|
Which main event are you looking forward to the most this month? This poll is closed. |
|||
|---|---|---|---|
| You already know how this gag works |
|
2 | 9.09% |
| You're going to pick O'Malley vs Chito |
|
1 | 4.55% |
| Unless you're really invested in Amanda Ribas |
|
1 | 4.55% |
| Sean O'Malley vs Marlon Vera 2 |
|
0 | 0% |
| Corey Anderson vs Karl Moore |
|
3 | 13.64% |
| Wait |
|
3 | 13.64% |
| How did that get there |
|
3 | 13.64% |
| Oh no, not more Beastin' |
|
9 | 40.91% |
| Total: | 22 votes | ||
|
Do you miss Alexander Volkanovski, too? Remember the good times of February here. Welcome to March. The slow start of the year is now fully and completely over, we've got eight events this month including five UFCs, Bellator's return from the dead and ONE actually putting on MMA championship fights AND Francis Ngannou vs Anthony Joshua over in the world of boxing, so buckle the fuckle up. This month's thread title courtesy of 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  After two months of trying as hard as possible to get people hyped about a main event Dana White said would blow everyone's mind, the UFC finally, officially announced the main event of UFC 300, their biggest event ever. That fight is Alex Pereira vs Jamahal Hill. Hill openly admitted he found out about the fight the day before Dana announced it to the world, meaning the main event of the biggest and best event in UFC history came together as a third or fourth choice. And it's a fine fight! It's a logical fight to make! But after promising a knock-your-socks-off caliber of contest, a fine fight is kind of a weird letdown, and nothing quite summarizes the current state of the UFC and its weird, persistent promotional doldrums like allowing rumors to kick up on everything from cross-class superfights to brand new weight classes to superstars of the sport coming out of retirement without refuting any of them in an attempt to coast on hype they were incapable of creating on their own when, ultimately, they just put the Contender Series guy they like back in the cage for a regular-rear end title fight. It's still a great card! I'm still looking forward to it! But UFC 100 had multiple generational star champions on it, and UFC 200 had Cormier/Jones 2 turned Cormier/Anderson Silva, the rise of Amanda Nunes, and the return of Brock Lesnar, and UFC 300, while a great card, is still just a great card. It's the kind of card they put on a few times a year when they decide to really give a poo poo for one weekend. I'll be there, but boy, I wonder what happened. 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
CarlCX fucked around with this message at 20:28 on Mar 12, 2024 |
#
¿
Mar 1, 2024 19:00
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 9, 2024 21:33 |
|
|
WHAT HAPPENED IN FEBRUARY We kicked off with UFC Fight Night: Dolidze vs Imavov on February 3. It was a mixed card on paper, and it was a mixed card in practice. On one hand, the prelims gave you fantastic fights like Charles Johnson's gutsy decision over Azat Maksum, Molly McCann destroying Diana Belbiţă, Luana Carolina's last-minute knockout of Julija Stoliarenko and Themba Gorimbo knocking Pete Rodriguez dead in thirty seconds; on the other, you had Lee Jeong-Yeong beating a visibly confused Blake Bilder, Marquel Mederos beating Landon Quiñones in a forgettable fight, and Jamal Pogues winning an extremely Heavyweight kind of decision against Thomas Petersen. Up on your main card Charles Radtke scored the night's biggest upset by knocking out Gilbert Urbina, Aliaskhab Khizriev went to a No Contest with Makhmud Muradov after almost poking his eye out ten seconds into the fight, Natália Silva outworked Viviane Araújo to a decision, Randy Brown knocked out Muslim Salikhov, and Renato Moicano took a close but fun decision over Drew Dober before cutting a bizarre promo about competing with his 62 year-old father regarding having kids and how he wants to be a cop and kill people and also everyone needs to go to church. And then Nassourdine Imavov beat Roman Dolidze despite losing a point for fouling him and almost getting disqualified after nearly coming to blows with Dolidze's cornerman Chris Curtis in mid-fight. February 10 brought us UFC Fight Night: Hermansson vs Pyfer, better known as the card where a bunch of prospects ate poo poo. Daniel Marcos went to a No Contest after repeatedly punting Aoriqileng in the junk, Hyder Amil punched out Fernie Garcia but Bogdan Guskov flatlined Zac Pauga, Max Griffin managed a tight split decision over Jeremiah Wells, Marcin Prachnio blew out Devin Clark, Loma Lookboonmee outworked Bruna Brasil, Bolaji Oki got a real, real narrow decision over Timothy Cuamba, and Carlos Prates knocked out Trevin Giles. On your main card, Rodolfo Vieira somewhat predictably choked out Armen Petrosyan, Michael Johnson took a wide decision over Darrius Flowers, Gregory Rodrigues overcame a scare to TKO Brad Tavares, Ihor Potieria took out Robert Bryczek, and Dan Ige absolutely crushed Andre Fili with one of the best knockouts of his career. But the night belonged to the main event, scheduled as a coming-out party for Contender Series favorite Joe Pyfer. The UFC had been trying to get Pyfer into the top ten for an entire year, and having finally found their mark in an aging Jack Hermansson, they were once again upset when Hermansson pulled his spoiler act, outfought a visibly tiring Pyfer, and rode off into the sunset with a decision over yet another prospect. ONE was up first on February 17 with ONE Fight Night 19: Haggerty vs Lobo, which is yet another in the long list of ONE cards I feel underqualified to discuss because it was mostly striking arts. This is the ongoing existential crisis of keeping track of ONE. Is it notable that Hiroyuki Tetsuka tapped out Abraão Amorim, or that Lito Adiwang beat Danial Williams? One hadn't booked Williams in an MMA fight in a year and a half, is this going to change now? Does any of ONE's booking matter when their ladders and divisions don't really exist? Will they forget about their MMA fighters again after ONE: Qatar next month? I don't know. But Martyna Kierczyńska knocked out Wondergirl, which probably made Chatri unhappy, and Saemapetch Fairtex butchered Mohamed Younes Rabah, which probably made Chastri happy, and in the main event Jonathan Haggerty and Felipe Lobo had a fantastic back and forth that ended with a Haggerty knockout, which probably made everyone happy. But that happiness got real confused later that weekend, thanks to UFC 298: Volkanovski vs Topuria. In order, on the early prelims: Miranda Maverick probably drummed Andrea Lee out of the UFC by decision, Oban Elliott outgrappled the poo poo out of Val Woodburn, and Danny Barlow won his game of conkers by knocking out Josh Quinlan in the third round. On the regular-flavor prelims: Zhang Mingyang knocked out Brendson Ribeiro in a furious minute forty, Rinya Nakamura easily outworked Carlos Vera, Marcos Rogério de Lima notched a leg kick TKO over Junior Tafa, who filled in for brother Justin Tafa on a day's notice, and Amanda Lemos punched the poo poo out of an outgunned but incredibly tough Mackenzie Dern, who hung on to lose a decision rather than a TKO. On your main card, Anthony Hernandez choked out Roman Kopylov, Merab Dvalishvili dropped a first round but completely drowned Henry Cejudo to win a decision anyway, Ian Machado Garry took a tentative decision over Geoff Neal, and Robert Whittaker engaged in a war with Paulo Costa and took home a gritty but clear decision. But if you're reading this, you probably already know what's coming next. The main event saw the violent passing of the torch, as Alexander Volkanovski's four-year, 1,526-day reign over the Featherweight division finally came to an end when, despite putting up a great first round, he was knocked out cold by Ilia Topuria in the second. Topuria is the first man not named Max Holloway or Alexander Volkanovski to hold the (real) belt in eight goddamn years. The month ended with a triple-header on February 24, and Rizin struck first with Rizin Landmark 8. It was one of their longest and most action-packed Landmark cards yet, thanks in part to a better balance of prospects and names. Your Daiki Yahiro and Takumi Teradas were able to pick up prelim wins right alongside your Daichi Abes and Hiroaki Suzukis, and boy, that's a much better business plan. The main card was what most people came for, though, and it didn't disappoint. Saori Oshima tapped out Claire Lopez, Yusuke Yachi cranked Rikuto Shirakawa's face off, and Masakazu Imanari, who just turned 48, picked up the twenty-ninth submission victory of his career. In your main event, Luiz Gustavo continued his winning streak by defeating Yoshinori Horie by decision. Arguably the most interesting part of the weekend, for once, didn't bnelong to the UFC. The first step in the new PFL-Bellator merger era was PFL vs Bellator, a champs-vs-champs card to determine who had the better talent all along. Except one of them wasn't a real weight division, and two of PFL's champs had to pull out, and PFL couldn't get anyone into the cage at Featherweight so Patrício Pitbull had a camp for nothing. Not a great start! Down on the prelims Malik Basahel beat Vinicius Pereira in an amateur clash, Abdullah Al-Qahtani knocked out Edukondala Rao, Claressa Shields just barely squeaked a split decision past Kelsey DeSantis, Biaggio Ali Walsh beat Emmanuel Palacio in his professional debut, and Aaron Pico avenged his 2019 loss by knocking out Henry Corrales, which is a bit unfortunate for Corrales, who took the fight on 48 hours' notice. The main card opened wth two special attraction bouts. One was a fight between the two second-best Lightweights in either company, which saw Bellator's A.J. McKee go through Clay Collard in a pretty effortless 1:10, and the other was a Bellator vs Bellator showdown between Yoel Romero and Thiago Santos, which, like any fight featuring the two over the last several years, was astonishing in its ability to showcase absolutely nothing happening. With Bellator already up by one, the championship matches unfolded somewhat unsurprisingly:
And we closed out February with the UFC's big return to Mexico, UFC Fight Night: Moreno vs Royval 2. It was packed full of Latin-American talent and, for the most part, it was actually pretty fun. On your prelims: Muhammad Naimov beat Erik Silva when he busted his leg walking the perimeter of the cage, Felipe dos Santos won a close split decision over Victor Altamirano, Ronaldo Rodriguez overcame an early struggle to choke out Denys Bondar, Farès Ziam notched a split decision over Claudio Puelles, Edgar Chairez had his fourth or fifth rescheduling of his bout with Daniel Lacerda and finally, uncontroversially choked him out, Jesús Santos Aguilar got a split over Mateus Mendonça, and Raoni Barcelos clubbed and subbed Cristian Quiñonez. On your comparatively short main card: Manuel Torres submitted Chris Duncan, Yazmin Jauregui boxed up Sam "Sampage" Hughes to a decision, Daniel Zellhuber took a decision over Francisco Prado, and Brian Ortega overcame a twisted ankle and getting dropped repeatedly to choke out Yair Rodríguez in the third round. Your main event was an extremely close Brandon Battle between Brandons Moreno and Royval, but this time, Royval came out on the right side of a split decision. WHAT'S COMING IN MARCH The slow times are over, baby. We've got seven events this month, including five separate UFCs. But ONE takes the stage first, with ONE 166: Qatar on March 1. After basically an entire year of ignoring their MMA divisions, this is After that's over, March 2 brings us UFC Fight Night: Rozenstruik vs Gaziev. This card, as of now, only has ten goddamn fights on it, which would honestly be a pleasant change of pace because there's so much UFC. It's a real, real weird offering--on one hand you've got some genuinely good prospect fights, like Aiemann Zahabi vs Javid Basharat, Joel Álvarez vs Ľudovít Klein, Matt Schnell vs Steve Erceg and Alex Perez vs Muhammad Mokaev, but on the other you've got pointless poo poo like Eryk Anders vs Jamie Pickett, Umar Nurmagomedov facing Bekzat Almakhan, a man who apparently exists, and Vitor Petrino, who just knocked out Modestas Bukauskas, vs Tyson Pedro, the last guy who lost to Modestas Bukauskas. And your main event is top heavyweight Jairzinho Rozenstruik fighting Shamil Gaziev, who made his UFC debut in December. I dunno, man. I just don't know. But next week it's pay-per-view time, so who cares. UFC 299: O'Malley vs Vera 2 comes to us March 9, and it's pretty loving stacked. Your early prelims are Joanne Wood's (probable) retirement match against Maryna Moroz, C.J. Vergara vs Assu Almabayev, 6'7" Taekwondo prospect Robelis Despaigne against sacrificial lamb Josh Parisian, and Michel Pereira against Michał Oleksiejczuk. Your mid-prelims give you Pedro Munhoz vs Kyler Phillips, Mateusz Gamrot vs Rafael dos Anjos, Katlyn Cerminara (you may remember her as Chookagian) vs Maycee Barber, and the previously-attempted Curtis Blaydes vs Jailton Almeida. Your main card is pretty much a card of main events: Petr Yan vs Song Yadong, Gilbert Burns vs Jack Della Maddalena, Kevin Holland vs a debuting Michael "Venom" Page, Dustin Poirier vs Benoît Saint Denis, and in your main event, Sean O'Malley attempts to avenge his career loss by defending the Bantamweight championship against Marlon "Chito" Vera, because rankings do not matter. And then we're right back to the Apex with UFC Fight Night: Tuivasa vs Tybura on March 16. This isn't a bad card, exactly, but it is, uh, an anticlimax after the pay-per-view. You've got some cool fights like Jafel Filho vs Ode' Osbourne, Natan Levy vs Mike Davis and Cory McKenna vs Jacqueline Amorim, but a lot of it is also more of a 'voting present' kind of deal. Gerald Meerschaert vs Bryan Barberena, Pannie Kianzad vs Macy Chiasson, Christian Rodriguez vs Isaac Dulgarian and Josh Culibao vs Danny Silva are extremely There fights. Ovince Saint Preux vs Kennedy Nzechukwu could be very There or very funny, in fairness. But your main event of Tai Tuivasa vs Marcin Tybura will probably be a one-rounder, one way or another, and that'll at least be gratifying. March 22 brings us the first new, solely-Bellator branded event in their new existence as an occupied territory of the Professional Fighters League, Bellator 302: Anderson vs Moore. This begins the PFL experiment of taking Bellator around the world to build their global profile, and the first stop is Ireland, a place Bellator has definitely not already been several thousand times. It's consequently also a local-appeal card, including Tofiq Musayev vs Alfie Davis, Ciarán Clarke vs Darius Mafi, Jeremy Kennedy vs James Gallagher and Fabian Edwards vs Aaron Jeffery. It's like you never left, Bellator. Your co-main event was to be a Women's Featherweight title eliminator between Leah McCourt and Sinead Kavanaugh, but McCourt's out injured and a replacement has yet to be announced. Your main event, filling the void Vadim Nemkov left behind, is a Light Heavyweight championship match between Corey Anderson and Karl Moore. And the next day, March 23, we have Rizin Landmark 9. This is another in the larger set of Landmark events Rizin's been putting on lately, with 11 MMA bouts and 4 kickboxing bouts. But Yuya's kickboxing, so goddammit, you should watch it. On your MMA side of things, highlights include Yusaku Nakamura vs Arman Ashimov, the 0-3 sumo Heavyweight Takakenshin trying to finally get a victory over Cody Jerabek, who is, uh, a Middleweight, Yuta Kubo against Ryogo Takahashi, Erson Yamamoto vs Yuya Shibata, Igor Tanabe vs Kiichi "Strasser" Kunimoto, and Koji Takeda vs Kyohei Hagiwara. Your top three bouts see RENA returning after almost a year off to face Shim Yu-ri, Naoki Inoue vs Shoko Sato, and Rizin Lightweight champion Roberto Satoshi de Souza vs legend Keita Nakamura, which is awesome except for the part where it is a non-title fight, for some goddamn reason. That evening we have UFC Fight Night: Ribas vs Namajunas, another Apex show. This one's very much a mid-prospect showcase, including some attempts at rehabilitation. Jarno Errens! He's back! He's facing Steven Nguyen. Davey Grant! You remember him, right? He's got Cody Gibson. Ricardo Ramos fights Julian Erosa, Kurt Holobaugh will complete the UFC's attempts to bury Trey Ogden, Billy Quarantillo tries to get back on track against Gabriel Miranda, and despite all sense, Mohammed Usman will face Mick Parkin. Edmen Shahbazyan was supposed to have a neat kickboxing match with Duško Todorović, but he's hurt, so instead it's Edmen and A.J. Dobson. Payton Talbott! You remember him! He's fighting Cameron Saaiman. And your main event is a fight with Amanda Ribas and Rose Namajunas, both of whom are, uh, ruled out of title contendership. I don't know, man! I don't know. We come to the end of the month with the rare second consecutive show fronted by women's MMA, UFC Fight Night: Blanchfield vs Fiorot, on March 30. And of course, like so many cases, it wasn't supposed to be main evented by women, Sean Brady vs Vicente Luque simply fell through, and hey, it's Jersey, so gently caress 'em, I guess. But you get Andre Petroski vs Jacob Malkoun, Viktoriia Duakova vs Melissa Gatto, Julio Arce vs Herbert Burns and Nate Landwehr vs Pat Sabatini! Who could be mad! Your main card is a little better, with bangers between Bill Algeo and Kyle Nelson, Vicente Luque and Joaquin Buckley and Virna Jandiroba vs Loopy Godinez, but you, uh, also have to watch Chris Weidman fight Bruno Silva. I know. I don't want it either. Your main event is, of course, Erin Blanchfield vs Manon Fiorot, a sure-thing #1 contender match for Women's Flyweight that you could easily have done a year and a half ago, but why not waste some goddamn time, I guess.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 1, 2024 19:01
|
|
|
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. Interim Heavyweight Champion   Tom Aspinall - 14-3, 0 DefensesThe UFC's Heavyweight division got itself into a weird spot in 2007. Randy Couture was the rightful, reigning, defending champion, but he and the UFC had a dispute that stretched out more than a year. The UFC couldn't strip him--it would have made it easier for him to get out of his contract--so they made an interim title. By the time Randy came back they had already made big plans for him and Brock Lesnar, but the interim title had gotten wrapped up in The Ultimate Fighter 8 (jesus christ) and it, too, had to be defended, meaning there were two championships being defended simultaneously: The Undisputed Championship, which was the 'real' belt despite being held by a guy trying to leave the company and contended for by someone with only two victories in the sport, and the Interim Championship, which was being fought over by the actual, legitimate top contenders. At UFC 295 on November 11th, 2023, Tom Aspinall, the rightful #4 contender, fought Sergei Pavlovich, the rightful #2 contender, for a new interim championship. And he won. On two weeks' notice! Aspinall's been one of the most promising heavyweight prospects in the world for years, his only loss in the UFC came from his knee tearing itself apart fifteen seconds into a fight, and he went toe-to-toe with one of the scariest punchers in the history of the sport and knocked him flat in just barely over a minute. He is, indisputably, the real deal. And now he gets to be the interim champion of a Heavyweight division in which the real champion, Jon Jones, is going to be out injured well into next year and, the UFC has made clear, will be returning to defend his title against Stipe Miocic, who by that time will have been on the shelf for 3+ years and will be going on 42. So congratulations, Tom. You're the real Heavyweight champion. I hope you get some credit for it. Light-Heavyweight Champion, 205 lbs   Alex Pereira - 9-2, 0 DefensesConflicting things can be simultaneously true in this sport. It is true that Alex Pereira was brought into the UFC as a 3-1 rookie based on his history as a kickboxer rather than his accomplishments in the sport. It is true that he was fast-tracked to a title shot against the primary focus of that history, megastar Israel Adesanya, after beating just three fighters, none of whom had any hope of testing his grappling. It is also true that he rendered that discourse ultimately irrelevant by not just beating but stopping Adesanya in his title shot anyway, in the process becoming the fastest Middleweight to go from debut to champion since Anderson Silva. It was more or less an open secret that he wasn't going to stay there: Being bigger than most Heavyweights in the UFC, the weight cut to 185 was always a short-term thing. Luckily for the UFC, he got knocked out by Adesanya and gave him the title right back on his way up to 205. Once again, he got fast-tracked, this time by happenstance. A split decision victory over Jan Błachowicz made Pereira a top five contender, and when Jamahal Hill was forced to vacate his title thanks to an ankle injury--and the previous champion, Jiří Procházka, was back from his own title vacation and injury--Pereira was slotted right back into championship place. They met at UFC 295 on November 11th, and after two back-and-forth rounds, Pereira punished a Jiří who dared to grapple by elbowing his skull until he briefly stopped moving. The commentary and audience thought it was an early stoppage, but Jiří Procházka didn't, so gently caress 'em. It is true that Alex Pereira has fought seven UFC fights without having to fight an actual grappler, and that was an intentional choice by matchmaking. It is true that getting the chance to win championships in two weight classes within just two years and seven fights in the UFC is not a thing that happens to most fighters. But it is unavoidably true that Alex Pereira is a two-division champion and no one can take it away from him. After none of the UFC's other ideas worked out, they announced Alex Pereira will attempt his first title defense against former champion Jamahal Hill in the main event of UFC 300. Middleweight Champion, 185 lbs   Dricus du Plessis - 21-2, 0 DefensesMiddleweight's loving wild, man. Generally when a belt changes hands repeatedly in a short period of time you can blame injuries and strippings and title vacations, but recent history has simply been a case study in how goddamn weird things can get at 185 pounds. As of this writing (February 1, 2024) we've had five separate Middleweight champions in less than fifteen months. Divisional king Israel Adesanya dropped the belt to his nemesis Alex Pereira, Adesanya dropped Pereira himself in an immediate rematch, and in one of 2023's bigger upsets, Adesanya lost his belt to human exclusion zone Sean Strickland. But that shot, initially, didn't belong to him: It belonged to Dricus du Plessis. Dricus joined the UFC in 2020 as one of the international scene's best prospects--a two-division champion in his native South Africa's Extreme Fighting Championship, a Welterweight champion in Poland's Konfrontacja Sztuk Walki, and a finishing machine who'd never gone to a decision in his life. The spotlight of the UFC gave him two new reputations: For one, as an exceptionally awkward-looking fighter who could appear shaky and exhausted and still easily knock anyone out, and for two, as a guy with real uncomfortable feelings about his homeland. Shortly after his debut Dricus du Plessis began making comments about becoming the first "real" African champion in the UFC, citing the way fighters like Kamaru Usman, Israel Adesanya and Francis Ngannou had left the country, and, boy, there's just no way to get around the topic that isn't gross as hell. But du Plessis knocked #1 contender Robert Whittaker dead, so it didn't matter. He was in pole position. And then he lost it, because he wanted more than a month to prepare for a world championship fight and the UFC decided that just wouldn't fly. A fully-trained du Plessis stepped into the cage against his replacement and now-champion Sean Strickland on January 20 at UFC 297, and after a close fight and a split decision, du Plessis brought the belt back to South Africa just like he promised. The UFC would really like to make good on their initial du Plessis/Adesanya plans, but we'll see if they can work it out. Welterweight Champion, 170 lbs   Leon Edwards - 22-3 (1), 2 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 found himself dealing with the UFC's bullshit insistence that his first defense came not against the top contender, but rather, the UFC's favorite bigot, Colby Covington. Edwards dominated him and sent him away 4-1, finally ending the bullshit. At which point he, immediately, brought the bullshit back by talking down a fight with #1 contender Belal Muhammad, after naming him repeatedly as the man he should be fighting instead of Colby. 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   Ilia Topuria - 15-0, 0 DefensesThe king is dead, long live the king. Everyone paying attention knew Ilia Topuria was a special sort of prospect all the way back in 2020, but it wasn't until he destroyed Ryan Hall that the rest of the world noticed. A man who is equal parts German, Georgian and Spanish, Topuria established himself immediately as a force to be reckoned with: An undefeated wrecking machine with a strong wrestling game, a thoroughly solid grappling game, and the combination of terrifying knockout power and the sheer confidence to use it that can only come from having never lost a fight. Which was tested, thoroughly, when Topuria went up to Lightweight on short notice, fought a man in Jai Herbert who was half a foot taller than him, nearly got knocked out twice, and proceeded to recover, regroup, and fold Herbert in half with a punch in the second round. Suddenly, his prospect status was proven. Not only was he good, he was capable of dealing with adversity. Within the year he'd become the first (non-exhibition) fighter to ever beat Bryce Mitchell after ragdolling him and choking him out, and by the end of 2023 he'd dominated Josh Emmett, proving both his place at the top of the Featherweight contendership ladder and his ability to go five full rounds without falling over. His ascension couldn't have come at a better time. Alexander Volkanovski, one of the greatest champions in UFC history, was finally beginning to show signs of wear--somewhat unfairly, as those signs came from an incredibly inadvisable last-minute fill-in 155-pound fight against Islam Makhachev--but getting knocked out is getting knocked out, and when you've only been beaten once in a decade, getting knocked out in one round makes people ask difficult questions about your age, longevity, and durability. When Volk and Ilia met at UFC 298 on February 17, almost every question people had was, in fact, answered. Can Volk outwork Topuria? Absolutely; he won the first round handily and was dancing around him. Can Ilia keep himself in check? Completely; knowing just how good Volk was, Ilia was uncharacteristically patient and measured and didn't get himself in any real trouble in the first round while he figured out what he wanted to do. Can Alexander Volkanovski stand up to Ilia Topuria's punching power? Buddy: No one can. Three and a half minutes into the second round Topuria successfully trapped Volkanovski against the cage with his footwork, and one combination later, Volkanovski was on the floor. Ilia Topuria's destiny has come. He's the Featherweight champion. And he has, of course, already sworn to try to become a double champion within his next two fights. 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. Just in case his status as a marketing favorite had not been made abundantly clear, the UFC announced he will have his first title defense not in a rematch with Sterling, or a meeting with top contender Merab Dvalishvili, or even a bout with the streaking Cory Sandhagen, but--of course--a rematch with Marlon "Chito" Vera, the #6 contender on a one-fight win streak who knocked O'Malley out back in 2020. Neat. They'll fight at UFC 299 on March 9th. Flyweight Champion, 125 lbs  Alexandre Pantoja - 27-5, 1 DefenseSometimes, 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 came against Brandon "Raw Dawg" Royval as the co-main event to UFC 296 on December 16th, and it was a wild affair with a couple scary moments, but Pantoja emerged victorious and notched the first successful defense of the title in three years. His next contender is, in all likelihood, the winner of the Brandon Moreno/Amir Albazi fight this February--or it would have been, until Albazi got injured. The UFC promoted a Moreno/Royval 2 showdown in hopes of scoring a Moreno rematch, but Royval won, meaning they now either have to do an instant Pantoja/Royval rematch or figure out who on Earth else deserves a shot. Women's Bantamweight, 135 lbs  Raquel Pennington - 16-8, 0 DefensesThe throne is once again full. Amanda Nunes left a gaping void in the world of women's mixed martial arts when she retired last Summer, and it took the UFC seven months to do something about it. The Women's Featherweight title? That's just gone, man. The patient could not be resuscitated. There's still life in Women's Bantamweight, though, and with Nunes gone and Julianna Peña injured, there was only one sensible match to make. Raquel Pennington should have gotten her title shot more than a year ago. "Rocky" is one of the UFC's longest-tenured women, at this point--her debut came more than a decade ago as a runner-up on The Ultimate Fighter 18 (jesus christ)--and the millstone weighing down her championship aspirations was the fact that more than five years ago she had a title fight, and it saw Amanda Nunes just beat her to a pulp. Despite being on the division's longest winning streak at the start of 2023, this loss was commonly cited as reason enough to deny Pennington the shot, and given that she's a generally affable, no-nonsense fighter with a grinding wrestling style, she is, categorically, the UFC's least favorite kind of person, which meant getting passed up over and over and having to settle for serving as a backup challenger for Irene Aldana--whom Pennington had already beaten. But with the top prospects out and Aldana having just gotten beaten even worse by Nunes than Raquel had, there was nowhere left for the company to hide. Mayra Bueno Silva had established herself as one of the division's most dangerous fighters after tearing apart Lina Länsberg's knee and nearly popping Holly Holm's skull out of her head with a ninja choke, and there were quite a few hoping she'd stop Pennington in her tracks when the two met at UFC 297 on January 20, but they were gratifyingly incorrect. Pennington outwrestled Silva, escaped her submission attempts, outstruck her 265 to 96, and finally, on a night where the UFC loudly celebrated bigotry, sexism and homophobia, took the belt home to her wife. Raquel's the first post-Nunes champion, and godspeed to her. The UFC is almost certainly waiting to see if either Peña gets healthy or the newly-signed Kayla Harrison beats Holly Holm to figure out what's next for Raquel. 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 a China vs China championship showdown against Yan Xiaonan at UFC 300.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 1, 2024 19:01
|
|
|
NOTABLE CHAMPIONS ACROSS THE WORLD 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. And now, rather than defending either, he's going to fight de Ridder for his 205-pound belt in March. Jesus wept. 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. And now he's going to do it again! On March 1, de Ridder will defend his belt against Anatoly Malykhin. Again. 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. After the passing of his younger sister Victoria, Christian took the whole of the year to, understandably, grieve. ONE planned his comeback for February of 2024, but, y'know, that clearly did not happen. 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. They'll try again in March. 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. We're trying Kai/Le 2, again, in March. 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. He promptly skipped away from MMA completely and faced Jonathan Haggerty for ONE's Featherweight Kickboxing Championship on November 3rd, where he was immediately destroyed. Haggerty wants an MMA fight next. 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 inadvertent 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 this is ONE and nothing matters, he called out 23-pound champ Mighty Mouse, unsuccessfully had a grappling match with Mikey Musumeci, and will now rematch Pacio in March. 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. He'll make his comeback against Keita Nakamura at Rizin Landmark 9, but it is, of course, a non-title fight. Rizin Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs   Chihiro Suzuki - 12-3 (1), 0 DefensesChihiro Suzuki has had a very fortunate year. Suzuki rose to Rizin's notice not through MMA, but after winning Japan's KNOCK OUT Super Lightweight Kickboxing championship. He made his Rizin debut six months later--and got knocked out in twenty seconds. He spent the next two and a half years simultaneously rounding out his MMA game and annually defending his kickboxing gold, and by 2023, he was one of Rizin's top Featherweight contenders, more than ready for his shot at Kleber Koike Erbst's Rizin championship. And--he got armbarred in three minutes. However, hilariously enough, Erbst lost his belt on the scale after missing weight, meaning the title was vacant and the fight, by Rizin rules, was a No Contest, so Suzuki didn't even technically lose. He then proceeded to get the biggest break of his career. At Bellator x Rizin 2 on July 30th, 2023, despite having just lost a five-round fight to Sergio Pettis a month prior, Patrício Pitbull was thrown onto the card against Suzuki on four days' notice--and Suzuki not only beat him, he became the first person to ever knock out Bellator's GOAT. Rizin immediately booked Suzuki in against new champion Vugar Keramov for their debut in Keramov's home country of Azerbaijan, and Keramov looked poised and powerful and was in the process of ragdolling Suzuki like he does everyone else--and Suzuki caught him with an upkick on the jaw and punched him the rest of the way out from his goddamn back. Chihiro Suzuki, you are Rizin's new star. Hold onto it as long as you can and pray they don't book a Kleber rematch. Rizin Bantamweight Champion, 135 lbs  Kai Asakura - 21-4, 0 DefensesRizin's Bantamweight title is snakebitten as hell, and, somehow, so is Kai Asakura. Kyoji Horiguchi was the first man to win it back in 2018, and a year later he gave it up, having been too injured to compete--in part thanks to fighting while injured and being defeated by, in fact, Kai Asakura, but only in a non-title fight. Asakura was a lock and a favorite to win the vacant belt that December--so he got immediately knocked out by Manel Kape. Manel Kape left Rizin for the UFC, leaving the belt once again vacant, and Kai won it after knocking out Hiromasa Ougikubo, meaning Kai was not only the champion, but he also got his rematch with Kyoji Horiguchi--only this time, Kai was defending his belt, and could finally show Horiguchi it wasn't a fluke! And then Horiguchi knocked him out in three minutes, and then the belt went into torpor for two whole years, after which Horiguchi gave it up to go be a Flyweight instead. Luckily, Rizin knew this was coming, so they booked a Bantamweight Grand Prix to crown a successor, with the explicit intention of crowning Kai Asakura. And he made it to the finals! Where he got revenge-stomped by Hiromasa Ougikubo, who then went on to lose badly to former Bellator champion Juan Archuleta, who became Rizin's first American titleholder. Archuleta was oddly at home in the pomp and circumstance of JMMA, and he promised big things for his future, and then he came into his New Year's Eve match sick, missed weight by six pounds, lost his belt on the scale, and thanks to Rizin's rules, was left with a fight where not only was he ineligible to win the title, he was ineligible to win the fight. And as sick as he was, he probably shouldn't have fought anyway! But he did, and Asakura dropped him in two rounds. Thus, for the second time, Kai Asakura is the best Bantamweight in Japan. I beg him not to walk under any dangling pianos. Rizin Flyweight Champion, 125 lbs  Kyoji Horiguchi - 32-5 (1), 0 DefensesWell, this was a long time coming. Before Rizin even existed, Kyoji Horiguchi was the consensus #2 Flyweight fighter on the planet. He'd won Shooto's 125-pound title, he'd come to America half to face the best in the world and half because Japan's MMA scene was in a real, real bad place at the time, and by mid-2015, he was 15-1 and ready to fight for a world championship. Unfortunately, said championship was held by Demetrious "Mighty Mouse" Johnson, the best Flyweight of all time. Johnson dealt Kyoji his second-ever loss and first-ever stoppage, and it stopped Horiguchi's dream of being the best, but it also opened him up to becoming a star. A year later he was out of the UFC, back home in Japan, and, immediately, one of Rizin's top attractions. But Rizin didn't have a 125-pound division--so he settled for just winning is 135-pound belt instead. When Rizin began cross-promoting with Bellator, he went and took their belt, too, just for good measure. But his strength of schedule and his own injuries caught up with him: He ultimately vacated both belts without ever recording a title defense. By the time he came back in 2021, things had changed. He'd been knocked out for the first time in Kai Asakura back in 2019, but he was fighting hurt and on short notice, so that was excused. When Sergio Pettis knocked him out in his 2021 return fight, it was a warning; when Patchy Mix dominated him in his first match in the Bellator Grand Prix of 2022, it was a sign. Horiguchi needed to be back at 125. Bellator opened a Flyweight division more or less just for him, and at Bellator x Rizin 2 in the summer of 2023, Horiguchi faced Rizin star Makoto "Shinryu" Takahashi to crown the company's inaugural champion--and the fight ended in a No Contest after Horiguchi poked Shinryu in the eye twenty-five seconds into the first round. And then Bellator got sold and stopped operating as an independent entity. Whoops! Rizin decided to just make the goddamn belt themselves, and on New Year's Eve of 2023, Horiguchi and Takahashi had their rematch, and this time, Horiguchi choked him out. Eight years after his first attempt, Kyoji Horiguchi has a Flyweight world championship. Now, let's see Rizin give him some competition. Rizin Women's Super Atomweight Championship, 108 lbs  Seika Izawa - 12-0, 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. Seika scored one more win on New Year's Eve, choking out Miyuu Yamamoto in her retirement bout, and while it was an honor, it does sort of emphasize the problem with Seika's position. She's unquestionably the best Atomweight in the world, but the last real top fighter she faced was more than a year ago. Will Rizin bring her real competition, or are they trying to simply build a star? And what IS real competition at Atomweight? She'll be taking on Si Yoon Park at DEEP JEWELS 44 on March 24, but, of course, that is not Rizin, so its title isn't on the line.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 1, 2024 19:01
|
|
|
THE BELLATOR CHAMPIONSHIP GRAVEYARD Bellator Heavyweight Champion, 265 lbs  Ryan Bader - 31-8 (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. He also, unfortunately, got his poo poo completely wrecked by Renan Ferreira in thirty seconds, making him the one and only Bellator fighter to lose at PFL vs Bellator. Bellator Light-Heavyweight Champion, 205 lbs   VACANT - The falling curtain on the empty stageLet the records show Light-Heavyweight was the first to fall, and in hindsight, who else could it have ever possibly been. After recording his fourth successful title defense against Yoel Romero in June of 2023, reigning champion Vadim Nemkov talked about the possibility of departing the division and moving up to Heavyweight to ruin Ryan Bader's life all over again, but didn't commit to the change, whether because he was waiting for a potential challenger or he knew at that point that Bellator's days were numbered anyway. Bellator got bought out by the Professional Fighters League at the end of the year and the PFL's first act was to vow a PFL Champions vs Bellator Champions card, and it was through this announcement that Nemkov's move was finally made official. He's left the division, he's moving up to 265, and he's facing 2021 PFL Champion Bruno Cappelozza on February 24. This means, at last, the 205-pound belt is vacant, but it won't be for long. The first nu-Bellator event is currently scheduled for March 22 in Belfast, and Corey Anderson, the top contender, will be facing Karl Moore to fill the void. Bellator Middleweight Champion, 185 lbs  Johnny Eblen - 15-0, 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. Eblen had a scare against Impa Kasanganay but ultimately won his PFL vs Bellator bout. Bellator Welterweight Champion, 170 lbs   Jason Jackson - 18-4, 0 DefensesGetting in right before the buzzer is one of the best times to get in. Jason Jackson does not win any points for having "The rear end-Kicking Machine" for a nickname, but his successes speak for themselves. Jackson actually had two run-ins with the UFC early in his career--since he got his start training with the short-lived Blackzilians team, he was part of The Ultimate Fighter 21 (jesus christ): American Top Team vs Blackzilians, where he was choked out in the second round. He didn't get invited to the UFC, but two years later he was on the third episode of the Contender Series, which saw him spend the first round mostly cage-clinching before breaking his ankle out of nowhere twenty seconds into the second round. He was in Bellator a couple years later losing a decision to Ed Ruth, and that was about the point the world decided to ignore him. As it turns out: A mistake. His path through Bellator was slow--to the point that he's only had one fight a year for the last three years--but by this year he was on a six-fight winning streak and a sensible opponent for Yaroslav Amosov. Very few people gave him a chance, but having not knocked anyone out since mid-2018, absolutely no one expected him to knock Amosov, the best Welterweight outside of the UFC, the gently caress out in the third round. Jason Jackson is, officially, the Bellator Welterweight Champion. He defended Bellator's honor by kicking Ray Cooper III's leg in half at PFL vs Bellator. Bellator Lightweight Champion, 155 lbs   Usman Nurmagomedov - 17-0 (1), 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. Until Usman failed his drug test. Bellator says it was for medication rather than PEDs and thus he won't be stripped, but the fight's a No Contest and they need a rematch, which seems awfully selective. Bellator Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs  Patrício Pitbull - 35-7, 1 DefensePatrício Pitbull had a weird goddamn 2023. 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  Patchy Mix - 19-1, 0 DefensesIt took a long goddamn time, but Patchy Mix is finally getting the credit he deserves. Fans had already singled out Patchy as a uniquely talented fighter by 2019, when he signed to Bellator as the 10-0 King of the Cage Bantamweight Champion who'd submitted almost everyone he faced, but it wasn't really until he choked out Yuki Motoya at Bellator's first co-promotion with Rizin that people really paid attention. Which was unfortunate, because his next fight was a shot at Juan Archuleta for the vacant Bellator Bantamweight Championship and Archuleta schooled him on their feet, ending both Mix's title hopes and his undefeated streak. It didn't help matters when, two fights later, he blew his weight cut for a big Dublin match against James Gallagher. But Mix kept winning, and when he entered the Bantamweight Grand Prix and promptly stormed the bracket by beating Kyoji Horiguchi and choking out Magomed Magomedov, suddenly, people paid attention again. When he fought interim champion Raufeon Stots and knocked him out cold with a knee in less than a minute and a half, people began wondering if maybe he was the real champion and Sergio Pettis, who'd been out for a year and a half and returned to a vanity fight with Patrício Pitbull, wasn't the fake. The two met at Bellator 301 on November 17th, and Mix left no doubt: He outwrestled Pettis and choked him out in the second round. Patchy Mix is, finally, the undisputed Bellator Bantamweight Champion. It remains to be seen if his division continues to exist. Bellator Women's Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs  Cris Cyborg - 27-2 (1), 5 DefensesYup. It's 2024 and Cris Cyborg is still out there. For those who don't know, Cris Cyborg was the canonical women's featherweight fighter, a Muay Thai wrecking machine who didn't just beat but brutalized essentially all of her opponents, including ex-Star Wars Gina Carano, and her popularity as a destroyer of humans is the only real reason women's featherweight even exists as a division, to the point that the UFC added it when she was the only actual fighter at the weight class they employed. She was 20-1 (1) when she passed the torch to Amanda Nunes, who slew her in just fifty-one seconds. She took one more fight in the UFC to complete her contract, but left for Bellator almost immediately afterward with uncharacteristic cooperation from the UFC itself--after all, they'd gotten what they wanted out of her. Her first Bellator fight was a one-sided destruction of their featherweight champion, and she's defended it three times since. At this point in Cyborg's career the problem isn't her or her fighting or her age, but simply that there's no one in Bellator for her to fight--after just five fights she's already hitting rematches, having just recorded her second one-sided bludgeoning of a very game but outmatched Arlene Blencowe. Cyborg decided her next fight would be a boxing match, and on September 25 she faced Simone da Silva, a jobber to the stars coming off twelve straight losses who had been knocked out just one month prior. Undeterred, she had her second boxing match on the undercard of December 10th’s Crawford/Avanesyan card, taking a unanimous decision over Gabrielle “Gabanator” Holloway, who is 6-6 in MMA and 0-3 in boxing. 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.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 1, 2024 19:01
|
|
|
Digital Jedi posted:And I beleive this makes Malykhin the first MMA fighter in a major org to hold 3 titles at the same time. Continuing this conversation from the previous thread, I've already seen a half-dozen MMA reporters breathlessly towing the marketing line about THE SPORT'S FIRST THREE-DIVISION CHAMPION and it's already driving me insane. Like, ONE's 265-pound Heavyweight division is basically a joke with at most five people in it, but at least it exists. It's a terrible division, but it exists. 225 pounds isn't real! It's not even real for ONE! There have been like four 225-pound fights in the company in the last six years and all of them were for the goddamn belt and all of them involved people who fought at other weight classes. Which is only slightly worse than ONE's 205 division, whose last three title fights were a) the 185-pound champion, b) a guy who hadn't made 205 in four years, and c) a heavyweight, who had already beaten the champion a year and a half ago. It's just such a fake loving marketing thing and I hate seeing people parrot it. I am hating. I am a hater.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 1, 2024 19:09
|
|
|
Diaz time is never wasted. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4055495 Rozenstruik/Gaziev fights don't start for 6 1/2 hours but that's gonna be morning here so I'm just putting the GDT up now to be bumped when the event starts.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 2, 2024 12:37
|
|
|
Today, on the funny side of antitrust lawsuit news: https://twitter.com/MMAanalytics/status/1764796060357288029 The UFC's witness list for how not a monopoly they are got tossed out. Unfortunately, also today, on the less funny side of antitrust lawsuit news: https://twitter.com/TrentReinsmith/status/1764767320348541238 It looks like someone leaned on someone in management because all of Bloodyelbow's excellent reporting on trade secrets and income reporting from the lawsuit has been suddenly deleted.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 5, 2024 01:18
|
|
|
https://twitter.com/antontabuena/status/1764895006173847936 Yup. Nate sold BE to a content mill and everything they ever did that mattered is gone. gently caress you, Kid Nate.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 5, 2024 07:57
|
|
|
He's been posting about how he was broke and had to sell the site to make payroll for the last time and did the best he could. but then he also retweeted Glenn Greenwald signalboosting Jack Posobiec, so
|
|
#
¿
Mar 5, 2024 20:38
|
|
|
Josuke Higashikata posted:Looking forward to the AI articles "Remember Cheick Kongo? He looks incredible at 54." and the thumbnail is Rodney Dangerfield Now, let's not be harsh, the new owner of Bloody Elbow has promised their journalistic standards will remain exactly the same and I'm sure he wouldn't just lie to peop  Tom Clancy is Dead posted:It’s poo poo that BE died that way but it’s been in a slow decline for a long time. I used to be a BE regular, but the community mostly died and the attempt to resuscitate it was to drop the moderation standards that made it somewhere I wanted to spend my time to begin with. The engagement first model devolved into a bunch of hateful assholes brigading anything remotely political and never commenting on anything that had to do with the sport otherwise. In presently having the weird experience of both running an MMA community and trying (well, 'trying' might be a generous term) to be a public MMA journalist/writer/whatever the gently caress, while I have absolutely no sympathy for anyone who kowtows to the conservative engagement grift in an attempt to build a fanbase, I objectively understand why they would: It's where the entire sport is right now. MMA has always been hostile to leftist viewpoints, but once upon a time there was enough balance in the sport that the audience could more easily support varied perspectives. That balance is extremely loving dead. We're not even at the 'keep politics out of sports' point anymore, the UFC openly advertises the right wing on its programming, relies on bigoted culture war bullshit as a central point of their event marketing, and outright uses their product to try to push people onto an alt-right video platform propped up by Peter Thiel. The vast, vast majority of the audience is being inundated with that kind of poo poo in an unfortunately successful attempt to make it the new normal. But you can't just go outside of it anymore, because there barely is an MMA outside of the UFC. The American b-leagues are as close to dead as they've ever been, PFL is a seasonal-only organization that still can't get their poo poo together, ONE practically stopped promoting MMA altogether last year and are now scrambling to bring it back in the hopes that they can keep the lights on, and after nine years of existence Rizin only just last month announced a stable international streaming solution, which, uh, still hasn't even launched. And that's without getting into every single internet journalism vertical closing down, pivoting to AI, or, somehow, both. It's real, real bad out there right now, and MMA is scraping the bottom of the barrel, and the UFC going out of its way to make clear the only acceptable MMA coverage comes in the form of fawning sycophancy only hammers the point home.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 6, 2024 07:33
|
|
|
CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 93: MAKE IT UP AS WE GO ALONG SATURDAY, MARCH 9 FROM THE KASEYA CENTER IN MIAMI, FLORIDA EARLY PRELIMS 3 PM PST / 6 PM EST | PRELIMS 5 PM / 8 PM | MAIN CARD 7 PM / 10 PM I'm a bit torn, here. By the standards of the UFC's cards on average, this is an absolute, unequivocal banger. There are fourteen fights scheduled for this card, half of them should be all-action showcases, several will crown new title contenders, several will reshuffle prospects, and at the end of it all there's a world championship grudge match. It's a fantastic card and it should be fun as hell. At the same time? I've spent a lot of time complaining about the UFC's attempts to get rid of the traditional rankings structure of the sport in favor of marketing, and this feels like a pretty complete victory of marketing over substance. Is Sean O'Malley defending his Bantamweight title against rightful top contender Merab Dvalishvili or, indeed, any of the top contenders? No: He's fighting Marlon Vera, the #5 guy, who just lost to #3 and, debatably, #12 last year. Pedro Munhoz, the #12 guy who should be in Marlon's place? He's fighting an unranked man on the prelims. Dustin Poirier has been at the absolute top of the Lightweight division for the last six years, and this is the first time in almost four that he isn't either fighting for a title, fighting a champion, or fighting in a title eliminator. Is he facing one of the top ten prospects waiting to break through? No: He's got Benoît Saint Denis, who has one top fifteen win in his career, and it was over the #14 guy. Which is funny, because the #6 ranked title prospect Mateusz Gamrot IS on this card! Against Rafael dos Anjos, who hasn't won a Lightweight fight since 2020. On the prelims. Michael "Venom" Page is getting a shot right at the rankings; Gilbert Burns is fighting a guy outside the top ten. Michel Pereira, who hasn't lost in four years, is on the early prelims; Kyler Phillips, who fights once a year, is on ESPN. Joanne Wood, one of the UFC's longest-tenured women, is having her retirement fight in the curtain jerking slot; two fights later, the Heavyweight debut of Robelis "The Big Boy" Despaigne. It doesn't mean it's not a fun card. It doesn't even mean it's not a great card. But the changing nature of what is and isn't a great card is starting to feel like we're stripmining the foundation to rebuild the walls. But Sean O'Malley might get kicked in the face, so, y'know, let's loving go.  all over the place. MAIN EVENT: CONTROL YOUR NARRATIVE  BANTAMWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP: Sean O'Malley (17-1, Champion) vs Marlon Vera (23-8-1, #5)The thing is, none of this was necessary. After years of marketing bullshit, the last 36 months of his career have proven that Sean O'Malley is inarguably one of the best Bantamweights on the planet. His accuracy and power were never in doubt; he was intercepting people with murderous counters all the way back in 2017 Contender Series debut. He was clearly very good, and there were signs that he might be very, very good, and all the UFC had to do was give him some real challenges to bring him up the right way. And then Marlon "Chito" Vera knocked him out in 2020 and they gave the gently caress up on that. Real challenges? No thank you. Broken prospect Thomas Almeida on a three-fight losing streak? Yes. Kris Moutinho, regional fighter and almost-immediate UFC washout? Yes. Raulian Paiva, career Flyweight? Yes. And now that he's on a winning streak, let's give him the softest possible landing into the top fifteen with Pedro Munhoz, who's 1 for his last 5 and clearly on his way out? YE- Oh. He poked Munhoz in the eye? It's a No Contest? gently caress it. Give him Petr Yan. What's that? O'Malley only barely scraped a split decision and it was widely agreed to be one of the worst decisions of the year? Who gives a gently caress? Give him the title shot. It's almost boring to talk about it because it comes up every time Sean O'Malley does, but it comes up because that's O'Malley's entire career. There is a world in which Sean O'Malley's long-range counterpunching, murderous accuracy and marketably lovely personality were enough to get him gradually, holistically into the title picture, but we don't live in that world, we live in the one where the UFC put its thumb on the scale so hard that the replay of Sean O'Malley knocking out Aljamain Sterling was brought to you by a UFC-promoted energy drink sponsorship commercial featuring Sean O'Malley. You can't discuss Sean O'Malley without discussing how he became Sean O'Malley. The marketing myopia around him is so strong that it was essentially predetermined that, no matter what happened with the rest of the division, if Sean O'Malley won the title his first defense was Marlon Vera. Funnily enough, a year ago that would've made a whole lot of sense. "Chito" is one of the UFC's best recent stories. He slid into the UFC as part of The Ultimate Fighter Latin America all the way back in 2014 (jesus christ), he was already a fun, dangerous fighter with heavy hands and somehow eternally unexpected headkicks, he had the classically sympathetic hard-luck tale of a fighter trying to provide for his daughter's medical needs, and the UFC was able to market him through all three. He was an up-and-coming star from Ecuador, he was a knockout striker with tricky grappling, and he had an inspirational story that let Dana White volunteer on television to pay for his daughter's $50,000 treatment himself. Except he got ruled out of the TUF tournament after an infection. And he went 1-2 in his first two years and nearly got cut. And the UFC never actually paid for his daughter. He had to start a GoFundMe. You know. Mixed martial arts. But Vera improved, gradually, over the years, and by 2019 he was on the verge of a ranking--but Song Yadong edged him out of a very close decision, and having seen him fail, the time was ripe to feed Chito to their big marketing prospect. Despite having more than twice as many fights as Sean O'Malley, despite being a more well-rounded fighter than Sean O'Malley, despite having fought much stiffer competition than Sean O'Malley, Marlon Vera went into their fight a +250 underdog and Sean O'Malley went in as a -300 favorite. And then, in a fight where the commentators talked nonstop about how great Sean O'Malley was, how inspiring his rise up the ranks had been, and how his "two-year layoff"--which, they were careful not to mention, was a suspension for repeatedly testing positive for ostarine--had only made him better, O'Malley jumped and dodged and swung jabs and kicks until dodging after eating a kick made something in his leg give out. Marlon jumped on the opportunity and elbowed him in the head until his eyes rolled back in his skull. (The commentators proceeded to make clear that the stoppage was early and questionable.) That fight was almost four years ago, and Vera has been a fixture in the rankings ever since. He crafted one of the most absurd-sounding fighting styles in the sport, a patience and output bordering on inactivity that saw him spending minutes at a time setting up single strikes--and somehow, that would work. He would spend an entire round getting jabbed and then drop opponents with vicious, perfectly timed shots. He was outstruck 273 to 167 by Rob Font, numerically beaten and often doubled up on or more in every single round, and it didn't matter, because he dropped Font on his rear end in almost every one of those rounds, be it with punches, knees, or a straight-up professional-wrestling superkick. By the end of 2022 Vera had just knocked Dominick Cruz the gently caress out and he looked all to hell like a title contender. But then 2023 happened. While Sean O'Malley sat and patiently waited for his title shot, Marlon Vera fought the actual top contender in the division, Cory Sandhagen. He lost. Badly. Inexplicably the judges rendered a split decision, but Sandhagen blew him out of the water. He had no answer for Sandhagen's jabs or uppercuts, his patient approach only got him picked apart, and anytime Vera tried to go on offense, Sandhagen wrestled him out of it. Chito fought Pedro Munhoz a few months later--the man Sean O'Malley valorously poked in the eye--and he won, technically, but at best, it was a very, very close fight for their different positions in the division, and at worst, well, 82% of media scorecards gave the fight to Munhoz. Marlon has a style. That style got him incredibly close to the top. But his last two opponents seem to have figured out that style, and they've made him pay for his reliance on it. All that momentum Chito had one year back as one of the hottest new contenders in the UFC has dissipated. But Aljamain Sterling can't fight for the title because he doesn't deserve a rematch, Merab Dvalishvili can't fight for the title because he's a stinky ol' wrestler who hasn't earned it, and Cory Sandhagen can't fight for the title because he's got more important fights to prepare for, like the #13-ranked Umar Nurmagomedov. It doesn't matter. None of it matters. It was always going to be Chito. A central part of O'Malley's idiot persona is the insistence that he should be undefeated, and beating Chito not only legitimizes his claim, it keeps him away from people the UFC would rather not have to market. Chito being the contender he used to be is entirely irrelevant to the equation. It had to be him. Nothing else was acceptable. Intellectually, I think Sean O'Malley will win this fight. Talk of their first fight being a fluke is idiotic, but O'Malley having a better, more comprehensive striking assault up until he backed himself into an injury isn't. In their subsequent fights he's demonstrated an improved control of his range, he's tightened his counterpunches even further, and he's proven himself capable of landing and escaping in the clinch, where Vera traditionally uses knees and elbows to tie his attacks together. Emotionally, I want Marlon Vera to win this fight. It's a better story from a more likable fighter. It would be a wonderful achievement for a man who was never supposed to get this far. His ability to hypnotize fighters into walking into front kicks and left hooks is exceptional, and while he may seem diminished by recent experience, the last time Sean O'Malley had to fight someone who could actually match him in outside striking work and range was the first time he fought Marlon Vera back in 2020. Do I side with my heart, which constantly lies to me about reality, urges me to root for underdogs from the unlikely to the hopeless, and is, assuredly, setting me up for disappointment? Or do I side with my brain, which wants me to pick the guy with the Tekashi69 tattoo he got from Tekashi69? gently caress you for even considering it, brain. I'm going to cram so many lovely video games into you. MARLON VERA BY TKO. CO-MAIN EVENT: THE GLASS ELEVATOR LIGHTWEIGHT: Dustin Poirier (29-8, #3) vs Benoît Saint Denis (13-1 (1), #12)I don't hate this fight! I really don't! I just feel like I got the Monkey's Paw version of what I asked for. Last year, in evaluating Rafael Fiziev vs Mateusz Gamrot, I wrote this: CarlCX posted:(...)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. The grip Poirier has held at the top of the rankings has been ironclad, but a great deal of its strength came from the lack of fresh blood challenging it. Charles Oliveira beat Islam; Charles Oliveira got a rematch with Islam. Islam beat Alexander Volkanovski; when Oliveira couldn't make the rematch, Islam beat Alexander Volkanovski again. Dustin Poirier fought Justin Gaethje in 2018 and lost a rematch against him last year. Gaethje, rather than any of the Lightweights in the UFC, is fighting Max Holloway at UFC 300. Michael Chandler hasn't fought in a year and a half because he's waiting on Conor. And yet, by painful, bloody effort, we have finally gotten some actual movement in the rankings. Arman Tsarukyan crushed Beneil Dariush and made it into the top five. Mateusz Gamrot ran through multiple people and strengthened his grasp on #6. Jalin Turner and Dan Hooker made themselves relevant again. Numbers moved. Fighters moved! But the very top of the ranks stayed barred and guarded. Until the UFC announced that new blood was getting a shot at the top ranks in a fight that could, legitimately, crown the first brand new title contender the UFC has seen in years! Is it Tsarukyan? Is it Gamrot? No! It's Benoît Saint Denis. And I get it! I really do! This fight exists because Benoît, and this fight, are both marketable as poo poo. He's an all-action fighter who's finished every fight he's won. He's 5-1 in the UFC, and his only loss was an incredibly ill-advised 170-pound debut where he got the absolute poo poo kicked out of him by a man who once knocked out Sean Strickland, and now he's fighting a guy who used to compete at Featherweight. Saint Denis is an absolute monster of violence. He's got brutal punching power and, as we discovered in his utter demolition of Matt Frevola last November, equally dangerous kicks. He's got wrestling enough in his back pocket to take fights to the ground and destroy people with elbows. He is constantly, endlessly hunting for finishes, and the dogged confidence with which he pursues them allows him to fight through defenses that have stopped less violent fighters. He's good. He might even be great! He's also the #12 fighter in the division despite having never beaten anyone ranked higher than #14 and rather than risking him against Gamrot's wrestling or Fiziev's counterstriking or Beneil Dariush's endless spoiling of marketing prospects, the UFC knows this is their best possible chance at getting him a path to the top of the ranks and, while they're at it, an incredibly violent fight. It's cynical and it's exhausting and I also can't hate it, because here's the thing: I like fighting. I enjoy good fights. Would I personally rather see the division treated with credibility and structure? Absolutely. Am I going to pass up getting to see Dustin Poirier and Benoît Saint Denis erase the front fourths of their fistbones in their attempts to bludgeon each other to death? Christ, no. On paper, I like Poirier here. He's a more versatile striker, he's much better at slipping and defending punches, his perennially underrated grappling is more than a match for Benoît's Evil French Wrestling, and he's bent punches around guards and knocked out far cleaner, far more experienced fighters. Despite all of this, Poirier is a betting underdog, and in practice, I get it. It's impossible to look at Dustin's career and not feel the nagging awareness of age. His activity has dwindled to the point of only making the walk once a year, the Chandler fight saw him nearly broken by pressure and the Gaethje fight saw him just plain starched for the first time in seven years. Looking at those performances side by side with Benoît Saint Denis violently chucking fighters into trash cans, and thinking about Poirier crossing 35 last month yet nearing 40 fights' worth of wear and tear, it's hard not to feel pessimistic. It's hard not to see a changing of the guard. I'd love to see Poirier jabbing Saint Denis up; I'd love to see Poirier weather the storm and turn Saint Denis' lights off in the third round. But time is undefeated, and I fear we are about to watch it pass. I would deeply, deeply love to be wrong about this one, but: BENOÎT SAINT DENIS BY SUBMISSION. MAIN CARD: THE KID'S GOING PLACES WELTERWEIGHT: Kevin Holland (25-10 (1), #13) vs Michael Page (21-2, NR)Somehow, I knew we'd wind up having to deal with Michael "Venom" Page in the UFC. It's been inevitable for years. The problem with discussing MVP is there are, in reality, two MVPs. One Michael Page is a striking phenom; an absolute sensation of martial arts technique who kills people with poo poo no one else in the sport is doing. He dropped a man with a tornado kick! He's only lost twice in twelve years! He busted Cyborg Santos' skull with his knee and rolled a pokeball at him while he was writhing on the mat in agony! He's the coolest! But there's also the cynical reality of Michael Page the Marketing Campaign. Page is one of the sport's most prolific crushers of cans, and half his knockouts come from competition that had no business in the cage with him. After finally losing to Douglas Lima, Page, now a mere 14-1, fought the 3-1 Richard Kiely. At 16-1, Page was fighting a 9-3 UFC washout more than half a foot shorter than him. Page's final Bellator fight was against Goiti Yamauchi, a genuinely talented, successful fighter! At Lightweight. Yamauchi was a goddamn Lightweight--and, when he was feeling spicy, a Featherweight--until 2022. MVP's made a career out of doing some of the coolest striking poo poo in the sport against some of the most outmatched people in the sport. Is he overrated? Unquestionably. "Big" John McCarthy once said his record was better than Anderson Silva's, because the whole point of having MVP under contract is to market the poo poo out of him. Is he a bad fighter? Speaking as a longtime MVP hater: Not at all. He may have robbed Douglas Lima in their 2021 rematch, but the first time around Lima killed him and two and a half years later MVP fought him to a close (if incorrect) decision. He hung in there with Logan Storley for five rounds. He made a historically tough dude like David Rickels quit on his feet. The frustration with MVP has never been that he's bad, but rather that, for how good he is, he continually fights people who aren't credible tests. Kevin Holland is a credible test. Holland was the UFC's golden prospect in the pandemic era as a wild Middleweight striker with deeply unfortunate takedown defense, and today, in the pretending-there-isn't-a-pandemic era, he's matured into a better-rounded Welterweight who can go toe to toe with some of the best fighters in the division but just can't quite crack the top ten. He can, however, knock anyone in the division out if he lands cleanly, he proved to Michael Chiesa that his chokes are deceptively good, and he was competitive with Jack Della Maddalena just this past September, which no other striker in the UFC can say. And it's that last bit that makes him the UFC's perfect man for this particular job. If you're hiring an almost-37-year-old MVP, you don't have time to gently caress around and see if he can beat the Niko Prices of the world. MVP needs a ranked test, and unfortunately, the vast majority of the Welterweight top fifteen are really good at wrestling, and you don't want MVP defending takedowns, you want him fighting someone who'll whip spinning kicks at him. This is, in all likelihood, staying on the feet the whole time it lasts. Although I'll cheer my loving rear end off if Holland just drives double-legs for fifteen minutes. Either way, if you're looking for technical analysis for this fight, you're in the wrong place. I am not Jack Slack, I do not care about MVP's sideways stance switches or Holland's irritating tendency to throw hooks where jabs would be better, and I especially am not interested in hoping for anything other than KEVIN HOLLAND BY TKO after which he scans Page like a Digimon. WELTERWEIGHT: Gilbert Burns (22-6, #4) vs Jack Della Maddalena (16-2, #11)This fight being below Holland/MVP on the card is hilarious. Gilbert Burns! Christ, Gilbert Burns. Weight cutting is one of the worst things about mixed martial arts, and rarely is that more visible than in the case of Gilbert Burns, the solid but unspectacular Lightweight who moved up to Welterweight and turned into a monster: A championship-level grappler with nuclear bombs for hands who retired Jorge Masvidal, nearly knocked out Kamaru Usman, and almost ended Khamzat Chimaev's undefeated streak. He's been a perpetual top contender for years, to the point that the UFC had to throw him into ridiculous circumstances like the Khamzat fight, or the Masvidal fight, or the insane decision to make a #1 contenders' match between him and Belal Muhammad with just three weeks of notice, all to keep either of them from getting a title shot while the company put its effort into failing to convince people Colby Covington was worth a poo poo. Jack Della Maddalena is a marketing darling too, but he's earned it the hard way. The entire hells-damned institution of Dana White's Contender Series was invented to find people like Maddalena--easily-marketable, fan-friendly strikers who are not only allergic to having boring fights, but solid enough in their pugilistic efforts to be legitimate contenders. He hasn't lost a fight since 2016, he's knocked out four of his six UFC opponents, his boxing is some of the absolute cleanest in the entire sport, and by last Summer he was already being looked at as a serious title threat. And then he fought the man, the myth, the legend: Bassil "The Habibi" Hafez. Hafez took the Maddalena fight on short notice and drat near upset the apple cart, wrestling Maddalena to the ground repeatedly and forcing Maddalena to settle for a shockingly competitive split decision. He rebounded with a much more striking-centric fight against Kevin Holland two months later in September, but that, too, went to decision. Those two bouts have quelled Maddalena's hype considerably, and Burns is both his shortcut and his toughest test. They're not risking him against a Neil Magny or Sean Brady: Either Maddalena can stop someone's takedowns, in which case he wins and gets rocketed all the way to the top five, or he can't, in which case we know he never had a shot at the title in the first place. Everything I said about Dustin Poirier goes for Gilbert Burns: He's turning 38 in a few months, he's been in a bunch of wars, he's got the wear and tear of a twelve-year career under his belt. He hits harder than Jack, but he doesn't hit faster or more accurately, and where Jack works in strategically-placed combinations and smartly-laid traps, Gilbert lunges into take-your-head-off overhands. The striking is a liability. But I don't think Della's grappling has improved enough to deal with Burns. I do think JDM will have a title shot in his future; I don't think it's coming this way. GILBERT BURNS BY SUBMISSION. BANTAMWEIGHT: Petr Yan (16-5, #4) vs Song Yadong (21-7-1 (1), #7) Petr Yan is going through a difficult time. Back in 2020 Yan was a 14-1 wrecking machine whose only loss had come against the fantastic if irritatingly redundant Magomed Magomedov, he'd just savaged the greatest Featherweight of all time in José Aldo to claim the Bantamweight title Henry Cejudo had left behind in his failed retirement power play, and his combination of painful chip-away-your-will-to-live boxing and clinch grappling had most of the sport's following prognosticating a dominant title reign. And then he illegally kneed Aljamain Sterling and became the first UFC fighter to lose a belt by disqualification. And then he got outgrappled in the rematch, lost a split decision, and went to the back of the line. And then he beat Sean O'Malley only to drop a deeply controversial (read as: incorrect) decision. And then he got absolutely loving drowned by Merab Dvalishvili. On their own, none of those things are really that bad! Aljo was a champion, O'Malley is a champion, and Merab should be a champion. But when you go through all of them back to back, you by necessity have to drop down the rankings and attempt to rebuild. Song Yadong is not interested in helping anyone build poo poo. Since entering the UFC back in 2017 Song's made it clear he wants to be the best in the world, and his punching power, volume, wrestling and simply being tough as poo poo have almost gotten him there repeatedly. He went six fights without a loss in his first run at the top, but the eternally hot-and-cold Kyler Phillips halted his momentum. He came back with a three-fight winning streak that culminated in the uppercut that knocked Marlon Moraes all the way down to the Professional Fighters League, but he couldn't avert a stoppage loss against Cory Sandhagen. To be clear, he didn't get finished--he was actually very keen on continuing--but the doctor correctly pointed out that his eyebrow was hanging off of his face and, generally-speaking, that's bad. 2023 marked his third run, and thus far, it's going extremely well. He dominated the irrepressible Ricky Simón and became just the second man to ever knock him out, he avenged Frankie Edgar's soul by completely outfighting Chris Gutierrez, and now, finally, he has his first chance to beat a former UFC champion. It's a testament to Petr Yan's abilities that in the middle of his worst career slump, at 1 for his last 5, he's still a betting favorite. I really, really want to pick Song Yadong here. I've been rooting for him for years, I would love to see him finally break into title contention, and I think the mirror-match nature of this fight could work out to his benefit--both men are pocket punchers, both men are clinch-range grapplers, both men like to work from the chin. But I cannot help the feeling that Petr Yan is still slightly better at everything Song does. PETR YAN BY DECISION. PRELIMS: A REALLY GOOD FIGHT NIGHT CARD HEAVYWEIGHT: Curtis Blaydes (17-4 (1), #5) vs Jailton Almeida (20-2, #7) They've been trying to make this fight happen for half a year, and by god, they got there. Curtis Blaydes is entering the fourth galactic cycle of his career. He's been one of the division's best wrecking machines for drat near a decade, at this point, and the beatings he put on folks like Aleksei Oleinik and Junior dos Santos are still damned impressive, and his can-opener elbows turning Alistair Overeem's face into a Jackson Pollock painting in seconds remains one of the scariest Heavyweight stoppages in MMA history. But however strong his wrestling, and however underrated his striking, he has repeatedly failed to get over the hump of the true monsters of the division. Francis Ngannou turned his lights out in 2018, Derrick Lewis knocked him cold in 2021, and last year, his latest winning streak ended when Sergei Pavlovich punched him out in a single round. So once again, Blaydes has to be tested against one of the UFC's marketing prospects, and once again, they're trying to make it Jailton Almeida. Almeida has been one of the company's more persistently surprising attempts at elevation to contendership. It's not because he's bad: If anything, he's proven their instincts right, as he's beaten every single person put in front of him, generally with absurd ease. After six UFC bouts, Almeida's total combined strikes landed vs strikes absorbed is 319 to 55, and more than half of those were just Derrick Lewis. That's a ridiculous stat! But it comes from Almeida being an absolute, consummate grappler. He does not want to stand, he does not want to bang, he wants to drag you to the canvas, refuse to let you move, and try his best to choke you out. The UFC has put an unprecedented level of matchmaking focus behind him, and he's not a big, funny, charismatic guy, or a controversially racist shitlord, or a fight-of-the-night entertainment machine. He's just a grappler. He's so much a grappler that as a Brazilian he fought an American in São Paulo and the crowd actually booed him for being insufficiently active. But that American was Derrick Lewis, and no one wants to root against Derrick Lewis. It was supposed to be Blaydes, and this time, in front of the classiest crowd Florida can offer, it will be. When it was first announced the UFC was targeting Blaydes/Almeida in early 2023 I thought it was bad news for Curtis, but after watching Almeida fight Lewis and Jairzinho Rozenstruik, to be honest, I've shaken away from the bandwagon a bit. He's very good, but his wrestling is more physical than it is clean, and against a wrestler like Blaydes that's a real, real weakness. It'd be one thing if Almeida had the standup or power to back up his gameplan, but his striking in the UFC has seemed profoundly uncomfortable. If he can ankle pick Blaydes and force him to fight from the bottom he's got a great chance, but if he can't, and he gets tired failing to get him there, CURTIS BLAYDES BY TKO is likely. WOMEN'S FLYWEIGHT: Katlyn Cerminara (18-5, #4) vs Maycee Barber (13-2, #6) If you are a longtime viewer wondering if you've somehow missed the crowning of a new top five contender, don't worry: Katlyn Cerminara is your personal favorite Katlyn "Blonde Fighter" Chookagian, the unstoppable force of entropy herself, she just adopted her husband's surname. Cerminara's endless wealth of implacable but questionably effective facepunching almost got her cut by the UFC in 2022, because even if you're one of the five best fighters in the world at your weight class with more than twice as many wins as losses, if you always go to decisions, who the gently caress needs you. Sure, Katlyn's an essentially permanent top contender, and sure, Katlyn can beat almost everyone on the planet, but goddammit, we have prospects to boost. Like Maycee Barber, who is only now, after five straight years of marketing, turning into the contender the UFC wanted her to be. Maycee's furious clinch work and occasionally flailing punches didn't do much to endear her to the fans or a winning record at first, and her occasionally generous decisions earned her a great deal of ire, but that all got wiped away last June when she met the legitimately very, very good Amanda Ribas and just beat the goddamn stuffing out of her. Ribas is one of the most persistent spoilers at Women's Flyweight, and a number of fighters have had to go the distance with her--including, uh, Katlyn Cerminara--but Barber finally put the skills she's been honing for years together, drowned Ribas in pressure, and ultimately battered her to a second-round TKO. It was, easily, the best Maycee's ever looked, and the proof that regardless of the path that led her there, she's matured into an extremely legitimate contender. She hits hard, she hits voluminously, and she is, finally, ready to take the throne the UFC has prepared for her. So anyway, KATLYN CERMINARA BY DECISION. What, you think I've forgotten the last eight years of my life? Nah. Blonde Fighter, motherfucker. LIGHTWEIGHT: Mateusz Gamrot (23-2 (1), #6) vs Rafael dos Anjos (32-15, #11)Boy, this really, really needed to be a five-round fight night header. In 2022 the UFC held an uncharacteristically structural main event between Gamrot and Arman Tsarukyan, at the time the #11 and #12 fighters at Lightweight, and it was roundly agreed that a rematch one day seemed inevitable, and that rematch being for the championship was entirely plausible. Gamrot won in a real close call, and now, two years later, Gamrot's #6 and Tsarukyan's #4 and both are making their case as rightful contenders. Gamrot has succeeded largely through three things: An irrepressible wrestling game, an exceptional gas tank, and dumb loving luck. He could easily have lost decisions against Tsarukyan and Jalin Turner but the great judging coinflips went his way, and he was struggling against Rafael Fiziev in their main event clash last September only for Fiziev's knee to abruptly give out midway through the second round. At this point, what Gamrot needs most to establish himself is a clean victory over a known quantity, and there may not be a better-known quantity in the UFC than Rafael dos loving Anjos. RDA is six months away from celebrating twenty straight years as a professional fighter, and for thirteen of those years he's been a perpetual fixture in the rankings at both Lightweight and Welterweight, and that's just an aggressively silly sentence. Rafael's career in this sport is so preposterously lengthy that it includes Johil de Oliveira, who was the best Lightweight in the world all the way back in the mid-90s before weight classes even existed, and guys like Gamrot, Fiziev and Kevin Lee, who just started fighting in the mid-2010s. It's an insane spread. And, unfortunately, it means RDA is also closing in on 40 this year. He's finally slowing down, his well-rounded skillset is no longer the unusual wonder it used to be, and his name exists now as a feather for the caps of prospects rather than a title contender to be feared. Which is funny, because after Gamrot's recent troubles, if this were a five-round fight, I might favor dos Anjos. Gamrot gets cracked a lot, he throws five takedown attempts for every one he lands, and he has trouble maintaining position once he gets it, meaning he expends a ton of energy to inflict very little damage, which is a bad thing against someone like RDA who has solid wrestling and grappling himself, and oh, god dammit, I just talked myself into making a mistake. RAFAEL DOS ANJOS BY DECISION. I know Gamrot's probably just going to clinch and drag him for fifteen minutes and this pick will feel aggressively silly, but I must be true to my whims. BANTAMWEIGHT: Pedro Munhoz (20-8 (2), #12) vs Kyler Phillips (11-2, NR) Poor, poor Pedro. Pedro Munhoz has been through some real bullshit over the last few years. On paper, Pedro's 2-4 (1) since 2020, which is why he's all the way down at the periphery of the rankings and overlooked by the world. In reality? Pedro Munhoz got boned out of a split decision against Frankie Edgar back in 2020, he almost knocked out Dominick Cruz in 2021, he went toe to toe with Sean O'Malley in 2022 and never got justice for almost having his eye gouged out, and he at best was robbed by and at worst was completely competitive with Marlon Vera in 2023. He easily could and arguably should have beaten the man who is now fighting for the title. But his bread-and-butter technique just doesn't do it for the judges, so instead he is down here, opening the ESPN portion of our card as a way to get Kyler Phillips back in the top fifteen. Kyler, to his credit, deserves the shot. He's an entirely legitimate Bantamweight contender, he already holds victories over fighters as highly-ranked as Song Yadong, and his exclusion from the contendership conversation is entirely predicated on bad luck. He was supposed to get Raphael Assunção's retirement bout twice, but both fights got scratched thanks to injuries on either side. He should be undefeated in the UFC, but what should have been an extremely clear draw against Raulian Paiva was judged as a loss. He should have had three separate cracks at top fifteen opponents since then, from Jack Shore to Said Nurmagomedov, but every single time injuries have scratched the fights before they could happen. So Kyler is a fantastic fighter with great striking and creative grappling, and he's only managed one fight in the last 25 months, which was, at least, a unanimous thumping of Raoni Barcelos. I really, really want Pedro Munhoz to win this fight. The mountain of bullshit he's gone through in the sport is infuriating and it would seem far more just if he turned Phillips aside. But Kyler is, in fact, very good, he's got a big reach advantage and a broader arsenal of strikes in his pocket, and he flows through his grappling well enough that Munhoz stifling him in the clinch will be dangerous. KYLER PHILLIPS BY DECISION. EARLY PRELIMS: GOODBYE, WOOD LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Ion Cuțelaba (17-9-1 (1)) vs Philipe Lins (17-5) This is becoming a habit. The last time we saw Philipe Lins it was a rescheduling of a fight from October of 2022 and I was able to just reprint what I wrote last time, and somehow, impossibly, Lins and Cuțelaba were supposed to fight in October of 2023 and Lins had to pull out right before that event too, so I will, once again, reprint what I wrote last time. Thanks for the break, Ion. CarlCX posted:LIGHT-HEAVYWEIGHT: Philipe Lins (17-5) vs Ion Cuțelaba (17-9-1 (1)) MIDDLEWEIGHT: Michel Pereira (29-11 (2)) vs Michał Oleksiejczuk (19-6 (1))Michel Pereira has managed to turn his mistakes into something good. "Demolidor" infamously hosed up a whole bunch of plans last year when he blew his 170-pound weight cut by four pounds, prompting opponent Stephen Thompson to make the unusually wise decision of waving off the fight altogether. This being Pereira's second weight miss in the UFC, he was ordered to go up to 185 pounds. I wasn't thrilled about his prospects in his new division, I ultimately picked against him, and I was a big ol' dumbass, because Pereira dropped Andre Petroski in a minute flat. As it turns out, when you hit hard at 170, you hit harder when you don't have to cut weight. Michał Oleksiejczuk, however, is a major threat. He went the distance with 205-pound strikers like Khalil Rountree Jr. and Dustin Jacoby, he just knocked out Chidi Njokuani last year, and, most importantly, he is powered by the infernal soul of Sam Alvey, whom he knocked out of the UFC back in 2022. He might be the stiffest striking test of Pereira's career. But Pereira is, as ever, very, very good, and after the way he appeared to have adjusted to his new division the last time we saw him, I'm not about to doubt him. He's got longer kicks, he's got bigger power, and while it usually takes big ol' grapplers to make Oleksiejczuk lose, I'm still all in on Middleweight Demolidor. MICHEL PEREIRA BY TKO. HEAVYWEIGHT: Robelis Despaigne (4-0) vs Josh Parisian (15-7) The UFC is keeping a real close eye on this one, which feels unnecessary, for they are large men, and very difficult to miss. Robelis Despaigne is a big Heavyweight prospect in both literal and figurative senses: A 6'7" man with a deeply implausible 87" of reach, a bronze medal in Taekwondo, and an irritatingly obvious nickname in "The Big Boy," but it's his performances that have really caught Twitter's attention. He's not just 4-0, and he doesn't have four knockouts, and he hasn't just scored them all in the first round: Three of the four knockouts happened with essentially the first punches of the fight. Of course, those fighters were 0-0, 0-0, 0-0 and 1-0 respectively, but it's regional Heavyweight, so honestly, what're you gonna loving do. The UFC is actively salivating at the prospect of a 6'7" Taekwondo knockout machine from Cuba as a prospect, which is why he is fighting good ol' Josh Parisian. Parisian is 2-4 in the UFC, and one of those two victories was a robbery of a split decision over Roque Martinez, who is, respectfully, also not particularly great, and the other was a ground-and-pound TKO over Alan Baudot that exists as a singularly perfect encapsulation of the Heavyweight division, as both men were visibly collapsing in exhaustion after exactly eight minutes and four seconds of fighting, not including the break between rounds. ROBELIS DESPAIGNE BY TKO is the reason this fight is here. If anything else happens, it would be a tremendous shock. If Josh Parisian wins, I will never stop laughing. FLYWEIGHT: CJ Vergara (12-4-1) vs Asu Almabaev (18-2) Styles make fights! You need one striker vs grappler fight on every card, it's a legal requirement dating back to the days when people who thought they were strikers didn't know what leg kicks were and people who thought they were grapplers didn't know how to defend an armbar. CJ Vergara has been fighting the stand-and-bang wars for more or less his entire career, and his furious punching power has won him most of his contests--except the ones where he has to deal with people who can pressure him on the ground. This is unfortunate, because pressuring people on the ground is basically all Asu Almabaev does. We saw his UFC debut last summer against Ode' Osbourne, and at the time I said his skills looked solid but unproven against top competition who could take advantage of his hittability, and he was hittable, and he took some lumps, and they didn't do a drat thing to stop him from throwing Ode' repeatedly to the mat or choking him out in two rounds. Vergara's bottom game is bad, but his takedown defense isn't. If he can keep Almabaev off him and punish his takedown attempts the same way he did to Daniel Lacerda, he's going to break his goddamn skull. But almost everyone who's tried to take Vergara down, ultimately, has, and I don't think his grappling will hold up under the assault. ASU ALMABAEV BY SUBMISSION. WOMEN'S FLYWEIGHT: Joanne Wood (16-8) vs Maryna Moroz (11-5) Oh, JoJo. Joanne Wood has been with the UFC ever since The Ultimate Fighter 20 (jesus christ) all the way back in 2014 (jesus christ) fifteen seasons ago (jesus christ). Outside of her UFC debut she was never quite a top fighter, she's always come out on the wrong side of fights with the real contenders of both Women's 125 and 115, and that repeated rejection from contendership meant she was forever on the outside looking in. But it also cemented her status as one of the sport's eternal underdogs, and along with her kickboxing, her occasional shocking submissions and her outright likability as a human, it made her a fan favorite. She lost more than she won, but--up until the last couple years--she was always competitive. This is rumored to be her retirement fight, and somewhat fittingly, it's against the woman who took away her streak. Joanne was an undefeated 9-0 before Maryna Moroz, whose "Iron Lady" nickname always gives me Thatcher chills, took her arm home in ninety seconds all the way back in her first official, non-TUF bout in 2015. (The main event: Cro Cop vs Gabriel Gonzaga 2. Good lord, the passage of time.) Moroz's activity has fallen off a bit, but her killer grappling hasn't gone anywhere. She outworked 135-pound title contender Mayra Bueno Silva, she choked out Mariya Agapova, and, uh, she lost her last two straight fights, which is why we're here instead of jockeying for contendership. And as much as I would like to see Wood ride off into the sunset on a win: MARYNA MOROZ BY SUBMISSION again. Sorry, JoJo. I hope you're happy if this is it, and I hope you get to relax into retirement with the millions of dollars you assuredly made as an internationally relevant TUF star who fought in the UFC for an entire decade.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 6, 2024 23:44
|
|
|
It was fun while it lasted and he still earned ten times as much from one fight than he would've gotten from the UFC, so he wins, but still disappointing.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 9, 2024 01:50
|
|
|
https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4056067 UFC 299 GDT is up. Prelims begin in 30.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 9, 2024 23:32
|
|
|
Alexandre Pantoja, the Flyweight champion, is calling out Sean O'Malley, the Bantamweight champion, who is calling out Ilia Topuria, the Featherweight champion, who is calling out Islam Makhachev, the Lightweight champion, who has already called out Leon Edwards, the Welterweight champion, who has previously made it clear he would like to fight Dricus du Plessis, the Middleweight champion, who is...actually happy there! But Light Heavyweight champion Alex Pereira wants to fight interim Heavyweight champion Tom Aspinall, who just wants to fight anyone, at this point. For bonus points, Women's Strawweight champion Zhang Weili keeps calling out Women's Flyweight champion Alexa Grasso and Women's Bantamweight champion Raquel Pennington is waiting for the winner of Holly Holm vs Women's Lightweight veteran Kayla Harrison.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 10, 2024 08:56
|
|
|
Liz Carmouche and Juliana Velasquez will fight in the opening round, and then they will fight again in the playoffs, and then, after Taila Santos gets injured, the finals will be Liz Carmouche vs Juliana Velasquez 5.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 12, 2024 02:34
|
|
|
The title is adjusted. I read the Mark Coleman bit sitting in a doctor's office this morning. It's such a loving awful coda on what's been a real struggle for him over the last few years, and if he goes out on an act of heroism god bless him, but I hope he pulls through.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 12, 2024 20:25
|
|
|
On a lighter note, in light of Gilbert Burns losing this past weekend the UFC has promoted Colby Covington to #4 at welterweight, so congratulations to that young go-getter.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 13, 2024 00:10
|
|
|
While we wait for Hammer House updates, the spice must flow. CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 94: HOLDING PATTERNS  SATURDAY, MARCH 16 FROM THE HOWLING MEANINGLESSNESS OF THE UFC APEX PRELIMS 1 PM PDT / 4 PM EDT | MAIN CARD 4 PM / 7 PM There's always a weird feeling of comedown after a pay-per-view, and that's aided an awful lot by the following week's card almost always being a touch underwhelming, as though the UFC itself is pausing to exhale. Our last five pay-per-view followups have been particularly inspiring in how immediately they've fallen off:
Will I still cheer for Ovince St. Preux? From the part of my soul that still longs for the days Yves Edwards walked the Earth, absolutely. Will it make this a great card? Probably not. Will anything keep me off the path to UFC 300? Hell no, baby. We're on a speeding train and we left the brakes in Miami. Feel the excitement! Feel the rush!  rerunning the old format for a week while i continue to fiddle. MAIN EVENT: LARGELY HOPEFUL HEAVYWEIGHT: Tai Tuivasa (15-6, #9) vs Marcin Tybura (24-8, #10) I am no longer feeling the excitement or the rush. Once upon a time it was very, very easy to get me excited about a Tai Tuivasa fight. He's a new-generation violence elemental, a fighter who combines the all-brawling all-the-time ethos at the core of the Heavyweight spirit with the footwork and finesse of an actual kickboxer! A furious pugilist made of chin checks and booze shoes! He defeated Derrick Lewis, took the Tank Abbott curse upon himself, and became the great hope of all fun-loving Heavyweight fight fans that we might, finally, get a champion who emphasized excitement over such lowly ideals as 'technique' and 'wrestling' and 'not inducing a brain injury in my opponents.' It was a wonderful time. It was a peaceful time. But it pretty definitively Was, and unfortunately, we are Now. There is no shame in losing to the people Tai Tuivasa has lost to. Ciryl Gane is the best striker at Heavyweight, for better or worse, and Tai still nearly knocked him out en route to being destroyed. Sergei Pavlovich has melted almost everyone he's touched, and was drat near the Heavyweight champion. Alexander Volkov is a persistently underrated contender with tricks up his sleeve in every aspect of mixed martial arts. All three men, given a chance, could feasibly become a champion. Fighting all three in a row is an incredibly tough ask; losing to all three is entirely understandable. Tai Tuivasa is damned not by his losses, but his wins. He's 8-6 in the UFC, but of those eight, only fan favorite Derrick Lewis and Andrei Arlovski, a champion from almost twenty years ago, are still here. His record otherwise includes:
I do not hate Heavyweight. I accept Heavyweight for what it is. Heavyweight is a division where Tai Tuivasa, the #9 Heavyweight in the UFC, has one top ten victory in his entire career, and that was enough to get him one more landed punch away from fighting Jon Jones for the chance to be the #1 Heavyweight On The Planet. Heavyweight is made of dreams, fantasies and marketing campaigns, and nothing is easier to market than a big, brawling man who knocks people out. Which is why Marcin Tybura has had to work so hard to get his moment in the sun. Because Tybura actually predates Tai! Next month will mark eight goddamn years of "Tybur" in the UFC, and he's been grinding in both the figurative and literal senses the whole drat time. His 11-7 record even bears some interesting connections and departures with Tai's:
Which was, of course, the point. CarlCX posted:Marcin returned last summer, and he's 2-0 since coming back, but if we're being honest, he occupies no part of the greater MMA consciousness. He fought Alexandr Romanov, who was ranked two spots below him, and should by all rights have left with a draw but was gifted a decision instead, and he followed that by fighting Blagoy Ivanov, who was ranked five spots below him, and won one of the least eventful decisions of the year. Neither fight gave him momentum from either a divisional or performance standpoint, neither fight earned him a mote of grace with the fans. These are the men Heavyweight is actually made of. For every Stipe Miocic or Josh Barnett, you have a dozen Dan Christisons and Justin McCullies. They are the meat and bones of the division, they are the ones who keep it afloat, and they are the ones who are pulled up when the UFC wants Tai Tuivasa to get a win, but not so much that they're willing to make it a sure thing. Which is fortunate, because MARCIN TYBURA BY SUBMISSION seems distressingly likely. Tai can blast Tybura out of the water just like Aspinall did if he connects, but Tai has an unfortunate tendency to struggle against anyone who can control him in a grappling exchange, which is why, generally, the UFC doesn't book him against loving grapplers. Tybura's tendency to wade forward and push straight into the clinch is his biggest weakness here, but if he can pressure his way in and get his hands on Tai he can take him down, and if Tai gets taken down, he's in trouble. CO-MAIN EVENT: AT LEAST YOU DID IT WELTERWEIGHT: Bryan Battle (10-2) vs Ange Loosa (10-3) I mean, sure. This can be a co-main event. We let Vitor Petrino/Tyson Pedro slide, so the fight's been over for quite some time. Bryan Battle's primary role in the UFC has been to consistently disprove the idea that the company will treat you with respect if you do poo poo right. "Pooh Bear" was the dark horse of The Ultimate Fighter 29 (jesus christ) back in 2021, a seemingly awkward, lanky Middleweight with a goofy sense of humor and an array of chokes that habitually took opponents by surprise. He won the TUF championship by strangling Gilbert Urbina, he ended any lingering doubts by defeating the injury-nixed finalist Urbina replaced, Tresean Gore, and having completed his TUF obligations, he dropped to Welterweight, took on a tough ask in Takashi Sato, a man who'd just gone the distance with no less than Gunnar Nelson, and knocked him cold with a headkick in under a minute. So, at this point, you've got an Ultimate Fighter champion with two super-cool finishes in two separate weight classes, and he's charismatic, and he's in his mid-twenties, and he's 3-0 in the UFC, and he just kicked a man in his god damned face. Ideally, you're already halfway through marketing him into becoming a thing, right? As I put it when I talked about Bryan Battle right after that fight: CarlCX posted:No! God drat it, we have been doing this an entire year, now, how on Earth have you not gotten that I ask these questions solely to hurt myself with frustrating answers! And now, as his reward, he gets to c-main event against the other guy who beat AJ Fletcher. Ange Loosa has had a real bitch of a time getting his international career off the ground. Back in 2016 Loosa was a genuine prospect, an undefeated all-arounder out of Switzerland who'd just raised eyebrows by going into hostile territory in Russia, taking on a fighter with almost three times his experience in Rustam Khasanov and winning after one round when Khasanov, exhausted and hurt, collapsed and passed out. It was bizarre (and deeply concerning), but it was enough to get Loosa over to America to fight in the Legacy Fighting Alliance, where he, of course, immediately lost for the first time, as you do. He made it back five months later for a tight split decision victory over Collin Lubberts, but it was 2019 and COVID was about to destroy international commerce and what remained of everyone's brain, and, as with many international fighters, Loosa was MIA for two full years. But when he came back, it was for the Contender Series! Unfortunately, his contract challenge was some unknown guy named Jack Della Maddalena. Ange did not win. But In 2022 he made it into the UFC through the back path: Fulfilling the company's desperate need for late replacements. He took a last-minute fight against Mounir Lazzez, despite having gone three rounds just two weeks prior, and somewhat unsurprisingly, Lazzez won in a shut-out decision. But Loosa had his contract, and god dammit, he wasn't going to let go. He bristled when the UFC tried to use him to rescue AJ Fletcher and settled for elbowing his face to pieces instead, and after spending a year on the shelf dealing with injuries, Loosa came back last September to welcome Rhys "Skeletor" McKee to the UFC, and despite fading in the third round, he still took home a decision victory and the healthy glow of another spoiled prospect. The 'fades in round three' thing is becoming a real recurring issue with Loosa, though. In 2022 he had AJ Fletcher dead to rights in the third round but was too exhausted to finish him, and in 2023 he had Rhys McKee beat but nearly snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by being too tired to keep McKee from steamrolling him right at the end of their fight. Loosa's a good fighter with strong combinations and some secretly powerful wrestling, but his focus on pressure means his energy management persistently fails him, and when he can't exert pressure, he tends to wilt. And Bryan Battle's just a weird loving cat, man. He snatches chokes out of clinches, he occasionally flails wildly but also lands absolutely murderous counters, he's got a hell of a chin, and I hope against hope that this will finally be his much-belated coming-out party. BRYAN BATTLE BY SUBMISSION. MAIN CARD: MOM SAYS I GET TO BE RYU LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Kennedy Nzechukwu (12-4) vs Ovince St. Preux (26-17) I mocked it earlier, but make no mistake: This is the fight Light Heavyweight deserves. This is the face of truth. This is the beginning of the third attempt to make Kennedy Nzechukwu a Thing. He was one of the UFC's earliest Contender Series prospects as a huge, scary, undefeated man folding human beings in half with headkicks, and they gave him a soft landing with the 1-for-his-last-4 Paul Craig, and Craig choked him out. Kennedy started over from square one, rattled off three wins of varying quality, and was immediately knocked the gently caress out by Da Un Jung in a single round. Two years and change later, Kennedy was again rehabilitated with three wins of wildly fluctuating quality, recaptured his momentum as a big 205-pound finishing machine, earned himself a spot as the #15 guy in the division, and was, once again, ready for a real, ranked test of his abilities, this time in the form of Dustin Jacoby. Just as in 2021, it was a way to dip Kennedy's toes into the realm of ranked competition, and just as in 2021, he got knocked out in a single round. Is it time to stop the cycle? Is it time for a new prospect? No, it is time for the total opposite! Ovince St. loving Preux, man. Nothing feels as present and vital as the #2 Light Heavyweight prospect of 2011. And I like Ovince St. Preux! I really do! The way he has somehow hypnotized multiple fighters across multiple decades into falling for the von Flue/von Preux choke is downright aspirational, and every once in awhile he'll still dust someone with a left hook out of nowhere to remind you that somewhere behind those tired eyes is a man who could have been a champion. But that last left hook was almost four years ago. OSP's 1 for his last 4, and all three of those losses were knockouts, and the only win was against please-for-god's-sake-retire 2022-era Shogun Rua, and OSP only barely won a split decision, which gives him the dubious honor of being the only person in the last entire decade of his career to not beat Shogun by finishing him. Which is funny, because OSP did finish him! In 2014. Ten god damned years ago. The fact that OSP can be this roadworn and this aged and still be a win away from a 205-pound ranking is a reminder that this is the division of doom. We are all bastards for allowing Light Heavyweight to exist, and in whatever afterlife claims us, we will have to explain our sins and beg forgiveness. KENNEDY NZECHUKWU BY TKO. FEATHERWEIGHT: Christian Rodriguez (10-1) vs Isaac Dulgarian (6-0) Sometimes, your success is a thorn in the UFC's side. Christian "CeeRod" Rodriguez was picked up in 2022 on a last-minute replacement contract to fight wrestling phenomenon Jonathan Pearce, a fight Rodriguez dutifully lost after being wrestled to a decision, and it was that performance that gave the UFC confidence in picking him out as a victim for Dana White's personal child soldier and undefeated wrestling stylist Raul Rosas Jr. Christian, instead, beat the absolute loving poo poo out of him, ending the fight with an incredibly uncomfortable strikes-landed differential of 83 to 2. To add insult to injury: Christian missed weight by two and a half pounds. The UFC threw the undefeated Cameron Saaiman at him, and Rodriguez took away his undefeated streak, too, except this time he missed weight by five pounds. Two strikes--two particularly promotionally inconvenient strikes--and you're out. It's up to Featherweight with you. Where you will fight another undefeated prospect, because baby, that's just how this works. Isaac "The Midwest Choppa" Dulgarian came onto the UFC's radar as the Featherweight champion of Missouri's Fighting Alliance Championship, which he earned by knocking out TeeJay "Bad Newz" Britton on a card Dana was openly scouting. That card also happened to include the 23-8 former Bellator champion Eduardo "Dudu" Dantas kicking a man's goddamn head off, but gently caress that, who needs him: We want Isaac Dulgarian, the guy with only first-round finishes, even if only one of them was against a guy with a winning record. Oh, and Josh Fremd. Josh Fremd also got signed off that goddamn event. Dulgarian made his UFC debut last August, fought Francis "The Fire" Marshall, chucked him on his back and methodically elbowed his entire face off in one round, even if it took almost the entirety of said round, which is an eternity by the standards of an Isaac Dulgarian fight. But he's not bigger or significantly stronger than Rodriguez, and no one's been able to keep Rodriguez down effectively yet, and I don't think that's changing here. CHRISTIAN RODRIGUEZ BY DECISION. WOMEN'S BANTAMWEIGHT: Pannie Kianzad (16-7, #6) vs Macy Chiasson (8-3, #10) I love Women's Bantamweight, but boy, the hole it's in is awful deep. It's not Pannie Kianzad's fault: Her wrestling, her volume striking, and her chin have all served her well during her six years with the UFC, but the division around her, and her challenges within it, have shown just how thin the ranks really are. All of Pannie's wins have come over people on the verge of retirement. You have to go all the way back to 2019 to find a victory over an active fighter, and that was Jessica-Rose Clark, who is, respectfully, 11-9. In April of 2022, Pannie Kianzad, ranked #11, beat Lina Länsberg, ranked #12. By her next fight in July of 2023, Pannie Kianzad was ranked #6, and Ketlen Vieira beat her. It's most of a year later, and Pannie, somehow, is still in exactly the same position. Which is funny, because this, too, is an old position for her. Pannie's first official UFC fight was in the finals of The Ultimate Fighter 28 (jesus christ), where she was choked out in two rounds by Macy Chiasson. That, of course, was at Women's Featherweight, and after dropping down to 135 for a couple of years, Macy went back up to 145 to chase a hopeful title shot. This, of course, did not happen. She instead got choked out by Raquel Pennington, scored an exceedingly narrow split decision over Norma Dumont, and, unable to choose between either weight class, fought Irene Aldana at a 140-pound catchweight and promptly got her liver upkicked out of her abdomen. So now, Macy is 1 for her last 3, hasn't fought in a year and a half, and is somehow still ranked as the 10th-best Women's Bantamweight in the UFC, despite not having actually competed in the weight class since 2021. I don't think the math on this matchup has changed much since the first time we saw it back in 2018. Macy's still much bigger and much stronger, and with how much of Pannie's success comes from the clinch, the lack of leverage is a killer. MACY CHIASSON BY DECISION, but I'm just hoping everyone makes weight. MIDDLEWEIGHT: Gerald Meerschaert (35-17) vs Bryan Barberena (18-11)This is like a mirror match of scrappy, brawling, bearded grapplers, and I am here for it. Gerald Meerschaert is stepping into his twentieth UFC fight this weekend, and as a longtime lover of underdogs choking people out, I have been a fan of his for nearly the entire time, which has been difficult, because he has spent a fair bit of it losing repeatedly. "GM3" has always struggled in the UFC. He's a legitimately solid wrestler and enough of a grappling threat to nearly beat folks like Kevin Holland, but he's just a bit too slow and a bit too chinny to get over the hump at the middle of Middleweight, and every time he's brushed up against the actual contenders of the division--your Khamzat Chimaevs, Jack Hermanssons and your Thiago Santosi--he's been violently knocked out. His club-and-sub win over Bruno Silva in 2022 is arguably his best, but he's once again on a losing streak and trying to avert the dreaded three losses in a row. Bryan Barberena, meanwhile, is in the process of crashing back down to Earth. "Bam Bam" has been brawling around the company for nearly a decade, and his hard-brawling, clinch-grinding style--along with his big upset submission over Sage Northcutt, which remains hilarious to this day--made him a fan favorite, but kept him well out of reach of a ranking. And then, unexpectedly, Barberena went on a late-career winning streak. Was it because he matured and became a better, smarter fighter? I mean, a little, but a lot of it was opportunistic timing in matchmaking. Beating Jake Ellenberger, Matt Brown and Robbie Lawler is an amazing achievement on paper! But when he beat them Jake Ellenberger was about to retire, Robbie Lawler was about to retire, and Matt Brown had already retired twice. Bryan's still a bad motherfucker to have been capable of defeating those men at any time, but when Rafael dos Anjos, Gunnar Nelson and Makhmud Muradov all immediately put him right back on a three-fight losing streak, it wasn't much of a surprise. And, look, Bryan, I like you. I do! I have liked you for years! But just as so many parents have a favorite child, whether they admit it or not, I have a favorite bearded grappling boy, and I'm sorry, but it's GERALD MEERSCHAERT BY SUBMISSION. PRELIMS: WEIGHT CLASS NOT FOUND LIGHTWEIGHT: Mike Davis (10-2) vs Natan Levy (8-1)This is a battle of lost prospects. Both Davis and Levy came through the Contender Series--although Davis lost his fight against the now-ranked Sodiq Yusuff, where Levy choked out Shaheen "Shazam" Santana, whose subsequent success in the sport can be gauged by the number of people currently wondering if I'm making the back half of this sentence up--and upon reaching the UFC proper, both got shellacked by bigger prospects. Mike Davis found himself the unfortunate owner of the last fight of pre-crisis Lightweight Gilbert Burns; Levy lost a wild clash with Rafa García. And then both men sort of fell into holes in the Earth. Between that Burns fight and today, Davis has fought only three times: Once more in 2019, once in January of 2021, and once in October of 2022. He won all three of those fights, but thanks to repeated injuries and surgeries, he's averaged one fight per every 539 days, meaning barely anyone remembers he exists. Natan Levy got off to a winning streak of his own in 2022 after outworking Mike "TKO by Dog Barks" Breeden and Genaro Valdéz, but he spent the first half of 2023 chasing a fight against Pete Rodriguez that never materialized and the second half getting injured in training, so now he, too, has been on the bench since December of 2022. So you've got two similar wrestleboxing stylists with similar layoffs and similar levels of ring rust. Davis is bigger; Levy is slightly more active. I still favor MIKE DAVIS BY DECISION but I cannot help feeling this is closer than the betting lines think. WOMEN'S BANTAMWEIGHT: Josiane Nunes (10-1, #13) vs Chelsea Chandler (5-2, #14) I know I just complained about the trainwreck that is the Women's Bantamweight rankings a few fights ago, but I just want to reiterate, here: Josiane Nunes is the 13th best woman at 135 and she has one victory at the weight class, and it was the 2-0 Bea Malecki back in 2021. Chelsea Chandler is the 14th best woman at 135, and she has never competed at 135 in the UFC. Both of these women were Featherweights. Josiane Nunes was the company's only real up-and-coming Featherweight contender, which is especially hilarious given that she's 5'2", and Chelsea Chandler inexplicably made her Featherweight debut in what is, as of now and for the foreseeable future, the very last Women's Featherweight bout the UFC ever promoted, a losing effort to Norma Dumont last July. Both women are now pressed back down to 135, where they are considered some of the best fighters on the planet by, essentially, default. And this is, altogether, the silliest poo poo in the goddamn world. There were a million ways to avert this reality and the UFC chose to pursue none of them, and now we have a fight between a woman who hasn't made Bantamweight in five years and a woman who was fighting at Featherweight despite being shorter than almost every Strawweight in the company, and both of them are good, but the world around them, the divisions they're inheriting and even the stakes of this fight itself are all so meaningless that my mind slides off their respective skills like crude oil off a duckling in a commercial for hand soap. JOSIANE NUNES BY DECISION while we all wait for the UFC to ignore everything else and give the next title shot to the winner of Holly Holm/Kayla Harrison anyhow. FLYWEIGHT: Ode' Osbourne (12-6 (1)) vs Jafel Filho (15-3)Jafel! Hey, buddy! It sure is good to see you again!  Yes. Did you see that Muhammad Mokaev is in the top ten and the UFC's trying to get him into a title shot now? That's crazy! You were like thirty seconds away from beating him! Isn't that just wild?  Yes. Yes it is. Aw, buddy. I know it's tough, but you did strangle Daniel Barez the last time we saw you, and it was great, and honestly, that's almost as good as being a top ten guy in the division, isn't it?  It is not. That sounds unseasonably angry, Jafel. Are you feeling okay? Do you need someone to talk to?  That is not what I need. So what do you need?  I need to break a man's loving leg. JAFEL FILHO BY SUBMISSION. LIGHTWEIGHT: Thiago Moisés (17-7) vs Mitch Ramirez (8-1) I feel like Thiago Moisés lives in that terrible hell of being persistently right on the cusp of mattering, but just not quite there. Tapping Michael Johnson and outworking Bobby Green and Alexander Hernandez is a real solid run, but it only gets you to the periphery of the rankings, and while getting shut down by Islam Makhachev is in no way disqualifying, being punched out by Joel Alvarez is a bit tougher. Hell, half of what got Benoît Saint Denis his shot at Dustin Poirier last week was pounding Thiago flat. His bad luck is continuing here, too. This was an extremely favorable fight for Thiago--he was scheduled to meet Brad Riddell, who, as much as I love him, is a smaller, grappling-challenged fighter coming off three straight losses and two straight submissions, making him red meat for Moisés--but Riddell got hurt, and his last-minute replacement is Mitch "The Fight Stalker" Ramirez, who is neck and neck with David Terrell in incredibly forced fight nicknames. Ramirez is a reheated Contender Series leftover who got knocked out by Carlos Prates in his contract mill appearance, but the UFC is never not looking for fighters who go all-out for knockouts, and if you're willing to accept a short notice replacement contract for the minimum possible amount of money, hey: You're gonna get in sooner or later. And it's a hell of an opportunity, because Ramirez is bigger, stronger, a much heftier puncher, and most importantly, the kind of hungry that comes from knowing a few months ago you were fighting Aireon "The Hyphy Kid" Tavarres in a hotel. I miss when hyphy was a thing. I miss when bay area culture wasn't just Twitter and Salesforce. THIAGO MOISÉS BY SUBMISSION. FEATHERWEIGHT: Josh Culibao (11-2-1) vs Danny Silva (8-1) The sheer difference in trajectory of Contender Series vs non-Contender Series folks is wild. Josh Culibao joined the UFC as a last-minute replacement back in February of 2020, and in that four-year period he hasn't had a single easy, notable fight. Jalin Turner, Charles Jourdain, Shayilan Nuerdanbieke, Seung Woo Choi, Melsik Baghdasaryan--every single one an incredibly tough prospect sunk down on the prelims. And when, after defeating those last three men in a row, Josh was finally put on a main card, it was to play victim to the undefeated Lerone Murphy as a treat for his hometown crowd on an all-UK card. And with that one, single loss, Culibao is all the way back down to being buried at the start of the prelims, dealing with welcoming a Contender Series favorite to the company. Danny "El Puma" Silva is a Cub Swanson-trained striker who's barely 27, 2-1 in the Legacy Fighting Alliance, and just got a contract after beating the extremely similarly-situated Angel Pacheco on the contract show. Pacheco also got signed. A couple years ago, Canaan Kawaihae--the one man to beat Danny Silva--fought on the Contender Series himself, only to get knocked out by Jonas Bilharinho. Bilharinho is 11-2-1, a personal training partner of José Aldo, and won that fight with a goddamn spinning wheel kick knockout, and Dana White saw that and decided he just wasn't quite worth signing. A lot changed in three years. If this sounds like I have a rank disinterest in Danny Silva, it's because I apparently do. I don't see anything wrong with him, but I also don't see a reason to pick against JOSH CULIBAO BY DECISION. WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT: Cory McKenna (8-2) vs Jacqueline Amorim (7-1) I've come to deeply appreciate Cory McKenna, who is trying as hard as she possibly can. She came off the Contender Series with a remarkably well-aged win over Vanessa Demopoulos, she beat Kay Hansen, she looked like a real solid divisional prospect, and then she lost a huge upset to the generally-ignored journeywoman Elise Reed and lost all her hype overnight. The UFC gave her a rebuilding fight with Miranda Granger, whom McKenna dutifully choked out, and Cheyanne Vlismas was a tougher challenge, but McKenna still pulled it out. Once again, she's on a winning streak, and once again, she's on the verge of having some divisional momentum again, and this time, she has to defend it against another troubled prospect. Jacqueline Amorim had a great deal of hype when she jumped to the UFC in 2023 as the undefeated Strawweight champion of the LFA, and the UFC felt very safe giving her the constantly embattled Sam "Sampage" Hughes for her debut, and despite being a -300 favorite, Amorim gassed completely midway through the fight and got pummeled to a unanimous decision loss. It was a humbling wake-up call, and she got a tune-up fight of her own against Montserrat Ruiz, who I will always appreciate but who, unfortunately, gets punched out an awful lot. Amorim wrestled her and pounded her out in the third, and she would deeply like to do it again. But McKenna doesn't really get stopped. She's tough as hell and has a fantastic gas tank, and I'm not convinced being put under heavy pressure again won't get Amorim right back in trouble. CORY MCKENNA BY TKO. BANTAMWEIGHT: Chad Anheliger (12-7) vs Charalampos Grigoriou (8-3) I try not to do the 'tee hee, funny name' thing, because it's the lowest form of ignorant American comedy, but, as I am an ignorant American, I must point out that 'Charalampos Grigoriou' is just an incredibly fun name to type. It makes me happy, and I can't tell if that's a sign of appreciation or if I'm just infantilizing Cypriot culture. Either way, this is a setup fight for him to win. He's the Contender Series baby who knocks everyone out, it's not subtle. It is in fact so unsubtle that Grigoriou was supposed to face Japan's Toshiomi Kazama here, a Road to UFC veteran who's 0-2 in the company after two straight knockout losses, but an injury forced Kazama out and left the UFC scrambling to figure out who else they had under contract on a two-fight losing streak. Chad Anheliger, come on down! You're 12-7 overall, you're one of the incredibly rare guys who got signed off the Contender Series despite committing the unforgivable sin of winning by split decision, you knocked out Jesse Strader a couple years ago in a fun comeback that you were real close to losing, and since then it's been one loss a year and the quiet wondering of what, if anything, is next. This is next. Next is the UFC trying to feed you to their new prospect. I hope you upset the apple cart, but CHARALAMPOS GRIGORIOU BY TKO feels a lot more likely.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 13, 2024 22:42
|
|
|
https://twitter.com/davemeltzerWON/status/1768127630665187503 Looking positive.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 14, 2024 09:40
|
|
|
That is deeply good to see, and it is also perfect that Mark Coleman somehow came out of this not just alive, but even redder and louder.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 14, 2024 20:04
|
|
|
GTO posted:I've not seen last week's UFC yet and not spoiled on any of the fights. Any to watch or skip? Are the main event fights any good? It's a decent card altogether, but Despaigne/Parisian, Pereira/Oleksiejczuk, Yan/Yadong, Maddalena/Burns and Poirier/BSD are all specifically worth watching. Blaydes/Almeida isn't a GOOD fight, but it is pretty funny. The main event is a bit disappointing.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 15, 2024 20:52
|
|
|
Just put me out of my misery and stop publishing rankings.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 15, 2024 23:21
|
|
|
https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4056549 The Tuivasa/Tybura GDT is up. Prelims in about 30.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 16, 2024 20:33
|
|
|
Jose Aldo is unretiring and will fight Jonathan Martinez in the co-main of UFC 301. I'm just going to stop writing the loving retirement corner.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 16, 2024 23:44
|
|
|
I'm Sean O'Malley hater number one now that DRJ doesn't post here, but he's absolutely a world-class fighter. Do I think he beat Petr Yan? No. Did he give Petr Yan a tougher fight than everyone but Aljo and Merab? Indisputably. Do I think he deserved the fight with Aljo? Not remotely. Did he knock Aljo the gently caress out? Easily. His matchmaking and marketing are poo poo and booking the Chito rematch was really stupid, but he's absolutely world-class in the division. I will also never pick him to win a fight because he sucks rear end. Both can be true.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 18, 2024 06:58
|
|
|
Aljo did get shoved into that fight in extremely lovely ways and I complained about them at length at the time, but I'm not sure it would've made a big difference to the final outcome after seeing the way the fight went. Also, rare Bellator victory: https://twitter.com/DonnDavisPFL/status/1770203586900721746 This is at least theoretically the best distribution deal they've had since the Spike TV days. CarlCX fucked around with this message at 00:18 on Mar 20, 2024 |
|
#
¿
Mar 19, 2024 19:34
|
|
|
In a terrible way, this pleases me, because I can once again go back to unequivocally hating Cung Le.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 20, 2024 19:54
|
|
|
That's a perfectly reasonable response right up until he used that loving Teddy Roosevelt quote and now I am glad they lost.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 20, 2024 20:56
|
|
|
Let's layer on one more bit of pain. CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 95: NOT GREAT, BOB  SATURDAY, MARCH 23 FROM THE PERILOUS ABYSS OF THE UFC APEX PRELIMS 4 PM PDT / 7 PM EDT | MAIN CARD 7 PM / 10 PM Remember a year-ish ago when UFC matchmaker Mick Maynard used Twitter to make fun of people complaining about card quality? It's easy to forget, but that was in reference to Bloody Elbow pointing out that the June 3, 2023 Fight Night was subpar. That card had Amir Albazi vs Kai Kara-France in drat near a title eliminator and fights featuring Alex Caceres, Jim Miller, Tim Elliott, Elizeu Zaleski and Andrei Arlovski on it. And the thing is: They were right! They were completely, objectively correct in their complaint. But the MMA internet largely fell in line with the UFC mocking them for it, because this sport is not kind to any form of critique or expectations. It's less than a year later. This card has 13-14 booked fights and one ranked fighter. The co-main event is a slapstick comedy bit. Next week's fight card lost its headliner and will now crown a #1 title contender who gets to sit on their hands for the rest of the year. The week after that is an injury replacement main. And the week after that is UFC 300, the biggest UFC ever, which promised a world-breaking main event for months only to put a routine title fight together two days before they announced it. Bloody Elbow died and its corpse has been resurrected as a zombie cursed to pump out puff pieces about how great the UFC is. All of their fantastic reporting on the UFC's unethical business practices has been scrubbed from the internet and, this morning, the UFC settled their antitrust suits out of court for 1/4 of what the plaintiffs were seeking, no admission of wrongdoing, and no systemic changes to their business practices. The settlement is tax deductible and their stock, as of this writing, is up 8%. But you get to watch Payton Talbott. So: Congratulations, fight fans. We won.  i'll be totally honest: i'm using the worst possible card graphic because after this morning's news about the antitrust suit i am just too angry at MMA to care. MAIN EVENT: ON THE OUTSIDE LOOKING IN WOMEN'S FLYWEIGHT: Amanda Ribas (12-4, #8) vs Rose Namajunas (11-6, NR) There's just an unavoidable sense of nihilism to this fight. It sucks, because I like both of these fighters. I think every time I write up a fight card with Amanda Ribas on it I redundantly dedicate a paragraph to how inexplicably underrated she's always been and continues to be despite hanging onto near-permanent contendership, and I don't need to say poo poo about Rose Namajunas, she's a two-time world champion, one of the most popular women in the sport, and the only person in the UFC to beat Zhang Weili. They're both great! They're both great fighters! But they're kind of dead in the water right now, and I cannot shake the feeling that this matchup ultimately won't do much for either of them. However underrated I feel she is, I cannot deny Ribas is now firmly entrenched in limbo. Her spinning kick destruction of Luana Pinheiro last November was her best performance in the UFC, but it was the cap on a problematic pattern that's been plaguing her for three straight years: No back to back wins, no back to back losses. Her path to actual title contendership keeps getting derailed by her annual appointments with the top of the division. In 2021 it was Marina Rodriguez, in 2022 it was Katlyn Cerminara, and last year, most devastatingly, it was Maycee Barber. And make no mistake: That was as devastating for Ribas and her hopes for contendership as it was an absolute paroxysm of joy for the UFC. Ribas has a half-dozen holes in her top-ten punchcard, but more than her victories, her consistently close competition even in loss has cemented her place in the division. When Marina beat her, she was winning up until she got cracked. When Katlyn beat her, it was by a close split decision. The UFC had been trying to legitimize Maycee as a contender for years, and she put on the best performance of her life against Ribas. Before the first round was over Ribas was already covered in blood; the fight didn't make it out of the second. All of which leaves Amanda out in the cold. She's too good to fall out of the top ten, but she can't crack the top five. She's too good to ignore, but not good enough to win fan investment. Normally--promotionally--this is exactly why you give her the Maycee Barbers and Luana Pinheiros of the world. You want a potentially vital contender to get the rub from beating her. I mean this with as little disrespect as is humanly possible to a fighter I have liked for ten years: This is the farthest away Rose Namajunas has ever been from feeling like a potentially vital contender. Which is bizarre! It's a bizarre thing to see. Rose Namajunas has been an absolute institution in the UFC's contendership picture since the moment she joined the roster. Which isn't even hyperbole, because her first UFC fight was for the Women's Strawweight Championship! It's silly. Just shy of half of every Strawweight title fight in UFC history has involved Rose. Even by the standards of a young division, that's an aggressively silly statistic. Her run at 115 would have been legendary had it not been overshadowed by the best ever in Joanna Jędrzejczyk, and Rose dealt with that issue by just straight-up beating Joanna twice. But she's not at 115 anymore, and her entire tenure there has been more or less forgotten because of the terrible way it ended. Losing your title in an upset is not unusual. Losing your title in a rematch is not new. Losing your title in one of the worst fights in UFC history while your cornerman/husband tells you the entire crowd booing in confusion means you're winning? That's very, very unusual. Losing your title and taking almost a year and a half off from the sport? That's a big red flag. Losing your title, taking almost a year and a half off from the sport, coming back a full weight class up and being immediately thrown at one of the only women with a claim to #1 contendership because the company would love to get you right back in the title mix? That's a gamble, and unfortunately, it didn't pay off. It wasn't a bad fight! Rose acquitted herself well against Manon Fiorot. But it wasn't particularly close, either. Fiorot was bigger and stronger and visibly hit harder, Rose repeatedly tried and failed to take her down, and at the end of the day she was simply outclassed by a bigger, cleaner fighter. All of that comes together to make this fight feel like the equivalent of screaming into the void. Both of these women abandoned Strawweight in pursuit of success at Flyweight and both have been clearly, definitively shut out of contendership. Rose isn't even in the rankings because, y'know, she's 0-1 at the weight class. I've seen MMA writers I respect discussing how great and promising the top of Women's Flyweight is right now, and respectfully: I just don't agree. I think there was a window where it could have become a hot potato division, but the UFC has been thoroughly shutting that window. Natalia Silva is on her way up, but she's so uninvested in as a prospect that she's already #7 and she's only been off the prelims once in five fights. Jéssica Andrade is back at Strawweight. Maycee Barber is finally in the mix, but for as much as the company has put behind her, very little fan interest seems to have stuck. Erin Blanchfield and Manon Fiorot have both deserved cracks at the title for more than a year, and the UFC spun its wheels so long that now they have to fight each other, which means sacrificing one of those contenders for the other. And Alexa Grasso, the new champion and marketing darling, is now chained to the UFC's favorite dilapidated boat, The Ultimate Fighter, and by the time it's over she will have spent almost a year and a half fighting Valentina Shevchenko over and over. Which is the optimistic scenario, because let's be real, here: Shevchenko was well on her way to winning the first fight on the scorecards before she hosed up, and however one feels about who should have been on top in their rematch, objectively, the only reason Shevchenko didn't win the belt back was an outright judging error. I'm almost certainly going to favor Grasso in their third fight, but it is completely and wholly plausible that Shevchenko could win her belt back, which would mean we have a fighter the UFC has invested millions into marketing who's now 1-1-1 with the champion, and should that happen, the UFC will book a Figueiredo/Moreno fourth-time's-the-charm rubber match so goddamn fast it'll melt every road between Nevada and Jalisco. So what do you do with whoever wins this fight? If Ribas chokes Rose out, she's still stuck and she gets all the momentum of beating an 0-2 former Strawweight who hasn't won a fight in three years. If Rose kicks Amanda's head off she's got her claim to the top ten, but with Grasso/Shevchenko happening for the rest of the year, Fiorot/Blanchfield coming up to put someone in the batter's box, Maycee ascendant as the UFC's favorite Flyweight and the looming possibility that we don't even get a non-Shevchenko/Grasso title fight for two full years, where do you go? I don't think we'll find out. AMANDA RIBAS BY DECISION. Rose's best advantage against Fiorot was her speed, but Ribas is just as fast. She's not as tricky nor does she flow as well as Rose, but she's arguably even more dangerous on the ground. Moreover--maybe I'm just not convinced Rose hasn't lost something. Maybe I still need to be convinced. CO-MAIN EVENT: MAKING THE JOKE OBVIOUS HEAVYWEIGHT: Karl Williams (9-1) vs Justin Tafa (7-3 (1)) In the long, long-ago time of last week, I wrote this: CarlCX posted:I do not hate Heavyweight. I accept Heavyweight for what it is. Anyway, this fight is happening because Heavyweight sucks enough that related fighters are literally interchangeable. Seriously, that's it. That's the write-up. We could stop now and you'd have the whole story. Justin Tafa was supposed to fight Marcos Rogério de Lima last month at UFC 298, but he got scratched with an injury 36 hours prior to fight night. So the UFC replaced him with his slightly larger, slightly younger brother, Junior Tafa, who was scheduled to fight Karl Williams here, this week. Junior proceeded to get his leg kicked in half in a hair over six minutes, and that's fine for de Lima, but What about poor Karl Williams, robbed of his fight for sake of saving a pay-per-view prelim? What does the UFC have hidden in its magic bag for his troubles? Surprise! It's the Other Tafa. Like, just imagine, man. Imagine if Nick Serra substituted for Matt in the Georges St-Pierre rematch. Imagine if the Nogueira Brothers had actually pulled the full switcheroo and had Rogério secretly fight Roy Nelson. Hell, Mohammed Usman is fighting down on the prelims, but gently caress it, have Kamaru come fight Mick Parkin instead. He's already gone up one weight class, what's another two. It's an aggressively silly thing in an aggressively silly sport as part of the sport's second-silliest* division. And it's ultimately more interesting than talking about the fight itself, because the joke of this fight existing at all is only roughly equivalent to the joke of the fight actually happening. Sorry, Women's Featherweight. It's not your fault, you were just left in the snow by your uncaring parents. Karl Williams is 2-0 at Heavyweight in the UFC. Those two victories came against Łukasz Brzeski, who is 0-3 in the UFC, and my corporately abandoned son, Chase Sherman, who is 4-11. Justin Tafa is going on five years with the company, over which time he is 4-3: The combined UFC records of the men he beat amount to 5-11, and four of those wins (and losses!) are from just one guy. They have, collectively, fought the absolute bottom of the barrel. And now they are co-main eventing a fight card because brothers switching off fights is funny, and the winner of this fight will be either on a three-fight winning streak or a five-fight unbeaten streak and, in so doing, will be one of the two most successful Heavyweight prospects in the company. One day, we're going to have an actual conversation about how, through the Contender Series, the UFC has simply imported the low-level regional Heavyweight scene and lowered the quality of the division in the hopes of capturing the next big draw before they know what they're worth. But this day is not that day, and I would not interrupt the Tafa Bros Super Show by turning it into academia. KARL WILLIAMS BY DECISION. MAIN CARD: CONSUME THE YOUNG MIDDLEWEIGHT: Edmen Shahbazyan (12-4) vs AJ Dobson (7-2) Edmen Shahbazyan cannot catch a goddamn break. "The Golden Boy" had a massive amount of hype as an undefeated Middleweight prospect: His kickboxing was exceptionally sharp, he finished almost every person put in front of him, and at the end of 2019 he became just the second man to flatline Brad Tavares. And then: Wrestling happened. Repeatedly. After getting ground-and-pounded to death three times in a row Shahbazyan's star had fallen considerably, but he wisely took a full year off to recover and improve, and the Edmen that showed up against Dalcha Lungiambula looked considerably better. He starched Dalcha with a flying knee, took the mic, and proclaimed that he was back, better than ever and ready to take over the division, and, shockingly, he promptly got wrestled to death again in his next fight and had his face elbowed into pieces. He's had another ten-month rest, but the UFC wanted to make sure he came back against a kickboxer just to give him the optimal chance for a solid, victorious recovery. This, of course, did not happen. His originally scheduled opponent, the striking specialist Duško Todorović, got himself injured a month out from fight time and AJ Dobson was tapped to take his place. Dobson, himself, was supposed to fight wrestleboxing grappler Tresean Gore last month, but Gore is injured on a seemingly monthly basis, so Dobson had to go back into the pile and wait for an opportunity like this. Can Dobson shoot takedowns? Yes! He does it somewhat regularly! Has Dobson proven to be a particularly effective wrestler? That's a tougher question. He's definitely not a pure wrestling stylist; he likes swinging hammers, sometimes so hard he throws himself off-balance, he likes getting in his opponent's face and trying to pressure him into losing sight of a sneaky single-leg, and once he gets them down, he will sit right the gently caress on top of them until the crowd boos lustily. Does it always work? Well, he averaged 16 seconds of ground control per takedown against noted non-grappler Armen Petrosyan, and that seems like an awful big concern here. And yet: AJ DOBSON BY DECISION. I don't think Dobson will be able to ragdoll Edmen the way his other opponents have, but I do think his pressure game will keep Edmen from using his best range, and in a three-round fight, those seconds add up. BANTAMWEIGHT: Payton Talbott (7-0) vs Cameron Saaiman (9-1) Here, we have the mechanics of the current system and its unfortunately frequent product. Payton Talbott, to be clear, is not bad. He's demonstrated an ability to deal with adversity and get out of bad spots, and hell, that's more than a lot of folks in his position. But it's impossible to separate him from said position. Payton Talbott is the latest in the long-running assembly line of Contender Series winners turned quickly-pushed UFC prospects, and like so many of those prospects he tries to win by knockout whenever possible, most of the fighters on his record are of dubious background, and his UFC debut was a gimme fight against an outmatched opponent that saw Talbott struggling with wrestling anyway. It's a pattern that's been repeating an awful lot recently. And I'm spending so much time on it because Cameron Saaiman is a case study in the way it can fail fighters. Saaiman came into the Contender Series as South Africa's undefeated Bantamweight champion, won his contract with a knockout, and ran up a 3-0 record in the UFC within a year. Which should, ideally, be great! Except those opponents were:
This is the flaw of the marketing machine. You're bringing up prospects who aren't getting the in-cage experience of fighting other genuine prospects. Fighters need to adjust to greater levels of competition if they're going to rise to those levels. Unless, of course, you get enough people through the Contender Series that those levels cease to exist. The future is rough. PAYTON TALBOTT BY DECISION. FEATHERWEIGHT: Billy Quarantillo (18-5) vs Youssef Zalal (13-5-1)At this point, Billy Quarantillo is Donald Cerrone-lite. He's been repeatedly rejected from anything resembling contendership, he hasn't shown much hope of climbing the rankings, but he fights so furiously that he's inevitably a highlight of any card he's on, and that's more than enough to stick around. It also gets you knocked horrifically unconscious by Edson Barboza here and there, but that's just the price of admission. Billy's first year in the UFC was an exceptionally busy and successful one, but since the turn of 2020 he's been stuck in tradeoff limbo, unable to string together back to back wins or losses, leaving him perpetually unable to either gain enough momentum to make a run or lose so much momentum that he gets a gimme fight to tune himself up. This isn't any different. Gabriel Miranda and his silly moustache were supposed to meet Billy this week, which would have meant fighting another man sans momentum, but he pulled out a week ago, and rather than anyone else on the roster, the UFC decided it was time to bring back Youssef Zalal. "The Moroccan Devil" made it into the UFC back in 2020, ran up a three-fight winning streak, followed immediately with a three-fight losing streak, and, in the most unforgivable sin of all, fought to a draw with Da'Mon Blackshear, for which he was immediately fired. What's Zalal been up to since? Primarily, and I admit I still haven't figured out if this is the dumbest or coolest thing I've ever seen, he won last summer's KING OF SPARTA, a one-night, eight-man tournament in which the quarter-finals were contested under boxing rules, the semi-finals under kickboxing rules, and the championship final in MMA. Is that a great display of verisimilitude? Absolutely. Is it a testament to strong competition? Well, his boxing opponent was 1-3, his kickboxing opponent was 4-1, and his MMA opponent in the finals was 0-0. Combat sports: They're just the goddamn best. YOUSSEF ZALAL BY DECISION. FEATHERWEIGHT: Luis Pajuelo (8-1) vs Fernando Padilla (15-5)Opening the show with a barnburner remains one of the greatest strengths of the Contender Series strategy. Luis Pajuelo, whose "Corazón de León" nickname makes me pine for the pro-wrestling tape-trading days of the 90s (and also pop rocks, the Gravis Ultrasound, and the way the Dairy Belle near my school made seasoned french fries), came through the contract mill last Summer as a main-event star out of Argentina (for the record, he is Peruvian), and has made a career out of just punching the poo poo out of everyone placed in front of him, most recently in his contract-winning knockout of "Razor" Robbie Ring (who is not, in fact, related to Nick Ring). He is here to hit people, win fight of the night awards, and inspire parenthetical statements. Fernando Padilla's had a much weirder time. He had gained notoriety as a really solid regional prospect, but his chance to be scouted by the UFC was taken away by Spike Carlyle and the next two years of his career were taken away by COVID. He got back on the radar, got scouted again, and got signed to the UFC back in 2021, only for visa issues to keep him stuck in Mexico for almost two more years. Having finally made his first UFC cagewalk twenty-six months after signing his contract, he stormed the gates with a big upset first-round knockout over Julian Erosa--and then promptly got comprehensively outfought by Kyle Nelson, who just half a year earlier had seemingly been on his way out of the company. It's a tough draw for both men. Padilla looks like the better all-around fighter and he's got a considerable size advantage; Pajuelo fights like a madman and will do his best to deny Padilla the chance to get into his rhythm. FERNANDO PADILLA BY TKO feels correct, but this could be close. PRELIMS: EVERY FIGHT HAS BEEN SHUFFLED LIGHTWEIGHT: Trey Ogden (16-6 (1)) vs Kurt Holobaugh (20-7) Trey Ogden's life is a life of indignity. Despite winning in impressive fashion at a UFC-scouted event, Ogden was only picked up as a late replacement to keep Contender Series winner Jordan Leavitt on-schedule, and after overperforming in that fight he was tapped to puff up another Contender Series winner, Daniel Zellhuber, and after beating Zellhuber he was slated against another Contender Series winner in Manuel Torres, and when Torres couldn't fight, he was replaced by Ignacio Bahamondes, who was, unsurprisingly, another Contender Series winner. When last we saw Ogden it was against Nikolas Motta--no points if you've guessed where his contract came from--and Ogden dominated the entire fight only to have it go up in smoke two minutes before the final bell when referee Mike Beltran hosed up and called Motta unconscious when he clearly was not. Here's the good news: Kurt Holobaugh is not, technically, a Contender Series winner. Which is hilarious, because he was, in fact, one of the first Contender Series winners, a title he lost after it turned out he'd broken USADA rules by rehydrating with an IV. It didn't stop the UFC from signing him, and it didn't stop him from going 0-3 and getting cut without a win, and that, in turn, set him up for his big comeback on The Ultimate Fighter 31 (jesus christ) last year, where he won the Lightweight tournament and earned himself a brand new contract. Which is great! But, uh, he only got cut in 2019. Two of the three people who beat him are still here, and now Holobaugh is closing in on being a 38 year-old at Lightweight. Some part of me would enjoy a Kurt Holobaugh comeback run--which would technically be his second, since he was in the UFC for fifteen minutes back in 2013--but I'm not convinced he has answers for Ogden's all-around game or his outright grit. TREY OGDEN BY DECISION. FEATHERWEIGHT: Ricardo Ramos (16-5) vs Julian Erosa (28-11)Let me drag you back to September, when Ricardo Ramos fought Charles Jourdain: CarlCX posted:Combine his losses, his having fought only once in the last two years and blowing weight by an entire division, and you have a solid recipe for bad will with the fanbase. All of that being said: If Ramos is healthy and on-target, this should be a hell of a fight. Both men are great, technically sound brawlers, although I'd give Jourdain's kicking range an edge of Ramos and his boxing. Ultimately, I think RICARDO RAMOS BY DECISION feels more likely, given the likelihood he pressures Jourdain down behind his power punches, but after the year he's had, Ramos is going to have a lot of ghosts to exorcise, and his looking terrible is by no means off the market. This is a tough one for me. I've been a Ricardo Ramos believer for years, and he absolutely hits hard enough to bounce Erosa off the mat headfirst all over again, but after the last couple years of his career, I'm a little worried, and Erosa is not only a big, heavy hitter, he's a much bigger fighter who'll be much harder to reach. JULIAN EROSA BY TKO, but I don't like it. BANTAMWEIGHT: Miles Johns (13-2 (1)) vs Cody Gibson (19-9) I will never forgive Miles Johns for knocking Anderson dos Santos out of the UFC. You may be a professional fighter and you may have dreams to achieve and a family to feed, but god dammit, man, sometimes you have to recognize that you have an obligation to the gods of combat sports comedy and you let the guy with the hilarious name win. For being an assassin of joy, Miles Johns had his 2023 win over Dan Argueta stricken from the record, as vengeful spirits villainously and magically planted turinabol in his bloodstream and forced him into a half-year's suspension. He's making this comeback as a short-notice replacement: Davey Grant was supposed to be here, but he had to pull out a week ahead of time, leaving Cody Gibson to adjust to Johns instead. Which sucks, because, boy, he's probably going to get trashed. Gibson was the other runner-up for last year's TUF comeback season, and he put up a hell of a fight against Brad Katona in the finals but just couldn't get past him, and after losing his initial UFC run back in 2015, I fear there is a pattern forming. MILES JOHNS BY DECISION. I just don't feel there's anywhere Gibson has a pronounced advantage here. FEATHERWEIGHT: Steven Nguyen (9-1) vs Jarno Errens (13-5-1) Steven Nguyen has fought on the Contender Series three goddamn times, and that's just hosed up. He showed up in 2019, put up a good fight, but got knocked out by Aalon Cruz with twenty-four seconds to the final bell, which is heartbreaking but fair: It's a rough sport and sometimes you lose. He took the obligatory COVID hiatus, came back to the show in 2021, and this time he won, putting in a solid effort against Theo Rlayang. However: He won by decision, so he got nothing. Two goddamn years later he came back for a third time, fought a much more reckless fight against AJ Cunningham, took a ton of punishment but knocked him out, and finally, he was anointed. And so was Cunningham, because unlike 2019, the UFC wants loving bodies. And this is why, even though it's a war we have clearly lost and it borders on the absurd to single out Contender Series competitors when they comprise drat near the majority of fights on a given card, I will still beat this drum until my hands bleed. This is neither normal nor healthy. Rosters getting filled by marketing whimsy isn't good. Fighters openly discussing the way they de-emphasized their own skillsets and defensive sensibilities in pursuit of brawls and knockouts because that's the only surefire way to get signed to the canonical mixed martial arts company is terrible for the sport. From roster quality to fight quality to even the expectations of modern judging, it's having an awful impact on every aspect of MMA, and the way it has simply become the new norm is both terrifying and depressing. If I have not mentioned Jarno Errens, it is because he is made of a fine, ethereal mist, and it is that discorporate form into which he will be once again punched. STEVEN NGUYEN BY TKO. WOMEN'S BANTAMWEIGHT: Montserrat Rendon (6-0) vs Darya Zheleznyakova (8-1) I really wonder how it feels to be an undefeated fighter who's already had a victory in the UFC, and then you get matched up against a woman who hasn't really broken out on the international scene, hasn't really recorded any great wins and actually lost for the first time just one fight ago, and somehow, you, the UFC veteran, are the betting underdog. Montserrat Rendon's debut came last September against Tamires Vidal, and to an extent, I get it: Rendon won, but it wasn't a great win, and she also had to cheat pretty noticeably by yanking on the cage to avoid getting into a bad position on the ground. Darya Zheleznyakova, by contrast, grew out of the Russian regionals and made a move over to France's Ares Fighting Championship, where, in her one non-preliminary, main-card appearance, she, uh, got TKOed by Melissa Mullins, née Dixon. She punched Melissa a bunch! But then she got taken down once and was immediately boned. There sure are a number of angry Russian commenters on Youtube making posts in Cyrillic about how the referee is a bastard who unfairly favors wrestlers, though. I don't know, man. I gotta be honest: I'm not high on either of these prospects. Rendon's win over Vidal wasn't much to write home about and Darya's boxing looks great against people who can't really box, but that ground game is unfortunate. MONTSERRAT RENDON BY DECISION, but I'm not sure I see great things for her in the future. FLYWEIGHT: Igor Severino (8-0) vs André Lima (7-0) We've made it. We've finally arrived at a point where there are so many Contender Series winners that they outnumber the hapless victims the UFC foists upon them. Severino won his contract by knocking out Shooto Brazil champion (at Strawweight! 115 pounds! give me Men's Tinyweight, Dana!) Jhonata Silva back in September, André Lima got his a month later after outworking Rickson Zenidim, and ordinarily this would kick off another episode of the marketing department's quest to get all the Contender Series people wins, but god dammit, man, this is Flyweight and we just don't have the roster. This is a division we almost closed like three times in the last six years, you should be lucky we're hiring you at all. Get out there and fight each other so we know which of you is worth the $12k/12k we took out of the stationery budget to pay you. The future is cold and it contains only the Contender Series. ANDRÉ LIMA BY DECISION. HEAVYWEIGHT: Mohammed Usman (10-2) vs Mick Parkin (8-0) This is a challenge for me. I have noted with some displeasure my tendency to be a Hater, but typically, that means I can easily pick whichever fighter I don't Hate on. I cannot do this here. I am a publicly-stated, card-carrying member of the Professional Haters Club for both of these men. I am bothered to death by Mohammed Usman's low output, slow-motion takedowns, and seemingly only partially-functional, barely-bending knees. But I am far more bothered by Mick Parkin's remarkable ability to be a 6'4" Heavyweight who can land dozens of punches and somehow never risk coming anywhere close to a finish. Like--this is it. This is the big crunch, the end of all things. We have a Heavyweight wrestler who doesn't really wrestle and a Heavyweight boxer whose boxing doesn't really work and one of them is already in his mid-thirties and the other made it to the Contender Series without ever fighting a man with a winning record and at the end of the weekend one of them will be on either a three or four-fight winning streak in the premier Heavyweight division in all of mixed martial arts and their greatest accomplishment will be beating either Mohammed Usman or Mick Parkin. When I die, I have left instructions for my remains to be ground into a powder, and that powder will through the machinations of my henchmen be loaded into the pallets of snow Dana White gets shipped to Vegas so his kids can go sledding for their birthdays without having to leave the house, and my psychic influence will permeate the ground, take root, and grow for years and years until, one day, it seizes control of the UFC's matchmaking department and forces them to book Mick Parkin fights, over and over, until the world learns a lesson about suffering. Oh, wait: We're already loving doing that. Merry Christmas, fight fans. MOHAMMED USMAN BY TKO.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 21, 2024 00:06
|
|
|
LobsterMobster posted:UFC 300 poster featuring the following information https://twitter.com/bravemmaf/status/1770777936829809099
|
|
#
¿
Mar 21, 2024 13:24
|
|
|
https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4056999 GDT for Ribas/Namajunas is up. Prelims in 20ish.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 23, 2024 23:39
|
|
|
never forget the voices of the pastfatherdog posted:Ronda would probably beat the 5-10 male bantamweights but Mighty Mouse is a bad example because he would probably beat the 2-10 male bantamweights and possibly #1 as well.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 25, 2024 19:51
|
|
|
It was during his time with the press afterward rather than his direct in-cage interview, but yeah. We ain't gotta post it here because it was your obvious, awful violent transphobia fantasy bullshit, suffice to say gently caress Julian Erosa.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 26, 2024 22:39
|
|
|
CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 96: NO SUBSTITUTION SATURDAY, MARCH 30 FROM THE BOARDWALK HALL IN ATLANTIC CITY, NEW JERSEY PRELIMS 4 PM PDT / 7 PM EDT | MAIN CARD 7 PM / 10 PM I wrote this thirteen months ago: CarlCX posted:Women make up roughly 25% of the Ultimate Fighting Championship roster. There were 42 UFC events in 2022, 6 of them were main evented by women, and 2 of those main events were co-mains that got bumped up on short notice after men were either hurt or rescheduled. The women got 14% of the main events for the year, but that's only because of booking errors--it was supposed to be 9%. In case you didn't click through: That card from 13 months ago? That was Jéssica Andrade vs Erin Blanchfield. They were supposed to play second fiddle to Cory Sandhagen vs Marlon Vera. But hey: It's more than a year later, Erin Blanchfield and Manon Fiorot are now the top contenders at Women's Flyweight, so they definitely wouldn't do her dirty again, right? This card's main event was Vicente Luque vs Sean Brady. Two periphery-of-the-top-ten Welterweights on one-fight winning streaks were going to main event this card over Erin Blanchfield and Manon Fiorot. We're only here because Brady got hurt. Blanchfield and Fiorot didn't even get their own loving poster. But hey: Two women's main events in a row, right? Say thank you, UFC.  not over it yet. MAIN EVENT: BEST OF THE BEST WOMEN'S FLYWEIGHT: Erin Blanchfield (12-1, #2) vs Manon Fiorot (11-1, #3) I feel like my self-quoting gets overly indulgent (or lazy) sometimes, but I was really, really tempted to build this entire writeup out of old quotes about how baffling the booking of both Erin Blanchfield and Manon Fiorot has been and how wild it is that we got here, but if I don't at least pretend to be professional, I'll never become one. This is a title eliminator. I recognize that I say 'this is a title eliminator' somewhat regularly and, often, I am wrong. Sometimes this is because the UFC said it was and later changed their minds, sometimes it is because I have made the lamentable choice of assuming someone beating a top contender will make them a top contender. Sometimes I am just trying with all my will to wish it into being. This is a title eliminator because it is impossible for anything else to happen. The only person ranked above either of these women is Valentina Shevchenko, who is already fighting for the title. Whoever wins this fight will have absolutely no one standing between themselves and the champion. It would be promotional malpractice to have these women fight each other and not give whoever wins the next crack at the championship. But they might not do it anyway, because boy, if they really wanted to, they could've had both these women fighting for the belt almost two goddamn years ago. And it doesn't even matter if you're prioritizing actual credibility as top competitors or personal marketability. They could have easily claimed both. At the end of 2022, Erin Blanchfield was 4-0 in the UFC. The company had spent an entire year marketing England's Molly McCann as a big British star right alongside Paddy Pimblett, which made it deeply perplexing when they threw McCann and her striking-centric gameplan to the wolves against the ultra-grapply Blanchfield in the middle of some pay-per-view prelims just under the immeasurably important fight that was Ryan Spann vs Dominick Reyes. Blanchfield ran through McCann in a single round. 4-0, multiple submission finishes, just destroyed the most-marketed woman in her division. That could've been enough! But it wasn't. So they threw her at Jéssica Andrade in that aforementioned not-exactly-a-main-event, and Blanchfield destroyed her, too. That could've been enough! But it wasn't. Sure, she's 5-0, and sure, she beat a former champion and two-division title contender, and sure, she's the first person to submit Andrade in eight years, but, uh, we forgot to market it. But don't worry, we'll market you next time! We'll make you a star! They did not make her a star. They had her fight Taila Santos at the rear end end of a card that started at two in the loving morning for the majority of their American audience. It didn't make main event, it didn't make co-main event, it just barely cleared curtain-jerking. Fun fact: The actual co-main event? Ryan loving Spann again. But whatever! Whatever. It's over now. She's undefeated in the company, she's on a six-fight winning streak and she just beat the woman who almost beat Valentina Shevchenko, which was so important to the UFC that they actually fired Taila Santos immediately after the Blanchfielkd loss. That's it! It's done! She's got next, right? There's literally no one else it could be. Well: There's this one lady. See, Manon Fiorot was also undefeated in the UFC. Manon Fiorot was also 4-0. Her striking had seen her score two back-to-back standing TKOs, which immediately raised promotional eyebrows, but she'd been unable to replicate the stoppages and had settled instead for simply outclassing everyone they put in front of her. She beat up future 135-pound contender Mayra Bueno Silva, she beat up former title challenger Jessica Eye, and right at the end of 2022 she was given the acid test that is the permanent 125-pound top contender Katlyn Cerminara, and she outfought her, too. She was now on a five-fight winning streak, she'd beaten two former title challengers back to back, and she'd punched her ticket to a #2 ranking in the division. But--once again--barely anyone had seen her. Almost all of her appearances had been on prelims. Her victory over Silva was television, and then, inexplicably, her fight with Maia was back down on the prelims again. It wasn't until her victory over Cerminara that she made her first pay-per-view appearance. Once again, they had an undefeated top contender, and once again, they hadn't done a thing to make people care about her. And so, almost an entire year later, they had her fight Rose Namajunas in an actual, honest to god co-main event in Paris, Fiorot's home country. It was a can't-lose prospect for the UFC: Either Manon beats a big-name fighter or their biggest Strawweight star gets catapulted into title contention after just one fight at Flyweight. It wasn't quite the fireworks they'd hoped for, but Fiorot won convincingly. So it's 2024. She's 6-0. She's got victories over title contenders at three weight classes. She just beat one of the company's biggest female stars. It's time, right? Well. We're here, aren't we? The UFC wants a threematch between Alexa Grasso and Valentina Shevchenko and it's going to take the entire Summer because it's tied to The Ultimate Fighter, so gently caress it: Have the two top contenders fight each other. And I hate hating it. This is what the sport should be! The most deserving contenders should be fighting! This is the living ideal of what I want out of mixed martial arts and a testament to the entire goddamn point of a ranking system! But it's not happening in a vacuum. We just finished talking about how Rose Namajunas jumped right into top contendership with a single fight. Alexa Grasso got her shot with a shorter, less impressive winning streak than either of these two women. The next Strawweight title contender is 2 for her last 4. Bo Nickal is fighting a 50/50 fighter on the main card of UFC 300. The insidious part of placing marketing over structure is the way structure becomes harder to appreciate. Instead of simply being excited to see the two absolute best contenders in this division test one another, I'm thinking about how it took three years and a dozen fights for them to even get here. I'm thinking about how the company has tried to swap them out for fighters they liked better. I'm thinking about the very real possibility that Valentina Shevchenko wins her title back, a rubber match gets booked, and suddenly the winner of this fight is left in limbo for another nine to twelve months, or, worse, has to defend their contendership all over again. In the end, the future is uncertain and drawn by increasingly coarse hands and all we can do is enjoy the great fights when we get them. And this is a great fight. Erin Blanchfield is the most dangerous grappler in the division. Her top game is crushing, her submission game is deadly and her technique is, even now, still underrated. But her takedowns aren't great. Against most fighters she has to chain attempts together to get her opponents on the mat; against bigger, stronger fighters with competitive grappling games like JJ Aldrich and Taila Santos, Blanchfield comes up short. She went 0 for 14 trying to get Santos to the floor, and while her inexhaustibility is admirable, her success is not. Manon Fiorot is one of the most consistent strikers in the division. She'll go for a takedown here and there, and sometimes she even succeeds, but it's less out of secret French wrestling techniques and more out of people being caught flat-footed by the unlikely prospect of Manon Fiorot taking them down. That and being 5'7" and thus one of the bigger, stronger women in the division goes an awful long way. But she's very rarely had to defend takedowns--to the point that half of her blocked shots came solely from the fight with Rose. Even now, 6-0 atop the ranks, she's fighting the first real, major grappling threat of her tenure. This could be one of these women being exposed--maybe Blanchfield can't deal with Fiorot's striking when she can't get her down, maybe Fiorot can't handle real grappling pressure and Blanchfield grounds her half a dozen times in the first round--and it could be very, very close. At the end of the day my heart says ERIN BLANCHFIELD BY SUBMISSION, but if she can't deal with Fiorot's counter-wrestling or her outright strength advantage, she's in for five rounds of getting chipped to pieces. CO-MAIN EVENT: CAREER MOBILITY WELTERWEIGHT: Vicente Luque (22-9-1, #11) vs Joaquin Buckley (17-6, NR)Vicente Luque is one of the best fighters everyone continually forgets exists, and unfortunately, it's becoming increasingly difficult to blame them, and even more unfortunately, it's not Luque's goddamn fault. Well, mostly. The losing was his fault. Luque was a dark horse in the Welterweight contendership picture heading into 2022, thanks partially to a four-fight winning streak but primarily to his status as an absolute king of horrifying violence. He finished almost everyone he fought, he pulled furious fighting instincts even out of the dying ghost of Tyron Woodley, and having beaten even Belal Muhammad back in 2016, the UFC really, really wanted him to do it again in the modern era and save them the hassle of dealing with Actual Title Contender Belal Muhammad. But he couldn't. Luque got wrestled into paste by Belal, and then he came out on the wrong end of a gunfight with Geoff Neal, resulting in the first knockout loss of his entire career. It was an entire year before Luque stepped in the cage again, and it was against Rafael dos Anjos, and Luque beat him with an uncharacteristically conservative, unusually wrestling-focused gameplan. Which he got a great deal of poo poo for, but honestly: Smart loving choice. People forget this, but Rafael dos Anjos has never actually been stopped at 170 pounds. Robbie Lawler couldn't do it. Kamaru Usman couldn't do it. Leon Edwards couldn't do it. Being strategic against 170-pound RDA is a smart choice, and if anything, it's a credit to Luque that he varied up his gameplan. Unfortunately, every attempt to capitalize on it has fallen through. Luque was due a big-time showdown with Ian Machado Garry in December, but Garry pulled out with pneumonia 48 hours ahead of the fight. Luque was supposed to have a top-ten main event against Sean Brady here, tonight, but Brady pulled out thanks to an injury. And rather than replacing him with another ranked fighter or another top opportunity, the UFC just threw in Joaquin Buckley and demoted the fight to a co-main event. This is not to poo poo on Joaquin Buckley as a fighter. Joaquin Buckley, as a fighter, is a bad dude. But, positionally, he's a massive step down from fighting Ian Garry. Buckley is only a year removed from the two-fight losing streak that saw him outworked by Nassourdine Imavov and outpunched by Chris Curtis, after which he decided being a 5'10" Middleweight was a sucker's game and it was time to drop to 170 and become a human brick. And it's gone quite well for him. His weight cut debut against Andre Fialho was, in fairness, a bit of a gimme--Fialho is a very fun fighter to watch, but he's also critically knockout-prone, had just taken two knockout losses back to back, and was essentially a soft target the UFC was hoping Buckley would get a highlight-reel stoppage against. He didn't disappoint: He reset Fialho's brain to ragdoll physics mode after dropping him with a headkick in the second round. His followup against Alex Morono, while much less dramatic, was even more impressive. Morono's been a prospect-spoiler in the division for six straight years, and Buckley outfought and outwrestled him for fifteen straight minutes. And that's the real exciting growth. Buckley's power was evident long before he was even in the UFC, but his maturing into a more well-rounded, strategically-minded fighter is the real boon of his time at Welterweight thus far. Which leaves us in a weird place. Both of these men are capable of being incredible violence machines, but as we've recently seen, both men have learned to embrace strategy when called for. This is a cosmic coinflip. In one quantum reality, this has fight of the year potential. In another, we're getting fifteen minutes of pumped jabs, spinning kicks from way too far out, and a whole, whole lot of pummeling in the clinch. At the end of the day I'm leaning towards VICENTE LUQUE BY DECISION, but anything at all is possible here. MAIN CARD: THERE AIN'T NO EASY WAY OUT MIDDLEWEIGHT: Bruno Silva (23-10) vs Chris Weidman (15-7) I say this with respect to a good fighter: Bruno Silva's participation in this fight is largely symbolic. It's not that Bruno is a bad fighter; he's fine. You don't knock out Alexander Shlemenko without being good at what you're doing. But every fighter who lives by the guns-blazing, all-out knock-out sword knows they must eventually be laid low by it, and that laying will, in all likelihood, come at the hands of a guy with a Russian name in front of a few dozen ardent fans who will watch anything. Bruno Silva is a fantastically dangerous striker with more knockouts than most people have fights. He's also 1 for his last 5, that victory was a bit of a dubious stoppage against Brad Tavares, and in that same timeframe Bruno's been clubbed-and-subbed by Gerald Meerschaert and outfought by Shara Magomedov, who is an honest to god one-eyed kickboxer who in any rational world would not get medically cleared to fight. Bruno Silva is not here for Bruno Silva. Bruno Silva is here because the UFC needs to give Chris Weidman one last chance. Once upon a time, Chris Weidman was the best of the best. He was an undefeated grappler with shocking power in his hands who took one of the greatest of all time in Anderson Silva, a man who'd run roughshod over the entire planet, and destroyed him twice in a row. He was the second-most successful champion Middleweight had ever seen, and he'd dominated the first. He was the best of his time; that time ended nine years ago. In those nine years, Chris Weidman has lost seven of his last nine fights. Five of those fights ended with him being viciously knocked out and a sixth saw his leg fold in half from the strain of throwing a blocked kick. He took almost two and a half years off, came back last Summer, and promptly got outfought--easily--by Brad Tavares. And the simple act of being kicked again fractured his tibia. Bruno Silva could be any 50/50 fighter in the UFC. He could be Cody Brundage or Julian Marquez or Abdul Razak Alhassan. It could not matter less. This fight is not about Bruno Silva's fortunes: It's about determining whether Chris Weidman is still there anymore. Like so many greats before him, he is at the nadir of his career and deeply believes he can claw his way back out. Where ordinarily I say something about wanting an old emotional favorite of mine to pull out one last moment of glory, I want no such thing here. A Chris Weidman who wins here is a Chris Weidman who's getting destroyed by Khamzat Chimaev or Caio Borralho or whoever else the UFC can build off of him, and I have no desire whatsoever to see it happen. It's better to end it here. Fortunately--unfortunately--I just don't think there's enough of Chris Weidman left to stop it. BRUNO SILVA BY TKO. MIDDLEWEIGHT: Nursulton Ruziboev (33-8-2 (2)) vs Sedriques Dumas (9-1) This has been a real weird career trajectory. Nursulton Ruziboev had long been considered one of the more interesting prospects Russia had to offer (over 155 pounds, anyway), but his break into the UFC came not because of talent scouting or his contendership prospects, but because Contender Series knockout machine Brunno "The Hulk" Ferreira needed a last-minute replacement to stay on an Apex card. Ruziboev knocked Ferreira flat in just over a minute, and having seen his potential, the UFC booked him against another marketing-favored Contender Series superprospect in Caio Borralho--which actually would've been a fascinating fight. But it fell through, which is fairly fortunate for two legitimately talented, legitimately promising potential future contenders. So who, given another chance, is Ruziboev fighting now? Why, he's fighting a promotionally preferred Contender Series prospect! You rube. You absolute jamoke. And by "you" I mean "me," and by "me" I mean "us," for we are all damned together, and by "Contender Series prospect" I mean "Sedriques Dumas, the guy who sucks with all the arrests for assault, DUI and domestic violence." Generally you can tell how invested the UFC is in a fighter by how favorably they matchmake them: Sedriques rolled from the Contender Series into a debut against the 0-2 Josh Fremd, and when he lost that fight he got the 2-3 Cody Brundage, and when he managed to win that one, he graduated all the way up to the 1-1 Abu Azaitar. (Fun fact: Cody Brundage is now 4-4, and will be So, anyway, NURSULTON RUZIBOEV BY TKO. Sedriques, and I mean this with a great deal of open disrespect, doesn't seem great. His best successes come from being bigger and stronger than his opponents. Nursulton is bigger, hits harder, and is a far more capable grappler. I do not particularly believe in Sedriques Dumas and I do not think this will be close. FEATHERWEIGHT: Bill Algeo (18-7) vs Kyle Nelson (15-5-1) I've really had to do some soulsearching about how much I actually like Bill Algeo vs how much I like having an excuse to type "Señor Perfecto" in fight write-ups. I am, officially, still on Team Algeo. My historical emotional weakness has always been for the scrappy, all-around fighters who succeed less by excelling at any one particular thing and more at just being tough motherfuckers who are impossible to stop. Bill Algeo hasn't managed more than two back to back wins in five years, but he also hasn't suffered a stoppage loss in just shy of a drat decade. Is he the best? No. Is he likely to make his way up into the top ranks? Not really. Will I follow him into hell and root for his unlikely successes? With the same heart that beat for Jim Miller in the 2000s. Kyle Nelson is a much more traditional overperforming underdog. At the start of 2023 Kyle Nelson was an embattled veteran who was 1 for 5 over the course of almost five goddamn years, and the UFC, presuming he was a safe out, put him up against "The Korean Superboy" Doo Ho Choi for his big post-military-service comeback fight. They were right--Choi outstruck him 2:1 and should have won a real clear decision--but bad judging combined with a specious point deduction turned the fight into a draw instead. Suddenly, Nelson was no longer on a pure losing streak, and one year later and even more surprisingly, he is now on a winning streak. Somehow, against the odds, Kyle Nelson is riding back to back victories over Blake Bilder and Fernando Padilla. Both times he was a deeply underestimated +200 underdog: Both times he simply outworked both men. I am, of course, making the UFC's mistake and underestimating Kyle Nelson, but I just don't see him--or most people--outworking Señor Perfecto. BILL ALGEO BY DECISION. Get that third win, for once. WELTERWEIGHT: Chidi Njokuani (20-10 (1)) vs Rhys McKee (13-5-1)It's time for a good old-fashioned no-defense showdown. Chidi Njokuani looked all to hell like a new Middleweight prospect after crushing Marc-André Barriault and Duško Todorović in about five minutes combined, but, as with his older brother, World Extreme Cagefighting veteran and homophobically anti-grappling activist Anthony Njokuani, his big punch-powered boat has been dashed on the rocky shoals of that roving villain of the seven seas: Wrestling. Having 80" reach and the ability to punch a hole in a rhinoceros means nothing when Robocop Rodrigues is throwing you on the floor. Chidi's two-fight knockout streak is now a three-fight losing streak thanks to a procession of manhandlers destroying him on the ground. Which is why Rhys McKee is here. McKee, too, was a big, hyped prospect for the UFC--twice! The first time around in 2020 he was a Cage Warriors contender who came over from England, brought his all-action style to the states and was promptly wrestled to death by Khamzat Chimaev and broken in the clinch by Alex Morono. Back to Britain, back to Cage Warriors, and back to the regional title picture--thank you for your service in raising the next generation of English prospects, "Judo" Jim Wallhead, I still miss you--and he got his second crack at the UFC this past September. He was seasoned and wizened by his experience, and this time, no Russian or American wrestling would stop him! No, this time it was the Swiss. Ange Loosa double-legged him into another busted debut. So now Chidi and Rhys have found one another. The world does not understand them and their anti-wrestling ways, but maybe, in this fight, they can get the acceptance they've been repeatedly denied in the UFC. Maybe, finally, someone will think of Julian Lane and simply let them bang. I'm going with CHIDI NJOKUANI BY TKO but honestly it would be the funniest loving thing in the world if Rhys just shot British doubles for 15 minutes while the commentators screamed in agony. PRELIMS: WRESTLING HAS ITS DAY FEATHERWEIGHT: Nate Landwehr (17-5) vs Jamall Emmers (20-7) Nate "The Train" Landwehr feels like a case study in how a single loss in the wrong place can destroy a fighter's momentum altogether. His first year in the UFC was a back-and-forth trade of losses with a single win, but he spent the next two years rattling off a winning streak that wasn't impressive just for its numbers, but its victims. David Onama was a hyped prospect: Nate beat him. Ľudovít Klein is a great fighter who hadn't been stopped since 2017: Nate choked him out. Austin Lingo was a violence machine who'd never been stopped at all: Nate submitted him in two rounds. But Dan Ige shut Nate Landwehr out of their subsequent fight--and Dan Ige is a man who, himself, has been shut out of contendership completely. This is why the UFC is so careful with their preferred prospects: If you fight a gatekeeper and lose, your hype goes with it, and all you can do is go back to fighting other prospects for traction. It wasn't supposed to be Jamall Emmers--it was supposed to be Pat Sabatini, the one wrestler-grappler for whom even I cannot find joy in my heart--but injuries did what they do, and here we are. Up until last November, despite going on four years in the UFC, Emmers' best performance was a split decision loss to Giga Chikadze back when Giga was still a massively marketed prospect. Upsetting the 23-0 Khusein Askhabov in his UFC debut was close, but for one, Khusein's record was pretty spotty, and for two, Khusein is now banned from the sport until 2026 for doping. But last November Emmers finally got his big signature UFC win by punching out Dennis Buzukja in under a minute. I like Nate Landwehr an awful lot. My fetish for the scrappy half-grappler wrecking machines is more or less the centerpiece of my writing, at this point. I think he would've had a real good night against Pat Sabatini. I do not think he's going to be able to deal with Emmers slinging leather at him. JAMAL EMMERS BY TKO. WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT: Virna Jandiroba (19-3, #5) vs Loopy Godinez (12-3, #10)Of all my tired catchphrase schticks--from The Ultimate Fighter (jesus christ) to dramatically overabusing 'Unfortunately,' and ', of course,' to my perpetually incorrect fight picks--none of them are as tired as my constant complaints about the bad booking of the women's divisions, because it's actually, genuinely infuriating. Virna Jandiroba is five years and eight fights deep into her time in the UFC, she's one higher-ranked win or late-injury replacement away from a title shot, and in all that time she's been off the prelims once--and it's because she was fighting Mackenzie loving Dern. Lupita Godinez is ten fights into the UFC--in just three loving years--and it took her eight fights to get off the prelims, too. But she did! They put her on the main card of a Mackenzie Dern card and she won! And then she was back to the prelims for the next fight. And then it was even lower on the prelims after that. Virna Jandiroba is a top fighter who just beat a former top contender in Marina Rodriguez. Lupita Godinez is a big prospect on a four-fight winning streak. This is a top five loving fight in the Women's Strawweight division. It does not rank a Sedriques Dumas main card spot. It does not even rank a featured prelim spot. Loopy was part of the UFC's massively marketed NOCHE UFC experiment in trying to get a death grip on the Latin American audience, and it bought her this. I cannot tell you how tired I am of complaining about this over and over again, and I cannot tell you how desperately I want them to just loving market people responsibly. Ever. LOOPY GODINEZ BY DECISION. The house is rotten. FEATHERWEIGHT: Julio Arce (18-6) vs Herbert Burns (11-4) This is our 'coming back from weird circumstances' fight of the night. Julio Arce was one of the UFC's biggest hot-and-cold prospects, trading back to back wins every single fight for four goddamn years straight and somehow still almost getting ranked out of it anyway, but the second to last time we saw him he missed weight, the last time we saw him he got dominated by Montel Jackson, and since that night in November of 2022 we haven't seen him at all. Herbert Burns is an even better case. He stormed into the UFC in 2019, became an immediate prospect by knocking out Nate Landwehr and retiring Evan Dunham, and then missed weight by almost five pounds and disappeared for two years. He came back in July of 2022, fought Bill Algeo, almost choked him out, and then got battered so badly for the next six minutes that Burns simply couldn't get up off the mat anymore and fell victim to the dreaded TKO (Exhaustion) result. And that, too, was the last time we saw him. So here's two genuinely talented prospects who looked like real contenders who are coming off of 16-20 months on the shelf rehabbing injuries and who, when last we saw them, put forth arguably the worst performances of their careers. The hell do either of them look like now? Is almost two years enough to recover from your body quitting on you completely in mid-fight? Julio's a huge betting favorite, but he's struggled like hell with strong grapplers, and Burns is a drat good one. But it's just so hard to have faith, at this point. JULIO ARCE BY TKO. FEATHERWEIGHT: Dennis Buzukja (11-4) vs Connor Matthews (7-1) I think this is my wall. I'm trying to find the care and it's just not there. Dennis Buzukja came into the UFC as the third replacement in a single fight against Sean Woodson, lost, came back three months later and got dunked on by Jamall Emmers, and is now on-deck to feed the latest Contender Series winner. As of the beginning of 2023, Connor Matthews was 5-1 against fighters with a combined record of 24-115. If that seems suspiciously insane to you, and if you happen to be a particularly attentive reader, congratulations: You found the guaranteed annual appearance of mixed martial arts superjobber Jay Ellis, who as of his latest fight this past January is now 16-109 all by himself. Matthews was on the Contender Series in 2022, lost, won exactly one fight and got invited right back, and thanks to his victory over Jair Farias, he's in the UFC now. And I don't care. I just don't. It's the most replacement-contract of all replacement-contract fighters against a guy who has one win against a genuinely successful fighter in his entire life, and as I try to find the words to explain to you why you should be invested in this fight, all the energy in my body slowly leaks from my fingertips and flows into the cracks between keys in my keyboard and I will have to get canned air out to retrieve it so I can go to the grocery store tomorrow and buy the high fructose corn syrup products that will help me survive watching Dennis Buzukja fight Connor Matthews. CONNOR MATTHEWS BY DECISION. Find me in the tenth bolgia of Hell where I will spend eternity. LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Ibo Aslan (12-1) vs Anton Turkalj (8-3) I'm going to use this fight to illustrate the problem I typically use words for. Ibo "The Last Ottoman" Aslan is, say it with me, a 2023 Contender Series winner. Who did he fight?  Well, that doesn't look too bad. Who did he fight to get there?  Okay, that's a lot worse. Boy, that's much worse. But he's 12-1, right? Who's the one?  This is a rematch? Are you loving kidding me? You got a Contender Series winner whose entire career is built around killing jobbers and you happen to have THE PLEASURE MAN Anton Turkalj still on the roster despite being on a three-fight losing streak and you're putting them back together? Did the world really need this Swedish rematch four years in the making? Were the stakes of the great BRAVE CF 40: MOCHAMED VS SHOAIB so high that you simply had to run it back in the UFC? Burn Light Heavyweight to the ground. Salt the Earth. Remove all memory of Jon Jones from our history. Let us move on. ANTON TURKALJ BY DECISION. WOMEN'S FLYWEIGHT: Victoria Dudakova (8-0) vs Melissa Gatto (8-2-2) Victoria Dudakova has not found the landing pad she was looking for. The UFC brought the undefeated Russian grappler into the Contender Series in 2022 and gave her the 6-4, three-fight-losing-streak-bearing Istela Nunes to victimize in her debut. Technically, she did: Nunes blew her elbow out defending a takedown the wrong way. TKO victory, sure; fan-favorite highlight, not so much. Next on the docket: Jinh Yu Frey, also on a three-fight losing streak, also at an even worse 11-9. Again, Dudakova won, but it was a decision, and she landed multiple illegal strikes, and she still only got a 29-28, and she missed weight. So now--for her third shot--it's Melissa Gatto, who is clearly a much more seriously-intentioned matchup because unlike Dudakova's other opponents, Gatto is only on a two-fight losing streak. But she's also actually good, and a very competent grappler, and a powerful striker, and she just came just a coinflip away from winning a split decision over Ariane Lipski in her last fight. I was excited about Dudakova's prospects after watching tape on her. After her two UFC fights thus far, I've become disconcertingly skeptical. MELISSA GATTO BY TKO feels like an underrated likelihood. MIDDLEWEIGHT: Andre Petroski (10-2) vs Jacob Malkoun (7-3) JACOB MALKOUN BY DECISION. Every time Jacob Malkoun fights I wind up picking him by virtue of his wrestling, and every other time, something goes wrong. He gets sparked by Phil Hawes, or he outwrestles Brendan Allen but loses a decision, or, as in his most recent fight, he utterly dominates Cody Brundage and, less than a minute away from winning a 10-8 round, Malkoun elbows Brundage in the brainstem and loses a disqualification. The universe has sent a clear message about Jacob Malkoun, and I am telling the universe, in no uncertain terms, that I do not care. I will not be moved from this course of action. I know Andre Petroski outgrappled Gerald Meerschaert; that does not remotely matter to the math of my soul. Give me fifteen minutes of Australian single-legs and let me be free. BANTAMWEIGHT: Angel Pacheco (7-2) vs Caolán Loughran (8-1) And here, at the end of all things, we have two prospects the UFC would really like to rescue from loss. Angel Pacheco rode the jobber->Contender Series pipeline so hard that at one point he actually scored two back to back first-round knockouts against the same exact jobber in 71 days, which should probably be illegal, but instead, we are here. He actually lost his Contender Series bout against Danny Silva, who made his own debut just two weeks ago, but Pacheco put up such a memorable fight that he got signed anyway. Caolán Loughran was another of the UFC's great big hopes--an undefeated Cage Warriors champion from Ireland whose almost-all-stoppages record looked great if you ignored that he didn't fight anyone with a winning record until he was already 5-0--and they put him all the way up in the featured prelim spot on the Gane/Spivac card in Paris last year, and thanks to replacements he had to fight the legitimately decent Taylor Lapilus, and Lapilus took his undefeated streak away before he could get it into the spotlight. I said back then that I don't like how Caolán Loughran fights--all offense, no defense, using his chin to excuse his power-punching style--and he heard me, because the moment Lapilus gave him trouble he turned into a cage-clinching machine. Pacheco's aggression is a bit more controlled and his chin is better-tested. ANGEL PACHECO BY TKO.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 27, 2024 23:27
|
|
|
as a fun followup on the topic of 'boy, it seems like the UFC really doesn't care about marketing their top female contenders,' https://twitter.com/BigMarcel24/status/1773061805729853668
|
|
#
¿
Mar 27, 2024 23:53
|
|
|
Why any fight promotion would release Tyson Nam is beyond me. Also, try not to be shocked, but Pavlovich vs Volkov was apparently announced without either fighter agreeing to it, they train together, they're adamant they're not fighting each other unless it's for a title, and now they're both really mad.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 30, 2024 08:37
|
|
|
https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4057477 Blanchfield/Fiorot GDT is up. Prelims begin in 30.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 30, 2024 23:32
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 9, 2024 21:33 |
|
|
 Let us leave this month and its constant unintentional ocular surgery behind. On to April.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 1, 2024 20:54
|
|