CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 149: THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME
Carl looks at UFC Fight Night: Lewis vs Teixeira and hates our economically streamlined future.
SATURDAY, JULY 12 FROM THE BRIDGESTONE ARENA IN NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE
PRELIMS 3 PM PDT / 6 PM EDT | MAIN CARD 6 PM / 9 PM
There is no Earthly power that can convince me this is not an Apex card that somehow broke containment.
MAIN EVENT: PERMUTATIONS OF LARGENESS
HEAVYWEIGHT: Derrick Lewis (28-12 (1), #9) vs Tallison Teixeira (8-0, #13)
Dana White's Contender Series has always been an obvious existential threat to the health of combat sports, but now it's becoming a threat to something even greater: My format.
When I started doing these writeups my overarching goal was to simply tell the complete story of a fight, which is, of course, a multitude of stories. There's the story of the promotion's intentions given their matchmaking, the stories of each fighter and the path they took to get here--hell, just recounting how much work they had to put in to simply make it to a main event in the UFC, the canonical MMA organization, is always a story in itself. It took eight UFC fights across two and a half years to get Georges St-Pierre into his first main event. Daniel Cormier came into the UFC as an Olympic medalist and undefeated Strikeforce champion and it still took five fights to get into the top spot. Hell, Valentina Shevchenko has been a UFC champion for 60 of the last 78 months, and in that entire twelve-fight span, she's only been in the main event twice.
Tallison Teixeira got here five months ago and now he's in the main event in his second UFC fight and the only interesting thing to talk about is how we collectively fell this far.
Because it's damn near superfluous to talk about Derrick Lewis at this point. If you're one of the unfortunate souls that's been reading these since I started doing them we've already met to discuss Lewis six times. He's one of the longest-tenured Heavyweights the UFC has ever seen. He has the most knockouts in company history. He's fought for the world championship twice, he's got one of the best come-from-behind wins in the annals of the entire sport, and the last time everyone thought he should retire he broke a man's face with a flying knee in thirty-three seconds.
He's an icon of the sport. He's stayed relevant for more than a decade. He was trained to box by George goddamned Foreman after going to jail for beating the shit out of a member of the Ku Klux Klan. He's one of the handful of fighters that will rightfully pass into legend despite never having worn UFC gold.
And Tallison Teixeira is in the main event in his second UFC fight.
I would like to show you, in simple shorthand, the path Tallison Teixeira took to make it to the Contender Series.
Here, equally unabridged, is Tallison Teixiera's UFC career to date.
A couple of years ago I bemoaned that the Contender Series would, inevitably, lead to fighters who were getting kicked straight into title contention fresh off their contract-earning victories. Every year we've inched closer to that reality, and here, we are closer than ever. Tallison Teixeira became the UFC's #13 Heavyweight for beating Justin Tafa, a man with one victory in the last two and a half years. He's about to fight for a spot in the top ten. If he wins one more fight after this, presuming he's on the typical three-fight minimum-wage DWCS contract the company now tells fighters they're not even allowed to negotiate about anymore, it is entirely feasible that Teixeira will go from beating up multiple Fonsecas to UFC title contention in just two years and three UFC fights, and he will almost assuredly become the lowest-paid titlist the company has seen since the Flyweight division was created for pennies on the dollar because they, too, were desperate and had nowhere else to go.
Because that's it, right? That's the story of this fight. The UFC has been trying to rub the Derrick Lewis shine onto newer, less shopworn fighters for years. They gave it to Ciryl Gane, they gave it to Tai Tuivasa and Sergei Pavlovich, they gave it to Jailton Almeida and they even managed to get a little of it on Serghei Spivac before he forgot to wrestle. The UFC does not want you if you cannot beat Derrick Lewis, to the point that the last two men he beat both got cut within one fight--even though one of them, Marcos Rogério de Lima, actually won said fight, and the man he beat, Junior Tafa, is opening this televised main card.
But they're not really marketing Tallison, either. It'd be one thing if they'd rolled out the Paddy Pimblett red carpet and blanketed the programming with mentionings of him and how cool his big scary spider tattoo is, but they really haven't. He beat a man with a 50/50 record and now he's being vetted for contendership because, as I have been preemptively whining about for years, this is and has always been the real goal of DWCS.
The UFC does not want to market their fighters to you. They want to market the UFC, itself, with as little overhead as is humanly possible, and have that be sufficient. That's why they still run the Apex a dozen times a year despite having ceased even pretending to care about COVID, that's why they were trying to get Joe Pyfer to fight Nassourdine Imavov for a top fifteen ranking back in 2023, and that's why when Pyfer said no they simply moved onto someone else. This is their desired model for the future of mixed martial arts: A rotating cavalcade of predominantly striking-centric fighters, each one leased as cheap as can be, thrown as high as possible up the card in the hopes of getting the maximum possible return on investment before they either fail to win or win enough that they have to be paid more.
Heavyweight is just beating the rest of the sport to the punch because there's no one fucking left in it.
And just as there's barely any story to tell here outside of the corporate disease at the heart of its matchmaking, I have barely any analysis to offer that isn't built atop my antipathy for it. Back in February I said Tallison was a powerful striker who exhibited very little defense, and Justin Tafa threw one strike before getting stopped, so we didn't really get to see if that lack of defense would matter. Derrick Lewis is an incredible wrecking machine who's beaten tall strikers at similar reach deficits before: He also turned 40 this year and has gotten knocked out an awful lot lately.
I frequently acknowledge the way my biases force me to pick things that probably won't happen. The figurative and literal odds here are both pretty reasonably fixed on Tallison punting Derrick in the gut until he falls over.
And I refuse to listen to reason. DERRICK LEWIS BY TKO.
CO-MAIN EVENT: INTENDED SERVICE
WELTERWEIGHT: Stephen Thompson (17-8-1, #12) vs Gabriel Bonfim (17-1, NR)
Two years and change ago I complained that the UFC wasn't doing shit with Stephen Thompson, and unfortunately, they agreed.
Back then, two-time title contender Thompson was coming off his first victory in two years. On paper, not great; in practice, it was a fight-of-the-year candidate and a stoppage victory over Kevin Holland, which was genuinely impressive. The UFC attempted to follow up on it by having Thompson, then ranked #7, defend his position against Michel Pereira, who had just barely made it to #15. And then Pereira missed weight by four pounds, and Thompson, who had already had the bout rescheduled once a month and a half prior, turned it down.
And honestly, the UFC should've thanked him. The debacle forced Pereira to go up to Middleweight, where he promptly had the best tear of his entire career and briefly looked like a contender. But management, shockingly, did not appreciate Thompson blowing up a pay-per-view fight. They heard Thompson's complaints about wanting important, professional fights with important professional fighters, and they decided, for once, that he was right.
So they gave him Shavkat Rakhmonov and Joaquin Buckley.
Stephen Thompson built a reputation for being absurdly difficult to finish. Between his MMA debut in 2010 and his fight with Shavkat at the end of 2023 Thompson had only been finished once, and it came at the hands of Anthony Pettis, who does at least one impossible thing every five years to make up for losing the rest of the time. Matt Brown couldn't do it. Tyron Woodley couldn't do it. Gilbert Burns couldn't do it. Belal Muhammad couldn't do it.
But Shavkat Rakhmonov choked Thompson out, and just under a year later, Joaquin Buckley overcame two split rounds and simply flattened Thompson in the third, and suddenly Thompson is just 1 for his last 5, he turned 42 this year, and the UFC is figuring out the best way to pick the bones.
Them bones are meant for Bonfim. At this point we've talked about the tale of the Bonfim Brothers multiple times, too: A pair of highly-regarded siblings on monstrous winning streaks, one undefeated, one having not lost a fight since 2014, both winning their contrats on the same 2022 episode of the Contender Series, both looking real impressive in their UFC debuts, both seemingly having a world of potential ahead of them.
But they hit the skids a year later. Down at Lightweight, Ismael got stopped twice in three bouts; here at Welterweight, Gabriel ran into the eternally tricky Nicolas Dalby and got knocked out in the second round. Gabriel's loss may have been more brutal than either of Ismael's, but his recovery has been much better: Eight months later he took a decision over Ange Loosa, this past February Gabriel managed to choke Khaos Williams unconscious, and just like that he's back on a winning streak and the UFC is ready to capitalize on him like they wanted to two years ago.
That said: I just don't know, man. Stephen Thompson is one for five, but it's a hell of a five. Belal Muhammad was the world champion, Shavkat Rakhmonov could well be world champion within the next year, Gilbert Burns was one more good punch away from becoming a world champion, and Joaquin Buckley was incredibly close to stopping a world champion just one month ago. Every one of those men is a top-class fighter.
And as interested as I am in Gabriel Bonfim's potential, that loss has shaken my faith a bit--not enough to give up on him, but enough to wonder about his having only one victory against someone with a winning UFC record. Stopping Mounir Lazzez is cool! But Warlley Alves did it too. Choking out Trevin Giles is cool, but not as cool as when Gerald Meerschaert did it. And hey, you know who else beat Ange Loosa by decision? Mounir Lazzez! How bizarre.
Even that Khaos Williams fight saw Khaos fighting as a short-notice replacement with just a couple weeks to prepare. None of this is disqualifying, of course. None of this makes Gabriel's jab any less sharp nor his chokes any less spectacularly opportunistic. But Stephen Thompson has been keeping the gate for the last decade and he's turned away prospects with bigger power, better grappling, and fancier technique.
He is, of course, also turning 43 in half a year, so Bonfim might just crush him into dust before the Moirai beat him to it.
But I'm choosing to keep the faith. STEPHEN THOMPSON BY DECISION.
MAIN CARD: CAN A TAFA EAT SOME TOKKOS
FEATHERWEIGHT: Calvin Kattar (23-9, #14) vs Steve Garcia (17-5, NR)
Single fights can be pivot points into tragic futures, and few are as tragic as the death slide of Calvin Kattar. Just a few short years ago, Kattar was a made man for the UFC. He was #6 in the world, he was regarded as one of the best strikers in the sport, and the UFC had so much faith in him as a provider of marketing-friendly fights that in their first-ever card on ABC, a massive debut on a network television channel, they trusted Kattar to main event against Max Holloway for #1 contendership. And Max slaughtered him. There are losses that let you see a fighter's potential to turn a corner and improve, and there are losses that let you know a fighter is up against a wall and may never get past it, and then there are losses where a higher-ranked man is facing away from their opponent and openly talking to the commentators while slipping punches and landing counters. Kattar's ceiling was set in stone, and he's been on gatekeeper duty ever since, and after twenty-eight straight fights without a single back-to-back loss, Kattar's dropped four in a row. A split decision to Josh Emmett isn't so bad, but busting your knee against Arnold Allen's a bit worse, and getting outgrappled by noted Bantamweight Aljamain Sterling is a bit worse than that. But getting knocked to the very edge of the rankings by Youssef Zalal? That's the danger zone.
And the danger zone is where Steve Garcia lives. Few fighters are as wholly dedicated to the fistic arts, and the UFC would've gleefully snatched him up after his Contender Series win in 2019 had he not committed the sin of missing weight by almost five pounds, because 6'-ass Steve Garcia was still fighting at Bantamweight at the time. A change in weight class and one more fight later, Garcia was in the UFC--as a Lightweight who lost a whole bunch. So Steve recalibrated one more time and dropped to Featherweight, and now he's one of the scariest knockout artists in the entire company. It's been more than five years since a Steve Garcia fight lasted longer than seven minutes. He punched Chase Hooper out after knocking him down three times in a minute and a half, which means just about every thirty seconds he was hitting Chase Hooper so hard that he had no choice but to fall over. He knocked out Shayilan Nuerdanbieke, he knocked out Melquizael Costa, he barnstormed Choi Seung-Woo and he took out an overweight Kyle Nelson at a 22-to-1 significant strike differential. He's a monstrous puncher and a threat to anyone he can get his hands on.
In other words: This is Calvin Kattar's final test. Kattar has been injured, he's been submitted--almost two decades ago on EliteXC, of all places, but still--and he's been outclassed on a number of occasions. But he's never been knocked out. Giga Chikadze couldn't do it, Josh Emmett couldn't do it, Max hit him four hundred and forty-seven fucking times and he still couldn't do it. In fourteen UFC fights he's never even been knocked down. And that's all Steve Garcia wants to do. He isn't a strategic fighter, he isn't going out there to chip away at his opponents, he craves only death and he will put himself at risk to get it. And just a few fights ago, I would have easily seen Kattar dancing around him, outjabbing him and making him pay for every missed hook. Just a few fights ago I would've had every bit of belief in Kattar carving him up and getting his prospect-spoiling hype train back on track.
But this train don't stop there anymore. STEVE GARCIA BY TKO.
FEATHERWEIGHT: Nate Landwehr (18-6) vs Morgan Charrière (20-11-1)
Speaking of violence, I give you: Violence. The UFC had real hopes for Nate Landwehr. He was big and aggressive and he threw angry combinations and jumped on wild chokes and cut post-fight promos like only coked-out professional wrestlers from the 1980s were wont to do, and if there's a better way to get yourself in the company's good graces short of embracing outright bigotry, I do not know what it is. Unfortunately, sometimes self-marketing succeeds where it maybe shouldn't have. Nate talked himself into a ranked fight against Dan Ige, one of the greatest gatekeepers in the sport's history, and Ige chucked him right back through that gate like he was D.J. Jazzy Jeff. The comeback trail hasn't been all that successful, either--he rebounded with a real good victory over Jamall Emmers, but he closed out 2024 getting trounced by Choi Doo-ho, and now he's at risk of getting lost in the shuffle.
Morgan Charrière hasn't quite made it out of that shuffle. The UFC picked him up during their 2023 trip to Paris and he obliged them by kicking Manolo "Angelo Veneziano" Zecchini to death in a single round, and I swear, I have mentioned this fight in every single Morgan Charrière writeup and I will continue to do so because typing out the entirety of Zecchini's name gives me a bit of carefree happiness in a dark world. But it's also difficult not to, as it's 50% of Morgan's success in the company. He knocked out Manolo but couldn't beat Chepe Mariscal; he knocked out Gabriel Miranda but couldn't get past Nathaniel Wood. Morgan's fun and dangerous and immensely skilled at committing acts of terrible violence, but well-rounded, defensively sound fighters have been the bane of his career, and he thrives most when paired with the willingly reckless.
This fight, consequently, is not subtle. They are here for chaos and chaos they will have. I'm leaning towards NATE LANDWEHR BY DECISION by sheer, outlasting grit, but anyone could drop here.
HEAVYWEIGHT: Vitor Petrino (11-2) vs Austen Lane (13-6 (1))
Sometimes I feel I am too hard on the Heavyweight division. Sometimes I get actively angry at myself over the feeling that I have the chance to say something meaningful or constructive, and instead I am contributing to the teeming, frothing negativity that powers the vast majority of combat sports discussion on the internet. But sometimes we have no choice but to face the realities of mixed martial arts.
And this is the reality of Heavyweight. Vitor Petrino was a decent Light Heavyweight who got bodied in back-to-back fights by Dustin Jacoby, who was 1 for his last 5, and Anthony Smith, who retired one year and three straight losses later, after which Petrino decided Heavyweight might be a better idea. Austen Lane has one victory in five UFC bouts, and it came against Robelis Despaigne, who was cut on the spot and has since busied himself with knocking men out in Karate Combat. Marcos Rogério de Lima was cut on a win as a ranked Heavyweight. Alexandr Romanov was cut on a win as a ranked Heavyweight. Jairzinho Rozenstruik was cut despite being ranked in the top ten and having only one loss in his last three fights and now competes for the Dirty Boxing Championship out of the finest repurposed warehouses Florida has to offer, and Vitor Petrino and Austen Lane have one win between them in the last year and they're fighting on ESPN.
Anger is what Heavyweight deserves. VITOR PETRINO BY TKO.
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Junior Tafa (6-3) vs Tuco Tokkos (10-5)
Speaking of Marcos Rogério de Lima, here's the guy he beat before he got cut. I don't really know why the UFC loves the Tafas so much, but by god, they do. Tallison Teixeira is in tonight's main event because he beat Justin Tafa, and Junior Tafa is on tonight's main card because in his last fight he knocked out Sean "The Smoke" Sharaf, a 4-0 fighter with only one victory over someone with a winning record, and for once I don't even say that as an insult so much as an observation of the inevitable reality of being signed to the UFC when you've only had four fights--much like, say, Junior and Justin Tafa, who were respectively 4-0 and 3-0 in mixed martial arts when the premier company in the sport decided they belonged there. They punch and they kick and they never shoot takedowns and we're only one fight away from that time Junior was so mad he got submitted by Valter Walker that he walked across the cage afterward and slapped Valter in the face. Once upon a time this was a thing that would have resulted in disciplinary action; now ESPN has it uploaded to YouTube as a highlight.
And he gets to fight Tuco Tokkos. You can take your pick from the Tuco Tokkos record book as to what his career highlight should be, but your choices are:
Going 0-2 in Bellator as a Middleweight
Coming onto Road to UFC as a -675 favorite only to get flattened by Mingyang Zhang anyway
Besting the 1-12 Brian Jackson, who mysteriously loses almost all of his fights within one minute
Getting his UFC contract for beating the 20-13 Myron "Lightskin Dynamite" Dennis after Dennis broke his own arm posting on a takedown
Going 0-2 in the UFC and being at risk of release immediately
Maybe I'm too mean about Light Heavyweight, too. It's the movable object vs the stoppable force and I'm flipping a coin. TUCO TOKKOS BY DECISION.
PRELIMS: RETURN OF THE MURPH
WELTERWEIGHT: Chris Curtis (31-12 (1)) vs Max Griffin (20-11)
Chris Curtis has spent his last few years living on the edge of the UFC, and now he is struggling not to topple over it. And it's tragic, because he has come so, so close to being A Thing. He knocked out Joaquin Buckley! He's the entire reason Buckley's a Welterweight now! Just one year ago, Curtis was inches away from scoring a split decision upset over Brendan Allen! A few more landed punches, or, hell, the cardio benefits of not taking the fight on short notice, and it's entirely possible Chris Curtis entered 2025 as a top five contender at Middleweight. But he didn't, and instead he got to lose his ranking to Roman Kopylov with an at least vaguely questionable stoppage in an otherwise competitive fight. Now there is nowhere for Chris to go but back down to Welterweight in the hopes that no longer fighting at a constant size disadvantage will work to his benefit. Max Griffin exists, and has always existed, in stark opposition to his perception. Max is considered to be this scary, aggressive power-puncher with devastating striking; he has three stoppages in seventeen UFC fights, the most recent happened all the way back in early 2021, and one of them wasn't a knockout but rather a referee stoppage because he'd elbowed most of a man's ear off. Which is still super cool! But it's not how people think of him. People do not think of Max Griffin losing to Neil Magny or 2019 Thiago Alves. People do not think about Max Griffin having only won by split decision over the last four years.
It's not a pretty fight. Both men are shopworn, both men are in their late thirties, both men have UFC records hovering around a 50/50 ratio, and both men could desperately use a stoppage to reinvigorate their career. I doubt either will get it. CHRIS CURTIS BY DECISION.
WELTERWEIGHT: Jake Matthews (21-7) vs Chidi Njokuani (25-10)
Jake Matthews, you are perpetually stranded in the land of prospects. Jake passed eleven goddamn years in the UFC last month. Twenty-one fights! That is one of the longest runs in company history for a man who has never been ranked. Matthews has just perpetually failed to make it to the show. Every time he's gotten close, someone's derailed him. Sometimes that someone was a heavy hitter, like a Kevin Lee or a Sean Brady or Michael Morales! Sometimes it's Matthew Semelsberger, and that's why, on a two-fight winning streak, Jake is down here aiding in the theoretical rehabilitation of Chidi Njokuani. In 2022 Chidi was one of the company's favorite prospects, a huge wrecking ball of a man who scored incredible knockouts every time he fought. Eleven months later he was on a three-fight losing streak and had been knocked silly twice. Somehow, 6'3"-ass Chidi Njokuani has forced himself down to 170 pounds, and he's on a three-fight winning streak that saw him knocking out Elizeu Zaleski in his last fight, so everything's great! Except he missed weight to do it so the UFC is still demoting him from co-main event to midway through the prelims to ensure he's learned his lesson.
I have always thoroughly appreciated Jake's well-roundedness and his incredible toughness, and as terrifying as Chidi's power can be, if Michael Morales couldn't get Jake out of there, I'm going to believe in Jake's defense. JAKE MATTHEWS BY DECISION.
WOMEN'S FLYWEIGHT: Lauren Murphy (16-6) vs Eduarda Moura (11-1)
Holy shit, it's Lauren Murphy. Lauren goddamn Murphy! For the uninitiated, Lauren Murphy was the first-ever Bantamweight champion of America's only major all-women's MMA league, Invicta FC, and like all champions she chucked her title in the trash to go fight for the UFC, and like so many fighters before and after her, she mostly lost. In one of the weirdest career arcs the UFC has done, they cut her after she went 1-3 only to immediate re-sign her for The Ultimate Fighter 26 (jesus christ), which inaugurated the Women's Flyweight division. She lost to eventual winner and worst-UFC-champion-of-all-time trivia answer Nicco Montaño, but the UFC let her stick around anyway, and a couple years later she repaid them with a deeply unexpected five-fight winning streak that got her into honest-to-god title contention against Valentina Shevchenko in 2021! Val outstruck Lauren 132 to 19 and ultimately stopped her in the fourth round. Murphy only fought two more times--once midway through 2022 to play spoiler to Miesha Tate's attempt at a career comeback and again at the start of 2023 in a losing effort against Jéssica Andrade--and then she just sort of stopped. Usually there's a bad injury or legal troubles or major life events, but according to Murphy, she just didn't have the heart for it and decided to take time off and start a now-successful gym business and secure her retirement.
Which is what this is. She is adamant that this is her last fight, she wants to finish out her contract here and ride off into the sunset secure with her legacy in the sport. If you have read anything I've ever written, you know that fighters taking long layoffs and making career comebacks while already intending to retire are essentially threading every you-are-going-to-lose needle there is. But if you have read anything I've ever written, you know that sometimes, I do not care. LAUREN MURPHY BY DECISION.
HEAVYWEIGHT: Kennedy Nzechukwu (14-5) vs Valter Walker (13-1)
The placement of this match is incredibly fucking funny. Kennedy Nzechukwu moved up to the Heavyweight division last October and since then he's 2-0, with violent first-round knockout victories over Chris Barnett and Łukasz Brzeski. Łukasz Brzeski is 1-5 in the UFC and coming off two straight losses: He's on the higher-profile pay-per-view prelims next week. Valter Walker--whose only loss, funnily enough, was against Brzeski--is also on a two-fight, first-round stoppage winning streak, and in a Heavyweight division dominated by sloppy brawling, he scored both of those victories by heel hook, which is so statistically unlikely as to be absurd. The heels he destroyed belonged to Don'Tale Mayes and Junior Tafa, who, as we discussed earlier, is on the higher-profile, higher-visibility, televised main card of this week's broadcast.
You can give them everything they ask of you and you will still, somehow, wind up buried in the prelims. KENNEDY NZECHUKWU BY TKO.
LIGHTWEIGHT: Mike Davis (11-3) vs Mitch Ramirez (8-2)
It's so easy to be forgotten in this sport. Until this past February, Mike Davis was a deeply underrated fighter on a four-fight winning streak, and his only loss in the company was in his last-minute debut against Gilbert goddamn Burns. Mike's wrestleboxing style and his ridiculous toughness finally got his foot in the door in his last fight, as he shared the main card of the UFC's blood money showing in Riyadh with folks like Sergei Pavlovich, Michael "Venom" Page, and Israel Adesanya. And then he got outwrestled by Fares Ziam, and just like that, he's busted all the way down to second from the bottom and he's fighting Mitch Ramirez, a man who got murdered by Carlos Prates on the Contender Series and wound up with a UFC contract a year later anyway because Thiago Moisés needed an opponent on a month's notice. It wasn't close, either: Thiago dominated him and ultimately scored the rare, beautiful leg kick TKO, and Ramirez has been icing his leg ever since.
He's a +600 underdog here, and yeah, that seems fair. MIKE DAVIS BY TKO.
WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT: Fatima Kline (7-1) vs Melissa Martinez (8-1)
We are curtain-joking this show with a battle of women who made good on second chances. Fatima Kline was an undefeated Cage Fury Fighting Championships Champion, which is redundant in at least three or four ways, when she got the call up to the big show on a week's notice because Jasmine Jasudavicius needed an opponent. Jasmine is now ranked #5 at Women's Flyweight, so understandably, it did not go well for Fatima. But she smashed Victoria Dudakova this past January, so the momentum, at least, is back in her corner. Melissa "Super Mely" Martinez experienced the debut blues the other way around. She, too, was an undefeated champion--this time for Combate Americas--but the UFC actually, intentionally signed her and gave her months to prepare for a gimme of an opponent in the 10-7 Hannah Cifers, who hadn't won a fight in years. And then Cifers pulled out a couple weeks later and got replaced by the insanely gritty Elise Reed, who walked Martinez down and ended her undefeated streak with a pointed decision. But Martinez got her comeback against the embattled Alice Ardelean, and this time the decision went her way.
Unfortunately, she's dealing with a bigger, stronger wrestler and I think we're going to see a Reed redux. FATIMA KLINE BY DECISION.