- CarlCX
- Dec 14, 2003
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We're beginning the month of June in the UFC, one way or another. Jim Miller is fighting a different guy now but that is also fine.
CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 60: THE FLYWEIGHT DIVISION EXISTS
SATURDAY, JUNE 3 FROM THE INESCAPABLE PIT OF THE UFC APEX ARENA IN LAS VEGAS, NEVADA
PRELIMS 3 PM PST/6 PM EST | MAIN CARD 6 PM PST/9 PM EST
Did everyone else enjoy their week off? Did you do something productive? Funnily enough, the UFC's vice president of talent relations and #2 matchmaking, Mick Maynard, didn't! He spent the week tweeting low-effort insults about how Bloody Elbow, one of the few acceptable MMA journalism enterprises, poo poo on UFC cards too much. (It went under the radar until Chael Sonnen retweeted it, in his endless quest to hurriedly embrace anyone willing to cut him a check.)
Which is funny, because the second annual Road to UFC tournament happened this weekend! And the UFC's main media accounts didn't say a goddamn thing about it, because they were too busy posting dozens and dozens of advertisements for the Power Slap League. They didn't tweet anything about the Road to UFC fights until, you know, they were over.
Or, as forums superstar DoombatINC more succinctly put it:
And now we've got a card that lost two main events as the start to a month with a Jared Cannonier main event and an Irene Aldana championship match.
Healthy sport. Nothing wrong. Nothing at all to be worried about.
wikipedia's still being dumb and i've really got to ditch it permanently
MAIN EVENT: JUPITER ALIGNS WITH MARS
 FLYWEIGHT: Kai Kara-France (24-10, #3) vs Amir Albazi (16-1, #7)
Holy poo poo, a flyweight main event.
I went back and counted just to be sure: This is the first flyweight main event for the UFC since UFC 256: Figueiredo vs Moreno on 12/12/2020, which was 104 events ago. Or, as of this event, 903 days. Or just shy of 30 months. Even crazier, this is the first flyweight main event to not have a championship on the line since UFC Fight Night: Pettis vs Moreno all the way back on 8/5/2017--a whopping 241 events, or 2,128 days, or almost six god damned years ago.
Six years! We've seen five Sean Strickland main events booked in less than two years, but it took a presidential term and a half to get another flyweight contendership match in a main event. But it finally happened! We made it! So everything's good now and I'm going to stop complaining about it, right?
If you have read any of this before, you should know by now that I will never stop complaining.
Here's the thing: This wasn't supposed to be a flyweight main event. It was going to be a middleweight tilt between Jack Hermansson and Brendan Allen until Hermansson got injured. And even then, the UFC was initially planning for the new main event to be a women's bantamweight match between Miesha Tate, who is one for her last five, against Mayra Bueno Silva, who hasn't been off the prelims in more than a year--but Tate got injured, and who's left but the flyweights?
Here's another thing, while we're at it: That Figueiredo vs Moreno pay-per-view headliner I mentioned as the last flyweight main event? That wasn't supposed to happen either! It was supposed to be Kamaru Usman defending the welterweight title against Gilbert Burns until Usman pulled out, and then it was Amanda Nunes vs Megan Anderson until Nunes got injured, and THEN it was Petr Yan vs Aljamain Sterling until that, too, got scratched by travel visa issues. Once again, the card was saved by the good ol' flyweights.
So the last real flyweight main event--the last time the UFC intentionally booked, promoted, and ultimately produced a fight card headlined by male flyweights--was that aforementioned six year-old fight night, now so ancient that only three of its twelve main-card fighters are still actually in the UFC.
But two of those three are world champions now. So it all worked out, and maybe this will, too.
Kai Kara-France has been on the precipice of title contention for several years, now. If you want to be technical, he already got there: The last time we convened here to discuss Kai it was for his Flyweight Interim World Championship match-up against Brandon Moreno while they all collectively waited for Deiveson Figueiredo to come back from another injury. But it wasn't just a title shot for Kai, it was a shot at revenge. Back in 2019 Kara-France was the big new thing at flyweight, a 20-7 contender on a three-fight winning streak in the UFC, and it was Moreno who turned him away. A better, stronger, much harder-punching Kai awaited Moreno in 2022, and he was wholly intent on getting his win back and punching his ticket to an undisputed title.
And he was doing okay! Up until he wasn't. A kick to the liver folded Kara-France's title hopes in half alongside his fragile, fleshy human body, which was unfortunately not designed to protect us from getting booted in the chest. It was a devastating loss--but it only dropped him down below Alexandre Pantoja in the pecking order. Kara-France is still right up in the title mix, particularly with former champ Deiveson Figueiredo stuck in the difficult position of having to sell the world on a completely unfathomable fifth match with Brandon Moreno should he remain champion.
It's a great position to be in! But it carries a price. If you're a top contender who can't quite get a title shot it means having to defend that contendership, and in a class as talent-rich as flyweight, there are always enemies at the gate.
Amir "The Prince" Albazi is a very dangerous man to have knocking on your door. He's exceptionally well-rounded, he's got multiple regional titles under his belt, he spent a year racking up a couple solid wins in Bellator, the only defeat of his career came against the criminally underrated (and unjustly released) Jose "Shorty" Torres, and in just four UFC fights Albazi's racked up a knockout and two submissions, including becoming the first man to ever tap out the exceptionally tricky Malcolm Gordon.
So if he's a flyweight finisher on a four-fight winning streak, why hasn't he been in contendership yet? The answer, as happens distressingly often, is lovely luck and bad timing. Albazi's been in the UFC since mid-2020, but in the three years since he's only had four fights--which is exactly as many fights as he's also seen evaporate thanks to injuries, COVID, or simple, terrible luck. His last appearance this past December was nearly scuttled, too--he was supposed to fight Alex Perez for his #6 spot, and after Perez withdrew he was bumped up to a matchup with the #4 Brandon Royval, and then Royval busted his wrist in training and Albazi had to settle for the unranked, newly-signed, last-minute replacement-for-a-replacement that was Alessandro Costa.
Life is not fair to Amir Albazi, to the extent that I cannot help worrying this fight will go up in smoke in the 48 hours before fight night and the world will get Main Event Alex Caceres instead. But, should all go as planned, this fight is, in all fairness, a loving banger. Kai Kara-France is an incredibly aggressive kickboxer who could knock out a horse and Amir Albazi is an exceptionally canny fighter who's proven his ability to win fights anywhere they go. Even the betting odds have the fight dead even.
I get why. But I feel oddly confident picking AMIR ALBAZI BY SUBMISSION. Kara-France is one of the most dangerous men in the flyweight division, but a huge part of that danger comes from his willingness to throw his all into his strikes--and we've seen that get him in trouble against strikers and grapplers alike. Amir isn't just very defensively sound, he's a fantastic opportunist with a track record of snatching submissions and knockouts from overextended opponents, and overextending has been Kai's weakness for years. I cannot help seeing the title hopes getting pushed back one more time.
CO-MAIN EVENT: RUNNING OUT OF PUNCHLINES
FEATHERWEIGHT: Alex Caceres (20-13 (1), #15) vs Daniel Pineda (28-14 (3), NR)
The Bruce Leeroy career arc has been kind of wild, man. Alex Caceres is coming up on thirteen consecutive years in the UFC, making him one of its most inexplicably enduring veterans, and if you'd told someone at the time that the TUF 12 quarterfinalist who kept getting drunk and bleaching the household laundry was going to have more longevity than almost the entire UFC roster, they would have thought you were crazy. (The intervening 13 years of geopolitical history you had just finished yelling about would probably not have helped.)
It's not that Alex Caceres was a joke--even young and green he was a dangerous submission artist and durable as hell--it's that no one really took him seriously as a factor in his divisions. No matter how talented, he was a dancer and a jokester who got his nickname from The Last Dragon, couldn't string together more than two victories at a time, and struggled with Roland Delorme. Five or so years into his tenure, the world had mostly given up on Alex Caceres ever getting anywhere.
And then a few years ago he abruptly got somewhere. He put together the best winning streak of his career, he gave Sodiq Yusuff a run for his money, he even scored his first knockout in the UFC after getting twenty-seven cracks at the bat. And it was a beautiful, sliding headkick! Alex Caceres, after a decade and a half of combat sports, is only now reaching maturity as a fighter and showing his true potential.
Having finally, painstakingly achieved his ranking, that potential will now be tested against Daniel "The Pit" Pineda, a fighter who, until two months ago, could barely be proven to demonstrably exist. Four years ago, Pineda was an extremely solid signing for the Professional Fighters League: A 26-13 UFC veteran and regional champion who only won by fun, violent stoppage and came inches away from a Bellator championship match. He was a perfect fit, he picked up a first-round knockout and a submission, and he seemed poised to be the breakout star of the season.
And then he failed a steroid test, both fights were erased, and he was fired.
A year of suspension later he was back in the UFC, and he was winning, and everything was great!
And then he got knocked out by Cub Swanson. And then he got poked in the eye by Andre Fili and had another fight erased.
And then he tested positive for amphetamines (he says it was an undisclosed prescription for Adderall) and got suspended again.
But now he's back! Again! He fought and choked out "Top Gun" Tucker Lutz this past March. So now, having won one fight in the last three years and having had three of his last six fights legally stricken from the record, he's fighting for a top fifteen ranking, because our sport is very, very real.
ALEX CACERES BY DECISION. Daniel Pineda hits hard, but Caceres still has an extremely solid chin, and most of Pineda's finishes come on the ground, where Caceres is at his best. It'll probably go the distance, it'll probably be close, and it'll probably be Caceres.
MAIN CARD: NO LARGE MEN ALLOWED
LIGHTWEIGHT: Jim Miller (35-17 (1)) vs Jared Gordon (19-6 (1))
I love both of these fighters, but boy, I hate this fight.
Jim Miller has been around in the UFC since two thousand and god drat eight. He has the most fights, the most wins, the second-most stoppages and the second-most submissions. Once upon a time he was just one fight away from championship contention. That time was more than a decade ago. In the modern era of Jim Miller, the UFC has vacillated between using him to get new fighters over, flirting with peripherally ranked opponents, and pitching him into nostalgia act showdowns like Clay Guida and Donald Cerrone. And they're sort of doing it again! He was initially supposed to fight the almost-ranked prospect Ľudovít Klein here, but Klein couldn't make the night.
So instead, he's fighting Jared Gordon. Jared Gordon, who was on the periphery of a ranking up until Grant Dawson choked him out last April. And then he should have had the biggest win of his career as the main who derailed the exceedingly silly runaway train that is Paddy Pimblett! Except the judges scored the fight against him in the communally-agreed biggest robbery of 2022. So he had a chance to get his rhythm back in a fight with Bobby Green a month ago! But that fight ended in a no-contest when Green, one of the most seasoned strikers in the sport, abruptly launched himself at Gordon skullfirst like a cranially-oriented missile and illegally knocked him out.
Generally speaking, when a fighter gets knocked loopy in a fight, they get medically suspended from training for at least thirty if not sixty days. Jared Gordon got dropped by a headbutt and pounded on until he went limp, as of this fight, 42 days ago. This fight even being legally sanctioned gives me hives. In an ideal situation, I think Gordon is a bad match for Miller. He's bigger, faster, younger, and a solid enough grappler that Miller would most likely have to try his luck on his feet. Barely a month after getting his skull based in by another man's skull? I dunno, man. I'm still picking JARED GORDON BY DECISION but this fight aggressively should not have been sanctioned, let alone booked.
FLYWEIGHT: Tim Elliott (18-12-1) vs Victor Altamirano (12-2)
Tim Elliott was one of the best flyweights in the world just a few short years ago, but, boy, it's been a bad couple of years for the man. He was supposed to get a high-profile bout against Sumudaerji, lost it to an injury, and went on to instead be trashed by Matheus Nicolau. He came back half a year later and beat Tagir Ulanbekov--in a fight virtually the entire media agreed he should have lost. And then he spent nearly an entire year on the shelf, nursing injuries, waiting for a fight, and becoming a deeply unfortunate international news story after revealing that his wife, former UFC fighter Gina Mazany, had been having an affair with fellow former UFC fighter Kevin Croom. Just a real, real poo poo run of luck.
And then this fight got messed up, too! Tim Elliott was preparing to fight Allan Nascimento, a fellow grappling ace, and Nascimento got hurt. So instead it's time for Victor "El Magnifico" Altamirano, a fighter who gave me an existential crisis about the future of the flyweight division after a fight this past March that looked like two light-heavyweight brawlers had been hit with a shrink ray and forced to butcher one another to win the favor of Rick Moranis that they might be returned to their normal size. He's got plenty of talent and plenty of submissions, but gently caress, that fight was ugly.
I want to believe Tim Elliott is still better than that. Is he, in reality? I don't know. But I want to believe. TIM ELLIOTT BY DECISION.
WOMEN'S FLYWEIGHT: Karine Silva (15-4) vs Ketlen Souza (13-3)
When "Killer" Karine Silva made her UFC debut this past June, I deeply underestimated her. Her previous fights, particularly her Contender Series victory, looked less than impressive, and it led me to pick Poliana Botelho's Muay Thai skills over her. That was exceptionally wrong. Karine had some trouble with Botelho's kicks before cottoning to the realization that she could simply walk punches into her face, and seconds later Botelho was flat on her face and stuck in a D'arce choke. It was a solid performance, not just for her ultimate success, but for the much rarer ability to adapt on the fly and alter a strategy that didn't seem to be working.
Ketlen Souza is here as a reminder that regional championships are just bus tickets to a bigger company. Invicta FC's Women's Flyweight Championship has seen four of its five champions toss the belt in the trash to move to Bellator or the UFC, and Ketlen was the quickest of them all: She won the title just this past January, and barely one hundred days later, the belt is once again vacant and Souza is ready for UFC competition. Souza is a student of the style that seems to drive a lot of hot prospects out of Brazil these days: Tons of kicks, many of them unnecessarily spinning, and a hyper-aggressive bottom game when you inevitably get pushed over.
And it worked just fine in Invicta. Will it work here? Do I dare underestimate Karine Silva again, or have I learned my lesson?
KARINE SILVA BY DECISION. The hot stove is hot. She's bigger, she hits harder, and she's a solid enough grappler to deal with the 'get in my guard' strategy.
LIGHTWEIGHT: Jamie Mullarkey (16-5) vs Muhammadjon Naimov (8-2)
Add Jamie Mullarkey to the list of people who cannot catch a loving break. His last fight was supposed to be a highly relevant matchup against the almost-ranked Nasrat Haqparast, but an injury and a last-minute replacement forced Mullarkey to content with the newly-signed, last-minute replacement Francisco Prado, and this fight was Mullarkey's shot at the VERY ranked Guram Kutateladze, but the week of the fight Guram pulled out and got replaced by--you guessed it--a newly-signed, last-minute replacement. Mullarkey's intense style of brawling and shooting is sufficiently one-size-fits-all to handle changes in opponent, but at some point, the man should probably get to fight the person he signed a contract for.
Muhammadjon Naimov would like to make this count. His Taekwondo styles and undefeated record got him one shot at the UFC already in the form of a 2020 Contender Series appearance, which he lost to Collin Anglin, who proceeded to get cut within a year after dropping two consecutive knockouts in three and a half months. Comparatively, not a great look. Naimov's core striking looks very solid and he's very good at sneaking elbows in on advancing opponents, but like most regional fighters, his competition makes it tough to judge him. He just scored an awesome, thirty-second headkick! But it was against a 4-4 guy who's only beaten rookies and jobbers.
Will his speed work against a Jamie Mullarkey? Probably not! JAMIE MULLARKEY BY SUBMISSION.
PRELIMS: ANDREI ARLOVSKI'S NEVERENDING PROSPECT SHOW
WELTERWEIGHT: Elizeu Zaleski (23-7) vs Abubakar Nurmagomedov (17-3-1)
Elizeu Zaleski dos Santos has not had a great time lately. For a time he and his capoeira kicks were at the very end of the UFC's welterweight top fifteen, but midway through 2020 he dropped out of the rankings after losing a robbery of a decision to Muslim Salikhov, and then he needed knee surgery, and then he had one of the most scandalous fights of the year in a battering of Benoît Saint-Denis that was so one-sided and inexplicably allowed to continue that the referee in charge was kicked out of the event and banned from the UFC immediately after it was over, and to top it all off, he tested positive for ostarine and got suspended for a year. That suspension only ended in March, and the UFC doesn't like wasting time, so now he's fighting Abubakar Nurmagomedov, a fighter who also, relatively speaking, keeps wasting their time. Abubakar is yet another cousin of Khabib, but more than wrestling, clinching and submissions he's into sidestepping, whipping headkicks, and Not Fighting. Over three and a half years in the UFC Abubakar has only actually made it to the cage three times, and each time has been some flavor of underwhelming. Maybe he's cursed by the degree to which other family members have been wrecking people across the globe, but even in his 2-1 UFC career, Abubakar hasn't set anyone's world on fire.
So he's fighting to be right up against a ranking, because of course he is. ELIZEU ZALESKI BY DECISION. Zaleski hits harder and kicks faster. Abubakar's best chances are going to come on the floor, but he's got to talk himself into pushing the issue to get there, and I'm not sure he's got it in him.
BANTAMWEIGHT: John Castañeda (19-6) vs Muin Gafurov (18-4)
John Castañeda's last fight was back in October. In my conclusion, I wrote this.
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. Castañeda'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 Castañeda by decision, but if he screws it up, by god, I hope I learn my lesson.
And then he spinning back kicked the poo poo out of people again and, oh, hey, welcome back, theoretically profitable knockout generator. MUIN GAFUROV BY TKO. I'm trying to at least learn from my John Castañeda-shaped mistakes.
HEAVYWEIGHT: Andrei Arlovski (34-21 (1)) vs Don'Tale Mayes (9-5 (1))
It's preliminary Arlovski time, baby. The man will never, ever go away, even after getting ragdolled and choked out in two minutes in his last fight, and by god, honestly, why should he? Why SHOULD Andrei Arlovski stop? His ability to a) throw a jab and b) move in more than the four cardinal directions make him a match for most of the world's heavyweights, and there will always be an audience that wants to see him because the sight of Andrei Arlovski reminds them of a time when they were young and weightless and believed in a future where things might actually get better instead of worse, and really, isn't that the only thing anyone can truly hope for in entertainment? Indiana Jones 5 comes out this month and I need you to accept that we're all trapped in this crab pot together. Don'Tale Mayes lives in that category of heavyweight we call Not Particularly Great. He's large! He is a strong, sizable man, and he likes to use that strength to drag people to the floor and elbow them until they politely ask him to stop. If he can chuck you? You will endure a violent thrashing. If you are unchuckable? Tends to go very, very poorly for him.
Which is a pretty sensible fight to put together right after Arlovski got tossed around and choked out, I suppose. Realistically, Arlovski is in his mid-forties, he's only getting slower, and it's only going to get harder for him to deal with people like Mayes. That said: ANDREI ARLOVSKI BY TKO because man, isn't it about time? Wouldn't it be nice? Don't you want nice things to happen, sometimes?
BANTAMWEIGHT: Daniel Santos (10-2) vs Johnny Munoz Jr. (12-2)
This is a rescheduling of the hastily-scratched opening prelim of last month's UFC 288, so let me drag that writeup out of the vault.
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.
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.
Prelims begin in ~20.
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Jun 3, 2023 22:42
