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How many of this month's B-league main eventers do you recognize without googling? This poll is closed. |
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|---|---|---|---|
| Logan Storley |
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16 | 9.20% |
| Brennan Ward |
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17 | 9.77% |
| Chingiz Allazov |
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13 | 7.47% |
| Marat Grigorian |
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7 | 4.02% |
| Bubba Jenkins |
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21 | 12.07% |
| Jesus Pinedo |
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4 | 2.30% |
| Renan Ferreira |
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7 | 4.02% |
| Maurice Greene |
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24 | 13.79% |
| Clay Collard |
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22 | 12.64% |
| Shane Burgos |
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43 | 24.71% |
| Total: | 46 votes | ||
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You can revisit our July elegy for Dustin Poirier's skull here. Welcome to August. We're three months into our fights-every-week marathon and we're not done yet, and it's Max Holloway fight month AND the end of the PFL playoffs, so strap in and get ready for fisticuffs and promotional malfeasance, because baby, we got 'em in spades. This month's title courtesy of Hollandia. 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  Francis Ngannou bet on himself and won. After years of teasing the idea and years of being soundly mocked and derided by Dana White, the UFC's marketing engine and the entire combat sports world for chasing an impossible dream, Francis Ngannou was right and literally everyone else was wrong. Ngannou will, in fact, get his boxing match against WBC heavyweight champion Tyson Fury, one of if not the world's most popular boxers, in a non-title fight in Riyadh on October 28th, and it will be a real, honest to god ten-round non-exhibition match. Should it be happening? No, Fury should be fighting Oleksandr Usyk, but he super, duper does not want to do that. Does Ngannou stand a chance? He really shouldn't, and the many comparisons to Floyd Mayweather, Jr. vs Conor McGregor are probably portentous. Is Ngannou going to make more money in this one boxing match than he did in his entire MMA career combined? You'd better loving believe it. Even if Fury makes him look stupid--which is the most likely outcome--he'll look stupid all the way to the bank.  Bellator's flyweight division is cursed and it doesn't even technically exist yet. At the turn of the year Bellator announced it was formally opening a men's 125-pound division and it would be anchored by Kyoji Horiguchi vs Ray Borg. Borg then proceeded to miss weight so badly he straight-up retired over it, scratching the fight and his career all in one. The inaugural title fight was shifted to an interpromotional bout at Bellator x Rizin 2, with Horiguchi taking on Rizin's nascent star Makoto Shinryu, which absolutely ruled as a concept. The fight ended in a No Contest after twenty five seconds when Horiguchi inadvertently poked Shinryu in the eye. Will the flyweight title launch before Bellator gets sold? Place your bets.  After a decade of torpor, K-1 is awake. There's a good chance most of today's combat sports fans don't even know this, but for a long time the biggest fighting organization on the planet wasn't Strikeforce, Pride or the UFC--it was K-1. K-1 kickboxing was a genuinely global enterprise with monstrous ratings in Japan, numerous pop culture icons, and for a couple of years it even had its own MMA brand. K-1's annual World Grand Prix tournament was the single biggest recurring event in all of combat sports. But K-1--like so many martial arts organizations--was chronically mismanaged and continually hurt by its association with criminal enterprise. K-1 nearly went bankrupt and had to be bought out, and within ten years the company that bought it went bankrupt and had to sell its assets to another company, which was then, itself, bought out again. If you became a combat sports fan anytime in the last decade, you've probably only heard of K-1 as being a weird shell of its former self that is constantly beset by money problems. But apparently the hype of the Tenshin Nasukawa/Takeru match set a bunch of things in motion, because midway through July, K-1 announced it is once again targeting global expansion. The Kyokushin Karate talent sharing is back, Kazushi Sakuraba is working with K-1 to bring back the Quintet team grappling tournament series, the international partnerships and higher weight divisions are back, and most importantly, the K-1 World Grand Prix, for the first time since 2010--no, the 2012 one didn't count--is back. MMA is the only game they're NOT coming back to, and honestly, that's probably for the best.  I don't know if this is news so much as an editorial, but boy, the UFC sure has started quintupling the gently caress down on right-wing insanity. Donald Trump was, once again, given presence and a spotlight at UFC 290. Which is terrible and could easily be construed as free advertising for a preferred presidential candidate slash criminal traitor, but, hey, at least it's just a brief cameo. Grit your teeth and move on. And then they released an exclusive episode of the UFC Unfiltered podcast that was just a 40-minute puff piece where Matt Serra and Jim Norton talked to Trump about his super cool and great background with sports and combat sports. Okay, so now we're in deeply, thoroughly gross territory, but at least that's as bad as it's going to get this month! And then Dana White started using his social media and the UFC to repeatedly advertise Sound of Freedom, the Qanon propaganda movie about how anti-leftist child trafficking conspiracy theories are totally real and all of your political enemies are blood-drinking satanists. Which is, even by the UFC's incredibly low standards, pretty loving out there in terms of what's acceptable to identify with your company in public. Honestly, I don't know how much lower you can go with that? And then Dana White set up an appointment to go on world-renowned shithead, avowed rapist and indicted sex trafficker Andrew Tate's podcast, which was averted at the last second when his bosses asked him what the gently caress he was doing. It's not like the UFC hasn't always been right-wing--hell, it's not like combat sports haven't always been right-wing. There's a historic link between conservative authoritarians and the appearance of strength and masculinity combat sports let them pretend to have, and lord knows it's not going anywhere anytime soon. And it's not like it's going to change anytime soon, either. But as we drift further into the bottomless pit of bullshit that includes things like advertising Qanon, trying to put a spotlight on Elon Musk and openly propagandizing for some of the dirt worst people on the planet, it becomes more and more important to reiterate just how loving bad things are getting so it doesn't start seeming normal. MONTHLY RETIREMENT CORNER  I started doing the monthly retirement corner because our sport doesn't really do anything to properly celebrate and say farewell to its fighters when they go. If you're lucky, you get a brief interview and a moment in front of the camera, and then your career is over, and fighters deserve better than that. For the first time, I do not have to do that. "Ruthless" Robbie Lawler was one of the best to ever do it, and for once, the UFC recognized that and gave him an actual, honest to god sendoff. You can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUCJko7UEL4 It was a genuinely wonderful moment, and if the UFC gave ever fighter that level of respect, the sport would be in a much, much better place. Robbie Lawler retires at 30-16 (1). If he comes back and does bareknuckle boxing, I will never forgive him.  There are a lot of fighters in this sport who were supposed to be champions but never quite got there. Kevin Lee was an undefeated regional lightweight champion when he joined the UFC back in 2014, and he was already hyped as a super-prospect with best-in-class wrestling, vicious ground-and-pound and an aggressive submission game. And then he lost his debut fight to Al Iaquinta. And that became the model for the rest of his career. Kevin Lee went 9-2 in his first four years with the UFC--everything about his grappling was accurate--and reached the highest point of his career when he met Tony Ferguson in the main event of UFC 216 for an interim championship bout. He nearly won, too--he dropped Tony in the first round, outgrappled him and was punching his face off when the bell rang, demonstrating every bit of promise the world saw in him. And then he got hurt and tired and choked out, and just like that, his time on top was over. After an incredible 16-3 run in the first half-decade of his career, Lee proceeded to win only three of his last eight fights. In 2021 he fought out the last bout on his contract and left for the theoretically greener pastures of free agency, and within a couple months, he became one of the biggest signings for Khabib Nurmagomedov's upstart Eagle FC, which was touting Lee and former heavyweight champion Junior dos Santos as their top new fighters and main-eventers for years to come. Kevin Lee fought for Eagle FC once, won his fight but blew out his ACL, and went on the shelf indefinitely. Junior dos Santos fought for Eagle FC once and ripped his shoulder completely out of its socket. The company released all its international talent and never ran an international card again. A year later, Kevin Lee was back in the UFC with a big new contract and a promise to come get the welterweight championship. The UFC matched him against the almost-undefeated Russian champion Rinat Fakhretdinov. Rinat dropped him and choked him out in under a minute. Kevin Lee retired a little over a week later. Things just never quite worked out for him anywhere he went. He was too good a grappler to not be ranked but not good enough to beat the best, too powerful a striker for his own occasionally iffy chin. He could never find a way to cut to the lightweight division with his frame that didn't leave him feeling drawn out and reduced, but he was just too small to fight at welterweight. He was great. But he was never quite one of the best, and that's what he felt he needed to be or there was no point in competing. So he got the hell out with his health, and sometimes that's all one can really hope for. He retires at 19-8. 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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Aug 1, 2023 18:46
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WHAT HAPPENED IN JULY The month kicked off right on the 1st with UFC on ESPN: Strickland vs Magomedov, a tortured and deeply unnecessary card with one of the least compelling main events the UFC has ever promoted. It was a slog with a few highlights. On the prelims, Elves Brenner scored a big upset with a last-minute comeback knockout over a visibly unwell Guram Kutateladze, Karol Rosa took a split decision over Yana Santos in what is likely the second to last women's featherweight fight in the UFC, Joanderson Brito knocked out a woefully outmatched Westin Wilson, and Kevin Lee made his big UFC comeback, was booked to lose immediately, and was dropped and choked unconscious by Rinat Fakhretdinov in under a minute. On the main card, Nursulton Ruziboev knocked Brunno Ferreira out in a round, Benoît Saint-Denis choked out Ismael Bonfim, Ariane Lipski managed to just squeak past Melissa Gatto, Michael Morales passed the prospect test by taking Max Griffin to a decision, Grant Dawson dominated a briefly unretired Damir Ismagulov with his wrestling, and in the main event, the unranked Abusupiyan Magomedov, main eventing after just one fight because the UFC got tired of matchmaking, gassed out in a single round and got beat to poo poo by Sean Strickland in the second. PFL Europe 2 aired on July 8th, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you probably did not watch it. Is this because you're philistines who can't bring themselves to care about international culture? No: It's because PFL literally did not air it in America. This isn't FOR you, Americans. You don't get to watch Ali Taleb knock out Kenji Bortoluzzi. You don't GET to see Francesco Nuzzi headkick Farbod Iran Nezhad in front of a couple hundred people. Y--where are you going? COME BACK FOR THE PLAYOFFS, I BEG YOU And then the UFC promptly erased everything else from memory with UFC 290: Volkanovski vs Rodríguez, a card that was amazing both on paper and in execution. Almost everything on it was good, but in short: Jesus Aguilar punched out Shannon Ross in seventeen seconds, Cameron Saaiman finally got a UFC victory that wasn't tainted by fouls, Alonzo Menifield ended a deeply unnecessary rematch by submitting Jimmy Crute in two rounds, Denise Gomes pulled a hgue upset by knocking out Yazmin Jauregui in twenty seconds, Tatsuro Taira overcame some scary moments to take a decision over Edgar Cháirez, and Robbie Lawler, the champ, ended his MMA career with one last perfect knockout over Niko Price in less than a minute. The main card didn't disappoint, aside from a thoroughly unnecessary opener where Bo Nickal knocked out 5'8" regional replacement Val Woodburn in about forty seconds, but Dan Hooker won a barnburner against Jalin Turner by split decision and Dricus du Plessis shockingly knocked out Robert Whittaker in two rounds. In the co-main event, Alexandre Pantoja and Brandon Moreno had a fight-of-the-year candidate that left scores all over the place, but ultimately--and with the consensus of most of the media--Pantoja took a split decision and the flyweight championship. The main event was much more traditional, as Alexander Volkanovski returned to his featherweight throne and reunified its championship by just crushing Yair Rodríguez, ragdolling and pounding on him for two rounds before engaging him in the standup during the third and ultimately dropping and TKOing him. July 15th brought us UFC Fight Night: Holm vs Bueno Silva, a truly cursed card in a number of ways. Two headliners fell through, three fights were rescheduled, a main card bout got scratched three days before the event, and then the card, itself, was a real, real mixed bag. Most of the prelims were both very slow and on-paper disinteresting; your main points of interest include Ailín Pérez dominating a returning Ashlee Evans-Smith, Azat Maksum squeaking past Tyson Nam, Melquizael Costa pulling an upset on Austin Lingo, and, unfortunately, the debuting Viktoriya Dudakova scoring one of the fastest finishes in Women's Strawweight history after Istela Nunes horrifyingly dislocated her elbow defending a takedown. The main card saw Nazim Sadykhov choking out Terrance McKinney, Norma Dumont winning what might be the final Women's Featherweight fight in UFC history, Jun Yong Park submitting ALbert Duraev, Francisco Prado breaking Ottman Azaitar's face with a reverse spinning elbow, and Jack Della Maddalena having the fight of his life with late replacement and debuting regional fighter Bassil Hafez, who wrestled him thoroughly and just barely lost a split decision. But it was all worth it for the main event, as Holly Holm, having gone four years without being stopped, got choked out by Mayra Bueno Silva in just five and a half minutes. Thank you, Mayra. But we also got ONE Fight Night 12: Superlek vs Khalilov, which was something of an exceedingly cursed card. Three separate main events wound up scratched by the time the event actually happened, and the replacement was a giant mismatch where the overwhelming favorite also happened to miss weight along with two other people on the card. Fantastic work. But Phetjeeja Lukjaoporongtom continued growth into ONE's good graces by destroying the (woefully outmatched) Lara Fernandez in twenty-six seconds, Akbar Abdullaev got a real neat spinning back kick knockout, Yuya Wakamatsu snapped his losing streak by beating Xie Wei, Amir Aliakbari ground-and-pounded an equally helpless Dustin Joynson, and in the best actual fight of the night, supergrappler Garry Tonon spent two and a half rounds having serious trouble and at one point nearly getting finished by Shamil Gasanov before suddenly snatching a kneebar out of nowhere and ripping Gasanov's leg apart, because he is Garry Tonon and he can do that. And in your deeply unnecessary main event, Superlek crushed Tagir Khalilov, who just exceptionally should not have been there. The UFC pulled up to London again for UFC Fight Night: Aspinall vs Tybura on the 22nd. It was a very long card both in make and performance: With 15 fights on the card, 9 went the distance, and a bunch of them were pretty thoroughly forgettable. But Jafel Filho choked out Daniel Bárez in a real impressive comeback after getting violently dropped, Chris Duncan got a decision over Yanal Ashmouz who inexplicably fought 2/3 of the round with only one functional arm, Ketlen Vieira got the nod over Pannie Kianzad down on the prelims, Joel Álvarez choked out Marc Diakiese, and Jonny Parsons knocked Danny Roberts flat. The main card was a big give-and-take for the hometown crowd. Daniel Marcos outfought Davey Grant, but Lerone Murphy dominated Joshua Culibao; Farès Ziam beat Jai Herbert, but Paul Craig TKOed André Muniz; Nathaniel Wood edged out Andre Fili, but Julija Stoliarenko broke Molly McCann's arm in just under two minutes. But the main event is what matters, and hero Tom Aspinall finished his dinner with ease, knocking out Marcin Tybura in just seventy-three seconds. The big show's month ended on UFC 291: Poirier vs Gaethje 2 on the 29th, and last-minute scratches brought it down to a minimal 11 fights, but boy, what a card it was. Down on the prelims Miranda Maverick dominated Priscila Cachoeira and armbarred her in three rounds, Uroš Medić stopped Matt Semelsberger with a spinning backfirst, Jake Matthews choked out an overmatched, short-notice-debut Darrius Flowers, Roman Kopylov shut Claudio Ribeiro down with a headkick, C.J. Vergara won a less eventful decision over Vinicius Salvador, and Gabriel Bonfim choked out Trevin Giles in just over a minute. Up on the main card, Kevin Holland crushed a returning Michael Chiesa and tapped him out in two minutes, Bobby Green controlled a Tony Ferguson who can't seem to fight age anymore and choked him unconscious with six seconds left in the fight to make a point and Derrick Lewis, who has abs now, dropped Marcos Rogério de Lima with a flying knee three seconds into the fight and pounded him out after about thirty. The co-main event was the least eventful fight of the night, as Alex Pereira and Jan Błachowicz largely neutralized each other and, if we're being honest, neither really looked great, but Pereira came away with a split decision. The Dustin Poirier vs Justin Gaethje rematch in the main event promised the fireworks of their first bout, and that was true for the first round; a minute into the second, Gaethje shut Poirier's lights off with a headkick. The big Bellator x Rizin 2 crossover ended the month on the 29th/30th thanks to the magic of midnight fights, but between injuries, replacements and unfortunate finger placement, most of the main events didn't go as planned. Bellator's segment came up first, and it was a little bit of a trainwreck. Andrey Koreshkov and Lorenz Larkin fought to a split decision that tilted Koreshkov's way, Magomed Magomedov choked out Danny Sabatello in one round, which was pretty gratifyting, and Kana Watanabe took a 2-1 decision over Veta Arteaga. But the long-awaited, twice-rescheduled debut for Bellator's Flyweight Championship finally, finally happened--and went to a No Contest after Kyoji Horiguchi inadvertently eye-poked Shinryu Takahashi in twenty-five seconds. Because that is, of course, exactly what would happen. And the main event of Bellator's side of the card, which also lost half of its competition when AJ McKee pulled out, turned instead into a last-minute, interpromotional Lightweight Grand Prix bout between Rizin champ Roberto "Satoshi" de Souza, by leaps and bounds Rizin's best 155-pound fighter, and Bellator's Patricky Pitbull, who is, respectfully, like #4 or #5. And Patricky beat the absolute brakes off Satoshi, dropping him twice and finishing him with a leg kick TKO. But Rizin got a modicum of revenge on Super Rizin 2, their half of the card. Sure, you had a fair number of Rizin-only fights--Yuki Ito taking a split over Hiroya Kondo, Igor Tanabe's heel hook of Daichi Abe, Shinobu Ota knocking out Kenta Takizawa--and sure, two of the five big fights on the card were Rizin vs Rizin championship bouts, as Seika Izawa defended her atomweight title by choking out Claire Lopez in a minute and Vugar Karamov disposed of Mikuru Asakura for the featherweight championship in one round--and sure, with Tofiq Musayev crushing Akira Okada and Juan Archuleta grinding Hiromasa Ougikubo for three rounds to win Rizin's bantamweight title, the actual scoreboard for the night was 3-1 in Bellator's favor. But the thing most people are going to remember is Bellator's best fighter, Patrício Pitbull, getting absolutely loving starched by Rizin fighter and Japanese kickboxer Chihiro Suzuki. Was it a fight at 155 pounds on four days' notice a month after Pitbull fought at 135 pounds? Yup. Will that un-punch Pitbull's face? Nope. Congrats on the new star, Rizin. WHAT'S COMING IN AUGUST We've got nine shows this month, and I hope you like the PFL, because they're back, baby. But before any of that, we get our dose of ONE for the month with ONE Fight Night 13: Allazov vs Grigorian 3 on August 4th, and I've gotta be honest, man, I'm struggling with ONE. It's no secret that they're pitching much harder into kickboxing--it's regionally popular, it differentiates them in the market, and boy, kickboxers are even cheaper than mixed martial artists--but this is a nine-fight card with only three MMA fights on it, and boy, I just don't feel attuned to ONE anymore. Your three MMA bouts are Jhanlo Mark Sangiago facing Eknh-Orgil Baatarkhuu, jiu-jitsuman Bucheca taking on musclewrestler Reug Reug, and former champion John Lineker getting what seems like a pretty soft target in Kim Jae Woong. Otherwise, uh, Tawanchai, one of the world's best Muay Thai fighters, is kickboxing a guy who's 39-20-1? Mikey Musumeci is defending his submission grappling championship against strawweight MMA champion Jarred Brooks, who won the title eight months ago but for some reason he's doing this instead of defending it? Chingiz Allazov is having a threematch with Marat Grigorian, a rivalry consisting of one No Contest and one Grigorian win almost a decade ago? Is any of this doing it for you? And then we're off to PFL for the semifinal rounds of this incredibly, painfully tortured season. PFL 7: Jenkins vs Pinedo is up first, featuring the semifinals for the Light-Heavyweight bracket, as Marthin Hamlet meets Impa Kasanganay and Josh Silveira faces Ty Flores, as well as the Featherweight bracket, which includes Chris Wade vs Gabriel Alves Braga and your main event, Bubba Jenkins vs Jesus Pinedo. I'd tell you that there are also some special attraction bouts down at 170 pounds and 155 pounds and even at Women's Flyweight, but that would require me believing that you are emotionally invested in watching Thad Jean fight Ali Omar, and I just don't believe that's true. The UFC's month begins the following day with UFC on ESPN: Sandhagen vs Font on August 5th. It looks like an awful lot of fun on paper, at least. Cody Durden and Jake Hadley will try to have an angry-off, Sean Woodson is back to face Jsse Butler, Kyler Phillps and Raoni Barcelos are going to have a barnburner, and Billy Quarantillo and Damon Jackson are both trying to rebound and need to take someone's head off to do it. Your main card has Ignacio Bahamondes vs Ľudovít Klein, Tanner Boser vs Aleksa Camur, Diego Lopes vs Gavin Tucker, Dustin Jacoby vs Kennedy Nzechukwu, a real scary bout featuring Jéssica Andrade vs Tatiana Suarez, and up in your main event, Cory Sandhagen and Rob Font will meet in a short-notice, 140-pound catchweight affair thanks to Umar Nurmagomedov busting his shoulder. Bellator takes its single swing for the month with Bellator 298: Storley vs Ward on August 11th, and like every Bellator card, the prelims alone are the size of an extra-big fight card and you will know almost no one on at least one half of them. Like, I know and appreciate Josh Hill, and Leandro Higo, and Dayana Silva, and Kai Kamaka III, and Enrique Barzola. They're all cool. I have no idea who Jaylon Bates or Alberto Rodriguez are. Will the fights be good? Some of them, probably! Should you watch 5 hours of Bellator prelims? That depends on if you have anything you'd rather do. Your main card sees Sidney Outlaw vs Islam Mamedov, a James-off between James Gallagher and James Gonzalez, Dalton Rosta vs Aaron Jeffery, a potentially horrifying heavyweight matchup between Valentin Moldavsky and Steve Mowry, and in your main event, Logan Storley tries to turn away Brennan Ward in the hopes of getting another title shot. The next night on August 12th, it's UFC on ESPN: Luque vs Dos Anjos. The UFC's put a bunch of potential bangers up for this one: Polyana Viana vs Iasmin Lucindo, Cub Swanson vs Hakeem Dawodu, Jacqueline Amorim vs Montserrat Ruiz, Da'Mon Blackshear vs Brady Hiestand, Josh Fremd vs Jamie Pickett, Lando Vannata vs Mike Breeden, Khalil Rountree Jr. vs Chris Daukaus--well, maybe that one's more of, like, a potential murder. Seriously, I don't get what the deal is with the UFC, but they either really believe in Chris Daukaus or they really hate him, because he got booked against three straight hard-punching murderers at heavyweight, got crushed every time, is dropping to 205, and is facing another big-punching power striker. Good luck, I guess. Your main event is five rounds of Vicente Luque vs Rafael dos Anjos, which has the potential to be absolutely loving stellar or deeply depressing. I'm rooting for optimism. On the topic of optimism: PFL 8: Ferreira vs Greene on August 18th. This one's got the semifinals of Women's Featherweight, with Marina Mokhnatkina meeting Amber Leibrock and Larissa Pachecho fighting Olena Kolesnyk, a woman she has violently knocked out once a year since 2021. Hey, Larissa, remember how you beat PFL's top star? That does not get you a main event, because the Heavyweight playoffs take precedence, apparently. They've got Denis Goltsov vs Jordan Heiderman and Renan Ferreira vs Maurice Greene, and just to be clear, that means two semifinalists for PFL's heavyweight season are a last-minute replacement who advanced because his opponent's knee randomly blew out and Maurice Greene, who is 3 for his last 9. Thanks, heavyweight. Also, Olympic gold medalist and one-time MMA prospect Satoshi Ishii is returning to PFL after four years away to face Danilo Marques on the undercard. Why not! The next day on the 19th we get our big show for the month, UFC 292: Sterling vs O'Malley. This is, to be honest, kind of a hell of a card. There isn't really any chaff on it. Karine Silva and Maryna Moroz will be a fun grappling match, Gregory Rodrigues will try to robo-punch Dennis Tiuliulin out of his wrestling mode, Andrea Lee will try not to get spinkicked in the head by Natália Silva, Andre Petroski and Gerald Meerschaert will out-grit one another, Chris Weidman is back to face Brad Tavares and we're all going to be biting down on our cheeks the whole time, Cody Garbrandt is up against Mario Bautista in what should be a lot of fun, Geoff Neal is going to try to repel Ian Machado Garry from the welterweight top ten, and Marlon Vera will fight to keep his spot against Pedro Munhoz. And then we get two title fights, and the first is pretty great! Zhang Weili is finally back, defending the Women's Strawweight Championship against Amanda Lemos. Unfortunately, the actual main event is Bantamweight Champion Aljamain Sterling basically being forced to fight a three-month turnaround against Sean O'Malley, who has been sitting around since last October waiting for the UFC to give him a title fight. We're finishing off the PFL playoffs on August 23rd with PFL 9: Collard vs Burgos, the most controversial of the bunch. This time around we've got the Welterweight semifinals, where Magomed Magomedkerimov faces Magomed Umalatov and Sadibou Sy meets Carlos Leal, and the Lightweight semifinals, where the PFL not only threw two people out of the bracket for extremely specious reasons, and not only promoted their big-money pickup to the semifinals, but gave him a match against the guy who, you know, didn't already beat him. So last year's champ Olivier Aubin-Mercier is fighting Bruno Miranda, and Shane Burgos, the guy he beat and who PFL desperately, desperately wants to win the title, is facing Clay Collard. Oh, and the weird Ali family side project in Biaggio Ali Walsh has another vanity amateur fight on the main card. End that season in style, baby. And we're closing the month on August 26th with UFC on ESPN: Holloway vs The Korean Zombie, which, boy, I wish they'd just use his name. This is the UFC's belated return to Singapore after its intention to do so earlier this year had to wait on their main eventer's body getting better, which is why you've got a lot of Asian representation on it because, y'know, just throw all the Asian people of varying ethnicities on the Singaporean card, I guess: Seung Woo Choi vs Jarno Errens, Yusaku Kinoshita vs Billy Goff, Toshiomi Kazama vs Garrett Armfield, Rinya Nakamura vs Fernie Garcia, and Song Kenan vs Rolando Bedoya. Get 'em all. Junior Tafa is also going to try to beat up Parker Porter faster than his brother did, Waldo Cortes-Acosta is back against Łukasz Brzeski, and Chidi Njokuani is going to throw hands with Michał Oleksiejczuk. Your main card, however, has a lot of real interesting stuff on it. Derailed hype train Giga Chikadze is back from a year and a half off to face the tricky Alex Caceres, Anthony Smith is going to see what he has left in the tank against Ryan Spann, Taila Santos and Erin Blanchfield are fighting for what's almost certainly the next crack at either Alexa Grasso or Valentina Shevchenko, and in your main event, Max Holloway is fighting Chan-sung Jung, and yeah, it's probably going to be a battering that leaves me feeling hurt and dead inside, but let me believe for a minute.
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Aug 1, 2023 18:47
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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. The UFC finally, formally announced his fight with Stipe Miocic on November 11th; I'll believe it when we get there. Light-Heavyweight Champion, 205 lbs   VACANT - The spectre of our sinsThat's right, baby. No one can stay away from Vacant, and Vacant sure can't stay away from you. Or the light-heavyweight division. Last year, 205 was thrown into chaos after brand-new champion Jiří Procházka was forced to give up the belt thanks to a shoulder injury. The UFC, for what it's worth, tried to fill the void with two of the rightful top contenders, but after Jan Błachowicz and Magomed Ankalaev fought to a draw they decided to just put their guy up instead. Jamahal Hill fulfilled the dread prophecy and became the first-ever world champion from Dana White's Contender Series, thus giving him everything he'd ever wanted to crow about. Sure, it took half of the division falling apart, and sure, they had to leapfrog everyone above him in the rankings, but hey: He beat Glover Teixeira, he got the belt, and nothing can take that away from him--except, as it turns out, the irrepressible need to ball. Midway through July, Hill announced that he'd torn his achilles tendon apart during a basketball game with Daniel Cormier. He's looking at, potentially, an entire year on the shelf. So once again, the belt has been lost, and once again, its future is uncertain. For the time being, all we know is what we already knew: No force on Earth can stop Vacant. 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. And du Plessis won! And then he turned down the title fight to heal up. The word is Israel Adesanya vs Sean Strickland is most likely; I would rather eat a shoe. 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. He'll be defending his title against a lightweight for the first time in exactly the way he got it: A matchup with Charles Oliveira in Abu Dhabi at UFC 294 on October 21st. Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs   Alexander Volkanovski - 26-2, 5 DefensesComing off of his cross-divisional bout against lightweight kingpin Islam Makhachev, Alexander Volkanovski found himself in both the highest esteem and one of the most complicated positions of his career. Volk put up a fantastic fight against Islam, took the champ to his limit and, in the opinion of some, even won their bout--but the judges didn't agree, meaning Volk not only lost the fight, but his undefeated streak in the UFC. To make matters worse, there were wolves at the door: While he experimented at lightweight, Yair Rodríguez had become the new interim champion after injuring Brian Ortega and kicking Josh Emmett's ribs apart. Volkanovski not only had to reunify his title, he had to drop back down to his home weight class, face the most versatile striking threat of his life, deal with his first-ever UFC bout coming off of a loss, and fight through the world's incredibly high expectations of him after his last championship performance. Many champions have fallen under the pressure. Alexander Volkanovski, somewhat unsurprisingly, was not one of them. He ran a clinic on Yair, wrestling him virtually at will, outstriking him 149-57, and ultimately finishing him off in the third round by outboxing him just to prove that he could. Alexander Volkanovski's throne is no longer disputed--but his next move is. The UFC has made it clear Volkanovski can have another crack at the lightweight belt if he wants it, but Islam Makhachev is defending his title against Charles Oliveira in October. On one hand, Volkanovski could put a quarter down on the arcade cabinet, wait to see who emerges victorious, and claim the next shot. On the other, Ilia Topuria has emerged as a serious contender at featherweight, and has been relentlessly calling Volkanovski out and preemptively accusing him of fleeing a real fight. I'm not sure you can accuse someone of cowardice when they're lining up to fight Islam Makhachev or Charles Oliveira, exactly, but I do know Volkanovski/Topuria would be a hell of a fight too. Whatever Alex's next move is, it's going to be interesting. 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   Alexandre Pantoja - 26-5, 0 DefensesSometimes, you just have someone's number. Brandon Moreno spent years fighting through a quadrilogy with Deiveson Figueiredo, and unfortunately for him, he had another trilogy waiting for him the second it was over. Alexandre "The Cannibal" Pantoja was Moreno's personal bogeyman, a man who'd fought and beaten him twice. But one of those fights was an exhibition on The Ultimate Fighter, and the other was against a Moreno with five less years of evolution and growth. Surely, a third fight in 2023 would be different. And it was--unlike the previous, one-sided dominations it was a fight-of-the-year candidate that took both men to their limit and led to a split decision--but its ending was not. Alexander Pantoja scored a third victory over Moreno, and with it, after sixteen years of competition, he finally became the clear, unequivocal best in the god damned world. Which was made even more poignant when he used his post-fight interview to ask if his absentee father was proud of him--and was made even more irritating when he also revealed that despite having eleven fights in the UFC at the time, he was paid so little that he'd been part-timing as a Doordash driver just to make ends meet right up up until 2022. The idea that one of the absolute best fighters on the planet, after years and nearly a dozen fights in the world's biggest, most profitable fighting organization, would need to take on a gig-economy job to make money is outright offensive, and in a better world, it would have launched a furor. In this one, all we can do is be happy he's got the belt and will, hopefully, make some actual loving money. His next bout is up in the air--there's an argument that the split decision should give Moreno a rematch, but his 0-3 record against Pantoja would seemingly say otherwise, and with Deiveson Figueiredo uncertain which weight class he's even at anymore, who knows where we go from here. Women's Featherweight, 145 lbs  VACANT - The silent queen of a dead landWomen's Bantamweight, 135 lbs  VACANT - The hole where memory still livesJune 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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Aug 1, 2023 18:47
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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 - 35-7, 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 he's now on a two-fight losing streak, with one of those fights being a bantamweight loss to Sergio Pettis and the other a lightweight knockout to Chihiro Suzuki that he took on four days' notice. Bellator: Please stop killing Pitbull. 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, and because ONE's sport classes don't matter, he's grappling Mikey Musumeci for his submission championship on August 4th. 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 - 15-3, 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. Satoshi fought Patricky Pitbull at Bellator x Rizin 2 on July 29th--in another non-title fight, naturally--and took the first definitive beating of his career, getting utterly outclassed and ultimately stopped on leg kicks in three rounds. Rizin Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs   Vugar Karamov - 19-4, 0 DefensesRizin needed a new champion after Kleber Koike Erbst lost the featherweight title on the scale, and they were by no means done punishing him yet, so the fight to fill the void did not in any way involve him. This was, of course, also part of Rizin's secret hope that promotional superstar Mikuru Asakura could fill the void--but it was not to be, as Azerbaijani grappler Vugar Karamov, who's been slowly whittling away at Rizin's 145-pound division over the last three and a half years, finally got his shot at the belt and he did not waste a goddamn second. Karamov chucked Asakura down, controlled him and choked him out in just two minutes and forty-one seconds. Another Asakura falls, and Vugar Karamov is now a world goddamn champion. Which probably has something to do with Rizin announcing its first-ever event outside of Japan--in Azerbaijan. Congratulations, Vugar. You're an international representative of the sport. A match with Kleber seems outright inevitable, but Kleber also managed to get into a scuffle with both Pitbull brothers at the show, so Rizin may pursue a bad blood fight and leave Karamov to fight a rematch with the only man to beat him in Rizin, Yutaka Saito. Rizin Bantamweight Champion, 135 lbs  Juan Archuleta - 29-4, 0 DefensesRizin has its first-ever American champion, and it happens to be a fighter with their partner and rival, Bellator. Seven months after Kyoji Horiguchi vacated it--and almost three years since its last defense--the vacant bantamweight throne was finally filled. Rizin had hoped to have Kai Asakura fight for the belt (do you notice a pattern, here?) agaisnt Archuleta at Bellator x Rizin 2, but Kai busted his knee in training and Rizin's 2021 Bantamweight Grand Prix Champion, Hiromasa Ougikubo, stepped in. And he was promptly ground down into dust by Archuleta's wrestling game. A lot of Rizin fans took to social media to register their displeasure at Archuleta's victory--I saw him called artless and passionless and a pox on the spirit of fighting--to which I say, my friends, I was there when the truest expression of mixed martial arts was a Gracie holding someone in full guard while hitting them in the ribs with their heel for forty-five minutes. If you don't LIKE wrestling, that's perfectly fine, but if you think teeth-grittingly long grappling exhibitions without a climax are counter to the spirit of mixed martial arts, you have never truly understood it. Juan Archuleta finished his celebration by yelling at Kai Asakura to get his poo poo together and find him, and I'd be shocked if Archuleta/Asakura wasn't the main event of Rizin's New Year's Eve special this year. Rizin Women's Super Atomweight Championship, 108 lbs   Seika Izawa - 11-0, 1 DefenseAll 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. It took more than an entire year, but Izawa finally had a title defense against the 8-4 grappler Claire Lopez, and Izawa scored the fastest championship victory in Rizin history, choking her out in just barely one minute.
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CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 69: IT'S NOT NICE, ACTUALLY SATURDAY, AUGUST 5 FROM THE BRIDGESTONE ARENA IN NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE PRELIMS 3 PM PDT / 6 PM EDT | MAIN CARD 6 PM / 9 PM VIA ESPN+ After the preposterous violence of last week's pay-per-view, we have a comparatively lower-key card this week, although it's one born from the ashes of other, weirder fights. The main and co-main events tonight both got switched around over the last five or so weeks, and the replacement fights are...arguably better, actually? I'm not sure what it says about the UFC's booking that this isn't the first time in recent memory that forced replacement fights they didn't actually want have turned in fights that are both more fun and more divisionally relevant than the things they actually intended to promote. That's probably a bad sign! But it's working, so hey. Enjoy it while you can.  let's use the other website this week. MAIN EVENT: KILLING TIME  CATCHWEIGHT, 140 LBS: Cory Sandhagen (16-4, #4 at Bantamweight) vs Rob Font (20-6, #7 at Bantamweight)What do you think being Cory Sandhagen is like right now? Place yourself in his shoes for a moment. You're 9-3, you've got two world champions under your belt, and the only losses of your UFC career are a hard-fought but clear decision loss to Petr Yan, a split decision loss that could very, very easily have gone the other way to TJ Dillashaw, and a near-instantaneous submission loss to Aljamain Sterling. Those are the last two Bantamweight champions and the current and arguably best champion, and you arguably beat one of them. And since that last loss, you've been put against two contenders the UFC would have liked to push up to a championship bout--Song Yadong, the UFC's best hope for a male champion out of China, and fan favorite Marlon "Chito" Vera, riding the biggest winning streak and by far the most momentum he's ever had in his career. You didn't just beat them, you crushed them. You tore a hole in the side of Song's face and you outstruck Vera 187-73--and somehow STILL got a split decision, because judges are funny things, but you won and the entire world knows the score. You're, at worst, the third-best contender in the division. You've proven it repeatedly, and you want the shot at the top you've clearly, once again, earned. And then Sean O'Malley does worse than you did fighting Petr Yan, except somehow, he wins. And the UFC makes it clear that he's going to get a title shot. Except he's not ready! He needs to recover. It's your time to shine! Actually, it's not. Henry Cejudo got off his couch after three years of retirement and walked right into a title match. He loses, and the UFC books him right into a title-implications fight with Marlon Vera, the guy you beat. Well, poo poo, if Marlon Vera's getting a contendership match after you dismantled him, that must mean they've got a real opportunity in store for you! They do. You're fighting Umar Nurmagomedov. He's the #11 fighter in the division. You're #4. People ask you why you're fighting this fight. You release a video from your car explaining to the "haters" that you are, quote, "a beast," and you're the best so it doesn't matter who you're fighting because you need to be able to beat everyone or you don't belong here anyway. So it's fine. It's fine! It's fine that you're the rightful contender and you're fighting down in the rankings. It's fine that it took Umar getting injured for you to actually fight someone in the top ten as a late replacement. It's fine. By contrast, if you imagine you're Rob Font, this has to be pretty loving great. You've been toiling away in the UFC for years--next year will mark a full decade with the company--and you've always been very, very good, but just not quite good enough to get to the top. Back in the day it was John Lineker and Pedro Munhoz and Raphael Assunção; guys who were just able to break you with pressure, or catch you with a mid-transition choke, or simply outwrestle you. But you kept grinding, and you kept improving, and soon you were back in the top ten, and you dropped Marlon Moraes before it was fashionable, and you were ready for your big, belated coming-out party as a contender. But the party wasn't actually, ultimately, for you. The party wound up taking place entirely in the Jair Bolsonaro Memorial Minions-themed bedroom in José Aldo's house, because, as it turns out, even an aging Aldo one fight away from retirement is still just too much for you to handle. And then things get worse, because you fight Chito Vera--and you outstrike him in every single round! You run up a 273-167 differential that looks like it should be a rout. And it is--but you're the one getting routed, because no matter how much you touch him up, every single round he loving floors you with a big punch or a foot upside your head, and all your work evaporates. You take a year off. By the time you come back you're still ranked at #6, but the UFC sees the writing on the wall with you. You're damaged goods. You're done. And you know they feel this way, because they're not matching you up with contenders--they're matching you up with the #13 ranked Adrian Yanez, winner of one notable fight almost an entire year prior. Because you're not a contender anymore. You're a stepping stone for people they think might be more marketable than you. So you obliterate him. One round, three minutes, and Adrian Yanez is a footnote. You're nobody's loving stepping stone. But you are someone's late replacement. It's a risk, but it's an opportunity. The UFC wanted you fighting Song Yadong--another guy ranked under you. If you beat Cory Sandhagen, that game finally stops. You're in the top five. You're one good fight away from a championship. No one can deny you anymore. Will that risk pay off? The world doesn't think so. Cory Sandhagen is a -270 favorite, and, honestly, that feels about right. The transitive property of MMA math isn't all that reliable--fighter A beating fighter B who beat fighter C doesn't actually mean fighter A will beat fighter C--but both of these men fought Marlon Vera within just about the last year, and one of them shut down every aspect of his game with range management, counterstriking and carefully applied pressure, and the other got their head repeatedly knocked off their shoulders and only survived the fight at all by the skin of their teeth. It doesn't mean Sandhagen will fare as well against Font. He's a much different type of fighter and his technical, jab-heavy approach is tougher to time and defuse than Vera's looping strikes. But the back-pocket wrestling that assists Font's pressure game isn't likely to get him very far here, either, and Marlon Moraes will gladly attest that Cory Sandhagen is just as good at putting a foot on your face as Marlon Vera. Ultimately: CORY SANDHAGEN BY DECISION. Font's incredibly tough to stop, and I don't see Sandhagen breaking his never-been-knocked-out streak, but I don't see Font getting his rhythm going against Sandhagen either. Put yet another notch on Sandhagen's belt, and hope that maybe this time it justifies him getting a shot at the upper echelon of the division--like, say, Sean O'Malley. CO-MAIN EVENT: A FIGHT THAT SHOULD HAVE HAPPENED FOUR YEARS AGO WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT: Jéssica Andrade (24-11, #5) vs Tatiana Suarez (9-0, #10) Ordinarily, when I am mad at a fight, I am mad because it's a bad fight. It's unfair, or it's slanted towards a promotional favorite, or there's some other sort of personally-perceived injustice I'm choosing to get rankled about. This is not a bad fight. It's actually a really good fight. I'm just mad at it because Jéssica Andrade is going to lose and it's bumming me out. Andrade is one of my favorite fighters, and I'll tell you, 2023 has been a difficult year to be a Jéssica Andrade fan. She ended 2022 in a fantastic position--near-top of the rankings at strawweight, all she'd have to do is just wait for a title shot--but she decided to bump back up to flyweight instead and try to get in at a second division, just to diversify her options. Great plan with the side benefit of less weight cutting. And then Erin Blanchfield tore her apart and choked her out while barely breaking a sweat, and the flyweight door shut itself as tightly as it possibly could. So she bounced right back down to strawweight--and came in like a flailing wrecking ball against Xiaonan Yan, and got cut in loving half. Yan bounced her head off the canvas and knocked her out in one round. Five months ago, Jéssica Andrade was a potential contender at two weight classes: Five months later, Jéssica Andrade is coming off two stoppage losses in a row and is locked out of a championship fight no matter where she goes. The woman she beat one year ago is about to fight for the strawweight title, and Jéssica Andrade is about to get mauled by Tatiana Suarez. In another universe, Tatiana Suarez was a world champion four years ago. She choked out current flyweight champion Alexa Grasso and TKOed two-time strawweight champion Carla Esparza in 2018, took a hard decision against Nina Nunes in 2019, and vanished completely into the land of constant, unending, horrifying injuries. It took three and a half years of surgery, stem cells and rehab to get Tatiana Suarez back in the saddle, and the UFC very wisely let her dip her toes in the water first--her big return bout this past February wasn't against a former champion or top contender, but rather, Montana De La Rosa, a solid, journeywoman grappler. And it was necessary. Suarez looked a little hesitant and rusty in the first few minutes--it'd be near-impossible not to be, honestly--but by the end of the round she'd found her groove again and was wrestling De La Rosa to the ground, pursuing every offensive opportunity she found, and ultimately settling for just jumping a guillotine and choking her out. Just like old times. They gave her a test, and she passed with flying colors. Jéssica Andrade is not a test. She's a powerful, terrifying fighter who can punch your ribs through your spine. She won a UFC championship by lifting the champion over her head and dropping her on her neck. She's long been one of the scariest women at not one but two separate weight classes. But she's finally looking worn. The Andrade who came out throwing wild, barely-aimed haymakers against Xiaonan is a step behind the Andrade who terrorized two divisions. And the Andrade who got outgrappled and turned into a pretzel by Blanchfield--a woman who, despite fighting at flyweight, is actually smaller than Suarez--feels distressingly relevant here. TATIANA SUAREZ BY TKO and I'm not happy about it. MAIN CARD: WE'LL MAKE TANNER BOSER A THING OR DIE TRYING LIGHT-HEAVYWEIGHT: Dustin Jacoby (18-7-1, #14) vs Kennedy Nzechukwu (12-3, #15) Is this a fight to determine one of the fifteen best Light-Heavyweights in the world, or is this a fight to determine if someone's job is at risk? Trick question: It's both! After spending the first five years of his mixed martial arts career getting bullied around at middleweight, Dustin Jacoby decided cutting weight was a sucker's game and moved up to 205. Within a year he was in the UFC, and within two, he was ranked as one of the best in the world thanks in no small part to his use of arcane tactics like "throwing combinations" and "moving, sometimes." He was, in fact, undefeated in the UFC through a genuinely impressive seven fights--though that includes one split draw to Ion Cuțelaba, who smashed him on the ground for a round before getting beaten up for the rest of the night--up until last October. A split decision that most of the world scored for Jacoby went to Khalil Rountree instead, ending Jacoby's streak in the least satisfying fashion possible. Fortunately for us, his next fight saw him much more fairly and unequivocally beaten by Azamat Murzakanov, rendering the injustice moot. Jacoby's rise up the rankings has stalled out, and now he has to defend his territory. Kennedy Nzechukwu is experiencing the opposite trajectory. One of the earlier people to roll off the Contender Series conveyor belt and into the UFC proper, Kennedy--and they can call him "The African Savage" as much as it wants but I refuse to be that awkward--entered the company with a bunch of hype behind his giant, 6'5" stature and powerful punches and all of that was instantaneously forgotten because he got hosed up by Paul Craig. Nzechukwu went to the back of the line, built himself back into a prospect over the next two years and three victories, and upon finally flirting with a ranking he proceeded to get elbowed to death by Da Un Jung and split out of a questionable decision by Nicolae Negumereanu, and hey, look at that, you're back at the start all over again. Two more years, three more victories, and once again, Kennedy Nzechukwu is trying to fight his way back into relevance and contendership--except this time he's already ranked, because, boy, the light-heavyweight division sure has fallen the gently caress apart over the last couple years, hasn't it. Jacoby's been running into trouble lately regarding people walking him down, and for as clean as his technique can sometimes be, watching him get continually outpowered and outmaneuvered by Murzakanov, on whom Jacoby had almost half a foot of height and reach, does not give me a great sense of confidence in his ability to cope with Kennedy, against whom Jacoby is giving up more than half a foot of reach. Kennedy is going to try to walk him down and out-power him, and he's got a very, very good chance of doing it unless Jacoby can slip away and force him into a chase. But his recent tendency to get walked down doesn't give me a great sense of confidence, nor does his tendency to shoot straight-line takedowns that could play very poorly against a much bigger, stronger, longer guy who also likes guillotine chokes an awful lot. KENNEDY NZECHUKWU BY SUBMISSION. FEATHERWEIGHT: Gavin Tucker (13-2) vs Diego Lopes (21-6) And now, your regularly scheduled fight between Guy Who's Been Gone For Years and Guy Who Just Got Here And We Don't Know What To do With Him. Gavin "Guv'nor" Tucker, which, sure, fine, I guess, was considered a pretty solid prospect when the UFC signed him back in 2016. I would say "his first UFC fight coming against Sam Sicilia dates him pretty badly," but most of the people reading those won't actually have ever heard of 12-fight UFC veteran Sam Sicilia, and that's the point. Tucker was a very solid, well-rounded fighter with an aggressive submission game and an appreciable commitment to knees on the liver, but his schedule has been sporadic, he's missed multiple years of his career, he got flattened in twenty-two seconds by Dan Ige the last time we saw him, and he's returning to a tougher division than ever--a month after his 37th birthday. Time is not on his side. And neither is Diego Lopes. Lopes was brought into the UFC this past May as a regional pickup making his debut on four days' notice against the undefeated, #10-ranked Movsar Evloev, and at the time, this was my take: CarlCX posted:A lot of people on the internet are celebrating, citing Lopes as a diamond in the rough and an immediate threat to the division. Having spent time watching his fights: I'm skeptical. Much is made of his 21-5 record and his 19 stoppages, but like so many regional competitors, when you look up the competition he's finishing, some of the luster fades. And the UFC thinks so, because, boy, they sure are giving him a less proven wrestler who hasn't fought in two years who's also giving up 5" of height and 6" of reach to a guy who rolled off his couch and almost became one of the ten best Featherweights on the planet. DIEGO LOPES BY SUBMISSION. LIGHT-HEAVYWEIGHT: Tanner Boser (20-10-1) vs Aleksa Camur (6-2) We're giving this Tanner Boser thing one more shot. Tanner Boser was a briefly exciting heavyweight prospect back in 2019 based on his ability to string multiple punches together, which, hey, that gets you ahead of the curve on most of the division, but then it turned out he couldn't beat 2020 Andrei Arlovski or 2021 Ilir Latifi, and that's a bit of a death knell for your status as an up-and-comer to keep an eye on. After going 4-4 in the heavyweight division Boser took half a year off to make his way down to 205 pounds. Which, y'know, points for trying, but when your big advantage is speed and your big weakness is wrestling, going to the division where most fighters are faster and better wrestlers seems like an iffy move. And it was! He made his Light-Heavyweight debut this past April and Ion Cuțelaba beat him senseless in two minutes. It wasn't great. And now Boser is 1 for his last 5, and winning this fight is almost certainly the difference between keeping or losing his contract. So--stop me if this sounds familiar--he's fighting a guy we haven't seen in more than two years. Aleksa Camur was only 4-0 when he landed in the Contender Series back in 2019, and as it turns out, being a 6'1" guy who can throw flying knees gets you signed fairly quickly. But William Knight's many muscles outwrestled him, and Nicolae Negumereanu took him to a split decision because no matter how many times Camur hit him in the jaw Nicolae just would not loving fall down, and somewhere in the middle of having his fingerbones repeatedly dashed on a Romanian man's iron skull, Camur busted his hand and had to go get it fixed. It took two god damned years to get back in fighting shape, and now that he's finally managed to get his metacarpals to line up properly again, it's time to break them all over again, because the human hand just was not made to punch things, but we refuse to collectively listen. I'm on the fence with this one. From a skill and mobility perspective, I think Camur has Boser beat: He's faster and his counterpunching is much crisper. But Boser's tough and, dare I say, herky-jerky, and given space to work, he's good at using leg kicks to make space for his hands. The people who beat Boser tend to be the people who refuse to allow him that space--so Camur should be trying to channel his flying-knee knockout days, and not his patient counterpunching days. But it's also been two god damned years, so as always, how Camur looks is anyone's guess. I'm still going with ALEKSA CAMUR BY TKO but it's a tossup. LIGHTWEIGHT: Ignacio Bahamondes (14-4) vs Ľudovít Klein (19-4-1) Okay, really, was this entire card made for dramatic size mismatches? Is that just what we're doing here? Ignacio Bahamondes a 6'3" Lightweight, which really just should not happen, and aside from a split decision to John Makdessi back in his 2021 debut he's looked great thus far, between wheelkick knockouts, diving on brabo chokes, and a one-sided but not particularly entertaining decision victory over Trey Ogden this past April. The UFC's clearly trying to build him, because they'd sure like to have a fun, successful 6'3" Chilean lightweight kicking people in the face for awhile. So he's fighting Ľudovít Klein, a 5'7" striker who...just had a fight with a tall lightweight in Jai Herbert that he clearly would have lost were it not for a point deduction thanks to multiple groin strikes letting him get away with a draw. And this is the second time they've tried to book this fight! They had them scheduled for last July and visa issues scratched it, and now that Klein's gotten himself visibly beaten by a big, tall, rangy kickboxer, well, hell, why don't we give you a taller, rangier kickboxer? Sure, you were SUPPOSED to fight Jim Miller, but hey: stocky aging grappler, young 6'3" guy who throws wheelkicks, they're basically the same deal. And I like Ľudovít Klein! He's got really fun, clean technique and I've really enjoyed watching him fight. But swinging on a guy who's most of a foot taller than you doesn't happen very often for a reason. IGNACIO BAHAMONDES BY DECISION. PRELIMS: THE ACTUAL MAIN CARD BANTAMWEIGHT: Raoni Barcelos (17-4) vs Kyler Phillips (10-2) Raoni Barcelos is the one I just can't let go of. I had great expectations for Raoni heading into 2021: He was 16-1, he had atomized multiple opponents, his hands and his grappling both looked thoroughly impressive and I foresaw a top ten run for the man. Since I began believing in Raoni Barcelos, he is 1-3. The only man he has managed to beat in the time I've been fightwriting is Trevin Jones, last seen somehow losing a strategically sound fight to Cody Garbrandt. Maybe it's Raoni entering his late thirties, maybe it's the step up in competition, or maybe he was broken under the weight of my belief. I've never been a huge Kyler Phillips guy. Which is probably unfair--he's perfectly fine. He's a very talented wrestler with a very successful grappling attack who's been chipping people down with elbows and throwing in the occasional headkick just to keep people guessing. And that's normally my exact kind of fighter, so honestly, I'm not sure why I never got on the Kyler Express. Maybe it's the hair. Maybe it's my envy for the concept of having hair. Either way, he'll probably win here, too. But I just cannot pick him. I've come this far on the Raoni Barcelos tour, I have to see it to its end, even if that means picking him knowing he's probably getting ground into dust. RAONI BARCELOS BY TKO, somehow, and my hopes and dreams go with him. WELTERWEIGHT: Jeremiah Wells (12-2-1) vs Carlston Harris (18-5)See, this? This is good. Jeremiah Wells is on the best run of his life: He knocked out Warlley Alves, he choked out Mike "Blood Diamond" Mathetha, he knocked out the impossibly tough Court McGee with one punch, and he scraped a split decision out over Matthew Semelsberger despite getting dropped twice. He's looked equal parts talented, powerful, and tough as hell, and a four-fight winning streak at welterweight in the UFC is a tough, tough ask. Carlston Harris isn't far behind, either. He's only 3-1, but that one loss came against the ridiculously good Shavkat Rakhmonov, so aside from getting beaten by one of the best fighters on the entire planet, he's been throwing everyone else in the garbage. He rebounded by dominating late replacement Jared Gooden this past March in a fight that was as impressive for its onesidedness as for proving just how many hooks to the head Jared Gooden can inexplicably absorb without falling down. So you've got two wrestleboxers who are both very good at spamming hooks and very difficult to knock out. The result should be fun. Harris has a bit of a size advantage, but Wells seems to carry more actual force in his punches, and I'm not sure Harris will be able to wrestle Wells to get an advantage the way he has with other people. JEREMIAH WELLS BY DECISION. FEATHERWEIGHT: Billy Quarantillo (17-5) vs Damon Jackson (22-5-1 (1)) And here, we have the grave of the would-be contenders. The UFC has wanted Billy Quarantillo to be a thing for a couple of years now. He's a fun, frenetic brawler with a visible glee for getting into firefights but he's not loose enough to get outright sloppy about it, which is admittedly pretty rare and admirable. But this past April saw his third attempt at breaking into the top ranks, and just like the other two, it got shut down along with the rest of his body, as Edson Barboza knocked him out cold with a knee in about two and a half minutes. Damon Jackson is unfortunately familiar with this dance, having been ejected from possible contention by an Ilia Topuria knockout three years ago, and he's dancing it with Billy right now: A four-fight winning streak and a lot of momentum got halted by a Dan Ige left hook in January. Jackson's life-sapping clinch attacks and aggressive choking game have gotten him repeated opportunities, but you just can't arm triangle someone while they're knocking you out on the feet, unfortunately. BILLY QUARANTILLO BY TKO. I'm a big fan of Damon Jackson, but his success largely comes from stopping his opponents in their tracks and forcing them to fight from a standstill--or, preferably, their back--and mobility is Quarantillo's entire game. Edson Barboza was able to use that mobility to catch Quarantillo and knock him out, and I just don't think Damon Jackson has that in him, particularly after Quarantillo chips him down for two rounds. FLYWEIGHT: Jake Hadley (10-1) vs Cody Durden (15-4-1) Hey, look, it's two guys I don't really like! Which isn't particularly fair, they're both very good fighters who hit real hard and have real solid wrestling games to back up their angrily swinging lunchbox fists, but I just get put off by them both from a personality standpoint, and by god, I already absorb so much bad-personality energy from covering the main event scene of this sport and its constant arms race of bullshit that I just don't have space in my heart for these two. Like, Jake Hadley is a wrestleboxer who knocked his last opponent out with a liver punch! I SHOULD love Jake Hadley! But it's just not there. I look at this fight and I see a blindingly white void, and all I can do is observe it, and nod at its presence, and hope that one day I come to terms with the void's place in my life. I don't mean to spurn you, my void roommate. I just don't know what to do with you right now. Anyway, JAKE HADLEY BY TKO but I constantly underestimate Cody Durden so if he fucks Hadley up add it to the file of things I'm persistently wrong about. FEATHERWEIGHT: Sean Woodson (9-1-1) vs Dennis Buzukja (13-1) This is the fourth opponent Sean Woodson has been scheduled to fight on this card. Fourth! He was going to fight 6' power brawler Steve Garcia, but Garcia pulled out, so the UFC switched it up and rebooked him against Jesse Butler, the last-minute replacement Jim Miller knocked cold in twenty seconds, only for the Tennessee State Athletic commission to very correctly ask the UFC why on Earth it was trying to book a fight for a guy who just lost consciousness sixty days ago when he shouldn't even be back to full-contact sparring yet, so they said "yeah I guess that's true" and matched Woodson up against the LFA's 5'9" all-around standout Mairon Santos, but Santos couldn't get a visa. So now, at long last, Sean Woodson, the 6'2" featherweight who looked like he had real good boxing right up until his last fight where he seemingly forgot how to use it, is fighting Dennis "The Great" Buzukja, a prospect out of Staten Island who was fighting 6-4 and 7-7 guys a few months ago. Buzukja is, in fact, just seven weeks removed from a two-round fight of his own. So you've got a UFC veteran who's had to swap out three separate opponents, all with wildly varying styles, who is now fighting an unknown regional fighter who just competed less than two months ago. I love this dumbass sport. SEAN WOODSON BY TKO, but Buzukja doesn't seem like a bad prospect. Hopefully he'll have more than three days to prep for his next fight. FLYWEIGHT: Ode’ Osbourne (12-5) vs Asu Almabaev (17-2) And once again, we're closing on another of these fights. Ode' Osbourne is a very good but irritatingly inconsistent kind of fighter. He's got dynamite in his hands and a great sense of timing--most of the time. Sometimes, he shoots a bunch of no-chance takedowns and comes away with a barely-there split decision or, worse, he jumps up and down in place trying to gauge distance for a flying knee and gets obliterated with a hook before he touches the ground again. The skills are there; the decisionmaking is sometimes questionable. Asu Almabaev, like so many international prospects, is kind of a question mark. I've watched as much tape on him as I can find, and like most flyweights, he's, y'know, pretty good at most aspects of fighting, but his striking defense is just a bit on the lax side. He's got real solid timing for shooting takedowns and he's very fast at snatching up chokes, but he also eats a bunch of bread-and-butter 1-2 combinations and his method for dealing with them tends to be moving backward into the cage, where he continues to get punched until he tries to get the fight on the floor. But that's the thing: His competition is woefully inconsistent. In his last four fights he went from a 10-4 prospect to a 6-1 rookie to a 21-11 former Bellator champion (nice to see you again, Zach Makovsky) to a 3-3 jobber with multiple fake fights on his record. I know I get too into the weeds on records, but the thing is, fighting is so subjective and momentary that the only reliable way to gauge it is performance vs peers, and when your peers are constantly vacillating between real fighters and guys the promoter found in a Campbell's Soup crate, it's that much harder to evaluate your skills. So ODE' OSBOURNE BY DECISION, but it's wholly possible Almabaev wrestles him around and gets a nod. I just don't have enough faith in the fights I've seen to come down on his side.
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Aug 2, 2023 20:37
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Whatever is happening here is less important than this https://twitter.com/Grabaka_Hitman/status/1687470962063601666
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Aug 4, 2023 18:35
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https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4038692 GDT for Sandhagen/Font is up. This feels low energy as hell but we're doing it anyway. Prelims in 30.
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Aug 5, 2023 22:34
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demanding the fight have two extra rounds so you can do nothing but pose and be a dick during them is the most diaz thing possible
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Aug 6, 2023 06:04
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The Paul brothers calculated that if they did just enough of a thing to kind of sort of be in it, they could do well enough that most people wouldn't realize they weren't really doing it. And they were right, unfortunately. Also, minor public service announcement: My computer blew the gently caress up and I am trying to fix it. I have made it through 69 weekly card posts without missing one and do not intend to this week either, but if I do, that is why.
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Aug 6, 2023 22:59
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https://twitter.com/ONEChampionship/status/1688399568201773056 ONE going so far into striking over MMA that it somehow invented boxing
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Aug 8, 2023 07:21
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Marching Powder posted:lol 'come check out these epic new rules of just punches and a 10 point must scoring system' Xiong Jing Nan is ONE's women's flyweight MMA champion, which they've basically been mad about for years because they wanted Angela Lee to be a double champ so bad that they booked her against Xiong three times, and when Xiong defended her belt twice and won their trilogy 2-1 ONE put a poll on twitter going OH MAN, WE REALLY NEED TO RUN THIS BACK AGAIN, WHAT DO YOU SAY, FANS, DO YOU WANT TO SEE XIONG JING NAN/ANGELA LEE 4 GIMME A HELL YEAH and then quietly deleted the post after the response was overwhelmingly negative. Wondergirl is a Muay Thai kickboxer that ONE really wants to turn into another promotional centerpiece like they did Angela Lee and Stamp Fairtex but she's 1-1 in MMA and just got loving crushed in her last fight, like, two weeks ago, but it's ONE, so they're just going to pretend it didn't happen and do this instead.
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Aug 8, 2023 09:30
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Logan Paul has rudimentary boxing abilities and Dillon Danis is a professional grappler whose only MMA fights have involved repeatedly shooting because every time he was on the feet for more than ten seconds he would get punched in the head. Paul also has assuredly better steroids. Also, Adesanya/Strickland is official for September 9th, so look forward to a writeup that's just the word "gently caress" printed 3000 times in varying font sizes.
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Aug 9, 2023 00:04
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CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 70: CHECK EXPIRATION DATE SATURDAY, AUGUST 12 FROM THE SCREAMING HOLLOWS OF THE UFC APEX PRELIMS 1 PM PDT / 4 PM EDT | MAIN CARD 4 PM / 7 PM VIA ESPN+ Often, when I write about cards and the way they have been put together, I feel I am intimating the cards will not be fun. This is not the case. This card could be incredibly fun. Vicente Luque vs Rafael dos Anjos alone is one of those fireworks-factory fights that could potentially be nuts, let alone Khalil Rountree's exhibitions of violence or Terrance McKinney's wild ride. But that does not mean this card was not put together to figure out who the UFC thinks isn't worth investing in anymore. I love words, and I abhor math, but I do think there are lessons to be found in numbers. For instance: You can get a decent--not necessarily precise, but decent--idea of how heavily a card is tilted towards fighters the UFC actually cares about by adding up the UFC records of all of the fighters on the card and seeing what kind of ratio of wins to losses you're left with. After its conclusion, last week's Sandhagen/Font card has a combined record of 119-67-5 (1), for a losses-to-wins ratio of 56%. The previous week's pay-per-view, Poirier/Gaethje 2, hit 171-97-2 (2), for a Goldbergian virtually-identical 57%. This week's card has a combined record of 87-69. That is 79%. If you remove the main event and leave the rest of the card to find for itself, it falls to a perfect 52-52. Below the main, this card has a 50/50 win/loss record. Which means there's a very good chance this is the last time you will see some of the people below in the UFC.  it's like looking at a painting of a vase. MAIN EVENT: PUNK ROCK REVIVAL WELTERWEIGHT: Vicente Luque (21-9-1, #10) vs Rafael dos Anjos (32-14, #9 at Lightweight)Neither of these guys, of course, will be getting cut. Honestly, at this point envisioning the UFC without Rafael dos Anjos in it feels somehow grossly incorrect. Dude's been in the company since 2008. The UFC tenure of Rafael dos Anjos predates weight classes below 155 pounds by two goddamn years. The fact that he's still ranked in the top ten after this long is genuinely insane. Unfortunately, that ranking is at 155 pounds. Whether he belongs in a top ten fight at 170 pounds is questionable. Vicente Luque unquestionably belongs here. He's still one of the most accomplished finishers in UFC history--both in terms of his actual finishing percentages and the simple emotional pleasure of how brutally he destroys people--and his only losses in the last eight years came against current champion Leon Edwards back in 2017, perennial contender Stephen Thompson back in 2019, and over the course of a very difficult 2022 he was dominated by rightful #1 contender Belal Muhammad and punched out for the first time in his career by welterweight's ever-dangerous gatekeeper, Geoff Neal. Everyone else, Luque has defeated; most of those times, he has absolutely loving crushed his opponent. He choked out Michael Chiesa and Tyron Woodley, he knocked out Randy Brown, he pounded Niko Price's eye shut. He's so brutal and so effective in his brutality that it's goddamn near impossible to keep him out of the top fifteen. I love Rafael dos Anjos. He's one of my favorite fighters in the history of the sport. His direct, orthodox effectiveness, his exceedingly dangerous jiu-jitsu, his 32-punch combinations and the fact that he almost hit an inverted STF in an actual fight make him, easily, one of the greatest to ever do it. He's been a constant presence in the top ranks of the sport's toughest division for more than a decade, and over the course of that decade he's only lost to two people who weren't destined to be world champions--and the jury's still out on Rafael Fiziev. He's an amazing fighter with an amazing career. He's also only had one victory at welterweight in the last four years, and that was against Bryan Barberena. Rafael dos Anjos moved up to 170 pounds because after losing to Khabib Nurmagomedov, Eddie Alvarez and Tony Ferguson he was as locked out of title contention at 155 pounds as it was possible to be at the time. And it was a very big deal that he made the jump up in weight and was competitive with top fighters at an entirely bigger weight class. And it's very, very easy to pick records apart in hindsight. But it's also informative and fun, so we're going to do it anyway. At welterweight, dos Anjos has claimed victories over:
But none of it has aged well. And in a UFC where contenders are getting passed over for Colby Covington, it's weird to say going-on-39 Rafael dos Anjos, the guy who got beat by both Leon Edwards and Kamaru Usman already, the guy who dropped down to 155 again because he was frustrated after being manhandled by barely-clinging-to-a-ranking Michael Chiesa, is the guy who gets to fight for a spot in the top ten. Which is, in its own way, a sort of lifetime achievement award. He's Rafael dos Anjos. You only have so many fights with him left, you want to make them count, and that's probably more important than making him fight Alex Morono or Mike Malott to see if he belongs in the division. He's been swimming for decades; it's a waste of everyone's time to do anything but throw him in the deep end. And this is, definitively, the deep end. Vicente Luque represents considerable threats to dos Anjos. Rafael has historically succeeded by drowning opponents in offense, chipping them down and either cracking their jaws or throwing them down and choking them out once they're too worn to fight back. Luque, arguably, does all of those things much, much more efficiently. He's brutally powerful and more than willing to engage in wild, flurrying combinations to stack damage atop damage, his offensive grappling is incredibly aggressive and his defensive grappling is incredibly effective unless you happen to be a world-class wrestler. In my heart, this is a dream fight. Luque and dos Anjos are both scrappy, gritty, well-rounded fighters with fantastic chins who love brawls, and the two combining could be wonderful and explosive and memorable. But in my brain, the more time I spend writing about it, the harder it is to escape the feeling that this is a deathtrap for dos Anjos. He's a better wrestler than Luque, but is he going to have better takedowns and ground control than Belal Muhammad, who struggled to keep Luque on the floor? He's a great combination striker, but is he going to be more powerful on the feet than Geoff Neal, who had to hit Luque a hundred goddamn times to put him down? If he can keep Luque worried about the wrestling--if he can keep Luque engaged in the clinch--if he can drag Luque into the championship rounds, where he starts to falter--if, if, if. Every argument my heart makes for dos Anjos is predicated on the hope that he can impose his gameplan entirely effectively on a bigger, stronger, more dangerous man. Because he used to, and it was amazing. And now 16 of the 21 men Rafael dos Anjos has defeated in the UFC have retired from MMA competition, because time, on a long enough line, always wins. VICENTE LUQUE BY TKO. CO-MAIN EVENT: WEC NEVER DIE FEATHERWEIGHT: Cub Swanson (28-13) vs Hakeem Dawodu (13-3-1) And then, there's Cub Swanson. Let's look back at our last visit to Palm Springs, from this past October: CarlCX posted:Cub Swanson has fought the best fighters on the planet. Unfortunately, more often than not, he has lost. He's been a top 20 fighter virtually his entire career, sometimes even top ten, but he's never been able to break past the top of his division. Which is why, at 38, he's giving a new one a try. This fight marks his first-ever appearance at 135 pounds. It was an understandable experiment. It did not work out. Cub dropped down a weight class and got savaged anyway. He's back at 145 pounds, he's hungry, he's motivated, he's ready to make another run, and he's turning 40 in November. I dunno, man. I just don't know. I've loved watching Cub Swanson fight for a long time, but most of his great performances in the last five or six years have come against people whose striking is, respectfully, not their forte. Styling on wrestlers and grapplers is one thing; dealing with kickboxers is another. Hakeem Dawodu is not a kickboxer. He's exactly the kind of all-around good-at-everything-but-not-great-at-anything fighter who's about to have his tenth fight in the UFC and most folks struggle to remember if they've watched any of them. Which is a shame, because Dawodu's solid as hell. He's never been knocked out, he's only been submitted once, he's incredibly tough and he's had some really fun brawls with the likes of Julian Erosa and Julio Arce. He's got sharp leg kicks. He's got a quick jab. He's got a hell of a chin. He's very good at scrambling out of bad positions on the ground. And he's fighting Cub Swanson, and once upon a time I would have talked about how much I love Cub's unpredictable footwork and unorthodox striking angles and the way he chains his punches and kicks together and what an impact they'll have on this fight. But I'm just not convinced that's true anymore. Hakeem likes to overcommit and he often gets pasted for it, but the thing is, he takes said pastings and keeps coming. Cub would have to hit him very, very hard, or string together a bunch of very, very clean shots to hurt him the way he's hurt other fighters in the past. Dawodu is not inclined to give him that chance. HAKEEM DAWODU BY DECISION. I'm sorry, Cub. I'd be happy if you proved me wrong. MAIN CARD: THE CHRIS DAUKAUS CONSPIRACY LIGHT-HEAVYWEIGHT: Khalil Rountree (11-5 (1), #13) vs Chris Daukaus (12-6, #14 at Heavyweight)The UFC loves Chris Daukaus, but their love is killing him at an accelerated pace. As a general rule, if the UFC doesn't like you, they don't book you into bad fights--they simply don't book you at all. They freeze you out and sit on you and condemn you to preliminary fights no one will watch until your contract expires. Chris Daukaus is experiencing the polar opposite of this phenomenon. As 2021 came to a close, Chris Daukaus was riding high as a heavyweight prospect: He was on a four-fight winning streak, he'd finished everyone he'd faced in the company and he'd made it into the top ten in just one year. They jumped at the chance to book a hard-punching ex-cop heavyweight into contendership bouts. And then he got his first-ever UFC main event and got knocked the gently caress out by the #3-ranked Derrick Lewis. And the UFC immediately booked him into a second main event where he got knocked the gently caress out by the #4-ranked Curtis Blaydes. And the UFC immediately booked him into a PPV prelim where he got knocked the gently caress out by the #9-ranked Jairzinho Rozenstruik--in twenty-three seconds. Despite getting repeatedly, violently trashed by better, stronger strikers, the UFC just kept booking him into ranked fights and getting him crushed over and over. So when Chris Daukaus announced he was dropping to the 205-pound division, I thought it represented, at the least, a new chance for him to dip his toes into a different subset of fights and fighters. And the UFC immediately booked him into a high-profile fight against a top fifteen fighter who is--you guessed it--a better, stronger striker. Khalil Rountree Jr. is not a perfect fighter. He can get outwrestled, and he can get overwhelmed, and he can sometimes fight like he's stuck in his own head and just doesn't know how to get out. He can also fold Karl Robertson in half with rib-breaking punches. He can knock out Gökhan Saki, one of the world's best heavyweight kickboxers, in a minute and a half. He can kick Modestas Bukauskas's kneecap out with a single strike. When Khalil Rountree is on his game, he's one of the scariest strikers in the entire light-heavyweight division: A terrifying combination of vicious power, incredible timing, and the simple, unquestioned will to do things like stomp a man's loving knee into multiple pieces if he sees an opening and knows it'll end a fight. When he's not unfocused and questioning his own gameplans he's one of the quickest, most successful trigger-pullers in the sport. That quickness is the thing I keep focusing on. Chris Daukaus is strong, but his real standout feature at heavyweight wasn't his power, it was his speed. He wasn't a one-punch knockout artist, he was the guy who lands and keeps landing until your legs give out. Even his 45-second knockout victory involved landing a dozen consecutive blows. By dropping to 205 pounds, he's entering the land of people who are equally fast--and in Khalil Rountree's case, not only is Daukaus losing that speed advantage, he's losing it to a guy who still hits as hard as heavyweights. KHALIL ROUNTREE BY TKO and I don't think it'll be pretty. WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT: Polyana Viana (13-5) vs Iasmin Lucindo (14-5) Polyana Viana is trying very hard to become a thing. She's got the chops for it: She's finished every fight she's ever won, she's snatched multiple armbars out of the aether the last time we saw her back in November she faced down the exceptionally tough Jinh Yu Frey and punched her silly in under a minute. Her skills cannot be questioned. But her ability to apply them to high-level fighters, unfortunately, can. She's 4-4 in the UFC: The four women she beat have a combined UFC record of 5-13, and the four women who beat her have a combined UFC record of 15-15. Which, if we're being honest, really ain't that great either. And that's the problem. Against fighters she can overwhelm, Polyana Viana is a monster. Against fighters who can outpower her, or outgrapple her, or simply deny her the chance to floor them, she tends to get lost. In other words: She's a measuring stick, and the UFC wants to see where Iasmin Lucindo falls. Even though she lost her UFC debut in the great Similar Name War against Yazmin Jauregui last August she impressed both the fans and the UFC brass with her sheer refusal to take a step backwards even against a fighter who was beating her to the punch, and she was even beginning to get the upper hand before she ran out of time. Her appearance against The Ultimate Fighter 30 (jesus christ) runner-up Brogan Walker this past April was considerably more successful, as she took Brogan down at will, outworked her on the feet, and won an extremely wide decision. Which I picked against her in, and I am ashamed. I thought Brogan's clinch attacks would make life difficult for Iasmin, and I could not have been more incorrect. Which makes it difficult to see this not being IASMIN LUCINDO BY DECISION. She'll still have to be careful, Viana could knock her cold given a chance, but her mobility and her grace under pressure don't give me much faith in Viana's approach rattling her into making the mistakes Viana's other victims have. MIDDLEWEIGHT: Tafon Nchukwi (6-3) vs AJ Dobson (6-2) Here, we have what is in all likelihood a loser-leaves-town match. Tafon Nchukwi is desperately trying to avert a contract-threatening skid--he's 1 for his last 4, he was violently knocked out in his last two fights, and the last one was a particularly effortless, one-minute thumping at the hands of one of the UFC's most currently-favored toys, Carlos Ulberg. If Tafon were a grappler this might be understandable, but he's never recorded a submission in his career. He likes to strike, he likes to grate people against the fence, and he likes takedowns only when he particularly needs them. And that makes things tricky, because boy, when you start getting hosed up that badly at your own game, you don't really have anywhere to go--except, say, down 20 pounds to the middleweight class, where he's hoping he'll have the physical advantage. Which is problematic, because AJ Dobson is bigger than he is. Dobson IS more of a career grappler than a striker, and that has, unfortunately, not panned out for him at all in the UFC. He's 0-2, with that first loss being a grinding, one-sided loss to a superior wrestler in Jacob Malkoun--who the UFC hasn't booked for another fight in almost a year, for some strange, definitely-not-wrestling-related reason--and the second, and probably more indicative, an equally one-sided loss to a superior kickboxer in Armen Petrosyan, who kicked Dobson's legs and chest apart while Dobson tried and failed to keep him grounded in an attempt to stop him from hitting him so goddamn much. He was by no means defenseless, and he scored a few good punches here and there, but it was largely one-way traffic and a blowout of a decision. Tafon Nchukwi is not as sophisticated a striker as Armen Petrosyan. But he is a strong, dangerous guy with long kicks, and moreover, he's tough enough to take down that Dobson's wrestling assaults aren't likely to bear fruit for him here, either. TAFON NCHUKWI BY DECISION, and we may be bidding farewell to Dobson. MIDDLEWEIGHT: Josh Fremd (10-4) vs Jamie Pickett (13-9) I must atone for my sins. I have written about Josh Fremd three times, and at the end of those three times I simply did not believe in him. I had him pegged as a sacrifice for Contender Series winner and noted jerk Sedriques Dumas in the latter's company debut this past March, and to be fair, the UFC most certainly had him pegged that way, too. And he proved all of us wrong by striking with Dumas, frustrating his attempts at jumping on submissions, and ultimately choking Dumas out midway through the second round. For derailing the Sedriques Dumas experiment before it could even start, I am ethically and honorably obligated to side with Josh Fremd in this fight no matter who he is facing. Fortunately, he is facing Jamie Pickett. Pickett was a successful sacrificial lamb for the UFC, who elected to use him and his 2-5 record in the company as an incredibly soft landing pad for superprospect Bo Nickal in the latter's debut this past March, and Pickett obliged by getting ragdolled and choked out in under a round. This is, realistically, most of his UFC career. Pickett's two wins were over UFC fighters even less successful than him, both of whom proved not to be long for the company after Pickett's eclectic mixture of grinding clinch attacks, rangy jabs, and inexplicable attempts to hit superkicks in real life took them to decision losses. And that's the tragedy of Jamie Pickett. He's not a bad fighter! He's athletic and he's got power and he's got talent and he's got a wide range of attacks and it just doesn't matter. He struggles to compete with the level of competition offered by the UFC. And now, tragically, I cannot pick him in a fight he has a chance at winning. JOSH FREMD BY SUBMISSION because the universe wills it. PRELIMS: ONE OF THESE THINGS IS NOT LIKE THE OTHER BANTAMWEIGHT: Marcus McGhee (7-1) vs JP Buys (9-5) Okay, this one's just an attempted murder, though. Marcus "The Maniac" McGhee had one of the more memorable UFC debuts of the year, having been called up in April to fight Journey Newson as an injury replacement with just three days to prepare, and unlike the vast majority of regional fighters who dutifully lose to their UFC counterparts, McGhee made the move up from fighting 50/50 guys on the regional circuit to beating and choking out a UFC fighter with surprisingly little difficulty. The UFC was immediately curious to measure him against another of their recently successful debuting prospects, the striking expert Gaston Bolaños, but Gaston had to pull out back in July, and in his place the UFC has substituted JP Buys, who, as of yet, is one of their least successful fighters. He's 0-3, he's been knocked out twice, and across 15 minutes of combat within the UFC he has thus far averaged just about ten significant strikes per fight and, uh, 1/3 of a takedown. It's not like he's losing to schlubs--there's no shame in getting knocked out by Cody Durden or Bruno Silva--but his inability to muster any effective offense is more damning. MARCUS MCGHEE BY TKO. JP Buys desperately needs this win to stay in the UFC, and I don't think he's going to get it. LIGHTWEIGHT: Terrance McKinney (13-6) vs Mike Breeden (10-5) I'll be honest, I did not expect to be writing a 'might need to win to stay in the UFC' fight preview about Terrance McKinney and the reality is deeply disconcerting. After McKinney's first three UFC fights I--and, in my defense, most of the MMA world--had him set aside as a fighter to watch. His destructions of Matt Frevola and Fares Ziam were both deeply impressive and his near-miss against Drew Dober was still wildly promising. And then Ismael Bonfim destroyed him on the feet, and then Nazim Sadykhov destroyed him on the ground, and quickly, suddenly, Terrance McKinney has gone from a nearly-ranked lightweight to 1 for his last 4 and fighting to stave off both a questionable future with the UFC and a questionable reputation as yet another skilled fighter who can't keep it together. "Money" Mike Breeden has had a less memorable run with the company. He was brought in as an injury fill-in against Alexander Hernandez, he was dutifully knocked out in a single round, and half a year later he put up a fantastic brawl against Natan Levy but ultimately still got outfought. And the UFC, respectfully, had him pegged as potential enhancement talent for fighters they care about anyway: He was originally supposed to fight the ever-tricky Lando Vannata here, another fighter the UFC would like to rehab, and McKinney stepped in after Vannata pulled out early last week. Wary as I am about siding with my irrational love for Terrance McKinney after the last couple fights, I'm doing it again. Breeden could outwrestle him or even simply break him with pressure, but I think McKinney's power is the differencemaker here. TERRANCE MCKINNEY BY TKO. FEATHERWEIGHT: Francis Marshall (7-1) vs Isaac Dulgarian (5-0) Sometimes it's the little things that make me feel old. Every time I see Francis "Fire" Marshall, I am reminded of Eliot "The Fire" Marshall, a UFC fighter and The Ultimate Fighter runner-up who used the same silly nickname->surname gag. I remember that the group of internet fight nerds I ran around with would joke that he should fight the similarly-new-at-the-time Jon Jones because the two names combined to make a semi-obscure comic book gag that was much less clever than we thought it was. That TUF season was 8. The current season is 31. Eliot Marshall's entire UFC career happened between 2008 and 2010. The guy he lost his last UFC fight to, Vladimir Matyushenko, had his first fight in 1997, which was the year the Spice Girls made their debut in America. It's 2023, and Francis Marshall and Isaac Dulgarian are both quality fighters with potential promise, and I look at them and all I can think about is the UFC back when Forrest Griffin was a world champion, and the world back when Titanic was new, and I wonder if, in thirteen years, I'll remember any of what's happening now as well as I remember what happened then. The first CD I ever personally chose to buy came out in 1997. It was Everclear's So Much for the Afterglow. FRANCIS MARSHALL BY DECISION. HEAVYWEIGHT: Josh Parisian (15-6) vs Martin Buday (12-1) I wrote about Josh Parisian just last month for his cancelled fight with Walt Harris, and I'm going to revisit it for a second. CarlCX posted: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 after all of that, I was still nervous about the possibility that Walt Harris was deteriorated enough that Josh Parisian could beat him. I--and I apologize to Walt Harris, whom I like, for this--do not have that concern about Martin Buday. Buday's a tough, straightforward heavyweight who's still in his prime and exhibits the classic Randy Couture style of grating motherfuckers against the fence while hitting them with short uppercuts repeatedly. He did it to Chris Barnett, he did it to Jake Collier, and I don't see Josh Parisian stopping it. MARTIN BUDAY BY DECISION. WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT: Montserrat Ruiz (10-2) vs Jaqueline Amorim (6-1) EL CONEJO! I had started to wonder if we'd ever see Montserrat Ruiz again. She had a great UFC debut back in 2021 against Cheyenne Vlismas, and then she got flattened by current title challenger Amanda Lemos in thirty-five seconds a few months later, and--that's it. She had one more scheduled fight that December, she pulled out, and we now haven't seen her in 25 months. Moreover, I cannot find a single interview about where she's been or what happened. Was she recovering from injuries? Was she fighting crime? I don't know, and may never know. We first met Jaqueline Amorim at her UFC debut this part April, where she showed up as an undefeated strawweight champion out of the Legacy Fighting Alliance, was a -300 favorite, put up a dominant round against Sam Hughes, and then promptly got rolled for ten straight minutes of vintage Sampage wrestling control. By the third round she was outstruck 29-2. No more undefeated record, no more LFA title, it's just the UFC, where Sam Hughes punches you in the face forever. We didn't get to see a lot of Montserrat Ruiz, and as I find myself saying an awful lot lately, after a two-year layoff, it's anyone's guess how she'll actually look. But her scrappy throwing game, her gas tank and her willingness to threaten to follow her opponent home after the fight to continue beating them up make me think the betting lines being so heavily in Amorim's favor here are a mistake. MONTSERRAT RUIZ BY DECISION. BANTAMWEIGHT: Da'Mon Blackshear (13-5-1) vs Jose Johnson (15-7) I was about to publish this thing and then this fight got added at the last minute. Thank you! Da'Mon "Da Monster" Blackshear had an incredible amount of hype coming into his UFC debut last summer--grappling monster, tons of submission victories, Cage Fury champion, trainee at the legendary Jackson Wink camp out of New Mexico--and then he got taken to a draw by Youssef Zalal, and then he got soundly beaten by Farid Basharat, and all that hype more or less evaporated. He began clawing some of it back by knocking out Luan Lacerda back in June, and he was hoping to continue that process against The Ultimate Fighter 29 runner-up Brady Hiestand this week, but Hiestand had to pull out thanks to a staph infection and the fight looked like it was simply not going to happen. Until Contender Series winner Jose "Lobo Solitario" Johnson stepped up. Johnson's been waiting on his shot at the UFC for a long time: He had his first shot at the Contender Series in 2020 but got outwrestled by Ronnie Lawrence, who was signed instead, and he was at the UFC-scouted Fury FC 46 the next year but got knocked out by Mana Martinez, who was signed instead, and he finally won a 2022 Contender Series bout and got his long-awaited shot at the big show--and then spent the entire next year struggling with medical issues and repeatedly pulling out of fights. It's rough. It's unfair! And it's probably going to lead to him losing his UFC debut. I get why he'd jump at the chance to finally fight, and I'm sure the UFC was gently prodding him along to take it, but Blackshear's a tough motherfucker on a full camp's notice, let alone when you were on the couch three days before the fight. DA'MON BLACKSHEAR BY DECISION. WOMEN'S FLYWEIGHT: Juliana Miller (3-2) vs Luana Santos (5-1) Juliana Miller will win. I don't care that she's 3-2. I don't care that she just got trounced by Veronica Hardy. I don't care that her big strength is her grappling and Luana Santos is probably better at it and Miller's backup plan is profoundly awkward striking. I have chosen this. I have chosen to be all in on the Juliana "Killer" Miller train. This is my life. Get those headlocks and hit those clinch trips and drag this fight to the ground where you can rain small hammerfists on people, Juliana "My Nickname Might Be Literal" Miller. I have faith in you and your unorthodox grappling, Juliana "Please Don't Ask Me About The Crawlspace Under My House" Miller. You're going all the way to the top, you're going to guillotine Erin Blanchfield, and you're going to become a world champion, Juliana "Records Indicate I May Have Been Involved In The Mysterious Disappearances Of Multiple Bodies In The Everglades" Miller. JULIANA MILLER BY SUBMISSION. Please remember to be irrational about your fighting fandom sometimes. It keeps us sane.
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Aug 9, 2023 21:23
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Snowman_McK posted:At one point I had plans to write an MMA blog. I wrote up my predictions for the Whittaker/Brunson card (Whittaker's middleweight debut) as a practice article, to get my eye in. I got literally every fight wrong and abandoned the idea, preferring private embarassment to public. As someone whose fight prediction percentage has gone measurably down since he started writing longform MMA poo poo: You must embrace the void of chaos at the heart of the sport. Also, nothing is better than when you pick someone for a dumb reason like "the other guy is better in every way but my heartsong sings for Guido Cannetti" and then they smash the poo poo out of someone.
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Aug 12, 2023 18:41
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https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4039192 Luque/dos Anjos GDT is up. Prelims in 20-30 minutes pending dead air.
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Aug 12, 2023 20:40
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LobsterMobster posted:
i don't appreciate being called out like this, I don't mind telling you Thank you because I genuinely cannot read a PFL prelim card without my eyes just completely glazing over. Also, Mario Bautista has a new opponent four days before this weekend's card, and it is...Da'Mon Blackshear, who just fought last weekend. I hate this poo poo.
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Aug 15, 2023 05:55
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Oh man, we're doing power slap again? Quick, let's change the subject to something other than corporate malfeasance slowly ruining combat sports wait oh god oh no
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Aug 16, 2023 20:53
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CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 71: THE MARKETING APOTHEOSIS SATURDAY, AUGUST 19 FROM THE TD GARDEN IN BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS EARLY PRELIMS 3:30 PM PDT / 6:30 PM EDT | PRELIMS 5 / 8 | MAIN CARD 7 / 10 PM VIA PAY-PER-VIEW Yeah, we're not wasting any loving time with the preview blurb on this one. I have too much to say and it's all going to be in the main event anyway. Welcome to the weekend where Dana White tries to get everything he ever wanted. We're going deep on this one, strap in.  so much to love, so much to fear. MAIN EVENT: A TALE OF TWO CITIES BANTAMWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP: Aljamain Sterling (23-3, Champion) vs Sean O'Malley (16-1 (1), #2) Against my deepest hopes, unfortunately, we are here. I'm going to tell you a pair of stories, but before that, let me preface with something I wrote back in March. CarlCX posted:It's surprisingly difficult to discuss the bantamweight contendership scene without feeling as though I am describing the combat sports equivalent of the wealth inequality problem. It's been five months since I wrote that. Petr Yan got utterly dominated by Merab Dvalishvili, and is no longer a contender. Merab Dvalishvili got publicly poo poo on by the UFC for being unwilling to fight his training partner, friend and champion Aljamain Sterling, and is on ice. Marlon Vera was easily outfought by Cory Sandhagen, instantaneously evaporating his momentum. Cory Sandhagen, the recipient of said momentum, was inexplicably booked against the #11 ranked Umar Nurmagomedov--and when he couldn't compete, rather than saving Sandhagen for a contendership bout, they had him fight Rob Font on short notice, in the process depleting both men. Ricky Simón got knocked out by Song Yadong; Song Yadong is now injured. Chris Gutierrez got taken apart by Pedro Munhoz. The unretired-but-unsuccessful Henry Cejudo is injured. Umar Nurmagomedov is injured. Virtually every contender has fallen through activity and bad booking. With the exception of the perennially is-he-or-is-he-not-retired Dominick Cruz, every person in the bantamweight top ten has fought at least once--some twice--in those last five months. Every person except Sean O'Malley. And this is the crux of the story of this fight. I complain about the UFC's matchmaking and marketing on a near-weekly basis, and after a certain volume of complaints, one could be forgiven for thinking it's a normal condition. If they fumble the ball with fighters so often, maybe that's just all they know how to do, and maybe that means it's not worth complaining about. But that's the trap. They absolutely know how to market fighters. They absolutely know how to set people up for success. The vast majority of the time, they simply do not care. And no fighter exemplifies this like Sean O'Malley. Let's do some contrasting, here. Both Aljamain Sterling and Sean O'Malley were looked at as potentially valuable prospects when they made their UFC debuts. Sterling's been at it almost twice as long--he's six months away from crossing a decade in the UFC and this is his 19th fight with the company, where O'Malley graduated from the Contender Series in December of 2017 and this will be his 10th--which means we can get a certain level of enlightenment by looking at the paths both men had to take to reach their first crack at the UFC championship. During Sterling's path to a title shot, along with several unranked fights, he challenged the following top-fifteen ranked fighters:
Well, in Aljamain Sterling's case, he:
There's one other metric I want to share, here, and it's by far the shortest, but I think it's also the most enlightening. How many of those five-fight runs to the title were actually aired on a proper UFC broadcast, rather than being buried on the prelims? Well, for the top-ten-ranked Aljamain Sterling, at the time ten fights into his UFC career:
There's this thing Dana White says constantly: You don't wait for fights in the UFC. It's his least favorite thing in the world. Any fighter with the temerity to say they've earned a title shot and will wait for their rightful matchup gets poo poo on at press conferences, called an unprofessional coward who's afraid of competition, and, most often, publicly and privately pressured until they take a fight with a lower-ranked opponent for less money. Sean O'Malley has one fight in the last 13 months. The entire bantamweight division has folded in on itself in an attempt to have all of its potential contenders consume one another, but Sean O'Malley has sat alone, at peace, waiting for the title shot that was incredibly obviously coming as a result of his incredible, one-fight top-ten-worst-decisions-of-2022 winning streak. Aljamain Sterling defended his title against Henry Cejudo three months ago. He noted that, it being his second title defense in six months and his third in the last year, he wanted to take a few months off to rehab a bicep injury he's been dealing with for essentially that entire span. Dana White made it clear--in public--that either Sterling was defending his belt against O'Malley in three months, or the UFC would at best give O'Malley an interim title fight without him or at worst strip Sterling outright. There are two stories in this fight. In one story, Aljamain Sterling, one of the sport's best prospects, had to grind his way through the entire bantamweight top ten over the course of almost ten years to get a shot at the championship, and even then he was consigned to barely-promoted preliminary bouts more often than he was featured, and upon winning the title--through a massive debacle involving Petr Yan losing his title by disqualification for illegally kneeing Sterling, for which the UFC kind-of sort-of blamed Sterling for being unable to continue--he was put on an aggressive schedule of title defenses against the UFC's hand-picked contenders and was publicly discouraged from taking time off to rehabilitate his injuries. In the other story, Sean O'Malley, one of the very first Contender Series babies, who has been given the benefit of more marketing than anyone in the UFC not named Rousey or McGregor, who has appeared on exactly one preliminary bout in a ten-fight career, who has one ranked victory in his entire life and it required one of the most unanimously-disagreed-with decisions in the history of mixed martial arts, gets a title shot after not fighting for almost a year solely because the UFC didn't want a single thing potentially getting in the way of putting Sean O'Malley in a UFC championship match. And the thing that makes it all truly, deeply maddening is: None of this was necessary. None of it. None! The UFC doesn't even have to keep putting promotional pressure on Aljamain Sterling in the hopes of crowning a champion they actually want because Aljamain Sterling is leaving the bantamweight division! He's made it clear he's accomplished everything he wanted to and he can barely make the weight cut anymore, and win or lose, he's moving to 145 pounds after this title fight. After this one fight, he's no longer anyone's problem. And for all of the things I have said about the UFC's marketing of him: Sean O'Malley? He's good! He's genuinely a very good fighter! He's got great awareness of his range, he's both creative and accurate with his striking and it's a deadly combination, and he's tough as hell. Did he go to a No Contest with Pedro Munhoz? Absolutely, but he won the first round before it ended. Did he lose to Petr Yan? I and most other humans think so, but he was also incredibly competitive with Petr loving Yan. Aljamain Sterling would have been out of the UFC's hair without them publicly running a marathon on his spine. Sean O'Malley would probably have made it into the top ten without the UFC launching him over their entire roster of ranked fighters on a trampoline made of flyweights and future endeavours. But that isn't what they wanted. They didn't want to wait for the right time, they wanted O'Malley in now. And--not for nothing--O'Malley vs a compromised Sterling definitely doesn't hurt. So will the house win? Does Dana White get the champion of his dreams when Sean O'Malley sleeps his least favorite titleholder? Does Aljamain Sterling bequeath the bantamweight division to Merab Dvalishvili and ride off into the sunset with the UFC's favorite son in the ground? We know a few things already. Aljamain Sterling's striking, generally-speaking, falls somewhere on the axis between Unorthodox and Not Great. He's deceptively powerful, but his striking technique, particularly as the fight progresses and he gets tired, can be loose to the point of leaving him wide open to counters--which is real, real good for O'Malley's extremely quick, accurate counterpunching. Sean O'Malley's takedown defense, historically, is also not enormously great. He struggles with suffocating, in-your-face grappling pressure, which is where the mass of Petr Yan's offense came in their fight, and Sterling's greatest strength comes from dragging opponents through clinch trips and standing back takes until they let one through, at which point, on the ground, he has proven capable of dismantling anyone. O'Malley's best chances in this fight come from making Sterling chase him while he snipes him with jabs and crosses. If he can chip Sterling down, tire him out, and keep him from grappling range while they're both still fresh and dry, he's got a very good chance of stopping Sterling. And I don't believe for a second he'll do it. ALJAMAIN STERLING BY SUBMISSION. Universe, I am asking you to give us all this one. It's been a real rough year. CO-MAIN EVENT: HITTING RESET WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP: Weili Zhang (23-3, Champion) vs Amanda Lemos (13-2-1, #5) Boy, that sure was a lot. I may be overcompensating, because despite Women's Strawweight secretly being one of my favorite weight classes, I find I don't have a ton to say about this fight. I'm glad it's happening, I'm glad Weili's finally defending, but it's hard not to see it as a factor of the very weird position the UFC has nudged the division into. The company wanted Rose Namajunas vs Weili Zhang 3 for the belt and they couldn't put it together. So Weili got Joanna Jędrzejczyk--who is the all-time great and a legend of the sport, but who was also coming off a 2+ year layoff and retired immediately after Zhang crushed her--and Rose got Carla Esparza, who took home the belt after one of the most inscrutable fights in mixed martial arts history. Six months later, Weili did the inevitable, destroyed Carla, and restored her place on the throne. But that was almost a year ago. In the ten-plus months since last we saw Weili Zhang, her list of contenders has gotten weird. Carla Esparza went on hiatus to have a baby, which, hey, congratulations, good luck, and please don't raise them on your personal diet of Fox News. Rose Namajunas moved up to the flyweight division. Jéssica Andrade went from an obvious top contender to a three-fight losing streak across two separate divisions. But it's not all bad news, because Xiaonan Yan is riding the best victories of her career, setting up a possible all-China superfight, and Tatiana Suarez came back after almost four years on the shelf and was in the top five within just a few months. There are options! We are not doing those options. We're doing Amanda Lemos. I don't mean that to dismiss Amanda Lemos as a fighter. She's exceedingly tough, she's a killer as both a striker and a grappler, she's dropped people with jabs and choked out black belts, she's a danger to anyone in any aspect of mixed martial arts. The only people to ever beat her had to essentially kill her to do it, and she's riding two of the best performances of her entire career into her championship bout. Again: By no means a bad fighter, and by no means out of contention here in this fight. But less than a year and a half ago Jéssica Andrade squeezed her head off in under a round. And now Jéssica Andrade is nowhere near title contention. One fight before Andrade, Lemos was struggling with Angela Hill--who is nowhere near title contention--and probably should have lost a split decision that she instead won. One fight after Andrade, Lemos choked out Michelle Waterson-Gomez, who is amazing, talented, and 1 for her last 6--and that one victory was also, in fact, a split decision against Angela Hill. Lemos is getting this fight because she knocked out Marina Rodriguez. Which, to be clear, I do not have a single questionable thing to say about. She walked down one of the most successful, mobile boxers in the division and punched her out on her feet. Rodriguez may not have agreed with the stoppage--I'm ambivalent, personally--but that has no bearing on Lemos smashing her. It's by far the best victory of Amanda's career and it wholly justified her place in the rankings. But it also means, if we're being honest, that she got the title fight off of one victory. She got the title fight because the UFC couldn't get either of the people they wanted in the spot. She got the title fight and she's a +300 underdog because an awful lot of folks don't even know who she is, let alone have faith in her ability to win. I'm not one of the former, but regretfully, I am one of the latter. Lemos sees her best successes when she can use her power, her aggression and her hands to walk her opponents down. Weili Zhang does not get walked down. She is the walk-downer. Her striking is tight, compact and vicious, her wrestling is a persistent threat, and she's demonstrated both the power and cardio to stay dangerous throughout a fight. I like Amanda Lemos. I don't think this is her story. But I hope she gets another crack again someday. WEILI ZHANG BY TKO. MAIN CARD: LOADING A NEW SALVO WELTERWEIGHT: Neil Magny (28-10, #11) vs Ian Machado Garry (12-0, #13) With the O'Malley Ascension the UFC needs to reload the Conor McGregor Revolver, and no one is better suited to load that bullet than Neil Magny. Magny's been kicking around the welterweight rankings for almost an entire decade, and his continuing longevity, relevance and strength of schedule are all downright legendary. Unfortunately, so is his proclivity for getting stomped out of actual contendership. That's how the universe has chosen to balance him. He's a 6'3" welterweight with a solid jab, tight clinch wrestling and cardio enough to throw hundreds of punches in three rounds without breaking a sweat, but he doesn't carry much power, he doesn't have the greatest chin, and he has enough problems with pressure and specialization that he's seemingly philosophically incapable of beating fighters inside the top ten. But now, as he is finally aging into his late thirties, Magny is starting to struggle and grit out split decisions and third-round victories over the borderline fighters of the world. Which makes him a perfect target for Ian Machado Garry, which is funny, because the UFC wanted Garry to fight Geoff Neal, who arguably would have been a stiffer challenge for Garry's striking. Let me say this preemptively: Garry is a very good fighter. He's also a big 6'3" for the division, he's got exceptional timing behind his punches, and while the UFC gave him a real gentle first couple of fights, knocking out Song Kenan and Daniel Rodriguez is genuinely impressive. The problem with Ian Garry is not Ian Garry. The problem is the UFC calls him "The Future" and runs one-sided hype packages about how great he is and, when he's onscreen, puts up graphics like this just to make absolutely sure you don't miss what they're putting down:  And Garry plays his part. He gets his knockouts, he boosts Ireland, and he's just verbatim quoted Conor McGregor multiple times in post-fight interviews. The thing they're doing is not subtle. And neither is this fight. I will forever have a Neil Magny-shaped place in my heart, but he's been finally slowing down and having trouble with the new crop of fighters who are good at everything, heavy punchers, and, most importantly, actually his size. Despite the 6" reach advantage on Magny's side he's at a sizable disadvantage on the feet, and he, assuredly, knows that. Magny's going to want to put pressure on Garry in the clinch and Garry's going to want to keep him at bay and smack him with rights every time he comes in. Inevitably, one of them is going to get the job done. IAN GARRY BY TKO. BANTAMWEIGHT: Da'Mon Blackshear (14-5-1) vs Mario Bautista (12-2) Boy, I really hate this. If you read this on a weekly basis--which, hey, thanks!--you may be wondering if this is a re-run. It's not. Da'Mon Blackshear just fought last weekend, and he won in the first round by way of one of the rarest submissions in the sport, the Twister, and hey, he only took a handful of strikes from a world-class athlete, so gently caress it, why not take a fill-in fight on four days' notice one week later? It's great! The UFC will love you for it, and everyone will talk about what a badass you are. And all it costs is letting management know that you're more than happy to take no-notice, no-preparation fights for barely any pay, because hey, you're a warrior, and who ever went bust being a good company man for the UFC? But this sure does suck for Mario Bautista. After a rocky start in the UFC--which tends to happen when your company debut is against Cory goddamn Sandhagen--Bautista is on the best streak of his career, with four straight victories over people like Jay "The Joker" Perrin and 43 year-old Guido Cannetti. But he won the lottery, because the UFC decided he was an acceptable level of risk for a former champ they've been desperately trying to rehabilitate, Cody Garbrandt, giving Bautista the biggest fight of his life! Former world champion! Pay-per-view main card! The chance to strangle one of the most popular bantamweights in the world in front of an audience of tens of thousands of people streaming the show online without paying for it! Whoops. Sorry, Cody got hurt. Now instead of an extremely popular pocket brawler you're fighting a virtually unknown power grappler. You have 72 hours. Good luck. I'm still going with MARIO BAUTISTA BY DECISION, mostly because I think he's got faster hands and grappling defense enough to keep Blackshear from implementing his gameplan, but honestly, it's a fill-in fight with a guy who just fought last week and a guy who thought he was fighting a kickboxer until today. Chaos will dictate. BANTAMWEIGHT: Marlon Vera (22-8-1, #6) vs Pedro Munhoz (20-7 (2), #10) Hey, you know who has more ranked victories than Sean O'Malley? Both of these guys! You know who fought and did not lose to Sean O'Malley? Both of these guys! You know who's curtain-jerking the main card despite this and our theoretical human obligations towards honesty and decency? Both of these guys. But neither is in a good position for a title shot right now. Marlon "Chito" Vera was on one of the hottest streaks in the company, having knocked out Frankie Edgar, dropped Rob Font thirty or eighty times in a single fight and kicked Dominick Cruz's face off altogether, and the fans were so sufficiently, rabidly behind him that you probably could've jumped him to a title shot and few would have complained. But the UFC booked what should have been a title eliminator between him and Cory Sandhagen, and Sandhagen, as he does, dismantled Vera, outworking him so thoroughly that Vera simply couldn't conjure the kind of vicious offense he's known for. He spent the entire fight getting bullied, was taken down repeatedly, and was ultimately outstruck 187-73. And somehow, he still only lost a split decision, because the judging of our sport is a wild eldritch nightmare from which none can awake. Over that same period of time Pedro Munhoz had the worst run of his career. He beat Frankie Edgar in 2020 only to lose a tight decision anyway, he thankfully DID get an even more obvious nod over Jimmie Rivera, and then he got the brakes beat off him by José Aldo and Dominick Cruz, both of whom very adamantly proved that as good as Munhoz and his incredibly solid, gritty, orthodox approach is, it's not quite good enough to break into actual contendership. So the UFC tried to feed him to Sean O'Malley, and after one very close round where O'Malley crossed Munoz up with punches and Munhoz kicked the poo poo out of his legs, O'Malley downed him with the classical Greco-Roman eyepoke. So, of course, O'Malley went on to a title eliminator and a vacation awaiting a title shot, and Pedro got to defend his top ten berth against rising star Chris Gutierrez and now he's here to try to heat Marlon Vera back up for the UFC so they can achieve their secret dream of keeping Merab Dvalishvili as far away from their hopeful new champion as possible and book O'Malley/Chito 2 instead. But boy, I don't see this one being easy for Chito. I'm still picking MARLON VERA BY DECISION, but Munhoz is made of granite. He's never been stopped, he's barely been stumbled, and Vera's settled into a style of landing heavy, sniping shots instead of dictating the pace of the fight, and if he doesn't mix it up more, that could cost him badly here. His size, his kicks and his power should still make the difference, but he can't afford to get hypnotized like he did against Sandhagen. PRELIMS: PREEMPTIVELY LOOKING AWAY FROM THE SCREEN MIDDLEWEIGHT: Chris Weidman (15-6) vs Brad Tavares (19-8) Do you ever read a line and just begin wincing halfway through it? When I describe Chris Weidman I want to say "just a few short years ago he was one of the best fighters on the planet," but that wasn't just a few short years ago, that was 2015. Chris Weidman has two victories in the last eight years: Kelvin Gastelum, the least consistent good fighter in the sport, and Omari Akhmedov, who also struggled in the UFC--at welterweight. Over that timeframe Chris Weidman has been knocked out three times as often as he's won fights. The last time we saw him was in early 2021, when he swung a single leg kick at Uriah Hall and, in a moment of weirdly appropriate universal cyclicality, shattered his own leg and collapsed screaming. Brad Tavares hasn't been doing quite that badly, but he, too, has been down in the dumps. Which feels disrespectful, because, and I know I have beaten this drum before, I think Brad Tavares is underrated. He's been a successful, borderline-ranked middleweight in the UFC for thirteen goddamn years. Sticking around the UFC at all is an incredibly tough ask; staying relevant, even as a gatekeeper, is exceptional. But he's currently dealing with the worst run of his career: He's 2 for 6 over the last five years. Some of those losses are fully understandable--there's nothing wrong with getting outfought by Israel Adesanya or Dricus du Plessis--but struggling with Omari Akhmedov and getting barnstormed by Bruno Silva in one round is a considerably worse look. It pains me not to pick Chris Weidman to win this fight. He's bigger, he's stronger, he hits harder, he's a better grappler, he's got every advantage. He's also been knocked out in 75% of his recent fights, and the last time we saw him he snapped his leg in half, and he turned 39 two months ago. Brad Tavares is a tough out for anyone, and the people who tend to beat him, let alone stop him, are very mobile and able to deal with his pace. I just don't think Weidman has either of those things in him anymore. BRAD TAVARES BY TKO. MIDDLEWEIGHT: Gregory Rodrigues (13-5) vs Dennis Tiuliulin (11-7) It's amazing how a single bad loss can really kill your momentum. Gregory "Robocop" Rodrigues spent the last two years getting into the UFC and becoming an unexpected fan favorite, a ludicrously tough man who walked his opponents down with power punches and judo throws and was so thoroughly unstoppable that he at one point scored a knockout while a major artery was hanging out of a hole in his head. The must-see television nature of his fights and the toughness of his style earned him a ton of buzz. But I've said in the past that having a reputation for being incredibly tough is one of the worst things you can have as a fighter, and that's half because it means you're taking a ton of damage and half because the moment you DO get stopped, that hype evaporates. Rodrigues met Brunno Ferreira in his UFC debut this past January and got knocked cold in one round, and instantaneously, the conversation moved on. Dennis Tiuliulin, on the other hand, never really built momentum in the first place. He joined the UFC as a short-notice replacement fighter in 2022, he quickly established himself as a pressure fighter who wants nothing more than to walk people into clinch range where he can ruin them with knees, elbows and short uppercuts, and he equally quickly established himself as someone who has significant trouble actually accomplishing that in the UFC. He's 1-2, and that victory is over Jamie Pickett, one of the division's least successful fighters. He presents an interesting challenge for Rodrigues, in that he fights a similar style and may force Rodrigues to take him down if he wants an advantage, but for one, Rodrigues is more than capable of doing so, and for two, I'm not sure he'll have to because he seems a lot better at power-heavy pressure fighting than Tiuliulin is anyway. GREGORY RODRIGUES BY SUBMISSION. THE ULTIMATE FIGHTER LIGHTWEIGHT FINAL: Austin Hubbard (15-6) vs Kurt Holobaugh (19-7 (1)) Another season of The Ultimate Fighter has come and gone, and despite the UFC putting a lot of marketing weight behind it, it may have been the least useful season yet. The fight between coaches Michael Chandler and Conor McGregor looks like it's just never going to happen, because Conor can't be arsed to care about drug testing ever again, and the season's gimmick--UFC veterans looking for a second chance vs prospects hoping for a first--wound up being a bust, because the prospects all got washed out of the tournament thanks to a combination of skill levels, bad matchups, and being stuck with Conor McGregor's coaching. So the stars of the show aren't going to fight each other, the hot prospects of the show all got eliminated, and all four of your finalists are people who've already been cut from the UFC, three of them within just the last few years. The most important show in MMA history, my friends. Austin Hubbard, the first of our lightweight finalists, was a successful, 10-2 Legacy Fighting Alliance champion when the UFC picked him up back in 2019 for his hard-punching, quick-choking ways. He proceeded to go 3-4 and get cut in two years. He was tough, and he very hilariously stopped the rise of Bo Nickal prototype Max Rohskopf in its tracks AND scored a win over ironic nickname champion Dakota "Hairy" Bush, but he had nothing for folks like Joe Solecki or Vinc Pichel who, themselves, are continually bounced out of potential rankings. But he went back to the regionals and scored victories over "The Violent Hippie" Kegan Agnew and former Ultimate Fighter meme celebrity Julian "Let Me Bang, Bro" Lane, who is now 7 for his last 20 across four different combat sports, and hey, if that doesn't get you a shot at the UFC, I don't know what does. Kurt Holobaugh got a contract on the first-ever episode of Dana White's Contender Series, and as an incredible portent of what was to come from that show, his win was overturned shortly afterward when it turned out he'd illegally used IV rehydration to recover from his weight cut. The UFC, when reached for comment, elected to not give a gently caress. Kurt Holobaugh served his suspension, came back, and promptly lost three straight UFC fights and was cut in under a year. The company didn't do him any favors--he fought Raoni Barcelos, Shane Burgos and Thiago Moisés back to back, which is a hell of a murderer's row--but losses are losses and the house is not in the game of keeping people around. But two knockouts on the regional scene against fighters fed a steady diet of soft targets and, baby, you got a TUF competitor on your hands. I don't mean to poo poo on these fighters, they're talented and tough and they dealt with the idiocy of a TUF tournament schedule, but it's not like Holobaugh and Hubbard getting knocked out of the UFC is a distant memory, nor that they've done a ton to distinguish themselves in the few years since. Hell, almost all of the people they lost to are still on the roster. This entire season feels like it was built in the hopes of just putting Conor McGregor on television and hoping everything would work out, but at the end of the day you had a show no one watched and fighters no one was all that jazzed about the first time. And I like Kurt Holobaugh! But I don't like this show, and I don't like his chances against someone who can counter-grapple the way Hubbard can, and I don't know that either of them would be long for the UFC anyway. AUSTIN HUBBARD BY DECISION. THE ULTIMATE FIGHTER BANTAMWEIGHT FINAL: Brad Katona (12-2) vs Cody Gibson (19-8) Our bantamweight final, by contrast, has one of the only fighters I'm actually excited about. It was aggressively silly that Brad Katona got cut from the UFC in the first place. He was 8-0 and only one fight removed from winning The Ultimate Fighter 27 back in 2018, including victories over currently-relevant folks like Kyler Phillips and Bryce Mitchell, when he ran into the living brick wall that is Merab Dvalishvili, the current #1 ranked man in the division, and lost a very close decision to top prospect Hunter Azure, and--that was it. Two losses, both to very good fighters, and the UFC cut their most recent TUF champion barely a year after they crowned him. Which makes more sense when you realize he committed the egregious sin of wrestling too much. Katona spent the last two years crushing people out in Bahrain's BRAVE Combat Federation, and in what assuredly was in no way an admission of fault, the UFC brought him in for this season. Cody Gibson is our odd man out: He washed out of the UFC, but said washout was all the way back in 2015. Half of the people he lost to (hi, Manny Gamburyan!) are retired now, one of them is going-on-forty-year-old-violence-elemental Douglas Silva de Andrade, and the last was a debuting Aljamain Sterling, all the way back in February of 2014, when parachute pants were making a comeback and Pharrell's "Happy" was teaching us all new ways to feel irritated all of the loving time. He's had the most time to go fight out in the regional circuit, and consequently, he's put together an impressive 7-2 record in the eight years since last we saw him in the UFC. Unfortunately, he's also been able to demonstrate during that run that he still has as much difficulty with aggressive wrestling as he did back in those old UFC days, and, hey: Guess what Brad Katona is so good at that the UFC fired him for doing it too much. BRAD KATONA BY SUBMISSION. MIDDLEWEIGHT: Gerald Meerschaert (35-16) vs Andre Petroski (9-1) Oh, Gerald Meerschaert, what will I do when you're gone? Your walking-underwater punching, your unquenchable lust for guillotine chokes, your inexplicable ability to always seem tired yet never actually be gassed--I'm only now realizing you were one of my favorite fighters, all along, and I just did not appreciate you properly. Please forgive me. I know you got shellacked by Joe Pyfer last April, but I believe in you, buddy. I believe in your ability to choke out Andre Petroski. Sure, he's faster and he's actually pretty tough and he's been outwrestling people for the last several years so I admittedly have some particular worries about your ability to work your magic on him when he's probably slightly better than you at most of the things you're probably going to want to do to him, but hey: Bryan Battle choked him out, and that means you can do. Just try not to get punched too much. Or wrestled too much. Also, don't jump the guillotine like you sometimes do. And maybe be careful throwing out the body kick as freely as you like to do because he'll probably catch it. Okay? Okay! Your ham and turkey sandwich is in the paper sack next to your math textbook and I made a happy face with the mayonnaise but it's on the inside so you'll just have to trust me that it's there. Now go choke that motherfucker out. GERALD MEERSCHAERT BY SUBMISSION. WOMEN'S FLYWEIGHT: Andrea Lee (13-7, #13) vs Natália Silva (15-5-1, NR) Andrea Lee's life is loving difficult. In a more equitable world, Andrea Lee would still be a top ten fighter. She got boned out of a split decision back in 2020 against Lauren Murphy, and she got done dirty again in a split decision to frequent recipient of favorable judging Maycee Barber this past March in a fight where Dan Miragliotta looked at rounds where Lee outstruck Barber, wobbled her, took her down, controlled her for half the round and threatened to choke her out, and scored them for Barber, because MMA is a collective hallucination we've all agreed to pretend is real no matter how many times scientists try to reach in and wake us up by making the judges do things so asinine we should assume reality does not exist. And now Maycee Barber is on her way to title contention, and Andrea is defending her spot against one of the UFC's most promising prospects: Natália Silva, a genuinely good fighter on a five-year, nine-fight winning streak that now includes a very impressive 3-0 UFC record since her debut last summer. What's more, she's been doing it by just kicking people in the loving head. She outgrappled the very dangerous Jasmine Jasudavicius, she outlasted hyper-prospect Tereza Bledá and spinkicked her face off in the third round, and just this past May she met Victoria Leonardo, a woman who lasted almost two rounds with striking sensation and top flyweight contender Manon Fiorot, and Silva destroyed her in three minutes. The UFC knows Silva might actually be for real, and they know Lee is an incredibly tough customer. This is the prospect exit exam. Lee's exceptionally tough to finish: Never been knocked out and only submitted once, and that was back in 2016 when Lee was still barely a rookie. They also know Lee's best offense comes from her wrestling, and Silva's spent her last three fights stuffing almost all of the takedowns thrown at her by some legitimately talented grapplers. They're betting on her being able to stop Lee, and I'm betting they're not just right, but that they're going to get luckier than they think. NATÁLIA SILVA BY TKO. WOMEN'S FLYWEIGHT: Maryna Moroz (11-4) vs Karine Silva (16-4) This isn't entirely dissimilar from the previous fight, actually. Maryna Moroz is another of my longtime favorites, a hard-nosed grinder who would generally prefer to wrestle and choke her opponents, but who also, particularly in her last appearance this past November, demonstrated a complete willingness to march straight forward, walk through fire and put as many punches as possible in her opponent's face. Which is great! Except she got outboxed pretty badly and ultimately lost. But she's a constant rankings threat who after ten years and fifteen bouts has yet to be stopped and is rarely even visibly hurt. Which is why the UFC is giving her Karine "Killer" Silva, who, much like Juliana Miller from last week, is nicknamed to throw the authorities off from suspecting her actual murderous past, and most definitely is not nicknamed for having never let a victory reach a decision. She had a number of knockouts back in the Brazilian regional circuit--except most of those fights were against people who were 0-0 or worse, because, y'know, it's the Brazilian regional circuit--but she's become famous for her grappling during her time in the international spotlight. She strangled Chinese can crusher Qihui Yan on the Contender Series, she choked out Poliana Botelho in her UFC debut last year, and she welcomed Invicta champion Ketlen Souza to the UFC just two months ago by tearing her entire goddamn leg apart in under two minutes. I've been a big Maryna Moroz fan for a long time, and I have a great deal of faith in her grappling, but boy, I don't want to see her use it here. Silva is aggressively dangerous on the ground, and Moroz's top game, however stifling, is not a thing I would take a chance on here. I'm still leaning towards MARYNA MOROZ BY DECISION here in a slight upset, as I think Moroz's composure will let her keep the fight standing where she has the advantage, but if she shoots, or if Silva is able to get her down, this could end very, very quickly.
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Aug 16, 2023 20:53
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Oh, yeah. The push isn't his fault and it's only odious because the UFC is so selective about their effort. I don't hate Sean O'Malley for his push. The whole 'let's hang out with Andrew Tate post-sex trafficking arraignment' and 'let's do podcasts rating the fuckability of my female coworkers' things, though, well
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Aug 17, 2023 04:39
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I regret to report I am fully defecting to the Ian Garry side of the Magny conflict. https://twitter.com/iangarryMMA/status/1691966026026467820
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Aug 17, 2023 21:04
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Massive levels of overachievement in sycophancy. Also, we're 30 minutes out from UFC prelims, so head over to Digital Jedi's multi-GDT. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4039751
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Aug 19, 2023 23:00
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https://twitter.com/aaronbronsteter/status/1693138546721219039 Things are going to be so much dumber in a couple years.
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Aug 20, 2023 07:04
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BlindSite posted:It's kinda dumb really. I mean, objectively, no. Did he win and thus prove he's the #1 guy? Totally. Did he deserve the shot? Not really. The two can, and with more regularity are, becoming entirely separate things. We will have this conversation again in December when Sean O'Malley is fighting Marlon Vera instead of Merab Dvalishvili.
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Aug 20, 2023 07:15
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Josuke Higashikata posted:Adesanya losing at 205 really wasn't good for the MW division huh, how the gently caress is Strickland in a title fight. Basically, of the top ten,
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Aug 20, 2023 09:54
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Also, with Sterling losing the belt, the current roster of UFC champions has 8 title defenses between them and 5 of those defenses belong to Alexander Volkanovski.
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Aug 20, 2023 10:06
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beep by grandpa posted:Disclaimer: this post isn't meant to be disingenuous/inflammatory, genuinely asking for those who remember better, ty! So you could get real abstract with this, but I don't think you have to because there are three easy answers. One is the least matchmaking-centric but most obvious: The UFC promoted the gently caress out of O'Malley from day one. O'Malley has made one preliminary appearance in his entire UFC run, and it was the fight after his leg exploded and he pissed hot for ostarine and was gone for two years. Aljo was still on the prelims two fights before he was fighting for the title and he wasn't even headlining said prelims. The marketing engine has been 100% behind O'Malley since the beginning of his UFC tenure. Which isn't, in itself, a bad thing--effective marketing is good!--but it's a privilege very, very few fighters get, and it's basically just the ones the UFC really cares about. Two is the matchmaking. You're absolutely right that Pereira and Chandler had faster runs to the title, but for one, both of those runs were also widely criticized for exactly how fake and astroturfed they were, and for two, Pereira had the complicating factor of, at least, having knocked out Adesanya in kickboxing, which--like, it's still stupid, but at least it's something. More importantly, though: Pereira and Chandler both obliterated their contenders. Sean Strickland was the #4 middleweight on a six-fight winning streak when Pereira crushed him in one round, and Dan Hooker was the #8 lightweight who'd just won three fights and lost a war with Dustin Poirier when Chandler crushed him in one round. O'Malley did not have either of those things. Like, you said "most of his fights were cans leading up to the top 10," but he didn't actually get into the top ten. He fought three cans, somehow got ranked in the top fifteen out of it, then fought Pedro Munhoz, who was #10, on a two-fight losing streak and 1 for his last 5, and they stalemated for a round and then O'Malley poked his eye out for an NC. And off of that performance, Munhoz got booked to fight Chris Gutierrez in the fringe top fifteen and O'Malley got booked to fight the #1 guy in the division, and the rest is history. And three are the circumstances surrounding the title fight itself. Dana shits on everyone who sits around waiting for a title shot, but Sean O'Malley got his victory over Petr Yan last October and the UFC didn't even try to book him at any point in that interim, while every other bantamweight contender fought once or sometimes twice and, in some cases, are already booked for a third. They had him sit around and wait for a title shot so as not to jeopardize it, and they were so bent on it that when Aljamain rightfully pointed out that he'd defended the belt twice in that time and really needed more than three months to recover from injuries and actually prepare for a title fight, Dana White very publicly told him to get hosed and that Sean O'Malley was fighting for a championship either with him or without him. Like, the instant replay of Sean O'Malley's victory last night was sponsored by a partnership between the UFC and Sweet Sweat's personal sponsorship of Sean O'Malley. It is not subtle and they're not trying to be subtle about it.
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Aug 20, 2023 22:53
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COPE 27 posted:Who deserved it more though? My personal predilection? Sandhagen, easily. Sandhagen's loss to Aljo was less recent than O'Malley's loss to Chito, in the time since he had a coinflip decision against Dillashaw he probably should've won and a loss to Yan that was competitive but clear, and between those he murder-death-killed #1 contender Marlon Moraes, Song Yadong and former champ Frankie Edgar and then cruised all over Chito. If Merab doesn't want to fight, which is perfectly understandable, Sandhagen was way, way more justifiable than O'Malley. And even failing that, if you want to get a little wibbly with the matchmaking? Go back a few months and book Sterling against Chito. At the turn of the year Chito was on a 4-fight winning streak, had just handed Dominick Cruz the worst loss of his career, had an insane amount of momentum with the fans and, as a bonus, he fuckin' killed O'Malley. You could have booked Aljo vs Chito for the Spring or Summer and no one would've batted an eye at it. Pulling Cejudo out of mothballs for some reason was a comparatively baffling choice, and in the time it took to get that done they fed Chito to Sandhagen. Hell, if they were really hellbent on bringing Cejudo back, they could have done Sterling vs Chito or Sandhagen while they also ran Cejudo vs Yan or O'Malley. That would have either teed Cejudo up for a crack at the belt, rehabbed Yan back into contendership, or wholly justified O'Malley's contendership. But doing none of those things and just sitting out until they could book this match got them everything they wanted and probably made more money, so I am, to be clear, wholly aware I am mad about divisional structure the UFC super, duper does not give a gently caress about.
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Aug 21, 2023 01:29
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CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 72: DAWN OF THE DEAD SATURDAY, AUGUST 26 FROM THE SINGAPORE INDOOR STADIUM IN KALLANG, SINGAPORE  RIDICULOUSLY EARLY START TIME WARNING: PRELIMS 2 AM PDT / 5 AM EDT | MAIN CARD 5 AM PDT / 8 AM EDTThat's right, baby. It's the Singapore card the UFC's been trying to put on since last November. Chan Sung Jung's injuries delayed this card twice--these are the things that happen when you only have so many draws for the market--but we got here, and that means if you live anywhere in America, good luck. For me, this card begins three hours before McDonalds starts slinging hash browns, and that means I will almost certainly be unconscious for most of it. Which is a shame. I used to pride myself on staying up for--well, Pride. Some of my favorite MMA memories come from sitting bleary-eyed in front of a too-bright monitor at four in the morning watching Japanese MMA with other degens on IRC. But for one, that was a lot easier to do when I was 20, and for two, it was also a lot easier to motivate myself to stay up to watch Shinya Aoki vs Joachim Hansen and Gilbert Melendez vs Tatsuya Kawajiri. I'm sorry, Garrett Armfield, but it's just not the same. But whether you're snoozing through it and catching the results later, or you're getting up with coffee and catching what you can, or if you live in some other time zone where this card is actually convenient because for once it's not tied to Amerocentric time constraints, I hope you have a wonderful time and please extend my condolences to Chan Sung Jung when you see him.  still not sure how I feel about these, either. MAIN EVENT: AND ALL THAT COULD HAVE BEEN FEATHERWEIGHT: Max Holloway (24-7, #1) vs Chan Sung Jung (17-7, #8)This fight feels almost destined to be sad. This fight is what happens when you buy a delicious cake and think about how amazing and tasty it's going to be and then you forget to open it for five years and by the time you get around to it the cake is so far past its expiration date that it's entering its late thirties and no longer knows how to use its footwork to cut off the cage, nor can it rely on its once-legendary chin anymore. And it's a shame, because you could have eaten that cake at basically any point between 2013 and 2018 and it would have been the best loving cake you've ever had in your life. In 2013, Max Holloway was a young prospect and still so scary he forced Conor McGregor to become a wrestler, and Chan Sung Jung had just so worried José Aldo with his boxing that he had Aldo shooting double-legs. It would've been an amazing fight and a solid way for Holloway to skip the next three years of his career en route to the #1 spot. But Max had to grind and improve, and Jung had to, uh, abandon his mixed martial arts career to go serve his two years of mandatory military service as a South Korean citizen. And then those two years wound up being closer to four. It's very easy to say "losing four years of his prime cost Jung his chance at a championship," and I see it come up frequently, but I don't think it's fair. The Korean Zombie who came back in 2017 looked just as fast, punchy and vital as he ever had before his hiatus. He was exactly one second away from a clear decision victory over future #1 contender Yair Rodríguez before he walked into an inverted no-look elbow uppercut knockout, a thing that will almost assuredly never happen again in the sport, and even after that knockout he still crushed Renato Moicano and Frankie Edgar (before it was fashionable!) and perennial top ten fighter Dan Ige. It'd be just as easy to say the Brian Ortega fight portended Jung's future demise--Ortega, while strong as hell, is not the world's most technically sound striker, and Jung getting cracked so hard in the first round he was on autopilot for the entire rest of the fight doesn't indicate an enormously promising future. But the Ige fight came afterward, and showed Jung's ability to still hang at the top ranks. The actual ending, as with so many fighters of this era, came from Alexander Volkanovski. And in that, at least, these two fighters are linked. Because Max Holloway is still the second-greatest featherweight on the planet. And he's being forced to cope with the fact that, for now, that's the highest he can go. Over the last entire decade Max Holloway is 13-4. One of those losses was a 155-pound bout against Dustin Poirier, and the other three were all, one after another, losses to Alexander Volkanovski. In every other featherweight bout in that ten-year run Holloway was not only defeating the best fighters in the world, he was crushing them. He knocked out Anthony Pettis, he knocked out José Aldo twice, he punched Brian Ortega's face into pieces. He outworked Yair Rodríguez and outboxed Arnold Allen and he beat Calvin Kattar so badly that he was able to have a conversation with the cageside commentary team while he did it. He has proven, over and over, that he is one of the greatest featherweight fighters of all time. But he's not the greatest of this current time. And all of the hopes people had that Max might regain his throne were dashed permanently after that third match, because after two very close, competitive fights back in 2019 and 2020, the Volkanovski of 2022 turned out to have so thoroughly improved that he shut Max down completely in every aspect of the game, comprehensively outstriking him and leaving absolutely no doubt about who deserved the #1 spot. And it shocked people. And maybe it shouldn't have, because just three months beforehand Volkanovski had defended his title against Chan Sung Jung and handed him the worst beating of his life. No one expected Jung to win. He got the title fight because Holloway was recovering from an injury, he was widely agreed to be a +500 underdog, the world was realistic about his chances. But Jung had never been anything but competitive even in his losing efforts, and despite his fanbase entering the bout already in the Acceptance stage of grief, there was still some excitement about how he'd make Volkanovski fight for it. But that fight never materialized. Volkanovski handed him an absolutely one-sided thrashing, wobbling him in every round, kicking his legs into immobility, leaving Jung swinging at the air on 2/3 of his strikes, and simply hurting him, over and over, until Herb Dean had to step in to save Jung from his own durability. In his post-fight comments, Jung called Volkanovski "an insurmountable wall," and admitted that discovering just how great the gap was between them made him think about retiring. Judging Chan Sung Jung by that single fight, of course, is just as unfair as judging him by Ortega or Aldo. Getting destroyed by the best fighter in your weight class--arguably the best pound-for-pound fighter on the planet--is nothing to be ashamed of, and I'd have no concerns about Jung fighting anyone else in the top ten. But he's not fighting anyone else in the top ten. He's fighting Max Holloway, the second-best featherweight on the planet. A few years ago, I would have loved to see it. Now I just cannot help thinking about Jung's capacity for getting hit and Holloway's capacity for hitting people and feeling very, very concerned about how many hundreds of punches to the jaw Jung can take before he finally drops, because Max isn't going to play matador like Volkanovski did, he's going to drown Jung in offense. And the more Jung's age and mileage catch up with him, the worse that possible beating becomes. I hope this is a swan song. I hope this is the big, marquee fight Jung gets to go out on in front of his countrymen and his family. I hope his proclivity for finding unexpected accuracy and Max's tendency to get cracked for being overaggressive and overreliant on his own durability give him a few shining moments to enjoy. But MAX HOLLOWAY BY TKO seems almost academic. CO-MAIN EVENT: GAS IN THE TANK LIGHT-HEAVYWEIGHT: Anthony Smith (36-18, #8) vs Ryan Spann (21-8, #10) This match feels like the exact kind of baffling and unnecessary that the light-heavyweight division more or less subsists on now. Neither of these guys is in a great position, nor will this fight do much to get either into a better position, and it's a re-run of a fight that happened less than two years ago. Which was, in fact, Anthony Smith's last victory. After Glover Teixeira actually, un-hyperbolically punched Smith's teeth out and Aleksandar Rakić ground him into dust, Smith managed to work his way back up the ranks again with a three-fight winning streak that included choking out Devin Clark, kicking out Jimmy Crute's leg, and, in September of 2021, he fought Ryan Spann, dropped him with a right hand and choked him out in under a round. It was a fantastic performance, a solid victory, and a ticket back to contendership. But, boy, taking the ride didn't go well. It would be ten months before Smith fought again, and he was promptly trounced and pounded out by Magomed Ankalaev with relative ease; it would be ten MORE months before Smith stepped back in the cage, and this time he was dismantled by Johnny Walker. He's on a two-fight losing streak, he's being asked about retirement in just about every interview he does, and he's very, very annoyed about it. Ryan Spann was equally annoyed by his loss to Smith. There was bad blood between the two--which was not helped by Smith sarcastically asking Spann about the rear end-whooping he'd promised him seconds after choking him out, which nearly caused a post-fight brawl--and Spann took it out on his next opponents. He fought Ion Cuțelaba the following Summer and choked him out in just two minutes, and, much more depressingly, he fought former title challenger and rightful Jon Jones dethroner Dominick Reyes six months later, whom he knocked out with a jab in less than ninety seconds because Dominick Reyes is now more dream than reality. Much like Smith, they were good, solid wins. And much like Smith, that momentum immediately went to pot. This past March saw Spann take another crack at the top ten proper, this time against Nikita Krylov, and Spann's aggressive attempts at grappling and choking Krylov led to predictable disaster, as Krylov choked him out in a single round. So you've got two guys, one of whom is barely clinging onto the edge of his top ten ranking and the other of whom has never gotten further in, and they already fought in extremely recent memory, and the fight had an extremely definitive ending, and we're running it back anyway, because gently caress, man, what else can you do with light-heavyweight right now? The champion was slain by a basketball, Jiří Procházka is off fighting zombie ghosts in Phuket while his bones mend, Magomed Ankalaev is fighting five spots down and Aleksandar Rakić is still getting his robot knees put in. So why not? Sure, neither fighter has shown any signs of changing, but it's light-heavyweight, so who's to say Spann doesn't beat him this time? Me. I am saying it. It is I, the sayer, saying. ANTHONY SMITH BY THE SAME poo poo AS LAST TIME. Or he gets knocked cold in ten seconds. It's light-heavyweight. The division is a ripple in the bottom of a tuna can. MAIN CARD: DERAILED TRAINS FEATHERWEIGHT: Giga Chikadze (14-3, #9) vs Alex Caceres (21-13 (1), #15) I have a strange sort of nostalgia for Giga Chikadze despite his UFC career being extremely recent, and it wasn't until Sean O'Malley's title victory this past weekend that I understood why: Giga is, quite possibly, the last attempt the UFC made at moving someone up the ranks the traditional way. He didn't skip the line, he didn't ride an array of easy matchups to the main event. He came in as a talented kickboxer with only mild MMA experience, he was given a steadily growing level of difficulty in his matchups, and he excelled, and after knocking Cub Swanson and Edson Barboza dead back to back, Giga rolled into 2022 as one of the biggest hype trains in the sport. And then, fifteen days into the year, Calvin Kattar beat him silly and collapsed the track in front of him. And that's it! He spent a year rehabbing injuries and recovering from multiple surgeries, and he's spent all of 2023 waiting for a fight. He was, initially, going to be main-eventing this card--back when it was planned for February. But Chan Sung Jung has bigger fish to fry, and Bruce Leeroy wants to take his recent winning streak to the next level. Alex Caceres is one of the longest-tenured fighters on the UFC roster, having made his (exhibition) debut on The Ultimate Fighter 12 back in 2010, and somehow, thirteen years later, he's not only still here, he's only now reaching his true potential. The first nine goddamn years of his tenure involved constant swapping between wins and losses, his loose, grappling-focused style regularly getting him into trouble against stiffer strikers, stronger wrestlers, or, every once in awhile, grapplers who were just plain better than he was. It was only when he crossed his first decade and 20 fights in the company--both of which, I must again reiterate, are batshit statistics--that he finally put it together. He's been disciplined, he's been careful, and he's 7 for his last 8, with the only loss coming to Sodiq Yusuff. Which is, funnily enough, who Giga was supposed to fight last year before his long-term injury layoff, and in some ways, despite Yusuff beating Caceres, I would've felt more confident in Giga's chances against him. Giga's best performances have come against fighters who were predominantly strikers and thus people he could engage with his greatest strength. Caceres is never going to win a pure kickboxing match with Giga Chikadze, but he doesn't get into pure kickboxing matches. His creativity, his ability to mix his striking and grappling, and his ridiculous durability make him a surprisingly difficult on-paper match for Giga--and that's before we wonder how much of an impact a 19-month layoff will have. Calling for the upset: ALEX CACERES BY SUBMISSION. BANTAMWEIGHT: Rinya Nakamura (7-0) vs Fernie Garcia (10-3)I'm gonna go back a month, real quick. CarlCX posted: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. And, truly, who is Fernie Garcia if not the new Mr. International. By which I mean that after this fight he will have fought in precisely two separate nations. Fernie had a fair bit of hype for his 2022 debut, thanks half to his wins in the LFA and half to his Big Right Hand knockout on the Contender Series, which is still the quickest way to please the bloodthirsty monsters who like this sport. Unfortunately, it's all been downhill from there. His debut was spoiled by Journey Newson--he is, in fact, Newson's only UFC victory in six attempts--and his sophomore comeback saw him almost knock out Brady Hiestand only to be outwrestled and outgrappled for the rest of the fight. The Fernie era--the Fernera, if you will--is in jeopardy, as one more loss here makes the dreaded three in a row. ...so, uh, RINYA NAKAMURA BY SUBMISSION. Garcia has already proven vulnerable to wrestling, Nakamura has plenty of it, and he's also a much tighter, more dangerous grappler than Hiestand. He is, however, vulnerable here, mostly through his own aggression. Rinya likes to throw caution to the wind and swing away at people, and he's been fortunate enough not to run into anyone who can make him pay for it. Fernie is absolutely that guy. If Rinya fights to his strengths, he should put this one away. If he fights cocky, he's getting dropped in a round. WOMEN'S FLYWEIGHT: Erin Blanchfield (11-1, #3) vs Taila Santos (19-2, #4) The venn diagram of times I say "I don't understand what the UFC's marketing is trying to do" and "I am mad about the UFC's booking of their women's divisions" is god damned near a circle. So, you've got Erin Blanchfield. Huge grappling threat to absolutely everyone at women's flyweight and, arguably, even higher, to the point that Blanchfield vs Julianna Peña was one of the matches the UFC floated for the newly-vacant Women's Bantamweight Championship. She's an undefeated 5-0 in the UFC, she notched that run in less than two years, and the UFC seemingly has no goddamn idea what they're doing with her. They knew she was the next big thing, because they threw Molly McCann at her after spending an entire year making McCann the secondary face of their new British invasion, but they did it in the dead middle of a preliminary card, so only half the audience saw it. They tried to fix that error by booking this fight as a main event back in February, but Taila couldn't get her visa together, so Blanchfield had to settle for effortlessly walking through Jéssica Andrade in two rounds instead. Which was a killer for Taila, whose cache with the fans had never been higher. Taila had been toiling in the UFC for three years when, on the strength of a four-fight winning streak--that, funnily enough, also began with Molly McCann--she got her shot at the queen. She came into her June 2022 showdown with flyweight champion Valentina Shevchenko as a +500 underdog, and she shocked the world by outgrappling Valentina, ragdolling her repeatedly, and taking her the distance, where she lost an exceptionally close split decision. Which was loving huge. Shevchenko had crushed everyone in her path for almost five years, the world had no expectations for Taila whatsoever, and even having lost, simply coming that close to unseating Valentina made her a point of interest for the fanbase. So, just to recap: This is a fight between the #3 and #4 fighters at this weight class, either of whom could easily be fighting for the title with a victory, and both women are coming off the most visible fights of their careers, and the UFC had this fight initially planned to be a main event. It's now second from the bottom on a television card airing live from Singapore. It's slightly more important than Parker Porter, but not as important as Fernie Garcia. This fight, which could easily be crowning a woman the UFC will use to sell pay-per-views in a championship bout, will be airing somewhere around 5:30 AM for half of the UFC's primary audience. Everything is stupid and we are all damned. ERIN BLANCHFIELD BY DECISION. HEAVYWEIGHT: Junior Tafa (4-1) vs Parker Porter (14-8) But who cares about that, we've got HEAVYWEIGHTS. Junior Tafa is here because Parker Porter got knocked out by his older brother six months ago. That's it. That's the fight. Tafa made his UFC debut this past April against The Ultimate Fighter 30 (jesus christ) winner Mohammed Usman, where he was clearly the better striker and clearly closer to finishing the fight, and it didn't matter whatsoever because Usman just sort of chucked him on the ground in the latter two rounds and Tafa had no answer for the forbidden art of 'being competent at wrestling.' Because this is heavyweight, and as long as you can do one thing pretty well, you'll probably be able to win at least one fight in the UFC. Parker Porter is the kind of heavyweight who, debatably, does not do one thing all that well. He does a bunch of things in a fashion I would call 'pretty okay,' though. He's an awkward striker, but he's willing to march forward and put pressure on people, and it makes his hands work. He's not a great wrestler, but he's strong enough that he can kind of fake it. He's tough and hard to stop--unless you're Justin Tafa, in which case you can knock him cold in a minute while he's lunging at you because you know how counterpunches work. The good news, though, is Parker Porter looks better than ever, having just scored his first-ever finish in the UFC in his last fight! The bad news is that finish was over Braxton Smith, a regional heavyweight making his UFC debut who gassed in about ninety seconds, got pounded out shortly thereafter, got his license revoked for two years for failing a steroid test, and was promptly fired. You could have just kept Chase Sherman around, you know. You had that power. But here we are instead, making Parker Porter fight a pair of brothers. Is Junior Tafa as solid a striker as Justin Tafa? I don't think so. Is he good enough to also light Parker Porter up like an alliterative Christmas tree? Almost certainly. JUNIOR TAFA BY TKO. PRELIMS: SALSA BOY RIDES AGAIN HEAVYWEIGHT: Waldo Cortes-Acosta (9-1) vs Łukasz Brzeski (8-3-1 (1)) Salsa Boy. SALSA. BOY. See, this is the magic unfairness of the heavyweight division. I devote at least forty-three paragraphs a month to moaning and whining about how bad the 265-pound boys are, in the mass spectrum of fighting, and this really isn't any different. Waldo Cortes-Acosta struggled mightily with Jared Vanderaa, a guy who got knocked out by Chase Sherman, and then he struggled mightily with Chase Sherman, and then his mighty 2-0 winning streak came to an end courtesy of Marcos Rogério de Lima, who was most recently seen getting his face crushed by a Derrick Lewis flying knee in thirty seconds, which is a baffling sentence in at least five unique ways. Łukasz Brzeski has, somehow, had even worse fortunes. His contract-winning submission over Dylan Potter on the Contender Series was overturned after Brzeski failed a steroid test, his year-delayed UFC debut led to a fight with the fast-rising Martin Buday that, in all honesty, Brzeski SHOULD have won, but the split decision went against him, and then career light-heavyweight Karl Williams jumped up a class and completely, one-sidedly rolled him. So all of my complaints apply here. Neither of these guys are in great positions. Waldo Cortes-Acosta is ten fights into his career and still doesn't seem to know how to defend against leg kicks. Łukasz Brzeski is a promising Polish prospect who's 0-2 (1) under the UFC's corporate banner and could very easily get cut if he loses. This fight is a living proof of my antipathy for the division. But his name is Salsa Boy and he punches people, and at heavyweight, by god, sometimes that's all it takes. WALDO CORTES-ACOSTA BY DECISION. BANTAMWEIGHT: Toshiomi Kazama (10-3) vs Garrett Armfield (8-3) The UFC is really trying to get as much mileage as possible out of the effort they put into that Road to UFC tournament last year--which is weird, because, honestly, they really could have put that effort into THIS year's Road to UFC 2, which started with almost no fanfare three months ago and is, in fact, holding its second round the day after this card with even less fanfare. The mind boggles. Toshiomi Kazama, a grappler by trade, got very lucky and skipped the entire penultimate round of his bracket after Korea's Road FC champion Min Woo Kim disqualified himself from the tournament for missing weight. Kazama's luck then immediately ran out, as Rinya Nakamura atomized him in the finals with a thirty-three second knockout. Knockouts are, in fact, the only way Kazama has lost since his first rookie fight. Which is potentially problematic, because Garrett Armfield has scored five of his eight victories by way of vicious, violent punching. Granted, most of those were also rookie fights against folks with records like 0-3 and 3-8, but hey, knockouts are knockouts, right? No. They are not. Please do not answer yes to that question, it means Dana White has won. Kazama's problems tend to come from fast, explosive strikers, where Armfield is more of an orthodox boxer, and Armfield's problems tend to come from faster, stronger grapplers with aggressive submission games, which is the entirety of Kazama's being. TOSHIOMI KAZAMA BY SUBMISSION. MIDDLEWEIGHT: Chidi Njokuani (22-9) vs Michał Oleksiejczuk (18-6 (1))This fight is the UFC's act of love and mercy to its fighters. Chidi and Michał are both devastatingly powerful, vicious strikers who excel at sniping and countering their opponents from a distance, and they have both managed to lose all of their momentum as killing machines thanks to fights with powerful grapplers and wrestlers who shut them down, pounded them out or forced them to submit by cruelly engaging them in the illegal art known as Nor do we give them favorable matchups. Oleksiejczuk is powerful as hell, but so is Chidi, and Chidi is a much longer striker with half a foot of reach on his side. Michał's going to have to reach and push to get to him, and it's going to cost him. CHIDI NJOKUANI BY TKO. WELTERWEIGHT: Song Kenan (19-7) vs Rolando Bedoya (14-2) Sometimes, the company decides it's just sort of done with you. Song Kenan got a pretty gentle set of matchups from the UFC--minus a failed test against Alex Morono--presumably as an attempt to build him as a star for the Chinese market. But apparently they're just fine now, because boy, the gloves are off. In 2021 they gave him Max Griffin and he got dropped in one round, and after two years of recovering and retraining, they welcomed him back with their brightest new star, Ian Machado Garry, and catapulted him into the ratings off of his third-round knockout over Song. With two back to back stoppage losses, this would, theoretically, be the time to rebuild. Instead, the UFC has him fighting Rolando "The Machine" Bedoya, a Peruvian fighter who made a short-notice UFC debut against Khaos Williams just three months ago and took one of the division's most dangerous punchers to an exceedingly close split decision that, while not a robbery, could easily have coinflipped Bedoya's way thanks to his many multitudes of kicks, his surprisingly calm combinations, and his you-goddamn-young-people ability to eat a Khaos Williams haymaker and just smile. It's a tough loving matchup for Song Kenan. He's powerful, but we've seen Bedoya deal with serious power and shrug it off. If Bedoya can keep Song on the outside, he can pick him apart with kicks and chip him down at will. ROLANDO BEDOYA BY DECISION. WELTERWEIGHT: Yusaku Kinoshita (6-2) vs Billy Goff (8-2)Rizin, the current iteration of Japan's PRIDE revival--which is only ten events and two years away from outlasting PRIDE, for the record, which is both pleasant and terrifying--decided to switch things up a couple of years ago, holding its first-ever event in a cage rather than a ring. For the most part it went off without a hitch, but one fighter knew the deep lore of mixed martial arts and the proper use of the cage: Making like Wes Sims in 2003 and holding the cage for leverage while you stomp the absolute poo poo out of your supine opponent's face. Because Rizin is Rizin, this caused a DQ, because stomping his face might have been legal, but daring to hold the cage while you do it was just a bridge too far. That fighter was Yusaku Kinoshita, and that was how he lost his rookie undefeated streak. He won back some prospect momentum (and a UFC contract) after a knockout on the Contender Series last year, but promptly got grounded out by Adam Fugitt, who I will admit I had already forgotten existed after his PPV spotlight a couple months ago. Billy Goff is your debuting Contender Series winner, a sentence that's losing more and more meaning as the roster is gradually replaced entirely by them. He was both the welterweight and middleweight champion of Classic Entertainment And Sports MMA before trading in both belts for his shot at the big time, thanks to his style of "walk at you while punching you" and "occasionally take you down while also punching you." He's real, real into the punching of you. Which means this stands a real good chance of being a big, fun brawl. YUSAKU KINOSHITA BY TKO. He's demonstrated greater power and his punches seem a bit cleaner, but with sufficient levels of violence, anything is possible. WOMEN'S FLYWEIGHT: Na Liang (19-6) vs JJ Aldrich (11-6) I have this thing about over-focusing on records, but sometimes, the sport requires it. Na Liang probably seemed like an excellent pickup for the UFC, as a young, marketable woman who could help them further cement a hold on the Chinese market they've been desperately trying to break into for years, and at 19-4, she already had the record of a champion! Except if you actually look at her record, almost everyone she's defeated in her career is a rookie. Her last fight before joining the UFC, the twenty-third professional bout of her career, was against an 0-0 fighter who never fought again. She has one victory over anyone that could be considered real competition in her life. Every other time she's stepped up to internationally recognized competition, she hasn't just lost, she's gotten crushed. This pattern has only accelerated in the UFC: In her 2021 debut she got pounded out by Ariane Carnelossi after visibly gassing out in one round, and last summer she was knocked flat by Silvana Gomez Juarez in under a minute and a half--the only UFC victory for Juarez, who was released later for being 1-3. And it leaves you wondering what could have been, because Na Liang is by no means untalented or unworthy of the sport. She's an aggressive wrestler with a genuinely dangerous grappling game. But seven years of almost exclusively fighting women who posed no threat to her has left her deeply unprepared for the realities of real, international competition. And now she's fighting JJ Aldrich, a once-hyped prospect who, herself, has had a difficult 7-5 run in the UFC, and who herself is on a two-fight losing streak and struggling to keep her job. She's a grinder and a clincher and she hasn't finished a fight since 2016. But boy, if Na Liang's previous performances are any indicator, she'll probably finish this one. It's always possible Liang catches her in a random choke or armbar, but it's a lot more plausible she's exhausted by round two and pounded out by three. JJ ALDRICH BY TKO. FEATHERWEIGHT: Seung Woo Choi (10-6) vs Jarno Errens (13-4-1) Seung Woo Choi is maybe the best fighter in the company who's about to get cut anyway. Choi's going on four and a half years with the UFC, and a 3-5 record in that span doesn't look great on paper, but in practice? He made his debut against undefeated top-ten featherweight Movsar Evloev and went the distance with him, he almost made it to a decision against the ultra-dangerous Gavin Tucker, he repeatedly stung Alex Caceres on the feet (although he also illegally kneed the crap out of his face) before getting submitted, he took Josh Culibao to a split decision and he got dropped by the unjustly-released Mike Trizano. All of those losses are deeply, deeply respectable. And between them he knocked the gently caress out of Julian Erosa. Jarno Errens, a year into his UFC tenure, is a less-known quantity. Even his run-up to the UFC was irregular--where most come in on the back of momentum-building winning streaks, he had a draw, a win, a loss and a win, and might not have been pulled into the company at all had he not been a convenient international talent for the UFC's big Paris party for Ciryl Gane. But he made it, and was promptly, dutifully defeated by the incredible power of French Wrestling, much to the crowd's approval. Which leaves me a bit puzzled about this fight. From the tape on his previous fights I know Errens is a solid striker, but he didn't get to show any of it off and his performances are inconsistent enough that I don't know which Errens we'll get on a given day. He's not bad off of his back, but Choi is deeply unlikely to want the fight on the ground in the first place. In the event of a prolonged standup battle, I'm going with SEUNG WOO CHOI BY DECISION.
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Aug 23, 2023 21:30
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Also now that I am not facedeep in writing and can catch up:DO YALL WANT A BOXC posted:Bantamweight has an incredibly strange history in the UFC/WEC. This fuckin' ruled and it made me think again about how much of the MMA consciousness Miguel Torres used to occupy as the guy pointed to as one of the absolute best in the world, and it's not just that he lost and retired, it's that his failure to figure into the UFC's adoption of the weight classes at all just paved so thoroughly over his memory that he's a total afterthought now. LobsterMobster posted:
Thank you for your service and the whole Shane Burgos thing is still just some incredible bullshit and I hope Clay Collard punches him extra just to make Donn Davis mad.
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Aug 23, 2023 21:44
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I'll have more to say in tomorrow's regularly scheduled writeup, but while I'm by no means saying the debuting talent on this Parisian fight card is necessarily bad, I am saying there's an 8-0 Cage Warriors champion making his debut whose first five opponents had a combined record of 5-75.
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Aug 29, 2023 23:58
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 Regional fight scenes, baby.
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Aug 30, 2023 02:56
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cagliostr0 posted:That record after the cancelled bout doesn't seem very lamentable, they just have him some cans before making him fight for real to sure up his confidence See, that's where it gets interesting to me, because the problem is those same people are coming from the same scene. So you've got:
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Aug 30, 2023 03:36
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CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 73: BREAKFAST IN PARIS SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 2 FROM THE SINGAPORE INDOOR STADIUM IN KALLANG, SINGAPORE EARLY START TIME WARNING: PRELIMS 9:30 AM PDT / 12:30 PM EDT | MAIN CARD 12 PM PDT / 3 PM EDTYou know, the UFC holds International Fight Week in July, but somehow, International Fight Week is just a bunch of poo poo happening in Las Vegas while all the executives have parties. Last week's UFC was in Kallang, this week's UFC is in Paris, and next week's UFC is in Sydney. We are in the middle of multiple, actual international fight weeks. And do we get parties? No. We get a card full of debuting French people you may or may not ever see again. Enjoy your complementary Morgan Charriere fight, free with purchase of one Ciryl Gane.  ALL THE STARS ARE HERE MAIN EVENT: WRESTLING LESSONS HEAVYWEIGHT: Ciryl Gane (11-2, #2) vs Serghei Spivac (16-3, #7) Oh, hey, Ciryl Gane. It feels like it's been half a year since last we saw you. I forget, what was going on back then? CarlCX posted:CIRYL GANE BY TKO. Look, it's a Jon Jones fight. Anything can happen, up to and including the fight never actually starting because Jones shot up a Vegas nightclub after the weigh-ins. If Jones can consistently catch Gane's kicks, or get inside and force him to fight at length in the clinch, Gane's in trouble. But Gane's control of range, Jones' historical trouble with anyone who can outbox him and the reality of having to fight a heavyweight who hits as hard as a heavyweight can for the first time make me desperately, desperately hope that finally, once and for all, we get to see Jon Jones eat poo poo. Jon Jones hasn't learned from a single mistake in his life and I'm hoping he'll continue that practice here. Here's the thing: I'm not an optimist, I'm an optimistic realist. I like to find the best plausible outcomes and hope deeply that they will happen. Did I think it was plausible that Ciryl Gane could beat Jon Jones? Absolutely. Did I think it was necessarily likely? Middlingly so, at best. Do I think it's shameful for Ciryl Gane to get outwrestled by Jon Jones? Absolutely not. Olympic medalists get outwrestled by Jon Jones. There's no shame in that. But there's a teensy bit of shame in being unequivocally one of the best kickboxers in MMA heavyweight history and having your entire performance in the biggest fight of your career consist of a few halfhearted jabs to the abdomen and then a naked left hand so awkward it actually spins you, the world championship kickboxer, around in place, leaving you conveniently exposed for your murder-grappler of an opponent. Losing to Jon Jones is natural, even if you're the #2 heavyweight in the UFC. Becoming one of the fastest, easiest fights in the UFC career of Jon Jones, when you are the #2 heavyweight in the UFC? Arguably, that's just a natural part of cementing heavyweight's true place as the best comedy division in combat sports. But boy, it sure doesn't look or feel great for your legacy. Like, getting outwrestled by Francis Ngannou, the actual #1 heavyweight on the planet? That's deeply excusable, because all of four people anticipated the sport's biggest puncher turning into a machine that spits out double-leg takedowns. Jon Jones? You had to know exactly what he wanted to do, and you had to have access to the numerous fights of his where people who could keep him at range gave him fits and, in at least one case, beat him in what was pretty clear to everyone who wasn't an official mixed martial arts judge. So when you come into your heavyweight championship fight with one of the most popular fighters in the history of the sport, with a clear blueprint on how to apply your skills against him, and you promptly footwork yourself back into the cage, throw lunging punches and get immediately ragdolled, that raises questions. Questions about if you can beat powerful wrestlers, or if, whether it be skill, performance anxiety or just bad luck, you have an Achilles heel. Sometimes, you have no choice but to answer those questions. Ciryl Gane, unfortunately, just doesn't have any strikers left to fight. Sergei Pavlovich is ranked above him and is deservedly awaiting the winner/waiting to be the drama-cancellation backup for Jones vs Miocic later this year. Tom Aspinall just made his comeback. Gane already beat Tai Tuivasa, Alexander Volkov, Derrick Lewis, and, just for good measure, Jairzinho Rozenstruik, currently ranked #12. There isn't a single striker left in the heavyweight top fifteen for him. He has no choice. He must wrestle. And no one in the division is more singlemindedly wrestling-focused than Serghei Spivac. Spivac's been in the UFC for almost half a decade, but it feels as though his entire career happened over just the last year and a half. When he joined the UFC back in 2019 as an undefeated Ukrainian champion and got absolutely flattened by Walt Harris in under a minute, it sort of consigned him to the great gray void the fanbase uses to store fighters they don't have any reason to believe in. That void was Spivac's home for years, and he couldn't get out of it. It didn't matter when he impressed people--choking out Tai Tuivasa, outgrappling Aleksei Oleinik--because he'd still get ground out by Marcin Tybura or nuked by Tom Aspinall, and that was that. But he was able to capitalize on one of the greatest things the UFC's fanbase ever collectively did: Completely and utterly reject Greg Hardy. Greg Hardy, for those who have thankfully forgotten, was Dana White's pet project to an extent rivaled only by Sean O'Malley. He was an American Football player who'd gotten suspended and ultimately dropped from his team thanks to a case of domestic violence that was auspicious even by the unfathomably low standards of the National Football League--although, it should be noted, not so auspicious that the Dallas Cowboys did not sign him for awhile afterwards, because gently caress you, we're Texas--and then he got bored of sports that disagreed with his pro-beating-people stance and decided to switch to mixed martial arts, where it would be encouraged. He was in the UFC at 3-0. He got immediately disqualified for throwing an illegal knee, but he got more chances anyway. He got a fight expunged after, incredibly, thinking it was okay to use an inhaler between rounds; he got re-signed to a new contract. He went 2-3 on his new deal, but by god, Dana White was not going to give up. So he gave him Serghei Spivac--a guy who'd had trouble with knockout artists before, a guy who was coming off just being crushed in one round. They would rehab Greg Hardy on Spivac's bones. And then Spivac just beat the absolute dogshit out of him. He chucked him to the ground three times and punched him senseless in two minutes, and in so doing, dealt Hardy the dreaded third loss in a row and drummed him out of the company. And the fanbase loved him for it, because no one loving liked Greg Hardy. So the UFC gave him another match with another striker they kind-of sort-of wanted to rehabilitate, but this time, they cared an awful lot less: Augusto Sakai. Midway through 2020 Augusto Sakai was 15-1-1 and looked like a real prospect. By August of 2022, he had lost three straight knockouts. Spivac did what was necessary: Grabbed him, chucked him, punched him until candy came out. It was neither competitive nor close, and one way or another this seemed to be working, so the UFC did it one more time--this time, at the biggest scale yet. Derrick Lewis, a two-time title contender and all-time knockout king, was also on the ropes, having gone 1 in 4 and taken all three losses by knockout. Once again, the UFC wanted to either rehabilitate a striking star or condemn him; once again, they picked Serghei Spivac; once again, Spivac lifted a terrifying man like a sack of potatoes and hurled him to the ground with ease. It only took three minutes for Spivac to choke Lewis out, giving him, at last, a win that propelled him into the top ten and the great contendership conversation. But what do you do with Serghei Spivac after that? What's next? Well, hey, what do you know: A fallen striking star the UFC wants to figure out if it needs to rebuild or melodramatically destroy. Make no mistake: The UFC needs help making up its mind. My earlier-stated highly-scientific breakdown of the available heavyweight division is defeated by the reminder that the UFC absolutely does not give a gently caress. Sean O'Malley got a title eliminator for poking Pedro Munhoz in the eye. Sean Strickland has a title shot next week because he beat a guy with one UFC fight. If the UFC wanted to protect Ciryl Gane, they absolutely had that option. They could have waited for someone to become available, or, hell, they could have booked Ciryl Gane vs Andrei Arlovski or Jake Collier or Chase loving Sherman if they really wanted to. I assure you the Parisian audience is not buying tickets for Serghei Spivac, and I promise you the UFC would not lose any sleep over booking a matchup that didn't make any rankings sense. No, Ciryl Gane costs money. He's got actual leverage, he's got actual promotion, and if the UFC's going to keep paying him, let alone putting marketing money behind him as an international star, they want to make sure he's worth the investment. If he happens to get dusted by a Moldovan wrestler who costs 1/10 as much money to book, hey: That's just fine, too. So that's the theory of this fight. I like Serghei Spivac a great deal, but it takes a "the sky is blue" level of observational power to note that he's no match for Ciryl in the striking department. This fight hinges entirely on whether Ciryl Gane is finally prepared to stop a powerful, talented wrestler from taking him down, and how well he can punish that wrestler's attempts at taking him out of his own element. Can he do it? Is this the fight where Ciryl Gane finally ascends and becomes a well-rounded heavyweight title contender? Nope! SERGHEI SPIVAC BY SUBMISSION. Spivac's a big loving problem for Gane: He's large, he's strong, and he's just as comfortable executing a technically beautiful ashi-garuma throw as he is just using brute strength to hoist a motherfucker up and drop them, and he will do it, over and over, until it sticks. Derrick Lewis is an actually talented wrestler, and Spivac threw him down six times in three minutes. If Gane has done nothing but wrestle for the last six months and he comes out looking prepared for anything, I'll be deeply happy. But I'm so, so very rarely happy. CO-MAIN EVENT: TESTING THE WATERS WOMEN'S FLYWEIGHT: Manon Fiorot (10-1, #2) vs Rose Namajunas (11-5, #2 at Strawweight) I'm not gonna lie: This fight actively angers me. It's not because I dislike either fighter; I'm a big fan of both. I've had my eye on Manon Fiorot as a possible title contender for the last couple of years and anyone who likes mixed martial arts and doesn't like watching Rose Namajunas fight is an impossible stranger to me. These are both talented, world-class fighters with a fantastic amount of skill, and this fight between them could be very, very good. And that does not make it anger me any less, because, boy, in the context of this division, this fight sucks. Manon Fiorot is the rightful #2 contender at women's flyweight. She's a perfect 5-0 in the UFC, she made her debut behind two devastating finishes over well-regarded competition, and the UFC was more than happy to market a strong, scary French striking lady who kept very conveniently beating the poo poo out of everyone. When she was matched up with seemingly permanent 125-pound contender Katlyn Chookagian last October she came in as a sizable -225 favorite, and she justified the bill by outstriking Chookagian and winning a solid decision. She was the rightful top contender, and a fight with world champion Valentina Shevchenko seemed inevitable. And then, instead of calling out Valentina, she talked about wanting to fight Alexa Grasso--or Rose Namajunas. Which was baffling, because not only was Rose Namajunas not a flyweight, no one was even sure if they were going to see her again. Rose, long one of the most popular women in the sport, was coming off of a very, very bad year. After a hall-of-fame worthy career--two-time world champion, seven world championship fights, a reputation as an incredible action fighter and two amazing knockouts over all-time greats in Joanna Jędrzejczyk and Zhang Weili--Rose came into her May 2022 title defense against Carla Esparza as a massive fan favorite and left it as one of the most maligned women in mixed martial arts. Rose and Carla put on one of the all-time worst title fights in the history of the sport--not the UFC, the sport--by taking nearly no action. Rose landed 38 strikes in 25 minutes and the internet feasted on replays of cornerman/husband/continual source of discomfort for the fanbase Pat Barry telling her that her inaction, and the crowd booing her, were signs that their plan was working. Rose lost her title and just went away for awhile, and, eventually, mentioned a desire to return to competition up a weight class at 125 pounds. And now we're here. Erin Blanchfield and Taila Santos, the two other justifiable top contenders who've been working their way steadily along the ladder, had a closely-contested grappling match last week. It was the second fight on the main card on a broadcast live from Singapore. It was barely marketed and for most of the UFC's viewing audience it aired at about 6 in the morning. Manon Fiorot could have been fighting for a title already, and instead she's sat out for almost an entire year, and now she's fighting Rose Namajunas, who has never appeared at this weight class and is coming off the single worst performance of her career, in a co-main event, with the winner very possibly getting the next shot at the champion. I like both of these women. I hate this fight. MANON FIOROT BY DECISION. Rose isn't that much smaller than Fiorot--it's a couple inches--but unless she's spent the last year rebuilding herself completely she's going to be much less strong, and the technical striking advantages she had over a Weili or Andrade aren't going to be as present here. I don't think it's going to go her way. MAIN CARD: BOG TIME LIGHTWEIGHT: Benoît Saint-Denis (11-1 (1)) vs Thiago Moisés (17-6)Benoît Saint-Denis has been trying very, very hard to upset the golden rule of combat sports--you're only as interesting as the most interesting thing in your career, and you'd better pray that it's something you did as opposed to something that was done to you--and he's finally starting to get there. After a disastrous UFC debut in 2021 that saw him beaten halfway to death by Elizeu Zaleski dos Santos in quite possibly the worst-refereed bout in company history, Saint-Denis dropped to 155 pounds and has been thoroughly successful ever since. But it's not just the three-fight win streak, it's the way he's done it. His wrestling assault, and his ultra-aggressive grappling attacks, have completely dismantled all of his lightweight opponents, culminating in a career-best first-round submission over the massively hyped Ismael Bonfim who, admittedly, I thought would win. I did not think Thiago Moisés would win his last fight, and said fight was against the short-notice, regional-circuit debut of Melquizael "Melk" Costa, which means I may just thoroughly underrate Moisés at this point in his career. In hindsight: Probably not fair. Thiago's a talented grappler and a solid striker, and while 5-4 wasn't a great UFC career on paper, those losses came against #2 contender Beneil Dariush, top ten lock Damir Ismagulov, future champion Islam Makhachev and Joel Alvarez, who is, himself, thoroughly underrated. Moreover, it's an interesting meeting of like styles. Both men have power in their hands, but both men vastly prefer to wrestle their opponent down and impose their top game. Saint-Denis seemingly has the more crushing grappling offense, but Moisés, historically, has the better sweeps and submissions off his back. It's my favorite kind of fight, in theory. In practice, it could be a one-sided grappling contest or, worse, a tentative kickboxing match. But I think we're hitting the ground, and I think BENOÎT SAINT-DENIS BY DECISION is the outcome. LIGHT-HEAVYWEIGHT: Volkan Oezdemir (18-7, #9) vs Bogdan Guskov (14-2) Volkan Oezdemir has nowhere left to go. Once upon a time (that time being a fantasy year known as "2017") Volkan was the most-feared knockout artist at 205 pounds, a puncher with seven wins not just by knockout, and not just by knockout in the first round, but knockout in the first minute of the first round. He was terrifying right up until the moment he reached the top and fell all the way back down. By the end of 2017 he was 15-1; since the start of 2018 he's 3-6. His last finish was four years ago. The world caught onto his One Weird Trick and began gameplanning to disable him, and in turn, Volkan's visibly lost some confidence in his punches, which were the thing floating most of his career. And the UFC was content to feed him to rising star Azamat Murzakanov, but then Murzakanov got injured and pulled out, so now, as you do, the ninth-best light-heavyweight on the planet is fighting Bogdan Guskov, a guy originally earmarked for the Contender Series but pulled into this instead because, let's be honest, it's what the light-heavyweight division deserves. The company will be happy to tell you Guskov is a massively successful fighter with a ton of regional victories and a 100% finish rate. Which is true! He has also spent most of his career fighting people who don't stand a chance against him. His 13th fight was against a guy who was 4-2, his 15th fight was a guy who was 4-1, and his last fight--well, hey, that was Brazillian veteran Carlos Eduardo, who was 20-10! And also 41. And also 1 for his last 7. And also known primarily for beating the poo poo out of overmatched rookies. But, as is always true at light-heavyweight, that could all be completely meaningless. Guskov has big, fast hands and power enough to knock people out, and at a certain level, that's more than enough to win fights. I'm still siding with VOLKAN OEZDEMIR BY DECISION, primarily because he's shown more patience in his recent fights and Guskov hasn't seen a fight go more than five minutes since 2019, and I think the nerves will rattle him enough to gas out when Volkan doesn't drop in the first round. Unless, of course, he does. FEATHERWEIGHT: William Gomis (12-2) vs Yanis Ghemmouri (12-1) Literally as I was writing this poo poo William Gomis lost his scheduled opponent, Lucas Almeida. Will the UFC find him a new one? It's a tough call. On one hand, William Gomis is, unmistakably, one of the world's best French mixed martial artists. He's a tough wrestler and he hasn't lost a fight since 2016, which was a) the first year of his career, b) his second fight in a single night and c) his third fight in two weeks, and, y'know, that's pretty thoroughly forgivable. On the other, he is the UFC's absolute least favorite kind of fighter: A low-volume, low-impact grappler. Both of his UFC fights have gone the distance, and across those six rounds of fighting, Gomis has managed a grand total of 1.96 significant strikes landed per minute. To put this in perspective, that's slightly less than half of the divisional average. As a bonus, he falls off hard in the third round and gets his rear end beat. But he's also French, and this is a French card. Will the UFC scramble to keep him on board? We'll update this when they either do or don't. Stay tuned. UPDATE: Not only did they keep him on board, they did it in the way that annoys me the absolute most: By tearing another fight in half and redistributing the fighters, meaning I have to rewrite multiple fights. gently caress you too, Sean Shelby. Yanis "The Desert Warrior" Ghemmouri is a French fighter by way of Algeria and he's been making a decent name for himself fighting out in Bahrain and the Emirates for the last couple years--which was deeply necessary, as up until that trip he'd been stuck fighting rookies who did very little for his development as a martial artist or a known quantity. He's set himself aside as a solid, traditionally orthodox fighter: No huge surprises, no standout skills, just a solid all-around approach with an unusually pleasant amount of patience in his approaches. Which is unfortunate, because William Gomis has already established himself as a guy who can walk through that. I like what I've seen of Ghemmouri and I'd like it if Ghemmouri could keep Gomis on his toes and pick him apart from the outside, but WILLIAM GOMIS BY DECISION seems both likely and not a ton of fun to watch. PRELIMS: AN AMERICA-FREE ZONE FEATHERWEIGHT: Morgan Charriere (18-9-1) vs Manolo Zecchini (11-3)Remember how I said double-debuts were incredibly rare? No, you don't, because that was the first line of a fight that stopped existing a day after I wrote about it because they shuffled the entire card around! It's an international UFC event, the gently caress're you gonna do. Morgan "The Last Pirate" Charriere, who should really watch some Tom Hanks movies, is also a French local, also a Cage Warriors veteran, and also a would-be knockout artist with persistent problems against strong grapplers that have kept him from ever reaching British title contendership. Which is, presumably, why he's fighting Manolo "Angelo Veneziano" Zecchini, which is maybe the most aggressively Italian name/nickname combination I've ever seen. Manolo has an armbar win in his history, but he really, primarily, wants to punch you as much and as fast as he possibly can. He does not like long fights, he historically does not do well in long fights, and he would rather gas himself out trying to end a fight in the second round than deal with a third. So it's gonna be a brawl, and it should be a pretty good one. I think Charriere has the wider arsenal and the better defense, and Manolo's tendency to wing hooks and gas will lead to Charriere picking him apart down the line. MORGAN CHARRIERE BY TKO. BANTAMWEIGHT: Taylor Lapilus (18-3) vs Caolan Loughran (8-0) Boy, this turned into a serious mismatch. Loughran was originally scheduled to fight Yanis Ghemmouri up on the main card, and Taylor Lapilus was going to fight LFA champion Muin Gafurov. But Gafurov got injured, and Ghemmouri got pulled for William Gomis, and now Lapilus is here. Which is kind of hosed, because Taylor Lapilus is a genuinely good fighter who was inexplicably cut from the UFC back in 2016 despite being 3-1 and coming off of a win. Even during his time back on the regionals he's been fighting and beating UFC-tier competition--sometimes literally, as in the case of, say, Nate Maness, who got knocked out by Taylor Lapilus in 2019 and was somehow in the UFC the next year. Caolan Loughran--try not to be shocked--is an Irish fighter from Ireland who really likes to punch people. I try to be honest, so let me say: From watching tape, I really dislike the way Loughran fights. He has almost no defense, he relies entirely on head flicks to avoid punches and his chin to get him through the punches he fails to avoid, which is most of them, and he throws lots of crosses with no setup while walking almost entirely flatfooted. Which generates a bunch of power, which works out great, as he's stopped 7 of his 8 wins! However: You know that whole "there are MMA jobber leagues that exist just to pad records" thing I complain about regularly? The combined record of Caolan's first five opponents was 4-75. And 70 of those losses came from just two loving guys. Against Yanis Ghemmouri, I understood the matchmaking: Two young regional standouts making their debut against one another. I may be shortchanging Loughran here, because wild things happen in mixed martial arts, but this feels like it's going to be a loving murder. Lapilus has almost three times his experience, he's an extremely well-rounded fighter who never should have left the UFC in the first place, and in eleven and a half years of professional fighting he's never been stopped. Caolan is a guy who punches a lot and seems profoundly uncomfortable with concepts like blocking. TAYLOR LAPILUS BY TKO feels almost inevitable, but typically when I'm that confident it goes poorly, so we'll see what happens. WELTERWEIGHT: Ange Loosa (9-3) vs Rhys McKee (13-4-1) It's time for our annual Ange check-in. Ange Loosa is the Swiss veteran with the unfortunate luck of meeting Jack Della Maddalena in his shot at the Contender Series--but he took Maddalena to a decision, which has aged quite well. Unfortunately, his actual UFC debut in 2022 saw him get pieced up by Mounir Lazzez all night, but four months later he came back, defied my predictions, and somewhat surprisingly outwrestled grappling artist AJ Fletcher for his first UFC win. And then he went away for an entire year. Rhys McKee is here for his second UFC stint, having gone 0-2 and gotten released from the company back in 2020, which seems lousy on paper, but those two fights were against top fifteen welterweight Alex Morono and Khamzat goddamn Chimaev, which is some deeply unfortunate matchmaking for a prospect. After three more victories with Cage Warriors--the most recent being an April stoppage over "Judo" Jim Wallhead, who I cannot believe is still fighting--he's ready for his rematch with the company. And I'm fairly high on it. McKee's a genuinely good and extremely well-rounded fighter, Loosa has some historical problems with people who can keep him at range and outwork him, and McKee has both. Loosa will likely have the wrestling boots back on for this fight, but I don't think it'll be enough. RHYS MCKEE BY DECISION. WOMEN'S BANTAMWEIGHT: Nora Cornolle (6-1) vs Joselyne Edwards (13-4) Nora Cornolle is another debuting fighter from France. She has won most of her fights by TKO, which pleases the overlords. Her skills are difficult to evaluate because most of her fights are against people with almost no experience and she fought an 0-0 fighter just sixmonths ago. The sole loss of her career came against the aforementioned Jacqueline Cavalcanti, which might make for a marginally awkward locker room experience. Joselyne Edwards is one of the most successful women's fighters the UFC would probably be happy to get rid of. She went 1-2 in her rookie UFC year back in 2021, and made the very wise choice of moving up to 145 pounds to begin 2022, where she found immediate success--and was then quietly told to go the gently caress back down because the weight class wasn't going to exist anymore. But she's on a two-fight winning streak at 135 pounds! But both fights were split decisions and the latest was an absolute robbery and she also missed weight for both of them. She hasn't actually made the bantamweight limit since October of 2021. All of that said: JOSELYNE EDWARDS BY DECISION. Cornolle's sort of stiff and I don't think she's going to be able to push through the volume-based spam Edwards likes to throw at fighters, nor is she a strong enough wrestler to reliably get Edwards on the floor--not that it matter sif she can, since apparently the judges don't give a poo poo about Edwards losing at grappling. BANTAMWEIGHT: Farid Basharat (10-0) vs Kleydson Rodrigues (8-2)Starting the show with a showstopper really isn't a terrible idea. Farid Basharat is the slightly smaller, slightly less experienced half of the undefeated Basharat brothers, an extremely solid, well-rounded, tactically-sound fighter whose UFC debut this past March saw him win a very close but still-unanimous decision over Da'Mon Blackshear, which, boy, if Da'Mon Blackshear was still "that guy who did a Twister" it would sound much cooler, as opposed to "that guy who got beat up by Mario Bautista." Don't do one-week fill-in fights, my friends. It's rarely a good idea. Kleydson Rodrigues is having a tough loving time in the UFC. He made his company debut as a hot flyweight prospect in mid-2022 and immediately lost a split decision he probably should have won, came back most of a year later and made a better accounting for himself by knocking out Shannon Ross in fifty-nine seconds--except Rodrigues missed weight, so no one really cared. Now he's fighting an entire weight class up, against one of bantamweight's top prospects, at a size and reach disadvantage. Sorry, Kleydson. I really liked your fighting style, for what it's worth. But FARID BASHARAT BY DECISION. WOMEN'S BANTAMWEIGHT: Zarah Fairn (6-5) vs Jacqueline Cavalcanti (5-1) I think the clock is running out on the Zarah Fairn experience. "Infinite" got signed to the UFC back in 2019--which was already a little odd, because she hadn't fought in almost two years--but she was 6-2, so what's the worst that could happen? As it turns out: Going 0-3 across four years of competition. She's spent the whole time at featherweight, where she served as a springboard for two separate title contenders. In fairness, her best performance in the UFC was her last fight--she was competitive with Josiane Nunes, stayed on the feet with her for three rounds, and even won a round, and Josi is undefeated in the UFC, so that's impressive! Zarah Fairn is also half a foot taller and rangier than Josiane and still got outstruck. Jacqueline Cavalcanti is your debuting fighter and the recently-crowned Women's Bantamweight champion of the Legacy Fighting Alliance, which sounds more impressive when you ignore both competing fighters being 4-1 and regional belts all being basically just bus tickets to the UFC or Bellator anyway. But she's well-rounded, she's got promise, and her only loss thus far was a split decision against the PFL's Martina Jindrová, who is, herself, a fairly decent talent. JACQUELINE CAVALCANTI BY DECISION. Even the infinite must end.
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Aug 30, 2023 21:28
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The UFC basically wants Merab to do their job for them. They have been incredibly hesitant to push him, they were already mad at him over the "I won't fight Aljo" thing, and O'Malley had barely gotten the belt over his shoulder before they were spinning the marketing wheels talking about O'Malley vs Chito 2 while completely ignoring Merab. They want Merab to self-promote and make himself valuable without having to actually invest in him as a company because they don't like him or his style, and by refusing to self-promote they also get to do their favorite chestnut, the "this guy just doesn't want to fight" bullshit, because that lets them invalidate their own #1 contender in favor of people they actually think are worth the return on investment.
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Aug 30, 2023 22:08
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Oh, yeah. There's a reason I did not even ask this month. Also Brandon Royval says the UFC's tapped him for Pantoja's next fight, which, if it happens after January, will be the first flyweight championship fight to not feature Figueiredo or Moreno in five years.
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Aug 31, 2023 21:46
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Well, when you put it that way. Group hug en route to the September thread.
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Sep 1, 2023 19:47
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