UFC/MMA June: Pride Never Die

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Sports Argument Stadium > The Hammer House: Stinger Splash Zone > UFC/MMA June: Pride Never Die

Which of June's main events are you most looking forward t--hold on, I've just be This poll is closed.
~~Jack Hermansson vs Brendan Allen~~	2	14.29%
~~Amanda Nunes vs Julianna Pe�a 3~~	2	14.29%
~~Basically every single PFL fight previously planned~~	3	21.43%
I mean, Bhullar vs Malykhin hasn't technically been cancelled yet	7	50.00%
Total:	14 votes

[Edit Poll (moderators only)]

CarlCX: Dec 14, 2003

_{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

Bellator 297: Nemkov vs Romero, June 16

Rizin 43: Erbst vs Suzuki, June 24

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 "Caboc�o" 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. ~~Nine~~TEN fighters got popped and are now suspended for the rest of the season, and they are:

Thiago Santos, 205
Will Fleury, 205
Krysztof Jotko, 205
Mohammed Fakhreddine, 205
Rob Wilkinson, 205
Bruno Cappeloza, 265
Rizvan Kuniev, 265
Cezar Ferreira, 265
Alejandro Flores, 145
Daniel Torres, 145

That strikethrough above isn't for fun: After I wrote this, Wilkinson's positive test came in, too. In case that isn't clear: that's 50% of the light-heavyweight season, including last year's champion, and 30% of the heavyweight season now removed from competition. That is dire. Fighters have been substituted and the season will continue, but the season's continuity is more or less ruined right out of the gate, and it took two of the season's biggest pickups--ex-UFC fighters Santos and Jotko--with it. Here's to better luck in 2024.

Fortunately, they had one last bit of positive news. The UFC tried to sign French-Cameroonian kickboxing world champion turned mixed martial artist C�dric Doumb� 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 Doumb� 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. C�dric Doumb� 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 M�xico" 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:

Sumo: Sumo loving rules and has been enjoying an internet popularity renaissance and you should 100% go watch giant naked men throw other giant naked men.
Grappling: This thread is for both discussing grappling as a sport and grappling as a thing a ton of us do for fun. Go learn about choking people. For fun.
Boxing: The place to discuss the sweet science of Youtube stars outearning 99% of actual professional fighters.
Kickboxing: At this point you can talk about kickboxing here too, being as two kickboxing things happen per year, but this thread stays forever as a tribute to our lost boy, duncan.

DO WE HAVE OTHER COMMUNAL THREADS?
So many.

Drew McIntyre's Official General Thread 2: Every forum needs a random community bullshit thread. This is the best one. Go make friends with some wrestling posters.
MMA's Best & Worst of 2023: LobsterMobster's thread for tracking the best and worst things happening this year, now in 2023 flavor.
Bet On MMA:The jase1 gambling memorial thread. Remember: Don't bet on MMA.
This Sport Can't Be Legal: This is the official zone for discussing the dregs of combat sports. Slap fighting, X-ARM, ShockFights, it's all good here. This means you WILL see gross stuff if you go in it. Be warned.
The Tank Abbott Tournament: I'm running a forum game to determine which Tank Abbott is, in fact, the true Tank Abbott.
Let's Remember Some Guys: A thread for fond or simply random reminiscing about anything that has ever happened to anyone in punchsports.
Dumb Combat People On Social Media: Almost everyone in combat sports is an idiot and almost everyone on twitter is an idiot. Talk about it here.
MMA Title Belt History: Mekchu is curiously examining the way every single championship in MMA winds up in the loving UFC.

WHERE ELSE DOES FIGHT CHAT EXIST?
Our community output has grown enough that we've got a few other places things get posted:

MMAtt B.: Boco_T's substack, where his JMMA writeups and Tape Delay Kickboxing episodes get posted.
The Punchsport Report: This is my substack, and you're basically reading it now, but it feels weird not to put it in the rolodex.
The Grapple Hut: Mekchu's going to start writing a regular report on the world of pro graps.
Fight Island: A collaborative aggregator of sorts. We're working on some stuff.

And if you just want to find some fun people to talk to:

The Fight Island Discord: Chat live, with people, about things, in a box!
The #MMA IRC Channel That Will Never, Ever Die: Point your client of choice to irc.synirc.net and go to #mma!
The Nate Diaz Literarcy Society: Forums superstar DigitalJedi started a Tapology picks group some of us compete in, feel free to join the club. #1 picks winner for pay-per-views gets to rename the group for the month.

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 :catdrugs:

# ¿ Jun 1, 2023 19:46

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 11:29

CarlCX: Dec 14, 2003

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, J�ssica 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 J�ssica 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 B�hm, 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, Nat�lia 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 Andr� 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 �zcan 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 Dvoř�k. The main card isn't much less weird. Marc-Andr� 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 Jindrov�, 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 G�khan 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 Patr�cio 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 C�dric Doumb�, Carlos Leal vs Dilano Taylor, Magomed Umalatov vs Nayib L�pez, 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.

# ¿ Jun 1, 2023 19:47

CarlCX: Dec 14, 2003

CURRENT UFC CHAMPIONS
Heavyweight Champion, 265 lbs

Jon Jones - 27-1 (1), 0 Defenses
Very 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 Defenses
The 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 Jiř� Proch�zka 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. Jiř� 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 Defenses
The 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 Defenses
It 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 Defense
Destiny 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 Defenses
Sometimes 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 Rodr�guez and attempt to reunify his championship.

Interim Featherweight Champion

Yair Rodr�guez - 15-3 (1), 0 Defenses
It's been a long, strange trip for Yair Rodr�guez. "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 Defenses
Aljamain 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 Defenses
The 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 Defenses

Women's Bantamweight, 135 lbs

Amanda Nunes - 22-5, 0 Defenses
Things 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 Pe�a. 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 Pe�a 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 Pe�a for five straight rounds, dropping her a half-dozen times and elbowing her face entirely open, and barring one touchy moment with an armbar, Pe�a 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 Pe�a 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 Defenses
Every 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 Defenses
Are 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. J�ssica 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.

# ¿ Jun 1, 2023 19:47

CarlCX: Dec 14, 2003

NOTABLE CHAMPIONS ACROSS THE WORLD

Bellator Heavyweight Champion, 265 lbs

Ryan Bader - 31-7 (1), 3 Defenses
Ryan 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 Defenses
Bellator 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 Defenses
There'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 Defense
There 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 Defenses
If 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 Pietil�e 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

Patr�cio Pitbull - 35-5, 1 Defense
Patr�cio 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 Patr�cio 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, Patr�cio 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, Patr�cio was left to face top contender �d�m 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 Defense
So 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...Patr�cio Pitbull, who is trying to become a three-class champion. Thanks, Bellator.

Bellator Interim Bantamweight Champion

Patchy Mix - 18-1, 0 Defenses
There'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 Defenses
Yup. 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 Defenses
It 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 Defenses
It'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 Defenses

ONE Light Heavyweight Champion, 225 lbs

Anatoly Malykhin - 12-0, 0 Defenses
It 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 Defenses
There'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 Defenses

ONE Lightweight Champion, 170 lbs

Christian Lee - 17-4, 0 Defenses
It 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 Defenses
Tang 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 Defenses
The 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 Defenses
The 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 Defenses
Jarred 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 Defenses
Xiong 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 Defenses
Angela 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 Defenses
Roberto "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 Defenses
Rizin 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 S�o 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 Patr�cio 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 meaning
THAT'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 Defenses
All 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.

# ¿ Jun 1, 2023 19:47

CarlCX: Dec 14, 2003

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
:piss:

FLYWEIGHT: Kai Kara-France (24-10, #3) vs Amir Albazi (16-1, #7) :piss:

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 Ľudov�t 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 Beno�t 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.

:piss:

BANTAMWEIGHT: John Casta�eda (19-6) vs Muin Gafurov (18-4) :piss:

John Casta�eda'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. Casta�eda'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 Casta�eda by decision, but if he screws it up, by god, I hope I learn my lesson.

And what happened? Casta�eda beat the crap out of Daniel Santos in the first round and then walked into a flying loving knee, got hurt, never really recovered, and was knocked out in the second round. And did I learn my lesson? Any cursory examination of my win/loss ratio will easily inform you that I absolutely did not. Did John? I hope so, because Muin Gafurov is, quite often, a bad motherfucker. Gafurov was real good in ONE Championship and went three hard rounds with John Lineker without dying, but he underperformed in his 2021 shot at the Contender Series and the UFC let him head back to the regionals.

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 Casta�eda-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?

:piss:

BANTAMWEIGHT: Daniel Santos (10-2) vs Johnny Munoz Jr. (12-2) :piss:

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.

JOHNNY MUNOZ JR BY DECISION. This should be frenetic but I still think the wrestling takes it in the end.

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:

Two straight goddamn years of issues later, Lins was down at 205 fighting Marcin Prachnio. It wasn't pretty: He won the decision, but he was nearly knocked out, he was decidedly outstruck, and by midway through the third round his output had dwindled.

And all of those things are bad news against someone like Grishin, who's going to be harder to take down and harder to outstrike. Maxim Grishin by decision.

# ¿ Jun 1, 2023 19:48

CarlCX: Dec 14, 2003

Oh yeah, it was just going around Twitter, I 100% did not make it.

# ¿ Jun 2, 2023 03:22

CarlCX: Dec 14, 2003

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.

# ¿ Jun 2, 2023 05:50

CarlCX: Dec 14, 2003

KSW is a testament to what you can accomplish as a regional if you have a) money, b) good talent scouts, and c) no steroid policies.

# ¿ Jun 3, 2023 22:03

CarlCX: Dec 14, 2003

Also, speaking of fighting organizations that aren't poo poo, let's be reminded of the ones that are:

https://twitter.com/TElliott125/status/1665028315273662464

So if you fight at the Apex, you don't get to bring your family anymore because that would sacrifice the eighteen seats they can sell to extract ticket money.

edit: unsurprisingly it is now deleted, but it was a Tim Elliott tweet about the above

CarlCX fucked around with this message at 22:37 on Jun 3, 2023

# ¿ Jun 3, 2023 22:13

CarlCX: Dec 14, 2003

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4033497

GDT for Kara-France/Albazi is up. Prelims start in ~20.

# ¿ Jun 3, 2023 22:43

CarlCX: Dec 14, 2003

So, and I'm not gonna post it because there's video so also be careful if you decide to go looking for it, a 16 year-old kid in Russia died during amateur competition. For whatever reason the requirement to wear headgear had been waived for his fight, he took a spinning kick to the head and dropped, and between the kick and somewhere between the landing he did not survive. I remain genuinely shocked this does not happen more often.

# ¿ Jun 4, 2023 20:30

CarlCX: Dec 14, 2003

hey, is there any reason I might post this immediately after that

https://twitter.com/MMAJunkie/status/1665419890730373120

straight into the loving sun

# ¿ Jun 4, 2023 20:45

CarlCX: Dec 14, 2003

So, fun story that's come out from reporters and managers talking about this on twitter: Apparently at some point in the last year the Nevada State Athletic Commission made the quiet and most definitely independent decision to stop releasing information on medical suspensions. Reporters now only get to see if a license is or is not suspended with no additional context on reason or duration, and if you're a manager, well:

https://twitter.com/dannyrube/status/1665433965178544135

This is an extremely positive change that portends absolutely nothing bad for fighters and will end extremely well.

# ¿ Jun 4, 2023 22:25

CarlCX: Dec 14, 2003

Hey, guess what other person who shouldn't be fighting in August

https://twitter.com/mmamania/status/1665833628847448065

# ¿ Jun 5, 2023 22:35

CarlCX: Dec 14, 2003

Yeah, I don't think Brad Tavares is out of pocket as an opponent for Weidman if he's going to fight, I just wish he wouldn't. Dude took a bunch of horrible knockouts very quickly and then exploded his leg and he's turning 39 in like a week and a half, I feel like it will end poorly.

# ¿ Jun 6, 2023 04:44

CarlCX: Dec 14, 2003

Brut posted:

Was it that quickly? It's like a year between Rockhold and Romero, 5 months between Romero and Mousasi (that one is too soon), next loss is jacare a year and a half later, and then it's another year before he fights Reyes. Seems...not any different from a bunch of other fighters? I think it stands out more because he was a champ.

It's three years and ten months between the Rockhold fight and the Reyes fight, and I would say taking five knockouts in under four years is less common than you think. It's pretty rare for a fighter to even GET five knockout losses in the UFC without having a real long tenure, and most of them are guys like Arlovski and Cerrone and Struve who spread them out over years. I'm pretty sure Bigfoot took as many or more knockouts in as short a period of time, and the result was the UFC releasing him and his continuing to fight being looked at as one of the most shameful scandals in the sport.

Also, fun fact I found while double-checking the concussion reports after the Mousasi fight: Weidman also says he got concussed in the Machida fight and has no memory of the last two rounds. So it's actually even worse than I thought, which makes me feel good about our sport.

# ¿ Jun 6, 2023 06:08

CarlCX: Dec 14, 2003

my I Have Never Done Any Bribery shirt has people asking a lot of questions that are in no way answered by my company's financial reports

Putting such a giant full-court press behind Rodtang is wild to me. And I like Rodtang! He's great! But he's got like four times as many decisions as he does stoppages on ONE broadcasts, and he's like one fight removed from missing weight, and he keeps talking about switching away from Muay Thai to do MMA instead, and boy it just seems like putting all your eggs in the Rodtang basket is a chancy idea.

# ¿ Jun 7, 2023 18:43

CarlCX: Dec 14, 2003

CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 61: IF THIS IS IT

SATURDAY, JUNE 10 FROM THE ROGERS ARENA IN VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA
EARLY PRELIMS 4 PM PST/7 PM EST | PRELIMS 5 PM PST/8 PM EST | MAIN CARD 7 PM PST/10 PM EST VIA PAY-PER-VIEW

You know, there have been some decent pay-per-views in the Ultimate Fighting Championship this year. Multiple championship fights, multiple #1 contendership bouts, prospects on the verge of breaking out, returning legends of the sport--it hasn't all been great, but on average, I'd say it's been solid. Acceptable. A decent first five months of big shows.

We're at the halfway mark of the year. The UFC has two pay-per-views next month, and that means at least one card has to suffer. And who better to pick than the card headlined by the ladies? Amanda Nunes is a star, right? She doesn't need much lower card support. Wait, we lost Stephen Thompson vs Michel Pereira and Hakeem Dawodu vs Lucas Almeida and Chris Daukaus vs Khalil Rountree? Well, that's unfortunate, but--what, replace them? No, no, we're not doing that. Put Mike Malott vs Adam Fugitt third from the top. It'll be fine.

This is a Bad Pay-Per-View. It's not that the fighters are bad: I'm a big fan of many. But the UFC is asking you to pay eighty currency units for the privilege of watching an Eryk Anders fight.

So I'm going to get my Ya Boi-induced fugue state out of the way ahead of time while I write this. Hopefully, that will let me be gentler, and fairer, and a little more kind to the UFC as it sits struggling in its time of need.

_{i know this is where i typically put a joke but just look at it, man.}

MAIN EVENT: RESUMING THE REIGN
WOMEN'S BANTAMWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP: Amanda Nunes (22-5, Champion) vs Irene Aldana (14-6, #5)

I am already done being gentle and fair and kind. The UFC's inability to make stars anymore is an incredible shame and they have only themselves to blame for their deeply unfortunate booking situations.

In case you did not already know: This fight was not supposed to happen. This show's main event was to be Amanda Nunes vs Julianna Pe�a Part Three. Julianna did a bunch of interviews about carrying a boring champion like Nunes and the entire UFC on her back, and then the Divine Ironic Punishment division scored a grazing hit and she went down with a rib injury. The UFC had booked a maybe-or-maybe-not-we're-not-committing-to-it title eliminator between Raquel Pennington and Irene Aldana for mid-May, but in the wake of the injury Aldana got tapped to be the new title contender, despite being the lower-ranked fighter, and Pennington was picked as the backup should one of them be unable to compete.

And now we're here. Irene Aldana is on a two-fight winning streak, neither win was actually contested at bantamweight--once because she missed weight, once because she and her opponent agreed to not even try--and her last losses were to Holly Holm, who is ranked above her and not fighting for a title, and Raquel Pennington, who is ranked above her, on a five-fight winning streak, and even more exceptionally not fighting for a title.

And even this is only happening because the weight of Julianna Pe�a's bad opinions broke her ribcage. And the funny thing is--according to Pe�a, who also thinks COVID-19 is a conspiracy and lesbian mothers don't count, so, y'know, grain of salt--the UFC was so insistent on the trilogy that they ultimately had to threaten to strip Amanda Nunes, the woman they are (correctly!) advertising for this show as the greatest female mixed martial artist in history, of her championship to force her to agree to the threematch.

Which is a baffling sentence. Baffling!

Until you realize that it's really not baffling at all. They just have absolutely nothing loving left.

Ronda Rousey was a massive windfall for the UFC. Dana White spent years using the UFC's platform to poo poo on the very concept of women competing in MMA after EliteXC and Strikeforce began promoting the first women's divisions in the major American leagues, and then a funny thing happened: The sport had a megastar, and not only was she not in the UFC, she couldn't be in the UFC, because there was nowhere for her to go. That changed real fuckin' fast: Ronda Rousey's first televised appearance with Strikeforce was in August of 2011, and by February of 2013 she was the champion of a UFC division that hadn't existed until that night. And she did absolute gangbusters for business!

And most of it was with women Strikeforce had put on the map.

Make no mistake: When Holly Holm destroyed Ronda, the UFC was upset, but it wasn't that upset. A marketable, UFC-grown striker as champion? Fantastic. And when Miesha Tate beat her just one fight later? Fantastic! The UFC's second-favorite female fighter, who already had a huge fanbase AND had a perfect return angle for Ronda? Things could not have worked out better.

But then Amanda Nunes killed her. They didn't even remotely change their plans--they just had Rousey come back and fight Nunes instead in the hope that Rousey could reclaim her throne and bring back the easy money-printing machine. Nunes punched Rousey out in under a minute and she never fought again.

Amanda Nunes went on to accomplish an unprecedented feat in the sport: She established herself as the best of all time not by abstract theorycrafting or professional analysis, but by beating every other champion there had ever been. She beat every Women's Bantamweight champion, she beat the best Women's Flyweight champion, and she went up to Women's Featherweight and beat the two titleholders there too just for good loving measure. Even when Nunes finally lost her bantamweight title she rallied back for a rematch and handed the first post-Nunes champion in UFC history the worst beating of her life.

And the UFC did a funny thing: They gave the gently caress up. They stopped trying to build challengers and they simply let Nunes go out there and do whatever she was going to do. It has for so long been a point of mockery that the very act of pointing it out is a dated joke, but I'm going to state it earnestly because it deserves to be earnestly reflected: The UFC has promoted a Women's Featherweight Champion for more than six years and has never even attempted to put together a set of rankings for its division. Multiple Women's Featherweight fighters, after being released from the UFC, talked openly about the company's constant attempts to force them into Women's Bantamweight fights.

And why wouldn't they? They don't care about the division. It only ever made money because of Cris Cyborg. Who's Amanda Nunes?

Oh, and lest you think I'm putting Julianna Pe�a forth as a promotional favorite, don't worry--they didn't give a poo poo about her either. She wasn't even supposed to fight Nunes, she was supposed to fight Holly Holm. Pe�a had only been off the preliminary side of cards twice in the half-decade before her championship fight--and she lost both very, very badly. She was a warm body for Nunes, as indifferentiable as any other, right up until she won.

It didn't matter that Nunes absolutely crushed her in their rematch. The third fight was inevitable--because what on Earth does the UFC have left? They haven't built anyone. They don't have any contenders. The clearest top contender is Raquel Pennington, and the UFC was tripping and falling all over itself to keep her away from the belt in favor of more marketing-friendly fighters with more marketing-friendly fighting styles.

Suddenly--and in entirely too familiar a manner--we wind up right back here, again. Irene Aldana, a fighter on a two-fight winning streak with zero victories at this weight class in the last three years, who in her last two brushes with contendership got controlled by Raquel Pennington and shut out to the point of dropping 10-8 rounds to Holly Holm, is getting a title shot because she beat Macy Chiasson, a featherweight who hasn't appeared at bantamweight since March of 2021.

And the UFC, as it does, is rushing to finish its project the day before it's due. The promo packages for Aldana try their hardest to make her sound like the obvious top contender with a perfect resume, but the marketing is so blunt that the first shot of Aldana's side of the official trailer is just a giant Mexican flag waving over a Mexican cityscape before they roll the Irene Aldana highlight reel. Her devastating knockout of Ketlen Vieira! Which was four years ago, featuring those terrible early-generation Reebok uniforms. Her violent ground and pound finish of Yana Santos! Which was actually sort of lackadaisical and more based on the ref worrying about a broken nose than a concussion. Her thrilling comeback from-the-ground upkick liver shot knockout of Macy Chiasson!

Which, to be clear, I don't have a single bad thing to say about. That completely ruled. But it's not great that she was two minutes away from losing a decision to Macy Chiasson.

Can Irene Aldana beat Amanda Nunes? Absolutely! For one, Aldana's got solid hands, and for two, we live in a post-Julianna Pe�a world. We're still only one fight removed from watching Nunes walk into jabs and get crossed and dropped like it was her first night of boxing practice. Aldana has more than enough power and accuracy to hurt Amanda if she fights reckless and stupid again.

Will Irene Aldana beat Amanda Nunes? Probably not! Aldana's boxing expertise is inversely proportional to how well her opponents can pressure her in non-boxing areas. Against fighters like Holly Holm and Raquel Pennington and even Macy Chiasson who can make her work on the feet AND force her to deal with grappling problems, things get a lot more difficult. As much as we always focus on Amanda Nunes and her ability to punch people, she has proven more than happy to toss and pretzel her opponents instead.

And that's where this starts to feel like a rerun again, because at a certain point we're not talking about the title-contender abilities of Irene Aldana and her boxing and her grappling and her ability to Kill the Queen--we're talking about if Amanda Nunes is going to miss a step again. And we probably will be for the foreseeable future, until either she falls apart and can't win anymore, she retires on top and goes home to her family, or the UFC finally succeeds in raising up an intriguing challenger--and they're currently trying to get Holly Holm back to a title shot, so I wouldn't hold your god damned breath.

AMANDA NUNES BY SUBMISSION. Let's just go home.

CO-MAIN EVENT: THIS FIGHT BEING THREE ROUNDS IS A CRIME
:piss:

LIGHTWEIGHT: Charles Oliveira (33-9 (1), #1) vs Beneil Dariush (22-4-1, #4) :piss:

Now, I'm not saying this should have been the main event. Championship matches SHOULD main event cards. I'm saying this fight should have been five rounds and everyone who had the opportunity to make it a five-rounder and chose not to should be considered a mortal enemy of the people.

Charles Oliveira is trying to keep from being steamrolled by history. Oliveira's rise to the lightweight title was the stuff of motivational sports movie legend--a prospect laden with great expectations who let people down one too many times to carry their belief any longer finally puts it together, becomes unquestionably the greatest lightweight in an era of killers, and finishes almost everyone in his way? Jiu-jitsu grappling extraordinaire Charles Oliveira winds up knocking out Michael Chandler and dropping Justin Gaethje? Come the gently caress on. These things don't happen in real life. Only Do Bronx could make that kind of Rudy bullshit a reality.

Unfortunately, reality also crashed down on his reign like a ton of bricks. Oliveira didn't lose his belt to a man, he lost it to a scale. Half a pound of weight ended his reign, and Islam Makhachev took care of the rest. But when Poirier and Gaethje are about to fight for a made-up belt, and Chandler is chasing a dream match with a living cocaine elemental, and Makhachev himself is waiting in the wings for a compelling contender who actually fights at his weight class, a title eliminator becomes more important than ever, and Charles Oliveira, a man who has lost only once in the last five years, would love to get his baby back.

But by god, Beneil Dariush has been waiting an awful long time to get his shot at number one contendership. Dariush is also riding an eight-fight win streak, Dariush has also not known defeat for more than half a decade, and most importantly, Dariush has been trying to get to the loving title for years. He was supposed to fight Charles Oliveira all the way back in October of 2020, but ~~COVID~~undisclosed reasons prevented it from happening. He was supposed to fight Islam Makhachev in a title eliminator in February of 2022, but he broke his ankle ten days before the fight. Even this very match got pushed back a month as one final little insult.

And that's absolute torture when you're on a streak as hot as Beneil's. The UFC made no bones about his wrestling-centric style holding him back, so he decided to get attention by snapping off four consecutive finishes at the outset of his streak, including the only knockout loss of Drakkar Klose's career and an incredibly cool spinning backfist knockout over Scott Holtzman. But it wasn't until he was thrashing Diego Ferreira and Tony Ferguson and Mateusz Gamrot that the world finally gave him his propers, and it wasn't until Islam Makhachev was champion that said world began wondering what an iron-fisted wrestler like Dariush could potentially do to him.

Provided, of course, he can beat Charles Oliveira. I'll just skip to the punchline, here: CHARLES OLIVEIRA BY SUBMISSION. I like Beneil Dariush (as a fighter, anyway; the person seems like the kind of horrorshow almost every fighter is but we sublimate that awareness into a fine, well-distributed powder because the constant active reminder is mind-numbingly terrible), but I foresee bad things happening to him here. Oliveira's striking has tightened considerably, and Dariush likes to throw the kind of looping hands that open him up for clinch counters. Which is, ordinarily, fine, because he can outwrestle everyone. Wrestling Charles Oliveira is Not Safe. Letting Charles Oliveira strike with you in the clinch isn't even safe--ask Dustin Poirier's liver. Dariush's wrestling works so well because it's quick and ragged and scrambly, and those are bad choices to make against someone who can choke you out as quickly as Charles Oliveira can.

MAIN CARD: THINGS FALL APART
WELTERWEIGHT: Mike Malott (9-1-1) vs Adam Fugitt (9-3)

I don't even dislike Mike Malott or Adam Fugitt. They're both fine fighters. But Mike Malott was beating up Mickey Gall on an undercard two fights ago. He WOULD have been on the prelims again in his last fight, but it was the impossibly cursed ~~Krylov vs Spann~~Muniz vs Allen Fight Night where so many people pulled out they started recruiting people out of catering to fill the void. Adam Fugitt is a 1-1 fighter who got punched senseless in his debut and pounded out Yusaku Kinoshita back in February. And they're third from the top. And I couldn't figure out why--until I realized the UFC is out of Canadians.

Canada was a hot market for the UFC once upon a time! They turned Patrick C�t� into a title contender! Now you've got, what--Tanner Boser? Hakeem Dawodu? Charles goddamn Jourdain? Mike Malott is third from the top because by god, we need a Canadian who might one day be in title contention on this card, and Mike Malott is what we've got. And he's perfectly fine! There's nothing wrong with his fighting and he seems like a perfectly nice guy, but seriously, gently caress.

The ongoing argument, fueled by UFC matchmaker Mick Maynard's lovely tweets about MMA media daring to complain about their product, centers on the idea that it's wrong to call a card bad when the card could have entertaining fights. Here's the thing: Any card can have entertaining fights. The UFC isn't special because only it can provide fun. You could go down to your local five-dollar fight nights promotion and be almost guaranteed to have a good time. The UFC is special because it, in theory, represents the best of the best. The dream. You, as a fighter, as supposed to see the UFC as the aspirational goal at the end of the rainbow, and saying you fought and won in the UFC is supposed to carry the idea that even if you never made it to the very top, you got on the drat mountain. You, as a fan, are supposed to see the UFC's flagship shows as a guarantee not just of quality fights, but quality divisions, quality contenders and quality presentation.

If you want to chip away at that to boost your profit margins? That's perfectly fine. But at least be open about what you're mortgaging and why. MIKE MALOTT BY DECISION.

:piss:

FEATHERWEIGHT: Dan Ige (16-6, #13) vs Nate Landwehr (17-4, NR) :piss:

This should loving rule, though. Dan Ige is a long-suffering contender trying to right the ship. After years as one of the best featherweights on the planet Ige spent most of the last few years coping with getting knocked all the way back down the totem pole: Battered by Calvin Kattar, outfought by the new generation of Movsar Evloev and Josh Emmett, and just for good measure, getting completely shut down by Chan Sung Jung. His boxing never stopped being sharp and technical, nor did his skills seem to fail him--he was just repeatedly outclassed. The UFC tested the waters by throwing Damon Jackson at him this past January and Ige knocked him cold in two rounds, proving he still had gas in the tank.

But that doesn't get him out of the prospect-testing woods yet. Nate Landwehr has been getting the hints of a promotional push from the UFC, thanks as much to his aggressive style and slick submission game as his being a goofy promo-cutting crowdpleaser who talks about his biceps like he's Scott Steiner. Cutting promos and finishing people is about 90% of what the UFC wants out of its contenders, so if Landwehr can do it again here he'll be top five by the end of the month. He's still got the spectre of getting knocked out by Julian Erosa and Herbert Burns hanging on his back, but he's erasing it bit by bit.

He's got a real tough ask here, though. Ige is a tough opponent with much cleaner striking and much sharper defense. His trouble with high-pressure gameplans is going to be the real question mark here--Landwehr can get wild, but that wildness comes from a stifling attack, and if he can stifle Ige's movement and force him out of his comfort zone he's got a real good chance. NATE LANDWEHR BY DECISION.

MIDDLEWEIGHT: Marc-Andr� Barriault (15-6 (1)) vs Eryk Anders (15-7 (1))

The line between reasonable criticism and memey internet fighter-bashing is thin. Fighters are human beings with incredibly difficult jobs, and the skill and heart it takes to do that job is incredibly rare. And, truthfully--most complaints the world has about fighters aren't even with the fighters themselves but the way their organization is using them, be it the steady line of cans Michael Venom Page crushed for years or Sean O'Malley being catapulted to title contention or Fedor Emelianenko only defending the Pride heavyweight championship in four out of his twelve Pride fights after capturing it.

So I mean this with the utmost level of respect: In a company that regularly cuts fighters for extremely specious reasons, for the life of me, I do not understand why Eryk Anders is still here. The last two times I wrote about Eryk Anders I did so in the form of exasperated jokey-jokes about how easily people forget about his fights and how inexplicable his UFC career has been, and it's more than a year later and we're still having this conversation. He dropped a decision to The Iron Turtle and kicked Kyle Daukaus out of the UFC and no one remembers any of it and we're still having this conversation.

I don't even think it's enormously disrespectful to opine about why Eryk Anders is still here, because the UFC doesn't seem to think he should be either--because no one he beats is still here. The one and only win on the Eryk Anders record to still be in the UFC is Gerald Meerschaert, and that was--sing the words if you know the chorus--a very poor split decision virtually the entire media scored against him. He loses more than he wins, he's never so much as smelled a ranking, his fights bounce off the human consciousness like soundwaves disappearing into a cave and the UFC seems to be convinced anyone he can beat doesn't actually belong on the roster.

And he's still here. And he doesn't seem to be going anywhere. And I cannot help feeling we are to be cursed with this continuing yet longer. ERYK ANDERS BY DECISION.

PRELIMS: THE ACTION MAN HOUR
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Nassourdine Imavov (12-4, #12) vs Chris Curtis (30-10, #14)

Honestly? I'm just disappointed in both of you. Nassourdine Imavov, you were supposed to stop the endless march of Sean Strickland this past January. And did you do it? No! You got jabbed two hundred times and lost a decision and now we're stuck with that human 4chan post in yet another god damned main event next month. You could have saved me from having to write another set of multiple paragraphs about Sean Strickland, and you didn't, and I will never forgive you. Chris Curtis, you were on the way up, man! You were supposed to unseat Kelvin Gastelum and give us some new blood in the top fifteen. And not only did you lose, you lost AND Kelvin left the weight class. Your fall was for nothing.

You know how Chris Curtis has a reputation as one of the few non-lovely MMA fighters to follow on social media, in terms of not being constantly inundated with the worst cultural takes on the planet? He started a podcast! With Sean Strickland! They made it through one half of one episode before Curtis was laughing along with Strickland talking about women's MMA being dumb and Amanda Nunes looking like an inhuman monster and the effects of steroids on Gabi Garcia's sex organs, and it's like a single, perfect encapsulation of how easily being friends with shitheads can turn you into a shithead.

But, y'know, we needed more of that in the world, I guess. Thanks, Chris. NASSOURDINE IMAVOV BY DECISION.

WOMEN'S FLYWEIGHT: Miranda Maverick (11-4, #15) vs Jasmine Jasudavicius (8-2, NR)

Miranda Maverick should be in the top ten, and it will never stop angering me that she isn't. Maverick is only now escaping the impact of her two losses in 2021, but one of those losses was a decision to perennial judging favorite Maycee Barber that stands as one of the worst decisions in UFC history, and the other was a decision loss against Erin Blanchfield, who was last seen absolutely running through JJ Aldrich, Molly McCann and J�ssica Andrade in a goddamn row. Maverick's clinching and swarming are effective as hell, and her grappling defense--well, it held up to three rounds of Erin Blanchfield trying to murder her. But Jasmine Jasudavicius presents problems for her, half because she is also a strong, talented grappler who will be happy to control her on the floor given a chance, half because she's like half a foot taller and has an awful lot of leverage.

Which would be great if Maverick were the kind of fighter to jab and move! But she likes the pocket and she likes the clinch, and those are opportunities for Jasmine to get the fight where she wants it. JASMINE JASUDAVICIUS BY DECISION.

BANTAMWEIGHT: Aiemann Zahabi (9-2) vs Aoriqileng (24-9)

We have a quandary. I am on the record as categorically not believing in Aiemann Zahabi. I believe he's got solid defense, and I believe he fights at a steady clip of exactly once a year and will thus struggle to go anywhere even if he begins winning consistently, and I believe there's a solid limit on how high he'll go in the rankings. But I said that last July when he fought The Ultimate Fighter 29 winner Ricky Turcios, and Aiemann played a successful matador and landed three or four glancing blows per minute and got the crowd to boo lustily as he took home a decision no one was happy with. Points to the man! Aoriqileng has been much busier, but his 2-2 record in the UFC bears out the difficulty he's had making that schedule count. His wrestleboxing is efficient and effective, but its limitations have been fairly clearly shown--faster fighters and stronger wrestlers give him fits.

Aiemann is not a stronger wrestler. He is faster, cleaner and difficult to take down, and that's going to make implementing the dualsided gameplan difficult. I'm still leaning towards AORIQILENG BY DECISION but my confidence is low.

FEATHERWEIGHT: Blake Bilder (8-0-1) vs Kyle Nelson (13-5-1)

It's feeding time, baby. Blake "El Animal" Bilder was one of the big new Contender Series babies of 2022, and as is so often the case, he was given a nice, slow softball over home plate for his promotional debut this February in the form of Shane Young, a 13-7 fighter coming off two straight losses and a two-year layoff. Bilder, unsurprisingly, won. Does that mean it's time for a stiffer test? No! It's time for Kyle Nelson, who has one victory in his last six fights across five years, and whom we last saw getting the crap beaten out of him by Doo Ho Choi only to take a truly inexplicable draw. Given that Bilder's best wins come by submission and Nelson was just thoroughly wrestled by a boxer, I cannot help wondering if this fight is, to some extent, revenge.

Nelson's a tough loving guy, but this is a bad matchup for him. BLAKE BILDER BY SUBMISSION.

EARLY PRELIMS: THE CONTINUING SUFFERING OF FLYWEIGHT
:piss:

FLYWEIGHT: David Dvoř�k (20-5, #10) vs Steve Erceg (9-1) :piss:

We're doing this again? We're doing this a-loving-gain. God dammit, man, come on. Come on.

We got a flyweight main event last week, despite the UFC's best attempts to keep it from happening, and here we are, one week later. This fight was supposed to be the #10-ranked Dvoř�k against the #8 ranked Matt Schnell--and it was STILL on the loving prelims--but Schnell had to pull out about two weeks before fight night, and the UFC searched high and low for a replacement, and they found Steve "AstroBoy" Erceg, a flyweight prospect out of Australia who's held the Eternal MMA title for his last couple fights.

Is Steve Erceg bad? I don't necessarily think so. He has some patient grappling entries, he's good at locking down position and, like any decent flyweight, he can sneak a left hook into an opening a couple seconds wide. Should Steve Erceg, who was fighting 4-2 guys in the regionals a few months ago and who the UFC initially planned to book against a fellow rookie, be fighting to be the tenth best flyweight on the planet? Probably not.

Should the tenth best flyweight on the planet be determined on the early prelims nobody watches? I have to ask the question often enough that the answer, whether I like it or not, is apparently yes, and that makes me all the gladder Demetrious Johnson got the gently caress out while he was young. DAVID DVOŘ�K BY DECISION.

WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT: Diana Belbiţă (14-7) vs Maria Oliveira (13-6)

There's a good chance this is our housecleaning fight for the night. Diana Belbiţă and Maria Oliveira are both riding the fine line of employment--Belbiţă is already 1-3 in the UFC and that one win saw her almost knocked out, and Oliveira is 1-2, but that one win was a real close split decision--and it took almost four years for Belbiţă to clear those four fights. It's not that either woman is an inherently bad fighter, they've both got talent. Belbiţă is incredibly tough and will walk through fire if it means scoring a right hand; Oliveira is a flak-cannon fighter who will throw hundreds of strikes to land several dozen.

But you might notice those are pretty backhanded compliments. Diana Belbiţă just cannot make most of her offense connect, and when she does, it invariably gets her hurt, too. Maria Oliveira isn't TRYING to make most of her offense connect, just enough to pull out a decision, and it turns out judges don't like it when you miss twice as many strikes as you land. MARIA OLIVEIRA BY DECISION, still, but I'm not sure it'll be all that fun to watch.

# ¿ Jun 7, 2023 21:08

CarlCX: Dec 14, 2003

Brut posted:

He has no plans of doing MMA right?

He does, actually. He did an interview last month about it and wanting to challenge himself, at some point he's going to fight at 125 pounds. No stated timeframe, though.

Also in b-league news: Remember how Bellator x Rizin ruled and it was immensely stupid because there wasn't actually a way to watch it on western television? They fixed it!

https://twitter.com/bellatorzone/status/1666509545684738060

Except it's only the Bellator card, so it won't include the Rizin fights, and it's also going to be airing at the same time as Poirier/Gaethje 2 and Crawford vs Spence. You're knocking it out of the park, guys.

# ¿ Jun 8, 2023 03:37

CarlCX: Dec 14, 2003

I appreciate Conor's slow change into all-comedy all the time.

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4033996

GDT for Nunes/Aldana is up. Prelims begin in half an hour.

# ¿ Jun 10, 2023 23:30

CarlCX: Dec 14, 2003

It's incredibly rare that a fighter actually goes out on top, and it's beyond rare that a fighter goes out on top surrounded by their seemingly healthy, well-adjusted family all happily partying with them on their way.

# ¿ Jun 11, 2023 06:32

CarlCX: Dec 14, 2003

https://twitter.com/aaronbronsteter/status/1667768128674336768

not with a bang, but with a whimper

# ¿ Jun 11, 2023 06:40

CarlCX: Dec 14, 2003

CommonShore posted:

I'd rather see them keep w145 if for no other reason than it will take pressure off of weight cutting in all women's divisions. Let the division get its feet under it without the heavy pressure of a dominant, scary champ up there. Make a champ, put money on being champ, and fighters will follow.

It would be nice, but unfortunately almost every women's 145er who's gotten cut from the UFC in the past year has gone on to say 'yeah they were constantly pressuring me to drop to 135' so I think that ship has sailed.

# ¿ Jun 12, 2023 02:26

CarlCX: Dec 14, 2003

CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 62: PROSPECT NIGHT

SATURDAY, JUNE 17 FROM THE MINIMUM WAGE PRISON THAT IS THE UFC APEX
PRELIMS 4 PM PST/7 PM EST | MAIN CARD 7 PM PST/10 PM EST

This is both a terrible and an extremely interesting card and I'm not sure where exactly I fall on the topic.

In terms of particular relevancy, there, uh, isn't much. This card has twenty-eight fighters on it and only three are ranked; one of them shouldn't be in the fight they're in, and the main event is a bout for championship pole position between two men no one wants to see fight for the championship again.

But once you get past those glaring issues and accept the UFC's clear decision to not give a gently caress about this card having star power, it's...actually a pretty promising prospect showcase. There are an awful lot of interesting talents in interesting matchups and far fewer squash matchups and blatant marketing attempts than we usually get.

So I don't hate it. Maybe things can actually be fun, for once.

_{it's like a time bomb and it takes ten fights into the card before it hits me}

MAIN EVENT: RESUMING THE REIGN
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Marvin Vettori (19-5-1, #3) vs Jared Cannonier (16-6, #4)

It is a little unfortunate that the main event is a fight that feels like it cannot possibly matter.

I typically try to spread around my exhaustion with the generally toxic points of view espoused by most fighters, but I'm going to get it out of the way ahead of time. I've talked about both of these guys being weird nutcases with just some of the worst possible sociopolitical opinions on multiple occasions and nothing has changed save Marvin Vettori becoming even more emphatic about Andrew Tate being a genius and satanists trying to turn your children gay. There's no need to rant further about it because there's nothing else to say.

Except for the fact that, in an era of both mixed martial arts and social media that craves credible right-wing blowhards more than ever, Marvin Vettori going full-bore Biden-is-the-devil-and-the-rapist-is-a-hero has made absolutely no one care about him one iota more. And that's as much of a referendum on the living black hole that is Marvin Vettori as it is a referendum on just how drawn out the UFC's middleweight division has become.

Your top five middleweight contenders in the UFC are, in order: Robert Whittaker, Marvin Vettori, Jared Cannonier, Paulo Costa and Dricus Du Plessis. Whittaker has already lost two fights to Israel Adesanya, and he's fighting Du Plessis in a title eliminator next month. Paulo Costa was absolutely humiliated by Adesanya in their fight and would have to move mountains to get another try.

But it doesn't get better if you go further down the list. Your bottom five consists of Sean Strickland, Derek Brunson, Roman Dolidze, Jack Hermansson and Kelvin Gastelum. Strickland got destroyed by the previous champion and is so far away from contendership that he's about to fight an unranked guy, Brunson is closing in on 40 and right on the precipice of retirement, Dolidze just dropped a decision to Vettori, Hermansson just got wrecked by Dolidze and Gastelum lost to most of the top ten and is about to drop to welterweight.

So we're left with Vettori and Cannonier. Except Vettori already lost to Adesanya twice, the second of which was an incredibly one-sided affair. And Cannonier also lost to Adesanya in a fight so uneventful a lot of people somehow forgot it already happened. And both men got the crap kicked out of them by Robert Whittaker. So they can't beat the champion, and they can't beat the number one contender, and there's no one underneath them waiting to be rocketed into contention.

Which leaves them with nothing to do but fight each other and hope against hope that they get a shot at a championship they've already repeatedly failed to grasp.

And it's a fight that, even in theory, is surprisingly difficult to care about.

Marvin Vettori has a reputation as a hard-charging punch-monster who never stops savaging people, but his last two performances were pretty unimpressive, his last great fight was his 205-pound comedy of errors against Paulo Costa, his last actual finish came against the now-fired Karl Roberson three years ago, and you have to go all the way back to his 2016 debut to get another one. The last time Vettori even particularly hurt an opponent was Jack Hermansson back in December of 2020. This is, in part, because his better opponents learned that using arcane strategies like 'moving' helped remove his pressure.

Jared Cannonier has a reputation as an unbelievably powerful knockout artist who can turn someone's lights out with a single punch, but his last two performances were pretty unimpressive, his last great fight was his 2019 destruction of--hey, look at that, Jack Hermansson again!--and aside from knocking out the about-to-retire Derek Brunson, he hasn't really hurt an opponent since that aforementioned Hermansson fight. This is, in part, because his better opponents learned that using arcane strategies like 'moving' helped escape his power.

Is my insistence on typing this as repetitiously as possible making the point? This fight is about treading water. Divisionally, stylistically, reputationally. These are two of the best middleweights on the planet, and neither has done something memorably impressive in long enough that their less impressive performances are coming to define them, and neither has realistic championship aspirations unless something significant changes.

Could something significant change? I'm cautiously optimistic. A big part of what has defused Cannonier's power is smarter, technically sound opponents using angles, feints and movement to keep him from planting and throwing. Marvin Vettori is many things, but 'smart' has never been one of them, and his last fight saw him eating Roman Dolidze haymakers every round as a consequence of his high-pressure approach. Jared Cannonier haymakers are much stiffer meals.

At least, that seems more likely than either Marvin Vettori executing a careful defensive gameplan. If he spends the fight coming forward as he is so often wont to do and Jared Cannonier still cannot pull the trigger, I don't know why any of us are still here. JARED CANNONIER BY TKO.

CO-MAIN EVENT: THE NEW NORMAL
:piss:

LIGHTWEIGHT: Arman Tsarukyan (19-3, #8) vs Joaquim Silva (12-3, NR) :piss:

This fight is going to be really fun, but it's truly baffling that it's happening.

Arman Tsarukyan is one of the best lightweight fighters in the world. He showed up in the UFC back in 2019, immediately established himself as a standout prospect, and has since demonstrated great striking, great wrestling and an intensely tight grappling game. He had to fight into the top ten the long way and he was taking three fights a year to do it, but he got there and he did it against some of the stiffest competition on the planet. He's 6-2 in the UFC and those two losses came against current best in the world Islam Makhachev and current #7-ranked Mateusz Gamrot, and that was a coinflip decision that could easily have gone Arman's way.

Joaquim Silva got into the UFC through The Ultimate Fighter Brazil 4 back in 2015--the season where both winners lost their first two fights and got cut immediately--where he was eliminated two rounds in. But the UFC signed him anyway, where he has managed, on average, one fight per year. He's a respectable 5-3 in the company, but only one of those victories happened in the last four and a half years. In actual recent memory he got knocked out by Nasrat Haqparast in 2019, sparked in thirty seconds by Ricky Glenn in 2021, and in his last fight he managed to put Jesse Ronson out with a really neat flying knee. Which is cool! But Jesse Ronson got cut immediately after that fight and now holds a lifetime record of 0-5 (1) with the UFC.

Which makes this fight pretty irritating! Lightweight has always been one of the UFC's best, toughest divisions, a shark tank where coming up through the ranks is akin to climbing a Mortal Kombat ladder full of dudes with metal arms and firebreathing skull faces, and we spent the last three years watching Arman Tsarukyan go through a murderer's row of a half-dozen talented fighters with a combined record of loving 100-16 just to get to the outer reaches of the top ten.

He will now defend that position against a guy with one win in almost half a decade and said win was over one of the statistically least successful fighters in the history of the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

Is Joaquim Silva a bad fighter? Of course not! He's a BJJ black belt who dropped a dude with a flying knee, he punched out Jared Gordon, he's got a ton of talent. Is this a bad fight? Yes, unmistakably! It's severely weird to have a guy get within a fight or two of title contention and then put his spot up for grabs against a guy who is, essentially, a rando. You can't even cite the Paddy Pimblett effect, it's not like there's a rampaging Joaquim Silva fanbase out there frothing at the mouth for him. It's not even a last-minute injury replacement situation, this is the fight they wanted.

And it's a dangerous fight! Silva's tough as hell, he's never been submitted, he's difficult to wrestle and grapple, and given the opportunity he hits like a truck. There are significant risks. I am still, obviously, picking ARMAN TSARUKYAN BY TKO, most likely after still getting Silva down and punching him just a whole bunch. But this is a deeply weird matchup and I cannot say I am a fan.

MAIN CARD: WHAT'S A MOTTA WITH YOU
:piss:

MIDDLEWEIGHT: Christian Leroy Duncan (8-0) vs Armen Petrosyan (7-2) :piss:

Hey, the annoying stuff's out of the way! Awesome. Let's get to prospects.

As the undefeated middleweight champion of the UK's Cage Warriors, Christian Leroy Duncan carried no small amount of fan intrigue coming into his UFC debut against Du�ko Todorović this past March. That intrigue, unfortunately, did not get a chance to develop into answers: There was a brief exchange of leg kicks and a few jabs, and then, two minutes into the fight, Du�ko pivoted out of a clinch and his knee popped out. Not, by any means, the fault of "CLD," but it does somewhat dampen the spirits. He looked decent for the few seconds of fighting we got to enjoy.

Armen "Superman" Petrosyan had a tremulous debut year. The kickboxing expert Contender Seriesed his way into the UFC in 2022, but his many murderous strikes met with mainly moderate success in the big leagues. He made his debut with an extremely close split decision against Gregory "Robocop" Rodrigues, he was offered up as a sacrifice to the grappling expert Caio Borralho, and he managed a dominant if forgetful victory over AJ Dobson. This is, admittedly, not what the UFC wants from a Contender Series baby they saw as a beautiful headkicking machine.

Honestly: Tough call. Petrosyan is an extremely sound technical striker with considerable grappling deficiencies; Duncan is much more of a striker than a grappler, but he'll shoot when he needs to. He also has about eight inches of reach, which is a big loving problem for Petrosyan's rangefinding. I'm leaning towards CHRISTIAN LEE DUNCAN BY DECISION as he finally gets the coming-out party the UFC wanted.

FEATHERWEIGHT: Pat Sabatini (17-4) vs Lucas Almeida (14-1)

Poor Pat Sabatini had all the makings of a rising star at featherweight--powerful wrestling, great cardio, the gumption to dive on heel hooks while half-conscious and rescue himself from certain doom--and four straight wins had him poised for a shot at the top ranks and true notoriety. And then Damon Jackson ran through him in one minute, and just to put a point on it, Jackson was promptly destroyed by Dan Ige. Suddenly, with just one loss, Sabatini is all the way at the back of the line again.

Which is why he has to deal with Lucas Almeida. Almeida was the lightweight champion of Jungle Fight and a one-time Contender Series loser when he was tapped for a UFC contract in mid-2022. He scored an upset victory over The Ultimate Fighter 27 (jesus christ) champion Mike Trizano, and then promptly fell into the perilous abyss of Bad loving Luck. He was going to fight Zubaira Tukhugov: Tukhugov hosed up his weight cut and was hospitalized. He was going to fight Andre Fili: Fili injured his eye. He was going to fight Hakeem Dawodu a week ago, but Dawodu had to pull out.

Thus, Pat Sabatini is fighting a guy at the bottom of the ladder, because he has to prove himself all over again, and Lucas Almeida is fighting a guy who could make his name, because he's gotten boned out of so many matchups that, honestly, you have to give the guy a break. PAT SABATINI BY DECISION. You got what you wanted, buddy. I don't know that it's going to work out for you.

LIGHTWEIGHT: Nikolas Motta (13-4) vs Manuel Torres (13-2)

"Iron" Nikolas Motta won on the Contender Series and waited through a full two years of injuries and COVID delays before he finally made his UFC debut, where he was promptly and unceremoniously knocked the gently caress out by Jim Miller, a sentence that is getting perplexingly less rare every day. He banked a win afterward over Cameron VanCamp, who was not long for the company and got released almost immediately thereafter. I wasn't sure what to make of Motta's UFC prospects before his debut against Miller, and a year and a half later, I'm still pretty undecided. Knocking out a guy with half a foot of height on you is pretty neat, though.

Manuel "El Loco" Torres has had a little bit of an odd ride from the regionals to the big show. In mid-2021 he was choking out a 10-11 guy at a fight night in Tijuana; at the end of 2021 he was earning a UFC contract after getting away with an unpunished eye gouge (in fairness, his victim was named "White Assassin"); by mid-2022 he was leaving Frank Camacho 1 for his last 6 by vicious knockout. His face-forward, hard-punching style is paying some fairly obvious dividends; the UFC putting the knockout artist in front of the guy who's taken 3/4 of his losses by knockout and got lit up by Jim Miller back when that was deeply unexpected seems like a bit of an intentional conclusion.

Let's let them have one. MANUEL TORRES BY KNOCKOUT.

:piss:

WELTERWEIGHT: Muslim Salikhov (19-3) vs Nicolas Dalby (21-4-1 (2)) :piss:

It takes a reasonable amount of confidence to go by "The King of Kung Fu," but when you've got twelve knockout wins and a half-dozen of them are by some variety of Spinning poo poo, you get to get away with it. The Sanda master turned MMA champion is trying to get back on track in the UFC after his five-fight winning streak was snapped by Li Jingliang last summer. He had a bit of a return to form thanks to his thrashing of the constantly unconscious Andre Fialho just before American Thanksgiving, but Salikhov turned 39 this month, so if he's going to make a run, in all likelihood, he's going to have to continue to make this one count.

And if there's one thing Nicolas Dalby hates, it's counting. Do not try to count around Nicolas Dalby. He will punish you for your numerical heresies and demand of you a wordly accord, during which he will, in all likelihood, punch you a bunch. "Why do you hate numbers," someone asks him, and after they return from the hospital he pens them a letter in beautiful cursive, a letter about life, and living, and the difficulty of keeping count of your wins and losses when you've got two fights that technically didn't happen and a draw dragging down your record. And his victim, from their full body cast, will say, "This is written in Danish and I am from Oklahoma."

MUSLIM SALIKHOV BY DECISION. And don't tell them to use Google Translate. It loses all the context.

PRELIMS: THEY HID ALL THE FLYWEIGHTS DOWN HERE
:piss:

BANTAMWEIGHT: Raoni Barcelos (17-4) vs Miles Johns (13-2) :piss:

Raoni Barcelos is an excellent fighter who is trying desperately to hold onto his job. At the start of 2021 Raoni was 16-1, had a five-fight win streak in the UFC, and was widely considered a top prospect: Today, he's 1 for his last 3. The UFC shoved Raoni up to the next echelon of competition, and he promptly got drowned by people like Timur Valiev and Victor Henry--but the company also knew exactly what it was doing this past January when it slotted him against Umar Nurmagomedov, one of the scariest bantamweights on the planet. Having gotten him repeatedly crushed, it's time to throttle down a bit: Miles "Chapo" Johns, while by no means a bad or unsuccessful fighter, is a representative of that previous tier of competition. He's 4-2 in the UFC, but he hasn't been able to string more than two consecutive wins together thanks to folks like John "Sexi Mexi" Casta�eda and Mario "Why Am I About To Fight Cody Garbrandt" Bautista.

I have been, unquestionably, in the tank for Raoni Barcelos. I continue to live in this tank. It is pleasant and humid and my owners regularly feed me grubs. RAONI BARCELOS BY DECISION.

FLYWEIGHT: Jimmy Flick (16-6) vs Alessandro Costa (12-3)

Jimmy Flick has had a very weird time in the UFC. He won on the Contender Series back in 2020, made his debut just three months later and scored a submission-of-the-year contender flying triangle choke over the very tough Cody Durden, and, having lived in glory, immediately retired. The pay wasn't great, there's no retirement plan and he was anxious over ruining his body for nothing. But two years, a divorce and a mid-life crisis brought him out of retirement this past January, as he was ready to strike for glory again! He was promptly knocked out in one round. Alessandro Costa skated into the UFC on the back of his time as the flyweight champion of Mexico's record-padding Lux Fight League, with the added benefit of Amir Albazi needing a replacement fighter for his replacement fighter and there just not being many flyweights who'll take a top ten fight on two weeks' notice. Costa made a good accounting for himself in the opening round, but Albazi adjusted, took over and ultimately pounded Costa out in the third.

Fighters coming out of retirement always gives me hives. It feels like it fails far more than it succeeds, and in a case like Flick's where his return from retirement got him almost immediately punched out, it's hard not to worry about a guy like Costa finishing the job. ALESSANDRO COSTA BY TKO.

BANTAMWEIGHT: Kyung Ko Kang (18-9 (1)) vs Cristian Qui�onez (18-3)

Kyung Ho Kang passed ten goddamn years in the UFC this March. That's an aggressively silly number. Dominick Cruz hadn't even been stripped of the inaugural bantamweight title when "Mr. Perfect" made his debut. Except three and a half years of that was lost to South Korea's mandatory military service, and two years were lost to COVID, so in actuality, Kyung Ho Kang is Link from Encino Man and he just gets periodically thawed out when the world needs someone to wrestle Rani Yahya. Cristian "Problema" Qui�onez is a comparatively new Contender Series winner who made his UFC debut last September with the UFC's favorite Contender Series combo meal: A fight with a veteran who hasn't won in years and who is almost certainly about to get fired. Cristian did his job, knocked out Khalid Taha and sent him to his inevitable release from the company, and the slide rule has moved to the next integer set.

CRISTIAN QUI�ONEZ BY DECISION. Kang's extremely difficult to finish and his transitions between jabbing and smothering are going to be difficult to overcome, but Cristian's got the power to back him off and we just saw Kang struggle with a similar threat in Danaa Batgerel.

:piss:

FLYWEIGHT: Carlos Hernandez (8-2) vs Denys Bondar (16-4) :piss:

I'm hoping this is the cool-rear end grappling match it could be rather than the tepid kickboxing match it might be. Carlos Hernandez hopped into the UFC last year and scraped the scrapiest of split decisions from Victor Altamirano before getting choked out by a superior grappler in Allan Nascimento, and Denys Bondar is, uh. Oh, god. In the middle of typing this sentence I started having an existential crisis about what I'm doing. This is a prospect showcase to me, someone who breathes enough UFC to recognize this people, but to any sane human being this is what Bellator prelims look like, isn't it? It's just a dozen people you've never heard of with inherently interchangeable names you won't recognize the next time you see them and none of it will actually matter because we've trained ourselves to ignore wins and losses and focus on marketing pushes and we know none of these motherfuckers are going to get one.

CARLOS HERNANDEZ BY DECISION, but we've all lost something.

FLYWEIGHT: Felipe Bunes (13-6) vs Zhalgas Zhumagulov (14-8)

Felipe Bunes is the latest to embark on the grand tradition of trading your regional championship in for a bus ticket to the big show; he won the Legacy Fighting Alliance's flyweight championship in January and then immediately hosed off to the UFC. Which is, in fact, what every single undisputed LFA flyweight champion in history has done. Feeder leagues: They exist and they're good. He's got a solid all-around game and he trains with the Pitbull brothers, but he's had trouble breaking through the upper ranks--he got bounced out of three straight top fights over in Russia and his first shot at LFA contendership saw him choked out by our old buddy Jussier Formiga, who should probably be back in the UFC. Zhalgas Zhumagulov is something of a modern tragedy: He's 1-5 in the UFC, but, in our favorite recurring refrain, three of those fights really, really should have been victories, and judges disagreed on wholly inexplicable grounds. After a November fight with Charles Johnson saw Zhalgas outland, outwrestle and outgrapple him in all three rounds only to lose a split decision anyway, Zhalgas ragequit mixed martial arts and announced his retirement on instagram. But his contract wasn't finished and he had some time to regroup, and by god, he's going to give it another try.

So, here's the thing: Is Zhalgas Zhumagulov a better fighter than Felipe Bunes? I definitely think so. Is Zhalgas Zhumagulov definitionally good enough to stop Felipe Bunes? I have doubts. Is Zhalgas Zhumagulov going to get hosed by the judges for his unfriendly style if it goes to a decision? Statistically speaking, I mean, yeah, probably! I'm still picking ZHALGAS ZHUMAGULOV BY DECISION because I want to live in a just world, but, y'know: We don't.

:piss:

WOMEN'S FLYWEIGHT: Tereza Bled� (6-1) vs Gabriella Fernandes (8-2) :piss:

I was fully behind Tereza "Ronda" Bled�, the Czech grappling monster, in her UFC debut this past November. I thought her takedowns were powerful and her grappling was dangerous as hell. and it was! For the first round. and then it turned out her opponent Nat�lia Silva is in fact For Real, and she proceeded to thrash her for a round and a half before executing Tereza with a spinning kick to the face. A few months later, LFA's Women's Flyweight Champion Gabriella Fernandes made a similar striker vs grappler debut against Jasmine Jasudavicius, and theirs was a mirror of the first match: Fernandes battered Jasudavicius in the first round with her array of jabs and kicks, only to get dragged to the mat and beat up for the rest of the bout.

The optics of putting a striker who had trouble with a grappler against another grappler are a little odd, but I am not done being in the tank for the third or fourth fighter to be named after Ronda Rousey, apparently. TEREZA BLED� BY SUBMISSION.

BANTAMWEIGHT: Ronnie Lawrence (8-2) vs Daniel Argueta (9-1)

This sentence will mean absolutely nothing to any sane person reading this: I like Ronnie Lawrence because he makes me remember liking Mitsuhiro Ishida back when emo music was still vibrant and fresh and cargo pants weren't funny. Lawrence's sheer dedication to endless wrestling is impressive in an age of contracts contingent on a certain percentage of mandatory stand-and-bang action. Weight cutting issues left him missing fights, and the incredibly unjustly released Saidyokub Kakhramonov stopped his winning streak in his tracks, but wrestling, unlike cargo pants and The Juliana Theory, never goes out of style. "The Determined" Dan Argueta, too, is a wrestler. He won the LFA bantamweight title on the strength of his ground and pound and his constant threats of armbars and his refusal to admit that the advent of folkrock was just as secretly misogynist as the college rock it supplanted, but it's worked out for him and we can't stay young forever.

RONNIE LAWRENCE BY DECISION. In a wrestler vs wrestler bout I think Lawrence has both the better wrestling and the more reckless hands, and I saw Dashboard Confessional at a festival once and found them more emotionally ingratiating but still had more fun at the N.E.R.D. show next door.

LIGHT-HEAVYWEIGHT: Modestas Bukauskas (14-5) vs Zac Pauga (6-1)

Am I betraying my convictions about this card being a fun prospect showcase by constantly veering off into random asides about weird bullshit, or is this just a commentary on how my actual fight analysis outside of main events is surface-level at best and my vague awareness that I'm more about the stories of the fighters that brought them to the moment of competition than their individual skillsets falters under the weight of cards with so little story propping them up? Modestas Bukauskas wasn't even supposed to still be here. He was a warm body for the UFC's inexplicably-beloved Tyson Pedro to drop at their big Australian supershow this past February, and then he had the temerity to win, and now he's curtain-jerking the televised prelims of a card the UFC doesn't care if you watch against Zac Pauga, the runner-up of the 30th god damned season of The Ultimate Fighter, who responded to his success by instantaneously leaving the heavyweight division, dropping to 205, and struggling mightily to defeat a middleweight.

MODESTAS BUKAUSKAS BY DECISION. I will never be Jack Slack and I think I'm happier that way.

# ¿ Jun 15, 2023 00:53

CarlCX: Dec 14, 2003

I criminally loathe Sean Strickland and want nothing but misery for him, and even I think that matchup is absolute garbage, and I have been thinking about how to write that whole main event that isn't just me saying "gently caress" thirteen hundred times.

Also, uh, about Pitbull's 135-pound debut this weekend:
https://twitter.com/BrMassami/status/1669187150653558784
When you cut so much weight your head is three sizes too big for the rest of your body.

# ¿ Jun 15, 2023 04:57

CarlCX: Dec 14, 2003

LobsterMobster posted:

i would like to join carl in the grubtank

# ¿ Jun 15, 2023 19:46

CarlCX: Dec 14, 2003

2023 Zombie vs 2023 Holloway should be considered a Hagueworthy crime.

# ¿ Jun 16, 2023 00:24

CarlCX: Dec 14, 2003

https://twitter.com/BellatorMMA/status/1669940509102559237

These are the reasons heavyweight is the most-loved division.

# ¿ Jun 17, 2023 09:04

CarlCX: Dec 14, 2003

ilmucche posted:

That sure is a thing you wrote, can someone read it and tell me if it was good

it's a bit memey but there's heart to it and I'm most definitely not going to tell anyone not to try to make longform funnies in my dumbass word-swamp threads; good try, cagliostr0

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4034430

Back to the GDT for the UFC at the top of the hour. Or you can watch AEW Collision at 5 like 99% of the subforum.

# ¿ Jun 17, 2023 23:26

CarlCX: Dec 14, 2003

I know this gets said on a nearly monthly basis at this point, but this might actually be the worst card yet.

# ¿ Jun 19, 2023 02:15

CarlCX: Dec 14, 2003

https://twitter.com/jedigoodman/status/1671013014890516480

The UFC removed Amanda Nunes from everything but Women's Featherweight, because she's the only thing they ever added so without her it would just be a header and a blank white rectangle.

# ¿ Jun 20, 2023 05:49

CarlCX: Dec 14, 2003

beep by grandpa posted:

cody garbrandt on prelims for 292.

bj penn is the only other former champ to not retire i can think of to meet this fate.

was curious, looked into it:

Renan Barao spent a good chunk of his late UFC career on the prelims, tragically
Carla Esparza, hilariously, was on the prelims literally the fight after losing the belt to Joanna
Rashad's last UFC fight was a prelim against Anthony Smith
Johny Hendricks was on the prelims for UFC 200, which is forgivable, but also on the prelims for UFC 207 getting hosed up by Neil Magny
Dom Cruz got demoted to the prelims after the end of both his title reigns
Nicco Montano, the best champion ever, was on the prelims after getting stripped

Also Arlovski's STILL on the prelims but he lost the belt in 2006 so that's a pretty edge case.

# ¿ Jun 21, 2023 04:37

CarlCX: Dec 14, 2003

CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 63: THE FIREWORKS FACTORY

SATURDAY, JUNE 24 FROM THE VYSTAR VETERANS MEMORIAL ARENA IN JACKSONVILLE, FLORIDA
EARLY START TIME WARNINGPRELIMS 8:30 AM PST / 11:30 AM EST | MAIN CARD 12 PM PST / 3 PM ESTEARLY START TIME WARNING

This card marks me a hypocrite.

The UFC's last trip to network television was May's Rozenstruik vs Almeida, and I had plenty to say about how cold and underwhelming the card felt. No name value, mostly prospects thrown to the wolves of one million casual viewers, and an incredibly artificial attempt to reinforce some fighters the UFC already clearly wanted to push.

Objectively, this card has all of those issues. I could tell you this card has an extremely high fun potential and a lot of interesting people on it, and both things are true. But I would still give it a pass anyway, because it is Ilia Topuria fight night, god dammit.

I think it's deeply necessary to be wholly in the tank for a fighter here and there. I think combat sports are such an inherently cruel, irrational and often outright arbitrary thing that you need the anchoring influence of an equally irrational force to stay afloat in its terrible seas. The day there isn't at least one fighter that you, as a diehard fan, want to aggressively root for above their peers, it's probably time to take a break.

Unless you write weekly essays. Then you just have to roll with it.

_{wikipedia needs to update better and i need to stop using all of these websites.}

MAIN EVENT: EVALUATING DESTINY
:piss:

FEATHERWEIGHT: Josh Emmett (18-3, #5) vs Ilia Topuria (13-0, #9) :piss:

This? This is a thing I have been waiting on for years. And it presents one of the few opportunities the UFC has left to get through the smoke and permafrost at the top of the featherweight division.

Men's featherweight has long been one of the best weight classes in the world for both density of talent and must-watch fights, but that talent is also choking it. Reigning champion and pound-for-pound great Alexander Volkanovski so thoroughly dominated the division that it earned him the first crack at newly-minted lightweight champion Islam Makhachev. Champion vs champion fights are both the highest point of mixed martial arts and one of its biggest traps: No matter who wins, two divisions are put in jeopardy for a chance at singular glory, and inevitably, one champion will be devalued.

Except this time. Somehow, this time, the inevitable was evited. Islam Makhachev won, but it was a difficult decision that made Alexander Volkanovski look even better in defeat. Which is great for the stature of both titleholders! And terrible for everyone else under them, because the UFC and the fanbase alike have been clamoring for a rematch to the point that Islam doesn't appear to be fighting again until this Fall--in what, should Volkanovski beat interim champion Yair Rodr�guez next month, could well be another champion vs champion rematch.

But the featherweight logjam doesn't end there: Max Holloway, the former champion, is still around, and still one of the best fighters on the planet, and he still has a bad habit of beating the poo poo out of every contender put in front of him. Even aforementioned interim champion Yair got into championship position after losing to Holloway, because after losing three fights to Volkanovski, Max will have to move Heaven and Earth to get another crack at him. The UFC's championship hype trains have to be rerouted around him because he is the penny on the tracks for every goddamn one of them.

And that's how we wind up here, with a match between the #5 guy and the #9 guy that somehow could, still, be a fight for #1 contendership. And it wouldn't even be that weird. Which is extremely weird.

Josh Emmett's road to the championship was as unlikely as it was rocky. For the first few years of his UFC tenure he didn't seem like a championship prospect--a hard-hitting wrestleboxer like the rest of Team Alpha Male who barely squeaked by fighters like Jon Tuck and got knocked out cold by an aging, collapsing Jeremy Stephens who followed that performance by failing to win nine of his next ten fights. By 2019, most of the mixed martial arts world had consigned Emmett to the middle of the pack.

And then he pulled off one of the rarest tricks in combat sports: He got better. He tightened his boxing, he improved his defense, and he worked his way up the rankings with four straight wins over top fifteen competition. His big break finally came in a great fight with Calvin Kattar, which he won--somewhat controversially, but hey, that's every other decision these days, so gently caress it. Josh Emmett was at the top of the ranks, and with the champion occupied and possibly even leaving the division, he got his crack at an interim championship.

He, of course, lost. Terribly. He got the poo poo kicked out of him in a nearly literal sense and was ultimately submitted in just two rounds. Hard rise; hard fall. And now the wolves are back at the door.

When Ilia Topuria made his UFC debut in 2020 he was only 8-0, but like any undefeated Euro-prospect, he had a fair amount of hype from in-the-know fans who were already familiar with his powerful hands and his dangerous wrestling--but it's a lot easier to look dangerous when you're fighting 0-0 rookies seven fights into your career. Topuria would have to perform against considerably tougher competition to justify the hype.

So he took the path of least resistance: Just loving killing everybody. He had one decision in his debut--against the absurdly tough, never-been-finished Youssef Zalal--and proceeded to just brutally, horrifyingly murder everyone else the UFC put in front of him. Damon Jackson, the finishing machine who was just fighting for a top 15 berth? Knocked out in two and a half minutes. Ryan Hall, the nearly-undefeated world jiu-jitsu champion no one wanted to fight? Topuria took him to the floor and put him out in one round. He even went up a weight class on short notice, fought a knockout artist in Jai Herbert who was both incredibly dangerous and half a loving foot taller than him, and knocked him dead on his feet in the second round.

Bryce Mitchell was supposed to be the real test for Topuria--a top ten bantamweight who also just happened to be a fellow undefeated wrestler. Mitchell was supposed to be a match for Topuria in every aspect of the game. Mitchell tapped out in two rounds and left the fight looking like he'd been in a car accident. Ilia Topuria left the fight looking ready for contendership.

Thus: Your UFC on ABC main event. The unlikely contender who ultimately fell short against a guy the world picked out as a contender before he set foot in the UFC. Ilia, as of this writing, is a -335 betting favorite. Is the hype train still justified? Is this a winnable fight for Josh Emmett?

Absolutely. Topuria likes to get way too aggressive, in his last fight he was swinging so hard he practically knocked himself over, and Josh has enough power to make him instantaneously regret it with one well-timed punch. Josh's wrestling probably isn't going to be much of a threat against Ilia, but the use of wrestling to bait responses and open up chances to swing an overhand into his jaw is very, very feasible.

But, I mean. You read everything I said in the intro, right? You know what I'm about to say. ILIA TOPURIA BY TKO. He's a better wrestler, he's an even fiercer striker, and Emmett also has the misfortune of being the extremely rare opponent who's Ilia's size. If Ilia can land giant murder punches through massive reach disadvantages, Emmett's chin is in grave danger.

CO-MAIN EVENT: ENFORCING PROPHECY
WOMEN'S FLYWEIGHT: Amanda Ribas (11-3, #9) vs Maycee Barber (12-2, #11)

There are some fighters who are blessed by the great gods of combat sports that are the judges, and there are some who fall under the cruelty of their gaze.

Amanda Ribas has been a bit of a thorn in the UFC's side for quite some time. She's a very, very good fighter, but her very strategic, very defensive, very fan-unfriendly performances and her plethora of decision victories mark her as the kind of presence the UFC just doesn't want to get behind. So they tried to feed her to their desired fighters instead, and then she beat Mackenzie Dern and took away her undefeated streak, and I'm not sure the UFC ever really forgave her.

Fight Paige VanZant! Fight Michelle Waterson-Gomez! Fight Katlyn Chookagian, god drat you. It doesn't matter that you're 6-2 in the company and one of those losses--say it with me--was an incredibly close decision that could easily have gone the other way, we are going to feed you to someone we want to market or die trying. Nor has this changed. Amanda Ribas just beat the crap out of Viviane Araujo. Is it time to fight someone in the greater top ten? Is it time to climb a newly-destabilized ladder that just got blown wide open after the defeat of its long-dominant champion Valentina Shevchenko?

Of course not! It's time to defend your position against the lower-ranked fighter we really want to push instead.

And boy, the UFC likes them some Maycee "The Future" Barber. I said it about Ian Garry at last month's ABC card and I'll say it again here: If the UFC is so un-subtle as to bill someone by the nickname "The Future," they probably want you to lose to them. Maycee Barber was one of the first women to win a UFC contract off the neverending grift that is Dana White's Contender Series, and she's been a pet project ever since. Lose a decision to Roxanne Modafferi? That's fine, you can fight our other big star Alexa Grasso. Get outpunched by Grasso? No problem! Here's streaking Invicta star Miranda Maverick.

Lose to Miranda Maverick? The judges will save you anyway. Maycee Barber got outstruck and outgrappled by Maverick and still came away with one of the worst decision victories in UFC history. And the UFC knew it, because they pumped the brakes pretty loving hard on Maycee's competition. No more wily veterans or rising prospects: It was time for a 1 for her last 3 Montana De La Rosa and, to follow that, a Jessica Eye who was 1 for her last 6. But hey, after that you've got a young prospect in the rankings on what should be a hot streak with three straight victories, so it's time for a top-tier test, right?

Nope! Andrea Lee, who was marginally better at 2 for her last 6 and coming off a loss. And the result was another split decision that Lee could easily have won.

We end up here one way or another, trying to once again get Maycee Barber into the top ten, an achievement she's definitely good enough to manage on her own without the UFC's more obnoxious attempts to cram her in lengthwise. Is she finally going to snatch a single-digit ranking off Amanda Ribas and her beaten body?

Probably not! AMANDA RIBAS BY DECISION. Maycee's best performances come from smothering people with her forward-pressure striking and its ultimate termination in clinch control; Ribas is a pretty strong clinch grappler, is real good at getting out of the goddamn way of striking traffic, and carries enough power in her jabs to disrupt Barber's typical flow. Ribas's biggest threat here is, in all likelihood, the judges.

MAIN CARD: EMBRACING ENTROPY
HEAVYWEIGHT: Justin Tafa (6-3) vs Austen Lane (12-3)

That's right, baby: This is third from the top of the card. Multiple top fifteen fights on the card? Tatsuro Taira, one of the best flyweight prospects in the world? Neil By God Magny? We don't need any of that poo poo on television, WE HAVE HEAVYWEIGHTS.

Justin Tafa is a heavyweight kickboxer who ran up a 2-3 UFC record before taking the entirety of 2022 off--by which I mean signing up for two fights throughout the year and pulling out a couple weeks before each--only to make a triumphant comeback this past February by icing Parker Porter in a single minute. Which is impressive! Sure, Porter isn't exactly setting the heavyweight division on fire, but he's a tough dude whose only other UFC knockout loss involved Chris Daukaus smacking him upside the head dozens of times and having to hit him with a jumping knee to actually finish the job. If you can drop Parker Porter with one shot, you're doing something right.

Austen Lane is yet another Contender Series baby who was supposed to make his UFC debut at that same card--and against Tafa's younger brother, Junior Tafa. Lane was the heavyweight champion of Fury FC before the UFC pulled him back in, in the process giving him a chance to avenge his OTHER Contender Series attempt from 2018 where he committed the terrible crime of getting knocked out by Greg Hardy and, in the process, failing to spare us all the multiple-year Greg Hardy project. He's big, he's fast and he throws with just about everything he has, but the bulk of his success comes from cage-wrestling and ground and pound.

That said: He's just a couple fights removed from struggling mightily with the striking threat of Juan Adams, who went 1-3 in the UFC, looked generally pretty bad in the process, and got fired after getting knocked out by--hey, what a small world, Justin Tafa. On paper, Tafa should be able to eat Lane alive on his way in. But y'know what? gently caress it. AUSTEN LANE BY SUBMISSION. Tafa's not too far removed from struggling with the Jared Vanderaas of the world either, and Lane's got the kind of hard, smothering attack that could land Tafa on his back, and I want something fun to happen.

:piss:

FEATHERWEIGHT: David Onama (10-2) vs Gabriel Santos (10-1) :piss:

David Onama came into the UFC with a whole lot more hype than most prospects get. His reach, his power, and word of mouth out of his pre-James Krause-scandal training camp Glory MMA had Onama pegged as a future championship contender. A year and a half later Onama is 2-2 in the UFC, one of those wins was a last-minute replacement in the form of Garrett Armfield whom he had, as statistically improbable as it is, already beaten before when they were amateurs, and after getting outfought by Nate Landwehr, Onama has had nothing to do but sit on the shelf for almost a year while opponents repeatedly pulled out of fights.

Gabriel Santos, by contrast, had almost no hype coming into his UFC debut, primarily because said debut was a one-week's-notice injury replacement debut against a British star in the undefeated Lerone Murphy. And that's a shame, because 89% of the media scored the fight overwhelmingly for Santos. His striking, his kicks and his surprising wrestling offense seemed to fairly handily win the first two rounds, but subjectivity leaves us at the whims of authority.

GABRIEL SANTOS BY DECISION. I was more impressed with the performance Santos put on with one week to prepare than I have been by Onama's UFC career to date, and the wrestling capacity he showed makes me doubt Onama's ability to pull off his usual trick of using his back-pocket wrestling to open opportunities for his hands.

:piss:

MIDDLEWEIGHT: Brendan Allen (21-5, #13) vs Bruno Silva (23-8, NR) :piss:

Brendan Allen's on a hell of a run. After a shaky sophomore year in the UFC saw the always-promising Allen kicked out of the range of a ranking by Sean Strickland and Chris Curtis, Allen found a new source of power in the greatest way he could: Slaying the Dread demon of the deep, Sam Alvey, and earning the good will of mixed martial arts fans worldwide for his services in bringing us one step closer to an Alveyless UFC. But Allen's best moment was his most recent: As a sizable underdog against grappling ace Andr� Muniz this past February Allen showcased his own shockingly good jiu-jitsu, outgrappling, sweeping and ultimately choking out the submission ace in three rounds.

Which is just fine with Bruno Silva, because Bruno Silva does not want to grapple with you. Those aforementioned 23 wins of Bruno's are, with just three decision-shaped exceptions, all horribly violent knockouts. He's never submitted anyone because he's never had to. He punches them until they stop moving, or he loses. Unfortunately, he's still righting the ship after a stretch of said losses--one to future champion Alex Pereira, which is nothing to sneeze at, and one a third-round submission loss to Gerald Meerschaert which is, admittedly, slightly less flattering.

And boy, it's hard not to think about Silva getting clubbed and subbed by Meerschaert when you're talking about as dynamic a fighter and grappler as Brendan Allen. Bruno Silva can knock out anyone in the middleweight division if he connects on them, and Allen's proven his ability to get lit up when he's not careful, but unlike the men who beat him, I don't think Silva has the counter-wrestling to stop Allen's assault. BRENDAN ALLEN BY SUBMISSION.

PRELIMS: OF LEY LINES AND HAYSTACKS
WELTERWEIGHT: Neil Magny (27-10, #11) vs Philip Rowe (10-3, NR)

That's right, baby. You lose a fight to the #2 welterweight contender and it's right the gently caress back to the prelims for you, Neil Magny. Who do you think you are, Justin Tafa? Neil Magny, the eleventh best welterweight in the world, the man with the most fight time in UFC welterweight history, is going to be with us for the entirety of martial history, and he's going to spend the rest of his career defending his position in the top fifteen until the rising stars of mixed martial arts dismember him and scatter his forty-two parts so wide that he can no longer keep new blood from the top fifteen. "The Fresh Prince" Philip Rowe is one of the most interesting and most frustrating prospects at welterweight. On one hand: He's a huge, 6'3" power-puncher who's scored every single win in his career by stoppage, and he's not only 3 for 4 in the UFC, but notched knockouts in all three of his victories. On the other: He's a huge, 6'3" power-puncher and he's missed weight in 50% of his UFC cagewalks, because 6'3" power-punchers don't typically fight at welterweight on account of their being 6'3".

"But Carl, Neil Magny is 6'3" too," I hear you say. Neil Magny also looks like cardiovascular conditioning took a human shape. Neil Magny has been fighting since the beginning of the Merethic Era and he has yet to spark a man with one punch and he likely never will, and that is perfectly fine. Philip Rowe has. And as the rare match for Magny's size and reach, and as a much scarier power striker, he's a bad matchup for the demon of the deep. PHILIP ROWE BY TKO.

:piss:

WELTERWEIGHT: Randy Brown (16-5) vs Wellington Turman (18-6) :piss:

Poor Randy "Rudeboy" Brown has been slain on the altar of prospect sacrifice repeatedly throughout his career. In 2017 he was a rising star getting ground down to nothing by a then-unknown Belal Muhammad, in 2020 he capped off two fantastic victories by getting pummeled by Vicente Luque, and after recovering and scoring a genuinely impressive four-fight winning streak he was smashed in two minutes by Jack Della Maddalena this past February. But he's only 32, and he's still a real solid fighter, and he will, once again, get a chance to rebuild, this time against Wellington Turman, who after just shy of four years has finally abandoned the middleweight division in the hopes of bringing a physical advantage with him on his first journey to 170 pounds. (Which is why he is, of course, matched against one of the few welterweights bigger than him. There are six 6'3" welterweights in the UFC, and by god, half of them are here in back to back fights.) Turman's a solid fighter with a genuinely dangerous grappling game, but he's rarely been able to use it in the UFC. He gets bullied, he gets stung, and he goes to a split decision with Sam goddamn Alvey.

I like Wellington, for reasons I have never found myself able to properly enumerate and that may in secret be simply that I think his name is cool, but RANDY BROWN BY DECISION. Turman's not going to have the physical advantage he was hoping for in his welterweight debut, and I don't know that his navigation of reach or wrestling are going to be enough to stop Randy's rhythm.

:piss:

LIGHTWEIGHT: Mateusz Rębecki (17-1) vs Loik Radzhabov (17-4-1) :piss:

I'm significantly into this one. Mateusz Rębecki had a lot of hype coming into his UFC debut this past January--arguably the best mixed martial artist in Poland (with Joanna Jędrzejczyk retired, anyhow), a regional champion who'd turned away international-grade competition for years, and a 5'7" firecracker of a fighter just as likely to sling haymakers as chuck considerable larger men on their rear end. And that hype got a little doused when he had an abrupt switch of opponents to the rather unheralded 6-0 Nick Fiore, who'd been fighting in the event room of a Doubletree Inn two months prior. Mateusz won, but not crushing Fiore--a man who was, in fairness, undefeated--felt like underperforming. So now he's got tighter competition in the form of THE TAJIK TANK, Loik Radzhabov. Loik made his American debut over in the welcoming tournamental arms of the Professional Fighters League, and despite an overall 4-4 record he made it to the 2021 lightweight finals before ultimately falling to Raush Manfio. He made the jump over to the UFC this past March and took a surprisingly difficult decision over Esteban Ribovics that saw Loik fading a bit in the second round.

This is a good-rear end fight. Rębecki's wildman assaults tend to wind him and Radzhabov was still chucking flying knees even when visibly tired in the third round of his debut, so there's a real good chance this is a war. Loik's going to be tougher to wrestle than most of Mateusz's opponents, but I think the pace he sets will ultimately be the deciding factor. MATEUSZ RĘBECKI BY DECISION.

:piss:

WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT: Tabatha Ricci (8-1, #15) vs Gillian Robertson (12-7, NR) :piss:

We're having a grappling party and everyone is invited. Both of these women are well-known grappling specialists, to the point that with twenty combined wins they also combine for just two TKO finishes--and both came from ground and pound through their grappling control. Ricci's a childhood judo expert with multiple grappling championships; Gillian Robertson is one of the most accomplished submission artists in women's MMA today. This means, realistically, that this fight has a real good chance at being a pretty tepid kickboxing match where both play The Floor Is Lava. But god dammit, I want to believe. I want to see these two hit the ground and tear it up the way only two experts can. It's been a long time since grappling was as disfavored by mixed martial arts as it is now, and by god, I miss Kazushi Sakuraba vs Carlos Newton.

The betting money is on Ricci, but while I will likely regret this, GILLIAN ROBERTSON BY DECISION. She's somehow still underrated as a grappler even now and she has a considerable size and strength advantage to back it up.

FLYWEIGHT: Zhalgas Zhumagulov (14-8) vs Joshua Yan (7-1)

Zhalgas Zhumagulov was supposed to fight last week, and I wrote this big long thing about how commonly he has been boned out of justice by combat sports, and then a few days before the card started his opponent, Felipe Bunes, got bounced out of the fight over a drug test. Which came just a month after losing two opponents in one week for a bout in May. So now the man who should still be considered one of the world's best flyweights is dealing with two bad split decisions, three fight cancellations, and a new bout against Fury FC Flyweight Champion Joshua Van with seven days to prepare. The UFC: It's a serious sports organization where nothing stupid ever happens. As far as evaluating Van himself, let me potentially shock you, here: He's a flyweight. He's good at everything. He's fast, he's got solid takedown defense and he hits pretty loving fast. He telegraphs his head movement a little, but otherwise he's a pretty interesting prospect.

So anyway, ZHALGAS ZHUMAGULOV BY DECISION. Or maybe not! I don't loving know. Zhumagulov's combat sports career is at this point so cursed by whatever sect of elder gods he clearly pissed off in a past life that I can't begin to give you reliable reads on what'll happen. Maybe he'll win, maybe he'll get outworked, maybe this fight will get cancelled 48 hours ahead of the event and Zhalgas will retire to be an accountant. Maybe they'll both get hit by high-precision meteorites seconds before the bell rings. A regular fight with a reliable decision is at this point the least statistically probable outcome.

:piss:

LIGHTWEIGHT: Trevor Peek (8-0) vs Chepe Mariscal (13-6 (1)) :piss:

I should hate Trevor Peek. I really should. He's a singular encapsulation of everything wrong with the Contender Series: A regional fighter who'd only had six fights with an unstoppable addiction to standing and banging being given a bottom-of-the-barrel contract to earn poverty wages as a reward for a style that will inevitably take years off his life while UFC-tier lightweights in other organizations who will never get a contract age out of their primes. But I cannot keep from loving him, because he is so comically committed to that lifestyle that watching him fight is like falling through a hole in mixed martial time and space and waking up in 2006, with Mickey's Malt Liquor logos all over the mat and CONDOMDEPOT.COM printed on Andrei Arlovski's rear end and Trevor Peek is there, back completely straight and head completely out, punching like a man swinging a pair of lunchboxes attached to a clothesline, and yet, somehow, it's working. And we all, at the end of the day, just want to feel young again. Chepe Mariscal's a Legacy Fighting Alliance veteran who's taking this fight with just about a week and a half of prep time after Peek's original opponent, Victor Martinez, realized he had just been knocked out by Jordan Leavitt and was making a huge mistake. Chepe's a similarly brawly stylist who been working as an unpaid talent scout for the UFC for his whole life--in that four of the six people who beat him were all in the UFC almost immediately thereafter, and one of the remainder only wasn't because he had already been cut once--and he should probably bill them.

Because he is not going to get paid enough for this. TREVOR PEEK BY TKO. Peek's style means he could also get knocked out at any time, but Mariscal has this tendency to get knocked out tryingr to engage in brawls with brawlier men, and Peek is the brawliest.

FEATHERWEIGHT: Jamall Emmers (19-6) vs Jack Jenkins (11-2)

Every once in awhile the UFC gets their hands on someone they seem to only use to get other people over, and by god, that's Jamall Emmers, the poor bastard. Emmers was main-eventing down in the LFA when he got called up to the big show, and the UFC immediately booked him against Giga Chikadze, a man they planned to get into main events before he'd even made his debut. Then it was supposed to be the nigh-undefeated Timur Valiev, and the extremely good Chas Skelly, and the returning-to-contention Pat Sabatini, and back in February it was the undefeated hyper-prospect Khusein Askhabov. There are no easy nights in the company for Jamall Emmers. And this is no different: One of the breakout stars of the Australian showcase that was Makhachev/Volkanovski this past February was Jack Jenkins, a striker out of Victoria who landed some of the most horrifyingly painful leg kicks the UFC had ever seen en route to taking out a thoroughly overmatched Don Shainis. The UFC would very much like to see if he can do it again before they begin investing in him.

And he probably will. Emmers is a very solid fighter and he'll have a very solid size advantage here, but that's not going to stop Jenkins from kicking his leg out of his leg. JACK JENKINS BY DECISION.

:piss:

FLYWEIGHT: Tatsuro Taira (13-0) vs Kleydson Rodrigues (8-2) :piss:

Tatsuro Taira is one of my absolute favorite prospects in the sport, a Shooto champion out of Japan with laser-beam straights and an absolutely murderous grappling game from both top and bottom positions, and he's been an absolute star in all three of his UFC performances, and he has yet to fight any higher than the second opening prelim. Is it an attempt to take it slow? Is it antipathy for the flyweight division? Do I need to let go of concepts like card position and marketing before they drive me insane? No, my friend. The damage has already been done. Kleydson Rodrigues is an incredibly fun fighter with an incredibly fun array of kicks and the only loss in his last nine years of competition was a split decision in his UFC debut against CJ Vergara that almost the entire media scored in his favor. He also rules. Both of these men rule. I'm angry one of them will have to lose.

But it'll probably be Kleydson. His frenetic pace is a drain not just on his gas but on his control, and while I do think he won the Vergara fight, that's what made it close enough for him to lose. Tatsuro Taira is all about control, and he's very, very good at it. TATSURO TAIRA BY DECISION.

MIDDLEWEIGHT: Cody Brundage (8-4) vs Sedriques Dumas (7-1)

Two months ago Cody Brundage fought Rodolfo Vieira, one of the best grapplers in the world, and I picked Brundage anyway, because he had the counter-wrestling to keep Vieira off him and the better striking. And it went great, for a round! And then in the second round Brundage decided to jump a guillotine on a six-time world jiu-jitsu champion and got submitted almost instantaneously. And now he's fighting to not get the dreaded three losses in a row that most often leads to a contract termination, and by god, he has only that incredibly silly guillotine attempt to blame. Sedriques Dumas was a Contender Series pickup as notable for his undefeated record, lanky frame, numerous knockouts and ultra-quick long-arm chokes as his multitude of assault, domestic and DUI arrests. The UFC immediately threw him in with persistent loser Josh Fremd in an attempt to give him an easy landing pad and a big finish, and instead Fremd punched him to the floor and choked him out in two rounds because mixed martial arts knows we're all having an extremely difficult time and every once in awhile we need a feelgood moment to keep going.

I'm not convinced this will be another one. Brundage likes to go wild and it's cost him--repeatedly--and Dumas is just as likely to make him pay for it as the multitude of other men who've done it before. SEDRIQUES DUMAS BY SUBMISSION.

# ¿ Jun 21, 2023 21:53

CarlCX: Dec 14, 2003

Hey, Arjan Bhullar vs Anatoly Malykhin is finally happening in a few hours! It didn't fall through! Sure, nothing elsewhere in mixed martial arts had to be sacrificed to make this happ--
https://twitter.com/BrMassami/status/1672149517343543296
I swear to christ there are going to be like five vacant titles in next month's thread

# ¿ Jun 23, 2023 09:07

CarlCX: Dec 14, 2003

Digital Jedi posted:

PFL put out a press release on one of the fights last night

They are suspending both Natan Schulte and Raush Manfio who fought yesterday.
And now Burgos advances to the playoffs

also ufc prelims in like 15 minutes

Boy, how incredibly coincidental that the PFL is so mad about this specific fight that they just HAD to suspend them and progress the guy they spent the most money on into the playoffs he otherwise wouldn't have made it to

# ¿ Jun 24, 2023 17:35

CarlCX: Dec 14, 2003

CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 64: NOPE

SATURDAY, JULY 1 FROM THE APPROPRIATELY POINTLESS UFC APEX
PRELIMS 1 PM PST / 4 PM EST | MAIN CARD 4 PM PST / 7 PM EST

We're gonna deviate from the norm this week, and if you look at the card picture below, you'll probably understand why.

_{it's a card at war with itself}

MAIN EVENT: NO, REALLY, NOPE
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Sean Strickland (26-5, #7) vs Abusupiyan Magomedov (25-4-1, NR)

This has probably been coming for a long time. It's fine. Let's do this. Or, more accurately, let's not loving do this. We're not talking about this fight. Not for awhile, anyway. I want to talk about something else.

There's this growing conversation in the UFC's following about the quality of their cards and their matchmaking, so much so that even UFC matchmaker Mick Maynard has been chiming in about it to ridicule the notion that there's been any decline and harangue the MMA media for daring to complain. And it gets a lot of traction from the fanbase, half because fanboyism exists even for multi-billion dollar international conglomerates, half because capital has so thoroughly brought American culture to heel that the existence of critique, itself, has become a point of unacceptable contention.

When the internet was born the first thing it learned was how to connect people and the second thing it learned was how to get half of those people to think the other half sucked total poo poo. The advent of mass, unprecedented human connection brought with it brave new ways to tell those newfound connections that everything they liked was stupid and they were idiots for disagreeing. This, in turn, created two avenues of coping that despite being inherently exclusionary were somehow used in concert: An ironic detachment from the concept of caring about what anyone else thinks, and an outright antipathy for the concept of criticism itself.

It was necessary. It was powerful. And it was immediately co-opted by every celebrity, company and politician conceited enough to see it as the best possible defense the world could have ever offered. 'Your criticisms have no validity, you're just hating.' And hating, we have collectively agreed, is a worthless enterprise. Why contribute negativity? Enjoy a thing or move on. Which sounds fine, right? When you're a person on the internet speaking to another person on the internet who thinks you're a horrible human being because you think Skyrim is good or you still enjoy Ska, it's a perfectly sensible response.

When you're a multi-millionaire c-suite executive working for a billion-dollar company that just merged with another billion-dollar company as part of years of planned acquisitions by a century-old international conglomerate worth more than the GDP of 25% of the world's countries who has learned through a life of vice that being struck by lightning for slaying the concept of honesty and meaning is a myth and the universe does not believe in karma and will gladly see you off to your rest with all your riches sewn into the fine linens inside of your casket, calling criticism 'hating' becomes puerile.

But that's fine. It's fine if it's puerile. If it's puerile, you win, too, because the act of gish galloping--the act of just saying some obviously dumb bullshit and just getting away with it because gently caress you, what are you going to do about it, we're the UFC--strengthens their position by further reinforcing that we exist in an era of near-monopoly where the company can do whatever it wants. If criticizing the cards doesn't matter, it means the cards don't matter. If the cards don't matter, the matchmaking doesn't matter, and you're free to put anyone you want to market anywhere you want them to be.

And let's be clear: It doesn't matter. It hasn't mattered for some time. Sean O'Malley leapfrogging the entire top fifteen and getting to sit out for a title shot against a champion being coerced into fighting twice in three months? Why not. Jorge Masvidal getting eighteen title shots? Sure! Marketing fights based on fighters outright assaulting people in real life and facing no consequences whatsoever because society accepts that their unrepentant behavior is a feature of martial training rather than a bug and the company they work for is just making GBS threads itself with glee that anyone would do anything to stand out and get some attention? I mean, the boss is currently trying to get Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg to have a cage fight and those guys carry responsibility for numerous actual deaths around the globe, so what's a criminal brain injury here or there?

I'm a person on the internet--a person from the embarrassingly early days of the internet--and I, too, am not immune to its travails, and I, too, think some people suck total poo poo, and among them is Sean Strickland. Not for his fighting. His fighting's fine. For his insistence on acting like the world's least interesting 4chan post came to life and decided to get into cardio boxing. It's perennially just offensive enough to rile, with great insights like 'fat people are ugly' and 'eating sushi is gay' that are not remotely interesting enough to elevate him anywhere further than the ranks of middleweights who a) don't really self-market and b) don't happen to have viewpoints echoed by brass, fanbase, and Joe Rogan enthusiasts the world round.

Strickland, like so many, chose a path that embraces the worst parts of human nature in the name of making a buck. I have hope for his downfall. And this is still a dumb loving fight that he doesn't deserve to be dealing with.

And the UFC agrees. That's the best part. Abus Magomedov has one UFC fight, it was against a guy who is now 1-4 in the UFC, and it lasted nineteen seconds. The UFC's response was to try to book him against perennial journeyman Gerald Meerschaert, and when that fight didn't work out it was Makhmud Muradov, one of the last guys Gerald Meerschaert beat, and when that didn't work out, gently caress it. Why not have him fight for a spot in the top ten? Does anyone care? We sure don't.

After all, you're still here. I'm still here! I am spending valuable moments of my life trying to esoterically discuss why this incredibly silly main event that shouldn't be happening is indeed happening, starring one fighter who shouldn't be here because he hasn't earned it and one fighter who shouldn't be here because we ideally should not want to publicly endorse certain levels of banal cruelty, co-main evented by a fighter who tried to retire and failed because he still had contractual obligations, marking our passing the midway point of the year with its twenty-second factory-assembled event by having a fight to determine one of the ten best middleweights on the planet Earth between a guy who'll never touch a championship belt and a guy whose UFC fight time is one-fourth the length of a TikTok.

But remember: If you don't like it, that means you're hating. Maybe you should take a break. Maybe it's time to go do something else for awhile! You're not getting anything out of the negativity, so say something nice and be positive, and the world will be a better place.

No. No, and additionally, gently caress off for trying to be the big tough sports company that prides itself on leading the market in hypermasculine gently caress-your-feelings bullshit while simultaneously whining about people saying the cards are bad on Twitter. gently caress off for advertising right-wing propaganda shitholes like Rumble and celebrating how anti-woke you are while you're selling gay pride merchandise.

gently caress off for booking top-ten fights even you don't really want or believe in while acting like the increasingly small minority of journalists who oh-so-controversially say things like 'the cards, maybe, could be better' are assaulting the sport and insulting the fighters.

Hate isn't universally bad and love isn't universally virtuous. Hate and love can, and sometimes must, occupy the same space. Hate, directed at cruelty, at intolerance, and at the institutions that deserve it, is not only constructive but necessary. Do not ever let powerful people tell you that your ability to rationally hate them and their products is an affront to decency. Will criticizing a product change it? Of course not. The world's corporate fortresses have exceptionally high walls and your distaste cannot leap over them. But the act of remaining collectively critical of products is what separates an audience those companies feel a need to appeal to from a fandom those companies feel they can mobilize at will.

If you're trading that away for the joy of watching a Sean Strickland main event every sixty-five days, you're already doing their job for them.

Maybe Sean Strickland will win another decision. Maybe Abusupiyan Magomedov will drop him in a round. I don't know. I know this is where I always make a prediction, but this time, all I can really tell you with genuine assurance is I DON'T loving CARE WHO WINS THIS BULLSHIT FIGHT.

CO-MAIN EVENT: GRAND OPENING, GRAND CLOSING
LIGHTWEIGHT: Damir Ismagulov (24-2, #12) vs Grant Dawson (19-1-1, #15)

But we do have other fights to talk about. This one is only marginally less weird, though.

Damir Ismagulov's career has been a loving rollercoaster. He dominated the competition out in Russia, reigned as its champion, came to America and within three fights he sustained the worst injury of his career and missed two years of his prime and all of his momentum. And then he came back, won but nearly got knocked out, and blew the divisional weight limit by almost eight pounds in his next fight and was drat near fired for it. And then it was a close split decision against the equally underrated Guram Kutateladze. And then he dropped a decision to Arman Tsarukyan, his first loss in almost eight years.

And then, at 31 years old, at 24-2, and as one of the fifteen best lightweights on the planet, he announced through his Instagram that he was retiring on account of health concerns.

And then, all of three weeks later, he announced his unretirement because the UFC informed him he still had one fight left on his contract.

Truly: What do you do with all of that? The best-case scenario is everything is a lie on the negotiation table, Ismagulov wants to go home and probably get paid more than the UFC was giving him for easier competition, and he wasn't aware he couldn't get out of his contract; the worst-case scenario is one of the best fighters on the planet had a health scare bad enough that he felt a need to immediately retire and feels as though he has to compete to fulfill his contractual obligations anyway. Neither of those is great, and either way, it's pretty goddamn hard to get a bead on what to expect from Ismagulov now.

Which is unfortunate, because Grant Dawson is a bad, bad man, in ways so overwhelmingly conventional that it gives me whiplash to revert to talking about this sport like a regular-rear end sport after the last twenty paragraphs. Dawson's a throwback--the hard-punching super-wrestler who spends drat near all of his fights whipping his opponents to the floor and simply outmuscling and outgrinding them until they give up a rear naked choke--and since winning one of the first Contender Series contracts all the way back in 2017 he's 7-0-1 in the UFC, and that draw could very easily have been a victory.

If there is a weird aspect to Dawson's career, that's the one. He's a Contender Series baby, he's only got one loss on his record, he's been killing people in the UFC--all but two of his seven wins were stoppages--and he's just #15, and he's only now getting a chance to move up the ladder. At a time when other promotional darlings were playing rankings hopscotch, Grant Dawson, who has not lost a fight since 2016, is divisionally less important than Matt Frevola and Jalin Turner. Is it the wrestling? Is it the unquenchable lust for single-leg takedowns?

The presumption here is, if he's on his way out anyway, Damir's spot should go to the guy they haven't found a better spot for. I get it, and I also get that Damir's entire career is a giant question mark right now. Generally-speaking, I live by the rule that if a fighter thinks they should retire, nine times out of ten, they should probably stay retired. I liked Damir a lot more than most people, but I cannot help thinking it's still a good rule. Also, he sure did get taken down a bunch by Kutateladze and Tsarukyan. GRANT DAWSON BY DECISION.

MAIN CARD: THE MULTIGENERATIONAL CONTENDER SERIES
:piss:

WELTERWEIGHT: Max Griffin (19-9) vs Michael Morales (14-0) :piss:

Max "Pain" Griffin is trying very hard to extend a UFC career that has been consistently interesting but inconsistently successful for most of the last decade. Griffin was eliminated from the preliminary phase of The Ultimate Fighter 16 eleven goddamn years ago--the season that gave us champion Colton "Fighters are wusses, being in the army was hard" Smith, who promptly got finished three times in a row and fired--but regional success brought him back to the company in 2016, where he proceeded to, uh, lose, most of the time. Max Griffin established two identities for himself very, very quickly: In one, a genuinely terrifying fighter with absurdly painful leg kicks and bag-of-bricks punches, and in the other, a 50/50 fighter who just keeps losing split decisions and falling back down the ladder. I enjoy his fights and I enjoy his skills, but objectively, he fights at one of the toughest divisions in the world, he's 7-7 overall, and he's turning 38 this year. If he's got a run in him, he's running out of time to make it.

And the UFC is ready to trade him in for the new model. Michael Morales has all the makings of a fighter the UFC would love to strap a jetpack to: A young, fresh-faced Contender Series baby, a regional champion in Ecuador, a very skilled grappler who will sometimes ignore his own grappling advantages if it means getting to swing hamhocks. We've seen Morales twice, and each fight told a similar story: He's dangerous as hell in any position, but his sheer commitment to finding offensive opportunities makes him a constant danger to himself. Michael Morales is so dedicated to finding opportunities to do damage that he puts himself in bad positions in every fight--his hands stay low, his head stays upright, he hunts for bodyshots that get him taken down too easily, he gives up positions he should be able to hold onto because he's hunting too heavily for a ground strike or a submission. And, honestly, of loving course he does. He's 24, he's undefeated, and he knocks out almost everyone he fights. What can you tell him that he doesn't already know and has very understandably chosen to disregard?

This is a surprisingly tough one for me. I'm a big Michael Morales fan, I think he's got a ton of potential, but he very nearly got smoked by Trevin Giles in his debut and he was struggling a bit with Adam Fugitt the last time we saw him. Max Griffin is powerful, orthodox, and has made a career out of hurting people in small openings. That said: He also almost got beat by Tim Means in his last appearance. MICHAEL MORALES BY DECISION still seems the most likely outcome to me, but his capacity for making unforced errors could get him hurt here.

WOMEN'S FLYWEIGHT: Ariane Lipski (15-8) vs Melissa Gatto (8-1-2)

Ariane Lipski has had a whole lot of trouble in her UFC career. The former dominant champion of Poland's Konfrontacja Sztuk Walki is 4-5 under the UFC's banner, and it's a shame, because on her good nights she's one of the flyweight division's best fighters to watch: An aggressive but measured striker with a ground game that goes from unnoticeable to terrifying very, very quickly if she happens to grab ahold of a knee or an elbow. It's her defense that tends to be problematic. She's good at avoiding takedowns, most of the time, but her commitment to her attacks has historically left her open to counters, be they quick takedowns or quick right hands. Her last fight with JJ Aldrich showed marked improvement, with a much more patient approach, an emphasis on longer jabs and combinations at range, and a total 0 for 12 shutout on Aldrich's attempts to get the fight to the floor.

And she'll need it again here, because grappling is Melissa Gatto's bread and butter. She can strike--she is, somehow, the only person to knock out Sijara Eubanks, owner of one of the more perplexing careers in women's MMA--but as someone who broke Victoria Leonardo's arm and submitted current featherweight contender Karol Rosa, there's no question about how she prefers her fights. Gatto wants to get you on the floor, and she wants to isolate a limb, and she wants to take it home with her and give it a visible but classy place of honor on her mantle next to her brown belt, her childhood Kung Fu trophies and the year off USADA gave her for taking PED masking agents that we don't really talk about anymore because getting into the nitty-gritty of drug use in MMA is like walking into the ocean except someone has to watch you pee after you're done.

MELISSA GATTO BY SUBMISSION. Lipski looked a lot better in the Aldrich fight, but Gatto's also a stiffer threat than Aldrich when it comes to the ground game.

:piss:

LIGHTWEIGHT: Beno�t Saint-Denis (10-1 (1)) vs Ismael Bonfim (19-3) :piss:

One of the oldest axioms of mixed martial arts is that a fighter is always going to be defined by the most memorable moment of their career, and all one can do is pray said moment is something you did to someone else, rather than something that got violently done to you. Beno�t Saint-Denis is on a two-fight winning streak in the UFC, he scored two great stoppages in a row, and he is still trying to outrun the memory of that one time Elizeu Zaleski dos Santos beat him half to death in a fight so irresponsibly officiated it caused the first and only mid-card firing of a referee in company history. Which sucks, not just as yet another reminder that combat sports exists on the whims of often barely-qualified sadists, but because Saint-Denis is fun as hell. He's an ultra-aggressive grappler whose angry swinging of punches for once exists to supplement rather than supplant his true love of strangulation, and I cannot help but root for it.

But he was supposed to fight Vinc Pichel tonight, and thanks to an injury he's dealing with Ismael Bonfim instead, and boy, that's a tough loving substitution. When Ismael made his post-Contender Series debut this past January against the extremely dangerous Terrance McKinney, I wrote this:

CarlCX posted:

I'm very interested in Ismael's future in the UFC. He's a talented fighter and anyone ambitious enough to dip into tight, risky countering techniques in MMA is a fighter to watch. It's almost certainly going to catch him against a jump in competition this big and this abrupt. Terrance McKinney by TKO.

I was as wrong as it is possible to be. Bonfim beat him in the first round, hurt him badly in the second and scored a knockout of the year-calibre flying knee seconds later. It was one of the best UFC debuts in years, and, by the rule of memorability, enough to etch Ismael in as a big, -300 favorite in this fight.

Which isn't undeserved, but I think it undersells Saint-Denis a bit. Bonfim looked great, but he also struggled with McKinney's wrestling, and not only is wrestling Beno�t's big strength, we've seen him absorb enough punishment to slay a small army without going down. I still cannot help seeing ISMAEL BONFIM BY TKO, in part because I doubt another referee will give Saint-Denis that kind of allowance again, but he's not out of this fight the way oddsmakers seem to think.

:piss:

MIDDLEWEIGHT: Nursulton Ruziboev (34-8-2 (1)) vs Brunno Ferreira (10-0) :piss:

We didn't quite make it out of the main card without one big giant question mark fight. Nursulton Ruziboev is popping in on short notice to replace Abdul Razak Alhassan, and it's a pretty loving solid replacement--in theory. Ruziboev is a heralded prospect out of Uzbekistan with a number of middle-eastern regional titles to his name, but like so many fighters out of that scene, his record is hard to judge. A lot of the tape on him looks great: At 6'4" he's huge for the division, he's got a solid balance of wrestling and striking, his submissions are on point and he knocked a motherfucker out with a Rampage Jackson triangle choke powerbomb counter just a couple years ago. His last five fights also include guys who were 12-12 and 4-4, and some of that tape shows fighters who very clearly shouldn't have been fighting him.

Brunno Ferreira, our patron saint of alliteration, also got into the UFC thanks to the necessities of last-minute replacements, and he made an immediate splash by meeting the ludicrously durable Gregory Rodrigues and knocking him dead in one round. Ferreira, as of now, has finished every single one of his fights and is riding a pretty healthy five-fight knockout streak, and you could do an awful lot worse for bringing that resume into the international spotlight than taking on a guy so tough he won a UFC fight with his supratrochlear artery hanging out of his face and faceplanting him with one giant left hook. That jumps you up in the prospect hierarchy.

But it also means you get fights like this. Ferreira's objectively dangerous as hell, but up until a week ago he was preparing to fight a fellow hard-nosed brawler in a physical mirror match and now he has to fight a multifaceted grappler who's half a goddamn foot taller than him. Ferreira can still spark him out if he catches him--after seeing him kill Robocop I'm not convinced there are many men he couldn't do it to--but this is a complex challenge and I'm going with my gut. NURSULTON RUZIBOEV BY DECISION.

PRELIMS: WELCOME BACK, KEVIN
WELTERWEIGHT: Kevin Lee (19-7) vs Rinat Fakhretdinov (21-2)

Kevin Lee, this was not the return you wanted. "The Motown Phenom" was a surprisingly big deal during a hot period in the UFC's lightweight division--Conor had the belt, Khabib was on his way up, Tony Ferguson was a monster, the whole world was paying attention to the guys at 155, and Kevin's fantastic wrestling and violent ground-and-pound got him a winning streak at just the right time. But then he got his shot at the interim belt, and he lost, and then he got a couple main events, and he lost, and then he moved up to welterweight, and he lost, and the UFC didn't want to pay him more money. He was briefly the main attraction of Eagle FC, the extremely short-lived attempt by Khabib and some investors to turn a regional Dagestani promotion into a new international contender, but after one match--against, of all people, Diego Sanchez--things fell apart and Lee went back to free agency. And now he's home in the UFC, who missed him so much that they're putting him up against one of their best prospects, Rinat Fakhretdinov, a Russian champion who's not only also been wrestling and knocking motherfuckers out, but was, up until his UFC debut, doing it an entire weight class up at middleweight. He's a great wrestler, he's got real power in his hands, he's a lot bigger, and he hasn't lost a fight in almost ten goddamn years.

One of the main points of contention with Kevin Lee and the UFC was his being just a bit too big for lightweight but a touch too small for welterweight. Coincidentally, one of the other main points of contention was his advocating for leftist politics and insisting that an MMA union is inevitable. Which is, presumably, why they brought back a former headliner and put him on the prelims against an unknown, unranked guy who spent his life fighting at middleweight. Welcome back, Kevin. I hope this goes better for you than I fear it will. RINAT FAKHRETDINOV BY DECISION.

FEATHERWEIGHT: Joanderson Brito (14-3-1) vs Westin Wilson (16-7)

It's very rare that a fight gets announced and people other than me get mad about how bullshit it is on the internet. Joanderson Brito is a serious competitor; an exceptionally talented, exceptionally dangerous fighter in one of the most dangerous, talent-rich divisions on the planet. Andre Fili is one of the UFC's most-journeyed journeymen, an absurdly tough customer who, until last year, had only been really knocked out once, and it was by Yair Rodr�guez, one of the best strikers in MMA history, and it took two and a half rounds and a flying switch kick to Fili's dome. Brito punched him into the fetal position in forty seconds. He's a real prospect in the prime of his career, and he was supposed to fight a similarly-positioned challenge in Khusein Askhabov tonight. But Askhabov got injured, and the only person the UFC could find to fill the void was Westin Wilson. I have immense respect for anyone who fights. It's tough as poo poo and deeply underappreciated. But we also have to be realistic about strength of schedule and preparation, and objectively, Westin Wilson has spent the last two years fighting in can-crushing federations against guys with 9-19 records. Brief internet sensation Teruto Ishihara, who got cut from the UFC after losing three in a row--at bantamweight--knocked Wilson cold in one round less than a year ago.

Wilson's big and he's got talent, and it's always possible he wins and I am the world's biggest fool. But I do not believe in a world that just. JOANDERSON BRITO BY TKO.

WOMEN'S FEATHERWEIGHT: Yana Santos (14-7 (1), #6 at Women's Bantamweight) vs Karol Rosa (16-5, #9 at Women's Bantamweight)

Y'know, an underrated feature of the greater argument about the UFC's card quality is when you have a fighter like Yana Santos somehow go from a main-card loss on a Conor McGregor pay-per-view, to a co-main event loss to Holly Holm on ESPN, to buried halfway down the prelims on the least-hyped UFC card of the year thus far. Was it wrong then or is it wrong now? Who knows. Santos was supposed to fight Macy Chiasson tonight, but Macy pulled out, leaving Karol Rosa to take her place. And, boy, it just underlines the sheer pointlessness of this thing. Karol Rosa is ranked at bantamweight because the UFC doesn't HAVE featherweight rankings. She was hoping to work her way to a shot at the UFC Women's Featherweight Championship, but now that Amanda Nunes has retired Dana's openly said the UFC's just going to kill the weight class. This is a scheduled fight for a weight class that isn't going to exist anymore.

KAROL ROSA BY DECISION. Yana just spent an entire fight getting grapplefucked by Holly Holm, Rosa's going to do it again and then we're all going to wonder what happens to any of them in a month when their belt gets tossed in the garbage.

LIGHTWEIGHT: Guram Kutateladze (12-3) vs Elves Brener (14-3)

Guram Kutateladze is having a bad loving time. "The Georgian Viking" has been in the UFC for almost three years, and he's managed exactly two fights. In one, he beat Mateusz Gamrot, one of the ten best lightweights on the planet; in the other, he arguably beat Damir Ismaguov, only to lose an extremely close split decision. That's a hell of a resume! Unfortunately, you may have noticed it's also just two fights in three goddamn years. Kutateladze, seemingly unable to stay healthy, has pulled out of four fights in the last two years. He's one of the best lightweights in the world and he's so inactive that he doesn't even rate a Wikipedia page. And that's how you wind up fighting Elves Brener. Guram was supposed to fight Jamie Mullarkey last month, Guram got hurt and Mullarkey went on to get iced by Muhammad Naimov; Brener, who has decidedly not ensconced himself as one of the best in the world, was supposed to fight Jordan Leavitt tonight, Leavitt pulled out, and Kutateladze, now recovered, was rebooked here.

And now he's a -400 favorite against a guy who only has a win in the UFC thanks to a judging robbery. I have no doubts about the outcome of this fight, but I have plenty about it happening at all. Presuming he actually makes it to the cage, GURAM KUTATELADZE BY DECISION.

WOMEN'S FLYWEIGHT: Ivana Petrović (6-0) vs Luana Carolina (8-4)

It's newcomer prospect time again, baby. Ivana Petrović is one of the best women's flyweights in the eastern hemisphere, which, which, boy, that's just a hell of a set of delineations. She was the reigning champion of France's Ares FC right up until the UFC called her in under their always present belt-for-a-bus-ticket program, and having seen her exhibit some solid all-around skills and come back from some surprising hardship in her last fight against Ewelina Woźniak, who I'd bet we'll also see in the UFC in the next couple years, she's ready for a test on the big show. Luana Carolina, unfortunately, is now in the 'extracting value' part of her UFC tenure. The company clearly had some hopes for her after she made it through the Contender Series and beat up Priscila Cachoeira, but it's been a rollercoaster ever since, and honestly, getting knocked out by Molly McCann in London provided the payday the UFC really wanted out of her. She's been getting nothing but decisions, she's on a two-fight skid, she's being used to test newly-signed prospects--they're not enormously concerned with her future.

Which makes the contrarian part of me really want to see her upset the apple cart, here, but I don't think it's in the cards. Petrović is bigger and rangier, and Luana's at her best when she can pick at people from a distance, and, well. IVANA PETROVIĆ BY DECISION.

HEAVYWEIGHT: Alexandr Romanov (16-2, #14) vs Blagoy Ivanov (19-5 (1), #15)

Curtain-jerking heavyweights? Now you're playing my song. There's a decent chance this is a loser-leaves-town match: Romanov is staring down a three-fight skid if he loses and Ivanov, as much as I love him, is one for his last four and has been turning in nothing but interminable decisions with very little action, and that is a sin that cannot be allowed to persist in the big boy division. And this...will probably also be an interminable decision. Alexandr Romanov is a big, physically powerful wrestler, but when he can't muscle people to the ground, things start to go poorly. Ivanov is a big, physically powerful clinch grappler, and he's very good at stalemating people from close range.

Guess where this fight is mostly going to take place! Grab a snack and settle in for a long run-in with the fence. BLAGOY IVANOV BY DECISION, I guess, but my inkling is this will be one of those fights where so little ultimately happens that no one's happy with the result. Prove me wrong, big boys.

# ¿ Jun 28, 2023 20:16

CarlCX: Dec 14, 2003

Sean Strickland is contractually obligated to say something dumb and inflammatory every time someone gives him a microphone because it's the only way he is holding onto relevance.

Also it's July thread title submission time if anyone's got one.

# ¿ Jun 29, 2023 18:35

CarlCX: Dec 14, 2003

ilmucche posted:

Great write-up as usual Carl. Sometimes I read your stuff and just want to pat you on the shoulder and tell you it's all going to be okay, but I don't know if I believe it myself.

The good news is, if there is a write-up and you're reading it, we're surviving it.

BrotherJayne posted:

Hey you.

Yeah you!

You loving rock

Thanks, buddy.

CarlCX fucked around with this message at 05:33 on Jul 1, 2023

# ¿ Jul 1, 2023 05:25

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 14, 2024 11:29

CarlCX: Dec 14, 2003

We are halfway done with this weird, weird year. Join us in the July thread so we can all collectively cope with the second half of 2023 together.

# ¿ Jul 1, 2023 19:58

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Sports Argument Stadium > The Hammer House: Stinger Splash Zone > UFC/MMA June: Pride Never Die