CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 162: STYROFOAM BELTS
The Heavyweight division is being replanted, and Carl is here to sift through the loam.
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 25 FROM THE ETIHAD ARENA IN ABU DHABI
EARLY START TIME WARNING | PRELIMS 7 AM PDT / 10 AM EDT | MAIN CARD 11 AM / 2 PM | EARLY START TIME WARNING
This is the third-to-last UFC pay-per-view (for now, until they remember it’s a revenue stream they’re leaving on the table), we’re back in Abu Dhabi, and I have tragic news: Despite the company’s love of regional marketing, Mohammad “The UAE Warrior” Yahya will not be participating in/getting knocked out on this card. You can have multiple championship bouts, but you are denied the fight that really matters.
MAIN EVENT: THE FUTURE PAST
HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP: Tom Aspinall (15-3, Champion) vs Ciryl Gane (13-2, #1)
On January 14, 2023 the UFC ended the lineage of its own Heavyweight championship, a lineage encompassing dozens of other companies from the entire history of mixed martial arts, some older than the UFC itself, by releasing active champion Francis Ngannou over issues like “I want to make you tons of money by doing a boxing match” and “healthcare would be nice.” The new lineage, the UFC noted, would be clear, undisputed, and better than ever.
We’re coming up on three years since the start of that new lineage, so it’s time to take stock. In the first three years of the original title you had seven title fights, five champions and some of the biggest matches in the sport. How’s the bold new era of Heavyweight stacking up so far?
Well,
Jon Jones, making his Heavyweight debut, dumpstered Ciryl Gane in two minutes, then called out Stipe Miocic, who was 40 and had been retired for two years
Jones injured himself in training, necessitating an interim championship match
Tom Aspinall and Sergei Pavlovich fought for the interim title on two weeks’ notice; Aspinall won
The UFC made clear, immediately, Jones would still fight Stipe eventually instead of unifying the belt
Tom Aspinall defended his interim belt against Curtis Blaydes, who was on a one-fight winning streak
Jon Jones finally defended the belt, which was hilariously still announced as undisputed, against Stipe, in November of 2024, by which point he had already been champion for 623 days without a fight
Stipe was now 42, hadn’t fought in three and a half years, hadn’t won a fight in more than four years, and hadn’t defeated a still-active fighter in six years
Shockingly, Jon Jones won
The UFC spent seven months trying to convince everyone Jon Jones vs Tom Aspinall was happening, including Dana White openly proclaiming the fight was a done deal
Reportedly, Jones asked for an enormous payday and after digging their heels in for months of negotiations, the UFC acquiesced
Jones changed his mind and retired this past June, vacating the title in the process
Tom Aspinall was quietly promoted to undispted champion
That’s it. That’s the new Heavyweight division. Arguably the most ludicrous championship fight in divisional history, a title being promoted as undisputed despite the existence of an interim belt, the undisputed champion refusing to fight his interim counterpart, months of bullshitting and an enormous anticlimax that ended in paperwork instead of a pay-per-view.
If you want a simple shorthand for how dire the entire situation was, it’s this: Tom Aspinall vs Ciryl Gane is the first undisputed UFC Heavyweight Championship bout between full-time fighters since January 22, 2022.
Forty-five months. I have spent a great deal of time in these columns discussing the UFC’s many promotional failures, and all of those evaluations carry the frustrated self-awareness that failure, as a concept, can barely even be considered to exist when the UFC is inherently insulated from consequences for it. But it took the UFC forty-five months to get the Heavyweight division to a state that can be called, at its most basic level, functional, and by any measure, that is an incredible failure.
But we’re here, right? We have at long last arrived at the point that we begin un-fucking this situation, and we have our champion and his number one contender, so it’s all champagne and roses now, right?
I mean, the Tom Aspinall part is great.
Honestly, Tom Aspinall’s greatness is half the reason the title picture has been so impossibly frustrating. When the UFC screwed up Francis Ngannou, a casual-friendly power-puncher with a fantastic highlight reel, it boggled minds. But there were backroom issues, there were contractual differences, there was enough external friction that, if you were for some reason inclined to give UFC management the benefit of the doubt, you could. They assuredly wouldn’t do it again, right?
Say, if they had a funny, charismatic British champion, something they spent an entire decade desperately trying to get, and he finished every single fight he won, and he did it so fast that his entire nine-fight UFC career could fit into a fifteen-minute promo package, and his only loss came from his own knee imploding?
They wouldn’t screw that up and leave him as an undermarketed background character wasting his athletic prime getting booked once a year, would they?
They would! They had a guy who fit every demographic desire they’ve ever had for a marketing darling, someone who could ragdoll Alexander Volkov and punch out Sergei Pavlovich, and they made him second fiddle to Jon Jones wasting multiple years of everyone’s time just so he could get his long-awaited showdown with a man as relevant to the present of the Heavyweight division as Casey Kasem. They seem almost annoyed that they had to hand their undisputed title to a guy who’s given them eight finishes in eight fights in the hardest-hitting division in the sport.
But Ciryl Gane?
They fucking love Ciryl Gane.
When Francis Ngannou first started asking for contract considerations like ‘could my title defense be in September instead of August,’ they threatened him by giving Ciryl Gane an interim title fight and promoting him as the real best Heavyweight in the company. When Ngannou beat him and left, the UFC booked Ciryl straight into another title eliminator to determine who would get the shot at the incoming Jon Jones, and after seeing how Gane dismantled one gassy brawler in Derrick Lewis, they matched him up with Tai Tuivasa. And he almost lost, which was hilarious.
But he won, and he got the huge Jon Jones match, and he got humiliated. Absolutely dumptrucked. Barely landed a thing, didn’t defend a single takedown, submitted in two minutes and four seconds with all the effort of a man taking the garbage out to the curb. It was a devastating loss, and if Gane had been forced to defend his position against one of the top guns of the division, it could’ve sent his career into a hole.
So he got the #7-ranked Serghei Spivac instead.
One easy win later, it was title eliminator time again. Ciryl Gane, with his one-fight winning streak, against Alexander Volkov, who had four wins under his belt and had just beaten the #3 contender. Gane, as the division’s top guy, was the known quantity and the heavy favorite, which made it very surprising when Volkov outworked him, outwrestled him, outlanded him more than two to one and was nearly-universally agreed to have won the fight to the tune of 95% of the media scorecards.
If you have read any of these before, you know what comes next.
Gane, of course, won. It went down as one of the biggest robberies of 2024, which was a real statement for a year that included Raquel Pennington vs Julianna Peña, Jared Gordon vs Nasrat Haqparast, and Carlos Leal dominating Rinat Fakhretdinov and somehow losing a 30-27 scorecard. The decision was bad enough that Dana White told Volkov he thought he won the fight and that they would take care of him with a huge fight to make up for it.
So Ciryl Gane’s fighting for the UFC Heavyweight Championship of the World and Alexander Volkov is three bouts down from here, fighting halfway down the rankings against Jailton Almeida.
It took forty-five months to get back to a real 265-pound title fight and the net result is a top contender who already lost two championship matches and only has two wins in the last three years and one of them was a decision everyone but the judges felt he lost.
I love fighting. I love the fighters who do it. But there’s a reason we call it Trashweight.
Look, I’m not fuckin’ picking Ciryl Gane. You know this. Even if I weren’t all-in on Aspinall, even if I didn’t believe in his ability to blast Gane upside the head just as fast as Tuivasa did but with the added benefit of also being able to break his arm on the ground, do you think I would simply forgive and forget that Gane betrayed the People by getting turned into a sockpuppet by Jon Jones? He’s one of the only people who could have stopped this from happening, and he decided the world was better served with his blood, and now, pursuant to his wishes, it is.
Tom could lose. He has so much confidence in his abilities that he puts himself at risk and all it’s going to take is one good shot to fuck up his entire career. But I do not think Ciryl Gane is the man to land that shot. TOM ASPINALL BY SUBMISSION.
CO-MAIN EVENT: MARKETING PARTY
WOMEN’S STRAWWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP: Virna Jandiroba (22-3, #1) vs Mackenzie Dern (15-5, #5)
Three years ago, I wrote a piece about Mackenzie Dern that made me very uncomfortable. It wasn’t, inherently, about Mackenzie herself, but about the UFC’s persistent marketing of sex appeal in the women’s divisions, and how Mackenzie has been the biggest beneficiary of it. I’m gonna bring back one particularly relevant bit, though.
But Marina Rodriguez is still the #3 in the division, and she’s on a four-fight win streak, and her last two victories were over both of these women, so she’s on deck for a title eliminator, right?
No, my friend, she is fighting the #8-ranked Amanda Lemos, winner of one straight fight, at a random fight night next month that the UFC currently doesn’t even advertise on its website.
Mackenzie Dern, whom she beat, is fighting Xiaonan Yan, whom she beat, to get into pole position for a title shot. ...if Dern wins. Because, after all, Xiaonan is riding a two-fight losing streak, so she’d need another win.
But Mackenzie’d be fine.
For some strange reason.
Mackenzie Dern did not beat Xiaonan Yan. For awhile there, she actually lost most of her fights. Between mid-2021 and mid-2024, Mackenzie went 2-4, and the women she lost to were all top contenders, and the women she beat were all ranked underneath her. Jéssica Andrade flattened Dern in two rounds and Amanda Lemos outwrestled, outstruck and dropped her, and by the start of 2024, Dern looked to finally be on the outs for the first time in her career.
Over that same period of time, Dern’s best-aging win had a career renaissance. Right at the end of 2020, Virna Jandiroba suffered her second-ever career loss to Mackenzie Dern. It was competitive, but Dern outpaced her in the final round and Jandiroba fell just short. It was, after three UFC fights, the first time Virna had been on a main card instead of the prelims. It would be six more fights before she was back on a main card, and that was because she was fighting Amanda Lemos for top contendership in the division.
In 2022, Virna dialed her style in. Her often sloppy striking tightened and became a tool that forced opponents to take their eyes off her takedowns, and those takedowns became the centerpiece of her strategy. She outwrestled and outgrappled everyone she fought, and when she armbarred Lemos--five months after Lemos had dominated Mackenzie--it made her the next woman in line for Zhang Weili’s title. Tatiana Suarez was injured, Yan Xiaonan had already failed to beat Weili, there was nobody else.
And then the UFC booked Virna vs Suarez as a title eliminator anyway, once Suarez was healthy again.
And then Suarez got injured and couldn’t make it.
And then the UFC booked Suarez directly into the title fight instead and gave Virna another title eliminator, this time against the aforementioned Yan Xiaonan. It was on the prelims, too. It didn’t even headline the prelims; Dan Ige vs Sean Woodson did. Virna beat her anyway and called for her long, long-belated shot at Zhang Weili’s title.
And then Weili vacated said title to go up to Women’s Flyweight and left Virna in the dust.
While this entire drama played out, Mackenzie Dern got on the path to recovery. She looked inside herself and asked what she really needed if she wanted to get back into the circle of contendership, and in her warrior’s heart, she found the answer:
More fights with people ranked under her and all of them needed to be on televised main cards.
The #7 ranked Dern fought the #10-ranked Loopy Godinez, who was coming off of her own defeat at Jandiroba’s hands. Jandiroba beat Loopy by a decision clear enough that one judge scored it as a shut-out; Mackenzie came close to losing and several outlets gave Godinez the fight. Five months later, the now #6-ranked Dern fought the #8-ranked Amanda Ribas, who was 1 for her last 3 and coming off a pretty unfortunate loss to Rose Namajunas and frankly had no business fighting to determine who was or was not a top contender in the Strawweight division at that point in her career.
However: She handed Mackenzie Dern her first career loss six years prior, and because Mackenzie is the protagonist of the division, that meant their rematch was necessary. Dern submitted her in three rounds and became the #5 contender for it.
That, of course, left four women ahead of her. Two of them are women she lost to, both of whom had since been beaten by Virna Jandiroba. One of them was Tatiana Suarez, who had helpfully evaded a fight with Virna Jandiroba.
Amanda Lemos and Tatiana Suarez were helpfully booked against each other to take them out of the running. Xiaonan Yan hasn’t been booked since Virna beat her.
Which sure does helpfully leave only one woman available, and coincidentally, it’s the only woman out of them that Mackenzie Dern has already beaten before.
Sean Brady, the UFC’s #2-ranked contender at Welterweight, was recently booked into a matchup with the #8-ranked Michael Morales. This is particularly crazy, as Brady is at the top of the heap, on a great winning streak and just became the first man to ever finish former champion Leon Edwards. Brady talked about this on Ariel Helwani’s show, and revealed that while negotiating his matchmaking with UFC second-in-command Hunter Campbell and pointing out the disparity, Campbell decided to simply stop pretending:
“I even said that to Hunter, I was, like, talking about the rankings, and he said, ‘The rankings really don’t matter.’ He was like, ‘At the end of the day, the UFC is gonna put whoever they want in there for the belt.’”
The UFC has wanted Mackenzie Dern in the spotlight since the dawn of time. Virna Jandiroba is the #1 woman in the Strawweight division and 8-3 in the company and only two of those eleven fights have ever been on a non-preliminary broadcast, and one of those is because it just happened to be against Mackenzie Dern, who in her 10-5 UFC career has been on the prelims only twice. They have tried, repeatedly, to get her in position to wear gold. It didn’t matter if she deserved it, it didn’t matter if she even wanted it.
It’s Mackenzie. It has always been Mackenzie. They spent the last year and a half artfully keeping Virna away from the championship, and now they have changed their minds not because they are ready to reward her for all of her hard work, but instead, for the only reason they put her on a main card back in 2020: She presents an opportunity for Mackenzie Dern.
Both women have improved in the last five years. They’ve both gotten smarter, they’ve both become more well-rounded fighters, they’ve both improved their cardio. Dern still swings wild, but she manages to land by doing so because she is, understandably, completely unafraid of having to grapple with any of her opponents. Virna works behind a jab that is often not enormously effective at doing the damage it’s seeking, but it gets her into range to bring the fight to the ground.
In other words, barring either woman unexpectedly summoning up the kind of punching energy neither has managed to manifest in their 0-collective-knockouts careers, this is inevitably becoming a grappling battle between the two best grapplers in the division.
And I wish I could just enjoy it for what it was instead of being angry at the engines of marketing.
VIRNA JANDIROBA BY DECISION.
MAIN CARD: WHENEVER THEY SAY THEY’LL MAKE IT UP TO YOU, THEY’RE LYING
BANTAMWEIGHT: Umar Nurmagomedov (18-1, #2) vs Mario Bautista (16-2, #8)
I have said, in the past, that fighters are defined by the coolest thing that happened in their career, and every fighter strives to ensure whatever that thing is, they were the one doing it, as opposed to having it done to them. This is also true in microcosm. For better or worse, fights are defined in memory not by what actually happened in them, but by whatever the coolest parts of them happened to be. Everyone remembers Umar Nurmagomedov getting controversially fast-tracked to a title shot against Merab Dvalishvili. No one remembers Umar winning the first two rounds of the fight and, by doing so, coming within one round of beating the best Bantamweight on the planet and, arguably, of all time. Everyone remembers Merab absolutely clowning him in the back half of the fight. By pushing Umar so fast out of the gate, they’ve left him with a bunch of top contenders he could fight. Sean O’Malley is still idle. Song Yadong is waiting in the wings. Deveison Figueiredo or Marlon Vera could’ve taken this fight instead of the ones they got this month.
But there’s a key difference here: The UFC wants to hang onto them. If Mario Bautista’s contendership simply went away, well, that’d be just fine. If you have a very long memory, you might vaguely recall the UFC marketing Bautista as an exciting new contender. That was because he knocked a man out with a flying knee five years ago. Since then, their willingness to book him has been begrudging. He wins all of the time and he has yet to make the UFC hate him the way they did a Corey Anderson or Muhammad Mokaev, so he’s still, categorically, too valuable to let go. But he hasn’t finished anyone in going on three years and he hasn’t knocked anyone out since that aforementioned 2020 knee, and that plants him firmly in their ‘wary acceptance’ camp. He likes the cage grind, he likes to work behind a solid defense and his striking is the kind of effective bread-and-butter 1-2 affair that forms the bedrock of the sport, which is, coincidentally, how far down Dana White would bury it in the Las Vegas desert if he could replace the entire roster with people who spin in a circle to throw a jab.
Umar’s a big favorite here, and if you are trying to pick winners, that’s probably the way to go. Umar won two rounds against the best fighter in the division, his striking is clean, his wrestling is on point, and unlike that championship match, he doesn’t have a fourth or fifth round to worry about here. He is, arguably, better at everything Mario does than Mario is. But I am not worried about picking winners, I am worried about feeling good, and imagining the Umarketing plans falling apart again because Mario’s actually a lot better at defusing his opponents than anyone gives him credit for makes me happy. MARIO BAUTISTA BY DECISION.
HEAVYWEIGHT: Alexander Volkov (38-11, #2) vs Jailton Almeida (22-3, #5)
All hail the real #1 contender. We already went over it at length in the main event so I won’t belabor the point: Alexander Volkov beat Ciryl Gane and should be fighting for the third world championship of his career. Volkov’s never been the flashiest fighter and that’s made it far too easy to ignore his place in the echelons of Heavyweight history, but he’s been a top fifteen contender for a good three generations of fighters. He was the champion in Bellator back in 2012 when Bellator was still a vital competitor, he was the champion of M-1 in 2016 back when M-1 essentially ran mixed martial arts for the entirety of Russia, and since jumping to the UFC he’s been a perpetual fixture in the rankings. He’s beaten world champions, he’s beaten #1 contenders, he was eleven seconds away from a title fight back in 2018 before Derrick Lewis decked him, and in a more just world, he’d be contending for the belt tonight.
Instead, he gets Jailton Almeida. Jailton’s always been kind of an odd fit for the UFC’s bid to have the Contender Series take over the entire sport--grappler instead of a striker, already in his thirties by the time he signed, not a particularly regional-marketing-friendly attraction as yet another in the endless army of Brazilian fighters that have always been the true backbone of mixed martial arts--but he fights whoever they want, he jumps weight classes when necessary, and he’s cheaper than all of their longterm contenders, and by god, that’s what really counts. His jiu-jitsu became slightly less impressive when he made it into the top ranks and discovered that submitting Derrick Lewis is actually very difficult and when Curtis Blaydes starts hitting you on the temple, you lose consciousness. But he beat Alexandr Romanov, whom the UFC cut one fight later, and Serghei Spivac, who is 1 for his last 4 and whose best win was also Derrick Lewis, so he’s basically the top contender already.
It wouldn’t surprise me to see Almeida wrestle Volkov down and submit him, here. Volkov’s bottom game isn’t great and Jailton beating Curtis Blaydes at his own wrestling game is proof he’s got offense enough to pull it off. But I foresee jabbing and clinching. ALEXANDER VOLKOV BY DECISION.
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Aleksandar Rakić (14-5, #7) vs Azamat Murzakanov (15-0, #10)
There’s an alternate timeline where Aleksandar Rakić became the UFC’s post-Jon Jones 205-pound champion in 2020. He was on a great winning streak, he was knocking people out, he was in his athletic prime and looked like a fixture for the top of the division. But he lost a pretty dodgy decision to Volkan Oezdemir in 2019 and it sent him down a dark path that has brought him perilously close to ruin. He was going 50-50 with Jan Błachowicz before his leg imploded. After two years on the shelf he made his grand return as a feature on UFC 300 and spent a round tuning up Jiří Procházka, only to get knocked out in the second. The UFC even threw Rakić a bone by using him in one last attempt to keep Magomed Ankalaev away from Alex Pereira last year, but Ankalaev could not be denied. After losing just two out of sixteen fights in the first decade of his career, Aleksandar is on a three-fight losing streak and could be looking at the end of his time in the UFC.
Azamat Murzakanov is trying to make his way up the ladder count. His time in the spotlight has been universally successful, and his being only at the periphery of the top ten is a product of bad luck rather than personal failure, to the point that his UFC debut got cancelled three goddamn times. He’s undefeated, he’s on a five-fight winning streak and he’s knocked out all but one of his opponents, but those opponents have also constantly fallen through and left him with lower-profile matchups. Volkan Oezdemir and Khalil Rountree Jr. became Alonzo Menifield. Nikita Krylov and Johnny Walker became Brendson Ribeiro. Knocking out everyone you fight is great! But knocking out Brendson Ribeiro doesn’t do anything for your place in the Light Heavyweight division. Azamat’s a killer with great power and a great ability to get his strikes on target, and that’s fortunate, because he’s 5’10” and he’s already 36 and that means he’s at war with what time he has left before his fast-twitch muscle fibers refuse to let him punch through people with 7-10” of reach on him anymore.
Rakić is one of those people. I’m at a bit of a crossroads here. I have unmistakably lost faith in Rakić. I think there’s an excellent chance that despite having every physical advantage possible here, he’s going to get pasted. I am dimly aware that Murzakanov’s defense is porous as shit and he gets caught plenty, and it’s entirely possible Rakić takes him out now that he’s not fighting, y’know, a world champion. I cannot replace that lost faith. But I can observe that every time this year I’ve made an I-no-longer-believe-in-one-of-my-favorites pick they’ve turned it around and won. So I’m going to make like half of the Catholics I know and fake the faith in the hopes that I can believe again. ALEKSANDAR RAKIĆ BY TKO.
PRELIMS: THIS STARTS TOO EARLY FOR EARLY PRELIMS SO WE JUST HAVE PRELIMS
LIGHTWEIGHT: Nasrat Haqparast (18-5) vs Quillan Salkilld (9-1)
Remember that ‘the rankings aren’t real’ point we’ve been hammering on all night? Nasrat Haqparast is 10-4 in the UFC and he’s currently on a five-fight winning streak in arguably the biggest shark tank in the sport. One fight ago he beat the borderline-ranked Esteban Ribovics. In exchange for his years of work, he is facing Quillan Salkilld, who has two UFC fights, and one of them was against Anshul Jubli, who was cut immediately afterward. What makes this non-equivalent exchange make sense, you ask? Nasrat’s contract is eight years old and probably worth slightly more money and Quillan is Australian and they think they can make more money off of him. Embrace the zero-sum astroturfing era of building contenders, it’s all we’re gonna have left pretty soon.
As for this, I dunno. Quillan does have promise, but his last time out against Yanal Ashmouz didn’t move me. NASRAT HAQPARAST BY DECISION.
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Ikram Aliskerov (16-2, #15) vs Junyong Park (19-6)
Ikram, the speed of Middleweight makes your life really goddamn weird. You are 3-1 and ranked, and hell, you should feel good about it, that’s hard to do. All three of the men you beat were also fired one fight later for no longer being good enough for the UFC. And the one blemish on your time in the UFC was a sub-two-minute barnstorming at the hands of Robert Whittaker, which shouldn’t be anything to be ashamed of, but boy, ol’ Bobby Knuckles has looked less than stellar lately, and the transitive property of how bad he looked against Reinier de Ridder, given how bad Reinier de Ridder just looked last week against Brendan Allen, means iffy things for your place in the pecking order. Unless you can knock out Junyong Park, a man who has only been stopped on strikes once in his career. By the tenets of MMAth, this is an iffy one for the Iron Turtle based on his struggling with André Muniz while Aliskerov took him out in a round.
But I have always preferred philosophy to math, and philosophically, I am ride or die on Park now. JUNYONG PARK BY TKO.
LIGHTWEIGHT: Ľudovít Klein (23-5-1) vs Mateusz Rębecki (20-3)
I spent a year and a half writing about the UFC’s refusal to give Ľudovít Klein a real shot. Four straight wins, seven fights without a loss, undefeated at Lightweight altogether, it didn’t matter: He was a prelim fighter and he got other prelim fighters and that’s the way it was. At least, until the UFC suddenly needed name value to boost Erin Blanchfield vs Maycee Barber this past Summer, which ultimately wound up being one of the most cursed events in UFC history. Then, suddenly, Ľudovít Klein got an opportunity at the rankings--as long as he fought Mateusz Gamrot, one of the toughest asks in the division, on short notice. Shockingly, Klein did not win. With that one loss, it is right back to the prelims. Mateusz Rębecki is the kind of Lightweight the UFC really wants: A berserk brawler who makes up for his short range by swinging giant sledgehammer overhands and eschewing defense in favor of offense. He’s exciting and he goes all-out and he regularly ends his bouts visibly disfigured, and by god, that’s the marketing dream.
He’s probably getting picked apart. ĽUDOVÍT KLEIN BY DECISION.
LIGHTWEIGHT: Abdul-Kareem Al-Selwady (15-4) vs Matheus Camilo (9-3)
If you remember Abdul-Kareem Al-Selwady, give yourself a hand for your very, very healthy brain. He was signed off DWCS more than two years ago, and he had exactly one UFC fight more than a year and a half ago, and it was the very first prelim on the Saudi Arabia-rejected Rozenstruik vs Gaziev, and it ended with Loik Radzhabov punching his head into the third row, which was unfortunate, as it was at the Apex and thus no one was around to catch it. He’s had three fights booked since then and every single goddamn one has fallen through. Matheus Camilo just got here, as the beneficiary of one of 2024’s sillier storylines involving an undefeated fighter crashing UFC pressers begging to get signed only to get dominated in his talent-scouting fight by Camilo and thrown into the ashcan. Camilo drew Gabe Green for his UFC debut, and he was a sizable favorite against him, as Green hadn’t won a fight in three years and hadn’t even competed after getting knocked out in fourteen seconds two years prior. Green choked him out in two rounds.
It’s rough out there. I think it’s rougher for Al-Selwady than most. MATHEUS CAMILO BY TKO.
HEAVYWEIGHT: Valter Walker (14-1, #15) vs Louie Sutherland (10-3, NR)
God bless you, Heavyweight, you are a neverending font of comedy. Two weeks ago we gathered here to talk about how silly it was that Valter Walker, a ranked Heavyweight with not just three consecutive submissions but three consecutive heel hooks, which should get you a Nobel Prize, was fighting Mohammed Usman, an unranked man who was 1 for 3. The universe heard us, because Usman pulled out two and a half days before fight night and left Valter in the lurch. But you know who else had a fight cancelled a few weeks ago?
As I was trying to take note of his footwork and his strange way of trying to strip the front hand, thirty seconds into the bout, (Louie) Sutherland feinted a front kick that barely reached his own waist, and one of the commentators was astonished by the way a 6’3” man can get his leg up so high and so quickly. I had a small aneurysm and I am recovering in my sickbed, thinking about if a bar can still be considered a bar if it’s so low as to be inseparable from the ground.
So congratulations, everyone. We moved from a ranked Heavyweight bout featuring a UFC journeyman to a ranked Heavyweight bout featuring a debutant who was fighting 3-2 and 5-7 guys a few months ago.
Bless this division. VALTER WALKER BY SUBMISSION.
FEATHERWEIGHT: Nathaniel Wood (21-6) vs Jose Delgado (10-1)
This has my pick for the sleeper fight of the night. Nathaniel Wood has been a prospect on the verge of becoming a contender for years, and every single time he’s come to the precipice, he’s been batted back down the card. It happened twice in his first two years with the company and that was enough to kick him out of the Bantamweight division, and his run at Featherweight was going swimmingly until Muhammad Naimov tossed him right back over the cliff. So, once again, Nathaniel has dusted himself off and picked up another couple wins, the last of which was a pretty impressive shut-out over Morgan Charrière, and once again, he has to prove he deserves his rise towards the rankings. Jose Delgado is the kind of fighter the UFC points to when it needs to justify the Contender Series. For every complaint I make about their appetite for poorly-tested fighters, every once in awhile, one of them excels. Delgado is exactly the kind of guy whose record and relative inexperience I would, and did, make note of, and he’s also 2-0 in the UFC with a pair of devastating knockouts, the most recent of which came against the undefeated and pretty well-rated Hyder Amil. They’re looking to see if he can make it three.
And he’s almost half a foot taller than Wood, so if he can’t, it’s gonna look real bad. JOSE DELGADO BY TKO.
HEAVYWEIGHT: Hamdy Abdelwahab (4-1 (1)) vs Chris Barnett (23-9)
This is it, my friends. This is why we live. This is why we struggle through all of the bullshit this sport puts us through. After so many mismatches, after so much abuse, for one shining, perfect moment, the ballroom is ours and we are dancing through the night on clouds filigreed with love. Hamdy Abdelwahab is a beautifully palindromic 1-1 (1) in the UFC and he missed almost three years for repeated drug test failures and in all of that time all he has to his name is a No Contest against Don’Tale Mayes, who is no longer here, a dodgy split decision over Jamal Pogues, who is no longer here, and a loss against Mohammed Usman, who we will never be rid of. Chris Barnett is a 5’9” Heavyweight, which is, itself, an improvement from the old days when he was a 5’9” Superheavyweight, and he throws wheel kicks and swings giant overhands and does terrifying backflips and he’s only fought once in the past three years because across said three years his wife died, he got injured twice and a hurricane fucked up his house. Has he missed the Heavyweight limit? Yes. Has he lost more in the UFC than he’s won? Also yes.
Do you have it in yourself to root against him? Because if you do, I do not want you to come to my parties. CHRIS BARNETT BY TKO.
FLYWEIGHT: Azat Maksum (15-2) vs Mitch Raposo (9-3)
Every fight card is legally obligated to have at least one the-loser-might-get-fired match, and unfortunately, Flyweight is on the chopping block this week. At one point, there was some real hope for both of these men. Azat Maksum was an undefeated prospect out of the surprisingly tough regional scene in Kazakhstan, Mitch Raposo was a multiple-time regional champion, and both, like damn near every good Flyweight, were well-conditioned, well-rounded and ready for primetime. But both men are now riding two straight decision losses--in Raposo’s case they were somehow both split decisions despite being fights that could easily have been 30-27 shut-outs against him because official judges are malevolent djinn--and if there are two things the UFC does not want, it’s losing streaks and too many decisions.
I’m banking on the wrestling, as I almost always do. AZAT MAKSUM BY DECISION.
WOMEN’S STRAWWEIGHT: Jacqueline Amorim (10-1) vs Mizuki Inoue (15-6)
Mizuki Inoue exists only in brief moments of time. She came to the UFC in 2019, she didn’t fight again for a full year, she didn’t return for another three, and now it’s been two more atop that. Six years, three fights. Back in Invicta she was going the distance with Alexa Grasso and Virna Jandiroba, and in the UFC, she’s barely had time to fight Hannah Goldy. Jacqueline Amorim matched Inoue’s entire UFC tenure in elven months. She’s bigger, she’s younger, she’s a more accomplished grappler and she’s the next candidate for promotion up to the rankings. Is she a heavy favorite? Yes. Does she train with a bigger, more proven camp? Yes. Is she going to win this fight? Almost definitely.
MIZUKI INOUE BY DECISION because I will stand in the course of the flowing river and demand it turn away.