- CarlCX
- Dec 14, 2003
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We've made it to the end of 2023 and we're ending it with Colby Covington, because of course we are. The card lost Luque vs Garry and Brown vs Salikhov in the last 72 hours, so we're running a little short and late.
Alright, let's end this year in style. Angry, angry style.
CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 85: FOR AN AUDIENCE OF ONE
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 16 FROM THE T-MOBILE ARENA IN LAS VEGAS, NEVADA
EARLY PRELIMS 3 PM PST / 6 PM EST | PRELIMS 5 PM / 8 PM | MAIN CARD 7 PM / 10 PM
There are some years that make it tough to love mixed martial arts, and boy, 2023 is pretty hard to beat.
Where do you even start? Is it the end of Robbie Lawler and Chan Sung Jung, or the life, death, and revenant undeath of Power Slap? The disgraceful release of Francis Ngannou and the subsequent disappointment of Jon Jones? A championship year defined as much by the rise of the two Seans as multiple last-minute thrown-together title fights? Watching the Contender Series slowly take over the UFC's roster while an antitrust lawsuit makes its fighter abuse public knowledge? The UFC and WWE becoming a single corporate entity over the background of the inevitable heat death of Bellator?
Is it the UFC's dogged insistence on propagandizing for Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump, or Dana White assaulting his wife on camera and facing no consequences whatsoever?
Or the worst parts of our combat sports community disgracing themselves over the death of Victoria Lee?
I would like to follow that up by discussing duality, and the contrast of terrible moments and wonderful ones, and how all of the worst parts of combat sports in 2023 highlight its best parts, and how staying positive keeps the dark away.
Unfortunately, this card has Tony Ferguson vs Paddy Pimblett and Leon Edwards vs Colby Covington on it, so today, we are gathered here only to burn.
But we burn together, here, at the end of the year, and if your love for this sport survived 2023 then cast a torch into the bonfire, warm your hands, and, by god, take comfort in knowing that love can survive anything.
for old time's sake, wikipedia
MAIN EVENT: I DON'T NEED YOUR TROPHIES OR YOUR GOLD / I JUST WANT TO TELL YOU ALL / GO gently caress YOURSELVES
WELTERWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP: Leon Edwards (21-3 (1), Champion) vs Colby Covington (17-3, #3)
One of my biggest pet peeves in the world of internet commentary--of critique in general, honestly--is overwrought anger. The sort of frothing-at-the-mouth insensible rage people seem to generate over things like a story not going the way they wanted, or a movie studio casting a black person, or a video game having a pronoun selector. The way people manage such blood-boiling fury over a hobby that all they can do is yell and swear and gnash their teeth has baffled me for my entire life.
Which means, today, I have finally reached adulthood, or finally grown into true hypocrisy, or, in all likelihood, both.
Because this fight loving sucks. This is dog-rear end bullshit. As baffled as I am by internet rage, I'm equally baffled by the way the mixed martial arts community tends to sigh and shrug and agree to take things seriously when they're presented as a main event out of some sense of helpless necessity. It is, if anything, even more important to point out how infuriatingly cynical and terrible the company's decisions are when they put them out in the spotlight. In a year of absolute nonsense from the UFC, this is top-tier, pure-strain clothes-inside-out knees-bending-the-wrong-way violence. This fight is an evolutionary dead end.
It took Leon Edwards eleven fights and six undefeated years to get a shot at the Welterweight championship. After shocking the world by knocking Kamaru Usman dead with a headkick in the summer of 2022, Edwards was, understandably, ordered to fight an immediate rematch with the long-reigning former champion. He shut Usman down for four out of five rounds and won again, which is, quite frankly, amazing, but the entire fight was overshadowed by the weigh-in-day revelation that the UFC had tapped Colby Covington as the emergency replacement fill-in fighter if either man had failed to make it to the show, and that Colby was locked in as Leon's next challenger. Leon called the fight out for exactly the kind of awful, disrespectful, division-defying booking it was and swore he wouldn't take the fight.
And, well, here we are.
There are three basic schools of thought when it comes to combat sports matchmaking. In one, you're matching the best, most proven fighters in a division against their peers; in another, you're prioritizing the fighters you think are the best even if their position doesn't necessarily show it; in the last, you're booking the fights that will make the most money and gently caress everything else.
Evaluating this fight as an example of two of the best, most-proven fighters in their division, here, presented unabridged, are the names of all of the fighters in the Welterweight top fifteen Colby Covington has defeated:
Similarly, here is a list of all of the fighters Colby has beaten in the last seven years who are not, currently, retired from mixed martial arts competition:
Well, shucks. Surely, Colby's on a winning streak or something, right? What's his recent record?
- He's fought once a year since December of 2019 and in that time he's 2-2 with one straight win, which was 21 and a half months ago
Jesus. He's a crazy finishing machine, though, right? Like, he's got a really fun, casual-friendly style? When's the last time he won a fight by knockout or submission?
- 2016 unless you count Tyron Woodley popping his own ribs jumping a guillotine and this gag is getting old
Not as old as this stupid fuckin' fight, little buddy.
Okay! We can shut the door on the first path. How about the second? Position aside, are these the two best 170-pound fighters the UFC has to offer?
'Best' can be a subjective term. Luckily, the human brain has gifted us with the power of comparative analysis. In this case, over his last four fights, Colby Covington got his poo poo completely wrecked by then-champion Kamaru Usman twice. The first time around was actually more competitive right up until it ended with Colby getting knocked out in the fifth round with a broken jaw leaking blood all over the floor; the second was just your garden-variety decision loss. Colby being competitive with Kamaru Usman is the thing cited as proof he belongs in contention, but Colby is, objectively, a worse fighter than Kamaru Usman, the #1-ranked Welterweight in the UFC.
Who Leon Edwards just shithoused twice in a row.
So, definitionally, no, this is not a fight between the two best guys in the UFC. Of course, there's no point in making a fight between Leon and the #1 guy, because he just beat him repeatedly in consecutive match-ups. It would be aggressively stupid to book a third when Usman hasn't done something definitive to earn it.
Which is when you say: Hey, wait, if Kamaru Usman is #1, and Colby Covington is #3, who's #2, and why isn't he here instead? #2 is, of course, Belal Muhammad, who is--tell me if this sounds familiar--unbeaten in his last ten fights over almost five years. When he knocked out the undefeated, top-ten-ranked Sean Brady in October of 2022, it was already considered ridiculous that he wasn't getting picked as the next 170-pound contender, and that was more than a loving year ago.
The second-best available Welterweight isn't in the fight. So that leaves only the third possibility: Colby is the biggest draw, and the money he's going to bring in means everything else is moot.
I got into an argument about this right after the announcement was made all the way back in March, and at the time, this is what I had to say:
The problem with "Colby is the only draw" is it stops being a good argument when the UFC stops making draws. The UFC's welterweight top ten currently includes:
- Belal Muhammad, a power-wrestler who hasn't lost in 9 fights, got screwed out of a potential title eliminator against the current champ, and got a knockout-of-the-night reward in his last fight for beating the absolute gently caress out of an undefeated top ten contender
- Gilbert Burns, a world jiu-jitsu champion with nuclear bombs for hands who almost knocked out Kamaru Usman and had a massively loved fight of the year candidate against Khamzat Chimaev
- Shavkat Rakhmonov, an undefeated man-butcher from Kazakhstan who's a perfect 5-0 in the UFC, just won a fight of the night award for Solid Snake choking out Geoff Neal, and has literally never gone to a decision in his life
- Stephen Thompson, a karate superhero with a surprisingly devoted fanbase who ended last year with a fight of the year candidate against Kevin Holland, one of the UFC's favorite fast-track title contenders
And they're doing nothing with them. Their current plan is to kill one of their top contenders by having Belal and Shavkat fight each other, they've booked Burns against Jorge Masvidal in the hopes of getting him right back into title contention, and the UFC is currently trying to book Thompson against the #15 ranked Michel loving Pereira.
And you can't say Belal is a fan-unfriendly wrestler, because Colby Covington, and you can't say Burns already lost to the champion and doesn't deserve a fight, because Colby Covington, and you can't say Shavkat doesn't have a title-justifying victory, because Colby loving Covington.
It's not enough for Colby to be the top draw when the reason Colby's the top draw is they're not putting an iota of effort behind anyone else. And if it IS enough reason that Colby's a draw then let's all stop being cowards and pay Royce Gracie to come out of retirement for a shot at the top welterweight on the planet again, because at that point we've already given up on any idea of matchmaking mattering anyway.
All of the contenders are being made to cannibalize each other and none of them are being properly promoted. But, hey: They ARE contenders, and they ARE fighting each other, and the end result is the best fighters will be left standing.
Which would be a comfort if Colby Covington weren't getting a title shot thanks to his championship-justifying victories over loving nobody.
So you're left with the elephant in the room. Colby is a draw because he made himself a draw. He's identified himself with Donald Trump and the right wing so closely that it's become his entire overarching personality. He did a Trump photo-op at the White House. He walked to the cage with the Trump children. He's the ex-president's favorite fighter. However cynical, however terrible, he's a big deal. He's a multiple-time pay-per-view main eventer! The UFC markets him because he's a great return on investment! Colby's where the money is!
Right?
No! That's the worst loving part! Every time he's been in a pay-per-view main event his opponent has been wildly more popular than he is, and absolutely none of it has ever loving rubbed off. I want you to think about how few mixed martial artists effectively market themselves, I want you to think about how much even the slightest bit of self-advertisement tends to change the world for an athlete, and then I want you to think about the fact that Colby Covington got personally endorsed by the President of the United States of America, and what it got him was, roughly, 200,000 followers on Twitter, which is roughly 1/15th of a Jorge Masvidal Instagram. Videos on the UFC's YouTube channel that outrank the most popular Colby Covington appearance include Greg Hardy's Contender Series debut, the Let Me Bang Bro meme, the first episode of the almost-immediately-cancelled-for-low-ratings Power Slap show, and a ninety-second clip that's just Dana White doing pullups because someone on the MMA Underground forum said he couldn't.
He's objectively not the top-ranked fighter in the division, he's objectively not the best fighter in the division, and there's a pretty good argument he's not even a proven draw.
So why is Colby Covington here?
Because Dana White has stated his belief on multiple occasions that Colby is the best Welterweight in the world not named Kamaru Usman, and that, had Usman not existed, Colby would have been the champion for the last five years. He's had many words about how Colby's cardio and his suffocating wrestling style and in-the-pocket punching are just so tenacious and unstoppable and they make him more than a match for anyone on the planet not named Kamaru Usman, and it is only right he gets his shot for being so skilled.
This offer, of course, does not apply to Merab Dvalishvili.
Colby Covington is here because the UFC wants him to be here. It's not a difficult concept. Once upon a time Colby nearly got fired for chasing Dana White around Las Vegas with a camera while threatening to put footage of his mistresses on social media, and now he's the top company guy. Is it their mutual love of Trump? Is it the out-and-out bigotry-as-marketing Colby has made the centerpiece of his career? Is it his place as the last white guy left standing in the top five?
Or is it this thing that I'm doing here? After all, aren't you mad about Colby Covington? Doesn't all of the bullshit around this fight just amplify your ever-present desire to see him get his for being such a bad boy?
It's all of it, of course. It's every bad reason the sport ever offers and absolutely none of the good ones. The act of booking it is, in itself, a sabotage, because rather than "Leon Edwards, the British Champion we've wanted for so long, the man who dethroned Kamaru Usman, is defending his title," the story of this fight is thoroughly dominated by "Wait, Colby Covington? Are you sure?" It's the most brutally cynical, bloodless thing the UFC could possibly do, and that, in itself, is all the more reason for them to do it. Colby Covington gets the title shot. Why? Because gently caress You, that's why.
There's a certain sense of futility that drips into being a fan. Barring the success of the antitrust lawsuit or an abrupt meteor strike, there's nothing that's really going to change the UFC; its money doesn't even come from its own consumers anymore. Being angry winds up feeling somewhere between pointless and pathetic, because at best, it's anger at a thing that will never stop making you angry, and at worst, it's being successfully manipulated into being angry because that means, clearly, you're engaged. If you're mad, it means you lose and they win.
But that's bullshit, too. You're always entitled to be mad, and if you still have enough in you to care about all of this, that's a blessing, not a curse.
Can Colby beat Leon? Sure. Is there even a single neuron in my brain with the slightest twitch of an inclination to write about Colby's five-round clinch capacity or his uncanny ability to land 200+ strikes on someone while barely leaving marks on them and how they could lead him to victory? Not a one. Not if I got a thousand subscribers overnight.
Bad fight, bad booking, bad egos, bad company. Pray the universe doesn't reward them for it. LEON EDWARDS BY DECISION or we're all having a really bad loving Christmas.
CO-MAIN EVENT: IT'S A BRAND NEW DAY
 FLYWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP: Alexandre Pantoja (26-5, Champion) vs Brandon Royval (15-6, #2)
This fight, right here? This is a brave new world. This will be the first fight for the UFC Flyweight Championship not to involve either Deiveson Figueiredo, Brandon Moreno or, most commonly, both, in just five days shy of four years. It's a strange juxtaposition when placed against every other championship division in the same timeframe--thanks, oddly, to the UFC's lack of care for its 125-pound fighters, they just didn't have anyone else to push towards contendership and that meant there was nothing stopping the two best fighters from clashing with each other over and over and over.
That championship hot potato game was extremely important to Alexandre Pantoja. For all of his grappling expertise and his deceptive knockout power and his oddly perfect hair, he'd been beaten, definitively, by Deiveson Figueiredo during his run-up to the title, and when you get shut out by a fighter it's real, real hard to talk the fanbase, let alone management, into giving you another crack at them.
But Pantoja had beaten Brandon Moreno. Twice! Once on The Ultimate Fighter 24 (jesus christ) and again two years later in the UFC proper. If Moreno won, Pantoja was the absurdly necessary next man up. All he had to do was wait for the fight rematch re-rematch director's cut quadrilogy to be over. And, as we know from Dana White's comments about our main event, when you have such a clear, obvious claim to the championship, the UFC is more than happy to hold the line and let you get the title fight you so richly dese--oh, wait, that's right, they made Pantoja fight like half of the entire Flyweight top ten. Funny how that works! But he won, and after three straight top ten victories, there was nothing to do but wait for him to get his crack at the belt.
So, here's where we have to deal with the unfortunate part of this matchmaking: One of those three victories was Brandon Royval.
Yeah! It's awkward. Moreso when you realize Brandon Moreno's initial shot at Figueiredo and the start of the great Flyweight championship war only happened after Moreno, uh, also beat Brandon Royval.
Royval's timing--not as a fighter, but as a person who exists in the unfortunately temporal annals of fighting--has been his biggest problem. He's had some great moments, but they've all come just too early or just too late. He choked out former title challenger Tim Elliott! But he did it at the end of the worst losing streak in Elliott's career. He strangled future title challenger Kai Kara-France! But it was the last fight before the hot streak that made people actually pay attention to Kai as a contender. And all of the momentum Royval built up from beating those two legitimately tough men went right out the window when he broke his shoulder against Moreno, missed nine months of competition, came back the next year and promptly got rolled by Pantoja.
At the time, no one knew those two were the next two world champions--it was just Brandon Royval getting hosed up twice. It didn't help matters when his comeback fight was an extremely close split decision victory over Rogério Bontorin, who, himself, was 0 for his last 3, had just gotten stuck with a No Contest for failing a drug test, and would be out of the UFC by the end of the year. With Flyweight already crowded as hell, between the championship battle and Alexandre Pantoja waiting in the wings and Kai Kara-France suddenly knocking people out and Manel Kape drawing attention by just constantly saying unhinged poo poo, the MMA world just didn't have much attention for Brandon Royval.
So Royval got them back through the most time-tested of methods: Wild-eyed violence. "Raw Dawg" throws everything he has into desperately trying to finish everyone he fights, and while that can sometimes lead him to, say, getting swept and choked or blowing out his own shoulder from grappling too hard, it also lets him vault right back into contention on a pile of bodies. Matt Schnell had only been submitted once in his career: Royval choked him out in half a round. Matheus Nicolau hadn't lost a fight in five years: Royval knocked him out in two minutes. When you're a Flyweight, being able to stop people is a boon; when you're able to stop other contenders, it's a godsend.
All of that being said, well. ALEXANDRE PANTOJA BY SUBMISSION. I'm a big fan of Royval and his style, but Pantoja taking him apart was just two years ago, and nothing either fighter has shown since then makes me question it happening again. Royval is still a wild man, and Pantoja is still an exceptional control fighter, and while Royval can end anyone's night if they make a mistake, Pantoja already showed a great capacity for disarming his best attempts and he's only looked better since. It should be great fun while it lasts, but unless Royval reinvents the way he approaches his offense, I don't see the math changing here.
MAIN CARD: EARNING IT
WELTERWEIGHT: Shavkat Rakhmonov (17-0, #5) vs Stephen Thompson (17-6-1, #6)
I said my piece about this fight being politically and organizationally stupid, and I'm glad I got it out of the way, because this fight also loving rules.
Shavkat Rakhmonov is the Welterweight the UFC wanted Khamzat Chimaev to be. He came in from Russia's M-1 in 2020, he hopped into the UFC against one of their toughest gatekeepers in Alex Oliveira, and he crushed him in one round. In his first three UFC bouts he averaged a knockdown for every twelve significant strikes he landed, which is absolutely absurd by the standards of Heavyweight, let alone 170 pounds. When he got his top fifteen fight with Neil Magny, it was supposed to be the first real, difficult test of his skills. Instead, Shavkat took him down, controlled him with ease, and choked him out more or less at will. His official top ten bout with Geoff Neal this past March was seen as more of a coronation than a fight--the betting odds were even more slanted towards Shavkat than they had been against Magny. Instead, the world got to see the toughest fight of his life. Geoff Neal has always been criminally underrated, and the absolute war he gave Shavkat is proof positive of it. But it made it even more impressive that, faced with real, genuine difficulty, Shavkat bloomed. He walked Neal down, he pushed through his punches, he broke his face, and he ultimately choked him out with the closest thing mixed martial arts gets to a 1980s pro-wrestling sleeper hold. It's not easy to blow people out of the water, but very few fighters who are accustomed to doing so can handle it when they have to struggle.
Stephen Thompson, at this stage in his career, is extremely accustomed to struggle. Thompson is only two months away from hitting eleven years in the UFC, and he's been ranked for drat near the whole thing, and the UFC has sort of refused to forgive him for not fulfilling their marketing hopes and smashing Tyron Woodley back in 2016. Thompson got two straight shots at Woodley, which are now widely considered two of the worst title fights in UFC history, and both times, he failed. And the UFC put him on contender duty. He beat Jorge Masvidal, he beat Darren Till--though the judges disagreed, in one of the great classic examples of a home-cooking decision--and then, because this sport is silly above all else, Thompson promptly suffered the one and only stoppage loss of his career when, having survived multiple championship fights and scored victories over multiple world champions at Welterweight AND Middleweight, Thompson was knocked out cold by career Lightweight Anthony Pettis. And Thompson never really recovered his place as a top contender, and the UFC never let him forget it. He beat Vicente Luque and Geoff Neal; he lost to Gilbert Burns and Belal Muhammad, cursing him to the middle of the pack. He had to defend his #6 ranking against unranked company favorite Kevin Holland, and when he made Holland quit on his stool, the UFC rewarded Thompson by...booking him against the #15 ranked Michel Pereira. When Pereira failed to make weight and Thompson promptly cancelled the fight, Dana White hit the roof, trash-talked Thompson in public and denied him his contractually obligated show money.
But they say he can have it if he, say, fights Shavkat Rakhmonov.
In every great thing, some fury must fall. Even with the bullshit, this is a fantastic fight. Shavkat has already proven he's the real deal as far as contenders go, but he needs a big, visible fight against someone with championship experience to cement his claim to a shot at the belt. Stephen Thompson has been set back over and over in his attempts to get back to the top of the mountain, and after six and a half years of trying, this is his best chance. If Thompson can stay on his feet and keep Shavkat on the ends of his attacks like he has so many other people, he's got a real good chance of walking away with a renewed lease on contendership. That being said: I think he's on his back before the first round is over and out of there by the second. SHAVKAT RAKHMONOV BY SUBMISSION.
LIGHTWEIGHT: Tony Ferguson (25-9) vs Paddy Pimblett (20-3)
Remember what I said about cynical booking? This is the real downside of it. This fight is so openly, plainly, on-its-face craven in its marketing desires that even Paddy Pimblett, the centerpiece of the UFC's big neo-British invasion, admitted it was a no-win fight. If he loses, well, he loses; if he wins, he beats a beaten man. Tony Ferguson, at one point, was one of the UFC's most popular, most dangerous fighters, a butcher on a twelve-fight winning streak who left opponents looking like they'd been in a car crash. That point, unfortunately, was almost five years ago. The last time Tony Ferguson won a fight, Bushwick Bill was still alive. Since then, it's looked a lot more like this:
Tony Ferguson is a compromised fighter. This is not a controversial or even particularly disrespectful statement, at this point in his career. It was easy to ignore when it was world-class, championship-level fighters like Charles Oliveira and Justin Gaethje. When you're getting shut down by Nate Diaz and easily controlled on the ground by Bobby Green, something has been lost. There's a void where Tony's stability used to be.
And that's the void the UFC wants to fit Paddy Pimblett into. I've said, repeatedly, that the problems with Paddy Pimblett have almost nothing to do with Paddy Pimblett and everything to do with the way the UFC markets Paddy Pimblett. This fight is, if anything, the point at which that marketing became self-aware. The mission to push Paddy up the ladder without putting him in a great deal of danger has been a tricky one--no real heavy hitters, no one who could potentially outgrapple him, no wrestlers--and at the end of 2022, in the real world, that experiment came to a close when the UFC served up what they thought was an easily winnable fight for Paddy against Jared Gordon, only for Gordon to outstrike, outgrapple and outwork Paddy to a wide decision. In the fake, terrible, everything-is-wrong-all-of-the-time world in which you and I live, Paddy won a unanimous decision in what was unanimously agreed by the media and fans to be the single worst robbery of the year. If you're the UFC: What do you do with that? You can't go backwards, you've already pushed Paddy to the rim of the top fifteen, but you also can't have a lick of confidence in his chances against anyone good enough to be ranked. Who do you have that represents a step forward for your biggest marketing darling but could, reasonably, lose to him?
The world-shaking impact of Forrest Griffin vs Stephan Bonnar makes it easy to forget, but the actual main event of the finale of The Ultimate Fighter 1 all the way back in 2005 (jesus christ) was Rich Franklin vs Ken Shamrock. The UFC knew it wasn't competitive; that was the entire point. Rich Franklin was the rising star the UFC wanted to push into the mainstream; Ken Shamrock was the well-known star who hadn't scored a quality in in a decade. It wasn't a fight, it was a marketing strategy. This is another stepping stone in the ever-more-complicated Paddy Pimblett marketing journey. The UFC saw Tony get outgrappled by Bobby Green, and they're making the educated assumption that Paddy, who is bigger, stronger and a more accomplished grappler, will be able to do it, too. They're probably right. This will probably be unpleasant and depressing and yet another case of the house winning.
So TONY FERGUSON BY TKO.
Because gently caress you, that's why.
PRELIMS: OF FALMER AND FLAT EARTH
FEATHERWEIGHT: Josh Emmett (18-4, #6) vs Bryce Mitchell (16-1, #10)
Alternative subtitle: The battle of who had their dreams crushed harder by Ilia Topuria. Poor Josh Emmett's unexpected rise to the top of the Featherweight division was one of the less expected stories of the last few years, but the cynics had already prognosticated his failure to crack the championship ranks, and unfortunately for the Fighting Falmer, the cynics were right. Emmett had only barely gotten by Calvin Kattar in the first place; when he was tapped for a just-in-case-Alexander-Volkanovski-wins-and-stays-at-155-pounds interim Featherweight Championship bout this past February he quickly found himself on the wrong end of Yair Rodríguez and his kicks, and was ultimately choked out in just two rounds. His return bout with Ilia Topuria in the Summer felt less like a second shot at contendership than a test for Topuria, and he aced it, destroying Emmett so badly that one judge scored a round 10-7, which is generally reserved for when a fighter is beaten so badly that cartoon birds circle their head and the reformed topography of their brain makes them abruptly begin believing in flat Earth conspiracies. Which brings us to Bryce Mitchell! The UFC's favorite conspiracy theorizing, white-rapping, biblical-apocalypse-foretelling impaling-his-own-nuts-with-a-power-drilling Featherweight wrestler carried his undefeated streak into 2022 (not counting when he was eliminated from The Ultimate Fighter 27 (jesus christ)) only to see it not just broken but shattered with a loving sledgehammer. Mitchell brought his aggressive wrestling game into the cage with, once again, Ilia Topuria, and got stomped loving flat, thrown around like a ragdoll and choked out in two rounds. He left the cage with a bruised ego, a busted face, and the first pause to his professional momentum in almost five years. Bryce devoted the back half of 2023 to recapturing that momentum, but his victory over Dan Ige this past September was far too narrow to return him to place as a top contender.
Which is, presumably, why he took this replacement fight. This was supposed to be Josh Emmett vs Giga Chikadze, but Giga tore his groin right at the turn of the month. Mitchell's in on just about two weeks' notice, and who that benefits more is a real question. Emmett's tough as hell, and we just saw Mitchell struggle with Dan Ige's counter-wrestling and power-punching, both of which, arguably, Emmett is better at, which is a real problem if you haven't prepared. But Emmett spent the last two months preparing for a championship-level kickboxer, and now, on very short notice, he has to switch tracks and deal with a chain-wrestling grappling specialist. That's a big loving monkey wrench. I'm still leaning towards JOSH EMMETT BY DECISION but I can't honestly say how much of that is wishful thinking.
WOMEN'S BANTAMWEIGHT: Irene Aldana (14-7, #5) vs Karol Rosa (17-5, #9)
It seems like every ranked matchup at Women's Bantamweight these days is a testament to the hole Amanda Nunes left in the UFC when she retired. We're finally filling that vacant throne next month, but the rankings have to get filled out below it, and boy, they're a mess. Irene Aldana is the fifth highest-ranked Women's Bantamweight in the UFC and, functionally, the world. Which is fantastic, because Irene Aldana's last victory at the weight class was four god damned years ago. Four years ago, Irene Aldana knocked out Ketlen Vieira, and that's her last successful outing at Women's Bantamweight. She lost to Holly Holm in 2020, she beat Yana Santos in 2021 but missed weight, she beat Macy Chiasson in 2022 but they agreed to fight at a 140-pound catchweight. And on the back of that stellar record, Aldana wound up fighting Amanda Nunes for the championship in the last fight of the GOAT's career, because Julianna Peña was hurt. She's the fifth-best at a weight class she hasn't succeeded at since The Big Bang Theory was still on the air. But going up to 145 pounds wasn't an option, and to prove it, hell, you can just ask Karol Rosa. Rosa was second in line for a Women's Featherweight title shot, but that belt is currently sealed away in a coffin at the bottom of the ocean floor lest it ever hurt anyone again, so, hey: Hope you like 135 pounds, because you're stuck with it. Rosa was a Bantamweight, but a loss to Sara McMann and an extremely close split decision over Lina Länsberg sent her upstream, where she promptly got beaten by Norma Dumont and, once again, scored a real, real tight split decision over Yana Santos, and if you're wondering why this is just a dry recitation of her fight record, it's because there just isn't much else to talk about. Karol Rosa's UFC career thus far is the precise definition of "This is fine, I guess." She doesn't really have any notable momentum, she doesn't have a memorable style, she doesn't have any great wins. She's grinding her way through the division as best she can.
But she has trouble with people she can't physically dominate, and even in mid-womanhandling she gets hit an awful lot. IRENE ALDANA BY DECISION.
BANTAMWEIGHT: Cody Garbrandt (13-5) vs Brian Kelleher (24-14)
Oh, Cody Garbrandt. Up until Sean O'Malley sprang fully-formed from Dana White's head in a cloud of weed smoke and shredded sexual harassment paperwork I'm not sure there was a Bantamweight fighter the UFC loved more than you. Few rises in the sport have been more meteoric than Cody's road to the top back in 2016, and fewer still have so thoroughly followed the cruel trajectory of gravity. In the first four years of his career, Cody made it to 11-0 and won the UFC Bantamweight Championship; in the seven years since he lost the title in his very first defense, got knocked out four times--three of them in succession--and has gone 2-5 overall. After eventually realizing the downside of a kill-or-be-killed fighting style is the inescapable reality of death, Garbrandt appears to have adjusted, as he came back from 15 months on the shelf against Trevin Jones this March and won by the kind of slow, strategic, thoroughly un-risky kind of fight that makes a crowd of half-drunk Vegas tourists boo lustily. Brian "Boom Boom" Kelleher hasn't ever quite made it that far. He spent the first three years of his time in the company fighting at Bantamweight, went 4-3, popped up to Featherweight, went 2-2, and then gave up on the entire philosophical concept of sticking to a weight class in favor of just going where the UFC wanted him. He was back at Bantamweight for a fight in 2021, he popped back up to Featherweight for the first half of 2022, and now he's right back down again, because, honestly, there's no reason for him not to go wherever there's space. I like Brian Kelleher! I like wrestleboxers, I like his style, I like his willingness to take risky chances. But he's 37, he one loss away from being 50/50 in the UFC, and he drat near retired this year after pre-fight MRIs turned up enough herniated discs in his back that even the UFC told him he should maybe take it easy.
Wild-eyed brawler Cody Garbrandt stands a great chance of getting knocked out by Brian Kelleher. Strategic slow-fighting Cody Garbrandt is probably a nightmare for him. He's faster, he still hits like a truck when he tries to, and Kelleher's style gives him lots of opportunities to get cracked in the jaw. CODY GARBRANDT BY DECISION is a thing I would not have envisioned writing a year ago, but time makes fools of us all.
WOMEN'S FLYWEIGHT: Casey O'Neill (9-1, #12) vs Ariane Lipski (16-8, NR)
The wild swings that seem to happen in the women's divisions are a thing to behold. At the start of 2023 "King" Casey O'Neill was one of the more promising prospects in the division, an undefeated grappling monster with vicious ground and pound, a power advantage over almost everyone she fought, and the dubious honor of retiring Roxanne Modafferi under her belt. Then she tore her ACL and wound up sitting on the sidelines for an entire year. Then she got completely outworked by longtime veteran Jennifer Maia in her comeback fight, who the UFC promptly let go of one fight later, because they've decided they strenuously dislike having good fighters on their roster. So now O'Neill is left trying to retcon her own return to competition. Ariane Lipski, on the other hand, is just desperately trying to keep a winning streak alive. Lipski has struggled ever since making the jump from being a champion in her native Poland's Konfrontacja Sztuk Walki to being a 50/50 fighter in the UFC. Her skills are evident, be it the striking power necessary to repeatedly drop Mandy Böhm or the grappling chops to tear Luana Carolina's knee apart in ninety seconds, but consistently putting those skills together has proven rather difficult for her. She only barely escaped her fight with Melissa Gatto this Summer with a split decision, and that was thanks largely to her successfully playing The Floor Is Lava to escape Gatto's ground assaults.
Casey is a lot harder to keep off of you. Strong wrestling and ground-and-pound have done Ariane in repeatedly, and unless she can either stick and move for fifteen minutes or follow submissions aggressively enough to scare Casey off of her bread and butter, she's almost certainly spending this fight on her back. CASEY O'NEILL BY TKO.
EARLY PRELIMS: MOST OF A FIGHT NIGHT MAIN CARD, REALLY
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Alonzo Menifield (14-3-1, #14) vs Dustin Jacoby (19-7-1, #15)
Alonzo Menifield's 2023 was about as frustrating as ours. Coming off of what had already been a weird 2022--the Askar Mozharov affair is still one of the funniest things to happen in a major MMA organization since Eric Prindle's Groin Destruction Revenge Tour--Menifield saw his momentum halted completely by a debacle of a matchup with Jimmy Crute, which saw a sure-thing decision victory turned into a draw thanks to a last-round point deduction over a fence grab. An instant rematch was ruled absolutely necessary, and, of course, it absolutely wasn't: Menifield mauled Crute and choked him out in seven minutes. Having spent the first two-thirds of the year repeatedly fighting one dude, Menifield is trying to get past the inertia by mantling the Hanyak. In another reality, Dustin Jacoby would be in the top ten right now. His 2022-closing bout with newly-minted contender Khalil Rountree Jr. was the kind of split decision that goes just past 'coinflip' territory and edges perilously close to 'the fighters should launch a class-action lawsuit against the judges,' but Rountree getting the nod meant he went on to consume the last vestiges of Anthony Smith's soul in a co-main event and Jacoby went on to getting beaten at length by Azamat Murzakanov. He dropped Kennedy Nzechukwu in a minute and a half this past August and in doing so defended the honor of herky-jerky kickboxing for a generation to come, but the herk and jerk demand more, more, more.
I don't say this often about Light Heavyweight: This is an interesting matchup. Menifield's powerful as hell, but he tends to fight raw and get caught over it. Jacoby's a genuinely good striker with some deceptive wrestling in his back pocket, but he has trouble putting it into practice against opponents who can exert pressure on him. In a pinch, I think DUSTIN JACOBY BY DECISION is more likely, but anything could happen here, and it could happen very, very quickly.
FLYWEIGHT: Tagir Ulanbekov (14-2, #13) vs Cody Durden (16-4-1, #15)
Subtitled: Jake Hadley's Revenge. Tagir Ulanbekov is another in the seemingly endless legion of Dagestani grapplers put on Earth to wrestle other humans into the dirt and make them pay for the temerity of assuming they were allowed to spend their lives with their necks un-choked. He's been constantly plagued by injuries, meaning as he enters the fourth year of his UFC run he's only four fights deep. His only speedbump thus far was the ever-present grappling of Tim Elliott; otherwise, he's been fully clean. But the UFC wanted him fighting Jake Hadley this past August, and instead it became Tagir's fifth pull-out, and his role was filled by one Cody Durden. Durden's particular brand of face-first, hard-nosed wrestle-boxing has been a problem for everyone in the Flyweight division outside of the top fifteen, and Hadley was no different; it was a wild, spirited grappling match, but it ended with Hadley squirting blood from his forehead and Durden walking away with a win. Durden's only real problems have come from opportunistic submission aces like Jimmy Flick or specimens like Muhammad Mokaev who can do more or less whatever they want.
But, boy, Tagir's tendency to nab guillotines and control grappling positions seems like bad news for Durden. Cody's definitely got a power and ferocity advantage on the feet, but I'm not sure how much time the fight will ultimately spend there. TAGIR ULANBEKOV BY SUBMISSION.
FEATHERWEIGHT: Andre Fili (22-10 (1)) vs Lucas Almeida (14-2)
When last we saw Andre Fili he was coming off a 1-2 (1) run that culminated in his being taken off of fighting out of medical concern when one of his eyes stopped working. I think, as a rule, if fighting starts making you blind, you should probably stop loving doing it. But Fili's been in the UFC a decade+ at this point and nothing can stop him, so he came back anyway and got outpunched by Nathaniel Wood for his troubles. This puts Fili in the unfortunate position of the gatekeeping veteran: He's genuinely quite good, but after all these years and fights he's 10-9 (1) in the UFC and has been pretty visibly relegated to testing new blood. Thus: Lucas Almeida. Almeida actually lost his 2021 crack at the Contender Series, but he's a stand-and-bang Brazilian with a penchant for flying knees and a deep-seated love for kicking people in the leg, and truly, how could the UFC resist. His debut against Mike Trizano was a definitive knockout, but it took an entire year for his second UFC fight thanks to constant, repeated bad luck with opponents blowing their weight cuts or getting injured--one of whom was, in fact, Andre Fili, who had to bow out due to the aforementioned eye injury.
Which is better now? I guess? Boy, I don't feel great about Andre continuing to fight at this point. But he's still an underrated fighter and he's still got some great kicks in his back pocket, and I secretly hope he uses them by mixing up some unexpected wrestling in the game because that's where Almeida really struggles. ANDRE FILI BY DECISION.
HEAVYWEIGHT: Martin Buday (13-1, #15) vs Shamil Gaziev (11-0, NR)
I wonder what it's like to be a pair of (almost) undefeated Heavyweights, meaning you're the most-desired fighters the UFC can get, and both of you came from the Contender Series, meaning you're Dana White's special project, and one of you is actually on a four-fight winning streak in the UFC, making you one of the most successful Heavyweight prospects they've got to the point of actually achieving a ranking, and their judgment of your worth still relegates you to the curtain-jerking portion of the prelims. Martin Buday, your wrestling is good but it's just not what they want. Sure, you tore Josh Parisian's arm off in your last fight, but make no mistake: They think you're gonna cage-clinch and punch a man again, and statistically, they're probably right. Shamil Gaziev is a much more traditional Heavyweight prospect--as in, all but one of his victories came by stoppage and his gameplan centers around murdering his opponent with his bare hands and possibly choking out his half-conscious corpse--but part of that tradition is an awful lot of those victims being outclassed rookie fighters and Light Heavyweights fighting significantly out of their weight class.
Let me be blunt: I would not disrespect Chris Barnett by daring to say Buday could handle his striking but not Gaziev's. If the world proves me wrong, I persist it is the world that is wrong. MARTIN BUDAY BY DECISION.
Prelims begin in 15-20.
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Dec 17, 2023 00:18
