fight for the red-hot featherweight division.
It's Jailton Almeida, the #12-ranked heavyweight grappler, fighting a guy who couldn't stop Ciryl Gane from taking him down.
It's baffling, but primarily, it's alienating. If you're not already a dyed-in-the-wool Contender Series fan who's already on the 10:45 hype train to Jailton, is this going to be what gets you onboard? Watching the UFC roll out the red carpet to get him into the top ten?
At least they'll get their man. The UFC is inevitably going to tout Rozenstruik's 75% takedown defense rate as evidence of how hard he is to take down; it is only 75% because Alistair Overeem and Ciryl Gane, who are categorically not grapplers, succeeded in 2 out of 10 and 14 takedown attempts respectively and unintentionally pumped his stats astronomically upwards by not knowing how double-legs work. JAILTON ALMEIDA BY SUBMISSION. Rozenstruik can flatten him with one solid connection anytime they're on the feet, but unless Almeida gets gunshy, they're not going to stay there for long.
CO-MAIN EVENT: O-U-T, BUT NO HARD FEELINGS
 LIGHT-HEAVYWEIGHT: Anthony Smith (36-17, #5) vs Johnny Walker (20-7, #7)
I want you to take a moment to feel empathy for Anthony Smith.
A little over four years ago, Anthony Smith fought Jon Jones for the light-heavyweight championship of the world. Jon Jones, being Jon Jones, hosed up and kneed the crap out of Smith while he was down. No one told Smith, in the moment, that he would have been the champion if he'd taken the disqualification--he simply didn't want to go out like that. He waved it off and resumed fighting, and lost a wide decision. At the post-fight press conference, Dana White lauded him as a good, company man.
Two fights later, Glover Teixeira beat Smith so badly that, in one of the more surreal visuals in the sport, Smith had to hand his suddenly ejected teeth to referee Jason Herzog for safekeeping. Smith was, reportedly, just about the fourth-highest paid person on the card.
By 2022, Anthony Smith is slowing down. His three-fights-a-year workrate has slowed to one, maybe two, and his work as a company man has seen him rewarded with an on-desk analyst position for the post-event shows watched primarily by the people who forgot to change the channel after the main event ended. But he's still ranked in the top ten, and he still wants to be the champion, and with Glover about to retire, Jiří Procházka injured and Jon Jones moving up to heavyweight the championship picture is wide open. He has a fight scheduled with Jamahal Hill in March, and even though Hill is ranked below him he's a talented, dangerous rising contender, and Smith wholly intends on using him to make a case for contendership.
And then Jan Błachowicz and Magomed Ankalaev fight to a draw at UFC 282 and leave the title vacant. Before the post-fight press conference is over Dana White announces Glover Teixeira will fight Jamahal Hill for the empty throne. As soon as the conference is over, ESPN returns to the feed of their analyst desk, where company man Anthony Smith has just learned, live on air, that his fight is being taken away and the man he was supposed to fight, who he is theoretically ranked over, is getting a title shot and he is not. A visibly dejected Smith mumbles "Yeah, that's a problem, for, uh...wow, that's a big problem for me," and Jon Anik rescues him by taking over. His despair is being mined for content, live.
But Anthony Smith is a company man. He handles it without getting angry or demanding a thing, and the UFC says they'll be making it up to him with a main event in the Spring. There's even a great opportunity--the UFC is having one of their rare ABC cards, and new champion Jamahal Hill needs a challenger, and you could not ask for a more opportune moment to give top-five contender Anthony Smith a big match to make up for the spotlight he narrowly missed. The UFC does right by its people.
Of course, we're not in the main event section, are we? Anthony Smith is in the co-main event, subordinate to a Contender Series winner with one ranked win in the heavyweight division.
And the UFC has him fighting Johnny Walker, one of the most dangerous one-shot knockout artists in the sport, and someone who--not at all subtly--the company has paid more attention to and spent more time hyping than Smith. In fairness, we've seen Walker fight four times in the same timeframe it took Smith to compete once, and there's nothing the UFC likes more than guys who throw themselves into the fray as often as is humanly possible. Walker got off to a fantastic, three-fight knockout streak in the UFC before being summarily crushed in four out of his next five fights, the last loss of which was to the aforementioned new champ, Jamahal Hill, but after two resurgent first-round finishes Walker's back on a win streak and back on the fast track to a title shot.
By which I mean the UFC has intimated that if Walker knocks out Smith, he'll probably get a title shot. No word on what happens if Anthony Smith wins, of course.
There is no glory in being a company man. Ask Randy Couture, who carried the banner for years and wound up sued and defamed in press conferences. Ask Georges St-Pierre, who did a decade of press for the UFC and is largely responsible for their having a Canadian fanbase at all, and who was publicly derided by the UFC for wanting to take a break. There is no pension plan, there is no pot of gold, it's just getting an extra pat on the back from the boss when he's not busy blowing your entire salary on internet gambling in a desperate attempt to feel young again.
JOHNNY WALKER BY TKO. Smith likes getting hit too much, and Walker's jiu-jitsu is good enough that Smith's usual grappling advantage won't work half as well as it typically does. On the feet, as in life, I cannot help thinking it is a matter of time.
MAIN CARD: SAME AS IT EVER WAS
WELTERWEIGHT: Daniel Rodriguez (17-3, #15) vs Ian Machado Garry (11-0)
The UFC had solid hopes for Daniel "D-Rod" Rodriguez. His no-nonsense persona, his crisp boxing, his granite chin and his surprisingly deep gas tank made him an unexpected threat in the welterweight division, and his batterings of Tim Means, Mike Perry and Kevin Lee--even with a loss to Nicolas Dalby in the middle--made him a dark horse contender in the welterweight division. 2022, unfortunately, was not kind: Injuries kept him sidelined until the fall, at which point the comedy of errors that was Chimaev vs DiazDiaz vs Ferguson saw him take a split decision over an undersized Li Jingliang that almost all media scores had him losing, and two months later he was much more clearly choked out by divisional gatekeeper Neil Magny, locking him out of the top ten altogether.
When the UFC matches you against someone they nicknamed "The Future," they're quietly hoping you'll lose. Ian "The Future" Machado Garry is so blatantly an attempt to get a second, more manageable pass at Conor McGregor that he did, in fact, reenact Conor McGregor quotes in his post-fight interviews after his first couple victories. He's an Irish knockout puncher who came to the UFC after winning the Cage Warriors title in Britain, he's an undefeated 11-0, and the UFC was taking it pretty loving easy on him until this past March, when they finally gave him a real opponent in Kenan Song, who gave Garry two and a half extremely tough rounds and nearly had him finished in the first, but Garry regrouped and got him out in the third.
This is where the UFC gets Conor 2 into the top fifteen. This is where the experiment finally comes to fruition. Or, alternatively, it's where DANIEL RODRIGUEZ WINS BY DECISION. Garry's taller and he hits very hard, but he finishes people when they overextend. Rodriguez is a genuinely good boxer who knows how to be conservative and economical when necessary, and when you look at the trouble Garry had with guys like Darian Weeks and Gabe Green, Rodriguez keeping him on the end of a jab and refusing to let him open up with combinations seems very plausible.
LIGHT-HEAVYWEIGHT: Carlos Ulberg (7-1) vs Ihor Potieria (19-3)
Carlos Ulberg seems like he's in a bit of a rebuilding phase. The UFC brought him in through the Contender Series back in 2020 only to have him debut against Kennedy Nzechukwu, a truly baffling decision that got him knocked out before he could build a fanbase. He's looked steadily better in every subsequent fight and is now on a three-fight winning streak, which is, and this is a horrifying sentence, one of the longest winning streaks in the light-heavyweight division. Ihor Potieria also came in through the contract mill show, and he also got crushed in his UFC debut, and he also is working on a comeback, having just retired Shogun Rua in a deeply depressing fight no one really wanted to see happen.
There's this thing called MMA Math--fighter A beat fighter B, fighter B beat fighter C and therefore fighter A will beat fighter C--and it's traditionally one of the worst predictors for fighting performances, because every fight is different, and those fights are almost always years apart and ignore how developed those fighters were at that point in their careers, or any subsequent improvements they may have made, and how stylistically different the fighters were to one another.
But in this case, Ihor Potieria got destroyed in a standup fight with Nicolae Negumereanu last July, and just barely three months later Carlos Ulberg got in a standup fight with Negumereanu and effortlessly destroyed him. This is one of the rare cases where it is extremely present and extremely relevant. CARLOS ULBERG BY TKO.
WELTERWEIGHT: Tim Means (32-14-1 (1)) vs Alex Morono (22-8)
Well, this is a fight of some kind. Tim Means has been very fun for a very long time, but at this point in his career, Tim Means has entered Honored Elder status within the UFC--which is to say he's 39 years old and 25+ fights deep and the UFC has long given up on his ever again being considered divisionally relevant, which means they can use him for whatever the gently caress they want. Give a fight card a little more spice? All the time. Put over Kevin Holland? Check. Rebuild Max "Pain" Griffin? Sure!
And now his job is to rehabilitate Alex Morono. "The Great White" has been a staple of the UFC's top twenty for years, a hard-headed forward-pressure brawler with the uncanny ability to just never loving stop moving. He's tough enough to beat almost everyone outside the top fifteen, but it's breaking past the number barrier that's always eluded him. He rolled off the couch on a week's notice this past December and was two and a half minutes away from finally getting that vaunted ranking by soundly outworking Santiago Ponzinibbio, right up until a right hand he never saw coming starched him.
But I'm just not convinced Morono has a lot to worry about here. Means succeeds by being meaner, tougher and higher-intensity than his opponents with a side of tricky grappling attacks to keep them guessing; Morono's even tougher, even more determined, and just as adept at snatching chokes out of nowhere. ALEX MORONO BY DECISION.
PRELIMS: EVERYONE WILL LEAVE AT EXACTLY THE SAME TIME
WELTERWEIGHT: Matt Brown (23-19) vs Court McGee (21-11)
Speaking of honored elders, jesus christ. Matt Brown is on his second or third return from retirement, which makes a lot of since when you consider his first UFC-branded fight was on The Ultimate Fighter 7 all the way back in 2008 and he was already nearing 30 at the time. "The Immortal" has been brawling with people across three separate loving decades in the UFC, and it's made him one of the company's most treasured must-see-TV names, but it's also gotten him hosed up repeatedly. He's won three of his last nine fights, and that includes getting knocked out three times and choked out once. His retirements were understandable, and I cannot help wishing one of them had stuck.
Court McGee, arguably, should have considered the same. His tenure doesn't start that much later--he was the championship winner on The Ultimate Fighter 11 back in 2010--but his wheelhouse has been the kind of grinding, chipping fights that tend to exasperate and irritate audiences, which is why his thirteen straight years of competition haven't succeeded in making him a fan favorite. Or a ranked fighter. He is, in fact, a perfect 10-10 with the UFC, thanks to his getting completely wrecked by a Jeremiah Wells left hook this past June, the first time he's been knocked completely out in his sixteen-year career. Does that loss mean he absolutely should retire? Nah. Does it mean he should probably have considered it? Boy, I hope so.
It's hard not to look at this as a referendum on which of the two has lost more steps. McGee in his prime would have a very good chance of simply suffocating Brown on the fence, but now he's 38 and his gas tank isn't what it used to be. Brown in his prime would have put McGee through the woodchipper of his clinch attacks every time he entered the pocket, but Brown turned 41 this January and he's just not moving as quickly as he once did. I think McGee's control is the stronger of the two possibilities, and I'm going with COURT MCGEE BY DECISION as a result, but mostly, I just want this fight to not make me sad.
HEAVYWEIGHT: Karl Williams (8-1) vs Chase Sherman (16-11)
Oh, my hated child. This is a rescheduling of a planned fight from April, and despite my fear that any UFC loss could be Chase Sherman's last, I will re-run the commentary I wrote back then. And honestly, if Chase Sherman gets turfed on a copy-and-paste, that'd probably be more fitting than anything I'd write anyhow.
My disappointment is immeasurable and yet utterly perfect. Until one week ago this was a heavyweight clash between Chase Sherman, the closest thing I have to a true spiritual antagonist in life, and Chris Barnett, a 5'9" superheavyweight who does spinning wheel kicks. No one has inspired me to greater depths of artistic despair and passion than Chase Sherman, and I had thought for a full month about just how to truly exemplify my feelings on this madness-inducing matchup. There are Discord logs about my intention to force myself into a dissociative fugue state until I'd created a poetic epic in the style of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea about the true depths of heavyweight and its power to crush dreams.
But the world is more artistic than I am. My writing is unnecessary. Industry is consuming the humanities, the Great Salt Lake is running dry, and our heavyweight dreams died before they could be born. Karl Williams is filling in for Chris Barnett. He doesn't do spinning wheel kicks. He shoots takedowns. There is no glory to be had in this battle. This is not a place of honor. The marlin was eaten long before we got back to port, and we don't even get to keep the skull. Chase Sherman's second UFC tenure will end not in an outstanding display of mixed martial comedy, but in the endless double-leg takedowns of a man who has no mind for mercy.
We could not ask for more. Nothing could be so precise to our cause. Heavyweight is a potter's field, an Omelas paved atop Yuki Nakai's suffering, and we are, one and all, damned by it. We are Chase Sherman, and we are no more. KARL WILLIAMS BY DECISION. The rest is silence.
BANTAMWEIGHT: Cody Stamann (21-5-1) vs Douglas Silva de Andrade (28-5 (1))
I am ride or die for Douglas Silva de Andrade, much to my detriment. When John Lineker left us to go to Singapore and punch people in even more unpleasant ways, Douglas Silva de Andrade was left behind as our replacement violence elemental. He's not as pure--his endless punchings are adulterated with takedowns and he dares to do this offensive thing known as 'blocking'--but he's a human wrecking ball who swings from the hip and crushes people with spinning backfists, and even if the dreams of a ranking seem deeply unlikely for him at this point in his career, he's still a tough motherfucker. Cody Stamann, by contrast, is Present. He's Fine. He is a factory-made, shelf-stable wrestle-boxer so deeply rooted in prototype that he is in 2023 still going by "The Spartan," one of the handful of nicknames you get out of the gumball machine in your kickboxing class. (The others: "Pitbull," "The Kid," and "Lionheart.") He's reliable, he's solid, and he got crushed by the last three ranked fighters he faced.
And I simply do not want to pick him. DOUGLAS SILVA DE ANDRADE BY DECISION. Realistically, the chances are high that Stamann will outwrestle him. I am choosing not to care.
LIGHTWEIGHT: Natan Levy (8-1) vs Pete Rodriguez (5-1)
Natan "Lethal" Levy is working his way up the ladder. After getting outclassed in his debut by Rafa García, Levy and his uncanny ability to punch so goddamn hard he somehow knocks himself over have gone on a two-fight winning streak, but both wins have come against fighters who, while decent in their own right, have yet to do anything but lose within the UFC's walls. On the plus side, Levy's moving up in the world, because he's fighting someone with a UFC win for the first time! On the minus, That someone is Pete "Dead Game" Rodriguez, the man Dana White paid to personally destroy CM Punk-slayer Mike Jackson as revenge for his truly despicable crime of making one of the UFC's meal ticket projects look stupid. Before that, Rodriguez was just the first of many deeply unfortunate victims for the up-and-coming Jack Della Maddalena.
This is a more interesting fight than it's getting credit for. Both men are tough as hell, both like to swing for the fences, and both have more than enough power to severely hurt one another given a chance. I think NATAN LEVY BY TKO is slightly more likely, given Rodriguez and his tendency to brawl his way into getting hit, but his sparking Levy is by no means out of the question.
WOMEN'S FLYWEIGHT: Ji Yeon Kim (9-6-2) vs Mandy Böhm (7-2)
It's rerun time again! This was actually supposed to happen all the way back in February at the Derrick Lewis vs Sergei Spivac card, which was, itself, a rescheduled fight, but Böhm fell ill and things had to get pushed. So here's a hit from the Valentine's Day vault.
Poor, poor Ji Yeon Kim. Kim was on the wrong side of a very close decision against Joselyne Edwards in her last fight and got out-and-out screwed against Priscila Cachoeira right before that. In an adjacent reality, 2022 was Kim's best year in the UFC and a showpiece for her striking-focused attacks; in this one, she's on a four-fight losing streak and almost certainly facing a pink slip if she loses here. Mandy Böhm, too, has had a deeply unfortunate time in the states. She left Germany as one of its best female fighters, became a champion up in Canada's TKO and slid down to the UFC as a late replacement only to have her replacement bout and her following two reschedulings of said bout cancelled, and once she finally got some god damned fights, she was immediately overwhelmed by KSW champion Ariane Lipski and Contender Series winner Victoria Leonardo. Böhm's just visibly had difficulty adjusting to UFC-level competition; her all-around attack gets her outgrappled by stronger wrestlers and outstruck by better strikers.
Ji Yeon Kim is, definitively, a better striker. Böhm could smother her with clinch attacks, but Kim's offensive output is more than enough to stifle her. Ji Yeon Kim by decision.
WELTERWEIGHT: Gabe Green (11-4) vs Bryan Battle (8-2)
Here, we find ourselves visiting one of the worst circles of hell in the UFC: The great and terrible ashpit of "we don't know what to do with you." "Gifted" Gabe Green was brought on as a sacrificial late replacement lamb back in 2020 only to beat the crap out of Philip Rowe and Yohan Lainesse in his subsequent fights, and his success earned him the honor of getting used as a promotional stepping stone for Ian Machado Garry, who dutifully beat him. Bryan Battle is a more baffling case: He won The Ultimate Fighter 29 back in 2021, and then they made him essentially defend his TUF crown against the guy they thought WOULD have won had he not been injured, and despite winning an upset victory and cementing himself as the UFC's reality show champion, they proceeded to aggressively not give a poo poo about him. He was buried in the prelims and shockingly knocked the poo poo out of Takashi Sato, and in recognition of his efforts he was STILL buried in the exact same spot prelims and fed to wrestler extraordinaire Rinat Fakhretdinov, and that is why he is now, once again, down here in the muck and silt.
I don't know why you run TUF if you're not going to push your winners. If you don't care about the show, stop doing the loving show. BRYAN BATTLE BY DECISION.
WOMEN'S BANTAMWEIGHT: Jessica-Rose Clark (11-8 (1)) vs Tainara Lisboa (5-2)
It's why-is-this-fighter-in-the-UFC time, baby. Jessica Rose-Clark has proven she belongs in the company--she's had a difficult 4-4 run, but that includes beating people like Paige VanZant and the currently-relevant Joselyne Edwards--but the UFC stopped trying to really promote her as a prospect after all the other actual prospects kept beating her. She spent her 2022 repeatedly losing to first-round armbars, one of which took 40 seconds and sent her to the hospital, so it's not the best position to be coming back from. And the UFC is, arguably, trying to give her a gentle comeback. Tainara "Thai Panter" Lisboa is making her UFC debut here and, respectfully, her presence is one of those regular reminders that the world of women's mixed martial arts is still a bit nascent. Tainara Lisboa, to be clear, is indisputably a real fighter. She's been doing Muay Thai for more than a decade--there's real grainy video of Valentina Shevchenko beating her up, but Lisboa does at one point punt her with a headkick right as Valentina is doing an inexplicable spinning attack, which is very funny now--and she's won kickboxing and grappling championships in Brazil. But she's also entering the UFC having never beaten a successful fighter. She has five victories: Three of them were over debuting rookies, and then her two most recent fights were against people who were 0-1 and 1-4, all carried out on cards like WOMAN'S FIGHT and DOG TOWER FIGHT 3.
It's one thing to bring regional talent with proven track records into the UFC. Hell, as much as I hate the Contender Series, it is, at least, a way to test fighters and see how good they are. Bringing in someone based on their submission victory over 1-4 Mr. Cage veteran Conceição "Honda" Oliveira is admitting you don't really know or particularly care how good a new fighter is and you're just rolling the dice to see if something randomly works.
Which is, unfortunately, the UFC. JESSICA ROSE-CLARK BY DECISION. Lisboa hasn't had to defend real takedowns in years and this is a bad way to start.
Fights are beginning as we speak.
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May 13, 2023 17:19
