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Which PFL champion are you most looking forward to seeing this month? This poll is closed. |
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|---|---|---|---|
| Olivier Aubin-Mercier |
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1 | 3.85% |
| Larissa Pacheco |
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4 | 15.38% |
| Sadibou Sy |
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1 | 3.85% |
| Lance Palmer |
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0 | 0% |
| Nicco Montano |
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1 | 3.85% |
| Alexander Shlemenko |
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2 | 7.69% |
| Bobby Southworth |
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3 | 11.54% |
| Hardcore Holly |
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14 | 53.85% |
| Total: | 26 votes | ||
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Nothing is spookier than late replacements, and you can relive October's plethora of them here. Welcome to November! The year is winding down and we're almost at the end, but before we get there, we've got two UFC title fights (well, one and a half since it's an interim belt), the 2023 season finale for the Professional Fighters League, and what will be at best the last Bellator event before it is acquired by yet another company or, at worst, the last Bellator event period. Get excited! This month's thread title courtesy of The SituAsian. 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 Oh, boy, is there. But we're gonna start with a feelgood moment.  Remember that whole "Francis Ngannou is going to fight Tyson Fury in a celebrity boxing match" thing most of the entire world thought was a joke? After months of taking poo poo, Ngannou went in there and almost did the drat thing. In the first professional boxing match of his life, he entered the ring with the undefeated WBC heavyweight champion and gave him one of the toughest fights of his life, dropping him on his rear end in the third round and hanging with him all the way to a one-point-differential split decision loss. Let me repeat that, because it bears repeating. The lineal heavyweight champion of essentially all of mixed martial arts, a man who has never boxed before and who was roundly mocked by virtually every MMA business expert for leaving the UFC to pursue an assured embarrassment on an international stage, took his first boxing match against at worst the second-best heavyweight boxer on the planet and knocked him down, and in the eyes of a judge and most of the audience, won. The UFC had the best heavyweight in the world and rather than getting a piece of the pie for a real-life Rocky movie they let him go. After every stupid thing Dana White said about him, after every time anyone mocked him, Francis Ngannou shocked the loving world. I don't know that MMA's ever getting him back, at this point, but honestly, more power to him. You're a star now. Go enjoy it.  And now, your regularly scheduled negativity. You know my constant yammering about the UFC mortgaging away the credibility it spent years building now that it no longer needs it to make money? Within one month of the WWE/UFC merger officially closing, they announced that as of the new year the UFC will no longer have the United States Anti-Doping Agency carry out its drug testing. To be clear: There is nuance to this. USADA runs one of the most comprehensive drug testing programs in the world, but they're also known for being uneven at best and draconian at worst. They don't always apply their punishments evenly, they've had extremely public instances of caving to UFC pressure--hello, Jon Jones--and there are some fighters, most notably Tom Lawlor, who had their careers irreparably harmed by USADA decisions they disagreed with. There are very valid reasons to dislike USADA and celebrate their departure from the sport. The UFC, of course, did not get rid of them for any of those reasons. After years of trying to put their thumb on the scale, the final straw wasn't any of USADA's imperfections, but rather, the fact that USADA demanded Conor McGregor, you know, take a drug test. Most of 2023 was spent with a slowly growing public acrimony between McGregor and USADA over the former's insistence on fighting again and the latter's insistence on McGregor taking part in the most basic levels of steroid testing. And you don't gently caress with McGregor money. The deal was inevitably doomed anyway--the UFC has no use for USADA, they don't need the credibility, so it no longer makes sense to pay for legally unnecessary drug testing that exists only to maintain respectability, which the UFC stopped giving a poo poo about awhile ago--but putting barriers around Conor hastened the process. As of January, USADA is gone. While I don't share in the feelings of the people celebrating, I understand them. Besides, the UFC's going to be instituting new drug testing to take its place. So everything's going to still be great and respectable and on the up and up, right? Well,  The new drug testing will be managed in a partnership with Drug Free Sport International, best known as the company that does drug testing for the National Football League, which, as we all know, is doing just a bang-up job over there. The UFC's side of the program will be overseen by George Piro, best known for being the FBI agent who interrogated Saddam Hussein, but most connected to MMA for being a longtime student at MMA supercamp American Top Team, which is as famous for its success as its number of steroid busts. But don't worry--George promises to administrate everything fairly, and he changed his Instagram handle from georgepiro_att to georgepiro_bjj, and when UFC executive Jeff Novitzky was asked during the announcement about program oversight, he had this to say.  Sounds airtight to me. Oh, as a bonus? The guy hired to run the UFC's side of doping science, Dr. Dan Eichner, used to be a higher-up at the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Agency. Up until around 2013, when he left just before a bunch of e-mails surfaced showing he was privately communicating with and seemingly on the take from supplement manufacturers he was supposed to be holding to task and investigating. But, y'know. I'm sure it will all be just fine.  Oh, and we also got less than one month into the merger era before the UFC announced that, much like their new family the WWE had, they, too, were going to start taking incredibly lucrative trips to Saudi Arabia to hold crown-financed events that double as propaganda for how great the KSA is and how they have never done anything wrong, ever.  But don't worry, it's not all bad UFC news this month--it's bad news for the rest of the sport, too. Bloody Elbow got their hands on Adriano Moraes' old contract with ONE Championship and did an excellent dissection of just how crappy it was. You can read the contract yourself at the link, but in short, it includes:
ONE has of course stated this controversy is scumbag muckraking journalists getting it wrong, but, much as when they said the same regarding ONE's own publicly-released financials over the last several years, they have yet to actually contract the story with any new information.  And, finally--putting sense to the as yet not-officially-confirmed reports of Bellator's desperate need to sell itself off--the Showtime network announced that after almost forty years of programming that included a huge chunk of Mike Tyson's career, the final tour of Floyd Mayweather Jr., the crowning of Anthony Joshua, the rise and fall of EliteXC and Strikeforce MMA and, apparently, the last two years of Bellator's time as an independent company, come January, Showtime Sports will no longer exist. At a time when seemingly every other television network is chasing down live sports as one of the last bastions of profitable viewing metrics, Showtime is kicking boxing and MMA to the curb. It's a tragedy, not just for the end of a huge part of combat sports history but for the closing of one of the few remaining berths in the already-monopolized world of combat sports. We don't yet know what Bellator's final fate will be, but whether they get folded into another company or just fold altogether, even less choice for fighters is a terrible thing. MONTHLY RETIREMENT CORNER  After just one year shy of a quarter-century of competition, Alistair Overeem officially retired from combat sports. This wasn't exactly news--he'd more or less retired back in July--but his management disagreed, and he walked it back, and there was some uncertainty left over. Now it's official, which means now, we can talk about it. Which is good, because boy, it's a complicated legacy. Let us be wholly clear: Alistair Overeem is one of the best heavyweights in mixed martial arts history. He was already one of the best light-heavyweights before he discovered how to pump himself up like a cartoon character, and as a heavyweight, he was a force of nature. He has thirty-three knockouts across MMA and kickboxing, he won world championships in both, and he stopped drat near everyone he ever beat. He's got victories over a dozen world champions and even more contenders. Despite having only one kickboxing match in the last four years he walked into a fight with one of the best heavyweights on the planet, Badr Hari, and knocked him cold in two minutes. Sergei Pavlovich is fighting for a UFC championship this month: Alistair Overeem is the 1 in his 18-1 record. And he did that in 2018, just shy of two full decades after his professional debut. He won the last real K-1 World Grand Prix. He ended Brock Lesnar's MMA career. He was, at one point, almost certainly the best heavyweight in mixed martial arts. But you cannot honestly talk about Overeem's career without discussing the elephant in the room. Alistair Overeem is the poster boy for steroids. His rapid expansion from a skinny 205-pounder getting knocked out by Chuck Liddell to a 265-pound muscle monster bullying Mark Hunt was the basis of half the memes you could find on the mid-2000s MMA internet. He pumped himself up so thoroughly and ridiculously that when he officially signed with the UFC the first question on everyone's mind wasn't who he would fight or when he would be champion, but rather, if he could pass a drug test. And the answer was, of course, no. He failed immediately. The UFC let him fight anyway, but he promptly failed again in his next fight--with a testosterone ratio more than double the legal limit. When he finally emerged again in 2013, he was, while still huge, noticeably smaller. And he got knocked the gently caress out. And that's the real patch on Alistair Overeem. He was a giant bag of steroids, but an awful lot of fighters are, and when he was winning all the time no one cared. But when his moment came in the UFC, he just couldn't break through the top. Bigfoot would outlast him, or Travis Browne would beat him by just spamming front kicks to the face, or Ben loving Rothwell would knock him out. Overeem still got close--he got a shot at champion Stipe Miocic in 2016 by beating Andrei loving Arlovski, of all people--and he hurt Stipe, and he almost submitted Stipe, and then he got knocked out anyway. In 2008-2010, Alistair Overeem could have been the man to beat Fedor and prove he was the best. But he didn't get the chance, and the moment passed, and by the time he got another one it was just too late. I'd like to say Alistair Overeem got out with his health and his youth, but he didn't; he's in his mid-forties, he's already visibly deflated the hundred extra pounds he carried for a decade and a half, and he's been knocked out nineteen times in his fights alone. I'd like to say he left the sport with his reputation intact, and he kind of did--in the sense that he came back for one last kickboxing fight with Badr Hari, beat him, and then had the win overturned after he tested positive for too many steroids for Dutch kickboxing, which is absolutely in line with his legacy. I'd like to wish him well in his post-fight career like I do for almost everyone, but I can't do that, either, because he's already dedicated his future to right-wing politics like, uh, saying he's going to cure his daughter's trans identity by changing her diet. So, mostly, I hope his heart gets both figurative and literal help. He retires with an MMA record of 47-19 (1), a kickboxing record of 10-4 (1), a place in the history books as both a K-1 World Grand Prix champion and the first (and probably only) fighter to hold simultaneous MMA and K-1 championships. WHERE ELSE CAN I TALK TO LIKE-MINDED PEOPLE ABOUT VIOLENCE? Any of the following hangouts:
DO WE HAVE OTHER COMMUNAL THREADS? So many.
WHERE ELSE DOES FIGHT CHAT EXIST? Our community output has grown enough that we've got a few other places things get posted:
 Disclaimer: These are unofficial offsites, somethingawful's rules and liability do not extend to them, and complaining about discord stuff is still offsite drama posting
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WHAT HAPPENED IN OCTOBER The month began immediately with Rizin Landmark 6 at midnight on October 1st, which was presumably a better time if you do not live in a sin-cursed country like America. It was a big ol' 16-fight card and most of that went to decision, but there were still some good highlights, including Joji Goto getting the rare twister submission over Junya Hibino, Yusaku Inoue's flying knee knockout over Kohei Tokeshi, Rogério Bontorin's first victory in four years after outfighting Yutaro Muramoto, former sumo Takakenshin getting stopped in two rounds by Hidetaka Arato, and Shooto Women's Atomweight Champion Ayaka Watanabe losing a split decision to Machi Fukuda. Up on your main card, Genji Umeno got a decision over Yuto Saito, Yuki Ito beat Road to UFC celebrity Topnoi Kiwram, Tsuyoshi Sudario overcame an early scare to knock out Lim Dong-hwan, Shoko Sato got a split decision against Shinobu Ota, and in your main event, Alan Yamaniha beat the living legend Hideo Tokoro, who is now just two losses away from a 50:50 ratio. We had a three-event Saturday, and ONE was up first with ONE Fight Night 15: Le vs Freymanov on October 7th. As usual, ONE put up a mixed card of fighting styles. You had two Muay Thai bouts, with Shakir Al-Tekreeti beating Bampara Kouyate and Phetjeeja Lukjaoporongtom getting a doctor's stoppage against Celest Hansen. You had four undercard MMA bouts, including Hiroyuki Tetsuka armbarring Jin Tae-ho, Hu Yong knocking out Eko Roni Saputra, Zhang Lipeng knocking out Timofey Nastyukhin and former champ Joshua Pacio getting a decision over Mansur Malachiev. There was a single submission grappling special attraction squash match, as Mikey Musumeci met legend Shinya Aoki and tapped him out in three minutes with a move Aoki himself innovated. There were two straight kickboxing matches, including Tawanchai defeating Jo Nattawut and Jonathan Di Bella defending his strawweight championship with a decision over Danial Williams. The main event, rarely, was MMA, and it didn't take long: Thanh Le returned from losing the featherweight title more than a year ago by, uh, winning the interim featherweight title after heel hooking Ilya Freymanov in just barely a minute. And then it was time for Bellator's big swing: Bellator 300, a mega-event that Bellator definitely didn't invent as a possible corporate farewell in case they went under before they could hold 301. It was a huge thing and, in a perfect tribute to Bellator, it went pretty poorly. As always the preliminary card was huge and as always I won't cover it all, but if you didn't watch it you missed Davion Franklin breaking his leg, Kai Kamaka III taking a split decision over Henry Corrales, Grant Neal beating Romero Cotton, and Bellator's big recent featherweight signing, UFC vet and former title contender Sara McMann, getting dropped in one round by Leah McCourt. The main card was intended to be just four matches, being as each was a title fight, but that, too, got hosed up: Ryan Bader's heavyweight title defense was cancelled when Linton Vassell pulled out and Bellator couldn't afford a replacement--no, really--and Ilima-Lei Macfarlane missed weight and was thus ineligible to win Liz Carmouche's Women's Flyweight Championship, leaving Carmouche doing the aggressively silly thing Bellator does where a champion defends against themselves. It didn't matter: Carmouche and Macfarlane, friends and training partners in real life, had a pretty forgettable fight where neither seemed to really want to commit to hurting the other, which was hilarious because Carmouche busted her leg with kicks in the fifth round. Cris Cyborg made her return to MMA after a year and a half spent chasing boxing, and it ended predictably, as the years of wondering if Cat Zingano was a good match for her ended in a tentative Zingano getting taken apart in four minutes. And your main event was both completely one-sided and pretty uneventful, as Usman Nurmagomedov both defended his lightweight championship and secured a spot in the finals of the lightweight grand prix after outwrestling an overmatched Brent Primus. The UFC kicked off its month that evening with UFC Fight Night: Dawson vs Green, a particularly oddly-matched card with some hilarious results. In the prelims, JJ Aldrich beat Montana De La Rosa and likely drummed her out of the company, Aoriqileng outworked a too-tentative Johnny Muńoz Jr., Vanessa Demopoulos won an inexcusably bad decision against Kanako Murata, Nate Maness knocked out Mateus Mendonça in one round, and Karolina Kowalkiewicz continued her comeback tour with a decision against Diana Belbiţă. On your undercard, Bill Algeo proved just too much for Alexander Hernandez, Drew Dober made short work of Ricky Glenn, Joaquin Buckley managed to outstrike Alex Morono, and Joe Pyfer choked out Abdul Razak Alhassan in two rounds. Your main event was a real, real weird matchup, with long-suffering but finally-established top ten prospect Grant Dawson facing off against the unranked Bobby Green--and, because this sport is never not hilarious, Green absolutely nuked Dawson, knocking him cold in thirty-three seconds. We were back one week later for UFC Fight Night: Yusuff vs Barboza on October 14th. It, too, was somewhat oddly-matched, but it was ultimately a fun night. Emily Ducote took a decision over Ashley Yoder, an inexplicably underbooked Chris Gutiérrez beat up Alatengheili, Melissa Dixon outgrappled Irina Alekseeva, Terrance McKinney finished another in his diet of squash matches by beating last-minute replacement Brendan Marotte in twenty seconds, Tainara Lisboa turned away Ravena Oliveira, and Darren Elkins turned in another vintage performance by getting beat up, outwrestling T.J. Brown anyway, and choking him out in the third round. On your main card, Christian Rodriguez came in overweight--for the second time in a row and the third time overall, counting his Contender Series appearance--but still dominated Cameron Saaiman, Michel Pereira made his middleweight debut by dropping Andre Petroski in just over a minute, Jonathan Martinez cemented himself as a bantamweight prospect with a leg kick TKO over Adrian Yanez, and Viviane Araújo won a close decision against Jennifer Maia, who was promptly drummed out of the company. The main event between Edson Barboza and Sodiq Yusuff was a great, back-and-forth fight-of-the-year contender, with Yusuff nearly finishing Barboza in the first round only for Barboza to mount a slow, four-round comeback culminating in a fantastic decision victory. But October 21st brought the big event for the month, UFC 294: Makhachev vs Finally, on October 27th, it was time to end the month with our quarterly Invicta check-in, courtesy of Invicta FC 54: McCormack vs. Wójcik. Two fight cancellations for Valesca "Tina Black" Machado meant Invicta's already-punctuated cards fell to an even shorter five fights, which makes recapping them real simple. At bantamweight, Maria Djukic pushed Fernanda Araujo further into the zone of negative records by decision, and at featherweight, undefeated prospect Riley Martinez choked out Julia Dorny. Down at strawweight, Andre Amaro scored a rear naked choke over Hilarie Rose, and in the flyweight co-main event, Kristina Williams scraped out a split decision over Dee Begley. In the main event, strawweight champion Danni McCormack cemented her reign by scoring her first title defense, choking out Karolina Wójcik and handing her the first stoppage defeat of her career. WHAT'S COMING IN NOVEMBER It's another fairly short month as the year of combat sports winds down, and once again, half the month is crammed into its first weekend. Rizin is up first with Rizin Landmark 7 on November 4th. Unlike their recent Landmark events, this one's a fairly constrained five prelims and five main card bouts, all of them are MMA, and the event, thanks in no small part to their top-card competitors, is in Azerbaijan, making this the Rizin card with the fewest Japanese fighters ever. This also means a lot of competitors are coming from the regional fight scene--I'm not going to even pretend I know Israel's Harel Cohen or Georgian heavyweight Shota Betlemidze--but Nariman Abbasov is fighting Ali Abdulkhalikov, and that should be cool, and former UFC standout Justin Scoggins is meeting Mehman Mamedov, and that should be cool, and Rizin Lightweight Grand Prix winner Tofiq Musayev is facing Koji Takeda, and that should be real cool, and Vugar Karamov is defending the Rizin Featherweight Championship he won four months ago against Chihiro Suzuki, the man who knocked out Patrício Pitbull, and that's extremely cool. And then it's time for ONE Fight Night 16: Haggerty vs Andrade, which is less cool to me. There are only four MMA bouts scheduled for the card--men's strawweights Jeremy Miado and Lito Adiwang, women's strawweights Meng Bo and Ayaka Miura, heavyweights Kang Ji-won and Ben Tynan, and lightweights Halil Amir vs Ahmed Mujtaba--but you've got Supergirl Jaroonsak vs Cristina Morales and Zhang Peimian vs Rui Botelho in kickboxing, and Sinsamut Klinmee vs Liam Nolan in Muay Thai. Your co-main event is a welterweight submission grappling championship match, as Tye Ruotolo faces Magomed Abdulkadirov to give ONE yet another in its endless array of progressively less meaningful title belts, and on that note, your main event is a match to fill the vacant ONE Bantamweight Kickboxing World Championship, featuring Jonathan Haggerty, who is already ONE's Bantamweight Muay Thai Champion, and Fabrício Andrade, who is already ONE's Bantamweight MMA Champion. Just chuck all the loving belts into the ring and let God sort them out. The UFC is off to the races that evening with UFC Fight Night: Almeida vs Lewis. It's the UFC's return to Brazil for the first time since January, and the card is, unsurprisingly, stacked with Brazilians. Kauę Fernandes faces Marc Diakiese, Eduarda Moura meets Montserrat Ruiz, Lucas Alexander faces David Onama, Angela Hill tries to keep the magic alive against Denise Gomes, Vitor Petrino will punch Modestas Bukauskas if he can, Elizeu Zaleski dos Santos drew the short straw and has to fight Rinat Fakhretdinov, Victor Hugo faces Daniel Marcos, and the upset-ranked Elves Brener faces Esteban Ribovics. On your main card: The Bonfim Brothers ride again, as Ismael faces Vinc Pichel and Gabriel meets Nicolas Dalby, Rodolfo Vieira faces Armen Petrosyan, Caio Borralho faces Abus Magomedov, and Rodrigo Nascimento faces Don'Tale Mayes. The main event, too, is heavyweights, as Jailton Almeida tries to leap into the top five by beating Derrick Lewis, a short-notice replacement for Curtis Blaydes. The following weekend, the UFC gets their PPV for the month in November 11th's UFC 295: We move on to the now-zombified Bellator card for the month, Bellator 301: Amosov vs Jackson, on November 17th. This card is even more baffling now that we know, one way or another, that Showtime Sports will cease to operate at the end of the year, meaning Bellator's either getting bought or ceasing to exist. Bellator is dying as it lived: 13 loving preliminary fights, including a bunch of people who probably deserve to be higher. Islam Mamedov? Prelims. Timur Khizriev? You better believe he's on the prelims. Marcelo Golm main evented a Bellator this year, and here he is on the prelims with Tyrell Fortune. Former champion Juliana Velasquez who's fighting her first non-championship fight in almost four years? Get thee on the loving prelims. Your main card? Patricky Pitbull vs Alexandr Shabily, AJ McKee vs Sidney Outlaw, and, despite having already beaten him and the latter coming off of a loss, gently caress it, why not do Raufeon Stots vs Danny Sabatello again. Your co-main is the long-overdue bantamweight title unification between standing champion Sergio Pettis and interim champion Patchy Mix, and your main event sees welterweight champion Yaroslav Amosov defending the throne against Jason Jackson. The UFC's month closes up with UFC Fight Night: Allen vs Craig on November 18th. After the other cards of the month, it's a comparatively low-impact affair. Lucie Pudilová vs Ailin Perez, Charles Johnson vs Rafael Estevam, Jeka Saragih vs Jesse Butler--honestly, you get it. You get it! I don't think anyone actually reads these and I don't know why I do them, exactly, except out of some weird idea of recording a time capsule for future reference as to what was happening in MMA. It is important that future generations know that Jonny Parsons was scheduled to fight Uro Medić, I guess. But Luana Pinheiro vs Amanda Ribas should be cool, and Jonathan Pearce vs Joanderson Brito should be cool, and Chase Hooper vs Jordan Leavitt should at least be funny. The top of the card is great, though. Michael Morales vs Jake Matthews has banger written all over it and Brendan Allen vs Paul Craig will almost inevitably become a real interesting grappling match. And the month, and the 2023 Professional Fighters League season, both end on the day after Thanksgiving. PFL 10, the annual pay-per-view finale, brings to you a dozen fights of varying import. On your prelims: Jesse Stirn faces Josh Blayden, Phil Caracappa faces Khai Wu, Bubba Jenkins meets Chris Wade, it just wouldn't be a PFL card without Biaggio Ali Walsh fighting a nobody (this time it's Joel Galarza Lopez), and the PFL welcomes Derek Brunson to its ranks by having him fight Ray Cooper III, which could be very, very funny. Your main card has seven fights, and the only one that isn't a tournament final is your obligatory Kayla Harrison match, as she faces Julia Budd. Otherwise, it's finals all the way down. At light-heavyweight: Josh Silveira vs Impa Kasanganay. At featherweight: Jesus Pinedo vs Gabriel Alves Braga. At welterweight: 2021 finalist Magomed Magomedkerimov vs 2022 champion Sadibou Sy. At women's featherweight: Larissa Pacheco looks to become a two-time winner against Marina Mokhnatkina. Up at heavyweight: Renan Ferreira meets Denis Goltsov. And, in your main event, the lightweight final: Olivier Aubin-Mercier vs the eternally punching warrior, Clay Collard.
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Nov 1, 2023 19:16
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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. And in the most predictable thing possible, some bullshit happened, he got injured, he's going to be gone for at least eight months, and the UFC is not only not stripping him of the title like they've done to everyone else, they've already gotten out ahead of themselves and made clear that when he comes back, he will be fighting Stipe Miocic, not whoever the interim champion is at the time. Funny, that. Light-Heavyweight Champion, 205 lbs   VACANT - The gaping maw of eternityThat'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 empty throne must be filled. The UFC put us all out of our collectively-wondering misery by announcing the co-main event for Jones/Miocic on November 11th, will, in fact, be returning former champion Jiří Procházka vs former middleweight champion Alex Pereira, with the winner getting the vacant title. This means we have two potential statistical outliers: Either Jiří will become the first person to ever be a two-time UFC champion after just four fights in the organization, or Pereira will become the first person to ever be a double-champion after just seven fights in the organization. Either way, we can all agree: Light-heavyweight isn't real. Middleweight Champion, 185 lbs  Sean Strickland - 28-5, 0 DefensesYup. Against all reason, we're here. The UFC has been gleefully pushing Sean Strickland for awhile--half because he's their favorite kind of lovely, bigoted white guy, half because he takes fights basically every ninety days and costs way less money. Is he anything close to the violent knockout machine they market him as? No, not really: He has two finishes in the last half-decade and all his other finishes came back when he was still a welterweight. Has he enjoyed a long tenure as a top contender in the making? Well, not exactly: He's been fringe top ten for quite awhile, but he spent most of 2022 losing repeatedly and was 2 for his last 4. Did he earn his title shot by vanquishing top contenders and establishing himself as their better? Not even remotely: He has two top fifteen-ranked wins in his entire career, he got beaten by actual top contenders like Jared Cannonier and Alex Pereira, and he got his shot at the champion thanks to his victory over Abusupiyan Magomedov, veteran of one single, unranked, 19-second UFC fight. But Dricus du Plessis didn't want to take his well-earned championship match while he was injured, so the UFC sent Strickland to Australia, and he did the drat thing anyway. Israel Adesanya turned out a deeply baffling performance where he proved completely unprepared for Strickland's orthodox 1-2 pressure game to the point that Strickland almost finished the fight in the first round, which, admittedly, would have been hilarious in a the-ending-of-In-the-Mouth-of-Madness kind of way. The UFC's already made clear a rematch is all but inevitable, but, god help us all, for this moment in time, Sean Strickland is the middleweight champion of the world, and we just get to deal with that and pretend things are normal. 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. After fighting about it in public all year, the UFC got its way: Leon Edwards vs Colby Covington will headline UFC 296 on December 16th. Lightweight Champion, 155 lbs   Islam Makhachev - 25-1, 2 DefensesDestiny 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. Or, at least, it was. In one of those funny moments of sport deterioration, his title defense against Charles Oliveira got scratched thanks to Oliveira busting his eyebrow in training, and on less than two weeks' notice the UFC ran Makhachev/Volkanovski 2, and with no hype, no marketing and no time to prepare, a visibly depleted Volkanovski got dropped by a headkick in the first round. Having now abruptly vanquished his rival, Islam Makhachev is...calling out the winner of the Leon Edwards vs Colby Covington welterweight title bout. God dammit. Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs   Alexander Volkanovski - 26-3, 5 DefensesSometimes, things get ruined for no good reason. Three things are true. 1: Alexander Volkanovski is one of the best fighters on the planet, and has proven it, repeatedly, over the last near-decade. His featherweight reign is second only to José Aldo in history, and he stands a great chance of surpassing him. 2: Alexander Volkanovski had one of the best performances of his career in February of 2023, when he met lightweight kingpin Islam Makhachev, took him to his limit and nearly knocked him out in the fifth round. Even though he lost a decision his stock rose considerably, and a rematch between the two seemed inevitable. 3: When the UFC called Volkanovski to step in and make that rematch happen as a short-notice replacement 13 days before fight night, he should have said no. For every fantastic story in mixed martial arts there are a thousand dreams crushed by reality. In reality, Islam Makhachev got most of a year to recover before training his rear end off to fight Charles Oliveira for months, and Alexander Volkanovski had just fought three months prior despite having a crippling arm injury, had just gotten surgery for said injury, and had only just finished his post-op recovery in mid-September. The Alexander Volkanovski who stepped into the cage on October 21st could have beaten up 9/10 of the planet, but he still looked diminished, and unfortunately, a fully-healthy, fully-trained, fully-prepared Islam Makhachev is firmly in that 1/10 even on a good day. It wasn't competitive, it wasn't dramatic, and it didn't take long. Islam domed Volk with a headkick and pounded him out in three minutes. In the post-fight interview an emotional Volkanovski talked about taking the replacement thanks to the psychological need to get back out there and fight again, and insisted that despite rushing back into the cage, and despite getting concussed, he still wanted to defend his featherweight title against Ilia Topuria at UFC 297 on January 20th. I say this as an enormous fan of the man: I really, really hope there's someone in his camp who can talk him out of it. It would be his fourth top-level world title fight in eleven months, and it would be his second in a row that would leave him with barely any time to prepare--given that, having been knocked out, he shouldn't have any sparring contact until the end of December. We all need time to get healthy. Bantamweight Champion, 135 lbs  Sean O'Malley - 17-1 (1), 0 DefensesThe house always wins. I have spent years being mad about Sean O'Malley. Very few people get the red carpet rolled out for them without having some other previous success to draw on, but Dana White seemingly hand-selected Sean O'Malley as The Guy back in 2017 when he won a contract on the second-ever episode of the Contender Series, and from the second he first stepped into the octagon, he was treated like a Big loving Deal. His matchmaking was favorable, his marketing was endless, and even when he hosed up--getting his leg broken against Andre Soukhamthath, pissing hot for ostarine and missing a year, getting knocked out by Marlon Vera--the UFC was there to pick him up and keep pushing him up the ladder. He went from fighting regional fighters and flyweights to a top ten matchup, and when that match ended with him poking out Pedro Munhoz's eye, he was catapulted into a title eliminator against the #1-ranked Petr Yan, and when he got one of the year's worst decisions against Yan, he was allowed to sit on his hands for almost a year to wait for a title shot against a champion who was given three months and no injury recovery time to prepare. Is it fair for me to dislike Sean O'Malley for decisions the UFC made? Absolutely not, and I don't blame him for them whatsoever. Fortunately for me, Sean O'Malley also has a great love of making public hot takes like "here's my power ranking of my female coworkers by how fuckable I think they are" and "publicly avowed rapist Andrew Tate is a great guy I want to co-promote and advertise with" and "convicted child molester Tekashi69 is my homeboy" and "I have an open relationship with my wife where I get to bang other people but she doesn't because I'm the man" that make me feel deeply, thoroughly at peace with disliking him for other reasons. But none of that means he isn't a hell of a fighter or he didn't absolutely loving flatten Aljamain Sterling with a picture-perfect counterpunch in their title fight. Did he deserve the shot? Not even a little. Did he prove he belongs at the top? Undeniably. However much of a shithead he may be, he's the champion of the goddamn world. 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 first title defense will officially come against Brandon "Raw Dawg" Royval as the co-main event to UFC 296 on December 16th, marking the first flyweight championship fight not to include either Deiveson Figueiredo or Brandon Moreno since January of 2019. Women's Featherweight, 145 lbs  VACANT - The quiet of the landWomen's Bantamweight, 135 lbs  VACANT - The last seat at musical chairsJune 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 Peńa 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 - 16-3-1, 1 Defense, Sort OfEvery 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 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. A rematch was inevitable, and it came at UFC Noche on September 16th, and, like everything does, it ended in controversy. After an incredibly close fight that the media had split almost cleanly down the middle, the judges ruled the contest a split draw. Which wouldn't be crazy--were it not for said draw hinging on Mike Bell, who is typically one of MMA's most reliable judges, giving Grasso a completely, utterly inexplicable and inexcusable 10-8 score in the final round, without which Valentina Shevchenko would have won a split decision. So Grasso did not win, in the end, but she did defend her title, technically. But unless Valentina turns out to need an extended break for hand surgery, we're going right back to the rematch well. Women's Strawweight, 115 lbs   Zhang Weili - 24-3, 1 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. In a surprise to no one, Zhang absolutely dominated Lemos, outstriking her 296-29, smashing her to the tune of multiple 10-8 rounds, and winning a very, very wide decision. The next step is, in all likelihood, a China vs China championship showdown against Yan Xiaonan.
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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. He was to defend his title against Linton Vassell at Bellator's series finale-sounding Bellator 300, but Vassell got injured and, as Bader himself put it in a reddit post, Viacom is done with Bellator and didn't want to pay for a replacement. Ryan Bader is the best heavyweight champion outside of the UFC, and it's anyone's guess if he'll still be champion of anything by January. 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. Bellator hasn't yet confirmed this, possibly because Bellator doesn't know in what fashion it will exist this time next year. Bellator Middleweight Champion, 185 lbs  Johnny Eblen - 14-0, 2 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. This mindset only grew again after Bellator 299 on September 23rd, as Eblen faced Fabian Edwards, knocked him out in the third round, and nearly got into a post-fight brawl with his brother, UFC champion Leon Edwards. Eblen admits he has no idea what his future is or if Bellator will still be around, but he's considering a move to light-heavyweight with Vadim Nemkov leaving the division wide open. 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. He'll be defending his title against Jason Jackson at Bellator 301 on November 17th. Bellator Lightweight Champion, 155 lbs  Usman Nurmagomedov - 18-0, 2 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 faced fellow tournament semifinalist Brent Primus at Bellator 300 on October 7th, and it was as one-sided and yet uneventful as you can imagine. Theoretically, Usman is set up for the $1 million tournament final next year. Realistically, uh, don't hold your breath, buddy. 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 on November 17th. 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 - 27-2 (1), 5 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 10ths Crawford/Avanesyan card, taking a unanimous decision over Gabrielle Gabanator Holloway, who is 6-6 in MMA and 0-3 in boxing. After a year and a half of inactivity, Cris Cyborg returned to MMA to defend her title against Cat Zingano at Bellator 300 on October 7th. It lasted four minutes. She'd like to go back to boxing now, if you don't mind. Bellator Women's Flyweight Champion, 125 lbs  Liz Carmouche - 20-7, 3 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 defended her title against Ilima-Lei Macfarlane at Bellator 300 on October 7th, and it was one of those fights where friends don't really want to hurt each other--until Ilima got kicked enough that her leg collapsed in the fifth round. ONE Heavyweight Champion, 265 lbs   Anatoly Malykhin - 13-0, 0 DefensesONE Light Heavyweight Champion, 225 lbs  Anatoly Malykhin - 13-0, 0 DefensesAnatoly Malykhin's bizarre 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 punched 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 Interim Featherweight Champion, 155 lbs  Thanh Le - 14-3, 0 DefensesWell, we're right back here again. Thanh Le was considered a potential breakout star for ONE during their own breakout in 2020: A genuinely skilled, hard-punching, well-rounded, charismatic, American star who only won by stoppage and almost never lost. Moreover, he was a black eye for the UFC, as they had him not once, but twice--first on The Ultimate Fighter 22 (jesus christ), where he lost in the semifinals, and second on the Contender Series in 2017, where he scored a vicious headkick knockout. But they only offered him short-notice replacement debuts, and when ONE came calling, they simply let him go. Within a year, Thanh Le was 4-0 and had knocked out Martin Nguyen to become the new featherweight champion. And then, as ONE does, they fumbled the ball. Thanh twiddled his thumbs for a year and a half for a fight with the 6-0 Garry Tonon, whom he dispatched in less than a minute. Five months later, he lost his title to Tang Kai. He waited an entire year for a rematch--and when Kai got hurt, he took an interim title fight with Ilya Freymanov on October 6, 2023, and tapped him out in 1:02. He's back. He has a belt again. And nobody knows when he'll fight next. 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. And, like almost all ONE's MMA champs, he is promptly going to skip away from MMA completely and face Jonathan Haggerty for ONE's Featherweight Kickboxing Championship on November 3rd. 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 grappled Mikey Musumeci for his submission championship, and lost, 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. An entire 364 days later, she had her next fight: A special rules match, with MMA gloves but only punches and no takedowns or clinching allowed, against Muay Thai champion Nat "Wondergirl" Jaroonsak. Xiong knocked her out in the third round. What are we loving doing here? ONE Women's Atomweight Champion, 115 lbs   Stamp Fairtex - 10-2, 0 DefensesIt was slightly awkward when Seo Hee Ham and Stamp Fairtex were booked to meet at ONE Fight Night 14 in an interim atomweight title match, given the longstanding rumors of Angela Lee's retirement, and boy, it didn't get any less weird when ONE, which clearly knew what was going on, had Angela Lee announce that retirement just minutes before said match, which was promptly changed to an undisputed championship bout. But that's just part of how ONE rolls, as is their blatant attempts at favoritism, and boy, Stamp Fairtex is their most successful case study thus far. ONE signed her back in 2017 as a Muay Thai stadium champion, and within one fight in ONE she was their Atomweight Kickboxing Champion, and within two fights she was their Atomweight Muay Thai champion. Is this a statement about how quickly they push people they want or how thin their divisions can be? The answer, as always, is Yes. But none of that stopped Stamp from being really loving good at fighting, and as she transitioned to mixed martial arts she ran up a great record--with the sole exception of a two-fight series with Alyona Rassohyna, where she tapped out in the first and attempted to deny it, then won a real close split decision in an immediate rematch. ONE did not feel the need to book a rubber match, for some odd reason. Stamp won the 2021 Atomweight Grand Prix, got her shot at Angela Lee, and got choked out for her troubles, but a year and two wins later, she was good to go for another championship showdown. It wasn't easy--Seo Hee Ham dropped Stamp in the second round and, for some mysterious reason, when recapping the round, ONE chose to highlight Stamp's offense and not show it--but she stopped Ham with body shots in the third round, and in doing so became not just the undisputed champion, but the first person to ever actually knock Ham out in a fight. (Before you say it: No, Ayaka Hamasaki doesn't count, that was a corner stoppage.) ONE has their new star, and she's a hell of a striker. The question is: Will they actually book more MMA fights for her?  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. Karamovs going to attempt his first title defense against Chihiro Suzuki on November 4th. 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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Let me also throw this out here between running around doing poo poo today, which is kind of fitting for the card. CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 80: REMEMBER YOUR ROOTS  SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 4 FROM THE IBIRAPUERA GYMNASIUM IN SAO PAULO, BRAZIL PRELIMS 3 PM PDT / 6 PM EDT | MAIN CARD 6 PM / 9 PM VIA ESPN+ Well, after the enormous clusterfuck at the end of October, we're going on the road. We're back in Brazil, we've got Bonfims and Breners and Borralhos galore, and we're going to make a new heavyweight star one way or a-goddamn-nother. No matter how far we come or how many deals we sign, the core of mixed martial arts still lives in angry Brazilian fans stabbing Renzo Gracie in mid-fight, and by god, we'll always be that sport.  I have nothing funny to say about any of this. MAIN EVENT: STICKING THE LANDING  HEAVYWEIGHT: Jailton Almeida (19-2, #9) vs Derrick Lewis (27-11, #10)The time has come to complete the elevation of Jailton Almeida. Almeida had his first-ever UFC main event this past May against Jairzinho Rozenstruik. At the time I spent several paragraphs reflecting on how bizarre the company's promotional focus on Almeida felt--not out of any distaste for "Maladinho" himself, as he's a hell of a fighter, but for how out-of-the-ordinary their appreciation for him seemed to be. There's a demonstrable pattern to the people the UFC pushes. Are you predominantly a striker? Are you still in your twenties or, if possible, younger? Do you happen to be from America, Ireland, Britain or Russia? Do you speak English to say really weird, bigoted, out-of-pocket poo poo? Do you have a big ol' Instagram following? If you check at least three of these five boxes: Congratulations! You may qualify for promotional assistance from the UFC. Go find Sean O'Malley, he knows where the door to the clubhouse is. Jailton Almeida was a surprising promotional choice because he carried none of the UFC's preferential-treatment traits. He's a Brazilian fighter in his thirties who almost exclusively prefers to grapple, speaks through a translator, doesn't have much social media presence and, as far as I know, has yet to say anything controversial or, indeed, say much of anything at all. Jailton Almeida is a pretty bread-and-butter fighter who just happens to be very, very good at it. If it sounds like I am saying this to criticize the man or the UFC for promoting him, please be aware that I mean absolutely nothing of the sort. It's awesome to see the company get behind someone who isn't a problematic stand-and-bang elemental. It's just puzzling to see them put one of their biggest pushes in years behind him. And make no mistake, it is, absolutely, one of the biggest. Jailton Almeida was getting ranked matchups two fights into his UFC tenure. He made it into the top ten on a steady diet of extremely favorable matchups--when you as a grappling specialist are matched up not against kickboxing-focused Jairzinho Rozenstruik, rest assured, the company is intensely aware of what it is doing. This bout, originally scheduled against repeatedly-failed top contender Curtis Blaydes, was supposed to place Almeida in the top five. But Blaydes couldn't make it. So the UFC took a step down and replaced him with Derrick Lewis--the man who ended Blaydes' second run at contendership after launching his head into loving orbit with an uppercut. Which probably doesn't sound like much of a step down, and in terms of visibility, if anything, it's a big upgrade. Derrick Lewis is one of the most popular heavyweights in the sport. He'll officially cross a decade in the UFC next April, and in those near-ten years he's become its all-time knockout leader. He's fought for the title twice, he's beaten multiple world champions, he even has a win over Francis goddamn Ngannou. Hell, he's coming off the fastest win of his entire career! But it's about one fight beforehand that the world was wondering if Lewis was finally done. He's flirted with retirement a number of times, but by the summer of 2023 Lewis had finally crossed the threshold into double-digit losses, dropped four of his last five, and, most damningly, been stopped in every single one of those losses. Which, hey: It's one thing when Ciryl Gane picks you apart. It's not even that bad when Sergei Pavlovich kills you in a minute. But when you're getting outbrawled by Tai Tuivasa? When Serghei Spivac is ragdolling you and choking you out in a single round? That's when things get touchy. And that's when the UFC starts thinking about your future not as a promotable fighter, but as a launching pad for the next generation. When I covered Lewis vs Spivac, I summarized it like this: CarlCX posted:In other words: This fight isn't a referendum on if Derrick Lewis can still survive a brawl, it's a referendum on if Derrick Lewis can still stay on his feet. Almeida's top control is very good. Almeida's ground and pound and submission offense are very, very good. He and Lewis both know this is another the-floor-is-lava fight. Almeida is going to want the clinch and drag, Lewis is going to want to check him with hooks and uppercuts when he ducks into takedowns. I have long enjoyed Derrick Lewis. I want good things for Derrick Lewis. I do not think this is one of them. Almeida isn't the power-wrestler Spivac is, but he is smarter, faster and considerably more patient. Add in Lewis taking the fight on short notice and Almeida having prepared for the hardest fight of his life, and I just cannot see this ending any way other than JAILTON ALMEIDA BY SUBMISSION. The time of ascension has come. CO-MAIN EVENT: CHOP loving CHOP WELTERWEIGHT: Gabriel Bonfim (15-0) vs Nicolas Dalby (22-4-1 (2)) Remember how I said they weren't wasting any time with Jailton Almeida? That goes for Gabriel Bonfim, too. The UFC was very sure they'd found a real good thing with the Bonfim brothers after they made it through the Contender Series. Ismael, the older but smaller brother, was a hell of a lightweight on a nine-year winning streak who made a huge splash in his UFC debut by killing the seemingly sure-thing future contender Terrance McKinney in two rounds; Gabriel, his younger but taller brother, was an undefeated welterweight with a 100% finishing rate. They would fight on the same cards, they would beat people together, and one day, they would be Contender Series champions. Except Ismael got hosed up by Benoît Saint-Denis in his last fight. Having possibly learned from that mistake, Gabriel is getting shot up the card, here. He had two UFC fights, they were both prelims; we're done with that poo poo, you're in the co-main event now. Bonfim's got four straight first-round submissions coming into this fight. His entire gameplan revolves around opening up opportunities to pop someone's head off with a guillotine or a rear-naked choke. He's not striking-deficient by any means: He in fact uses surprisingly good footwork and a quick back hand to open up his grappling attempts. But he wants to finish on the ground. It's where he lives. Nicolas Dalby is absolutely fine with that. Nicolas Dalby is fine with most things, quite frankly. He's had a profoundly loving weird career. The first UFC run for "Danish Dynamite" came all the way back in 2015, and it was a weird, 1-2-1 run where he almost ground future contender Darren Till to dust but got completely dominated by Peter Sobotta. He went off to Cage Warriors and nearly won its welterweight title, only for the fight to be waved off as a No Contest not because of drugs or fouls, but because both men bled so much that the mat became a big red slip-n-slide and Marc Goddard ruled it no longer a safe fighting surface. Which was enough to get Dalby back in the UFC, because, gently caress, how can you not invest in that? And it's been more successful--which is to say Dalby's actually won most of his fights, this time, including some sizable upsets over Daniel Rodriguez and Muslim Salikhov. Except for the part where Jesse Ronson choked him out but pissed hot for steroids so it didn't count. Or the part where, right after that big Rodriguez upset, Dalby promptly got outworked by, of all people, Tim Means. Dalby's late-career commitment to gritty grappling and up-close infighting has given him the best wins of his career, but it's also made him an odd puzzle piece for the UFC--a 38 year-old too good not to use, but not good enough to get ranked, who is heading into his dozenth UFC fight without ever finishing or being finished by anyone--at least, in fights we can still legally acknowledge to have occurred. But I worry an awful lot about Dalby's love of up-close, head-first grappling against a guy with as much control as Gabriel Bonfim. He's demonstrated remarkable timing and precision with his submission attempts, and Dalby's reliance on scrambling for better positions is a liability against an opportunist like Bonfim. That said: We've never had to see Bonfim struggle. He wins so easily and so quickly that his stamina rarely gets tested. If he doesn't get Dalby out of there, that could very quickly become a problem. Dalby's gas is legendary, and his third-round beatings have been a predictable institution for the last eight years. I still think GABRIEL BONFIM BY SUBMISSION ending Dalby's never-finished streak is the right call, but if this fight gets out of the first round, it's time for the Bonfim brothers to get very nervous again. MAIN CARD: VARIATIONS ON A THEME HEAVYWEIGHT: Rodrigo Nascimento (10-1 (1), #15) vs Don'Tale Mayes (10-5 (1), NR) We're in prime heavyweight territory here. Rodrigo Nascimento is a top fifteen heavyweight, which is impressive, because not only has he never beaten a ranked heavyweight, he's never fought a ranked heavyweight. In fact, 3/4 of Rodrigo Nascimento's UFC career thus far has come against people who aren't actually here anymore. And he only barely beats them. Six months ago he fought Ilir Latifi, got thoroughly outwrestled and scraped out a narrow split decision. Before that? He desperately wrestled Tanner Boser to, once again, a narrow split decision. He knocked out Alan Baudot before that--but for one, Alan Baudot is one of the least successful heavyweights in UFC history, for two, he was beating the crap out of Nascimento until he kicked Baudot in the junk, and for three, Nascimento pissed hot so the fight legally didn't happen anyway. And before that, Nascimento was getting knocked out in 45 seconds by Chris Daukaus. And none of those guys are in the UFC anymore! Who was, in fact, the only person Nascimento's fought who's still actually here? Why, it was Don'Tale Mayes. That's right, baby, this isn't just a heavyweight bout, it's a heavyweight rematch. Back in May of 2020, at the Overeem/Harris card that was heavily advertised around Walt Harris making a comeback after the murder of his stepdaughter which made it really uncomfortable when Overeem beat him silly, the prelims opened with Nascimento outscrambling Mayes and choking him out in two rounds. The following three years have been a pretty mixed bag for "Lord Kong," too. He beat Roque Martinez and Josh Parisian--neither of whom were long for the UFC, either--but he got pretty thoroughly outwrestled by Hamdy Abdelwahab only for that, too, to be wiped from the record books after Hamdy failed a drug test, and the UFC tried to use Mayes to drum fallen star Augusto Sakai out of the company only for Sakai to outwork him to a shut-out decision. (After which the UFC released Sakai anyway, because gently caress you, that's why.) It's only Mayes' last appearance, where he ragdolled and choked out the legendary if thoroughly aged Andrei Arlovski, that propels him back towards the top fifteen. And thus, the rematch. Has the math on this fight changed at all in the last three years? I am not convinced. Mayes spent two of his last three fights getting controlled in much the same way Rodrigo did to him in the first place. He's a powerful wrestler and a scary clinch grappler, but he's much more suited to being the hammer than the nail. RODRIGO NASCIMENTO BY SUBMISSION feels probable. MIDDLEWEIGHT: Caio Borralho (14-1 (1)) vs Abus Magomedov (25-5-1) Caio Borralho's rise through the UFC feels like a slightly saner version of Jailton Almeida's. They graduated out of the Contender Series just two weeks apart from one another, and they fight similar, technical-grappling-focused styles, but where the company tried to ramp Almeida into contendership at top speed, Borralho's rise has been much more reasonable and measured. The undefeated but also-debuting Gadzhi Omargadzhiev, the upset-minded Armen Petrosyan, the always-tough Makhmud Muradov; even his last fight against Michał Oleksiejczuk was a solidly-matched test against a 6-3 veteran on a two-fight winning streak. Borralho's passed every test thrown at him with flying colors--even when it means, say, a fight with only 19 significant strikes in 15 minutes. Will the UFC keep ramping him slowly, or is it time to take the plunge? Well, it's both. Because he's fighting Abus Magomedov, who has exactly two UFC fights: His debut, a 19-second knockout over the 1-4 Dustin Stoltzfus, and his followup a year later, which was a top-ten-ranked bout against Sean Strickland, who, after knocking out Magomedov, somehow wound up in a title fight and won the middleweight championship of the loving world. Could Caio Borralho beat the unranked, unheralded, 1-1 Abus Magomedov and get a title shot, too? Probably not, but honestly, who the gently caress knows! As it is, all we know about Abus after 15 months in the UFC is he hits pretty loving hard and accurately, and if you try to make him do it for longer than a single round, apparently, he falls the gently caress apart. Sean Strickland is a very tough person to look good against, but after the first five minutes of their fight in July Abus looked lost and exhausted. Which is a bad loving set of traits to have against a guy like Caio Borralho, who is more than willing to grind you out for three straight rounds. Abus is secretly a good wrestler--he DID get Strickland down, which is not easy--but I don't think he's going to be defensively sound enough to ward Borralho off for fifteen minutes. CAIO BORRALHO BY DECISION. MIDDLEWEIGHT: Rodolfo Vieira (9-2) vs Armen Petrosyan (8-2) It's Styles Make Fights time, baby. In the red corner: Rodolfo Vieira. One of the best grapplers in history! 100-9 in a decade of competition! More than a dozen world championships! By 2021 he was 7-0 in MMA and looked like a potential middleweight contender! And then he, uh, got choked out by a guy named Fluffy. Over the last two years, the story of Vieira's fighting has become very clear. If he can take you down, you are in massive loving danger. He will control you, he will submit you, and it will hurt. If he can't? He's got nothing. Never was this on better display than his 2022 fight against Chris Curtis, where he desperately spammed single-legs while getting boxed up for two and a half rounds and ultimately lost a decision after attempting 20 takedowns and completing 0. He does not want to strike with you. He's tried to display some newfound boxing abilities, but they're perfunctory at best. Particularly against a guy like Armen Petrosyan, who is a kickboxer through and through. To put this in perspective: Rodolfo Vieira averages 3.7 takedowns per every 15 minutes in the UFC. Armen Petrosyan? 0.23. He completes a quarter of a takedown per fight. Every four fights someone punches his Subway card and he gets a free sandwich. But he's struggled to really hurt people in his UFC appearances, largely because his kickboxing focus means he spends goddamn near every fight trying to keep people from taking him down. And--generally speaking--he fails. Only one of Petrosyan's five corporate competitors has failed to ground him. Petrosyan's made all of them work for it, and he came back to win decisions against Gregory Rodrigues and AJ Dobson by outstriking them 2:1 between getting taken down, but he still wound up on his back, repeatedly. For a guy like Vieira who will just exhaust himself trying to force you to the floor, that's a bad sign. If Petrosyan can keep his distance, jab Vieira and run like hell every time he sees a takedown coming, he's got a chance. Otherwise? RODOLFO VIEIRA BY SUBMISSION seems pretty inevitable. LIGHTWEIGHT: Ismael Bonfim (19-4) vs Vinc Pichel (14-3) You can't have one Bonfim without the other. Ismael's in the unfortunate position of trying to get his mojo back. His outboxing and flying-knee-flattening of Terrance McKinney was one of the UFC's best debuts in years, but five months later that hype train got violently derailed. After thirteen straight wins and nine straight years without a defeat, Ismael stepped into the cage against Benoît Saint-Denis this past July. A few seconds into the fight, Saint-Denis hit Bonfim with a kick to the body and Bonfim slapped his side and told him to try it again; Benoît replied by marching forward and kicking him in the ribs over and over without a care in the world. As it turns out, being a hard counterpuncher doesn't help when your opponent can eat your hooks and chuck you to the goddamn mat anyway. Bonfim tapped out with twelve seconds left in the round. He's very, very mad about it, and he wants revenge. And the UFC wants to see if he can defend takedowns. When last we saw Vinc Pichel, I wrote this: CarlCX posted:Vinc "From Hell" Pichel is one of those fighters people regularly forget exists. At 14-2 he's by no means bad: He's a very solid grappler and a decent striker. But he's gotten absolutely destroyed by superior wrestlers in his two cracks at the top ten, one of which was a very entertaining suplex knockout at the hands of poor lost Rustam Khabilov, and he's only managed one fight a year for the past four years, which has made it easy for him to slip through the cracks in the shark tank that is the lightweight division. But he's a good test for Bonfim. Pichel's an incredibly tough motherfucker with just two stoppage losses in his entire career. He's not as clean or technical as Bonfim, but he's a better pressure fighter. My money's still on ISMAEL BONFIM BY DECISION, because we've seen Bonfim's gas tank before and I don't think he'll have stamina problems while he plays matador with Pichel, but if he focuses too much on countering instead of range management and winds up stuck on the cage, he could be in for a very long night. PRELIMS: WHERE MOST OF THE ACTUAL RANKING-ADJACENT FIGHTERS LIVE NOW LIGHTWEIGHT: Elves Brener (15-3) vs Kaynan Kruschewsky (15-1 (1)) The last time we saw Elves Brener, he was facing the deeply underrated Guram Kutateladze, who was a fill-in replacement after both men had been rebooked over the past month. At the time, I was pretty low on his chances: CarlCX posted:Kutateladze, seemingly unable to stay healthy, has pulled out of four fights in the last two years. He's one of the best lightweights in the world and he's so inactive that he doesn't even rate a Wikipedia page. And that's how you wind up fighting Elves Brener. Guram was supposed to fight Jamie Mullarkey last month, Guram got hurt and Mullarkey went on to get iced by Muhammad Naimov; Brener, who has decidedly not ensconced himself as one of the best in the world, was supposed to fight Jordan Leavitt tonight, Leavitt pulled out, and Kutateladze, now recovered, was rebooked here. So I am once again in the position of casting severe personal doubts on a recent signing whose footage doesn't wow me. ELVES BRENER BY DECISION feels appropriate, but it's a last-minute change, anything can happen. BANTAMWEIGHT: Daniel Marcos (15-0) vs Victor Hugo (24-4) It's another Contender Series clash, and with it, another reminder of how frustrating I find the drat thing. Daniel Marcos won his contract last year and notched two victories in 2023: A knockout over Saimon Oliveira, who chose to eschew his grappling in favor of overswinging and getting repeatedly countered for it, and a split decision over Davey Grant, who outstruck Marcos in every round and had an easy shut-out victory on most media scorecards, and yet, somehow, still lost. Marcos was supposed to get tested against another promising-but-unproven Daniel here in Daniel "Willycat" Santos, but the council of nicknames decided to finally punish Santos for his sins, so he's out injured. Instead, we've got Victor "Striker" Hugo, so I can only assume the aforementioned council was so puzzled about why the Hunchback guy is a professional fighter now that they forgot to fine Hugo for that terrible name choice. Hugo's been cleaning up the Brazilian regionals for quite awhile, knocking people out and cranking heel hooks in places like Qualify Combat and Sicario MMA and a Serbian federation named Ad Astra per Aspera and whatever the gently caress a 'Pancrase' is--aside from a between-rounds corner stoppage thanks to a slipped rib, he hasn't been beaten since 2013. Of course, Daniel Marcos hasn't been beaten period, according to judges. Dodgy decision or no, Marcos hung in there for fifteen minutes with Grant and made a good accounting for himself, which is more than most of his opponents can say. Hugo's got some real promise, and I appreciate anyone who's still throwing out kneebars in 2023, but Marcos seems like too much, too fast. DANIEL MARCOS BY DECISION. WELTERWEIGHT: Elizeu Zaleski dos Santos (24-7) vs Rinat Fakhretdinov (22-2)Why this isn't headlining the prelims, I have no idea. I'm not sure the UFC knows what it's doing with either of these fighters, quite frankly. Elizeu Zaleski is a hell of a fighter, a fun, powerful, scary striker with multiple fight-of-the-night awards, a knockout victory over Sean Strickland and one of the most uncomfortably one-sided beatings in MMA history against Benoît Saint-Denis. But he's also turning 37 this month, and he also just came back from a year off thanks to a failed test for ostarine, and he also struggled with Li Jingliang and Muslim Salikhov, so I get having some trouble placing him in the pecking order. Rinat Fakhretdinov, though? That I don't get. Fakhretdinov came into the UFC last year as a middleweight champion out of Russia on a 14-fight, eight-year winning streak, he pieced up Andreas Michailidis and Bryan Battle with relative ease, and management gave him a big ol' present by having him welcome Kevin Lee back to the UFC this past July, who retired after Rinat destroyed him in under a minute. So Rinat's 3-0 in the UFC, he just got the most visible win of his career and he hasn't lost a fight in drat near a decade. So give him Elizeu Zaleski halfway through the prelims of a random Brazilian TV card? I guess? This is what I mean re: how weird the pushes for Jailton and Caio Borralho are. Why, it's enough to make one think they might be giving favorable treatment to Contender Series winners they can push as pet projects who just happen to also be ritualistically underpaid! But that'd be crazy. RINAT FAKHRETDINOV BY DECISION. LIGHT-HEAVYWEIGHT: Vitor Petrino (9-0) vs Modestas Bukauskas (15-5) This is one of those "the UFC knows exactly what they want" fights and that means I am deeply biased against it. Which is unfortunate, because Vitor Petrino is fun as poo poo to watch fight, in that he's big and powerful and athletically gifted, and he also just cannot stop having profoundly weird fights. He won his Contender Series debut by knockout despite being so tired a round and a half into the fight that he could barely keep his hands up, but his opponent was somehow even sloppier. He won his UFC debut against Anton "The Pleasure Man" Turkalj by grapplefucking him in a fight where, despite two groin shots and a half-dozen fence grabs, no points were deducted from Turkalj. Even in his most normal fight, his last outing against Marcin Prachnio, he still visibly tired himself throwing giant slams for little gain before snatching an arm triangle a minute before the fight would've ended. He's got big, powerful weapons, and he knows he has to use them, but he's not quite sure how they go together yet. Modestas Bukauskaus is the UFC's spoiler. After getting rid of him back in 2021 after Khalil Rountree Jr. kicked his knee in half, he was brought back as a short-notice, last-minute replacement the UFC could sacrifice to Tyson Pedro for a big, fun, hometown Australian win--except Modestas, who is actually pretty technically sound, outfought Pedro and won. So the UFC threw him at The Ultimate Fighter 30 (jesus christ) runner-up Zac Pauga, intending to rehab him into a potential light-heavyweight prospect--and it probably should've worked, because Pauga outstruck him and won on 90% of the media scorecards!--but Bukauskaus took home another decision. He's a smart, conservative, technical striker, which is, of course, less fun than slinging leather, and the UFC would very much like to stop paying him money to upset their guys. Vitor Petrino is here to knock out Modestas Bukauskas. This fight has a scritped ending, and it's Petrino punching his face in while a Brazilian crowd loses its poo poo. I think this is likely: Modestas is good at playing keepaway, but he's historically struggled with fighters who can use their physicality to pressure him out of his gameplan, and few guys are as singleminded about their physicality as Petrino. But I cannot resist. MODESTAS BUKAUSKAS BY DECISION. WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT: Angela Hill (15-13, #12) vs Denise Gomes (8-2) The Angela Hill life is a rough one. Two fights ago? Headlining the prelims against Emily Ducote. One fight ago? A full-on main event showdown with Mackenzie Dern. Having done her job and gotten the permanently-marketed Dern a big, notable win? Get your rear end all the way down on the prelims and fight Denise Gomes. Angela Hill's great--fun, funny, rarely boring, always well-rounded--but after almost ten years and two dozen fights, she's one of the UFC's most-used and most-abused utility players. I'm sure they'd be thrilled if she went on a title run, she's got a big fanbase, but they're not doing her any matchmaking favors. This fight isn't much different. Denise Gomes got through the Contender Series, got into the UFC, and immediately lost her debut when the irrepressible Loma Lookboonmee managed to trip her to the ground and elbow her face for ten minutes. The UFC clearly lost some confidence in Gomes, as her next two bouts came against other women the company wanted to push, namely fellow Contender Series winner Bruna Brasil and the heavily-hyped Yazmin Jauregui, but Gomes walked Brazil down in a one-and-a-half-round TKO and blasted Jauregui flat in twenty seconds. So now she gets the Angela Hill test. If Gomes can beat her, it's a big feather in her cap and a ranking in her future. I think she's got a chance--with her power and aggression she's got a chance against anyone, frankly--but Hill's grappling and clinch control are both solidly underrated, and we haven't seen Gomes have to fight off takedowns the way she did against Loma. I'm sticking with ANGELA HILL BY DECISION. WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT: Montserrat Ruiz (10-3) vs Eduarda Moura (9-0) I was thrilled to see Montserrat Ruiz back this past August. I had enjoyed her do-or-die fighting style back in 2021, and after Amanda Lemos sparked her out in a round and Ruiz disappeared for two years, I had assumed she was simply done with the sport. And then she came back! And, uh, looked bad. Really, really bad. Outstruck 141 to 20 bad. She was completely helpless under the ground assault of Jaqueline Amorim and wound up getting a TKO loss not so much because she was absorbing devastating blows, but because the referee was--correctly--tired of seeing her get helplessly mauled. So now, she gets to welcome Eduarda Moura to the UFC. Moura is an undefeated prospect with a grappling focus so strict that her nickname is Ronda--which makes her the second Ronda Rousey-themed female fighter in the UFC, and I cannot help wondering if this is a Khaleesi situation where a sea of Rousey-tribute grapplers will slowly overtake the women's division. But I thought it was cool when Kiichi Kunimoto did it, so I should probably shut the gently caress up. After her last fight, I should probably--rightly--assume another ground-based mauling for El Conejo here. That's almost certainly the correct answer. I refuse to stop being a dumbass. MONTSERRAT RUIZ BY TKO. LIGHTWEIGHT: Kauę Fernandes (8-1) vs Marc Diakiese (16-7) Oh, Marc Diakiese. You somehow fooled the UFC into signing you thinking you were an ultra-exciting British kickboxer, and then you actually turned out to really like wrestling. British wrestling! The most shameful kind there is. Now it's seven years later and you're a perfectly even 7-7 in the UFC, and you've been trading two wins and two losses apiece over and over since the dawn of 2019, and you've never been farther from a ranking, and you're once again desperately trying to stave off a contract-endangering third consecutive loss, and they're not even giving you established UFC fighters anymore. Hell, they're not even giving you Contender Series winners. Kauę Fernandes has one claim to fame, and it's winning Shooto Brasil's lightweight title back in 2018, and as much as I love Shooto and all it has done for the sport, Shooto Brasil is the company that brought you things like 'José Aldo fails to hurt a 130-pound boxer' and '22-7 world champion Dudu Dantas vs 3-5 Michel Costa' and three of the four social media links on their official page are dead. I have no faith in the things Shooto Brazil brings to my doorstep. But I think Marc Diakiese losing is a lot funnier. KAUĘ FERNANDES BY SUBMISSION.
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Nov 1, 2023 20:42
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https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4046568 The GDT for Almeida/Lewis is up. Putting their names in that order feels wrong.
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Nov 4, 2023 22:33
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Snowman_McK posted:It is amazing how often you see the refrain of 'Man, Ngannou just couldn't market himself so the UFC was right to let him go' and you have to wonder what these people think the UFC is actually for. The unfortunate thing about the UFC marketing itself as a brand rather than a promoter is, well, they succeeded. A lot of people see it as a brand, and that means it's the obligation of fighters to service the brand, rather than the other way around. It is stupid and terrible.
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Nov 5, 2023 05:02
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Mr. Nice! posted:Mark Goddard is a coward and should have stood that dude up from mount multiple times holy poo poo I can't believe he let him just lay on Lewis for drat near the whole fight without doing anything. counterpoint: full mount is a dominant position people shouldn't get stood out of and if someone can sit on you for five minutes at a time without fear of losing position your suffering is earned Also, Lewis deserves everything he gets for having like four different points in that fight where he could have separated and forced a tired Jailton to fight on the feet, and instead Lewis's brain thought, 'no, I'm going to take him down, this is going great for me.'
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Nov 6, 2023 02:41
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Mr. Nice! posted:This isn't a grappling competition. You only get points for position if absolutely no effective striking or grappling is happening. Here's the funny thing: This isn't actually true. You're right, in that the unified rules say: quote:Merely holding a dominant position(s) shall not be a primary factor in assessing dominance. What the fighter does with those positions is what must be assessed. But two paragraphs before that, they also say: quote:Judges must CONSIDER giving the score of 10 8 when a fighter shows dominance in the round even though no impactful scoring against the opponent was achieved. And one paragraph later: quote:If a fighter has little to no offensive output during a 5 minute round, it should be normal for the judge to consider awarding the losing fighter 8 points instead of 9. So holding position is meaningless if you don't have significant offensive output and it shouldn't be a factor in grading dominance because you shouldn't give fighters benefits for not being impactful. But if a fighter is dominant even though they don't do anything impactful, which, definitionally, means they were holding a dominant position but not doing anything with it, you should consider awarding them a 10-8. And if a fighter has no offensive output, such as, say, if they were held in a dominant position and didn't/couldn't muster anything in response, you should consider punishing them with a 10-8. The rules have never been consistent and they will not save any of us. They were written by the same people who think 12-6 elbows are Mortal Kombat fatalities and marijuana is a performance-enhancing drug. Which is why, in my heart of hearts, I still go by the original golden rule: MMA is the closest thing we can get to sport as simulation of a real fight. I don't even like neutral position standups, personally, but I get why they're there. If someone gets to full mount or back mount? Congratulations, that's your problem.
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Nov 7, 2023 09:17
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Eat This Glob posted:AND i get that no one wants to watch people get laid on for 15-25 minutes while nothing else happens, but if there's gonna be a ground game, you gotta let there be a ground game. cut the dude or dudette if they're really boring or whatever, this is a hilariously timed post because the UFC cut Taila Santos this morning
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Nov 7, 2023 19:47
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So, back when the title got stripped for the eleventh time in three weeks this summer, I said I was going to have to do another giant championship history effortpost for Light Heavyweight before they finally fixed it. That fight is this weekend. Thus: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4046814
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Nov 8, 2023 04:51
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Well, it's Wednesday, so here's double-post writing. CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 81: REPLANTING A POTTER'S FIELD  SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 FROM MADISON SQUARE GARDEN IN NEW YORK CITY EARLY PRELIMS PRELIMS 3 PM PST / 6 PM EST | PRELIMS 5 / 8 | MAIN CARD 7 / 10 VIA PAY-PER-VIEW Every time a championship changes hands, I write a new entry into the endlessly lengthy champion carousel at the bottom of each month's report, and every time there's relevant news or an update on who they'll be fighting next, I append it to the end of their entry. When Jon Jones won the heavyweight championship of the world this past March, before I wrote his entry, I stared at the wall making the Tina Belcher groan for half an hour. And when the UFC announced Jon Jones' next title defense this past summer, I wrote this: CarlCX posted: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. So now we have Sergei Pavlovich vs Tom Aspinall for an interim title with almost no time to prepare. Which, unless I'm missing one--Glover Teixeira vs Jamahal Hill, Sean Strickland vs Israel Adesanya, the UFC's failed attempt to make Strickland take a short-notice title fight against Khamzat Chimaev, Islam Makhachev vs Alexander Volkanovski II, and now this--makes five times this year the UFC has tried to set up a fight for the sport's most prestigious world championships with less than a month's notice. It's almost like the divisions and the matchmaking are falling apart. And what can you do but make like Molly Coddle and just start picking up the pieces.  honestly: it's not bad. MAIN EVENT: THE HOTTEST POTATO LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP: Jiří Procházka (29-3-1, #1) vs Alex Pereira (8-2, #3)Normally, I would subject you all to a lengthy rant about the long history of chaos in the Light Heavyweight division, but if you're reading this, chances are I already subjected you to it in a much longer format! If you want the full story, check out The Sins of the Snowball King: A Light Heavyweight Championship History, in all its terrible glory. But for those who don't want to read 21,000 words about one of the worst weight classes in the sport, or for those who just need a primer, here's a real quick catchup on exactly how we got here:
And now we have had seven title strippings or vacations in the last eight years, and the only successful title defense in the last four years (no, Dominick Reyes doesn't count, fight me about it) was against a middleweight who has yet to win at 205 pounds, and as of now, in fact, your Light Heavyweight top ten looks like this:
The gyre widens, the void screams, chaos reigns and nothing matters. Which, as a fan of this sport, is an endlessly frustrating cycle I'm deeply irritated to be back in. But it does lead to some hilarious possibilities, and boy, this fight is one of them. Honestly, everything about Jiří Procházka is kind of hilarious. He's a Czech samurai who trains in the woods, stabs trees and talks about living by the code of Bushido, but he was inspired to fight by Ranker.com's 19th best action movie of 2008, Never Back Down. He lives a pastoral life in a cottage without gas or heat but he lists his fighting heroes as Scorpion and Liu Kang and tries to imitate moves from Tekken. He's the #1 205-pounder on the planet and fights like a madman with no fear of exhaustion or death, but one fight ago he was nearly knocked out by the desiccated 0-for-his-last-4 remains of Dominick Reyes. He beat Glover Teixeira, and it was the fight of the year, but it was the fight of the year because Teixeira almost killed him repeatedly, too. He's the best kind of throwback. In an age of carefully-managed offensive output and deeply thought-out strategy, Jiří just wants to punch you until either you've been punched so much you can no longer move or he's punched so much that he can punch no more. Which is the kind of thing Alex Pereira desperately needs. Pereira was the talk of the town when he got a UFC contract back in 2021 not so much for his 3-1 rookie record, but because he had defeated Israel Adesanya twice as a kickboxer. The UFC carefully navigated him away from anyone who stood a chance at forcing him to grapple, and within three fights, he was getting his shot at the king--and he won! He stopped Israel loving Adesanya and became the Middleweight Champion of the God Damned World. For five months. Then Adesanya killed him dead in two rounds in the rematch. But that was fine, because Pereira, who is as big as Jon Jones, was very, very tired of the weight cut, and had planned to move to 205 pounds, win or lose. Which he did, this past July, with a triumphant split decision over Jan Błachowicz. And the crowd went--pretty mild. Here's the thing: On his merits as both a kickboxer and a mixed martial artist, Alex Pereira is probably the best striker in the division, and arguably, the UFC. But his guns-blazing aggression got him melted by Adesanya in their second encounter, and the Pereira who showed up against Jan was measured and tentative enough that he wound up just a coinflip away from losing. Against Jan Błachowicz, however, that's understandable. Jan is smart, tactical and defensive, and the first fighter who presented enough of a grappling threat to stifle Pereira given a chance. Pereira struggled to get his offense together because every combination he threw was a liability. But Jiří Procházka does not pose that problem. Jiří Procházka, if anything, is the solution to that problem. He chains spinning elbows into other, separate spinning elbows. He throws flying knees and eschews his own defense if it means getting to throw back harder. This is a wild, powerful, savage of a striker against an extremely measured, technical kickboxer. And it's also a weirdly historically significant fight. If Jiří wins this fight, he'll have become a two-time UFC champion after just four fights with the company, which is a pretty bonkers statistic that's pretty unlikely to ever be matched. If Alex Pereira wins this fight, he'll have become a two-division UFC champion after just seven fights with the company, which is an insane statistic that probably won't be seen again until the UFC finally caves and adds Women's Atomweight, Men's Super Lightweight and Cruiserweight to the roster. Is it as much an artifact of the shambles the Light Heavyweight division is in as the quality of either fighter? Oh, absolutely. One hundred percent. We're crowning the King of the Ashes, here. We're in the same territory here as the way the UFC had two cross-divisional champions in its first 22 years of existence and six in its next 8. Should we keep having fun with it anyway? I mean, gently caress, what's the alternative? I think history is on Pereira's side, here. I love Jiří Procházka's fighting style, but here's the thing: It succeeds based on his ability to be bigger and tougher and hit harder than whoever's offense he's walking through. Volkan Oezdemir hurt him. Dominick Reyes hurt him. Glover Teixeira almost decapitated him several times. Alex is bigger, stronger, rangier and a much better striker than all of those men--and he has Glover in his corner, as his coach, to draw on. Jiří is not only fighting an incredibly dangerous style matchup, he's doing it after a year of injury recovery. His best chances for success here are going to come from drowning Alex. Put pressure on him, smother him with strikes, force him to defend takedowns to draw his attention away from strikes, and do not, under any circumstances, give him room to chip and counter and time out openings for his combinations. But Jiří likes to go for the knockout, and his commitment to that hunt will get him hunted in return. Eventually, painfully, I'm picking ALEX PEREIRA BY TKO. CO-MAIN EVENT: THE BIG GOLD BELT INTERIM HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP: Sergei Pavlovich (18-1, #2) vs Tom Aspinall (13-3, #4)When trying to discuss Makhachev vs Volkanovski 2 last month, I said a thing: CarlCX posted:This is a great fight. In a company that is absolutely addicted to rematches it is, easily, the most anticipated rematch they could possibly promote. And the fact that it is happening here and now is an absolute failure on the UFC's part. Look, it's the worst-kept secret in the world that Jon Jones is here for a good time, not a long time. There's a reason he won the heavyweight title and called out the only person in the entire top fifteen who hasn't actually fought in almost three years. There's a reason he started talking about retiring after he beat Stipe Miocic. There's a reason the UFC made it clear within minutes of announcing this interim championship fight that when Jon Jones DOES come back at some indeterminate point next year, instead of unifying the title or fighting the #1 contender or even pretending to care about whatever else has happened in the division over the 12+ months since last he fought, he will, still, fight Stipe Miocic (and then maybe retire). Heavyweight is going to have two championships: The vanity title, which belongs to Jon Jones and will come back whenever he does, and the Real title, which is here, being fought over by the, realistically, #1 and #3 heavyweights in the UFC. And it infuriates me, because Sergei Pavlovich and Tom Aspinall are both fighters who deserve to be fighting for a heavyweight championship. I would favor either of them over a Jon Jones or a Stipe Miocic in the present day. Both have proven themselves far more than a Jon Jones or a Stipe Miocic in the present day. If you'd told me Sergei Pavlovich vs Tom Aspinall was going to determine the post-Jones-retirement world champion in 2024, I would have believed you without question, and I would have been thrilled to see them fight. With preparation. And full training camps. For a real belt. Instead, we're getting it as a two-weeks-notice late-replacement co-main event. The last time a heavyweight championship match didn't main event a card was thirteen goddamn years ago, because Shane Carwin literally murdering Frank Mir wasn't as profitable as Georges St-Pierre vs Dan Hardy. But here we are. Both men deserve better. Sergei Pavlovich is a living loving wrecking ball. After seven fights and half a decade his entire UFC career can be rewatched in less time than it takes to complete an episode of Frasier. Only three of his fights have ever made it out of a first goddamn round, and the only time he's ever lost it was because Alistair goddamn Overeem sat on top of him and punched him in the face repeatedly. He dropped Derrick Lewis and Tai Tuivasa in less than a minute. Seven months ago he easily sprawled on Curtis Blaydes, one of heavyweight's best wrestlers, and blasted him out in one round. He's on a six-fight first-round knockout streak, and the best way to illustrate just how ridiculous an accomplishment that is requires noting that Lewis, the all-time heavyweight knockout leader in UFC history, never managed more than two in a row. Tom Aspinall was already the UFC's heir apparent a year ago and if he hadn't blown out his knee fighting Blaydes in 2022 he'd almost certainly have fought for the belt already. He's big, he's British, and unlike most of the people the UFC promotes with those two qualities, he's very, very good at fighting. Where most heavyweights, even Pavlovich, focus solely on power and fury, Aspinall is a genuinely well-rounded athlete who uses his bag of tricks to set up his finishes. And his fights are all finishes. His hands are strong and fast enough to drop guys like Marcin Tybura and Serghei Spivac, his wrestling is solid enough to just dumptruck Andrei Arlovski at will, and his grappling is scary enough to take a man like Alexander Volkov, who spent almost ten minutes on the ground with Fabricio Werdum, and snap his arm in minutes. Pavlovich is a physical specimen with fist-based anger issues that no one can stop. Aspinall is one of the most legitimately well-rounded heavyweights in the world. I would have loved to see this fight with three months of camp, and I think, one day, we probably still will. But on two weeks' notice? When Pavlovich was already preparing to be the backup fighter in case someone fell through, only for the UFC to, of course, not actually use him that way, and Aspinall is coming off the couch? Yeah. SERGEI PAVLOVICH BY TKO. Aspinall's extremely smart and well-rounded, and I think he has the tools to get through Pavlovich's flak field and drag him to the floor, but that takes a lot of practice and timing. In a pinch, you can't beat Pavlovich's power. MAIN CARD: FINISH HER WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT: Jéssica Andrade (24-12, #5) vs Mackenzie Dern (13-3, #7) I have been calling the FBI about arresting Jéssica Andrade's management all year, and inexplicably, history's greatest monsters are still running free. Andrade was riding high at the turn of 2023: She'd taken some time off to rehab injuries and group, she'd decided to focus on Women's Flyweight, and she'd battered Lauren Murphy to justify her status as a contender. And then Taila Santos had to drop out of a fight with Erin Blanchfield, so, with five days' notice, Andrade stepped in to face the most dangerous grappler in the division. And she got destroyed. It was an incredibly silly matchup to take and it led Andrade to go back on her word and drop right back down to strawweight, where, less than three months later, she took a fight with Xiaonan Yan, waded recklessly forward into fire, and got knocked out in less than a round. Ideally, you should take another break. Instead, Jéssica Andrade accepted another late replacement fight against another top-division grappler. This time she got choked out by Tatiana Suarez. That's three stoppage losses across two separate weight classes in six months. If you're a responsible promoter, this is where you stop, sit your fighter down, and ask them what on Earth they are doing. If you're the UFC, this is when you call Mackenzie Dern and tell her she's got a live one. Management has been trying to fast-track Mackenzie into title contention for four straight years, and the last year has been no different. She was supposed to beat Xiaonan Yan at the end of 2022 and skate right into title contention--in a fight where it was made clear only Dern was up for a shot--but getting outstruck to a majority decision set her back. The UFC gave her seven months to recover, then booked her against the woman they use to put over everyone they want to succeed, Angela Hill. And it worked! Hill's lack of power (I'm sorry, Angie, you're one of my favorites but it's true) meant Dern could walk through her offense and chase her down both standing and on the ground. She couldn't get a stoppage--she may not always win, but Angie's one of the hardest people in the sport to stop--but she could demolish her with multiple 10-8 rounds and walk away with a lopsided decision. And those are the two sides of this situation. This is the fifth fight Jéssica Andrade will have in 2023. She's lost three of them. By stoppage. When Mackenzie Dern lost her second fight of 2022 she got a long period of recovery and a fight against someone ranked six slots below her, which, somehow, still pushed her further up the ladder. When Jéssica Andrade gets stopped three times in six months, she gets Mackenzie Dern. I would love it if Andrade put one of those sledgehammers to work and scored an upset victory here, but she's been looking worse and worse every time we see her, and Dern has been steadily improving, and I just cannot help feeling we're seeing a forcible changing of the guard, here. MACKENZIE DERN BY SUBMISSION. LIGHTWEIGHT: Matt Frevola (11-3-1, #14) vs Benoît Saint-Denis (12-1 (1), NR)And here, we have our all-action madness fight of the night. Matt Frevola is an accomplished wrestler. Matt Frevola is a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu brown belt! Matt Frevola does not care about either of these facts. Matt Frevola stopped attempting takedowns in fights years ago. He wants to swing hooks. It is the well from which his joy springs. He's been on a tear recently, punching his way slowly up into the top fifteen, but that all-fun all-the-time style starts to give diminishing returns as you climb the ranks. People assumed his last fight against Drew Dober would see him finally adopt a tactical approach again so as to minimize risk against a fellow big-handed brawler. As it turned out: Nope! Headkicks and superman punches. He actually faked a takedown just to chuck another hook. And it worked. He proved himself the bigger, better gunfighter and knocked Dober dead in a round. Benoît Saint-Denis is a berserker, too, but he's a comparatively versatile one. He likes to walk forward behind long kicks, he likes to stick people with body shots to get them pinned to the cage, but he doesn't want the fight there. He wants you on the ground. He wants to wrestle you down, get to top position, and just erase your face with his fists and elbows. Benoît Saint-Denis understands that you have felt pangs of self-doubt about your appearance over the course of your life, and he wants to make sure you know that, to him, you are beautiful, because to him, every face is an equally perfect canvas to be Jackson Pollocked with blood and plasma. He's been trying as hard as possible to overcome his UFC debut, which was one of the most one-sided beatings in the company's history, and honestly, he's done pretty loving well: He's on a four-fight winning streak that just saw him stop Ismael Bonfim and Thiago Moisés back to back. He's established himself as relevant in the sport's biggest shark tank. But Matt Frevola is a real scary shark. Frevola's takedown defense is statistically not the best, but those statistics are lopsided thanks to Arman Tsarukyan dumping him ten times in a single fight. Combined with Benoît's tendency to eat shots as a way of closing distance and getting in on his takedown attempts, MATT FREVOLA BY TKO feels awful likely. FEATHERWEIGHT: Pat Sabatini (18-4) vs Diego Lopes (22-6) While thinking about this fight, I came to a realization.  I don't feel great about it! But I also don't feel bad about it. And that, in truth, is the problem. I feel nothing for you, Pat Sabatini. I don't know if this is a problem with you or a problem with me. I like your submission holds! I like your heel hooks! But I cannot find it in myself to muster the energy to care if you win or lose. Maybe it's just because I watched you get wrecked by Damon Jackson and then watched Damon Jackson get wrecked by Dan Ige and Billy Quarantillo and I've just been hurt so many times by wrestlers I like not making it to the top that I'm scared to allow myself to emotionally invest in you. And it's so comparatively easy to get invested in Diego Lopes! He made the incredibly silly choice of taking on the undefeated, top-ten ranked Movsar Evloev on three goddamn days' notice as a late-replacement signee, and he almost beat him! He won a round and he probably hyperextended the poo poo out of Movsar's knee and in a saner world would have gotten a submission, but this is mixed martial arts, where grappling doesn't count and submissions are only real if you die. Lopes lost, but he and his turn-of-the-century-emo haircut came back three months later and submitted the poo poo out of Gavin "Guv'nor" Tucker, which brings me one step closer to never having go hear a ring announcer say "GAVIN "GUV'NOR" TUCKER" ever again, which is only more reason to love him. But mostly? Sabatini's biggest strengths are his grounded submissions and Lopes, thus far, is a human blender full of discarded leg and arm bones. Sure, Sabatini's never been submitted, but neither had Tucker, and hell, neither had Evloev, and it didn't stop him then. DIEGO LOPES BY SUBMISSION. PRELIMS: HANG ON LOOPY, LOOPY HANG ON FLYWEIGHT: Steve Erceg (10-1, #14) vs Alessandro Costa (13-3, NR)If the sport hadn't had so much crazy poo poo happen in the past five months, and if the fanbase didn't perennially devalue the Flyweight division, Steve Erceg's UFC debut would have been one of the better stories of the year. Seven years of toiling away in the Australian fight scene got Erceg on the UFC's radar--but as a feeder prospect, brought in to put over one of their newest Contender Series winners, Clayton Carpenter. But the #10 ranked David Dvořák lost his bout against Matt Schnell at the last minute, and Erceg was the lucky last-minute replacement volunteer. And he won! Four months prior Erceg was fighting a 4-3 guy in Perth, and now, he was beating a top ten flyweight in the goddamn world. Which is why, of course, he is He's great! He hits hard, he's a vicious opportunist and he kicks people in the legs until their legs stop working, which will always be one of the quickest ways to my heart. But he's also a bit overly aggressive, and Erceg showed a whole lot of promise as a smart, tactical fighter who was able to quickly adjust when his gameplan failed, and boy, I find that real hard to pick against. STEVE ERCEG BY DECISION. WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT: Tabatha Ricci (9-1, #10) vs Lupita Godinez (11-3, #13) I'm in a bind, here. Every time Lupita Godinez fights I say the same exact thing: She's one of the best chain wrestlers in the division and if she remembers to wrestle, she'll win. It's as common a catchphrase of mine as "The Ultimate Fighter Number Goes Here (jesus christ)" and "Why are the ranked flyweights/bantamweights/women's competitors on the loving prelims." Which we've ALSO hit within our first two prelims, so thank you for keeping me addicted to Rolaids, UFC. But I can't use my catchphrase this time! Because Tabatha Ricci is a really, really good grappler. The only woman to actually beat her in the UFC thus far was Manon Fiorot, who was able to avoid Ricci's grappling by virtue of being half a goddamn foot taller than her. That fight, in fact, made Ricci go down to 115 just to keep it from ever happening again. Godinez might still be able to take Ricci down--she is, still, an extremely talented, agile wrestler--but for the first time in her UFC tenure, it's not actually her best bet. So, Loopy: Ignore everything I have ever said. Your best weapon here is your pace. Do what you tried to do to Angela Hill and Cynthia Calvillo and just drown Ricci in offense. The floor is lava, but your fists are like birds holding knives in their beaks. LUPITA GODINEZ BY DECISION. LIGHTWEIGHT: Mateusz Rębecki (18-1) vs Roosevelt Roberts (12-3) It's time to watch someone spin the late replacement roulette wheel again. Mateusz Rębecki joined the UFC this year not as the near-undefeated top lightweight out of Poland but instead as a Contender Series winner, because that's all that gets you these days. Rębecki's wrecking ball ways have continued unabated in the UFC, as he walked through late replacement Nick Fiore in his debut and destroyed Loik Radzhabov in his sophomore appearance, but he was really hoping for a good, traditional, pre-scheduled opponent tonight. Unfortunately, Nurullo Aliev busted his leg. So now Roosevelt Roberts is back! Roberts was an early Contender Series baby, a 2018 winner who wound up in the UFC after just six professional fights, no losses, and multiple chances to show off an aggressive grappling game, a great gas tank, and, most importantly, the ability to be a lightweight despite being 6'2". That did not stop him from getting cut in 2021 after dropping three in a row. He was part of The Ultimate Fighter 31 (jesus christ) this past year, and, boy, it's beyond impressive how quickly that entire season has just slipped out of the collective MMA consciousness, but he was eliminated by eventual finalist Austin Hubbard. But, hey: What better way is there to secure a contract than by taking a last-minute fight. It is, potentially, a very interesting matchup. Mateusz is, officially, the smallest lightweight in the UFC. Clay Guida and Rafa Garcia share his height, but at 66", he has by far the shortest reach. Roosevelt Roberts is half a foot taller and has more than half a foot of range on Rębecki. What's more, he's very good at forcing headstrong fighters into the clinch, which is where his big, dangerous guillotine chokes come from. But he's also, y'know, taking this fight on 4 days' notice. Is he in shape? Can he deal with a madman trying to kick his kneecaps apart? It's a dangerous fight, but I'm still going with MATEUSZ RĘBECKI BY TKO. LIGHTWEIGHT: Nazim Sadykhov (9-1) vs Viacheslav Borshchev (7-3)This is my sleeper fight of the card, personally. Nazim Sadykhov had a great night back in July. He took on Terrance McKinney, a fighter most people still generally believed in as a potential worldbeater, and he beat him! Tapped him right out! Did he have to cheat repeatedly to do it? Good lord, yes! The sequence that ended the fight relied specifically on Sadykhov defending a takedown by hanging onto the cage for dear life about five times in twenty seconds while Keith Peterson periodically slapped at his hand while not actually halting the action, resetting the position or, indeed, penalizing him in any way. Cheating: It's still the best strategy. Viacheslav Borshchev is one of the most potentially fun fighters to watch in the UFC. His striking is some of the most varied, fluid and dangerous in the Lightweight division, and that is, to be clear, the Lightweight division. His overhands, his leg kicks, his ability to weave combinations out of very limited space and his capacity for keeping opponents guessing by mixing bodyshots and headshots with no warning make him one of the most underratedly potent punchmen mixed martial arts has to offer. But here's the thing: That offer is void if the opponent so much as dreams of trying to take him down. Slava Claus specced himself completely towards striking. He's been training with Team Alpha Male for years and he still struggles with wrestling in all of its forms. Which is problematic, because Nazim Sadykhov is a Judo and Sambo champion and he also has Matt loving Serra in his corner. But I'm psychically binding him from shooting any doubles. Today, I am both Judge Gabranth and Dana White. All wrestling is forbidden in the interests of fairness. VIACHESLAV BORSHCHEV BY TKO. EARLY PRELIMS: LOSING A WHOLE YEAR LIGHTWEIGHT: Jared Gordon (19-6 (1)) vs Mark Madsen (12-1) Jared Gordon is trying to redeem what has been an unfathomably cursed year. Last December the UFC slotted him in as the latest sacrifice on the altar of Conor McGregor Cloning Project #132 Paddy Pimblett, and Gordon extremely clearly upset marketing's apple cart and won the fight, and promptly lost not just a decision, but a unanimous decision, which was unanimously agreed by the fans to be the absolute worst of 2022. The UFC tried to make it up to him by booking him against Bobby Green in April, and that fight ended in a No Contest after Green launched himself headfirst into Gordon's jaw like a Tupolev torpedo and punched him out because the referee had, somehow, missed it. That referee? Keith Peterson. I hate it when Dominick Cruz has a point. In one of the most underratedly boneheaded moves the UFC has made this year, after a fight between Jim Miller and Ľudovít Klein fell apart, the UFC slotted Gordon in as a last-minute replacement, despite Gordon having been knocked out barely a month ago. Unsurprisingly, that fight fell apart before it started. Funnily enough, Mark Madsen, too, is ending the worst year of his professional career. The Danish wrestler spent six years--technically nine, but he took a break from MMA between 2014 and 2018 to do some silly thing called "the Olympics"--as one of the sport's undefeated prospects, a powerful, compact wrestler who overwhelmed everyone he fought. Well, almost everyone. Honestly, when he fought Clay Guida in 2021 and barely scraped out a split decision the world tugged its collar a little about his wrestling prospects against the top of the division. It was, unfortunately, prophetic. The last time we saw Madsen was last November, where he finally lost after simply being outwrestled and outgrappled by Grant Dawson. Who just got knocked out by Bobby Green. It's like poetry. It rhymes. I like Madsen, but the same way Dawson was too wrestley and strong, I think Gordon's too fast and fluid, and too solid a defensive wrestler himself. JARED GORDON BY DECISION unless a loving light falls out of the rafters and hits him on the head, with the year he's been having. BANTAMWEIGHT: John Castańeda (20-6) vs Kyung Ho Kang (19-9 (1)) The last time John Castańeda fought, I had a small existential crisis about it. I wrote of my difficulties with always assuming fighters would fight to their strengths instead of taking into account their foibles and tendencies, and I thought about how Castańeda was a great, fast, well-rounded fighter who tended to occasionally get sloppy in his aggression, and I altered my philosophical trajectory, took that tendency into account, and picked against him. At which point he, of course, fought a fantastic loving fight, jabbed and countered Muin Gafurov all night and won a great decision. So, clearly, the universe is telling me to go back to my old ways and take fighters more directly and literally. But I can't do that, because Kyung Ho Kang is nicknamed Mr. Perfect, which, taken literally, invalidates the whole experiment. Kang's actually going on eleven years in the UFC, which is incredible not just for its longevity, but for the fact that he might, right now, be getting the best wins of his career. Most of his tenure has been spent fighting the Guido Cannettis and Teruto Ishiharas of the world, and while I have an endless well of love for Teruto Ishihara and the happiness he's found living among Team Alpha Male's denizens and only rarely wearing shirts, they're not big resume highlights. Fighting a guy like Cristian Quińonez, who went toe to toe with Khalid Taha and won, and choking him out in two and a half minutes? That's the good stuff. It's a real close fight, on paper. Castańeda's quicker and his striking's more varied, but Kang's bigger and stronger and I don't think Castańeda's ability to sneak in combinations by making opponents fear takedowns will work. I'm still leaning towards JOHN CASTAŃEDA BY DECISION but this feels like a real, real close fight. FLYWEIGHT: Joshua Van (8-1) vs Kevin Borjas (9-1) The Contender Series has become self-aware and is now, officially, eating the UFC itself. Joshua Van won the Fury FC Flyweight Championship last year, which, as with all regional titles, is redeemable for one (1) trip to the UFC. They contracted him for the Contender Series, but, in the show's eternal capacity as a backup roster of desperate fighters who will never say no, he was tapped to fight Zhalgas Zhumagulov on two weeks' notice instead. Best of all: He won! Skip the Contender Series altogether, go straight to Flyweight proper. Kevin "El Gallo Negro" Borjas wasn't too different. His Flyweight title came from Peru's Inka FC, and he, too, traded it for a shot on the Contender Series, and he, too, dealt with reschedulings and replacements before ultimately meeting and beating Victor Dias to earn his contract with the UFC. But who, do you suppose, was that first rescheduling? Why, it was Joshua Van. That's right, baby: This UFC fight on a UFC event in the UFC is a makeup fight for a Contender Series bout. The mouse is eating the cat. Time is inverting upon itself and rivers are flowing against the pull of a weeping moon. Hell is full, and its contracted fights are running free on our cards. JOSHUA VAN BY DECISION but don't watch it or you'll loving melt like René Belloq witnessing the Ark of the Covenant. FEATHERWEIGHT: Dennis Buzukja (11-3) vs Jamall Emmers (19-7) Dennis Buzukja is in a tough spot. He was contracted to the UFC as a replacement for a replacement for another replacement in a desperate bid to keep Sean Woodson on the Sandhagen vs Font card this past August, and, well, he missed weight and got the crap beaten out of him. Which, honestly, is about what you'd expect. Making weight is hard; making weight with 48 hours to prepare is drat near impossible. Making weight on 48 hours' notice and then fighting a real talented boxer who did get a full training camp and also they're almost half a foot taller than you? Good on you for trying at all. But the UFC isn't doing him any favors in his followup. Jamall Emmers has become a sort of prospect gatekeeper for the Featherweight division. Despite almost four years of trying he just hasn't been able to establish himself as a prospect, having traded wins and losses back and forth repeatedly. But he has proven his ability to give big standup-fighting prospects hell. He took Giga Chikadze to a split decision, he beat up Vince Cachero and Khusein Askhabov, and he was out-and-out robbed against Jack Jenkins this summer. And maybe I think he's too tricky for Buzukja, or maybe I just want something nice to happen to him as penance for bad judging. JAMALL EMMERS BY DECISION.
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Nov 9, 2023 01:44
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https://twitter.com/mma_orbit/status/1723438085432623567 what would bellator be without one last humiliation for the road
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Nov 11, 2023 21:52
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KSW has primed the pump and now we must make the pilgrimage to the great square. UFC 295 GDT is up. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4047124
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Nov 11, 2023 23:37
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loving fantastic card, delivered wonderfully, wish I smoked so I could go smoke. But also they announced this during the show, and man, UFC, you're just being cruel. https://twitter.com/BigMarcel24/status/1723556383784669618
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Nov 12, 2023 06:35
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Marching Powder posted:god drat. Yeah, if you're going all the way back to antiquity you can't really beat the first. Having googled around, your shortest of the at-all-regulated era is UFC 29 with 19:10, your shortest of the recognizable as modern era is UFC 91 with 19:23, and your shortest of the actual modern era is 261 with 20:56 because gently caress Jorge Masvidal.
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Nov 12, 2023 08:06
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Given the ease with which Aspinall grounded Volkov, I think Aspinall/Gane is on the ground within about ninety seconds.
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Nov 13, 2023 00:18
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Jamahal Hill says he wants to come back, beat Pereira, and then go up to heavyweight and fight Tom Aspinall. In the past four weeks we've now had Volkanovski going after Makhachev, Makhachev calling for a fight with the winner of Edwards/Covington, Edwards calling dibs on the winner of Strickland vs du Plessis, Pereira winning the 205 belt and then calling out Israel Adesanya, and now, Hill talking about using the 205 belt to go to heavyweight. I miss weight classes.
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Nov 14, 2023 20:16
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LobsterMobster posted:it's also fitting that the active champ of the grand prix got stripped for doin illegal steroid drugs. even in its death throes, bellator manages to be funny Bellator actually decided not to strip him, because he only took prescribed medication so it wasn't PEDs and can't have impacted the fight so he doesn't need to lose the title. But they endorse the fight being an NC and say it needs to have an instant rematch. Thank you for your public service in making Bellator make sense, lobmob. It is a great burden and I hope you are stuck with it for another couple years of Bellatoring.
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Nov 15, 2023 05:17
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I have theories about this (and, this may shock you, an outline to write an editorial about it), and I think the Vince McMahonification of the product is a big overarching umbrella reason a lot of people are turned off. Not just that Dana's all over the drat thing and pushing it into abhorrent poo poo like right-wing pandering and slap fighting, but in terms of who the product is for. MMA's always struggled with periods of transition between target audiences. You had a lot of people who were into it solely because it was this no holds barred martial arts movie masterpiece of bullshit with mullet guys doing somersault kicks and one-gloved boxers, and when that transitioned into the weird sports-spectacle era of Pride and the pre-breakout UFC it shook a lot of those people off because it wasn't what they wanted anymore. When the UFC did break big with their we-are-a-legitimate-sport respectability era, for one, it still had a lot of previous-era stars like Tito and Shamrock and Coleman and BJ hanging around, so they were a gateway into it for older fans, and for two, while a bunch of spectacle fans got pushed out, the pool of fans who could be successfully tricked into thinking of it as a real sport was much, much larger. The slow degradation of that real-sport angle into the Conor McGregor Superfights era began instantaneously turning people off, but for one, you still had those divisional structures they'd spent a decade building in place to springboard off of, for two, you still had your Frankies and Bendos and Juniors and Robbies hanging around and if you were really, really good you'd get a GSP appearance for Christmas, and for three, that product was still for someone. It wasn't US, for the most part, but the Conor audience was there. And then, like the WWE, the UFC transitioned to a model where fan investment was no longer the main driver of their income and, unsurprisingly, it stopped giving a poo poo. The UFC right now is playing to one audience, and that's the executive team. There's no divisional structure for fans to get invested in, there's nothing holistic or natural left in the matchmaking or starbuilding, the last star the UFC really traditionally built was Adesanya and that was already five goddamn years ago, and they also already knew they wanted to invest in him and started the marketing before he even fought for the first time. The cards are built around who the company would like to see succeed and how quickly they can put them in successful positions regardless of if the fans give a poo poo or not. Sean Strickland got his contendership by beating Abus Magomedov on a Fight Night nobody watched. A heavyweight champion was crowned in a two-weeks-notice fight with no promotion whatsoever. Paddy Pimblett is about to fight Tony Ferguson and even Paddy has done interviews about how it's a terrible fight. One of your main card fights for this week is Payton Talbott vs Nick Aguirre. Like, who are the breakout stars of 2023? Who are the upcoming contenders the UFC has made you excited about? Merab got a ton of attention and got thrown in a trunk for the entire year. Erin Blanchfield became a top contender and promptly got buried midway through a fight card half of the UFC's audience wasn't going to watch. Alexander Volkov is the #6 heavyweight in the world and he's on a really impressive three-fight stoppage streak; has the UFC kept you able to name any of them? Do you even remember Giga Chikadze made a comeback this year? Who was the last person the UFC really went out of their way to actually promote to you, and why was it Jailton Almeida? CarlCX fucked around with this message at 19:34 on Nov 15, 2023 |
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Nov 15, 2023 19:28
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As long as we're talking about the infuriating decline of the company: CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 82: PROMOTION NIGHT  SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 18 FROM THE END OF MEANING THAT IS THE UFC APEX PRELIMS 11 AM PST / 2 PM EST | MAIN CARD 2 PM / 5 PM It's always weird to go have a regular fight night the week after a card-of-the-year candidate. UFC 295 was fantastic! Great on paper, great in practice, near-total delivery of violent quality, multiple championship fights. Fantastic! Obviously, not every card can be that balls-out. But boy, the fourth fight from the top last week was Benoît Saint-Denis vs Matt Frevola for a top fifteen berth in arguably the UFC's deepest division, and the fourth fight from the top this week is the UFC debut of Payton Talbott, the champion of Urijah Faber's A1 Combat, against Nick Aguirre and his 0-1 record. Does that mean it's a bad night of fights? No, they can always be fun. Is it a whole lot harder to get preemptively excited for? I dunno. How much do you like Mick Parkin?  it's Wednesday and no one has this card updated and notated correctly. not the UFC, not Tapology, not Wikipedia, not even Marcel Dorff. this is madness. MAIN EVENT: EIGHT LIMBS ENTER, SEVEN LIMBS LEAVE MIDDLEWEIGHT: Brendan Allen (22-5, #10) vs Paul Craig (17-6-1, #13)Ignore the division and the rankings, this is a battle to determine the true champion of making André Muniz miserable. It's tempting to think of Brendan "All In" Allen as a 'journeyman makes good' story, but truthfully he was never really a journeyman, he just had some real, real bad timing regarding taking losses. Get through the Contender Series, rack up three wins (including a submission over Kevin Holland that's aged quite well), get knocked out by future champion Sean Strickland. Come back with two victories, get hosed up by Chris Curtis, a top fifteen Middleweight. People are paying close attention to him now that he's on his big winning streak, but truthfully, he's always been right on the cusp of a breakout. He just needed to ritualistically bathe in the blood of the dread demon Sam Alvey before the heavens would bless his conquest. Because, boy, it's been pretty smooth loving sailing since then. The only bad tape you can find on Allen over his last five fights is a pretty close encounter with Jacob Malkoun, and in fairness, Jacob Malkoun tends to make everyone look bad, himself included. He choked out Sam Alvey, he choked out Krzysztof Jotko, he choked out André Muniz in a surprise main event, he choked out Bruno Silva without even breaking a sweat. Suddenly--as one of the benefits of taking three fights a year, every year--Allen's 10-2 in the UFC and looking like a possible contender. His grappling is quick, canny and aggressive, his striking is threatening enough to keep his opponents from getting comfortable, which is half of what enables his submission offense in the first place, and while he can be taken out, you have to beat him insensible to get it done. Paul "Bearjew" Craig's route here is slightly less impressive, but much, much funnier. Craig's spent his entire career at Light Heavyweight, and he WAS the journeyman people feel like Allen was, going 4-4 in his first three years with the company and getting beaten up an awful lot in his losses. But he built a legacy for himself as the greatest mixed martial arts hypnotist outside of the Diaz brothers. His trademark quickly became apparent: Getting hurt up, inexplicably convincing someone to follow him down into his guard in an attempt to finish him, and immediately just wrecking their poo poo with his bottom game. Sure, he'd get knocked out by Tyson Pedro, but #1 contender Magomed Ankalaev? Tapped him out. Sure, he'd go to a draw with 2019-era Shogun Rua, but future champion Jamahal Hill? Snapped his arm completely limp. He even managed a four-fight winning streak that got him into the top ten! But then his mojo failed and he got beaten fairly handily by Volkan Oezdemir and Johnny Walker, and he did what every guy in his thirties does when he feels insecure about his place in life: He decided to try losing some weight. He dropped to Middleweight for the first time this past July, where he fought your buddy and mine André Muniz, and it was, generally-speaking, exactly what you'd expect. Paul Craig's always had some difficulties on the feet, and Muniz spent the first round repeatedly kicking him, jabbing him and keeping him at bay, and then the second round began, and Muniz, a third-degree black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, decided to grapple at length with a 1920s pugilist and a couple minutes later Craig had him stuck in mount eating elbows until the referee jumped in to save him. It's hilarious that we're here, having this top fifteen fight between two guys who are only top fifteen because they both ruined André Muniz's life. at the beginning of 2023 Muniz was 23-4 and had only lost once in a decade and had the scariest grappling in the division and had never been submitted in his career. Now he's fighting The Iron Turtle because he got grappled to death by the guy named after a Tarantino movie from a decade and a half ago right after he got grappled to death by the guy whose nickname is just his name if you pronounce it slightly different. I like rooting for Paul Craig. I want to root for Paul Craig. For one, when he wins, it's usually very funny, and boy, the sport needs levity. For two, he's impossible to count out and refuses to give up even after sustaining ridiculous beatings, which is a terrible thing to have a reputation for because it means you, y'know, regularly take terrible beatings, but it's still a deeply admirable trait. And for three? I haven't forgotten Brendan Allen taking a proud stand for how weak and emasculated society has become for not endorsing the wisdom of whooping his four year-old daughter, and I don't really want to root for him ever again. And I won't! But he's probably still going to win this fight. The big questions about Craig's weight cut, aside from his ability to simply make it, centered around how he'd adjust to the speed of the 185-pound division. And he...mostly didn't. Allen's faster, he hits straighter, and I cannot see him falling prey to the same mass hysteria that makes fighters throw themselves headfirst at Paul Craig's thighs. Would love to be wrong! But BRENDAN ALLEN BY TKO feels right. CO-MAIN EVENT: DON'T YOU SEE, I USED TO BE THE NEW KID WELTERWEIGHT: Jake Matthews (19-6) vs Michael Morales (15-0)The UFC was really invested in Jake Matthews once. In ways that belie their normal parameters for investment, even. He's Australian, but he predates their big attempt at breaking the Australian scene. He was drat near a teenager when the UFC signed him, but he came in years before the Contender Series started trying to build Dana White an army of child soldiers. He wasn't a regional champion, he didn't have a long record, he wasn't a must-see TV fighter, he wasn't Instagram famous. He got knocked out of the first round of the Ultimate Fighter season that gave us Chad Laprise and the unfortunately departed Elias Theodorou. But the UFC thought he was a young, solid prospect, and once upon a time, that was enough. Matthews has been kicking around the UFC for almost a decade, at this point. And they are only now, finally, tired of him. Matthews has had a score of tough opponents over the course of his career--Kevin Lee and Li Jingliang come to mind--but it wasn't until recently that the UFC pushed him into the 'fighting people we visibly want to push using your corpse' category of fighter. He bought himself one more shot at matchmaking's good graces after his picture-perfect destruction of Andre Fialho back in 2022, but he was right back to trading wins and losses once it was over. So the subtlety is out the window. Congratulations, Jake, you're fighting the guy the UFC wants wearing a belt. Michael Morales came through the Contender Series in 2021, rolled right into the UFC and immediately resumed knocking motherfuckers out. The UFC had huge expectations for Morales right off the bat, and, funnily enough, those expectations kept getting kneecapped by poorly-timed injuries. Just one fight into his run they wanted him taking on noted tough motherfucker Ramiz Brahimaj, but thanks to a withdrawal he got Adam Fugitt. They booked up against Rinat goddamn Fakhretdinov, but Morales' own injury wound up seeing him against Max Griffin instead. Max Griffin was still more than enough of a test, though. After a career of ragdolling his opponents at will and dropping them behind sniping crosses and looping hooks, Max Griffin gave Morales actual trouble. His power striking and his wrestling offense didn't stop Morales, but they did cost him a round and leave him scrambling to adjust. Which he did--which is, frankly, a lot more impressive than if he'd simply sockpuppeted Griffin and beaten him without a second thought. Having the physical tools to destroy people is impressive; having the fight IQ to change your gameplan on the fly and win difficult fights is what actually makes champions. The UFC, however, is still pumping the brakes just a touch. Matthews is tough and by no means an easy out for anyone, but make no mistake: The company that was willing to book Morales against Fakhretdinov is making a conscious choice to slow his ascension just a touch by giving him Jake Matthews. Morales is bigger, he's much rangier, he's a stronger, faster wrestler, and he's got an awful lot more stopping power than Jake has shown off. MICHAEL MORALES BY TKO and I don't think it'll be pretty. MAIN CARD: FURIOUSLY REFRESHING WIKIPEDIA LIGHTWEIGHT: Jordan Leavitt (11-2) vs Chase Hooper (12-3-1) How exactly do you move on with your life after you get successfully used for marketing purposes? Jordan Leavitt built himself a niche in the UFC after ending Matt Wiman's career comeback with a disgusting slam knockout and twerking about narrowly beating Trey Ogden, but when push came to shove, the UFC knew the real money lay in the wide world of British pageboys. In another, better reality, Jordan Leavitt stopped the Paddy Pimblett train and we are all the better for it. In this reality, Pimblett choked Leavitt out in two rounds and honestly, if you're the UFC, what do you do with him after that? You already got what you wanted out of Jordan Leavitt and you clearly don't have any big plans for his future, so what's next? Why, it's going down the list of other people you want to push, of course. First it was Contender Series winner Victor Martinez, who Leavitt overwhelmed, and now it's Chase "The Dream" Hooper. Chase is one of the youngest-ever UFC talents, having been signed at 19 on the back of his undefeated streak down in the regional circuit, and like so many young talents throughout history--we still miss you, Jordan Mein--the UFC's caliber of competition has proven a little much. Hooper's spent his entire four-year UFC career trading wins back and forth, over and over. None were as definitive or painful as the first-round knockout battering Steve Garcia gave him last October, though. This is the problem with growing up as a fighter in the middle of the UFC: The holes in your game will be exploited by angry people with very large hands. On paper, this is a good fight for Chase. His grappling has always been his strength and Paddy laid a pretty clear blueprint for using solid wrestling and a size advantage to bully Leavitt down, and while Leavitt may have the tighter striking, he's at a significant range disadvantage if he wants to put punches on Hooper's jaw. But: Hooper signed a contract in blood that he must lose every alternating fight, and the bill is due. So JORDAN LEAVITT BY TKO. BANTAMWEIGHT: Payton Talbott (6-0) vs Nick Aguirre (7-1) Boy, it feels sort of hollow to go through this after I already summarized it in one line in the intro. Here's the thing: I don't think having debuting prospects on main cards is bad! It's actually a good, smart idea to put a little attention behind new fighters to get the fans interested in them. Solid, well-intentioned marketing. It's just the frequency with which the only people who get that treatment are Contender Series winners that makes it particularly grating. Hey: Guess where Payton Talbott came from! Sure, he was knocking out people in Urijah Faber's personal fighting organization with flying knees and poo poo, but he didn't truly exist until he beat two-time Contender Series loser Reyes Cortez, and now it's time for the UFC, baby. And that brings us to the other side of the marketing coin. Well-intentioned marketing feels a lot worse when you're blatantly setting someone up to lose! Nick Aguirre is in the UFC because he agreed to fight Dan Argueta on 72 hours' notice. That's it. That's the contract. It's not that Aguirre isn't a good fighter. He's quick and he's scrappy and he proved he's very tough to finish. But he also got beat up 93-15 and elbowed into dust on the ground. He's not on the main card because the UFC has a secret vested interest in the professional future of Nick Aguirre. He's here because he got dominated by a guy who's 1-2 (1) in the UFC and Payton Talbott is a fun, young prospect who does flying knees and can probably give the UFC a bunch of good fights for minimum wage. PAYTON TALBOTT BY TKO. Give the people what they want, I guess. BANTAMWEIGHT: Amanda Ribas (11-4, #11) vs Luana Pinheiro (11-1, #9) Boy, Amanda Ribas has been around the top ranks for awhile, now. Enough so, in fact, that when the UFC booked her into a fight with Maycee Barber this past June, I very confidently said this: CarlCX posted:Maycee's best performances come from smothering people with her forward-pressure striking and its ultimate termination in clinch control; Ribas is a pretty strong clinch grappler, is real good at getting out of the goddamn way of striking traffic, and carries enough power in her jabs to disrupt Barber's typical flow. Ribas's biggest threat here is, in all likelihood, the judges. Luana Pinheiro, historically, doesn't quite fit into that mold. To be honest, her UFC tenure as a whole has been pretty bizarre. She fought Randa Markos in a one-round battle that included fence grabs, multiple eye pokes and Pinheiro winning by disqualification after eating a grounded upkick, she beat Sam Hughes in a fight that saw her visibly gassed after two rounds, and in her last outing this past April she managed to pass the initiation test every top ten Women's Strawweight must one day face: Winning a split decision against Michelle Waterson-Gomez that you probably should have lost. She got outstruck and outgrappled by the world's favorite Atomweight in search of a weight class, but sometimes that doesn't matter. In other words: My hopes for Luana do not loom large, here. She's a solid fighter with some particularly underrated kicks, but historically, she has trouble holding position, she has trouble with her gas tank and she has trouble with people who can sting her on their feet, and Ribas fills all three of those criteria. AMANDA RIBAS BY DECISION. WELTERWEIGHT: Uroš Medić (9-1) vs Myktybek Orolbai (11-1-1) Uroš Medić is having a tough time getting fights to stick. Medić is nearing his third year in the UFC, but half his fights have been either late replacement situations or late additions to cards altogether. He's made the most of it, though: Outside of a loss to Jalin Turner in his second fight he's continued his trend of not just persistently winning, but violently stopping everyone he faces in style. A flying knee over Aalon Cruz, a three-knockdown victory over Omar Morales by spamming angry left hands, even a spinning backfist over Matt Semelsberger; his variety of strikes has been as impressive as his success, and the UFC was really looking forward to a barnburner between him and Jonny "The Sluggernaut" Parsons tonight. And it is not happening! For as-yet undisclosed reasons, Parsons is out, and in his place is the newly-signed week-of fight replacement Myktbek Orolbai. Which, uh--sure. Why not. It more or less absolves me of responsibility, because if you've read any of these before, you can probably recite 3/4 of what I'm about to say by inference alone. Regional champion back east, this time in Kyrgyzstan! Grappling credentials in his past, but prefers to strike and land giant punches! Spent most of his career fighting guys who are 10-7 and 0-0 and othersuch examples that look numerically devastating! Got a little bit of internet fame for a killer uppercut knockout over the 18-14 Adam Duritz impersonator Hayward Charles in LFA just three weeks ago! After watching a bunch of tape: He seems fine. He seems like the kind of fighter who will hang around in the UFC for several years on the prelims. He does not seem like the kind of fighter who has yet dealt with being tested by significantly competitive strikers and I'm very curious to see what happens if that changes. For now, UROŠ MEDIĆ BY TKO. PRELIMS: WHAT'S A MOTTA WITH YOU FEATHERWEIGHT: Jonathan Pearce (14-4) vs Joanderson Brito (15-3-1) The UFC just wants to break my heart, man. I'm a big Joanderson Brito fan. Joanderson fought Bill Algeo on the very first card I did a writeup for. We are interconnected, and it is written in fire on the shackles binding me that I cannot be freed from my prison of words until Joanderson Brito holds a world championship. And he could! He hits like a truck, he's extremely fast, and he's awfully hard to stop. But he's also a 5'8" Featherweight in a division that keeps getting bigger, and Bill Algeo made an awfully clear case for how a larger, better wrestler could use a size and strength discrepancy against him. Which is where Jonathan Pearce comes in. "JSP" is six feet tall, he's been wrestling since he was a child, he's taken down every single person in the UFC he's ever attempted a takedown on--multiple times--and he gets just about a full round of control time in every goddamn fight he has. He's only lost once in the UFC and it was against Joe Lauzon, which is a) hilarious and b) just somehow perfect for the kind of poo poo Joe Lauzon has done in his career, but that was also four years ago. In the time since, Pearce has tightened up his game enough to not only avoid that kind of trouble, but wrestle the crap out of Darren Elkins, which is aggressively difficult. I would find it deeply personally ingratiating if Brito blasted Pearce out of the fight in thirty seconds. I think JONATHAN PEARCE BY DECISION is much more likely. BANTAMWEIGHT: Chad Anheliger (12-6) vs Jose Johnson (15-8)There are some fights I look forward to because they are technically thrilling or divisionally interesting, and there are some fights I look forward to because of their potential for chaos. This is a chaos fight. Chad Anheliger is a 50/50 win/loss fighter with two UFC fights: A battle with Jesse Strader, who despite going 0-2 in the UFC and being released immediately was winning right up until he got knocked silly with 90 seconds left to a decision, and a back-and-forth with Alatengheili, himself more of a UFC journeyman, who completely shut him out. Jose Johnson, who I still remember primarily because the nickname "Lobo Solitario" gives me Airheads flashbacks, is a 50/50 win/loss fighter who made his way through the Contender Series in the summer of 2022, spent an entire year on the shelf thanks to medical issues, finally made his debut just this past August as a late replacement against Da'Mon Blackshear, and for his efforts he was submitted in one round and made history as just the third fighter in UFC history to be submitted via Twister. So it's two guys who have a lot of trouble winning in the UFC, like to get real jumpy and go all-out for striking finishes, and, statistically-speaking, get hurt about as often as they find success. Also, there's a loving half-foot height and reach difference between them. So let's just go with JOSE JOHNSON BY TKO and watch something silly happen. MIDDLEWEIGHT: Christian Leroy Duncan (8-1) vs Denis Tiuliulin (11-8) We're still thick in the weird fight woods, here. Christian Leroy Duncan came into the UFC as an undefeated Cage Warriors champion with an awful lot of hype for being an ostensibly well-rounded fighter who reminded some folks of Georges St-Pierre, but British imports are a dangerous business. Sometimes it turns out Americans love the Gallagher brothers and sometimes Americans decide Robbie Williams is just a smugness bridge too far even for them. Duncan won his debut when Duko Todorović did that fun trick where your knee spontaneously separates in two minutes into a fight, and then Duncan got not just outstruck but outwrestled by Armen Petrosyan, a kickboxer with 0 credited takedowns in the rest of his UFC career. This was supposed to be an equally weird fight against the kickboxer-turned-MMA rookie César Almeida, but Almeida had to go to the drat hospital, so hey: It's Denis Tiuliulin, which is no less weird. Tiuliulin got into the UFC as a late replacement in early 2022, and it aggressively has not gone well for him. His storm-into-clinch-range style has gotten him quickly stopped in three of his four fights, and the only exception came against Jamie Pickett, who is, respectfully, a 2-6 fighter the UFC has mostly used as a jobber. From a strictly statistical perspective, Tiuliulin's striking accuracy is below average, his striking defense is below average, and he's one of the rare fighters with a truly impressive 0% takedown accuracy rating. So if this isn't CHRISTIAN LEROY DUNCAN BY SUBMISSION or at least a solid ground-and-pound stoppage, it's probably time to pull the ripcord on this experiment. HEAVYWEIGHT: Mick Parkin (7-0) vs Caio Machado (8-1-1) I spend a lot of my life writing about regional championships, so I want to use this fight to hammer home how they are not necessarily created equal. Mick Parkin won his first heavyweight championship in his third professional fight. His opponents, at the time, added up to a professional record of 5-30. By the time Parkin made it onto the Contender Series, he had a grand total of zero fights against people with winning records. His Contender Series opponent? A 5-0 guy who'd only had one fight with a non-rookie in his life and thought comboing spinning elbows into other, separate spinning elbows was good striking. And his UFC debut? A worst-fight-of-the-night contender against a barely-mobile Jamal Pogues who just sort of sat there while Parkin jabbed him for three rounds. But don't worry, that's all going to change now, because he's fighting Caio Machado! How did Caio Machado win HIS regional heavyweight championship, you ask? Why, by beating the 11-14 Lee Mein, of course. And who did he then proceed to defend it against? Why, the 11-15 Lee Mein, of course. Who did Machado beat to get here? Poland's own Kevin Szaflarski, who put up such a tremendous fight that he got outstruck 156-18. On the flipside of that: Caio Machado outstruck a guy 156-18 and never actually came close to finishing the fight. So we've got two heavyweights, both of whom the UFC swears are the hot new prospects of the division, and both had belts, and neither fought anyone good to get them, and they have the incredible heavyweight superpower of being able to land hundreds of strikes without ever being at risk of knocking out their opponents. Heavyweight: It's just the goddamn worst. MICK PARKIN BY DECISION, I guess. FEATHERWEIGHT: Lucas Alexander (8-3) vs Jeka Saragih (13-3)This is our make-up patchwork fight for the night. Lucas "The Lion" Alexander, who got choked out by fellow preliminary contestant Joanderson Brito but beat up Steven "Ocho" Peterson who is most famous for beating main-card fighter Chase Hooper because the natural shape of mixed martial arts is a Lambert quadrilateral, was supposed to meet the similarly-embattled David Onama two weeks ago. A late injury scratched Onama and forced Alexander back into limbo. Fortunately, Jeka "Si Tendangan Maut" Saragih--it's 'The Deadly Kick,' for the record--is here. Jeka made it to the finals of last year's Road to UFC tournament, but a wrestling-based battering by Anshul Jubli kept him from taking the whole thing home. His performance, his regional popularity and his striking-centric style was still more than enough for the UFC, so they booked him against Jesse Butler, most famous for getting knocked out in twenty seconds by Jim Miller and only being prevented from fighting again two months later when the Nevada State Athletic Commission asked the UFC what the gently caress they were doing. But Butler's hurt, and Alexander needs a dance partner, and here we are. And it should be a pretty fun scrap. Both guys are big standup fans, both like to get occasionally wild with their technique when they think they can get away with it, and both are just the right kind of statistically hittable to make the fight a potential coinflip. I'm leaning towards LUCAS ALEXANDER BY DECISION but it should be fun while it lasts. WOMEN'S BANTAMWEIGHT: Lucie Pudilová (14-8) vs Ailin Perez (8-2) The last time we saw Lucie, I said this. CarlCX posted:Lucie is on her second UFC tenure, having been released in 2020 after four consecutive losses and brought back just last year, but she seems stuck in that unfortunate middlespace where she's too good for the regional scene but struggles against international competition. Her success is tied solely to her ability to effectively ground and grapple her opponents, but her method of getting there is the tried and true official takedown of women's MMA, the good ol' harai goshi headlock-and-throw-for-dear-life technique. Striking gets her in trouble, failed takedowns get her in trouble, and generally speaking, fighting people with decent records gets her in trouble.
So anyway, LUCIE PUDILOVÁ BY SUBMISSION. Ailin got rolled by Stephanie Egger, Lucie's best strengths are on the floor, and Ailin's intentions as a stylist are so clear that since her last appearance she's changed her nickname from "Fiona" to "Nurmagomedov." I'm envisioning sweeps and subs. LIGHTWEIGHT: Nikolas Motta (13-5) vs Trey Ogden (16-6) Speaking of people who got knocked out by Jim Miller, we have Nikolas Motta. This might actually be our pink slip fight of the night: Both guys are 1-2 in the company, neither is quite what the UFC is looking for, and one of them has only managed three fights in three years with the company, which is a pain in their rear end. Motta got his Contender contract in 2020, spent the next 14 months on the shelf, got blown out of the water by Jim Miller and has fought once per seven months thereafter, first a knockout over the short-lived Cameron VanCamp, and second, this past June, a two-minute loss to the newer, more fun Contender Series winner, Manuel Torres. Trey "Samurai Ghost" Ogden popped into the company as a late replacement fill-in against Jordan Leavitt, drat near won a split decision, and then upset the apple cart by dominating--once again--a big favored Contender Series competitor in Daniel Zellhuber. He was then fed to another, different Contender Series winner in Ignacio Bahamondes, and god, that's loving four references to the Contender Series in the background for a single fight between two people. This is where we are now, man. It's just the Contender Series all the way down. We're running out of space for anything else. TREY OGDEN BY DECISION. I need to go hug my dog. FLYWEIGHT: Charles Johnson (13-5) vs Rafael Estevam (11-0) This may be the end of the line for Charles Johnson. "InnerG" hasn't had a bad UFC run by any means; he's 2-3, but unlike a lot of fighters those 3 were Muhammad Mokaev, for whom Johnson is the one fighter he couldn't finish, Ode Osbourne, who is just violently hot and cold, and Cody Durden who, as much as I find myself disliking him, is a hell of a fighter. Johnson's smart, he's defensively sound, no one's been able to finish him yet, and when he gets the chance he's proven to have some remarkably violent ground-and-pound. But he just can't quite crack the top fifteen, and in a company as harsh on Flyweight talent as the UFC, coming into a fight on a two-fight losing streak when you're already seen as a divisional gatekeeper is a tough spot to be in. Particularly when they're putting you up against--you know where this loving sentence is going, don't act like you don't--their latest Contender Series winner. Rafael Estevam is a Shooto Brasil champion who's never lost a fight and savaged all of his opponents on the ground, including just beating the stuffing out of Joăo Elias to win his contract, and that's an actual accomplishment, because Elias is a tough dude with some hellacious grappling himself. So this is a the-floor-is-lava fight for Johnson. Jab, kick, move. Being on the ground with Estevam is an extremely dangerous concept. Unfortunately, Charles Johnson gets taken down an awful, awful lot. RAFAEL ESTEVAM BY SUBMISSION.
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Nov 15, 2023 23:14
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The Ngannou thing is a really profound breaking point. The UFC has let people go before when they really shouldn't--Mousasi, Bader, Anderson, I bet they're unhappy they let Zingano go now that w135 is a crater--but they were always just potential contenders and typically they'd already lost enough for the company to make an argument that they're not worth it. The UFC has always made clear it's where the best fighters go, end of line, and that cuts both ways. But with no competition whatsoever that was only going to matter for so long, and now the math is no longer 'how much does it hurt us to not have the #1 heavyweight,' but 'is having the #1 heavyweight worth showing fighters they have negotiating power?' And the entire arc of the UFC right now is exerting maximum control over roster and industry, so.
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Nov 16, 2023 00:33
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On the topic of feeling good about ONE Championship, there's still no word on Christian Lee's return, so ONE has decided to do the only sensible thing and remove their 170-pound rankings altogether. Just stop promoting MMA. Just stop. It's fine. You've got John Lineker doing Muay Thai. It's fine. We get it.
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Nov 17, 2023 19:38
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It's pretty perfect for the first fight on the last real Bellator main card ever to be a deeply unimpressive Patricky fight.
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Nov 18, 2023 03:53
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https://twitter.com/DealStreetAsia/status/1726435269744701838 Apparently ONE's financial shellgames are finally catching up with them, Qatar is 'embarrassed' about their investment in them, and ONE's scrambling for new investment because the Bloody Elbow reports they claimed were lies were of course true and their actual cash revenue is somewhere between $5-8 million.
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Nov 20, 2023 05:56
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I was gonna say, Conor's "it was just business" while Khabib punched him in the face was pretty great. Colby Covington trying to complain about his knockout stoppage around his own broken jaw was fairly gratifying.
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Nov 20, 2023 09:08
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MassRafTer posted:I am reminded of a different kind of one sided beat down: Shalorus landing one kick to the groin, getting a warning, landing a second kick to the groin, losing a point, then landing a third kick to the groin and somehow going back to just getting a warning remains one of the most infuriating yet endearingly funny things that has happened in MMA.
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Nov 21, 2023 04:12
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I am deeply thankful for all of you, our dead gay forums and our dead gay sport. May we all consume this dumb poo poo forever.
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Nov 24, 2023 09:05
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CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 83: THE GOOD OLD DAYS SATURDAY, DECEMBER 2 FROM THE MOODY CENTER IN AUSTIN, TEXAS PRELIMS 1 PM PST / 4 PM EST | MAIN CARD 4 PM / 7 PM Somehow, against all odds, we've made it to December. It's been an intensely long year of weird booking and abrupt title shots and the unpredictable return of Jon Jones and the incredibly predictable return of Jon Jones not making it to fights, and there's one less MMA organization in the world than there was the last time we talked, but by god, we're almost done. Three more UFCs to go, and then we're off for an entire month. But the UFC's spent the last couple years making their December-opening cards unexpected bangers, and on paper, this one gets pretty high marks. A whole mess of ranked fighters, two long overdue weight class-shifting tests, and a main event with honest to god contendership ramifications? For Lightweight? Hell yes. Sure, next week we're watching a half-cancelled card that doesn't start until the evening's already half over, but this week, we're eating good.  i really need to figure out my own card layouts during the winter break. MAIN EVENT: PROFESSIONAL WRESTLING LIGHTWEIGHT: Beneil Dariush (22-5-1, #4) vs Arman Tsarukyan (20-3, #8) A couple of months ago, when Rafael Fiziev fought Mateusz Gamrot, I wrote this: CarlCX posted:Lightweight is, and has always been, one of the best hotbeds of talent in the world. This is in no way untrue now. There isn't a single fighter in the top fifteen who's a step below world-class. Championship grapplers, star wrestlers and world-class kickboxers litter its ranks. They're all amazing. They're all killers. And not a single one of them can actually break through to title contention, because a combination of skill, timing and marketing means no one can break the iron loving grip four men have on the entire division: Islam Makhachev, Charles Oliveira, Justin Gaethje, Dustin Poirier. This legitimately very good fight contains two of the only men to threaten that hierarchical ceiling, and I am way the gently caress here for it. Beneil Dariush came closer than drat near anyone. Which, to be frank, remains surprising, because it took years for me to accept Dariush as a top Lightweight. At the end of 2018 Dariush was already four years into his UFC tenure and he looked like he'd found his ceiling. His last three fights were two violent knockout losses and a draw, his last two wins were two years prior, and even those were barely distancing him from getting choked out by Michael Chiesa and taking an incredibly narrow decision over Michael Johnson that won "Robbery of the Year" awards from the mixed martial media. Was he a bad fighter? Absolutely not. His wrestling was solid, his endurance was impressive and he secretly hit like a Buick. Did it seem like his contendership days were behind him? I mean, yes. When Alexander Hernandez nuked him in under a minute it felt like the closing of a very heavy door. Coming back from losing streaks is difficult, coming back from a losing streak that saw you get eaten alive by a hot young prospect is extremely rare. Resurfacing after drowning in Lightweight, the deepest division in the entire sport? Why, that's the kind of thing that takes years. Five of them, as it turns out. Eight-fight winning streaks at 155 pounds are really, really hard to obtain. Stopping guys like Drew Dober and Drakkar Klose on your way up is even harder. But finding your stride as a fighter when you're already 20 bouts into your career? That's just absurdly unlikely. In any other era of Lightweight, Dariush would've rode that streak right into a championship. Unfortunately, in this one, there were two fighters who'd made that statistically improbable comeback journey. Dariush got his crack at #1 contendership this past June and Charles Oliveira knocked him out in a single round. Five years of effort gone in just over four minutes. Right back to proving yourself. Arman Tsarukyan has been working tirelessly on proving himself. He brought his own years-long, twelve-fight winning streak into the UFC when he made his debut, but he had the misfortune of making said debut against Islam Makhachev, who was just a couple years away from becoming the undisputed best Lightweight on the planet. That loss ultimately reflected real well on Arman: As Makhachev rose up to the championship, Tsarukyan giving him one of his toughest fights and being one of just two people in the UFC to ever take him down turned into a particularly strong moral victory. That, of course, would have been meaningless had Tsarukyan not also been beating everyone he fought. He wrestled Olivier Aubin-Mercier right out of the UFC and over to make millions in the Professional Fighters League, he ground Matt Frevola into dust, he knocked out Christos Giagos and Joel Alvarez, and, suddenly, Arman Tsarukyan was on a five-fight winning streak and primed for contendership all over again. His fight with Mateusz Gamrot in the summer of 2022 wasn't just his first main event in the UFC, but his first real test as the future of the division. He and Gamrot were both highly-touted prospects with aggressive, grappling-heavy styles, both were looked at as future champions, and the fight between them felt like one that could easily happen again for a title one day. As happens with truly good contendership fights, it was exceptionally close, and as happens with mixed martial arts altogether, people are still grumbling about the decision a year and a half later. Tsarukyan landed more strikes, Gamrot had more control time; 68% of the media scored the fight for Tsarukyan, all three judges scored it for Gamrot. Mateusz Gamrot went on to a top contendership fight, which he lost--to Beneil Dariush. Arman dropped back down the contendership ladder. A year later and two victories later, he's got his momentum back and he's ready to climb the mountain Gamrot fell off. Which makes it difficult not to draw direct MMAth comparisons. If Arman struggled with Gamrot, and Beneil shut Gamrot down, does that mean Arman's in trouble all over again? ARMAN TSARUKYAN BY DECISION. This is an extremely competitive fight, but Gamrot's more traditional wrestling style--long shots at the legs and fisticuffs to make up the difference--played heavily into Dariush's strengths both as a puncher and a defensive wrestler. Arman favors his kicks, which will help disrupt Dariush's ability to maintain distance, and he likes to push behind them into trips, which plays well against Beneil's sprawling game. Over five rounds, I think Arman wearing Dariush down is more likely than Dariush shutting him down. And maybe, god willing, we can finally get some new blood in contendership and Lightweight title fights can move into a brave new world of--  God dammit. CO-MAIN EVENT: LAST MINUTE GLORY LIGHTWEIGHT: Jalin Turner (13-7, #12) vs Bobby Green (31-14-1 (1), #13)This is a fight about exceptionally weird positioning. Somehow, despite the last-minute substitution, that hasn't actually changed. Up until two weeks ago Dan Hooker was booked in against Bobby Green, and Hooker's place as a living superposition of top ten/not top ten is a thing of legend. But Green has been racing to usurp him, and after a decade and a half in the business he's having what might be the weirdest year of his entire career, and for a guy who fought on an Affliction card, that's a goddamn statement. It took Green years to make it into the UFC's top ten, but by god, he got there--and then he gambled on himself, took a short-notice fight against Islam Makhachev (filling in for, funnily enough, Beneil Dariush) and got crushed in one round. Getting knocked out by Drew Dober at the end of 2022 didn't help. Rebuilding years are normal in mixed martial arts. Rebuilding years like the 2023 Bobby Green has had are not. He walked into a bout with Jared Gordon and got a No Contest after knocking him silly with an unintentional headbutt. He came back three months later against the rapidly decaying skeleton of Tony Ferguson and, having not recorded a submission victory in more than a decade, proceeded to choke out Ferguson, a man just a few fights removed from surviving Charles Oliveira on the ground. And then, just two months ago, Green took a fight against Grant Dawson, one of the scariest wrestlers in the division with an unblemished UFC streak six years long, and knocked him out cold in thirty god damned seconds. Wild poo poo. Wild poo poo! For the third or fourth time in his career Bobby Green has gone from looking done to knocking on the door of the top ten. Jalin Turner, in the meantime, is trying to prove he belongs there at all. Which is, itself, wild, because Jalin Turner is having both the best and worst year of his entire career. Turner's been exactly as scary as a 6'3" Lightweight can ever since dropping down from 170 pounds, but his 2019 loss to Matt Frevola meant the UFC chose to slow-walk him along the rankings. Which is not to say his victories have been in any way unimpressive--the list of people who can knock out Jamie Mullarkey is very short, and choking out Brad Riddell is cool as hell--but they've left fans questioning where exactly he stacks up against the real contenders of the division. Jalin's 2023 has been entirely about finding out, and the answers, unfortunately, have been mixed. He took a last-minute fight with Mateusz Gamrot and nearly won, which is impressive as hell and would have vaulted him right into the top five--but he couldn't stop Gamrot's takedowns and he didn't win, so it didn't take him anywhere. He got his originally-scheduled fight with Dan Hooker back, and it was a fantastic scrap that was ultimately close--but still a decision victory for Hooker, who outworked Turner on the feet. So Green's suddenly back in the top fifteen after a big upset, and Turner is trying to reverse a downward slope built out of his own harsher challenges. The fight, itself, is at least conceptually fascinating. Turner's an exceptionally dangerous striker with a big size advantage, but he has a tendency to overextend himself and pay dearly for it. Green's one of the sport's best defensive strikers and has made an entire career off making people pay for their mistakes, but he's been paying for his own, recently, and it's hard to tell if he's finally slowing down. But I picked against my own heart by picking Dawson to beat him and I paid for it then, and by god, I will not make the same mistake again. BOBBY GREEN BY DECISION. MAIN CARD: IN SEARCH OF CLASS BANTAMWEIGHT: Rob Font (20-7, #8) vs Deiveson Figueiredo (21-3-1, #2 at Flyweight)Rob Font is stuck being a gatekeeper, and that loving sucks. Font is, and has been, one of the best Bantamweights in the goddamn world for an entire decade, but "one of" is an unfortunately damning descriptor. He couldn't beat John Lineker in 2016, he couldn't beat Raphael Assunçăo in 2018, he couldn't beat José Aldo in 2021, and despite outstriking Marlon Vera by 100+ strikes in 2022, he still lost a lopsided decision because he couldn't stop getting almost knocked out in every round. He had hoped 2023 would be different--and blitzing Adrian Yanez was a great start--but this past Summer he had a main-event showdown with top contender Cory Sandhagen that was depressing in a number of ways, from Sandhagen completely shutting him down despite only having one fully functioning arm to Font getting outwrestled so badly that he scored 0 significant strikes in three out of five rounds, setting records for main-event inactivity in the process. He's still Rob loving Font, and the top ten just would not be the same without him, but his time fighting for contendership is, for the moment, over, and now he has to defend his position against the barbarians at the gates. Deiveson Figueiredo is, potentially, a hell of a gatecrasher. He was so ludicrously imposing as a Flyweight--massive power, horrifying chokes, and most importantly an outright aggression that made him drat near impossible to avoid--that the MMA world, and the UFC's marketing department, openly expected him to rule the 125-pound roost for years to come. But, somehow, it just didn't quite happen. He missed weight for his first title fight, requiring him to brutally murder poor Joseph Benavidez twice in a row, he managed exactly one title defense that was over in two minutes, and then he embarked on the mad, almost three-year long odyssey that was his quadrilogy of fights with Brandon Moreno. He went to a draw--which he would have won, easily, were it not for a point deduction--and then he got choked out, and then he notched a decision victory, and finally, breaking their perfect 1-1-1 series, he got his eye punched shut in the fourth match. Not only did Deiveson lose the series, he announced his intention to leave Flyweight completely: The weight cut sucked, he'd just fought the same guy four times in a row, he was ready to move onward and upward. And then he, uh, changed his mind, and announced he was facing Manel Kape for #1 contendership this past July, except almost three months before the fight he wasn't medically cleared, and rather than rescheduling the bout Deiveson just sort of disappeared. For months! And now he's here at 135 pounds after all. I cannot help feeling that weight change is the real story of this fight. At 125 pounds, Deiveson Figueiredo is a ripped, scary monster. At 135 pounds, he's the second-shortest fighter in the division. Rob Font is not a particularly large Bantamweight, but he's still got a sizable advantage in height and reach. At the same time, he is almost definitely Deiveson's most favorable fight in the top ten. He's got proven troubles with power strikers and physical pressure fighters, and Figueiredo fills those qualities out easily. But I keep thinking about Moreno jabbing Figueiredo up, and I keep wondering how he's going to adjust to someone even larger and crisper, and I keep remembering the way Chito Vera rattled Font a half-dozen times without actually putting him away, and boy, I just don't know if I believe in Figueiredo's chances at the class. ROB FONT BY DECISION, but if he can't keep Deiveson out of the pocket it could get very, very interesting. WELTERWEIGHT: Sean Brady (15-1, #9) vs Kelvin Gastelum (18-8 (1), #11 at Middleweight) I have so many concerns that this fight will not actually happen. Sean Brady's career has come to something of a screeching halt over the last twelve months, and it's a shame, because his brand of fighting--the ol' Mike Pierce special, hard-nosed wrestling with just enough fisticuffs behind it to enable him to take people down and score a late submission if you're lucky--won him every fight of his career, but it sure didn't win him much cache with fans or UFC management. He, instead, served as a stepping stone for perennially underserved #1 contender Belal Muhammad, who despite having not finished a fight with strikes since 2016 decided to switch things up and punch out the undefeated Brady in two rounds last year. And that's it, though not for lack of trying. Brady was supposed to take a fight against the incredibly dangerous Michel Pereira this past March, only to get nixed after tearing his groin; he attempted to come back against the equally dangerous Jack Della Maddalena in the Summer, but an infection kept him hospitalized. So now, working his way down the chain, he's got former #1 Middleweight contender Kelvin goddamn Gastelum. Kelvin, too, has been having a lot of trouble keeping his fights together. Gastelum came into 2019 as a top contender, and two years later he'd gone 1-5 and been more or less eliminated from contention altogether. He spent the FOLLOWING two years repeatedly trying to work his way back in, but fights with contenders like Dricus Du Plessis and Shavkat Rakhmonov kept getting scratched--mostly because Gastelum kept injuring himself. A busted tooth here, a skull fracture there, what can you do. When he DID fight he proved he still had it, as he went three ultimately successful rounds with Chris Curtis, but even that included Gastelum getting away with essentially knocking Curtis briefly unconscious with a headbutt. But the entire MMA world has spent the last nine years begging Gastelum to drop back down to Welterweight. Kelvin Gastelum, when he's on, is a world-class fighter with unnaturally fluid boxing and some seriously imposing wrestling. He's also 5'9". He was the shortest 185-pounder in the company and he's the second-shortest 170-pounder, and that poo poo adds up. KELVIN GASTELUM BY DECISION is the sensible choice. Brady's a solid wrestler, but his hands leave a lot to be desired compared to Gastelum's. That said, the actual most sensible choice here is this fight never happens. Gastelum misses weight like he used to, or Brady's legs fall apart while he's stretching in the locker room, or the lighting rig falls from the rafters and destroys the Octagon seconds before the bout begins--those are my betting favorites. I'll believe this goes down when the bell rings and not a second before. LIGHTWEIGHT: Clay Guida (38-23) vs Joaquim Silva (12-4) I'm not sure if you CAN get rid of Clay Guida anymore. Guida's been in the UFC since two thousand and god damned six. The main event of his debut card was Anderson Silva killing Rich Franklin for the first time. There are multiple people on that card who have been retired for more than a decade, at this point. And yet, somehow, Clay persists. Is he a contender? Heavens, no. His days of relevancy to the rankings are years gone. Is he knocking off prospects? No, not really. Actually, almost everyone he's beaten in the last ten years retired from the sport within a couple fights. His only victory over a still-active UFC fighter (aside from Joe Lauzon, who's trying but hasn't actually made it back yet) in the last thirteen years was Michael Johnson back in 2021, and Johnson is a spirit of interminability himself. Guida's just here. He was a carpenter for so long he's become part of the wood. He wrestles, he bobs his head and he loses every other fight, and it is as central to the UFC's existence as aggressively bad politics and fighters with childhood trauma. If he's anything, he's a testing mark for people the UFC isn't quite sure about. Thus: Joaquim Silva. Joaquim Silva had a fill-in co-main event against Arman Tsarukyan this Summer, and at the time, I was pretty unhappy about it. CarlCX posted:Lightweight has always been one of the UFC's best, toughest divisions, a shark tank where coming up through the ranks is akin to climbing a Mortal Kombat ladder full of dudes with metal arms and firebreathing skull faces, and we spent the last three years watching Arman Tsarukyan go through a murderer's row of a half-dozen talented fighters with a combined record of loving 100-16 just to get to the outer reaches of the top ten. But it would be much, much funnier if it still happened, and honestly, I don't know that Silva has the hands or the bottom game to make Clay pay for his attempts. CLAY GUIDA BY DECISION and we roll ever onward. MIDDLEWEIGHT: Punahele Soriano (9-3) vs Dustin Stoltzfus (14-5) No matter how many times I write some variation of 'this is a fight where someone might get fired' it never stops feeling disrespectful. Objectively, it's true. Punahele Soriano is a powerful brawler who's won most of his professional fights by simply punching his opponent's skull into the rafters. He's strong, he's mean, and he's landed exactly one takedown in six UFC fights. He's also 1 for his last 4. There's no shame in those losses--Brendan Allen's a top ten Middleweight, Nick Maximov's a hell of a wrestler and Roman Kopylov is just now getting the flowers he deserves as one of the division's best strikers--but none of that changes the cruelty of math. That math is even less kind to Dustin Stoltzfus. Technically, Dustin's best UFC win wasn't even in the UFC--it was his 2020 Contender Series victory over the now highly-hyped Joe Pyfer. Within the UFC itself he's 1-4 overall. It's been more than a year since last we saw him, and that was his worst appearance ever, as Abus Magomedov nuked him in nineteen seconds before embarking on one of the company's least sensible contendership failures. After a loss like that, I do not think taking a long break to think about things is in any way unwarranted. Honestly, I wish more fighters responded to devastating knockouts by giving their brains time to fully recover and regroup. Unfortunately, this is a hell of a fight to come back to. Stoltzfus has a grappling advantage here, but he's pretty definitively proven himself to be profoundly hittable, and Soriano is the kind of guy who only needs to hit you a couple times to get his point across. I'm kind of rooting for Dustin, but PUNAHELE SORIANO BY TKO seems much more likely. PRELIMS: BELLATO ACQUIRED BY THE UFC WOMEN'S BANTAMWEIGHT: Miesha Tate (19-9, #12) vs Julia Avila (9-2, #13) That's right: We're doing the Miesha Tate thing again. When last we saw Miesha Tate it was mid-2022 and I was apoplectic about how she was still, somehow, ranked. It's now the end of 2023, Miesha Tate is 1-4 since 2016 and she's still the #12-ranked fighter at a weight class she hasn't seen in more than two years. But that's okay, now, because holy christ, Women's Bantamweight is a mess. Amanda Nunes retiring and Julianna Peńa getting seriously injured left so massive a void at the top of the division that more or less all bets are off, now. If you can string together a couple victories, you, too, can be the Women's Bantamweight Champion. If you're Miesha Tate, one of the most popular women's mixed martial artists of all time? Just give them an excuse. Julia Avila would certainly love the chance, because she's had an absolutely terrible time just getting fights to loving stick. Avila signed up with the UFC all the way back in mid-2019, and in the four years since she has managed exactly four fights--and ten cancellations. She signed up to fight Karol Rosa four goddamn times. She was scheduled against Karol Rosa and Nicco Montańo six goddamn times in 2020 and each one fell through. We haven't actually seen "Raging Panda" and her aggressively forward-moving assaults since she beat up Julija Stoliarenko all the way back in June of 2021; a knee injury took her out at the end of the year and she's been on the shelf ever since. I'll give Tate credit: Her last two fights weren't easy, and this one's no better. Tate's hard-nosed wrestle-boxing style isn't a bad one for Avila's defensive gaps--the last time she lost, it was at the hands of a similar assault from Sijara Eubanks--but Tate doesn't have quite the same physicality in her game and she tends to walk into fire to get her takedown attempts, which is where Avila's offense shines. On paper, this seems like a real good first round for Miesha followed by getting picked apart for the rest of the fight. But Avila's also been rehabbing for years, and she's coming back against a tough, canny fighter, and it's anyone's guess how she'll look. I'm still leaning towards JULIA AVILA BY TKO but this fight is covered in question marks. MIDDLEWEIGHT: Cody Brundage (9-5) vs Zach Reese (6-0) Cody Brundage is a very, very lucky man. Heading into his September showdown with Jacob Malkoun, Brundage was 0 for his last 3 and very much fighting to keep his job, and after four minutes of being completely dominated, the pink slip appeared inevitable. And then, in the middle of very easily beating him, Malkoun smashed Brundage in the back of the head with an elbow. Disqualification: The best way a fight can end. On the plus side, Brundage and his heavy-handed wrestle-boxing lived to fight another day. On the minus side, the UFC clearly hasn't forgotten about the losing streak, because rather than a similarly known, weathered quantity Brundage is welcoming a shiny new Contender Series toy into the UFC. Zach Reese is, and I acknowledge the disrespect inherent to my appraisal, the living ideal of the Contender Series fighter. He's a 6'4" guy who showcases virtually no defense to the point that he got outboxed and dropped by a man half a foot shorter than he is during his Contender Series fight, he's undefeated with nothing but first-round finishes except almost all of his opponents were rookies or jobbers, and his outspoken ethos as a fighter is to push for finishes constantly with no regard for safety or points. I'd like to be wrong about Reese. I appreciate anyone who's still getting armbars off their back in 2023. But that dude carries his hands like it's still 2005 and he's about to fight Gideon Ray, and CODY BRUNDAGE BY TKO just seems so thoroughly easy to imagine. LIGHTWEIGHT: Joe Solecki (13-3) vs Drakkar Klose (13-2-1) Paths to the top are narrow, and sometimes when you pursue them you wind up moving sideways instead. Joe Solecki was on his way up the prospect rankings when he dropped a split decision to Jared Gordon back in 2021, and it was the kind of close that could easily have gone the other way had the judges felt a cool breeze on their faces that caused them to smile instead of frown, and Solecki has certainly tried to work his way back up, but boy, the universe hasn't allowed it. First he took another close decision over the soon-to-be-fired Alex da Silva--which would have been a split draw were it not for da Silva losing a point for cage grabs. Then he was supposed to fight the deeply impressive Benoît Saint-Denis--but an injury left him disposing of the less-regarded Carl Deaton III, another in the long line of Carls destined not to climb their fields. Drakkar Klose represents Solecki's chance to claw his way back into relevance. Klose has flown under the radar for years, half because his style just tends to not be particularly fan-friendly and half because he keeps taking poorly-timed losses that derail his momentum, but he's secretly been one of the UFC's most underrated Lightweight fighters for years. Klose is the kind of solid, sound fighter that gives the world hives--no big weaknesses, no tendency to overextend, just sound gameplanning and an approach so well-rounded that fighters just don't know how to disarm him. Main-event fighter Beneil Dariush is the only man to ever stop him, and the act of stopping Drakkar Klose was so sufficiently notable that it served as the point people realized Dariush might, in fact, be for real. If that effusiveness leads you to think I am in the tank for Drakkar Klose: You're probably right. But his grappling defense makes me wonder what Solecki really has for him, and how much damage Klose will put on him while he tries to get him down. DRAKKAR KLOSE BY DECISION. FEATHERWEIGHT: Steve Garcia (14-5) vs Melquizael Costa (20-6)Steve Garcia is trying as hard as he can. "Mean Machine" jumped into the UFC as a late replacement back in February of 2020--after having just knocked out current UFC prospect Chepe Mariscal barely a month earlier--and, like most late replacement contract fighters, he quickly went 1-2 and seemed like he was probably done. And then he knocked the gently caress out of UFC child soldier Chase Hooper in ninety seconds. At something of a loss, the UFC put him up against rising international star Shayilan Nuerdanbieke, and once again, Garcia obliged by nuking Shayilan in two rounds with body shots. Having recorded two fantastic, devastating knockout victories in a row that were unfortunately buried midway through the prelims, Steve Garcia is, uh, once again buried midway through the prelims. This time his dance partner is Melquizael "Melk" Costa, a fellow short-notice replacement fighter who's currently midway through his I-belong-here redemption tour. He lost his debut fight against Thiago Moisés, which is pretty understandable as Moisés is an absolute motherfucker to fight even with a full camp, but he made up for it by shutting out the ever-tough Austin Lingo in his sophomore appearance. The clash in their respective styles makes this a real interesting fight. Garcia has vicious power and he's very good at using it to fight long, with particularly severe body kicks, but his defense tends to suffer for it. Melk likes to sling slapping headkicks and throw fun spinning poo poo, but he picks his spots and tries to keep himself defensively covered between his attempts. What I can't get out of my head is watching Costa smack Austin Lingo upside the head with a half-dozen kicks without putting him down, though, and compared to the opportunistic power Garcia carries, STEVE GARCIA BY TKO doesn't feel out of the question here. LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Ihor Potieria (20-4) vs Rodolfo Bellato (11-2) Ihor Potieria drank the blood of the ancients and now he is cursed for life. His entire 19-3 career before 2023 is void, because in January of 2023 he ended the mixed martial arts career of Pride FC legend and former UFC champion Mauricio "Shogun" Rua by entirely-too-predictably blitzing him in a single round, and for daring to commit such a crime as defeating an opponent, his name has been written in the book of death. Carlos Ulberg knocked him cold four months later and now, one fight from retiring a legend, Ihor is struggling not to go 1-3 in the UFC. That's where Rodolfo "Trator" Bellato comes in, and if you guessed that Bellato won a Contender Series contract within the last couple months, you get absolutely no points. It's not because you're wrong--you're right!--it's because correctly yet automatically assuming it means your heart has been colonized by the dark and terrible forces that run our abominable sport. Don't worry, it's a rite of passage for becoming a mixed martial arts fan. We call it The Hollowing. Anyway, RODOLFO BELLATO BY TKO because Ihor Potieria likes getting hit in the head too much. WELTERWEIGHT: Wellington Turman (18-7) vs Jared Gooden (22-9) In my head, for some reason, Wellington Turman has been around the UFC for a very long time and he's run up a seasoned veteran's record. In reality, it's only been four years and he's 3-5 and one of those victories was inexplicably needing a split decision to beat Sam Alvey. Turman's always been a skilled fighter--his striking's sound and his grappling's solid--but putting it all together consistently in the cage seems to give him fits, and the UFC booking him against killers like Andre Petroski and Randy Brown is decidedly unhelpful. Tonight, thankfully, he's got Jared "NiteTrain" Gooden instead. When last we checked in with Jared Gooden this past March, he had just returned to the UFC after a year and a half on the regional circuit, and I summed up how bizarre it was thusly: CarlCX posted:He beat former contender Curtis Millender after Millender broke his leg and collapsed on a leg kick, he got knocked cold by the inexplicably released Impa Kasanganay, he beat Doug Usher after Usher somehow broke his own hand punching Gooden in the chest, and he beat Damarques Jackson when Jackson got so tired and hurt that he knocked himself down throwing a haymaker. It's the kind of bizarre poo poo that happens on the regional scene, but hey: It got Gooden back to the mothership. Nine months and an actual training camp can make a lot of difference, and Gooden's got a reach and power advantage, but I just do not believe in the man. I'm not convinced he'll have the punches to keep Turman off him, or that he'll be able to stop his grappling if the fight goes there. WELLINGTON TURMAN BY DECISION. WOMEN'S FLYWEIGHT: Jamey-Lyn Horth (6-0) vs Veronica Hardy (7-4-1) Here, starting the card, we have a story of surprises. Jamey-Lyn Horth's UFC debut wasn't supposed to be her night. The UFC had heavily invested in Contender Series winner Hailey Cowan, to the point of having marketing rolling out for her before she'd even officially fought in the company, but her debut had been repeatedly scratched by scheduling issues and illnesses. So the UFC brought in Canada's Jamey-Lyn Horth to fight Cowan on a month's notice with the intention of giving Cowan a landing pad. Instead, Horth outworked her and won a close, but clear, decision. Which is great! But the UFC doesn't tend to like it when you ruin their plans. This is part of why Horth is curtain-jerking the prelims against Veronica Hardy, who's two steps into her comeback tour. Veronica--back when she was still known as Veronica Macedo, before she married the eternally-threatening-to-unretire Dan Hardy--had a deeply unfortunate 1-4 run in the UFC that ended in 2020 when she retired after being very understandably spooked by persistent concussion issues. Three years was enough of a rest to give her brain another shot at glorious trauma, and she made her grand return to the sport and the UFC this past March where, in all honesty, she looked better than ever. She completely dominated The Ultimate Fighter 30 (jesus christ) champion Juliana Miller, landed an astonishing 82% of her strikes, went 4 for 4 on takedowns, and completely controlled her on the mat. Here's the thing, though, and I say this as an irresponsibly big Juliana Miller fan: Juliana Miller's defense is profoundly bad. Horth presents a much different set of challenges. She's fast, she throws some drat hard kicks, she was able to deal with Cowan's grappling. Cowan, in fairness, doesn't have Hardy's grappling chops, but she does have a big size and strength advantage that didn't do her any good. I'm leaning towards JAMEY-LYN HORTH BY DECISION, but I'd really like to see the Veronica Hardy train keep rolling.
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Nov 29, 2023 20:12
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 11:21 |
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You can PM Mekchu and ask if you want, but yeah, request was made to take it out of the OP. On that note:  The month is over and Scott Coker has fallen. Follow the surf ninja to the December thread.
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Dec 1, 2023 19:01
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