- Brut
- Aug 21, 2007
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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 EDT
That'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.
I wrote that about Tatsuro Taira, and now, thanks to the 2022 Road to UFC tournament, we might have a second. Rinya Nakamura was, essentially, born for this. His father Kozo helped build Shooto, the organization that essentially birthed modern mixed martial arts; Rinya has been immersed in the sport from the second he began breathing. This is also why he absolutely butchered his way through the tournament in progressively quicker fashion: A three-and-a-half minute submission over Indonesia's Gugun Gusman in the first round, a two-and-a-half minute knockout of Japan's Shohei Nose in the second, and a thirty-three second knockout of Toshiomi Kazama in the final. He certainly looks the part, but now he has to step up to international competition.
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 Peńa 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 the Dim Makground fighting. Chidi Njokuani has an 80" reach. Forcing him to fight on the ground is deeply unfair to him, as the length of his arms cause gravity to exert a greater pressure upon his limbs, visiting the Earth's revenge on him for daring to reach past the stratosphere. Coincidentally, this is why Buzz Aldrin has trouble getting out of bed. Michał Oleksiejczuk deserves at worst a tickertape parade and at best his own internationally recognized holiday for being the man who finally rid the UFC of the dread curse of Alvey, but alas, we do not recognize our fighters for the good they do in the shadows.
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 26, 2023 09:51
