- CarlCX
- Dec 14, 2003
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Boy, this card came in hot. Main event scratched a month out, card shuffled three times a couple weeks beforehand, and then four people missed weight, one fight got scratched, and the heavyweight highlight got moved to the prelims. Expect some weird scheduling and dead air.
CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 97: BEFORE THE STORM
SATURDAY, APRIL 6 FROM THE EMOTIONLESS PIT OF THE UFC APEX
PRELIMS 12 PM PDT / 3 PM EDT | MAIN CARD 3 PM / 6 PM
We're pretty close to the end of the road, here. UFC 300 is next week, the UFC has put together about as good a card as it is currently capable for the occasion, and we've gone several months without missing a weekend, and that means we're at the 'people who haven't won a fight in four years are on the main card' level of booking on this latest trip to the wonderful Apex.
Will it be fun? Honestly, yeah. There are some solid on-paper scraps to be had. Will you recognize most of the people on it? Almost certainly not.
But that's okay. Everyone's just sort of holding their breath for 300 anyway. Enjoy the hors d'oeuvres.
you can tell i had to hurriedly add a section this morning because this screenshot is in day mode
MAIN EVENT: LOWERED EXPECTATIONS
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Brendan Allen (23-5, #6) vs Chris Curtis (31-10 (1), #14)
Climbing the ranks just ain't like it used to be, man.
Let's get the big point out of the way first: This was supposed to be a different fight. This was, initially, Brendan Allen vs Marvin Vettori. At this point Vettori is more or less the division's retroactive championship gatekeeper: Too good to fall out of the top five, perpetually turned away by champions and top contenders. The UFC really wanted the fight as a way to potentially legitimize Brendan Allen as a top contender.
Which feels like an awfully weird sentence. Brendan Allen's on a six-fight winning streak, the second-longest in the division* behind current champion Dricus du Plessis, and he's finished his last four opponents in particularly impressive fashion. Why on Earth would a guy like that not be pretty thoroughly legitimate already?
*You could count Khamzat Chimaev, but you really shouldn't.
Well, here's the thing about that winning streak.
- Win #1: Sam Alvey, one of the losingest men in UFC history
- Win #2: Jacob Malkoun, the 1-2 wrestler and only man Allen didn't finish
- Win #3: Krzysztof Jotko, who was so important the UFC cut him after the fight
- Win #4: André Muniz, by far Allen's best win, the #11 fighter in an impromptu main event and a big upset
- Win #5: Bruno Silva, an inexplicable step down, who was 1-3 and unranked
- Win #6: Paul Craig, the #13 ranked fighter, who earned that ranking by defeating, uh, André Muniz
To diagram that more succinctly: Brendan Allen beat three unranked guys, then the #11 guy, then an unranked guy, then the #13 guy who was only ranked thanks to beating the guy Allen already beat, and now, Allen is the #6 guy.
Is it about the numbers? Outside of the absolute sickos like me with structural fetishes, no. It's about the way the numbers reflect the actual investment the UFC has made in its fighters. Brendan Allen isn't #6 because he won his way to it, he's #6 because the UFC started investing in him and, in turn, asking the fans to invest themselves in him. But because the UFC handles their matchmaking with all the restraint of a child facing down Christmas presents, and because the Middleweight division is in its hot potato phase, Allen's one fight away from title contention but has yet to fight anyone the fans really care about. André Muniz was a fantastic win, but peripheral to the top ten. Bruno Silva was a warm body. Paul Craig had some popularity, but he was also one fight deep into the Middleweight division after getting wrecked at 205.
Marvin Vettori was their credibility man. But Vettori can't make it. So instead, we have unfinished business.
Chris Curtis is the last man to beat Brendan Allen. This is the UFC's primary justification for the replacement. (You could also say that Sean Strickland is pitching a fit about not getting his title rematch, Israel Adesanya's the next contender, Robert Whittaker just beat Paulo Costa and Jared Cannonier is on the mend, but that's less fun.) When they fought on the Rob Font vs José Aldo card back in 2021 Allen took the first round with kicks and some brief success in the clinch but Curtis punched Allen out midway through the second. It is, easily, the best win of his career.
But that didn't seem like the path Chris Curtis was on. Midway through 2022, Chris Curtis seemed all to hell like the next big Middleweight contender, much moreso than Allen. He punched out Phil Hawes, he punched out Brendan Allen, he made Rodolfo Vieira look silly, he'd gone eight fights without a loss and his capacity for violence seemed incredibly, thoroughly promising. I was real, real high on his chances and I was looking forward to what he could bring to the top ten.
He never quite got there. He fought Jack Hermansson as a fill-in replacement less than a month after the Vieira fight, he lost, and things never righted themselves. He beat Joaquin Buckley, but only after getting battered for a round. He fought Kelvin Gastelum in a bout that controversially included Gastelum getting away with a big ol' unintentional headbutt, but he was losing the fight regardless. He was a round and a half into getting outworked by Nassourdine Imavov when another unintentional headbutt ended the affair on a No Contest, causing Curtis no small amount of consternation.
On the plus side: When we last saw Curtis in January, he won! On the minus: It was against the 5-6 (1) Marc-André Barriault, and it was an extremely close split decision.
To once again be succinct: Chris Curtis has two wins in his last five fights, one of them was a contentious decision against a journeyman and the other a victory over a man who immediately dropped to Welterweight.
For how definitive their first fight was, these men have taken entirely different paths since. However unlucky it is for Allen to lose his shot at the top five is precisely as inversely lucky it is for Curtis to go from fighting fringe top fifteen fighters to a shot at the top of the ranks by way of a man he already knocked out once.
And it is, frankly, an interesting fight. There's an argument to be made that the fortunes both men have received are thanks as much to their skills as their respective opponents. Brendan Allen, whose greatest strength is his grappling, has been largely fighting opponents who are either submission-prone or submission-oriented, either of which is a natural fit for his gameplan; Chris Curtis, as a brawl-friendly counterpuncher, has been dealing with a procession of cleaner, more well-rounded fighters capable of outworking him.
Curtis has been exceedingly tough to take down and, more importantly, keep down. It was Allen's inability to ground him in their first fight that forced him to exchange, and it's those exchanges that ultimately doomed him. Has he improved enough since to either get Curtis off his feet or keep him too uncomfortable standing to really land? Middleweight could desperately use a submission-oriented contender: Is Allen the guy?
I'm not sure if I'm really judging this fight for the realities of the fight or simply rooting for chaos, but: CHRIS CURTIS BY TKO. This still reads like a bad style clash for Allen: I don't see him getting Curtis down any more than he did the first time around, and I haven't seen much improvement in his standup since, mostly because he really hasn't needed to use it. The last time Brendan Allen had to engage in a lengthy standup battle he went 50/50 with Muniz; going 50/50 with Chris Curtis gets you hurt.
CO-MAIN EVENT: UFC 300 IS NEXT WEEK, IT'S FINE
FEATHERWEIGHT: Alexander Hernandez (14-7) vs Damon Jackson (22-6-1 (1))
Two fights from the top of the prelims there's a ranked bout between Norma Dumont, who was on deck to fight for the Women's Featherweight Championship before they killed it, and Germaine de Randamie, a former world champion with victories over three other UFC champions, and our co-main event tonight is a battle to see which man who recently lost to Billy Quarantillo is the least bad.
I like both of these men. I do! At one point in time I thought both of them had genuine contendership prospects. But Alexander Hernandez got hosed all the way up by Donald Cerrone and Damon Jackson was firmly rejected from the top fifteen by Dan Ige. Now we're closing in on mid-2024, Jackson is on the first official losing streak of his career and Hernandez is 2 for his last 5, 4 for his last 10, and hasn't managed back-to-back wins since 2018.
But this is our co-main event, because that, my friend, is the power of the UFC Apex. God bless this hole.
Alexander Hernandez was supposed to be a thing, man. He was this big, powerful Lightweight wrecking machine who barnstormed Beneil Dariush and outworked Olivier Aubin-Mercier in his first two UFC fights, both of which have aged astonishingly well, and no one knew at the time that he'd already hit his peak in the company. It's entirely too easy and entirely too unfair to play armchair analyst as to what went wrong--losing to Cerrone hurt his confidence in his power and pressure, swimming in deeper competitive waters made him drown, when he reached his late twenties the FOXDIE virus accelerated his aging--but, objectively, he never quite recovered. His 2022 drop to Featherweight was an attempt at rejuvenating his contendership chances, but he's 0-2 at the weight class thus far, so, uh, it's not going great.
Damon "The Leech" Jackson had the inverse experience. His first UFC run all the way back in 2014 was catastrophic: He went 0-1-1 (1) and got fired in just seventeen months. He got picked up again on a short-notice replacement contract in 2020 and--aside from getting knocked out by some recently-debuted guy named Ilia Topuria, whoever the gently caress that is--he established himself as a bit of a spoiler. In just two years he went 5-1, including rather dramatic derailings of well-regarded prospects like Kamuela Kirk and Dan Argueta, and his one-minute pounding of Pat Sabatini gave Jackson the chance to finally see if he was a top fifteen Featherweight. The answer, unfortunately, was an extremely clear No. Dan Ige knocked him cold in two rounds, and seven months later Billy Quarantillo took a decision away from him, and now, after all his work, Jackson is back to square one.
It's hard not to read this as a battle of who you believe in less, at this point. When he's on, focused and confidence, Alexander Hernandez is still scary as hell. His punching power is significant. But he gets hit more often than he lands, and his backup plan is clinching and grinding on the cage, and Damon Jackson's opportunism in the clinch is where he does his best work. DAMON JACKSON BY DECISION.
MAIN CARD: 75% OF THESE FIGHTERS DO NOT HAVE WIKIPEDIA PAGES
FEATHERWEIGHT: Morgan Charriere (19-9-1) vs Chepe Mariscal (15-6 (1))
Morgan Charriere has had a considerable change in schedule. "The Last Pirate" made his UFC debut last September as part of the public works program for French fighters surrounding their big corporate return to Paris, and he made the most out of it, showcasing his striking-centric gameplan by thoroughly thrashing the unbelievably Italian Manolo "Angelo Veneziano" Zecchini. It wasn't even remotely close--Charriere made Zecchini whiff on almost 80% of his strikes and put him down with an exceedingly painful kick to the body in just one round. It may, in fact, have been too good, because the UFC matched him up with Seung Woo Choi, who is not only an exceedingly tough prospect in his own right but a good 4" taller and much bigger. When Choi pulled out, there was likely some level of relief at the likelihood that a fill-in opponent would be a little easier.
But it's not, because they gave him Chepe goddamn Mariscal. Mariscal has upset the UFC's apple cart twice, at this point. Last June he was pulled up from the regionals on real short notice to face the UFC's newly-minted brawling machine Trevor Peek, and Mariscal pulled the upset, outwrestling, outworking and even straight-up outbrawling him to take the decision. Two and a half months later he was in Australia as a +200 underdog against rising star Jack Jenkins, and after a tough first round Mariscal threw Jenkins so fast and hard that Jenkins snapped his arm trying to break his own fall. Suddenly the last-minute replacement guy is on a two-fight winning streak thanks primarily to a wonderful mixture of a well-rounded gameplan and an absurd level of grit, and if you have ever read any of these before, you know that makes him one of my instantaneous favorites.
He is, however, the betting underdog again, and I get why. Chepe's hittable, his defense tends to be More offense, and that style's gotten him knocked out repeatedly on the regionals. The success Jenkins was having picking away at Chepe in the first round combined with Charriere's striking clinic against Zecchini makes it easy to see Chepe taking a fall. But I believe in the power of grit more than I believe in the power of kickboxing. CHEPE MARISCAL BY DECISION.
LIGHTWEIGHT: Ignacio Bahamondes (14-5) vs Christos Giagos (20-11)
It's time for round three of the Ignacio Bahamondes arc. Ignacio got a lot of hype coming off his 2020 Contender Series win, but that hype pretty quickly dissipated when he made his UFC debut five months later, missed weight, and got comprehensively outfought by John Makdessi, despite Bahamondes being 12 years younger and 7" taller. Unlike far too many of his peers, Bahamondes went back to the drawing board and learned from his mistakes. His wrestling improved, his distance control improved, and his control over his own offense improved dramatically, and that led him down a three-fight winning streak that had people all bubbling about his prospects again. Up until last summer, when Ľudovít Klein shut him out. Back to start, yet again.
Christos Giagos has had a tougher run of things. Once upon a time his 6-7 record in the UFC could be chalked up to his aborted run back in 2014, but in the last three years Giagos has gone 1-3, and boy, it's been rough to watch. Half of this is because of an absurd strength of schedule. Those three losses came against Arman Tsarukyan, who is right on the precipice of title contendership, Thiago Moisés, who reminded everyone just a few weeks ago that he's a factor in the division, and Daniel Zellhuber, one of the most promising prospects the Contender Series has fielded in years. Not only did he lose to all three, but all three finished him, which is a bad, bad look. He would have been in pink slip territory already were it not for his 2023 knockout over Ricky Glenn inbetween the losses.
But Bahamondes is around a -350 favorite, and it's not hard to see why. Giagos has been getting hit more, hurt more and submitted more, and Bahamondes has been proving himself more than capable of all of those things--and he's also still almost half a foot taller, meaning Giagos will have a much, much tougher time pressuring and bullying him in the clinch to get out of trouble. IGNACIO BAHAMONDES BY SUBMISSION.
 LIGHTWEIGHT: Trevor Peek (9-1 (1)) vs Charlie Campbell (8-2)
This is going to be really, really stupid, and I mean that as the highest form of flattery. One of the best parts of having been a mixed martial arts fan for so long has been charting the evolution of the sport and its level of technique. Trevor Peek is an aberration in this pattern. Trevor Peek slipped into an arctic crevasse during a Spike TV marathon of Stripperella in 2004 and was reconstituted from a block of ice made out of pure Axe Body Spray. Trevor Peek sprung fully-formed from the forehead of Eric "Butterbean" Esch as the rightful champion of the intergalactic toughman league that never was. Trevor Peek learned to throw punches by watching remorseful fishermen throw marlins back into the sea in a desperate attempt to save their families from the wrath of Poseidon. Trevor Peek exists out of step with time and space, and he is working his way back into it one wide, sweeping bolo strike at a time.
Charlie Campbell is close, though. He showed up on the Contender Series in 2022 as a hopeful prospect out of the Ray Longo/Chris Weidman anti-eyeball camp, but his plan of throwing all caution to the wind and furiously windmilling his way towards victory ultimately got him knocked out by Chris Duncan. But don't worry, kid: Dana White appreciates your moxie, and he's gonna keep you on the shortlist of people to call up for short-notice last-minute replacement contracts for minimum wage. Hey, look at that! It's a year later and you're in the UFC. Campbell welcomed Alex Reyes back after six loving years away from the sport, and Reyes learned the hard way that fighting at 30 is a lot easier than fighting at 36, particularly when you've been out of pratice the whole goddamn time. Campbell polished him off three and a half minutes and it was not at any point competitive.
This is a real, real good fight for Campbell. Peek's going to engage him in exactly the manner Campbell wants to be engaged, Campbell's got a healthy size advantage that should allow him to kite Peek around the cage at will, and a few good counters is all it takes for Charlie Campbell to end any man's night. This should be open and shut, and it shouldn't take long. So, of course, I'm ignoring all of that. TREVOR PEEK BY TKO. I respect and honor the old ways.
PRELIMS: MATCHES YOU'D THINK WOULD HAVE HAPPENED ALREADY
WELTERWEIGHT: Court McGee (21-12) vs Alex Morono (23-9)
Court McGee has been an institution of the sport for so long, and watching his career seemingly come to an end just has a sense of melancholy to it. McGee's got 14+ years with the UFC, he's just one loss out from a 50/50 record, he's shared the cage with three separate world champions and he even beat one of them. His tough, scrappy, energizer-bunny strategy towards fighting has carried him through drat near two dozen fights on the biggest stage in mixed martial arts. But talent improves, chins crack, and the problem with being known for your toughness is the damage you accumulate eventually catches up with you. Between his debut in 2007 and the dawn of 2022 Court McGee was stopped only once, and it took one of the sport's biggest punchers in Santiago Ponznibbio to do it, and even then McGee wasn't out, just unable to defend himself. Court McGee has fought once every eleven months since then, and that's because in his last two outings he's gotten loving flattened in a single round. The good news is Alex Morono isn't really much of a power puncher; the bad news is he's far enough above McGee's present league that it makes this matchup downright baffling. Morono's an ultra-solid wrestleboxer who's been drat near ranked at Welterweight twice. Where McGee has struggled to scrape together wins to the tune of going 3-7 since 2016, Morono has been a divisional gatekeeper for drat near that entire time. His only losses in almost four years came from Joaquin Buckley, the newly-minted #11 in the world, and a knockout loss to the same Santiago Ponzinibbio who put McGee down--except Morono had beaten him for two and a half rounds before finally falling short. And Buckley couldn't even stop him! Morono may have fallen off the precipice into the chasm of gatekeepers, but he's still a hell of a gatekeeper.
In short: ALEX MORONO BY TKO. In some respects McGee's a tough style matchup for Morono, as he's just as much of a hard-nosed pressure machine, but I just don't think he's got enough left in the tank.
HEAVYWEIGHT: Łukasz Brzeski (8-4-1 (1)) vs Valter Walker (11-0)
Every week I have something unkind to say about the Heavyweight division, and baby, I'll stop doing it when they stop giving me so many goddamn reasons. Łukasz "The Bull" Brzeski has been one of the UFC's bigger Contender Series busts, to the point that the win that got him his contract did not, legally, happen, thanks to his pissing hot for clomiphene. But hey: He's a Heavyweight, sign him anyway. And then he managed to lose a split decision to Martin Buday--which he probably should've won, but it's much funnier this way. And then he got outwrestled by Karl Williams in a fight where he gassed to total exhaustion about seven minutes into the fight. And then he got knocked out by Salsa Boy. It's 2024, Łukasz Brzeski is 0-3 (1) during his time with the company, and they are, officially, tired of him.
Which is why he's welcoming Valter Walker to the fold. "The Clean Monster" is another of those living testaments to the big boys of the sport. He's undefeated! He's got tons of finishes! He's a regional champion! And the majority of his victories came from guys who, respectfully, aren't that great. His championship victory came against Alex "The Spartan" Nicholson, who is an accomplished Heavyweight, a two-time PFL season competitor, and best known for washing out of the UFC as a Middleweight. But Valter Walker is not only an undefeated crusher of regional Heavyweights, he is the younger brother of everyone's favorite self-injuring knockout machine, Johnny Walker. He is, in fact, ever so slightly smaller than Johnny, but Johnny called Light Heavyweight when they were kids, so what can you do.
It's the Nogueira Brothers for a new generation. VALTER WALKER BY TKO.
WOMEN'S BANTAMWEIGHT: Norma Dumont (10-2, #11) vs Germaine de Randamie (10-4, NR)
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.
I wrote that a week ago. I wrote that a week ago.
I know I spoiled that I was going to complain about this already, but come the gently caress on, man. In another reality, this was a championship bout. Norma Dumont was the next title contender at Women's Featherweight, she's 6-2 and she's been successful enough that the UFC ranked her at a weight class she's never made under their banner. Germaine de Randamie was the first-ever UFC Women's Featherweight champion, she was hilariously stripped of the belt for refusing to fight Cyborg Santos at the weight class made specifically for her, and she's making a career comeback after taking three and a half years off to deal with injuries and have a baby. Norma only has two losses in her entire career; Germaine has victories over three separate Women's Bantamweight champions and, just for good measure, PFL's champion at both Lightweight and Featherweight, Larissa Pacheco. Both of these women are fantastic, top-class, best-in-the world fighters at a weight class that no longer exists. Which is even more baffling, because Holly Holm, herself a former Featherweight title contender, and Kayla Harrison, who's spent almost her whole career at 155 pounds, are fighting next week. Both of these things could have easily been used to reignite Women's Featherweight! The UFC, which is currently so precious with its championships as to promote a brand new fake BMF title fight twice a year, could have put a belt on either Kayla Harrison, their first big women's signing in a decade, Holly Holm, whom they are inexplicably obsessed with putting into title matches, Germaine de Randamie, one of the only other women they have that anyone might have heard of, or Norma Dumont, who is, at the very least, extremely credible.
Instead everyone's getting shoved into Women's Bantamweight and a fight like this is down on the prelims of a card with an Alexander Hernandez co-main event. poo poo sucks, man. GERMAINE DE RANDAMIE BY DECISION, but that obviously depends highly on how three years on the shelf and having a goddamn child treated her.
BANTAMWEIGHT: Victor Hugo (24-4) vs Pedro Falcão (16-3)
Victor Hugo is making it into the UFC with all the grace of an angry horse trying to land a Sopwith Camel. When he tore up a man's knee on the Contender Series he seemed all to hell like one of the better prospects the show has managed to field: Well-rounded to the point that his KO/Submission/Decision ratio is a near-even distribution, undefeated since 2014, and while some of his fights are unfortunate regionals, he's proven himself against some real, legitimate competition. Which is why it was deeply unfortunate when he blew weight for his UFC debut in November and got the fight cancelled. To some extent I blame the UFC for this--his Contender Series fight was almost exactly one month beforehand, and asking a fighter to fight, win, go home, recover, cut weight and fight again in four weeks is tough--but he signed the contract and suffered the consequences. His rebooking here was supposed to see him fight Alatengheili, but he got scratched during fight week, and on Wednesday morning, on 72 hours' notice, Pedro Falcão stepped up. "Pedrinho" had racked up a wholly respectable if unspectacular record as a beater of journeymen out in Shooto Brasil when the UFC tapped him for the Contender Series in 2021, but despite pounding out James Barnes and earning his obligatory violent stoppage, Dana White was not pleased, and signed every person that night except Pedro. Pedro more or less threw up his hands and left the sport for two years, but a regional win got him back on the radar last November and the insatiable need for fill-in fighters got him here.
Congratulations on making it, Pedro. This is, in theory, actually a very good fight. Both men are genuine prospects and both are good just about everywhere, and I'm tempted to pick Pedro for the big upset here, given how solid his grappling is and how much of Hugo's best work comes from aggressively hunting submissions. But a three-day turnaround is a big, big ask in a situation like this. VICTOR HUGO BY SUBMISSION.
WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT: Cynthia Calvillo (9-6-1) vs Piera Rodriguez (9-1)
I have been a Cynthia Calvillo fan for a very long time, and if I'm being really, truly honest, I'm kind of astonished she's still here. Cynthia was a real successful fighter at Women's Strawweight, but difficulties with the weight cut led her to bump up to 125 pounds, and, boy, it really did not work out for her. Even after dropping back down Cynthia's on a five-fight losing streak, which might actually be a company record for the women's divisions, and her last two losses may have been split decisions, but boy, they really shouldn't have been. After three loses I figured losing to Nina Nunes would get her cut, and after four losses I thought losing to Loopy Godinez would get her cut, and after five losses, I realize she is here specifically to lose to people the UFC likes. Piera "La Fiera" Rodriguez was a 2021 Contender Series baby and they dutifully booked her into real advantageous matchups right up until, after two wins, Gillian Robertson pretty easily outgrappled her and scored an armbar and a verbal submission. Rodriguez still says she didn't tap, but for one, her defense seemed a bit dubious, and for two, she was getting completely mauled on the ground anyhow.
Calvillo's still not an easy out! She's still tough, and while those last couple of fights shouldn't have been splits, she did stay competitive for three full rounds in both. I'm still going with PIERA RODRIGUEZ BY DECISION, but counting Calvillo out entirely is a mistake, even at five straight losses.calvillo missed weight, fight cancelled
BANTAMWEIGHT: Jean Matsumoto (14-0) vs Dan Argueta (9-1 (2))
Sometimes it's not even remotely subtle, and honestly, I've come to appreciate it. Jean Matsumoto is one of the most promising prospects to come through the Contender Series in awhile. I know this is ordinarily where I say withering things about bad competition and stand-and-bang fighting styles and every other thing I have become aggressively tired of complaining about, and I have the week off, because by god, this is the rare instance of the Contender Series actually succeeding at its goal. Matsumoto is one of the best Bantamweights out of Brazil and a genuinely fantastic prospect. He's got an extremely well-rounded gameplan that alternates between chopping leg kicks and quick, powerful takedowns, he manages to move both his head and his guard, and he's not just undefeated, but undefeated against some actual competition. It's a miracle! The sacrificial fight is not. Dan Argueta ain't no fortunate one. Despite being an LFA champion Argueta was not a talent-scouted fighter, he was a late-replacement fighter. The UFC booked him on short notice to keep Damon Jackson on a card, Argueta dutifully lost, Argueta got his revenge against his own short-notice replacement five months later, and since then it has been nothing but legal chaos. Last June saw Argueta fight Ronnie Lawrence and submit him with a guillotine in just two and a half minutes--except Lawrence was actually completely conscious and the referee hosed up, so it was a No Contest. Three months later Argueta got pretty handily outfight by Miles Johns, but Johns failed a a drug test, so that, too, became a No Contest. Dan Argueta is four fights deep into his UFC tenure and half of them didn't technically happen.
It's a complication the company does not want to deal with. Dan Argueta is a wholly capable fighter and he is here to put over the new guy, and, in all likelihood, he will. JEAN MATSUMOTO BY DECISION.
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Dylan Budka (7-2) vs César Almeida (4-0)
I sure am glad I said all those nice things about the Contender Series, because man, gently caress the Contender Series. Dylan Budka--"The Mindless Hulk," which, admittedly, is at least a level of directness I appreciate--is a regional guy who vacillates between winging rear-lead uppercuts and clinching for dear life. He has lots of word tattoos, he was fighting a 2-5 guy just two weeks before his Contender Series appearance, and when I did tape research on him the first strike I saw him land was a punch to the dick. César Almeida has four fights. To be clear: He's an accomplished kickboxer in his native Brazil. He won a bunch of kickboxing fights. But in MMA he's 4-0, two of his opponents were 0-0, and his last fight prior to the Contender Series was against professional jobber Danilo "Guerreiro" Silva, who is 6-33-1, with just a whole bunch of suspicious first-round losses on his record, often within days of each other. But by god, we need our strikers. Can't get enough of those strikers.
I am resorting to the hope of the mindless. Save me, Budka. Save us all. DYLAN BUDKA BY SUBMISSION.
WOMEN'S BANTAMWEIGHT: Melissa Mullins (6-0, #15) vs Nora Cornolle (7-1, NR)
Are we at the point where talking about the tire fire that is Women's 135 is passe? Melissa Mullins (née Dixon) is a talented British grappler who's 1-0 in the UFC, and that one victory was over Irina "Russian Ronda" Alekseeva, who was herself 1-0 in the UFC after beating the extremely unranked Stephanie Egger in a fight where Irina missed weight by five pounds. For beating a 1-0 woman who didn't even make the Bantamweight division, Melissa Mullins is now the #15 Women's Bantamweight in the world. Nora Cornolle is a French striker who made her own debut in Paris last September, and she, by contrast, beat the 4-2 Joselyne Edwards. Edwards had also missed weight in her last two attempts at making 135, but she was, to her credit, on a three-fight winning streak, and Cornolle won what could, arguably, be called a hometown decision, but for one the media scorecards were pretty evenly split between either competitor, and for two, Edwards had just been the beneficiary of one of the biggest robberies of the year in her last fight, so no one was sympathetic.
And this is our ranked fight. This is the hole they're trying to dig Women's Bantamweight out of. It's going to take years to repair the damage left by their complete mismanagement of the roster and their inability to promote a single goddamn person, let alone fill in the structure beneath them. MELISSA MULLINS BY SUBMISSION.
Prelims begin in 30. I'm probably going to miss half this card in a rare attempt to be social, so I hope someone enjoys it for me.
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Apr 6, 2024 19:36
