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Which Mayn event are you most looking forward to? This poll is closed. |
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|---|---|---|---|
| Jairzinho Rozenstruik vs Jailton Almeida |
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3 | 10.71% |
| Raquel Pennington vs Irene Aldana 2 |
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1 | 3.57% |
| Gegard Mousasi vs Fabian Edwards |
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1 | 3.57% |
| Anything that isn't any of those fights |
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23 | 82.14% |
| Total: | 28 votes | ||
|
Do you miss the days when Curtis Blaydes was still a potential champion? Relive the April thread here. Welcome to May, and congratulations on making it through another month of mixed martial arts. After a real long April we're in for a shorter, gentler and considerably less interesting May, with just three UFCs and seven major MMA events altogether--and by the time the first week of this month is over we'll already have burnt through four of them. It's gonna be fast and/or furious and then it's going to be quiet and/or sad, and we will all cope with the stillness together, because let me warn you: June is going to loving suck. This month's thread title courtesy of CommonShore. 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. NEW RULE AS OF MAY: After communal discussion, no more clips of slap fights in the MMA thread. Discussion is fine when it touches base with MMA, as it unfortunately often does, but it turns out a lot of folks use this place as a bastion to escape it elsewhere, and we're going to collectively respect that. DO YALL WANT A BOXC has started a fantastically-written thread for the unrestricted discussion of slap fighting and all the other terrible fringes of combat sports, and you can go check it out here. It's also going to live in the thread rolodex from here on out. If you want to talk about MMA or combat sports events that aren't included in this breakdown: Please do. In a world of Road FC and Rizin events that don't actually air in America and the WBC threatening to rank Jake Paul, there's space for everything. And if there's an event you want to make a GDT for, go right ahead, just make sure to link it here so everyone sees it and basks in the joy of violence. THIS MONTH'S PUNCHSPORTS EVENTS 
IS THERE ANY NEWS  Y'know, maybe a little. Endeavor, the company that started as a talent agency and grew into a soulless megaconglomerate, announced that it was acquiring World Wrestling Entertainment, the world's biggest professional wrestling company, and that the WWE and UFC were going to be merged into a single corporate entity. In one of those signs of exactly what capitalism prioritizes, the money involved, the new management structure and the reworked hierarchy were all immediately defined, but no one actually knows what the name of the new company that now de facto runs professional wrestling and mixed martial arts will be named. But we do know that Vince McMahon, a racist, alleged rapist and all-around horrible person who has preyed on talent for decades and whose family quite literally runs Donald Trump's SuperPAC money laundering operations and who was very nearly ousted from power in 2022 after it became public that he had coerced subordinates into sleeping with him and paid them hush money out of the WWE's coffers, will be the chairman of the new company that owns the biggest combat sports company in the world. Will it matter? Who knows. The UFC's management is still theoretically in charge of its division, absolutely nothing in the UFC's day to day could change, or it could all go to hell depending on the whims of insane billionaires. For my friends who still regularly watch the WWE: I'm very sorry for what Endeavor is about to do to your company. And for the rest of us: I'm sorry we're stuck in this moneyed loving hellscape where some of the worst people on Earth somehow keep getting richer every day.  Speaking of stuff that sucks, everyone wondered what Nate Diaz was going to do after his time with the UFC came to an end, and the answer is: The most obvious moneymaking choice possible. Jake Paul, the specter who represents every sin of combat sports, social media and the horrifying point at which the two become one, is backing the money truck into the 209, and on August 5, the celebrity boxing match a lot of people care about but no one really wants will finally come to pass. Well, maybe. Here's the thing.  On April 22, having already almost started a fight through his traditional practice of chucking water bottles at people he doesn't like, Nate and his entourage got into another, different brawl with another, different set of people, and it ended with Nate choking out a guy, letting his friend punch him in the ribs, and dropping his unconscious body on the concrete. Nate got a warrant for second-degree battery, turned himself in on the 27, posted bail and left, and his lawyer is claiming self-defense, which, admittedly, seems a little iffy given the multiple-angle video footage of the guy he choked holding up his hands in the universal sign of 'I exceptionally do not want to fight you.' Will it wind up mattering? Probably not, but he did crack the dude's head open on camera, so who knows. The internet has of course already determined that Nate is innocent and the other guy absolutely deserved it, because the Diaz brothers are always right.  Having lost the middleweight championship to rival Israel Adesanya, rather than seeking a rematch, Alex Pereira is moving up to 205 pounds--which is what he was supposedly going to do anyway even if he'd retained the title. The picture above is Pereira standing next to Dominick Reyes, who is tied for second-tallest person in the light-heavyweight division, so, uh, Pereira will probably be just fine.  On the other hand, despite his big, teary-eyed farewell to the flyweight division after losing his lengthy championship series against Brandon Moreno this past January, Deiveson Figueiredo announced he has changed his mind about moving up to bantamweight, he is, in fact, staying at 125 pounds, and he's going to get the belt back even if it means fighting Moreno all over again. He's going to return to the division he never technically left in July, where he'll be fighting #9 contender Manel Kape, and I--oh, wait, hold on, I'm getting an update.  Yeah, the fight's cancelled. Just hours after the UFC made the bout official they scratched it, because Figueiredo's eye won't be healed by then. Thanks, mixed martial arts. MONTHLY RETIREMENT CORNER  A number of writers I deeply respect wrote a number of sad tributes to the end of Jorge Masvidal's mixed martial arts career. One of them said that Jorge Masvidal WAS mixed martial arts and the sentence has stuck with me for weeks, because it's absolutely true, but while that writer meant it as an affectionate compliment, I think it's one of the most damning things ever written about both. MMA is, and has always been, a conglomerate of ideas feuding for importance and struggling to stay afloat against the tides of money and corruption that actually surround them. One of the most common complaints you'll hear from longtime fans is a yearning for the older, simpler days, when the sport was more pure and meaningful, but every cycle of combat sports has thrived on consuming that meaning; every source of purity is ultimately just another supply of fuel for marketing. This is why, as gross as it is, combat sports always meander back to amateurs. Street fights. Toughman competitions. Youtube boxing. Even the Contender Series is, in its way, an attempt to monetize young, raw, unfinished fighters who will better connect with an audience--and at much cheaper rates. Audiences crave authenticity and simplicity and reality, and anything that peels back the layers of abstraction added by years of marketing feels real by comparison. But mixed martial arts isn't real. And neither is Jorge Masvidal. Jorge was, however, an OG of combat sports. His martial origins didn't come from kickboxing and tournament medals, they came from street fighting in Miami and battering members of Kimbo Slice's crew. He didn't finish high school, he didn't go to college, he was fighting professional mixed martial arts bouts back in 2003, years before the sport became mainstream, let alone profitable. He wanted fighting to be his entire life--and it was. Jorge fought professionally for twenty straight years, across seven different countries and six major promotions, in a career that saw him go from street fighting for nothing in front of a dozen people to pay-per-view main events in 20,000-person stadiums. For a lot of people, it's a triumph. And I get it. But I cannot help but see it as a tragedy. Jorge Masvidal is held up as a beacon of mixed martial arts, an example of the Old Ways that somehow persisted into excellence in the present and exemplified the traits of A Real Fighter, and respectfully, I think that's bullshit. By the time Jorge retired, everything about his identity had become a modern mixed martial arts sham. He was trying to cling to his tough real-man street fighting persona, but he wasn't street fighting, he was launching unprovoked assaults on fighters like Leon Edwards and Colby Covington--and then he was turning them into marketing catchphrases for t-shirts and inspiring pictures for NFTs. His lines were rehearsed and reshot, his hand-tailored Scarface suits were sponsored, and his Street Jesus attitude was carefully laundered through a Hollywood talent agency so old and enshrined they used to represent Al Jolson. And all of that, all of the fakery and facade, was meant to support his reputation as one of the best welterweights in the world. Except--he wasn't. And if we're being honest, he wasn't ever really close. Jorge Masvidal's entire career is a repeating pattern of beating up middle-of-the-pack opponents, struggling with contenders, and losing every time he encountered the top of the mountain. He got knocked out by Rodrigo Damm in Sengoku, he got choked out by Toby Imada in Bellator. Paul Daley, Gilbert Melendez, even Raphael Assunção: Masvidal could never hang with the second-best, let alone the actual best. But he made it to the UFC, and he scored three straight victories, and that's where everything turned around and he became a main event talent! Except he didn't. He still got crushed by Rustam Khabilov. He still couldn't cope with Benson Henderson or Lorenz Larkin. He still got run through with ease by Demian Maia and Stephen Thompson. He was still Jorge Masvidal. But then he struck gold--by killing the undefeated, recently-signed Ben Askren with a flying knee in five seconds in one of the most famous knockouts in mixed martial arts. Jorge Masvidal, finally elite! I mean, unless you remember how Askren was getting beaten up by Luis Santos, or how he got a screwjob of a win over Robbie Lawler, or how, realistically, he went a 1-2 that should've been 0-3 in the UFC and immediately retired. And the UFC knew it, because they didn't follow Masvidal's signature victory by having him fight top contenders like Tyron Woodley, or Colby Covington, or Leon Edwards. In fact, they didn't have him fight anyone in the top fifteen. They had him fight the unranked Nate Diaz. For a fake title belt named the Bad Mother Fucker Championship. Presented by Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. And that earned Masvidal two back to back shots at the top welterweight title in the sport, followed by two back to back #1 contendership bouts. All four of which he lost. Badly. Jorge Masvidal didn't get to the top of the sport by being a bad motherfucker. He didn't get there because of the people he beat, or his credibility as a fighter, or his incredible performances. He got there because a bunch of people in a boardroom ran focus testing and determined his flavor of Street Attitude was marketable. He let the sport turn him into a meme. He changed in all of his years, and all of his accomplishments, to cash out right at the end and get humiliated by the actual best fighters on the planet, who repeatedly, and definitively, proved how thoroughly he didn't belong in the cage with them. And nothing summarizes this better than his last act as a mixed martial arts fighter: Not reflecting on twenty years of martial arts, not standing up for what brought him to the game, but allowing himself to be a marketing pawn for rich, corrupt men one last time, dedicating his career to Donald Trump and leading the crowd in one last chant of the most limp, pathetic political catchphrase in a century: "Let's go Brandon." He was credible, once. He was a respectable fighter. He traded it in to make his cash and become a cartoon character who existed for the benefit of the moneyed forces he used to disdain. He gave himself to the machine and the machine consumed him wholly and gave him a fraction of a percent of the profits he made it, and like any good street fighting rebel he thanked it profusely for its generosity. He is--he was--mixed martial arts. And as someone who watched his career since the BodogFIGHT days, as much as it pains me to say it: I'm glad he's gone. Enjoy your money, Jorge. I hope it was worth what you gave away. He retires after 20 years of competition (minus one month, but who's counting) with a 35-17 record in mixed martial arts and a 1-0 record as a professional boxer.  We had the exceptionally rare double-retirement bout this past month, and in a way, it's sort of fitting.  When he retired, Ed "Short Fuse" Herman ended an unprecedented, unbroken, 17-year run with the UFC. His debut predates instant title contender Anderson Silva, it predates world champion Georges St-Pierre, it predates weight divisions below 170 pounds existing at all. Hell, when he had his first amateur fight in October of 2002 not only was mixed martial arts not yet legal in half of America, most people still didn't actually know what the phrase "mixed martial arts" meant, if they'd even heard it at all. The UFC had just promoted its 44th ever event. Star Wars: Attack of the Clones was still new. Ed Herman would be the runner-up for The Ultimate Fighter 3 four years later, and he never looked back. Aside from one fight in Strikeforce--in what was supposed to one of many UFC vs Strikeforce bouts after the UFC purchased the organization, a plan that ultimately never came to fruition--between his first TUF bout in February of 2006 and his retirement bout last month, Ed fought 28 UFC bouts across seventeen years. And if we're being honest? He never really got as far as he did rising through TUF. He was an unshakable standby of the midcard for his entire career, but--aside from a 2005 victory over a baby Glover Teixeira that has aged extremely well--he never really beat anyone who threatened to rank him.  Zak Cummings didn't get started until 2007, but he took a very similar trajectory--mostly successful but unable to crack his way out of the middle of the pack, cleaning up on the regional scene until The Ultimate Fighter called for him. In his case it was 2012's TUF 17, the season that gave us Kelvin Gastelum and Uriah Hall, that saw Cummings eliminated in the semifinal round. But he made the UFC his home for the next decade, and again, like Herman, he was a respectable staple of the middle of the card. His wrestling, his heavy hands and most particularly his aggressive grappling saw him choke out a solid percentage of the periphery of the middleweight and welterweight divisions, but every time he got close enough to the top fifteen to fight someone within it--or particularly close to it--he got shut down. It may sound like I am saying these things to insinuate these men underachieved or were unimportant to the sport, and to be clear, I mean the precise opposite. Virtually every fighter wants to be the best. It's exceedingly hard to be a fighter if you DON'T secretly believe you're the best, whether you're fighting for world championships or doing smokers at your gym. But the real lifeblood of mixed martial arts comes from the thousands of fighters who form the sport's actual body public. Not being in the main event doesn't mean you're not part of the show, and not being the champion doesn't mean you're not one of the best fighters on the planet. Zak Cummings submitted national Sambo champions. Ed Herman outwrestled NCAA All-Americans. Both spent decades in the biggest combat sports organization in the world and left with winning records. It's insanely hard to do. They are insanely tough human beings. And the two of them embracing and retiring together after bludgeoning one another is just a little perfect. Ed Herman retires from the sport at 24-16 (1). Zak Cummings retires at 25-7.  Ray Borg was supposed to have a better career, man. "The Tazmexican Devil" was very nearly one of the best flyweights in mixed martial arts. He held a regional title in Oklahoma, he made it to the UFC less than two years after his professional debut, and by 2017 he was 11-2, he had victories over multiple national champions, and his mixture of quick striking and tricky submission offense had earned him a shot at the UFC championship--where he would fall victim to what is still one of the coolest finishes in the sport's history, Demetrious Johnson's german suplex/flying armbar combination. And if Borg's sin as a fighter had just been not being the best in the world, he would be remembered incredibly fondly. But it wasn't. His problem was his inability to stay on target. Ray Borg's personal life--a difficult one, including a very public struggle with the health of his child--has always interfered with his ability to make weight. He missed the flyweight limit twice in his run to the UFC championship, breathed a small sigh of relief as his loss allowed him to move up to the 135-pound bantamweight division, and then he promptly blew that limit in his divisional debut. Two fights later he was back at flyweight, and despite winning he missed weight again, so it was back to 135--where, two fights later, he would be released from the UFC after failing to make the weigh-in for one last bout. Borg considered retirement and opted to return to the regional scene again--where he looked great, because he was still Ray goddamn Borg. This past February, Bellator proudly announced that they had signed Borg as part of the inauguration of their long-awaited flyweight division, and that he would be facing former bantamweight champion Kyoji Horiguchi in a fight with immediate title implications. But it never came. The day of the weigh-ins Borg was nowhere to be seen, and it was eventually announced that he wasn't going to be able to make weight--apparently he wasn't going to even come close--and the fight was scrapped. And then his talent management publicly fired him. And then he quietly announced his retirement. And, unfortunately, it's hard to think of a more appropriate coda for Ray Borg. He was always one of the best, and were it not for the whims of judges he'd be 18-3, which is a preposterous record at divisions as competitive as flyweight and bantamweight, but he just couldn't keep himself on track, and that ultimately cost him more than any of his fighting skills did. A day of incredibly anticipated promise that ends in disappointment, concern and unexpected retirement is as accurate a way for his career to end as any. I hope he can finally relax a bit now that he never has to worry about weight management again. He retires with a mixed martial arts record of 16-5.  Some records do not accurately display how valuable a fighter was to the sport, and Kaitlyn Young is way the gently caress up on that list. "The Striking Viking" wasn't quite an OG of women's MMA, but she was part of the first wave of talent to push it into the mainstream, and she was personally there for some of the watershed moments in that push. She won BodogFIGHT's first women's tournament in HooknShoot back in 2007, she fought in one of the first handful of nationally televised women's MMA matches against Gina Carano over at EliteXC in 2008, and she was one of the women competing at the inaugural card for Invicta FC, America's first real all-women's MMA league, in 2012. And much like Ed Herman and Zak Cummings she was never the top of her division, and in the same vein, who the hell cares. Short of a UFC stint, she really did it all. She even turned up in Japan to spurn her responsibility as a gaijin jobber and defeat fan favorite and DEEP Jewels champion Reina Miura, much to the audience's chagrin, and she ended her career in the Professional Fighters League, still competitive with just about everyone save, as with the rest of her career, the best. There are precious few fighters of any gender who went as far or saw as much as she did, and her retirement isn't so much the end of a fighting career as the end of a little piece of women's mixed martial arts history. She leaves the sport at 12-13-1.  The careers that never quite got to be are the saddest. Juan "El Guapo" Espino was a championship grappler across multiple countries and traditions--Canarian wrestling, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, Tatar, Lucha Leonesa--he was even the first foreigner to win in Laamb, the Senegalese tradition of wrestling, widely considered one of the toughest in the world. In other words: He was a natural fit for mixed martial arts, and he excelled at it. By 2018 he was 8-1, his only loss a 9-second flash knockout to future Bellator champion Vitaly Minakov in what was just Espino's third fight, and The Ultimate Fighter 28 (christ) called his name. Espino outwrestled all three of the heavyweights they put in his way, and after tearing Justin Frazier's arm off in one round, claimed the seasonal championship and his UFC contract. One more first-round submission against LFA champion Jeff Hughes punched Espino's ticket to a ranked fight. It went askew. In the third round of a hard fight against undefeated wrestler Alexander Romanov in 2021, Espino clattered a knee off his cup that left Romanov unable to continue, and left the fight to go to a technical decision, and left with the task of deciding who won a round that had only lasted a minute and had consisted of a right hand and a groin shot, the judges shrugged and gave it to Romanov. Espino was upset, and vowed he would never let it happen again. And...that's the end of the story. Anticlimactic, right? Despite being one of the best grapplers and wrestlers in the division, Espino was also just about to turn 40 when he signed with the UFC, and his body showed the mileage of a lifetime of combat sports. Two years of rehabbing a hand injury passed between winning TUF and the Hughes fight, it took another seven months to get to Romanov, and after that, his body simply wouldn't stay healthy enough to compete. He didn't have a last fight, he didn't have a cage interview, he just announced his injury-frustrated retirement on Instagram and hung up the gloves. It's weird to think about a career being cut short when a fighter is 42, but hey: It's heavyweight. Anything could have happened. But in this reality, Juan Espino leaves mixed martial arts with a record of 10-2. WHERE ELSE CAN I TALK TO LIKE-MINDED PEOPLE ABOUT VIOLENCE? Any of the following hangouts:
DO WE HAVE OTHER COMMUNAL THREADS? So many.
WHERE ELSE DOES FIGHT CHAT EXIST? Our community output has grown enough that we've got a few other places things get posted:
 Disclaimer: These are unofficial offsites, somethingawful's rules and liability do not extend to them, and complaining about discord stuff is still offsite drama posting
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WHAT HAPPENED IN APRIL Japan got to go first, for once, with Rizin 41: Osaka on April 1. The card featured a nearly even 50/50 split between kickboxing and mixed martial arts, and not all of it was particularly recognizable, but in kickboxing, Daichi Akahira knocked out Yuto Miwa, the rising Sota Kimura stopped Shingeki no Yuuki with body shots and Shun Onishi took out Motoki in just barely a minute and a half, and in mixed martial arts, Mehman Mamedov overcame his jobber status by knocking out Yusaku Nakamura in just twenty seconds, Kim Kyung-pyo upset Sho Patrick Usami by submission, Kyohei Hagiwara outfought Kyle Aguon, Makoto Takahashi choked out Pancrase champion Daichi Kitakata, good ol' K-Taro Nakamura soccer kicked Kiichi "Strasser" Kunimoto into oblivion, and Vugar Karamov choked out Yushinori Horie. The main event was a razor-close kickboxing contest that saw Ryusei Ashizawa score an upset, taking a narrow split decision over superstar Kouzi. The Professional Fighters League began its season later that day with PFL 1: Loughnane vs Moraes, the kickoff of the featherweight and light-heavyweight brackets. At 145 pounds, Gabriel Alves Braga narrowly beat Jesus Pinedo, Alejandro Flores outworked Daniel Torres, Bubba Jenkins outwrestled Chris Wade and Movlid Khaybulaev kept Ryoji Kudo at bay; at 205, Impa Kasanganay beat Cory Hendricks, Ty Flores decisioned Delan Monte, Joshua Silveira choked out Sam Kei and Marthin Hamlet cranked Mohammed Fakhreddine's face off, and on the main card, Will Fleury narrowly (and probably incorrectly) got a decision over Krzysztof Jotko and Rob Wilkinson slowly but decidedly beat Thiago Santos. In your incredibly depressing main event, Brendan Loughnane beat the brakes off Marlon Moraes both figuratively and literally, scoring a leg kick TKO in just six minutes. But the train didn't stop there, and PFL 2: Pachecho vs Budd came on April 7. This week's episode started the heavyweight and women's featherweight seasons, and there was a little more violence to be had. At women's 145, Marina Mokhnatkina knocked out Yoko Higashi, Evelyn Martins displeased the gods by decisioning Karolina Sobek, Amber Leibrock kicked off Martina Jindrova's head, and Olena Kolesnyk beat Aspen Ladd, but she came in overweight and only gets 2 points in the standings as a result. At heavyweight, Danilo Marques beat newly-imported Yorgan De Castro, Maurice Greene stopped Marcelo Nunes, Eagle FC champion Rizvan Kuniev outwrestled Renan Ferreira, and Bruno Cappelozza knocked out Matheus Scheffel. Your main event saw 2022 women's lightweight champion Larissa Pacheco turn in another solid performance, scoring a clear victory over Julia Budd. The UFC got on the board the next night with UFC 287: Pereira vs Adesanya 2 on April 8, and it was a hell of a show. Down on the prelims Sam Hughes outwrestled Jaqueline Amorim, Steve Garcia overcame an early scare to knock out Shayilan Nuerdanbieke, Ignacio Bahamondes outstruck Trey Ogden, Lupita Godinez pulled a tight decision out of Cynthia Calvillo, Joe Pyfer punched the poo poo out of Gerald Meerschaert, Luana Pinheiro got a pretty questionable decision over Michelle Waterson-Gomez, and Kelvin Gastelum won an incredibly close fight with Chris Curtis. Up on the main card, the UFC's attempt to push 18 year-old Raul Rosas Jr. into the stratosphere ended with Christian Rodriguez beating the hell out of a teenager on pay-per-view, Kevin Holland knocked out Santiago Ponzinibbio, Rob Font ended the Adrian Yanez hype train in one round, and Gilbert Burns dominated Jorge Masvidal on the feet and ground alike. But the main event was a shocker, as Israel Adesanya finally got a modicum of revenge and reclaimed his middleweight championship after knocking nemesis Alex Pereira out cold in two rounds. The PFL season's first stretch came to an end the next week on PFL 3: Aubin-Mercier vs Burgos on April 14. Lightweights, welterweights and one heavyweight make-up fight took the stage. Your unrelated fights saw Zach Juusola and Brandon Jenkins fight one of the most fun sloppy brawls in years, with Jussola coming out on top, and up at heavyweight Denis Goltsov knocked out former welterweight Cezar Ferreira. At welterweight, Nayib Lopez took a decision over Shane Mitchell, Magomed Magomedkerimov headkicked Ben Egli, Sadibou Sy surgically removed Jarrah Al-Silawi's liver with his knee, Magomed Umalatov knocked out Dilano Taylor, and Carlos Leal punched out David Zawada in one round. At lightweight, Bruno Miranda took a comfortable decision against Ahmed Amir and Raush Manfio did the same against Alexander Martinez, but Clay Collard ensured there was nothing comfortable about his beating of Yamato Nishikawa including nearly losing his own leg in the process, Natan Schulte outwrestled Stevie Ray, and 2022 champion Olivier Aubin-Mercier spoiled the PFL debut of Shane Burgos with a slow but decisive decision. And once again, the UFC got the following night with UFC on ESPN: Holloway vs Allen on April 15. After something of a rough start, it turned into a real, real fun card. On the prelims Joselyne Edwards scored a truly reprehensible decision against Lucie Pudilova, who should definitely appeal, Gaston Bolanos had a much more reasonable decision against Aaron Phillips, and Daniel Zellhuber took an equally comfortable call against Lando Vannata. Meanwhile, Denise Gomes punched out Bruna Brasil, Gillian Robertson submitted Piera Rodriguez, Zak Cummings knocked out Ed Herman in what turned out to be a mutual retirement fight, Brandon Royval crushed Matheus Nicolau with a beautiful knee in one round, and Bill Algeo choked out TJ Brown. On your main card, Rafa Garcia beat a Clay Guida who vowed he was nowhere near retirement, Pedro Munhoz turned back Chris Gutierrez, Ion Cutelaba knocked out a 205-debuting Tanner Boser in one round, Azamat Murzakanov outstruck Dustin Jacoby, and Edson Barboza eliminated Billy Quarantillo with a counter knee in two and a half minutes. The main event was Arnold Allen's audition for title contention, and like so many, he got ate by one of the best, as despite giving Max Holloway one hell of a fight, he still lost a comfortably broad decision. The following week was the month's quadruple-header, and it was an all-action kind of weekend. It started with ONE Fight Night 9: Nong-O vs Haggerty on April 21, and it came into the hangar actively on fire after two cancellations, a rescheduling and multiple weight and hydration misses. The result was still good, though: Jhanlo Mark Sangiao scored a real neat one-minute kneebar over Matias Farinella, Asa Ten Pow knocked out Han Zihao in a Muay Thai bought, Men Bo outfought Dayane Cadoso and Isi Fitikefu choked out Valmir da Silva on the prelims. Up on the main card, perennial atomweight contender Denice Zamboanga outpointed Julie Mezabarba, Felipe Lobo knocked out Saemapetch Fairtex, Bokang Masunyane kept himself in strawweight contention by beating Hiroba Minowa, and Halil Amir got the nod against Maurice Abevi. The main event was the only thing anyone was talking about after the fight was over: Muay Thai superman and dominant ONE Bantamweight Muay Thai World Champion Nong-O Gaiyanghadao, who hadn't lost since 2015, defended his title against Britian's Jonathan Haggerty, a talented but overlooked fighter who had lost repeatedly to Rodtang a weight class down--and Haggerty shocked the world by not just beating Nong-O, but dropping him three times in two and a half minutes and knocking him out. Bellator started its two-event weekend later with Bellator 294: Carmouche vs Bennett 2. On your unusually short preliminary card, Sharaf Davlatmurodov beat two-time Contender Series loser Anthony Adams, Chris Lencioni choked out Blake Smith, Tyrell Fortune took a disqualification victory when Sergei Bilostenniy rabbit-punched him, and Killys Mota submitted Kenneth Cross. Up on the main card, Levan Chokheli outpointed Michael Lombardo, Danny Sabatello grappled the poo poo out of Marcos Breno, a debuting Sara McMann crushed Arlene Blencowe for three rounds, and Timothy Johnson very, very slowly beat Said Sowma. There was some controversy leading into the main event--DeAnna Bennett missed weight, meaning she was ineligible to win the Bellator Women's Flyweight World Championship, but defending champion Liz Carmouche opted to keep the title on the line anyway, meaning it would be rendered vacant if she lost. It wound up not mattering: After losing the first three rounds against Bennett's wrestling game, Carmouche choked her out with an arm triangle in the fourth. The UFC took the stage on April 22 with UFC Fight Night: Pavlovich vs Blaydes. It was a long, weird night--fitting for a fight crowning at a bare minimum the rightful #1 heavyweight contender on a random TV card in the UFC Apex in front of nobody. A middlingly appreciable preliminary card involved Brady Hiestand crushing Danaa Batgerel in the third round, William Gomis getting a real close decision against Francis Marshall, Mohammad Usman slow-motion wrestling Junior Tafa, Norma Dumont slow-motion jabbing Karol Rosa, and then two violent knockouts, as Montel Jackson took out old veteran Rani Yahya and Christos Giagos knocked out Ricky Glenn. The main card is where things got weird. Jeremiah Wells got a decision over Matthew Semelsberger that included two judges scoring rounds for him in which he was repeatedly nearly knocked out, Iasmin Lucindo beat a Brogan Walker-Sanchez who appeared to have actively regressed as a fighter since last we saw her, Jared Gordon's cursed year continued after he went to a No Contest with Bobby Green when Green, in an attempt to throw an elbow, launched himself at Gordon headfirst and headbutted him into semi-consciousness, and Bruno Silva scored a slightly early TKO stoppage over a very upset Brad Tavares. There was nothing unexpected about the main event, though: Sergei Pavlovich, as he does, punched out Curtis Blaydes in three minutes. And Bellator rounded out its month with Bellator 295: Stots vs Mix. Aside from Yancy Medeiros choking out Charlie Leary and Masayuki Kikuiri punching out Alexey Shurkevich, there were a lot of loving decisions. Bruna Ellen got the nod against Ilara Joanne, heavyweight Davion Franklin beat Kasim Aras, who was once disqualified for biting, Aalon Crus beat Bobby King, Sumiko Inaba took the duke over Veta Arteaga, Kai Kamaka III beat Adli Edwards, Mads Burnell wrestled Justin Gonzalez, Aaron Pico outdecisions James Gonzales, and Ilima-Lei Macfarlane got a contentious coinflip split decision over Kana Watanabe. But everyone was there for the main event, which was both a defense of Bellator's interim bantamweight championship and the finals of its year-long bantamweight grand prix, and there was nothing left to the judges this time: Despite his traditional reputation as a submission artist, Patchy Mix knocked Raufeon Stots out cold with a high knee in just eighty seconds, securing himself the tournament, the interim title, and hopefully, a shot at the winner of Pettis/Pitbull this summer. Rizin finished off its month with Rizin Landmark 5 on April 29, and it was one of their smaller cards, but it proved to be a good time. On your prelims, Russian import Ali Abdulkhalikov dropped Tatsuya Saika in three and a half minutes, 40 year-old vet Masanori Kanehara beat Sora Yamamoto, sumo turned fighter Tsuyoshi Sudario looked like an actual heavyweight prospect kicking the hell out of Roque Martinez, Clare Lopez scored the exceedingly rare dogbar submission over Rena Kubota, Kanna Asakura managed to outfight Mei Yamaguchi, and Luiz Gustavo won his fight but lost his 100% finish rate after taking a split decision against Koji Takeda. Up on your main card, Olympic wrestler Shinobu Ota knocked out Kazuma Kuramoto in half a minute, Yutaka Saito took a split decision against Ren Hiramoto, and Mikuru Asakura beat former champion Juntaro Ushiku. But the month ended on the UFC's exceedingly cursed UFC Fight Night: Song vs. Simón later that day. It was a card of a million replacements and reschedulings, and it wasn't even that great before them, and the net result was largely disappointing. On the undercard, Hailey Cowan's long-deferred UFC debut saw her miss weight and lose a decision to Jamey-Lyn Horth, three-days-notice replacement Marcus McGhee choked out Journey Newson, Irina Alekseeva hit a really cool kneebar on Stephanie Egger that was slightly overshadowed by a 4-pound weight miss, Cody Durden outwrestled Charles Johnson, and Martin Buday narrowly beat Jake Collier. Up on the main card, Trey Waters used a half-a-foot reach advantage to decision Joshua Quinlan, Marcos Rogério de Lima almost kicked Waldo Cortes-Acosta's leg off and somehow still only won a 29-28 decision, Fernando Padilla scored a somewhat questionable stoppage over Julian Erosa, Rodolfo Vieira lost a round to Cody Brundage but choked him out in the second after Brundage decided to inexplicably jump a guillotine on one of the best grapplers in the world, and Caio Borralho finally got his first UFC stoppage by choking out Michał Oleksiejczuk. The main event, a bantamweight showdown between Song Yadong and Ricky Simón, wound up being a bit underwhelming, as Simón's typical wrestling and pressure game just wasn't there, and Song played matador, countered him for four rounds and finally knocked him out in the fifth. WHAT'S COMING IN MAY It's a little bit of a shorter, and weirder, month, but it starts with a traffic jam of combat. Invicta FC is starting us off with Invicta FC 53: DeCoursey vs dos Santos on May 3. We've already lost a fight, so as of now the card is seven bouts: Ky Bennett vs Kendal Holowell, Liana Pirosin vs Elise Pone, a pair of atomweight contendership featuring Elisandra Ferreira vs Flor Hernandez and Monique Adriane vs Nicole Geraldo, former atomweight champion Jéssica Delboni's return to strawweight against Danielle Taylor, a bantamweight co-main event featuring Olga Rubin vs Claire Guthrie, and in your main event, Jillian DeCoursey defends the Invicta Atomweight World Championship against Rayanne dos Santos. ONE is up two days later on May 5 with ONE Fight Night 10: Johnson vs Moraes 3. Despite being less than a week away the card still isn't finalized--Marcus "Buchecha" Almeida is announced as fighting with no announced opponent--but ONE has still aggressively populated this card with cool stuff, including former lightweight champion Ok Rae Yoon returning against Lowen Tynanes, former flyweight champion Kairat Akhmetov vs Reece McLaren, former light-heavyweight champion and current middleweight champion Reinier de Ridder in a grappling match against Tye Ruotolo, a women's Muay Thai showdown with Jackie Buntan and Diandra Martin, Aung La Nsang vs Fan Rong, Sage Northcutt returning after a four-year layoff against Ahmed Mujtaba, KSW champion Roberto Soldić getting a do-over on his botched ONE debut against Zebaztian Kadestam, and Stamp Fairtex against Alyse Anderson. The top of the card is three straight flyweight title matches: Mikey Musumeci defends the Flyweight Submission Grappling Championship against jiu-jitsu champion Osamah Almarwai, Rodtang Jitmuangnon defends his Flyweight Muay Thai Championship against Edgar Tabares, and Demetrious Johnson will defend his Flyweight World Championship against Adriano Moraes in a rubber match to end their trilogy. Rizin takes their swing for the month the next day, with Rizin 42 on May 6. It's a real big loving card: Yasuhiro Kido vs Sota Kimura and Kota Miura vs YA-MAN will face each other in kickboxing matches, Ramazan Temirov, Viktor Kolesnik and Boyd Allen will all play foreign villains to Japanese heroes Yuta Hamamoto, Atsushi Kishimoto and Ulka Sasaki respectively, Takuya Yamamoto will face Takeji Yokoyama, family royalty Erson Yamamoto retursn to fight Yuki Ito, Takahiro Ashida faces Kazumasa Majima, and ex-UFC titlist and growing international superstar John Dodson returns to Rizin to face Tatsuki Saomoto. After a long intermission there's a four-fight main card, and it is loving unhinged. Buakaw Banchamek--yes, the 2004 K-1 champion--has a kickboxing match against Rukiya Anpo, one of Japan's best young kickboxers. Roberto Satoshi Souza, Rizin's Lightweight World Champion, is facing shared Bellator/Rizin lightweight wrestler Spike Carlyle--in a non-title fight, because it's Japan. former UFC competitor and Rizin bantamweight standout Naoki Inoue is facing former Bellator champion Juan Archuleta. And in your main event, Kai Asakura, who has not competed in a year and a half, faces Yuki Motoya, who currently owns Bellator's longest bantamweight winning streak. And the long opening week finally concludes with the month's pay-per-view, UFC 288: Sterling vs Cejudo, later that day. If the rest of the month is sedate, it's because they put everything on this loving card. On your early prelims: Daniel Santos faces Johnny Munoz Jr., Joseph "Ugly Man" Holmes fights Claudio Ribiero, Rafael Estevam faces the persistently screwed Zhalgas Zhumagulov, Phil Hawes throws down with Ikram Aliskerov, and Braxton Smith faces Parker Porter, 'cause you gotta have the big boys. On your regular-flavor prelims, Marina Rodriguez meets Virna Jandiroba, Khaos Williams throws hands with Rolando Bedoya, Kennedy Nzechukwu meets Devin Clark in what has a high comedy potential, and Drew Dober and Matt Frevola will punch each other so hard it sunders the ground. Your main card is equally stacked: Kron Gracie is finally done pouting and will face Charles Jourdain, Movsar Evloev and Bryce Mitchell will wrestle one another passionately, Jessica Andrade and Yan Xiaonan will jockey for strawweight contendership and Belal Muhammad and Gilbert Burns, on about three weeks' notice, will make a case for #1 contendership at welterweight. And in your main event, Aljamain Sterling, whose title reign is just determined to be abnormal forever, defends his bantamweight championship against an unretiring Henry Cejudo. And six days into the month, we're done with most of the MMA it has to offer, believe it or not. Bellator wanders to Paris on May 12 with Bellator 296: Mousasi vs Edwards, and I'll level with you: There are 13 prelims, some of them aren't even fully announced yet, a bunch of them are local French talent I've never heard of and that we will likely never hear of again, and if you want to read all of them, click the link, because I Just cannot. Denise Kielholtz is fighting, she's cool. Oliver Enkamp is the guy who did a buggy choke the announcers didn't even recognize the last time we saw him and I hope he does cool poo poo again. Your main card is just four fights long: Thibault Gouti vs Kane Mousah, a once-again-middleweight Douglas Lima vs Costello Van Steenis, Mansour Barnaoui vs Brent Primus, and in your main event, Gegard Mousasi rebounds from last year's title loss against Fabian Edwards. The next day on May 13 the UFC makes its return to network television with UFC on ABC: Rozenstruik vs Almeida. It's not a bad card, but it is a weird one, particularly given that it's, y'know, in front of a potential audience of millions. Carlos Ulberg avenges Shogun against Ihor Potieria, Kim Ji-yeon tries desperately not to get hosed by the judges again vs Mandy Bohm, Jessica Rose-Clark meets Tainara Lisboa, Matt Brown and Court McGee will have a grizzle-off, Bryan Battle faces "Gifted" Gabriel Green, and Alex Morono will have a brawl with Tim Means. Up on the main card, Cody Stamann faces Douglas Silva de Andrade--which is a REAL weird choice of a fight to open a network television card, but whatever--Daniel Rodriguez faces Ian Garry, Karl Williams will try to wrestle CHASE GOD DAMNED SHERMAN, Mackenzie Dern will desperately hope to take down Angela Hill, Anthony Smith will face Johnny Walker, and in your main event, Jairzinho Rozenstruik is to be served up as a sacrifice to Contender Series product Jailton Almeida. And the month limps to a close with UFC Fight Night: Pennington vs Aldana 2 on May 20, and it's, uh, boy, it's a loving card. This truly baffling collection of fights has a couple high points--most notably Emily Ducote vs Polyana Viana--but it's mostly just a series of matchups that feel like they were drawn out of a hat. Abdul Razak Alhassan vs Brunno Ferreira? Hayisaer Maheshate vs Viacheslav Borschev? Carlos Diego Ferreira, last seen submitting not to strikes or submissions but to the knee-on-body position, vs Michael Johnson? Ilir Latifi is out of retirement and he's facing Rodrigo Nascimento, who was last seen barely scraping by Tanner Boser? Recently resurgent Karolina Kowalkiewicz vs Vanessa Demopoulos? Kickboxer Edmen Shahbazyan, who's still trying to put it back together, vs grappling specialist Anthony Hernandez? Even the main event is bizarre--a rematch between Raquel Pennington, the unquestionable top contender, and Irene Aldana, the woman Pennington already beat a few years ago. It's a baffling end to a baffling month.
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May 1, 2023 18:17
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CURRENT UFC CHAMPIONS Heavyweight Champion, 265 lbs   Jon Jones - 27-1 (1), 0 DefensesVery few things in combat sports reach the crossroads of awe-inspiring and unfathomably frustrating as Jon Jones. In 2020, Jon Jones notched the third defense of his second light-heavyweight championship reign after an exceedingly contentious decision against Dominick Reyes, only to abdicate the title because the UFC wasn't paying him enough, and he was bored of 205 pounds and wanted to move up to heavyweight like he'd been planning to for nearly a decade, and he needed more time to cement his place as not just one of the sport's greatest pound-for-pound fighters, but one of its biggest pound-for-pound pains in the rear end. On September 23, 2021, Jon Jones was inducted into the UFC Hall of Fame; on September 24, 2021, he was arrested (for the fifth time!) after his daughter called the police on him for beating her mother, during which he antagonized the police and, inexplicably, headbutted a police car. Because this is Jon Jones, of course, the primary charges were dropped, he paid $750 for the hood of the police cruiser, and got a stern warning to stay out of trouble, young man, because there is a money-powered reality-distorting field around Jon Jones whereby nothing matters. After a year of rumors, and after the unconscionable firing of heavyweight champion Francis Ngannou, the UFC gleefully announced Jon Jones vs Ciryl Gane to fill the vacant heavyweight throne. Did it matter to the matchmaking that there were more deserving candidates? Of course not, because it's Jon Jones: He deserves the spot for his earlier success. Did it matter to his public appearances that when last we saw him he was arrested for beating his fiancee? Of course not, because it's Jon Jones: He was, if anything, more up his own rear end with self-righteousness than ever before. Did it matter to the fight that he hadn't competed in more than three years and looked terrible at the time? Of course not, because it's Jon loving Jones. Ciryl Gane looked too nervous to use footwork let alone throw anything, and he should have been, as Jones effortlessly threw him to the canvas and choked him out in two minutes. The longest-running, most dominant and yet most persistently annoying show in mixed martial arts is back. Jon Jones is your heavyweight champion, and we are all damned. He's theoretically fighting Stipe Miocic next, but honestly, who the hell knows. Light-Heavyweight Champion, 205 lbs  Jamahal Hill - 12-1 (1), 0 DefensesThe dread prophecy has been fulfilled: After five years Dana White's Contender Series has produced a UFC champion, and all it took was the complete and utter collapse of a division. After half of the light-heavyweight top ten retired or left the UFC in the span of just two years the division scrambled for a new frontrunner, and after Jan Błachowicz, Glover Teixeira and Jiří Procházka all won and lost the title in the space of just four fights and a draw between Błachowicz and Magomed Ankalaev failed to fill the throne, the division was left in dire straits, with half of the top ten ruled out through loss, draw or injury. So the UFC pulled the trigger, went past their own higher-ranked Anthony Smith, and booked #2 Glover Teixeira vs #7 Jamahal Hill for the vacant belt. It is, in many ways, Dana White's dream: Hill won his way to the UFC through the Contender Series in 2019, just a year and a half after his professional debut, he's a big, tall, American striker who doggedly pursues knockouts and he's a staunch company man to the point of getting in hot water on social media for brave stances like "my boss slapping his wife is fine" and "Andrew Tate is good, actually." A lot of people, myself included, picked Glover to submit Hill--the only blemish on his record (not counting the No Contest one of his victories was swapped for because he dared to smoke the devil weed) is a grotesque submission loss against Paul Craig and just one fight prior he'd struggled visibly with the grappling of Thiago Santos--but the Jamahal Hill who showed up against Glover Teixeira was massively improved, stuffing 15 of 17 takedown attempts and giving up only three and a half minutes of ground control across five rounds against one of the most feared top games in the sport. He wobbled but wasn't able to finish Glover, but he did batter and control him, and however many questions there are about how much he deserved the title shot itself, there are no questions about how much he deserved his 50-44 shutout victory. What happens from here, who knows. Jiří wants to fight for the title again this Spring but doctors aren't sure if he'll be ready, Jan and Ankalaev are in a tenuous position and Aleksandar Rakić is still injured. For the moment, Dana has his personal champion. Middleweight Champion, 185 lbs   Israel Adesanya - 24-2, 0 DefensesThe Last Stylebender has finally exorcised the ghosts of his past. Combat sports fans who considered themselves In The Know had long heralded Adesanya as a potential crossover superstar based on his extremely successful kickboxing career, which had seen him win multiple championships and lose only by decision, and it was an open secret that the UFC was already taking a good look at him as he prepared to leave his home sport behind and transition entirely into mixed martial arts--so it was a bit of a shock when, instead of his last kickboxing match being a victory lap, he was knocked out cold by one of the very few men to eer beat him, Alex Pereira. Izzy kept to his word, left kickboxing, joined the UFC and became a superstar nearly overnight, and a year after his UFC debut he was already the middleweight champion of the world. A misguided trip to the light-heavyweight division to chase the double-champ dream proved to be a step too far, but the only blemish on his record came from a separate weight class, and after three more title defenses he was still perfect at middleweight and, easily, the second-best middleweight champion of all time. And then the UFC brought in this one guy named Alex Pereira. The UFC desperately wanted an all-striking showdown between the two rivals, and after the easiest path to the title since Brock Lesnar, they got it, and on November 12, 2022, Alex Pereira etched his place in the history books by stopping Adesanya once again, this time taking his MMA championship home with him in the process. This being the UFC an instant rematch was, of course, inevitable, and the world looked on with considerably more worry this time--but the Israel Adesanya who showed up at UFC 287 on April 8, 2023 was a smarter, better fighter who'd learned from his mistakes. After baiting Pereira into throwing caution to the wind, Izzy flatlined him with a counterpunch in just two rounds. There will be no MMA rubber match--the UFC doesn't want it, Izzy doesn't want it, and Pereira is done with middleweight altogether. So Israel Adesanya is back on his throne, even if he has to start his defense counter from 0 again. His war of words with Dricus du Plessis over who is and is not truly African (sigh) bore fruit, as du Plessis inadvertently talked himself into a title eliminator against Robert Whittaker this July, with the winner facing Adesanya at the end of the year. Welterweight Champion, 170 lbs   Leon Edwards - 21-3 (1), 1 DefensesIt took half a decade to get the world to notice, but everyone sees Leon Edwards now. "Rocky" came from the kind of circumstances sports movies are made of--a poor kid from Jamaica who moved to England, lost his father to gang violence, nearly lost himself to it as a teenager and found a healthy outlet for his anger in mixed martial arts. Edwards made his debut in 2011 as a prime example of the modern generation of fighter, cross-trained from the beginning in every discipline, and in just three years he was the welterweight champion of Britain and off to the UFC. Entering 2016, Leon had suffered the first true loss of his career--he was 10-3, but one of those losses was a DQ for an illegal blow and the other a coinflip decision that could easily have gone either way--at the hands of the newly-crowned Ultimate Fighter 21 winner, Kamaru Usman, making his debut as an official UFC competitor. It took ten fights without a loss for Leon to get his rematch. The UFC seemed especially resistant to his title contendership, pushing him down in favor of the ostensibly more marketable UK star in Darren Till and booking him against numerous other contenders and gatekeepers while repeatedly elevating less deserving fighters to the championship. He wouldn't have gotten it at all, in fact, had Jorge Masvidal not gotten arrested. On August 20, the UFC acquiesced and granted the clear #1 contender his shot at the championship, and at revenge against Kamaru Usman--and after getting dominated for three and a half out of five rounds, with the commentators openly opining on the likelihood that he had given up, with just fifty-six seconds left in the fight, Edwards uncorked a headkick that shocked the world and knocked Kamaru Usman out for the first time in his career. The rubber match was inevitable, and once again, Edwards opened as an underdog, and once again, he proved everyone wrong. Instead of a last-minute comeback Leon simply shut Usman down for the majority of the fight, stuffing eleven of his takedown attempts, outstriking him in four out of five rounds and landing an absolutely wild 75% of his strikes in the process. It was an incredible performance against one of the greatest welterweights of all time, marred only by Leon losing a point for fence grabs. The decision was unquestionably his, and now legitimized as the champion of the world, Leon's first move is...getting into a big, public spat with the UFC, because instead of any of the working contenders of the division Dana White is demanding he defend the belt against Colby Covington. Leon says he won't fight Colby, Colby and Dana seem convinced the championship fight is happening this summer with or without Leon, it's a big, lovely mess. Lightweight Champion, 155 lbs   Islam Makhachev - 24-1, 1 DefenseDestiny has come. When Islam Makhachev made his UFC debut in 2015, Khabib Nurmagomedov, considered by most to be the #1 contender and soon to be the best in the world, swore up and down that Makhachev, not him, would be the best lightweight champion of all time. Coming from him, the praise made sense: Khabib and Islam have trained together since they were children growing up and learning to wrestle in Makhachkala. Islam learned under Khabib's father, trained with Khabib's team and even made the pilgrimage to America to join Khabib at the American Kickboxing Academy. And then, two matches into his UFC tenure, Islam got knocked the gently caress out in the first round by the little-known Adriano Martins, who hasn't won a fight in the six years since. Even as Makhachev racked up wins, the memory of his loss and his wrestling-heavy approach to his fights let people cast doubts on him. Sure, he's good--but he lost, so he's not as good as Khabib. Islam Makhachev, as his trainer tells it, never wanted to be Khabib. He loves fighting, but he doesn't love the spectacle or the glory or the attention. So when, after ten straight wins, Makhachev was picked to challenge Charles Oliveira for the vacant title he never truly lost, a lot of folks just weren't quite sure what to think. Sure, he was an incredible wrestler, but Charles Oliveira is a submission wizard, and sure, he's on a ten-fight streak, but he hasn't fought a single person actually IN the top ten, and Oliveira represents a huge, dangerous step up as a man who's been destroying some of the most accomplished lightweights in the sport's history. Analyst opinion was split right down the middle; the fight, as it turned out, was nowhere near that competitive, and the only analyst who was entirely correct was Khabib. Islam demolished the former champion, outstriking him, taking him down at will, controlling him in the grappling, and ultimately dropping him with punches and choking him out in the second round. His first defense was a different story. Islam faced featherweight champion Alexander Volkanovski at UFC 284 on February 12th in a rare best-of-the-best, champion vs champion match, and this time, his team's prediction of domination was thoroughly incorrect: It was a pitched battle that ended with Makhachev visibly exhausted and Volkanovski pounding on his face. Islam took an extremely close decision and the divisions will remain separate, but his aura of invulnerability has been thoroughly punctured. Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs   Alexander Volkanovski - 25-2, 4 DefensesSometimes it takes a lot of work to convince people you're the best. Alexander Volkanovski's rise through mixed martial arts is the kind of thing reserved for the all-time greats of the sport: He lost once, in the fourth fight of his career--at welterweight--and that was nine years ago. He's won twenty-one straight fights since, defeating top talent from around the world before landing in the UFC and proceeding to dominate every fighter placed in his way. There was one, single weight placed around his career's ankle: Max Holloway. Holloway was the UFC's much-lauded and much-marketed featherweight champion while Volkanovski was on his way up, and even as a 20-1 dynamo, he was an underdog against the Hawaiian. Alex beat him--soundly--but because of Holloway's prior dominance, and because the UFC wanted to get the most for its marketing buck, they ordered an instant rematch. Alex won again, but this time it was by a very close split decision, and that left a vocal part of the fanbase even angrier and more certain Max was the real champion. Two years and two fights apiece later, Alex and Max met one last time on July 2, and Volkanovski beat every shade of hell out of Holloway, not just repeatedly wobbling and outstriking him but completely and utterly shutting him out of a fight for the very first time in his career. When the bell rang, there were no questions left: Alexander Volkanovski is the absolute, undisputed best featherweight in the UFC. And now, having more or less destroyed his division, he has his eye on the pound for pound ranks. Volkanovski called his shot at the lightweight title before Charles Oliveira and Islam Makhachev had even fought, and moments after Makhachev was victorious, Volkanovski was in the cage staring him down. At UFC 284 on February 12th, in front of a rabid hometown crowd, Volkanovski gave Islam the fight of his life and was smashing him by the end of the final round--but it wasn't quite enough, and he lost a close, but unanimous, decision. He got the moral victory of going toe to toe with the heavier champion, but it cost him his winning streak. Volk says he was offered a rematch later this year, but he wants to keep his kingdom secure, so at UFC 290 on July 8 he'll face Yair Rodríguez and attempt to reunify his championship. Interim Featherweight Champion   Yair Rodríguez - 15-3 (1), 0 DefensesIt's been a long, strange trip for Yair Rodríguez. "El Pantera" was just 21 when he first appeared on UFC television and barely 22 when he won The Ultimate Fighter: Latin America, making him explicitly the UFC's great hope for breaking into the Mexican market. The reasoning wasn't hard to see: Yair's Taekwondo background gave him a fighting style unlike anyone else in the UFC, one that mixed attacks at odd angles with wild varieties of kicks. When he knocked out Andre Fili with a jumping switch kick, the world abruptly took notice and the UFC started giving him main events. And then, as they do, things fell apart. He took his first UFC loss to Frankie Edgar in 2017 and was fired and quickly rehired shortly thereafter as part of the UFC's attempt at strongarming him into accepting fights, and then he almost lost a fight against Chan-sung Jung only to knock him out with a blind, reverse, upwards elbow in the very last second of the fight, and then he fought Jeremy Stephens twice in two months after an eyepoke ended their first bout in just fifteen seconds, and then he disappeared for two years thanks to a USADA suspension--not for testing positive for drugs, but for insufficiently updating his address in their smartphone app. In November of 2021 Yair took the second loss of his career in a fight against Max Holloway, and, oddly, that loss boosted him higher than his previous win--the world had expected Holloway to blow him out, and instead Yair gave him an incredible fight and very nearly won, proving he'd matured far more than people gave him credit for. And through that bout he got a title eliminator against Brian Ortega, which--ended in one round when Ortega's shoulder popped out while they were grappling. Through yet another freak occurrence, Yair found himself fighting for the interim featherweight title against Josh Emmett, who, himself, was there largely through chance, and Yair battered and submitted him in two rounds to etch his name in the has-an-asterisk side of the history books. He'll try to erase that asterisk on July 8, when he meets Volkanovski to figure out who the real champion is. Bantamweight Champion, 135 lbs  Aljamain Sterling - 22-3, 2 DefensesAljamain Sterling is the most simultaneously blessed and cursed fighter I've ever seen. A lifelong wrestler and grappler who started fighting at 19, Aljo took the long road to championship contention, dealing with setbacks and beating half the challengers the division had to offer before getting his shot at the seemingly unbeatable Petr Yan. He left their fight as the new, victorious champion, not because he had defeated Yan--he appeared to be on his way towards a loss--but because Yan had both illegally and outright intentionally kneed him in the head on the ground, resulting in the first-ever title change by way of disqualification. It took thirteen months for the inevitable rematch to materialize, and this time, Aljamain soundly outgrappled Yan and won fair and square--but the judges only gave him a split decision, which Dana White himself got pissy about, and the fanbase that already loved Yan and hated Sterling took it as carte blanche to poo poo on him all over again. Aljamain Sterling had the rare and coveted UFC title defense, and people hated him more than ever. The UFC itself made matters worse when, rather than booking the José Aldo title fight everyone wanted or giving Marlon Vera and his fan-favorite winning streak a shot, they tapped former champion and marketing favorite TJ Dillashaw as the top contender after winning one contentious split decision. Fans were split on whether Sterling would be able to outgrapple the accomplished wrestler, and Sterling made them all look extremely silly by catching a Dillashaw kick and immediately, easily ragdolling and controlling him thirty seconds into their fight. Unfortunately, seconds after that, Dillashaw dislocated his shoulder. Because everything is silly, Dillashaw was allowed to fight for a round and a half with one of his arms clearly not functioning, leading to Sterling getting a very easy ground-and-pound TKO in the second round, and after the fight Dillashaw immediately admitted that his shoulder had popped out dozens of times during camp, to the point that he had forewarned the referee of the injury before the fight so he wouldn't stop it immediately. If everything about that sentence sounds completely insane and backwards to you: Welcome to our fake idiot sport. Aljamain Sterling has three straight victories in championship fights, and through absolutely no fault of his own, most of the fanbase thinks none of them should count. It's not getting any less weird, either: His next title defense was announced for UFC 288 on May 6th, where he will face a returning Henry Cejudo. Flyweight Champion, 125 lbs   Brandon Moreno - 21-6-2, 0 DefensesThe war is over. Brandon Moreno has one hell of a career arc in the UFC. He was brought in as part of 2016's The Ultimate Fighter: Tournament of Champions, where he represented Arizona's World Fighting Federation as its flyweight titleholder, only to get eliminated in the first round by Alexandre Pantoja. The UFC kept him on, but cut him two years later despite a 3-2 record after two consecutive losses to future Bellator champ Sergio Pettis and, once again, Alexandre Pantoja. He was back in the UFC just one year later, and just one year after that he was fighting Deiveson Figueiredo, the man the entire world thought was the new unbeatable flyweight king, for the UFC championship. Their feud became the first thing to make the UFC give a poo poo about the flyweight division in years, and as the UFC does, it showed it by re-running it over and over. In December of 2020, Moreno fought Figueiredo to a shocking draw--primarily because Figueiredo was docked a point for groin strikes. An instant rematch was ordered for June of 2021, and this time, a Moreno who'd learned and adjusted to Figueiredo's power and timing outfought him, dropping him with jabs and choking him out in three rounds. The UFC decided to roll the dice again, seeing the fight as insufficiently determinative given their previous bout, and booked the two against each other again in January of 2022, and this time it was Figueiredo who had made the necessary adjustments, dropping Moreno three times en route to a unanimous decision victory. With the series now 1-1-1, the UFC, of course, needed a closing chapter. The fourth fight was originally booked for the summer, but a hand injury forced Figueiredo out and led to an interim title fight between Moreno and top contender Kai Kara-France instead, but destiny would not be denied, as Moreno exploded Kai's liver with a kick, handing him his first knockout loss in a decade. The final chapter, an unprecedented Figueiredo/Moreno 4, was rebooked for January 2023 as a title unification match--and because the gods of violence love jokes, the concluding fight ended on a doctor's stoppage. It SHOULDN'T be controversial, as the stoppage only happened because Moreno punched Figueiredo in the god damned eye so hard it was left swollen completely shut within a round, but Figueiredo's inability to tell he hadn't been poked, the confusion of the commentary team, and a partisan Brazilian crowd so angry Moreno had to be rushed backstage while being pelted with cups and garbage all conspired to make the fight seem somehow invalid. The longest series in UFC history is over, Brandon Moreno stopped the scariest flyweight on the planet twice, and he is, at last, the undisputed champion of the world. And his first order of business is defending his title against the only man who beat him twice, Alexandre Pantoja, at UFC 290 on July 8. Women's Featherweight, 145 lbs   Amanda Nunes - 22-5, 2 DefensesWomen's Bantamweight, 135 lbs  Amanda Nunes - 22-5, 0 DefensesThings are back as they should be. Up until December of 2021, Amanda Nunes was unquestionably the greatest women's mixed martial artist in history. She held and defended titles at both the signature class of Women's Bantamweight and the arguably real class of Women's Featherweight, and with her mixture of vicious power, aggressive grappling and solid conditioning, she defeated every UFC champion in the history of either class and, for good measure, Valentina Shevchenko, the ultra-dominant champion of Women's Flyweight, twice. What's more, she crushed most of them, taking on legends like Ronda Rousey and Cris Cyborg and knocking them dead in under a minute. Which is why it was something of a shock when she was choked out by unheralded journeywoman Julianna Peña. The abruptness of the ending to her streak, and the shockingly sloppy way she was taken out, left the fanbase both demanding a rematch and openly questioning how much of the loss was due to something being wrong with Nunes, rather than Julianna Peña doing something right, and opinions flew wildly regarding how close the second bout would be. Seven months and one season of The Ultimate Fighter later they met on July 30, and the answer was: Not even slightly. Amanda Nunes dumpstered Julianna Peña for five straight rounds, dropping her a half-dozen times and elbowing her face entirely open, and barring one touchy moment with an armbar, Peña was entirely shut out and lost a wide unanimous decision that included an incredibly rare 50-43 scorecard. After ten months of silence, the UFC announced that the only logical thing to do next...was a second rematch. Amanda Nunes and Julianna Peña will meet for the third time in less than two years at UFC 289 on June 10. God help us all. Women's Flyweight, 125 lbs  Alexa Grasso - 16-3, 0 DefensesEvery once in awhile someone gets to shock the combat sports world, and in 2023, it's Alexa Grasso. The UFC has been high on Grasso since she left Invicta for her company debut back in 2016--she's been one of the most consistently featured fighters in ANY women's division, be it her time at strawweight or her move up to flyweight--but her two bids at the top of the mountain at 115 pounds met with disaster, once in Tatiana Suarez handing her the only stoppage loss of her career and once in Carla Esparza outwrestling her to a decision, and watching her manhandled by 115-pound fighters left the world doubting her 125-pound chances. But thanks to her solid boxing and her ever-improving ground game she ran up a four-fight winning streak, and when the UFC announced that she'd be taking on divisional queen and one of the greatest of all time in Valentina Shevchenko, the collective fan reaction was a unanimous "sure, okay," because Valentina disposing of people was a generally accepted phenomenon and she needed a warm body. The first round was a slight surprise, with Grasso stinging Shevchenko on the feet, but as so often happens, by the fourth round Valentina had taken over the fight, was ahead on every judge's scorecard and looked poised to cruise to her her eighth title defense. And then, she was struck down by the bane of the sport: Spinning poo poo. Backed into the fence, Shevchenko did what she does entirely too often--a spinning back kick--and in the half-second she was turned away Grasso leapt to her back, dragged her to the floor, and became the first person to ever submit Valentina Shevchenko. Alexa Grasso, after years of work, is the Women's Flyweight Champion of the World. But after six undefeated years and the longest women's title reign in UFC history (not counting Women's Featherweight which, as we all know, is Not Real), a rematch with Shevchenko later this year seems inevitable. Women's Strawweight, 115 lbs   Zhang Weili - 23-3, 0 DefensesAre you really surprised? There's a long tradition of underestimating unlikely champions in mixed martial arts, particularly when they're not the fan-friendliest in style or personality, from Michael Bisping to Frankie Edgar, only to have those demeaned champions remind the world that they didn't reach the peak of their divisions by mistake. Many of the wise, studied scribes of the sport warned the foolish masses against assuming the same about Women's Strawweight Champion Carla Esparza: She was no pushover, they said, and Zhang will have real trouble. And then, come fight day, we unwashed masses pulled them from their ivory towers and forced them to run in the streets amongst the mud and filth so they, too, could feel the unburdened joy of being, because Zhang Weili, as basically every fan had assumed, did, in fact, beat the absolute tar out of Carla. It wasn't particularly close: Carla got outlanded 37-6, hurt several times on the feet, and choked out just a minute into the second round. The inexplicable, season-long Cookie Monster subplot is over, Zhang Weili is now a two-time world champion, and things are back as they should be. What comes next, however, is tricky. Carla was blown out, so a rematch is out of the question. Rose Namajunas, the only person in the UFC to beat Weili, is a likely candidate--but after her disastrous performance against Carla, it remains to be seen how much faith the UFC has in her. Jéssica Andrade has a claim, but she's splitting time between 115 and 125, and probably needs to pick a weight class if she wants a shot. Amanda Lemos is on deck, but she could really use a marquee win first. The UFC is spoiled for almost-but-not-quite contenders: They just need to crown someone.
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May 1, 2023 18:17
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NOTABLE CHAMPIONS ACROSS THE WORLD Bellator Heavyweight Champion, 265 lbs  Ryan Bader - 31-7 (1), 3 DefensesRyan Bader is the greatest Bellator Heavyweight Champion of all time, and on a dairy farm somewhere in Wisconsin, Cole Konrad feels a pang of regret. Bader made his name as the winner of The Ultimate Fighter: Nogueira vs Mir all the way back in 2008, but his UFC career proved to be one of Sisyphean torment and humiliation that included, somehow, impossibly, being the only man to lose a UFC fight to Tito Ortiz during his last six years in the company. Bader left for free agency and Bellator in 2016 and became its light-heavyweight champion on his first night with the organization, and just two years later he became its first-ever simultaneous double-champion after knocking out the legendary Fedor Emelianenko and taking the heavyweight title. Bader would go on to lose his 205-pound crown, but Fedor never forgot his 35-second drubbing at the American wrestler's hands, and for his retirement fight, he demanded a rematch. Thus it was that the entire mixed martial arts community watched with bated breath as on February 4th, 2023, Fedor Emelianenko walked into the cage one last time and promptly got the absolute crap beaten out of him again. Ryan Bader remains undefeated at heavyweight. Who comes next, we'll have to see. Bellator Light-Heavyweight Champion, 205 lbs   Vadim Nemkov - 16-2 (1), 3 DefensesBellator CEO Scott Coker has been complicating title reigns with tournaments for decades and he's not about to stop now. Vadim Nemkov won the Bellator Light-Heavyweight Championship from Ryan Bader in 2020, and his title reign was immediately wrapped up in the Light-Heavyweight Grand Prix that started the following year. Nemkov, a Fedor Emelianenko protege, former Spetsnaz operative and understated wrecking machine who hadn't lost a fight since his early-career days in Rizin back in 2016, continued his Bellator streak by handling the always-game Phil Davis and dealing with some trouble en route to submitting Julius Anglickas, but then the tournament came to a screeching halt. Bellator threw all its marketing cash at the ultimately ill-fated Bellator 277 in April of 2022, and a sizable chunk of that misfortune came from both its championship and tournament-final co-main event. Corey Anderson looked handily en route to defeating Nemkov, only to unintentionally headbutt him while diving in to throw a punch. The headbutt opened an uncloseable gash on Nemkov's brow--and it happened five seconds before round three would've ended and allowed the judges to score a technical decision. It would be seven full months before the final got its re-do, and this time, Nemkov avoided Anderson's wrestling and controlled the fight with distance strikes en route to a unanimous decision victory. It took nearly two years for Bellator to complete an eight-man tournament, but they did it, and Vadim Nemkov is still your world's champion. Nemkov was initially planned for a quick turnaround against Yoel Romero on February 4, but an undisclosed injury saw him pulled from the card; the fight is now scheduled for Bellator 297 on June 16th. Bellator Middleweight Champion, 185 lbs  Johnny Eblen - 13-0, 1 DefensesThere's an old combat sports tradition whereby a champion isn't really a champion until they defend their title. Gegard Mousasi has been established as the best middleweight outside the UFC that, despite the one-sided nature of their fight, Johnny Eblen's victory over him was treated as an aberration rather than the passing of a torch. It didn't matter that Eblen was undefeated, widely considered one of the absolute best by his cohort at American Top Team or that he'd dropped Mousasi on his face with his bare hands, the world needed verification. On February 4th at Bellator 290, they got it. Fedor Emelianenko's team was intending to pull one big, beautiful night of success out of the ether for their leader's retirement fight, but it was not to be: Vadim Nemkov had to pull out of the card thanks to an injury, Fedor himself was crushed for the second time by heavyweight champion Ryan Bader, and middleweight hopeful Anatoly Tokov was competitive for the first couple of rounds but was subsequently washed out by Eblen's overwhelming assault. Johnny Eblen is a defending champion now, and as things always seem to go, the conversation changed overnight from his being overrated to his being better than everyone in the UFC. Nuance escapes our fanbase. Eblen will likely see the winner of May's showdown between Gegard Mousasi and Fabian Edwards this Fall. Bellator Welterweight Champion, 170 lbs   Yaroslav Amosov - 27-0, 1 DefenseThere may not be a fighter alive who's had a tougher year than Yaroslav Amosov. Bellator picking Amosov up in 2018 was an obvious choice: He was already a world champion in Sambo and an MMA champion in Russia, already 19-0 with 17 finishes, and already being talked up by his training partners as quite possibly the best welterweight in the world. By 2021 he'd run up a six-fight winning streak in Bellator and earned a shot at world champion Douglas Lima, and he didn't waste a second of it, dominating Lima in every round. His success far outstripped his fame, but a scheduled title defense against superstar Michael "Venom" Page in May of 2022 promised to finally give him the spotlight. That, obviously, did not happen. In the wake of Russia's invasion of his homeland Ukraine Amosov returned home to evacuate his family and, once they had passed the border, notified Bellator he was pulling out of the fight and fighting in the war. Six months later, having liberated his home city of Irpin, he posted video of his troop returning to his mother's home to retrieve his Bellator championship belt, which he'd kept hidden in a closet. Amosov's return bout, a title unification against interim champion Logan Storley, was announced for February 25th, just barely one year after the invasion began, and after a year and a half not just away from competition but actively fighting in a war, there were many questions about how much like his old self Amosov could realistically look. As it turned out: He looked even better. When they'd first fought back in 2020, Storley gave Amosov all he could handle and the fight came down to a split decision; in 2023, Amosov wiped the floor with him, repeatedly hurting him standing and winning the entirety of the wrestling war. His home may still be in crisis, but Yaroslav Amosov is, at least, back on his throne. Bellator Lightweight Champion, 155 lbs  Usman Nurmagomedov - 17-0, 0 DefensesIf there's a single, developing throughline of mixed martial arts in 2022, it's the growing power of the Dagestani wrestling brigade. Abdulmanap Nurmagomedov built an army of ultra-grapplers, and after his passing the American Kickboxing Academy's Javier Mendez and Adulmanap's son and protege, the now-retired Khabib Nurmagomedov, unleashed them on the world. Usman, Khabib's cousin (as well as the younger brother of Umar Nurmagomedov, undefeated and ranked UFC bantamweight), took to Bellator in April of 2021 and proceeded to burn an undefeated path through the Manny Muros and Patrik Pietiläe of the world. His style was a little more eclectic--lots of spinning kicks, lots of stick-and-move jabs and stomps to the leg--but the resemblance became uncanny once he inevitably, and easily, ragdolled his opponents to the canvas and generally choked them out in short order thereafter. When he was announced as the #1 contender to Bellator's lightweight title, I was somewhat miffed: He hadn't beaten any top contenders, Bellator had already held a title eliminator and it was won in a crushing thirty-second knockout by Tofiq Musayev, the whole thing smacked of a pathetic attempt to glom onto some of Khabib's mainstream attention. I at no point said that he wouldn't very, very easily win. At Bellator 288 on November 18th, Usman very, very easily won, defeating Patricky "Pitbull" Freire at every aspect of the game and leaving him sans both his championship and one eyebrow. Usman's first fight as champion was both a defense and an entry into the first round of Bellator's Lightweight Grand Prix on March 3rd at Bellator 292, where he met, crushed, and retired former UFC champion Benson Henderson, handing him just the third submission loss of a 17-year, 42-fight career. He'll be waiting for the winner of May 12's tilt between Mansour Barnaoui and Brent Primus. Bellator Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs  Patrício Pitbull - 35-5, 1 DefensePatrício Pitbull has had a weird goddamn year. Pitbull has long been the GOAT of Bellator, sometimes to the company's open chagrin--there were definitely times they would have vastly preferred a Pat Curran or a Michael Chandler to carry their banner, and Patrício had this unfortunate habit of not just beating them but making them look like poo poo. By mid-2021, he was Bellator's dual featherweight and lightweight champion, he was on a seven-fight win streak, and he was a finalist in their Featherweight Grand Prix. And then undefeated rising star A.J. McKee dropped him and choked him out in two minutes. Bellator, clearly, felt they had hit the jackpot and were going to be riding the McKee train for some time, as by their rematch ten months later, McKee was the centerpiece of all of their advertising. It was somewhat awkward when, as he had done to so many before, Patrício took him to a victorious decision that made McKee kind of look like poo poo, neutralizing his offense in the clinch, jabbing under his range, and grinding away the clock. Bellator pushed for a trilogy, but McKee, pissed off, tired of cutting weight and worried about having it happen all over again, declined and moved up to lightweight. Instead of a big-money rematch, Patrício was left to face top contender Ádám Borics, and the match, while hard-fought, was not particularly entertaining or memorable. Pitbull's next fight was the rare cross-promotional bout, facing Rizin's featherweight champion Kleber Koike Erbst on the New Year's Eve Bellator x Rizin special. It was the only fight on the card that wasn't particularly competitive: He shut Kleber down completely and won a wide decision. There is only one featherweight king outside the UFC. And now, on June 16th, he'll be facing Sergio Pettis in an attempt to claim a third divisional championship. 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 was out long enough that Bellator crowned an interim champion and held the entirety of a Bantamweight Grand Prix, which wound up being one of their more successful and highly-lauded tournaments in quite awhile, so of course, when they announced Sergio would be returning on June 16th, months after the tournament's conclusion, they also announced that he would be fighting...Patrício Pitbull, who is trying to become a three-class champion. Thanks, Bellator. Bellator Interim Bantamweight Champion  Patchy Mix - 18-1, 0 DefensesThere's something to be said for how silly it is to have an interim championship last so long that it not only has multiple defenses but multiple titleholders, but there's nothing silly about the path Patchy Mix took to get it. Long one of Bellator's best bantamweights and arguably one of the best in the world altogether, Patchy "No Love" Mix has torn people apart across the globe, be it his five fights as the King of the Cage champion, his ninety-second submission of Yuki Motoya in Japan, or his 7-1 run in Bellator. The only loss in his entire career was a 2020 decision against Juan Archuleta, where the first five-round fight of Mix's life saw him exhausted and ultimately outworked. But he rebuilt, and he took Bellator's bantamweight grand prix by storm, and on April 22, 2023, he didn't just defeat Raufeon Stots, he knocked him out cold in eighty seconds. Mix won the grand prix, the million-dollar pot and the interim championship--and now he has to wait to see what happens with the Pettis vs Pitbull dust settles. Bellator Women's Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs  Cris Cyborg - 26-2 (1), 4 DefensesYup. It's 2023 and Cris Cyborg is still out there. For those who don't know, Cris Cyborg was the canonical women's featherweight fighter, a muay thai wrecking machine who didn't just beat but brutalized essentially all of her opponents, including ex-Star Wars Gina Carano, and her popularity as a destroyer of humans is the only real reason women's featherweight even exists as a division, to the point that the UFC added it when she was the only actual fighter at the weight class they employed. She was 20-1 (1) when she passed the torch to Amanda Nunes, who slew her in just fifty-one seconds. She took one more fight in the UFC to complete her contract, but left for Bellator almost immediately afterward with uncharacteristic cooperation from the UFC itself--after all, they'd gotten what they wanted out of her. Her first Bellator fight was a one-sided destruction of their featherweight champion, and she's defended it three times since. At this point in Cyborg's career the problem isn't her or her fighting or her age, but simply that there's no one in Bellator for her to fight--after just five fights she's already hitting rematches, having just recorded her second one-sided bludgeoning of a very game but outmatched Arlene Blencowe. Cyborg decided her next fight would be a boxing match, and on September 25 she faced Simone da Silva, a jobber to the stars coming off twelve straight losses who had been knocked out just one month prior. Undeterred, she had her second boxing match on the undercard of December 10th’s Crawford/Avanesyan card, taking a unanimous decision over Gabrielle “Gabanator” Holloway, who is 6-6 in MMA and 0-3 in boxing. It's kind of tiring to watch the second-best women's featherweight in MMA history take repeated nothing boxing matches, but on the other hand, what on Earth is there better for her to do right now, other than, uh, use her instagram account to call for a military coup of her home country in the hopes of restoring fascism to power? Bellator Women's Flyweight Champion, 125 lbs  Liz Carmouche - 19-7, 2 DefensesIt took more than a decade and some controversy, but Liz Carmouche got her flowers. "Girl-Rilla" was just as present a figure in establishing women's MMA in the mainstream, but she's the most consistently forgotten because she was the losing fighter in all of those establishing moments. She was a challenger for the early, pre-fame Strikeforce Women's Bantamweight Championship, and was winning on the scorecards before Marloes Coenen choked her out. She was a central part of the inaugural Invicta FC card, and was planned as a title contender before the big show came calling. She became one half of the first women's fight in UFC history, and at one point had Ronda Rousey in a nearly destiny-defying neck crank, but was ultimately submitted in the first round. She's one of two women to ever defeat Valentina Shevchenko, but when given a second chance at the now-UFC champion Shevchenko, she fell short. Despite her powerful wrestling and submission skills, she was eternally denied the top of the mountain. So it was both particularly appropriate and particularly cruel when she finally won a championship on April 22, 2022--in a way that displeased everybody. Standing champion Juliana Velasquez was winning on every scorecard, but Liz Carmouche got her in the crucifix position and landed a number of, respectfully, small elbows, but referee Mike Beltran called a TKO to the immediate chagrin of the entirely safe ex-champion. The controversy made a rematch all but mandatory, and it took Bellator most of the year to do it, but the two met in the cage to run it back at Bellator 289 on December 9, and this time there was no controversy, as Velasquez submitted to an armbar two rounds in. The weirdness didn't stop there: Liz's next title defense against Deanna Bennett also hit the skids, as Bennett missed weight and was thus ineligible to win the championship. Carmouche put it on the line anyway, and fortunately, she choked Bennett out in the fourth round. She's most likely defending against Ilima-Lei MacFarlane later this year. 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. ONE Interim Heavyweight Champion   Anatoly Malykhin - 12-0, 0 DefensesONE Light Heavyweight Champion, 225 lbs  Anatoly Malykhin - 12-0, 0 DefensesIt was a very good, but very strange, 2022 for Anatoly Malykhin. With Bhullar out indefinitely, the undefeated Russian bruiser was placed in the driver's seat of the heavyweight division, and after quickly dispatching of an outmatched Kirill Grishenko, Malykhin took home an interim championship. ONE planned to reunify the championships fairly quickly, with Bhullar vs Malykhin tentatively planned for ONE's debut on Amazon Prime Video in August, but Bhullar needed more time to recover from his injury layoff. The match was finally, formally announced for ONE Championship 161 on September 29--and then, the day of the aforementioned Prime debut, Bhullar announced he was pulling out with another injury. The match was once again tentatively planned for December, but the two sides couldn't come to terms, and after ten months, ONE was tired of doing nothing with their big, angry punchman. The new announcement was even more surprising: Malykhin, while remaining the interim heavyweight champion, was also dropping down to light-heavyweight and challenging the undefeated double champ and promotional kingpin Reinier de Ridder. The result was quick and brutal, as Malykhin bludgeoned de Ridder to a bleakly one-sided first-round knockout. After his undisputed championship victory, ONE took its third swing at the constantly-rescheduled heavyweight championship unification match. Bhullar vs Malykhin was booked, yet again, for ONE Fight Night 8 on March 24th, and yet again, it fell apart. They have scheduled it, yet again, for ONE Fight Night 12 on July 15. ONE Middleweight Champion, 205 lbs   Reinier de Ridder - 16-1, 2 DefensesThere's a long tradition of B-league hype in mixed martial arts. The hardcore fanbase chafes under both the total ubiquity of the UFC as a product and the way they set thesmelves up as the end-all be-all of the sport. As the B-leagues create dominant champions of their own, the fanbase inevitably rallies behind them as equal to, if not greater than, the UFC's equivalent titleholder, and further, as evidence of other companies having even better talent. And once or twice a generation, they're right! But most of the time, they're not. Fighters who destroy their B-league equivalents will commonly take a step outside their comfort zone and get immediately rolled by reality. Reinier de Ridder, more than any other competitor, was the popular argument for ONE's supremacy over the UFC: An undefeated ultra-grappler with belts at two divisions, one of which happened to be the UFC's permanently embattled light-heavyweight class. The remarkable ease with which he ragdolled and submitted his opponents, and the shaky nature of his UFC peers, led to wide exultation of his skills and regular comments from ONE CEO Chatri Sityodtong about his prospects against the best the world had to offer. It was consequently something of a bummer when he fought Anatoly Malykhin, the first opponent in years he didn't have a strength or grappling advantage over, and looked immediately lost when his takedown attempts did nothing. He had no visible striking defense to speak of and was ultimately, and distressingly easily, destroyed. The cycle has played out once again, the latest idol has lost, and now Reinier de Ridder will have to move forward. He'll be facing Tye Ruotolo in a grappling match on May 5th, because ONE is silly. ONE Welterweight Champion, 185 lbs   Christian Lee - 17-4, 0 DefensesONE Lightweight Champion, 170 lbs  Christian Lee - 17-4, 0 DefensesIt took three tries, but by god, Chatri gets what Chatri wants. Christian Lee, the male half of the first family of ONE Championship and its homegrown golden boy, was very mad about losing his lightweight championship in a controversial decision to Ok Rae Yoon last year. He demanded the decision be reviewed and overturned and his championship reinstated. Unsurprisingly: This did not happen. After months of complaining and just shy of a year of waiting, the two had their long-awaited rematch and Lee left nothing to chance, knocking Yoon out in six minutes to reclaim his belt. Having finally retrieved his title, Lee, being a responsible champion, proceeded to immediately challenge ONE'S 185-pound champion, Kiamrian Abbasov, for his title, a move that was definitely in no way influenced by ONE's repeated attempts to get his sister Angela Lee double-champion status. Fortunately for Christian, Abbasov horribly botched his weight cut: He came in overweight, lost his title on the scale, and was visibly depleted in the fight. Which is particularly lucky, because Abbasov beat Lee senseless in the first round to the point that a standing TKO would not have been an unreasonable stoppage. But whether from his failed weight cut or simply from punching himself out, Abbasov was exhausted by the second round, and Lee mounted a gutsy comeback and ultimately stopped him with ground-and-pound in the fourth round. After three attempts, ONE has succeeded in getting two belts on a Lee. Unfortunately, it was followed by tragedy. With the death of his 18 year-old sister and fellow ONE competitor Victoria Lee, the future of the entire Lee fighting family is both up in the air and the last possible thing that could matter at this moment in time. For now, they have to grieve. ONE Featherweight Champion, 155 lbs  Tang Kai - 15-2, 0 DefensesTang Kai has been flying under the radar for some time, and in hindsight, that was clearly a mistake. He made his professional debut as a 20 year-old collegiate wrestler and won a rookie featherweight tournament in China's WBK (after investigating, we THINK it's World Battle Kings), but his stylistic limitations became apparent when he moved up to Kunlun Fight--and stopped fighting rookies. Dominant decision losses to ACA standout Bekhruz "Ong Bak" Zukurov and Road to UFC runner-up Asikeerbai Jinensibieke made Kai's weaknesses too apparent to ignore, and he made the tough call to commit to his dream, pack up his life, and move away from home to start training with real fight camps, most notably Shanghai's Dragon Gym and Phuket's legendary Tiger Muay Thai. It's worked out quite well: He hasn't lost a fight in five years. Three knockout wins in China's Rebel FC got ONE's attention, and since debuting with the organization in 2019, Kai has soundly defeated everyone in his path. He claims his wrestling base makes him impossible to take down and he proves it by using it almost entirely defensively, vastly preferring to bludgeon his opponents on his feet. His fight against Thanh Le, while blistering and difficult, was proof: He evaded every takedown attempt, widely outstruck him, dropped him with punches and leg kicks alike, and took the belt he's held for two years. Tang Kai, at the beginning of ONE's worldwide invasion, is suddenly a very visible prospect: A power striker on a 10-fight winning streak and a champion in the world's most competitive weight class. The target on his back is very, very real. ONE Bantamweight Champion, 145 lbs  Fabricio Andrade - 9-2 (1), 0 DefensesThe second time was the charm. When Fabricio "Wonder Boy" Andrade joined ONE Championship back in 2020 he was a virtual unknown in the mixed martial arts world, a 20-3 kickboxer but only a 3-2 mixed martial artist who'd been fighting out in the regional circuit of China. His association with Tiger Muay Thai put him on ONE's radar, and his visible striking skills despite being just 21 at the time made him interesting enough for a developmental contract. Said contract proceeded to develop into Andrade going on a five-fight winning streak that only got more dominant as he met tougher competition, and three straight first-round knockouts punched his ticket to the championship picture. His first appearance in the spotlight, unfortunately, went a touch awry. First, bantamweight champion John Lineker lost his title on the scale after missing weight, meaning only Andrade was eligible to become champion, and he was well on his way to doing so before hitting Lineker with an errant strike to the groin so hard it shattered his cup, and with the fight not yet halfway complete, it had to be rendered a No Contest. It took four months to get to the rematch, and it was much more closely contested, but after four rounds Lineker threw in the towel, his face having been punched too swollen to continue. Fabricio Andrade is 25 and a world goddamn champion. ONE Flyweight Champion, 135 lbs  Demetrious Johnson - 31-4-1, 0 DefensesThe king has returned. Demetrious Johnson's 2019 debut with ONE Championship was essentially scandalous. "Mighty Mouse" had long been a fan favorite of the lighter weight classes, a 5'3" combat machine who had been going the distance with world champions like Kid Yamamoto and Dominick Cruz while still working a day job in a warehouse, but it was only in 2012 when he dedicated himself to mixed martial arts as his full-time job that he became a star. He won the UFC's flyweight tournament and became its inaugural champion, and his talents are the reason a division that has existed for a decade has only had five champions--three of whom came in the last two years after he left. By 2018, Johnson had one of the longest winning streaks in the UFC, was the all-time recordholder for championship defenses in the UFC and had recorded some of the most outstanding finishes in the history of the UFC. By 2019, he was out of the company. Johnson and the UFC never got along--or, to be blunt, Johnson was one of the few publicly calling the UFC out on its bullshit. When he won the flyweight title and became a world champion while only getting paid $23k/23k he let it be known, when the UFC cut sponsorship money in the Reebok era he noted the raw deal it gave the fighters, and when Dana White tried to force him to take fights up at bantamweight by threatening to kill the flyweight division if he didn't, he told the world. After Henry Cejudo beat him in a razor-close coinflip decision and took the bargaining leverage of his championship away, it was over in a heartbeat. Dana White personally disliked him enough that he traded him to ONE Championship in exchange for their welterweight champion, Ben Askren. Johnson proceeded to immediately win ONE's flyweight grand prix, but took the first stoppage loss of his entire career in his shot at Adriano Moraes and his world championship and engendered a thousand MMA thinkpieces about if his time as a top fighter was over. A year and a half later, he got his rematch, and on August 27 at ONE on Prime Video 1 he returned the favor, handing Moraes his own first stoppage loss after knocking him out with a flying knee. A trilogy rematch seems inevitable, but for the moment, having just turned 36, Mighty Mouse is a world champion in the second weight class of his career and shows no signs of slowing down. ONE Strawweight Champion, 125 lbs  Jarred Brooks - 20-2 (1), 0 DefensesJarred Brooks dealt with some crap on his way to a title. By 2017 he was one of the most-heralded flyweight prospects in the sport: An undefeated 13-0 multi-champion as an amateur, an undefeated 12-0 as a professional with fights across three separate weight classes, his heavy wrestling-and-grappling grinding style ground most of his opponents to dust. He took the moniker of "The Monkey God" thanks to his unorthodox striking and wrestling entries--when you're not afraid of grappling, you can get creative with the striking. And then he hit the UFC in 2017 and everything kind of went to hell. Three of his four UFC bouts went to split decision: A debut victory against Eric Shelton Brooks probably should've lost, a followup loss against future champion Deiveson Figueiredo Brooks probably should've won, an intervening bout where Brooks was easily dominating Jose Torres only to score the rare MMA own goal and knock himself out after smacking his head on the ground doing a big, showy slam, and a third and final split decision victory over Roberto Sanchez that really, really shouldn't have been split at all. And then the UFC cut him, despite being 2 and 2 and having gone the distance with the biggest new prospect in the division, because the UFC Doesn't Like Flyweights. So Brooks went over to Rizin, where he intended to build his way up as the next big foreign threat to top star Kyoji Horiguchi--and it was over in eleven seconds, after an inadvertant headbutt cut his opponent's eyebrow open and the blood-unfriendly Japanese network called a no-contest. His international comeback was further destroyed by COVID, and Brooks found himself iced for two straight years as he waited for the dust to settle. By November of 2021, he was making his long-delayed ONE debut; by June of 2022, he was 3-0 and the top contender. And then, of course, his title fight got delayed another six months thanks to an injury. On December 3rd, 2022, he finally got his long-belated shot at a major title, and shocking no one, he wrestled the poo poo out of Joshua Pacio for five straight rounds. Four years later than expected, Jarred Brooks has international gold. And because ONE's weight classes don't matter, he immediately called out 135-pound champ Demetrious Johnson. ONE Women's Strawweight Champion, 125 lbs  Xiong Jing Nan - 18-2, 7 DefensesXiong Jing Nan dreamed of lifting weights. She'd enjoyed sports as a child, and when China started its national push for Olympic supremacy she began training heavily in hope of joining the national weightlifting team. But then she met aspirants for its boxing team and fell in love with the idea of living out a martial arts movie and getting to hit people for fun and profit and she never looked back. She turned pro in 2014 and immediately became a standout, going 9-1 in China's Kunlun Fight promotion with wins across three separate weight classes. What made her truly dangerous wasn't one-punch power, but the ability to break her opponents with constant pressure striking, scoring TKOs with combinations stretched out across dozens of consecutive, unending strikes. The story was no different when she moved to ONE in 2017, and she was strawweight champion within two fights. ONE's women's MMA divisions have been its most stable, each having had exactly one champion, and they were so dominant that they inevitably had to fight each other--and, hilariously, traded wins back and forth in the process. 115 lbs champion Angela Lee went up to 125 to challenge for Xiong Jing Nan's belt but Nan stopped her with body kicks in the fifth round, and half a year later Nan dropped down to 115 to challenge for Lee's belt only for Lee to choke her out with twelve seconds left in the fight. Xiong has notched three successful title defenses since, which set her up for her greatest challenger yet: Angela Lee, again, apparently. Despite ONE's best attempts, Xiong successfully defended her title against Lee again, nearly finishing her in the first round and ultimately winning a decision. ONE Women's Atomweight Champion, 115 lbs  Angela Lee - 11-3, 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 arguably 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. She got a trilogy fight with Nan on September 30, once again coming to her weight class and challenging for her title, but ultimately fell short and lost a decision. In the wake of her 18 year-old sister Victoria's tragic passing, Angela and the rest of the Lee family have shut down their gym and are focusing on much more important things than fighting.  Rizin Lightweight Champion, 156 lbs  Roberto de Souza - 14-2, 2 DefensesRoberto "Satoshi" de Souza is trying to become the new Gegard Mousasi. On April 17 he had the chance to avenge the only loss of his career, a half-knockout half-injury against "Hollywood" Johnny Case back in 2019, and he succeeded in emphatic fashion, climbing Case's back, locking him in an inverted triangle choke and eventually forcing an armbar. He's now 14-1 and inarguably one of the best lightweights outside of the UFC, but unlike most of the other fighters to bear that title, he has made it clear he has no interest in changing that. Where the A.J. McKees and Michael Chandlers of the world want to test free agency and notoriety, Roberto de Souza is happy in Japan, both because his Rizin pay is fairly lucrative and his entire family jiu-jitsu business is based in the country. This is admirable, but it's also a little unfortunate: Rizin really only has around a dozen lightweights under contract, and "Satoshi" has already beaten a third of them. He may be waiting for a Spike Carlyle or a Luiz Gustavo to work their way into contention, but the Rizin ranks hold few surprises for him at this point. It was thus of particular interest when the main event for the New Year's Eve Bellator x Rizin card was announced as Roberto de Souza vs AJ McKee--a test of where Souza ranks with the rest of the world's competition. Unfortunately for him and Rizin, the answer was "under them." He positionally threatened McKee and was able to land some solid strikes in the final round, but was otherwise controlled and lost a decision. He'll be facing Spike Carlyle--in a non-title match, because, after all, this is Japan--on May 6th. Rizin Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs   Kleber Koike Erbst - 31-6-1, 0 DefensesRizin has found the solution to Japanese MMA's historical troubles with losing their championships to foreigners: Get Japanese foreigners. Kleber Koike Erbst, while born in São Paulo, moved to Japan as a fourteen year-old and, four years later, elected to stay behind and continue training in grappling and mixed martial arts while his parents returned home. He found community with the above-mentioned de Souza family, working odd jobs to fund his continuing study at their school in Iwata, and later that same year he began his career as a professional fighter. His rookie years were somewhat fraught: By his twenty-first birthday he was only 4-3-1 and his prospects seemed somewhat dim. As it turns out, aging into actual adulthood makes a loving difference, as in the following twelve years he has lost only two fights. One was a decision loss to Artur Sowiński, the champion of Poland's Konfrontacja Sztuk Walki federation, and he rematched and choked him out two years later; the other, Erbst's final KSW fight, was a loss to Mateusz Gamrot, who is currently the #8 fighter an entire weight class up in the UFC's lightweight rankings. Koike joined Rizin in 2020 and immediately snapped off a five-fight submission streak, leading to his challenging featherweight champion Juntarou Ushiku at Rizin 39 on October 23. It only took six and a half minutes for Erbst to submit Ushiku with his trademark triangle choke, making him, for the second time in his career, a world champion. Kleber had the shortest turnaround of all the Rizin talent competing at Bellator x Rizin, and the stiffest competition in the form of the legendary Patrício Pitbull, and that proved to be a bad combination. Erbst was unable to muster any effective striking or grappling and spent fifteen minutes getting calmly picked apart by one of the greatest fighters in the sport. Rizin Bantamweight Champion, 135 lbs   VACANT - The unseen departure of meaningTHAT'S RIGHT, MOTHERFUCKERS. You thought Vacant was done? VACANT IS NEVER DONE. On March 5, 2023, just one single day after Jon Jones closed the door on the long, multi-national title reign of Vacant, God opened a window. Kyoji Horiguchi, who has long struggled with feeling undersized at the 135-pound bantamweight division, announced he was moving back to the 125-pound flyweight division for good, and that he could not in good conscience hold onto a championship he could not defend. Fundamentally, admittedly, it barely makes a difference to Rizin--he won the bantamweight championship back in 2018 and, because Japanese MMA hates ever putting its treasured champions at risk, despite having five Rizin fights in the time since his championship victory he'd only actually defended the title once, and that was in a rematch with Kai Asakura, who'd knocked him out a year earlier in, of course, a non-title fight. Horiguchi will be fighting Ray Borg at flyweight in Bellator on April 22nd, and Rizin is supposedly spinning up a flyweight championship for later this year, but no one knows what's going to happen with any of Rizin's championships, quite frankly. So Vacant will sit in his new apartment in Japan and wait, at peace, with his shiny new toy, confident that no matter what happens, he will always have a throne somewhere in this sport. Rizin Women's Super Atomweight Championship, 108 lbs  Seika Izawa - 9-0, 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. Rizin's Superatomweight Grand Prix was both a big coming-out party for Izawa and a series of opportunities to look shockingly mortal: She had a fair bit of trouble with Anastasiya Svetkivska in the semifinals before ultimately submitting her, but her berth in the finals against former rival Si Woo Park proved the toughest fight of her career, ending in a split decision victory she easily could have lost. Seika was supposed to face Miyuu Yamamoto at Rizin 42, but after Yamamoto had to pull out with an injury, Izawa was instead scheduled to face...the last person Yamamoto beat, the 5-3 Suwanan Boonsorn, at DEEP Jewels 41 on July 28.
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May 1, 2023 18:18
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BKFC is by far the largest beneficiary of slap bullshit, because it's just as gross and uncomfortable and often reckless as it was this time last year, and it's still the company that got one of its fighters killed, but boy, the immediate visuals aren't nearly as shocking on average anymore and it's amazing how much that winds up mattering to people. Also, we made it less than half a day into June before bad poo poo happened; Felipe Colares, who spent three years in the UFC, was a pretty solid feather/bantamweight and only got released last summer, walked out of his gym and got run over by a loving bus.
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May 1, 2023 20:22
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Marching Powder posted:i don't agree. i can't equivocate striking a defenceless opponent and a boxing match. even the oildome was a fairer fight than slapping. I personally agree, but I'm more speaking to the tenor of the conversation that seems to go on around BKFC in the combat sports public. I noticed a lot more "it's gross/barbaric' talk before power slap and now it seems like people are less fussed even though BKFC's profile hasn't really grown that much, and I can't help thinking people are directly contrasting the two. Here's my problem with the bareknuckle vs padding thing, though: Instead of bareknuckle MMA it's bareknuckle boxing, so while you're getting rid of some of the subconcussive impact issues with padding you're also going back to fighters getting hosed up badly enough to lose the ability to stand and just getting a standing count before being thrown right back in, so I kind of wonder if it makes any difference. butros posted:Did imgur finally delete everything because I don't see any photos in the OP even tho there is reference to photos It all looks fine to me, anyone else having problems?
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May 1, 2023 20:57
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Ngannou did an interview afterwards in which he more or less confirmed being verbally committed to PFL and Chatri insisting on the negotiations anyway, so it sounds more like Chatri saying 'nah, we walked away from the table but it totally wasn't about money' to save face vs the inevitable PFL OUTBIDS ONE FOR NGANNOU narrative.
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May 2, 2023 05:05
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There's a sliding scale and a big part of that scale is "boxing" vs "everything else," but combat sports are dangerous and it's a small miracle no one's actually died from a fight in the UFC yet. Like, the UFC's the only one you can point to some level of medical stringency for and note as a contributing factor, because ONE got a fighter killed and Bellator came as absurdly close as you can by letting Kimbo and Dada fight, and the UFC has at least managed to do better than that. But it's also, to some extent, luck. Every knockout has just that teensy chance of something going horribly wrong. I rewatched Jessica Andrade bodyslamming Rose Namajunas out of consciousness for this week's writeup, and it still fuckin' rules, but it's also scary as poo poo and every time I see a fighter get knocked out in such a way that their head whiplash-smacks the floor, I hold my breath a little.
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May 2, 2023 17:42
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Julianna Pena is also out of the Amanda Nunes re-rematch due to broken ribs and has been replaced by Irene Aldana, who is no longer fighting her scheduled main event against Raquel Pennington on the 20th. Irene Aldana is on a two-fight win streak, the first involved missing the bantamweight limit by 4 pounds and the second was a mutual agreement to not even try to hit the limit, her last two losses were to Holly Holm and Raquel Pennington, and she's ranked #5. She is fighting for the world championship. Raquel Pennington is on a five-fight win streak and has not lost since 2019. She is ranked #2. Her fight is TBA. This sport is stupid.
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May 3, 2023 03:25
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Brut posted:Did the kimbo/dada stuff really have anything to do with fightsports being dangerous or could those two have gotten themselves in the same trouble trying to just like, run a half marathon or something? quote:The medical documents also reveal that Ferguson was taking medication at the time. However, that medication was not listed on the medical forms, despite the form requesting that information. The medical documents show that neither blood tests or an electroencephalography (EEG) were submitted with this medical examination form. Both blood tests and EEG are required to gain a combative sports license in Texas. Bloody Elbow was not provided any additional medical examination forms, blood test results, or EEG results for Ferguson. Lid posted:if this is true Francis we love you but you aint gonna pull this M1 Global poo poo Telling the truth isn't really Chatri's thing. Faustian Bargain posted:are any fights from the last ufc fight night worth going back to watch, other than probably the main? Not really, and honestly, the main wasn't even that interesting either. It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't anything to write home about. Most of the night was like that--just kind of milquetoast and forgettable. You could peruse the finishes by McGhee and Alekseeva and Padilla if you wanted, but Alekseeva's was probably the best of them.
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May 3, 2023 08:17
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CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 57: THE THRONE NOBODY WANTS SATURDAY, MAY 6 FROM THE PRUDENTIAL CENTER IN NEWARK, NEW JERSEY EARLY PRELIMS 3 PM PST/6 EST VIA ESPN+ | PRELIMS 5 PM PST/8 EST VIA ESPN | MAIN CARD 7 PM PST/10 EST VIA PAY-PER-VIEW What do you do when you find yourself in a hallway with two doors and you know, for a fact, that you don't want to open either of them? The UFC's really been in a mood to book its championships into a corner lately, and the bantamweight division has suffered more than most, and somehow, our answer to the "What do you do with a struggling championship and a champion with an uncertain future?" question has turned out to be "Go get a milk crate for Henry Cejudo." I used to really like Aljamain Sterling. I used to really like Henry Cejudo! And now Aljamain is wishy-washy about his future, way too eager to cape for bad causes and spends way too much time tweeting about freeing Andrew Tate, and Henry Cejudo has always been a company scab who will sell out everything about himself if it makes him money and/or gives him more time to do photoshoots for Ramzan Kadyrov or post about how he thinks gay people are gross. I know people who watch sports without giving a single poo poo about what fighters, athletes or coaches think about politics or culture or society, and I envy them deeply. And I don't even mean that in a 'this is a backhanded compliment that exists to make me seem wiser and more caring by comparison' sort of way. I don't think a single thing about my life has been improved by knowing Henry Cejudo's a weirdo bigot, nor does it do a thing for anyone reading this to have it restated. But all we can do is be who we are and say what we feel, and by god, if that means being mad all the time while watching my favorite sport, that just makes me all the more American.  did i not click on some of them by mistake, or did i do it just to mess with you MAIN EVENT: CRINGE COMEDY  BANTAMWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP: Aljamain Sterling (22-3, Champion) vs Henry Cejudo (16-2, NR)As a rule I hate it anytime a fighter ends years of retirement and goes straight into title contention, but after months of this matchup bothering me I've found a peace with this fight, and it's that, if we're being honest with ourselves, this may not be the championship fight the bantamweight division needs, but it is the fight it deserves. We went over this in brief last week: CarlCX posted:Despite the 135-pound class providing some of the UFC's best fights (and fighters) ever since its inception back in 2010, the top of the ranks have been stuck in a sort of unending purgatory for most of that time. We're looping time together here. The car crash that ended the bantamweight title's lineage three years ago is still haunting its intersection, and we can't escape it until we clear the wreckage. And the real kick in the pants is our grand prize, should we all survive this phantasmal process, is the guaranteed ending of the bantamweight championship lineage--again! Because neither the champion nor contender want to keep it. The UFC has paved over this particularly terrible part of its history, but back in 2017 Demetrious "Mighty Mouse" Johnson wasn't just the flyweight champion of the world, he was the most dominant champion in UFC history. The most title defenses, the best fighting skills. He was the kind of champion who armbarred world jiu-jitsu champions, knocked out Olympic gold medalists and chucked human beings through the air only to submit them before they hit the ground, just because he could. And the company hated him. The UFC openly sabotaged the flyweight division during his reign, releasing winning competitors if they refused to move up to bantamweight and threatening to fire Johnson and simply take his belt away if he didn't start taking cross-divisional superfights. And then they got lucky. Henry Cejudo, one of the sport's most opportunistic fighters, had failed in his first title bid and became the aforementioned gold medalist victim back in 2016, losing his undefeated streak in the process. But two wins was enough to get him a 2018 rematch, and despite being outstruck he just barely squeaked a controversial split decision past Mighty Mouse, ending one of the greatest title reigns in the history of combat sports. The change was instant: Henry Cejudo immediately established himself as a company man who was willing and eager to have the superfights the UFC wanted and openly noted his lack of caring about the future of flyweight in interviews, and Demetrious Johnson was traded to ONE Fighting Championship in exchange for Ben Askren and a ham sandwich. But that opportunism struck again. After years of pressing Johnson to move up to 135 pounds to fight bantamweight champion TJ Dillashaw, the UFC changed its tone and, twisting the knife, had Dillashaw drop to flyweight to challenge Cejudo. The Dillashaw who showed up for their fight was visibly drained by the process, was knocked out almost immediately, and was then discovered to have only (barely) made weight by abusing performance-enhancing drugs, forcing him to abdicate his belt. Suddenly, Henry Cejudo hadn't just defeated the bantamweight champion--there WAS no bantamweight champion. Which meant nothing could stop him from fighting Marlon Moraes for the vacant title. While there's no way he could have known this, the universe enabled him one more time. Marlon Moraes was one of the best bantamweights on the planet--but his time, abruptly, was up. After years as one of the best in the sport, Marlon would lose to Cejudo, win a very controversial split decision over José Aldo, and lose his next six straight fights--by knockout. Henry Cejudo fought one of the best bantamweights in the sport just one moment before all of his years of built-up credibility vanished. It was an unquestionable bantamweight win, and Cejudo was an unquestionable two-division champion. But Cejudo wanted his. After one defense of his bantamweight championship, Cejudo decided to pull a power move by unexpectedly retiring in the middle of his post-fight interview, claiming he'd accomplished everything he wanted and he was done unless the UFC wanted to pay him big money for big money matches. Having apparently not learned anything from the circumstances that brought the championship into his home, it came as little surprise to anyone but Cejudo when the UFC just sort of shrugged at him. There were new bantamweight and flyweight champions six weeks later. The double-champion was forgotten shockingly quickly. But that opportunistic streak didn't go anywhere, and the moment it became clear the UFC was stuck with a champion they didn't want, they got in touch with Henry Cejudo and made a deal. Because the UFC absolutely does not want Aljamain Sterling. They never have. Aljo entered the UFC as an undefeated regional champion, and rather than fast-tracking him or even matching him with ranked, relevant fighters, they gave him years of nothing. Debuting fighters, Ultimate Fighter washouts, aging WEC veterans--and when Sterling finally faltered, despite losing only razor-close decisions that could easily have gone the other way, he went to the back of the line. When the UFC finally did promote him, it was so he could fight their aforementioned shiny new toy, Marlon Moraes. And when Moraes knocked Sterling out cold, they sent him all the way back down the ladder. He had to win four more fights to get anywhere near the rankings. He had to take one of the best fighters on the planet in Cory Sandhagen, a man who'd never been close to getting finished and has been no closer since, and choke him the gently caress out in ninety seconds to force the UFC to give him his god damned title shot. At which point the champion illegally kneed him in the face and disqualified his own championship away. Somehow, despite the extremely clear cause-and-effect on display--break the rules, hurt your opponent, lose the fight--it was agreed upon by a wide swath of the mixed martial arts fanbase that Petr Yan was the victim, and Aljamain Sterling, the 20-3 veteran with ten years as a professional fighter, was, in fact, a whiny coward. Aljmain beating Petr Yan in a rematch changed virtually nothing, because he dared to grapple and control him on the floor without successfully finishing him, which, as we know, is morally wrong. Nor did it help when the UFC decided he had to defend his title against a preemptively crippled TJ Dillashaw no one wanted to see fight in the first place. And now they're trying to supplant him with a rerun from the Conor McGregor salad days. Aljamain Sterling is tired. He's been fighting for more than a decade--almost a decade and a half, if you count his amateur years--and it took three tries to climb the mountain, and once he got there, all he found was ridicule. It's his fault Petr Yan cheated got himself disqualified, it's his fault he had injuries to rehab, it's his fault the UFC wanted TJ Dillashaw in a title fight and it's somehow still his fault Dillashaw walked into a world championship match with one functioning arm. He's done. He's done with the fans, he's done with the weight cut, and he's done watching his buddy Merab Dvalishvili crush an entire division when he can't get a championship match. If Sterling wins, he's abdicating the throne so Merab can take over: He has at most one more championship match in him, and then he's going up to featherweight. But the rerun doesn't want to go back, either. Henry Cejudo has made it abundantly clear that he has no designs on becoming a reigning bantamweight champion and facing down the division: He is openly using this opportunity to come back, rocket into the spotlight by beating Sterling, and use that abrupt prominence to jump up to 145 pounds so he can challenge Alexander Volkanovski and return to retirement, this time as the UFC's first-ever triple-champion. It's one of the best weight classes in any combat sport in the world. And no one wants to keep it. No matter what, the championship is on borrowed time. So who gets to play Musical Chairs with the throne? Who knows. No, seriously. The oddsmakers largely have this fight as a pure pick 'em, and I get why. Aljamain Sterling is bigger and stronger, but his striking has always been loose and visibly uncomfortable, where Henry Cejudo had become a very efficient puncher by the end of his career. Cejudo is obviously a better wrestler, but he struggled with the counter-grappling of smaller, more orthodox fighters, and Sterling is one of the most creative, dangerous grapplers in the sport. Henry Cejudo also hasn't fought in three loving years. The gap is real, and as always, it begs questions. Will he have improved in his time off, or will he have degenerated? Has he trained well enough to deal with a threat like Sterling, or will ring rust cost him in the grappling? I can tell you that Cejudo winning would be a lot funnier, and I've come to expect the funniest thing is generally, somehow, more likely to happen. But I'm going with ALJAMAIN STERLING BY SUBMISSION. Maybe I think Cejudo's aggression and overconfidence will get him in trouble, the same way it almost did against Marlon and Dominick Cruz before he retired. Maybe I think Sterling continues to be underrated, and his ability to find back control against a pressure-wrestler will pay dividends. Maybe I just want revenge for Mighty Mouse. CO-MAIN EVENT: THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME WELTERWEIGHT: Belal Muhammad (22-3 (1), #4) vs Gilbert Burns (22-5, #5)I hate this. I hate this! This is an absolutely fantastic fight between two absolutely fantastic fighters who have a perfect reason to fight each other, and I hate this. And I hate hating it! Because both of these guys rule. Belal Muhammad has worked his absolute rear end off to get here. After seven years in the UFC he is only now, finally, getting his roses, and all it took was making a bunch of very, very good competitors look terrible. Muhammad had a very tough start in the UFC--he made his debut in 2016, went 1-2, got knocked out by Vicente Luque and looked doomed to be lost in the shuffle--and thus he made the decision to just sort of stop losing fights. Since February of 2017 Muhammad is 12-1 (1): One loss to Geoff Neal back in 2019, who was on the cusp of title contention just a few months ago, and one No Contest against now-champion Leon Edwards, who managed to gouge Belal's eye shut. In those same six years he mauled prospective golden boy Chance Rencountre, choked out Takashi Sato, outwrestled Demian Maia and Stephen Thompson, and even avenged his loss to Luque. And the UFC was still so uninterested in using him for anything important that they had him fight down in the rankings against Sean Brady, the undefeated, 15-0 prospect destroyer. Belal promptly sent a message to the UFC by beating the gently caress out of him. Brady's undefeated streak ended with 40 unanswered punches to the face. Belal's meaning was clear: I'm The Guy. Four straight wins over solid competition, nine fights without a loss, the case for contendership was more than clear. But it didn't matter. Gilbert Burns, in turn, was trying to justify his climb back up the mountain. Burns had been in the UFC even longer, having started as a late injury replacement all the way back in 2014--and then spent years as a lightweight. His fantastic grappling credentials and his hard-nosed style weren't enough to overcome the shark tank of the 155-pound division nor the degree to which cutting to lightweight took the energy out of him, and he was largely forgotten in the annals of the weight class. And then he decided to just stop cutting as much and bulk up closer to his natural size at welterweight. And, shockingly, in a lesson I wish the sport would learn: It went really, really well. Gilbert immediately scratched out a four-fight winning streak, and--stop me if this is a wild, crazy concept--impressively winning four fights in a row at the weight class wound up being enough to get him a title shot. He almost won, too, dropping Kamaru Usman in the first round and putting him in the worst danger of his title reign up to that point, but ultimately, he couldn't make it work. He went on to rout Stephen Thompson, give Khamzat Chimaev three rounds of absolute hell, and easily defeat Neil Magny, which is a real solid resume for potential contendership. But that didn't matter, either. Last March, Leon Edwards retained his welterweight championship and officially ended the Kamaru Usman era. But the big story the day before the fight wasn't either of them--it was the surprise reveal that Colby Covington was the championship backup fighter in case one of them got injured. Before the event was over, the UFC had tried as hard as possible to flag Colby as the natural #1 contender, and by the time the post-fight presser was over, Dana had made it clear he saw Colby not just as the top guy in the division, but somehow, insanely, as a rightful champion who was only denied the belt due to Usman's existence, meaning with Usman out of the picture, it was his match to take. Colby Covington hasn't fought in more than a year. His only victories in the last three years are over Tyron Woodley, who was cut from the UFC just a few months later on a four-fight losing streak, and Jorge Masvidal, one of the least deserving, most astroturfed contenders in company history. And, funnily enough, Jorge was about to fight again--against Gilbert Burns, who was putting his top spot at risk against Masvidal, who hadn't won a fight since 2019. It was made clear that if Jorge won, a title shot was in his future, and if Gilbert won, well, that'd be really nice for him. Belal Muhammad didn't even get that much. Belal Muhammad was slated to fight yet another contender in Shavkat Rakhmonov sometime this summer, in the UFC's constantly recurring hope that someone they actually like will solve the Belal Muhammad problem. It didn't matter that the fans poo poo all over the announcement, it didn't matter that Leon Edwards openly called it ridiculous and cited Muhammad as the obvious top contender. I wish I could tell you that it mattered now. But it still doesn't. Colby Covingon is almost assuredly getting his championship match this summer. It's currently expected for July, meaning by the time he gets his shot at the title, Colby won't have fought in sixteen months and his last victory over currently ranked competition will be more than five years old. And this fight, between the two actual top contenders in the division? It was made on three weeks' notice, as a last-minute replacement for the lightweight fight between Charles Oliveira and Beneil Dariush that was supposed to co-main this pay-per-view. This is a fantastic fight. It's an incredibly important fight. It will be a fascinating fight to watch. But either of these men could, and arguably should, have been fighting for the championship. And instead, we're here, where Colby Covington rolls off the couch into a title fight he earned by doing nothing and the rightful #1 contender and the next-closest guy have to fight each other with almost no time to prepare because it's the only way the company will even consider giving them a shot. This is a great sport. I love this sport. But as I find myself saying an awful lot: gently caress this sport. I cannot help feeling this is a very difficult ask for Belal. He's incredibly tough, but his forward-pressure approach tends to get him stung. Typically this works out for him anyway, half due to his fantastic chin and half due to his wrestling, which lets him force opponents out of their comfort zones and into his. Unfortunately: This is Gilbert Burns. Half of what allows Gilbert Burns to throw nuclear-bomb level punches is his complete and utter lack of concern about being taken down. Even Khamzat Chimaev, one of the best, most aggressive grapplers in the sport, noped right out of Gilbert's guard after all of a minute on the ground. Belal showed off improved boxing in the Sean Brady fight, but it wasn't so improved that he didn't still get clipped repeatedly, and getting clipped by Gilbert Burns is hazardous to your health. That said: Belal is, I think, a smarter fighter than Burns. The awareness of his advantages tends to leave Burns less organized in his approaches to fighting, whereas Belal has also repeatedly proven his complete and total willingness to fight slow, intellectual, neutralizing strategies. Belal throwing out leg kicks, jabs and wall-clinches for fifteen minutes is wholly feasible. I almost always wind up picking these fights with my gut. My gut has about a 40% success rate recently, and I already let it pick the main event. So we're going with BELAL MUHAMMAD BY DECISION. Take that, intuition. MAIN CARD: GRACIE RULES WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT: Jéssica Andrade (24-10, #4) vs Xiaonan Yan (16-3 (1), #6)Poor Jéssica Andrade. Jéssica demonstrated just how quickly someone can go from a massively hyped title contender to an afterthought, and it all stems from a refusal to focus on a single goal. Between 2016 and 2020, Andrade was one of the most feared strawweight competitors in the world and cemented her place in the division's history after winning its championship by deadlifting Rose Namajunas and dropping her on her god damned head. But then she lost the belt, and lost her contendership, and decided to go up to flyweight and lose there, too. And that began a very strange couple years where Andrade was ranked at both strawweight and flyweight, and bounced back and forth knocking off contenders at either, all while seemingly uncertain which belt she was going to go for--and then it wound up not mattering, as Erin Blanchfield buzzsawed through her this past February, stopping her 125-pound bid cold in its tracks. Without focusing on a weight class, Andrade couldn't even focus on an opponent. Xiaonan Yan has been nothing but focus. Her 14-fight unbeaten streak came to an end thanks to Carla Esparza and her dastardly wrestling offense in 2021, and Yan took nearly an entire year off to improve her skills, shifting her camp from the UFC's facilities in Shanghai to the Team Alpha Male compound in Sacramento, California, all in the name of improving her wrestling and grappling defense. Her return fight was an impossibly close split decision loss to top contender Marina Rodriguez--it could very easily have gone the other way--but the UFC's attempt to make a stepping stone of her backfired. Promotional darling Mackenzie Dern had a much tougher time taking down the improved Xiaonan Yan, ultimately completing only 2 of her 11 takedown attempts, and Yan landed more significant strikes in four of their five rounds, and this time, the close decision went her way. And now, despite being 1 for her last 3, she's still at the precipice of the top five and has a shot at contendership with just one solidly made argument. But it's going to be a tough argument to make. Yan is an extremely tough fighter and a hell of a brawler in her own right, but Andrade is a berserker who, whether it was wise to do so or not, has consistently been demonstrating her ability to walk through strikes from bigger, stronger fighters at a bigger, stronger weight class. Yan doesn't have the wrestling offense of a Blanchfield or the versatile striking of a Namajunas. Her strengths come from fighting toe-to-toe. And there are very, very few women I would pick toe-to-toe against the Piledriver. JÉSSICA ANDRADE BY DECISION. FEATHERWEIGHT: Movsar Evloev (16-0, #10) vs Diego Lopes (21-5, NR) Boy, this fight has gone through the wringer. Initially, Bryce Mitchell was going to have a wrestlefest with Jonathan Pearce to determine who the true wrestling prospect was at featherweight. Pearce got injured, so the fight became Mitchell vs Movsar Evloev, the undefeated Russian star teetering on the precipice of contendership after dominating Hakeem Dawodu and Dan Ige in his last two fights. And then, the morning of the 2nd, Mitchell was pulled thanks to an undisclosed injury, leaving Evleov sans opponent just four days before the fight. So now, it's the #10 ranked Movsar Evloev vs the unranked, newly-signed injury replacement Diego Lopes. A lot of people on the internet are celebrating, citing Lopes as a diamond in the rough and an immediate threat to the division. Having spent time watching his fights: I'm skeptical. Much is made of his 21-5 record and his 19 stoppages, but like so many regional competitors, when you look up the competition he's finishing, some of the luster fades. His last victory was against the 11-11 Angel Rodriguez, who threw wild hooks and naked leg kicks the whole fight; before that it was the 10-10 Kenneth Glenn who's been getting knocked out regularly for a decade. It's only a few fights ago that Lopes was padding his career against the 1-3 and 0-0 rookies of the sport. The only times in recent memory we've seen him fight top-tier competition involved him losing. It doesn't mean he'll lose again. He's a big, 5'11" featherweight with an extremely aggressive style and everything to gain, and when you're talking about fighters with just days to prepare for one another, anything can happen. But Movsar's defense is extremely sound and his wrestling even moreso, and stepping up to this level when he was struggling with the wrestling games of some of those aforementioned regional journeymen doesn't give me a lot of faith in Lopes. MOVSAR EVLOEV BY SUBMISSION. FEATHERWEIGHT: Kron Gracie (5-1) vs Charles Jourdain (13-6-1)Do you remember that Kron Gracie existed? Do you remember that people were excited about him once upon a time? It's been almost four years and statistically speaking there's a good chance you have no loving idea what I'm talking about, so let's recap! The Gracie family are the godfathers of modern mixed martial arts and directly responsible for the creation of the UFC itself, and their massive tree of grapplers spanned the entire world of combat sports from the mid-90s to the late 2000s--which is just about when the sport caught up enough that their grappling-over-everything approach started getting them visibly hosed up by modern fighters. Where once Gracies roamed the combat sports world like an endless legion, by the end of the 2010s, only a few were still actively trying to compete. But the one people were most excited about was Kron. Aside from simply being a world-class grappler, Kron was young, athletic, and most importantly seemed to understand that a functional knowledge of striking was necessary for modern mixed martial arts success. He was in Japan fighting for Rizin during its opening week, and within a year he was 4-0, having submitted real legends like Hideo Tokoro and Tatsuya Kawajiri. When he joined the UFC in 2019 and choked out Alex Caceres in two minutes, people had high hopes for his future. And then he fought Cub Swanson and got the crap beaten out of him. Cub danced around him, peppered him with almost everything he threw, and came away with an exceedingly obvious 30-27 shutout of a decision. And Kron, proving himself finally, truly worthy of the Gracie name, responded by pitching a fit about unfair judging, declaring himself the unequivocal winner, and leaving the sport to focus on jiu-jitsu. "Air" Charles Jourdain did not turn pro until two years after Kron's debut, and that's still been enough time to accrue more than three times his fighting experience. Almost half of Jourdain's career happened during Kron's retirement tantrum. He's had three narrow, contentious decisions go against him in the last three years, and his response has been to try to punch the next guy even harder. He's an extremely tough, extremely talented fighter who's been held back primarily by his own occasional recklessness. His willingness to throw caution to the wind gets him touched up by tighter fighters, and his aggressive grappling attacks get him picked off by faster grapplers. One of those things is very much not a problem here. The other is more concerning. Jourdain's a fine grappler in his own right, but Kron Gracie is not someone you should test yourself against. If Jourdain has tightened up his game enough to stick, move and force Kron to chase him like he did to Swanson, this should be an easy night at the office. Every time he engages in the grappling, his chances lower drastically. CHARLES JOURDAIN BY DECISION but I'll be tense the whole time. PRELIMS: NOTHING BUT PUNCHING LIGHTWEIGHT: Drew Dober (26-11 (1), #14) vs Matt Frevola (10-3-1, NR)The divisional label on this fight may say lightweight, but make no mistake: This is loving Violenceweight. After nearly a decade of grinding, Drew Dober is finally getting somewhere in the UFC. When you go back to his older fights where he was a little more reserved, the improvement he's displayed over the last five years is obvious, and it's paid off in his record: His only losses in his last twelve fights came against the current champion, the rightful #1 contender, and Brad Riddell, who was really something before he broke down to the point of going on hiatus from the sport. Dober's on a three-fight knockout streak, and it's a damned impressive one, having culminated last December with his clean knockout of defensive master Bobby Green--a feat previously accomplished only by Dustin Poirier. Matt Frevola's UFC career got off to a less than memorable 2-3-1 start, which wasn't at all aided by COVID, injuries and just plain bad luck leaving him unable to fight more than once a year in 2020 and 2021, but he started turning it around in 2022 by absolutely flattening two undefeated lightweight prospects in Genaro Valdéz and Ottman Azaitar with first-round knockouts. He, too, appears to be trying to make up for lost time, and he, too, has visibly changed his ways from the more carefully metered all-around attacks of his youth in favor of trying to take your god damned head off. This fight promises so much potential punching that I cannot help fearing it will ultimately disappoint; that both men will be so aware of their respective knockout power that we'll get fifteen minutes of tentative jabbing and clinching. But I hope not. I hope this is the symphony of beautiful violence it should be, and I hope the redemption story goes on for another year. DREW DOBER BY TKO. LIGHT-HEAVYWEIGHT: Kennedy Nzechukwu (11-3) vs Devin Clark (14-7) You know, Kennedy Nzechukwu was in a main event the last time we saw him. Sure, he wasn't SUPPOSED to be, but hell, at worst, he was in a co-main event. And he won! He kicked the poo poo out of Ion Cuțelaba and became just the second man to ever knock him out! And now he's fighting Devin Clark, who is 2 for his last 5 and one of those losses is, in fact, a loss to Cuțelaba, on the prelims. I know the light-heavyweight division is actively on fire at the moment and literally nothing makes sense, but I cannot help feeling you could try just a little bit harder. Nzechukwu has been looking steadily better and he wasn't even that bad in the first place--sometimes awkward and iffy at using his range, but that was still enough to win most of his UFC fights, and frankly, his last decision loss to Nicolae Negumereanu probably should've been a win. Devin Clark has just been struggling for more or less his entire UFC tenure; in 15 fights he's only managed two back to back wins, and one of those times was all the way back in 2017. He's a wrestleboxer, but his wrestling and boxing just aren't that great. And he's fighting a much, much larger opponent who's looked steadily better at dealing with his kinds of threats as of late. I think the no-back-to-back-wins streak is going to continue. KENNEDY NZECHUKWU BY SUBMISSION. WELTERWEIGHT: Khaos Williams (13-3) vs Rolando Bedoya (14-1)This is a divisionally baffling fight. Kalinn Williams, aka Khaos, aka The Oxfighter, is a scary loving bruiser of a fighter who's sort of orbiting the periphery of the top fifteen at welterweight. He doesn't belong there just yet--he got turned away by Michel Pereira and Randy Brown--but the Brown fight was extremely close, and he gave Pereira a hell of a fight, and with his ridiculous knockout power and willingness to swing for the fences, he's only ever a single hook away from a number by his name. Rolando Bedoya, by contrast, is an interim welterweight champion out of the regional scene in Peru who is making his UFC debut here. And I...don't really know why. He didn't touch the Contender Series, he hasn't been beating particularly notable competition, he hasn't even been particularly active--he's only had three fights since 2018. And, to be frank, he doesn't look great! He's got a really fast, pawing left hook, but he's sort of flatfooted, he's got real bad defensive instincts, and he gets stung constantly. Which is fine, and even worth a trip to the UFC to see how he does anyway, but throwing him in with a guy who's realistically in the top twenty in the world sure does seem like a weird choice. KHAOS WILLIAMS BY TKO. WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT: Marina Rodriguez (16-2-2, #5) vs Virna Jandiroba (18-3, #9) What's that? Is it a women's fight with contendership ramifications buried in the prelims? It is! Am I going to complain about it? Only if I can break through the chunky crust of exhaustion the sport has erected around my heart! Marina Rodriguez is the #5 goddamn strawweight in the world, and until this past November, there was a solid argument to be made that she was undefeated. Her crisp boxing, her smart defense and her willingness to get punches in and get the gently caress out of dodge made her a huge pain for any woman in the division, but--as defensive fighting always does--it made her a judging liability. She was stuck with draws against Randa Markos and Cynthia Calvillo which could easily have been victories, and she took a split decision loss to Carla Esparza that probably SHOULD have been a victory. But there was nothing questionable about her getting knocked silly by Amanda Lemos in her last fight. Virna Jandiroba is a tougher story--the kind of tough where you draw Carla Esparza for your UFC debut and get very non-controversially wrestled into paste. Jandiroba's proven to be a dangerous fighter, both in power and in quick, crushing grappling attacks, and no one has managed to finish her or even come particularly close. But she's barely been able to string two wins together against the UFC's level of competition, and she's fighting to escape the orbit of the top ten gatekeeper that she's been steadily falling into over the last three years. In other words: It's someone who could be fighting for the title with one solid win against someone who's been perennially stuck at the bottom of the top ten, in a division that's recently blown itself wide open and has a rush for contendership. Which is, of course, way less important than Kron Gracie's first fight in four years. Or the UFC debut of Rolando Bedoya. Or--wait, isn't there a women's strawweight contendership match prominently featured on the main card next week? Why is that getting the spotlight? Oh. Mackenzie Dern's in it. Funny how that keeps working. MARINA RODRIGUEZ BY DECISION. PRELIMS: YESTERDAY'S SPEEDBUMPS HEAVYWEIGHT: Parker Porter (13-8) vs Braxton Smith (5-1) HEAVYWEIGHTS! You knew they had to be here somewhere. Our old friend Parker Porter is back just two and a half months after getting knocked flat by Justin Tafa in a single minute, which, man, that just doesn't seem like enough time to recover from a potential concussion but I'm not a doctor, I suppose. Parker Porter's UFC career feels like it's on borrowed time--he's not terrible, but he's not noticeably great at anything except being willing to march forward. He gets beaten by the good fighters he fights, and his best victories are against people like Chase Sherman. Chase...Sherman.  NO. He's not even in this fight. Of course he's going to come up, he's in the UFC, I refuse to be haunted by Chase Sherman yet again just because he's fighting his current UFC peers. That's completely loving normal. Leave me alone. Fortunately for me, we're safe now, because Porter's opponent isn't even from the UFC. Braxon "The Beautiful Monster" Smith is, much like Porter, a compact, 5'11" heavyweight made of pure mass and punching power. You can watch his entire fighting career in about six minutes and it unfolds exactly the way you've already correctly assumed it does: A stocky guy throwing his body forward and winging wild punches until his opponent falls over, and because it's regional heavyweight, it always works. He's got five wins in a row, all of them were first-round knockouts, and at heavyweight, that's enough. Although there's a weird gap in his career, because his only loss came from his very first fight back in 2014, and he didn't fight again for eight more years. Who could have scared him so badly in his debut match that he left the sport for almost a decade? Who c--oh, no. No.  NO.  I'm done. I can't. PARKER PORTER BY DECISION. I have to go. MIDDLEWEIGHT: Ikram Aliskerov (13-1) vs Phil Hawes (12-4) This is, potentially, a very interesting fight. Ikram Aliskerov is one of the lost Dagestani superstars--possibly from lack of direct connection to the Nurmagomedovi--but he, his stiff punches and his fantastic wrestling have made him a standout in the middle-eastern fight scene for years, and he'd still be undefeated had he not run into some 4-0 guy named Khamzat Chimaev back in 2019. And even then, he was doing an admirable job of blocking Khamzat's takedowns and sticking him with punches right up until, you know, he died. Phil "No Hype" Hawes, who I am deeply, deeply sad is no longer nicknamed Megatron, is trying to spoil Aliskerov's UFC debut and right his own ship. Hawes spent most of the last two years getting bounced out of the rankings--after a great first three fights in the UFC he got knocked out by Chris Curtis and Roman Dolidze, although he did put a downright uncomfortable beating on Deron Winn between the two losses. Hawes is very tough, very strong and enough of a wrestler in his own right to have the rare perfect takedown defense record in the UFC--but then, only one of his opponents actually tried to take him down. We know Aliskerov can get knocked out by a sufficiently scary striker, and we know Hawes is scary as hell when he lays his hands on someone. This fight is more or less just a question of if you believe Ikram Aliskerov's Dagestani wrestling can break Hawes' defense and force the fight to the floor. And the answer's almost certainly yes, but honestly? I'm pretty bored about it. PHIL HAWES BY TKO. Let's have some more comedy in our MMA today. FLYWEIGHT: Zhalgas Zhumagulov (14-8) vs Rafael Estevam (11-0) Zhalgas Zhumagulov deserves an awful lot better. His 1-5 UFC record looks dismal on paper, but two of those fights--his two most recent losses--were split decisions he unquestionably should have won, and his UFC debut against Raulian Paiva was, itself, an ultra-close decision 3/4 of the media scored for him. In a better world Zhalgas would be 4-2 in the UFC, 17-5 overall, and ranked in the top fifteen. But we live here, where he's welcoming undefeated prospect, Contender Series winner, and former flyweight champion of Brazil's FATALITY ARENA, Rafael "Macapá" Estevam, to the UFC. And Estevam's good. He's more offensively-oriented than most flyweight competitors, which is presumably what put him on the UFC's radar in the first place, but he's a solid, all-around fighter, like virtually any flyweight, and is just as comfortable winging punches as driving all the way across the cage to finish a takedown. ZHALGAS ZHUMAGULOV BY DECISION. I want to think Zhumagulov's defense is going to neutralize a lot of Estevam's best offense, but if I'm really being honest, I just want Zhalgas to win a loving fight. He deserves it. MIDDLEWEIGHT: Joseph Holmes (8-3) vs Claudio Ribeiro (10-3) This is what we call a 'figuring out how to cut our losses' fight. Joseph Holmes and Claudio Ribeiro were both well-heralded Contender Series victors for very different reasons--in Holmes' case it was his reputation as an enormous, 6'4" middleweight with trees for arms who choked out almost everyone he fought, and in Ribeiro's, it was his 100% knockout rate, thanks in no small part to his old-school throwback tendency to wing punches like he was swinging a lunchbox from his hip on his way to work. But Holmes has gone 1-2 in the UFC, getting soundly outgrappled and finished for the first time in his career by "The Iron Turtle" Jun Yong Park back in October, and Ribeiro made his debut this past January only to get starched by Abdul Razak Alhassan in five and a half minutes. It's okay to lose. The UFC's fine with losing. It's when you lose at the things they thought you were good at--clinch grappling and wild brawls--that they start to get wary. JOSEPH HOLMES BY SUBMISSION. Ribeiro's lunchbox punches are going to get him clinched up, and unlike Park, he doesn't have the judo base to stop it. BANTAMWEIGHT: Daniel Santos (10-2) vs Johnny Munoz Jr. (12-2)Sometimes the UFC picks a fight to start a card just because they think it'll be fun. This should, realistically, be fun. Daniel "Willycat" Santos is a Charles Oliveira training partner, one of the last Chute Boxers left standing, and a representative of the true meaning of mixed martial arts: Devoting years of your life to learning and practicing historically proven techniques so you can throw them out the window and throw endless arrays of spinning poo poo. Johnny Munoz Jr. is the slightly more confused stylist of the two--he's much more of a grappler by trade, with solid takedowns and an aggressive choke game, but he likes to lead with his head on the feet and get stuck in brawls, which often go very poorly for him. All martial arts modernity is about rejecting the past and blazing your own trail, and sometimes you make those trails by spinning in circles, and sometimes you do it by jumping guillotines. JOHNNY MUNOZ JR BY DECISION. This should be frenetic but I still think the wrestling takes it in the end.
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May 3, 2023 21:23
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Foul Fowl posted:tbh i have no idea how anyone watches this sport without being able to switch it off, nearly everyone involved in mma (and combat sports in general) is a deranged hateful lunatic. if you get lucky your favourite fighter's derangement is just profoundly strange and not venomous (machida #1 nice boy #1 piss drinker) I feel like the UFC's starting to get to the point where the ability to turn it off is starting to feel just as weird as my leaving it on all the time has always felt to me. Dana White uses the press conferences to talk about how bad being woke is, Holly Holm wins a fight and goes on about the groomer problem, Jon Anik randomly shouts out Ron DeSantis on commentary, the UFC takes time out of its broadcast to hold a Donald Trump party and every subsequent fighter grovels at him, I dunno, man. It used to just be 'are you the kind of person who isn't so online to know/doesn't care that Bryce Mitchell thinks the Earth is flat' but the programming itself is more and more often used as a platform to talk about this poo poo and it seems like switching it off must be harder than ever. In less depressing fighter news, this is Zhalgas Zhumagulov now. https://twitter.com/RiniMMA/status/1654050935226736640
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May 4, 2023 18:18
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vibe-check MMA writing is good MMA writing but I've also been concerned about mighty mouse being all 'ehh, maybe i'll retire' right before a fight with a dude what knocked him out
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May 5, 2023 07:17
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https://twitter.com/AlexPereiraUFC/status/1654446581809070081 christ almighty just stop. just stop. i am begging you to stop doing title rematches. my children, they're sick.
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May 5, 2023 17:55
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Trillhouse posted:lmao he's still alive. The thing this video doesn't show is the entire preceding 3 1/2 minutes of the round was Roy just getting the poo poo kicked out of him the whole time while looking terrible and then he landed one punch and won anyway, just a consummate Roy Nelson performance preservation of treasure, this is
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May 6, 2023 22:06
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https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4031190&pagenumber=3#post531684882 Back to the GDT one more time for the weekend, UFC begins in 15-20 minutes.
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May 6, 2023 23:13
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Henry Cejudo and a Gracie ate poo poo. A good night. Also mute this so you don't hear any of the terrible trash talking again, but pay attention to Merab just immediately swiping O'Malley's jacket, it's fantastic. https://twitter.com/KoreanJohn_/status/1655082555446792193
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May 7, 2023 06:36
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For anyone who doesn't click through, he didn't so much just get drunk and flip his truck, which would already be bad enough, as he got drunk and flipped his truck after wrecking it smashing the poo poo out of two parked cars and then refused a sobriety test. Dude needs help, but that's been true for a long time about a number of things.blue footed boobie posted:It seems weird to me that goons hate on Cejudo for being a socially awkward guy that makes up for it with cringe worthy attempts at comedy. I mean, I don't hate him for being socially awkward and trying to make up for it with a cringe persona, I hate him for using his cringe persona to paper over poo poo like this. quote:“My dad wasn’t the best human,” Cejudo said at a Latinos for Trump rally in South Phoenix Wednesday. “He came to this country as a foreigner, broke the law, and was deported."
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May 7, 2023 17:03
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It's wild that we only have three MMA events for the entire rest of the month and one of them, which is 13 days away, has no main event.
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May 7, 2023 18:23
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Benson Cunningham posted:Wait, One isn't doing Friday nights this month? Blaaahhhhhhh Oh yeah, that's why I specified MMA. Muay thai never ends.
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May 7, 2023 18:45
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Lucasar posted:Just finished watching the card and it occurred to me that apart from Islam, Volk and Moreno, all the UFC men's champions are really loving lanky. Jones, Hill, Adesanya, Edwards, and Sterling are all very tall and range-y for their weight classes, despite pretty substantial differences in how they make that work for them (pressuring vs countering, striking vs wrestling).  some standards are set early
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May 7, 2023 20:07
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LobsterMobster posted:there are really just 2 types of fighters, gangly violence monsters or meaty cubes  it had everything the sport was made of, and we all booed. we all booed!
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May 7, 2023 21:01
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Don Frye was doing the dumb 'men aren't men anymore/pussified society' schtick back in like 2005, that boat sailed a long time ago. Mostly I'm just glad he's alive, dude was having a pretty bad time not too long ago.
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May 8, 2023 06:15
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I cannot believe the UFC elected to use an opportunity to try to push Mackenzie Dern.
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May 8, 2023 19:20
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Hey, good news, they've got Arman Tsarukyan back on the schedule! It's against a guy who's only fought three times since 2019 and got his poo poo hosed up by Nasrat Haqparast and is nowhere even remotely close to a ranking. https://twitter.com/bokamotoESPN/status/1655989557857509376 When Brett loving Okamoto is subtly signaling that your matchmaking is bad.
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May 9, 2023 18:59
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LobsterMobster posted:
this rules and you are braver than I for managing to make it through an entire Bellator prelim section without giving up I will never let the world forget that Uriah Hall completely hosed up Gegard Mousasi's poo poo, though
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May 10, 2023 11:42
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That does look like a good card, so let's help it out with some good karma by talking about one that isn't. CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 58: WE'RE ON A RIDE TO NOWHERE  SATURDAY, MAY 13 FROM THE SPECTRUM CENTER IN CHARLOTTE, NORTH CAROLINA  EARLY START TIME WARNINGPRELIMS 8:30 AM PST/11:30 AM EST | MAIN CARD 12 PM PST/3 PM ESTEARLY START TIME WARNINGThe UFC has always seemed sort of ambivalent about its network television shows. They act like they're a big deal--and they are! Short of running fights for free on Youtube, network television is the biggest audience you can realistically get; the highest potential for the most eyes. When the UFC struck its first network television deal back in 2011 they made it a giant media event, paid enormous attention to it, and booked their heavyweight championship on it. Almost nine million people watched Junior dos Santos become the new champion of the world. It was a big loving deal. And the next time they were on network television, they did, uh, Nate Diaz vs Jim Miller. They made it the lightweight championship show for awhile, but even that fell to the wayside. When the UFC started promoting network television events on ABC in 2021 they packed them not with the most consequential fights, but with the fighters they wanted people to care about but knew they weren't quite yet ready to pay for. Calvin Kattar. Kevin Holland. Yair Rodríguez. Each time, slightly lesser. And each time, the network was just a bit less happy. It's 2023. The UFC is back on network television. Their timeslot starts at 8:30 in the morning. And they really, really want you to decide you like Jailton Almeida.  i know this is where i put jokes, but something about this card just gives me ennui MAIN EVENT: THESE SLIPPERY PEOPLE GONNA SEE YOU THROUGH HEAVYWEIGHT: Jairzinho Rozenstruik (13-4, #9) vs Jailton Almeida (18-2, #12) Organic matchmaking is one of the rare pleasures of combat sports. People coming up and down the rankings, people meeting each other while climbing the ladder in parallel, long-deserving #1 contenders, even just journeymen fighting each other thanks to complementary styles and fortuitous timing. Or, to put it more simply: Mixed martial arts is as much about story as technique. Audiences want to be invested in fighters and companies want to create, cultivate and ultimately harvest that investment. Sometimes you get lucky and stories fall in your lap--say, a destitute Cameroonian immigrant who crushes everyone in his way and becomes the best heavyweight on the planet--but typically, promotions find themselves doing the razor-dance of marketing. Find the path forward for a fighter that tests them without being likely to derail them. Push, but don't push too hard, or the audience will catch on to the manipulation and reject it. Try to spread the attention around so you have multiple irons in the fire in case one or two get knocked cold. A lot of fans have become a lot more vocal about their feelings of burnout with the UFC over the last few years. I think a sizable part of that is the complete burial of this theory of starmaking in favor of their modern ethos, which can be best summed up as "You will watch who we want you to watch, and additionally, gently caress you." The championship contenders are artificial, the divisional rankings are made up, and the promotional favorites are unavoidable. If you like Paddy Pimblett, or Sean O'Malley, or Colby Covington, or Mackenzie Dern, good news: This is the product for you. If you don't, the UFC does not really care. They don't actually need your money anymore. ESPN pays them whether you give a poo poo about their contenders or not. Jairzinho Rozenstruik was, at one point, positioned as one of those contenders. As a championship kickboxer with tons of knockout power and no grappling offense to speak of he had the exact skillset the UFC salivates for in its heavyweights, and they supported their symbiotic relationship by feeding him a series of softer targets--the striking-deficient Junior Albini, the knockdown-prone Allen Crowder, the ever-chancy Andrei Arlovski--and when he passed his big test by scraping victory from the jaws of defeat and exploding Alistair Overeem's mouth with just four seconds left in their fight, the UFC knew Jairzinho Rozenstruik was for real. They booked a fantastic, organic matchup between their two biggest knockout strikers, Rozenstruik and Francis Ngannou, in a title eliminator that was sure to have lengthy fireworks. And then Ngannou flatlined him in twenty seconds, and suddenly, the Jairzinho Rozenstruik experiment was over. To be clear, they have by no means buried the man. He's stayed active and prominent as a heavyweight contender--which is the problem. There have been no further gimme fights for Jairzinho Rozenstruik. Junior dos Santos, Ciryl Gane, Curtis Blaydes, Alexander Volkov--he even fought Augusto Sakai during the very brief window in which Augusto Sakai looked like he might be a contender. It took three years for Rozenstruik to get a gimme fight, and that was perennial knockout victim Chris Daukaus during that inexplicable stretch of time where the UFC either desperately wanted him to succeed or truly, deeply hated him, and it was impossible to tell which. Rozenstruik was only briefly a favorite toy. Once he got destroyed, the shine came off and the UFC moved on. In 2023 the UFC's favorite heavyweight toy is Jailton Almeida, and it's sort of baffling. Which isn't to say there's anything even remotely wrong with Jailton Almeida. He's a fantastic fighter. Chopping leg kicks, great takedowns, solid submission game. The confusion, and distaste, have absolutely nothing to do with the man himself and everything to do with the promotion, and, of course, his roots in the Contender Series. "Malhadinho" walked into the bread-and-circuses show in 2021 as a 13-2 light-heavyweight who hadn't lost since 2018 and had never recorded a win by decision, and for whatever reason, despite their usual antipathy towards grappling, takedowns and fighters who don't speak English, Almeida had a jetpack strapped to him the second he entered the UFC. After the requisite debut jobber match, Almeida was put immediately in a position to hop the fence and enter the rankings. He was slated for light-heavyweight standout Maxim Grishin, and when that fell through, he was bumped up to heavyweight to fight Shamil Abdurakhimov, but injuries and bad timing left him fighting exceptionally outclassed replacement competition. But the UFC never stopped the push, and after wiping the floor with both wide-eyed substitutions the UFC finally got Abdurakhimov into the cage and finally got Almeida in the rankings, as he outwrestled, outgrappled and submitted the #14 heavyweight in the world, which somehow, over time, led to Almeida at #12, because that's how rankings work. Almeida had proven he could hang with a grappler, and that's good, because heavyweight is chock-full of talented wrestlers and grapplers. Alexandr Romanov, Blagoy Ivanov, Marcin Tybura, Serghei Spivac--all of them were similarly hovering around the outer edge of the top ten, and all of them posed interesting challenges for this nascent contender. So the UFC booked him against a kickboxer ranked higher than all of them who was once repeatedly taken down and controlled by a man who intentionally bunched up his fight shorts to make them look like a diaper. Which is, of course, the point of all of this. Three weeks ago the top two heavyweight contenders in the UFC fought on an internet-only card in an empty arena with no fanfare. The winner took his post-fight interview in a sea of darkness and used his translator to ask a bunch of empty chairs for bonus pay since he knocked his opponent out. This week the UFC is making one of its incredibly rare appearances on network television with a crowd of thousands, and the fighter it has chosen to put front and center isn't the #2-ranked heavyweight knockout artist, or the possible next contenders for the women's strawweight championship, or the June-scheduled on-deck fight for the red-hot featherweight division. It's Jailton Almeida, the #12-ranked heavyweight grappler, fighting a guy who couldn't stop Ciryl Gane from taking him down. It's baffling, but primarily, it's alienating. If you're not already a dyed-in-the-wool Contender Series fan who's already on the 10:45 hype train to Jailton, is this going to be what gets you onboard? Watching the UFC roll out the red carpet to get him into the top ten? At least they'll get their man. The UFC is inevitably going to tout Rozenstruik's 75% takedown defense rate as evidence of how hard he is to take down; it is only 75% because Alistair Overeem and Ciryl Gane, who are categorically not grapplers, succeeded in 2 out of 10 and 14 takedown attempts respectively and unintentionally pumped his stats astronomically upwards by not knowing how double-legs work. JAILTON ALMEIDA BY SUBMISSION. Rozenstruik can flatten him with one solid connection anytime they're on the feet, but unless Almeida gets gunshy, they're not going to stay there for long. CO-MAIN EVENT: O-U-T, BUT NO HARD FEELINGS LIGHT-HEAVYWEIGHT: Anthony Smith (36-17, #5) vs Johnny Walker (20-7, #7)I want you to take a moment to feel empathy for Anthony Smith. A little over four years ago, Anthony Smith fought Jon Jones for the light-heavyweight championship of the world. Jon Jones, being Jon Jones, hosed up and kneed the crap out of Smith while he was down. No one told Smith, in the moment, that he would have been the champion if he'd taken the disqualification--he simply didn't want to go out like that. He waved it off and resumed fighting, and lost a wide decision. At the post-fight press conference, Dana White lauded him as a good, company man. Two fights later, Glover Teixeira beat Smith so badly that, in one of the more surreal visuals in the sport, Smith had to hand his suddenly ejected teeth to referee Jason Herzog for safekeeping. Smith was, reportedly, just about the fourth-highest paid person on the card. By 2022, Anthony Smith is slowing down. His three-fights-a-year workrate has slowed to one, maybe two, and his work as a company man has seen him rewarded with an on-desk analyst position for the post-event shows watched primarily by the people who forgot to change the channel after the main event ended. But he's still ranked in the top ten, and he still wants to be the champion, and with Glover about to retire, Jiří Procházka injured and Jon Jones moving up to heavyweight the championship picture is wide open. He has a fight scheduled with Jamahal Hill in March, and even though Hill is ranked below him he's a talented, dangerous rising contender, and Smith wholly intends on using him to make a case for contendership. And then Jan Błachowicz and Magomed Ankalaev fight to a draw at UFC 282 and leave the title vacant. Before the post-fight press conference is over Dana White announces Glover Teixeira will fight Jamahal Hill for the empty throne. As soon as the conference is over, ESPN returns to the feed of their analyst desk, where company man Anthony Smith has just learned, live on air, that his fight is being taken away and the man he was supposed to fight, who he is theoretically ranked over, is getting a title shot and he is not. A visibly dejected Smith mumbles "Yeah, that's a problem, for, uh...wow, that's a big problem for me," and Jon Anik rescues him by taking over. His despair is being mined for content, live. But Anthony Smith is a company man. He handles it without getting angry or demanding a thing, and the UFC says they'll be making it up to him with a main event in the Spring. There's even a great opportunity--the UFC is having one of their rare ABC cards, and new champion Jamahal Hill needs a challenger, and you could not ask for a more opportune moment to give top-five contender Anthony Smith a big match to make up for the spotlight he narrowly missed. The UFC does right by its people. Of course, we're not in the main event section, are we? Anthony Smith is in the co-main event, subordinate to a Contender Series winner with one ranked win in the heavyweight division. And the UFC has him fighting Johnny Walker, one of the most dangerous one-shot knockout artists in the sport, and someone who--not at all subtly--the company has paid more attention to and spent more time hyping than Smith. In fairness, we've seen Walker fight four times in the same timeframe it took Smith to compete once, and there's nothing the UFC likes more than guys who throw themselves into the fray as often as is humanly possible. Walker got off to a fantastic, three-fight knockout streak in the UFC before being summarily crushed in four out of his next five fights, the last loss of which was to the aforementioned new champ, Jamahal Hill, but after two resurgent first-round finishes Walker's back on a win streak and back on the fast track to a title shot. By which I mean the UFC has intimated that if Walker knocks out Smith, he'll probably get a title shot. No word on what happens if Anthony Smith wins, of course. There is no glory in being a company man. Ask Randy Couture, who carried the banner for years and wound up sued and defamed in press conferences. Ask Georges St-Pierre, who did a decade of press for the UFC and is largely responsible for their having a Canadian fanbase at all, and who was publicly derided by the UFC for wanting to take a break. There is no pension plan, there is no pot of gold, it's just getting an extra pat on the back from the boss when he's not busy blowing your entire salary on internet gambling in a desperate attempt to feel young again. JOHNNY WALKER BY TKO. Smith likes getting hit too much, and Walker's jiu-jitsu is good enough that Smith's usual grappling advantage won't work half as well as it typically does. On the feet, as in life, I cannot help thinking it is a matter of time. MAIN CARD: SAME AS IT EVER WAS WELTERWEIGHT: Daniel Rodriguez (17-3, #15) vs Ian Machado Garry (11-0) The UFC had solid hopes for Daniel "D-Rod" Rodriguez. His no-nonsense persona, his crisp boxing, his granite chin and his surprisingly deep gas tank made him an unexpected threat in the welterweight division, and his batterings of Tim Means, Mike Perry and Kevin Lee--even with a loss to Nicolas Dalby in the middle--made him a dark horse contender in the welterweight division. 2022, unfortunately, was not kind: Injuries kept him sidelined until the fall, at which point the comedy of errors that was When the UFC matches you against someone they nicknamed "The Future," they're quietly hoping you'll lose. Ian "The Future" Machado Garry is so blatantly an attempt to get a second, more manageable pass at Conor McGregor that he did, in fact, reenact Conor McGregor quotes in his post-fight interviews after his first couple victories. He's an Irish knockout puncher who came to the UFC after winning the Cage Warriors title in Britain, he's an undefeated 11-0, and the UFC was taking it pretty loving easy on him until this past March, when they finally gave him a real opponent in Kenan Song, who gave Garry two and a half extremely tough rounds and nearly had him finished in the first, but Garry regrouped and got him out in the third. This is where the UFC gets Conor 2 into the top fifteen. This is where the experiment finally comes to fruition. Or, alternatively, it's where DANIEL RODRIGUEZ WINS BY DECISION. Garry's taller and he hits very hard, but he finishes people when they overextend. Rodriguez is a genuinely good boxer who knows how to be conservative and economical when necessary, and when you look at the trouble Garry had with guys like Darian Weeks and Gabe Green, Rodriguez keeping him on the end of a jab and refusing to let him open up with combinations seems very plausible. LIGHT-HEAVYWEIGHT: Carlos Ulberg (7-1) vs Ihor Potieria (19-3)Carlos Ulberg seems like he's in a bit of a rebuilding phase. The UFC brought him in through the Contender Series back in 2020 only to have him debut against Kennedy Nzechukwu, a truly baffling decision that got him knocked out before he could build a fanbase. He's looked steadily better in every subsequent fight and is now on a three-fight winning streak, which is, and this is a horrifying sentence, one of the longest winning streaks in the light-heavyweight division. Ihor Potieria also came in through the contract mill show, and he also got crushed in his UFC debut, and he also is working on a comeback, having just retired Shogun Rua in a deeply depressing fight no one really wanted to see happen. There's this thing called MMA Math--fighter A beat fighter B, fighter B beat fighter C and therefore fighter A will beat fighter C--and it's traditionally one of the worst predictors for fighting performances, because every fight is different, and those fights are almost always years apart and ignore how developed those fighters were at that point in their careers, or any subsequent improvements they may have made, and how stylistically different the fighters were to one another. But in this case, Ihor Potieria got destroyed in a standup fight with Nicolae Negumereanu last July, and just barely three months later Carlos Ulberg got in a standup fight with Negumereanu and effortlessly destroyed him. This is one of the rare cases where it is extremely present and extremely relevant. CARLOS ULBERG BY TKO. WELTERWEIGHT: Tim Means (32-14-1 (1)) vs Alex Morono (22-8) Well, this is a fight of some kind. Tim Means has been very fun for a very long time, but at this point in his career, Tim Means has entered Honored Elder status within the UFC--which is to say he's 39 years old and 25+ fights deep and the UFC has long given up on his ever again being considered divisionally relevant, which means they can use him for whatever the gently caress they want. Give a fight card a little more spice? All the time. Put over Kevin Holland? Check. Rebuild Max "Pain" Griffin? Sure! And now his job is to rehabilitate Alex Morono. "The Great White" has been a staple of the UFC's top twenty for years, a hard-headed forward-pressure brawler with the uncanny ability to just never loving stop moving. He's tough enough to beat almost everyone outside the top fifteen, but it's breaking past the number barrier that's always eluded him. He rolled off the couch on a week's notice this past December and was two and a half minutes away from finally getting that vaunted ranking by soundly outworking Santiago Ponzinibbio, right up until a right hand he never saw coming starched him. But I'm just not convinced Morono has a lot to worry about here. Means succeeds by being meaner, tougher and higher-intensity than his opponents with a side of tricky grappling attacks to keep them guessing; Morono's even tougher, even more determined, and just as adept at snatching chokes out of nowhere. ALEX MORONO BY DECISION. PRELIMS: EVERYONE WILL LEAVE AT EXACTLY THE SAME TIME WELTERWEIGHT: Matt Brown (23-19) vs Court McGee (21-11) Speaking of honored elders, jesus christ. Matt Brown is on his second or third return from retirement, which makes a lot of since when you consider his first UFC-branded fight was on The Ultimate Fighter 7 all the way back in 2008 and he was already nearing 30 at the time. "The Immortal" has been brawling with people across three separate loving decades in the UFC, and it's made him one of the company's most treasured must-see-TV names, but it's also gotten him hosed up repeatedly. He's won three of his last nine fights, and that includes getting knocked out three times and choked out once. His retirements were understandable, and I cannot help wishing one of them had stuck. Court McGee, arguably, should have considered the same. His tenure doesn't start that much later--he was the championship winner on The Ultimate Fighter 11 back in 2010--but his wheelhouse has been the kind of grinding, chipping fights that tend to exasperate and irritate audiences, which is why his thirteen straight years of competition haven't succeeded in making him a fan favorite. Or a ranked fighter. He is, in fact, a perfect 10-10 with the UFC, thanks to his getting completely wrecked by a Jeremiah Wells left hook this past June, the first time he's been knocked completely out in his sixteen-year career. Does that loss mean he absolutely should retire? Nah. Does it mean he should probably have considered it? Boy, I hope so. It's hard not to look at this as a referendum on which of the two has lost more steps. McGee in his prime would have a very good chance of simply suffocating Brown on the fence, but now he's 38 and his gas tank isn't what it used to be. Brown in his prime would have put McGee through the woodchipper of his clinch attacks every time he entered the pocket, but Brown turned 41 this January and he's just not moving as quickly as he once did. I think McGee's control is the stronger of the two possibilities, and I'm going with COURT MCGEE BY DECISION as a result, but mostly, I just want this fight to not make me sad. HEAVYWEIGHT: Karl Williams (8-1) vs Chase Sherman (16-11) Oh, my hated child. This is a rescheduling of a planned fight from April, and despite my fear that any UFC loss could be Chase Sherman's last, I will re-run the commentary I wrote back then. And honestly, if Chase Sherman gets turfed on a copy-and-paste, that'd probably be more fitting than anything I'd write anyhow. CarlCX posted:My disappointment is immeasurable and yet utterly perfect. Until one week ago this was a heavyweight clash between Chase Sherman, the closest thing I have to a true spiritual antagonist in life, and Chris Barnett, a 5'9" superheavyweight who does spinning wheel kicks. No one has inspired me to greater depths of artistic despair and passion than Chase Sherman, and I had thought for a full month about just how to truly exemplify my feelings on this madness-inducing matchup. There are Discord logs about my intention to force myself into a dissociative fugue state until I'd created a poetic epic in the style of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea about the true depths of heavyweight and its power to crush dreams. BANTAMWEIGHT: Cody Stamann (21-5-1) vs Douglas Silva de Andrade (28-5 (1)) I am ride or die for Douglas Silva de Andrade, much to my detriment. When John Lineker left us to go to Singapore and punch people in even more unpleasant ways, Douglas Silva de Andrade was left behind as our replacement violence elemental. He's not as pure--his endless punchings are adulterated with takedowns and he dares to do this offensive thing known as 'blocking'--but he's a human wrecking ball who swings from the hip and crushes people with spinning backfists, and even if the dreams of a ranking seem deeply unlikely for him at this point in his career, he's still a tough motherfucker. Cody Stamann, by contrast, is Present. He's Fine. He is a factory-made, shelf-stable wrestle-boxer so deeply rooted in prototype that he is in 2023 still going by "The Spartan," one of the handful of nicknames you get out of the gumball machine in your kickboxing class. (The others: "Pitbull," "The Kid," and "Lionheart.") He's reliable, he's solid, and he got crushed by the last three ranked fighters he faced. And I simply do not want to pick him. DOUGLAS SILVA DE ANDRADE BY DECISION. Realistically, the chances are high that Stamann will outwrestle him. I am choosing not to care. LIGHTWEIGHT: Natan Levy (8-1) vs Pete Rodriguez (5-1)Natan "Lethal" Levy is working his way up the ladder. After getting outclassed in his debut by Rafa García, Levy and his uncanny ability to punch so goddamn hard he somehow knocks himself over have gone on a two-fight winning streak, but both wins have come against fighters who, while decent in their own right, have yet to do anything but lose within the UFC's walls. On the plus side, Levy's moving up in the world, because he's fighting someone with a UFC win for the first time! On the minus, That someone is Pete "Dead Game" Rodriguez, the man Dana White paid to personally destroy CM Punk-slayer Mike Jackson as revenge for his truly despicable crime of making one of the UFC's meal ticket projects look stupid. Before that, Rodriguez was just the first of many deeply unfortunate victims for the up-and-coming Jack Della Maddalena. This is a more interesting fight than it's getting credit for. Both men are tough as hell, both like to swing for the fences, and both have more than enough power to severely hurt one another given a chance. I think NATAN LEVY BY TKO is slightly more likely, given Rodriguez and his tendency to brawl his way into getting hit, but his sparking Levy is by no means out of the question. WOMEN'S FLYWEIGHT: Ji Yeon Kim (9-6-2) vs Mandy Böhm (7-2) It's rerun time again! This was actually supposed to happen all the way back in February at the Derrick Lewis vs Sergei Spivac card, which was, itself, a rescheduled fight, but Böhm fell ill and things had to get pushed. So here's a hit from the Valentine's Day vault. CarlCX posted:Poor, poor Ji Yeon Kim. Kim was on the wrong side of a very close decision against Joselyne Edwards in her last fight and got out-and-out screwed against Priscila Cachoeira right before that. In an adjacent reality, 2022 was Kim's best year in the UFC and a showpiece for her striking-focused attacks; in this one, she's on a four-fight losing streak and almost certainly facing a pink slip if she loses here. Mandy Böhm, too, has had a deeply unfortunate time in the states. She left Germany as one of its best female fighters, became a champion up in Canada's TKO and slid down to the UFC as a late replacement only to have her replacement bout and her following two reschedulings of said bout cancelled, and once she finally got some god damned fights, she was immediately overwhelmed by KSW champion Ariane Lipski and Contender Series winner Victoria Leonardo. Böhm's just visibly had difficulty adjusting to UFC-level competition; her all-around attack gets her outgrappled by stronger wrestlers and outstruck by better strikers. WELTERWEIGHT: Gabe Green (11-4) vs Bryan Battle (8-2) Here, we find ourselves visiting one of the worst circles of hell in the UFC: The great and terrible ashpit of "we don't know what to do with you." "Gifted" Gabe Green was brought on as a sacrificial late replacement lamb back in 2020 only to beat the crap out of Philip Rowe and Yohan Lainesse in his subsequent fights, and his success earned him the honor of getting used as a promotional stepping stone for Ian Machado Garry, who dutifully beat him. Bryan Battle is a more baffling case: He won The Ultimate Fighter 29 back in 2021, and then they made him essentially defend his TUF crown against the guy they thought WOULD have won had he not been injured, and despite winning an upset victory and cementing himself as the UFC's reality show champion, they proceeded to aggressively not give a poo poo about him. He was buried in the prelims and shockingly knocked the poo poo out of Takashi Sato, and in recognition of his efforts he was STILL buried in the exact same spot prelims and fed to wrestler extraordinaire Rinat Fakhretdinov, and that is why he is now, once again, down here in the muck and silt. I don't know why you run TUF if you're not going to push your winners. If you don't care about the show, stop doing the loving show. BRYAN BATTLE BY DECISION. WOMEN'S BANTAMWEIGHT: Jessica-Rose Clark (11-8 (1)) vs Tainara Lisboa (5-2) It's why-is-this-fighter-in-the-UFC time, baby. Jessica Rose-Clark has proven she belongs in the company--she's had a difficult 4-4 run, but that includes beating people like Paige VanZant and the currently-relevant Joselyne Edwards--but the UFC stopped trying to really promote her as a prospect after all the other actual prospects kept beating her. She spent her 2022 repeatedly losing to first-round armbars, one of which took 40 seconds and sent her to the hospital, so it's not the best position to be coming back from. And the UFC is, arguably, trying to give her a gentle comeback. Tainara "Thai Panter" Lisboa is making her UFC debut here and, respectfully, her presence is one of those regular reminders that the world of women's mixed martial arts is still a bit nascent. Tainara Lisboa, to be clear, is indisputably a real fighter. She's been doing Muay Thai for more than a decade--there's real grainy video of Valentina Shevchenko beating her up, but Lisboa does at one point punt her with a headkick right as Valentina is doing an inexplicable spinning attack, which is very funny now--and she's won kickboxing and grappling championships in Brazil. But she's also entering the UFC having never beaten a successful fighter. She has five victories: Three of them were over debuting rookies, and then her two most recent fights were against people who were 0-1 and 1-4, all carried out on cards like WOMAN'S FIGHT and DOG TOWER FIGHT 3. It's one thing to bring regional talent with proven track records into the UFC. Hell, as much as I hate the Contender Series, it is, at least, a way to test fighters and see how good they are. Bringing in someone based on their submission victory over 1-4 Mr. Cage veteran Conceição "Honda" Oliveira is admitting you don't really know or particularly care how good a new fighter is and you're just rolling the dice to see if something randomly works. Which is, unfortunately, the UFC. JESSICA ROSE-CLARK BY DECISION. Lisboa hasn't had to defend real takedowns in years and this is a bad way to start.
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May 10, 2023 22:19
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to all good fight news, there must be a counterbalance https://twitter.com/mma_orbit/status/1656412160380026881
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May 10, 2023 23:01
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coathat posted:Man the UFC hates flyweights i didn't even notice jesus loving christ
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May 11, 2023 01:50
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So hey, about those 'Bellator is in financial straits and really needs to get sold' rumors: https://twitter.com/aaronbronsteter/status/1656749017634598924
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May 11, 2023 21:25
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Yeah, my sleep schedule's all hosed up lately and if I actually manage to stay unconscious I'm not going to be forcing myself out of bed early to make sure I don't miss Bryan Battle, so if no one's gotten to it by showtime someone feel free to throw up a GDT or somesuch.
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May 13, 2023 05:52
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https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4031895 The dog does not like letting me sleep. GDT is up, fights are starting as we speak.
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May 13, 2023 17:20
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Dana White, the world's greatest promoter, on promoting fighters.quote:“Walker didn’t really wow anybody tonight, but he won,” White said at the UFC Charlotte post-fight press conference. “He was put on the co-main event to kind of shine tonight. He got a ‘W,’ so I guess that’s good.” I look forward to effusive speech about how amazing Mackenzie Dern's performance was next week.
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May 14, 2023 21:45
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The UFC is trying to put together Cory Sandhagen vs Umar Nurmagomedov for the summer. I was going to get mad about rankings but I looked and Henry Cejudo is now the #3 fighter in the division, so.
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May 16, 2023 02:54
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welp https://twitter.com/arielhelwani/status/1658404625576280064 quote:It’s official. Real curious to see what that boxing match winds up being, and real hopeful it doesn't wind up hurting his drawing power before he can start doing something outside of the UFC. I'm glad he negotiated for things but I gotta be honest, given how half-invested PFL has seemed to be in the PFL Europe initiative, I'm not sure I see a whole lot coming out of PFL Africa. It'd be real cool to wind up being overly pessimistic about it, though. EFC has been proving there's talent in the region for years. CarlCX fucked around with this message at 10:54 on May 16, 2023 |
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May 16, 2023 10:51
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I'd be stunned if Ngannou gets Fury or Usyk or anyone at that level. It's going to be extremely interesting to see who is and isn't playing ball with him in the boxing world right now, especially with his reputation kind-of sort-of on the line.LobsterMobster posted:Wonder how many heavyweights nearing the end of their UFC contract will opt out of re-signing to try and win the Francis Sweepstakes Yeah, the $2 million is kind of a huge deal. I would bet there is exactly one heavyweight in the UFC making that kind of money, and it's Jon Jones. For anyone else that's a huge pay bump and a huge spotlight, and if it represents PFL beginning to offer a higher baseline to heavyweights prospects period to entice them away from the UFC, that's potentially huge. I know this is the boring thing to think about coming out of this but I'm deeply intrigued by what this means for PFL as a business, because it basically reduces down to two options: Either their investors have made them flush enough with cash that they can safely pull moves like this in exchange for market share, which in the longterm gets very, very interesting, or this is a decent financial risk for them, in which case anything going wrong with the Ngannou experiment could be very, very bad.
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May 16, 2023 20:21
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doubleposting because fitting to this conversation, the last event being held in North Carolina means we have publicly-disclosed pay information for the first time in awhile, and it turns out new fighters like Tainara Lisboa and, for some reason, Mandy Bohm are back down to the good ol' $10k show/10k win contract.
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May 16, 2023 23:00
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aljamain just did an interview about how august was too fast a turnaround and he didn't want to do it, so either they backed up the money truck, he capitulated, or this is a case where they're announcing the fight to make him look like the bad guy if he refuses it, either way i am mentally preparing myself for an interim bantamweight title fight between sean o'malley and fuckin' ricky simon or something Also, like can we just retire the rankings if they matter this little #2 and 3 lightweights? BMF title. #3 light-heavyweight in the world in probable title contendership? Fighting a debuting middleweight who just got knocked out by the champion. Guy who hasn't beaten a ranked middleweight in almost four years? Defending the #5 spot against a guy who just made his debut a week ago. Stephen Thompson is defending his contendership-adjacent spot against the #15 guy and Kevin Holland is going to jump both of them by fighting Michael Chiesa, who was beating up Diego Sanchez two wins ago, which was still 2019 because he hasn't won a fight in 2+ years.
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May 17, 2023 00:26
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CarlCX posted:aljamain just did an interview about how august was too fast a turnaround and he didn't want to do it, so either they backed up the money truck, he capitulated, or this is a case where they're announcing the fight to make him look like the bad guy if he refuses it, either way i am mentally preparing myself for an interim bantamweight title fight between sean o'malley and fuckin' ricky simon or something courtesy mekchu in the discord https://twitter.com/Shak_Fu/status/1658626916465930241 What an incredible and unforeseen shock.
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May 17, 2023 02:52
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Costa just signed his new contract in March and says he's getting a million per fight, so he may have just given away his leverage and at this point has to take what they give him. Also, I know we've got stuff going on, but there's much more important news that's gotten overshadowed. https://twitter.com/UFCRosterWatch/status/1658514669923860491 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQitKj14y7M
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May 17, 2023 04:29
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