- CarlCX
- Dec 14, 2003
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This should be fun! I hope it should be fun.
We lost Pereira/Thompson and Lewis/de Lima is now third from the top, but otherwise we're intact.
CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 68: YOU'RE TEARING ME APART
SATURDAY, JULY 29 FROM THE DELTA CENTER IN SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH
EARLY PRELIMS 3:30 PM PDT / 6:30 PM EST | PRELIMS 5 PM / 8 PM | MAIN CARD 7 PM / 10 PM VIA PAY-PER-VIEW
This card is such a strange midpoint of great and deeply irritating.
Dustin Poirier vs Justin Gaethje part two, in a near-certain title eliminator, for five rounds? gently caress yes, sign me up. The winner gets to have Jorge Masvidal wrap the vacant BMF faux-championship around them and for promotional reasons has to pretend it means something? I don't understand why you are doing this.
Jan Błachowicz is back? In a fight for pole position at 205 pounds? Fuckin' awesome. Alex Pereira is also here, and is, uh, also in a title eliminator despite having only been the middleweight champion for one fight and having never competed in the weight class? I mean, I guess Light-Heavyweight could do worse, but oof.
Stephen Thompson! You're here! And you are...fighting the lowest ranked person in the welterweight division. But the fight should be good! But the fact that it's happening is kind of depressing.
It's a good card. It's a weird card. It's our sport that isn't a sport. It's what we deserve.
honestly, after last week's 15-fight marathon, this is relieving.
MAIN EVENT: DESIRED SEQUELS
 LIGHTWEIGHT: Dustin Poirier (29-7 (1), #2) vs Justin Gaethje (24-4, #3)
In some ways, this feels like inevitable destiny. There was no forseeable universe in which these two men did not wind up fighting one another one more time.
Five years ago, Dustin Poirier was coming off getting fouled out of a fight by Eddie Alvarez and breaking Anthony Pettis with a body triangle, and Justin Gaethje, after a 17-fight undefeated streak, had just eaten the first defeat--and the first stoppage loss--of his entire career, and was hoping to bounce back. Both men were incredibly scary and both men needed momentum.
The result was an instant classic that swept most Fight of the Year awards and showcased exactly how scary both men could be. But after three rounds of back-and-forth beatings Poirier found the timing on Gaethje's leg kicks, shot a right hand straight down the pipe and left him too wobbled to stop Poirier from battering him to a TKO. It was proof that Dustin belonged at the top of the division, and it was proof that Justin wouldn't make it to the top without fixing the holes in his defense.
And the two went off on their separate trajectories. And somehow, they wound up in exactly the same place.
In the five years since that fight, both men have established themselves as the seemingly permanent top contenders at lightweight. Both men earned that contendership after dethroning seemingly unbeatable fighters on impossibly long winning streaks. Both men ultimately got one title shot each against Khabib Nurmagomedov and Charles Oliveira and both men were submitted in both fights. Both men were forced to turn away surging, heavily-hyped contenders, Dan Hooker and Rafael Fiziev, through painful wars of attrition. Both men did the world a favor by defeating Michael Chandler.
Both men got big money matches by defeating fighters who probably shouldn't have been fighting anymore. Only Gaethje's was Donald Cerrone and Poirier's was Conor McGregor, and he beat the tar out of him twice, and it was much, much more satisfying.
They've walked the same road. But their transfigurative experiences have been considerably murkier.
Dustin Poirier is still, fundamentally, Dustin Poirier. His style wasn't broke and he hasn't gone to any particular lengths to fix it. His fluid boxing, his awkwardly-angled hooks, his commitment to working the body and his best-in-class counterstriking were not only apparent in that 2018 fight with Justin Gaethje, they were instrumental in Dustin's victory. He's picked up some new tricks--the calf kicks that crippled Conor McGregor, the scrambling switch that doomed Michael Chandler--but his style, as effective as it is, has stayed fundamentally the same.
Which has come at a cost. Poirier favors the shoulder roll over a traditionally high guard, and Michael Chandler noticed, because by pressuring his way through Dustin's defensive range he almost punched his nose through the back of his skull several times. Dustin's great at closing distance and stringing together combos in the pocket, but he has trouble in the clinch, and Charles Oliveira noticed, because by hammering him with elbows and knees in the clinch he slowed him down enough to choke him out. Dustin's an offensive fighter, but he's famous for getting into so many wars because his aggression isn't conducive to avoiding getting hit.
Justin Gaethje, by contrast, has been evolving. He'd made his name as the most captivating and successful lightweight brawler outside of the UFC, but once he got INTO the UFC, the limitations of his style became apparent. Michael Johnson almost stopped him in his debut, but Eddie and Dustin putting him down finally forced him to reexamine his gameplan. The Justin Gaethje of the next three fights was a study in greater patience, and the Justin Gaethje who won #1 contendership against Tony Ferguson was the best he'd ever looked: A smart, defensive sniper who landed almost 75% of his strikes and slowly, methodically broke the scariest lightweight in the world down to nothing.
And then Khabib Nurmagomedov choked him out, and something in Gaethje's resolve around his new style seemingly got choked out of him too. When he fought Michael Chandler he was back to swinging berserker haymakers and getting clipped in every other exchange; when he fought Charles Oliveira he came at him with wild leg kicks and hooks and was doing great right up until he got floored and submitted; when he fought Rafael Fiziev he came out prepared for war, and it wasn't until the third round that he seemingly remembered jabs and strategic wrestling could work.
Five years. One fighter has stayed largely the same and tacked new weapons onto their already deadly arsenal; one fighter has gone through perdition and re-emerged as a new man, then backslid into his old ways. Five years ago, it was enough for Dustin Poirier to win. Has the math changed?
HEY KIDS! Are you enjoying this commentary on a really important fight? Well, gently caress YOU, because I'm Dana White and I'm here to remind you that what REALLY MATTERS here, for purposes of branding and advertising, is that this fight is for the BMF CHAMPIONSHIP! Yeah, man! It's so crazy and nuts! Aren't you excited? Wasn't it so awesome when we did this before and The Rock gave Jorge Masvidal a belt shortly before we forced all of our fighters to wear his terrible shoes for no additional money? Didn't that kind of brand synergy just get you turgid with anticipation for more opportunities to buy merchandise?
Well, we're back! Sure, we never mentioned it again because even we knew how loving stupid it was, but here we are, about to do it again, for no reason! This isn't loving distracting at all! It's not in any way whatsoever pathetic that we're a hyper-violent ultra-masculinist we're-so-anti-woke company but we can't actually bring ourselves to put cuss words in things so a bunch of grown men have to say "the Bee Emm Eff title" as if a) they were all fourth graders terrified their parents were going to put them in Time Out and b) the whole concept of this belt isn't the dumbest thing on the planet!
BMF TITLE, BABY! THE UFC IS BACK!
DUSTIN POIRIER BY TKO. Justin Gaethje is, of course, a madman who can end a fight with a single giant fuckoff haymaker at any moment. But this match has, I think, gotten even worse for him. We've already seen what Poirier's style can do when Gaethje is brawling; smart, defensive Gaethje is, I think, still at a disadvantage, because Poirier's movement and footwork are better and his ability to slide jabs and crosses in on approaching opponents is best-in-class. Gaethje's best style for this fight could well be just getting Dustin to the fence and wearing him down, but that's never been his style--either of them. It's going to be a barnburner, but once the barn's burnt down, Dustin's walking away.
CO-MAIN EVENT: BRAWLING IN AN EMPTY HOUSE
LIGHT-HEAVYWEIGHT: Jan Błachowicz (29-9-1, #3) vs Alex Pereira (7-2, #2 at Middleweight)
You know, that last writeup? Aside from the obligatory silly marketing gag, that's my happy place. I talk about sociopolitics and promotional malfeasance and all that jazz most weeks, but if I had the choice, I'd really rather not. When mixed martial arts is at its best--when you have a compelling fight between compelling fighters who've been properly invested in and are properly placed in their division? That's when this is a sport. That's when I love it. If the only thing worth talking about in every fight on a card was how good and interesting it is, I would be content never mentioning external bullshit ever again.
So: Let's talk about some external bullshit.
The UFC's light-heavyweight division is a tire fire. This is not necessarily a reflection on the talent within it, so much as the continual plague of bad luck and bad booking that has infested it. Jan Błachowicz was the champion, Glover Teixeira beat him, and Glover lost the title to Jiří Procházka. That's all fine. But you can't have a champion without contenders--and, as it turns out, sometimes you can't have a champion at all.
Jan was supposed to fight Aleksandar Rakić in a likely title eliminator: Rakić was arguably winning, then blew out his knee in the third round. Jiří broke his shoulder and had to abdicate the throne, leaving Jan to fight #1 contender Magomed Ankalaev for an impromptu championship match: Ankalaev won the fight on almost every media scorecard, but the fight was ruled a split draw. The UFC jumped the rankings to instead put Contender Series winner Jamahal Hill in against Teixeira in a new title match, and Hill won, finally ending the chaos! And then vacated the belt six months later without ever defending it because he ruptured his achilles.
For the last two weeks people have just been waiting for this fight to be abruptly switched to a vacant championship fight. Only now, the week of the bout, has the fanbase accepted that it won't actually happen. It is worth considering how incredibly low the standards at 205 pounds have fallen that this fight becoming a title fight was considered a favorable and possibly even straight-up optimal outcome.
Because, honestly: Neither guy deserves it.
I loved the rise of Jan Błachowicz. His power hooks, his heavy leg kicks--just great. Even the way he lost the belt to Glover was narratively perfect. But objectively, Jan Blachowicz is on an extremely wonky streak of fights. He lost against Glover, he was getting outpaced by Rakić, and he lost or at best went to a stalemate with Ankalaev. His last unequivocal victory was back in March of 2021--and it was against Israel Adesanya, a career middleweight, who immediately went right back home to 185 pounds and never returned.
And now he's fighting for contendership against a middleweight, because all of time is actually occurring in concert and everything you use to space out the events of your life in memory is an illusion.
I like Alex Pereira. As a rule of thumb, if you knock out Sean Strickland, hey: I'm a fan. His road to the middleweight title was unbelievably astroturfed by management, but he then proceeded to stop Israel Adesanya and actually win the drat belt, so it worked out! Up until the instant rematch, where he got starched in two rounds. Also, he had already committed to leaving the division whether he won or lost. So now Alex Pereira is a 4-1 middleweight, and one of his victories was against a welterweight, and now he's fighting for the top contendership of the light-heavyweight division.
Like, look, man: Even Anderson Silva had to fight James Irvin before he fought a former champion, and he was Anderson loving Silva.
Is it going to be a bad fight? Probably not, but honestly, maybe! Pereira is a nightmare on the feet and as good a striker as Jan can be, when you do the math of how easily Jan outwrestled Izzy and extrapolate how Izzy outwrestled Alex, boy, it sure would make sense for Jan to start shooting as soon as he sees an opening and never look back.
Will he? Boy, I don't know. My buddy the talented fight writerINTERNET MMA ARTIST CHUNGUS SUPREME has made a habit out of reminding me that I always, always make the mistake of envisioning fighters fighting to their greatest strengths instead of their clearest instincts. When I envision this fight in my heart, I see Jan trying to trade jabs and kicks between attempts at control and ultimately getting murdered for it. But god dammit, I am going to listen to my brain even if it kills me. JAN BŁACHOWICZ BY DECISION.
MAIN CARD: JUST PLEASE DON'T BE SAD
HEAVYWEIGHT: Derrick Lewis (26-11 (1), #11) vs Marcos Rogério de Lima (21-8-1, NR)
How fast the drops can come at heavyweight. Twenty-three months ago Derrick Lewis was on a four-fight winning streak, had just knocked out the #2 contender in the world, and was staring down an interim championship match with Ciryl Gane. Today, he is one for his last five, he's been knocked out horrifically in three of those losses, and the only time he wasn't, he got ragdolled and choked out by Serghei Spivac. Lewis remains one of the scariest punchers in the history of the sport, but he's staring down 39 and starting to look it. On the other hand, his opponents were all some of the top heavyweights in the world and Marcos Rogério de Lima, respectfully, has not proven himself to belong in that conversation. If you include his stint on The Ultimate Fighter Brazil 3, de Lima has been in the UFC for just shy of ten years and twenty fights, and in all that mileage he has never been able to string more than two wins together at a time. Across a decade and two different weight classes, the pattern is always the same. His punching and his brute-strength grappling will score him a couple solid victories, and then he'll get choked out by Ovince St. Preux or Alexandr Romanov and everything will start over again.
Do I believe in numerical superstition? No. Do I believe Derrick Lewis is a much harder puncher and a much better striker than Marcos Rogério de Lima? Absolutely. Do I have any fear of Lewis being so roadworn that de Lima is able to punch him out? More than I'd like to, but like George Michael and Fred Durst before me, I gotta have faith. DERRICK LEWIS BY TKO.
WELTERWEIGHT: Stephen Thompson (17-6-1, #7) vs Michel Pereira (28-11 (2), #15)
Honestly, it's not that I hate this fight. I don't. This should be a great mix of striking styles, and that is, obviously, why they made it. It just feels like part of the ongoing waste of Stephen Thompson.
On paper, Stephen Thompson is everything the UFC would want from a welterweight. He's a karate striker who after a decade and almost 20 fights in the UFC averages one-fourth of a takedown per fight, he knocks motherfuckers out with spinning kicks and he is perpetually one of the most charming, photogenic people on the roster. But the UFC asked him to kill Tyron Woodley back in 2016, and he failed, and they never, ever forgave him. He went on a real contendership run by beating up Vicente Luque and Geoff Neal and reminding everyone he was a top five guy in the division, and where the UFC was jumping at the chance to feed unlimited title shots to Jorge Masvidal--a guy Thompson beat, by the by--they had Thompson get ground to death by grapplers and then tried to feed him to Kevin Holland. And now that Thompson has had the audacity to beat their favorite son, they have him fighting a high-risk matchup against the absolute lowest-ranked guy in the entire welterweight top fifteen.
And that's not meant to poo poo on Michel Pereira, because Michel Pereira loving rules. Pereira's a wild, creative striker himself; he's a karate stylist too, but he mixes it with more flying knees and clinch attacks and, just for good measure, the occasional reminder that he does, in fact, have a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu to periodically fall back on. Most of the time, this is great! Sometimes, his weird style means he freaks out and breaks Diego Sanchez's head open with an illegal knee and becomes not just the last man Diego actually beat in mixed martial arts, but the only ranked welterweight fighter with a recorded loss to Diego Sanchez since the year Two Thousand and loving Six. But that's part of the Michel Pereira experience, baby. He's got an incredible amount of skill and he's extremely dangerous, but he also likes to keep his distance and peck and wait for counters, which does not do him any favors with fans or management.
Nor is it likely to do him a great deal of favors here. Thompson also likes to play the distance game, Thompson also likes working behind long kicks and counterpunches, and I believe he's better at it than Pereira. The quality of this fight, from a viewership perspective, is going to depend on Pereira's willingness to push the fight and force Thompson into close exchanges, because left to his own devices, Thompson will kick Pereira's abdomen apart for three rounds and call it a day. And I'm not sure Pereira has the hands or the wrestling to stop him. STEPHEN THOMPSON BY DECISION.
LIGHTWEIGHT: Tony Ferguson (25-8) vs Bobby Green (29-14-1 (1))
Boy. This is a fight I would have killed to see three years ago, and now I'm just not sure.
Three years ago, Tony Ferguson was the scariest lightweight on the planet. It wasn't just the nature of being on a twelve-fight winning streak in the toughest division in the sport, it was the optics of fights that left his opponents looking like they'd been in a train wreck. Tony vs Khabib was the fight everyone wanted. But it got delayed, repeatedly, and then scratched by COVID, and then the window shut on Tony Ferguson with astonishing force. Tony's 0-5 in the last three years. He got crushed by Justin Gaethje, he got starched by Michael Chandler, and in a last-minute shuffle that also would've been better half a decade ago, he got staggered and choked out by Nate Diaz this past September. And the frustrating thing is--he still looks good, sometimes. He hurt Chandler in their first round. He boxed up Nate for awhile. But his toughness and speed were the glue holding his style together, and at 39 after a lifetime of wars, those seem to have deserted him.
Bobby Green has never been an undefeated marvel or even a main event guy. Green's spent his entire career as an underrated, underheralded fixture in the lightweight midcard; a thoroughly tactical fighter with some of the best defensive instincts in the sport. If you follow this sport, you will know that, unfortunately, "defensively sound" is one of the least popular traits a fighter can have. Green's long been one of my favorite fighters to watch, but I am a strange crab-person who writes fight essays and has opinions on which fighting styles are or are not pretentious: In the rest of the world, Bobby Green is a striker who has one stoppage in the last nine and a half years. He's also 0 for his last 3, but in fairness, one of those three was Islam Makhachev, the best in the world, one was Drew Dober, who could turn a mountain into a cave with a single punch, and his most recent was a hilarious No Contest against Jared Gordon where Green managed to uppercut him using only his skull.
Both of these guys were some of my favorite fighters on the planet in the very recent past. Both guys are seemingly on the way out and flirting with retirement. Both guys still show flashes of their old talents and look good when they're not getting violently beaten. This is a depression fight where you're not so much gauging the two against each other as gauging which of them has deteriorated the least. BOBBY GREEN BY TKO. But I don't think either ending here would make me happy.
WELTERWEIGHT: Michael Chiesa (16-6, #12) vs Kevin Holland (24-9 (1), NR)
Man, the "guys who were a thing a couple years ago" force is strong with this card. Back in 2021, Michael Chiesa was riding the best run of his career. He was on a four-fight winning streak, with each fight coming against big, recognizable fighters like Rafael dos Anjos and Neil Magny, and he was the #6 welterweight in the UFC, and his grappling was terrifying, and the world was his oyster. And then he got choked out in a single round by Vicente Luque. And then he got wrestled to death by Sean Brady. And then he disappeared. Chiesa, knowing his momentum was gone, took 2022 off and tried to come back for Li Jingliang this past April, but Li's busted spine meant putting off his return even longer. Now Chiesa wants his spot back, and he's got two years of ring rust to shake off.
Ring rust does not really exist in Kevin Holland's world. The man who became a COVID-era superstar for fighting as often as the UFC would let him still hasn't really taken his foot off the gas--he's happiest when he's active and he'd rather be active all the goddamn time. He took four fights in 2022, this is his second in 2023 and he would really like to get a third in before the end of the year. Which the UFC absolutely adores him for, and it's been as instrumental in their pushing him up the card as his own violent, vicious striking. But that push has repeatedly wound up mashing him into the ceiling. He couldn't get past the wrestlers of Middleweight, so he dropped to 170 last year in the hopes of making a fresh start. But Khamzat Chimaev reminded him Welterweight also has some pretty good wrestlers, and Stephen Thompson reminded him the striking world isn't all that easy, either. Holland's destruction of Santiago Ponzinibbio in April has left him right at the cusp of a ranking, but he doesn't want cusps, he wants numbers.
Every part of me but my fear thinks Chiesa should win this. He's a very good grappler, he's a powerful wrestler, he's more than capable of controlling and pretzeling Holland on the floor, and he's also tough as poo poo and still has yet to actually get knocked out in his career. But he's hittable, and Kevin Holland will hit you frequently and violently, and as big as Chiesa is, Holland is bigger and rangier. Chiesa's coming off two years on the bench and into a fight with one the best knockout artists in the division. If he's rusty, and he tries to brawl his way into wrestling range, it could be a very short night. Still: MICHAEL CHIESA BY SUBMISSION.
PRELIMS: CHECKING ON THE BEAST
WELTERWEIGHT: Trevin Giles (16-4) vs Gabriel Bonfim (14-0)
I have no idea how on Earth they talked the UFC into making this the preliminary headliner over Lewis/de Lima. It's by no means a bad fight, let me be clear. Trevin Giles is a solid, hard-hitting dude who is still trying to find his way at Welterweight after deciding Middleweight was just a bit too Weighty for him. He got crushed by Michael Morales--which is perfectly fine, everyone does--but he bounced Louis Cosce out of the UFC and he won a coinflip of a split decision over Preston Parsons, which means after two straight years of fighting to keep his job he's now on an honest to god winning streak. And the UFC does not care about making it easy for him to keep it, because they're giving him one of their most-hyped prospects. Gabriel Bonfim choked his way through the Contender Series in 2022, and he and his brother Ismael both made fantastic UFC debuts this past January, with Ismael knocking out Terrance McKinney in two rounds and Gabriel one-upping him by choking out Mounir Lazzez in less than a minute. Stellar work! But Ismael got himself outwrestled and submitted by Benoit Saint-Denis earlier this month. Will Gabriel keep his undefeated streak going, or is he following his brother again?
GABRIEL BONFIM BY SUBMISSION. I'm old enough to remember when Giles got guillotined twice in a row at middleweight back in 2019. I'd bet on it again.
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Roman Kopylov (10-2) vs Claudio Ribeiro (11-3)
I did not believe in Claudio Ribeiro, and I must face my punishment. I had plenty of belief in Roman Kopylov during his last fight, and he obliged by using his smart, mobile, stick-and-move tactics to break Punahele Soriano down, and ultimately stopped him with absolutely vicious liver shots. But Claudio Ribeiro's UFC debut included some of the wildest, silliest haymakers I've seen this side of Trevor Peek, and lo, did I scoff and prognosticate misery, and for my lack of belief, I was laid low and shamed. Ribeiro's bolo punches staggered Joseph Holmes and left him too discombobulated to stop a giant knee from finding his chin, and as Holmes fell, I knew, in my heart, that my pride had fallen with him. The violent art of wild-eyed punching remains one of the strongest forces in mixed martial arts, and no matter how many decades of technical progress are made, there will always be room for guys who swing fists from the next neighboring county.
But I also refuse to ever loving learn from my mistakes. ROMAN KOPYLOV BY DECISION.
WELTERWEIGHT: Jake Matthews (18-6) vs Darrius Flowers (12-5-1)
It really, truly does not take much at all to fall out of the fanbase's favor. Jake Matthews has been tooling around in the UFC for goddamn near a decade without anyone really taking notice of him--right up until June of 2022, when he fought the perpetually dangerous Andre Fialho and put up the best performance of his entire career. It wasn't a battering, it was better: A pure, technical deconstruction, with boxing far more fluid and far more effective than Matthews had ever previously displayed. It was so singularly impressive that commentators and fans alike were left wondering if, after nine years, Matthews had finally found himself as a fighter. And then he promptly got dropped three times in a single fight by Matt Semelsberger and lost a decision. And that's really all it takes. The conversation moved on, the matchmaking moved on, and now Matthews is stuck welcoming Contender Series winners to the big show as though that win never happened. Darrius Flowers got his contract on the Contender Series through one of its most eclectic TKOs: Georgian grappler Amiran Gogoladze had Flowers in an inverted triangle choke, and Flowers promptly stood up, lifted Gogoladze with him, and hit the closest thing mixed martial arts will ever see to a tombstone piledriver, in the process dislocating Gogoladze's shoulder. Extremely cool? Completely. Informative as to the extent of Flowers' skills? Less so. But Matthews was preparing for a tall, lanky striker in Miguel Baeza, and Flowers is stepping in as a replacement on four days' notice, so we're in pure chaos territory here anyway.
JAKE MATTHEWS BY DECISION. Matthews doesn't have much time to adjust to the big change in opponent, but Flowers doesn't have much time to prepare to fight a guy like Jake Matthews. Flowers likes big power punches and big power wrestling, and unlike Semelsberger, Flowers will be fighting at a height, reach, experience and, given the notice, most likely a conditioning disadvantage. I don't see an upset here.
FLYWEIGHT: CJ Vergara (11-4-1) vs Vinicius Salvador (14-5)
Yeah, this is probably going to be a lot of fun. CJ Vergara is a bruising stand-and-bang fighter whose ground game has been the continual bane of his career: He has yet to shoot a single takedown in the UFC, he has yet to earn a submission victory in his career, but fighters who force him to wrestle and grapple are the ones that give him real, regular trouble. His last two fights are a great study in the duality of the topic: Back in October he was repeatedly controlled and ultimately armbarred by Tatsuro Taira--who does that to everybody, so it's fine--but this past March he was getting progressively angrier at Daniel Lacerda's attempts to ground him out until he ultimately defended a Lacerda grappling scramble by just punching him in the side of the loving head until he stopped responding. So the UFC has, smartly, matched him against Vincius Salvador, who has scored thirteen of his fourteen wins through constant, angry striking. He'll wrestle if he has to--in his one and only UFC fight thus far, a very sloppy but admittedly fun war with Victor Altamirano, he eventually began trading takedown attempts after Altamirano shot on him twenty-two loving times--but his happy place involves man-bludgeoning.
But I'm still going with CJ VERGARA BY TKO. Vergara's shots are shorter, cleaner and more economical, and Salvador's wider attacks will leave him open for counters.
WELTERWEIGHT: Matthew Semelsberger (11-5) vs Uroš Medić (8-1)
Matthew Semelsberger is one of those fighters it's deeply frustrating to be a fan of. It's not that he's bad--he's very, very good. It's that he can't be consistent in his goodness. He's got ferocious power in his hands and a reach advantage over a huge swath of the division, he's got two knockouts in the first fifteen seconds of each fight, and he's scored knockdowns in a statistically astonishing six of his eight UFC bouts, but on two separate occasions now he's been able to drop his opponents, sometimes multiple times, and still ultimately lose a decision. Dropping someone and not finishing them is understandable. Dropping someone twice, not finishing them, and going on to lose the fight? That means something's wrong. And he was supposed to be fighting Yohan Lainesse here, but one late replacement later, he's got Uroš Medić instead. Medić's UFC resume isn't bad--a flying knee knockout over Aalon Cruz here, a vigorous outpunching of Omar Morales there--but he typically hangs out at Lightweight, he had the unfortunate luck of getting choked out by Jalin Turner in 2021, and he's spent more than a year on the shelf rehabbing injuries and waiting to get scheduled for his first bout since mid-2022.
And now it's at welterweight, and it's against one of Welterweight's biggest punchers. There isn't a huge size difference here--Medić is 6'1" and the cut down to the lightweight division seems like it must suck an awful lot--but he hasn't had a ton of time to prepare for this fight or this weight class, and with the power Semelsberger brings, that could mean a stark and dangerous difference. MATTHEW SEMELSBERGER BY TKO.
WOMEN'S FLYWEIGHT: Miranda Maverick (11-5) vs Priscila Cachoeira (12-4)
Priscila Cachoeira has had a difficult life in the UFC. She was extremely inexplicably brought in as a blood sacrifice for Valentina Shevchenko in 2018, and took what I believe is the most statistically lopsided beating in company history, ultimately getting TKOed on a strike differential of 230-3 which, with a stoppage time of 4:25 in the second round, comes out to roughly 24 strikes absorbed per minute. And she lost her next two fights, but I think the UFC's deep-seated guilt over her deeply unnecessary trauma softened their hearts, because they proceeded to put her up against Shana Dobson and Gina Mazany, both of whom had somewhat lacking records and both of whom she crushed. But 2023 has not been kind to Cachoeira: She was supposed to fight Sijara Eubanks in January, but Eubanks couldn't make the weight and was ultimately cut over it, and then she was supposed to fight Karine Silva in April, but this time it was Cachoeira who blew the divisional limit by five pounds, ultimately getting the fight scratched altogether. She was supposed to fight Joanne Wood here, but Joanne withdrew and, with two weeks to fight night, Miranda Maverick stepped in. Maverick is the scrappy, gritty wrestling machine who's a somewhat underwhelming 3 for her last 6, but in fairness, one of those losses was to Erin Blanchfield, who might be the best Women's Flyweight in the world, and one of those losses was a decision to Maycee Barber that was so absolutely inexplicable in its judging it was nearly unanimously voted the worst of 2021. Maverick's big weakness is superior grapplers, which is how Jasmine Jasudavicius ultimately beat her just a little over a month ago, but Maverick's hoping the quick turnaround will both help her take advantage of her training camp and help her wash the taste of the loss out of her mouth.
But she's probably also just hoping this is a favorable matchup for her, and she's probably also right. Cachoeira's takedown defense can be spotty, and Maverick will be more than happy to keep pressing until she lands one. Or three. Or five. The numbers don't lie, and they spell disaster for Priscila at Sacrifice. MIRANDA MAVERICK BY DECISION.
Prelims begin in thirty.
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Jul 29, 2023 23:31
