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Which main event fighter are you most looking forward to seeing in July? This poll is closed. |
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|---|---|---|---|
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1 | 3.33% | |
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9 | 30.00% | |
| Holly Holm |
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11 | 36.67% |
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0 | 0% | |
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1 | 3.33% | |
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3 | 10.00% | |
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3 | 10.00% | |
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2 | 6.67% | |
| Total: | 30 votes | ||
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If you want to remember a time when Amanda Nunes walked the Earth, you can return to June here. Welcome to July, a month that has some fantastic cards in store, but boy, you're gonna have to crawl through some poo poo to get to them. We've got five UFCs this month including the very rare double pay-per-views, we've got Bellator X Rizin, and we've got five possible rounds of Holly God Damned Holm. Appease your respective gods and pray. This month's thread title brought to you by kensei. 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. If you want to talk about MMA or combat sports events that aren't included in this breakdown: Please do. In a world of Road FC and Rizin events that don't actually air in America and the WBC threatening to rank Jake Paul, there's space for everything. And if there's an event you want to make a GDT for, go right ahead, just make sure to link it here so everyone sees it and basks in the joy of violence. THIS MONTH'S PUNCHSPORTS EVENTS 
IS THERE ANY NEWS  One of the most incredible things about mixed martial arts is how quickly every ostensibly good promoter abandons their scruples when they don't get what they want. The Professional Fighters League has had a very, very rough year. The heavyweight champion was injured, a huge swath of the roster got scratched midway through the season over failed drug tests, their big-ticket UFC pickups all underperformed and failed to make the playoffs or in some cases win at all--they've been under a lot of stress. On June 23rd, the final PFL card before the beginning of their playoffs, the company booked a lightweight showdown between 2021 champion Raush Manfio and 2019 champion Natan Schulte. The match raised a low of eyebrows when it was announced, half because PFL was oddly matching two winning fighters against each other and seemingly playing favorites by giving their most visible UFC pickup still in the tournament, Shane Burgos, an easier match, half because Schulte and Manfio had openly asked not to be pitted against one another. MMA has a long history of promotional difficulty when it comes to training partners being forced to fight one another. In this case, it goes a step further: The two are best friends. After he won the 2019 championship Schulte used his prize money to house, feed and safeguard Manfio while he struggled professionally; after Manfio's daughter was born, he asked Schulte to be her godfather. It's hard to get closer in this sport. The PFL booked them against each other anyway. And when the two turned in a completely uneventful match--not fixed, not predetermined, but clearly two people with a deep love for one another who don't want to hurt each other in the middle of non-televised prelims for pennies--the company jumped at the chance to punish them. For violating their contractual obligations and not fighting to their best, for disgracing the tournament and themselves, Natan Schulte and Raush Manfio were both summarily suspended for the season. And hey, wouldn't you know it: That means Shane Burgos gets into the playoffs. What a strange coincidence. It's a nakedly corrupt move and it lays bare just how worthless the PFL's sense of professionalism is, and just how empty the vows about the integrity of their tournament system really are. They booked a lovely fight in the hopes of getting Burgos into the playoffs--as if the two winning fighters being on the prelims and Burgos being on the main card didn't already give it away--and when it failed, and they just happened to feel disappointed in two of their former champions, they tossed them instantaneously to get their chosen star into their postseason and, they hope, the championship. Let it be your regularly scheduled reminder that the B-leagues aren't actually much better than the UFC. Scott Coker will get mad about wrestling, Chatri Sityodtong will poo poo all over Japanese kickboxing, and the PFL will throw its own format in the garbage as long as it gets them what they want. Good luck, Shane.  You know how we periodically discuss the completely arbitrary horror that is existence? While training for his August showdown with James Gallagher in Bellator, Cris "Sunshine" Lencioni, a 28 year-old featherweight prospect in fantastic shape and ostensibly in the prime of his career and his bodily health, had a heart attack and collapsed in the middle of a grappling exercise. He was resuscitated and survived, but appears to have suffered considerable brain damage from the episode. His recovery has thus far defied expectations--in the sense that he survived and can now do things like move his hands and drink water--but he's still very far from functional, and has, thus far, racked up around $300,000 in hospital bills, and that's before the cost of what will in a best-case scenario be lengthy recovery and therapy. But, hey: This guy's been with Bellator for six and a half years. This was going to be his ninth fight with the organization. You'd expect the #2 MMA promotion in America, backed by a multi-billion dollar giant like the CBS Corporation, would be more than willing to help--not just because it's the ethical thing to do, not just because this happened while he was training for a Bellator fight, but because it was EKGs and physicals under their watch that failed to detect the heart defect that almost killed him and may have ended his career. Good news! They decided to help! By tweeting out the GoFundMe his family put up and asking fans to donate to it. This poo poo is ridiculous and they should all be ashamed. I hope he recovers and I hope his family sues Bob Bakish for a billion dollars.  Antônio "Bigfoot" Silva has long seemed like one of MMA's inevitable stories of tragedy. The one-time UFC title challenger is not only 1 for his last 13 mixed martial arts fights, but between all the sports he's tried--MMA, boxing, bareknuckle fighting--he's been knocked out twelve times in his last sixteen combat sports appearances. And six of those knockouts were consecutive. And a couple were just two weeks apart. His manager openly quit because Bigfoot simply wouldn't stop taking fights and he didn't want to be a part of his entirely plausible demise. But, finally, sanity prevailed. Bigfoot lost one more MMA fight--this time by decision, thank god--to the 5-1 Moroccan heavyweight Salim El Ouassaidi, and he laid his gloves down, admitted it was over, and finally, mercifully, retired. For eight days. His retirement lasted a week. He says he knew he should have won the fight and he's desperate for a rematch to prove himself. I cannot loving imagine watching Bigfoot fight again at this point in time and I hope someone forces him into a quilting class for his own good.  I had individual entries here for the shame categories of the month--Joe Rogan using his platform to rail harder than ever against vaccines, Conor McGregor being accused of sexual assault yet again, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg pretending for a moment that they aren't the most pampered assholes on the planet and challenging one another to a duel, and the UFC jumping on the chance to whip up press about getting them into a cage fight--but it is all, universally, just the worst poo poo on the planet, and the Conor allegations are already seemingly getting buried, and the industry continues to be the worst at every turn. I beg everyone in it to stop using their completely absurd levels of unprecedented privilege and wealth for just the dumbest possible poo poo in the world. MONTHLY RETIREMENT CORNER  Amanda Nunes has finally called it a career, and women's mixed martial arts as a whole will be feeling the loss for years to come. Combat sports was more or less Amanda's destiny. Her uncle was a fighter in the early days of Vale Tudo, her mother was a boxer, and she was training in multiple martial arts before she was 8. She moved into Edson Carvalho's gym as a teenager and started winning gold medals in jiu-jitsu a year later, and the rest quickly became history. The fanbase's favorite circular MMA argument has always been greatest-of-all-time determinations. It's always an exercise in annoying abstracts--the differences of time and place, the questions of which champion was or was not in their prime, the innumerable and unknowable answers. This is true in every case save that of Amanda Nunes. The combination of her skills, her power, and the relative youth of women's MMA in the mainstream means Nunes has the best argument ever made for why she is the greatest her divisions have ever seen: She beat every loving one else in them. Amanda Nunes has victories over every UFC Women's Featherweight AND Bantamweight champion--and, just for shits and giggles, the canonical Women's Flyweight champion, too. Even Julianna Peña, the woman who ended her title reign, was immediately destroyed in a comically lopsided rematch. And her retirement might be the best retirement mixed martial arts has ever seen. It's rare that a fighter goes out on top and it's even rarer a fighter goes out on top AND happy. Amanda Nunes is only 35, she has her health, she has her family, she has her own gym, and she has the greatest legacy in women's MMA. Her last moments in the octagon were spent dancing with her wife, friends and children in front of a cheering audience bidding her farewell. If the sport were as picturesque or kind to all its practitioners, combat sports would be a far kinder place. It's a hell of an achievement, and one that belongs right alongside the rest of the monolithic career she left behind. She retires at 23-5.  Marlon Moraes is done, and the world breathes a sigh of relief. It's very hard to remember now, but it was a big loving deal when the UFC signed Marlon Moraes. The bantamweight division was on fire: Dominick Cruz had just been unseated by Cody Garbrandt, TJ Dillashaw had just re-established himself as the #1 contender, Aljamain Sterling was on his way up and Thomas Almeida still looked like a killer. There was a glut of talent, and Marlon Moraes was widely considered the world's best bantamweight outside of the company, the champion of the pre-PFL World Series of Fighting who was not only on a five-year, thirteen-fight winning streak but was savaging almost everyone he encountered. The world was very, very interested in Moraes against the best the UFC had to offer. And then Marlon lost his UFC debut by split decision. It probably should have been a sign. He still had plenty of success--he beat Aljo, he beat Raphael Assunção, he arguably beat Jose Aldo, he earned a title shot on his own merits--but that success has been entirely overshadowed by what came afterward. Mixed martial arts is not kind of aging or insecurity, and when you're Marlon Moraes and you're just too good to not compete at the highest levels of the sport, it will, unfortunately, eat you alive. Between his debut in 2007 and his successful title eliminator in February of 2019, Moraes went 22-5-1; between June of 2019 and his final fight on June 8, 2023, he went 1-8, and all eight of those losses--seven of them consecutive--came by knockout. Moraes briefly retired in 2022 when his UFC contract ended, but decided to go home to the PFL to finish his career on a high note--by going up a weight class, where everyone was bigger and scarier. He got three more knockout losses and the wake-up call he finally needed. After being punched out in one round by Gabriel Alves Braga, Marlon Moraes has finally called it a career. As at one time one of the scariest fighters on the planet I'm relieved to see his legacy end while there's still something recoverable in it, but I'm much more relieved that he won't get knocked out any more. Marlon leaves the sport at 23-13-1.  Stevie Ray didn't quite get the flowers he deserved until the very end of his career, and that's a bit of a shame. One of the precious few fighters to break out of the surprisingly competitive Scottish fight scene and achieved international notoriety--realistically it's basically just him, Paul Craig and Joanne Wood--Ray was notable for his submission abilities, which somehow stayed perpetually underestimated despite almost a decade and a half of strangling people. He held championships with the British Association of Mixed Martial Arts and Cage Warriors alike before making it to the UFC, where he went a respectable 7-4 before being one of the rare fighters cut on a win--supposedly because the UFC was just sort of tired of having him around. He retired, spent a couple years away from the sport, and ultimately joined the PFL in 2022--and it would have been a bigger deal were it not overshadowed by superstar Anthony Pettis, who had failed to make the playoffs in 2021 and was swearing to do better this time. And then Stevie Ray submitted him with an inverted twister, a move most of the MMA audience didn't even know existed. And then he beat him up in the immediate rematch. And that, honestly, was just about enough to make him. He didn't win the championship--he was dispatched by Olivier Aubin-Mercier in the final--but with how visible the Pettis fights were, Ray taking care of him twice in a row made people reevaluate the whole of his career. He was never the best in the world, he never mantled the mountain, but he was an incredibly tough, tricky grappler, and I'm glad he finally got some of the attention he deserved right at the end of the line. He called it a day on June 23rd after Clay Collard stopped him, but there's plenty to be proud of in his body of work. he retires at 25-13 and I hope he teaches a bunch of Scottish kids how to rip arms apart forever. WHERE ELSE CAN I TALK TO LIKE-MINDED PEOPLE ABOUT VIOLENCE? Any of the following hangouts:
DO WE HAVE OTHER COMMUNAL THREADS? So many.
WHERE ELSE DOES FIGHT CHAT EXIST? Our community output has grown enough that we've got a few other places things get posted:
 Disclaimer: These are unofficial offsites, somethingawful's rules and liability do not extend to them, and complaining about discord stuff is still offsite drama posting
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WHAT HAPPENED IN JUNE As a note: We're gonna do something a little different. I don't think this section is the most useful thing in the world. I don't think most people need to know all the prelim participants in a given month! It's probably just making this long and not enormously helpful, since it's actually faster and easier for anyone who wants a real card rundown to click on any of the embedded links and see it in a digestible format. So I'm gonna try just writing the things that seem worth writing about. If it turns out that I'm wrong about this and anyone actually really cares about thorough examination of cards here, please feel free to comment, I'd love to know. But in the meantime: June got off to a quick start with UFC Fight Night: Kara-France vs Albazi on the 3rd. A whole lot of cancellations led to this main and this card in general, and the result was, unsurprisingly, a mixed bag. Jamie Mullarkey got crushed by late replacement Muhammad Naimov, Don'Tale Mayes handed Andrei Arlovski a difficult TKO loss, a returning Elizeu Zaleski managed a tight split decision over Abubakar Nurmagomedov, debuting Invicta champion Ketlen Souza got painfully kneebarred by Karine Silva, and aging warhorse Jim Miller knocked out last-minute replacement Jesse Butler in about twenty seconds. Your co-main saw Alex Caceres scrape by Daniel Pineda, and your main event crowned a new contender in Amir Albazi by everyone's favorite method of victory: An extremely contentious decision almost everyone thought his opponent Kai Kara-France should've won. The second phase of the incredibly embattled Professional Fighters League season began on the 8th with PFL 4. With the cards mor or less in total chaos thanks to the preponderance of drug test failures it was a bit all over the place. At light-heavyweight Impa Kasanganay, Ty Flores, Marthin Hamlet and Josh Silveira all clinched playoff spots, although Silveira got his by a deeply unfortunate knee injury. Featherweight saw Bubba Jenkins, Movid Khaybulaev, Chris Wade and Jesus Pinedo make it through to the playoffs--Pinedo by upsetting last year's champion Brendan Loughnane, knocking him out in just a minute and a half. The card also saw Gabriel Alves Braga hand Marlon Moraes his seventh consecutive loss, which was also his seventh consecutive knockout, at which point Moraes finally, mercifully, retired. ONE kicked off a double-header of a weekend with ONE Fight Night 11: Eersel vs Menshikov on the 10th. It was a touch schizophrenic even by ONE's mixed-card standards, with no two consecutive fights occurring under a single ruleset, but Kwon Won Il scored a knockout over Artem Belakh in MMA, the famous but aging kickboxer Nieky Holzken missed weight AND lost a decision to Arian Sadiković, Superbon knocked out Tayfun Özcan with a horrifying headkick, Kade Ruotolo retained his lightweight submission grappling title by outworking Tommy Langaker to a decision, and in the main event, ONE Lightweight Muay Thai Champion Regian Eersel continued his seven-year undefeated streak by knocking out Dmitry Menshikov in forty-six seconds. But all eyes were on UFC 289: Nunes vs Aldana later that night. A card also ultimately troubled by cancellations, it still wound up a good if bittersweet time. Late replacement Stephen Erceg went from regional talent to top fifteen flyweight by upsetting David Dvořák, Aiemann Sahabi knocked Aoriqileng cold in just one minute, Jasmine Jasudavicius put on a fantastic performance in besting Miranda Maverick, and Nassourdine Imavov was in the process of seemingly dismantling Chris Curtis when a headbutt ended the match in a no-contest. The main card was marked by Dan Ige turning away surging prospect Nate Landwehr, Mike Malott choking out Adam Fugitt in what was inexplicably a pay-per-view match, and Charles Oliveira reestablishing himself as the top contender at lightweight after punching out Beneil Dariush in just one round. The main event marked the end of an era: Amanda Nunes fought a solid contender in Irene Aldana, utterly dominated her for five rounds, laid her gloves and belts down in the ring and announced her retirement before spending her last moments in the octagon dancing with her wife and children. A TRIPLE-header weekend began with Bellator 297: Nemkov vs Romero on June 16th. YOur traditional seven hundred Bellator prelims included Archie Colgan beating Emmanuel Sanchez, Ramazan Kuramagomedov justifying his prospect-watch status by knocking out Jaleel Willis, and Gadzhi Rabadanov taking a competitive but clear decision over Pieter Buist. A short, four-fight main card began with the traditional destruction of a heavyweight prospect, as Bellator's hopes of launching their championship hopeful Daniel James in front of a rabid hometown crowd were crushed by Gökhan Saricam, who wrestled him thoroughly for fifteen minutes. Top light-heavyweight contendership was established as Corey Anderson and Phil Davis had a similarly wrestling-focused match that Anderson took by split decision. The simultaneously compelling and confounding title fight between champion Sergio Pettis and newly-135-pound Patrício Pitbull ended with a reminder that, sometimes, cutting a ton of weight doesn't work out, as Pitbull found himself outsped and outworked to a shutout loss. And your main event was the typical perplexing Yoel Romero performance, with Vadim Nemkov successfully defending his light-heavyweight title by soundly beating Romero and yet also constantly looking terrified he could lose at any moment. PFL stepped up next with PFL 5, showcasing heavyweights, women's featherweights, and yet another appearance of Biaggio Ali Walsh in an amateur bout as PFL keeps desperately trying to make fetch happen. Olena Kolesnyk's victory over Yoko Higashi and Marina Mokhnatkina's decision over Evelyn Martins got them into the playoffs; in one of those ongoing statements about the oddity of this format for mixed martial arts, Aspen Ladd scored a gorgeous armbar over Karolina Sobek yet failed to break the points threshold, but Larissa Pachecho knocked out Amber Leibrock in forty-five seconds and both Pacheco AND Leibrock will continue onto the playoffs because points systems are silly. Up at heavyweight Denis Goltsov and Marcelo Nunes qualified after making first-round work of Yorgan De Castro and Danilo Marques, Renan Ferreira got in by knocking out Matheus Scheffel, and despite Ante Delija being a former champion making an abrupt return to save the ravaged PFL season he won but did NOT qualify; his spot will instead be taken by Jordan Heiderman, who technically scored a first-round stoppage and thus six playoff-qualifying points when his opponent's kneecap randomly came apart in mid-match. It's just a stupid loving system. The UFC was back the next evening with UFC Fight Night: Vettori vs Cannonier. The interims were a loving rollercoaster, with Tereza Bledá redeeming her failed UFC debut by beating Gabriella Fernandes, Kyung-ho Kang choking out Cristian Quiñonez, Alessandro Costa destroying a Jimmy Flick who should really consider returning to retirement, and a massive ref fuckup leading to Dan Argueta and Ronnie Lawrence being rendered a no-contest--the referee, while attempting to determine if a (visibly awake!) Lawrence was conscious, interfered and caused Lawrence's arm to slap Argueta's back, which the referee interpreted as tapping out. It's a silly sport, folks. Your main card was decent from top to bottom: Nicolas Dalby beat up Muslim Salikhov, Manuel Torres knocked out Nikolas Motta, Pat Sabatini choked out Lucas Almeida, Armen Petrosyan put the first loss on Christian Leroy Duncan's record and Arman Tsarukyan survived an early scare to defeat an inexplicably matched-up Joaquim Silva. Your main event was fun if you hate Marvin Vettori: Jared Cannonier beat the absolute poo poo out of him and was stymied by Vettori's ridiculous loving skull, which refused to let him get knocked out, forcing Cannonier to settle for a wide decision victory. ONE Friday Fights 22 took place on June 23rd, and as always it had a ton of excellent Muay Thai I am too uncultured to describe with any expertise whatsoever--except for masters Superlek Kiatmuu9 and Prajanchai P.K.Saenchai winning by brutal knockout, like they often do--but I note it because it had the extremely rare mixed martial arts match. After years of trying to book it, ONE finally succeeded in putting their heavyweight championship unification match on, with champ Arjan Bhullar returning to battle interim champ Anatoly Malykhin--and after years of talking poo poo, Bhullar had absolutely nothing, looking lost for two and a half rounds, at one point receiving a penalty for trying to crawl out of the ring, and ultimately losing a ground-and-pound TKO to Malykhin in the third. Thank Christ that's over. Speaking of things that are over, this section of the PFL season ended with PFL 6 later that day. Welterweights and lightweights ruled the day, and there were cool moments but very few surprises--at least until the card was over. Up at welterweight Magomed Umalatov entered the playoffs with a dominant decision, Carlos Leal made it in by knocking out Dilano Taylor, Magomed Magomedkerimov got in by taking out David Zawada, and last year's champion Sadibou Sy got in by way of an incredibly cool spinning wheel kick knockout. Lightweight is where the controversy lives. 2022 champion Olivier Aubin-Mercier, all-violence superstar Clay Collard, Challenger Series prospect Bruno Miranda and 2019 champion Natan Schulte all clinched berths in the playoff--at first. Natan Schulte made his way in by defeating Raush Manfio, but the two had requested not to fight each other, as they're training partners and incredibly close friends, and when forced to do so by PFL they proceeded to put on a fight that felt more like a sparring session than a bloodsport--which is frowned upon, but not illegal. The day after the event, PFL announced that it found their actions unacceptable and it was suspending them both from the tournament--and replacing Schulte with Shane Burgos, a UFC cast-off they'd very publicly signed last year who hadn't performed well enough to make it in on his own. Late-night MMA fans (or, y'know, people who don't live in America) got to enjoy Rizin 43 that night/morning. It was an incredibly violent event--only two out of the seventeen fights on the card went to a decision--and those, too, were pretty great. It would take a very long time to go over every single highlight, so we'll stick with the big ones: Aoi Kuriyama's faceplant knockout over Marina Kumagai, Joji Goto's inverted twister submission of Trent Girdham, Saori Oshima's scarf hold tapping-out of Pancrase champion Haruka "SALT" Hasegawa, Minoru Kimura's absolutely terrifying knockout of Daryl Lokoku that froze him standing like a goddamn zombie, Hiroki Suzuki's flying knee over Genji Umeno, Mikio Ueda's breaking of Hideki "Shrek" Sekine's face, and Yusuke Yachi's real easy chokeout over Zach Zane. The main event should have been impressive--Kleber Koike Erbst armbarred Chihiro Suzuki in three minutes--but it was overshadowed by drama. Erbst missed weight by just under one pound, meaning not only was he ineligible to win the fight--it's officially a no-contest--but his Rizin Featherweight Championship is void. He won, easily, and he is no longer the champion. June concluded with the UFC's return to network television, UFC on ABC: Emmett vs Topuria. The card was stacked to hell and back with interesting prospect matchups, and while it ran real long, it was, ultimately, a lot of fun. Prelim highlights: Jack Jenkins scored a pretty raw robbery over Jamall Emmers, Chepe Mariscal made his debut by beating an outmatched Trevor Peek, Joshua Van continued the cursed streak of Zhalgas Zhumagulov by dealing him his third split decision loss in a row, Tabatha Ricci beat Gillian Robertson even though they broke my heart by forgoing their grappling chops in favor of a tepid kickboxing match, Mateusz Rębecki demolished Loik Radzhabov with leg kicks and uppercuts, and Neil Magny just barely squeaked past Philip Rowe. Up on the main card: Brendan Allen and Bruno Silva had a one-round classic culminating in an Allen submission victory, David Onama scored a great comeback knockout over Gabriel Santos, Justin Tafa drat near got his eyes gouged out by Austen Lane and ended the card's only heavyweight fight in a no-contest in thirty seconds, and Maycee Barber had the best performance of her career, knocking out Amanda Ribas in two rounds. The main event was a masterclass in prospects arriving: Ilia Topuria, long picked as a favorite to one day become a champion, put an absolutely hellacious five-round beating on former titlist Josh Emmett, scoring one of just four 50-42 decisions in UFC history and establishing himself as a legitimate championship contender. WHAT'S COMING IN JULY It's a very busy month for the UFC and a very sleepy month for literally everyone else. The UFC wants you to suffer immediately, because on July 1st, we're getting UFC Fight Night: Strickland vs Magomedov. Not only is it a Sean Strickland main event, which puts us at pace for a Sean Strickland main event every two and a half months this year, it's a Sean Strickland main event where the other guy is a barely-known Dagestani fighter with one UFC bout who is now fighting for a top ten ranking. Also, Damir Ismagulov is coming out of retirement to fight Grant Dawson to fulfill his contractual obligations, after which he may or may not immediately re-retire, and Ariane Lipski is fighting Melissa Gatto despite their divisional positions being completely different, and Joanderson Brito is fighting Westin Wilson who absolutely should not be in the UFC at all, and Yana Santos went from co-maining against Holly Holm to being buried in mid-prelims with Karol Rosa fighting at a division in Women's Featherweight that might not exist anymore. Nothing matters. Eat Arby's. PFL only has one event for the month, and it's the non-seasonal PFL Europe 2 on the 8th, because an entire continent can be compressed into a singular card as long as you don't actually live or operate a business there. There are three European tournaments going on here--lightweight, bantamweight and women's flyweight--but the tournament events are so scattered across the year (March, July, September and December, rhythm like a Grateful Dead percussionist) that it's drat near impossible to keep track of. If you want to watch Francesco Nuzzi and Geysim Derouiche, this is your card. But later that night we have the big loving deal card of the month: UFC 290: Volkanovski vs Rodríguez. A lot of weakness in surrounding UFC cards can be pinned on this one being stacked: A rematch of the comedy special that was Jimmy Crute vs Alonzo Menifield, rising star Yazmin Jauregui vs Denise Gomes, Sean Brady vs Jack God Della drat Maddalena and Robbie Lawler's retirement fight against Niko Price, and that's just the undercard. Your main card has Bo Nickal vs Tresean Gore, Jalin Turner vs Dan Hooker, a middleweight title eliminator pitting Robert Whittaker against Dricus du Plessis, our first non-Figueiredo flyweight championship match in almost five god damned years as Brandon Moreno defends his title against his other recurring nemesis Alexandre Pantoja, and in your main event, Alexander Volkanovski looks to reunify his featherweight title with interim champion Yair Rodríguez. ONE shows up next weekend on the 15th for their one event of the month, ONE Fight Night 12: Kryklia vs Xhaja. This card has been uprooted a couple times, now--it was supposed to be headlined by the long-awaited Arjan Bhullar vs Anatoly Malykhin heavyweight championship unification bout, only for it to be moved to the midcard of a Friday Fights instead, and then the championship rematch between Tang Kai and Thanh Le was going to happen but Tang got injured, so now, despite being only a couple weeks out, it's got a half-dozen fights announced and not a ton going on. Submission grappling champion Mikey Musumeci's sister Tammi is going to wrestle! Uh, Garry Tonon is here, in a non-submission MMA contest! Can we interest you in a light-heavyweight kickboxing championship match between Roman Kryklia and Françesko Xhaja, winner of one straight fight? No? That's probably fine. But don't worry: The UFC's here to save your soul that evening with UFC Fight Night: Holm vs Bueno Silva! Yes. That is Holly Holm vs Mayra Bueno Silva. In a five-round fight. That is your main event. Your main event is twenty-five mintues of Holly Holm fighting Mayra Bueno Silva. The UFC would like you to give away a half-hour of your life so Holly Holm and Mayra Bueno Silva can do something that may or may not be sensibly interpretable as fighting. You have choices to make, every single day, and one of those choices, on July 15th, is whether or not to let yourself watch five rounds of Holly Holm, who is fighting, and Mayra Bueno Silva, who is fighting her. One week later, it is time for the UFC to pretend to be British again. UFC Fight Night: Aspinall vs Tybura comes to you on July 22nd, and it's the usual attempt at a big ol' appeal to the UK: Paul Craig's middleweight debut against André Muniz, Marc Diakiese tries to wrestle Joel Álvarez, Davey Grant faces Daniel Marcos, Jai Herbert is back, Nathaniel Wood is back, even Molly McCann gets a fight with Julija Stoliarenko even if she'll have to do it without the moral support of a Paddy Pimblett fight on the card. The main event is the big deal: Tom Aspinall, exactly 365 days after his last UFC appearance saw his leg more or less implode just fifteen seconds into the fight, is back to see if his surgically-repaired ligaments can bring him back to the runaway momentum he had leading into 2022, and Marcin Tybura is out to stop him. And the last weekend of the month concludes in a big double-header. The UFC's got the rare two pay-per-views in one month, the second being the 29th's UFC 291: Poirier vs Gaethje 2. This card is an all-violence affair: Trevin Giles vs Gabriel Bonfim, Roman Kopylov vs Claudio Ribeiro, Matthew Semelsberger vs Yohan Lainesse, Michael Chiesa vs Kevin Holland (this one may just be Chiesa wrestling a perpetually angry Holland, in fairness), Derrick Lewis is back to fight Marcos Rogério de Lima, Stephen Thompson and Michel Pereira are going to do some esoteric striking things to one another, Paulo Costa's big new contract means he gets to trade bludgeonings with Ikram Aliskerov, Tony Ferguson and Bobby Green will fight to see who is aging worse (spoiler: it's Tony), Jan Błachowicz is welcoming Alex Pereira to the light-heavyweight division in what is probably a title eliminator, and your main event is a rematch of one of the best violence exhibitions of all time, Dustin Poirier vs Justin Gaethje, but this time, it's for the completely made up BMF title, which obviously makes it more important. But July 30th brings us the end of the month, and it's a doozy: The second full, official co-promotional card, Bellator x Rizin 2. The card's going to be split into two sections, one airing in Japan and by PPV internationally and one airing on Showtime in the US. On the Japanese side, which is officially Super Rizin 2, you've got Kenta Takizawa vs Shinobu Ota, Daichi Abe vs Igor Tanabe, Mikuru Asakura vs Vugar Karamov, Seika Izawa defending the Rizin Super Atomweight Championship against Claire Lopez, and a fight to fill the vacant Rizin Bantamweight Championship throne between Kai Asakura and Bellator's Juan Archuleta. On the Showtime portion of the card, which is officially Bellator x Rizin 2, you've got--mostly Bellator fights, actually. Andrey Koreshkov vs Lorenz Larkin, Kana Watanabe vs Veta Arteaga, Danny Sabatello vs Magomed Magomedov in a Bellator Lightweight Grand Prix Quarterfinal, and, perplexingly, a main event between AJ Mckee and Patricky Pitbull. Your most important fight--and yet, not the main event--is both the only actual crosspromotional fight on this side of the card and a fight to inaugurate Bellator's Flyweight Championship, as Kyoji Horiguchi faces Japanese prospect Makoto Shinryu.
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CURRENT UFC CHAMPIONS Heavyweight Champion, 265 lbs   Jon Jones - 27-1 (1), 0 DefensesVery few things in combat sports reach the crossroads of awe-inspiring and unfathomably frustrating as Jon Jones. In 2020, Jon Jones notched the third defense of his second light-heavyweight championship reign after an exceedingly contentious decision against Dominick Reyes, only to abdicate the title because the UFC wasn't paying him enough, and he was bored of 205 pounds and wanted to move up to heavyweight like he'd been planning to for nearly a decade, and he needed more time to cement his place as not just one of the sport's greatest pound-for-pound fighters, but one of its biggest pound-for-pound pains in the rear end. On September 23, 2021, Jon Jones was inducted into the UFC Hall of Fame; on September 24, 2021, he was arrested (for the fifth time!) after his daughter called the police on him for beating her mother, during which he antagonized the police and, inexplicably, headbutted a police car. Because this is Jon Jones, of course, the primary charges were dropped, he paid $750 for the hood of the police cruiser, and got a stern warning to stay out of trouble, young man, because there is a money-powered reality-distorting field around Jon Jones whereby nothing matters. After a year of rumors, and after the unconscionable firing of heavyweight champion Francis Ngannou, the UFC gleefully announced Jon Jones vs Ciryl Gane to fill the vacant heavyweight throne. Did it matter to the matchmaking that there were more deserving candidates? Of course not, because it's Jon Jones: He deserves the spot for his earlier success. Did it matter to his public appearances that when last we saw him he was arrested for beating his fiancee? Of course not, because it's Jon Jones: He was, if anything, more up his own rear end with self-righteousness than ever before. Did it matter to the fight that he hadn't competed in more than three years and looked terrible at the time? Of course not, because it's Jon loving Jones. Ciryl Gane looked too nervous to use footwork let alone throw anything, and he should have been, as Jones effortlessly threw him to the canvas and choked him out in two minutes. The longest-running, most dominant and yet most persistently annoying show in mixed martial arts is back. Jon Jones is your heavyweight champion, and we are all damned. He's theoretically fighting Stipe Miocic next, but honestly, who the hell knows. Light-Heavyweight Champion, 205 lbs  Jamahal Hill - 12-1 (1), 0 DefensesThe dread prophecy has been fulfilled: After five years Dana White's Contender Series has produced a UFC champion, and all it took was the complete and utter collapse of a division. After half of the light-heavyweight top ten retired or left the UFC in the span of just two years the division scrambled for a new frontrunner, and after Jan Błachowicz, Glover Teixeira and Jiří Procházka all won and lost the title in the space of just four fights and a draw between Błachowicz and Magomed Ankalaev failed to fill the throne, the division was left in dire straits, with half of the top ten ruled out through loss, draw or injury. So the UFC pulled the trigger, went past their own higher-ranked Anthony Smith, and booked #2 Glover Teixeira vs #7 Jamahal Hill for the vacant belt. It is, in many ways, Dana White's dream: Hill won his way to the UFC through the Contender Series in 2019, just a year and a half after his professional debut, he's a big, tall, American striker who doggedly pursues knockouts and he's a staunch company man to the point of getting in hot water on social media for brave stances like "my boss slapping his wife is fine" and "Andrew Tate is good, actually." A lot of people, myself included, picked Glover to submit Hill--the only blemish on his record (not counting the No Contest one of his victories was swapped for because he dared to smoke the devil weed) is a grotesque submission loss against Paul Craig and just one fight prior he'd struggled visibly with the grappling of Thiago Santos--but the Jamahal Hill who showed up against Glover Teixeira was massively improved, stuffing 15 of 17 takedown attempts and giving up only three and a half minutes of ground control across five rounds against one of the most feared top games in the sport. He wobbled but wasn't able to finish Glover, but he did batter and control him, and however many questions there are about how much he deserved the title shot itself, there are no questions about how much he deserved his 50-44 shutout victory. What happens from here, who knows. Jiří wants to fight for the title again this Spring but doctors aren't sure if he'll be ready, Jan and Ankalaev are in a tenuous position and Aleksandar Rakić is still injured. For the moment, Dana has his personal champion. Middleweight Champion, 185 lbs   Israel Adesanya - 24-2, 0 DefensesThe Last Stylebender has finally exorcised the ghosts of his past. Combat sports fans who considered themselves In The Know had long heralded Adesanya as a potential crossover superstar based on his extremely successful kickboxing career, which had seen him win multiple championships and lose only by decision, and it was an open secret that the UFC was already taking a good look at him as he prepared to leave his home sport behind and transition entirely into mixed martial arts--so it was a bit of a shock when, instead of his last kickboxing match being a victory lap, he was knocked out cold by one of the very few men to eer beat him, Alex Pereira. Izzy kept to his word, left kickboxing, joined the UFC and became a superstar nearly overnight, and a year after his UFC debut he was already the middleweight champion of the world. A misguided trip to the light-heavyweight division to chase the double-champ dream proved to be a step too far, but the only blemish on his record came from a separate weight class, and after three more title defenses he was still perfect at middleweight and, easily, the second-best middleweight champion of all time. And then the UFC brought in this one guy named Alex Pereira. The UFC desperately wanted an all-striking showdown between the two rivals, and after the easiest path to the title since Brock Lesnar, they got it, and on November 12, 2022, Alex Pereira etched his place in the history books by stopping Adesanya once again, this time taking his MMA championship home with him in the process. This being the UFC an instant rematch was, of course, inevitable, and the world looked on with considerably more worry this time--but the Israel Adesanya who showed up at UFC 287 on April 8, 2023 was a smarter, better fighter who'd learned from his mistakes. After baiting Pereira into throwing caution to the wind, Izzy flatlined him with a counterpunch in just two rounds. There will be no MMA rubber match--the UFC doesn't want it, Izzy doesn't want it, and Pereira is done with middleweight altogether. So Israel Adesanya is back on his throne, even if he has to start his defense counter from 0 again. His war of words with Dricus du Plessis over who is and is not truly African (sigh) bore fruit, as du Plessis inadvertently talked himself into a title eliminator against Robert Whittaker this July, with the winner facing Adesanya at the end of the year. Welterweight Champion, 170 lbs   Leon Edwards - 21-3 (1), 1 DefensesIt took half a decade to get the world to notice, but everyone sees Leon Edwards now. "Rocky" came from the kind of circumstances sports movies are made of--a poor kid from Jamaica who moved to England, lost his father to gang violence, nearly lost himself to it as a teenager and found a healthy outlet for his anger in mixed martial arts. Edwards made his debut in 2011 as a prime example of the modern generation of fighter, cross-trained from the beginning in every discipline, and in just three years he was the welterweight champion of Britain and off to the UFC. Entering 2016, Leon had suffered the first true loss of his career--he was 10-3, but one of those losses was a DQ for an illegal blow and the other a coinflip decision that could easily have gone either way--at the hands of the newly-crowned Ultimate Fighter 21 winner, Kamaru Usman, making his debut as an official UFC competitor. It took ten fights without a loss for Leon to get his rematch. The UFC seemed especially resistant to his title contendership, pushing him down in favor of the ostensibly more marketable UK star in Darren Till and booking him against numerous other contenders and gatekeepers while repeatedly elevating less deserving fighters to the championship. He wouldn't have gotten it at all, in fact, had Jorge Masvidal not gotten arrested. On August 20, the UFC acquiesced and granted the clear #1 contender his shot at the championship, and at revenge against Kamaru Usman--and after getting dominated for three and a half out of five rounds, with the commentators openly opining on the likelihood that he had given up, with just fifty-six seconds left in the fight, Edwards uncorked a headkick that shocked the world and knocked Kamaru Usman out for the first time in his career. The rubber match was inevitable, and once again, Edwards opened as an underdog, and once again, he proved everyone wrong. Instead of a last-minute comeback Leon simply shut Usman down for the majority of the fight, stuffing eleven of his takedown attempts, outstriking him in four out of five rounds and landing an absolutely wild 75% of his strikes in the process. It was an incredible performance against one of the greatest welterweights of all time, marred only by Leon losing a point for fence grabs. The decision was unquestionably his, and now legitimized as the champion of the world, Leon's first move is...getting into a big, public spat with the UFC, because instead of any of the working contenders of the division Dana White is demanding he defend the belt against Colby Covington. Leon says he won't fight Colby, Colby and Dana seem convinced the championship fight is happening this summer with or without Leon, it's a big, lovely mess. Lightweight Champion, 155 lbs   Islam Makhachev - 24-1, 1 DefenseDestiny has come. When Islam Makhachev made his UFC debut in 2015, Khabib Nurmagomedov, considered by most to be the #1 contender and soon to be the best in the world, swore up and down that Makhachev, not him, would be the best lightweight champion of all time. Coming from him, the praise made sense: Khabib and Islam have trained together since they were children growing up and learning to wrestle in Makhachkala. Islam learned under Khabib's father, trained with Khabib's team and even made the pilgrimage to America to join Khabib at the American Kickboxing Academy. And then, two matches into his UFC tenure, Islam got knocked the gently caress out in the first round by the little-known Adriano Martins, who hasn't won a fight in the six years since. Even as Makhachev racked up wins, the memory of his loss and his wrestling-heavy approach to his fights let people cast doubts on him. Sure, he's good--but he lost, so he's not as good as Khabib. Islam Makhachev, as his trainer tells it, never wanted to be Khabib. He loves fighting, but he doesn't love the spectacle or the glory or the attention. So when, after ten straight wins, Makhachev was picked to challenge Charles Oliveira for the vacant title he never truly lost, a lot of folks just weren't quite sure what to think. Sure, he was an incredible wrestler, but Charles Oliveira is a submission wizard, and sure, he's on a ten-fight streak, but he hasn't fought a single person actually IN the top ten, and Oliveira represents a huge, dangerous step up as a man who's been destroying some of the most accomplished lightweights in the sport's history. Analyst opinion was split right down the middle; the fight, as it turned out, was nowhere near that competitive, and the only analyst who was entirely correct was Khabib. Islam demolished the former champion, outstriking him, taking him down at will, controlling him in the grappling, and ultimately dropping him with punches and choking him out in the second round. His first defense was a different story. Islam faced featherweight champion Alexander Volkanovski at UFC 284 on February 12th in a rare best-of-the-best, champion vs champion match, and this time, his team's prediction of domination was thoroughly incorrect: It was a pitched battle that ended with Makhachev visibly exhausted and Volkanovski pounding on his face. Islam took an extremely close decision and the divisions will remain separate, but his aura of invulnerability has been thoroughly punctured. Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs   Alexander Volkanovski - 25-2, 4 DefensesSometimes it takes a lot of work to convince people you're the best. Alexander Volkanovski's rise through mixed martial arts is the kind of thing reserved for the all-time greats of the sport: He lost once, in the fourth fight of his career--at welterweight--and that was nine years ago. He's won twenty-one straight fights since, defeating top talent from around the world before landing in the UFC and proceeding to dominate every fighter placed in his way. There was one, single weight placed around his career's ankle: Max Holloway. Holloway was the UFC's much-lauded and much-marketed featherweight champion while Volkanovski was on his way up, and even as a 20-1 dynamo, he was an underdog against the Hawaiian. Alex beat him--soundly--but because of Holloway's prior dominance, and because the UFC wanted to get the most for its marketing buck, they ordered an instant rematch. Alex won again, but this time it was by a very close split decision, and that left a vocal part of the fanbase even angrier and more certain Max was the real champion. Two years and two fights apiece later, Alex and Max met one last time on July 2, and Volkanovski beat every shade of hell out of Holloway, not just repeatedly wobbling and outstriking him but completely and utterly shutting him out of a fight for the very first time in his career. When the bell rang, there were no questions left: Alexander Volkanovski is the absolute, undisputed best featherweight in the UFC. And now, having more or less destroyed his division, he has his eye on the pound for pound ranks. Volkanovski called his shot at the lightweight title before Charles Oliveira and Islam Makhachev had even fought, and moments after Makhachev was victorious, Volkanovski was in the cage staring him down. At UFC 284 on February 12th, in front of a rabid hometown crowd, Volkanovski gave Islam the fight of his life and was smashing him by the end of the final round--but it wasn't quite enough, and he lost a close, but unanimous, decision. He got the moral victory of going toe to toe with the heavier champion, but it cost him his winning streak. Volk says he was offered a rematch later this year, but he wants to keep his kingdom secure, so at UFC 290 on July 8 he'll face Yair Rodríguez and attempt to reunify his championship. Interim Featherweight Champion   Yair Rodríguez - 15-3 (1), 0 DefensesYair Rodríguez's moment is almost here. "El Pantera" was just 21 when he first appeared on UFC television and barely 22 when he won The Ultimate Fighter: Latin America, making him explicitly the UFC's great hope for breaking into the Mexican market. The reasoning wasn't hard to see: Yair's Taekwondo background gave him a fighting style unlike anyone else in the UFC, one that mixed attacks at odd angles with wild varieties of kicks. When he knocked out Andre Fili with a jumping switch kick, the world abruptly took notice and the UFC started giving him main events. And then, as they do, things fell apart. He took his first UFC loss to Frankie Edgar in 2017 and was fired and quickly rehired shortly thereafter as part of the UFC's attempt at strongarming him into accepting fights, and then he almost lost a fight against Chan-sung Jung only to knock him out with a blind, reverse, upwards elbow in the very last second of the fight, and then he fought Jeremy Stephens twice in two months after an eyepoke ended their first bout in just fifteen seconds, and then he disappeared for two years thanks to a USADA suspension--not for testing positive for drugs, but for insufficiently updating his address in their smartphone app. In November of 2021 Yair took the second loss of his career in a fight against Max Holloway, and, oddly, that loss boosted him higher than his previous win--the world had expected Holloway to blow him out, and instead Yair gave him an incredible fight and very nearly won, proving he'd matured far more than people gave him credit for. And through that bout he got a title eliminator against Brian Ortega, which--ended in one round when Ortega's shoulder popped out while they were grappling. Through yet another freak occurrence, Yair found himself fighting for the interim featherweight title against Josh Emmett, who, himself, was there largely through chance, and Yair battered and submitted him in two rounds to etch his name in the has-an-asterisk side of the history books. He'll try to erase that asterisk on July 8, when he meets Volkanovski to figure out who the real champion is. Bantamweight Champion, 135 lbs  Aljamain Sterling - 23-3, 3 DefensesAljamain Sterling is a first-ballot candidate for the best bantamweight champion in UFC history, and his title reign will, one way or another, be ending very soon and he will immediately be buried by history, and it's a tragedy you can see happening in realtime. In nearly a decade of UFC competition, Sterling has only three losses: Two split decisions that could easily have been draws, and one knockout loss to pre-crisis Marlon Moraes. Aside from that it's been nothing but victory. Aside from Aljamain himself, six men have held the UFC Bantamweight Championship: Aljo has personally defeated four of them. By any measure, his has been a hall of fame career. And he is, even as the literal world champion, completely forgotten thanks to bad matchmaking and things entirely out of his control. He won the championship from Petr Yan, but he won it by disqualification--the first time a championship has ever changed hands thanks to a DQ--and despite soundly beating Yan in a rematch he won only a split decision, thus reinforcing the people who already disliked him. Matters were not helped when his first real contender was TJ Dillashaw, himself coming off a dodgy decision victory, and they were made even worse when Dillashaw came into the fight so badly injured that his shoulder came out of its socket within minutes. With a division laden with potential challengers the audience wanted to see, the UFC, once again, selected None Of The Above: Sterling's next defense would be against Henry Cejudo, returning after three years of retirement to an immediate title shot. Once again, Sterling won clearly, and once again, the judges awarded him only a split decision, prompting much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Sterling's made clear that win or lose, he's leaving the division and moving to 145 after his next title defense--and the UFC is, once again, putting its thumb on the scale and having him face the company's favorite son, Sean O'Malley. Quickly. The UFC wants Sterling on UFC 292 on August 19th, another three-month turnaround, and in response to his concern about having time as a champion to recover and prepare, the UFC has made it publicly clear that if he doesn't do it, despite having literally just had a successful defense, they'll have O'Malley fighting for an interim title. Thanks, Dana. Flyweight Champion, 125 lbs   Brandon Moreno - 21-6-2, 0 DefensesThe war is over. Brandon Moreno has one hell of a career arc in the UFC. He was brought in as part of 2016's The Ultimate Fighter: Tournament of Champions, where he represented Arizona's World Fighting Federation as its flyweight titleholder, only to get eliminated in the first round by Alexandre Pantoja. The UFC kept him on, but cut him two years later despite a 3-2 record after two consecutive losses to future Bellator champ Sergio Pettis and, once again, Alexandre Pantoja. He was back in the UFC just one year later, and just one year after that he was fighting Deiveson Figueiredo, the man the entire world thought was the new unbeatable flyweight king, for the UFC championship. Their feud became the first thing to make the UFC give a poo poo about the flyweight division in years, and as the UFC does, it showed it by re-running it over and over. In December of 2020, Moreno fought Figueiredo to a shocking draw--primarily because Figueiredo was docked a point for groin strikes. An instant rematch was ordered for June of 2021, and this time, a Moreno who'd learned and adjusted to Figueiredo's power and timing outfought him, dropping him with jabs and choking him out in three rounds. The UFC decided to roll the dice again, seeing the fight as insufficiently determinative given their previous bout, and booked the two against each other again in January of 2022, and this time it was Figueiredo who had made the necessary adjustments, dropping Moreno three times en route to a unanimous decision victory. With the series now 1-1-1, the UFC, of course, needed a closing chapter. The fourth fight was originally booked for the summer, but a hand injury forced Figueiredo out and led to an interim title fight between Moreno and top contender Kai Kara-France instead, but destiny would not be denied, as Moreno exploded Kai's liver with a kick, handing him his first knockout loss in a decade. The final chapter, an unprecedented Figueiredo/Moreno 4, was rebooked for January 2023 as a title unification match--and because the gods of violence love jokes, the concluding fight ended on a doctor's stoppage. It SHOULDN'T be controversial, as the stoppage only happened because Moreno punched Figueiredo in the god damned eye so hard it was left swollen completely shut within a round, but Figueiredo's inability to tell he hadn't been poked, the confusion of the commentary team, and a partisan Brazilian crowd so angry Moreno had to be rushed backstage while being pelted with cups and garbage all conspired to make the fight seem somehow invalid. The longest series in UFC history is over, Brandon Moreno stopped the scariest flyweight on the planet twice, and he is, at last, the undisputed champion of the world. And his first order of business is defending his title against the only man who beat him twice, Alexandre Pantoja, at UFC 290 on July 8. Women's Featherweight, 145 lbs   VACANT - The brand new double championWomen's Bantamweight, 135 lbs  VACANT - Trying to fit onto two thrones at onceIt was a banner month for Vacant, as they claimed three belts in four weeks. Amanda Nunes spent seven years--minus about six really, really weird months last year--as not just the undisputed best women's mixed martial artist on the planet, but the undisputed best women's mixed martial artist of all time. While there are plenty of arguments to be had about the legitimacy of Women's Featherweight in the UFC, factually, she's the only UFC fighter to actually hold and defend championships in two weight classes at once, and she did it for years, and she made all of her opponents look like absolute poo poo. On June 10th she did it one last time, absolutely crushing Irene Aldana for five straight rounds, before officially retiring and passing into legend. This leaves two championships in the shadow-grip of Vacant, but their futures, respectively, are uncertain. Women's Bantamweight remains one of the UFC's more visible divisions, and you can almost certainly pencil in some sort of Julianna Peña vs Question Mark fight to fill the vacancy later this year. But the UFC has already acknowledged Women's Featherweight will, in all likelihood, simply cease to be. They're still promoting a couple fights in the division, but the belt has been taken off the website and it's entirely likely that, before the summer is over, we'll see the first shuttering of a weight class since the UFC gave up on the lightweight division back in 2004. Women's Flyweight, 125 lbs  Alexa Grasso - 16-3, 0 DefensesEvery once in awhile someone gets to shock the combat sports world, and in 2023, it's Alexa Grasso. The UFC has been high on Grasso since she left Invicta for her company debut back in 2016--she's been one of the most consistently featured fighters in ANY women's division, be it her time at strawweight or her move up to flyweight--but her two bids at the top of the mountain at 115 pounds met with disaster, once in Tatiana Suarez handing her the only stoppage loss of her career and once in Carla Esparza outwrestling her to a decision, and watching her manhandled by 115-pound fighters left the world doubting her 125-pound chances. But thanks to her solid boxing and her ever-improving ground game she ran up a four-fight winning streak, and when the UFC announced that she'd be taking on divisional queen and one of the greatest of all time in Valentina Shevchenko, the collective fan reaction was a unanimous "sure, okay," because Valentina disposing of people was a generally accepted phenomenon and she needed a warm body. The first round was a slight surprise, with Grasso stinging Shevchenko on the feet, but as so often happens, by the fourth round Valentina had taken over the fight, was ahead on every judge's scorecard and looked poised to cruise to her her eighth title defense. And then, she was struck down by the bane of the sport: Spinning poo poo. Backed into the fence, Shevchenko did what she does entirely too often--a spinning back kick--and in the half-second she was turned away Grasso leapt to her back, dragged her to the floor, and became the first person to ever submit Valentina Shevchenko. Alexa Grasso, after years of work, is the Women's Flyweight Champion of the World. But after six undefeated years and the longest women's title reign in UFC history (not counting Women's Featherweight which, as we all know, is Not Real), a rematch with Shevchenko later this year seems inevitable. Women's Strawweight, 115 lbs   Zhang Weili - 23-3, 0 DefensesAre you really surprised? There's a long tradition of underestimating unlikely champions in mixed martial arts, particularly when they're not the fan-friendliest in style or personality, from Michael Bisping to Frankie Edgar, only to have those demeaned champions remind the world that they didn't reach the peak of their divisions by mistake. Many of the wise, studied scribes of the sport warned the foolish masses against assuming the same about Women's Strawweight Champion Carla Esparza: She was no pushover, they said, and Zhang will have real trouble. And then, come fight day, we unwashed masses pulled them from their ivory towers and forced them to run in the streets amongst the mud and filth so they, too, could feel the unburdened joy of being, because Zhang Weili, as basically every fan had assumed, did, in fact, beat the absolute tar out of Carla. It wasn't particularly close: Carla got outlanded 37-6, hurt several times on the feet, and choked out just a minute into the second round. The inexplicable, season-long Cookie Monster subplot is over, Zhang Weili is now a two-time world champion, and things are back as they should be. What comes next, however, is tricky. Carla was blown out, so a rematch is out of the question. Rose Namajunas, the only person in the UFC to beat Weili, is a likely candidate--but after her disastrous performance against Carla, it remains to be seen how much faith the UFC has in her. Jéssica Andrade has a claim, but she's splitting time between 115 and 125, and probably needs to pick a weight class if she wants a shot. So the UFC solved the problem by picking Amanda Lemos. The assumption was the UFC was waiting for Lemos to get one more big win, but after seven months of silence, it turns out they were fine with her all along, apparently. She'll face Zhang for the belt at UFC 292 on August 19th.
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NOTABLE CHAMPIONS ACROSS THE WORLD Bellator Heavyweight Champion, 265 lbs  Ryan Bader - 31-7 (1), 3 DefensesRyan Bader is the greatest Bellator Heavyweight Champion of all time, and on a dairy farm somewhere in Wisconsin, Cole Konrad feels a pang of regret. Bader made his name as the winner of The Ultimate Fighter: Nogueira vs Mir all the way back in 2008, but his UFC career proved to be one of Sisyphean torment and humiliation that included, somehow, impossibly, being the only man to lose a UFC fight to Tito Ortiz during his last six years in the company. Bader left for free agency and Bellator in 2016 and became its light-heavyweight champion on his first night with the organization, and just two years later he became its first-ever simultaneous double-champion after knocking out the legendary Fedor Emelianenko and taking the heavyweight title. Bader would go on to lose his 205-pound crown, but Fedor never forgot his 35-second drubbing at the American wrestler's hands, and for his retirement fight, he demanded a rematch. Thus it was that the entire mixed martial arts community watched with bated breath as on February 4th, 2023, Fedor Emelianenko walked into the cage one last time and promptly got the absolute crap beaten out of him again. Ryan Bader remains undefeated at heavyweight. Who comes next, we'll have to see. Bellator Light-Heavyweight Champion, 205 lbs   Vadim Nemkov - 17-2 (1), 4 DefensesBellator CEO Scott Coker has been complicating title reigns with tournaments for decades and he's not about to stop now. Vadim Nemkov won the Bellator Light-Heavyweight Championship from Ryan Bader in 2020, and his title reign was immediately wrapped up in the Light-Heavyweight Grand Prix that started the following year. Nemkov, a Fedor Emelianenko protege, former Spetsnaz operative and understated wrecking machine who hadn't lost a fight since his early-career days in Rizin back in 2016, continued his Bellator streak by handling the always-game Phil Davis and dealing with some trouble en route to submitting Julius Anglickas, but then the tournament came to a screeching halt. Bellator threw all its marketing cash at the ultimately ill-fated Bellator 277 in April of 2022, and a sizable chunk of that misfortune came from both its championship and tournament-final co-main event. Corey Anderson looked handily en route to defeating Nemkov, only to unintentionally headbutt him while diving in to throw a punch. The headbutt opened an uncloseable gash on Nemkov's brow--and it happened five seconds before round three would've ended and allowed the judges to score a technical decision. It would be seven full months before the final got its re-do, and this time, Nemkov avoided Anderson's wrestling and controlled the fight with distance strikes en route to a unanimous decision victory. It took nearly two years for Bellator to complete an eight-man tournament, but they did it, and Vadim Nemkov is still your world's champion. Nemkov scored one more defense after defeating Yoel Romero at Bellator 297 on June 16th, and he followed it up by opining about giving up the division and the belt and moving to heavyweight. gently caress you, 205. Bellator Middleweight Champion, 185 lbs  Johnny Eblen - 13-0, 1 DefensesThere's an old combat sports tradition whereby a champion isn't really a champion until they defend their title. Gegard Mousasi has been established as the best middleweight outside the UFC that, despite the one-sided nature of their fight, Johnny Eblen's victory over him was treated as an aberration rather than the passing of a torch. It didn't matter that Eblen was undefeated, widely considered one of the absolute best by his cohort at American Top Team or that he'd dropped Mousasi on his face with his bare hands, the world needed verification. On February 4th at Bellator 290, they got it. Fedor Emelianenko's team was intending to pull one big, beautiful night of success out of the ether for their leader's retirement fight, but it was not to be: Vadim Nemkov had to pull out of the card thanks to an injury, Fedor himself was crushed for the second time by heavyweight champion Ryan Bader, and middleweight hopeful Anatoly Tokov was competitive for the first couple of rounds but was subsequently washed out by Eblen's overwhelming assault. Johnny Eblen is a defending champion now, and as things always seem to go, the conversation changed overnight from his being overrated to his being better than everyone in the UFC. Nuance escapes our fanbase. Thanks to Fabian Edwards defeating the perennially sleepy Gegard Mousasi in May, the next title defense will in fact be Johnny Eblen vs Fabian Edwards sometime later this year. Bellator Welterweight Champion, 170 lbs   Yaroslav Amosov - 27-0, 1 DefenseThere may not be a fighter alive who's had a tougher year than Yaroslav Amosov. Bellator picking Amosov up in 2018 was an obvious choice: He was already a world champion in Sambo and an MMA champion in Russia, already 19-0 with 17 finishes, and already being talked up by his training partners as quite possibly the best welterweight in the world. By 2021 he'd run up a six-fight winning streak in Bellator and earned a shot at world champion Douglas Lima, and he didn't waste a second of it, dominating Lima in every round. His success far outstripped his fame, but a scheduled title defense against superstar Michael "Venom" Page in May of 2022 promised to finally give him the spotlight. That, obviously, did not happen. In the wake of Russia's invasion of his homeland Ukraine Amosov returned home to evacuate his family and, once they had passed the border, notified Bellator he was pulling out of the fight and fighting in the war. Six months later, having liberated his home city of Irpin, he posted video of his troop returning to his mother's home to retrieve his Bellator championship belt, which he'd kept hidden in a closet. Amosov's return bout, a title unification against interim champion Logan Storley, was announced for February 25th, just barely one year after the invasion began, and after a year and a half not just away from competition but actively fighting in a war, there were many questions about how much like his old self Amosov could realistically look. As it turned out: He looked even better. When they'd first fought back in 2020, Storley gave Amosov all he could handle and the fight came down to a split decision; in 2023, Amosov wiped the floor with him, repeatedly hurting him standing and winning the entirety of the wrestling war. His home may still be in crisis, but Yaroslav Amosov is, at least, back on his throne. Bellator Lightweight Champion, 155 lbs  Usman Nurmagomedov - 17-0, 0 DefensesIf there's a single, developing throughline of mixed martial arts in 2022, it's the growing power of the Dagestani wrestling brigade. Abdulmanap Nurmagomedov built an army of ultra-grapplers, and after his passing the American Kickboxing Academy's Javier Mendez and Adulmanap's son and protege, the now-retired Khabib Nurmagomedov, unleashed them on the world. Usman, Khabib's cousin (as well as the younger brother of Umar Nurmagomedov, undefeated and ranked UFC bantamweight), took to Bellator in April of 2021 and proceeded to burn an undefeated path through the Manny Muros and Patrik Pietiläe of the world. His style was a little more eclectic--lots of spinning kicks, lots of stick-and-move jabs and stomps to the leg--but the resemblance became uncanny once he inevitably, and easily, ragdolled his opponents to the canvas and generally choked them out in short order thereafter. When he was announced as the #1 contender to Bellator's lightweight title, I was somewhat miffed: He hadn't beaten any top contenders, Bellator had already held a title eliminator and it was won in a crushing thirty-second knockout by Tofiq Musayev, the whole thing smacked of a pathetic attempt to glom onto some of Khabib's mainstream attention. I at no point said that he wouldn't very, very easily win. At Bellator 288 on November 18th, Usman very, very easily won, defeating Patricky "Pitbull" Freire at every aspect of the game and leaving him sans both his championship and one eyebrow. Usman's first fight as champion was both a defense and an entry into the first round of Bellator's Lightweight Grand Prix on March 3rd at Bellator 292, where he met, crushed, and retired former UFC champion Benson Henderson, handing him just the third submission loss of a 17-year, 42-fight career. He'll be facing fellow tournament semifinalist Brent Primus later this year. Bellator Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs   Patrício Pitbull - 35-5, 1 DefensePatrício Pitbull has had a weird goddamn year. Pitbull has long been the GOAT of Bellator, sometimes to the company's open chagrin--there were definitely times they would have vastly preferred a Pat Curran or a Michael Chandler to carry their banner, and Patrício had this unfortunate habit of not just beating them but making them look like poo poo. By mid-2021, he was Bellator's dual featherweight and lightweight champion, he was on a seven-fight win streak, and he was a finalist in their Featherweight Grand Prix. And then undefeated rising star A.J. McKee dropped him and choked him out in two minutes. Bellator, clearly, felt they had hit the jackpot and were going to be riding the McKee train for some time, as by their rematch ten months later, McKee was the centerpiece of all of their advertising. It was somewhat awkward when, as he had done to so many before, Patrício took him to a victorious decision that made McKee kind of look like poo poo, neutralizing his offense in the clinch, jabbing under his range, and grinding away the clock. Bellator pushed for a trilogy, but McKee, pissed off, tired of cutting weight and worried about having it happen all over again, declined and moved up to lightweight. Instead of a big-money rematch, Patrício was left to face top contender Ádám Borics, and the match, while hard-fought, was not particularly entertaining or memorable. Pitbull's next fight was the rare cross-promotional bout, facing Rizin's featherweight champion Kleber Koike Erbst on the New Year's Eve Bellator x Rizin special. It was the only fight on the card that wasn't particularly competitive: He shut Kleber down completely and won a wide decision. There is only one featherweight king outside the UFC. And, because sports are stupid, he promptly blew his winning streak dropping to 135 to try to win a third title, and Sergio Pettis beat him up. Good job, everybody. Bellator Bantamweight Champion, 135 lbs  Sergio Pettis - 23-5, 2 DefensesIt's been a long, strange trip for Sergio Pettis. When the world was introduced to Sergio as part of the UFC back in 2013 he was just the smaller, less visible alternative to his big brother Anthony, who was riding high as the lightweight champion of the world and the face of loving Wheaties. but Anthony's time atop the sport was ultimately short, and Sergio, at seven years younger, had plenty of time to develop. In 2023, Anthony Pettis is seemingly retired from mixed martial arts after losing most of the back half of his career, and Sergio is arguably the best bantamweight in the world outside of the UFC. His move to Bellator in 2020 paid dividends: Within three fights he was a champion, and in his fourth, he knocked out the highly-regarded Kyoji Horiguchi in a huge upset and officially arrived as one of the world's best. And then he got injured and spent more than a year and a half on the shelf, killing all of his momentum. Sergio returned right as Bellator's Bantamweight Grand Prix ended, but rather than fighting the winner, he was given a more esoteric contest: A title defense against Bellator's greatest fighter, Patrício Pitbull, who was making his 135-pound debut and attempting to win a third divisional title. Unfortunately, Pitbull's best features are his speed and power, and cut down to 135 he both lacked his knockout power and was, for the first time in his career, the slower fighter. Sergio won a unanimous decision, retained his throne, and will now, presumably, fight to reunify the title against Patchy Mix later this year. Bellator Interim Bantamweight Champion  Patchy Mix - 18-1, 0 DefensesThere's something to be said for how silly it is to have an interim championship last so long that it not only has multiple defenses but multiple titleholders, but there's nothing silly about the path Patchy Mix took to get it. Long one of Bellator's best bantamweights and arguably one of the best in the world altogether, Patchy "No Love" Mix has torn people apart across the globe, be it his five fights as the King of the Cage champion, his ninety-second submission of Yuki Motoya in Japan, or his 7-1 run in Bellator. The only loss in his entire career was a 2020 decision against Juan Archuleta, where the first five-round fight of Mix's life saw him exhausted and ultimately outworked. But he rebuilt, and he took Bellator's bantamweight grand prix by storm, and on April 22, 2023, he didn't just defeat Raufeon Stots, he knocked him out cold in eighty seconds. Mix won the grand prix, the million-dollar pot and the interim championship--and now that Sergio Pettis is back, all Patchy has to do is wait for their showdown. Bellator Women's Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs  Cris Cyborg - 26-2 (1), 4 DefensesYup. It's 2023 and Cris Cyborg is still out there. For those who don't know, Cris Cyborg was the canonical women's featherweight fighter, a muay thai wrecking machine who didn't just beat but brutalized essentially all of her opponents, including ex-Star Wars Gina Carano, and her popularity as a destroyer of humans is the only real reason women's featherweight even exists as a division, to the point that the UFC added it when she was the only actual fighter at the weight class they employed. She was 20-1 (1) when she passed the torch to Amanda Nunes, who slew her in just fifty-one seconds. She took one more fight in the UFC to complete her contract, but left for Bellator almost immediately afterward with uncharacteristic cooperation from the UFC itself--after all, they'd gotten what they wanted out of her. Her first Bellator fight was a one-sided destruction of their featherweight champion, and she's defended it three times since. At this point in Cyborg's career the problem isn't her or her fighting or her age, but simply that there's no one in Bellator for her to fight--after just five fights she's already hitting rematches, having just recorded her second one-sided bludgeoning of a very game but outmatched Arlene Blencowe. Cyborg decided her next fight would be a boxing match, and on September 25 she faced Simone da Silva, a jobber to the stars coming off twelve straight losses who had been knocked out just one month prior. Undeterred, she had her second boxing match on the undercard of December 10th’s Crawford/Avanesyan card, taking a unanimous decision over Gabrielle “Gabanator” Holloway, who is 6-6 in MMA and 0-3 in boxing. It's kind of tiring to watch the second-best women's featherweight in MMA history take repeated nothing boxing matches, but on the other hand, what on Earth is there better for her to do right now, other than, uh, use her instagram account to call for a military coup of her home country in the hopes of restoring fascism to power? Bellator Women's Flyweight Champion, 125 lbs  Liz Carmouche - 19-7, 2 DefensesIt took more than a decade and some controversy, but Liz Carmouche got her flowers. "Girl-Rilla" was just as present a figure in establishing women's MMA in the mainstream, but she's the most consistently forgotten because she was the losing fighter in all of those establishing moments. She was a challenger for the early, pre-fame Strikeforce Women's Bantamweight Championship, and was winning on the scorecards before Marloes Coenen choked her out. She was a central part of the inaugural Invicta FC card, and was planned as a title contender before the big show came calling. She became one half of the first women's fight in UFC history, and at one point had Ronda Rousey in a nearly destiny-defying neck crank, but was ultimately submitted in the first round. She's one of two women to ever defeat Valentina Shevchenko, but when given a second chance at the now-UFC champion Shevchenko, she fell short. Despite her powerful wrestling and submission skills, she was eternally denied the top of the mountain. So it was both particularly appropriate and particularly cruel when she finally won a championship on April 22, 2022--in a way that displeased everybody. Standing champion Juliana Velasquez was winning on every scorecard, but Liz Carmouche got her in the crucifix position and landed a number of, respectfully, small elbows, but referee Mike Beltran called a TKO to the immediate chagrin of the entirely safe ex-champion. The controversy made a rematch all but mandatory, and it took Bellator most of the year to do it, but the two met in the cage to run it back at Bellator 289 on December 9, and this time there was no controversy, as Velasquez submitted to an armbar two rounds in. The weirdness didn't stop there: Liz's next title defense against Deanna Bennett also hit the skids, as Bennett missed weight and was thus ineligible to win the championship. Carmouche put it on the line anyway, and fortunately, she choked Bennett out in the fourth round. She's most likely defending against Ilima-Lei MacFarlane later this year. ONE Heavyweight Champion, 265 lbs   Anatoly Malykhin - 13-0, 0 DefensesONE Light Heavyweight Champion, 225 lbs  Anatoly Malykhin - 13-0, 0 DefensesAnatoly Malykhin's bizzare two-year journey through ONE Championship has finally come to a place of rest. Ascension in the heavyweight division has never been the longest road in the world, but in ONE, where they don't actually bother with divisional rankings past lightweight and there have somehow only been five undisputed heavyweight championship bouts in eight years, the road is very short and easily traversed through violent punchings. Thus, when Anatoly Malykhin arrived in 2023 and punhed two men out in five minutes, that was more than sufficient. But the standing champion, Arjan Bhullar, just couldn't make it to the cage. They were supposed to fight in February of 2022, but Bhullar was hurt, so Malykhin got an interim title by destroying Kirill Grishenko. They were supposed to unify the belts in September, but Arjan was hurt, so they pushed it to December--and then Arjan played contractual hardball, so in a truly baffling reversal, ONE had Malykhin drop to 225 pounds and destroy double-champ Reinier de Ridder instead. The heavyweight unification got rebooked for March of 2023--and then Bhullar pulled out again. It wasn't until June 23rd, with their bout unceremoniously placed smack-dab in the middle of a Friday Fights Muay Thai card, that the match two years in the making finally happened. And it was...massively underwhelming, with Bhullar seeming alternately frozen and as though he wanted to be absolutely anywhere else in the world. Malykhin used him as a punching bag for two and a half rounds, with Bhullar at one point penalized for trying to escape the ring, and Malykhin put a stamp on it with a TKO in the third round. Finally--mercifully--the heavyweight championship is unified. Anatoly Malykhin is whole. And he immediately began talking about dropping to 205 for Reinier's OTHER belt, because, uh, ONE doesn't have any other loving heavyweights to fight. ONE Middleweight Champion, 205 lbs   Reinier de Ridder - 16-1, 2 DefensesThere's a long tradition of B-league hype in mixed martial arts. The hardcore fanbase chafes under both the total ubiquity of the UFC as a product and the way they set themselves up as the end-all be-all of the sport. As the B-leagues create dominant champions of their own, the fanbase inevitably rallies behind them as equal to, if not greater than, the UFC's equivalent titleholder, and further, as evidence of other companies having even better talent. And once or twice a generation, they're right! But most of the time, they're not. Fighters who destroy their B-league equivalents will commonly take a step outside their comfort zone and get immediately rolled by reality. Reinier de Ridder, more than any other competitor, was the popular argument for ONE's supremacy over the UFC: An undefeated ultra-grappler with belts at two divisions, one of which happened to be the UFC's permanently embattled light-heavyweight class. The remarkable ease with which he ragdolled and submitted his opponents, and the shaky nature of his UFC peers, led to wide exultation of his skills and regular comments from ONE CEO Chatri Sityodtong about his prospects against the best the world had to offer. It was consequently something of a bummer when he fought Anatoly Malykhin, the first opponent in years he didn't have a strength or grappling advantage over, and looked immediately lost when his takedown attempts did nothing. He had no visible striking defense to speak of and was ultimately, and distressingly easily, destroyed. The cycle has played out once again, the latest idol has lost, and now Reinier de Ridder will have to move forward. He lost a grappling match to Tye Ruotolo on May 5th, because ONE is silly. ONE Welterweight Champion, 185 lbs   Christian Lee - 17-4, 0 DefensesONE Lightweight Champion, 170 lbs  Christian Lee - 17-4, 0 DefensesIt took three tries, but by god, Chatri gets what Chatri wants. Christian Lee, the male half of the first family of ONE Championship and its homegrown golden boy, was very mad about losing his lightweight championship in a controversial decision to Ok Rae Yoon last year. He demanded the decision be reviewed and overturned and his championship reinstated. Unsurprisingly: This did not happen. After months of complaining and just shy of a year of waiting, the two had their long-awaited rematch and Lee left nothing to chance, knocking Yoon out in six minutes to reclaim his belt. Having finally retrieved his title, Lee, being a responsible champion, proceeded to immediately challenge ONE'S 185-pound champion, Kiamrian Abbasov, for his title, a move that was definitely in no way influenced by ONE's repeated attempts to get his sister Angela Lee double-champion status. Fortunately for Christian, Abbasov horribly botched his weight cut: He came in overweight, lost his title on the scale, and was visibly depleted in the fight. Which is particularly lucky, because Abbasov beat Lee senseless in the first round to the point that a standing TKO would not have been an unreasonable stoppage. But whether from his failed weight cut or simply from punching himself out, Abbasov was exhausted by the second round, and Lee mounted a gutsy comeback and ultimately stopped him with ground-and-pound in the fourth round. After three attempts, ONE has succeeded in getting two belts on a Lee. Unfortunately, it was followed by tragedy. With the death of his 18 year-old sister and fellow ONE competitor Victoria Lee, the future of the entire Lee fighting family is both up in the air and the last possible thing that could matter at this moment in time. For now, they have to grieve. ONE Featherweight Champion, 155 lbs  Tang Kai - 15-2, 0 DefensesTang Kai has been flying under the radar for some time, and in hindsight, that was clearly a mistake. He made his professional debut as a 20 year-old collegiate wrestler and won a rookie featherweight tournament in China's WBK (after investigating, we THINK it's World Battle Kings), but his stylistic limitations became apparent when he moved up to Kunlun Fight--and stopped fighting rookies. Dominant decision losses to ACA standout Bekhruz "Ong Bak" Zukurov and Road to UFC runner-up Asikeerbai Jinensibieke made Kai's weaknesses too apparent to ignore, and he made the tough call to commit to his dream, pack up his life, and move away from home to start training with real fight camps, most notably Shanghai's Dragon Gym and Phuket's legendary Tiger Muay Thai. It's worked out quite well: He hasn't lost a fight in five years. Three knockout wins in China's Rebel FC got ONE's attention, and since debuting with the organization in 2019, Kai has soundly defeated everyone in his path. He claims his wrestling base makes him impossible to take down and he proves it by using it almost entirely defensively, vastly preferring to bludgeon his opponents on his feet. His fight against Thanh Le, while blistering and difficult, was proof: He evaded every takedown attempt, widely outstruck him, dropped him with punches and leg kicks alike, and took the belt he's held for two years. And then, absolutely nothing else happened. It took ONE almost a full year to book another match for Tang Kai, and it was just an instant rematch with Thanh Le with no fanfare. And then Tang Kai busted his knee and announced he was out with no definite return date. Great job, everybody. ONE Bantamweight Champion, 145 lbs  Fabricio Andrade - 9-2 (1), 0 DefensesThe second time was the charm. When Fabricio "Wonder Boy" Andrade joined ONE Championship back in 2020 he was a virtual unknown in the mixed martial arts world, a 20-3 kickboxer but only a 3-2 mixed martial artist who'd been fighting out in the regional circuit of China. His association with Tiger Muay Thai put him on ONE's radar, and his visible striking skills despite being just 21 at the time made him interesting enough for a developmental contract. Said contract proceeded to develop into Andrade going on a five-fight winning streak that only got more dominant as he met tougher competition, and three straight first-round knockouts punched his ticket to the championship picture. His first appearance in the spotlight, unfortunately, went a touch awry. First, bantamweight champion John Lineker lost his title on the scale after missing weight, meaning only Andrade was eligible to become champion, and he was well on his way to doing so before hitting Lineker with an errant strike to the groin so hard it shattered his cup, and with the fight not yet halfway complete, it had to be rendered a No Contest. It took four months to get to the rematch, and it was much more closely contested, but after four rounds Lineker threw in the towel, his face having been punched too swollen to continue. Fabricio Andrade is 25 and a world goddamn champion. ONE Flyweight Champion, 135 lbs  Demetrious Johnson - 31-4-1, 0 DefensesThe king has returned. Demetrious Johnson's 2019 debut with ONE Championship was essentially scandalous. "Mighty Mouse" had long been a fan favorite of the lighter weight classes, a 5'3" combat machine who had been going the distance with world champions like Kid Yamamoto and Dominick Cruz while still working a day job in a warehouse, but it was only in 2012 when he dedicated himself to mixed martial arts as his full-time job that he became a star. He won the UFC's flyweight tournament and became its inaugural champion, and his talents are the reason a division that has existed for a decade has only had five champions--three of whom came in the last two years after he left. By 2018, Johnson had one of the longest winning streaks in the UFC, was the all-time recordholder for championship defenses in the UFC and had recorded some of the most outstanding finishes in the history of the UFC. By 2019, he was out of the company. Johnson and the UFC never got along--or, to be blunt, Johnson was one of the few publicly calling the UFC out on its bullshit. When he won the flyweight title and became a world champion while only getting paid $23k/23k he let it be known, when the UFC cut sponsorship money in the Reebok era he noted the raw deal it gave the fighters, and when Dana White tried to force him to take fights up at bantamweight by threatening to kill the flyweight division if he didn't, he told the world. After Henry Cejudo beat him in a razor-close coinflip decision and took the bargaining leverage of his championship away, it was over in a heartbeat. Dana White personally disliked him enough that he traded him to ONE Championship in exchange for their welterweight champion, Ben Askren. Johnson proceeded to immediately win ONE's flyweight grand prix, but took the first stoppage loss of his entire career in his shot at Adriano Moraes and his world championship and engendered a thousand MMA thinkpieces about if his time as a top fighter was over. A year and a half later, he got his rematch, and on August 27 at ONE on Prime Video 1 he returned the favor, handing Moraes his own first stoppage loss after knocking him out with a flying knee. The trilogy match was inevitable, and on May 5th, Johnson beat Moraes by a comprehensive decision, ending the story--and maybe his career. He says he's not sure if he's coming back yet. Fingers crossed. ONE Strawweight Champion, 125 lbs  Jarred Brooks - 20-2 (1), 0 DefensesJarred Brooks dealt with some crap on his way to a title. By 2017 he was one of the most-heralded flyweight prospects in the sport: An undefeated 13-0 multi-champion as an amateur, an undefeated 12-0 as a professional with fights across three separate weight classes, his heavy wrestling-and-grappling grinding style ground most of his opponents to dust. He took the moniker of "The Monkey God" thanks to his unorthodox striking and wrestling entries--when you're not afraid of grappling, you can get creative with the striking. And then he hit the UFC in 2017 and everything kind of went to hell. Three of his four UFC bouts went to split decision: A debut victory against Eric Shelton Brooks probably should've lost, a followup loss against future champion Deiveson Figueiredo Brooks probably should've won, an intervening bout where Brooks was easily dominating Jose Torres only to score the rare MMA own goal and knock himself out after smacking his head on the ground doing a big, showy slam, and a third and final split decision victory over Roberto Sanchez that really, really shouldn't have been split at all. And then the UFC cut him, despite being 2 and 2 and having gone the distance with the biggest new prospect in the division, because the UFC Doesn't Like Flyweights. So Brooks went over to Rizin, where he intended to build his way up as the next big foreign threat to top star Kyoji Horiguchi--and it was over in eleven seconds, after an inadvertant headbutt cut his opponent's eyebrow open and the blood-unfriendly Japanese network called a no-contest. His international comeback was further destroyed by COVID, and Brooks found himself iced for two straight years as he waited for the dust to settle. By November of 2021, he was making his long-delayed ONE debut; by June of 2022, he was 3-0 and the top contender. And then, of course, his title fight got delayed another six months thanks to an injury. On December 3rd, 2022, he finally got his long-belated shot at a major title, and shocking no one, he wrestled the poo poo out of Joshua Pacio for five straight rounds. Four years later than expected, Jarred Brooks has international gold. And because ONE's weight classes don't matter, he immediately called out 135-pound champ Demetrious Johnson. ONE Women's Strawweight Champion, 125 lbs  Xiong Jing Nan - 18-2, 7 DefensesXiong Jing Nan dreamed of lifting weights. She'd enjoyed sports as a child, and when China started its national push for Olympic supremacy she began training heavily in hope of joining the national weightlifting team. But then she met aspirants for its boxing team and fell in love with the idea of living out a martial arts movie and getting to hit people for fun and profit and she never looked back. She turned pro in 2014 and immediately became a standout, going 9-1 in China's Kunlun Fight promotion with wins across three separate weight classes. What made her truly dangerous wasn't one-punch power, but the ability to break her opponents with constant pressure striking, scoring TKOs with combinations stretched out across dozens of consecutive, unending strikes. The story was no different when she moved to ONE in 2017, and she was strawweight champion within two fights. ONE's women's MMA divisions have been its most stable, each having had exactly one champion, and they were so dominant that they inevitably had to fight each other--and, hilariously, traded wins back and forth in the process. 115 lbs champion Angela Lee went up to 125 to challenge for Xiong Jing Nan's belt but Nan stopped her with body kicks in the fifth round, and half a year later Nan dropped down to 115 to challenge for Lee's belt only for Lee to choke her out with twelve seconds left in the fight. Xiong has notched three successful title defenses since, which set her up for her greatest challenger yet: Angela Lee, again, apparently. Despite ONE's best attempts, Xiong successfully defended her title against Lee again, nearly finishing her in the first round and ultimately winning a decision. ONE Women's Atomweight Champion, 115 lbs  Angela Lee - 11-3, 5 DefensesAngela Lee is one of ONE's biggest stars and has been widely called its postergirl, and while the metrics may be debatable, she's an extremely solid choice. Her background is varied both culturally and martially: Born in Canada in a Singaporean-South Korean family made entirely of martial artists who all collectively moved to Hawaii when she was a child, she was not only training alongside them as a child, but training in multiple disciplines. By 15 she was a national Pankration champion, by 18 she had been signed by ONE before having a single professional fight, and by 20 she had two black belts and three defenses of ONE's atomweight championship. Lee is an extremely versatile fighter, capable of backing up her aggressive if sometimes loose striking with very solid defensive and offensive grappling, and her only two losses have come when fighting up a class at 125 pounds, against both its champion Xiong Jing Nan--whom she later choked out in a rematch at 115--and world jiu-jitsu champion Michelle Nicolini in a very, very close decision. Lee went on hiatus at the end of 2019 to have a baby and intended to be back by the end of 2020, but then the pandemic happened and she decided to use her cache within the company to just sit it out, making her arguably the smartest fighter in the world. ONE declined to make an interim championship, so she returned to competition this past March as a defending champion and main-evented the ONE X supercard against its atomweight queen in her absence, Stamp Fairtex, and notched her fifth title defense after choking her out in the second round. She got a trilogy fight with Nan on September 30, once again coming to her weight class and challenging for her title, but ultimately fell short and lost a decision. In the wake of her 18 year-old sister Victoria's tragic passing, Angela and the rest of the Lee family have shut down their gym and are focusing on much more important things than fighting. In June, Chatri said Angela Lee was most likely retiring for good, but is going to take a little more time before the decision is made. Seo Hee Ham and Stamp Fairtex will be fighting for an interim title at ONE 14 on September 1st.  Rizin Lightweight Champion, 156 lbs  Roberto de Souza - 15-2, 2 DefensesRoberto "Satoshi" de Souza is trying to become the new Gegard Mousasi. On April 17 he had the chance to avenge the only loss of his career, a half-knockout half-injury against "Hollywood" Johnny Case back in 2019, and he succeeded in emphatic fashion, climbing Case's back, locking him in an inverted triangle choke and eventually forcing an armbar. He's now 14-1 and inarguably one of the best lightweights outside of the UFC, but unlike most of the other fighters to bear that title, he has made it clear he has no interest in changing that. Where the A.J. McKees and Michael Chandlers of the world want to test free agency and notoriety, Roberto de Souza is happy in Japan, both because his Rizin pay is fairly lucrative and his entire family jiu-jitsu business is based in the country. This is admirable, but it's also a little unfortunate: Rizin really only has around a dozen lightweights under contract, and "Satoshi" has already beaten a third of them. He may be waiting for a Spike Carlyle or a Luiz Gustavo to work their way into contention, but the Rizin ranks hold few surprises for him at this point. It was thus of particular interest when the main event for the New Year's Eve Bellator x Rizin card was announced as Roberto de Souza vs AJ McKee--a test of where Souza ranks with the rest of the world's competition. Unfortunately for him and Rizin, the answer was "under them." He positionally threatened McKee and was able to land some solid strikes in the final round, but was otherwise controlled and lost a decision. On May 6th, Satoshi beat Spike Carlyle in a fantastic fight--but it was a non-title fight, because Japanese promoters are still real scared of their own belts. Rizin Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs  VACANT - The intercontinental championRuin has come to our family. Kleber Koike Erbst spent most of 2021 and 2022 enjoying the best run of his career: He was a perfect 6-0 in Rizin, not just winning but submitting everyone he faced, and ultimately claiming Rizin's Featherweight Championship after choking out Juntarou Ushiku. But then he participated in the promotionally disastrous Bellator x Rizin event that saw the Rizin boys get swept by their American-promoted counterparts, Erbst in particular finding himself dominated by Patrício Pitbull, and it prognosticated his true downfall. Japan is even more anal about weight classes than America, and on June 23rd, Kleber became the second champion in a year to lose his belt on the scale after coming in just .8 of a pound over the limit. He still easily submitted Chihiro Suzuki in their scheduled match, but not only was the belt still gone, the fight was a No Contest, as Japan will not even let you record a win if you blow the weight limit. The belt is in the void now, and it remains to be seen if Rizin will give Kleber a crack at regaining it. Rizin Bantamweight Champion, 135 lbs  VACANT - The unseen departure of meaningTHAT'S RIGHT, MOTHERFUCKERS. You thought Vacant was done? VACANT IS NEVER DONE. On March 5, 2023, just one single day after Jon Jones closed the door on the long, multi-national title reign of Vacant, God opened a window. Kyoji Horiguchi, who has long struggled with feeling undersized at the 135-pound bantamweight division, announced he was moving back to the 125-pound flyweight division for good, and that he could not in good conscience hold onto a championship he could not defend. Fundamentally, admittedly, it barely makes a difference to Rizin--he won the bantamweight championship back in 2018 and, because Japanese MMA hates ever putting its treasured champions at risk, despite having five Rizin fights in the time since his championship victory he'd only actually defended the title once, and that was in a rematch with Kai Asakura, who'd knocked him out a year earlier in, of course, a non-title fight. So it falls to Kai Asakura to try to fill the void, in the second Bellator x Rizin cross-promotional card this July, when he faces former Bellator champion Juan Archuleta. Rizin would probably like it if the new champion, y'know, was natively available in the country. Rizin Women's Super Atomweight Championship, 108 lbs   Seika Izawa - 9-0, 0 DefensesAll hail the new queen. After years of reigning as Japan's best atomweight, the legendary Ayaka Hamasaki fell not once but twice to the rookie Seika Izawa. A 24 year-old who was pushed into judo as a child by a frustrated mother who was tired of her constant fighting with her brothers, Izawa discovered a love for grappling that led her to win junior championships in judo, wrestling and sumo alike. She would still be pursuing judo had the pandemic not shut down much of its competitive scene, but fortunately, mixed martial arts is a terrible sport run by monsters who don't care about things like deadly diseases, which made it a tempting professional prospect. Four months after her formal MMA training began Izawa was winning fights in DEEP, less than a year after that she was DEEP's strawweight champion, and one year later she was dominating one of the best women's fighters in history on Rizin's New Year's Eve special. As Japanese organizations tend to do, frustratingly, the fight was a non-title affair, meaning Izawa had to come back and do it again on April 17. After a scary moment where Hamasaki almost stole an armbar, Izawa resumed her wrestling domination and formally took Rizin's atomweight championship. As entirely fresh blood, the world of Rizin's talent is open to her--but that also means she's got a real, real big target on her back. Rizin's Superatomweight Grand Prix was both a big coming-out party for Izawa and a series of opportunities to look shockingly mortal: She had a fair bit of trouble with Anastasiya Svetkivska in the semifinals before ultimately submitting her, but her berth in the finals against former rival Si Woo Park proved the toughest fight of her career, ending in a split decision victory she easily could have lost. Seika was supposed to face Miyuu Yamamoto at Rizin 42, but after Yamamoto had to pull out with an injury, Izawa was instead scheduled to face...the last person Yamamoto beat, the 5-3 Suwanan Boonsorn, at DEEP Jewels 41 on July 28. Izawa choked her out, shockingly. She'll be meeting Claire Lopez at Bellator x Rizin 2 on July 30th.
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Jul 1, 2023 19:57
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I'm thankful for your readership and apologetic for keeping you stuck in this hellhole. Also I forgot to link it but Strickland/Magomedov is live in the GDT at https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4035595 if you're just coming in you really haven't missed much
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Jul 1, 2023 22:34
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FootballFreak2 posted:Strickland is so fun to watch, he needs to be fighting like Robert Whitaker next I think these things are both aggressively untrue.
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Jul 2, 2023 18:32
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Man, I disagree. And while I do dislike Strickland, it's not even about distaste, it's just that he doesn't have the wins. If you look at their last five fights, Whittaker beat the #5 guy in Darren Till, dominated the #2 guy in Jared Cannonier, dominated the #8 guy (thanks, UFC) in Kelvin Gastelum, lost a real close decision to the champ in Adesanya and dominated the #2 guy in Vettori, and now he's about to fight the #5 guy in Dricus Du Plessis, who also happens to be the only person left in the top 8 Izzy or Pereira didn't kill yet. In Sean Strickland's last five he beat Jack Hermansson, who was #6 and that was good, and then he got murdered to death by Alex Pereira, and then he got worked by the aforementioned Jared Cannonier, and his recovery has been beating the #12 ranked Nassourdine Imavov, a guy who'd been getting hosed up by Phil Hawes a year prior, and stopping Abus Magomedov, an unranked guy who had one UFC fight and it was against the 1-4 Dustin Stoltzfus. Whittaker is a former champ who has only lost to the current champ, has beaten most of the top ten in the division, and is fighting in what has already been labeled a title eliminator next. Sean Strickland has zero top five wins in the UFC in his entire career and he's spent this year fighting guys underneath him. The two times they gave him an opponent with title implications he choked. I think he needs to beat someone who actually matters again before they send him up to a contendership fight. Personally I'd like to see Strickland vs Brendan Allen 2, since Allen's got a lot of momentum and it would be a good launchpad for one of them, but that would probably be unfair to Strickland because he'd be fighting down yet again. I think Strickland vs Paulo Costa would be both a great placement match and an entertaining style matchup, but Costa's booked in ANOTHER top ten-vs-unranked match, because things are stupid. With the people who are currently unbooked, I think Strickland vs Vettori is a good pole position fight. You don't gently caress up the Whittaker/DDP booking, you don't run back Strickland/Cannonier which was just six months ago, and you give Strickland a chance to actually break into the top five again, and if Izzy beats the winner of Whittaker/DDP and Strickland beats Vettori it gives him a challenger in the top five he hasn't already crushed.
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Jul 3, 2023 00:50
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At risk of spoiling this week's writeup I'm obviously picking Volk, but I do think Yair presents a surprisingly interesting challenge. One of Volk's best weapons is his range management, but almost everyone he's fought in the UFC likes to fight up close. The only outside fighters he's really dealt with were Holloway and Aldo, and Holloway's distance weapons were his hands so we saw Volk struggle until he turned the corner in the third fight by just countering and shutting him down with better boxing, and Aldo he just went 'i'm not loving with you' to and spent the entire fight ramming him into the fence. Yair's the first dude Volk's fought in the UFC with a big size advantage AND a good kicking game, and one of Volk's most common tactics is staying at range and pecking with leg kicks until he figures out what he wants to do, and it's feasible if he tries that with Yair he'll get lit up for it because he will probably not win a kicking war at range. But I don't think Volk is dumb enough to not adjust at all.
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Jul 3, 2023 05:32
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Brut posted:Maybe? I mean matching him up with some completely unknown dude from some unknown organization doesn't exactly accomplish that, and just by the numbers this is a 7-0 dude replacing 4-2 dude so it's possible this matchup is actually less favorable for him. So funny story: I'm obviously working on the writeup (see y'all tomorrow), and while doing research on that dude--on most of the late replacements on this card, actually--it seems like most of them are getting their numbers from the kind of incredibly stupid record-padding leagues that specialize in pumping up prospects with jobber squashes. The last two people Val Woodburn beat were a 17-9 guy for whom 16 of those wins came against people with either 1 or 0 fights and a 30-16-3 guy, except he's 42 years old and he's 1 for his last 7 and those 7 fights date back to 2013 because he hadn't actually had an MMA fight since 2017. I'm actually looking forward to this card, most of it is good and the fun potential is very high, but we are dealing with some incredibly silly substitutions.
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Jul 5, 2023 06:30
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CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 65: THE BALANCING ACT SATURDAY, JULY 8 FROM THE T-MOBILE ARENA IN PARADISE, NEVADA EARLY PRELIMS 3 PM PDT / 6 PM EDT | PRELIMS 5 PM PDT / 8 PM EDT | MAIN CARD 7 PM PDT / 10 PM EDT VIA PAY-PER-VIEW We've had a pretty shaky past six weeks in terms of overall card quality, and while most of it is the UFC's refusal to give a poo poo, blame and/or credit can also be laid on the altar of International Fight Week. The UFC has chosen the week of July 4th to be one of their biggest of the year; in eons past you'd have multiple press events, multiple television specials and sometimes even multiple fight cards in those seven days. We're not doing that this week. Even International Fight Week, itself, has been scaled down to just be the 6th through the 9th. It's more of an International Fight Weekend. But the Hall of Fame is happening, and one of the year's biggest pay-per-views is happening, so, hey: It could be a lot worse. And this card, to be clear, is fantastic. Two title fights, one title eliminator, one ultra-popular prospect and the retirement of Robbie Lawler, one of the greatest to ever do it? A score of great prospect fights? You could and arguably should have spread this out among some other cards, because boy howdy we are paying for it when Holly Holm vs Mayra Bueno Silva main events next weekend, but for now, let's enjoy the ride.  i have so many little bits of template art i've made for card graphics so i stop using these but i hate all of them MAIN EVENT: A THRONE FOR AN ERRANT KING  FEATHERWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP: Alexander Volkanovski (25-2, Champion) vs Yair Rodríguez (15-3 (1), Interim Champion/#1)I'm thoroughly into this fight and its implications, and it's funny, because I virtually always hate interim championships, especially interim championships happening while the world champion is not only healthy but active. That almost always happens because the UFC is trying to put contractual pressure on a fighter who is daring to ask questions and make demands. But this one time, I'm into it. Hell, this one time, the title challenger isn't the real #1 contender, and I'm into it. We're breaking all the rules. And it's only possible because every once in awhile you get to follow one of the greatest fighters of all time and things get real, real weird. At this point, I've been doing these writeups for a year and a half. In those eighteen months in the UFC:
Every single one except the featherweight title. In a time of upheaval and divisional change, Alexander Volkanovski has been a constant. Not only was his almost decade-long unbeaten streak tearing unabated through the shark tank that was the UFC's featherweight division, not only was he easily racking up the second-longest reign featherweight has ever seen, but defying all normality, he has, somehow, gotten better. He was threatened by Brian Ortega and replied by beating him insensible. He so thoroughly dominated Chan Sung Jung that Jung very nearly retired afterwards out of sheer despair. He faced Max Holloway--one of the greatest featherweights of all time and Volkanovski's greatest nemesis, the only man who'd come close to beating him in the UFC not once but twice--and Volkanovski shut him down completely and wholly, outboxing the scariest featherweight boxer in the sport. It was a career-best performance and an illustration of just how far ahead of the rest of featherweight Alexander Volkanovski really was. Which is why everyone agreed he could no longer be contained by its limit. Volkanovski fought Islam Makhachev, the best lightweight in the world, and he came shockingly close to victory. By the end of the fifth round Makhachev was getting dropped and looking beaten and exhausted--but he had done enough damage and banked enough rounds to take the decision, and with it, Volkanovski's undefeated UFC record. But not the featherweight title. Makhachev can barely make 155, he wanted nothing to do with 145. Alexander Volkanovski was the only one flirting with a new weight class. And that meant the UFC needed someone waiting in the wings--just in case he won. Featherweight is an incredibly talented division, but it has struggled to field contenders, and the fault for that falls solely on Max Holloway. The danger of having a weight class with multiple greatest-of-all-time candidates at once is one of them will, inevitably, beat the other, and that other will, inevitably, kill all of your contenders. Max became the 145-pound logjam: He simply couldn't beat Alexander Volkanovski, but he could beat everyone else. Calvin Kattar, Arnold Allen--Yair Rodríguez. Every one of them failed the Max Holloway test. But when Holloway lost the third Volkanovski fight and became essentially ruled out of title shots as long as Volk holds onto the belt, the UFC decided to pull from that roster of beaten contenders, and between the three of them there was a stark difference. When Max Holloway fought Arnold Allen he punched him to a comfortable decision and left the commentators--and Allen--pontificating about the levels of the sport. When Max Holloway fought Calvin Kattar he beat him so comically badly that he was, at one point, jabbing him and slipping punches while yelling at the commentators about the quality of his boxing. When Max Holloway fought Yair Rodríguez, he had to hang on for dear life. Max Holloway has eight takedowns in his entire 27-fight UFC career. Three of those eight came against Yair, and he attempted five. Yair's punching and kicking were so ferocious and so difficult to contend with that the greatest volume striker in the sport abandoned his striking and resorted to wrestling just to keep him under control. Yair lost, but of all the contenders, he came the closest to victory. And that was enough--particularly because the UFC has, to some extent, always wanted to see him get a title fight. Yair Rodríguez has been in the UFC for nine years. He was the winner of The Ultimate Fighter Latin America all the way back in 2014, and they've had Big Plans for him ever since. The company knew exactly what a treasure they had in Yair: A young, talented, deeply unique fighter who was throwing attacks out of cartwheels and knocking people out with flying switch kicks while most of the sport was still trying to figure out if calf kicks were a myth. He was unique, he was dangerous, and cynically, as a Mexican fighter he represented the Latin American fanbase the UFC desperately wanted to break into. He was a star in the making. And for years, for various reasons, they just couldn't quite get there. First it was losing to Frankie Edgar. Then it was contractual disputes, to the point that the UFC briefly fired him before realizing they absolutely did not want him showing up in Bellator and hurriedly re-signing him. Then he lost two years of his career thanks to disagreements with USADA--not over failing an actual drug test, but because Yair didn't like them having constant access to his location through their phone app. And then, of course, it was coming up just short against Max Holloway. There was always someone just a touch better, or there was always some circumstance getting in the way. Until, suddenly, there wasn't. Max's third loss blew the division open. Yair, who had just managed a victory over two-time title challenger Brian Ortega, was given a fight with Josh Emmett for an interim title as the co-main event of the Volkanovski/Makhachev card. At best, it would provide an insurance policy and a champion to take over if Volkanovski was suddenly too preoccupied with the lightweight division to return; at worst, it would leave no doubt as to who would be waiting to welcome Volkanovski home after he lost. Josh Emmett had not lost since 2018, and it did not matter. Yair Rodríguez kicked him. He kicked him in the legs, in the arm, in the body and the head. We just watched Josh Emmett deal with Ilia Topuria punching him in the head a hundred times over five rounds; after two rounds of getting kicked repeatedly in the chest Emmett wanted nothing to do with further striking and dumped Yair on the mat, where he was promptly choked the gently caress out. It was a career-best performance for Yair. It was the fight that finally solidified him as one of the best featherweights in the UFC; the fight that punched his ticket to a challenge for the world championship. And it's the fight most people are pointing to as evidence that he's going to lose. Yair Rodríguez is a fantastic striker with one of the most dangerous arsenals in the sport. He also tends to almost lose an awful lot of his fights. He was one second away from dropping a decision to Chan Sung Jung before destroying him with the best elbow knockout in the history of the sport. He was beating Max Holloway--until he wasn't. And even his second-round destruction of Josh Emmett followed a first round where Emmett dropped Yair with right hands. Yair has always had trouble with pressure. Be it Emmett pressing him with his hands or Edgar pressuring him with wrestling or Holloway forcing him to work at both, Yair is at his best when given space to move, aim and land his attacks at a distance and at his most vulnerable when people are in his face, roughing him up and making him uncomfortable. It does not escape the notice of most that Alexander Volkanovski roughs everyone up. The world just watched him make a champion who can barely make the lightweight limit profoundly uncomfortable. There's no shock that Alexander Volkanovski is the heavy favorite to win this fight. If anything, it'd be deeply perplexing if he wasn't. He's one of the smartest, toughest, most adaptable fighters the sport has ever seen. And that does not stop Yair from being one of his biggest threats. Navigating distance got Alex in trouble during the first two Max Holloway fights, and Holloway's distance was primarily earned behind his hands, which is what ultimately led to his repeated demise. Yair Rodríguez is a very different beast. One of Volkanovski's favorite approaches involves patiently gauging his opponent's speed, range and timing while softening them up with leg kicks until he's convinced he knows his way in. Yair is the one man in the division where this plan becomes a liability. He's bigger, he's rangier, and he's a much stronger, much more dangerous kicker. Every second Volkanovski is letting Yair work from his desired range is a second Yair is, in all likelihood, winning this fight. Which means we're almost certainly going to see the Alexander Volkanovski who beat José Aldo back in 2019: High-pressure, low-distance, and nothing but crushing power and weight. He survived Brian Ortega's guard and submissions, he's confident in his chances against Yair's, and every second HE spends punching Yair in the mouth while he's on his back or against the fence is another second Yair has none of his truly effective offense available. Yair has paths to victory. But honestly--even having written all of those paragraphs--if you told me Alexander Volkanovski was going to show up this weekend, out-kick the kickpuncher and walk away with his gold, I'd believe you. He outgrappled the scariest grappler in the division and he outboxed the scariest boxer in the division and he just came one round away from winning the lightweight title. He's earned the faith. And I don't think his time on top is done just yet. ALEXANDER VOLKANOVSKI BY TKO. CO-MAIN EVENT: THE FIRST FLYWEIGHT TITLE FIGHT WITHOUT DEIVESON FIGUEIREDO IN IT SINCE 2019 FLYWEIGHT: Brandon Moreno (21-6-2, Champion) vs Alexandre Pantoja (25-5, #2)Seriously, it's been a long loving time coming. There have, essentially, been two eras of flyweight: The Demetrious Johnson era and the Deiveson Figueiredo era. When Henry Cejudo vacated the title after just one defense back in December of 2019 the company needed a someone to pick up the banner, and between February 29, 2020 and July 7, 2023--1,224 days--there was not a single undisputed flyweight championship match that didn't have Deiveson Figueiredo in it. The UFC was certain he was going to be the top man at the weight class for a very long time, and they gladly put what little advertising they were willing to spare for the 125-pound division behind the big, angry stoppage machine. And then Brandon Moreno happened, and everything got weird. The UFC didn't expect a lot from Brandon Moreno. He'd washed out of The Ultimate Fighter 24, he'd dropped two in a row and been cut from the promotion in 2018, and he earned his title shot because Brandon Royval dislocated his shoulder during a scramble on the floor. Deveison was still The Guy: Moreno was the +300 warm body of an underdog they were putting in front of him while they waited for the next big challenger. As it turned out: Brandon Moreno was the next big challenger. In one of the most unlikely fight series in UFC history, Brandon Moreno and Deiveson Figueiredo fought each other four god damned times in two years. A foul turned their first fight into a draw, then Moreno choked Figueiredo out, then Figueiredo outfought Moreno and won a decision, and then Moreno punched Figueiredo's eye shut and earned a doctor's stoppage, in the process so thoroughly pissing off the Figueiredo-favoring Rio de Janeiro crowd that security had to rush Moreno to the back under a hail of beer cans and garbage. Brandon Moreno has thoroughly proven himself worthy of being the flyweight champion. But he hasn't had a chance to establish a reputation as champion independent of Deiveson Figueiredo. Starting down that road will, as it inevitably had to, go through Moreno's greatest remaining bogeyman: The guy who already beat him twice. Alexandre Pantoja is very, very good, but he's never made it quite to title contention on his own. He reached the semifinal round of TUF 24, but couldn't beat Hiromasa Ougikubo. He got signed, won two fights: Couldn't get past Dustin Ortiz. Three fights: Beat down by Deiveson Figueiredo. Knock out Matt Schnell: Get controlled by Askar Askarov. Pantoja's scary power and even scarier jiu-jitsu kept getting him to the top ten, but they couldn't carry him to the top itself. But some wins age better than others. In 2016, submitting Brandon Moreno was an Ultimate Fighter footnote; he hadn't even fought in the UFC itself yet. In 2018, outgrappling Moreno was a given; Moreno had already lost to him once and he was cut from the company immediately thereafter. But suddenly, in 2022, being the man who had beaten Brandon Moreno twice was a very, very big deal. And a three-fight winning streak meant all he had to do was wait to see if Moreno emerged from the Figueiredo series triumphant. If Deiveson had won, well, that's tougher: Pantoja had just lost to him in 2019, and another contendership match would be necessary. But if Moreno escaped with the belt, no one could deny Alexandre Pantoja, the man who'd already defeated him twice, deserved the first crack at his championship. Moreno can't credibly establish a lineage without beating his nemesis. Pantoja has already beaten him twice and sees no reason today should be any different. Has the theory of this fight changed any since the last two times we've seen it? Well--yes. Obviously. Not just in terms of personal skillset, but preparation. Brandon Moreno has better resources, better preparation, and much, much better gameplanning than his wild-eyed 2018 approaches. His game has expanded considerably, and his both strangling and punching out the scariest man in the division provides all the evidence one could neat. Alexandre Pantoja, by contrast, has never really stopped being Alexandre Pantoja. He swings hard right crosses, he shoots for fast takedowns and he crushes people on the ground. He hasn't grown his arsenal the way Brandon Moreno has. Of course, he also hasn't been fighting one man over and over like Brandon Moreno has. Four of Moreno's last five fights were all against Deiveson Figueiredo, and the only one that wasn't, an interim title fight with Kai Kara-France, took place almost entirely on the feet. Can Moreno stop Pantoja's takedowns and top control? Or does this fight end with Pantoja stretching Moreno on the ground like he's already done twice before? BRANDON MORENO BY DECISI0N. I do not believe this fight is by any means a sure thing, and I will be gritting my teeth for its duration, but at this point in his career I have come to believe in Brandon Moreno, and I think his speed, his growing grappling abilities and his much faster hands will spell the difference between a Pantoja fight now and a Pantoja fight five years ago. MAIN CARD: PREPPING A RERUN MIDDLEWEIGHT: Robert Whittaker (24-6, #2) vs Dricus du Plessis (19-2, #5)Championship trilogies are pretty rare in the UFC, and it's impressive that this card somehow rotates around three of them. Robert Whittaker is the second best middleweight of this generation. His UFC tenure started down at welterweight back in 2012, an aggressively silly weight cut that actively harmed his career, and then in 2014 he moved up to middleweight and promptly beat everyone they put in front of him. In a better world, Whittaker would've been regarded as the second-best middleweight champion of all time: He beat most of the top ten, he knocked out Jacaré Souza back when that was still rare and exceptional, and he beat Yoel Romero twice. But he was overshadowed by the Michael Bisping/Georges St-Pierre drama, and his record was marred by Romero missing weight, and he ultimately went into the history books--despite multiple successful title fights--as a champion without a single recognized defense. He's just the transitional bridge into the Israel Adesanya era. Which is deeply unfair, because Robert Whittaker has beaten every single middleweight he's faced other than Adesanya, and he came shockingly close to unseating him the second time around before Alex Pereira ever had a chance. Whittaker is, unquestionably, the top contender, but being a top contender who's already lost two title shots is treacherous ground. You don't get a third shot unless you prove one of your replacements doesn't deserve it. Dricus du Plessis is trying to prove he deserves it, and he needs to, because the jury's still out. His questionable position is based on two things: For one, du Plessis has an unbeaten, five-fight winning streak at middleweight and has more than earned his spot in the top ten, and for two, Du Plessis still hasn't actually fought a real contender. His last three fights came against Brad Tavares, who, much as I adore him, has never been a top guy, Darren Till, who is one for his last six and decided to go on hiatus from the sport altogether immediately afterward, and Derek Brunson, who mauled Dricus in the first round before gassing in the second and contemplating retirement while du Plessis beat him insensible. His relevance to the title picture is also based on two things: For one, a lot of attention-grabbing idiocy about du Plessis, a white South African, declaring himself a real African as opposed to Israel Adesanya, who was born in Nigeria but moved to New Zealand in his twenties, and for two, the fact that there just isn't anyone loving else. Adesanya's beaten almost everyone in the top ten already, and unlike Whittaker, no one else looked like they could have done any better in a rematch. Dricus looks kind of sloppy and awkward and he hasn't beaten a top contender, and it doesn't matter, because there's no one left to do the job. Do I dislike weird crypto-racism, especially when it's done in that mealy-mouthed 'nooo, I NEVER said anyone was a fake African or that I was MORE African than anyone, I just said I breathe African air and live in Africa and am African and they're not, the media's twisting my words' way of cowardice where people want controversy but not consequences? Totally. Do I mentally wall off the part of my brain that knows Robert Whittaker is into Jordan Peterson? Every day. Do I struggle to believe in du Plessis after seeing him get the poo poo both kicked and wrestled out of him by Derek Brunson one fight ago before Brunson abruptly remembered he's about to turn 40 and his hips started aching? Extremely. It's not an unwinnable fight for du Plessis, he's impossible to count out, but ROBERT WHITTAKER BY DECISION is awful hard to avoid. LIGHTWEIGHT: Jalin Turner (13-6, #10) vs Dan Hooker (22-12, #11)Jalin Turner came so, so very close to getting leapfrogged into title contention on account of this fight. These two were supposed to meet back in March to determine the true tall lightweight king, but Hooker broke his hand a month before the fight and, of all people, the #7-ranked Mateusz Gamrot took the fight on short notice as a gamble. It paid off, but only barely: Turner hurt Gamrot repeatedly and Gamrot scraped by on a split decision that infuriated legions of people who still think wrestling shouldn't count in mixed martial arts judging. Having just violently crushed five unranked lightweights in a row, honestly, going toe to toe with a future contender in Gamrot looks pretty loving good on Turner's resume, even if it did expose some holes in his wrestling defense. Dan Hooker is still trying to recover from encountering the dangers of relevancy. A slow rise up the divisional rankings led to a big couple years for Main Event Dan Hooker, and those years were, largely, extremely unkind. Going to war with Dustin Poirier and surviving, even in loss, was enriching for Hooker's career, but it also led to his getting thrown into main event where he was much more furiously dissected. Michael Chandler knocked him stupid, Islam Makhachev tore his arm off, and after an incredibly ill-advised attempt to return to the featherweight division last year Hooker ended in Arnold Allen elbowing his skull apart Hooker moved back to lightweight for good. He overcame an early scare against Claudio Puelles last November and stopped him on body shots to get back in the winning column, but being a big name means big fights, so one bout later, we're right back in the danger zone. Not gonna beat around the bush on this one: JALIN TURNER BY TKO. Hooker's best weapons are his size, his toughness and his ability to mix wrestling into his striking: Turner's bigger, he hits both harder and straighter, and we just watched him make one of lightweight's best wrestlers whiff on 2/3 of his takedown attempts. Hooker gets clipped in almost every fight he has, and getting clipped by Jalin Turner is bad for your health. MIDDLEWEIGHT: Bo Nickal (4-0) vs Valentine Woodburn (7-0) This got interesting, all of a sudden. Bo Nickal is one of the UFC's pet projects, a super-wrestler who banked three national championships, one world wrestling championship and a truly insane 120-3 record in the NCAA before turning to mixed martial arts. The UFC, never one to pass on a chance to do something stupid for sake of marketing, made Bo fight on Dana White's Contract-Begging Extravaganza twice: The first time he choked out an opponent in sixty-two seconds and, after being told he didn't have enough experience, the UFC rebooked him for a second Contender Series fight six weeks later, which he also won, thus proving everything's totally fine. He drew the 2-5 Jamie Pickett for his debut this past March, which, shockingly, he also won easily, and he was supposed to fight the 1-2 Tresean Gore on this card, but Gore tore his wrist in training and had to be replaced at the last minute and, as they always do, things got very, very silly. The UFC has 60-70 middleweights under contract. Most of them are comparably unsuccessful. The UFC did not pick any of them to fill in. They picked Valentine "THE ANIMAL" Woodburn, the 7-0, 5'8" champion of the prestigious COMBAT NIGHT PRO, one of the many, many regional organizations that helps young fighters puff up their records by feeding the rookie prospects of the world a steady diet of professional jobbers named Ramon Butts with 1-15 records. Just so we're clear, that's not me putting funny words together: Ramon Butts is real, and he's really 1-15, and he really lost to a 1-0 guy on Woodburn's last fight card. Woodburn himself is coming off a decision victory over Luis "Sergio Junior" Melo, a 42 year-old veteran with a 1-7 record in mixed martial arts over the last decade who hadn't competed in the sport in four years. Before that? The 17-11 Wesley Martins, who scored 16 of those victories over people with either 1 or 0 wins. This was the problem with CM Punk and Mickey Gall, and it's only becoming a bigger problem as the Contender Series claims ownership of more and more roster space. The UFC wants to get fighters young, half to maximize the amount of time they have with them, half to get them for minimum wage before they have leverage. But when you bring in fighters at certain levels of inexperience--as the UFC openly advertised with Nickal--you run headlong into the UFC not being a developmental league. What do you do with those fighters? You feed them the worst-performing fighters on the roster--and when you don't have any available, you import 5'8" middleweights from the Contender Series. Maybe Val Woodburn overturns the apple cart. It'd be nice. But I don't think we live in that timeline. BO NICKAL BY SUBMISSION. PRELIMS: HOLD ON, I'M GOIN' WELTERWEIGHT: Robbie Lawler (29-16 (1)) vs Niko Price (15-6 (2))Boy, the UFC has really not been giving people pleasant retirements lately. "Ruthless" Robbie Lawler is a god damned legend with one of the best Cinderella stories in the sport: He made his UFC debut all the way back in 2002, ultimately fell out with the company after going 4-3, left for the independent scene and wound up becoming a star for upstart companies EliteXC and Strikeforce! Except he went, uh, 3-5 there. By the time the UFC bought Strikeforce and folded him back into the company in 2013 Lawler was 19-9, entering his thirties, and overlooked as a relic of the past by the MMA media. A year later, he was the world goddamn champion. It didn't last--it never does--but for three wonderful years, Robbie Lawler was one of MMA's best fighters, a living violence elemental with one of the best highlight reels in the sport whose fights were guaranteed barnburners every single time. And now it's 2023, and he's 1 for his last 6, and that one was an even sadder, older Nick Diaz in a fight that exceptionally should not have happened. But it also would've been a better retirement fight than this. Niko Price is one of the UFC's wildcards, a talented, powerful, thoroughly dangerous fighter who's scary enough to knock a man out with hammerfists while laying supine on the mat, but not scary enough to stop Geoff Neal from punching his face in. He can't break the top ranks, but he can't get ruled out, either--he has, in fact, managed to go without consecutive wins OR losses for the last five loving years. He wins, he loses, he upsets, he underperforms, and once every three years he gets a win deducted from his record because it turns out he smokes too much weed. In other words: I don't know what we're doing here. The UFC doesn't really do dignified retirement fights, but after the career he's had, seeing Robbie Lawler off into the great hereafter by way of a preliminary fight with Niko Price just feels wrong. And I'm sure he'll probably lose--getting punched out by Bryan Barberena doesn't give me a great deal of faith--but if this is my last chance to pick a Robbie Lawler fight in the UFC, I'm not going to waste it on faithlessness. ROBBIE LAWLER BY TKO. WELTERWEIGHT: Jack Della Maddalena (14-2, #14) vs Josiah Harrell (7-0, NR) You know that whole 'competition plucked from the regional circuit' conversation we just had? We're having it again. Congratulations! Jack Della Maddalena is quite possibly the single best thing to come out of the Contender Series, an Australian wrecking machine who stands as one of the few mixed martial artists whose boxing is actually, genuinely smart and effective, as Randy Brown's face and Ramazan Emeev's liver can attest. He's blazed a four-fight winning streak through the welterweight division, forced his way into the top fifteen, and was scheduled to face Sean Brady, the eighth-best welterweight in the company. And then Brady got a staph infection. And the UFC, with their near-hundred welterweights, picked Josiah Harrell, the Muscle Hamster, the welterweight champion of the Ohio Combat League, which is a drat fine accomplishment when you realize five of Harrell's seven fights were, in fact, not at welterweight. Harrell's biggest MMA achievement isn't even winning, it's getting a few thousand views on Twitter for double-legging Mike Roberts through the cage door at the Legacy Fighting Alliance last month. Great clip! Really funny! Mike Roberts is a 9-9-1 lightweight. Josiah Harrell seems like he could have a lot of promise. He's a strong wrestler with a good top game, he's only 24, he's got a world of potential. He's also about to fight one of the UFC's best strikers on four days' notice with a significant size disadvantage. I hope they give him a fight with a really bad lightweight to make this sacrificial lamb act up to him later. JACK DELLA MADDALENA BY TKO. WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT: Yazmin Jauregui (10-0) vs Denise Gomes (7-2)The UFC's hopes for Yazmin Jauregui are very, very high. She came out of Combate Global as an undefeated regional standout, a midpoint somewhere between a volume-heavy brawler and a defensively solid grappler who had overwhelmed almost all of her opponents with punches, elbows and knees. She was an easy pickup for the UFC--they didn't even need to subject her to the Contract Farm Club--and she has yet to disappoint, winning a stellar contest against Iasmin Lucindo last August and following it up by pounding out the blood sacrifice that was Istela Nunes in December. The UFC is stepping up her competition, this time in the form of Denise Gomes. I had "Dee" pegged as a soft target for Bruna Brasil, a--try to be shocked--Brazilian Muay Thai champion who made her UFC debut against Gomes back in April, but Gomes turned out to have improved following her loss to Loma Lookboonmee the previous year, and ultimately walked Bruna down, staggered her with heavier, more consistent punches, and stopped her halfway through the second round. Was it what the UFC wanted? Maybe not, but honestly, they're both Contender Series winners in the same division with similar styles and I'm pretty sure management is just fine either way. And she presents an interesting challenge for Jauregui. Both of these women are at their best when they're controlling the flow of a fight, Yazmin with volume and footwork, Gomes with forward pressure and power. Gomes has definitely demonstrated more stopping power than Jauregui. But the versatility in her attack, and Gomes' tendency to work out of more of a flat, straightforward style, is, I think, going to cost her. YAZMIN JAUREGUI BY DECISION. LIGHT-HEAVYWEIGHT: Jimmy Crute (12-3-1, #14) vs Alonzo Menifield (13-3-1, NR) The idea of what constitutes a great fight operates on a sliding scale. If you're a featherweight, your idea of a great fight is an Aldo vs Mendes II or a Poirier vs Zombie: Exhibitions of incredible skill and athleticism where fighters at the top of their game do and survive amazing things that leave you hungry for more. If you're a light-heavyweight, it's Jimmy Crute vs Alonzo Menifield 1 from this past February, a fight where a striker is too tired from beating up his opponent to compete and ultimately gasses too hard to stay upright and a grappler is too beaten and rusty to utilize his skills and ultimately whiffs on a bunch of takedowns and can't complete a submission on someone who can barely move. The fight would, in fact, have simply gone down in the books as an obvious Menifield win had he not grabbed the fence in the third round, which, contrary to the usual warnings-upon-warnings standard, necessitated the immediate loss of a point. Which I'm fine with! I think fouls should be punished more harshly. But boy, it's annoying as poo poo when some fights have three eyepokes and two groin kicks and eight fence grabs with nothing but a vaguely stern warning and others are immediately altered. But it was a draw, and by 205-pound standards it was great, and that means we get to and/or have to see it again. Here's the thing, though: Menifield did basically win that fight. Has Jimmy Crute become a much better wrestler in the last four and a half months? Probably not. Has Alonzo Menifield spent more time on an exercise bike? I hope so. ALONZO MENIFIELD BY TKO. EARLY PRELIMS: A COME TO JESUS MOMENT FLYWEIGHT: Tatsuro Taira (13-0) vs Edgar Cháirez (10-4)Good lord, Tatsuro Taira is out of the curtain-jerking slot! And it only took three wins! Fantastic. Every few years us aging, jaded fucks on the MMA internet get excited about a Japanese prospect who looks like a possible title contender because somehow, despite being one of the canonical countries of origin for mixed martial arts, we have yet to see a Japanese champion in the UFC, and if ever it happens we all get to briefly think about Pride and Kazushi Sakuraba and feel young again for a split second. Taira is the latest beneficiary: A Shooto champion turned UFC prospect with razor-sharp submission skills and a deeply underrated right cross who been easily dispatching everyone the company throws at him. Taira was supposed to meet Kleydson Rodrigues a few weeks ago, but Kleydson blew his weight cut and it got scratched, and the UFC, once again, pulled from their endless pile of Contender Series hopefuls awaiting fights. This time, it's Edgar "Pitbull" Cháirez, a Fury FC refugee who, like so many regional fighters, is in the Schrodinger's Cat position of being real difficult to gauge. He's quick, he's one of the rare martial artists who's decent at fighting off his back foot, he's got a blistering outside leg kick and a really, really fast flying knee that he likes to throw repeatedly as a counter to approaching opponents. It's cool! However, most of the tests of his skills have been regional can crushers, and his one brush with the UFC was a 2022 Contender Series appearance where he gassed after the first round and got outworked for ten minutes. Edgar could surprise people here, but I don't think Taira's going to fall victim to random jumping knees. TATSURO TAIRA BY SUBMISSION. LIGHT-HEAVYWEIGHT: Vitor Petrino (8-0) vs Marcin Prachnio (16-6) The last time Marcin Prachnio fought I wrote a lengthy historical treatise on the up-and-down nature of his career, and how bizarre it is to go from a #1 contender in ONE to completely destroyed by Sam Alvey. It was an attempt to contextualize the sheer weirdness of his combat sports trajectory. And it turned into the horrible incantation that gave us one of the worst performances in UFC history, as Prachnio found himself opposite a William Knight who spent most of the fight leaning against the fence and landed a grand total of eight strikes in fifteen minutes. While that isn't Prachnio's fault, his inability to dispose of an essentially one-legged man offering no offense whatsoever in return is somewhat disconcerting. And that's presumably why the UFC has him fighting Vitor Petrino, the Contender Series winner and knockout artist whose debut against Anton Turkalj--yes, that would be THE PLEASURE MAN, thank you for asking--was also pretty loving weird, as what seemed like a dominant performance by Petrino in both swinging haymakers and repeated ground control was stymied by constant fence grabs and even a groin shot that all went without a point deduction. In some ways, Petrino's a good match for Prachnio. Prachnio is at his best when he can hang around on the outside, slice leg kicks and jabs into the middle distance, and avoid close, prolonged exchanges, and Petrino's tendency to chase could play right into that. I acknowledge this. I also acknowledge my refusal to ever pick anyone who lost to Sam Alvey after 2014. VITOR PETRINO BY TKO. BANTAMWEIGHT: Cameron Saaiman (8-0) vs Terrence Mitchell (15-2) Cameron Saaiman fought this past March, and at the time, I said this. CarlCX posted:I had Cameron Saaiman picked to easily win his UFC debut back in December; he wound up in the toughest fight of his life and scraped a last-minute standing TKO together to save himself from what was probably going to be a draw. Was that stage fright, or are there just levels to this game and Steven "Obi Won Shinobi The Pillow" Koslow is higher level than anyone thought? I hope we never have to find out, because every time I type his nickname it takes two minutes off of my life. I haven't really been impressed with Cameron Saaiman, and I'm not sold on the hype train he's somehow still riding, but I'll tell you, I'm much less sold on Terrence Mitchell. CAMERON SAAIMAN BY DECISION. FLYWEIGHT: Shannon Ross (13-7) vs Jesus Aguilar (8-2) We're always guaranteed one potential housecleaning fight, and this is the one. "The Turkish Delight" Shannon Ross wasn't really supposed to be here. Ross had a Contender Series fight in the summer of 2022 and, despite a solid struggle, was knocked out in the second round. And then he started involuntarily convulsing in his hotel room the next day, because it turned out he'd ruptured his appendix and was dying of sepsis! (High five, fellow almost-died-from-undiagnosed-appendicitis buddy.) When the UFC heard about this they offered him a contract, which was definitely a thing they did out of the goodness of their hearts, and definitely had nothing to do with attempting to ameliorate the fallout from almost killing a person on their dumbass prospect show. Ross's UFC debut ended with Kleydson Rodrigues kicking his nonexistent appendix and then knocking him out with a flying rear end to the face in under a minute. So the UFC is doing the only thing that makes sense: Booking him against Jesus Aguilar, another flyweight Contender Series veteran. Aguilar actually won his bout and his contract, which is great! But then he lost his debut after drawing Tatsuro Taira, one of the best submission artists at the flyweight division, and thinking, 'The correct thing to do to this man is jump a guillotine and put myself on my back.' He was submitted in short order and now he is here, with the UFC attempting to see if his aggressive kicking habits can in any way equal Kleydson's aggressive kicking habits. And, uh, probably not, he's not that good at kicking, but he is good enough to badly hurt Shannon Ross. Ross likes engaging behind the same sort of calf and knee kicks that Aguilar does in place of jabs, but Aguilar's better at it and he traditionally hits quite a bit harder. JESUS AGUILAR BY DECISION. FEATHERWEIGHT: Kamuela Kirk (11-5) vs Esteban Ribovics (11-1) Kamuela "The Jawaiian" Kirk suffers the permanent curse of willingly going by "The Jawaiian" as a professional moniker, and it has haunted him for years. In 2021, Kirk earned his spot on the UFC's radar by winning an LFA main event against Daniel Swain--when Daniel Swain retired from mixed martial arts altogether on his stool between rounds. Less than a month later, Kirk made a successful UFC debut and took a decision over Makwan Amirkhani--a decision 93% of media outlets scored against him. After almost an entire year's layoff, Kirk came back against Damon Jackson--and his grappling expertise got him submitted for the first time in his career. It's been an entire year and a goddamn half since then, and Kirk has resurfaced to experience his curse once again, this time at the hands of Esteban "El Gringo" Ribovics, the Argentinian bruiser and Contender Series baby who had the deep misfortune of getting matched in his UFC debut against THE TAJIK TANK, Loik Radzhabov, and boy, it's impressive how putting "The Tajik Tank" in quotes makes it sound like a nice, sensible martial arts nickname but just writing THE TAJIK TANK in all caps in the middle of a sentence makes me feel as though I'm going to be called into the principal's office for grade-school racial stereotyping. Ribovics is a student of the most modern of mixed martial arts mentalities: Being genuinely good at a bunch of stuff and ignoring all of it completely to swing heavy punches at people because that's where the goddamn money is. ESTEBAN RIBOVICS BY DECISION. I can't pick you, Kirk. I cannot. I know your dad gave you the nickname, don't change it just for me, but a curse is a curse. I'm sorry.
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Jul 5, 2023 21:53
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Lid posted:https://bloodyelbow.com/2023/07/04/alistair-overeem-retires-weight-loss/ well that didn't last quote:Dutch combat sports outlet Main Even NL, has reached out to Overeem's management after mainstream media picked up the news a couple days ago, to confirm that the Dutch legend will not retire. While he does indeed plan to leave combat sports soon, likely to promote his new lifestyle and perhaps work in the health industry, he still plans to fight one or two more times.
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Jul 6, 2023 06:23
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Freudian slippers posted:Reddit (for what it's worth) also seems to think that he killed his neighbor some years ago, and another person years before that. Which is... not something I saw coming. They're actually talking about a different Muay Thai guy, Pornsanae Sitmonchai. Muay Thai: Not even once.
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Jul 6, 2023 10:35
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One of the most successful MMA media personalities is a guy named The Schmo whose schtick you can instantaneously absorb by looking at a picture of him he was one of the first journalists they called to cover power slap.
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Jul 7, 2023 01:56
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He was there for the inaugural media day, which I only know because I googled it while looking for that picture. In other news of the sport being annoying, Deiveson Figueiredo retired from flyweight after the last Moreno fight to move to bantamweight, and then he announced he was actually staying at flyweight and was going to fight Manel Kape to get another shot at the title, and now, apparently, he's back at 135 and is in talks to fight Dominick Cruz sometime in September. Also, unrelatedly but re: all the dirty slut for the writeups stuff, thanks, y'all. It means a lot.
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Jul 7, 2023 10:14
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Boy, that's a hell of an update: https://twitter.com/mma_kings/status/1677431747456249857 Dumb loving fight and I'm ultimately glad it's not happening in the first place, but hey, the UFC's incredibly bad matchmaking may have inadvertently saved a fighter's life by getting him the first actual medical exam of his career.
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Jul 7, 2023 22:41
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How incredibly coincidental that the day news breaks that Francis Ngannou vs Tyson Fury might actually be happening is the day the UFC finally announces Jones/Stipe just hours later. How absolutely random and circumstantial.
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Jul 8, 2023 01:11
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coathat posted:Can we fast forward to pavlovich fighting the winner of that fight please I am at this point pretty convinced both guys are retiring after that fight. Jones has been talking about beating Stipe and retiring since before he even won the belt and Stipe hasn't fought in two and a half years, will be 41 by the time this fight theoretically happens and has been sick of the UFC's poo poo for about half a decade. I'm guessing by the turn of the year we've got Pavlovich vs either Gane or Aspinall for the vacant belt.
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Jul 8, 2023 03:38
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Oh, I remember, but when he relinquished the light-heavyweight belt last time his contract nearing its end/his wanting to renegotiate for heavyweight was a sticking point that took months to resolve, so when they announced an eight-fight heavyweight deal I got the feeling that was more about locking him into a much longer, much more annoying to fight contract if/when he decides he's done again. At this point in his life and career I cannot imagine Jon Jones sticking around for eight fights. It'd be neat to be wrong, he's Jon Jones and he's still a hell of a fighter to watch, but it just doesn't feel likely to me.
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Jul 8, 2023 05:40
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The broadcast still starts at 3 per ESPN, but I'd expect a bit of extra dead air.
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Jul 8, 2023 19:44
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https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4036133 On that topic, GDT is up. Prelims in 40.
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Jul 8, 2023 22:20
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Ringo Roadagain posted:“Did those belts ever go to Africa?” Du Plessis asked at UFC 285 media day. “As far as I know, they came to America and New Zealand. I’m going to take a belt to Africa. I’m the African fighting in the UFC. Myself and Cameron [Saaiman], we breathe African air. We wake up in Africa every day. We train in Africa, we’re Africa born, we’re Africa raised, we still reside in Africa, we train out of Africa. That’s an African champion, and that’s who I’ll be.” To be further clear, du Plessis proceeded to say of these comments that he never said anything racist or anything intimating Izzy wasn't a real African or that he was less African, and therefore this is all the media's fault for trying to stoke controversy. Coincidentally, Dana White spent the post-fight presser making GBS threads on the media for lying and saying he said USADA didn't matter when he looked into a camera a couple weeks ago and said "Who cares what USADA says?"
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Jul 9, 2023 19:52
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Boco_T posted:good fact alert lmao https://twitter.com/mattyh_12/status/1678197291134402560 Yeah, this is the bit I wrote for the card summary for this coming week's writeup quote:There's an ongoing argument about what constitutes a terrible UFC card. Some hold that any card without a championship fight is bad, some need a minimum of a contendership bout, some are happy with prospects. Some consider it a factor of the proportion of ranked fighters to unranked fighters in competition on a given night.
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Jul 10, 2023 01:44
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 The Brandon Royval fight was Pantoja's 11th with the company. 14th, if you count TUF. I know this is nothing this thread does not already know, but seriously, gently caress this sport.
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Jul 10, 2023 19:48
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blue footed boobie posted:I hope Francis gets his payday, but I really doubt it will ever happen. Fury is notorious for not going through with these kinds of things, and he has a lot of big money fights that would actually mean something that he could make. See, I feel like this one's likely to actually happen. It's a huge money fight that will get Fury more publicity than anyone else outside of the people he already doesn't want to fight except this time Fury's practically guaranteed a win.
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Jul 11, 2023 16:28
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I know he's still early in the collapse period, in all unfortunate likelihood, but I'd put Dominick Reyes up there as a biggest-collapse dark horse candidate. He beat Jon loving Jones and got screwed by judging, and it's not just that he's done nothing but lose since, nor that each loss has been a crushing, one-sided defeat, but that in each subsequent fight he's looked as though he's forgotten more and more about fighting itself. There isn't even three years between the Dominick Reyes who beat Jon Jones and the Dominick Reyes who stared at Ryan Spann like a headlight-blind deer because the part of his brain that remembered how punches work isn't there anymore.
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Jul 12, 2023 03:22
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Marching Powder posted:if the poo poo between izzy and whats his name gets out of control and it ends up being a proxy race war i think i'm going to call it. i can't even steal that poo poo in good conscience. the trump poo poo and everything colby does and says is my absolute limit and that is a mark against my character i realise now that i've typed that. Weirdly, as the UFC has drifted even further to the right and become an out-and-out platform for total bullshit, rather than driving me away it has made me more determined to stick around. I may be way less inclined to financially support the company but I'm not ceding the space of this sport to some of the worst, dumbest motherfuckers on the planet just because they got louder and more desperate. I was renting UFC on VHS before Dana White was here and I'll still be watching the day after he wakes up in Hell.
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Jul 12, 2023 10:23
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Marching Powder posted:if i was to leave someone behind to bear witness, i curse you. and many years from now, when they try to find out what happened here, you will describe for them what it was like to cry tears you didn't know you had and feel them evaporate instantly as a fire storm big enough to carry you on to the next life engulfs the ufc dome. but not before you see the guy who ran that backyard bumfights thing destroy wet andy for the lhw strap. So, here's a funny story about forcing oneself to bear witness to the end of humanity:
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Jul 12, 2023 20:39
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CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 66: A BRIEF LIST OF UNFORTUNATE THINGS SATURDAY, JULY 15 FROM THE HOLE IN THE WORLD THAT IS THE UFC APEX PRELIMS 4 PM PDT / 7 PM EDT | MAIN CARD 7 PM PDT / 10 PM EDT VIA ESPN+ There's an ongoing argument about what constitutes a terrible UFC card. Some hold that any card without a championship fight is bad, some need a minimum of a contendership bout, some are happy with prospects. Some consider it a factor of the proportion of ranked fighters to unranked fighters in competition on a given night. There's truth to all of them, but I think one of the abstract concepts that runs through all of them is momentum. If the fans give a poo poo about people on the card, it'll float even if half of those people are years away from the top fifteen. Momentum's a tough thing to measure, but a real simple, real reductive way of making that measurement is asking a very simple question: How many fighters on this card are on a winning streak in the UFC? In this case, the answer is eight. Eight out of the twenty-eight fighters booked for this card as of this writing are coming off of a win in the UFC. Two of those winning streaks are one fight long. The other 79% of this card's competitors are fighting to either avoid or pull out of a losing streak. Some cards struggle with inertia. Some are just inert.  still not sure i believe in this card order MAIN EVENT: EXPLORING HELL WITHOUT A FLASHLIGHT WOMEN'S BANTAMWEIGHT: Holly Holm (15-6, #3) vs Mayra Bueno Silva (10-2-1, #10) What is there to say about nothing? Three and a half months ago Holly Holm fought Yana Santos, and I wrote an artistic piece summarizing the experience of watching a Holly Holm fight as akin to watching your life ebb away, purposeless and lonely, and the existential horror of dying without meaning. I try not to talk about myself too often in these things--fighting takes up enough written bandwidth--but aside from being a scream into the void about years of watching Holly Holm, that essay was a bit of art therapy about the abrupt and then-recent death of a loved one. As much as I did not relish another Holly Holm fight, I appreciated her presence at that moment in time as an outlet for helping me deal with it. And then Holly Holm spent her post-fight interview making veiled references to anti-trans groomer propaganda and Qanon child trafficking conspiracy theories. So now those two things are connected in the neurons in my brain forever. So we're not wasting another artistically-inclined sentence on Holly loving Holm. We're describing things exactly as they are. Which is to say: Women's Bantamweight is incredibly, thoroughly hosed and this fight is our first step into a brave new world of divisional horror. Amanda Nunes retired last month, bringing the greatest women's MMA career in history to a close and, with it, the official end of the UFC having any kind of hold on the rudder at the 135-pound women's weight division. The matchmaking has been iffy, the UFC has failed to capitalize on their contenders and instead chased things like Miesha Tate comeback tours, and now we're in a post-Nunes world and the most likely matches to fill the vacant throne, as of yet, are:
Holly Holm's last victory over a potential contender was three years ago. In the time since she dropped a deeply forgettable split decision to Ketlen Vieira, who is now ranked #4, and defeated Yana Santos, who was ranked #6. Because of the way math works, this means Holm is #3. Mayra Bueno Silva is on a three-fight win streak at 135 pounds. Those three wins were against the unranked 1-5 Yanan Wu, who was fired one fight later, the unranked 3-3 Stephanie Egger, who took her next fight at featherweight, and the #12-ranked Lina Länsberg, who was on a three-fight losing streak and retired immediately after their bout. This, too, makes Silva #10. These two women combined have one top ten victory in their last 34 months and seven fights. Whoever wins will be the #3 fighter in the division and, in all likelihood, next in line for a shot at the championship of the world. The rankings are more of a suggestion than a rule, but boy, the moment you get to Women's Bantamweight they cease to have even the slightest sense of meaning, because Women's Bantamweight has never been a division. Despite being the weight classes that essentially launched women's mixed martial arts in America, women's MMA at 135 and above has always a single-attraction spectacle. In EliteXC it was Gina Carano and the 140-pound weight class that didn't exist, in Strikeforce it was Cris Cyborg at 145 pounds fighting dramatically underqualified women, and then it was the salad days of Ronda Rousey making millions of dollars for the UFC by simply existing. They didn't have to work. And then Amanda Nunes destroyed her, and then she destroyed everyone, and the UFC had six whole years to build new, interesting challengers for Nunes to fight and to take over when she was gone. And--they didn't. They just didn't! It's wild. Contenders fought contenders and ate each other alive, women on long winning streaks went unadvertised in favor of older names like Holm and Tate, even right up to Nunes' very last fight she was getting Julianna Peña rematches and, when those fell through, a lower-ranked, less successful contender, because the UFC saw more money in it. Which was, of course, wrong! Nunes completely ruined her and it made no difference whatsoever. And now there's no champion and no contenders and your next divisional queen is going to be one of the largely unadvertised people she ruined or a fighter who's never won a title at 125 or fought at 135 getting a belt in her very first appearance, most of the top ten have no momentum and are currently coming off of losses so there's no one ready to be elevated, and the end of the top fifteen is rounded out by fighters who compete at different weight classes, one of which is, in all likelihood, about to cease to exist. I love mixed martial arts. I love women's mixed martial arts. But Amanda Nunes was the thread holding everything together at 135 pounds and up in the UFC, and with her gone, there's nothing left but a potter's field. But the UFC's gotta elect a groundskeeper. So: Holly Holm and Mayra Bueno Silva. What's going to happen? Let's just get it out of the way: HOLLY HOLM BY DECISION. Mayra's at her best on the ground, but Holm is a better wrestler; she's got power in her punches and kicks, but Holm is a better striker; she succeeds thanks to her physicality, but Holm is a bigger fighter. Mayra came into the UFC at 125 pounds and Holly arguably should have been the UFC's first 145-pound women's champion. Holm's ability to defend and avoid conflict defines her entire goddamn career. Unless Mayra can pin her against the cage or get her on her back, it's going to be a long loving night and it'll end with someone pulling the microphone away from Holly Holm while she talks about adrenochrome. CO-MAIN EVENT: BRINGING PLASTIC CUPS TO A POTLUCK MIDDLEWEIGHT: Albert Duraev (16-4) vs Jun Yong Park (16-5) I know I say this a lot, but yes: This is the co-main event. Our last six co-mains included a Flyweight championship fight, a top ten bout at Lightweight, a top ten bout at Women's Flyweight and a Lightweight title eliminator. This week, you get Albert Duraev and Jun Yong Park. And I like both of these guys! I've said as much in a number of writeups! But gently caress me, man. Albert Duraev is coming off getting his eye punched shut by Joaquin "No Longer Appearing At This Weight Class" Buckley and just barely winning a split decision over Chidi Njokuani and Jun Yong Park is on a three-fight winning streak, but those wins were a dodgy split over the void at the center of all things, Eryk Anders, and a pair of submissions, one over the 1-3 Joseph Holmes and the other the 1-2 Dennis Tiuliulin. Here's the thing about MMA matchmaking: It's loving weird and difficult. It's very, very easy (and very, very fun!) to play armchair management, but quality matchmaking is an abstract thing. You have to please three masters: The promotion, which wants the most commercially-friendly fights you can give them, the fans, who want the fighters they care about and nothing else, and the sport, which wants divisional structure so it can stay legible. When matchmaking is at its best and all of those goals are accomplished at once it helps enable the sport's best runs, with divisionally-proven champions, strong stables of contenders, and an identifiable ladder for prospects to climb. When it isn't, you get this. I enjoy Albert Duraev: He's a tough, angry wrestler with solid hooks and scary elbows. I enjoy Jun Yong Park: He's an incredibly persistent clinch grappler who drags opponents through hell. But I'm not sure what this match is supposed to do for either of them or, indeed, anybody. It's not a fan-friendly style matchup: They're both largely wrestlers who want to wrestle, and neither is particularly popular. It's not a commercially pertinent matchup: They're just regular guys and neither has any particular momentum. It's not a divisionally pertinent fight: Neither guy is near a ranking and beating one another does nothing to move them closer. It's just a fight. It is what it is. Pick your similarly-sized, similarly-positioned wrestler of choice based on your personal predilections. I'm going with ALBERT DURAEV BY TKO because Park's emphasis on clinch takedowns and chokes seems less inclined to work on a strong, sound guy like Duraev, but honestly, flip a coin. MAIN CARD: GETTING FOXTAILS STUCK IN YOUR FEET WELTERWEIGHT: Jack Della Maddalena (14-2, #14) vs Bassil Hafez (8-3-1) Or is this the co-main event? I don't know! This fight just got added to the card yesterday, and I am here on Tuesday, hurriedly shoehorning it in despite the UFC not having put it on its own website or officially announced its placement. Maybe it's the new co-main event. Maybe it's a prelim! ESPN says it's buried in the middle of the prelims, but I think that's probably wrong, because it would be aggressively silly. I'm banking on the likelihood that Azaitar/Prado or Dumont/Chandler are getting bumped to the prelims in favor of this fight. If you're reading this on fight night and they actually put Jack Della loving Maddalena in the prelims, I apologize for my hubris. I love watching Jack Della Maddalena fight. In a sport where the average fighter still struggles to throw a bread-and-butter one-two boxing combination correctly, Maddalena is a great striker with sublime control over the placement, rhythm and power in his hands. The Contender Series was essentially built to find fighters like him and get them into the UFC for a fraction of their real worth, and by god, it worked at least once. Maddalena's 4-0 in the UFC and each victory has been a more impressive stoppage than the last, culminating in his entering the welterweight rankings this past February after atomizing the much taller, much rangier Randy Brown in two minutes. Which is, as always, where things got silly in the way only mixed martial arts can. Maddalena was supposed to fight the #9-ranked Sean Brady at last week's pay-per-view, but ten days before the fight Brady was hospitalized over an infection in his elbow. The UFC looked at its bench of fighters, came up empty, and chose to replace Brady with "The Muscle Hamster" Josiah Harrell, a 7-0 lightweight from the regional circuit fighting up a weight class on a week's notice against one of the most dangerous men in the sport. And then that fight got scratched--because Harrell got the first MRI of his career during the UFC's medicals and discovered he had a brain condition called Moyamoya disease that needed life-saving surgery. At that point, you could just cut your losses and rebook Maddalena against a ranked opponent in the near future. That is not what the UFC did. The UFC rebooked him for this weekend's card, midway through the week, against yet another regional replacement. On the plus side: It's a welterweight this time! Bassil Hafez is the 170-pound champion of Fury FC, the Fight Pass feeder league I regularly get angry at for booking ridiculous record-padding cards designed solely to get good numbers next to a fighter's name so they look pretty when the spotlight comes for them. By those standards, Haffez is one of the better people Fury has. He's a black belt in jiu-jitsu, he's durable enough that he has yet to be stopped in his career, and he's got the kind of sneaky, painful left kick to the body I wish more fighters took advantage of. That being said: We've already got a pretty solid idea of where he stacks up. Three years ago there was another Fury FC welterweight champion, Anthony "Aquaman" Ivy, who made it to the UFC. He was promptly crushed by Christian Aguilera and ground into paste by Bryan Barberena and released, having demonstrated with unfortunate clarity that he just wasn't up to the UFC's level. Bassil Hafez fought Anthony Ivy last year: He dropped him repeatedly, couldn't put him away, and then got repeatedly hurt and struggled with him to a split decision victory. Look: It's MMA. Anything can happen. Bassil Hafez isn't a bum--none of these people are bums--and he's got more than enough power to shock the world. But he also gets clipped a lot, and he also leads with his head a bunch, and he's fighting one of the sport's best strikers with less than a week to prepare. I'm sure Maddalena didn't want to waste the trip or the camp, and I kinda wish it wasn't this way, but what can you do. JACK DELLA MADDALENA BY TKO. HEAVYWEIGHT: Walt Harris (13-10) vs Josh Parisian (15-6) Boy, this one's tough. Walt Harris was a well-regarded 6-1 prospect when he joined the UFC back in 2013. Ten years later, he's barely hanging on to a winning record and he hasn't won a fight in four years. His power, his clinch assaults and his knees got him into the top fifteen after a number of unfortunate losses, but right as he seemed to be putting it together in 2019 his career got derailed in one of the most tragic scenes in MMA history with the murder of his daughter. I would feel bad bringing it up at all--it's an atomic bomb of a tragedy way too important for something like cagefighting--but it's unfortunately relevant, because the UFC extremely uncomfortably used it as their main marketing push for his return fight against Alistair Overeem. Harris was knocked out and that wound up being a trend: Alexander Volkov and Marcin Tybura both stopped him in his subsequent fights, and since that last loss on June 5, 2021, we haven't seen the man. I don't know if he's been taking time to finally grieve, or if he's been letting his body recovery from the stoppages, or if he was just figuring out what he wanted to do. But I do know he just turned 40 last year, and coming back to competition is very, very hard. Which is why he's fighting Josh Parisian. Parisian has established himself as the you-must-be-this-tall-to-ride line for the UFC's Heavyweight division: He's 2-3, and those two victories were over Roque Martinez and Alan Baudot, both of whom fell to 0-3 with the company (with one additional No Contest, in Baudot's case) and both of whom were immediately released following the fight. In that same timeframe, he's managed to get outfought by a 4-3 Parker Porter, a 3-3 Don'Tale Mayes, and a debuting Jamal Pogues in one of the least eventful heavyweight bouts of the year, as Parisian landed a dozen strikes per round and Pogues did even less, but also managed to wrestle him thoroughly enough to win anyway, much to Parisian's chagrin. This is, after all, heavyweight, and there's a gentlemen's agreement to grade on a stand-and-bang curve. Parisian's tough--he's only been stopped once in the UFC, and that was less about concussive damage than mercy from a referee who knew Parisian was done and would never escape the crucifix--but he's also a warm body whose only stoppage in the last three years came from stopping Alan Baudot, after which he was so exhausted at three minutes of the second round that he collapsed. It's not a great look. And yet, I am still worried. On a skill basis, there's no world in which Walt Harris should not handily win this fight. He's bigger, he's stronger, he hits much harder and he's a better wrestler. He should be able to roll Parisian however he wants. But he's also 40 and coming off the worst run of his career and a two-year layoff, and Parisian is very durable. Am I still picking WALT HARRIS BY TKO? Yes. Am I severely worried Walt Harris is going to beat the piss out of Parisian for one round, get tired and get picked apart for the next two rounds by a heavyweight he would've trounced back in 2018? You bet. WOMEN'S FEATHERWEIGHT: Norma Dumont (9-2, #13 at Women's Bantamweight) vs Chelsea Chandler (5-1, #15 at Women's Bantamweight) This fight might actually be historically relevant. This is the last Women's Featherweight bout the UFC currently has on its schedule, and unless management changes its mind about its future plans, that means this is, in all likelihood, the last Women's Featherweight bout the UFC will promote. Norma Dumont is--was?--the closest thing 145 had to a contender, but her whole UFC career is just one big case study in how the company never really knew what it was doing with the division. The UFC had Dumont trying (and failing, miserably) to cut down to 135, then fighting the 145-pound title contender one fight later, then welcoming back Aspen Ladd after a two-year layoff, then fighting Ultimate Fighter winner Macy Chiasson, then battling Danyelle Wolf, a 1-0 fighter who has yet to return and may no longer have a weight class she could even return to. Dumont was one of the most solid if unspectacular fighters in a division that had nothing for her to do, and given that she struggles to even make 145 pounds, if featherweight is going the way of the dodo, this is, in all likelihood, the last time we'll see her in the UFC. Which leaves Chelsea Chandler as the last woman to get on the boat. This is, in fact, Chandler's first bout at this weight in the UFC--she was a featherweight back in Invicta, but she was scheduled to make her UFC debut last year down at 135. But late replacements make fools of us all, and Chandler wound up punching out Julija Stoliarenko in the first round at 140, and at that point, why not go up to 145? Chandler was, in fact, supposed to fight the aforementioned and now 1-1 Danyelle Wolf earlier this year, but Wolf pulled out and the UFC didn't have a single goddamn featherweight to put in her place, nor were they inclined to hire any more. Some divisions get last-minute regional replacements: Women's Featherweight is not one of them. So Chandler puttered around for a quarter of a year, and now, we are here, at the end of all things, where the #1 contender for a belt that no longer demonstrably exists can fight someone who's never technically competed in the division and yet both of them are ranked at a lower weight class neither has ever successfully made in the UFC. Chelsea Chandler has never competed at any recognized UFC weight class, but by god, she's the #15 at bantamweight, the weight class this fight is not at. I'll be honest: I'm glad to see it end. I would much prefer the UFC actually investing in Women's Featherweight, but that ship sailed a long, long time ago, and you can't even say the division has been on life support because there's no body connected to the ventilator. Women's Featherweight is a Pepper's Ghost show, an illusion built around a couple of stars. The UFC promoted the weight class for six and a half years and never once published rankings that weren't just pictures of Cris Cyborg or Amanda Nunes next to a blank space where other names were supposed to be. NORMA DUMONT BY DECISION, one last time, and then let's all fold ourselves into that blank space together and embrace the end of a division that was never truly meant to be. LIGHTWEIGHT: Ottman Azaitar (13-1) vs Francisco Prado (11-1)On a night of weird backstories, Ottman Azaitar remains one of the most fun. Ottman was one of the most promising international prospects in the business, an undefeated fighter out of Morocco with two first-round knockouts in the UFC, the most recent of which was the destruction of the then-highly-rated Khama Worthy. Azaitar was one fight away from being ranked and looked all to hell like a future contender. And then he got released from the UFC for helping one of his teammates scale the wall of the fighter hotel to sneak supplies in through a balcony window in the middle of COVID lockdowns. The company ultimately brought him back within a month, but it would be two years before Ottman set foot in a cage to reclaim his spot as the sport's premier undefeated lightweight contender. He was, promptly, knocked completely loving unconscious by Matt Frevola in two and a half minutes. Ottman Azaitar spent a decade building his reputation, and then he lost once, and now it's been almost three years since his last victory and most of the world only knows him as the idiot who had Spiderman smuggle stuff into his hotel room. Francisco Prado is one of the star products of the most productive Brazilian feeder leagues of the 2020s, my beloved people at Samurai Fight House, the only company brave enough to ask the hard questions like 'can our young, 11-0 champion beat a 1-6 guy?' Prado was already on the UFC's radar as Samurai's best undefeated lightweight, but his likely fate in the Contender Series with the rest of his samurai kin was put off in favor of a last-minute replacement contract to fill in against Jamie Mullarkey this past February. And--this may surprise you--the regional fill-in fighting one of the UFC's veteran lightweights on short notice did not, in fact, win. Mullarkey outstruck Prado almost three to one, took him down repeatedly, and shut him out of the fight while Prado threw progressively angrier wheel kicks. He had a good shot here and there, and he proved he is obviously dangerous in a close, tight brawl, but he looked lost against Mullarkey's ground game and overwhelmed by his boxing, and ultimately, he couldn't put together enough offense to win a round. Azaitar is a much better match for Prado than Mullarkey was. Ottman punches for power rather than volume--he wants his opponents out of there as fast as possible----and that's a remarkably difficult pace to keep up, particularly against someone who just got beat up for three rounds without stopping. Azaitar could spark him in a round and go home, but Prado's age, durability and size advantage make me think this could be the beginning of the end for the Ottman Azaitar experiment in the UFC. FRANCISCO PRADO BY TKO. LIGHTWEIGHT: Terrance McKinney (13-5) vs Nazim Sadykhov (8-1)Terrance McKinney has fallen, and my faith has been shaken. McKinney has been one of my favorite lightweight prospects for the last two years--when you knock out Matt Frevola in seven seconds, you get my attention--but in hindsight, McKinney also busting his knee overexuberantly celebrating should have warned me to park my car sideways. McKinney's deep emotional commitment to violence has both made him a star and repeatedly thrust that star into the abyss, as his aggression has tended to get him hosed up on the regular. At first it was nearly finishing Drew Dober before his overenthusiasm got him winded and dropped, but this past January McKinney managed to get himself handled and flying kneed to death by Ismael Bonfim. He landed a few punches, but it was the first fight in which he was simply outclassed. And now the hot prospect is trying to avoid falling to a 50/50, 3-3 UFC record. Nazim Sadykhov is not inclined to make that process any easier. Sadykhov is the star pupil out of LAW MMA, the Ray Longo/Chris Weidman camp born out of the ashes of Matt Serra's kingdom, and after crushing cans down on--hey, how about that, Fury FC, sure is crazy how these record-padding organizations keep sending people to the UFC--he won on the Contender Series last year and made a successful UFC debut this past February. On one hand: It's a win in the UFC, and that's great. On the other: It was against Evan Elder, the last-minute late replacement fighter who came directly from fighting 9-16 guys on the regional circuit and is now 0-2 at the big show, except, uh, Elder was outgrappling and outstriking Sadykhov and was four minutes away from winning on every scorecard before Sadykhov kneed his eyebrow open in the third round and won an almost instantaneous doctor's stoppage. Which is in no way shameful. Doctor stoppages are perfectly legit. Getting hosed up by Evan Elder for two rounds is slightly more concerning. TERRANCE MCKINNEY BY TKO, based on just how many strikes Sadykhov was taking to the face in that fight, but if he can make it out of the first round McKinney's slowing down will be a big problem for him. PRELIMS: HAVING TO COUNT TO REMEMBER HOW OLD YOU ARE FEATHERWEIGHT: Tucker Lutz (12-3) vs Melsik Baghdasaryan (7-2) And lo, the prelims that might get a bunch of people fired have begun. Tucker "Top Gun" Lutz is a wrestleboxer who fought through the jesus CHRIST am I really going to say 'regional record-padding scene' yet again? This is every goddamn fight. Every second Contender Series winner came through some form of organization that had them fight some poor motherfucker with a record like 3-14 and it got them on the tee-vee so it worked out in the end, so it's impossible to say if it's good or bad that the underpinning bones of the sport are knockdown men in professional butcher shops and nothing is real. The records are stupid, the fights are nothing, and the level of professionalism once you get up to the big leagues is so much greater that Tucker Lutz had to win on the Contender Series twice because Dana White was unimpressed with his insistence on wrestling. He made it in on his second attempt, but he's now not only 1-2 in the UFC, he's only managed one fight in the last eighteen months, and it got him choked out in two rounds. Melsik Baghdasaryan fought on the same Contender Series episode as Lutz, and he ALSO won a decision, and he was ALSO initially denied a contract, and then a full year of inactivity later he was suddenly in the UFC, and while I cannot say with assurance that this mattered, I'd say the eleven cancelled fights on that card probably had something to do with it. Baghdsaryan won--twice!--and then, once again, missed more than a year with injuries, and this time he came back and got run over by Joshua Culibao. MELSIK BAGHDASARYAN BY DECISION. He's more mobile, he's more versatile, and as long as he avoids the takedowns he should be fine. WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT: Viktoriya Dudakova (6-0) vs Istela Nunes (6-4) It's aggressively obvious sacrificial pyre time. Viktoriya Dudakova is young, undefeated, and a Contender Series winner from last August after wrestling through a seeming knee injury to narrowly defeat Maria Silva. Sure, the wrestling is normally frowned upon, but the UFC actually wants women in the strawweight division and Dudakova is one of the more accomplished prospects out there in the weight class--as far as 24 year-olds go, anyway. Having spent most of the last year rehabbing her busted wheel, she's ready for primetime. The UFC is not subtle about wanting her to win, which is why she's drawn Istela Nunes, who is 0-3 in the company, has cancelled as many fights as she's participated in during her four years with the company, and who dropped two of those three losses because of--wait for it--a precipitous wrestling and grappling disadvantage. That's so weird! It's just crazy how these things happen to line up this way, sometimes. VIKTORIYA DUDAKOVA BY SUBMISSION. This fight exists for a reason. Nunes isn't a can, she's tough and talented, but the UFC has very intentionally given her disfavorable matchups, and this is no different. FEATHERWEIGHT: Austin Lingo (9-2) vs Melquizael Costa (19-6) Austin Lingo has been having a pretty bad time. He was the undefeated pride of the Legacy Fighting Alliance before he was called up to the UFC in 2020, where he immediately lost his record. And a year of his career. He regained his momentum with two victories--and then, thanks to injuries, missed ANOTHER entire year and a half of his athletic prime. When he finally resurfaced in 2023 all he got was run the gently caress over by Nate Landwehr. His hard-charging style is still there, and it won him the first round, but the constant layoffs haven't helped him stop banging his head on his ceiling in the division. Melquizael Costa is running on the opposite track. The vitiligo-laden warrior was a last-minute regional replacement against Thiago Moisés this past January, and his hard-luck story and incredibly internet-relatable tale of finding the will and bravery to take up mixed martial arts after seeing fellow vitiligo sufferer Scott Jorgensen in digital form on UFC Undisputed 3 (I miss you, THQ) won him a surprising amount of fan support for someone so unknown. Unfortunately, he was also visibly out of his depth and got grappled and choked out in two rounds. I picked Costa for the upset as a pure expression of heart, and it did not pan out. And I refuse to learn my lesson. MELQUIZAEL COSTA BY DECISION. I'd say something like "Lingo has a tendency to lose his rhythm' that doesn't actually mean anything fundamentally useful but stylistically I'm pretty sure he's a bad matchup for Costa. I would just prefer it if Costa won. LIGHTWEIGHT: Evan Elder (7-2) vs Genaro Valdéz (10-2) Man, there are a lot of mirror matches tonight. Once again, we've got two fighters who were undefeated before they set foot in the UFC, once again, they were mostly disposing of lower-caliber competition that did not adequately prepare them for the big show, and once again, they are both 0-2 under the corporate banner and facing down the possibility of a deadly third consecutive loss. I feel like I'm writing a loving AI preview of this event. This is the equivalent of attempting to describe the taste of cardboard. Which is disrespectful! Evan Elder works his rear end off and he hasn't really looked BAD in his UFC fights, he just hasn't won, and Genaro Valdéz went toe-to-toe with Matt Frevola and had one of the better one-round rock-em-sock-em fights of the year. Most people get dropped by Frevola once and lose consciousness; Genaro ate four knockdowns in a single round. But he, too, lost. EVAN ELDER BY DECISION. Genaro hits a lot loving harder than Elder does, but he also plods and swings wide and takes an awful lot of shots to the head. I don't think Elder will put him down, but he'll outpoint him. FLYWEIGHT: Tyson Nam (21-13-1) vs Azat Maksum (16-0) Tyson Nam looked like he was getting somewhere right up until he wasn't. Long celebrated as one of the rarest of birds--a terrifying knockout puncher in the flyweight division, where heavy hands are few and farbetween--Nam seemed to be doing the unthinkable and turning back the clock, hitting his stride in his late thirties, taking fighters like Sergio Pettis, Kai Kara-France and Matt Schnell the distance, and absolutely loving obliterating everyone below that high bar. After he punched Ode' Osbourne out in mid-air last August people were ready to catapult him straight to the top ten. Unfortunately, his ten (ten) years without a stoppage loss came to an end this past March when Bruno Silva dropped him with a front kick to the face and choked him out. A solid decade of being terrifying ended on a Brazilian man's toes. And now he's been dropped all the way back down to the welcome wagon. Azat Maksum has an awful lot of hype from the 'smart' internet fans I follow in an attempt to seem more informed than I actually am. He the best fighter out of Kazakhstan, which is actually high praise given the shocking level of competition found in a country that relatively small, and his style is balanced and dangerous as hell--lots of powerful overhands, lots of jumping on quick, tight chokes, and a deceptively fast straight right alongside a decent technical wrestling game. It's a test for Maksum. The UFC wants to see if he can compete with a spoiler. I'm erring on the side of caution. AZAT MAKSUM BY DECISION. LIGHTWEIGHT: Alex Munoz (6-2) vs Carl Deaton III (17-6) This is like pulling loving teeth, except the teeth represent my writing and having to write the same thing over and over. Alex Munoz: A fighter who was undefeated, joined the UFC, and is now 0-2 in the majors! He's even been MIA for almost two and a half years, just like a half-dozen other writeups today! Carl Deaton III is a regional fighter who spent his career battling nobodies in tiny rooms and losing to the better fighters he faced up until the UFC yanked him out of the ether as a last-minute injury replacement! He lost and now they're stuck with him! These words feel like they're tattooed onto the insides of my god damned eyelids. There's nothing else here on this card. It's just losing streaks, fighters who've barely shown up over the past three years, and late replacements fighting out their contractually obligated matches, and the longer the Contender Series goes on, and the longer the UFC promoted fight cards almost every single week, the more common this will be. We're not to 100% Contender Series cards yet, but by god, we will be very, very soon. It'll happen. And we won't even notice. ALEX MUNOZ BY DECISION. Carls aren't allowed to be happy tonight. WOMEN'S BANTAMWEIGHT: Ashlee Evans-Smith (6-5) vs Ailin Perez (7-2) this is yet another fight with someone on a losing streak who hasn't shown up for three years and a regional padded-record person who does not seem to belong here Ashlee Evans-Smith hasn't fought since losing to Norma Dumont all the way back in November of 2020, and a steroid flag from USADA last year after a random out-of-competition test kept her away even longer. Ashlee's last UFC victory was all the way back in April of 2018. Before that, it was September of 2016. Ashlee Evans-Smith is 1 for her last 5, and counting that far back requires traversing more than six years of time and space. Ailin Perez was a somewhat-hyped pickup with a not-really-but-sort-of undefeated record last year--she had one loss on her record for repeatedly fouling and illegally kneeing Tamires Vidal during a Samurai Fight House match that was held in a gym on some filthy puzzle mats and the least convincing fight fencing I've seen outside of a bar--and after giving a bunch of interviews about how she was the next big thing at 145 pounds and she was going to be the woman who dethroned Amanda Nunes, Perez promptly got rolled by Stephanie Egger, who choked her out in two rounds. Perez is back down to Women's Bantamweight now. It's a smart move. AILIN PEREZ BY DECISION. Ashlee Evans-Smith was already only barely holding onto her UFC contract back in fuckin' 2017. She hasn't fought in three years and I don't know how to even begin describing the level of rust she has to shake off here. Her main talent was always being unbelievably tough, but that's a real unfortunate skill to have when the wolves are at the door.
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Jul 12, 2023 20:39
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LobsterMobster posted:Do not abandon Iron Turtle 
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Jul 12, 2023 21:55
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https://twitter.com/mmamania/status/1679725866467860483 Jan Blachowicz vs Alex Pereira might wind up being for the loving belt.
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Jul 14, 2023 06:38
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AndyElusive posted:It does! A friend of my gf's, Dustin Joynson, is fighting on the card against Amir Aliakbari at Heavyweight. I hope he does well because Aliakbari seems like a mean mf'er. I'm sorry about your friend and the steroid elemental.
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Jul 15, 2023 03:42
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KSW ended with the commentators labeling Szymon Bajor, who is white and from Poland, "the great white hope" to defeat Phil de Fries, who is white, and from England. And then de Fries choked Bajor unconscious because Bajor tapped three inches in front of the referee's face and he somehow missed it.
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Jul 15, 2023 22:48
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And on that note, the GDT for Holm/Bueno Silva is live. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4036790 Prelims in 30. You could watch this. You could.
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Jul 15, 2023 23:31
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Snowman_McK posted:Phil De Fries once knocked himself out running into Matt Mitrione's legs so this story is even more ridiculous than you thougt. Matt Mitrione is going to wind up having one of the most oddly fascinating career spectrums at heavyweight by the time he's done. Majkol posted:Was anyting on last nights UFC Card worth watching? Nothing enormously exceptional, but Costa/Lingo, Park/Duraev, Prado/Azaitar and Maddalena/Hafez were all decent, and Holm/Bueno Silva is fun if you like watching Holly Holm lose.
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Jul 16, 2023 07:51
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Yeah, after that fight the only people at the welterweight top fifteen who seem like they might not be able to outwrestle Maddalena are Garry, Luque and Thompson. Lot of sprawl work coming in those camps. Also, in what everyone more or less called: https://twitter.com/BloodyElbow/status/1680668718978801666
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Jul 16, 2023 21:07
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No one really knows. Last time he talked about it he said the UFC wanted him against Hill in August but he wouldn't be ready by then, so presumably that means the last quarter of the year if at all this year. Also the UFC told a journalist Pereira/Jan being a title fight was "a typo" but that seems like a hell of a typo, so flip a coin as to if it's not happening or if they just revealed it too early.
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Jul 16, 2023 22:42
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BlindSite posted:TBH a Jan vs Alex title fight wouldn't seem that bad to me. Jan is the only LHW contender healthy right now and not old as gently caress or recently had the poo poo kicked out of them and in terms of hype you can at least build a fight around the whole "only two guys in the UFC to beat Adesenya". I don't think this sentence is wrong, but I do think this sentence being right is an incredible indictment of the current state of 205.
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Jul 17, 2023 02:49
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BlindSite posted:It's a hard one. I guess that large lads tend to go into other sports with either less brain damage, or comparable but a lot more money just keeps them out of fighting. I would have thought eastern europe would have been more of a breeding ground than it is for talent given that the only sports the large dudes seem to play there are basketball or weight lifting but if Fedor didn't inspire a generation of talent into fighting it's hard to see the Dagestani revolution doing so either. I think this is all true, but I think the UFC has also made some demonstrable mistakes along the way as far as roster retention and growth. Phil Davis, Ryan Bader, Corey Anderson and Yoel Romero would 100% be competitive in the UFC and at least a couple of them would be bigger names commercially than most of the top fifteen right now, and the UFC let all of them walk. Even some decent 205 prospects like Julius Anglickas and Alex Polizzi were in UFC feeders like the LFA or in Anglickas' case were straight up on the Contender Series, and the UFC passed on them. Combine that with Jones leaving the division, Cormier retiring, Teixeira retiring and Reyes and Santos falling to pieces, and the division--which has always been thin--kind of got gutted. And now, within that gutted division, Hill's injured, Jiri's injured, Rakic is injured, Craig dropped to middleweight, Reyes seems like he needs to retire, and Ankalaev has been asking the UFC to book him for months and hasn't gotten anything. 205 is just running on loving fumes.
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Jul 17, 2023 04:22
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This made me curious enough to be a weird data nerd again. The age of each Light-Heavyweight champion when they first won the belt: Frank Shamrock - 25 Tito Ortiz - 25 Randy Couture - 40 Vitor Belfort - 26 Chuck Liddell - 35 Quinton Jackson - 28 with one month left Forrest Griffin - 29 Rashad Evans - 29 Lyoto Machida - 30 with seven days left Mauricio Rua - 28 Jon Jones - 23 with one month left Daniel Cormier - 36 Jan Blachowicz - 37 Glover Teixeira - 42 Jiri Prochazka - 29 Jamahal Hill - 31 Average age of a first-time LHW champ: 30.8. If you take out the two outliers in Jon and Glover, that turns into 30.5, so the difference is negligible. But this mathematically proves Jiri's the only person in the division who's allowed to win the belt. Everyone else should file for SSI and get it over with.
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Jul 18, 2023 02:58
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reeg posted:We're still in the rumor phase of this, but allegedly Paulo Costa has been removed from the Ikram fight to fight Chimaev in Abu Dhabi, and Ikram will take on Roman Dolidze instead. Silly, but two better fights come out of it Dolidze's people now say he's not fighting, so no one knows what's going on. Islam Makhachev is also now calling out Leon Edwards for a welterweight title fight in Abu Dhabi.
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Jul 18, 2023 21:53
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