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Which of June's main events are you most looking forward t--hold on, I've just be This poll is closed. |
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2 | 14.29% | |
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2 | 14.29% | |
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3 | 21.43% | |
| I mean, Bhullar vs Malykhin hasn't technically been cancelled yet |
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7 | 50.00% |
| Total: | 14 votes | ||
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Do you desperately want to see Jailton Almeida again? Head back to May here. We have made it to June, the gateway to the second half of the year. After a fairly gentle May we're in for a considerably more packed month, albeit not one that's an awful lot better. The UFC is back to four events! But they include Marvin Vettori vs Jared Cannonier and Amanda Nunes vs Irene Aldana. Yoel Romero is back for Bellator! But you have to watch Corey Anderson vs Phil Davis first. The Professional Fighters League is back to resume their season! Half of said season has been suspended for failing drug tests. Strap in, it's gonna be long and weird and I don't know how much of it you'll remember by July. This month's title courtesy of CommonShore. If this is your first time here you should stop and say hi so we know it's not just the same couple dozen of us cussing each other out all the time, but you may want to start with The General Q&A Thread for the basic gist of mixed martial arts. Yes, I'm still doing the new one. NEW RULE AS OF MAY BUT I'M LEAVING IT UP HERE FOR ANOTHER MONTH: After communal discussion, no more clips of slap fights in the MMA thread. Discussion is fine when it touches base with MMA, as it unfortunately often does, but it turns out a lot of folks use this place as a bastion to escape it elsewhere, and we're going to collectively respect that. DO YALL WANT A BOXC has started a fantastically-written thread for the unrestricted discussion of slap fighting and all the other terrible fringes of combat sports, and you can go check it out here. It's also going to live in the thread rolodex from here on out. If you want to talk about MMA or combat sports events that aren't included in this breakdown: Please do. In a world of Road FC and Rizin events that don't actually air in America and the WBC threatening to rank Jake Paul, there's space for everything. And if there's an event you want to make a GDT for, go right ahead, just make sure to link it here so everyone sees it and basks in the joy of violence. THIS MONTH'S PUNCHSPORTS EVENTS 
IS THERE ANY NEWS Unfortunately, we're starting out with a pair of deaths, one complicated and one just tragic.  FELIPE COLARES - 3/31/1994 - 5/1/2023 Felipe "Cabocăo" Colares was a fairly well-regarded featherweight prospect when he signed with the UFC back in 2019--an undefeated submission artist who already held a Jungle Fight championship in his native Brazil. He knew at a young age that he wanted to be a martial artist; he was a judo and taekwondo practitioner as a child and was a cross-trained mixed martial artist before he'd even graduated from school, and his professional career started almost immediately afterward. His time in the UFC was troubled--he bounced between 145 and 135 pounds looking for a place his body felt at home, his undefeated record was spoiled in his debut, and he ultimately went just 2-4 in the company before being released in mid-2022--but he was young, and had a lot of talent, and his 2023 had gotten off to a remarkably start, as he first went viral for choking out a mugger on the street and then choked out the much more professional French champion Alioune Nahaye in his first post-UFC bout. His return seemed inevitable. And then, because the world is a random, terrifying place, he stepped off a curb in Rio de Janeiro to walk home after a long day of training and was promptly run over by a bus and died before he could make it to a hospital. Life is arbitrary and I hope you told someone you loved them today. Felipe Colares moves on from the mortal plane at the terribly young age of 29, leaving behind a wife and a son.  JIM BROWN - 2/17/1936 - 5/18/2023 I'm aware, intellectually, that Jim Brown is considered one of the greatest football players of all time. I'm not going to even remotely begin talking about it, because I am not even remotely qualified to do it. My entire awareness of football begins and ends at NFL Blitz and some shady memories of a childhood where the San Francisco 49ers were good. Jim Brown, for a number of fans, was an integral part of their first taste of combat sports. The UFC picked Jim Brown as their color commentator for their first six shows--this was presumably because of Brown's continuing popularity as an actor and his combat sports history as a boxing commentator, but in modern recollections, early UFC brass didn't really elucidate on the decisionmaking further than, quote, "We thought it would be cool." Brown clearly had very little idea what was actually happening in the nascent sport, but he had a baffled enthusiasm that presaged Mike Goldberg's eventual rise to power, and his confusion made him an oddly appropriate cipher for an audience that, at the time, had no idea what they were watching. And then there's the rest of his life. Talking about Jim Brown honestly means threading a needle, and most of the time, it's easier to just not bother. The simplest, easiest way to explain Jim Brown's genuinely incredible contributions to the American Civil Rights movement, the struggles of black athletes and the struggles of black Americans period is pointing out that the FBI had a mile-long file dedicated specifically to watching Jim Brown and finding ways to discredit the work he did advancing the causes of his people. And the simplest, easiest way to explain why talking about Jim Brown is difficult is pointing out that he was a self-admitted womanbeater with a score of cases of domestic abuse, assault and even rape under his belt, and of all the things he made peace with and improved over his life that, somehow, never really became one of them--not long after his time with the UFC ended, during his fifth or sixth arrest, he blamed his wife's period for his smashing her car with a shovel and threatening to murder her. Mixed martial arts wouldn't be the same without him. Football would not be the same without him. The country, itself, would not be the same without him. And we owe it to all of them--and his victims--to be honest about the good and bad alike in the man. He passed peacefully at home, in his bed, with his family. He was 87. And now, the news.  It turns out the company's 'no, The TKO Group is just a temporary name while we think of a better one' line was, in fact, a lie. The soulless corporate megaentity that combines the UFC and WWE announced that it will be officially known as The TKO Group. Both companies will continue their current branding, so this will exist solely as a holding company and a stock ticker. Layoffs are expected in July. Thanks, capitalism.  The Professional Fighters League has officially won the Francis Ngannou sweepstakes. (As it turns out: Bellator was very professional and ultimately didn't make him an offer given their current financial situation, ONE was extremely weird and was Chatri mostly telling him how every person in Asia was a ONE viewer, and BKFC said they rejected his offer for costing too much when in reality they never actually talked to him.) Ngannou got essentially everything he wanted: Multi-million dollar paydays, a guaranteed multi-million dollar payday for anyone who fights him, the right to pursue boxing matches, a seat on the board, and a talent expansion in Africa. Ngannou isn't even expected to fight for PFL until next year, as he's apparently pursuing a boxing fight for this Fall.  Which was great, because PFL desperately needed some good news after a giant loving swath of their 2023 competitors tested positive for PEDs.
 Fortunately, they had one last bit of positive news. The UFC tried to sign French-Cameroonian kickboxing world champion turned mixed martial artist Cédric Doumbé last year, but the matchmaking ultimately fell through thanks to French regulations regarding experience--at 2-0, it would have been illegal (in France) for Doumbé to fight the 6-1 fighter the UFC booked him against. They rescinded his contract and attempted to rein him back in this year, only to discover PFL was also bidding for the international star, and unlike the UFC, they weren't offering an insultingly low entry-level contract. Cédric Doumbé will have his first PFL fight at PFL 6 this month.  As a sign of their dedication to making sure no one can notice when they do genuinely cool things, Bellator announced Bellator x Rizin 2, the sequel to December's very successful cross-promotional event, at like two in the morning so no one in their core American audience but crazy MMA night owls would notice. Two titles will be settled between the companies, with Bellator's Juan Archuleta facing Rizin's Kai Asakura to fill the vacant Rizin bantamweight throne and kind-of sort-of Bellator's Kyoji Horiguchi facing Rizin's Makoto Shinryu to determine the first-ever Bellator Flyweight Champion.  Oh, and former UFC (interim) title contender Kevin Lee is back in the company. Because the UFC is not yet done trying to make him feel bad for testing free agency, he's making his return against the 21-2 Rinat Fakhretdinov. Welcome back, Kevin! MONTHLY RETIREMENT CORNER  Efrain "Hecho en México" Escudero was one of the UFC's first attempts at courting the Latin-American market, and boy, he almost got there. Escudero was an undefeated veteran of the Arizona fight scene when the UFC picked him out for The Ultimate Fighter 8, the season responsible for loosing Ryan Bader upon an unsuspecting and unprepared world, and the UFC was more than slightly surprised when he beat Dana White's favorites Junie Browning and Phillipe Nover to win the tournament, the season, and the contract. He was well-rounded, fun, and extremely tough. And within two years, he was gone. Efrain Escudero is not, technically, the first TUF winner to get canned by the UFC--that honor goes to Travis Lutter--but he is the first young, ground-built, we-have-plans-for-you winner. Two losses and a three-pound weight miss were just too much for the UFC to overlook, apparently. Efrain would wind up fighting across Bellator, the Professional Fighters League, and even the revival of Vale Tudo Japan, but the story of his career, for better or worse, was his back-and-forth with the UFC. He's one of the few fighters to have three separate, distinct stints with a company that's generally more than happy to stop picking up the phone after they release someone. Unfortunately, they weren't enormously successful ones. After his three stints Escudero was still only 5-7 in the UFC. And it's easy to look at that and scoff, but when you look at some of the competition he lost to--Evan Dunham, Kevin Lee, Charles goddamn Oliveira--that he hung in there at all is impressive, and that he made it out of a 48-fight career with just two stoppage losses and NO knockout losses while competing at such a high level of competition for a decade and a half is outright bonkers. He never made it to the top, but he was a permanent fixture at the door, and honestly, good on him. It's remarkably difficult to hold onto. He leaves competition with a record of 32-16. WHERE ELSE CAN I TALK TO LIKE-MINDED PEOPLE ABOUT VIOLENCE? Any of the following hangouts:
DO WE HAVE OTHER COMMUNAL THREADS? So many.
WHERE ELSE DOES FIGHT CHAT EXIST? Our community output has grown enough that we've got a few other places things get posted:
 Disclaimer: These are unofficial offsites, somethingawful's rules and liability do not extend to them, and complaining about discord stuff is still offsite drama posting
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WHAT HAPPENED IN MAY It was a fairly quiet month, frankly. Invicta FC 53: DeCoursey vs Dos Santos got us started on May 3rd, and as with most Invicta events, it was short and fun. Ky Bennett knocked out Kendal Holowell, Elisandra Ferreira and Monique Adriane both moved themselves into atomweight contention, Elise Pone continued her trademark creepy staring at people betwen rounds en route to beating Liana Pirosin, Jéssica Delboni made her successful move to strawweight by defeating Danielle Taylor, and Olga Rubin scored an extremely neat buggy choke submission over Claire Guthrie. The main event saw a big atomweight shakeup, as defending champion Jillian DeCoursey got outgrappled and outworked by underdog Rayanne dos Santos, who now holds one of the world's two canonical atomweight championships. A long combat sports weekend kicked off with ONE Fight Night 10: Johnson vs Moraes 3 on May 5th, and it was, at long last, one of the better shows of their run on Amazon Prime. Ok Rae Yoon and Kairat Akhmetov won somewhat forgettable preliminary bouts, and the main card was as all-over-the-place as it was entertaining. Jackie Buntan knocked out Diandra Martin in Muay Thai, Tye Ruotolo took a grappling decision over Reinier de Ridder, Aung La Nsang choked out Fan Rong, Sage Northcutt returned after a four-year layoff and heel hooked Ahmed Mujtaba, Zebaztian Kadestam upset Robert Soldić with a second-round TKO, and Stamp Fairtex dropped Alyse Anderson with a murderous kick to the body. The card was headlined by three flyweight championships, and each was a banger. Mikey Musumeci retained his grappling championship by choking out Osamah Almarwai, Rodtang kept his Muay Thai championship with an elbow knockout over Edgar Tabares, and Demetious "Mighty Mouse" Johnson put an end to his mixed martial arts rivalry with Adriano Moraes, shutting him down over five rounds and winning a decision and their trilogy. Rizin took the night shift with Rizin 42, and boy, I miss being able to stay up for JMMA every time it was on. Rizin made up for its last card being light by stuffing this one with talent: Sota Kimura and YA-MAN won kickboxing matches against Yasuhiro Kido and Kota Miura, Ramazan Temirov and Viktor Kolesnik became hated foreigners by knocking out Yuta Hamamoto and Atsushi Kishimoto, Takeji Yokoyama continued his prospect rise by submitting Takuya Yamamoto, Erson Yamamoto outwrestled Yuki Ito, Ulka Sasaki managed to get past Boyd Allen, Kazumasa Majima choked Takahiro Ashida unconscious, and UFC vet John Dodson outworked Tatsuki Saomoto for a decision. The main card began with a truly baffling kickboxing match, as the mostly-retired, 41 year-old legend Buakaw Banchamek came back to fight top ten featherweight Rukiya Anpo, for some reason; it wound up a draw so it didn't really matter anyway. Roberto de Souza fought one of JMMA's deeply irritating we're-afraid-the-champion-might-lose non-title bouts against Spike Carlyle, which was silly, because it was a fantastic fight and Satoshi won. The co-main and main events were connected: Juan Archuleta scored a decision against Naoki Inoue and Kai Asakura stopped Yuki Motoya, setting up a showdown later this year where Archuleta and Asakura will fight for the vacant bantamweight championship. But the weekend's highlight was UFC 288: Sterling vs Cejudo, and it was, in fact, a pretty good time. On your early prelims, Claudio Ribeiro took out Joseph Holmes with his giant lunchbox punches, Ikram Aliskerov made a successful debut by knocking Phil Hawes cold, and Parker Porter notched his first stoppage in the UFC by TKOing Braxton Smith. On your regular-flavor prelims: Virna Jandiroba scored an upset victory by outgrappling Marina Rodriguez, Kalinn "Khaos" Williams notched an exceedingly tight decision over late replacement Rolando Bedoya, Kennedy Nzeschukwu choked out Devin Clark, and Matt Frevola ended the Drew Dober hype train by knocking him out in the first round. Your main card was considerably weirder. Charles Jourdain defeated an inexplicably returning Kron Gracie who, after almost four years away, inexplicably looked even worse than when he left. Movsar Evloev defeated last-second replacement Diego Lopes, who put up a hell of a fight against one of the ten best featherweights in the company. Yan Xiaonan loving obliterated Jéssica Andrade, stopping her in just two and a half minutes. Belal Muhammad beat Gilbert Burns in a #1 contendership match at welterweight that was set up in less than a month while both men were visibly injured, because our sport is silly. And in the main event, Aljamain Sterling retained his bantamweight championship with a split decision grapple-victory over Henry Cejudo, ensuring people will continue to never give him the credit he deserves. Bellator 296: Mousasi vs Edwards came next week on May 12th, and, look: It's a Bellator Paris card. Not only do I not have the will within me to tell you about all of the local fighters on the prelims you've never heard of and may never again, how would any of us know if I was telling the truth? are you going to google Fabacary Diatta to verify that I'm not messing with you when I tell you he beat Keir Harvie? You're not. And why should you? We're lal happier this way. But Denise Kielholtz beat Paula Cristina, and Thibault Gouti knocked out Kane Mousah, and Douglas Lima beat Costello Van Steenis, and Brent Primus ended the almost seven-year undefeated streak of Mansour Barnaoui. But above and most important of all: Gegard Mousasi performed disappointingly, surprising no one, and lost the main event to Fabian Edwards, meaning the Edwards family is now in pole position to hold championships in the UFC and Bellator at once. Don't gently caress it up, Fabian. Our penultimate event for the month was UFC on ABC: Rozenstruik vs Almeida the next day. Despite the odd choice of promotion, it was ultimately a fun card. Tainara Lisboa choked Jessica-Rose Clark out of the company, Bryan Battle knocked out Gabe Green, Ji-yeon Kim lost yet another screwjob decision after an absolute comedy of errors against Mandy Böhm, Douglas Silva de Andrade outworked Cody Stamann, which his camp has vowed to appeal, Karl Williams removed my terrible son Chase Sherman from the roster, and Matt Brown knocked Court McGree out cold in one round. On your main card, Alex Morono choked out Tim Means, Carlos Ulberg quickly disposed of Ihor Potieria, favored son Ian Machado Garry punched his ticket to the rankings by stopping Daniel Rodriguez, Johnny Walker scored a dominant victory over Anthony Smith, and Jailton Almeida continued humiliating the heavyweight division by fairly easily choking out Jairzinho Rozenstruik. And May concluded early with UFC Fight Night: Dern vs Hill on May 20th. On the undercard, Themba Gorimbo outwrestled Takashi Sato, Natália Silva continued her rise up the ranks by destroying Victoria Leonardo, Chase Hooper turned in a punch-heavy performance against Nick Fiore, Rodrigo Nascimento squeaked by Ilir Latifi, Gilbert Urbina stopped Orion Cosce, Karolina Kowalkiewicz dominated Vanessa Demopoulos, and Viacheslav Borschchev stopped mononymic superstar Maheshate. On your main card, Carlos Diego Ferreira turned Michael Johnson's lights out, Joaquin Buckley got a headkick stoppage over André Fialho, Lupita Godinez won a decision despite infuriating me by continuing to refuse to wrestle against Emily Ducote, and Anthony Hernandez overcame an early scare to elbow Edmen Shahbazyan into dust. The main event saw Mackenzie Dern, having finally begun to realize her potential, drop one round to Angela Hill yet still win the fight 49-43, lifting multiple 10-8 rounds in an incredibly one-sided rout. WHAT'S COMING IN JUNE PFL's back for the month, so the schedule's a bit dense. June 3rd brings us UFC on ESPN: Kara-France vs Albazi. That's right: It's a flyweight main event. The UFC WANTED middleweights, but hey, what can you do. Philipe Lins and Maxim Grishin have their oft-rescheduled showdown, Elise Reed tries to end the Jinh Yu Frey story, Andrei Arlovski is on the undercard against Don'Tale Mayes and Abubakar Nurmagomedov attempts to sneak into the rankings against Elizeu Zaleski. The main card is an all-lower-weights affair: Jamie Mullarkey vs Guram Kutateladze, Karine Silva vs Invicta champ Ketlen Souza, Tim Elliott vs Victor Altamirano, Jim Miller vs Jared Gordon, Alex Caceres vs Daniel Pineda, and up in the main, Kai Kara-France defends his next-to-the-top contendership against Amir Albazi. The Professional Fighters League returns to their now exceedingly-torpedoed season with PFL 4: Lougnane vs Pinedo on June 8th. Light-heavyweights and featherweights rule the night, with one women's featherweight makeup between Abigail Montes and Brandy Hester. At 145 you've got Alexei Pergande vs Akeem Bashir, Gabriel Braga vs Marlon Moraes, Chris Wade vs Ryoji Kudo, Bubba Jenkins vs Sung Bin Jo, Movlid Khaybulaev and your main event of Brendan Loughnane vs Jesus Pinedo. At 205, Andre Sanchez vs Taylor Johnson, Impa Kasanganay vs Tim Caron, Josh Silveira vs Delan Monte, Marthin Hamlet vs Sam Kei, and Dan Spohn vs Ty Flores. ONE Fight Night 11: Eersel vs Menshikov comes to us on June 10th. As with much of ONE it's a big weird pastiche of martial arts: Rade Opačić and Guto Inocente will fight in regular kickboxing, as well Nieky Holzen and Arian Sadiković, there are five MMA bouts, including Hu Yong vs Woo Sung Hoon, Artem Belakh vs Kwon Won Il, Mansur Malachiev vs Jeremy Miado, Superbon Singha Mawynn vs Tayfun Özcan and Ilya Freymanov vs Shinechagtga Zoltsetseg, there's one singular, lonely submission grappling championship defense as Kade Ruotolo tries to keep his belt out of Tommy Langaker's clutches, and your two Muay Thai fights see Matine Michieletto vs Amber Kitchen and lightweight champion Regian Eersel vs Dmitry Menshikov. Later that day we get our pay-per-view for the month, and it's, uh, a main event: UFC 289: Nunes vs Aldana. Your prelims are a bit all over the place: Miranda Maverick vs Jasmine Jasudavicius, Diana Belbiţă vs Maria Oliveira, Kyle Nelson vs Blake Bilder, Aiemann Zahabi vs Aoriqileng, Hakeem Dawodu vs Lucas Almeida, Nassourdine Imavov vs Chris Curtis, Khalil Rountree Jr. vs Chris Daukaus, and Matt Schnell vs David Dvořák. The main card isn't much less weird. Marc-André Barriault takes on Eryk Anders, Dan Ige faces Nate Landwehr, Mike Malott fights Adam Fugitt, Charles Oliveira faces Beneil Dariush, and Amanda Nunes defends her Women's Bantamweight championship against Irene Aldana. I guess. PFL 5! June 16th! It's heavyweight and women's featherweight, two of the most real divisions on the planet! The women's featherweights get Olena Kolesnyk vs Yoko Higashi, Julia Budd vs Martina Jindrová, Marina Mokhnatkina vs Evelyn Martins, Aspen Ladd vs Karolina Sobek and Larissa Pacheco vs Amber Leibrock. Up at heavyweight you've got Isaiah Pinson vs Denzel Freeman, Patrick Brady vs Jordan Heiderman, Danilo Marques vs Marcelo Nunes, Denis Goltsov vs Yorgan De Castro, Renan Ferreira vs Matheus Scheffel, and Ante Delija vs Maurice Greene. Oh, and a lightweight contest between Biaggio Ali Walsh and Travell Miller. Bellator takes its single swing for the month that same day with Bellator 297: Nemkov vs Romero. It's--like, look, there are fourteen prelims as of now. Fourteen goddamn prelims. Bellator, I am begging you to stop doing this. It doesn't help you nor does it make you money. Cody Law's fighting. Lenadro Higo's fighting. Austin Vanderford is there, I guess. The full Bellator preliminary experience is like going through the stargate sequence in 2001. But don't worry, the main card isn't any less silly. Daniel James fights a heavyweight bout against Gökhan Saricam, which should be great, and then Corey Anderson faces Phil Davis in what could be incredible or could be one of the worst fights of all time, Sergio Pettis comes back from a year and a half on the shelf to defend his bantamweight championship against a Patrício Pitbull who starved himself down to 135 pounds, and in your main event, Vadim Nemkov, the best light-heavyweight in the world outside of the UFC, defends his championship against Yoel Romero, who earned his shot by beating, uh, Melvin Manhoef. June 17th gets us UFC on ESPN: Vettori vs Cannonier, which is guaranteed to be a card on which people have fights for money. Pat Sabatini! He's fighting Lucas Almeida. Can I interest you in a Raoni Barcelos vs a Miles Johns? Because that should rule. Or Nicolas Dalby vs Muslim Salikhov! Or, poo poo, Arman Tsarukyan and Joaquim Silva! Yeah? Are you excited now? Well then get ready for five main event rounds of Marvin Vettori vs Jared Cannonier, coming at you f--yeah, no, it's fine, I would leave too if I could. It's fine. No judgment. I'm breaking my rule of not talking about One Friday Fights to note ONE Friday Fights 22 on June 23rd. It's still Muay Thai, it's still a bunch of stuff I don't know with no established rankings, and it's still going to be a ton of fun that is forgotten about within a day because that is the nature of Muay Thai in the sport right now, but I point it out because, breaking their all-Muay Thai streak for Friday fights, ONE has scheduled the heavyweight championship unification match between Arjan Bhullar and Anatoly Malykhin for the fourth time. Will it happen this time? Who the hell knows. The summer phase of the PFL season ends later that day with PFL 6: Aubin-Mercier vs Romero. We're wrapping the month up with welterweights and lightweights. The former gets Jarrah Al-Silawi vs Cédric Doumbé, Carlos Leal vs Dilano Taylor, Magomed Umalatov vs Nayib López, Magomed Magomedkerimov vs David Zawada, and Sadibou Sy vs Shane Mitchell. Lightweight will bring us Abdullah Al-Qahtani vs Lamar Brown, Alex Martinez vs Bruno Miranda, Natan Schulte vs Raush Manfio, Clay Collard vs Stevie Ray, Shane Burgos vs Yamato Nishikawa, and in your main event, Olivier Aubin-Mercier vs Anthony Romero. And the month ends back in the UFC with UFC on ABC: Emmett vs Topuria, and I know I have a lot of poo poo to say about bad cards and inexplicable matchmaking, so let me rejoice in being able to say this card, from top to bottom, loving rules. Tatsuro Taira vs Kleydson Rorigues will rule, Tabatha Ricci vs Gillian Robertson will rule, David Onama vs Gabriel Santos will rule, Punahele Soriano vs Sedriques Dumas will rule, Mateusz Rębecki vs Loik Radzhabov will rule, Brendan Allen vs Bruno Silva will rule. Neil Magny vs Philip Rowe! Rules. Amanda Ribas vs Maycee Barber should be fun! Austen Lane vs Justin Tafa will probably be short! And your main event, in which Josh Emmett faces Ilia Topuria, should absolutely loving rule.
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CURRENT UFC CHAMPIONS Heavyweight Champion, 265 lbs   Jon Jones - 27-1 (1), 0 DefensesVery few things in combat sports reach the crossroads of awe-inspiring and unfathomably frustrating as Jon Jones. In 2020, Jon Jones notched the third defense of his second light-heavyweight championship reign after an exceedingly contentious decision against Dominick Reyes, only to abdicate the title because the UFC wasn't paying him enough, and he was bored of 205 pounds and wanted to move up to heavyweight like he'd been planning to for nearly a decade, and he needed more time to cement his place as not just one of the sport's greatest pound-for-pound fighters, but one of its biggest pound-for-pound pains in the rear end. On September 23, 2021, Jon Jones was inducted into the UFC Hall of Fame; on September 24, 2021, he was arrested (for the fifth time!) after his daughter called the police on him for beating her mother, during which he antagonized the police and, inexplicably, headbutted a police car. Because this is Jon Jones, of course, the primary charges were dropped, he paid $750 for the hood of the police cruiser, and got a stern warning to stay out of trouble, young man, because there is a money-powered reality-distorting field around Jon Jones whereby nothing matters. After a year of rumors, and after the unconscionable firing of heavyweight champion Francis Ngannou, the UFC gleefully announced Jon Jones vs Ciryl Gane to fill the vacant heavyweight throne. Did it matter to the matchmaking that there were more deserving candidates? Of course not, because it's Jon Jones: He deserves the spot for his earlier success. Did it matter to his public appearances that when last we saw him he was arrested for beating his fiancee? Of course not, because it's Jon Jones: He was, if anything, more up his own rear end with self-righteousness than ever before. Did it matter to the fight that he hadn't competed in more than three years and looked terrible at the time? Of course not, because it's Jon loving Jones. Ciryl Gane looked too nervous to use footwork let alone throw anything, and he should have been, as Jones effortlessly threw him to the canvas and choked him out in two minutes. The longest-running, most dominant and yet most persistently annoying show in mixed martial arts is back. Jon Jones is your heavyweight champion, and we are all damned. He's theoretically fighting Stipe Miocic next, but honestly, who the hell knows. Light-Heavyweight Champion, 205 lbs  Jamahal Hill - 12-1 (1), 0 DefensesThe dread prophecy has been fulfilled: After five years Dana White's Contender Series has produced a UFC champion, and all it took was the complete and utter collapse of a division. After half of the light-heavyweight top ten retired or left the UFC in the span of just two years the division scrambled for a new frontrunner, and after Jan Błachowicz, Glover Teixeira and Jiří Procházka all won and lost the title in the space of just four fights and a draw between Błachowicz and Magomed Ankalaev failed to fill the throne, the division was left in dire straits, with half of the top ten ruled out through loss, draw or injury. So the UFC pulled the trigger, went past their own higher-ranked Anthony Smith, and booked #2 Glover Teixeira vs #7 Jamahal Hill for the vacant belt. It is, in many ways, Dana White's dream: Hill won his way to the UFC through the Contender Series in 2019, just a year and a half after his professional debut, he's a big, tall, American striker who doggedly pursues knockouts and he's a staunch company man to the point of getting in hot water on social media for brave stances like "my boss slapping his wife is fine" and "Andrew Tate is good, actually." A lot of people, myself included, picked Glover to submit Hill--the only blemish on his record (not counting the No Contest one of his victories was swapped for because he dared to smoke the devil weed) is a grotesque submission loss against Paul Craig and just one fight prior he'd struggled visibly with the grappling of Thiago Santos--but the Jamahal Hill who showed up against Glover Teixeira was massively improved, stuffing 15 of 17 takedown attempts and giving up only three and a half minutes of ground control across five rounds against one of the most feared top games in the sport. He wobbled but wasn't able to finish Glover, but he did batter and control him, and however many questions there are about how much he deserved the title shot itself, there are no questions about how much he deserved his 50-44 shutout victory. What happens from here, who knows. Jiří wants to fight for the title again this Spring but doctors aren't sure if he'll be ready, Jan and Ankalaev are in a tenuous position and Aleksandar Rakić is still injured. For the moment, Dana has his personal champion. Middleweight Champion, 185 lbs   Israel Adesanya - 24-2, 0 DefensesThe Last Stylebender has finally exorcised the ghosts of his past. Combat sports fans who considered themselves In The Know had long heralded Adesanya as a potential crossover superstar based on his extremely successful kickboxing career, which had seen him win multiple championships and lose only by decision, and it was an open secret that the UFC was already taking a good look at him as he prepared to leave his home sport behind and transition entirely into mixed martial arts--so it was a bit of a shock when, instead of his last kickboxing match being a victory lap, he was knocked out cold by one of the very few men to eer beat him, Alex Pereira. Izzy kept to his word, left kickboxing, joined the UFC and became a superstar nearly overnight, and a year after his UFC debut he was already the middleweight champion of the world. A misguided trip to the light-heavyweight division to chase the double-champ dream proved to be a step too far, but the only blemish on his record came from a separate weight class, and after three more title defenses he was still perfect at middleweight and, easily, the second-best middleweight champion of all time. And then the UFC brought in this one guy named Alex Pereira. The UFC desperately wanted an all-striking showdown between the two rivals, and after the easiest path to the title since Brock Lesnar, they got it, and on November 12, 2022, Alex Pereira etched his place in the history books by stopping Adesanya once again, this time taking his MMA championship home with him in the process. This being the UFC an instant rematch was, of course, inevitable, and the world looked on with considerably more worry this time--but the Israel Adesanya who showed up at UFC 287 on April 8, 2023 was a smarter, better fighter who'd learned from his mistakes. After baiting Pereira into throwing caution to the wind, Izzy flatlined him with a counterpunch in just two rounds. There will be no MMA rubber match--the UFC doesn't want it, Izzy doesn't want it, and Pereira is done with middleweight altogether. So Israel Adesanya is back on his throne, even if he has to start his defense counter from 0 again. His war of words with Dricus du Plessis over who is and is not truly African (sigh) bore fruit, as du Plessis inadvertently talked himself into a title eliminator against Robert Whittaker this July, with the winner facing Adesanya at the end of the year. Welterweight Champion, 170 lbs   Leon Edwards - 21-3 (1), 1 DefensesIt took half a decade to get the world to notice, but everyone sees Leon Edwards now. "Rocky" came from the kind of circumstances sports movies are made of--a poor kid from Jamaica who moved to England, lost his father to gang violence, nearly lost himself to it as a teenager and found a healthy outlet for his anger in mixed martial arts. Edwards made his debut in 2011 as a prime example of the modern generation of fighter, cross-trained from the beginning in every discipline, and in just three years he was the welterweight champion of Britain and off to the UFC. Entering 2016, Leon had suffered the first true loss of his career--he was 10-3, but one of those losses was a DQ for an illegal blow and the other a coinflip decision that could easily have gone either way--at the hands of the newly-crowned Ultimate Fighter 21 winner, Kamaru Usman, making his debut as an official UFC competitor. It took ten fights without a loss for Leon to get his rematch. The UFC seemed especially resistant to his title contendership, pushing him down in favor of the ostensibly more marketable UK star in Darren Till and booking him against numerous other contenders and gatekeepers while repeatedly elevating less deserving fighters to the championship. He wouldn't have gotten it at all, in fact, had Jorge Masvidal not gotten arrested. On August 20, the UFC acquiesced and granted the clear #1 contender his shot at the championship, and at revenge against Kamaru Usman--and after getting dominated for three and a half out of five rounds, with the commentators openly opining on the likelihood that he had given up, with just fifty-six seconds left in the fight, Edwards uncorked a headkick that shocked the world and knocked Kamaru Usman out for the first time in his career. The rubber match was inevitable, and once again, Edwards opened as an underdog, and once again, he proved everyone wrong. Instead of a last-minute comeback Leon simply shut Usman down for the majority of the fight, stuffing eleven of his takedown attempts, outstriking him in four out of five rounds and landing an absolutely wild 75% of his strikes in the process. It was an incredible performance against one of the greatest welterweights of all time, marred only by Leon losing a point for fence grabs. The decision was unquestionably his, and now legitimized as the champion of the world, Leon's first move is...getting into a big, public spat with the UFC, because instead of any of the working contenders of the division Dana White is demanding he defend the belt against Colby Covington. Leon says he won't fight Colby, Colby and Dana seem convinced the championship fight is happening this summer with or without Leon, it's a big, lovely mess. Lightweight Champion, 155 lbs   Islam Makhachev - 24-1, 1 DefenseDestiny has come. When Islam Makhachev made his UFC debut in 2015, Khabib Nurmagomedov, considered by most to be the #1 contender and soon to be the best in the world, swore up and down that Makhachev, not him, would be the best lightweight champion of all time. Coming from him, the praise made sense: Khabib and Islam have trained together since they were children growing up and learning to wrestle in Makhachkala. Islam learned under Khabib's father, trained with Khabib's team and even made the pilgrimage to America to join Khabib at the American Kickboxing Academy. And then, two matches into his UFC tenure, Islam got knocked the gently caress out in the first round by the little-known Adriano Martins, who hasn't won a fight in the six years since. Even as Makhachev racked up wins, the memory of his loss and his wrestling-heavy approach to his fights let people cast doubts on him. Sure, he's good--but he lost, so he's not as good as Khabib. Islam Makhachev, as his trainer tells it, never wanted to be Khabib. He loves fighting, but he doesn't love the spectacle or the glory or the attention. So when, after ten straight wins, Makhachev was picked to challenge Charles Oliveira for the vacant title he never truly lost, a lot of folks just weren't quite sure what to think. Sure, he was an incredible wrestler, but Charles Oliveira is a submission wizard, and sure, he's on a ten-fight streak, but he hasn't fought a single person actually IN the top ten, and Oliveira represents a huge, dangerous step up as a man who's been destroying some of the most accomplished lightweights in the sport's history. Analyst opinion was split right down the middle; the fight, as it turned out, was nowhere near that competitive, and the only analyst who was entirely correct was Khabib. Islam demolished the former champion, outstriking him, taking him down at will, controlling him in the grappling, and ultimately dropping him with punches and choking him out in the second round. His first defense was a different story. Islam faced featherweight champion Alexander Volkanovski at UFC 284 on February 12th in a rare best-of-the-best, champion vs champion match, and this time, his team's prediction of domination was thoroughly incorrect: It was a pitched battle that ended with Makhachev visibly exhausted and Volkanovski pounding on his face. Islam took an extremely close decision and the divisions will remain separate, but his aura of invulnerability has been thoroughly punctured. Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs   Alexander Volkanovski - 25-2, 4 DefensesSometimes it takes a lot of work to convince people you're the best. Alexander Volkanovski's rise through mixed martial arts is the kind of thing reserved for the all-time greats of the sport: He lost once, in the fourth fight of his career--at welterweight--and that was nine years ago. He's won twenty-one straight fights since, defeating top talent from around the world before landing in the UFC and proceeding to dominate every fighter placed in his way. There was one, single weight placed around his career's ankle: Max Holloway. Holloway was the UFC's much-lauded and much-marketed featherweight champion while Volkanovski was on his way up, and even as a 20-1 dynamo, he was an underdog against the Hawaiian. Alex beat him--soundly--but because of Holloway's prior dominance, and because the UFC wanted to get the most for its marketing buck, they ordered an instant rematch. Alex won again, but this time it was by a very close split decision, and that left a vocal part of the fanbase even angrier and more certain Max was the real champion. Two years and two fights apiece later, Alex and Max met one last time on July 2, and Volkanovski beat every shade of hell out of Holloway, not just repeatedly wobbling and outstriking him but completely and utterly shutting him out of a fight for the very first time in his career. When the bell rang, there were no questions left: Alexander Volkanovski is the absolute, undisputed best featherweight in the UFC. And now, having more or less destroyed his division, he has his eye on the pound for pound ranks. Volkanovski called his shot at the lightweight title before Charles Oliveira and Islam Makhachev had even fought, and moments after Makhachev was victorious, Volkanovski was in the cage staring him down. At UFC 284 on February 12th, in front of a rabid hometown crowd, Volkanovski gave Islam the fight of his life and was smashing him by the end of the final round--but it wasn't quite enough, and he lost a close, but unanimous, decision. He got the moral victory of going toe to toe with the heavier champion, but it cost him his winning streak. Volk says he was offered a rematch later this year, but he wants to keep his kingdom secure, so at UFC 290 on July 8 he'll face Yair Rodríguez and attempt to reunify his championship. Interim Featherweight Champion   Yair Rodríguez - 15-3 (1), 0 DefensesIt's been a long, strange trip for Yair Rodríguez. "El Pantera" was just 21 when he first appeared on UFC television and barely 22 when he won The Ultimate Fighter: Latin America, making him explicitly the UFC's great hope for breaking into the Mexican market. The reasoning wasn't hard to see: Yair's Taekwondo background gave him a fighting style unlike anyone else in the UFC, one that mixed attacks at odd angles with wild varieties of kicks. When he knocked out Andre Fili with a jumping switch kick, the world abruptly took notice and the UFC started giving him main events. And then, as they do, things fell apart. He took his first UFC loss to Frankie Edgar in 2017 and was fired and quickly rehired shortly thereafter as part of the UFC's attempt at strongarming him into accepting fights, and then he almost lost a fight against Chan-sung Jung only to knock him out with a blind, reverse, upwards elbow in the very last second of the fight, and then he fought Jeremy Stephens twice in two months after an eyepoke ended their first bout in just fifteen seconds, and then he disappeared for two years thanks to a USADA suspension--not for testing positive for drugs, but for insufficiently updating his address in their smartphone app. In November of 2021 Yair took the second loss of his career in a fight against Max Holloway, and, oddly, that loss boosted him higher than his previous win--the world had expected Holloway to blow him out, and instead Yair gave him an incredible fight and very nearly won, proving he'd matured far more than people gave him credit for. And through that bout he got a title eliminator against Brian Ortega, which--ended in one round when Ortega's shoulder popped out while they were grappling. Through yet another freak occurrence, Yair found himself fighting for the interim featherweight title against Josh Emmett, who, himself, was there largely through chance, and Yair battered and submitted him in two rounds to etch his name in the has-an-asterisk side of the history books. He'll try to erase that asterisk on July 8, when he meets Volkanovski to figure out who the real champion is. Bantamweight Champion, 135 lbs  Aljamain Sterling - 23-3, 3 DefensesAljamain Sterling is a first-ballot candidate for the best bantamweight champion in UFC history, and his title reign will, one way or another, be ending very soon and he will immediately be buried by history, and it's a tragedy you can see happening in realtime. In nearly a decade of UFC competition, Sterling has only three losses: Two split decisions that could easily have been draws, and one knockout loss to pre-crisis Marlon Moraes. Aside from that it's been nothing but victory. Aside from Aljamain himself, six men have held the UFC Bantamweight Championship: Aljo has personally defeated four of them. By any measure, his has been a hall of fame career. And he is, even as the literal world champion, completely forgotten thanks to bad matchmaking and things entirely out of his control. He won the championship from Petr Yan, but he won it by disqualification--the first time a championship has ever changed hands thanks to a DQ--and despite soundly beating Yan in a rematch he won only a split decision, thus reinforcing the people who already disliked him. Matters were not helped when his first real contender was TJ Dillashaw, himself coming off a dodgy decision victory, and they were made even worse when Dillashaw came into the fight so badly injured that his shoulder came out of its socket within minutes. With a division laden with potential challengers the audience wanted to see, the UFC, once again, selected None Of The Above: Sterling's next defense would be against Henry Cejudo, returning after three years of retirement to an immediate title shot. Once again, Sterling won clearly, and once again, the judges awarded him only a split decision, prompting much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Sterling's made clear that win or lose, he's leaving the division and moving to 145 after his next title defense--and the UFC is, once again, putting its thumb on the scale and having him face the company's favorite son, Sean O'Malley. Quickly. The UFC wants Sterling on UFC 292 on August 19th, another three-month turnaround, and in response to his concern about having time as a champion to recover and prepare, the UFC has made it publicly clear that if he doesn't do it, despite having literally just had a successful defense, they'll have O'Malley fighting for an interim title. Thanks, Dana. Flyweight Champion, 125 lbs   Brandon Moreno - 21-6-2, 0 DefensesThe war is over. Brandon Moreno has one hell of a career arc in the UFC. He was brought in as part of 2016's The Ultimate Fighter: Tournament of Champions, where he represented Arizona's World Fighting Federation as its flyweight titleholder, only to get eliminated in the first round by Alexandre Pantoja. The UFC kept him on, but cut him two years later despite a 3-2 record after two consecutive losses to future Bellator champ Sergio Pettis and, once again, Alexandre Pantoja. He was back in the UFC just one year later, and just one year after that he was fighting Deiveson Figueiredo, the man the entire world thought was the new unbeatable flyweight king, for the UFC championship. Their feud became the first thing to make the UFC give a poo poo about the flyweight division in years, and as the UFC does, it showed it by re-running it over and over. In December of 2020, Moreno fought Figueiredo to a shocking draw--primarily because Figueiredo was docked a point for groin strikes. An instant rematch was ordered for June of 2021, and this time, a Moreno who'd learned and adjusted to Figueiredo's power and timing outfought him, dropping him with jabs and choking him out in three rounds. The UFC decided to roll the dice again, seeing the fight as insufficiently determinative given their previous bout, and booked the two against each other again in January of 2022, and this time it was Figueiredo who had made the necessary adjustments, dropping Moreno three times en route to a unanimous decision victory. With the series now 1-1-1, the UFC, of course, needed a closing chapter. The fourth fight was originally booked for the summer, but a hand injury forced Figueiredo out and led to an interim title fight between Moreno and top contender Kai Kara-France instead, but destiny would not be denied, as Moreno exploded Kai's liver with a kick, handing him his first knockout loss in a decade. The final chapter, an unprecedented Figueiredo/Moreno 4, was rebooked for January 2023 as a title unification match--and because the gods of violence love jokes, the concluding fight ended on a doctor's stoppage. It SHOULDN'T be controversial, as the stoppage only happened because Moreno punched Figueiredo in the god damned eye so hard it was left swollen completely shut within a round, but Figueiredo's inability to tell he hadn't been poked, the confusion of the commentary team, and a partisan Brazilian crowd so angry Moreno had to be rushed backstage while being pelted with cups and garbage all conspired to make the fight seem somehow invalid. The longest series in UFC history is over, Brandon Moreno stopped the scariest flyweight on the planet twice, and he is, at last, the undisputed champion of the world. And his first order of business is defending his title against the only man who beat him twice, Alexandre Pantoja, at UFC 290 on July 8. Women's Featherweight, 145 lbs   Amanda Nunes - 22-5, 2 DefensesWomen's Bantamweight, 135 lbs  Amanda Nunes - 22-5, 0 DefensesThings are back as they should be. Up until December of 2021, Amanda Nunes was unquestionably the greatest women's mixed martial artist in history. She held and defended titles at both the signature class of Women's Bantamweight and the arguably real class of Women's Featherweight, and with her mixture of vicious power, aggressive grappling and solid conditioning, she defeated every UFC champion in the history of either class and, for good measure, Valentina Shevchenko, the ultra-dominant champion of Women's Flyweight, twice. What's more, she crushed most of them, taking on legends like Ronda Rousey and Cris Cyborg and knocking them dead in under a minute. Which is why it was something of a shock when she was choked out by unheralded journeywoman Julianna Peńa. The abruptness of the ending to her streak, and the shockingly sloppy way she was taken out, left the fanbase both demanding a rematch and openly questioning how much of the loss was due to something being wrong with Nunes, rather than Julianna Peńa doing something right, and opinions flew wildly regarding how close the second bout would be. Seven months and one season of The Ultimate Fighter later they met on July 30, and the answer was: Not even slightly. Amanda Nunes dumpstered Julianna Peńa for five straight rounds, dropping her a half-dozen times and elbowing her face entirely open, and barring one touchy moment with an armbar, Peńa was entirely shut out and lost a wide unanimous decision that included an incredibly rare 50-43 scorecard. After ten months of silence, the UFC announced that the only logical thing to do next...was a second rematch. Unfortunately, Julianna Peńa suffered a back injury and was forced out of the rematch she apparently somehow deserved, so Nunes will now be facing Irene Aldana at this month's UFC 289 on June 10. Women's Flyweight, 125 lbs  Alexa Grasso - 16-3, 0 DefensesEvery once in awhile someone gets to shock the combat sports world, and in 2023, it's Alexa Grasso. The UFC has been high on Grasso since she left Invicta for her company debut back in 2016--she's been one of the most consistently featured fighters in ANY women's division, be it her time at strawweight or her move up to flyweight--but her two bids at the top of the mountain at 115 pounds met with disaster, once in Tatiana Suarez handing her the only stoppage loss of her career and once in Carla Esparza outwrestling her to a decision, and watching her manhandled by 115-pound fighters left the world doubting her 125-pound chances. But thanks to her solid boxing and her ever-improving ground game she ran up a four-fight winning streak, and when the UFC announced that she'd be taking on divisional queen and one of the greatest of all time in Valentina Shevchenko, the collective fan reaction was a unanimous "sure, okay," because Valentina disposing of people was a generally accepted phenomenon and she needed a warm body. The first round was a slight surprise, with Grasso stinging Shevchenko on the feet, but as so often happens, by the fourth round Valentina had taken over the fight, was ahead on every judge's scorecard and looked poised to cruise to her her eighth title defense. And then, she was struck down by the bane of the sport: Spinning poo poo. Backed into the fence, Shevchenko did what she does entirely too often--a spinning back kick--and in the half-second she was turned away Grasso leapt to her back, dragged her to the floor, and became the first person to ever submit Valentina Shevchenko. Alexa Grasso, after years of work, is the Women's Flyweight Champion of the World. But after six undefeated years and the longest women's title reign in UFC history (not counting Women's Featherweight which, as we all know, is Not Real), a rematch with Shevchenko later this year seems inevitable. Women's Strawweight, 115 lbs   Zhang Weili - 23-3, 0 DefensesAre you really surprised? There's a long tradition of underestimating unlikely champions in mixed martial arts, particularly when they're not the fan-friendliest in style or personality, from Michael Bisping to Frankie Edgar, only to have those demeaned champions remind the world that they didn't reach the peak of their divisions by mistake. Many of the wise, studied scribes of the sport warned the foolish masses against assuming the same about Women's Strawweight Champion Carla Esparza: She was no pushover, they said, and Zhang will have real trouble. And then, come fight day, we unwashed masses pulled them from their ivory towers and forced them to run in the streets amongst the mud and filth so they, too, could feel the unburdened joy of being, because Zhang Weili, as basically every fan had assumed, did, in fact, beat the absolute tar out of Carla. It wasn't particularly close: Carla got outlanded 37-6, hurt several times on the feet, and choked out just a minute into the second round. The inexplicable, season-long Cookie Monster subplot is over, Zhang Weili is now a two-time world champion, and things are back as they should be. What comes next, however, is tricky. Carla was blown out, so a rematch is out of the question. Rose Namajunas, the only person in the UFC to beat Weili, is a likely candidate--but after her disastrous performance against Carla, it remains to be seen how much faith the UFC has in her. Jéssica Andrade has a claim, but she's splitting time between 115 and 125, and probably needs to pick a weight class if she wants a shot. So the UFC solved the problem by picking Amanda Lemos. The assumption was the UFC was waiting for Lemos to get one more big win, but after seven months of silence, it turns out they were fine with her all along, apparently. She'll face Zhang for the belt at UFC 292 on August 19th.
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NOTABLE CHAMPIONS ACROSS THE WORLD Bellator Heavyweight Champion, 265 lbs  Ryan Bader - 31-7 (1), 3 DefensesRyan Bader is the greatest Bellator Heavyweight Champion of all time, and on a dairy farm somewhere in Wisconsin, Cole Konrad feels a pang of regret. Bader made his name as the winner of The Ultimate Fighter: Nogueira vs Mir all the way back in 2008, but his UFC career proved to be one of Sisyphean torment and humiliation that included, somehow, impossibly, being the only man to lose a UFC fight to Tito Ortiz during his last six years in the company. Bader left for free agency and Bellator in 2016 and became its light-heavyweight champion on his first night with the organization, and just two years later he became its first-ever simultaneous double-champion after knocking out the legendary Fedor Emelianenko and taking the heavyweight title. Bader would go on to lose his 205-pound crown, but Fedor never forgot his 35-second drubbing at the American wrestler's hands, and for his retirement fight, he demanded a rematch. Thus it was that the entire mixed martial arts community watched with bated breath as on February 4th, 2023, Fedor Emelianenko walked into the cage one last time and promptly got the absolute crap beaten out of him again. Ryan Bader remains undefeated at heavyweight. Who comes next, we'll have to see. Bellator Light-Heavyweight Champion, 205 lbs   Vadim Nemkov - 16-2 (1), 3 DefensesBellator CEO Scott Coker has been complicating title reigns with tournaments for decades and he's not about to stop now. Vadim Nemkov won the Bellator Light-Heavyweight Championship from Ryan Bader in 2020, and his title reign was immediately wrapped up in the Light-Heavyweight Grand Prix that started the following year. Nemkov, a Fedor Emelianenko protege, former Spetsnaz operative and understated wrecking machine who hadn't lost a fight since his early-career days in Rizin back in 2016, continued his Bellator streak by handling the always-game Phil Davis and dealing with some trouble en route to submitting Julius Anglickas, but then the tournament came to a screeching halt. Bellator threw all its marketing cash at the ultimately ill-fated Bellator 277 in April of 2022, and a sizable chunk of that misfortune came from both its championship and tournament-final co-main event. Corey Anderson looked handily en route to defeating Nemkov, only to unintentionally headbutt him while diving in to throw a punch. The headbutt opened an uncloseable gash on Nemkov's brow--and it happened five seconds before round three would've ended and allowed the judges to score a technical decision. It would be seven full months before the final got its re-do, and this time, Nemkov avoided Anderson's wrestling and controlled the fight with distance strikes en route to a unanimous decision victory. It took nearly two years for Bellator to complete an eight-man tournament, but they did it, and Vadim Nemkov is still your world's champion. Nemkov was initially planned for a quick turnaround against Yoel Romero on February 4, but an undisclosed injury saw him pulled from the card; the fight is now scheduled for Bellator 297 on June 16th. Bellator Middleweight Champion, 185 lbs  Johnny Eblen - 13-0, 1 DefensesThere's an old combat sports tradition whereby a champion isn't really a champion until they defend their title. Gegard Mousasi has been established as the best middleweight outside the UFC that, despite the one-sided nature of their fight, Johnny Eblen's victory over him was treated as an aberration rather than the passing of a torch. It didn't matter that Eblen was undefeated, widely considered one of the absolute best by his cohort at American Top Team or that he'd dropped Mousasi on his face with his bare hands, the world needed verification. On February 4th at Bellator 290, they got it. Fedor Emelianenko's team was intending to pull one big, beautiful night of success out of the ether for their leader's retirement fight, but it was not to be: Vadim Nemkov had to pull out of the card thanks to an injury, Fedor himself was crushed for the second time by heavyweight champion Ryan Bader, and middleweight hopeful Anatoly Tokov was competitive for the first couple of rounds but was subsequently washed out by Eblen's overwhelming assault. Johnny Eblen is a defending champion now, and as things always seem to go, the conversation changed overnight from his being overrated to his being better than everyone in the UFC. Nuance escapes our fanbase. Thanks to Fabian Edwards defeating the perennially sleepy Gegard Mousasi in May, the next title defense will in fact be Johnny Eblen vs Fabian Edwards sometime later this year. Bellator Welterweight Champion, 170 lbs   Yaroslav Amosov - 27-0, 1 DefenseThere may not be a fighter alive who's had a tougher year than Yaroslav Amosov. Bellator picking Amosov up in 2018 was an obvious choice: He was already a world champion in Sambo and an MMA champion in Russia, already 19-0 with 17 finishes, and already being talked up by his training partners as quite possibly the best welterweight in the world. By 2021 he'd run up a six-fight winning streak in Bellator and earned a shot at world champion Douglas Lima, and he didn't waste a second of it, dominating Lima in every round. His success far outstripped his fame, but a scheduled title defense against superstar Michael "Venom" Page in May of 2022 promised to finally give him the spotlight. That, obviously, did not happen. In the wake of Russia's invasion of his homeland Ukraine Amosov returned home to evacuate his family and, once they had passed the border, notified Bellator he was pulling out of the fight and fighting in the war. Six months later, having liberated his home city of Irpin, he posted video of his troop returning to his mother's home to retrieve his Bellator championship belt, which he'd kept hidden in a closet. Amosov's return bout, a title unification against interim champion Logan Storley, was announced for February 25th, just barely one year after the invasion began, and after a year and a half not just away from competition but actively fighting in a war, there were many questions about how much like his old self Amosov could realistically look. As it turned out: He looked even better. When they'd first fought back in 2020, Storley gave Amosov all he could handle and the fight came down to a split decision; in 2023, Amosov wiped the floor with him, repeatedly hurting him standing and winning the entirety of the wrestling war. His home may still be in crisis, but Yaroslav Amosov is, at least, back on his throne. Bellator Lightweight Champion, 155 lbs  Usman Nurmagomedov - 17-0, 0 DefensesIf there's a single, developing throughline of mixed martial arts in 2022, it's the growing power of the Dagestani wrestling brigade. Abdulmanap Nurmagomedov built an army of ultra-grapplers, and after his passing the American Kickboxing Academy's Javier Mendez and Adulmanap's son and protege, the now-retired Khabib Nurmagomedov, unleashed them on the world. Usman, Khabib's cousin (as well as the younger brother of Umar Nurmagomedov, undefeated and ranked UFC bantamweight), took to Bellator in April of 2021 and proceeded to burn an undefeated path through the Manny Muros and Patrik Pietiläe of the world. His style was a little more eclectic--lots of spinning kicks, lots of stick-and-move jabs and stomps to the leg--but the resemblance became uncanny once he inevitably, and easily, ragdolled his opponents to the canvas and generally choked them out in short order thereafter. When he was announced as the #1 contender to Bellator's lightweight title, I was somewhat miffed: He hadn't beaten any top contenders, Bellator had already held a title eliminator and it was won in a crushing thirty-second knockout by Tofiq Musayev, the whole thing smacked of a pathetic attempt to glom onto some of Khabib's mainstream attention. I at no point said that he wouldn't very, very easily win. At Bellator 288 on November 18th, Usman very, very easily won, defeating Patricky "Pitbull" Freire at every aspect of the game and leaving him sans both his championship and one eyebrow. Usman's first fight as champion was both a defense and an entry into the first round of Bellator's Lightweight Grand Prix on March 3rd at Bellator 292, where he met, crushed, and retired former UFC champion Benson Henderson, handing him just the third submission loss of a 17-year, 42-fight career. He'll be facing fellow tournament semifinalist Brent Primus later this year. Bellator Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs  Patrício Pitbull - 35-5, 1 DefensePatrício Pitbull has had a weird goddamn year. Pitbull has long been the GOAT of Bellator, sometimes to the company's open chagrin--there were definitely times they would have vastly preferred a Pat Curran or a Michael Chandler to carry their banner, and Patrício had this unfortunate habit of not just beating them but making them look like poo poo. By mid-2021, he was Bellator's dual featherweight and lightweight champion, he was on a seven-fight win streak, and he was a finalist in their Featherweight Grand Prix. And then undefeated rising star A.J. McKee dropped him and choked him out in two minutes. Bellator, clearly, felt they had hit the jackpot and were going to be riding the McKee train for some time, as by their rematch ten months later, McKee was the centerpiece of all of their advertising. It was somewhat awkward when, as he had done to so many before, Patrício took him to a victorious decision that made McKee kind of look like poo poo, neutralizing his offense in the clinch, jabbing under his range, and grinding away the clock. Bellator pushed for a trilogy, but McKee, pissed off, tired of cutting weight and worried about having it happen all over again, declined and moved up to lightweight. Instead of a big-money rematch, Patrício was left to face top contender Ádám Borics, and the match, while hard-fought, was not particularly entertaining or memorable. Pitbull's next fight was the rare cross-promotional bout, facing Rizin's featherweight champion Kleber Koike Erbst on the New Year's Eve Bellator x Rizin special. It was the only fight on the card that wasn't particularly competitive: He shut Kleber down completely and won a wide decision. There is only one featherweight king outside the UFC. And now, on June 16th, he'll be facing Sergio Pettis in an attempt to claim a third divisional championship. Bellator Bantamweight Champion, 135 lbs  Sergio Pettis - 22-5, 1 DefenseSo Sergio Pettis is good now, apparently. It's not that he was ever bad, exactly, it's that he was more or less forever in big brother Anthony's shadow. Sergio had a long five years in the UFC where he on several occasions seemed poised to break out into the top ranks and vie for a title, but he always managed to fall just short, building a strong win streak before getting controlled by Henry Cejudo, barely squeaking past Joe Benavidez only to get dominated by Jussier Formiga, moving up to 135 and getting shut down by Rob Font. He went to Bellator just a few months before his brother left for the PFL, and now, in a stunning turnaround, Sergio is the successful one in the family. He won Bellator's bantamweight championship in his third fight with the organization, and in the biggest fight of his career, an interpromotional match pitting his title against Rizin bantamweight champion (and former Bellator champion himself, who vacated due to injury) Kyoji Horiguchi, Pettis shocked the world by battling through four difficult rounds he was fairly clearly losing and knocking out the heavy favorite with a painfully pretty spinning backfist. Sergio Pettis is no longer an also-ran. Unfortunately, as these things always go, he followed this up by getting injured. He was out long enough that Bellator crowned an interim champion and held the entirety of a Bantamweight Grand Prix, which wound up being one of their more successful and highly-lauded tournaments in quite awhile, so of course, when they announced Sergio would be returning on June 16th, months after the tournament's conclusion, they also announced that he would be fighting...Patrício Pitbull, who is trying to become a three-class champion. Thanks, Bellator. Bellator Interim Bantamweight Champion  Patchy Mix - 18-1, 0 DefensesThere's something to be said for how silly it is to have an interim championship last so long that it not only has multiple defenses but multiple titleholders, but there's nothing silly about the path Patchy Mix took to get it. Long one of Bellator's best bantamweights and arguably one of the best in the world altogether, Patchy "No Love" Mix has torn people apart across the globe, be it his five fights as the King of the Cage champion, his ninety-second submission of Yuki Motoya in Japan, or his 7-1 run in Bellator. The only loss in his entire career was a 2020 decision against Juan Archuleta, where the first five-round fight of Mix's life saw him exhausted and ultimately outworked. But he rebuilt, and he took Bellator's bantamweight grand prix by storm, and on April 22, 2023, he didn't just defeat Raufeon Stots, he knocked him out cold in eighty seconds. Mix won the grand prix, the million-dollar pot and the interim championship--and now he has to wait to see what happens with the Pettis vs Pitbull dust settles. Bellator Women's Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs  Cris Cyborg - 26-2 (1), 4 DefensesYup. It's 2023 and Cris Cyborg is still out there. For those who don't know, Cris Cyborg was the canonical women's featherweight fighter, a muay thai wrecking machine who didn't just beat but brutalized essentially all of her opponents, including ex-Star Wars Gina Carano, and her popularity as a destroyer of humans is the only real reason women's featherweight even exists as a division, to the point that the UFC added it when she was the only actual fighter at the weight class they employed. She was 20-1 (1) when she passed the torch to Amanda Nunes, who slew her in just fifty-one seconds. She took one more fight in the UFC to complete her contract, but left for Bellator almost immediately afterward with uncharacteristic cooperation from the UFC itself--after all, they'd gotten what they wanted out of her. Her first Bellator fight was a one-sided destruction of their featherweight champion, and she's defended it three times since. At this point in Cyborg's career the problem isn't her or her fighting or her age, but simply that there's no one in Bellator for her to fight--after just five fights she's already hitting rematches, having just recorded her second one-sided bludgeoning of a very game but outmatched Arlene Blencowe. Cyborg decided her next fight would be a boxing match, and on September 25 she faced Simone da Silva, a jobber to the stars coming off twelve straight losses who had been knocked out just one month prior. Undeterred, she had her second boxing match on the undercard of December 10th’s Crawford/Avanesyan card, taking a unanimous decision over Gabrielle “Gabanator” Holloway, who is 6-6 in MMA and 0-3 in boxing. It's kind of tiring to watch the second-best women's featherweight in MMA history take repeated nothing boxing matches, but on the other hand, what on Earth is there better for her to do right now, other than, uh, use her instagram account to call for a military coup of her home country in the hopes of restoring fascism to power? Bellator Women's Flyweight Champion, 125 lbs  Liz Carmouche - 19-7, 2 DefensesIt took more than a decade and some controversy, but Liz Carmouche got her flowers. "Girl-Rilla" was just as present a figure in establishing women's MMA in the mainstream, but she's the most consistently forgotten because she was the losing fighter in all of those establishing moments. She was a challenger for the early, pre-fame Strikeforce Women's Bantamweight Championship, and was winning on the scorecards before Marloes Coenen choked her out. She was a central part of the inaugural Invicta FC card, and was planned as a title contender before the big show came calling. She became one half of the first women's fight in UFC history, and at one point had Ronda Rousey in a nearly destiny-defying neck crank, but was ultimately submitted in the first round. She's one of two women to ever defeat Valentina Shevchenko, but when given a second chance at the now-UFC champion Shevchenko, she fell short. Despite her powerful wrestling and submission skills, she was eternally denied the top of the mountain. So it was both particularly appropriate and particularly cruel when she finally won a championship on April 22, 2022--in a way that displeased everybody. Standing champion Juliana Velasquez was winning on every scorecard, but Liz Carmouche got her in the crucifix position and landed a number of, respectfully, small elbows, but referee Mike Beltran called a TKO to the immediate chagrin of the entirely safe ex-champion. The controversy made a rematch all but mandatory, and it took Bellator most of the year to do it, but the two met in the cage to run it back at Bellator 289 on December 9, and this time there was no controversy, as Velasquez submitted to an armbar two rounds in. The weirdness didn't stop there: Liz's next title defense against Deanna Bennett also hit the skids, as Bennett missed weight and was thus ineligible to win the championship. Carmouche put it on the line anyway, and fortunately, she choked Bennett out in the fourth round. She's most likely defending against Ilima-Lei MacFarlane later this year. ONE Heavyweight Champion, 265 lbs   Arjan Bhullar - 11-1, 0 DefensesIt's Arjan Bhullar, the man ONE CEO Chatri Sityodtong swears is better than Francis Ngannou. Bhullar, the first Indian world champion in the sport, was a big deal as a wrestler in his native Canada, won multiple collegiate championships at heavyweight, took a Commonwealth Games championship and ultimately achieved his dream of representing Canada at the 2012 Olympics where he was eliminated in the first round. He made his MMA debut two years later as, you may have already guessed, predominantly a wrestler. He was picked up by the UFC in 2017 at 6-0, and had a respectable 3-1 record with the organization, but chose not to sign a new contract after feeling the UFC was lowballing him. He signed with the then-growing ONE Championship in 2019, won his debut fight, took a year and a half off for the pandemic and returned in May of 2021 to TKO the baddest heavyweight in ONE, its reigning champion of almost six years, the man, myth, legend and Truth, Brandon Vera. And then, much like Vera, he promptly refused to sign a new contract and sat out for a year so he could play hardball. Chatri publicly shat on him and his management and set up an interim championship. ONE Interim Heavyweight Champion   Anatoly Malykhin - 12-0, 0 DefensesONE Light Heavyweight Champion, 225 lbs  Anatoly Malykhin - 12-0, 0 DefensesIt was a very good, but very strange, 2022 for Anatoly Malykhin. With Bhullar out indefinitely, the undefeated Russian bruiser was placed in the driver's seat of the heavyweight division, and after quickly dispatching of an outmatched Kirill Grishenko, Malykhin took home an interim championship. ONE planned to reunify the championships fairly quickly, with Bhullar vs Malykhin tentatively planned for ONE's debut on Amazon Prime Video in August, but Bhullar needed more time to recover from his injury layoff. The match was finally, formally announced for ONE Championship 161 on September 29--and then, the day of the aforementioned Prime debut, Bhullar announced he was pulling out with another injury. The match was once again tentatively planned for December, but the two sides couldn't come to terms, and after ten months, ONE was tired of doing nothing with their big, angry punchman. The new announcement was even more surprising: Malykhin, while remaining the interim heavyweight champion, was also dropping down to light-heavyweight and challenging the undefeated double champ and promotional kingpin Reinier de Ridder. The result was quick and brutal, as Malykhin bludgeoned de Ridder to a bleakly one-sided first-round knockout. After his undisputed championship victory, ONE took its third swing at the constantly-rescheduled heavyweight championship unification match. Bhullar vs Malykhin was booked, yet again, for ONE Fight Night 8 on March 24th, and yet again, it fell apart. They have scheduled it, yet again, for ONE Fight Night 12 on July 15. ONE Middleweight Champion, 205 lbs   Reinier de Ridder - 16-1, 2 DefensesThere's a long tradition of B-league hype in mixed martial arts. The hardcore fanbase chafes under both the total ubiquity of the UFC as a product and the way they set thesmelves up as the end-all be-all of the sport. As the B-leagues create dominant champions of their own, the fanbase inevitably rallies behind them as equal to, if not greater than, the UFC's equivalent titleholder, and further, as evidence of other companies having even better talent. And once or twice a generation, they're right! But most of the time, they're not. Fighters who destroy their B-league equivalents will commonly take a step outside their comfort zone and get immediately rolled by reality. Reinier de Ridder, more than any other competitor, was the popular argument for ONE's supremacy over the UFC: An undefeated ultra-grappler with belts at two divisions, one of which happened to be the UFC's permanently embattled light-heavyweight class. The remarkable ease with which he ragdolled and submitted his opponents, and the shaky nature of his UFC peers, led to wide exultation of his skills and regular comments from ONE CEO Chatri Sityodtong about his prospects against the best the world had to offer. It was consequently something of a bummer when he fought Anatoly Malykhin, the first opponent in years he didn't have a strength or grappling advantage over, and looked immediately lost when his takedown attempts did nothing. He had no visible striking defense to speak of and was ultimately, and distressingly easily, destroyed. The cycle has played out once again, the latest idol has lost, and now Reinier de Ridder will have to move forward. He lost a grappling match to Tye Ruotolo on May 5th, because ONE is silly. ONE Welterweight Champion, 185 lbs   Christian Lee - 17-4, 0 DefensesONE Lightweight Champion, 170 lbs  Christian Lee - 17-4, 0 DefensesIt took three tries, but by god, Chatri gets what Chatri wants. Christian Lee, the male half of the first family of ONE Championship and its homegrown golden boy, was very mad about losing his lightweight championship in a controversial decision to Ok Rae Yoon last year. He demanded the decision be reviewed and overturned and his championship reinstated. Unsurprisingly: This did not happen. After months of complaining and just shy of a year of waiting, the two had their long-awaited rematch and Lee left nothing to chance, knocking Yoon out in six minutes to reclaim his belt. Having finally retrieved his title, Lee, being a responsible champion, proceeded to immediately challenge ONE'S 185-pound champion, Kiamrian Abbasov, for his title, a move that was definitely in no way influenced by ONE's repeated attempts to get his sister Angela Lee double-champion status. Fortunately for Christian, Abbasov horribly botched his weight cut: He came in overweight, lost his title on the scale, and was visibly depleted in the fight. Which is particularly lucky, because Abbasov beat Lee senseless in the first round to the point that a standing TKO would not have been an unreasonable stoppage. But whether from his failed weight cut or simply from punching himself out, Abbasov was exhausted by the second round, and Lee mounted a gutsy comeback and ultimately stopped him with ground-and-pound in the fourth round. After three attempts, ONE has succeeded in getting two belts on a Lee. Unfortunately, it was followed by tragedy. With the death of his 18 year-old sister and fellow ONE competitor Victoria Lee, the future of the entire Lee fighting family is both up in the air and the last possible thing that could matter at this moment in time. For now, they have to grieve. ONE Featherweight Champion, 155 lbs  Tang Kai - 15-2, 0 DefensesTang Kai has been flying under the radar for some time, and in hindsight, that was clearly a mistake. He made his professional debut as a 20 year-old collegiate wrestler and won a rookie featherweight tournament in China's WBK (after investigating, we THINK it's World Battle Kings), but his stylistic limitations became apparent when he moved up to Kunlun Fight--and stopped fighting rookies. Dominant decision losses to ACA standout Bekhruz "Ong Bak" Zukurov and Road to UFC runner-up Asikeerbai Jinensibieke made Kai's weaknesses too apparent to ignore, and he made the tough call to commit to his dream, pack up his life, and move away from home to start training with real fight camps, most notably Shanghai's Dragon Gym and Phuket's legendary Tiger Muay Thai. It's worked out quite well: He hasn't lost a fight in five years. Three knockout wins in China's Rebel FC got ONE's attention, and since debuting with the organization in 2019, Kai has soundly defeated everyone in his path. He claims his wrestling base makes him impossible to take down and he proves it by using it almost entirely defensively, vastly preferring to bludgeon his opponents on his feet. His fight against Thanh Le, while blistering and difficult, was proof: He evaded every takedown attempt, widely outstruck him, dropped him with punches and leg kicks alike, and took the belt he's held for two years. Tang Kai, at the beginning of ONE's worldwide invasion, is suddenly a very visible prospect: A power striker on a 10-fight winning streak and a champion in the world's most competitive weight class. The target on his back is very, very real. ONE Bantamweight Champion, 145 lbs  Fabricio Andrade - 9-2 (1), 0 DefensesThe second time was the charm. When Fabricio "Wonder Boy" Andrade joined ONE Championship back in 2020 he was a virtual unknown in the mixed martial arts world, a 20-3 kickboxer but only a 3-2 mixed martial artist who'd been fighting out in the regional circuit of China. His association with Tiger Muay Thai put him on ONE's radar, and his visible striking skills despite being just 21 at the time made him interesting enough for a developmental contract. Said contract proceeded to develop into Andrade going on a five-fight winning streak that only got more dominant as he met tougher competition, and three straight first-round knockouts punched his ticket to the championship picture. His first appearance in the spotlight, unfortunately, went a touch awry. First, bantamweight champion John Lineker lost his title on the scale after missing weight, meaning only Andrade was eligible to become champion, and he was well on his way to doing so before hitting Lineker with an errant strike to the groin so hard it shattered his cup, and with the fight not yet halfway complete, it had to be rendered a No Contest. It took four months to get to the rematch, and it was much more closely contested, but after four rounds Lineker threw in the towel, his face having been punched too swollen to continue. Fabricio Andrade is 25 and a world goddamn champion. ONE Flyweight Champion, 135 lbs  Demetrious Johnson - 31-4-1, 0 DefensesThe king has returned. Demetrious Johnson's 2019 debut with ONE Championship was essentially scandalous. "Mighty Mouse" had long been a fan favorite of the lighter weight classes, a 5'3" combat machine who had been going the distance with world champions like Kid Yamamoto and Dominick Cruz while still working a day job in a warehouse, but it was only in 2012 when he dedicated himself to mixed martial arts as his full-time job that he became a star. He won the UFC's flyweight tournament and became its inaugural champion, and his talents are the reason a division that has existed for a decade has only had five champions--three of whom came in the last two years after he left. By 2018, Johnson had one of the longest winning streaks in the UFC, was the all-time recordholder for championship defenses in the UFC and had recorded some of the most outstanding finishes in the history of the UFC. By 2019, he was out of the company. Johnson and the UFC never got along--or, to be blunt, Johnson was one of the few publicly calling the UFC out on its bullshit. When he won the flyweight title and became a world champion while only getting paid $23k/23k he let it be known, when the UFC cut sponsorship money in the Reebok era he noted the raw deal it gave the fighters, and when Dana White tried to force him to take fights up at bantamweight by threatening to kill the flyweight division if he didn't, he told the world. After Henry Cejudo beat him in a razor-close coinflip decision and took the bargaining leverage of his championship away, it was over in a heartbeat. Dana White personally disliked him enough that he traded him to ONE Championship in exchange for their welterweight champion, Ben Askren. Johnson proceeded to immediately win ONE's flyweight grand prix, but took the first stoppage loss of his entire career in his shot at Adriano Moraes and his world championship and engendered a thousand MMA thinkpieces about if his time as a top fighter was over. A year and a half later, he got his rematch, and on August 27 at ONE on Prime Video 1 he returned the favor, handing Moraes his own first stoppage loss after knocking him out with a flying knee. The trilogy match was inevitable, and on May 5th, Johnson beat Moraes by a comprehensive decision, ending the story--and maybe his career. He says he's not sure if he's coming back yet. Fingers crossed. ONE Strawweight Champion, 125 lbs  Jarred Brooks - 20-2 (1), 0 DefensesJarred Brooks dealt with some crap on his way to a title. By 2017 he was one of the most-heralded flyweight prospects in the sport: An undefeated 13-0 multi-champion as an amateur, an undefeated 12-0 as a professional with fights across three separate weight classes, his heavy wrestling-and-grappling grinding style ground most of his opponents to dust. He took the moniker of "The Monkey God" thanks to his unorthodox striking and wrestling entries--when you're not afraid of grappling, you can get creative with the striking. And then he hit the UFC in 2017 and everything kind of went to hell. Three of his four UFC bouts went to split decision: A debut victory against Eric Shelton Brooks probably should've lost, a followup loss against future champion Deiveson Figueiredo Brooks probably should've won, an intervening bout where Brooks was easily dominating Jose Torres only to score the rare MMA own goal and knock himself out after smacking his head on the ground doing a big, showy slam, and a third and final split decision victory over Roberto Sanchez that really, really shouldn't have been split at all. And then the UFC cut him, despite being 2 and 2 and having gone the distance with the biggest new prospect in the division, because the UFC Doesn't Like Flyweights. So Brooks went over to Rizin, where he intended to build his way up as the next big foreign threat to top star Kyoji Horiguchi--and it was over in eleven seconds, after an inadvertant headbutt cut his opponent's eyebrow open and the blood-unfriendly Japanese network called a no-contest. His international comeback was further destroyed by COVID, and Brooks found himself iced for two straight years as he waited for the dust to settle. By November of 2021, he was making his long-delayed ONE debut; by June of 2022, he was 3-0 and the top contender. And then, of course, his title fight got delayed another six months thanks to an injury. On December 3rd, 2022, he finally got his long-belated shot at a major title, and shocking no one, he wrestled the poo poo out of Joshua Pacio for five straight rounds. Four years later than expected, Jarred Brooks has international gold. And because ONE's weight classes don't matter, he immediately called out 135-pound champ Demetrious Johnson. ONE Women's Strawweight Champion, 125 lbs  Xiong Jing Nan - 18-2, 7 DefensesXiong Jing Nan dreamed of lifting weights. She'd enjoyed sports as a child, and when China started its national push for Olympic supremacy she began training heavily in hope of joining the national weightlifting team. But then she met aspirants for its boxing team and fell in love with the idea of living out a martial arts movie and getting to hit people for fun and profit and she never looked back. She turned pro in 2014 and immediately became a standout, going 9-1 in China's Kunlun Fight promotion with wins across three separate weight classes. What made her truly dangerous wasn't one-punch power, but the ability to break her opponents with constant pressure striking, scoring TKOs with combinations stretched out across dozens of consecutive, unending strikes. The story was no different when she moved to ONE in 2017, and she was strawweight champion within two fights. ONE's women's MMA divisions have been its most stable, each having had exactly one champion, and they were so dominant that they inevitably had to fight each other--and, hilariously, traded wins back and forth in the process. 115 lbs champion Angela Lee went up to 125 to challenge for Xiong Jing Nan's belt but Nan stopped her with body kicks in the fifth round, and half a year later Nan dropped down to 115 to challenge for Lee's belt only for Lee to choke her out with twelve seconds left in the fight. Xiong has notched three successful title defenses since, which set her up for her greatest challenger yet: Angela Lee, again, apparently. Despite ONE's best attempts, Xiong successfully defended her title against Lee again, nearly finishing her in the first round and ultimately winning a decision. ONE Women's Atomweight Champion, 115 lbs  Angela Lee - 11-3, 5 DefensesAngela Lee is one of ONE's biggest stars and has been widely called its postergirl, and while the metrics may be debatable, she's an extremely solid choice. Her background is varied both culturally and martially: Born in Canada in a Singaporean-South Korean family made entirely of martial artists who all collectively moved to Hawaii when she was a child, she was not only training alongside them as a child, but training in multiple disciplines. By 15 she was a national Pankration champion, by 18 she had been signed by ONE before having a single professional fight, and by 20 she had two black belts and three defenses of ONE's atomweight championship. Lee is an extremely versatile fighter, capable of backing up her aggressive if sometimes loose striking with very solid defensive and offensive grappling, and her only two losses have come when fighting up a class at 125 pounds, against both its champion Xiong Jing Nan--whom she later choked out in a rematch at 115--and world jiu-jitsu champion Michelle Nicolini in a very, very close decision. Lee went on hiatus at the end of 2019 to have a baby and intended to be back by the end of 2020, but then the pandemic happened and she decided to use her cache within the company to just sit it out, making her arguably the smartest fighter in the world. ONE declined to make an interim championship, so she returned to competition this past March as a defending champion and main-evented the ONE X supercard against its atomweight queen in her absence, Stamp Fairtex, and notched her fifth title defense after choking her out in the second round. She got a trilogy fight with Nan on September 30, once again coming to her weight class and challenging for her title, but ultimately fell short and lost a decision. In the wake of her 18 year-old sister Victoria's tragic passing, Angela and the rest of the Lee family have shut down their gym and are focusing on much more important things than fighting.  Rizin Lightweight Champion, 156 lbs  Roberto de Souza - 15-2, 2 DefensesRoberto "Satoshi" de Souza is trying to become the new Gegard Mousasi. On April 17 he had the chance to avenge the only loss of his career, a half-knockout half-injury against "Hollywood" Johnny Case back in 2019, and he succeeded in emphatic fashion, climbing Case's back, locking him in an inverted triangle choke and eventually forcing an armbar. He's now 14-1 and inarguably one of the best lightweights outside of the UFC, but unlike most of the other fighters to bear that title, he has made it clear he has no interest in changing that. Where the A.J. McKees and Michael Chandlers of the world want to test free agency and notoriety, Roberto de Souza is happy in Japan, both because his Rizin pay is fairly lucrative and his entire family jiu-jitsu business is based in the country. This is admirable, but it's also a little unfortunate: Rizin really only has around a dozen lightweights under contract, and "Satoshi" has already beaten a third of them. He may be waiting for a Spike Carlyle or a Luiz Gustavo to work their way into contention, but the Rizin ranks hold few surprises for him at this point. It was thus of particular interest when the main event for the New Year's Eve Bellator x Rizin card was announced as Roberto de Souza vs AJ McKee--a test of where Souza ranks with the rest of the world's competition. Unfortunately for him and Rizin, the answer was "under them." He positionally threatened McKee and was able to land some solid strikes in the final round, but was otherwise controlled and lost a decision. On May 6th, Satoshi beat Spike Carlyle in a fantastic fight--but it was a non-title fight, because Japanese promoters are still real scared of their own belts. Rizin Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs   Kleber Koike Erbst - 31-6-1, 0 DefensesRizin has found the solution to Japanese MMA's historical troubles with losing their championships to foreigners: Get Japanese foreigners. Kleber Koike Erbst, while born in Săo Paulo, moved to Japan as a fourteen year-old and, four years later, elected to stay behind and continue training in grappling and mixed martial arts while his parents returned home. He found community with the above-mentioned de Souza family, working odd jobs to fund his continuing study at their school in Iwata, and later that same year he began his career as a professional fighter. His rookie years were somewhat fraught: By his twenty-first birthday he was only 4-3-1 and his prospects seemed somewhat dim. As it turns out, aging into actual adulthood makes a loving difference, as in the following twelve years he has lost only two fights. One was a decision loss to Artur Sowiński, the champion of Poland's Konfrontacja Sztuk Walki federation, and he rematched and choked him out two years later; the other, Erbst's final KSW fight, was a loss to Mateusz Gamrot, who is currently the #8 fighter an entire weight class up in the UFC's lightweight rankings. Koike joined Rizin in 2020 and immediately snapped off a five-fight submission streak, leading to his challenging featherweight champion Juntarou Ushiku at Rizin 39 on October 23. It only took six and a half minutes for Erbst to submit Ushiku with his trademark triangle choke, making him, for the second time in his career, a world champion. Kleber had the shortest turnaround of all the Rizin talent competing at Bellator x Rizin, and the stiffest competition in the form of the legendary Patrício Pitbull, and that proved to be a bad combination. Erbst was unable to muster any effective striking or grappling and spent fifteen minutes getting calmly picked apart by one of the greatest fighters in the sport. Rizin Bantamweight Champion, 135 lbs   VACANT - The unseen departure of meaningTHAT'S RIGHT, MOTHERFUCKERS. You thought Vacant was done? VACANT IS NEVER DONE. On March 5, 2023, just one single day after Jon Jones closed the door on the long, multi-national title reign of Vacant, God opened a window. Kyoji Horiguchi, who has long struggled with feeling undersized at the 135-pound bantamweight division, announced he was moving back to the 125-pound flyweight division for good, and that he could not in good conscience hold onto a championship he could not defend. Fundamentally, admittedly, it barely makes a difference to Rizin--he won the bantamweight championship back in 2018 and, because Japanese MMA hates ever putting its treasured champions at risk, despite having five Rizin fights in the time since his championship victory he'd only actually defended the title once, and that was in a rematch with Kai Asakura, who'd knocked him out a year earlier in, of course, a non-title fight. So it falls to Kai Asakura to try to fill the void, in the second Bellator x Rizin cross-promotional card this July, when he faces former Bellator champion Juan Archuleta. Rizin would probably like it if the new champion, y'know, was natively available in the country. Rizin Women's Super Atomweight Championship, 108 lbs  Seika Izawa - 9-0, 0 DefensesAll hail the new queen. After years of reigning as Japan's best atomweight, the legendary Ayaka Hamasaki fell not once but twice to the rookie Seika Izawa. A 24 year-old who was pushed into judo as a child by a frustrated mother who was tired of her constant fighting with her brothers, Izawa discovered a love for grappling that led her to win junior championships in judo, wrestling and sumo alike. She would still be pursuing judo had the pandemic not shut down much of its competitive scene, but fortunately, mixed martial arts is a terrible sport run by monsters who don't care about things like deadly diseases, which made it a tempting professional prospect. Four months after her formal MMA training began Izawa was winning fights in DEEP, less than a year after that she was DEEP's strawweight champion, and one year later she was dominating one of the best women's fighters in history on Rizin's New Year's Eve special. As Japanese organizations tend to do, frustratingly, the fight was a non-title affair, meaning Izawa had to come back and do it again on April 17. After a scary moment where Hamasaki almost stole an armbar, Izawa resumed her wrestling domination and formally took Rizin's atomweight championship. As entirely fresh blood, the world of Rizin's talent is open to her--but that also means she's got a real, real big target on her back. Rizin's Superatomweight Grand Prix was both a big coming-out party for Izawa and a series of opportunities to look shockingly mortal: She had a fair bit of trouble with Anastasiya Svetkivska in the semifinals before ultimately submitting her, but her berth in the finals against former rival Si Woo Park proved the toughest fight of her career, ending in a split decision victory she easily could have lost. Seika was supposed to face Miyuu Yamamoto at Rizin 42, but after Yamamoto had to pull out with an injury, Izawa was instead scheduled to face...the last person Yamamoto beat, the 5-3 Suwanan Boonsorn, at DEEP Jewels 41 on July 28. Izawa choked her out. Try not to be shocked.
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And finally, since it's this weekend, carrying it over from the previous thread: CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 60: THE FLYWEIGHT DIVISION EXISTS  SATURDAY, JUNE 3 FROM THE INESCAPABLE PIT OF THE UFC APEX ARENA IN LAS VEGAS, NEVADA PRELIMS 3 PM PST/6 PM EST | MAIN CARD 6 PM PST/9 PM EST Did everyone else enjoy their week off? Did you do something productive? Funnily enough, the UFC's vice president of talent relations and #2 matchmaking, Mick Maynard, didn't! He spent the week tweeting low-effort insults about how Bloody Elbow, one of the few acceptable MMA journalism enterprises, poo poo on UFC cards too much. (It went under the radar until Chael Sonnen retweeted it, in his endless quest to hurriedly embrace anyone willing to cut him a check.) Which is funny, because the second annual Road to UFC tournament happened this weekend! And the UFC's main media accounts didn't say a goddamn thing about it, because they were too busy posting dozens and dozens of advertisements for the Power Slap League. They didn't tweet anything about the Road to UFC fights until, you know, they were over. Or, as forums superstar DoombatINC more succinctly put it:  And now we've got a card that lost two main events as the start to a month with a Jared Cannonier main event and an Irene Aldana championship match. Healthy sport. Nothing wrong. Nothing at all to be worried about.  wikipedia's still being dumb and i've really got to ditch it permanently MAIN EVENT: JUPITER ALIGNS WITH MARS  FLYWEIGHT: Kai Kara-France (24-10, #3) vs Amir Albazi (16-1, #7)Holy poo poo, a flyweight main event. I went back and counted just to be sure: This is the first flyweight main event for the UFC since UFC 256: Figueiredo vs Moreno on 12/12/2020, which was 104 events ago. Or, as of this event, 903 days. Or just shy of 30 months. Even crazier, this is the first flyweight main event to not have a championship on the line since UFC Fight Night: Pettis vs Moreno all the way back on 8/5/2017--a whopping 241 events, or 2,128 days, or almost six god damned years ago. Six years! We've seen five Sean Strickland main events booked in less than two years, but it took a presidential term and a half to get another flyweight contendership match in a main event. But it finally happened! We made it! So everything's good now and I'm going to stop complaining about it, right? If you have read any of this before, you should know by now that I will never stop complaining. Here's the thing: This wasn't supposed to be a flyweight main event. It was going to be a middleweight tilt between Jack Hermansson and Brendan Allen until Hermansson got injured. And even then, the UFC was initially planning for the new main event to be a women's bantamweight match between Miesha Tate, who is one for her last five, against Mayra Bueno Silva, who hasn't been off the prelims in more than a year--but Tate got injured, and who's left but the flyweights? Here's another thing, while we're at it: That Figueiredo vs Moreno pay-per-view headliner I mentioned as the last flyweight main event? That wasn't supposed to happen either! It was supposed to be Kamaru Usman defending the welterweight title against Gilbert Burns until Usman pulled out, and then it was Amanda Nunes vs Megan Anderson until Nunes got injured, and THEN it was Petr Yan vs Aljamain Sterling until that, too, got scratched by travel visa issues. Once again, the card was saved by the good ol' flyweights. So the last real flyweight main event--the last time the UFC intentionally booked, promoted, and ultimately produced a fight card headlined by male flyweights--was that aforementioned six year-old fight night, now so ancient that only three of its twelve main-card fighters are still actually in the UFC. But two of those three are world champions now. So it all worked out, and maybe this will, too. Kai Kara-France has been on the precipice of title contention for several years, now. If you want to be technical, he already got there: The last time we convened here to discuss Kai it was for his Flyweight Interim World Championship match-up against Brandon Moreno while they all collectively waited for Deiveson Figueiredo to come back from another injury. But it wasn't just a title shot for Kai, it was a shot at revenge. Back in 2019 Kara-France was the big new thing at flyweight, a 20-7 contender on a three-fight winning streak in the UFC, and it was Moreno who turned him away. A better, stronger, much harder-punching Kai awaited Moreno in 2022, and he was wholly intent on getting his win back and punching his ticket to an undisputed title. And he was doing okay! Up until he wasn't. A kick to the liver folded Kara-France's title hopes in half alongside his fragile, fleshy human body, which was unfortunately not designed to protect us from getting booted in the chest. It was a devastating loss--but it only dropped him down below Alexandre Pantoja in the pecking order. Kara-France is still right up in the title mix, particularly with former champ Deiveson Figueiredo stuck in the difficult position of having to sell the world on a completely unfathomable fifth match with Brandon Moreno should he remain champion. It's a great position to be in! But it carries a price. If you're a top contender who can't quite get a title shot it means having to defend that contendership, and in a class as talent-rich as flyweight, there are always enemies at the gate. Amir "The Prince" Albazi is a very dangerous man to have knocking on your door. He's exceptionally well-rounded, he's got multiple regional titles under his belt, he spent a year racking up a couple solid wins in Bellator, the only defeat of his career came against the criminally underrated (and unjustly released) Jose "Shorty" Torres, and in just four UFC fights Albazi's racked up a knockout and two submissions, including becoming the first man to ever tap out the exceptionally tricky Malcolm Gordon. So if he's a flyweight finisher on a four-fight winning streak, why hasn't he been in contendership yet? The answer, as happens distressingly often, is lovely luck and bad timing. Albazi's been in the UFC since mid-2020, but in the three years since he's only had four fights--which is exactly as many fights as he's also seen evaporate thanks to injuries, COVID, or simple, terrible luck. His last appearance this past December was nearly scuttled, too--he was supposed to fight Alex Perez for his #6 spot, and after Perez withdrew he was bumped up to a matchup with the #4 Brandon Royval, and then Royval busted his wrist in training and Albazi had to settle for the unranked, newly-signed, last-minute replacement-for-a-replacement that was Alessandro Costa. Life is not fair to Amir Albazi, to the extent that I cannot help worrying this fight will go up in smoke in the 48 hours before fight night and the world will get Main Event Alex Caceres instead. But, should all go as planned, this fight is, in all fairness, a loving banger. Kai Kara-France is an incredibly aggressive kickboxer who could knock out a horse and Amir Albazi is an exceptionally canny fighter who's proven his ability to win fights anywhere they go. Even the betting odds have the fight dead even. I get why. But I feel oddly confident picking AMIR ALBAZI BY SUBMISSION. Kara-France is one of the most dangerous men in the flyweight division, but a huge part of that danger comes from his willingness to throw his all into his strikes--and we've seen that get him in trouble against strikers and grapplers alike. Amir isn't just very defensively sound, he's a fantastic opportunist with a track record of snatching submissions and knockouts from overextended opponents, and overextending has been Kai's weakness for years. I cannot help seeing the title hopes getting pushed back one more time. CO-MAIN EVENT: RUNNING OUT OF PUNCHLINES FEATHERWEIGHT: Alex Caceres (20-13 (1), #15) vs Daniel Pineda (28-14 (3), NR) The Bruce Leeroy career arc has been kind of wild, man. Alex Caceres is coming up on thirteen consecutive years in the UFC, making him one of its most inexplicably enduring veterans, and if you'd told someone at the time that the TUF 12 quarterfinalist who kept getting drunk and bleaching the household laundry was going to have more longevity than almost the entire UFC roster, they would have thought you were crazy. (The intervening 13 years of geopolitical history you had just finished yelling about would probably not have helped.) It's not that Alex Caceres was a joke--even young and green he was a dangerous submission artist and durable as hell--it's that no one really took him seriously as a factor in his divisions. No matter how talented, he was a dancer and a jokester who got his nickname from The Last Dragon, couldn't string together more than two victories at a time, and struggled with Roland Delorme. Five or so years into his tenure, the world had mostly given up on Alex Caceres ever getting anywhere. And then a few years ago he abruptly got somewhere. He put together the best winning streak of his career, he gave Sodiq Yusuff a run for his money, he even scored his first knockout in the UFC after getting twenty-seven cracks at the bat. And it was a beautiful, sliding headkick! Alex Caceres, after a decade and a half of combat sports, is only now reaching maturity as a fighter and showing his true potential. Having finally, painstakingly achieved his ranking, that potential will now be tested against Daniel "The Pit" Pineda, a fighter who, until two months ago, could barely be proven to demonstrably exist. Four years ago, Pineda was an extremely solid signing for the Professional Fighters League: A 26-13 UFC veteran and regional champion who only won by fun, violent stoppage and came inches away from a Bellator championship match. He was a perfect fit, he picked up a first-round knockout and a submission, and he seemed poised to be the breakout star of the season. And then he failed a steroid test, both fights were erased, and he was fired. A year of suspension later he was back in the UFC, and he was winning, and everything was great! And then he got knocked out by Cub Swanson. And then he got poked in the eye by Andre Fili and had another fight erased. And then he tested positive for amphetamines (he says it was an undisclosed prescription for Adderall) and got suspended again. But now he's back! Again! He fought and choked out "Top Gun" Tucker Lutz this past March. So now, having won one fight in the last three years and having had three of his last six fights legally stricken from the record, he's fighting for a top fifteen ranking, because our sport is very, very real. ALEX CACERES BY DECISION. Daniel Pineda hits hard, but Caceres still has an extremely solid chin, and most of Pineda's finishes come on the ground, where Caceres is at his best. It'll probably go the distance, it'll probably be close, and it'll probably be Caceres. MAIN CARD: NO LARGE MEN ALLOWED LIGHTWEIGHT: Jim Miller (35-17 (1)) vs Jared Gordon (19-6 (1)) I love both of these fighters, but boy, I hate this fight. Jim Miller has been around in the UFC since two thousand and god drat eight. He has the most fights, the most wins, the second-most stoppages and the second-most submissions. Once upon a time he was just one fight away from championship contention. That time was more than a decade ago. In the modern era of Jim Miller, the UFC has vacillated between using him to get new fighters over, flirting with peripherally ranked opponents, and pitching him into nostalgia act showdowns like Clay Guida and Donald Cerrone. And they're sort of doing it again! He was initially supposed to fight the almost-ranked prospect Ľudovít Klein here, but Klein couldn't make the night. So instead, he's fighting Jared Gordon. Jared Gordon, who was on the periphery of a ranking up until Grant Dawson choked him out last April. And then he should have had the biggest win of his career as the main who derailed the exceedingly silly runaway train that is Paddy Pimblett! Except the judges scored the fight against him in the communally-agreed biggest robbery of 2022. So he had a chance to get his rhythm back in a fight with Bobby Green a month ago! But that fight ended in a no-contest when Green, one of the most seasoned strikers in the sport, abruptly launched himself at Gordon skullfirst like a cranially-oriented missile and illegally knocked him out. Generally speaking, when a fighter gets knocked loopy in a fight, they get medically suspended from training for at least thirty if not sixty days. Jared Gordon got dropped by a headbutt and pounded on until he went limp, as of this fight, 42 days ago. This fight even being legally sanctioned gives me hives. In an ideal situation, I think Gordon is a bad match for Miller. He's bigger, faster, younger, and a solid enough grappler that Miller would most likely have to try his luck on his feet. Barely a month after getting his skull based in by another man's skull? I dunno, man. I'm still picking JARED GORDON BY DECISION but this fight aggressively should not have been sanctioned, let alone booked. FLYWEIGHT: Tim Elliott (18-12-1) vs Victor Altamirano (12-2) Tim Elliott was one of the best flyweights in the world just a few short years ago, but, boy, it's been a bad couple of years for the man. He was supposed to get a high-profile bout against Sumudaerji, lost it to an injury, and went on to instead be trashed by Matheus Nicolau. He came back half a year later and beat Tagir Ulanbekov--in a fight virtually the entire media agreed he should have lost. And then he spent nearly an entire year on the shelf, nursing injuries, waiting for a fight, and becoming a deeply unfortunate international news story after revealing that his wife, former UFC fighter Gina Mazany, had been having an affair with fellow former UFC fighter Kevin Croom. Just a real, real poo poo run of luck. And then this fight got messed up, too! Tim Elliott was preparing to fight Allan Nascimento, a fellow grappling ace, and Nascimento got hurt. So instead it's time for Victor "El Magnifico" Altamirano, a fighter who gave me an existential crisis about the future of the flyweight division after a fight this past March that looked like two light-heavyweight brawlers had been hit with a shrink ray and forced to butcher one another to win the favor of Rick Moranis that they might be returned to their normal size. He's got plenty of talent and plenty of submissions, but gently caress, that fight was ugly. I want to believe Tim Elliott is still better than that. Is he, in reality? I don't know. But I want to believe. TIM ELLIOTT BY DECISION. WOMEN'S FLYWEIGHT: Karine Silva (15-4) vs Ketlen Souza (13-3) When "Killer" Karine Silva made her UFC debut this past June, I deeply underestimated her. Her previous fights, particularly her Contender Series victory, looked less than impressive, and it led me to pick Poliana Botelho's Muay Thai skills over her. That was exceptionally wrong. Karine had some trouble with Botelho's kicks before cottoning to the realization that she could simply walk punches into her face, and seconds later Botelho was flat on her face and stuck in a D'arce choke. It was a solid performance, not just for her ultimate success, but for the much rarer ability to adapt on the fly and alter a strategy that didn't seem to be working. Ketlen Souza is here as a reminder that regional championships are just bus tickets to a bigger company. Invicta FC's Women's Flyweight Championship has seen four of its five champions toss the belt in the trash to move to Bellator or the UFC, and Ketlen was the quickest of them all: She won the title just this past January, and barely one hundred days later, the belt is once again vacant and Souza is ready for UFC competition. Souza is a student of the style that seems to drive a lot of hot prospects out of Brazil these days: Tons of kicks, many of them unnecessarily spinning, and a hyper-aggressive bottom game when you inevitably get pushed over. And it worked just fine in Invicta. Will it work here? Do I dare underestimate Karine Silva again, or have I learned my lesson? KARINE SILVA BY DECISION. The hot stove is hot. She's bigger, she hits harder, and she's a solid enough grappler to deal with the 'get in my guard' strategy. LIGHTWEIGHT: Jamie Mullarkey (16-5) vs Muhammadjon Naimov (8-2) Add Jamie Mullarkey to the list of people who cannot catch a loving break. His last fight was supposed to be a highly relevant matchup against the almost-ranked Nasrat Haqparast, but an injury and a last-minute replacement forced Mullarkey to content with the newly-signed, last-minute replacement Francisco Prado, and this fight was Mullarkey's shot at the VERY ranked Guram Kutateladze, but the week of the fight Guram pulled out and got replaced by--you guessed it--a newly-signed, last-minute replacement. Mullarkey's intense style of brawling and shooting is sufficiently one-size-fits-all to handle changes in opponent, but at some point, the man should probably get to fight the person he signed a contract for. Muhammadjon Naimov would like to make this count. His Taekwondo styles and undefeated record got him one shot at the UFC already in the form of a 2020 Contender Series appearance, which he lost to Collin Anglin, who proceeded to get cut within a year after dropping two consecutive knockouts in three and a half months. Comparatively, not a great look. Naimov's core striking looks very solid and he's very good at sneaking elbows in on advancing opponents, but like most regional fighters, his competition makes it tough to judge him. He just scored an awesome, thirty-second headkick! But it was against a 4-4 guy who's only beaten rookies and jobbers. Will his speed work against a Jamie Mullarkey? Probably not! JAMIE MULLARKEY BY SUBMISSION. PRELIMS: ANDREI ARLOVSKI'S NEVERENDING PROSPECT SHOW WELTERWEIGHT: Elizeu Zaleski (23-7) vs Abubakar Nurmagomedov (17-3-1) Elizeu Zaleski dos Santos has not had a great time lately. For a time he and his capoeira kicks were at the very end of the UFC's welterweight top fifteen, but midway through 2020 he dropped out of the rankings after losing a robbery of a decision to Muslim Salikhov, and then he needed knee surgery, and then he had one of the most scandalous fights of the year in a battering of Benoît Saint-Denis that was so one-sided and inexplicably allowed to continue that the referee in charge was kicked out of the event and banned from the UFC immediately after it was over, and to top it all off, he tested positive for ostarine and got suspended for a year. That suspension only ended in March, and the UFC doesn't like wasting time, so now he's fighting Abubakar Nurmagomedov, a fighter who also, relatively speaking, keeps wasting their time. Abubakar is yet another cousin of Khabib, but more than wrestling, clinching and submissions he's into sidestepping, whipping headkicks, and Not Fighting. Over three and a half years in the UFC Abubakar has only actually made it to the cage three times, and each time has been some flavor of underwhelming. Maybe he's cursed by the degree to which other family members have been wrecking people across the globe, but even in his 2-1 UFC career, Abubakar hasn't set anyone's world on fire. So he's fighting to be right up against a ranking, because of course he is. ELIZEU ZALESKI BY DECISION. Zaleski hits harder and kicks faster. Abubakar's best chances are going to come on the floor, but he's got to talk himself into pushing the issue to get there, and I'm not sure he's got it in him. BANTAMWEIGHT: John Castańeda (19-6) vs Muin Gafurov (18-4)John Castańeda's last fight was back in October. In my conclusion, I wrote this. CarlCX posted:It has been pointed out to me that my most constant fight prediction error is assuming fighters will wisely use their strengths. This feels like one of those inevitable errors. Castańeda's quick movement and versatile attacks are easily poised to give Santos fits--if he uses them well. If he doesn't, he could just as easily charge facefirst into a spinning heel or a flying knee and get hurt. I'm still choosing to believe in John Castańeda by decision, but if he screws it up, by god, I hope I learn my lesson. And then he spinning back kicked the poo poo out of people again and, oh, hey, welcome back, theoretically profitable knockout generator. MUIN GAFUROV BY TKO. I'm trying to at least learn from my John Castańeda-shaped mistakes. HEAVYWEIGHT: Andrei Arlovski (34-21 (1)) vs Don'Tale Mayes (9-5 (1)) It's preliminary Arlovski time, baby. The man will never, ever go away, even after getting ragdolled and choked out in two minutes in his last fight, and by god, honestly, why should he? Why SHOULD Andrei Arlovski stop? His ability to a) throw a jab and b) move in more than the four cardinal directions make him a match for most of the world's heavyweights, and there will always be an audience that wants to see him because the sight of Andrei Arlovski reminds them of a time when they were young and weightless and believed in a future where things might actually get better instead of worse, and really, isn't that the only thing anyone can truly hope for in entertainment? Indiana Jones 5 comes out this month and I need you to accept that we're all trapped in this crab pot together. Don'Tale Mayes lives in that category of heavyweight we call Not Particularly Great. He's large! He is a strong, sizable man, and he likes to use that strength to drag people to the floor and elbow them until they politely ask him to stop. If he can chuck you? You will endure a violent thrashing. If you are unchuckable? Tends to go very, very poorly for him. Which is a pretty sensible fight to put together right after Arlovski got tossed around and choked out, I suppose. Realistically, Arlovski is in his mid-forties, he's only getting slower, and it's only going to get harder for him to deal with people like Mayes. That said: ANDREI ARLOVSKI BY TKO because man, isn't it about time? Wouldn't it be nice? Don't you want nice things to happen, sometimes? BANTAMWEIGHT: Daniel Santos (10-2) vs Johnny Munoz Jr. (12-2)This is a rescheduling of the hastily-scratched opening prelim of last month's UFC 288, so let me drag that writeup out of the vault. CarlCX posted: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. WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT: Jinh Yu Frey (11-8) vs Elise Reed (6-3) Jinh Yu Frey is one of those fighters who has been cursed into the Negative Zone by the sport. She's perfectly fine--snappy jab, solid kickboxing--but she's been continually incapable of putting together any real mixed martial momentum. She fell out of title contention in Invicta, she got smashed in Road FC and Rizin, she floundered in the UFC, and when she finally, finally managed to put together a three-fight winning streak last year for the first time since 2016, she, uh, didn't, because the judges inexplicably took the third fight away from her. And then she got knocked the gently caress out in her subsequent fight. Elise Reed hasn't been doing much better. She joined the UFC at a fairly green 4-0--by which point she had two defenses of the Cage Fury Strawweight Championship, meaning yes, she was fighting for a championship belt at 1-0 because that's the talent pool--and in the two years since she's been back and forth, trading losses and wins in turn. But her two wins were scrappy decisions and her two losses were absolute maulings. But those maulings happened on the ground. Reed's big weakness is wrestling and grappling, and Jinh Yu Frey has a statistical average of just about one half of one takedown per fight. It's not her wheelhouse, and Reed's implacability is going to make implementing a standing gameplan difficult. ELISE REED BY DECISION. BANTAMWEIGHT: Luan Lacerda (12-2) vs Da'Mon Blackshear (12-5-1) I tried my best to generate a spirit bomb for Luan Lacerda in his UFC debut against Cody Stamann this past January, and in what is becoming a thing I say with genuinely distressing frequency, most of the media and fans thought Lacerda had outworked and outgrappled Stamann but not a single one of the judges agreed. To hell with your black belt in jiu-jitsu and your leg kicks, you failed at the most important part of being a martial artist: Making Derek Cleary feel something. Da'Mon "Da Monster" Blackshear had a surprising amount of hype coming into his UFC debut last summer, and he has followed up on that hype by getting beaten to a draw by Youssef Zalal and comprehensively outfought by Farid Basharat, and now the world has already mostly forgotten him. My willingness to believe in Luan Lacerda has not abated. Blackshear's striking tends to start behind leg kicks, which Lacerda's arguably better at, and Blackshear's tendency to get winded makes beating a guy who fought a full fifteen against a cardio monster like Stamann difficult. LUAN LACERDA BY DECISION. LIGHT-HEAVYWEIGHT: Maxim Grishin (32-9-2) vs Philipe Lins (16-5) Incredibly, this is actually a rescheduling of a fight that was supposed to happen all the way back in October of last year and got scratched during the TV broadcast after Lins got sick. So we close out today's writeup with my bit from eight months ago, which might actually be the longest gap I've done so far. Since the fight Lins HAS finally fought again and knocked out Ovince St. Preux in the process, but it's Ovince St. Preux, so I ultimately am sticking to my guns. CarlCX posted:It's the battle of used-to-be-heavyweights. Grishin's stay at the division was brief: Grishin's gameplan of pecking leg kicks, looping hands and Sambo clinch trips was not long for the big boy division, and his immediately unsuccessful short-notice-replacement stint led him right back to 205. Except for that one fight where William Knight missed weight by 13 pounds. I guess that was technically also heavyweight. Thanks, Mr. Knight. Philipe Lins is a sacrifice in the name of continually reinforcing the irritating reality of the UFC's place vs the B-Leagues of the world, as he ran through PFL's 2018 heavyweight tournament with a series of violent stoppages, won the championship with ease, and was in the UFC one fight later getting outstruck by a 76 year-old Andrei Arlovski. And then he got knocked out by Tanner Boser. And then this happened:
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Jun 1, 2023 19:48
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Kevin Lee is back? Ugh
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Jun 1, 2023 21:23
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Counterpoint: Kevin Lee is cool
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Jun 1, 2023 21:43
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Is it cool if I repost the rainbow pride elsewhere? I like that.
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Jun 2, 2023 02:43
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Oh yeah, it was just going around Twitter, I 100% did not make it.
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Jun 2, 2023 03:22
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reeg posted:Counterpoint: Kevin Lee is cool He's also extremely handsome. He should give up that fighting business and just stand around being hot.
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Jun 2, 2023 03:28
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CarlCX posted:Oh yeah, it was just going around Twitter, I 100% did not make it. Sweet!
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Jun 2, 2023 04:54
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Gordon talked about his concussion publicly, and now he's out: https://bloodyelbow.com/2023/06/01/ufc-fighter-jared-gordon-concussion/
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Jun 2, 2023 05:33
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i think ONE needs bigger championship belts.
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Jun 2, 2023 05:40
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Freudian slippers posted:Gordon talked about his concussion publicly, and now he's out: https://bloodyelbow.com/2023/06/01/ufc-fighter-jared-gordon-concussion/ Good, that fight should never have been sanctioned in the first place. He's been replaced by Fury FC featherweight Jesse Butler, so this is either gonna be real fun or real sad. Also Chris Daukaus is out of next week's Khalil Rountree fight, so the big pay-per-view card for the month is currently down to 11 fights and Eryk Anders is still on the main card. STONE COLD 64 posted:i think ONE needs bigger championship belts. I have loved championship belts since my childhood pro-wrestling days, but I have nothing on Chatri's absolute fetish for belts. There's like 20 minutes out of every ONE broadcast dedicated just to how awesome their belts are. It's pornographic.
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Jun 2, 2023 05:50
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a promoter after my own heart. except for the other stuff he does or doesnt do.
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Jun 2, 2023 05:52
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Forget belts, swords, trophies, all that. The championship should be a gaudy suit of armor.
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Jun 2, 2023 08:34
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  This was from some card in Uzbekistan last year A giant plate, gun, a clock and smaller guns. .
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Jun 2, 2023 11:17
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ONE fights starting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0DDri1LpxE
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Jun 2, 2023 13:32
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Digital Jedi posted:ONE fights starting Thanks for linking again!
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Jun 2, 2023 17:16
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ONE Friday Fights 19 Report: MUST SEE FIGHT: Panrit (69-27) vs. Ferzan “The Boogeyman” Cicek (20-6) (MT 145) 1:43:05 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0DDri1LpxE&t=6185s Not a great show otherwise, but they can't always have 8 great fights out of 12. Show report: https://bocot.substack.com/p/one-friday-fights-19-2023-06-02
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Jun 2, 2023 18:30
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Digital Jedi posted:
hell yeah
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Jun 3, 2023 02:18
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boxing but relevant https://twitter.com/SpinninBackfist/status/1664820718125588482?s=20
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Jun 3, 2023 07:31
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lol
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Jun 3, 2023 08:45
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lol
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Jun 3, 2023 08:52
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My least favourite part was when the ref stepped in and afforded Greg the same mercy that he failed to give his ex as he was bashing her.
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Jun 3, 2023 10:48
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Nierbo posted:My least favourite part was when the ref stepped in and afforded Greg the same mercy that he failed to give his ex as he was bashing her. All timer fun at parties post Beeswax fucked around with this message at 17:57 on Jun 3, 2023 |
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Jun 3, 2023 11:59
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Nierbo posted:My least favourite part was when the ref stepped in and afforded Greg the same mercy that he failed to give his ex as he was bashing her. who tf writes this
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Jun 3, 2023 12:04
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Dana really thought he had something with Greg Hardy. And to that I say lmao.
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Jun 3, 2023 12:29
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Nierbo posted:My least favourite part was when the ref stepped in and afforded Greg the same mercy that he failed to give his ex as he was bashing her. wtf
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Jun 3, 2023 13:09
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i personally liked how he got knocked down and checked the time to see it's only a fifth of the way through, so i knew he was going to get hurt again. jase winning like 300k betting against him was so cathartic.
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Jun 3, 2023 13:28
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Um wtf is that post lmao but anyway I was happy to wake up and see the prince of war or whatever lose again lol
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Jun 3, 2023 17:33
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Whenever i think of greg hardy i think of that clip of dan mergliata laughing, turning and walking away shaking his head at hardy celebrating his win and lol
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Jun 3, 2023 17:35
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KSW is doing a show in a soccer stadium right now if you want a contrast to the apex card tonight
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Jun 3, 2023 18:37
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And in the 2nd fight a guy has full mount and he is the one that gets KOed https://twitter.com/KSW_MMA/status/1665056095541563392?s=20 Slow mo https://twitter.com/zaspany_34/status/1665052223385083906?s=20 Digital Jedi fucked around with this message at 19:15 on Jun 3, 2023 |
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Jun 3, 2023 18:45
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completely insane
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Jun 3, 2023 18:46
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thats gotta be ko of the year. dude was out.
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Jun 3, 2023 19:52
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KSW rules Guy rapping on top of a Benz van driving around the ground floor that has a giant cake on it with ring girls on the side with flamethrowers! https://twitter.com/Grabaka_Hitman/status/1665079245608038406?s=20 edit: omg some guy came out of the cake to sing happy birthday Digital Jedi fucked around with this message at 20:37 on Jun 3, 2023 |
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Jun 3, 2023 20:35
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it's weird that they use gladiator/spartan imagery. they should use winged hussars instead. c'mon Poland, you have your own cool historical warrior, use it.
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Jun 3, 2023 20:38
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It's seriously going to be depressing going from this to an apex show
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Jun 3, 2023 21:19
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| # ? Apr 28, 2024 20:43 |
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KSW rules and on the one hand it's unfortunate we don't see too many people come to the big leagues from there because those guys are on everything, on the other hand that's probably part of why it rules. Cool knockout.
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Jun 3, 2023 21:20
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