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It's not too late to pretend it's still April. You have the power. Jump through the time hole here. Welcome to May. You are one step closer to being halfway done with this grinding marathon of a year. Suffuse your pain through the glories of punchsports. This month's thread title courtesy of Kensei. 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 BKFC and KSW and Logan Paul inexplicably refusing to leave boxing alone, there's space for everything. THIS MONTH'S PUNCHSPORTS EVENTS 
IS THERE ANY NEWS https://twitter.com/arielhelwani/status/1519346551855927297Welcome to the MMA streaming wars. Amazon is going to use ONE as their big live sports property and ONE is going to adopt some level of US primetime broadcasting to start directly competing with the UFC on their turf. First shows will be starting in early 2023. https://twitter.com/MMAJunkie/status/1517990460324827136After knocking Dillian Whyte the gently caress out, Tyson Fury welcomed estranged UFC champion Francis Ngannou into the ring to hype a fight between the two. Ngannou now says that fight is a necessary component of any future UFC contract negotiations. Whether this is a thing they really want to do or they're just playing hardball for said negotiations, it was a hell of a power move. https://twitter.com/marcraimondi/status/1519714103694082049Colby says Masvidal's suckerpunch gave him a brain injury. Make your Schaub jokes now. https://twitter.com/MMAJunkie/status/1519078269336838146Jon Jones vs Stipe for the interim heavyweight title, which was initially intended for Spring and then Summer, is now being targeted for Fall, which will then become Winter, and later, Never. WHERE ELSE CAN I TALK TO LIKE-MINDED PEOPLE ABOUT VIOLENCE? Any of the following hangouts:
DO WE HAVE OTHER COMMUNAL THREADS? So many.
WHAT IF I HATE FORUM SOFTWARE? Through the magic of instant messaging and 40 year-old technology, you have, at a minimum, two exciting options!
 Disclaimer: These are unofficial offsite chatrooms, somethingawful's rules and liability do not extend to them, and complaining about discord stuff is still offsite drama posting
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WHAT HAPPENED IN APRIL Everyone got sad, but then a bunch of cool stuff happened. Let's just get it out of the way. UFC 273: Volkanovski vs The Korean Zombie kicked off the month on April 9, and there was a lot of cool poo poo like Alexey Oleynik coming back from getting the poo poo kicked out of him to get a scarf hold in 2022, Khamzat Chimaev facing the first real adversity of his career in an absolute war against Gilbert Burns and Aljamain Sterling beating Petr Yan and making Dana White very mad, but the main event was the sort of inevitable tragedy you see in disaster movies as Alexander Volkanovski put a painfully one-sided beating on Chan Sung Jung, to the point that Jung is now considering retirement. Bellator pulled up next with Bellator 277: McKee vs Pitbull 2 on April 15. As happens so often, Bellator's attempt at a huge starmaking show blew up in their faces. The year-long light-heavyweight tournament culminated in a showdown between champion Vadim Nemkov and Corey Anderson, which ended in a no-contest after an accidental headbutt just five seconds before the fight could have gone to a technical decision, and the coming-out party for Bellator's newest megastar A.J. McKee ended with him losing his championship and his undefeated streak back to Patricio Pitbull. Then it was off to UFC on ESPN: Luque vs Muhammad 2 on April 16, which overdelivered on action with a bunch of surprisingly good fights, knockouts and submissions, hilariously including two separate technical decisions, but the card will be remembered primarily for a main event which saw Belal Muhammad secure his place in the top five at welterweight with a very smart if not particularly fun gameplan that successfully neutralized murder machine Vicente Luque. And then Rizin 35 happened on April 17 and just did a bunch of wild poo poo. Spike Carlyle began his career as a Japanese superstar, 52 year-old Tsuyoshi Kohsaka retired for the third time after knocking out a karateka half his age, Seika Izawa got her much-deserved rematch with Ayaka Hamasaki and won the atomweight championship, Juntaro Ushiku continued to piss off Rizin by holding onto its featherweight title, and Roberto de Souza defended the lightweight title and avenged his only career loss with an incredibly loving slick backpack ride triangle armbar over Johnny Case. The Professional Fighters League began its 2022 season with PFL 1 on April 20. UFC vets Omari Akhmedov and Rob Wilkinson got violent knockout wins on the undercard but fellow debuting vet Stevie Ray fell to Alexander Martinez and 2019 PFL champion Emiliano Sordi was knocked out by Cory Hendricks; the main card saw Olivier Aubin-Mercier take a narrow split, forum superhero Shoeface get a brabo choke in thirty seconds, Raush Manfio took out Don Madge, and in the main event Clay Collard welcomed a particularly cocky Jeremy Stephens to the PFL by punching the crap out of him for three rounds. Bellator pulled a double-header that weekend. First came Bellator 278: Velasquez vs Carmouche, an April 22 benefit show for THE TROOPS, Which is to say it was a pretty weak card mostly made of people you haven't heard of. Grant Neal won and Danny Sabatello and Enrique Barzola won wildcard qualifiers for the bantamweight grand prix, but the only thing anyone took away from the card was the ending of its main event, as Juliana Velasquez lost her flyweight championship and her undefeated streak to the Girl-Rilla herself, Liz Carmouche, in a stoppage universally hailed as "oh my god what did you do," as bearded wonder Mike Beltran called a TKO after a handful of distressingly small elbow strikes from the crucifix. Velasquez is appealing, but she's not gonna get it. The card they actually cared about, Bellator 279: Cyborg vs Blencowe 2, came the next night on April 23. It was a much bigger affair, with forever awesome Goiti Yamauchi getting yet another slick submission, Yancy Medeiros winning a brawl of the year contender, Patchy Mix continuing to depress everyone by taking a decision over Kyoji Horiguchi, Justine Kish ruining a bunch of poop jokes by dominating Ilima-Lei Macfarlane and Raufeon Stots knocking out Juan Archuleta to become the interim bantamweight champion. The main event was practically an afterthought, with the only real surprise being Arlene Blencowe surviving the full five rounds and at a few points managing to back Cyborg up, even if she never put much damage on her whilst being thoroughly trounced. April 23 also included UFC Fight Night: Lemos vs Andrade. which was a loving violence festival. Mike Jackson won a DQ after Dean Barry used his eye sockets like a bowling ball, Aoriqileng knocked out Cameron Else, Tyson Pedro murdered Ike Villanueva, Sergey Khandozhko destroyed Dwight Grant, and four out of five main card bouts ended in first-round submissions: Marc-André Barriault's guillotine over Jordan Wright, Charles Jourdain's guillotine over Lando Vannata, Claudio Puelles' kneebar over Clay Guida and Jéssica Andrade's absolutely ridiculous standing arm triangle against Amanda Lemos. (Maycee Barber won a really boring decision somewhere in there, too.) Our penultimate event of the month was April 28's PFL 2, which featured the first round of their featherweight and heavyweight brackets, and which was, with respect to the athletes, kind of terrible. Most of the fights went to very slow, anticlimactic decisions, including a particularly awful fight between Chris Wade and Lance Palmer in the co-main event, one fight went to a technical decision thanks to a headbutt AND the wrong guy won, Renan Ferreira managed to land a pretty cool face-kicking knockout over a heavyweight, and last year's champion Bruno Cappelozza won his squash match main event against Stuart Austin. We closed the show with April 30's UFC on ESPN: Font vs Vera, which was loving violent. Shanna Young took out Gina Mazany, Francisco Figueiredo hit our second kneebar in as many weeks, Alexandr Romanov hit a saito suplex on Chase Sherman, Joanderson Brito knocked Andre Fili stupid in forty seconds, Andrei Arlovski took an incorrect yet hilarious split decision victory over Jake Collier, and in the main event, Marlon Vera and Rob Font had an absolute war that saw Font outbox Chito all night, outlanding him 273-167, and yet at the end of the night Chito looked amazing and had never been in trouble while Font's face was beaten to a pulp and he'd nearly been knocked out four times. Vera took the decision and the first top five ranking of his career. WHAT'S COMING IN MAY It's going to be a little more sedate of a month but it's starting with a big ol' weekend. We kick off with Rizin Landmark 3, one of their minor-series cards, on May 5. There are some good scraps here, as former Shooto titlist Kazuma Kuramoto meets longtime veteran and brawling machine Mamoru Uoi and the main event is a hilarious squash match between the actually good, 29-5-1 Kleber Koike Erbst and the not particularly good, 6-5 Kyohei "KENKA BANCHO" Hagiwara, but I don't want to lie to you: I'm including it mostly because there's a fight between two guys named Yushi and Tony Tony Zenki. A B-league double-header comes at us the next day on May 6, starting with PFL 3. This is PFL's attempt at getting people to actually pay attention, which is something of an odd choice given that it's their last card for a month and a half, but they've stacked it with their biggest stars: Gleison Tibau, Julia Budd, Brett Cooper, Rory MacDonald, Anthony Pettis, Ray Cooper the Third and promotional Rouseyite Kayla Harrison will all desperately try to get a higher rating than the Bellator-rear end numbers they've been pulling. Speaking of said devil, Bellator 280: Bader vs Kongo 2 also features on the day. Thibault Gouti is here for some reason and I've missed typing his name, but mostly, Lorenz Larkin is back after a year off, Bellator will continue to try to find international stardom with Søren Bak, Yoel Romero is fighting Our three-day marathon comes to a close on the card of the month: UFC 274 on May 7. This is the kind of giant blowout card that serves as the reason all the UFC cards in the preceding and following several weeks kind of suck. On the prelims alone: Francisco Trinaldo vs rising Danny Roberts, Blagoy Ivanov returns against Marco Rogério de Lima, Brandon Royval and Matt Schnell fight to get in potential title contendership, Macy Chiasson and Norma Dumont fend for 145 contendership, Randy Brown and Khaos Williams punching the crap out of each other. On the main card: Donald Cerrone vs Joe Lauzon and Shogun Rua vs Ovince Saint Preux in depressing comedy fights of yesteryear, followed by Michael Chandler vs Tony Ferguson, Rose Namajunas defending the strawweight championship against Carla Esparza, and in our main event, Charles Oliveira defends the lightweight championship against Justin By God Gaethje. And we're off to London the next week as Bellator attempts the superstar crowning they've been matchmaking around for literal years. Bellator 281: MVP vs Storley comes on May 13. There's a big, long preliminary card with some folks like Daniel Weichel and Charlie Ward on it, but the main card is the show: Paul Daley's retirement fight against Wendell Giácomo, women's flyweight contender Denise Kielholtz against Japanese star Kana Watanabe, Lyoto Machida vs Fabian Edwards, and in the main event, as welterweight champion Yaroslav Amosov is off fighting the Russian invasion of his homeland Ukraine, top contenders in American wrestler Logan Storley and British striking jackass Michael "Venom" Page will fight for an interim championship. A day later on May 14, it's UFC on ESPN: Błachowicz vs Rakić. There are a lot of grasping-to-stay-afloat fights on this card--Ryan Spann vs Ion Cuțelaba, Angela Hill vs Virna Jandiroba, Michael Johnson vs Alan Patrick--but the big deals are Katlyn Chookagian welcoming Amanda Ribas back to flyweight in a fight with potential contendership implications, and the main event, where Jan Błachowicz will face Aleksandar Rakić to determine the next contender to the light-heavyweight championship after Texieira/Procházka next month. ONE Championship will be live on Youtube the next week with ONE 157: Petchmorakot vs Vienot on May 20. As always with ONE this is a big ol' mixed card: Three MMA contests, including the return of the mononymic Wondergirl, five muay thai bouts for the year's flyweight tournament, including Rodtang, British champion Jonathan Haggerty, Japanese champion Taiki Naito and the incredibly fun to type Superlek Kiatmuu9, two submission grappling matches as Garry Tonon and Shinya Aoki individually take on the Ruotolo brothers, and two muay thai championship defenses at strawweight and featherweight, as Prajanchai P.K.Saenchai defends against Italian champion Joseph Lasiri and Petchmorakot Petchyindee defends against French star Jimmy Vienot. Finally, we end on a real weird card: UFC Fight Night: Holm vs Vieira on May 21. Felipe Colares meets Chase "The Dream" Hooper, Duško Todorović and Chidi Njoukuani try to scare each other to death, Jailton Almeida moves up to heavyweight to face Parker Porter, Eryk Anders refuses to leave us alone and meets Park Jun-yong, Santiago Ponzinibbio tries to get his career back on track against the eternally weird Michel Pereira, and in the main event, Holly Holm and Ketlen Vieira will try to set a new record for least amount of strikes thrown with any potential to connect in a fight. CarlCX fucked around with this message at 20:59 on May 1, 2022 |
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CURRENT UFC CHAMPIONS Heavyweight Champion, 265 lbs   Francis Ngannou - 17-3, 1 DefenseAfter getting dicked about by the UFC for most of 2021, Francis "The Predator" Ngannou met both the biggest challenge of his career and the nexus of his promotional challenges in the form of a championship unification match against heavyweight striking savant and (bullshit) interim champion Ciryl Gane. For all of his punching prowess, Ngannou found himself getting pretty soundly outstruck and on the road to a decision loss--and he adjusted by channeling Mark Coleman and repeatedly tossing Gane on his rear end with double-legs and powerslams. In what was somehow a simultaneously incredible and disappointing performance, Francis Ngannou won a unanimous decision, notched his first title defense, turned away his stiffest challenge, and went home with his future one great big question mark. He's made a lot of noise about going into boxing thanks to the UFC's refusal to stop paying him peanuts, but his contract situation is complicated by his standing as a champion, particularly as he's now had knee surgery to repair his ACL and MCL and will be sitting out the remainder of the year on medical leave, which could mean dealing with a contract freeze. It all depends on how lovely the UFC decides to be to him, but the best gauge for that is Dana White's auspicious absence at the post-fight belt ceremony and post-card press conference. In response, Francis Ngannou appeared with Tyson Fury after his high-profile destruction of Dillian Whyte and the two hyped a potential boxing vs MMA fight between them. The UFC is pinning its hopes on a Jon Jones/Stipe Miocic interim championship match later this year, but that requires relying on Jon Jones. Light-Heavyweight Champion, 205 lbs   Glover Teixeira - 33-7, 0 DefensesMost folks did not see this one coming, and I was definitively one of them. Glover Teixeira is MMA's new old-man punching champion, a fighter with 20 years banked in the sport who won his first world championship just two days after his 42nd birthday. Teixeira was actually first scouted by the UFC back in 2008, but illegal residency meant having to return to Brazil for three years while awaiting a work visa. He made his UFC debut in 2012, immediately rattled off five dominant wins thanks to heavy hands and a terrifying top game, and promptly got his poo poo hosed all the way up by Jon Jones. He settled into a role as a reliable, aging gatekeeper--a win over OSP here, a mauling by Alex Gustafsson there--but in the smoking crater that is the post-Jones, post-Cormier light-heavyweight division he put together a five-fight winning streak that included breaking former title challenger Anthony Smith's teeth and choking out Thiago Santos, and despite being a +300 underdog, he shocked the world by dominating and submitting standing champion Jan Błachowicz in just two rounds. He was originally scheduled to defend his moment in the sun against genuine madman Jiří Procházka at UFC 274 on May 7, but for no reason the UFC bothered to tell anyone it got bumped down a month to UFC 275 on June 11. Middleweight Champion, 185 lbs   Israel Adesanya - 22-1, 4 DefensesIsrael Adesanya has described Anderson Silva as his idol, a man who shaped the path of his life in martial arts and mixed martial arts alike. He has long aped Anderson Silva's evasiveness, flamboyance and striking acumen, and now, in a bid to further take his throne, Israel Adesanya has learned to imitate Anderson's habit of winning fights in ways that make people really mad. Adesanya's big February rematch with Robert Whittaker wound up feeling almost like a stalemate: Whittaker couldn't get solid strikes in on him so he primarily clinched and took him down but failed to control him on the ground, Adesanya touched Whittaker up and landed a couple stiff counters but largely kept his distance and stayed light on his feet to avoid more grappling exchanges. Adesanya walked away with a close but unanimous decision and some amount of grumbling from the fans who expected another amazing striking performance from the amazing striker (or who just wanted Rob to win). With Whittaker most likely going to have to put a lot of work in to justify a third shot, Adesanya's sights now turn to Jared Cannonier, whose murderous performance against Derek Brunson almost certainly guaranteed him a title match later this year. Welterweight Champion, 170 lbs  Kamaru Usman - 19-1, 5 Defenses"The Nigerian Nightmare" had to work harder than anticipated in November. Usman/Covington 2, a rematch very few people outside of the UFC's top brass wanted, seemed at first like the one-sided beating most people had hoped for, but Colby Covington's shitheadedness is matched only by his toughness and he was able to give Usman serious trouble in the back half of the fight. Usman won a hard-fought but clear decision, and now stands as unquestionably the UFC's greatest male champion, an incredibly tough, well-rounded and cerebral fighter who now holds the second-longest reign in welterweight history. The UFC appreciates him, kind of, but not enough to not repeatedly try to get him to drop the title to Jorge Masvidal or Colby Covington. They spent several months dicking around regarding his next contender, but after years of trying to deny his existence and desperate attempts to buy time for Khamzat Chimaev, the UFC has finally acquiesced and admitted Leon Edwards and his 19-3 record deserve the next shot at the belt. The fight has yet to be officially announced, but is being targeted for UFC 276 on July 2nd. Lightweight Champion, 155 lbs  Charles Oliveira - 32-8 (1), 1 DefenseThe resurgence is real. Charles Oliveira was in the UFC for eleven years before he received and won a title shot, and that's not a thing that happens. A BJJ specialist with an extremely tricky, aggressive style, Oliveira was seen by many as a future champion at the start of his UFC tenure and was securing top-card PPV berths after just two fights--and then the inconsistence and lack of focus that would define his career for most of a decade set in. He'd pull off incredible victories, vault back toward contendership, and get hosed up by gatekeepers like Cowboy Cerrone or Cub Swanson. He'd take down incredible grapplers like Hatsu Hioki one minute, then get guillotined by Ricardo Lamas the next. Around 2018, as Oliveira entered his tenth year of fighting at the wizened old age of 28, he apparently figured out his poo poo: He's won his last nine straight fights, culminating in violently knocking out Michael Chandler to win the Khabib-vacated lightweight championship. Hey, look, you found the hidden bullshit, good job. First person to quote this gets something dumb from Steam. As of now, he has the most submissions in UFC history, the most FINISHES in UFC history, the highest finishing ratio in UFC history, and his name in the books as the best in the world. His December showdown with Dustin Poirier saw him suffering a couple of scary knockdowns in the first round, but he rebounded immediately, butchered Poirier in the clinch, controlled him on the ground and ultimately choked him out in three rounds. The lightweight division has an undisputed champion again, and he'll be defending his title against Justin Gaethje on May 7. Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs   Alexander Volkanovski - 24-1, 3 DefensesAlexander Volkanovski, as it turns out, is really, really loving good at fighting. Volkanovski has been criminally underrated for the near-entirety of his time in the UFC, in part due to his generally amiable and unassuming personality and in part because he doesn't have singular, standout traits as a fighter like so many other champions, but unlike those peers he's only improved since reaching the top of the mountain. This was both impressively and depressingly exemplified in his title defense against The Korean Zombie, Chan Sung Jung, who despite being a legendarily tough fighter and enormous striking threat was dismantled like never before in his career: Volkanovksi outstruck him 152-51, battered him to a 10-8 in the third round and scored a merciful standing TKO in the fourth. Or, as Jung put it: https://twitter.com/LiberationistMA/status/1513029109894451205 A third fight with Max Holloway seems more or less inevitable, but Volkanovski has also begun making noise about a champion vs champion fight with the winner of Oliveira/Gaethje. We'll see what the UFC thinks will make the most money. Bantamweight Champion, 135 lbs   Aljamain Sterling - 21-3, 1 DefenseVindication has rarely pissed off so many people or been so loving funny. Aljamain Sterling is a tough man and an exceptional grappler, but when he became the bantamweight champion of the world on March 6, 2021, it was not because of his talents but because the undisputed king of the division Petr Yan was a huge idiot and intentionally fouled him, leading to the first time a championship has changed hands by disqualification in MMA history. The MMA world, being a smart, balanced community, placed almost universal blame on Sterling for this. After thirteen months of anticipation, two reschedulings and an absolutely endless raft of poo poo-talk from Yan about Sterling being a fake champion, the rematch finally came on April 9, 2022, and against almost everyone's predictions (including mine!), Aljamain Sterling beat Petr Yan fair and square, controlling him in the grappling and neutralizing his striking for most of the fight and ultimately taking a split decision. People are of course even more upset at him now, but gently caress 'em. Yan is foaming at the mouth for a rubber match, but Sterling, rightly pointing out that a rubber match when you're 0-2 is stupid, is instead eying a fight with TJ Dillashaw, Jose Aldo or Dominick Cruz later this year. Flyweight Champion, 125 lbs  Deiveson Figueiredo - 21-2-1, 0 DefensesWe have come so far, and yet we are still where we were. On December 12, 2020, Deiveson Figueiredo shockingly went to a draw with heavy underdog Brandon Moreno. On June 12, 2021, Moreno even more shockingly dropped and choked him out, wrestling the flyweight championship from his hands. On January 22, 2022, the two met for the third time and the result was an instant fight of the year candidate that saw both men trade the advantage in striking, grappling and wrestling alike back and forth, but Figueiredo's smart adjustments from their second fight won him a razor-close but still unanimous decision and the return of the flyweight championship. And now, having fought each other three times in thirteen months and finally finished their trilogy, the next stop for new champion Deiveson Figueiredo is...probably his fourth consecutive Brandon Moreno fight, because they're now a hilariously even 1-1-1 and they were talking about a final match in Mexico before they even left the cage. There's been some recent drama involving Figueiredo being upset and declining a rematch citing racism from Moreno's camp, but Moreno has denied it and the UFC doesn't give a poo poo either way, so we're presumably still on for another six weeks of winter. Women's Featherweight, 145 lbs  Amanda Nunes - 21-5, 2 DefensesI really did not expect to have to rewrite either of these sections, and doing it still feels wrong. Amanda "The Lioness" Nunes is the undisputed greatest women's fighter of all time, having demolished not just every contender placed in front of her but every previous champion at both women's bantamweight and featherweight. Her 135-pound defense against Julianna Peña at UFC 269 was looked at by most as an afterthought. And then, she lost. Not only did she lose, she lost and looked so bad in doing so that most of her fans are left wondering if COVID-19 ruined her. A rematch against Peña is already in the books for later this year, but for the moment, Amanda Nunes is only the women's featherweight champion, and if she DOES win a rubber match is a virtual necessity, meaning the featherweight division could be on hold for a year or more. Which is even funnier now, because it appears the UFC, rather than rolling straight into a fight, is going to have Nunes and Peña be the opposing coaches for this year's 30th season of The Ultimate Fighter, which means we in all likelihood won't get to their rematch until the late summer. Women's Bantamweight, 135 lbs  Julianna Peña - 11-4, 0 DefensesJulianna Peña shocked the world. Absolutely no one gave her a chance against Amanda Nunes, as my previous threads are now embarrassing evidence of, and the precious few people who did thought her only chance involved avoiding direct exchanges as much as possible and dragging Nunes into the deep waters in the clinch until she wore down in the later rounds. The first round seemed to bear this out entirely, as Nunes dropped her twice and seemed fairly in control of the match, and then somehow in the second round Julianna Peña, who was once on the wrong end of the striking of 4-3 flyweight Nicco Montaño, outboxed and repeatedly wobbled Amanda Nunes, and somehow, Julianna Peña, who was once choked out by noted non-grappler Germaine de Randamie, submitted Amanda Nunes with a rear naked choke. The world is still in such absolute disbelief about the fight's outcome that despite having walked Nunes down, punched her silly and choked her out in eight minutes, betting for the rematch opened with Nunes still a -250 favorite to regain her crown. Julianna Peña is the biggest story in MMA right now, and the UFC's intention to capitalize on it by parlaying her victory into a new season of The Ultimate Fighter means she'll get to enjoy the spotlight quite a bit longer. Look forward to even more podcasts about how COVID is fake and she doesn't know how old she is. Women's Flyweight, 125 lbs   Valentina Shevchenko - 22-3, 6 DefensesValentina "Bullet" Shevchenko has multiple news articles and interviews about denying that she is a spy. She has multiple black belts, holds national titles in boxing, kickboxing, muay thai and judo, speaks four languages, has been personally recognized by the President of Kyrgyzstan, and is an excellent dancer, motorcycle enthusiast and trained pistol marksman who was knocking out adults at 12. But she is definitely not a spy. She is, however, a problem for the UFC. Valentina Shevchenko is an exceptionally good fighter. She has always been an exceptionally good fighter, and she has only gotten better. The UFC established women's flyweight as a marketing engine for The Ultimate Fighter, ultimately stripped its inaugural champion after she refused multiple fights and was physically incapable of cutting weight, and Valentina immediately won the vacant belt, and that was 1,176 days ago and she has shown no sign whatsoever of letting it go. Her game is so well-rounded and her technique so well-executed that she has opened a gulf so wide between herself and her challengers that they've entered sacrificial lamb territory. She's already successfully defended the title against half of the top ten of the division, and the other half have been beaten by the people she smashed. Until this past December, the internet was deeply invested in a third match between Shevchenko and Nunes. Then Nunes got got. With nothing to do but continue to crush her own division, Valentina will defend her title against the 19-1 Taila Santos, who got her title shot thanks to a victory over 1 for her last 5 Joanne Wood, at UFC 275 on June 11. Women's Strawweight, 115 lbs  Rose Namajunas - 11-4, 1 Defense"Thug" Rose Namajunas is still on top of the world. Her UFC 268 rematch with Weili Zhang was controversial both in conception and execution, and Zhang's strength and wrestling consistently gave the champion trouble, but Rose's versatility and adaptability ultimately won her a split decision victory and the first successful defense of her new reign.
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ROGUES GALLERY: NOTABLE CHAMPIONS ACROSS THE WORLD Bellator Heavyweight Champion, 265 lbs  Ryan Bader - 29-7 (1), 1 DefensesMy anti-Bader agenda must wait awhile longer for satisfaction, and I must confront the likelihood that I, too, am a Bader hater. After winning The Ultimate Fighter 8 with his powerful wrestle-boxing abilities, coming one Jon Jones away from a 205-pound title shot and amassing a total record of 15-5 within the organization, Ryan Bader left the UFC on a two-fight win streak and they allowed him to go off to Bellator essentially unimpeded, seeing him as no great loss. In some ways they were wrong, and in some ways, they were very, very right. Ryan Bader stormed Bellator, winning his first five straight fights, becoming its simultaneous heavyweight and light-heavyweight champion and earning himself a modicum of the respect and attention that he felt he deserved. Having gotten his spotlight, he promptly went to a no-contest when he poked Cheick Kongo in the eye, and then lost his light-heavyweight title when Vadim Nemkov beat the absolute poo poo out of him, and then he had to wrestle a decision away from a 43 year-old Lyoto Machida, and then he got knocked out of Bellator's 205-pound grand prix when Corey Anderson smoked him in fifty-one seconds. In January Bader held onto his one remaining accolate in Bellator's heavyweight championship by the skin of his teeth, barely taking a decision over interim champion Valentin Moldavsky. Because of the incredibly silly way Bellator works, it was his first successful title defense after more than one thousand days as champion. He'll be attempting to get his second in a long-belated rematch with Cheick Kongo come Bellator 280 on May 6. Bellator Light-Heavyweight Champion, 205 lbs   Vadim Nemkov - 15-2 (1), 2 DefensesAll the success in the world cannot stop the curse inherent to being in Bellator. Vadim Nemkov is a four-time sambo world champion, a former Spetsnaz operative, a 6'0" steroid golem and the light-heavyweight champion of Bellator, but his main contribution to the MMA world right now is unintentional comedy. Bellator held the finals of its light-heavyweight grand prix on April 15, and after twelve months of competition including six titlists it came down to standing champion Nemkov and top contender and professor emeritus of Beastin' Corey Anderson, and while Anderson was well in control an inadvertent headbutt opened a huge gash on Nemkov's brow--and as the fight was paused just five seconds before the end of the third round it was too early for a technical decision. So the tournament ended in a No Contest, and Bellator's championship is held by a champion who was clearly beaten, and the tournament final will need a do-over later this year, and Scott Coker continues to live a life cursed by his participation in Surf Ninjas. Bellator Middleweight Champion, 185 lbs   Gegard Mousasi - 49-7-2, 2 DefensesGegard Mousasi is in a very weird spot. He is, definitively, one of the best middleweights in the world: After almost twenty years in the sport he's 49-7-2 with victories over a dozen world champions across multiple organizations and with the exception of Uriah Hall, every one of his losses has been against world champion, hall of fame-level talents, and all of this by his 36th birthday. He may still be the single most egregious talent departure from the UFC thanks to its abusive stances on figher pay and sponsorships, and he's been a great player for Bellator over the last half-decade. And now it's 2022, and he kind of doesn't have anything to do. Bellator's middleweight division is kind of a wreck, maybe most evidenced by his bout with top contender Austin Vanderford in February, who reached Bellator's #1 spot by defeating exactly one ranked fighter, whom Mousasi dusted virtually effortlessly in 90 seconds. Mousasi says he has six fights left in Bellator and is adamant about retiring within the organization, so he's presumably not going anywhere, and his next contender will be "The Human Cheat Code" Johnny Eblen on June 24. Bellator Welterweight Champion, 170 lbs   Yaroslav Amosov - 26-0, 0 DefensesYaroslav "Dynamo" Amosov is in that very strange place where he's simultaneously one of the most successful prospects in the sport and a fighter almost no one feels a need to pay attention to. He's a four-time world champion in sambo, he's undefeated in nearly a decade of mixed martial arts competition, he has a 26-0 record at just 28 years old and he dominated the very tough Douglas Lima to become the first Ukrainian MMA world champion (you came so close, Igor), and he has a total of 1,253 Twitter followers. Some of it is exposure--it probably doesn't help that Amosov was on Bellator's prelims just before his title eliminator--and some of it is a very tactical and sometimes control-centric style that does not lend itself well to attracting viewers, as seen in a 7-0 Bellator record with only two stoppages, one of which was a doctor's stoppage on cuts between rounds. The fact that he's a 26-0 world champion and is still mostly being looked at as a prospect is a testament to both the amount of talent he very clearly has and the way everyone's still kind of waiting for something big to happen to him, which, uh, also indicates where Bellator is in the pecking order of the collective MMA consciousness. Bellator had been planning to finally cash in on their many years of can-crushing by having Amosov defend his title against weirdo striker Michael "Venom" Page on May 13, but Amosov is fighting in the ongoing war in his homeland of Ukraine so MVP will now meet Logan Storley for an interim championship on May 13, hopefully to be unified when this horror is over. Bellator Lightweight Champion, 155 lbs  Patricky "Pitbull" Freire - 24-10, 0 DefensesBellator's lightweight division is in a deeply unfortunate place right now. Bellator's canonical best fighter, for a very long time, was the reigning Featherweight and Lightweight double champion Patricio Pitbull, who knocked out some guy you may have heard of named Michael Chandler to win the latter. He's one of the best fighters on the planet. This is not him. This is his twin brother Patricky, who is one inch taller and also less good. Patricio held the lightweight championship without defending it for two years until the moment Bellator agreed to put Patricky in a championship main event, at which point he coincidentally decided to vacate the belt and focus on 145. Patricky also got the title shot coming off two consecutive losses, one of which was a somewhat absurd cut stoppage in a fight he was winning against Peter "The Showstopper" Queally, who himself was only 11-6 at the time and was delivered into title contention based on a victory over a guy who never won a Bellator fight. (The secret: He was Irish and the title fight was in Dublin.) Patricky won the rematch handily and is now the champion of a lightweight division where the two top contenders are 4-1 and 3-0 respectively and when you talk about him most people think you're talking about his brother. Bellator Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs  Patrício Pitbull - 33-5, 0 DefensesOne fight after being violently dethroned, Patrício Pitbull is back on top of the world. Patrício Pitbull has long been considered Bellator's GOAT, as a two-division champion with a 21-5 record across twelve years in the organization that's staggering not just for its breadth but for the way he had only ever been defeated by hard-fought decision or freak injury until July 31, 2021, when the meteorically-rising A.J. McKee knocked him loopy and choked him unconscious in one round. Pitbull protested the stoppage, as fighters always do, but he didn't have a case. By their rematch on April 15, 2022, Bellator had already anointed McKee as their new top star to the point of making him the central feature of their new promo packages--which made it very awkward and very funny when, after five hard-fought if tentative rounds, Patrício emerged with a unanimous decision victory. It has since been McKee's turn to complain and cry foul about bad judging, despite the fight actually being fairly clear, but he's also declared his intention to leave the division and move to lightweight, so Patrício is once again the undisputed king of his division. What comes next is presumably a match with Adam Borics later this year. Bellator Bantamweight Champion, 135 lbs  Sergio Pettis - 22-5, 1 DefenseSo Sergio Pettis is good now, apparently. It's not that he was ever bad, exactly, it's that he was more or less forever in big brother Anthony's shadow. Sergio had a long five years in the UFC where he on several occasions seemed poised to break out into the top ranks and vie for a title, but he always managed to fall just short, building a strong win streak before getting controlled by Henry Cejudo, barely squeaking past Joe Benavidez only to get dominated by Jussier Formiga, moving up to 135 and getting shut down by Rob Font. He went to Bellator just a few months before his brother left for the PFL, and now, in a stunning turnaround, Sergio is the successful one in the family. He won Bellator's bantamweight championship in his third fight with the organization, and in the biggest fight of his career, an interpromotional match pitting his title against Rizin bantamweight champion (and former Bellator champion himself, who vacated due to injury) Kyoji Horiguchi, Pettis shocked the world by battling through four difficult rounds he was fairly clearly losing and knocking out the heavy favorite with a painfully pretty spinning backfist. Sergio Pettis is no longer an also-ran. Unfortunately, as these things always go, he followed this up by getting injured. He's out of this year's Grand Prix and his timetable for return is iffy enough that Bellator immediately booked an interim championship between Raufeon Stots and Juan Archuleta for Bellator 279 on April 23. Bellator Interim Bantamweight Champion  Raufeon Stots - 18-1, 0 DefensesHe did not waste the opportunity. Raufeon Stots has been looked on as a major bantamweight prospect for years: A two-time DII wrestling champion, a heavy-handed puncher and an exceptionally conditioned grappler with guidance from Roufusport, Jens Pulver and Kamaru Usman thanks to their shared alma mater who won his first regional title just two years into his career. He's 18-1 with his only loss coming via a shock 15-second knockout against one of the best in the world in Merab Dvalishvili. Stots stormed Bellator in 2019 and is on an unbeaten six-fight streak with the organization, and when faced with both the entrance to his first grand prix, the stiffest competition of his career in former champion Juan Archuleta and the interim Bellator championship on the line, Stots did what some of the best in the world couldn't and knocked Archuleta out in the third round. He'll now wait on Leandro Higo and Danny Sabatello's match on June 24 to see who he'll have to face to both defend his interim title and reach the finals of the grand prix. Bellator Women's Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs  Cris Cyborg - 26-2 (1), 4 DefensesYup. It's 2022 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. Consequently, Cyborg has stated she wants her next fight to be a boxing match, not MMA, which Bellator is more than happy to oblige being as it's apparently always been an option in her contract and they couldn't stop her if they wanted to. Who or how this will happen is anyone's guess. If you read this lengthy and mostly repeated Cyborg screed pat yourself on the back and quote this, first person gets a dumb computer game. Bellator Women's Flyweight Champion, 125 lbs  Liz Carmouche - 17-7, 0 DefensesThis wasn't a thing most people expected, nor are most people happy about it, but it kind of makes me smile. Liz "Girl-Rilla" Carmouche is a former marine who's been grinding away at mixed martial arts for twelve years, and for the entirety of those twelve years she's been just good enough to touch the top of the mountain but not quite good enough to climb it. In 2011, just one year into her career, she challenged for Strikeforce's bantamweight championship only to get choked out, in 2013 she participated in the first women's fight in UFC history and nearly upset everyone's marketing plans by neck cranking the poo poo out of Ronda Rousey before ultimately getting armbarred, and in 2019 she challenged Valentina Shevchenko for her flyweight title but just couldn't touch her. Her shift to Bellator wasn't met with much fanfare, but three wins with two violent stoppages earned her a shot at champion Juliana Velasquez on April 22, 2022. It seemed to be going Velasquez's way, but just before the end of the fourth round Carmouche muscled her to the ground, put her in the crucifix position and began landing elbows that were, respectfully, pretty visibly inconsequential, but referee Mike Beltran felt differently and called the fight off, leaving Velasquez apoplectic and Carmouche a world champion for the first time in her career. Velasquez is appealing the decision, which is aggressively silly and will go nowhere, but Bellator will almost certainly put together a rematch. It's worth noting that a) ONE uses different weight classes and b) ONE also has a dozenish various kickboxing champions, and for the moment, for sake of my sanity, we're just going to stick to the MMA champions. Maybe later we'll change this. FOR NOW: ONE Heavyweight Champion, 265 lbs   Arjan Bhullar - 11-1, 0 DefensesIt's Arjan Bhullar, the man ONE CEO Chatri Sityodtong swears is better than Francis Ngannou. Bhullar, the first Indian world champion in the sport, was a big deal as a wrestler in his native Canada, won multiple collegiate championships at heavyweight, took a Commonwealth Games championship and ultimately achieved his dream of representing Canada at the 2012 Olympics where he was eliminated in the first round. He made his MMA debut two years later as, you may have already guessed, predominantly a wrestler. He was picked up by the UFC in 2017 at 6-0, and had a respectable 3-1 record with the organization, but chose not to sign a new contract after feeling the UFC was lowballing him. He signed with the then-growing ONE Championship in 2019, won his debut fight, took a year and a half off for the pandemic and returned in May of 2021 to TKO the baddest heavyweight in ONE, its reigning champion of almost six years, the man, myth, legend and Truth, Brandon Vera. And then, much like Vera, he promptly refused to sign a new contract and sat out for a year so he could play hardball. Chatri publicly shat on him and his management and set up an interim championship, and after many, many months of back and forth Bhullar agreed to a new deal, setting himself up against his stiffest competition yet. ONE Interim Heavyweight Champion   Anatoliy Malykhin - 11-0, 0 DefensesFor all things, there is a Russian punchman. Anatoly "Spartak" Malykhin is both an undefeated mixed martial arts fighter, a punching machine, and an avowed wife guy who credits her with his career, which he was about to give up as a 5-0 regional champion before meeting her. He promptly moved to Phuket, upped his game, met ONE's talent scouts and got signed directly into co-main event status. He is not only 11-0, and not only has finished all eleven fights, no one has yet made it further than the second round with him, including noted steroid elemental Amir Aliakbari, whom he starched in three minutes, and interim championship contender Kirill Grishenko. The fight hasn't been formally signed yet, but the heavyweight championship unification is expected sometime this summer. ONE Light Heavyweight Champion, 225 lbs   Reinier de Ridder - 15-0, 0 DefensesONE Middleweight Champion, 205 lbs  Reinier de Ridder - 15-0, 1 Defense"The Dutch Knight" Reinier de Ridder is probably ONE's most successful MMA fighter and he was recently deemed insufficiently important to merit a Wikipedia page. ONE prides itself on creating the 225-pound cruiserweight class many MMA fans have wanted for years, but it almost immediately fell victim to the problem many had theorized: A sufficiently skilled 205-pounder will probably also just win at 225. Aung La N Sang was the first to hold both titles simultaneously, but Reinier, a childhood judoka turned all-around adult grappling monster, choked him out in one round to win his middleweight title. Curiously, Sang was scheduled to defend his remaining title against someone else, but COVID put the seemingly more logical Reinier in, who promptly took the other belt home too. Because ONE is very, very silly, Reinier then made his first defense of the 205-pound title against Kiamrian Abbasov, ONE's 185-pound champion (whose own title was not on the line) whom he also choked out, meaning Reinier de Ridder is now the lineal titleholder of 1/3 of ONE's entire men's MMA program. To further make this more ridiculous, his first post-triple-champ fight was not a fight, but a grappling match against all-time BJJ great André Galvão, and upon wrestling him to a draw, he challenged him to an MMA fight which Galvão accepted. André Galvão's last mixed martial arts bout was twelve years ago, it was at 170 pounds, and he was knocked out in two minutes by Tyron Woodley. It'll still happen later this year. ONE Championship: It's a very silly place. ONE Welterweight Champion, 185 lbs   Kiamrian Abbasov - 23-5, 1 DefenseIt's Kyrgyzstani wrestleboxing time, baby. Kiamrian "Brazen" Abbasov came up in the Russian regionals and took home both the Tech-Krep FC championship and the MixFace championship, which is much, much funnier. He was picked up by ONE as an ultra-promising middleweight prospect, and lived up to that promise by immediately getting outworked against living legend Luis "Sapo" Santos. He was back in ONE nine months later, and was its new welterweight champion ten months after that. He's a smart, tactical fighter with a well-rounded skillset, but he has a tendency to get manhandled by superior wrestlers, which made it all the more baffling when ONE booked him against Reinier de Ridder, who pretty easily controlled and ultimately submitted him. Admittedly, ONE kind of has a proto-WEC thing going on--their lower weight classes are dangerous and interesting, their higher weight classes are so much less important that ONE doesn't even have rankings above lightweight on their own website. Abbasov is a champion, but what he is a champion of, no one knows. ONE Lightweight Champion, 170 lbs   Ok Rae Yoon - 16-3, 0 DefensesOk Rae Yoon was not supposed to be here. A lifelong part of Team MAD, the South Korean chain of MMA gyms that boasts superstars like Seo Hee Ham, Kyung Ho Kong and Doo Ho Choi under its wing, Ok Rae Yoon, despite being a very tough striker and counter-wrestler, flew mostly under the radar for most of his career. It wasn't until his mid-2020 capturing of South Korea's regional Double G Lightweight Championship that ONE took an interest. He was booked against former ONE featherweight champion Marat Gafurov, whom they seemingly expected to win, and he instead shut him down and took a decision. ONE promptly booked him into another match seven days later against Eddie Alvarez, whom they OPENLY expected to win, only for Yoon to shut him down, too. So they gave him a shot ONE's lightweight champion and one of its biggest stars, Christian Lee, and in the funniest thing yet, Ok Rae Yoon won an extremely controversial decision and upended everything. Christian Lee called the decision bullshit and demanded it be overturned and he be given a rematch. It was not overturned, and the fight happened back in September of last year and there's still no word about what happens next. If you want to know how ONE feels about having one of their golden boys knocked off, Ok Rae Yoon has been a champion in ONE for more than half a year and they have yet to give him a written profile on their website. ONE Featherweight Champion, 155 lbs   Thanh Le - 13-2, 1 DefenseDemetrious Johnson was once asked which ONE fighter would have the best shot in the UFC, and without hesitation he answered Thanh Le, which is particularly funny because they had two shots at him and passed each time. A Vietnamese-American by way of New Orleans, Thanh Le took to Taekwondo as a child and MMA after graduation, and five fights into his career he was on ill-fated The Ultimate Fighter: McGregor vs Faber that left us stuck with Artem Lobov forever. Despite scoring a knockout victory on the show, he was eliminated in the second round and not brought back. Two years later he was 6-1-0 and invited onto the second-ever episode of Dana White's Contender Series, and even knocked his opponent out with a violent headkick, but that was also the episode that debuted Sean O'Malley so nothing else mattered. Two years later he was an 8-2 prospect getting his shot in ONE, and five violent knockouts later he's a defending champion who has stopped every fight he's ever won. The culmination of his career came this past March, when undefeated MMA fighter, multi-time BJJ champion and total rear end in a top hat Garry Tonon came in against him as a betting favorite and got ground and pounded into unconsciousness in fifty-six seconds instead. Thanh's knockout streak makes him one of the most exciting fighters on ONE's entire roster. But, y'know, the UFC got Sean O'Malley, so really, who won? ONE Bantamweight Champion, 145 lbs   John Lineker - 35-9, 0 DefensesJohn God drat Lineker, world champion. "Hands of Stone" is a 5'3" ball of muscle with lunchboxes attached to it. Our own LobsterMobster very accurately described him as someone who hits like a truck made out of a train. Lineker's been fighting since 2008, but he ran up a fairly unimpressive 6-5 record in the first year of his career and briefly considered retiring. And then, settling into his style of gritting his teeth, stomping forward and never, ever ceasing in his attempts to punch you as hard as he possibly could, he started murdering everyone. After thirteen straight victories and two regional bantamweight championships he was picked up by the UFC for its then-nascent 125-pound weight class, which was problematic given his love of being a giant muscle golem. He went 6-2 at the weight class, but he also managed to miss weight in half of those fights, resulting in his being forced up to bantamweight, where he was noticeably undersized and often gave up half a foot of height, and it didn't loving matter because he was John God drat Lineker. He went 6-2 again, with his only losses being a unanimous decision to two-time champ TJ Dillashaw and a razor-close split against top contender Cory Sandhagen. And staring at this massively marketable multiple-bonus-winning top contender who was knocking dudes dead at 135 pounds, the UFC decided to release him. Dana White said it was his lack of professionalism and weight misses, which seems like a strange thing to get mad about three years later; it is somewhat more likely ONE FC was trying to sign him and he rationally asked why he, as an eight-year, 16-fight UFC veteran, was only getting paid $46k to show. Three months later he was destroying people at 145 pounds in ONE, and three years later he fought reigning champion Bibiano Fernandes, one of the best featherweights of all time and arguably the best fighter outside the UFC period, and became the first person to ever knock him out. John Lineker is a violence machine, his fights are must-see television, and he's a goddamn 145-pound champion at 5'3". ONE Flyweight Champion, 135 lbs  Adriano Moraes - 20-3, 2 DefensesAdriano Moraes was one of MMA's best-kept secrets until very recently. His is a hard luck story that almost ended tragically; abandoned by his mother in an alley at 3, learning capoeira and judo at 7, running with street gangs by the time he was 12 and narrowly escaping death on several occasions until his friends and his adoptive mother convinced him to channel his energy into learning jiu-jitsu. He made his MMA debut at the end of 2011, and by the summer of 2013 he was 9-0 and a Shooto Brazil champion. His ultra-aggressive grappling, his quick, accurate crosses and his willingness to throw his entire body at you to take you down made him an incredibly dangerous grappler. It also made him occasionally too wild to retain control over his fights. Moraes is 17-3, and all three of those losses were close split decisions--two of which he's since avenged. This has also made him ONE's most recurrent champion, as he's actually now on his third flyweight title reign, with one successful defense in each previous period. But most people only really started paying attention to him this past April when he met the greatest flyweight of all time in Demetrious Johnson and not only defeated him, but became the first man ever to knock him out. Now he's in the weird if enviable position of having cleaned out ONE's flyweight division: Every successful contender they've signed, he's turned away. This makes him really, really loving good, but unless they want to run more champ vs champ matches, it also means he doesn't really have much to do at the moment. ONE Strawweight Champion, 125 lbs   Joshua Pacio - 20-3, 3 DefensesJoshua "The Passion" Pacio, thusly named after his passion for hotel and restaurant management. A childhood student of both kickboxing and wushu, Pacio quickly established himself as one of the best 125-pound MMA fighters in the Philippines and, ultimately, was too good to stay there. He signed on with ONE in 2016, and his combination of solid grappling, spinning kicks and quick, darting punches got him up to a strawweight title shot within the year, which led to the first loss of his career and the discovery of his primary weakness: Strong wrestling games. Fortunately, this being 125 pounds and a striking-centric promotion, there aren't that many threats out there for him. He's on his second title reign now, his first having been ended during its first defense in a split decision by the greatest rival of his career, grappler Yosuke Saruta, but he wrested the championship back from him in a rematch and this past September defeated him again in a rubber match. (Look at you, reading past Adriano Martins. Good job. First person to quote this gets a stupid computer game.) Pacio is among the longest-reigning champions in ONE, having notched 1000+ days and 3 title defenses, but as ONE's profile has risen it has begun attracting international talent, and at ONE: Reloaded on April 22, former UFC fighter Jared "The Monkey God" Brooks took a decisive victory and lined himself up as the most likely next contender. ONE Women's Strawweight Champion, 125 lbs   Xiong Jing Nan - 17-2, 6 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. Having ultimately accomplished nothing both returned to their own divisions, and Xiong Jing Nan now has six defenses to her name, the most of any champion in the company. ONE Women's Atomweight Champion, 115 lbs  Angela Lee - 11-2, 5 DefensesAngela Lee is one of ONE's biggest stars and has been widely called its postergirl, and while the metrics may be debatable, she's an extremely solid choice. Her background is varied both culturally and martially: Born in Canada in a Singaporean-South Korean family made entirely of martial artists who all collectively moved to Hawaii when she was a child, she was not only training alongside them as a child, but training in multiple disciplines. By 15 she was a national Pankration champion, by 18 she had been signed by ONE before having a single professional fight, and by 20 she had two black belts and three defenses of ONE's atomweight championship. Lee is an extremely versatile fighter, capable of backing up her aggressive if sometimes loose striking with very solid defensive and offensive grappling, and her only two losses have come when fighting up a class at 125 pounds, against both its champion Xiong Jing Nan--whom she later choked out in a rematch at 115--and world jiu-jitsu champion Michelle Nicolini in a very, very close decision. Lee went on hiatus at the end of 2019 to have a baby and intended to be back by the end of 2020, but then the pandemic happened and she decided to use her cache within the company to just sit it out, making her aguably the smartest fighter in the world. ONE declined to make an interim championship, so she returned to competition this past March as a defending champion and main-evented the ONE X supercard against its atomweight queen in her absence, Stamp Fairtex, and notched her fifth title defense after choking her out in the second round. ONE has its star player back, and in all likelihood she'll be facing her next challenge in Hamderlei Silva herself, Seo Hee Ham, later this year.  Rizin Lightweight Champion, 156 lbs  Roberto de Souza - 14-1, 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 notoreity, 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. If he's happy, though, he's happy. Rizin Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs   Juntaro Ushiku - 21-8-1, 0 DefensesJapan has always had an extremely strong regional MMA scene, and occasionally top competitors somewhat abruptly pop out of it. The Fighting Bull Juntaro Ushiku is the latest, and one Rizin didn't quite seem to expect. One of Rizin's primary stories has been its love of the Asakura brothers, Kai and Mikuru, both of whom have made big impacts and gotten some perhaps occasionally favorable matchmaking to speed along their route to Japanese stardom. It was somewhat counter to Rizin's plans when Mikuru got outfought and controlled by a lesser-known wrestler in Yutaka Saito, and even moreso when Saito promptly got his face kneed off by Ushiku, the featherweight champion of DEEP. Ushiku did, in fact, immediately return to DEEP two months later. He's a scrappy fighter--well-rounded, no enormous standout skills, lots of split decisions, very difficult to finish--and Rizin wanted the title back on Saito enough that they gave him a rematch despite having only lost a fight in the interim. The resulting fight was very close, but off the strength of having dropped Saito with a headkick, the judges gave Ushiku the unanimous decision. It's presumably a matter of time before Ushiku has to defend against Mikuru. Rizin Bantamweight Champion, 135 lbs  Kyoji Horiguchi - 29-5, 0 DefensesKyoji Horiguchi is going through a difficult time in his career. Horiguchi is, indisputably, one of the absolute best flyweights on the planet. He's an incredibly fast, powerful striker with very solid wrestling and aggressive grappling to back up his skills, and the streak of incredible knockouts and submissions on his record is a testament to his skills. Trouble is: He's not fighting at flyweight, he's fighting at bantamweight, and it's finally starting to become a problem. His half-decade unbeaten streak ended in 2019 thanks to a first-round upset loss against Kai Asakura, but Rizin rushing him back in mid-knee injury was blamed for that, especially when Kyoji starched Kai in a rematch the next year. And then he lost his Bellator bantamweight championship to Sergio Pettis after winning most of the fight only to walk into a spinning backfist. And now he's lost his berth in Bellator's bantamweight grand prix after just getting grappled to death by Patchy Mix, who, while very good at jiu-jitsu, also had the advantage of half a foot of height and reach on Horiguchi. He continues to be almost certainly the best fighter in Rizin, and inarguably Japan's best at flyweight AND bantamweight, but three years ago he was the nearly-undefeated champion of the two biggest b-leagues in the world simultaneously and now he's 1-3 in said three years and has a Rizin title he's never defended. For someone who wants to be the best in the world, there are questions to be answered about where he goes from here. Rizin Women's Super Atomweight Championship, 108 lbs  Seika Izawa - 6-0, 0 DefensesAll 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.
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the main joy i get out of ufc these days is dana's reactions when fighters win wh ohe does not like. i would like to see more of it going forward. ty mma gods
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May 1, 2022 17:56
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i feed off of it
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May 1, 2022 18:54
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Lmao that another heavyweight got Arlovski-ed
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May 1, 2022 20:44
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Excellent thread title
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May 1, 2022 21:46
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CarlCX posted:Hey, look, you found the hidden bullshit, good job. First person to quote this gets something dumb from Steam. hook me up Carl!
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May 1, 2022 22:48
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Kongo v Bader is not a fight I thought I'd see in 2022. Great op as always, the friere bros pictures are excellent
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May 1, 2022 23:04
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Also please join my lonley Tapology group, Thug Jug Apperication, and make bad picks with fellow goons. https://www.tapology.com/groups/998
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May 2, 2022 00:19
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Outstanding OP as always. Can't wait for this weekends card!
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May 2, 2022 00:31
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CarlCX posted:https://twitter.com/MMAJunkie/status/1519078269336838146Jon Jones vs Stipe for the interim heavyweight title, which was initially intended for Spring and then Summer, is now being targeted for Fall, which will then become Winter, and later, Never. I'm surprised they were able to convince Daniel Cormier to fight Stipe again as a last minute replacement for an arrested Jon Jones several months from now.
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May 2, 2022 01:23
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https://twitter.com/BorrachinhaMMA/status/1520573183329550337?t=
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May 2, 2022 02:13
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Jerusalem posted:I'm surprised they were able to convince Daniel Cormier to fight Stipe again as a last minute replacement for an arrested Jon Jones several months from now. lol
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May 2, 2022 04:39
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May 2, 2022 05:05
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CarlCX posted:https://twitter.com/MMAJunkie/status/1517990460324827136After knocking Dillian Whyte the gently caress out, Tyson Fury welcomed estranged UFC champion Francis Ngannou into the ring to hype a fight between the two. Ngannou now says that fight is a necessary component of any future UFC contract negotiations. Whether this is a thing they really want to do or they're just playing hardball for said negotiations, it was a hell of a power move. Some more detail on this situation: https://mmajunkie.usatoday.com/2022/04/ufc-news-francis-ngannou-wont-re-sign-without-tyson-fury-fight I hope Ngannou has all his finances squared away long term, cuz props to him for publicly negotiating with Dana. I've always been super horny for designing a ruleset that would level the playing field for top tier boxers and MMA fighters. Ideas I've come up with: - allow kicks above the waist and below the neck - under normal timing for breaking clinches, you can go for a standing RNC. If you get a tap, to be scored like a knockdown - throws from standing are legal but don't score
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May 2, 2022 20:15
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just do shootboxing
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May 2, 2022 21:14
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Points for throws is too much of an edge for MMA fighters.
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May 2, 2022 21:39
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Piping hot take: fights between boxers and mixed martial artists mean nothing to me if they're using boxing / "modified" rules, if you have to take weapons away from the MMA fighter to make it competitive then what's even the point of the thing
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May 2, 2022 22:52
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If an mma fighter wants to box then play by boxing rules. If a boxer wants to side check kick their way to victory in an mma match, let them try. They're two different sports
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May 2, 2022 23:01
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Yeah that's a better way to put it - I don't want to watch a fight under a modified ruleset because you're never going to bridge the gap between the two sports in a way that makes sense and is fair to both parties, and I don't want to watch a fight under a boxing ruleset because I could just turn on a fan if I need white noise for a nap
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May 2, 2022 23:10
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DoombatINC posted:Yeah that's a better way to put it - I don't want to watch a fight under a modified ruleset because you're never going to bridge the gap between the two sports in a way that makes sense and is fair to both parties, and I don't want to watch a fight under a boxing ruleset because I could just turn on a fan if I need white noise for a nap Time to do what ONE did with a fight that alternated between Muay Thai/MMA and alternate rounds with Boxing/MMA. Which to start with though? That reminds me that I saw a documentary on Youtube where some of the underground promotions in Thailand will often have 3 round fights of alternating rules: Boxing, Muay Thai, and some other ruleset I can't remember. Unperson_47 fucked around with this message at 23:16 on May 2, 2022 |
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May 2, 2022 23:13
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Alternating boxing and mma would still have the problem that the mma fighter will defend for the boxing round and then try and take down and submit the boxer. What kind of gloves are they wearing too. Somehow chessboxing ends up being a better balanced sport
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May 2, 2022 23:35
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picking up from the last thread. kimbo305 posted:I’m sure there’s a number of us that search for it on a regular basis. It’s lost in the void. This is a drat shame.
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May 2, 2022 23:42
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ilmucche posted:Alternating boxing and mma would still have the problem that the mma fighter will defend for the boxing round and then try and take down and submit the boxer. How soon we forget that time Shinya Aoki lost to a cosplaying kickboxer.
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May 3, 2022 01:07
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If what we're looking for is a way to level the playing field and ensure both competitors have a precisely equal chance with their respective skillsets in an environment that favors neither, there's only one answer, and we have to bring it back.
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May 3, 2022 01:11
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all the formulations of rulesets result more or less in modern mma. if a boxing champion wants to get laid and prayed on by college wrestler with shot knees thats his problem.
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May 3, 2022 01:19
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Take note of the special European start time, it is B-League Preview! Bellator 280 - Friday, May 6, 2022 Main Card - 4PM ET, Showtime Heavyweight Title - Ryan “Darth” Bader vs Cheick “The Darkness” Kongo Y’all know Ryan Bader. Wrestle man, decent power in his hands, but also kinda bad. Bader turned away Valentin Moldavsky back in January to keep this title. Kongo might get billed as a kickboxer, or sometimes a savate guy, but he’s been using his wrestling a lot more these days. That, plus his vast array of illegal techniques makes him a formidable foe. Bader’s got better technical wrestling chops, but Kongo is a big ol strong dude. If this stays standing, I give it to Cheick. Last time they fought, prior to the eye poke, Bader did get a takedown. So I think we’ll get a repeat, another No Contest due to a foul. Light Heavyweight - Yoel “Soldier of God” Romero vs Alex “Eazy” Polizzi Romero is a high level wrestler who prefers to wait 95% of the time and then explode violently with either strikes or a takedown. He’s allegedly 45 years old, but I know enough about Cuban athletes to seriously doubt that number. He’s probably 75. Yoel is also on a 4-fight losing skid, including his Bellator debut, where he thought it was a 5-round bout, instead of 3. Polizzi is a bit of a grappler as well, with some submission wins on his record. A lot of this fight hinges on how much Yoel tries to do. He could very easily stand around and stare his way to a decision loss. I’m just upset we don’t get the original fight, Yoel vs Melvin Manhoef, because that fight was guaranteed to be funnier. Lightweight - Davy Gallon vs Benjamin “El Skeletto” Brander Gallon is a 20-7 judo man with 12 finishes. He’s on a 4-fight, 3 finish win streak, including a Rolling Thunder win, which loving rules. Brander is 13-8 with 9 finishes. He’s 2-3 in his last 5. El Skeletto sounds like a badass nickname. This fight seems to have been added late, as it wasn’t originally on the Tapology page when I checked last weekend. I just want another Rolling Thunder. Middleweight - Lorenz “The Monsoon” Larkin vs Kyle “Gunz Up” Stewart Larkin is a Kung Fu striker, with 11 of his 23 wins coming via TKO. Though his last stoppage win was in 2016. He’s currently on a 5-fight win streak. Stewart is 15-5 with 7 TKOs. This has high potential for a good punch-kick fight. Let’s hope these two just whomp each other in the face and body to our delight. Middleweight - Mike “Sea Bass” Shipman vs Gregory “Blade” Babene Shipman is 14-3, with all but one bout ending early. Babene is 21-11, with most of his fights ending via submission, and he’s on a 6-fight win streak. Neither of these dudes have any notable wins on their records. Babene is 38 and has been fighting since 2004. So he’s accumulated a lot of miles (Or perhaps kilometers?) Prelims - 1PM ET, YouTube Welterweight - Lewis “The Foot” Long vs Thibault “GT” Gouti Long is 19-6 with 12 submission wins. He’s on a 2-fight win streak, both 1st round submission wins. I’m torn between hating and loving his nickname/last name combo. Gouti is 15-6 with 12 stoppage wins. He went 1-5 in the UFC. Let’s see how good Welsh grappling is. Featherweight - Fabacary Diatta vs Jordan “The Lord” Barton Diatta is 8-0, with 5 decision wins. He is 2-0 in Bellator. Barton is 6-2 with TKOs. He lost his Bellator debut via RNC. I hope Diatta doesn’t win because it’s likely to go the distance and I don’t have time to watch two European dorks flail at each other for 15 minutes. Catchweight (160lbs) - Soren “The True Viking” Bak vs Charlie “917” Leary Bak is 15-1, with 7 submission victories. He beat Paddy Pimblett in 2018, so no real accomplishments so far. Leary is 17-12, with 9 TKO wins. He’s 3-3 in Bellator. Oh wow, who could predict the intended winner of this one? Flyweight - Lucie “Fireball” Bertaud vs Katarzyna Sadura Bertaud is 3-3 in MMA and went 15-10 in amateur boxing. Sadura is 5-4 with 3 wins by TKO. Let’s have a good, old fashioned bout of fisticuffs, what say ye? Lightweight - Yves “You Know” Landu vs Gavin “Big Tasty” Hughes Landu is 16-9 with 9 stoppage wins (4 TKOs, 5 submissions). He’s beaten the likes of Mehdi Baghdad, 11 years ago. Hughes is 10-2, with the exact same number and breakdown of stoppage wins as Landu. Hughes is probably better, I guess? Featherweight - Pedro “The Game” Carvalho vs Piotr “Niedziela” Niedzielski Carvalho is 12-5 with 6 submission wins. He’s 5-2 in Bellator, currently 1-2 in his last 3, having been stopped by Patricio Pitbull and Jay Jay Wilson before righting the ship with a decision over Daniel Weichel. Niedzielski is 16-4 with 5 TKOs and 6 submissions. He’s on a 8-fight win streak with 5 finishes. Carvalho has faced much better competition, so I think he’s got this. Probably. Maybe. Middleweight - Youcef Ouabbas vs Matthieu Letho Ouabbas is 2-0, but hasn’t fought since 2019. Letho is 2-1, having dropped his pro debut to a heel hook, but has won two in a row. According to Tapology, Ouabbas trains out of Kongo Smashin Club, so that’s cool. Welterweight - Victor Verchere vs Bourama Camara Verchere is 5-1, having lost his last bout. Camara is 4-1, also having lost his last bout. Someone’s skid has got to end! Solli is 3-1 with all wins by stoppage. Kouadja is 7-8 with 5 TKOs. He lost his first 4 fights before notching a win. He’s currently riding a 6-fight finish streak, all won via stoppage. Normally, I’d say the 7-8 guy is in here as a can, but I think maybe Kouadja just took a while to get his poo poo together. Let’s go Joel. this fight is off. ok
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May 3, 2022 01:31
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thank you as always, lobmob, for teaching us about people I have never heard of and will never heard of again The Soren Bak fight is one of the most hilariously blunt squash matches I have seen even by Bellator standards, but I'm all the gently caress about El Skeletto now.
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May 3, 2022 01:49
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Kongo gassed so hard in his last fight he looked like he was having a heart attack and refused to stand up after getting the win. this is gonna be amazing,
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May 3, 2022 02:08
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I haven't posted my RIZIN preview yet because I still haven't been able to confirm it will even be streamed in English. I'll post it tomorrow afternoon at the latest.
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May 3, 2022 04:22
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If you want to see a great 5 round fight and didn't catch bellator last week, go watch Mix vs Horiguchi. Horiguchis movement was incredible, he must have landed a dozen inside leg kicks completely imperviously. And the last round ends in a grapple fest with both fighters putting it all out there and attempting sweeps. I won't spoil the decision but that was a pretty dope fight. On a semi unrelated note, the way these guys fought and scrambled till the very last second isn't nearly talked about as much as it deserves. To still be fighting after almost half an hour of anything is crazy, but imagine having to keep fighting after 24 minutes of being punched and kicked and grappled with the whole world watching. It just really stuck out to me in this fight how supremely conditioned high level MMA fighters are even compared to other athletes. Definitely worth a watch.
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May 3, 2022 09:21
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I post this basically anytime this topic comes up, because it's hilarious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnoygVbkmf0&t=4s For those that don't recall, this was supposed to be a pure boxing match, but the local AC wouldn't sanction it as such because Sylvia was not a boxer. They would sanction it as an MMA bout, though. Tim and Ray had a gentleman's agreement to just box. Ray's disappointment when Tim kicks him is palpable.
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May 3, 2022 16:11
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DoombatINC posted:I don't want to watch a fight under a modified ruleset because you're never going to bridge the gap between the two sports in a way that makes sense and is fair to both parties I do want to watch it because of my Joe Rogan freakshow gene, and I also think negotiating on the terms of that compromise ruleset is an amusing meta aspect. ilmucche posted:What kind of gloves are they wearing too. Fighter's choice, imo. Southpaugh posted:all the formulations of rulesets result more or less in modern mma. Clearly there's many rulesets on the spectrum between boxing and mma?
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May 3, 2022 17:29
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Light the Violent Bob signal https://twitter.com/BigMarcel24/status/1521580013107269633
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May 3, 2022 21:15
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https://twitter.com/wrestlejamia/status/1521573255307534336?t=bIyl__jS9_HaZMjsvkCxtw&s=19 was khamzat/n.diaz announced anywhere?
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May 3, 2022 22:08
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Eat This Glob posted:https://twitter.com/wrestlejamia/status/1521573255307534336?t=bIyl__jS9_HaZMjsvkCxtw&s=19 nope and the same video or w/e also shows July 30th as the date for Miocic vs. Jones
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May 3, 2022 22:23
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O'Malley vs Munhoz is interesting to me. I think a couple of years ago Munhoz would have ripped O'Malley's leg off and taken it home with him but with how he's looked recently I don't know. He's pretty slow. He still hits hard as gently caress, though and has some good leg kicks. It might be interesting.
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May 3, 2022 23:33
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kimbo305 posted:- under normal timing for breaking clinches, you can go for a standing RNC. If you get a tap, to be scored like a knockdown What if dude doesn't tap and goes unconscious, are you going to give him a 10 count?
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May 4, 2022 00:38
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