- CarlCX
- Dec 14, 2003
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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:
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:
- Steven Koslow, who had never in his life fought a man with a winning record
- Mana Martinez, who was scraping skin-of-his-teeth decisions against people the UFC was about to fire for not being able to cut it
- Terrence Mitchell, who was plucked out of the Alaskan regionals specifically to fill in against Saaiman
Cameron Saaiman isn't bad, either. He's a tough, well-rounded guy. But his introduction to the UFC, thanks to their repeatedly replacing injured opponents with some of the least qualified, soon-to-be-released fighters possible, left him unprepared for Christian Rodriguez, who battered his undefeated record away last October.
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:
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.
Prelims in roughly 20 minutes.
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Mar 23, 2024 23:39
