- CarlCX
- Dec 14, 2003
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It's pay-per-view time, and it is an actually good show, and the main event will tear me apart inside. Prelims got moved up to 3:30/6:30 but the card has stayed intact except Justin Tafa has been replaced by twin brother Junior Tafa, because our sport is not real.
CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 90: OR, THERE AND BACK AGAIN
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 17 FROM THE HONDA CENTER IN ANAHEIM, CALIFORNIA
EARLY PRELIMS 3:30 PM PST / 6:30 PM EST | PRELIMS 5 PM / 8 PM | MAIN CARD 7 PM / 10 PM
Man, I don't wanna do this. I really don't. And I do! And I don't. But at least it's for the good reasons.
Last week, I mentioned/whined to a friend that I've come to dislike the negativity in my MMA writing. Not because it's undeserved--trust me, it's thoroughly deserved--but because I do, still, love mixed martial arts, just as I have for almost thirty years. It's the most interesting sport in the world, it provides some of the most interesting clashes of talent in the world, and there is an immediacy and relatability to the lack of obfuscation surrounding the way it is performed that's still incredibly unique.
It's never been the mixed martial arts I hate; it's the everything else. The bad matchmaking, the promotional favoritism, the bigotry as advertising, the laundering of toxicity into product, the million things that get in the way of the best thing combat sports has created. But a few times a year, the UFC manages to get out of their own way and put on the kind of main event that reminds you why you ever started watching in the first place.
It's cleansing. It's refreshing.
And all I have to do to finish enjoying it is choose between my two favorite fighters.
Goddammit.
i wanted to test the new format this week but i am too busy to be bad at photoshop
MAIN EVENT: THE POSTURE OF A KING
 FEATHERWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP: Alexander Volkanovski (26-3, Champion) vs Ilia Topuria (14-0, #3)
Eight months ago, when Ilia Topuria fought Josh Emmett, I introduced the card like this:
Objectively, this card has all of those issues. I could tell you this card has an extremely high fun potential and a lot of interesting people on it, and both things are true. But I would still give it a pass anyway, because it is Ilia Topuria fight night, god dammit.
I think it's deeply necessary to be wholly in the tank for a fighter here and there. I think combat sports are such an inherently cruel, irrational and often outright arbitrary thing that you need the anchoring influence of an equally irrational force to stay afloat in its terrible seas. The day there isn't at least one fighter that you, as a diehard fan, want to aggressively root for above their peers, it's probably time to take a break.
He hasn't disappointed me since. He briefly concerned me by going up to 155 pounds on short notice and almost getting knocked out by Jai Herbert, but Ilia folded him like a deck chair with punches a few minutes later; Topuria almost got wrestled by Bryce Mitchell in their fight at the end of 2022, but promptly destroyed him immediately thereafter. His big contention-earning main event with Josh Emmett was fun, incredibly one-sided (judge Chris Lee's 50-42 is still one of the most brutal scorecards I have seen), and a thorough proof of concept for Ilia Topuria's worthiness as a top contender.
Honestly: I never stood a chance. A heavy-handed wrestleboxer who always wins and he knocks out flatearthers? Who else is it even possible for me to like more?
I mean.
There's this one guy.
At this point it's almost passé to talk about Alexander Volkanovski's greatness. He's the second-most accomplished Featherweight champion in history (and, while he still hasn't quite matched José Aldo's career record, he did beat the crap out of him), he's the fifth-longest reigning male champion in UFC history, he's a goddamn phenomenon. A number of fans liken him to Georges St-Pierre and that comparison is typically interpreted as a statement about dominance, but their real likeness comes from visible, ongoing improvement.
A bunch of fighters get to the main event, a score of those fighters become champions and a number of those fighters get to actually defense their belts. Only a handful manage to reach the peak and find ways to climb higher. Alexander Volkanovski was already the best Featherweight in the world when he was squeaking past Max Holloway in 2019, but Volk's entire career has been defined by constant improvement. He was predominantly a wrestler in the mid-2010s, he was a wrestleboxer with a solid leg kicking game when he became the champion, and by 2022 he had developed into such a smart, tactical striker that he punched Chan Sung Jung, a man defined by his toughness, into an existential crisis about the future of his career.
In 2020, Max Holloway, the consensus #2 Featherweight in the world, came so close to beating Alexander Volkanovski that the champion was dogged for years by claims that Holloway was the better man. In 2022, Alexander Volkanovski beat Max Holloway so thoroughly and unquestionably that even his most ardent detractors gave up on one of the most contentious rivalries in the sport.
He's the best. He's been the best for years.
At Featherweight.
Volk going up to 155 pounds to challenge Islam Makhachev for the Lightweight championship was huge. Their fight was a genuine superfight both on paper and in execution: Both men looked amazing, both posed one of the toughest challenges either had ever seen, and both came away looking better for it. But Islam won. Volk returned to 145 to fairly easily defeat interim champ Yair Rodríguez, but he made it clear his eyes were on a Makhachev rematch.
Unfortunately, he got it.
Islam was supposed to fight Charles Oliveira, Oliveira busted his face open in training, the UFC needed someone willing to fight the dominant Lightweight champion with ten days to prepare.
I wasn't happy.
Amidst all of that, in the middle of the matchmaking and the marketing and the defiance of weight divisions altogether, it sucks because it introduces doubt into the equation. Islam vs Volkanovski 1 was a best-of-the-best fight in every sense of the term: The two best at the top of their game with ample time to prepare. But, as Volkanovski himself pointed out, taking the fight on short notice entirely changes its expectations. If Islam beats him again, it'll be handwaved away as Islam beating an unprepared fighter rolling off the couch. There's a flip side to that: If Volkanovski wins, after Islam beat him the first time, Islam's lack of time to adjust and prepare for him will, inevitably, be cited as a differencemaker.
In all likelihood, Islam Makhachev would have won their rematch anyway. He beat Alex once, he hasn't gotten any worse, and as he demonstrated, he'd learned to exploit some of Alex's own weaknesses. But the Alexander Volkanovski who showed up for the rematch was visibly not in prime fighting shape, visibly slower than he should've been, visibly should not have taken the fight, and, consequently, he was visibly knocked the gently caress out in three minutes. He'd later admit he was nowhere near fighting shape, he'd been drinking and relaxing more or less every day, and he did it half for what was apparently a shitload of money and half because he was going stir-crazy without a fight to the point that he almost broke down crying talking about it.
Now, I want to be clear: There's absolutely nothing wrong with having, or discussing, those feelings as a professional fighter. It would be a better sport if everyone were as open about the mental struggles that go into participating in combat sports. There is no shame in it.
But Volkanovski's identity as a fighter is so tied into his never-die, always-improve mindset that a whole bunch of folks were convinced he only took the short-notice rematch because he'd stayed constantly prepared and was at the top of his game. It humanized him by showing he could still make mistakes. And, unfortunately, when you're the longterm kingpin of an entire division and have superpowered human howitzers like Ilia Topuria gunning for you, that starts to make people worry your eye has fallen off the ball.
Which, to some extent, feels inevitable. Long-term champions finally cracking a little under the myriad pressures of age, expectation and young barbarians at the gate is another of those classic combat sports stories. Anderson Silva spoke of finally losing his title as an outright relief. Amanda Nunes was overjoyed to finally rest and relax with her wife and child. Fighters like Jon Jones and Conor McGregor who were adamant they were perfectly fine with their lengthy stays in the spotlight at the top of the sport more or less immolated their careers and personal lives. Being the best is hard. Staying the best, when you have to deal with press and celebrity and corporate obligation, is drat near impossible.
Even the best collapse. The ones we remember most fondly tend to get out on top and ride away in peace. The others get punched out by Matt Mitrione. Taking a doomed short-notice fight and getting your head kicked in by a higher-weight champion by no means heralds the end of a run.
But it does explain why despite dominating the division for half a decade he's at completely even odds with Ilia Topuria.
Make no mistake: Ilia Topuria is an extremely live challenger. In some ways, it's easy to read him as the newer, better version of Volkanovski: A compact, explosive power wrestler with great boxing and underratedly devastating leg kicks, only this time he's a better knockout puncher, a more credentialed wrestler, and a more dangerous grappler. He's younger, he's stronger, and he's got the confidence that comes from having never lost a fight in his life.
That examination underrated Volk's best asset: His defense. He's made himself progressively tougher and tougher to reach, let alone hurt, whether it's thirty seconds into a fight or twenty-three minutes into a grueling fight with a wrestler almost half a foot bigger than him. Topuria's confidence also plays against him. He swings for the fences, he misses regularly, he gets caught for his troubles, and he fatigues as fights wear on.
Alexander Volkanovski has been making fun of the media's focus on his age and tenure, but the last time he was knocked out in a fight was an entire decade ago, when he was a 24 year-old rookie fighting as a 5'6" Welterweight. Coming back after getting dropped after so long is going to be a daunting task, and doing it against someone as dangerous in every aspect of the game as Ilia Topuria takes this out of the realm of comparing skills and theorycrafting results and makes it more of an epistemological question:
Do you still believe in Alexander Volkanovski?
Because I'll tell you, I've watched Ilia Topuria outgrapple one of the world's greatest grapplers, outwrestle one of the sport's best wrestlers, and outpunch one of MMA's biggest punchers. I've believed in Ilia as a future champion for years. Do you still believe, after watching Alexander Volkanovski show up out of shape and unprepared and pay for it, that he's capable of turning back the scariest young lion in the division? Do you still believe Alexander Volkanovski is the best Featherweight in the world?
Because I do.
ALEXANDER VOLKANOVSKI BY DECISION.
CO-MAIN EVENT: NOT APPEARING IN THIS FEATURE
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Robert Whittaker (24-7, #3) vs Paulo Costa (14-2, #6)
I give this fight at best a 30% chance of actually happening.
Robert Whittaker! He's great! He's doomed to go down in history as one of the most unfairly unheralded Middleweights the UFC ever saw, and it loving sucks! While Michael Bisping was figuring out how to successfully hold onto the Middleweight championship without ever facing any of its top contenders, Robert Whittaker was force-feeding all of those contenders his goddamn shins. He was the best 185-pound fighter on the planet for years, and he didn't get a title out of it until way too late, and despite winning multiple championship fights he never got to record a title defense because Yoel Romero couldn't stay on weight.
And then Israel Adesanya came around, and suddenly, Robert Whittaker's time was up. Losing his title to Adesanya was a blow, but not as big a blow as almost beating him in their rematch. The near-loss seemingly cemented Rob as the second-best Middleweight in the division and an inevitable future challenge to Adesanya's throne--right up until Alex Pereira showed up. Suddenly, Adesanya had been knocked out, too, and suddenly, Robert Whittaker was struggling to reclaim the space he occupied in the notoriously short memory of not just the mixed martial arts fanbase, but the UFC's marketing department, who were all-in on Adesanya, Pereira, the bad bigotry takes machine that was Sean Strickland, and new top contender Dricus du Plessis and his quest to determine the validity of African identity.
I picked Whittaker to beat du Plessis. Almost everyone picked Whittaker to beat du Plessis. And then Dricus flattened Rob in two rounds, and now he's the champion, and Rob is left desperately trying to claw his way back into contendership.
On the other hand, however troubled, that is, at least, an identity as a fighter. Paulo Costa's predominant reputation within the sport is never loving showing up.
Paulo Costa was a big deal! He was a legitimate top contender when he challenged Izzy for the title. He was an undefeated 13-0, he'd knocked out four of his five UFC opponents, and he'd just taken a decision off Yoel Romero, who was seemingly the division's top contender for about five straight years. He talked absolute rafts of trash, but he backed them up in the cage by being an unending punching and grinding machine whose forward momentum was nearly impossible to stop. The world saw him as a potential foil for Adesanya, and I'd like to note that I am on the record on the internet disagreeing and am thus clearly very smart, but even I was not prepared for how one-sided it would be. Adesanya humiliated Costa, took his undefeated streak, and knocked him out in two rounds.
And, uh, that's it. No, really. That's basically the entire relevant career of Paulo Costa. And that fight happened three and a half loving years ago.
Costa was supposed to fight Robert Whittaker in 2021: He pulled out. He was scheduled against Jared Cannonier four months later: He pulled out. He fought Marvin Vettori at the end of the year, but not without an incredible debacle where he didn't even try to come close to the weight limit and demanded progressively higher and higher catchweights until they finally met twenty pounds up in a loving Light Heavyweight fight--which Vettori easily won. It would be almost a full year before Costa came back again, and this time it was against, of all people, Luke Rockhold, who Costa still somehow struggled with. And that was the last time we saw him. He was going to fight Ikram Aliskerov, it fizzled; he was supposed to fight Khamzat Chimaev, he pulled out thanks to an infection.
Let's be completely clear, here: Paulo Costa is the #6 Middleweight in the UFC, and as of this weekend's fight his last ranked victory will be 1,645 days old, and in those intervening four and a half years he has won only one fight, and it was against a fighter who had been retired for more than three years who came off the shelf to finish his UFC contract, went 'boy, that sure was a mistake,' and went off to fight in bareknuckle boxing, and that was his last fight and it was still a year and a half ago.
So if analyzing and predicting fights is about comparative performance, honestly, what on Earth are we comparing? You could pretty easily point out that Rob almost beat Izzy and did beat Vettori and both of them made Paulo look silly, but what kind of point of analysis is a bout that had to be moved up 20 goddamn pounds because Paulo Costa was too busy calling Vettori a coward to make weight? Exactly how nervous do we get about Rob getting punched out by Dricus, particularly after watching Dricus run an athleticism clinic on Sean Strickland last month?
And does any of this matter when it's just as likely the fight gets cancelled after Paulo Costa decides he'll only come out if it's rebooked at Heavyweight and he's allowed to strap knives to his hands?
ROBERT WHITTAKER BY TKO or we riot.
MAIN CARD: ONLY THE RIGHT KIND OF WRESTLING
WELTERWEIGHT: Geoff Neal (15-5, #8) vs Ian Machado Garry (13-0, #10)
We're here for unfinished business. Geoff Neal, whether he necessarily agrees or not, has been cast in the role of Welterweight gatekeeper over the last four years. He's established himself as far, far too good to ignore--a tough, ultra-composed fighter with an equal distribution of granite across his hands and chin, capable of giving the best incredibly difficult fights--but he's just not quite capable of cracking the ceiling. His five-fight debut winning streak got him shut down by Stephen Thompson and Neil Magny, his 2022 resurgence got him choked out standing by Shavkat Rakhmonov, and the UFC wanted to finish the job last August by having him fight and/or get destroyed by Ian Machado Garry last August, in a not-too-subtle attempt to capitalize on a faltering top ten fighter. Neal pulled out, Garry mocked him endlessly over it, and unwittingly set the groundwork for the downfall of his own public figure.
Because, boy, the internet sure has turned on Ian Machado Garry. Up until August of last year Garry was a fairly popular figure; a big, young, undefeated knockout artist who was wholly committed to the UFC's attempts to market him as yet another in the endless experiment to clone more Conor McGregors, and his utter thrashing of Neil Magny in Neal's stead proved he was more than his hype and did, in fact, belong in the top ten. And then everything else kind of fell apart. Garry's attempt to poo poo-talk Neal by walking around wearing his mugshot on a t-shirt managed to actually crack his goodwill with the fanbase, but they didn't turn on him until he committed the ultimate of internet crimes: A perceived failure of masculinity. He's married to a gold-digger who wrote a book about manipulating athletes into marrying you and she's sleeping with her ex! She groomed Garry as a teenager when he didn't know any better! The entirety of the brash male fanbase he'd been pursuing (read as: shitheads) flocked to Sean Strickland instead, who joined in on the chorus of detractors. When Garry pulled out of his December showdown with Vicente Luque citing pneumonia it only reinforced the mass opinions about his failures as a man.
Was any of it true? Of course not. They met when Garry was 23, his wife's 'book' was an eleven-page article featuring advice like 'set aside a savings account for breast implants' and 'embrace a future of having no talent' that could not have been more clearly satirical without Mel Brooks doing a softshoe in the background while you read it, which any of the breathless talking heads discussing it would have noticed had any of them bothered to, and all of it was the kind of misogynist internet rage-bait surrounding combat sports that's so painfully close to the incel movement that you can hear Elliot Rodger's manifesto echoing in the voices of a thousand lovely podcasters.
All of it's stupid, none of it matters. Geoff Neal is easily the toughest test of Garry's career, but IAN MACHADO GARRY BY TKO still feels predictable. Neal's only been stopped on strikes once, and it was Kevin Holland all the way back in 2017 showcasing what range management, countering and throwing in combinations could do against Neal's defensive plan of shelling up and waiting to throw back. Neal's offense has improved since then, but his defense hasn't, and Garry is legitimately very, very good at timing his openings. I think Neal scares him early and Garry picks him apart by the third.
BANTAMWEIGHT: Merab Dvalishvili (16-4, #2) vs Henry Cejudo (16-3, #3)
Remember when I waxed ecstatic about how great the sport could be sans bullshit? You can't ever get rid of it completely.
Let's not waste time getting to the point, here: Merab Dvalishvili is the division's true top contender. He's a funny, charismatic, world-class pressure wrestler who drowned Petr Yan in an ocean of offense, outstruck José Aldo, arguably hasn't truly lost a fight since 2014, and is currently riding the division's best winning streak. He even has a built-in feud with new champ Sean O'Malley, half to avenge his fallen training partner Aljamain Sterling, half because he stole O'Malley's jacket and O'Malley paid a lot to cosplay Shinsuke Nakamura. And the UFC does not want him anywhere near the title. You can take your pick as far as reasons go--he's a wrestler, he's only got one finish in the UFC, he refused to fight Aljo and they haven't forgiven him--but it's hard to avoid their fear of the very real possibility that Merab would win, and by god, they just got the belt on O'Malley and they're not done basking in the afterglow yet.
Which is why he has to fight Henry Cejudo. If you're just joining the sport now, the marketing will gladly tell you Henry Cejudo is one of the greatest fighters of all time! An incredible Olympic gold medal wrestler and two-division champion who defeated the best and retired on top and then came back and picked up right where he left off! Which is true, for an interpretive permutation of the truth. A competing permutation would say Cejudo tried to power play the UFC by retiring with a belt unless they gave him big money fights, they waved politely and moved on to promoting other people, and then, years later, a combination of Cejudo lowering his price, the UFC getting desperate for name value and Cejudo's late-career turn to right-wing agitprop as personality created the sort of corporate synergy combat sports loves to roll around in until it smells familiar again. An objective truth would be Henry Cejudo is ranked #3, hasn't won a fight in 45 months, doesn't have a single win over a currently active UFC fighter, and is following a failed title shot by fighting the #1 contender.*
*It's been two years, Dominick Cruz, poo poo or get off the pot.
I just don't see this going Cejudo's way. He's got better technical wrestling and he does have punching power, but he's always struggled to land with it and he's always had difficulty dealing with people who can physically overwhelm him. Physically overwhelming people is all Merab does. We just saw him do it effortlessly for twenty-five minutes. This being a fifteen-minute exhibition in stifling a man seems entirely likely. MERAB DVALISHVILI BY DECISION.
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Anthony Hernandez (11-2 (1), #14) vs Roman Kopylov (12-2, NR)
Middleweight prospects! Middleweight prospects I actually like! Christ, it's refreshing. I'll wholly admit I was not an early passenger on the Anthony "Fluffy" Hernandez hype train--my friends were more into Jun Yong Park, so Hernandez beating him was more of a disappointment, and following it up by getting crushed in under a minute by Kevin Holland felt like a bit of a nail in the coffin. But Hernandez scored a lifetime achievement in mixed martial comedy by choking out world-class jiu-jitsu monster Rodolfo Vieira in his next fight, and he's been blazing a path of sharp combination boxing and deeply fun chokeholds ever since, and in a world as devoid of joy as the 185-pound division, it was not hard to win me over. He's on a real good four-fight streak, he got into the top fifteen after elbowing Edmen Shahbazyan's face off, and he's entirely ready to make his run for the belt.
But he's not the only Middleweight prospect I like, and hell, he's not even the only Middleweight prospect on a four-fight winning streak I like. Roman Kopylov might be my favorite striker to watch in the UFC right now. Often, striking descriptor words like 'tactical' and 'patient' can be translated with uncharitable accuracy as 'ineffective,' but Kopylov is an actual case study in effective patience. He sticks, he moves, he times his strikes and finds openings for his combinations and he does helpful corrective surgery on abdominal organs. His last UFC losses were back-to-back in 2019 and 2021 against tough, gritty grapplers who were able to power through his strikes and shut down his gameplan, and it's, uh, not coincidental that the UFC hasn't matched him with another grappling-focused fighter since.
Anthony Hernandez is probably going to want to take that approach. He's got great, long, fluid punches, but he's also a tenacious grappler, and there's only one realm of this fight in which Kopylov poses a threat to him. As I say this, I can feel internet mixed martial arts celebrity Chungus Supreme/LegKickTKO/LobsterMobster's voice ringing in my head like a warning siren:
But I cannot change my ways. ANTHONY HERNANDEZ BY SUBMISSION.
PRELIMS: CONSTANTLY FAILING UPWARD
WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT: Amanda Lemos (13-3-1, #3) vs Mackenzie Dern (13-4, #7)
Amanda Lemos, welcome to the back of the line. When last we saw "Amandinha" she was booked into the biggest fight of her career, a shot at Zhang Weili's Women's Strawweight Championship. It was, respectfully, a bit of a stretch--Lemos was on a two-fight winning streak and only one of those wins was contender-worthy--but the division was in a weird place, Zhang needed an opponent, and Lemos' heavy-handed boxing had a number of people expecting an upset. The result was one of the most one-sided beatings in a championship fight in MMA history, as Zhang outstruck Lemos 296 to 29. It's not just the kind of fight that bounces someone from top contendership, it's the kind of fight that makes it abundantly clear they have virtually no chance of becoming a champion. Which means the UFC has a top contender to sacrifice. Lemos was supposed to fight Tatiana Suarez here, but her fantastic career comeback from injury was delayed by another injury, and that means Lemos needs an opponent, and that means the UFC has a top contender to sacrifice, and that means there's only one woman to call.
Let's rewind to November for a second.
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!
Which you'd think would mean taking a step back and rebuilding! But, no. Instead, having been violently knocked out by the #5 fighter in the division just three months ago, Mackenzie Dern is now going to fight the #3 fighter in the division, because half the UFC's booking plans for Women's Strawweight revolve around a big flashing sign that says "MACKENZIE DERN TITLE FIGHT" and no one gets to go home until it happens.
Which is unfortunate for a whole slew of interns, because AMANDA LEMOS BY TKO is the pick. Dern can absolutely submit Lemos given a chance, but for one, Lemos isn't easy to take down and Dern's takedowns are the weakest part of her offensive grappling, and for two, we've seen Dern's attempts at evolving her striking and all of them involve spamming offense instead of improving her defense. It's what gave her trouble with Yan, it's what got her caught against Andrade, and with Lemos slinging leather at her, I think it's a matter of time.
HEAVYWEIGHT: Marcos Rogério de Lima (21-9-1, #15) vs Justin Tafa (7-3, NR)
You know, this is going to be just the third Heavyweight fight promoted by the UFC this year. We had Waldo Cortes-Acosta vs Andrei Arlovski, which was awful in both concept and conception, and we had Jamal Pogues vs Thomas Petersen, which the UFC had so little faith in they made it a curtain-jerking fight despite having Flyweights on the card, and now we have this. Marcos Rogério de Lima has been in the UFC for nearly a decade, he finally got his crack at the top ten last July against a Derrick Lewis the world was quietly worried needed to retire after getting repeatedly and completely destroyed, and Lewis promptly knocked de Lima down with a flying loving knee two seconds into the fight and pounded him out after another thirty. Back down the mountain you go, to the periphery of the rankings, where the UFC can try to have prospects climb your corpse. Justin "Bad Man" Tafa has had a profoundly weird time in the company. They signed him in 2019 as a 3-0 prospect because a) Australian/New Zealander market and b) Heavyweights, he was knocked out immediately, and he spent the next two years going 1-3 and dropping bouts to storied Heavyweight fighters like Carlos "Boi" Felipe and Jared "Got Knocked Out By Chase Sherman" Vanderaa. And then he knocked out Harry Hunsucker, one of the least successful fighters in company history, took a year and a half off, came back to drop Parker Porter in a minute, spent most of an entire year rematching Austen Lane after their first fight ended in a thirty-second eyepoke, and now Tafa is fighting for a top fifteen ranking! Based on his incredible victory over a guy whose UFC record is 0-1 (1) with both fights being Justin loving Tafa.
It's Heavyweight, man. What can you do? I'm going to say MARCOS ROGÉRIO DE LIMA BY SUBMISSION, but what's even the point of predicting? A butterfly could float past a spotlight and Tafa could drop Marcos in four seconds with a shovel hook or both men could clinch on the cage for fifteen minutes without landing a strike. The pickings are slim and the likelihoods are dry.
BANTAMWEIGHT: Rinya Nakamura (8-0) vs Carlos Vera (11-3)
For all that I complain about sacrificial lamb fights I am an enormous hypocrite, because every once in awhile a fighter I like will get one and I will watch it with folded hands like Gendo Ikari and feel nothing but contentment. Out of the entire four-class field of contestants the UFC slung contracts to during the pan-Asian scouting tournament that was 2022's Road to UFC Rinya Nakamura retained the most hype. Between his history as the son of one of the fathers of Shooto and his atomizing every one of his tournament bouts via first-round stoppages his potential as a serious prospect was immediately evident, and his utter domination of Fernie Garcia last Summer cemented the case. He was supposed to follow that up with a very interesting fight against Brady Hiestand, the runner-up from The Ultimate Fighter 29 (jesus christ), but Hiestand had to pull out, and in his stead, the UFC has tapped Carlos "Pequeno" Vera as a fill-in. Vera was one of Fury FC's better Bantamweight fighters before he got the call up to the big show's little-show variant, and he became the proud owner of a first-round loss on The Ultimate Fighter 31 (jesus christ) after being outgrappled by eventual tournament winner Brad Katona in a fight that was less notable for being competitive than for coach Conor McGregor, whose team was now 0-5, complaining afterward that the show needed to change its rules because he was losing too much. The UFC signed Vera later in the year anyway as an opponent for Daniel Marcos, but Marcos couldn't make it, meaning Vera has exactly ten minutes of fight time in the last seventeen months.
And those ten minutes were spent getting absolutely grappled to death, which is a pretty unfortunate thing when your opponent is a man who grapples people to death. RINYA NAKAMURA BY SUBMISSION.
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Zhang Mingyang (16-6) vs Brendson Ribeiro (15-5)
Not all of those Road to UFC fights were tournament bouts. Truthfully, I'm not sure you could do a particularly successful Light Heavyweight tournament through Road to UFC; the air around the higher weight classes starts to get very, very thin. Zhang Mingyang is an excellent case study. He's arguably the best 205 AND 265-pound fighter in the entirety of China, he's on a nine-fight first-round stoppage winning streak, he's got big ol' hands and he hasn't lost a fight in almost five years. On paper, it's a fantastic record. Except, gee, a whole lot of his opponents have pretty awful records, and boy, the guy he beat on Road to UFC sure did flame out of Bellator pretty spectacularly, and golly, the last two people Zhang lost to were Luan Aguirre Elias, a man with no fights, and Askar Mozharov, who you may recognize as the guy who got kicked out of the UFC for falsifying his entire fight record. Brendson Ribeiro, by contrast, is just your run of the mill Contender Series winner. He was a champion in Shooto Brasil, he's got a fairly well-rounded fighting style, you at least have to go back to 2018 to see the last time he got matched with a rookie who had no business fighting him save for the institutional practice of record-padding, and when he got knocked out, he at least did it against guys who didn't lie about winning Steven Seagal underground fights in the Far East where no one owns video cameras.
But mostly, even in that Road to UFC victory, Mingyang was catching almost every punch thrown at him with his face. His tape shows an active disdain for defense, and that only works until it doesn't. BRENDSON RIBEIRO BY TKO.
EARLY PRELIMS: HUDDLE AROUND THE WOODBURNING STOVE
WELTERWEIGHT: Josh Quinlan (6-1 (1)) vs Danny Barlow (7-0)
Man, Contender Series favoritism is a hell of a thing. Josh Quinlan got booked onto the contract sideshow in 2021 as a 5-0 prospect, knocked out Logan Urban in under a minute, then immediately had the fight scratched from the records after testing positive for steroids. The UFC signed him anyway and booked their fancy new knockout artist against a guy who almost solely lost by big-punching knockouts, and then the fight had to be postponed when Josh Quinlan, shockingly, failed another steroid test. They rebooked the fight, Quinlan effortlessly murdered his delicious tomato soup dinner, and then we didn't see him again until last April, where he fought last-minute replacement Trey Waters, and, uh, got completely handled. Waters battered Quinlan to a unanimous decision. And that was almost a year ago, and there hasn't been so much as a peep about booking Trey Waters since, but hey--we got Josh Quinlan again, baby! And he's fighting another Contender Series guy! And this time Quinlan is the late replacement! Aren't you excited by the knowledge that nothing will ever change? Danny "LeftHand2God" Barlow, who has my new least favorite nickname to type in the entire world, got his Contender Series contract last September after knocking out Raheam Forest (if you remembered Raheam Forest from two weeks ago as the guy who got choked out by Charles Radtke, please get yourself something nice for dinner) and was intended to fight the 0-2 Yusaku Kinoshita here, which would have been--try to be surprised, here--a Contender Series knockout artist making his debut against a guy who's gotten knocked out repeatedly in the UFC! But Kinoshita is hurt, so we're doing Contender Series knockout winners against one another instead.
Except we're not, because legally, Josh Quinlan never won his Contender Series bout. Also, we just watched Quinlan struggle with a longer, rangier fighter, and Barlow has an even larger 8" reach advantage and hits much harder, too. Barlow's less experienced and most of his competition is bottom of the barrel fare, but in all of Quinlan's appearances thus far he's been too in love with brawling to really worry about defending, and punches bouncing off his skull from three states away concerns me. DANNY BARLOW BY TKO.
WELTERWEIGHT: Val Woodburn (7-1) vs Oban Elliott (9-2)
Do you remember Val Woodburn? Let me remind you about Val Woodburn. Last year, ultra-hyped superprospect Bo Nickal needed an opponent, and this is what happened.
The UFC has 60-70 middleweights under contract. Most of them are comparably unsuccessful. The UFC did not pick any of them to fill in. They picked Valentine "THE ANIMAL" Woodburn, the 7-0, 5'8" champion of the prestigious COMBAT NIGHT PRO, one of the many, many regional organizations that helps young fighters puff up their records by feeding the rookie prospects of the world a steady diet of professional jobbers named Ramon Butts with 1-15 records. Just so we're clear, that's not me putting funny words together: Ramon Butts is real, and he's really 1-15, and he really lost to a 1-0 guy on Woodburn's last fight card. Woodburn himself is coming off a decision victory over Luis "Sergio Junior" Melo, a 42 year-old veteran with a 1-7 record in mixed martial arts over the last decade who hadn't competed in the sport in four years. Before that? The 17-11 Wesley Martins, who scored 16 of those victories over people with either 1 or 0 wins.
This was the problem with CM Punk and Mickey Gall, and it's only becoming a bigger problem as the Contender Series claims ownership of more and more roster space. The UFC wants to get fighters young, half to maximize the amount of time they have with them, half to get them for minimum wage before they have leverage. But when you bring in fighters at certain levels of inexperience--as the UFC openly advertised with Nickal--you run headlong into the UFC not being a developmental league. What do you do with those fighters? You feed them the worst-performing fighters on the roster--and when you don't have any available, you import 5'8" middleweights from the Contender Series.
OBAN ELLIOTT BY DECISION. We are all eating our own tails.
WOMEN'S FLYWEIGHT: Andrea Lee (13-8, #15) vs Miranda Maverick (12-5, NR)
This may be the end of the line for Andrea Lee. It's been a long, difficult run in the UFC for "KGB" thanks half to some horrible issues with domestic abuse from her husband and trainer that dominated her public identity early in her tenure, and half for judges who inexplicably hate her style. Lee's 5-6 UFC record looks fairly poor on paper, but in practice three of those losses were split decisions, two of them could have seen a coin flip either way and one of them was an out-and-out robbery, meaning but for marginally different judging, Lee is 8-3 and one of the most successful female fighters in company history. It doesn't help that one of those questionable split decisions was last year's loss to current #6 in the world Maycee Barber, who earned the ire of the mixed martial arts fanbase after taking one of, without hyperbole, the worst decisions in UFC history--over Miranda Maverick. Maverick has long been frozen at the periphery of Women's Flyweight, and while her loss to Maycee Barber and subsequent demotion was bullshit of the strictest order, her followup loss to Erin Blanchfield felt more like an inevitability, and getting shut out of the top ranks that badly put her in a precarious position. She's stuck around thanks to her continued disposal of the less successful women in the field, but last year's shellacking at the hands of Jasmine Jasudavicius hasn't helped her case as a contendership prospect.
I want to root for Andrea Lee here. She's doomed to be underrated in the annals of Women's Flyweight, and it's a shame, and I would like to see her succeed. But her style hasn't gotten any more likely to curry favor, and Maverick's also adept at the same gritty, cage-clinching grinding that Lee uses to space out her striking. MIRANDA MAVERICK BY DECISION and Lee's subsequent pink slip feels unfortunately plausible.
Prelims begin in an hour.
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Feb 17, 2024 23:30
