SATURDAY, AUGUST 1 FROM THE BELGRADE ARENA IN BELGRADE, SERBIA
EARLY START TIME WARNING | PRELIMS 7 AM PDT / 10 AM EDT | MAIN CARD 10 AM / 1 PM | EARLY START TIME WARNING

There was a time when I would have really enjoyed the phrase “UFC Serbia” as a testament to the growth and universal appeal of mixed martial arts. To some extent, that kind of self-identification with the product is how we wound up in this particularly terrible present day for the sport, but when Pride died the UFC became the sole global face of mixed martial arts, and expanding the sport internationally meant falling in line. People used to talk about MMA joining the Olympics, man. People used to wonder what the future of MMA as a fully globalized industry would look like--interpromotional title fights, grand prix tournaments across national borders, a world cup of combat sports!

We’re here. We made it. It turns out the face of international mixed martial arts is Uroš Medić vs Daniel Rodriguez as a main event.

MAIN EVENT: SPORT AS A SECONDARY FACTOR
WELTERWEIGHT: Uroš Medić (13-3, #14) vs Daniel Rodriguez (20-5, #15)

This is it. This is the end of our long, dark month of terrible main events. We survived the Conor McGregor comeback tour, we shrugged our way through Kamaru Usman’s Middleweight title eliminator, we stared in disbelief as Bogdan Guskov got a shot at the top of the 205-pound ladder. Next week, we’re free. Next week we emerge from our cocoon of bad fights into a long string of genuinely good main events. Mateusz Gamrot vs Quillan Salkilld! Anthony Hernandez vs Gregory Rodrigues! Umar Nurmagomedov vs Song Yadong! The UFC finally signed Salahdine Parnasse and he’s main eventing in Paris against Dan Hooker! Our first actual title fight in two goddamn months, and it’s Islam Makhachev vs Ian Machado Garry!

It’s a legitimately great run. It’s the kind of cleansing string of cards that makes you feel motivated to watch this sport, for all of the terrible things it chooses to do to the world and to you, as a fan, for caring about it.

But that’s next week.

This week, you have to survive Main Event Uroš Medić.

Is he on a winning streak? Sure! Granted, two of them were Muslim Salikhov and Gilbert Urbina--more on that later--but he knocked out Geoff Neal! Geoff Neal matters, right? Why, I remember Geoff Neal being nigh-unto a contender once upon a time!

That time was four years ago. In the last four years Neal is 1 for 5 and said win was Rafael dos Anjos, who was fighting on his honest-to-god 40th birthday, which made it especially funny when his knee collapsed ninety seconds into the fight. By the transitive property, Uroš is a ranked fighter because Rafael dos Anjos doesn’t have any cartilage left in his kneecaps.

Before that, Medić was a good-but-not-great competitor. He tried his hand at Lightweight, he went 1-2 and the weight cut kept killing him, so he moved up to Welterweight and promptly went 2-2. But those two pick-offs were Matthew Semelsberger, who got cut shortly after on a losing record, and Tim Means, who was, also, past 40. Mytykbek Orolbai tapped Uroš easily and Punahele Soriano punched his head into the third row in thirty-one seconds.

Hell, Punahele’s on a four-fight winning streak. If we still believed in the UFC’s line about the best rising to the top, he’d be here. He is not here. He isn’t booked at all right now, actually.

But Uroš is Serbian, and we’re in Serbia, so by god, let the man in. Who do we have to fight him? Well, fortunately, Daniel Rodriguez just got out of a Mexican prison.

Just to be clear, that’s not some dumb joke. Daniel’s been plagued by problems maintaining momentum thanks to poorly-timed losses and a history of hand injuries, so when he finally ran up a three-fight winning streak last year that culminated in a win over Kevin Holland only to drop off the face of the Earth again, everyone--by which I mean the incredibly small handful of people still plugged into mixed martial arts enough to know or care about Daniel Rodriguez--wondered if he was having contract issues or if he’d busted his hand up again.

Nope! Mexican prison. He got busted crossing the border to Tijuana with an ounce of weed in his backpack, got stuck in prison for eight months, and only narrowly avoided a six-year sentence over it. At one point he was going to be fighting for a top ten berth in one of the sport’s best divisions and then he left an 11th-grader’s sandwich bag worth of reefer in his car and that was most of a year of his life gone, because we are still, collectively, really fucking weird about marijuana*.

_{*In full disclosure: I am not cool enough to smoke weed.}

Only a few months ago D-Rod said the UFC sent him a contract to fight Leon Edwards for International Fight Week. I wonder if being in a main event in Serbia instead carries any kind of comfort. I wonder if knowing the UFC values him so much that they’d shunt him towards hopefully putting over their biggest Serbian fighter in Serbia makes him feel any better about his professional comeback.

I dunno. I do know I still don’t really believe all that strongly in Uroš Medić. He hits like a fucking truck, there’s no way to doubt that unless you’re covering your eyes and screaming every time he fights, which, in all fairness, is a fully acceptable way to survive being a mixed martial arts fan in 2026. But his best work comes against people who are willing to trade recklessly, and Daniel’s always been good, to a fault, at keeping his distance, flicking jabs, and slowing the pace of a fight all the way down if it means he doesn’t catch a fist upside the head.

As always, though: That was a year ago. Is another long layoff, this time in prison, going to mess with his head? Is nearing 40 going to take a toll on his defensive speed? Will Uroš feel the power of Serbia surging through his veins?

Are you emotionally invested in the answer? You should not be. The main event of this show is Uroš Medić vs Daniel Rodriguez. That is a main event in the UFC. This is the first time in a longi time that I have more to say about a co-main than its main, and if I am going to make fun of the Professional Fighters League for Main Event Salamat Isbulaev, I can at least be fair enough to know this sucks ass, too. DANIEL RODRIGUEZ BY DECISION.

CO-MAIN EVENT: AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH, PART 2
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Jan Błachowicz (29-11-2, #4) vs Navajo Stirling (10-0, #15)

Last week, in discussing Magomed Ankalaev’s top-ranked 205-pound main event, we prepared ourselves for this.

But last week, Khalil Rountree Jr. got injured. This left the UFC in a pickle. Fortunately, Jan Błachowicz and Bogdan Guskov were scheduled for a fight on the UFC’s card in Serbia next week, in an attempt to get Jan out of the rankings once and for allrun back the majority draw they went to last December, but that means Jan was fresh and available. It even made perfect sense as a fight. Jan’s the #4-ranked man in the division, he’s a former world champion, and he and Ankalaev also have unfinished business--back in 2022 they fought for the then-vacant title and it ended in a controversial split draw.

The two highest-ranked available fighters, and they’re both former champions and multiple-time main event talents, and they have a built-in backstory to finish. It’s rare that the universe gives you a better replacement fight than the original would’ve been, but the gods of combat smiled on the UFC and sent them a gift.

So anyway, Jan’s fighting the unranked Navajo Stirling next week. Ank’s got Bogdan.

Well, thank god they made the right decision, because Magomed Ankalaev vs Bogdan Guskov was a terrible fight that served only to remind the world that a) there are levels to this and b) Light Heavyweight is at its lowest possible point. It was the kind of fight that made the commentary team begin nervously discussing the way that, sure, Magomed is completely outclassing the opponent deemed an acceptable challenge for him, but is he, the undisputed #1 contender, winning impressively enough to justify getting a shot at the title?

You know. The prestigious Light Heavyweight title, whose champion is out until sometime next year and whose next logical top contender is Paulo Costa, a man whose only Light Heavyweight bout before 2026 was a decision loss to Marvin Vettori, who is, notably, not a Light Heavyweight. Did Magomed Ankalaev, who beat Alex Pereira and hasn’t lost to anyone but him in nearly a decade, do enough to justify being in the contendership discussion alongside such luminaries of the sport as Literally Fucking No One Because We Don’t Have Any Contenders Left Please God Can One Of Our Contender Series Wage Slaves Do Something To Separate Themselves From The Pack And Save Us From The Wreckage We’ve Made Of What Was Once The Most Popular Division In The Sport?

Oh, hey, Navajo Stirling. You heard us call your name.

Last week we played the “look at how we got here” game with Bogdan Guskov, and Navajo’s even less visible, so we’re going to go even deeper. We’re not just talking about his UFC tenure, this is The Full Navajo Stirling Story.

• Debuts in his native New Zealand with a decision victory over fellow debutant James Craughwell, who eventually retires at 0-3; despite being between two 0-0 guys this fight is for the Shuriken Fight Series Heavyweight Championship

• Defends his title by knocking out the 15-13-2 (1) Kevin Filtial, who has one victory in the last seven years and it came against Ben Schneider, a 3-29-1 Welsh fighter who mysteriously loses almost all of his fights by TKO within 90 seconds

• Stops Stu “Tumbleweed” Dare, a 9-8 Heavyweight out of Tasmania

• Becomes a two-division champion after winning the HEX Light Heavyweight title against Sam Kei, who promptly retires at 8-9

• Wins his UFC contract on the Contender Series after knocking out Phillip “The Doctor” Latu, who is 6-1 at the time; Latu is now 7-5, including somehow losing a decision--a decision--against Greg Hardy

• Makes his official UFC debut with a decision over Tuco Tokkos, who is cut from the UFC a year and a half later after going 1-3

• Earns another decision victory over Ivan Erslan, who is cut from the UFC a year later after going 1-3, with that one win being, of course, Tuco Tokkos; this is demoted to the prelims

• Gets a decision over Rodolfo Bellato, which makes Rodolfo officially 1-1-1 (1) in the UFC; as of March, he now has two wins; you better believe this was a fuckin’ prelim

• Knocks out Bruno Lopes, who is 1-2 in the UFC and was once denied a Contender Series contract after getting knocked out by Brendson Ribeiro, who, as of last week, is 2-6; this fight is even LOWER on the prelims

• Outlasts Ion Cuțelaba, who is 9-11-1 in the UFC and has never beaten a ranked opponent, marking Navajo’s first main-broadcast fight since his debut a year and a half earlier

• Gets picked on short notice to fight the former world champion for the #4 spot in the division.

You may assume that I am here to tell you what a terrible thing it is that this is the route you now take to reach the top of the Light Heavyweight division. You may assume that I am going to say Jan Błachowicz deserves better. And you’re absolutely right! Both of those things are true. But, also, here’s every fight Jan has had since Navajo started his professional MMA career in September of 2022:

• Goes to a split draw with Magomed Ankalaev (which Ank should 100% have won) for the vacant Light Heavyweight title, leaving the belt unclaimed

• Loses a split decision to Alex Pereira in the latter’s 205-pound debut

• Spends almost two years on the shelf with a shoulder injury

• Comes back in 2025 and loses a unanimous decision to Carlos Ulberg

• Goes to a majority draw with Bogdan Guskov

• Turns 43

• Tears his meniscus and goes right back on the shelf for half a year

I need you to understand: This is the fourth-best Light Heavyweight in the UFC, and he deserves that distinction, and he also hasn’t won a fight in more than four years. Jan is one of the best men in this weight class in the world, and he’s also 43 and has spent most of the last five years of his career recovering from injuries.

Up until one fight ago, you could defend Jan by pointing out that he was fighting the absolute best of the best in the sport. Ankalaev, Pereira and Ulberg are the last three men to hold the Light Heavyweight Championship, and Jan wasn’t just competitive with them, some folks had him outright beating all three on the scorecards. We’re one Ron McCarthy coinflip away from living in the reality where the Alex Pereira era never came to pass because Jan almost strangled it in its crib.

But that Bogdan Guskov fight? That was rough on its own terms, let alone re-examined after watching Guskov look completely, utterly lost in the cage against Ankalaev. And that was Jan before tearing his meniscus at 43 and having to make a combat sports comeback within the same calendar year against an undefeated man in his twenties who is also taller, rangier, and pretty defensively sound.

I don’t think the UFC is wrong to invest in Navajo. He is, by the standards of Light Heavyweight, pretty darn good. He doesn’t make many silly mistakes, he controls his weapons, and he knows how to wait for his chances. He’s a rock-solid prospect. He’s also not going to save the division. Nothing that is currently happening is going to save the division. There is, arguably, no saving this fucking division. The UFC is bending over backwards to find a way, any way, to keep from booking another Magomed Ankalaev title fight, and if you think they wouldn’t bounce Navajo all the way to top contendership should he knock Jan out, you have not been paying attention to the way they do business now.

And that’s the problem. They put all their eggs in the Alex Pereira basket and when he hatched into a beautiful failure of a Heavyweight, they had nothing left. They spent years kneecapping Ankalaev. They got Jiří Procházka murdered in three straight title fights. They overpushed Jamahal Hill and were subsequently stunned by his sudden lust for imploding his own leg tendons. They slow-rolled Azamat Murzakanov and now after one loss he’s already done. They jumped the gun on Guskov and now no one will take him seriously as a contender.

And their best plan--their original plan, the thing they actually intended to do--was have Ankalaev fight Khalil Rountree Jr., a man with 0 wins over active Light Heavyweights in the last four years, and have Jan fight an immediate rematch with Guskov, a fight no one was asking for, and have Navajo fight a fight against (blank), because he just beat Ion barely a month ago and they hadn’t figured out what to do with him yet.

Because they don’t have a plan.

Some divisions do! They parked the entire Heavyweight division for Alex Pereira! They froze multiple contenders to put Sean Strickland in the driver’s seat at Middleweight! Christ, they spent years arranging the dominos necessary to belt up Mackenzie Dern. With Pereira gone, there is no plan for Light Heavyweight. There’s no anointed prospect, there’s no up-and-coming star, there aren’t even many international prospects waiting in the wings. Middleweights are moving up to Light Heavyweight to try to take over the division again because it is ripe for the taking. But there’s no promotional aid package coming for anybody. They’re just throwing darts and hoping to God that one of them somehow sticks.

This will, probably, stick. I have appreciated Jan for a very long time, but unfortunately, I have appreciated Jan for a very long time. I would absolutely love to see him come out and batter Navajo’s legs and wear him down until he can’t avoid one of those big Jan Błachowicz hooks anymore, but after watching him struggle against Bogdan, who I genuinely believe is worse at fighting than Navajo, and knowing that he’s coming back from a serious leg injury and will almost certainly be even more diminished than he has been the last couple of times we’ve seen him, I think this is just about the end of the road.

Prove me wrong, Jan. I need one more run. NAVAJO STIRLING BY DECISION.

MAIN CARD: THE EXODUS
HEAVYWEIGHT: Aleksandar Rakić (14-6, #13 at Light Heavyweight) vs Marcin Tybura (27-11, #12 at Heavyweight)

I used to believe in you, Aleksandar. I thought you were gonna be a damn champion one day. You had the tools, you had the power, you were big as heck for 205 pounds and you could maintain a fighting pace for fifteen minutes, and by jove, that puts you ahead of the game. But then you got signed to fight Jan, and you twiddled your thumbs for a year waiting, and when you got there the gods of humor and hubris ripped your ACL in half in mid-fight, and since then everything’s been fucked. You were gone for two whole years, you looked solid against Jiří Procházka for a round before you got flattened, you had nothing for Magomed Ankalaev and Azamat Murzakanov knocked you out in one round with a fucking jab. The Light Heavyweight world cast you out, and you are leading the charge up to the Heavyweight division in the hopes of reinvigorating your career, because if there’s one thing leg ligaments love, it’s deciding to make them support even more weight than they did when you were healthy.

Don’t you look so smug over there, Marcin, you’re in trouble, too. You’ve been one of the UFC’s most reliable gatekeepers--maybe we have to forgive you for letting Augusto Sakai through, but we forgave Anderson Silva for losing to Daiju Takase, everyone gets one mulligan--and you will always have our eternal gratitude for putting a stop to the rise of Greg Hardy. But the fact remains that you have been doing an unfortunate job lately. You beat Mick Parkin! That’s good! But you let Ante Delija blast through you in two minutes, and then, when we needed you to show some signs of improvement, you let Tyrell goddamn Fortune take your spot in the top ten. Being an unstoppably grinding wrestleboxing meat wall is your entire reason for being, and you let a guy who needed a doctor’s stoppage to beat Demoreo Dennis take the crown from you. Now you’re trying to hold the door against the Light Heavyweight invasion. Ciryl did it! Now it’s your goddamn turn.

I think Aleksandar is a lot faster than Marcin. I think he has more tools in his belt. I also think putting on more weight and trying to compete at a higher weight class at this stage in his physical progression is a really difficult path. But above all: I think Heavyweight is Bad. ALEKSANDAR RAKIĆ BY TKO.

MIDDLEWEIGHT: Duško Todorović (13-6) vs Robert Valentin (11-6 (1))

Really roll that fight around on your tongue. Main Card Robert Valentin. In the past three years, these two men combine for a truly outstanding UFC record of 2-6. They’ve both been stopped twice and they’ve both lost a decision. And their sole wins? Eleven months ago Duško knocked out José Medina, who was released one fight later for being 0-4 in the company, and this past April Robert saved his contract by choking out Julien Leblanc, who was making his UFC debut thanks to his truly incredible victory on the Quebecois regional circuit over the 6-10 Ryan “The Lion” Rohovich. That is how deep they had to dig to find people who could feasibly lose a fight to either of these men. “But Duško has other UFC wins,” you plaintively cry from the alcove where I told you I kept the Amontillado. And you’re right! He does! He has three whole other wins! The most recent one was almost four years ago, and the three of them put together were just 3-14 in the UFC, and brother, you don’t want to know who the three poor motherfuckers were that they beat, and also, no one can hear you.

However, and this may shock you: Duško Todorović is Serbian. Sorry, everyone else. Nothing to be done. Gotta sell those Serbian tickets, and if that means Duško Todorović and Robert Valentin get a big bright spot on the main card, that’s what’s best for the sport. Wanna hear something fun? This is the 25th UFC held this year, and presuming it doesn’t face any last-minute cancellations, by the time it’s over, there will have been 140 main-card fights broadcast in 2026. Seven of those main-card slots went to women. That’s five percent. It is so worth it to the UFC to make sure there’s broadcast space for folks like Duško Todorović and Vlasto Čepo to secure those lucrative government grantsinternational audiences, but heaven forfend you have lady parts, because there’s definitely never been any money in women fighting in mixed martial arts.

This fight is bad and neither of these guys have done much to prove they belong here but we’re just gonna keep on trucking, I guess. DUŠKO TODOROVIĆ BY TKO.

MIDDLEWEIGHT: Vlasto Čepo (14-3) vs Gilbert Urbina (7-4)

Do you even need me to say anything? Do we need to talk about this fight? Are context clues enough for you to know why the UFC booked a debuting Serbian fighter against a guy with half as many wins and yet more losses than him? Can I just communicate my feelings through pictures?

No? I need to be a professional? Why the fuck! Why do I have to give a shit about this more than they do.

Here’s your cypher: Vlasto Čepo is Pretty Good, he’s been fighting in OKTAGON and doing a bang-up job of it, he’s Serbian as fuck and he’s finished everyone he’s ever beaten, most of them by knockout. Gilbert Urbina managed to lose The Ultimate Fighter 29 (jesus christ) twice (jesus christ). He has won exactly one fight not just in the UFC but in the last five+ years of his life, and that was against Orion Cosce, who seemingly retired from shame on the spot because that was in mid-2023 and he still hasn’t fought again. Otherwise it’s been a half-decade of getting knocked out or choked out, over and over. Which is why he’s still under contract. They’ve been waiting for a Vlasto Čepo to book him against.

Congratulations, matchmakers. Your day has come. VLASTO ČEPO BY TKO.

LIGHTWEIGHT: Miloš Janičić (19-3) vs Noah Gugnon (9-2)

One of these men fights out of Serbia. One of them fights out of France. You may be able to subtly guess which is which! It’s a sign of where the sport is right now that Janičić is simultaneously a genuinely promising Lightweight prospect and he’s spent more of the last three years on kickboxing, bareknuckle boxing and my personal favorite, the Dirty Boxing Championship promotion that runs out of sweaty rooms in Miami and has the goddamn Schmo as an interviewer, than he has on MMA. This is how you make money as a regional fighter now. You go to fucking DBX. Noah Gugnon has been beating folks up in France’s ARES FC, and he was born in the year 2000, and that should be illegal and I do not appreciate it. Do not tell me a fighter born in the year 2000 is closing in on thirty, because I assure you, I cannot do math.

I dunno, man. I like Janičić’s offense and the way he lances forward into his jabs and straights, it’s very Whittakery, and I like how Gugnon drives forward and gets real aggressive on the ground, but Janičić also has some trouble getting outwrestled, and Gugnon also keeps his head bolt-upright way too often, and I cannot help seeing both men getting hurt badly by the time they get anywhere close to the Lightweight ladder.

But we’re not actually there yet, so whee! NOAH GUGNON BY DECISION.

PRELIMS: THE LAST STAND OF COWAN
LIGHTWEIGHT: Ľudovít Klein (24-5-1) vs Tofiq Musayev (23-6)

Ľudovít Klein continues to exist as an example of just how bizarre the path to success is in the UFC today. He was a steady, reliable winner as a Lightweight prospect, but despite going three years and seven fights without a loss (albeit one slightly embarrassing draw against Jai Herbert) he was no closer to a ranking, or a ranked fight, than any of his managerially-favored peers. Then, suddenly, they threw him in there on relatively short notice with Mateusz Gamrot, one of the ten best Lightweights on the goddamn planet. Klein lost, so now it’s back to back to the prelim mines forever. One fight ago it was scraping out a decision over Mateusz Rębecki; now it’s battling Tofiq Musayev, former Rizin and Bellator veteran turned currently 50/50 fighter in the UFC. Myktybek Orolbai ruined his much-ballyhooed debut after submitting him in one round, but Musayev managed to take his own decision--the first victory by decision he’d earned in six and a half years--after beating on-again off-again marketing darling Ignacio Bahamondes. Who is, coincidentally, the man Klein pissed off the UFC by beating almost three years ago to the day.

I still like Musayev, but I think the UFC’s going to continue to be a very tough run for him. ĽUDOVÍT KLEIN BY DECISION.

WELTERWEIGHT: Oban Elliott (12-4) vs Michael Oliveira (9-0)

Oban, buddy, I think they’re tired of you. We’re barely two years removed from Oban’s debut as a big Contender Series prospect out of the UK, and it went well, in the sense that he beat several folks with losing UFC records, and then he kept getting injured and struggling to get a visa (which is clearly his problem and has nothing to do with America), and then he dropped two fights in a row, and now his fortunate son status has been revoked and he’s on the DWCS welcoming committee. Michael Oliveira is your new Brazilian knockout guy. A year and a half ago he was in the Legacy Fighting Alliance beating a 13-11-2 guy named Aldo Pereira, then he was winning on the contract mill show by destroying Victor Valenzuela, who wound up signed to the company anyway. Oliveira is trained by our old Strikeforce buddy Rafael “Feijão” Cavalcante, and it shows, because he really likes big, angry punches and does not appear to be sufficiently concerned with pacing himself.

Oliveira also has this style of defense that centers entirely around moving his head just barely enough to avoid punches, which is going to work incredibly well right up until the moment it very violently does not. Fortunately, that probably won’t be tonight. MICHAEL OLIVEIRA BY TKO.

BANTAMWEIGHT: Mark Vologdin (12-4-2) vs Borislav Nikolić (16-2)

Remember back in April, when I introduced you to Mark Vologdin, the 5’3” Bantamweight who the UFC signed despite losing his DWCS fight because his entire fighting style can be summarized by that Simpsons gif of Bart walking forward while constantly windmilling his hands? Good news! He’s still here. I said he’d lost his debut match against John Castañeda, and he would have, were it not for John getting docked a point over errant groin shots. Funnily enough, even with the deduction most of the media still thought Castañeda won, but that’s just not how this works. Vologdin was supposed to meet in a prospect-filtering fight with fellow struggler Josias Musasa here, but Josias couldn’t make it, so instead it’s Borislav Nikolić, who is--try to be surprised--a Serbian guy who stops almost everyone he beats. He’s half a foot taller, he hits a lot harder, and primarily, I just don’t think Mark Vologdin is great at this.

And I normally love my short guys! Just not this one. BORISLAV NIKOLIĆ BY TKO.

FEATHERWEIGHT: Dennis Buzukja (12-6) vs Bogdan Grad (15-4)

Speaking of fights featuring people who are inexplicably still here, there’s this, which will probably be a lot of fun. Bogdan Grad is an adherent of the modern-day meta whereby winning excitingly is more important than fighting well, and consequently he needed two chances to win on the Contender Series and he’s on a two-fight losing streak that could, with one more fall, very easily get him fired. Dennis Buzukja got signed as a replacement for a replacement for another replacement, he’s a whole 1-4 in the company, and he would’ve been released already had his losses not been separated by a knockout over the incredibly unfortunate Connor Matthews.

Buzukja’s solid, but aside from being in unfriendly territory he’s also been booked into this fight despite being just under three and a half months separated from getting completely, utterly, limp-on-the-ground knocked out by Márcio Barbosa. In the old days, he wouldn’t even have been cleared to spar until about two weeks ago. They know what they are doing. BOGDAN GRAD BY TKO.

LIGHTWEIGHT: Mateusz Rębecki (20-5) vs Kyle Prepolec (18-10)

How many times do you think we can write about people who probably shouldn’t be here? Spoiler: This isn’t the last time on this card. Kyle Prepolec was hired as a last-minute replacement to keep Benoît Saint Denis on a card in Quebec, meaning Kyle punched his ticket to a UFC contract by defeating no less than the 25-33 Gustavo “Show Man” Wurlitzer, and now he’s 0-2 in the company and he’s gotten completely fucked up in both fights and the second was a brutal mauling at the hands of the aging Drew Dober, but that, too, was in Canada, so it made sense to put the Canadian in. Now he’s in Serbia fighting a guy whose name I have to copy-paste because it’s easier than finding the character map and manually keying in the combination to make the ę, which I have only just today discovered has a Polish name that honest-to-god translates as “e with a little tail” and I don’t know if there’s any inherent purpose in life but that’s the kind of factoid that makes me glad to still be living it. Kyle, they want to kill you. I’m sorry. Mateusz is their big brawler and he’s on a losing streak and someone in matchmaking thinks Poland and Serbia are close enough together that this is fine and you are here to be destroyed.

I hope Quebec welcomes you home. MATEUSZ RĘBECKI BY TKO.

WOMEN’S BANTAMWEIGHT: Nina Milošević (8-1) vs Hailey Cowan (7-5)

Hailey Cowan, it’s now or never. It’s very hard to imagine now, but four years ago the UFC put a surprising amount of hype behind Hailey after she won her Contender Series contract. It would be very easy to be cynical and say they only cared about her because she’s a blonde American lady from Texas and they have no idea how to market any female fighters who aren’t generically photogenic to American audiences. Very, very easy. Even easier now, because in the last four years Hailey’s fought three times and she’s lost every one of them. She lost her debut by decision, she spent two years on the shelf, she got choked out by noted kickboxer Nora Cornolle, she went back on ice for another year, she got knocked out by Alice Pereira this past April, and even though it’s barely four months later they’re cutting bait and shipping her off to Serbia to get eaten alive. Because that’s what’s going to happen, right? I mean, Nina Milošević is 8-1! She’s the Serbian champion in Serbia! She hasn’t lost a fight since her rookie outing! All of this is true. It is also true that Nina and Hailey both have exactly the same number of career victories against women with winning records, and that number is Two, and you only get that far if you are willing to think of “2-1” as a winning record. I watched Nina’s tape and I’ll tell you, man, it isn’t great. Neither of them are great. Hailey still looks lost a lot of the time and Nina tends to throw punches like she’s swimming, and I want to tell you neither of them belong here, but is that even true anymore? Miesha Tate is still a ranked Women’s Bantamweight and she has one ranked win in the last decade. Bia Mesquita is the most exciting prospect in the division and one fight ago Melissa Mullins had her basically dead on her feet, but gave away the bout taking the half-conscious world champion grappler to the ground only to react in Pikachu shock when she got armbarred seconds later. Joselyne Edwards is the only new, genuinely-cultivated contender Bantamweight has had in years, and she isn’t even two years removed from constantly missing weight and being unable to stop Ailín Pérez.

I don’t know if I can say the bar is too high for anyone anymore. Throw all the talent into a pool. Invest real time and money in them. See what happens. Hailey, this is your chance. HAILEY COWAN BY DECISION.

HEAVYWEIGHT: Jovan Leka (13-2) vs Alexander Poppeck (21-5 (1))

Like this! This is a perfect continuation for that conversation we were just having, because Heavyweight and Women’s Bantamweight are, inherently, the same division. Legendary champion and international celebrity who left the company? Check. Current champion sidelined with injury issues the UFC really doesn’t want to talk about? Double check. Former champion the company wants to bury? You better fuckin’ believe that’s a check. Thrown-together matchups? Buddy, one of these Heavyweights isn’t even a Heavyweight. Jovan Leka is! He’s a 6’5” meatbrick whose primary skills are Wrestling, Kind Of and Being Dense. I strongly encourage you to go watch the footage of his last fight against Danilo Suzart--the iron-brained will remember him as the guy Waldo Cortes-Acosta nuked on the Contender Series back in 2022--and observe, as Jovan looks visibly confused by Suzart walking at him throwing giant winging overhands again and again until the moment it clicks in Leka’s head that he is half a foot larger and can simply push the other man over and choke him. Poppeck, funnily enough, is also a former DWCS guy--he’s the one who got pounded out by Jamahal Hill way back in 2019 and in so doing helped steer us onto the dark, terrible course into which we now have no escape. He’s been fighting as a constant favorite in OKTAGON as a 205-pounder and he’s actually visibly mobile and has a couple legitimately solid wins and he’s content to take his time attacking and defending and once he’s back at his home weight class I think he might have some work to do.

Here, I think he’s gonna get smothered by the actual Heavyweight in this Heavyweight bout. JOVAN LEKA BY DECISION.

WOMEN’S STRAWWEIGHT: Marina Spasić (7-1) vs Stephanie Luciano (7-2-1)

There’s been some level of attempt to get Marina Spasić some debut hype, here, but I’m not feeling it. The sentence “the best Women’s Strawweight in the Balkans” is one of those things that’s so utterly specific that it feels like an insult more than an endorsement, and when you look at her record and watch her tape and see her struggling with women who are only barely staying afloat in the sport, or watch her need two and a half rounds to dispatch Samara Santos, who is 12-11-1, has never beaten anyone with a winning record and whose opponents have a truly, genuinely incredible combined record of 16-60, you begin to realize why I both focus on numbers as a way of evaluating where someone’s been in the sport and fully recognize just how useless they can be. After all, I loved Jingnan Xiong, and it took her three rounds to knock out Santos, too. Is struggling with Samara Santos an equivalent exchange to Stephanie Luciano losing a split decision to Sam Hughes? What’s a 50-50 on the regional scene worth vs a 50-50 in the UFC? Is Stephanie choking out Ravena Oliveira really any more impressive than Marina knocking out journeywoman Maristela Alves?

I don’t know. Nothing in her tape wows me, though. STEPHANIE LUCIANO BY DECISION.

SATURDAY, JULY 25 FROM THE ETIHAD ARENA IN ABU DHABI
EARLY START TIME WARNING | PRELIMS 6 AM PDT / 9 AM EDT | MAIN CARD 9 AM / 12 PM

You know William Utermohlen? The artist who very tragically and famously painted a series of progressively more confused self-portraits depicting his gradual descent into Alzheimer's and his growing inability to recognize himself, his work, and the things he loved?

I've just been thinking about that a lot lately, for some reason. Anyway, two weeks after Conor McGregor's Welterweight comeback fight that ended in hilarious disgrace and one week after Kamaru Usman got a top-ranked Middleweight fight that concluded equally pointlessly here's a card built around a de facto Light Heavyweight title eliminator featuring one guy who was the world champion one fight ago and one guy with just one ranked win and a draw in his last fight.

MAIN EVENT: AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Magomed Ankalaev (21-2-1 (1), #1) vs Bogdan Guskov (18-3-1, #9)

I’ve been staring at the blinking caret on this paragraph header for two hours because talking about this fight is like trying to describe the sound a body makes when it falls off the back of a truck into an unkept interstate thicket.

Up until about a week and a half ago, this fight was just the normal sort of bad. If you’ve read these articles you already know the story, but let’s recap it in a blurb: The UFC spent years keeping Magomed Ankalaev away from Alex Pereira because Alex was their meal ticket and Ankalaev was a dangerous #1 contender, they finally ran out of road and put them in the cage together, Ankalaev took Pereira’s title, Alex presaged his current situation by complaining about being injured, the UFC gave him an instant rematch, he mauled Ankalaev in eighty seconds, Ankalaev noted that he, too, was injured and they should have a rubber match, and the UFC/the entire world laughed at him and then Alex moved on to getting rabbit-punched by a scab in front of the White House.

Magomed was supposed to fight former title contender Khalil Rountree Jr. here. I was already crotchety about this, because Khalil is the guy they surfed to contention on the back of a victory over a near-retirement Anthony Smith in a blatant attempt to keep Ankalaev away from the belt, but Khalil was ranked relatively high and Light Heavyweight is a tire fire where Ankalaev’s only other adjacently-ranked options were a just-knocked-out Jiří Procházka or Paulo fucking Costa, so: Fuck it. Fine. I was willing to grit my teeth and admit that this was the best they could do, even if that was their own fucking fault.

But last week, Khalil Rountree Jr. got injured. This left the UFC in a pickle. Fortunately, Jan Błachowicz and Bogdan Guskov were scheduled for a fight on the UFC’s card in Serbia next week, in an attempt to get Jan out of the rankings once and for allrun back the majority draw they went to last December, but that means Jan was fresh and available. It even made perfect sense as a fight. Jan’s the #4-ranked man in the division, he’s a former world champion, and he and Ankalaev also have unfinished business--back in 2022 they fought for the then-vacant title and it ended in a controversial split draw.

The two highest-ranked available fighters, and they’re both former champions and multiple-time main event talents, and they have a built-in backstory to finish. It’s rare that the universe gives you a better replacement fight than the original would’ve been, but the gods of combat smiled on the UFC and sent them a gift.

So anyway, Jan’s fighting the unranked Navajo Stirling next week. Ank’s got Bogdan.

Here, unabridged, is Bogdan Guskov’s entire UFC career:

• Gets mauled in one round by Volkan Oezdemir

• Knocks out The Ultimate Fighter 30 (jesus christ) runner-up (jesus christ) Zac Pauga, who is cut after the fight for being 1-3

• Knocks out Ryan Spann, who is best summed up by the fact that the aforementioned retiring Anthony Smith only managed to beat three men in the last four years of his career and Ryan was two of them

• Chokes out Billy Elekana, a man who is 3-1 in the UFC and has yet to beat anyone with a winning record

• Knocks out Nikita Krylov, who had just been knocked out by Dominick Reyes barely three months prior

• Goes to a draw with Jan Błachowicz, who, despite all of the nice things I just said about him, is 43 years old and has one win in the last five and a half years and it happened because Aleksandar Rakić’s leg imploded in mid-fight

Like, fuck, man. This division! This fucking division! I really don’t like being negative to the point of histrionics about mixed martial arts, but oh my fucking god, Light Heavyweight is garbage. Light Heavyweight is so goddamn bad that Alex Pereira just fought at Heavyweight, and has reiterated his intention to never, ever come back, and he’s still ranked #3. Jamahal Hill, Johnny Walker and Aleksandar Rakić are joining him at 265. Volkan Oezdemir is out of action after getting busted for using EPO. Paulo Costa is a fight away from a title shot. Robert Whittaker, who spent the last five years getting repeatedly knocked around at Middleweight, is now a top fifteen Light Heavyweight after knocking out Nikita Krylov, who is, coincidentally, Bogdan Guskov’s best fucking win and the only thing keeping him ranked.

There are two matchups scheduled for the entire ranked roster, and this is one of them, and the other is Jan/Stirling, which means Stirling is going from beating up Bruno Lopes and fighting tooth and nail to beat the 9-11-1 (1) Ion Cuțelaba to fighting a former world champion for a berth in the top five. The company’s biggest, deepest hopes for the future of this division lay in Bogdan Guskov knocking out Ankalaev and that somehow making him a star despite their putting absolutely no effort into any of it.

And whoever wins this fight is the top contender to a champion whose injury status still isn’t clear, and the leader of a top ten that only contains one active fighter coming off of a win.

Burn the estate. Salt the Earth. Disband Light Heavyweight like they disbanded Lightweight back in 2003 and just give it a few years off to see if anything good happens or if we can all learn to live without Frank Shamrock’s division. MAGOMED ANKALAEV BY TKO.

CO-MAIN EVENT: THE WAY THE OTHER SIDE LIVES
FLYWEIGHT: Steve Erceg (14-4, #10) vs Ramazan Temirov (19-2, NR)

You think you can just mollify me by throwing a Flyweight fight at me right after all of that bullshit, Mick Maynard? Do you really think I’m that easy? Honestly, you’re probably right. Once upon a time I would’ve held a bit of loathing in my heart for this matchup thanks to the presence of Steve Erceg, but I think he’s officially off my shitlist.

Which is probably overdue. I have said it before, I will say it again: My problems with Steve Erceg had nothing to do with Steve Erceg. He is and has always been a perfectly fine fighter. His boxing is sharp and fluid, his wrestling is underrated in the annals of the division, and by all accounts he seems like an entirely inobtrusive personality. He’s a fine young man with an acceptable head of hair.

The problem is not Steve. The problem is Steve knocked out Matt Schnell once and the matchmakers lost their shit about an Australian Flyweight with punching power and refused to ever let him go. Despite being ranked #10, Steve got a shot at Alexandre Pantoja’s world title. Despite losing, he followed it up with a title eliminator against Kai Kara-France. Despite getting flattened in four minutes, his next fight was a main event against the #2-ranked Brandon Moreno, and despite having lost twice in a row, Erceg went up in the rankings.

It was an exceedingly blunt marketing push and it killed Erceg’s momentum. He went from a rising prospect to a three-time loser who’d been so effectively boxed out of the title picture that despite being featured on main cards for his last six straight fights, no one’s really talking about him as a relevant Flyweight anymore. He’s being booked and winning on broadcasts, but it’s against folks like Ode’ Osbourne and Tim Elliott--solid fighters that no one really pays heed to.

Which is what tends to happen when the UFC wants to keep one of their old projects vital. They don’t turf them, but they don’t give them room to maneuver, either. They get matchmade into stasis, so the UFC can one day cash in on them.

Steve: The day has come. After a career spent as the favored Australian, you’re fighting in Abu Dhabi against an Uzbekistani man whose name ends in -V. The matchmakers spent the last season planting and watering you, and now they have come for their harvest.

Which is good, because Ramazan Temirov kind of needs the boost. When he popped into the UFC in late 2024 he had a fair bit of hype as one of the better international Flyweight prospects the world had to offer. No losses since 2019, a whole bunch of knockout highlights from Kazakhstani organizations that you could find on Dailymotion with titles like SPIN KICK MASTER, he had everything except a win in a global league.

It didn’t come from the UFC, either. In 2023, Japan’s Rizin gave Temirov a shot at their favorite kind of matchup--the scary, unfamiliar foreigner against the canny local veteran--by putting him up against Takaki Soya. Soya had more than a decade of experience under his belt, he’d been a standout in Shooto, the actual oldest extant MMA organization in the world, and he had a reputation for being a tough out for anyone. The only man to stop him since his rookie years was a multiple-time Pancrase champion with a dozen knockouts under his belt, and it still took him three rounds.

Ramazan dusted Soya in three minutes. He never fought for Rizin again. The UFC signed him away, and in 2024 he hopped into the cage and repeated his performance by meeting the tough-as-nails CJ Vergara and becoming the only man to ever knock him out--once again, in just about three minutes. Five months later Temirov met Charles Johnson, at the time on a four-fight winning streak that included crushing future champion Joshua Van, and ended his winning streak with a decision loss. Five months, two wins, and Ramazan had all the momentum in the world on his side.

And then he failed a drug test and became a sacrificial lamb for the UFC’s need to pretend it still has a legitimate drug testing program.

It’s been a year and a half. Ramazan has served his time. The UFC wants him back on track, and they’re willing to sacrifice their Australian marketing darling to do it.

But it’s going to take a fucking scrap to get it done. Steve’s only been stopped once in his entire career, and it took Kai, one of the single hardest punchers in the history of the Flyweight division, to do it. And even Kai was gifted with long-ass arms that saw him actually outrange Erceg despite being visibly shorter than him. Ramazan is both the shorter man and fighting with an almost half-foot reach disadvantage. He’s going to have to tank Erceg’s traditionally sharp jabs to get into range enough to land one of his spinning kicks or big hooks.

I am choosing to have faith that he’ll get there. RAMAZAN TEMIROV BY TKO.

MAIN CARD: VIOLENTLY BACKPEDALING
WELTERWEIGHT: Islam Dulatov (12-1) vs Wellington Turman (18-8)

Here, we have your scheduled murder of the week. If you have a particularly good memory, you’ll recall Islam Dulatov as a fairly well-hyped Contender Series debutant last July. He hadn’t lost a fight since his very first outing back in 2019, he’d made a solid name for himself by picking up wins in organizations like BRAVE and OKTAGON, and he was benefitting greatly from possessing the best gimmick you can have as a mixed martial artist, the “What if I just destroy everyone and never lose” Hardcore Holly special. (Unfortunately, he also has the currently popular ‘what if I say a lot of antisemitic shit and also think vaccines are the devil and QAnon is great’ gimmick.) He showed up, he punched the shit out of an exceedingly digestible target in Adam Fugitt, and then he decided to fuck off for an entire year.

The UFC would like to keep the train running, because of all the people they could have matched him up with for his return, they picked Wellington Turman. Wellington is on a three-fight losing streak. He hasn’t competed since 2023, when he was choked out by Jared Gooden, who was released one fight later after repeatedly botching his weight cut and losing. Wellington is two for his last seven, which conveniently goes back seven entire-ass years, and said two victories came against Misha Cirkunov, who retired one fight later on a massive losing streak, and Sam fucking Alvey, one of the losingest men in UFC history, whom Turman only beat by split decision on account of losing multiple points for poking Alvey in the eye.

It is hard to get more blatant than this. ISLAM DULATOV BY TKO.

LIGHTWEIGHT: Magomed Zaynukov (8-0) vs Damian Rzepecki (10-0)

I’m not sure that there is a better testament to the current age of the sport than this. Magomed Zaynukov is an undefeated fighter, a UAE Warriors veteran, a Contender Series winner and yet another soldier in the endless Dagestani wrestling army. Nobody knows him for any of these things. He is not here because of any of those things. He is here because Islam Makhachev said his nickname in an interview, and because of his accent, people thought instead of “Chanco” Islam said “John Pork,” like the fucking meme, and now that’s his identity. If you search for his name you will find perfunctory results, but if you search for “John Pork MMA” you will find twice as many articles, all of which also include how much he and his team really hate the nickname.

But that’s maybe less unfortunate than being Damian Rzepecki, who is also undefeated, and also a top international prospect, and a Lightweight champion in his native Poland thanks to his tendency to punch his opponents in the liver until they stop being able to stand up and/or process toxins, and after ten straight wins he’s accomplished enough that the UFC signed him without even sending him to DWCS first. But they did it because they wanted John Pork on the card. Imagine that you have spent your entire adult life singlemindedly dedicated to mixed martial arts, and you finally get the call up to the big show, and it’s just because you’re a convenient target for a guy who’s popular because he makes people think of a virtual pig-man.

We get the sport we deserve. I kinda want an upset. DAMIAN RZEPECKI BY TKO.

HEAVYWEIGHT: Rizvan Kuniev (14-3-1 (1), #8) vs Tyrell Fortune (18-3, #9)

Okay. Lemme make sure I have this all correct. The UFC signed Rizvan Kuniev, former Eagle FC champ and PFL steroid enthusiast, and spent half a year trying to repeatedly book him into a debut fight against the #5-ranked Curtis Blaydes. When Kuniev lost, they tried to bump him allllll the way down to the entirely irrelevant Ryan Spann, and when Spann couldn’t make it, they decided to give Kuniev the #6-ranked Jailton Almeida instead. And Kuniev won! For which they immediately fired Almeida. Despite being the #6-ranked man in the world, and despite that man not even being in the UFC anymore and thus a big ol’ opening being right there, Kuniev is #8.

And despite being a top-six contender, Kuniev is now fighting Tyrell Fortune. Fortune, you may recall, went from fighting Oklahoma City’s Dennis brothers, the 22-13 Myron and the 9-7 Demoreo, and the 52 year-old 65-34 (1) Tony Lopez sandwiched between them, to getting called up to the UFC for a top ten bout against Marcin Tybura. And, hey, it’s Heavyweight, so Fortune won! He took a 29-28 and became a ranked fighter and got that sweet, sweet, minimum wage contract, and in exchange, the UFC booked him into an adjacently-ranked fight as a big underdog against a big Dagestani grappler in Abu Dhabi.

Matchmaking department: What are you doing. What are you doing with this entire division. You’ve spent years antagonizing Tom Aspinall even though he’s a star, you tried to put all your eggs in the Alex Pereira basket again and then Ciryl Gane scrambled them, you are constantly shitting all over two very good top contenders in Alexander Volkov and Sergei Pavlovich while pushing Josh Hokit to the moon, you are having the entire world fight Curtis Blaydes in an attempt to suck the marrow out of his bones, Serghei Spivac is ranked and winning so you have him fighting an unranked Vitor Petrino, Valter Walker is on a submission streak so he’s down here on the prelims against Thomas fucking Petersen, and after repeatedly trying to force Rizvan Kuniev through the square hole you finally, finally succeeded, and you’re celebrating by pushing him down the rankings for a fight with zero stakes or purpose.

In other words: You are booking Heavyweight with the exact amount of respect it deserves. Don’t change a thing, you’re doing great. RIZVAN KUNIEV BY DECISION.

WELTERWEIGHT: Abubakar Vagaev (24-4) vs Saygid Izagakhmaev (22-3)

This is probably going to rule. There’s one major MMA promotion ruling the roost in Russia, and that’s Absolute Championship Akhmat, the only company big enough to promote regular events and attract international talent. Abubakar Vagaev’s been its Welterweight champion twice, which not only puts him in the rare position of holding one of the precious few international titles left with a lot of credibility, but means he’s had the chance to fight folks like Michel Pereira and ol’ Trator Prazeres and Yasubey Enomoto and Albert Tumenov, people who were moderately to fairly successful in the big leagues. He beat all of them. This was, funnily enough, originally supposed to be an ersatz champion-vs-champion ACA fight--Vagaev, who gave up his 170-pound belt for a shot in the UFC, was going to welcome ACA Middleweight champion Magomedrasul Gasanov, himself a mega-prospect.

But Gasanov couldn’t make it, and for once, the UFC found a really solid replacement. We wrote about Saygid Izagakhmaev during his UFC debut back in November--he was the Eagle FC fighter turned ONE Championship contender who’d turned heads by flattening living-if-aging legend Shinya Aoki in under ninety seconds, and all of those heads proceeded to get stuck with horrible neck problems, as ONE proceeded to ice Saygid for two and a half goddamn years of his athletic prime before finally letting him go in 2025. He stopped over in Karate Combat for a donut, he made it to the UFC, he fought the undying enigma that is Nicolas Dalby, and Dalby managed to exhaust him and scrape away a split decision.

Hopefully, Saygid has learned to pace himself better and navigate the realities of his gas tank. Realistically? ABUBAKAR VAGAEV BY DECISION.

PRELIMS: LARGE MEN OF SHAME
HEAVYWEIGHT: Valter Walker (15-1, #13) vs Thomas Petersen (11-4, NR)

In the current mire of the large-man no man’s land, Valter Walker should be getting a place of honor. The Heavyweight landscape lacks people who can manage persistent success: Valter has four straight first-round finishes. Heavyweight struggles to find effective grapplers: Valter’s submitted everyone he’s beaten in the company. In a time where the product is glutted with meaninglessness, historically notable achievements are harder to find than ever: Before Valter there were three heel hook submissions in the entire history of the UFC’s Heavyweight division, and now Valter has four. In just under two years, he has outstripped the nearly thirty-year history of the regulated weight class. He’s funny. He’s memorable. He comes to weigh-ins wearing a necklace made of a decapitated foot. You could push this man to the moon. He is instead risking his winning streak on the Abu Dhabi prelims in a timeslot no one will be watching against Thomas Petersen, a man who cannot string together two wins or losses, just barely survived a run-in with Guilherme Pat three months ago, and is more likely, when named, to make people think you are talking about Tom Goes to the Mayor rather than mixed martial arts.

There is no order. There is no reason. Feet must be removed until no one can run any longer. VALTER WALKER BY SUBMISSION.

LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Dustin Jacoby (22-9-1) vs Muhammad Said (9-0)

Y’know what? This too, actually. This is also a thing that sucks. Dustin Jacoby is one of the 205-pound division’s best gatekeepers. He’s a very reliable knockout artist, he’s always an interesting challenge, and he has so much credibility for both that Dominick Reyes dropping him--Dustin’s first stoppage loss in the UFC after six goddamn years--singlehandedly made Dom a relevant fighter again. And Dustin’s knocked three motherfuckers out since then! Hell, Dustin dusted Vitor Petrino and now Vitor’s about to fight for a top ten berth at Heavyweight! In a division as completely hosed as Light Heavyweight you could be doing a lot with a Dustin Jacoby. Instead he’s down here fighting Muhammad Said, a UAE Warriors prospect who’s been subsisting on a diet of aging jobbers and can-crushers who rush at him with their heads completely still and then get very confused when he punches them. Said’s been waiting patiently for the next time the UFC needs a guy who knocks people out for a show in the UAE.

So congrats on getting here, I guess. If you win I’ll never forgive you. DUSTIN JACOBY BY TKO.

WELTERWEIGHT: Santiago Ponzinibbio (30-9) vs Sam Patterson (14-3-1)

This is a big part of why I complain so much about the matchmaking these days. The institution of marketing favorites getting preferential treatment is neither new nor shocking. If you went to a Boston library’s microfiche department I’m sure you could find newspapers complaining about promoters letting Gentleman Jim duck a rematch with Peter Jackson. While I would prefer a perfectly even promotional playing field, I am not so foolish as to think such a thing does, or even could, exist. But even the attempts to promote specific guys these days are so often batshit that I don’t really know what the UFC is trying to get out of them anymore. They fell in love with Sam Patterson’s tall-ass habit of gangling about, and they made a big deal out of him, and then he got smashed in his debut. It happens! They proceeded to feed him a diet of digestible opponents for two straight years, and having proven himself capable of dispatching people like Kiefer Crosbie, the UFC threw him into a main-card mid-London fight with Michael “Venom” Page, one of the trickiest, weirdest and yet most successful fighters in the sport, a man who damn near beat Ian Machado Garry. Patterson, shockingly, did not win. And now they’re trying to rehabilitate him by having him fight Santiago Ponzinibbio, who is almost solely losing these days, looking worse every time we see him and a couple months away from crossing 40, but they’re doing it buried halfway through the prelims in Abu fucking Dhabi.

Like, have a plan. Have a goddamn plan! That is all I ask of you. SAM PATTERSON BY TKO.

LIGHTWEIGHT: Ismael Bonfim (20-6) vs Axel Sola (11-1-1)

Once upon a time, the Bonfim Brothers were the future of mixed martial arts. Within just a few months, they both suffered their first UFC losses. Gabriel got knocked out by our earlier-mentioned enigma, Nicolas Dalby; Ismael was trounced and choked out by future gatekeeper Benoît Saint Denis. In the three years since, Gabriel has beaten everyone in front of him--including kind of a screwy decision over Stephen Thompson, but judges have always hated Wonderboy, so that goes with the territory--and now he’s beaten a former champion and he’s a fight away from the title. Ismael has badly botched his weight cut twice and spent 2025 getting his face broken by Nazim Sadykhov and his head dribbled off the canvas by Chris “Taco” Padilla. The trajectory is deeply unfortunate for his future, and the UFC is hedging their bets on whether said future still exists by giving Axel Sola the chance to take away the last vestiges of his hype. Axel came into the UFC with some legitimate international-prospect hype as the reigning king of France’s ARES Fighting Championship, I doubted him by saying his tendency to rush headfirst into punches while aggressively wrestling would cost him against Rhys McKee, he knocked McKee out, they promptly booked Sola against Mason Jones in London, I chose to doubt again, and this time, I was correct. Sola’s no longer undefeated, and he’s real mad about it.

He will probably get to take that rage out here. I really hope Ismael’s fixed whatever’s been dragging him down for the last three years, because if he comes in as half-assed as he’s been lately, Sola’s going to crush him. AXEL SOLA BY TKO.

LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Brendson Ribeiro (17-10) vs Magomed Tuchalov (6-0)

Into every card at least one -600 favorite slaughter must fall, and if you have ever watched mixed martial arts, you cannot be surprised that it’s some guy named Magomed. Brendson Ribeiro was supposed to be a big Contender Series punchman who would be the king of vaguely large men, but he discovered too late that his true love was not punching, but being punched, as consenting adults are wont to do. Unfortunately it also means he’s 2-5 and on a three-fight winning streak and about to go reclaim his title in Shooto Brasil. Magomed Tuchalov is the bigger, angrier, undefeatedier man who has mostly spent his career brutally destroying rookies--which is fine, because he, too, was a rookie. In this specific case, though? One of Brendson’s two UFC wins came against Caio Machado. It was a razor-close coinflip of a split decision, it was Caio’s third loss in the company, it made him a clean 0-3, and he was fired immediately after. Five regional wins later, Caio, the man who so very nearly beat Brendson, fought Magomed Tuchalov and got torched by a right hook in two minutes.

Godspeed, Brendson. May Shooto be bright. MAGOMED TUCHALOV BY TKO.

LIGHTWEIGHT: Nurullo Aliev (11-0) vs Mike Davis (12-3)

We touched on Mike Davis last week vis-a-vis the tragic injustice of Chase Hooper and Mitch Ramirez getting a big main card matchup despite having both gotten violently trounced in their last fights by people who were booked much less prominently or not booked at all. Davis crushed Ramirez! Wadded him up and threw him in the damn trash. And his reward is an underdog bout against an undefeated Middle Eastern standout in Abu Dhabi. Nurullo Aliev’s been signed to the UFC for damn near four years, but a bad leg injury meant almost half of that time was spent on the shelf. He only just came back in 2025, he beat the decidedly unsuccessful Joe Solecki and he got a comedy matchup against the genuinely inexplicable Shem Rock, and now he is here to hopefully beat someone who is actually relevant.

And I really wanna see what happens to the crowd if one of their guys loses right off the bat because Davis is actually pretty good at everything. MIKE DAVIS BY DECISION.

BANTAMWEIGHT: Abdul Hussein (15-2) vs Cody Gibson (21-12)

I try--maybe not as hard as I should--to not fall into the trap of making fun of goofy fighter names. Not only is it too easy, it’s essentially impossible to avoid falling into quasi-racist traps by just thinking names from other cultures are funny. But when I looked up Abdul Hussein to do my usual tape research, the very first fight that came up was Hussein’s first-round submission victory over the former Flyweight champion of South Africa, Gift Walker. Gift mostly stood in front of Abdul and got kicked in the leg a bunch en route to getting choked out off of a really bad takedown attempt, and it was a reminder that a) even in the sliding scale of regional skill, 125 and 135 are still divisions you have to be at least pretty athletic and dangerous to exist at, and b) I am but a human, and if you put a man named Gift Walker in front of me, I am going to chortle and feel bad about it.

Anyway Cody mostly loses and he’s probably going to lose this one too, but it’d be really funny if he didn’t and we need every Cody we can get, so CODY GIBSON BY DECISION.

SATURDAY, JULY 18 FROM THE PAYCOM CENTER IN OKLAHOMA CITY
PRELIMS 2 PM PDT / 5 PM EDT | MAIN CARD 6 PM / 9 PM

We’re not currently thriving, my friends.

The central point of the UFC’s existence is, in theory, the promotion of the best mixed martial arts fighters and the best mixed martial arts fights on the planet. You put up with all of their evil bullshit because, at the end of the day, they will give you big main events with the top fighters the sport has to offer.

Including this week, our next four UFC main events are:

• Dricus du Plessis vs Kamaru Usman for top contendership at Middleweight, where Usman is 0-1

• Magomed Ankalaev, former champion and the main who beat Alex Pereira, vs Khalil Rountree Jr., whose last three wins were Jamahal Hill, Anthony Smith and Chris Daukaus

• Uroš Medić vs Daniel Rodriguez, because they’re in Serbia and Medić is Serbian

• Mateusz Gamrot vs Quillan Salkilld in the fucking Apex

UPDATE: It got worse! Between writing this and publishing it, Khalil Rountree Jr. dropped out with an injury and next week’s main event is now Magomed Ankalaev vs Bogdan Guskov. Everything is terrible. We are in the dead of Summer and we must travel the desert before we reach the light of Islam in mid-August. Come survive with me.

MAIN EVENT: HOW CAN WE MAKE THINGS MATTER LESS
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Dricus du Plessis (23-3, #2) vs Kamaru Usman (21-4, #9 at Welterweight)

I’m so tired of writing these.

Not write-ups. Somehow, impossibly, I have not yet burned out on big, silly essays about our fake sport. I am tired of writing some variant of ‘here’s why this match is an active drag on matchmaking and represents a further movement towards nothing mattering’ three times a month. We just finished watching mixed martial arts fully and wholly debase itself by circling the wagons around Conor McGregor and celebrate his grand return to the sport after forty years spent wandering through the twin deserts of sex abuse and bigotry, and its reward for giving up its last shreds of credibility was ten seconds of an angry Irishman breaking his own leg while trying to pretend he was still in his twenties.

Things Don’t Matter right now. In three decades of watching this sport I would be hard-pressed to think of a time in mixed martial arts when things Mattered less than they presently do, and when I say that, I am including memories of Murilo Bustamante having to submit Matt Lindland twice because after the first time Lindland said “nuh uh,” and Nate Quarry randomly getting a world championship bout because he knocked out no less than Pete “Drago” Sell, and Vitor Belfort somehow being allowed to compete despite very visibly having every known steroid in the world fighting to burst out of his veins, and Michael Bisping bypassing all of his relevant contenders in favor of defending his title against a seventy-eight year-old Dan Henderson, and if you haven’t yet picked up on the pattern, it’s that Middleweight has always been the most frustrating division in the fucking world.

It’s not the worst division! That’s Light Heavyweight. But it is, perpetually, the most annoying. The aforementioned Murilo Bustamante left to go get boned out of decisions in Pride. Anderson Silva was the best mixed martial artist in the world and he would occasionally prove it by winning fights through interpretive dance. Chris Weidman went from the biggest new star in the sport to losing his belt because he crossed 30 and decided after a lifetime of using his knees for wrestling it was time to start throwing spinning wheel kicks. Bisping won the belt in a short-notice match against a man who’d beaten him before, refused a rubber match, and lost the belt to a retired Georges St-Pierre, who promptly re-retired because his colon was dying. Robert Whittaker has zero title defenses because Yoel Romero couldn’t make weight. Yoel Romero exists.

185 has always been the division that most commonly defies the concept of purpose. It asks you to care, then it spits in your eye and makes fun of your sexuality through obscure terminology that only makes sense if you understand the intricacies of Brazilian class struggle*. It tells you to get emotionally invested in contenders, then spurns them in favor of random fighters chosen by a hidden conclave of men in suits who took the auspices and decided Marvin Vettori was In this year.

_{*This happened.}

We already complained about all of this just two months ago, of course. I lamented the way Nassourdine Imavov had been passed over for a shot at then-grand poobah Khamzat Chimaev in favor of Sean Strickland, and because the arc of the present bends towards assholes, Sean is, once again, world champion. Which should be fantastic news for Dricus du Plessis! He beat Sean twice already, so, clearly, he should be the logical choice for the next shot at the belt.

But back in May, I had to break fellow co-writer Jess’s heart by letting her know about the latest matchmaking rumors.

Carl: But then, this is Middleweight, where the guy we both agree to be #3 hasn’t fought in almost a year for no apparent reason and, if rumors are true, his next bout will be Kamaru Usman. This is a division where Kamaru Usman could be 1-1 as a Middleweight and also the #2 contender to its title. Rhyme nor reason have purchase here, this is simply a Place where things Happen and we must hide in the storm cellar until they tell us who the new Anderson Silva is this time.

Jess: I was unaware of that Dricus/Kamaru matchup rumor. I would like to lay down, now.

The baffling thing here is you could have easily run du Plessis/Imavov and had an extremely natural, internationally-relevant #1 contender. And you could have done that at any point in the last year! Imavov hasn’t been booked to fight since he beat Caio Borralho back in September, DDP hasn’t been on the docket since losing the belt to Khamzat one month before that, your two former champ and your top contender have both been sitting idle for an entire season.

And that’s still better than Kamaru Usman, who is proceeding to a top contendership bout despite having one victory in the last five years, and said victory was already thirteen months ago, and it was at Welterweight.

For most of the last decade the UFC beat the marketing drum about Usman being arguably the best Welterweight of all time, having eclipsed Georges St-Pierre on the back of an eight-year unbeaten streak. It was, to be clear, a hell of a streak! In his prime Usman was a Terminator of a champion, a technically sound wrestler with an unending gas tank, a piston of a jab, and enough power in his back hand to surprise you every once in awhile by knocking Jorge Masvidal cold or breaking Colby Covington’s jaw.

Unfortunately, he had a lot of opportunities to do it, because the UFC booked his five-fight title reign to be dominated by rematches. He beat Colby twice, he beat Jorge twice, and sandwiched between them he knocked out poor Gilbert Burns, and at the apex of his success, as everyone was talking up his double-champion prospects, he fell apart. He lost his title to a last-minute Leon Edwards leg upside the head in 2022, he much more comprehensively lost the rematch that following March, he took half a year off, moved up to 185 pounds on short notice to fight Khamzat Chimaev, did better than anyone expected, still lost, and vanished for a year and a half.

Last June was everyone’s last Kamaru Usman sighting. He showed up to fight Joaquin Buckley in a matchup widely seen as the UFC attempting to force a passing of the torch from an old, falling, expensive star to a new, rising, cheap contender, and Usman proceeded to remind everyone why he reigned for so long, practically grinding Buckley into dust in the first round and running the table on him right up until the fifth. Usman walked away with his first win in half a decade, he regained his place as a relevant Welterweight contender, and he opened up all sorts of conversations about where he fit into the deeply crowded, talent-rich top ten of the division.

So he is, of course, leaving for Middleweight, where he already lost to the man who just lost the title.

That’s the funniest part of this whole thing. This is, technically, a fight between two men who’ve both already beaten the champion. Dricus famously took Strickland’s title and defended it against him with ease, but Usman less famously dominated a then-Welterweight Strickland back in 2017 to the tune of multiple judges giving him a 10-8 after he broke Sean’s face and dropped him on his ass. There’s an argument to be made that this fight makes sense, given that either man has an argument to be favored over the champion. It’s just, y’know, one of them beat him twice in very recent history and the other did it back when Charlie Rose was still on the air.

It also falls a bit flat when you remember that both men also got beat by Khamzat in equally recent history. So whoever wins, they beat the champion but lost to the guy the champion beat, and either way Nassourdine Imavov, the only top contender that hasn’t gotten a shot at the belt, is twiddling his thumbs.

But everything’s currently as silly as it can possibly be, so fuck it, whatever. Have Usman fight Dricus. Why the hell not. They’re practically the same size and Usman probably only has another couple fights in him and it’s not like Middleweight isn’t built on a foundation of lies, so as long as everything’s already stupid, why not make it stupid in another, stupider way. And y’know what? I’m gonna pick Usman, too. Is it an enlightened, strategically thought-out choice? Not even a little. Dricus is an energy gremlin and Usman was getting winded just dominating Buckley and there’s a very good chance he won’t be able to wrestle Dricus as well as he has everyone else. I think, realistically, this is Usman trying to pace Dricus behind his jab and hunt for good takedown entries and every time he tries Dricus will make him work so hard for it that by the midway point of the fight Usman’s going to be getting tired and Dricus is going to club him until he falls over.

And I’m picking Usman anyway, because a) he’s still very, very good, and more importantly, b) that’s the dumbest thing that could possibly happen, which makes it much more likely. KAMARU USMAN BY DECISION.

CO-MAIN EVENT: THE RETIREMENT PLAN
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Jared Cannonier (18-9, #11) vs Christian Leroy Duncan (14-2, #13)

You know what we need after all of that? More Middleweights who are all fighting in one big circle.

On one side of this equation you have Jared Cannonier. Big puncher. Loves crystals. His management took away the keys to his social media several years ago because he wouldn’t stop posting crazy conspiracy shit, which, honestly, way to have your finger off the pulse of the sport. Jared’s had a really rough go of it, he’s 1 for 4 in the past three years, and the sole win keeping him afloat was a vicious knockout over Gregory “Robocop” Rodrigues just a year and a half ago.

Christian Leroy Duncan was a Cage Warriors champion who was supposed to coast into title contention on an undefeated record and British boxing power, but he found things more difficult than anticipated. His ship eventually got righted and he’s now on a four-fight winning streak that saw him knock out Eryk Anders and take a decision over Roman Dolidze, but he’s still dogged by his only loss in his past seven outings, which came against Gregory “Robocop” Rodrigues just two years ago.

If you’re good at keeping a calendar in your head, you will have already surmised that those fights came back to back. Robocop beat Duncan in July of 2024, and in so doing earned his shot at Jared in February of 2025, and promptly got his head bashed in for it. There is a direct, 1:1 connection between both of these performances and what can be surmised about their respective competitors. So why are we still here?

Well, mostly, it’s because they really want Jared to go away.

Seriously, they’ve been throwing prospects they’d like to get boosts at Jared Cannonier for years. The UFC was already talking about Jared being long in the tooth and facing the twilight of his career when he got his title shot at Israel Adesanya because he was already in his late thirties, and that was four goddamn years ago. Since then, in order, he has:

• Beaten Sean Strickland, which Sean still complains about to this day

• Beaten Marvin Vettori, which was impressive, at the time

• Lost to Nassourdine Imavov in a really wonky stoppage, but he was losing anyway

• Lost to Caio Borralho in a fight that probably SHOULD have been stopped, but wasn’t

• Knocked the fuck out of Gregory Rodrigues

• Stood there in confusion while Michael “Venom” Page waved his hands at him for fifteen minutes, which constituted losing a decision

For better or worse, that’s a lot of fucking top contenders. How about Duncan? What’re his last six fights like?

• Knocked out Cláudio Ribeiro, who was cut immediately after for being 1-3

• Lost to Robocop

• Got a decision over Andrey Pulyaev, who is currently 1-3

• Knocked out Eryk Anders, whose last wins were a crippled Chris Weidman and the five-fight-losing-streak-laden Jamie Pickett

• Knocked out Marco Tulio, who is currently 2-2

• Decisioned Roman Dolidze, whose entire career is a confusing morass of looking persistently middling

In other words: Jared has been persistently fighting top competition, and Duncan has been getting gently nudged up the ladder in the hopes that by the time he gets to guys like, say, Jared Cannonier, he’ll be ready to feast on their aging bones. Even this fight, itself, isn’t dissimilar. He’s not rematching Robocop, he’s not defending his spot against Ikram Aliskerov. And it’s not like the UFC is shy about pushing it! They just gave Edmen fucking Shahbazyan an abrupt shot at the top five! If they thought he could handle it, they’d have Duncan fighting Reinier de Ridder.

But he’s facing 42 year-old, one-win-in-recent-memory Jared Cannonier, because they want Jared out of the damn way, and each time he shows up he looks just a bit creakier and just a bit more exhausted and just a bit less happy to be there. They launched Imavov off of him and they’re hoping they’ll get Duncan there too.

So I’m rooting for one last big uppercut. JARED CANNONIER BY TKO.

MAIN CARD: THE TRAVELING APEX
LIGHTWEIGHT: Chase Hooper (16-5-1) vs Mitch Ramirez (8-3)

This is just funny. Both of these men are on losing streaks--violent losing streaks. Two fights ago Chase Hooper got knocked out by Alexander Hernandez; one fight ago it was Lance Gibson Jr. kneeing him to death. For Mitch Ramirez, it was a leg kick TKO to Thiago Moisés followed by just getting flattened by Mike Davis last July.

Alexander Hernandez was thrown right back into the Apex. Mike Davis is on the early prelims in Abu Dhabi next week being served up to the undefeated Nurullo Aliev on a silver platter. Lance Gibson Jr. is not currently booked at all. Thiago Moisés got fired.

Chase Hooper is on the main card of a road show just under the co-main event as a -375 favorite against a man who’s 0-2 in the company after almost three years under contract.

As of this December we’re going to be in year 8 of Chase Hooper in the UFC. He’s not the literal teenager they were hoping to sport as their star prodigy anymore, he is a grown man who can legally rent cars. For eight god damned years they have built him with softballs like Nick Fiore and ancient, retiring Clay Guida only to tentatively put him in the cage with real competition, and every time, he’s gotten fucking thrashed. We’re not talking about close scrapes or fights that prove how competitive he can be with his fellow prospects. Every time in the last five years they’ve put Chase in there with someone who has even the faint chance of divisional relevance, he’s gotten knocked out in the first round.

But he’s a marketing favorite and they refuse to let go, so we’re going to do it all over again. CHASE HOOPER BY DECISION, and I look forward to writing that again in five months when he gets booked against the 0-3 Alex Reyes, and then, maybe, they’ll take the chance of booking him against Kyle Nelson or something and he’ll unfortunately get smashed all over again.

WOMEN’S STRAWWEIGHT: Tabatha Ricci (12-4, #8) vs Fatima Kline (9-1, #11)

Tabatha Ricci, welcome to the back half of the equation. For the last three years, Tabatha has been eating a steady diet of older, more-established fighters on a downward trajectory--Tecia Pennington, Angela Hill, Amanda Ribas--in an attempt to keep her afloat as a potential contender given her bad habit of getting beaten by actual contenders. Loopy Godinez outworked her, Xiaonan Yan outstruck her, and just three months ago the UFC begged Tabatha to rid them of persistent top contender and grappling bugbear Virna Jandiroba, and once again, Tabatha failed. Women’s Strawweight is not an enormous division, it is easy to re-entrench yourself with one or two good wins as long as the UFC cares about you, but when you are hired to carry out a hit and you fail, the Family exacts consequences.

In this case, those consequences include falling into the ‘aging, troubled veteran being changed out for a younger model’ trap that once lifted you into the top ten. These two women even share an origin story. Ricci and Kline were both successful, undefeated Strawweight prospects before the UFC called them up on short notice to fill in at a higher weight class, where they were promptly thrashed by a bigger, stronger woman. For Tabatha it was Manon Fiorot; for Fatima, it was Jasmine Jasudavicius. Kline’s return to her proper weight class has worked out much better. She pounded out Victoria Dudakova, she outright knocked out Melissa Martinez, and just one fight ago she completed the Strawweight entrance exam by beating Angela Hill. She was supposed to get her own shot at Amanda Ribas here, but Ribas couldn’t make it, and Ricci’s the veteran in need of a win now.

I don’t think she’ll find it here. Kline’s game isn’t without issues, she’s got vulnerabilities, but she’s a lot better than Ricci on the feet and she’s a lot bigger than Ricci on the ground. FATIMA KLINE BY DECISION.

FEATHERWEIGHT: Tommy McMillen (10-0) vs Alberto Montes (11-1)

Ordinarily this is where I pitch some form of fit about how the UFC marketing machine is working overtime to push their blood-obvious favorites like Tommy McMillen over the better fighters and genuine prospects and ranked women who are perpetually stuck on the undercard. Fortunately for all of us, I can’t do that this week! Because there aren’t any. Unless you have really strong feelings about Dione Barbosa or Alvin “Goozie” Hines, we’ve reached the point in the Apexification of the UFC’s product that even the road shows barely qualify as half-assed. This is a card people are supposed to pay money for. This is a card intended to fill a 16,500-seat arena.

And your anchoring fight for the main card is industry plant Tommy “Gun” McMillen, owner of one incredible victory over no less than the world’s most Italian man, Manolo “Angeleno Veneziano” Zecchini, and Alberto Montes, who’s had one fight in almost two years as a contracted UFC fighter, and it was a victory over Ricky Turcios, who has one real win in his entire UFC career. Management really likes McMillen given his propensity for violently swinging with no thought of defense or strategy, and coincidentally, he is half a foot taller and has almost as much of a reach advantage on Montes, who is the second-shortest Featherweight in the company and, equally coincidentally, is a lifelong grappler whose sole loss was a violent knockout against a wildly-swinging man.

Congrats on the red carpet, Tom. TOMMY MCMILLEN BY TKO.

PRELIMS: AN ARRAY OF CHOICES
FEATHERWEIGHT: Austin Bashi (14-1) vs Jose Delgado (11-2)

One of the issues with the current talent funnel into the UFC is how little time it gives fighters to make names for themselves. Austin Bashi is a good, solid fighter, but the company gave him a little too much hype as the latest in their neverending march of young, undefeated Contender Series prospects, and said hype centered around his being a) young and b) undefeated. Christian Rodriguez proceeded to beat the stuffing out of him in his UFC debut, and now, two whole years later and going on a truly ancient 25, Bashi has no identity. He’s just another scrappy grappler (”scrappler”) who was throwing guys with 15-35 records in the garbage to get to the company. And they know it, too, because they rehabilitated him by having him beat John Yannis, the same punching bag you saw Marcus McGhee knock around last month. Jose Delgado is, similarly, just here, which feels awfully disrespectful. He’s 3-1, he’s the only man to ever knock out Hyder Amil, he’s coming off a victory over the perennially tricky Andre Fili, and that means he’s right on par with guys who’ve only scraped together one win and need to be re-established.

Bashi just hasn’t quite done it for me yet. He’s very solid, but I need to see more from him before I can let him carry the emotional weight of my time watching Team Alpha Male in the WEC. JOSE DELGADO BY DECISION.

WELTERWEIGHT: Seokhyeon Ko (13-2) vs Jean-Paul Lebosnoyani (10-2)

This may be an overreaction on my part, but I believe whoever booked this fight should go to jail. Ordinarily I say this due to lopsided odds or a fighter who got knocked out ten minutes before the booking or some similar injustice, but none of those apply here. This fight is the nexus of even more odious crimes: Sloth and incuriosity. Seokhyeon Ko is one of South Korea’s better MMA prospects, a very tough all-around stylist who trains under former UFC contender Dong Hyun Kim and has a hell of a left hook. Jean-Paul Lebosnoyani is a promising, up-and-coming submission prospect with headkicks in his back pocket and a victory by scarf hold in the 2020s, which means I’m ethically obligated to root for him. Both of these men are good! Both of these men just beat Phil Rowe. In Seokhyeon Ko’s last fight back in November, he beat Rowe by unanimous decision. In Jean-Paul Lebosnoyani’s last fight back in February, he beat Rowe by split decision.

Every fight is, or should be, about proving something. You compare two fighters and determine who deserves to rise up in the pecking order. There are 80ish Welterweights in the UFC. You could have booked any of them. You could have called up Ty Miller. You could book Darrius Flowers. You took the only two people in the entire division who fought and beat the same guy in their last fight and you booked them against each other, knowing that means whoever wins receives no momentum from the experience. Nothing will be proven. Nothing of value will be learned. We are letting the days go by, and I am letting the water hold me down. SEOKHYEON KO BY DECISION.

LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Felipe Franco (10-2) vs Levi Rodrigues Jr. (5-0 (1))

On the topic of things that don’t matter: Oh my fucking god, this fight. Let me diagram this. Just a hair under a year ago, Felipe Franco made it to the Contender Series as an undefeated 8-0 prospect who had only fought an opponent with any wins, ever once in his life, and that was the 19-18 Nilton dos Santos. Franco met the 3-0 Freddy Vidal, a part-time fighter and full-time P.E. coach, and Vidal choked him out. However: Vidal missed weight by 4 pounds. He took the fight as a short-notice replacement with all of one week to prepare, so you would think the UFC would understand, but Dana White was unimpressed, and that’s all that matters. Instead, they told Freddy to return to the DWCS one month later and fight Levi Rodrigues Jr., another undefeated prospect. Levi knocked Freddy out in the first round, only to have his win struck down as a No Contest after he pissed hot for steroids. Vidal, who beat Felipe, jumped through the UFC’s hoops and got screwed by someone who broke the rules even worse than he did, was not signed to a contract. Levi was. Felipe, after defeating a 1-2 man in Brazil, was brought into the UFC as a short-notice competitor for undefeated Heavyweight Mario Pinto, who beat him easily but unimpressively.

Mario Pinto is not booked to fight. (LAST MINUTE PRE-PUBLISHING UPDATE: As of this morning, no longer true! Now Mario Pinto is fighting down in the rankings against Ryan Spann this September, which is even worse.) Freddy Vidal is moldering on the regional circuit. Levi has a UFC debut as a -225 favorite. Everything is as stupid as it can possibly be, all of the time, and when I tell you that Light Heavyweight is the worst weight class on the planet, I want you to realize that this is the kind of shit the UFC is looking towards for its future. This is where we’re headed. Make your fucking peace. LEVI RODRIGUES JR. BY TKO.

FLYWEIGHT: Alden Coria (12-3 (1)) vs Stewart Nicoll (8-3)

This is going to be fun, because it’s Flyweight, but make no mistake, this is a setup. Alden Coria is a four-figure favorite and he should be. Coria’s 2-0 in the UFC and one of those wins was a beautiful, violent knockout over Alessandro Costa, a deeply dangerous boxer who’s only now starting to get his flowers. Stewart Nicoll was picked up by the UFC as an attempt to add local flavor to an Australian card back in the Summer of 2024, and since then he’s 0-3 in the UFC, and the last of those three bouts just this past April was a violent, one-sided knockout loss--against Alessandro Costa.

So three months ago Stewart got his liver punched out by a man Alden knocked senseless last September. The intentions are clear. ALDEN CORIA BY TKO.

HEAVYWEIGHT: Alvin Hines (7-1) vs RJ Harris (5-0)

Hey, sports fan. Do you remember Alvin “Goozie” Hines? No? That’s probably fair! He showed up in the UFC last June, fought Jhonata Diniz, got the stuffing beat out of him, won the third round because he poked Jhonata in the eye really badly but Jhonata continuned to fight anyway because fouls aren’t real? That guy! Unlike the rest of the UFC’s budget Heavyweight brigade you didn’t hear from ol’ Goozie again because he got busted after pissing hot for multiple steroids, and unlike every other fighter on Earth who blames it on tainted supplements he said “oh yeah I totally did all of that and thought I’d pissed it all out already so you wouldn’t catch me,” for which he was thanked for his honesty, suspended for a year, and booked into a comeback against an undefeated man who is almost half a foot taller than him, almost half a decade younger than him, and appears to have a baseline awareness of how grappling works.

Sorry, Goozie. RJ HARRIS BY SUBMISSION.

WOMEN’S FLYWEIGHT: Dione Barbosa (9-4) vs Anna Melisano (6-1)

I miss Invicta, man. I miss the women of mixed martial arts having more spaces to develop. When Dione Barbosa made it to the Contender Series she was only 5-2 against a woman who was 5-1, and unsurprisingly, she’s spent the two and a half years since beating other women who were underprepared for the realities of fighting in the UFC while losing when set against anyone relevant to her division. And now she gets to welcome Anna Melisano, who has, herself, only just completed her first fight against someone with any kind of real experience under her belt. There was a time that these women could compete in Invicta or Strikeforce and build themselves up. Now I watch Anna Melisano’s tape and see a woman who has some legitimate offensive talent, but hasn’t yet had to worry about defense or proper technique to the point that I watched her, two fights ago, complete a takedown by just sort of gently shoving Lydia Warren’s shoulders until she fell over.

And I’m genuinely not sure if it’s more unfortunate that we don’t currently have that kind of developmental space for an entire gender, or that what I’m describing is, now, the UFC’s level. DIONE BARBOSA BY DECISION.

FEATHERWEIGHT: Damien Anderson (5-0) vs Ezra Elliott (7-0)

Speaking of missing the days of MMA having a proper developmental level: This fight got added to the card on Tuesday. Damien Anderson is a BJJ black belt who’s spent a lot longer grappling than fighting, his MMA career is all of two and a half years old, and he’s only fought two fights against people with more than 0 wins. Ezra Elliott’s career didn’t start until April 2024, he, too, has never fought anyone with a non-rookie record, two months ago he was beating the stuffing out of the 8-9 Ashton “No Chance” Caniglia for CINCO DE MAYO FIGHT NIGHT, which was not, in fact, held on Cinco de Mayo, as part of Ringside Unified Fighting, yet another of those companies that dares to ask questions like ‘can an undefeated prospect beat a 50/50 fighter with a mysterious preponderance of first-round stoppage losses?’

Here’s the secret: Ezra Elliott knows Sean O’Malley. He’s one of the BJJ coaches at Tim Welch’s Red Hawk Academy in Arizona. You still get opportunities by knowing people. Both of these guys are really good at grappling and I really want this to turn into the kind of fascinating and increasingly rare grappling showcase we need these days, but these guys both being relatively inexperienced and having almost no time to prepare, I feel like a tepid kickboxing match is more likely. Still gonna hope for DAMIEN ANDERSON BY DECISION, though.

SATURDAY, JULY 11 FROM THE T-MOBILE ARENA IN LAS VEGAS
EARLY PRELIMS 2 PM PDT / 5 PM EDT | PRELIMS 4 PM / 7 PM | MAIN CARD 6 PM / 9 PM

I’m not sure things have ever been more meaningless than they are this week. This is the first card the UFC has promoted under the auspices of its new Meta-powered AI bullshit rankings, and you can tell how seriously they’re taking them right off the bat, because the official card list doesn’t reflect those rankings at all. The AI says Paddy Pimblett is barely hanging onto the top ten? Fuck that, he’s #6. Mario Bautista’s #5 now? That’s too goddamn high, he’s #7.

I know that sounds silly, but really, genuinely, engage with the reality that we now exist in an era of the sport where the UFC openly advertises rankings it no longer even reflects. MMA has never been less real and there is no more appropriate way to welcome Conor McfuckingGregor back to our terrible sport.

MAIN EVENT: WHATEVER IT TAKES
WELTERWEIGHT: Conor McGregor (22-6, NR) vs Max Holloway (27-9, #4 at Lightweight)

The last time we talked about a Conor McGregor comeback was just over two years ago, when the UFC pulled a bait-and-switch by lying about Conor’s return only to abruptly switch the fight to an Alex Pereira/Jiří Procházka rematch when they could no longer cover up that Conor was nowhere near fighting shape. I cursed us into this timeline.

Normally, when a main event gets cancelled, I'll devote a little bit of space to complaining about it before moving on to analyzing the new fight we have in its place. Normally this is because we have an entirely new fight to discuss and, inevitably, I will get my chance to complain about the previously-scheduled fighter when they come back.

But I don't think I'll get that chance, because I don't think Conor McGregor is ever coming back.

Oh, how I wish I had been right.

The assumption that Conor McGregor would stay in his torpor was rooted in the idea that we still occupied a consensus reality where things matter, which was, in June of 2024, still a thing you could hold at least a little hope for. It is two years later. That hope is dead. Every barrier to Conor McGregor’s return has been shattered.

Legitimate drug testing? That’s gone. The UFC infamously severed their ties with the US Anti-Doping Agency in large part because Conor was very visibly on every goddamn steroid known to man during his time away from the sport, and they were insisting, as a drug testing agency, that he be tested for drugs before his return. The UFC does, of course, swear by the legitimacy of their new, in-house testing program, and just like their USADA days, they have a website where you can see how many times everyone’s been tested. Why, Conor’s been tested 14 times in 2026! That’s more than anyone! Sure, there are about 1/5 as many test failures as there were under USADA, and sure, the only people who seem to get caught are conveniently the ones whose loss would be maximally convenient--they’ve published five test failures this year and the biggest hit was Iasmin Lucindo--but I’m sure it’s legit and everything’s fine.

Weight classes? Never been less of an issue. The Featherweight champ was the Lightweight champ and the Lightweight champ is the Welterweight champ and the former Welterweight champion who’s never won a Middleweight fight in his life is about to fight in a 185-pound title eliminator and the former 185-pound champ who became the 205-pound champ just got a 265-pound title fight at the fuckin’ White House. This fight, here, is between Max Holloway, a Featherweight great who is 2-2 at Lightweight in the UFC, and Conor McGregor, who is 1-3 at Lightweight in the UFC, and it’s being contested at Welterweight, and it’s already widely agreed that the winner will probably get a shot at the Lightweight title anyway.

Social expectations of conduct? Last time around we were talking about Conor suckerpunching people and whipping a dolly into the window on a UFC bus, and now he’s been found civilly liable for rape by two separate juries. Once upon a time, that would’ve mattered. Now? Hell, Conor’s not even the only legally-noted attempted rapist on this card. The UFC got tired of lowering the bar over and over, so now the bar is gone. Did you try to incite anti-immigrant pogroms a couple weeks ago? Have multiple juries of your peers looked at you and decided you sexually assaulted someone? Congratulations! This era of the sport was meant specifically for you.

In the aftermath of the White House card there were a few folks that noted the joy of enjoying the sport for the sport, rather than getting bogged down in its philosophical and political muck. I got it. I didn’t agree, but I understood. You could still do that, even with the White House.

But you can’t really do that here, because the muck is the only fucking thing to talk about. I’ve seen people try to discuss the reality of this as a rematch, in the way rematches are used to gauge how two fighters have grown since their first meeting, but Conor’s victory over Max Holloway was in 2013. Forget the fighters: The entire Featherweight division was less than three fucking years old.

There is nothing you can say about Conor McGregor The Mixed Martial Artist In Twenty Twenty Six that isn’t just pulling guesses directly from your own ass. It’s been half a decade since his last fight. It’s been six and a half years since his last win. It’s been ten years since his last Lightweight victory. Barack O-fucking-bama was still in the White House the last time Conor McGregor beat a ranked fighter in their own weight class. Anyone who starts to say a goddamn thing to you about the accuracy of Conor’s counterpunches or his speed or his precision is lying to you, and themselves, and picturing the Conor McGregor from the year fucking Finding Dory came out.

Conor’s contributions to the current age of mixed martial arts are getting knocked out by Dustin Poirier, shattering his own leg in an instant rematch against Poirier and following it by laying on the floor and screaming about how he really won the fight because he knows Dustin’s wife wants to fuck him, leading Michael Chandler on for years only to constantly cancel on him and make him look like an idiot for thinking Conor ever gave a shit about fighting him, and coasting on the triune powers of inertia, unbridled bigotry, and being a complete asshole in an era built by, and for, complete assholes.

And Max? Max is just here, man. Max should’ve been a Lightweight contender after knocking out Justin Gaethje and Dustin Poirier, but the UFC bet big on Paddy Pimblett and wanted to cash in on him, and when that failed, well, hell, Ilia Topuria’s the champ so obviously Max can’t fight him given the way Topuria smashed him at 145 pounds, so far better to make Gaethje your top contender even though Holloway and Charles Oliveira both crushed him. Which worked out gangbusters for the UFC! They got everything they wanted. Justin Gaethje won the title at the White House, Max is sidetracked for Conor, everyone’s chasing the money match again, and #1 contender Arman Tsarukyan isn’t even in the goddamn conversation.

Instead of anything that mattered, Max fought Charles Oliveira for the Bad Mother Fucker Championship, and then when Oliveira took Max down and dominated him for five straight rounds, the audience got mad about it, because daring to use a grappling-based gameplan was an affront to the legitimacy of the Bad Mother Fucker Championship, a title that was used by the UFC to sell Dwayne Johnson’s PROJECT ROCK shoes.

Mateusz Gamrot is fighting down in the rankings. One match down from here, Benoît Saint Denis is being used to try to rehabilitate Paddy Pimblett. Arman is unbooked. Oliveira is unbooked.

And Max Holloway is fighting adjudicated rapist Conor McGregor at Georges St-Pierre’s weight class five years after his last fight because this is how we make our money.

There is no sport here. There is no analysis. Maybe the cocaine and the steroids have joined forces in Conor’s body and now he has superpowers. Maybe he’s so hopped up on the power of getting away with sex abuse that he has the crushing force of a Rumble Johnson. Maybe Max kicks him in the calf once and Conor stops the fight so he can get on his phone and tweet about how immigrants made his leg hurt. Everyone involved in this should feel bad and I hope to god this is MAX HOLLOWAY BY AN INCREDIBLY FUNNY AND GRATIFYING KNOCKOUT so we can just move the fuck on from this once and for-fucking-all because my soul cannot take the Conor McGregor Title Tour we will be stuck with if he somehow wins.

CO-MAIN EVENT: WHATEVER IT TAKES
LIGHTWEIGHT: Benoît Saint Denis (17-3 (1), #5) vs Paddy Pimblett (23-4, #6)

I just don’t care, and that’s devastating, because this is the smartest, best-matched fight they could’ve made for these two men.

They’re both fine. They’re fine! Benoît’s a solid throwback of a savage wrestleboxer who doesn’t care half as much about his health as he really should if he wants to still be able to read by the time he’s 40, Paddy’s a big, aggressive grappling machine who is incredibly difficult to knock out, all of these things are true, none of them matter. We have trod repeatedly on the posies of praise when it comes to both prospects. Their talents have never been the issue, the matchmaking has.

But the UFC keeps trying with BSD. Hot on the heels of his knockout victory over Matt Frevola back in 2023 they decided to strap the jetpack to his aggressively French back and throw him in there with Dustin Poirier in a title eliminator, and he got stomped out in two rounds. They tried to rehabilitate him with a main event in France against Renato Moicano, and Moicano, who has self-described his fighting talents as “I fucking suck,” beat Benoît even worse than Poirier had. He went from having a ton of momentum to looking like a complete afterthought.

So they gave him Kyle Prepolec, a Canadian regional who’d already flunked out of the UFC once. Fine: Tune-up fight, I get it. And they followed that up with Mauricio Ruffy, a legitimate threat and now-top-ten competitor, and BSD handed him his only UFC loss, and it was great! Sending in Beneil Dariush afterward was kind of a lateral move, but at the time, it seemed justifiable--Beneil had just beaten Moicano, so by the transitive property, it was a good match!--and then Beneil showed up overweight and preemptively exhausted and looking like the clock had run out on his career. And then, to emphasize the point, the UFC booked Benoît against Dan Hooker, who still had a visibly damaged face from the hellacious beating Arman Tsarukyan had laid on him two months prior.

So BSD’s back in the top five, and all it took was one and a half real wins in a four-fight span. Paddy? You can’t even give him that.

Paddy Pimblett’s journey to the top was managed the way an ornithologist manages a robin’s egg. Paddy Pimblett’s UFC career has been so gently booked that even Paddy Pimblett himself repeatedly mocked it. Paddy Pimblett beat three guys with 50/50 or worse records, extremely clearly lost a fight to Jared Gordon only to inexplicably win a decision anyway, got matched up with Tony Ferguson at the ass end of the longest losing streak in UFC history, graduated from that to King Green, who was on a winning streak of 1 and it was over Jim fucking Miller, and finally faced Michael Chandler, who, himself, was 1 for his last 5 (now 7!) and that one win was, of course, also Tony Ferguson.

They gave him a title shot for that. Paddy Pimblett beat Michael Chandler, who hadn’t won a fight in three years, and they put him in there with Justin Gaethje for the interim Lightweight championship of the world. Of this world.

People will tell you Paddy vs Gaethje was close, and it was, in the sense that if I am hit by a truck and do not die, I can say that I almost defeated it. Justin beat seven shades of hell out of Paddy, whose best assets in the fight were a) his chin, b) his willingness to repeatedly knee Justin in the dick, and c) Justin’s refusal to stop ducking into the same strike over and over. Paddy hit him! A bunch! It did not matter. Justin practically killed him in the second round but somehow not a single judge scored a 10-8, and somewhere, Jared Gordon’s blood boiled in his bed.

So the UFC astroturfed Paddy to a title shot and it failed. It happens! No shame in it, except for, y’know, how ashamed all of the matchmakers should be for doing it in the first place. What do you do with him now? Do you make him fight down in the rankings? Do you test him against the Rafael Fizievs or Grant Dawsons of the world?

Of course not! You get that fucker back in the top five as fast as fucking possible, and you do it on the Conor McGregor comeback card so we can keep rubbing that fandom off on him like it’s a fucking disease.

I dunno, man. Like I said, it’s a smart matchup. Either BSD beats Paddy and the UFC hypes it as his big signature win or Paddy beats someone who isn’t old and broken down and this is cited as proof that he’s ready for another title shot so we can continue to ignore Arman Tsarukyan forever. On a skill by skill basis it’s practically a mirror match. Both men eschew defense in favor of their own toughness, both men would really like to take you down because their top game is where their most effective offense comes from, both men would really, really prefer it if you not put them on their backs because that’s just unfair.

And I very clearly want Benoît to win, which makes me second-guess all of the reasons I think he could. Paddy’s really, really fucking tough, and Benoît is good at a number of things, but persistent offense and self-pacing have never been one of them. I can easily see him blowing his gas tank trying to get Paddy out of there early and getting Pimbletted in the back half of the fight. Hell, I can see Paddy using his clinch game to drag BSD down and simply deny him the chance to be the aggressor.

But the heart wants what it wants. BENOÎT SAINT DENIS BY TKO.

MAIN CARD: WHATEVER IT TAKES
BANTAMWEIGHT: Cory Sandhagen (18-6, #4) vs Mario Bautista (17-3, #7)

Oh, Cory. Your day will never come. In eight and a half years with the UFC, Cory Sandhagen has only ever lost fights against world champions or title contenders--and he arguably beat T.J. Dillashaw!--but as much as I will always root for him, when you lose all of the big ones, it becomes progressively harder to get mad that you aren’t getting more of them. Cory was supposed to win a title eliminator with ol’ Dilly, and he probably should have, but he didn’t. Cory got his interim title shot against Petr Yan, and he tried, but he couldn’t get it done. Two summers ago they sacrificed Cory to Umar Nurmagomedov, and after Cory shredded Deveison Figueiredo last year they finally gave him a shot at the title and Merab Dvalishvili, and unfortunately, Merab did what Merab does and drowned him. Does Cory deserve the shot at Sean O’Malley he’s been calling for? Absolutely. Is there any universe in which they give it to him instead of Song Yadong and Aiemann Zahabi, whom they’re more confident Sean can beat? Absolutely not.

No, what Cory gets is prospect rejection rematch duty. Mario Bautista is one of the best Bantamweights in the world, and if they could keep him carefully separate from the title picture, they’d be much, much happier. They gave him a shot! They tried to dispose of him by having Mario welcome Patchy Mix to the UFC last year, and then it turned out Patchy had dissolved into a horrifying skeletal approximation of his former self, so they pivoted the other way and gave Mario a shot at Umar with top contendership implications. But Mario failed the Umar test, and just like that, it was back to trying to get Mario killed, this time at the hands of Vinicius Oliveira. Unfortunately for the Lok Dog, the fight reinforced that there are, in fact, levels to this shit, as Mario turned him into a pretzel and choked him out with relative ease. He is, still, one of the best in the world. But he’s a grappler who usually goes to decisions, and by god, that’s just not acceptable.

This match is incredibly fucking cool. They already fought back in 2019, Cory armbarred Mario in one round, and since then Mario’s gotten a lot better at fighting to his strengths and Cory has gotten a lot better at not getting booked into the fights he deserves. Cory and Mario are both the caliber of fighter that could be king, were it not for the tip-top of the mountain just out of their reach, and there’s a very good chance whoever loses this fight is condemned to never sniff a title shot again. I love Mario’s grappling, I love his creativity; I am still going with CORY SANDHAGEN BY DECISION because I think he’s got a few more tools in his bag.

FLYWEIGHT: Brandon Royval (17-9, #4) vs Lone’er Kavanagh (10-1, #6)

It’s open season on Brandons again. All Brandons must proceed to the back of the boat and depart for their Brandon-shaped life rafts. After winning the Battle of the Brandons and wresting the title of The Brandonest from Brandon (the lesser) Moreno, and following it by derailing the then-undefeated Tatsuro Taira, Brandon Royval was supposed to get a title eliminator with Manel Kape last year. But Royval got injured, and then Kape got injured, and the UFC had Royval fight Joshua Van on barely any notice, and the rest is history. After his loss, Royval finally got that matchup with Manel, and unfortunately for him it ended with Manel punching him stupid in one round. Now Brandon is well and truly out of the title picture, and that means it falls to him to give prospects the jump they need.

Lone’er Kavanagh was supposed to fight Bruno Silva in a barely-ranked bout this past March. Instead, after the aforementioned Moreno’s main event with Asu Almabayev fell through, the UFC decided to send Kavanagh in. Was he coming off a knockout loss to Charles Johnson, who is only barely clinging to the edge of the top fifteen? Yes. Did he deserve a shot at the top five? Nope! Did it matter? Not even slightly. It was competitive but clear, Kavanagh outstruck Moreno and took his spot in the title picture, and now that the UFC has managed to get their Irish-English-Chinese marketing idol into the conversation by feeding him a Brandon, their ravenous appetite must be sated. All Brandons must fall.

More than any particular analysis about Kavanagh’s striking style vs Royval’s clubbing aggression, I just want something nice to happen for Brandon the Greater. The sport was not kind to him and I would like him to get one back. BRANDON ROYVAL BY TKO.

LIGHTWEIGHT: King Green (35-17-1 (1)) vs Terrance McKinney (18-8)

At this point I’m convinced the UFC got what they wanted by jobbing King Green out to Paddy and Mauricio Ruffy and now he’s part of the same non-canonical class of fighter Shara Magomedov and Michel Pereira exhibited the other week. In his last three fights, in order, King Green has fought and defeated:

• Lance Gibson Jr., a Bellator veteran who’d been fighting 22-52 guys named Charon Spain for Muckleshoot Fight Night before his abrupt callup to the UFC

• Daniel Zellhuber, a former UFC marketing darling now losing fights to circa 2025 Michael Johnson

• Jeremy fucking Stephens, who is, inexplicably, still fucking here

This is why sentences like “this fighter is on a three-fight winning streak!” are becoming less and less meaningful. If your winning streak incorporates The Muckleshoot King and a man whose last UFC win was damn near a decade ago, did it really happen?

We’re not going to find out here, because Terrance McKinney exists only for two and a half minutes at a time. For those one hundred and fifty seconds, he is a stone-cold killer with insane power and the willingness to sling headkicks and flying knees and punches that come all the way from his ass, and if he can strangle you on the way, by god, he will. After that? He disappears into dust and dreams. In thirteen UFC appearances, McKinney has never won a fight that lasted beyond two and a half minutes. Everyone who drags him into the deep waters of half the length of Next’s “Too Close,” 1998’s hottest dance song about being embarrassed you have a boner, will, statistically, defeat him.

King, once upon a time, you were a defensive mastermind who could run circles around damn near any Lightweight in the world. Lately, you have been bouncing off the cage and getting punched in the head. I am requesting that you fight like the guy who dodges punches tonight. KING GREEN BY TKO.

PRELIMS: WHATEVER IT TAKES
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Nikita Krylov (31-11, #12) vs Robert Whittaker (26-9, NR)

I did this. This is my fault. I’m so sorry, everyone. I have spent years talking about how giving up your harsh, unpleasant weight cut and moving up to a higher class is the sport’s best basis for success, but I never thought to stop and disclaim “Not you, Robert Whittaker,” and now we are all doomed to a harvest of depression. You already did this, Rob! You were a Welterweight and it sucked shit and you hated it and then you became a Middleweight and it went good up until you started dying a lot! Some of it is the division getting better, sure, but some of it is you decided to focus your fighting style around darting, lancing attacks and then you turned 30 and you slowed down at the same time people figured out that they can just hit you! You were already not a big Middleweight, you are about to be tied as the second-shortest Light Heavyweight in the company and I am so, so very afraid you are about to get lit the fuck up by Nikita Krylov as he punches you from half a foot away.

And yet: You beat the stuffing out of Paulo Costa and now he’s the #4 Light Heavyweight on the planet and he did it by beating the only man in the division who’s smaller than you. So fuck it, I guess, you do what you gotta do. Please don’t make me as sad as I think you’re about to. ROBERT WHITTAKER BY DECISION.

HEAVYWEIGHT: Gable Steveson (3-0) vs Elisha Ellison (5-2)

When you book a fight with a -3000 favorite someone should come to your office and throw you in jail. Speaking of which: Hi, Gable. I knew we were going to get here sooner or later, but christ, I was really hoping for later. For those who don’t know, Gable Steveson is a) an Olympic gold medalist, b) one of the best amateur wrestlers of all time, c) an (alleged) attempted rapist who got away with it in part thanks to his professed inability to perform and in part to a now-closed loophole whereby women in Minnesota couldn’t be considered unable to consent to sex if they’d willingly gotten drunk, and d) a failed professional wrestler who flunked out of the WWE’s developmental program after a combination of his lack of charisma and reputation as a sex criminal led to the audiences completely rejecting him. Fortunately for us, mixed martial arts has no standards.

I wish Gable Steveson were not here. I am sad it has come to this. He is probably still the best Heavyweight prospect on the planet. I wish both things could be mutually exclusive but I am afraid we are going to be stuck with him for some time. Elisha, you have the opportunity to do the funniest shit in the entire world. GABLE STEVENSON BY TKO.

BANTAMWEIGHT: Cody Garbrandt (15-7) vs Adrian Yañez (17-6-1)

I kinda thought we were done with this. Both of these guys, honestly. Adrian, you got a lot of good will for knocking Tony Kelley the fuck out of not just the UFC but mixed martial arts altogether, but for one, we immediately replaced him with much worse people, and for two, it’s been pretty downhill since then. You are 1 for your last 5, and the guy you beat was Vinicius Salvador, a Flyweight so unsuccessful he got kicked up to Bantamweight for screwing up his weight cut AND losing, and in the middle of that you’re going to draws with Ricky Simón, and it’s just a bad scene, man. But Cody? Cody, my guy, what are we doing here? You were supposed to leave! You were talking about your contract being done, like, two goddamn years ago, and now it’s 2026 and you are coming off a fight with Xiao Long where you were the beneficiary of a two-point deduction and people still think you winning the decision was a fucking robbery!

Like, it’s okay. You can stop. It’s a big world out there. Go learn about leatherworking. ADRIAN YAÑEZ BY TKO.

FEATHERWEIGHT: Kai Kamaka III (18-7-1) vs Luke Riley (13-0)

In another of those somehow-this-is-an-even-matching-of-careers moments, Kai Kamaka III, who got cut from the UFC on a 1-2-1 run back in 2021 after only managing to beat--hey, Tony Kelley! How wonderful it is to get a chance to remind you that Tony Kelley sucked shit twice in one writeup--was invited back to the company on less than a week’s notice this past April. Not because of an injury, or a need for a replacement, but simply because the UFC looked at Renato Moicano vs Chris Duncan and said “maybe if we add one more fight to the prelims no one will notice that we tried to convince them Renato Moicano vs Chris Duncan was a legitimate main event.” Luke Riley, meanwhile, is an undefeated contender from Cage Warriors who’s already 2-0 in the UFC after knocking out Bogdan Grad, which leaves him perfectly positioned to fight the guy who was losing decisions to Diego Brandão less than a year ago but made it to the UFC even though they turned Brandão down for the crime of being 39.

LUKE RILEY BY DECISION.

EARLY PRELIMS: WHATEVER IT TAKES
WOMEN’S FLYWEIGHT: Tracy Cortez (12-3, #8) vs Wang Cong (9-1, #12)

Welcome to the war of women the UFC wishes were more successful. They fuckin’ love them some Tracy Cortez. Is it her grappling? Is it her lack of finishes? Is it her incredibly distressing habit of not taking off her fake eyelashes before she gets in the cage? Either way, Rose Namajunas and Erin Blanchfield, both potential contenders, had fights with Maycee Barber fall through and saw Maycee replaced with Tracy, and they both beat her, and she is still here, getting fights on numbered events. Wang Cong was supposed to be the UFC’s 125-pound Zhang Weili, the new female face of their Chinese invasion, and then they put her in a big splashy fight in Macau and she got run through by Gabi Fernandes and everything’s been kind of blurry since then. She beat Bruna Brasil, who has a losing record, and she beat Ariane da Silva, who has a losing record and got released immediately afterward, but then she beat Eduarda Moura, who has a winning record! By one fight. Also Cong missed weight. Manon Fiorot hasn’t fought since October, Valentina Shevchenko hasn’t fought since November, Erin Blanchfield is fighting down in the rankings and there are, as of now, exactly two matches booked for absolutely anyone in the entire top fifteen at Women’s Flyweight.

But Cong and Cortez are one of them, so nothing else matters. TRACY CORTEZ BY DECISION.

MIDDLEWEIGHT: Damian Pinas (9-1) vs César Almeida (7-2)

This fight exists because people need to watch a motherfucker get punched in the head. Motherfuckers getting punched in the head is the only reason César Almeida has a job. They signed him as a 4-0 fighter because he used to do kickboxing and they were still so high on Alex Pereira’s success that signing a guy with four fights who was already in his late thirties seemed like a wise use of time and money, because hey: It worked once. Two years after his UFC debut, Alex Pereira was a two-division champion! Two years after his UFC debut, César Almeida is 3-2 and hasn’t beaten anyone with a winning record. Damian Pinas just got here. They signed him off the Contender Series because he knocks out goddamn near everyone he fights, and they booked his UFC debut against a guy who got knocked out on the Contender Series back in 2024, and, shock of shocks, Pinas knocked him out. He is large, he is scary, he was fighting 4-5 guys just a couple fights ago, and he will continue to terrify anyone until it turns out he doesn’t know what to do if someone moves laterally.

Until then, DAMIAN PINAS BY TKO.

BANTAMWEIGHT: Farid Basharat (15-0, #15) vs John Garza (6-1, NR)

This went from my favorite fight on this entire card to the fight I’m angriest at for reasons unrelated to sex criminals. Farid Basharat is one of the Bantamweight division’s best prospects: An undefeated all-arounder who’s defensively sound and smart enough in his approach to make it to the rankings despite only having one finish in the company. He was supposed to meet red-hot prospect Ethyn Ewing, in what would have been a genuinely fascinating contest between one of the division’s best defensive strategists and one of its best offensive boxers. But Ewing dropped out, and rather than just rebook the fight later, or find someone for Basharat who’s already in the company, they’re bringing in 23 year-old John Garza, a rookie with barely two years in the sport who’s been fighting guys down in Fury FC who don’t even stand out at the regional level. He hits hard, he hits fast, and he hits like someone who’s barely had to worry about people testing his defense.

So he’s fighting for a berth in the top fifteen. God bless. FARID BASHARAT BY DECISION.

MIDDLEWEIGHT: Ryan Gandra (9-1) vs Zach Reese (10-3 (1))

The pattern feeds on itself to survive. Zach Reese was hired because he openly advertised his desire to ignore things like ‘defense’ and ‘strategy’ in favor of simply being a wild-eyed savage who goes for finishes all of the time. Two and a half years later he’s coming off a loss because he can’t beat Michel Pereira and he has yet to record a win over anyone with a successful UFC record. Ryan Gandra just got here four months ago, and he was fighting nobodies one bout before his shot at the Contender Series, and they hired him because he, too, knocks out all of the warm bodies tossed in front of him, and to make sure he succeeded, they started him off against José Medina, who was on a five-fight losing streak that included--shock of shocks--Zach Reese.

Now the models must fight to determine which interchangeable punch-rookie matters the most. None of this means anything. Neither of these guys seems particularly good. ZACH REESE BY SUBMISSION.

FLYWEIGHT: Cody Durden (18-10-1) vs Alessandro Costa (16-5)

This is Cody Durden’s third fight in four months. That’s very silly. That’s a silly thing to do. But it got Cody his first win in two goddamn years and that win was over Jafel Filho, the fighter I have arguably the unhealthiest relationship with, so honestly, who’s to say if it’s actually bad or if I’m just bitter? It worked out gangbusters last time, and all it took was a last-minute replacement fight against an underprepared grappler with bad stand-up fighting at an unfamiliar weight class. Surely, that will translate extremely well to a return to Flyweight against a strong wrestleboxer with real knockout power!

ALEESANDRO COSTA BY TKO.

Welcome to July. You have survived more than half of this year and you should be proud of yourself. It's a weird month, with the entire world taking the first week of July off and four separate events all being crammed into the 17th/18th, and also Conor's back so that sucks.

THIS MONTH’S PUNCHSPORTS EVENTS

• UFC 329: McGregor vs Holloway 2, July 11

• UFC Fight Night: du Plessis vs Usman, July 18

• UFC Fight Night: Ankalaev vs Rountree Jr., July 25

• PFL Austin: Eblen vs Kasanganay 2, July 18

• PFL New York: Nurmagomedov vs Colgan, July 31

• ONE Friday Fights 161: Pacio vs Malachiev, July 10

• ONE Fight Night 45: Lessei vs Rabah, July 17

• Rizin Landmark 15: Ota vs Tilenov, July 18

A NOTE FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF BOOKKEEPING

As of this month, I am removing Invicta from the championship rolls. Which sucks! I love Invicta and the industry has never, ever needed a dedicated home for women’s MMA like it does right now. But at this point it’s been 14+ months since the last Invicta event with no news in sight. We’re half a year overdue for the big relaunch they promised, and I certainly hope they return, but even if they do, their only two champions were Jennifer Maia and Elisandra Ferreira and both are now fighting for other promotions, with Maia kickboxing in K-1 and Ferreira having just made a successful 115-pound debut for the PFL. Get better soon, Invicta. We miss you.

IS THERE ANY NEWS

Dustin Poirier got arrested for being drunk and disorderly in an airport and threatening to beat up cops and yelling the n-word in reference to kicking their asses. He’s since posted apologies lamenting how he’s struggled with his drinking since retirement, and no one actually got hurt, so the biggest lasting impact is Sean Strickland having an excuse to say the n-word on social media a bunch now it’s okay. I hope Dustin gets help.

Remember that whole thing over the last year where the Global Fight League announced a completely preposterous event series with a massively expensive roster of aging veterans, AI-generated hype videos and no explanation for how on Earth they were going to make money, and then it folded before it could even begin and no one on Earth was shocked?

We’re gonna do it all over again! The GFL has announced it’s back, for totally real this time, and they’ll be holding it from the venue at Sam’s Town Live, which has just barely one thousand seats, on October 17. We mean it! We’re really gonna do it! Also here’s a link to our cryptocurrency.

Alex Pereira is really, really mad about Herb Dean. He wants you to put in the papers that he’s mad. He celebrates it. It’s hard to avoid a little bit of schadenfreude, here, as Pereira was happy to scab for Tom Aspinall and was decidedly unsympathetic towards his woes, but now that he, himself, has felt the sting of questionably legal blows en route to his TKO loss to Ciryl Gane, he has decided Herb Dean is a stain on the sport and must be fired immediately. He started a petition! Which was especially funny a couple weeks later when Herb turned in an incredibly bad performance during Shara Magomedov vs Michel Pereira, allowing Shara to get away with pulling Pereira’s hair and poking his eye without ever taking a point, despite a stern warning.

Multiple things can be true at once. It is true that Herb Dean makes a lot of mistakes. It is true that we are desperately overdue for a conversation about the reffing, judging and administration of the rules of mixed martial arts. It is also true that Alex going from a fuck-you-got-mine marketing face-of-the-UFC favorite to Dom Cruz levels of referee grudge this fast is really, really funny.

The UFC launched their long-promised, Meta-powered LLM-driven rankings system, and the net result was several days of the website having no idea who the champions were and changing the identity of beltholders every few times you reloaded the page.

But they fixed it! It’s perfect now! Except it’s so weighted towards recency bias that Kevin Borjas is a top ten Flyweight despite being 2 for 6, and Marcus McGhee is #9 at Bantamweight because he beat up John Yannis but Aiemann Zahabi is only #12 because he got knocked out by Sean O’Malley, and Pat Sabatini is now the world’s #7 Featherweight, and Mike Malott is ranked above Yaroslav Amosov at Welterweight despite Malott getting crushed by a man Amosov choked out in seconds, and Joe Pyfer is the world’s #5 Middleweight, and we could keep going but I’m already weeping blood.

Rankings are terrible. And I should know, because we made our own! It takes real work to make something worse than what the rankings already are. But by god, they managed.

WHAT HAPPENED IN JUNE

We kicked off the month in the Apex with UFC Fight Night: Muhammad vs Bonfim on June 6. Ketlen Souza knocked out Ariane Carnelossi, Jeisla Chaves won a 'why is this in the UFC' split decision over Yuneisy Duben, we had a very rare three straight submissions as Joanderson Brito choked Jordan Leavitt, Chelsea Chandler armbarred Priscila Cachoeira, and Édgar Cháirez got the rear naked choke on Bruno Silva all in one round apiece, Marcus McGhee took a wide decision over John Yannis, and Alessandro Costa knocked out Matt Schnell in two and a half minutes. On the main card, Iwo Baraniewski leg kicked Junior Tafa to death in a minute and a half, Bryce Mitchell choked out Santiago Luna, Tom Nolan earned his way into the rankings by beating Farès Ziam, Brendan Allen won a really obvious decision against Edmen Shahbazyan that Edmen reacted to with shock anyway, and in the main event, Gabriel Bonfim dominated Belal Muhammad, whose career is just making me sad now.

Rizin Landmark 14 came later that night. After Rizin's attempts to make the Landmark cards bigger, flashier affairs of late, this was something closer to their baseline, with kickboxing and rookie fights and guys with 0-4 records that are somehow still here. But Yusuke Yachi beat fellow aging veteran Isao Kobayashi, and good ol' Blackpanther Beynoah damn near decapitated Bilal Kai Haga, and Tony Laramie scored the upset by taking a decision over Yuki Motoya, and in the main event, Shinryu Takahashi finally got his revenge on Hiromasa Ougikubo after their first fight in 2024, this time taking home a unanimous decision and Ougikubo's Flyweight championship.

On the 13th we had PFL Africa 2, and I'll be honest, I could tell you things like "Patrick Ocheme knocked out Ayinda Octave" or "Ignacio Campos choked out Wasi Adeshina," and I'm sure we'll touch base more on the Africa tournaments later this year when they hold their finals, but what I really care about is Invicta Atomweight champ Elisandra Ferreira moving up to Strawweight, debuting in the PFL, and armbarring Juliet Ukah, a former Featherweight. Good fuckin' job, Lili.

The next day on the 14th, the UFC went to the White House.

Six days later, we came back to the Apex for UFC Fight Night: Kape vs Horiguchi. Was it bad? Not really! Was it depressing? Man, yeah, kinda. Shane Collins beat Otari Tanzilovi in a fight that didn't make either of them look all that great, Luana Santos unseated Karol Rosa with a similar performance, Levan Chokheli destroyed Leon Shahbazyan in twenty-three seconds, Gastón Bolaños pulled a decision over Michael Aswell Jr., Mitch Raposo just barely scraped a split over Allan Nascimento, Bia Mesquita looked pretty lousy and almost got knocked out by Melissa Mullins but Mullins inexplicably followed the world-class grappler to the ground and got armbarred for her troubels, and Kevin Borjas missed the Flyweight limit and proceeded to beat hyped prospect André Lima by decision anyway. On the main card, Vinicius Oliveira knocked out Andre Fili in two rounds, Murtazali Magomedov hit the Scottish Twister on Melsik Baghdasaryan, Christian Rodriguez choked out Hyder Amil, Navajo Stirling overcame an early scare to stop an exhausted Ion Cuțelaba, and in your ultimately sad main event, Kyoji Horiguchi pitched a near-perfect game against Manel Kape for two and a half rounds, looked amazing, reminded everyone why he's one of the best fighters in the world, and then promptly got socked in the chin by Kape and fell over.

The 26th brought us ONE Fight Night 44: Jarvis vs Rungrawee 2 and I dunno, man. I dunno. Every couple months they get rid of more MMA and I wonder when it'll just be over. Paul Elliott knocked out Regan Upshaw in seconds with a jumping Heavyweight kick and that was pretty neat, I guess. Karen Ghazaryan knocked out Hisashi Ezaki in a round. Lucas Gabriel won an upset split decision over former champ Ok Rae Yoon. George Jarvis knocked out Rungrawee Sitsongpeenong in the Muay Thai main event and some people liked it, I'm pretty sure.

And on the 27th the UFC returned to Baku for UFC Fight Night: FIziev vs Torres, a night where it was awful, awful good to be a UFC fighter whose name ends in a V. The prelims included Farman Hasanov beating Eric Nolan, Abdul-Rakhman Yakhyayev dropping Julius Walker in eight seconds, Nursulton Ruziboev choking out Andrey Pulyaev, Kaan Ofli looking like a different fighter entirely in destroying Javier Reyes in one round, Daniil Donchenko taking out Theodor Berggren and Jean Matsumoto outlasting Bekzat Almakhan to a decision, but the prelim people will remember most was Tahir Abdullayev vs Jefferson Nascimento, a truly baffling fight in which Abdullayev repeatedly complained to the referee that Nascimento was moving around too much, somehow succeeded in getting the ref to admonish Nascimento for not engaging even though he was the only one landing strikes, god away with several cage grabs and a groin shot, may have actually bitten Nascimento in mid-fight, and wound up getting a TKO ruling so early even the commentary team was shocked by it. On your main card, Abus Magomedov choked out Michał Oleksiejczuk, Ikram Aliskerov got a decision over Brunno Ferreira, Asu Almabayev hit the goddamn Suloev stretch on Charles Johnson, Matheus Camilo flattened Nazim Sadykhov in ninety seconds, Shara Magomedov won a pretty bad fight with Michel Pereira before calling for a title shot, and in the main event, Rafael Fiziev turned back the clock and knocked out Manuel Torres.

The month closed later that night with PFL San Diego: McKee vs Isbulaev. The prelims were an all-finishes affair, with Cobey Fehr, Savarjon Khamidov, Khasan Magomedsheripov and Jena Bishop all scoring submission victory, the latter over former UFC contender Ariane da Silva, and Shannon Clark scored the only knockout of the prelims against Ilara Joanne. Up top, Rob Wilkinson won a moustache fight with Abraham Bably, knocking him out in the second, Alexander Shabliy took a dominant decision against Alfie Davis, Liz Carmouche guillotined Viviane Araújo in two rounds before calling for the PFL to make a Women's Bantamweight division, and in the main event, a game but outmatched Salamat Isbulaev got dominated by A.J. McKee.

WHAT'S COMING IN JULY

ONE is up first this month with ONE Friday Fights 161: Pacio vs Malachiev on July 10, and as is the standard with ONE there are only two MMA fights announced and they're Eduard Folayang vs Shozo Isojima and the main event, Joshua Pacio defending the ONE Strawweight MMA title against Mansur Malachiev. As is the NEW standard for ONE, I'm typing this on June 28th, this event is less than two weeks away, and those are the only two fights announced. I want ONE to just take a break and get their shit together, man.

The next day, it's UFC 329: McGregor vs Holloway 2, because everything sure does suck. Ryan Gandra vs Zach Reese in a "why are we still here" matchup. Farid Basharat vs Ethyn Ewing in a "why is this still on the early prelims" matchup. Gable Steveson vs Elisha Ellison in a "why are you not in prison" matchup. Plus Tracy Cortez vs Wang Cong, Cody Garbrandt vs Adrian Yañez, Robert Whittaker moving up to 205 pounds against Nikita Krylov, and a main card of King Green vs Terrance McKinney, Brandon Royval vs Lone'er Kavanagh, Cory Sandhagen vs Mario Bautista, Benoît Saint Denis vs Paddy Pimblett, and, in the main event, Conor McGregor is back, and he's getting a fight against #4-ranked Lightweight Max Holloway except it's being contested at Welterweight because nothing matters, especially not being found legally liable for sexual assault.

Our very long weekend begins on July 17 with ONE Fight Night 45: Lessei vs Rabah, which has five MMA fights on it: Ayaka Miura vs Victoria Souza and Jihin Radzuan vs Anastasia Nikolakakos at the again-vacant Atomweight division, Sanzhar Zakirov vs Ruslan Satiev and Lito Adiwang vs Joshua Perreira at Flyweight, and Bokang Masunyane vs Lee Seung Cheol at Strawweight. Your actual main event is a Muay Thai match between Luke Lessei and Mohamed Younes Rabah.

The 18th kicks off with PFL Austin: Eblen vs Kasanganay 2. As of now, only six fights are announced: Andrea Vázquez vs Aleksandra Savicheva, Sergio Cossio vs Kolton Englund, Jesus Pinedo vs Levy Saúl Marroquín, Caolán Loughran vs Julio Arce, Sergio Pettis getting back on the horse against Lewis McGrillen, and your main event was supposed to be a Middleweight title rematch between Costello van Steenis and Johnny Eblen, but with Costello out injured, it's now a rematch between Eblen and Impa Kasanganay for an interim title.

Middleweight madness continues throughout the day thanks to UFC Fight Night: du Plessis vs Usman. This aggressively silly card includes amazing fights like Allen Frye Jr. vs Alvin "Goozie" Hines, Austin Bashi vs Jose Miguel Delgado, Tommy McMillen vs Alberto Montes, Brad Tavares vs Marc-André Barriault, and Tabatha Ricci vs Fatima Kline. Your anchoring fights are, in all likelihood, Chase Hooper vs Mitch Ramirez, Kevin Holland vs Jacobe Smith, Marlon Vera vs Charles Jourdain, Jared Cannonier vs Christian Leroy Duncan, and, in your main event, #2-ranked former Middleweight champion Dricus du Plessis vs Kamaru Usman, who is 0-1 at the class.

Our long 48 hours of combat sports concludes late that evening with Rizin Landmark 15. As before, this is still a developmental show, so there's a lot of development talent and subsequent records on it--the 6-5 Namiko Kawabata vs the 4-3 Ayane Hirata, the 19-18-1 Shoji Maruyama against the 2-1 Genji Umeno, the kinds of things you would expect to see from a Rizin card where a bunch of kickboxers are trying their hand at MMA. But we've got Rizin's first stabs at filling the void Seika Izawa left in their Atomweight division, as Saori Oshima faces Lee Ye-Ji and Si Woo Park meets Moeri Suda, and a couple embattled fan favorite bouts, with Hiroya Kondo facing Erson Yamamoto and Karshyga Dautbek fighting ol' Kenka Bancho himself Kyohei Hagiwara, and your main card is a score of good, old-fashioned Japanese-vs-foreigners bouts, as Tatsuki Shinotsuki faces Korea's Lee Jae-Hoon, Tenya Yoshimura fights America's Johnny Case, Shinobu Ota tries to outwrestle Kyrgyzstan's Yrysbek Tilenov, and in the main event, Jinnosuke Kashimura tries to wrest Rizin's Bantamweight title away from champion Danny Sabatello, whom Rizin is threatening to fire if he doesn't start finishing people.

The UFC closes their month out on July 25 by returning to Abu Dhabi for UFC Fight Night: Ankalaev vs Rountree Jr. It is, once again, a night of EMEA-friendly competitors, with highlights including Nurullo Aliev vs Mike Davis, Uran Satybaldiev vs Dustin Jacoby, Islam Dulatov vs Wellington Turman, Ramazan Temirov vs Steve Erceg, Rizvan Kuniev vs Tyrell Fortune, Umar Nurmagomedov vs David Martinez and, playing the role of our honorary Abu Dhabian for the week because his name at least STARTS with a V, Valter Walker vs Thomas Petersen. Headlining the show is former champion Magomed Ankalaev and former challenger Khalil Rountree Jr. fighting to see which of them gets a potential claim on a belt that will probably have an interim or a vacancy in the very near future.

And July ends on the 31st with PFL New York: Nurmagomedov vs Colgan. The PFL's throwing a bit more at this one than usual, with Montana De La Rosa vs Tatiana Postarnakova, Raufeon Stots vs Lazaro Dayron and Dovletdzhan Yagshimuradov vs Simeon Powell filling out the card, but the big deal are their two biggest stars both gettin gpole position. Striking queen Dakota Ditcheva is in the co-main event against former Bellator titlist Denise Kielholtz, and in the main event, Usman Nurmagomedov defends his Lightweight title--in what might be his last-ever fight for the PFL--against the undefeated Archie Colgan.

CURRENT UFC CHAMPIONS
Heavyweight Champion, 265 lbs

Tom Aspinall - 15-3 (1), Either 1, 2 or 0 Defenses Depending On How You Look At It

You know, once upon a time, the UFC would’ve killed for a Tom Aspinall. Entire years of UFC events were spent desperately trying to get a Dan Hardy or Darren Till or Jimi Manuwa into championship pictures so they could cash in on UK superstardom. And somehow, Tom Aspinall just fell into their lap. They didn’t go out of their way to softball him, they didn’t put a ton of effort into marketing him, they just let him mulch everyone in his path. In 2025, Tallison Teixeira has a main event in just his second UFC bout: In 2022 Tom Aspinall had to notch five straight stoppages to get his first crack at the top of the card against Curtis Blaydes, and it ended with his knee imploding fifteen seconds into the fight. When he lost that fight, Francis Ngannou was the reigning UFC Heavyweight Champion of the World. By the time Tom returned in the Summer of 2023, it belonged to Jon fucking Jones. Within one fight Aspinall was a top contender again, and with Jon comically scheduled to defend his title against Stipe Miocic, who hadn’t fought in two and a half years, Aspinall was left in a holding pattern--until Jon injured himself in training. With barely two weeks to prepare, Tom Aspinall fought Sergei Pavlovich for an interim championship. Sergei was the most devastating knockout artist in the Heavyweight division: Tom knocked him out in sixty-nine seconds. Not only did it give him gold, it gave him a golden ticket. The sole purpose of an interim champion is to one day reunify the belts, and that meant Tom had a shot at Jon Jones, one of the biggest fighters in the history of the sport. All he had to do was wait. And wait. And wait. Tom waited so fucking long the UFC made him defend his interim title in a rematch with Blaydes--which he won easily, knocking him out in 60 seconds--on July 27, 2024. Four months later, Jon Jones returned and had his fight with Stipe, who by that point had been effectively retired for almost four years. Unsurprisingly, Jon won. Equally unsurprisingly, Jon and the UFC refused to commit to fighting Aspinall. Jones reportedly held the UFC up for a huge payday, and when they shockingly agreed, he changed his mind. In the end, the most obvious pair of conclusions happened: On June 21st, during the press conference after Fight Night Baku, Dana White announced Jon was retiring and Tom was being promoted to Undisputed Champion; an hour later, coincidentally, news broke that Jon was being summoned for arraignment in July on charges of leaving the scene of an accident after drunkenly crashing another car and leaving another heavily-inebriated half-naked woman behind in it and also threatening the police over the phone when they called him. It is the only way the Jon Jones story could possibly have ended. Tom Aspinall was an interim champion for 588 days, and he made his first undisputed one against Ciryl Gane at UFC 321 on October 26--and, because this division is fucking cursed, it ended in a No Contest after Gane poked him in both of his eyes at once. The UFC has decided this is mostly Tom’s fault, which has nothing at all to do with Tom’s dad talking about how he shouldn’t sign a new contract. A rematch has been vowed, but Tom had to get eye surgery to regain his sight and the UFC doesn’t want to wait when there’s marketing to be done, so Ciryl Gane and Alex Pereira fought for an interim title at the godforsaken White House.

Interim Heavyweight Champion

Ciryl Gane - 14-2 (1), 0 Defenses

Five years ago, the UFC ran into issues with their undisputed Heavyweight champion and chose to end-run around them by putting an interim title on Ciryl Gane. It is 2026, and nothing has changed. With Tom out thanks to Ciryl’s fingertips piercing his eyeballs, Ciryl was rewarded with a big fight against Alex Pereira for the interim belt--again--at the UFC’s big, terrible White House super-event, in the not-so-subtle hopes that the UFC’s continuing attempts to put all their eggs in the Alex Pereira basket would pay off in the form of their first-ever three-division champion. Instead, Ciryl beat the crap out of him. At 205 pounds, Alex was a monster; at 265 he was slower, smaller and no longer possessed the biggest guns in the cage. Ciryl boxed him up and knocked him out in the second round, but in the process of getting the stoppage he dropped elbows on a fallen, shaky Pereira that hit the back of his head, over which Pereira is attempting to a) have the fight’s result reversed and b ) have referee Herb Dean fired. Ciryl Gane, meanwhile, continues to profit from everyone else’s misery. He’s the interim champ again, which means either he’s going to face Tom in a rematch when Tom’s healthy, or the UFC’s going to stop pretending and strip Tom and Ciryl will ascend to the Heavyweight throne on a trail of eyeballs and brainstems.

Light Heavyweight Champion, 205 lbs

Carlos Ulberg - 14-1, 0 Defenses

It’s so hard not to skip to the punchline on this one. Carlos Ulberg’s combat sports career is more mixed than MMA alone would lead one to believe. He started as a mixed martial artist all the way back in 2011, but after winning his debut fight, he decided to give fighting a break for almost half a decade. Then it was boxing, and then it was MMA again, and then it was kickboxing, and for a brief period of time it was both at once. The rise of Israel Adesanya led the UFC on an all-out talent search for big, credible strikers from Oceania, and that is how despite being just 3-0 as a mixed martial artist, Carlos wound up on the Contender Series in 2020, and just a few months later, in March of 2021, he was debuting in the UFC. They hyped him, they gave him a spot on the pay-per-view prelims, they booked him against the 1-1 Kennedy Nzechukwu and despite having half his experience Ulberg was the heavy betting favorite, because everyone knew they wanted him on top. Which was unfortunate, because Kennedy knocked him out in two rounds. Carlos described the loss as the most important moment of his career--half for the lesson of the loss itself, half for the $50,000 bonus that gave him his first taste of actual profit as a professional. He vowed to take his career more seriously, he vowed to prepare for his fights as though every one mattered rather than simply being happy to be in the UFC, and four years later, he was the top contender for the Light Heavyweight crown. A testament to determination and a good mindset? Absolutely! But also a bit of a testament to the careful cultivation and protection of a prospect. Carlos did his job and beat everyone the UFC put in front of him, but the people put in front of him tended to be carefully picked. At one point he beat a genuine prospect in Nicolae Negumereanu, and the UFC followed it up by giving him Ihor Potieria, the man Nicolae had just knocked out in his previous fight. Stiff prospects like Aleksandar Rakić and Azamat Murzakanov flew past in the background, but Da Woon Jung and Alonzo Menifield had to be destroyed. The UFC spent a year and a half trying on three separate occasions to book Ulberg against Dominick Reyes, and by the time they finally got there, it was, somehow, impossibly, a title eliminator. But Ulberg won, just as he’d won every fight since his meeting with Kennedy Nzechukwu, and he proceeded to his title fight with Jiří Procházka for the championship Alex Pereira had left behind to try his hand at the Heavyweight division. It was fun, it was fast, it was dramatic and it was definitive. In just a hair under four minutes, Jiří was flat on the canvas and Carlos Ulberg, five years after his debut, was the Light Heavyweight champion of the world. He also very visibly tore his ACL in half right in the middle of the fight and could barely move. If Jiří had simply backed away, hacked a few leg kicks and kept his distance, the fight would’ve been stopped between rounds, but he chose to engage and got flattened by a left hook counter for his troubles, and the result was a brand new titleholder who proceeded directly to the emergency room after the fight and had knee surgery less than a week later. For the third time in six title reigns, the new champion has an injury so bad it will prevent them from defending their title for at least the rest of the year. Will we get an interim title? Will yet another champion have to give up the gold? Will Paulo fucking Costa wind up technically a 205-pound champion? Stay tuned.

Middleweight Champion, 185 lbs

Sean Strickland - 31-7, 0 Defenses

After all of that time, we are back where we were. When Sean Strickland got his first shot at the UFC Middleweight Championship back in 2023, it was under particularly thin circumstances. Strickland had just come off back-to-back losses against Alex Pereira and Jared Cannonier, his title prospects seemed slim, and a short-notice victory over the then-unheralded Nassourdine Imavov and one-fight UFC veteran Abus Magomedov seemed unlikely to get Strickland anywhere. But then Dricus du Plessis wanted another month to prepare for Israel Adesanya, and the UFC wanted to keep their pay-per-view main event, and suddenly, Sean Strickland was beating one of the sport’s biggest stars and becoming its top Middleweight. It was a stellar performance, it was a career-defining victory, and it was one of the shortest title reigns in UFC history, as just four months later Strickland lost the belt to du Plessis in his first defense. But it was a split decision, so his argument for a rematch was sound, and after a pretty dubious win over Paulo Costa, Strickland got du Plessis back in the cage, where he vowed vengeance, justice, and a return to greatness. Dricus beat him 50-45. It would be a full year before Strickland returned, and in that time, the Middleweight division had changed shape. Nassourdine Imavov was in pole position. Israel Adesanya was a shadow of his former self. Anthony Hernandez was the fastest-rising contender in the class. And Strickland’s nemesis Dricus du Plessis had lost his title to Khamzat Chimaev. On February 21, 2026, on the back of a bunch of bigot bullshit that was growing ever-more tired by the day, Sean returned to the cage and walked right through Hernandez, not just beating him but knocking him out in the third round, and just like that, Imavov’s work didn’t matter, Dricus beating Sean twice didn’t matter. The UFC has its favorites, and Sean got the shot. Khamzat, as he did, hadn’t fought in nine months, and had been busying himself making threats about moving to Light Heavyweight and chasing a superfight with Alex Pereira, who had, himself, already moved up to Heavyweight altogether. Chimaev swore he would outwrestle Sean, smash him, and move on with his life. And for one round, he looked completely correct. After the first, suddenly, Strickland evened things up. Khamzat was never able to assert his wrestling game again, so the rest of the title fight became a boxing match, and in that sense, it was surprisingly even, with Khamzat arguably landing the bigger punches but Strickland landing at a higher clip, and the scorecards were split right down the middle. But the coinflip went Sean’s way. For the second time, Sean Strickland is a world champion, and we are all bastards for it. A rematch seems almost inevitable, but Sean has a shoulder injury to rehabilitate, so we’ll see what the future holds.

Welterweight Champion, 170 lbs

Islam Makhachev - 28-1, 0 Defenses

The prophecy has been fulfilled. Khabib Nurmagomedov was considered by many to be the greatest Lightweight of all time, but in the later stages of his career he began to repeatedly reference his lifetime friend and training partner Islam Makhachev as not just his successor, but the man who would break the mold he’d left behind. And the fanbase was more than willing to buy another Abdulmanap Nurmagomedov protege coming in and wrecking shop--until he got knocked out by Adriano Martins. Khabib’s aura of invulnerability came from the simple, so-obvious-more-people-should-try-it factor of simply never losing a damn fight. When Islam got torched in under two minutes by a man that couldn’t beat Donald Cerrone, that aura vanished. A lot of folks still thought he could be a champion, but most felt the greatest-of-all-time lane was closed to him. It turns out there’s another way to regain that sense of unbeatable awe, though: Just don’t lose for so goddamn long people forget it ever happened. In the ten full years since that Martins bout, Islam has not lost a single fight. Most of the time, he hasn’t even lost a round. He worked his way up the Lightweight ladder and began to rack up incredible achievements. He tore through top prospects with virtually no effort, he choked out one of the best MMA grapplers ever in Charles Oliveira, he outlasted and later knocked out one of the two men with a claim to the all-time Featherweight crown in Alexander Volkanovski, he choked out Dustin Poirier and he broke the Lightweight title defense record after stomping Renato Moicano. And then he traded in his record-breaking reign to challenge for Welterweight gold. Jumping divisions is always difficult, but the 15-pound leap from Lightweight to Welterweight is a mountain, and no Lightweight champion had ever managed it. Even BJ Penn, the canonical first man to hold gold at both, had to do it in reverse: He failed at both of his attempts to win Lightweight gold and shocked the world by abruptly taking it at Welterweight instead, and it would be five more years before he finally got his shit together and won a title in the division that made him famous. His subsequent attempts all ended in defeat, half because Matt Hughes and Georges St-Pierre were both great and half because BJ was just a Lightweight. Even though Islam was Islam and widely agreed to be a monster in the cage, Jack Della Maddalena had won the Welterweight title with some of the cleanest boxing the UFC had seen, and his championship victory over wrestler Belal Muhammad had people convinced that Islam, at best, would struggle. They met in the main event of UFC 322 on November 15, 2025, and there was absolutely no struggle. Islam kicked Jack’s leg to pieces, landed some surprisingly big punches, and took the fight to the ground almost at will, and by the time the fight ended, it felt like Jack never had a chance. The shadow has been stepped out of. Islam Makhachev is a two-division champion. And now he has a brand new horde of contenders beating down his door. He’ll try to notch his first defense against Ian Machado Garry at UFC 330 on August 15.

Lightweight Champion, 155 lbs

Justin Gaethje - 28-5, 0 Defenses

This has been a long, long time coming. Justin Gaethje has been right on the edge of the top for so long he banked two half-championships on his way up the mountain. Back in 2016, before the UFC even signed him, he was the champion of the World Series of Fighting--now known as the Professional Fighters League, much to our collective sadness--and was widely considered one of the best Lightweights in the world before ever setting foot in the Octagon. Back in 2020 he fought Tony Ferguson, then arguably the scariest Lightweight in the world, and beat him so horrifically that his career never recovered, and that netted Gaethje his first interim belt, which he promptly lost to Khabib Nurmagomedov in the latter’s retirement bout. Back in 2022, Gaethje got his second shot at the undisputed title against Charles Oliveira and he wound up strangled in three and a half minutes. Three and a half years after that, Gaethje was still right there at the precipice of the top, Ilia Topuria needed a break from the sport, and the UFC needed an aging veteran to propel their marketing star Paddy Pimblett to the top, and at UFC 324 on January 24, 2026, they threw Paddy’s big party and Justin crashed it. The UFC will tell you the fight was close, and it was in the sense that it went the whole way and one judge only gave Justin three rounds, but Paddy got brutally beaten and dropped repeatedly. With their desired player having failed his final exam, the UFC booked Gaethje into the main event of their big, terrible White House card against the finally-returning Ilia Topuria, who vowed to put Gaethje out within two rounds and resume his journey to a Welterweight showdown with Islam Makhachev. Instead, the two men had a goddamn war, with both hurting each other repeatedly and Topuria, arguably, giving away a TKO victory in the second round after crumpling Gaethje with bodyshots and choosing to roll for an armbar rather than pound him out. Gaethje broke Topuria’s face and left him nearly blind, and by the end of the fourth round, Topuria had nothing left and his corner threw in the towel. It took ten years, two interim belts and two failed shots, but finally, Justin Gaethje is the champion of the world. Which makes whatever happens next really fucking weird. They could run a Topuria rematch, but the ending was definitive and Topuria never defended the belt in the first place. They could have Gaethje fight rematches with Oliveira or Max Holloway, both of whom stopped him in the recent past, but Gaethje is hesitant about them and Holloway is booked against Conor McGregor. I’m sure they would LOVE it if Conor won so he could fight Gaethje instead, but that seems drastically unlikely. Arman Tsarukyan is, as ever, the #1 contender, but we know the UFC doesn’t care about that. My guess: Paddy Pimblett rematch.

Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs

Alexander Volkanovski - 28-4, 1 Defense

And just like that, 2024 never happened. For eleven years Alexander Volkanovski was the best Featherweight on the planet, and most of that time was simply waiting for everyone else to notice. He was short and he won by decisions a lot and the world was entirely into Max Holloway so he skated under the radar right up until the moment he finally beat Max. And that wasn’t enough to convince people, so Volkanovski beat him again. And that somehow made the world doubt him even more, so he beat Max a third time. By 2023 Volk was second only to all-time great José Aldo in Featherweight title defenses--and he’d beaten Aldo in a fight, and his only actual loss was an all-timer of an effort against Islam Makhachev that still stands as the closest Islam has come to losing his title as the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world, so it was very, very easy to accept Alexander Volkanovski as the greatest Featherweight on the planet. And then he took a rematch with Islam with only one week to prepare and got knocked out in three minutes, and then he came back less than four months later and got flattened by Ilia Topuria, and in the space of two fights the audience went from celebrating him as the best around to calling for his retirement. Volkanovski took an entire year off to heal and rebuild, which was enough time for Ilia to get bored and vacate the belt to go chase Lightweight greatness, and the Topuria/Volkanovski rematch became Volkanovski vs Diego Lopes at UFC 314 on April 12 to fill the vacant throne instead. It was somehow both close and clear. Lopes gained steam in the middle stanza of the bout and at one point dropped Volk, but Volk got right back up and resumed punching him in the face, and by the end of the bout he’d outlanded him more than two to one. The judges sided with him, the audience sided with him, and Alexander Volkanovski became not just one of the rare few to win back a UFC title, but the first man over 35 to ever win a UFC belt in the sub-170 weight classes typically reserved for young lions. His logical next contender should’ve been Movsar Evloev, but the UFC was busy trying to get him to fight an unranked, debuting Aaron Pico, thus clearing the way for a rematch with Yair Rodríguez in Guadalajara for Noche UFC 3 in September. Except the Arena Guadalajara wasn’t done yet, so Noche UFC 3 got moved to the most Mexican of places, Las Vegas, in October, and Alex’s manager said he had an eye injury that needs time to heal, so he took the rest of 2025 off. Good news, though: That left time for the UFC to get new contenders going. Lerone Murphy wound up fighting and knocking out Pico! Aljamain Sterling beat Brian Ortega! Hell, Movsar Evloev is still right there! The UFC looked at all of them and gave them all the finger. At UFC 325 on January 31, fresh off his title victory over Diego Lopes, Alexander Volkanovski had his first title defense against Diego Lopes. Unsurprisingly, the guy who beat Diego Lopes beat Diego Lopes again. The UFC had Evloev and Murphy fight in March and Evloev won a contentious decision, and now Jean Silva is lobbying as hard as possible for the fight, so we’ll see who gets it.

Bantamweight Champion, 135 lbs

Petr Yan - 20-5, 0 Defenses

Petr Yan’s road to the top has been incredibly circuitous. When Yan initially won the Bantamweight title back in 2020, no one was particularly surprised. He’d been one of the best in the world for years, he’d put together a six-fight winning streak on his road to the title shot, and the UFC had fed aging legend Urijah Faber to him in an attempt to make him a known quantity. Felling an even greater legend in José Aldo and taking the belt felt like an entirely expected passing of the torch, and a long reign as the division’s standardbearer seemed all but assured. And then, as they so often do, things went wrong. In quite possibly the most infamous title change in UFC history, Yan became the first champion to ever lose his title by disqualification after drilling Aljamain Sterling in the face with an illegal knee. Yan’s team cried foul and the world turned on Sterling, but when they had their rematch a year later, Sterling beat him by decision and that was that. But it was a split decision, and it was close, so the UFC gave Yan another theoretical title eliminator with Sean O’Malley, and this time the world was almost unanimously convinced Yan won--except for two of the three judges, who split in O’Malley’s favor. To top it off, Yan’s attempt to stay in the contendership conversation ran into the brick wall that was the rising Merab Dvalishvili, who handed him the most one-sided loss of his entire life. In the space of two years, Petr Yan went from being perceived as a generational champion to 1 for his last 5 and seemingly eliminated from contendership. After a year off to cope with injuries, reassess his career and figure out how to turn things around, Yan proceeded to take the path that most commonly leads to success: Just fucking beating everyone. He battered Song Yadong, he outpunched Deiveson Figueiredo, he won an exceedingly weirdly-booked matchup with Marcus McGhee, and suddenly, he was on a winning streak and right back in contendership. It might have taken him longer to get an actual title fight were it not for Merab Dvalishvili being a crazy person. Merab was on the greatest championship run the division had ever seen, and after clearing out most of his to contenders and recording a blistering three defenses in a single year, he announced his intention to break a UFC record and cement himself as the greatest 135-pounder of all time by recording a fourth--just two months after the last one--and Petr Yan was available and ready. The world saw the fight as a foregone conclusion, given how one-sided their first match had been, and the world was wrong. Yan put on the best performance of his career, not just battering Merab but outwrestling him, and in one of the best career comebacks we’ve seen, almost five years after he’d given it away, Petr Yan got his title back. He’s on top of the world again, and in all likelihood, the rubber match with Merab will be next. But it’s gonna have to wait until the second half of the year, because Yan’s having back surgery.

Flyweight Champion, 125 lbs

Joshua Van - 17-2, 1 Defense

It would be disrespectful as hell to Joshua Van to say that no one saw this coming, as many people perceived it as a possibility, but I don’t think anyone saw it coming like this. Van was the Flyweight champion of the Fury Fighting Championships when the UFC came calling, as a 21 year-old regional titleholder with a penchant for collecting knockouts despite fighting at 125 pounds so thoroughly ticks all of their boxes that Van couldn’t have been a more perfect fit without also having a history of racist tweets, and his Contender Series debut was set for August of 2023. But the UFC needed someone to fill in against Zhalgas Zhumagulov, so Van got called up to the big show early and proceeded to justify their faith by beating Zhalgas, and then beating the man he was originally slated to Contend against, and then facing off with Legacy Fighting Alliance champ Felipe Bunes and handing him the first TKO loss of his entire career. In the space of six months, Van went from a little-known regional fighter to a borderline-ranked Flyweight in the UFC. And then he got atomized by Charles Johnson. It was the second loss of Van’s career, the first time he’d ever been knocked out, and the snapping of an eight-fight winning streak, and in many cases, that would’ve permanently ended his momentum. But Van was smart enough to learn from his mistakes, and the UFC was invested enough in him to bring him back up to speed with a gentle hand, and eleven months later he was on a four-fight winning streak again and had successfully made his way to the top ten after knocking out Bruno Silva, which left him in the perfect position to take advantage of an abrupt opportunity. Top contender Brandon Royval had just lost his opponent and needed a replacement, and Van was game to fight for the second time in three weeks if it meant a shot at the belt. It was a close bout, and if Van hadn’t knocked Royval down at the end of the third round he may well have lost, but he did, so he didn’t, and suddenly the prospect was next in line for the title. All but one month of Joshua Van’s UFC career took place during Alexandre Pantoja’s reign as the Flyweight king. His streak was monstrous and he was a sizable favorite coming into his defense against Van, but many were waiting to see if Van’s boxing could defuse Pantoja’s aggression. As it turns out: We’re gonna have to wait a bit longer. Twenty-six seconds into the bout Pantoja busted his own arm on the mat after a head kick gone awry. So Van’s the champion, but it’s under some real weird circumstances, and it means a number of people are immediately gunning for him. Alexandre Pantoja presumably has a rematch as soon as he’s back, but Tatsuro Taira just pounded Brandon Moreno out and got his crack at Van at UFC 327 on April 11. It was an amazing fight, but ultimately, Van got the knockout in the final round.

Women’s Bantamweight, 135 lbs

Kayla Harrison - 19-1, 0 Defenses

Every once in awhile the inevitable turns out to actually be inevitable. Ronda Rousey parlayed a 2008 bronze medal in Judo into mixed martial arts stardom; Kayla Harrison took the gold medal in 2012 and 2016. The world was already asking her about MMA before the second. The UFC made a play for her, but there was a problem: By the standards of female fighters Kayla was huge. Ronda had competed at 70 kg in the Olympics, which translated to about 154 pounds, well within the range of weight cutting for the insane standards of combat sports and Women’s Bantamweight. Kayla competed at 78 kg, which was almost 172 pounds. Even at a twenty-pound weight cut, her division simply did not exist in major mixed martial arts organizations. So she had to find one that would build it. The Professional Fighters League needed star power, and Kayla was their gal. They founded the first Women’s Lightweight division in a major American organization, and it was populated mostly by Bantamweights and Featherweights who were trying the best they could. For four straight years, Kayla was their recurring, undefeated champion. She won the 2019 and 2021 tournaments, and in 2022 she made it to the finals and looked poised to take it for a third time, as her only competition was Larissa Pacheco, whom she’d already beaten twice. In a massive upset, Larissa took a decision off of her. It was shocking, it was unexpected, and it was also more or less fine, because Kayla was more or less done with the PFL. She took one more fight against Aspen Ladd as a one-off, but her future was with the UFC. Even with her loss to Pacheco, the world was sure she was a future UFC champion--as long as she could stomach the weight cut. And it did, visibly, kill her! But she made it. She choked out Holly Holm in her debut, she took a decision over Ketlen Vieira in a title eliminator, and all she had to do after that was wait. Julianna Peña was a +500 underdog in her own title defense against Kayla, and that turned out to be just about right. On June 7, 2025, at UFC 316, Kayla achieved the inevitable, ragdolled Peña and tapped her out in just two rounds. She’s the best in the world and she’s going to get her shot at the superfight everyone wanted in the first place, as Amanda Nunes is coming out of retirement to face her later this year--actually, this got delayed so much it’s only now finally booked for UFC 324 on January 24, 2026--maybe never? A couple weeks before the superfight Kayla had to pull out for apparently fairly major neck surgery. No word on when she’ll be back or what on Earth happens now.

Women’s Flyweight, 125 lbs

Valentina Shevchenko - 26-4-1, 2 Defenses

After almost two years of suffering, we have gone back to the start. At the end of 2022 Valentina Shevchenko was so thoroughly ensconced as The Greatest Women’s Flyweight that a sizable segment of the fanbase had built an honest-to-god antipathy for her over it. Sure, she won, all the time, and sure, her only losses in almost a decade and a half came to the greatest of all time in Amanda Nunes, and sure, Shevchenko arguably won their second fight, but familiarity breeds contempt, and after watching the purported greatest struggle with a split decision to Taila Santos that could easily have gone the other way, too, a big chunk of the mixed martial world was ready to move on from Val. And then, unexpectedly, it did. Valentina was a -900 favorite when Alexa Grasso shocked the world, choked her out, and took her title away on March 4, 2023. An instant rematch was obligatory, given Val’s long history on top, so half a year later they ran it back at Noche UFC in 2023, and, awkwardly, it ended in a draw. If the rematch had been obligatory, the threematch was mandatory, but a hand injury on Val’s part and the UFC’s desire to put an entire season of The Ultimate Fighter behind their promotion meant a full twelve months passed before they got back in the cage. That’s a long goddamn time, and it left a lot of air, and that air was filled by doubt. Alexa won the first fight, after all--but she was on her way to losing a decision before Valentina made a costly mistake, threw one of her trademark nowhere-close-to-landing spinning back kicks, and got immediately jumped on and choked out for her troubles. Alexa didn’t lose the second fight--but based on the scorecards, she should have, and would have, were it not for one judge handing her a completely indefensible 10-8 in the final round. When the third fight came on September 14, 2024, it was seen as Alexa’s chance to cement her legacy: Either she was the superior fighter and the herald of a new generation for Women’s Flyweight, or the whole thing was just a weird episode. Unfortunately for Alexa, it was the latter. Valentina dominated her. She outstruck her and outwrestled her with almost comical ease, the fight was a complete shutout, and despite their series being now tied at 1-1-1, no one has any doubts about the winner, nor any desire to see them fight again. Once again, much to the internet’s chagrin, Valentina Shevchenko is a champion. And--only two years late--she defended her title against Manon Fiorot at UFC 315. It was close, it was contentious, and it was also a fight the audience does not want to see again. Her next fight was a long-awaited champion vs champion affair against Zhang Weili at UFC 322 on November 15, 2025. After years of watching Zhang dominate her competition, the world felt she had genuine double-champ potential and could be the woman to unseat Valentina. As it turned out: Not even close. Val dominated her in every aspect of the game, Zhang got completely shut out, and her Flyweight hopes are dead in the water. Valentina has multiple title defenses again and is now tied with Amanda Nunes and Anderson Silva for the fourth-most wins in title fights in UFC history. We’ll have to see who they give to her next, but Natália Silva feels like a safe bet.

Women’s Strawweight, 115 lbs

Mackenzie Dern - 16-5, 0 Defenses

On a long enough timeline, the house always wins. Mackenzie Dern signed with the UFC as a 5-0 fighter all the way back in 2018 and they’ve been trying to get a belt on her ever since. She came into mixed martial arts with a pre-existing pedigree as one of the more decorated women in the history of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu: Gi championships, no-gi championships, pan-Am championships, Asian open championships, world championships, ADCC championships, she took them all. And the UFC marketed her as a grappling champion who was bringing some of the best submission offense in the sport to the Strawweight division! But they also marketed her as an extremely conventionally attractive woman who frequently wore bathing suits. It was one of the touchiest things to comment on with her career: Where other women would have to struggle for their matchmaking and featured spots, Mackenzie’s opportunities kept coming, and they were almost always on the main broadcast and, on multiple occasions, in the main event slots women almost never received. And she needed them, because despite being legitimately quite good, she just wasn’t great. She could make it into the top fifteen, and sometimes even brush the top ten, but every time they tried to get Mackenzie into title contention, she’d falter. It was Amanda Ribas in 2019, it was Marina Rodriguez in 2021, and between 2022 and 2024, Mackenzie had the worst run of her life, winning only one out of four bouts, getting shut down by Yan Xiaonan and Amanda Lemos, and taking the first stoppage loss of her career after being knocked out by Jéssica Andrade. She managed to get her way back up the ladder again by outgrappling Loopy Godinez and submitting a struggling Amanda Ribas in a six-years-belated rematch, but with so many losses to top contenders, her path to the title still seemed closed. Then a funny thing happened: Zhang Weili gave up the Strawweight belt to move up to Flyweight and challenge Valentina Shevchenko. Suddenly, the door was wide open. And conveniently, the UFC had booked all the women who beat Mackenzie into other matches, leaving Mackenzie with just one contender left--and it was Virna Jandiroba, a career grappler whom Mackenzie had already beaten back in 2020. The two met at UFC 321 on October 25, and after seven years of effort, the UFC finally got its way. Mackenzie beat Virna again, fair and square, in a close and hard-fought but ultimately clear decision. She is, at last, the Strawweight Champion of the World. And she’s in the exceptionally weird position of being a newly-minted champion that has very recently lost to several of her own top contenders. One would think, Zhang Weili having been soundly thwomped by Valentina Shevchenko in her bid for 125-pound supremacy, she would be back at Strawweight to reclaim her crown. Instead she’s MIA and Mackenzie will defend her title against Gillian Robertson at UFC 330 on August 15.

NOTABLE CHAMPIONS ACROSS THE WORLD

Rizin Lightweight Champion, 156 lbs

Luiz Gustavo - 16-4, 0 Defenses

Sunrise, sunset. Luiz Gustavo is not new to Rizin. He made his debut all the way back in 2018, when he was an undefeated, 8-0 22 year-old who’d only barely started fighting real competition down in Katana Fight. Rizin threw him straight into a main event in the hopes of completing the ascension of their rising star Yusuke Yachi, who’d just capped off a six-fight winning streak that included torch-passing matches with Japanese legends like Satoru Kitaoka and Takanori Gomi. Gustavo was supposed to be Yachi’s victim. Instead he knocked Yachi out in two rounds. Suddenly, Gustavo was the star and the man folks had flagged as Rizin’s next big Lightweight champion. He proceeded to go 1-3 over the next year, which culminated in the first knockout loss of his life against Patricky Pitbull and, ultimately, an almost three-year hiatus while the world struggled with COVID. When Rizin tried to get back to its wholly-international ways in 2022, they had Yusuke Yachi waiting for a rematch, and once again, Gustavo knocked him dead in two rounds. In two years Luiz had a winning streak and a shot at longtime champion Roberto “Satoshi” de Souza, and the world expected a classic striker-vs-grappler clash. Satoshi shocked him with a right hand and knocked him out in twenty seconds. Having lost his shot, and followed it with an unsuccessful bout against Shunta Nomura, Gustavo’s hopes for the top of the heap were so distant that Rizin booked him into a fight with living legend Kazushi Sakuraba’s son, the 2-1 Taisei. Gustavo punched him out in seven and a half minutes. Barely two months later, Rizin needed a challenger to stand opposite Ilkhom Nazimov, the man who had unseated Satoshi during their big New Year’s Eve special, and Luiz was available. Once again, the world underestimated him, and once again, they were wrong. Luiz punched Nazimov out in two minutes to finally take his title home.

Rizin Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs

Razhabali Shaydullaev - 18-0, 3 Defenses

I asked how long the second reign of Kleber Koike Erbst would last, and as it turns out, the answer was sixty-two seconds. Razhabali Shaydullaev’s rise through the sport has been impressively meteoric. Four years ago he was a rookie fighting on Batyr Bashy cards in Kyrgyzstan as a predominantly grappling-based fighter. Three years ago he was disposing of journeymen in the developmental leagues of Russia’s Absolute Championship Akhmat. Two years ago he was choking out top contenders in South Korea’s Road FC. One year ago he got signed to Rizin. In just six months he choked out a DEEP champion, submitted a Bellator champion and smashed through a K-1 Kickboxing champion with virtually no resistance. He was the favorite against Erbst, but few thought it would be an easy night, with Erbst having been finished only once in his entire career, and even that was an armbar all the way back in 2009 when he was still a rookie. Shaydullaev, as he has been doing for the entirety of his run thus far, destroyed Erbst. He walked through him and flattened him in just barely over a minute. Rizin’s got another gaijin champion, and given how good he’s looked, they may be stuck with him for awhile--or, worse, they might lose him to the UFC sooner than later. With Mikuru Asakura’s victory over Chihiro Suzuki on the same night he’s the logical next contender, but that would just be stupid, so instead it was Shaydullaev making his first defense against Viktor Kolesnik at Rizin 51 on September 28: He knocked Kolesnik out in just thirty-three seconds. His successful murders got him the main event of 2025’s Japanese New Year’s MMA special, where Rizin secretly hoped their big national star Mikuru Asakura would get the job done; Shaydullaev chain-suplexed him, grounded him, and laid an unconscionable amount of ground and pound on him in one of those Japan-likes-to-let-its-heroes-die moments before the ref finally called the fight in just shy of three minutes. Shaydullaev’s the best guy in the company, and now there’s a question of what’s left for him to do. For now, inexplicably, the answer was carrying the murder of the 5-2 Yuta Kubo at Rizin Landmark 13 on April 11, which is wild because they already fought at the end of 2024 and Shaydullaev destroyed him in seven and a half minutes. Try to control your shock: This time it only took Shaydullaev four.

Rizin Bantamweight Champion, 135 lbs

Danny Sabatello - 18-4-1, 1 Defense

When Naoki Inoue won Rizin’s Bantamweight title I wrote that Rizin was one step closer to its dream of an all-Japanese championship roster, and it’s fitting that as gaijin once again take over the majority of the championship belts in the biggest organization in Japan, Danny goddamn Sabatello is one of the men to do it. Sabatello has been dogged by a reputation as a grinding wrestler without a ton to offer since 2020, when he got the call to compete on Dana White’s Contender Series, won, and was notably not offered a contract on the grounds of Boring Grappler. He made the move to late-stage Bellator instead, where he attempted to establish himself as their own personal Chael Sonnen: An indefatigable wrestling machine whose mouth ran just as hard as his double-legs. But it never quite caught on. The talk seemed a bit forced, the wrestling wasn’t that fun to watch, and all his 1980s wrestling promos about the bums in Bellator’s Bantamweight Grand Prix ended with an elimination at the hands of Raufeon Stots. Sabatello swore he’d won and that he’d get revenge; instead he ended his Bellator tenure getting choked out by Magomed Magomedov, decisioned again by Stots, and losing out on a shot at the PFL after going to a draw with Lazaro Dayron, who would’ve won the decision were it not for a point deduction. It was a bit of a shock when Sabatello signed with Rizin in 2025, but it seemed to have paid off when he scored his first knockout in six years during his debut against Shinobu Ota and swore he’d reinvent himself as Japan’s new American superstar. Then he went back to wrestling. It was still enough to get him his shot at Inoue’s belt at 2025’s New Year’s special, and despite the common wisdom of judging favoritism, a very close split decision went Danny’s way. It took three years longer than he intended, but Danny Sabatello is holding gold. Now we see if he can, in fact, become Big In Japan. His first title defense was against Joji Goto at Rizin Landmark 13 on April 11, and, unsurprisingly, he wrestled Goto to a broad decision. He’ll try to do it again when he meets Jinnosuke Kashimura on July 18.

Rizin Flyweight Champion, 125 lbs

Makoto Takahashi - 23-5-1 (1), 0 Defenses

Oh, buddy, Rizin has wanted this one for years. Anytime a fighter with an above-average winning rate successfully gets their name replaced with a nickname it means the marketing power is strong with them, and within one fight in Rizin, no one called him Takahashi anymore. Japanese MMA is perpetually desperate for young national stars, and they knew almost immediately that Makoto Shinryu was their guy. By July of 2023 Shinryu was already 16-1-1 despite having just turned 23, he was the most-hyped male prospect in the country, and he was uniquely positioned to take over the world, as Rizin and Bellator were in the middle of their historical co-promotion days, and Bellator was inaugurating its Flyweight title with a match between Shinryu and top dog Kyoji Horiguchi. It ended with Kyoji unintentionally poking Makoto in the eye in twenty-five seconds. It took half a year to get the rematch together, and this time it was for Rizin’s Flyweight title, and Kyoji choked Shinryu out in two rounds. This marked the beginning of Shinryu’s career hitting speedbumps, as after almost seven years of constant victory, it’d be two years before he managed back-to-back wins again. Hiromasa Ougikubo, Jose Torres and Yuki Motoya all turned Shinryu away by decision, the last of which knocked him out of the Flyweight Grand Prix to fill the throne Horiguchi abdicated to return to the UFC. Ougikubo ultimately won the tournament and the title, but wins over Hiroya Kondo and Nkazimulo Zulu were enough for Rizin’s brass to put Shinryu right back in the title conversation, because, well, that’s what they wanted in the first place. They were right, too. Three years after his first failed attempt at grasping gold, Shinryu took Ougikubo the distance and took his belt home. There may have been detours along the way, but he’s got the title everyone felt he was destined for. Now we get to watch him try to keep it.

Rizin Women’s Super Atomweight Championship, 108 lbs

VACANT - The source of life and death

The world has long wondered who or what could beat Seika Izawa, and as it turns out, the answer is childbirth. At Rizin Landmark 13 on April 12, 2026, Seika took to the ring and announced her pregnancy and, accordingly, her hiatus from the sport. After four straight years as the undisputed best Atomweight in the world, the queen has abdicated the throne. She vowed to one day return and take back the belt from whichever unlucky woman gets it in her absence, but obviously there’s no timeline for said return, nor should there be. All eyes now turn to the rest of Rizin’s Atomweight division, which is, like, four people. Ayaka Hamasaki’s back in Rizin, but she got armbarred pretty easily by the debuting Natasha Kuziutina. Moeri Suda and Saori Oshima are always around on loan from DEEP. I’m sure they’d love to belt up RENA, but she spends half of her time closer to Strawweight. It’s a loss for mixed martial arts, we are all happy for Seika and wish her well, and god bless Rizin, which can never, ever have a full complement of champions.

ONE Heavyweight Champion, 265 lbs

ONE Light Heavyweight Champion, 225 lbs

ONE Middleweight Champion, 205 lbs

VACANT - The inevitable end of hubris

We were always destined to end here. ONE’s heavier title belts have always been more suggestion than reality. All three have seen at most five champions apiece in their decade-plus of existence--in Light Heavyweight’s case it’s just four, which makes sense, as after ten goddamn years there have been exactly five Light Heavyweight title fights. The belt-padding era began in earnest when ONE made Reinier de Ridder the double-champion over a division that barely existed, and when he fell on hard times with ONE management, they one-upped him by having Heavyweight champion Anatoly Malykhin drop to 225 and 205 thereafter just to beat him out of the company entirely. Over the past two years there was exactly one championship fight across all three weight classes, and it saw Oumar “Reug Reug” Kane take Malykhin’s Heavyweight title away, and it was a portent of the future that Marcus Buchecha won #1 contendership on that same night and opted to leave the company rather than fight for its title. Kane and Malykhin wouldn’t have their scheduled rematch until May 15, 2026, when Malykhin got his revenge by knocking out an exhausted Kane in the fourth round. Having won back his belt, he retired immediately, and in so doing rendered 1/3 of ONE’s MMA championships vacant. I’d bet we will, eventually, see another Heavyweight champion in ONE; I doubt we’ll ever see the other two belts again.

ONE Welterweight Champion, 185 lbs

Christian Lee - 18-4 (1), 0 Defenses

ONE Lightweight Champion, 170 lbs

Christian Lee - 18-4 (1), 1 Defense

It 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. After the passing of his younger sister Victoria, Christian took the whole of the year to, understandably, grieve. ONE planned his comeback for February of 2024, but, y’know, that clearly did not happen. ONE held an interim title fight between Alibeg Rasulov and Ok Rae Yoon to welcome him back--but that didn’t exactly happen either, as Rasulov failed hydration tests, became ineligible to win the title, then won the fight anyway. Lee vs Rasulov was scheduled for October. And then November. It finally happened on December 7, 2024--and it ended in a No Contest after two rounds thanks to Christian unintentionally gouging Rasulov’s eye. They ran it back almost a full year later at ONE 173 on November 16, and this time Lee knocked him out in the second round, marking Lee’s first win in three years.

ONE Featherweight Champion, 155 lbs

Tang Kai - 20-4, 2 Defenses
Tang 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. And then, absolutely nothing else happened. It took ONE almost a full year to book another match for Tang Kai, and it was just an instant rematch with Thanh Le with no fanfare, and it was delayed by eight full months thanks to an injury. So after more than a year and a half without a fight, Tang Kai finally fought Thanh Le again, and this time, he knocked him out in three rounds. Congratulations, Tang Kai: You are back at square one. His position hasn’t improved much, either. He was supposed to defend his title against Akbar Abdullaev on January 10, and Abdullaev pounded him out in the fifth round, but he also missed weight by a pound and a half and thus was ineligible for the championship. So, hey: Still a world champion! You just got knocked out a little bit. It’s fine. ONE cut Abdullaev anyway rather than give him another shot. After almost another year and a half of inactivity Tang Kai finally defended his title on May 15, this time knocking out Shamil Gasanov.

ONE Bantamweight Champion, 145 lbs

Enkh-Orgil Baatarkhuu - 14-3, 0 Defenses

By god, ONE had an MMA title change hands in 2025. Enkh-Orgil Baatarkhuu is one of the precious few success stories for ONE’s feeder system. He was a 5-2 champion in the small (but competitive!) regional scene in his native Mongolia, which put him on ONE’s talent-scouting radar for their Warriors of the Steppe tournament in 2022. Enkh won two fights in six days to earn his contract with ONE, where he quickly discovered that no matter where you go in the wide world of sports, being a grappler-type Pokemon makes companies less invested in promoting you. Enkh went 6-1 across two years--8-1, if you count those aforementioned tournament wins--and finished most of his opponents, but title contention eluded him in no small part thanks to ONE’s turn away from mixed martial arts as a whole. It wasn’t until December 6 that Enkh finally got his long-belated shot at Fabricio Andrade’s Bantamweight title, and the first round and a half looked pretty thoroughly one-sided in Andrade’s favor, as most had figured it would be given the gap in Enkh’s striking game, and Andrade battered him to a near-stoppage on a couple occasions. But Enkh, as it turns out, is tough as shit. He weathered the storm and used his grit, his power and his wrestling to turn the tables, and towards the end of the fourth round, an exhausted Andrade gave up the ghost and got himself strangled. Enkh-Orgil Baatarkhuu is ONE’s Bantamweight champion, and his very first act as a champion was to call for a cross-class title match with Tang Kai, because weight classes aren’t real. Instead, a measly eight months after winning it, his first defense will be against the undefeated Elbek Alyshov on July 31.

ONE Flyweight Champion, 135 lbs

Avazbek Kholmirzaev - 16-2, 0 Defenses

There’s a certain kind of tragedy in winning a championship during what certainly seems to be the waning days of a promotion’s time with mixed martial arts. Avazbek Kholmirzaev is by no means new to ONE, his title victory came a whole eleven fights into his time on their roster, but he spent a great deal of that time nigh-unto invisible. He got his start in his native country’s Uzbekistan MMA Association, but like so many of his countrymen, the successes that built his career came from the bigger, more popular Alash Pride FC, Kazakhstan’s biggest promotion, which is large, well-populated, and also the kind of bullshit record-padding organization that books main events between promising prospects and 5-11 guys who mysteriously always lose within three minutes. But he was on the positive side of the equation, and he knocked people out with spinning kicks, so ONE scouted him for their expansion across the East and he proved to be a natural fit--for the prelims. Avazbek almost never left the first few fights of the cards he was booked on, right up to his championship-opportunity-earning victory over no less than the 11-10 Jeremy Miado this past December curtain-jerking an Amazon Prime card, and an unkind man would probably intimate that his shot at Yuya Wakamatsu’s Flyweight Championship was an attempt to get Yuya a win, being as it was ONE’s big Ariake Arena show in Tokyo and they were attempting to showcase as much of their Japanese talent as possible. It was going well for Yuya right up until he ate a spinning elbow to the dome and went down in a heap just moments before the second round was about to end. Avazbek is a champion and he should be duly proud, and now we’re just left to see what being an MMA champion in ONE means in 2026.

ONE Strawweight Champion, 125 lbs

Joshua Pacio - 23-5, 1 Defense

It’s been a difficult couple of years for Joshua Pacio. “The Passion” stands as a true veteran of ONE Championship, having made his debut--and his first, unsuccessful attempt at winning the Strawweight title--all the way back in 2016. Pacio established himself as both a fan favorite and a solid promotional favorite for the company, and when he lost his second bid for the title against Yosuke Saruta in 2019, ONE, in a trick they’d become very friendly with over the years, gave him an instant rematch anyway. Pacio knocked Saruta out in the rematch and became easily the greatest 125-pound champion in ONE history, ultimately defending the title three times--including a trilogy match against Saruta. By 2022, Pacio was a crown jewel for ONE’s lineup. Which is when he promptly got wrestled into paste by UFC cast-off Jarred Brooks. Rather than having him defend the title, ONE booked Brooks into grappling matches, and in the meantime Pacio fought and defeated undefeated prospect Mansur Malachiev to earn himself a rematch. Multiple delays ensued, but on March 1, the Brooks/Pacio rematch finally came. Fifty-six seconds in, Pacio attempted a standing kimura on Brooks, who hoisted him off the ground, suplexed him, and knocked him out. Unfortunately, this was a problem. Under ONE’s ruleset, slams that land headfirst are illegal. ONE has been regularly criticized for this--less for the rule itself as for ONE’s tendency to selectively enforce the rule, using it to benefit fighters they would like to succeed. ONE, of course, denies this vehemently. However you draw your own conclusions, at the end of the day Jarred Brooks was disqualified, and thus, by DQ, Joshua Pacio is now a three-time Strawweight champion. He almost immediately announced he has torn his ACL and was out for an entire year. On February 20th, 2025, Pacio and Brooks finally fought again and it was weird, but definitive. Jarred Brooks seemingly exhausted himself after a round and Pacio pounded him for the entire second round, which eventually elicited a mercy stoppage from the ref. ONE has only one 125-pound champion again. So he, of course, challenged for the 135-pound title next. Pacio vs Wakamatsu happened at ONE 173 on November 16 and ended in Pacio getting smashed in six minutes. He’ll try to defend his actual belt against Mansur Malachiev on July 10.

ONE Women’s Atomweight Champion, 115 lbs

VACANT - The planting ground for broken dreams

On June 23, Denice Zamboanga vacated the Atomweight title after she had a baby. On one hand: Mazel tov. On the other, for those keeping track, this means Stamp Fairtex was the champion, then she got hurt, then Denice won the interim belt a year and a half ago, then Stamp fell out of their unification bout with an injury so ONE promoted Denice to undisputed champion, and that was more than a year ago, and now it’s ended with the belt going to nobody. There has been one championship fight in the last three fucking years and it was for an interim belt and one of the women in said fight hadn’t recorded a win since January of 2021. I am once again pleading with ONE: Just stop doing MMA. Let my people go.

PFL Heavyweight Championship, 265 lbs

Vadim Nemkov - 19-2 (1), 0 Defenses

When the PFL announced that it was going to crown a standing Heavyweight champion, they had a raft of interesting options. Oleg Popov, their 2025 tournament champion, had a strong argument. Denis Goltsov, 2024 champion and the only man in almost ten years to beat Popov, could’ve called dibs. Hell, the PFL still technically has Francis Ngannou, the best Heavyweight on the planet, under contract. They, of course, did not choose any of those men. They chose Renan Ferreira, the 2023 tournament champion whose only fight in almost two years was a TKO loss to Ngannou, and Vadim Nemkov, Bellator’s best Light Heavyweight. Nemkov, a Fedor protégé, hadn’t lost since 2016, when he got himself punched out by Jiří Procházka and narrowly edged out by Karl Albrektsson, and it’s a testament to both his skills and the world’s dim view of the Heavyweight division that when the PFL acquired Bellator and Nemkov announced he was leaving 205 for the 265-pound world, instead of the expected fretting about how a 6’1” man would contend in the world of the big boys, more or less everyone said “Yeah, that’s fine.” And lo: It was. Nemkov choked out 2021 PFL champ Bruno Cappelozza, and then he choked out the ever-pained Timothy Johnson, and when he fought Renan Ferreira at PFL Champions Series 4 on December 13, 2025, shockingly, he choked him out, too. Nemkov’s now the only major Heavyweight champion in American MMA outside of the UFC. Hopefully it pays off.

PFL Light Heavyweight Championship, 205 lbs

Corey Anderson - 20-6 (1), 0 Defenses

One of the best Light Heavyweights in the world isn’t in the UFC, and they have only themselves to blame. Corey Anderson was the precise kind of fighter the UFC wanted when they first got ahold of him in 2014: Big, young, athletic, talented, undefeated. He had all the makings of a future champion, and his victory on The Ultimate Fighter 19 (jesus christ) cemented him as a prospect to watch. Unfortunately, he had also barely been in the sport for a year and only had four professional fights to his name. In short order he’d suffered his first loss, and a couple years later, a pair of back-to-back knockouts in 2017 sent him to the realm of afterthoughts. But a recommitment to his wrestling style, an extremely well-aged victory over Glover Teixeira, and a devastating knockout over Johnny Walker got Anderson back in the title picture, and in 2020, he fought Jan Błachowicz to determine the #1 contender to the soon-to-be-vacated belt. They’d done battle once, five years prior, and Corey had won a clear decision. This time, Jan flattened him in three minutes. Despite his top-ten ranking and the four consecutive fights he’d just won, the UFC decided to dump Corey, sending him from main event to unemployment in a week. Corey went straight to Bellator and proceeded to become one of its best stars, and he would have become the first man in America to beat Vadim Nemkov had they not banged their heads together and ended the fight prematurely. Corey lost the rematch, but he became the last man to hold Bellator’s Light Heavyweight title after beating Karl Moore, and on October 3, Corey had a champion vs champion match against the PFL’s 205-pound tournament champion, Dovletdzhan Yagshimuradov. Corey had pounded him out in Bellator four years prior, and while he didn’t get the stoppage in the present, he did get the win, and in so doing he became the inaugural PFL Light Heavyweight Champion. What that actually means going forward, we’ll have to see.

PFL Middleweight Championship, 185 lbs

Costello van Steenis - 18-3, 1 Defense

For years, the Professional Fighters League has threatened to crown standing champions. Did they carry through any of their major tournament winners? Nope. Did they bring out their holdout Bellator champions? Not exactly! Did they at least make a big hubbub about finally going through with it? Of course not. Instead, just five days before PFL Champions Series 2, their promotional debut in South Africa, they abruptly announced that Bellator champ Johnny Eblen was suddenly the first-ever PFL Middleweight Champion, and his match with Costello van Steenis was the first-ever defense of the title. Costello, himself, was a Bellator veteran who’d been absorbed in the PFL buyout, but he’d always played second fiddle in the organization, unable to get through the John Salters and Douglas Limas of the world, and thus said world was mostly overlooking him as a challenger. The first three rounds of Eblen gradually grinding him into dust bore out that expectation, but then a funny thing happened: The inexhaustible wrestler got tired. Eblen found himself punched up by van Steenis in the fourth round, and he seemed to be pulling it together again in the fifth, but right before the bell could ring van Steenis managed to take his back and sink in a choke, and with just seven seconds separating him from an almost-certain decision victory, Eblen passed out. Costello van Steenis is the first man to truly hold a standing PFL Championship, and he became the second man to defend one after knocking out Fabian Edwards on March 20.

THE PFL WELTERWEIGHT CONUNDRUM

Yeah, I don’t quite know what to do here. On February 7, the (technically) final Welterweight champion of Bellator, Ramazan Kuramagomedov, beat 2024 PFL tournament champion and undefeated favorite Shamil Musaev and became the first official PFL Welterweight Champion. In his post-fight interview he immediately retired. On one hand, the PFL still lists him as their officially reigning champion. On the other, the PFL’s Youtube channel has a video on it named RAMAZAN KURAMAGOMEDOV ANNOUNCES THIS WAS HIS LAST FIGHT and in their own description phrase it as “announcing his retirement.” Does the PFL have a Welterweight champion? I don’t think even they know. So, as of March 1, 2026, I’m leaving ol’ Matthew Lesko here until the PFL clarifies its own title situation and I am on pins and needles to see how long it’ll take before I remove this section. UPDATE, JUNE: The PFL has announced that Ramazan has officially been stripped, which sure does feel like a ‘you can’t quit, you’re fired’ kind of move, and Thad Jean vs Shamil Musaev on July 25th will crown the second Welterweight champ. Matty Lesks can stick around for another two months, as a treat.

PFL Lightweight Championship, 155 lbs

Usman Nurmagomedov - 21-0 (1), 1 Defense

The Nurmagomedov family is trying to run the sport, and Usman is their B-league beachhead, but that assault has proven to be an awful lot rockier than the rest. As the kid brother of Umar and the cousin of Khabib, Usman had great expectations thrust upon him very early in his career, and he dealt with them the way regional talents with great camps traditionally do: Squashing severely overmatched competition until you get a contract from one of the big companies. Bellator won the Usman bidding war and brought him over in 2021, and he proved to be one of the breakout stars of their final days, blitzing his way up the Lightweight ranks, knocking off several contenders and ultimately beating Patricky Pitbull to win the 155-pound championship and securing his reign by retiring former star and UFC champ Benson Henderson. It was 2023, and even though Bellator’s upcoming death was clear, Usman was a name and widely considered one of the best Lightweights in the world. Unfortunately, then, things got weird. He was a massive, -2200 favorite to beat Brent Primus in the waning days of Bellator, and he did--and it became the first non-win of his career after failing a drug test for something that was never disclosed. He carried Bellator’s title over into its new life as a colony of the PFL, and he immediately ran into controversy after barely scraping a majority decision off of Irish superprospect Paul Hughes. The world wanted a rematch for the inaugural PFL Lightweight Championship fight, and on October 3, at the PFL’s big Dubai show, they got it--and this time, it waws even closer, with media scorecards split right down the middle. This, by itself, is not that unusual, nor is one fighter winning a controversial decision unusual. It is unusual when the decision is not only unanimous, but one judge scores the entire fight as a 50-45 shut-out. So Usman’s last two wins were dubious, and his future as part of the PFL depends on how they treat their own championship, but for now, he is the damn champion. He notched his first title defense by choking out Alfie Davis on February 7, and he’ll shoot for a second--and possibly the end of his PFL contract--against Archie Colgan on July 31.

PFL Women’s Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs

Cris Cyborg - 29-2 (1), 1 Defense

Are you noticing how all of the inaugural PFL champions are just Bellator’s champions? Funny, that. Cris Cyborg is the greatest Women’s Featherweight of all time, and we all just kind of have to deal with that, because Women’s Featherweight has only barely ever existed. Strikeforce set the standard back in 2006 because Gina Carano was one of their biggest stars, and that star lasted right up until 2009, when they attempted to put a belt on her and failed because Cris Cyborg punched the shit out of her. In the following sixteen years Cyborg’s only lost one mixed martial arts fight, and it took Amanda Nunes, the greatest Women’s mixed martial artist of all time, to do it. Aside from that one loss, she’s run the table. She was the Strikeforce Featherweight Champion until it closed, and then she was Invicta’s Featherweight Champion until they let the UFC have her, and then she was the UFC’s Featherweight Champion until Amanda dropped her, and Cyborg promptly went to Bellator and won their title, too. When the PFL brought her over in the Bellator buyout, they set her up for an interpromotional superfight against Larissa Pacheco, a two-time PFL tournament winner and the only woman who’d ever beaten Kayla Harrison. On one hand, Pacheco’s one of just six women to ever make it to the final bell with Cyborg. On the other, she lost 4-1. In the ultimate act of promotional cowardice, the PFL promoted Cyborg to champion status three days before her appearance at the PFL Champions Series on December 13, 2025, meaning her fight with Sara Collins was, technically, a title defense. It was as one-sided as you’d expect. In theory, this is great! The biggest female fighter outside the UFC has a belt and the PFL is bringing back a division the UFC threw in the garbage. In practice, Cyborg didn’t even get out of her post-fight interview without noting that after her next fight she’s going to retire from MMA in favor of focusing on her boxing career. Unless she changes her mind--again--her swan song will come against UFC cast-off Ketlen Vieira on August 22.

SATURDAY, JUNE 27 FROM THE NATIONAL GYMNASTICS ARENA IN BAKU, AZERBAIJAN
EARLY START TIME WARNING | PRELIMS 6 AM PDT / 9 AM EDT | MAIN CARD 9 AM / 12 PM

There’s exactly one main section I wound up pulling out of the White House write-up this month: A rumination on the way the UFC’s repositioning of itself as a faux-regional promotion whose two primary products are a) a developmental talent show they don’t expect their fans to pay real attention to and b) traveling shows that take money from countries to create locally-friendly shows that’ll totally put those small countries like Australia on the map. Watching them have to turn that on its head and figure out how to program a regional-appeal for their own American backyard was fascinating, in a this-is-what-America-is-to-them sense, but there was already too much going on in that essay and I just didn’t think it fit.

And now we’re in Baku, where the government paid the UFC millions of dollars to bring them a card where only two out of thirteen fights are between ranked, relevant fighters, but ten out of thirteen feature a fighter whose name ends with a V. Thank you, Baku.

MAIN EVENT: THE CHURN
LIGHTWEIGHT: Rafael Fiziev (13-5, #11) vs Manuel Torres (17-3, #15)

Rafael, you are too damn young to be in the ‘old veteran getting put out to pasture’ position.

The first time we talked about Raffy Fizzy in these writeups it was mid-2022, he was 5-1 in the UFC, he hadn’t lost a fight in more than three years and he was about to cement his place as a top ten Lightweight by not just beating but knocking out Rafael dos Anjos, which was, at the time, incredibly impressive. His striking seemed a step above everyone in the division, his back-pocket wrestling had progressed nicely while no one was paying attention, and a giant swath of the audience saw him as a future title contender. He was booked into a fight with Justin Gaethje as a -250 favorite.

It’s four years later. Rafael is 1 for his last 5. What the hell happened?

Well, part of it is just incredibly bad luck. Losing a decision--and not even a unanimous decision, a majority decision--to Justin Gaethje, current #1 Lightweight on the planet, is nothing to feel too bad about, and with a solid rebound Fiziev would’ve been right back in the mix. That looked like it was in the cards, too, as he met Mateusz Gamrot, defended almost all of his takedowns and unanimously won the first round. Two minutes into the second round Fiziev blew his ACL. A year and a half of his prime disappeared on the spot. When he was finally healthy, rehabbed and ready to go, the UFC looked at his two straight losses and 18 months of inactivity and very sensitively booked him into a short-notice fill-in match...against Justin Gaethje, the man who had beaten him two fights prior. Unsurprisingly, Fiziev did not win. He averted a career crash by knocking off Ignacio Bahamondes, and that was supposed to propel him into a top contendership match with Charles Oliveira, but Fiziev’s injuries cropped up again, and he instead followed months of recovery with a severe drubbing at the hands of Maurício Ruffy.

And that’s the other reason he’s in this particular hole. The Lightweight division has changed an awful lot in a very short time. When Fiziev stepped into the cage for that first fight against Gaethje, the division’s top ten included Dustin Poirier, Beneil Dariush, Michael Chandler, Rafael dos Anjos and Jalin Turner. Drew fucking Dober was #14. Arman Tsarukyan wasn’t in the conversation. Max Holloway and Ilia Topuria were still Featherweights. Maurício Ruffy hadn’t even joined the UFC. No one had heard of Quillan Salkilld.

No one was paying attention to Manuel Torres.

It was hard to blame them. He wasn’t one of those smart prospects a bunch of hardcore fans were salivating for, he wasn’t fighting through Fury FC or the Legacy Fighting Alliance, he’s one of the few Mexican prospects to not have a stint with Combate Americas. He competed on regional cards. He got heel hooked by a guy named Mahatma for Club Hardcore Fighter. He had his knee ripped up for Crixus MMA, which closed after five events. One fight before his Contender Series debut, Manuel was beating up a 10-11 man named Carlos Cañada for the ULTIMATE WARRIOR CHALLENGE. But he rattled off three straight first-round finishes in the UFC after just a year and a half! That’s top-fifteen worthy, right?

As it turns out: No. Beating Frank Camacho and Nikolas Motta and Chris Duncan does not prepare you for the top of the heap. The UFC gave Manuel a borderline-ranked shot at the much-maligned, Mexico-focused mega-event at The Sphere©, and it ended with Ignacio Bahamondes knocking him flat in four minutes. Ignacio, who, as we know from the previous paragraph, would himself fail to beat Fiziev and achieve a top-ten ranking, was the brick wall in Manuel’s path.

Except it’s a year and a half later and Manuel’s ranked and fighting the guy who beat the guy who beat him. Once again: What the hell happened?

Here’s the thing about Lightweight: That dramatic change we talked about? It wasn’t entirely natural. For every Poirier retirement, there were a handful of attempts to churn older veterans and rid themselves of meddlesome wrestlers. Drew Dober has dozens of UFC bouts, but when they put him in front of Manuel Torres, he had lost two in a row, was 1 for his last 4, and had gotten the absolute shit beaten out of him in all three of those losses. Manuel knocking him out in two minutes wasn’t a surprise, it was a foregone conclusion. Grant Dawson spent years as an undefeated UFC Lightweight repeatedly denied chances to fight up in the rankings because of his wrestling-heavy style, and once King Green torched him, they tried to book him right back into the ground. By last December, Dawson, who had one loss in thirteen UFC appearances, had put together another three-fight winning streak and gotten his ranking back.

They booked him against the unranked Torres on a one-fight winning streak and Torres smashed him in half a round.

And, like, look: It’s fighting. You can only get so upset about fighters being forced to fight. Management did not book Manuel’s fist upside Dawson’s jaw. But you can glean an awful lot about how fighters are booked, and who is or isn’t favored, by looking at the patterns in their matchmaking.

For instance, this fight wasn’t supposed to happen. Remember this past April, when Beneil Dariush, former contender turned late-thirties hard luck story who can’t stop missing weight and getting knocked out over and over, was marched out to Australia to fight Quillan Salkilld, despite Quillan being a young, in-his-prime knockout machine and Beneil being a human target who’d been knocked out in sixteen seconds less than six months prior?

Yeah! That! That only happened because Manuel got injured. Manuel was supposed to catch that body on the undercard of Procházka vs Ulberg. So what do you do? Do you book Torres against a Salkilldian killer of a prospect? Do you make him defend his spot against a young, hungry guy?

Why would you, when you have another aging, expensive veteran on a skid who got brutally knocked out in the last half-year?

It’s crass and cynical and gross and it also makes complete sense, which makes me hate it even more. I have spilled too much ink on my yearning for the days when the UFC booked fights that were good for the division regardless of who won, rather than fights built to benefit a marketing favorite, and by that metric, this is a really smart match-up. Manuel is distinctly unlikely to wrestle Fiziev, he’s going to fight to his strengths, which virtually guarantees the kind of striking battle the c-suite considers the only acceptable form of fighting, and any eventuality works to their benefit. If Manuel blasts Fiziev out, it gives him his first recognizable victory and puts him in the conversation for a top ten bout. If Fiziev beats back another young prospect, it gives him a new lease on life at Lightweight and gives the Azerbaijani crowd a main-event victory for a hometown hero.

Good matchmaking is good matchmaking whether I like it or not. Torres is solid and dangerous as hell, but he’s also a very straightforward fighter, and I want to believe Fiziev is still fast and technically sound enough to deal with it. RAFAEL FIZIEV BY DECISION.

CO-MAIN EVENT: THE ALTERNATE UNIVERSE WHERE NOTHING MATTERS
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Shara Magomedov (16-1) vs Michel Pereira (32-14 (2))

You know? I’m fine with this.

Shara Magomedov has always occupied this inexplicable, noncanonical space in the annals of the UFC. Too talented to ignore, too good to fire, too likely to suckerpunch men in shopping malls: Too illegal to book outside of the Middle East. He’s got one eye, dude. Michael Bisping got away with being a one-eyed UFC fighter and then he bragged about it and ruined it for every cyclops of the future. For all of the UFC’s repeated assurances that Shara can absolutely totally fight in America and there’s nothing wrong and only a crazy person would say he can’t get licensed, as of this weekend, his seven UFC fights will have taken place in, respectively,

• Abu Dhabi, UAE

• Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

• Abu Dhabi again

• Abu Dhabi for a third time

• Riyadh’s back!

• Oops! All Abu Dhabis

• Baku, motherfuckers

And that’s a real bitch if you’re trying to make him relevant to anything real. Which they did! Just two fights ago they inexplicably booked Shara against Michael “Venom” Page, a man the UFC seems to actively resent having hired because they took him from getting ranked at Welterweight after taking a round off Ian Machado Garry and threw him in at Middleweight against the undefeated guy who can’t fight outside of a small vertical slice of the globe. But the campaign failed, Shara lost his unblemished record, and the UFC just sort of admitted defeat and gave up and had Shara beat up the 6-10 (1) Marc-André Barriault for shits and giggles and now it’s Michel Pereira.

Which is fine, because Michel Pereira doesn’t and arguably has never existed.

Can you prove Michel Pereira is real? A guy who does capoeira kicks but has more decisions than knockouts? A guy who did a moonsault kneedrop on his opponent’s forehead in a real fight? A guy who gained a ton of credibility as a Middleweight contender after buzzsawing three men in three minutes only for everyone to conveniently forget that Ihor Potieria and Andre Petroski aren’t real contenders and everyone in or remotely close to the top fifteen was going to beat him?

Weird knockout artist Michel Pereira, who is supposed to be a terrifying Middleweight knockout threat while also being the last man to ever record a loss against 2005’s hottest prospect, former Featherweight sensation Diego Sanchez?

Forty-three second Kyle Daukaus victim Michel Pereira?

Demonstrably-worse-than-Cody-Brundage Michel Pereira?

Yeah! That’s fine. Put him in there with Shara. Let the guy who can’t fight anywhere with an athletic commission that has at least one optometrist get in the cage with the world’s most dangerous knockout artist who can’t knock out Zach Reese. That’s a genuinely good use of both of these guys. Let them spin at each other threateningly at a ratio of 720 degrees per jab. Let the centripetal force power the lights of Baku.

Start a whole Elseworlds imprint of the UFC around these two. Put Junior Tafa in it so his continued presence makes sense. Put Charles Johnson in it so he can stop being simultaneously the most and least successful Flyweight in the world. Put Yair Rodríguez in it so he can find ways to not take fights in two places at once. Put Bryce Mitchell and Umar Nurmagomedov in it so they can talk about how the Holocaust was fake somewhere no one has to hear about it anymore.

Anything that keeps them over there. SHARA MAGOMEDOV BY TKO.

MAIN CARD: SMALL CONUNDRUMS
LIGHTWEIGHT: Nazim Sadykhov (11-2-1) vs Matheus Camilo (10-3)

Nazim, you were almost heading this thing up. 2025 was almost a breakout year for the Black Wolf. Sadykhov had been heralded as a can’t-miss prospect by all the Ray Longo aficionados out there, but going to a draw with Viacheslav “Slava Claus” Borshchev and going almost a year and a half without a fight thanks to injuries and scheduling issues dampened his hype almost completely. But Nazim surged back at the start of 2025 and, in the space of just five months, stopped the highly-hyped Ismael Bonfim and knocked out Nikolas Motta, a man who now, technically, has a knockout win over a top fifteen Lightweight. It took a little longer than expected, but Nazim was finally living up to the high expectations the world had for him. Right up until December, when Fares Ziam handed him his first-ever knockout loss. No longer borderline-ranked, no longer chasing the big time, Nazim’s just fighting to get back in the conversation.

Matheus Camilo, on the other hands, is fighting to get mentioned in it for the first time in his life. He wasn’t a hyped prospect, he wasn’t even a Contender Series signing--he got signed because of someone else’s misfortune. Dorobshokh Nabotov, a prospect out of Tajikistan, staged a series of publicity stunts that concluded in getting the microphone at a UFC press conference to ask for a shot in the company. Dana had company buddy Chan Sung Jung book him as a try-out, and Matheus Camilo got the call to test him, and Nabotov was found wanting. Camilo took Nabotov’s undefeated record, his UFC contract, and his shot at mainstream approval. He immediately spent it getting choked out by Gabe Green. A few months later Camilo righted the ship with a decision over Nazim’s former foe Slava Claus, but he’s 1-1 and on shaky ground, and booking him to fight the Azerbaijani fighter in Azerbaijan means they either have faith he can pull off another upset or they’re content to let him get crushed for the hometown crowd’s approval.

I’m banking on the Sadykhov revenge tour. NAZIM SADYKHOV BY SUBMISSION.

FLYWEIGHT: Asu Almabayev (23-3, #8) vs Charles Johnson (19-8, #14)

Flyweight is both a land of impossible riches and terrible tragedies. Asu Almabayev is one of the best 125-pound fighters in the entire world. He wrestles, he grapples, he jumps on chokes, he can bother someone for three straight rounds without looking even remotely tired and, as we just saw in his last appearance, he can violently strangle Alex Perez. Asu only has one loss not just in the UFC, but in the last nine years of his career. That loss? Manel Kape, the current top contender, and Kape did it by chaining together eyepokes into one unholy, ocularly-abhorrent combination, which was clearly visible on replays but was not overturned because our sport is fake. Asu is one of the best, but he is boxed out of the top, and he lost his shot at it by a fingertip.

Charles Johnson is in a much weirder, much funnier spot. Despite my years of recorded love for InnerG’s fighting, he is, demonstrably, not one of the best Flyweights in the world. He’s only narrowly above a 50/50 UFC average at 8-6, he hasn’t put together back-to-back wins in years, his long, solid winning streak ended at the hands of Rizin vet Ramazan Temirov, and he’s only just rebounded after getting obliterated in one round by the aforementioned Alex Perez. And yet, Charles cannot be an afterthought, because that same string of bad luck also includes knockout victories over Lone’er Kavanagh, the recently-minted #6 in the world, and Joshua fucking Van, the current world champion. Van only has one loss in an eleven-fight UFC run, and it was Johnson knocking him on his ass.

That’s the kind of thing you have to capitalize on as a journeyman, and Johnson’s fucking trying. This is a real tough matchup for him, Asu’s pressure game is very, very good and he’ll likely run Johnson right into the cage and grind him into dust, but I put up with O’Malley vs Chito 2 as a completely undeserved marketing-favorite’s-revenge title fight that passed up much more deserving contenders, and by god, let’s do that again but this time it’s for a guy I like so it’s okay. CHARLES JOHNSON BY TKO.

MIDDLEWEIGHT: Ikram Aliskerov (17-2) vs Brunno Ferreira (15-3)

For mysterious reasons that definitely aren’t related to his tendency to knock people out, the UFC is real invested in Ikram Aliskerov’s future. Despite his being a relative unknown after beating the likes of Phil Hawes and Warlley Alves, when the first attempt to book former champ Robert Whittaker and Khamzat Chimaev fell through back in the summer of 2024, the UFC decided to put Aliskerov in for Khamzat and hope that, somehow, it would all work out for the best. And it did! In the sense that Bobby Knuckles dusted him in under two minutes and for us Whittaker fans, that’s the only thing left to keep us warm. They let Aliskerov crush André Muniz to get his groove back, they actually tried to book this fight an entire year ago, and when that failed they had Aliskerov beat The Iron Turtle himself, Jun Yong Park, who had, funnily enough, already lost a fight to Muniz.

If you beat someone and they follow that up by booking you against someone who already lost to the guy you beat: Congratulations! Management likes you. If you’re Brunno Ferreira, and you’ve just failed the UFC for the third time after getting stomped out in 107 seconds by Robocop Rodrigues, and in response to your loss they not only book you against an unranked opponent on a winning streak, but one they already tried to match you up with once? Brunno, buddy, I’m sorry, they’re plotting your demise. What’s even sadder: Brunno was supposed to fight Paulo Costa back in March. With a win, that would’ve gotten him a damn ranking. But Costa decided he was too bored of cutting weight and hopped to Light Heavyweight instead, and now he’s a prominent contender and Brunno is stuck fighting a big favorite knockout artist whom the local crowd would much rather root for.

Sorry, Brunno. IKRAM ALISKEROV BY TKO.

MIDDLEWEIGHT: Abus Magomedov (28-7-1) vs Michał Oleksiejczuk (22-9)

Abus: I give up. I give up on you. I give you up. You and your long, lanky legs had one job, and that was to prevent us from falling into the Sean Strickland timeline, and you failed, and now he’s a two-time champion. That would be enough to damn you. But you had a chance at cleansing yourself of your sins. They put you up against Joe Pyfer last October, and once again, yours was the fist standing between Heaven and Hell, and once again, you let the god damned demons in. You got choked out and now I have no use for you. You have disappointed me too many times.

Michał: This is your job, now. Are you being set up to lose this fight? Yes. Have you, in fact, gotten destroyed by people Abus beat? Yes. Are you going to win this fight anyway, half because your time training with the Fighting Nerds seems to have worked really well in terms of getting you to finally calm the hell down and fight to your strengths and half because you are now the sword of the divine and all of the pressure of rebuilding the wall that once kept the bigots and horrors out of the Middleweight division rests on your shoulders?

Do it for Dave Menne. Do it for Murilo Bustamante. Do it for the Middleweight we need. MICHAŁ OLEKSIEJCZUK BY TKO.

PRELIMS: FINISH YOUR JUICE BOX
WELTERWEIGHT: Farman Hasanov (5-0) vs Eric Nolan (8-4)

Should Farman Hasanov be here? Probably not. He’s only fought rookies or people who, themselves, have only fought rookies, but at 5-0 that makes sense. At 5-0 you probably shouldn’t be fighting people who matter, and the fact that 5-0 people are getting into the UFC is more of an indictment of the UFC than anything else. Hasanov’s tape is mild and inoffensive, the kind of wrestleboxing that would be a throwback were it not for how kind of slow and laborious it is, like watching a c-tier sitcom pretend to be Wings, and if any part of you replied to that with “but Carl, Wings was a c-tier sitcom,” you can get the fuck out right now. Eric Nolan, on the other hand, is absolutely supposed to be here, because this is why they hired him in the first place. He was signed on 48 hours’ notice because Baisangur Susurkaev got a big win on the Contender Series and the UFC decided to pull a publicity stunt by booking him into a proper fight that same week, and Nolan was the Cage Fury FC champion--i.e., one fight beforehand he’d been competing with a 4-7 guy named Trevor Gudde--at Welterweight. So they pulled him into the main show up a weight class with two days to prepare because they wanted another guy to get a stoppage in the UFC.

And now he’s fighting a fighter who got signed for being Azerbaijani so they could put him on a card in Azerbaijan. Their decisionmaking is rarely subtle and I hope it blows up in their face. ERIC NOLAN BY TKO.

LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Abdul Rakhman Yakhyaev (9-0) vs Julius Walker (7-2)

The “x beat y and y beat z so x will beat z” nature of MMA math is, and has always, been specious. It exists to simplify problems that exist not in a place of logic, but dreams and mysteries. Sometimes, however, you can compress it to something more reasonable. In this case, Abdul Rakhman Yakhyaev is an undefeated man with 2 UFC wins and a near-100% finishing rate, and Julius Walker is 1-2 in the company and just got violently knocked out four months ago, and Walker’s one UFC victory was an awkward decision over Raffael Cerqueira that Cerqueira gave away after nearly knocking him out and choosing to jump a guillotine instead of finishing the job, and one fight later, Cerqueira met Yakhyaev, who floored him and choked him out in thirty-three seconds.

Math is cruel. ABDUL RAKHMAN YAKHYAEV BY TKO.

MIDDLEWEIGHT: Nursulton Ruziboev (36-9-2 (2)) vs Andrey Pulyaev (10-4)

Sometimes you have one of those fights whose end result doesn’t feel like it’s in doubt, but the act of getting there will probably still be a lot of fun. Like, Nursulton is extremely likely to win this fight. He is big and powerful and extremely hard to defeat, and Andrey Pulyaev’s career has been marked primarily by getting repeatedly outstruck. But he’s overperformed in his losses. The last time we saw Andrey he was being served up as a +650 underdog to living wrecking ball Ateba Gautier, and yeah, Pulyaev lost, but he not only ended Ateba’s finishing streak, he took a round off Ateba and even narrowly beat him on a couple media scorecards. That level of toughness starts to raise questions. How much of Nursulton’s success is favorable matchmaking? How much of Pulyaev’s failure is being constantly thrown to the wolves? If Pulyaev doesn’t go away in the first half of the fight, do the odds begin to shift?

NURSULTON RUZIBOEV BY DECISION is still the call, but Pulyaev’s got real upset potential.

FEATHERWEIGHT: Kaan Ofli (13-4-1) vs Javier Reyes (23-5)

Kaan, buddy, I don’t think this is gonna work. For those who missed my horrible 2024 odyssey through the shapeless, featureless doldrums of The Ultimate Fighter 32 (jesus christ), Kaan Ofli came from its terrible depths, and while they introduced their picks for each team and gave some background for almost everyone involved,

• Kaan Ofli of Australia, Pick #5: The show does not bother to talk about him.

Kaan ultimately lost the season's championship fight after being knocked out by Mairon Santos, but the UFC signed him anyway, because nothing means anything. Kaan lost again, but pulled together a submission over the perpetually troubled Ricardo Ramos and the perpetually overpushed Yizha, and for that, he must fall. Javier Reyes is one of the few, welcome Contender Series signings I didn't have a single bad thing to say about. He's experienced, he's well-balanced, he's aggressive and traveled, and while he does tend to favor the house style of shirking defense more than is necessarily wise, in his case, it is a skillset honed over dozens of fights rather than embraced because he hasn't been around long enough to figure out how blocking works.

He's very solid, he's very dangerous, he's hard to wrestle and he's got half a foot of reach on Kaan. Violence seems likely. JAVIER REYES BY TKO.

WELTERWEIGHT: Daniil Donchenko (13-2) vs Theodor Berggren (8-3)

We're just cramming all the TUF stuff together. Do you remember Daniil Donchenko? Do you remember anything of TUF 33 (jesus christ)? Did you even know TUF 34 (jesus christ) had its debut this week? Guess what: It didn't! That was last week. Daniel Cormier and Chael Sonnen, once upon a time stars of the sport, are old and retired and hosting a talent development show that no one fucking watches and the UFC barely acknowledges exists and your reward for winning a TUF championship now is the right to fight a guy with a journeyman's record in FIGHT CLUB RUSH and a win over in Cage Warriors against a 3-2 guy.

I miss Kendall Grove. DANIIL DONCHENKO BY DECISION.

BANTAMWEIGHT: Bekzat Almakhan (12-3) vs Jean Matsumoto (17-2)

What a deeply bizarre fight between two bizarrely booked fighters. Bekzat Almakhan was a solid and respectable if unheralded regional prospect who'd barely left his native Kazakhstan when the UFC signed him in 2024 and immediately booked him against Umar Nurmagomedov, one of the three best Bantamweights on the entire planet. Shockingly, he lost, and they've been keeping him in a strange holding pattern ever since, wheeling him out to beat up poor Brad Katona or test Ilia Topuria's brother Aleksandre, and now, he's here to see if Jean Matsumoto still has what it takes. Just a touch over one year ago, Jean looked like he was going to be a player in Bantamweight's new era. Young, well-rounded, undefeated, defensively sound--when Dominick Cruz fell out of his own retirement fight with Rob Font the UFC picked Jean to take his place, and the world widely considered him a favorite to beat the eternal gatekeeper and take his place in the rankings. Sixteen months later, Jean is 1 for 3 and all three fights were split decision tossups, with Font and Farid Basharat both beating Jean. For three straight fights, Jean was a main card prospect. Now he's one slot away from curtain-jerking in Baku, and there are valid questions to be asked about how much of his fall comes from higher competition and how much comes from losing part of his edge.

BEKZAT ALMAKHAN BY DECISION. I think Jean is heading to the land of What Ifs.

WELTERWEIGHT: Tahir Abdullayev (21-3) vs Jefferson Nascimento (13-0)

This is not a fight between two men, this is a battle between the two sides of the sport. Jefferson Nascimento has, in theory, done everything right. He worked his way through Brazil's regional scene, he hooked up with a solid fight team, he made his way to the Legacy Fighting Alliance, battled through solid competition, and has reigned as their Lightweight champion for the last two years. He earned every part of his contract. Tahir Abdullayev lost to the last good fighter he faced. He's on a four-fight winning streak against journeymen, jobbers, and, in my personal favorite, a guy who was 2-0 against Tahir's 21 recorded bouts. He is here because he was born in Baku. He is here because he is convenient.

I will root for the soul of the sport until its embers are dead and gone. JEFFERSON NASCIMENTO BY TKO.

SATURDAY, JUNE 20 FROM THE EMPTY SOUL OF THE APEX
PRELIMS 2 PM PDT / 5 PM EDT | MAIN CARD 5 PM PDT / 8 PM EDT

Feels real weird to go back to normal after all of that, doesn’t it?

Aside from the million other reasons I resent the White House card for existing, I can now add that for the first time in my entire goddamn life, I looked at a UFC event and thought “Oh, thank god, it’s only the Apex.”

MAIN EVENT: HIDDEN HISTORY
FLYWEIGHT: Manel Kape (22-7, #2) vs Kyoji Horiguchi (36-5 (1), #5)

This is a great fucking fight. This is an amazing bout between two of the best Flyweights on the entire planet. It is only through the lens of the Apex, and what it says about the different scales at which mixed martial arts operates, that I can find a single thing to feel bad about.

I mean, aside from the whole ‘Manel Kape keeps using gay slurs and calling people who anger him genetic failures’ thing. I could complain about that, and honestly, our proximity to the White House card is probably why I just don’t have the energy to get mad about it again right now. I am not thinking about Manel Kape the weirdly insecure guy, I am thinking about Manel Kape, unequivocal top contender to the Flyweight title.

Because he is, man. There’s no more denying it. Kape has spent the last five years being dogged by an inability to get over the line, be it badly-timed losses or injuries or opponents botching their weight cuts or Kape botching his weight cuts or, you know, steroids, he’s found himself repeatedly boxed out of contention. Should Muhammad Mokaev have his spot? Yes. Should Asu Almabayev sue the Kape estate for beating him with multiple eye gouges strung together like a Mortal Kombat Armageddon create-a-fatality? Also yes.

Did Kape make himself undeniable by blowing Brandon Royval out of the water? That, unfortunately, is the biggest and most present yes. Royval spent years stuck in his own holding pattern right at the edge of the summit. Good enough to beat Brandon Moreno and get to Alexandre Pantoja twice: Not good enough to win the belt. Went the distance with Tatsuro Taira and Joshua Van, but only beat the former, not the latter. He was long considered the toughest top contender to beat in the entire goddamn company. So Kape immolating him in three minutes last December made him, seemingly, the natural fit for the title picture. Sure, there was the complicating wrinkle of Joshua Van having just won the belt on a bizarre injury stoppage, but Kape was next, right?

Nope! Tatsuro Taira, the man who lost to the man Kape had just destroyed. Well, that sucks for Kape, but that means he gets the next crack at Van, surely?

Why, no. Instead, he gets to fight the goddamn bogeyman.

Kyoji Horiguchi is the best fighter in the world. I don’t care that this is objectively untrue: I am asserting it anyway. 36-5 (1) is already an absurdly good record for anyone who’s spent the majority of their career in the major leagues, but it belies an even wilder sub-statistic: Only one of those losses actually came at Horiguchi’s home in the Flyweight division, and that was against Demetrious “Mighty Mouse” Johnson, arguably the greatest fighter of all time.

Flyweight is such an underbooked global divisionKyoji Horiguchi is just so god damned good that he had to fight at 135 pounds, despite being shorter than all but one of the UFC’s Bantamweights, and he was still great there. At one point in an era of co-promotion that now seems like an impossibly beautiful dream, he simultaneously held 135-pound gold in both Japan and America, thanks to Rizin and Bellator joining forces in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to compete with the UFC’s iron grip on the sport.

Shinryu Takahashi and Ougikubo, the only other Rizin Flyweight champions, both lost to Horiguchi before he left to return to the UFC. Kai Asakura fell to Horiguchi’s fists in under a round. Darrion Caldwell, Bellator champion, got beat by Horiguchi twice in six months. Ian McCall, UFC standout. Hideo Tokoro, living legend.

Manel Kape.

That’s right, baby: This is a rematch. The first time Kyoji and Manel fought was as part of a three-fights-in-48-hours tournament back in 2017 in Rizin. It was a good fight, too, with Kyoji ultimately choking Kape out late in the third. At the time, they were the two best Bantamweights Rizin had to offer, and they did battle in the Saitama Super Arena on New Year’s Eve on the same card as Mirko Cro-Cop, Takanori Gomi and Tenshin Nasukawa in front of tens of thousands of people.

And now they’re two of the best Flyweights the UFC has to offer and they’re fighting for title contention in the Apex.

Really sucks the air out of things, doesn’t it? Like, this is great! This is a stellar fucking fight! Almost nine years of history leading up to this rematch, two men at the top of their game, one maddened by a need for revenge, the other trying to live up to the dreams of his fallen master (no, really, he changed his nickname over it and everything), with the winner all but guaranteed a shot at the greatest Flyweight prize in the world. This is exactly the kind of thing the pomp and circumstance of combat sports theatrics were made for. You could market entire shows around this. When this fight was first rumored it was assumed to be an anchoring fight for the UFC’s first Japanese event in damn near a decade.

And instead it’s here, in the Apex, in front of a few dozen people and also co-main eventer Navajo Stirling before they kick him out because competing in the Apex doesn’t entitle you to a seat afterward.

This was a great fight in 2017 and it’s even better now. Both men have come even further into their own styles. Horiguchi has mastered his darting attacks and the way he varies up his offense so opponents don’t see his takedowns coming; Kape has calmed the fuck down (stylistically, if not personally) and is much better at taking his time and controlling how quickly he burns his gas tank. He’s a much more mature version of the 25 year-old Kyoji choked out.

But: He’s Kyoji goddamned Horiguchi. KYOJI GODDAMNED HORIGUCHI BY TKO.

CO-MAIN EVENT: AH, THAT’S BETTER
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Ion Cuțelaba (20-11-1 (1)) vs Navajo Stirling (9-0)

It’s like falling down an elevator shaft. It’s like running after the Road Runner and smacking facefirst into what you thought was a conveniently-placed tunnel. It’s like walking out of the shower in the morning happy, clean and prepared to face the horrors of the world only to slip and fall into the moat you dug around your house for when the Water Wars happen.

Except a moat has at least a little bit of depth, and Light Heavyweight does not.

Ion Cuțelaba has a losing UFC record. It’s close--it’s 9-10-1--but it’s still on the wrong side of history. He has a victory over top contender Khalil Rountree Jr.! In 2019. In the seven years since then, he has defeated the following men:

• Devin Clark, cut after going 8-9

• Tanner Boser, who just got re-signed after his unsuccessful 5-5 run

• Ivan Erslan, who just saved his job with his first-ever UFC victory last month after dropping three straight

• Ibo Aslan, who just finished dropping three straight

• Oumar Sy, who went from an undefeated superprospect to 1 for his last 3 after Ion choked him out in a single round

But, hey: Navajo Stirling, right? Undefeated! Young-ish! Name sounds sort of interesting! Is he setting the world on fire?

No. You fool. You foolish fool. There is no fire. There is no fuel to burn. In four UFC wins, Navajo Stirling has exactly one victory over a man with a winning record in the company. That man is Rodolfo Bellato, and that record is 2-1-1 (1).

These two men have only the barest hint of divisional traction. Neither has a particularly impactful win anywhere in their recent history. Nobody in this arrangement has demonstrated the capacity to be the future of the division.

Which sucks, because this fight might, legitimately, be pivotal to the future of the division.

Light Heavyweight is fucked, man. We talk about Women’s Bantamweight being in bad straits, but 205 is right on their tail. Here is the entire goddamn ladder, without missing a single beat.

• Brand new champion Carlos Ulberg tore his ACL in his title win and is out indefinitely

• #1 Magomed Ankalaev just got shitcanned by Alex Pereira and is being booked down the card against Khalil Rountree Jr.

• #2 Alex Pereira isn’t even in this division anymore and just got destroyed by Ciryl Gane at Heavyweight

• #3 Jiří Procházka is a fan favorite who has also been knocked out in three title shots in as many years and already lost to the champ

• #4 Jan Błachowicz just went on injury leave for a torn meniscus, by the time he returns from which he’ll be either damn near or past 44 years old and he already lost to the champ

• #5 Khalil Rountree Jr. is somehow the best-positioned contender left, which is unfortunate because he’s 1 for his last 3 after getting brutally knocked out twice in one year

• #6 Jamahal Hill is currently on his third or fourth injury leave for serious leg issues

• #7 Paulo Costa has one fight at Light Heavyweight

• #8 Azamat Murzakanov just got knocked out by Paulo Costa, who has one fight at Light Heavyweight

• #9 Volkan Oezdemir is almost 38 and already lost to the champ

• #10 Bogdan Guskov failed to beat Volkan and Jan both

• #11 Dominick Reyes is a weird, tragic meme and already lost to the champ

• #12 Nikita Krylov got knocked out by Reyes and Guskov both and is welcoming former Welterweight Robert Whittaker to the division next month

• #13 Johnny Walker is moving up to Heavyweight

• #14 Aleksandar Rakić is moving up to Heavyweight

• #15 Alonzo Menifield is almost 39, gets crushed by everyone in the top ten, and already got knocked out by the champ in twelve seconds

That’s it. That is the top of your entire Light Heavyweight division. 20% of the Light Heavyweight ladder is injured and another, separate 20% doesn’t even fight at Light Heavyweight anymore. There is exactly one fight between already-ranked fighters booked in the entire fucking weight class, and it’s Magomed Ankalaev, who was champion one fight ago, against Khalil Rountree Jr., who is half the top ten below him and coming off a vicious knockout loss. Pereira’s gone. Jiří’s tarnished. Ulberg might have to vacate. Paulo fucking Costa might get the next shot at the title.

BREAKING NEWS: In the middle of editing, Jamahal Hill announced that he, too, wants to move up to Heavyweight. We are now at one-fourth of the entire ladder departing said ladder for Heavyweight all at once. Half of the rankings are functionally gone. Jesus wept.

205 was the UFC’s premiere division. It was the land of Frank Shamrock and Tito Ortiz, Chuck Liddell and Randy Couture, Lyoto Machida and Rampage Jackson. Jon Jones. Daniel Cormier.

If you’re asking where the next great Light Heavyweight prospects are: This is, unironically, it. Navajo Stirling. Longest non-Ulberg winning streak in the division. Beneath him, it’s a three-way tie between no less than Dustin Jacoby, Iwo Baraniewski, and Billy Elekana. This is all there is.

Sit on the rusted throne. Inherit the ashes under your feet. NAVAJO STIRLING BY DECISION.

MAIN CARD: MISPLACED PIECES
FEATHERWEIGHT: Vinicius Oliveira (23-4, #12 at Bantamweight) vs Andre Fili (25-13 (1), NR)

One fight really changes everything, doesn’t it. On February 6, Vinicius Oliveira was one of Bantamweight’s biggest prospects. Rangy, powerful, difficult to effectively grapple, and possessed of that overt meanness in the way he hit people--not hunting for knockouts, not technically timing his counterpunches, just going out there trying to make his opponent completely miserable. And it worked fantastically, and it got him past a number of genuine prospects, and it got his name into the conversation for the top ten. And then it got him in the cage with Mario Bautista. Sometimes fights play out in such a way that it reinforces the concept of levels. Oliveira barely got a dozen strikes off between being absolutely styled on by Bautista’s grappling advantage, which, in turn, let Bautista crack him upside the head at will, and in just a hair under two rounds Bautista choked him out. More than being bummed out, though, Oliveira admitted a bit of relief, because cutting to 135 pounds was killing him.

He was supposed to get a solid measuring stick fight against the tragically fallen Giga Chikadze here, but Giga’s out, so instead we have the eternal road warrior, Andre Fili, who is entering, I swear to god, his seventh straight year of managing to never string together a pair of wins or losses. Back in 2019 he beat Myles Jury and Sheymon Moraes back-to-back, and since then: Chaos. He’s rarely ever boring, he’s rarely an easy out, and he goes to split decisions all the god damned time. But, statistically speaking, he wins more of them than he loses, so who’s to say if it’s good or bad? Hell, his entire career is a perpetually horrifying Sword of Damocles situation where every time I see him I think ‘hey, didn’t he temporarily go blind in one eye from getting punched too much?’ and then I remember that not only did that, in fact, happen, it was already almost three and a half years ago and he’s absorbed another 175 recorded headshots since then and that’s not counting sparring and I have to go lay down.

Please do not rob this poor man of his sight, Lok Dog. VINICIUS OLIVEIRA BY DECISION.

FEATHERWEIGHT: Hyder Amil (11-2) vs Christian Rodriguez (12-4)

Hyder Amil, you were supposed to be a thing. Amil was one of the more-hyped Contender Series children, a 2023 winner who seemed promisingly well-rounded and had already successfully tested himself in Bellator and the LFA en route to the big show, and starting off his UFC career with two straight underdog knockout victories earned him a whole lot of respect from the fans. Beating William Gomis by split decision didn’t really lower his stock, either--it’s William Gomis, no one’s stopped him in almost ten years, and besides, he won! Then Jose Delgado knocked Amil out in twenty-six seconds. Then Jamall Emmers, who had gone half a decade without managing back-to-back wins, finally broke his streak by grinding Amil down to a unanimous decision loss. One year ago, Amil was undefeated: Now, he is trying to avert a three-fight losing streak.

No one gets how quickly the sport can move past you like Christian Rodriguez. The UFC hand-picked him as a main-card pay-per-view victim for their undefeated child soldier Raul Rosas Jr. thanks to Christian’s history of getting outwrestled, and Christian proceeded to really piss them off by a) missing weight and b) beating the absolute dogshit out of their special boy. He then proceeded to miss weight even worse in his next fight, which meant it was time for a--completely correct--forced move to Featherweight by the UFC. 145 just hasn’t been kind to the man. Hilariously, his two moments of glory have come from taking out two more undefeated UFC prospects, one in Isaac Dulgarian and the other in Austin Bashi, but he’s 1 for his last 4 and I promise they would not miss him if he lost and they could finally get their just revenge.

So I am asking you to do it to ‘em one more time. CHRISTIAN RODRIGUEZ BY DECISION.

FLYWEIGHT: André Lima (11-0) vs Kevin Borjas (10-5)

André Lima has had an incredibly annoying time in the UFC, through very little fault of his own. He makes it through the Contender Series in 2023, waits half a year to make his debut against Igor Severino, and wins--by disqualification, after Severino bites him so hard it leaves a dental imprint of his teeth so perfect you would scoff at it for being unrealistic if you saw it on whatever iteration of CSI is still plaguing the airwaves. He goes through two replacements for one fight, then fucks up his own weight cut. He wins two fights, including his first finish and by far the best win of his career, then finds himself on the shelf for more than a year with an injury. He waits on a return against Dong Hun Choi, only for that fight to be rescheduled twice and ultimately cancelled.

And now, as one of the most promising Flyweight prospects in the company, he is making his return against Kevin Borjas, who is 1-4 in the company and whose one and only win came against Mexican meme star Ronaldo “Lazy Boy” Rodríguez, who missed weight and hasn’t competed since. Borjas wasn’t supposed to win that fight, and as revenge for his victory the UFC sent him to China to lose to Chinese star Sumudaerji, and when that didn’t satisfy their thirst for revenge, they followed it up by sending him to Mexico City to lose a fight against Imanol Rodriguez. He is here to be defeated. He is here to suffer.

So please make it quick, André. ANDRÉ LIMA BY SUBMISSION.

FEATHERWEIGHT: Melsik Baghdasaryan (8-3) vs Murtazali Magomedov (10-0)

As someone who spends too much of their free time face-deep in MMA research, I’d like you to know, for the record, that half the problem is how much of our data is just plain wrong. The UFC’s punch stats? The ones I cite all the time? Not just frequently miscalculated, but also beholden to such absurd rubrics that every three-feet-away teep Sean Strickland throws is counted as a significant strike attempt, but someone landing a ground-and-pound haymaker might not make the cut. The records? Regularly disputed, given that one leading database counts everything and another tries to reflect fixed fights.

When I went looking up tape on Murtazali Magomedov, I saw that his last pre-Contender Series fight was a bout with Brazilian champion Claudeci Brito. According to Tapology’s database--and the UFC’s--Murtazali and Brito are the same exact height, down to the centimeter.

Down to the centimeter.

I dunno, man. Melsik Baghdasaryan had promise as a striking prospect but then he disappeared in a puff of smoke and this is just one month shy of being his second fight in the last three years. We saw him in February of 2025 and he got destroyed in one round by Jean Silva and then he went right back to the toy chest. Every time he shows up he looks a little worse and a little more tentative, and meanwhile, Murtazali is fighting out in Kazakhstan where people are of indeterminate height and everyone knows how to wrestle at least a little bit.

I will side with the Steppe. MURTAZALI MAGOMEDOV BY TKO.

PRELIMS: DEATH WOULD BE MORE HONEST
WOMEN’S BANTAMWEIGHT: Bia Mesquita (7-0, #13) vs Melissa Mullins (7-2, NR)

It’s very, very funny that I spent all that time talking about how Light Heavyweight is doing almost as poorly as Women’s Bantamweight, and yet, the inequality remains. Navajo Stirling and Ion Cuțelaba? Co-main event. Hyder Amil vs Christian Rodriguez? Main card. And yet, predictable as the sun, we have two ranked women’s fights on the prelims, and both of them are at Women’s Bantamweight, and the higher-ranked one is actually lower than this one because nothing is real. Bia Mesquita is, quite possibly, one of the only hopes for this division. She’s a hyper-aggressive grappler with world-class bonafides and despite being the second-smallest woman in the division they’ve allowed her to strangle everyone in her way. Melissa Mullins was 2023’s iteration of a bigger, stronger and considerably more British version of a grappling prospect for the future, but unfortunately, she just isn’t quite as good at it and she also keeps boning up her weight cut. The UFC putting her here in a ranked match is not a favor to her; it is an attempt to get rid of her.

At least they’re putting Mesquita in a preliminary headliner? I fucking guess? My fingers are scrabbling through the dirt and silt to find the bottom of this bar. BIA MESQUITA BY SUBMISSION.

FLYWEIGHT: Mitch Raposo (10-3) vs Allan Nascimento (22-6)

Good news, me: This is a rescheduling so you don’t have to do any goddamn work. We were supposed to see this back in April at Burns vs Malott, but Raposo got sick 48 hours before the event. Consequently: A rerun.

They're putting you out to pasture, Mitch. You were a late replacement signing that they expected very little from, and you managed to wrestle a bit, which they also don't like, and somehow despite pretty clearly losing most of your fights you kept only barely dropping split decisions, which is even worse. They expected you to lose to Azat Maksum last October and help rebuild his prospects, and they were not anticipating Azat blowing his weight cut and coming in tired and unprepared. So here's the good news, Mitch: You get another shot and it's at a real opponent who's damn near ranked! The bad news is he's one of the best grapplers in the division and they are wholly intent on him strangling you.

I almost want to root for you, but Allan beat my boy Jafel Filho, so I'm honorbound to root for him. ALLAN NASCIMENTO BY SUBMISSION.

FEATHERWEIGHT: Michael Aswell Jr. (11-4) vs Gaston Bolaños (8-5)

If you asked me to imagine the platonic ideal of an Apex prelim, it would be either this or a Middleweight bout between people with 4-0 records and nicknames like “Party Time” or “Bodybagz.” Gaston was a Bellator also-ran four years and change ago, he was one of the odder UFC pickups and he has proceeded to go 2-2, accomplish nothing, and sit out for an entire year since getting choked out by Quang Le, who has actually since been released from the organization, which is even more insulting. Michael Aswell Jr. is 1-2, his only victory came against Lucas Almeida, who was cut immediately afterward, and as an additional bonus he got hit one hundred and thirteen times just one day shy of three months ago but he’s still here because fuck you, get back in the fucking cage or we’ll go back to Samurai Fight House and hire Emmanuel “El Perro” Vallejos and replace you.

MICHAEL ASWELL JR. BY DECISION.

WOMEN’S BANTAMWEIGHT: Karol Rosa (19-7, #8) vs Luana Santos (10-2, #11)

Yup, here it is. Top ten Women’s Bantamweight fight? One woman who’s beaten former title contenders and been in a Fight of the Year candidate, one woman who’s 5-1 and on a solid winning streak? You better fucking believe that’s all the way down the fuck here. Karol Rosa may have a dozen UFC fights, but win or lose she’s gone to a decision in every single one of them, so the UFC has no use for her because it’s not like she’s Colby fucking Covington or anything. Luana Santos dropped a bout to Casey O’Neill a couple years ago, but since then she’s tapped Tainara Lisboa and beaten promising Canadian prospect Melissa Croden, so it makes perfect sense that she’s getting tested in the top ten against one of the longest-tenured, most-successful veterans in the division.

On the prelims. Under Michael Aswell Jr. It’s almost like they don’t want the division to live. What a crazy thought, that. KAROL ROSA BY DECISION.

WELTERWEIGHT: Leon Shahbazyan (12-4) vs Levan Chokheli (14-3 (1))

Hold on, wait. I’m sorry. Leon Shahbazyan? Edmen Shahbazyan wasn’t already enough, you had to go hire his older fucking brother? His brother who got knocked out by Phil Rowe on the Contender series? His brother who got thrown in a trashcan by Ryan Loder, TUF 32 (jesus christ) champion, in a minute and a half, a couple years before Loder proceeded to get repeatedly and effortlessly destroyed in the company? You are hiring that Leon Shahbazyan? His last five wins were the 14-10 Robert Hale, the 10-9 Gláucio Eliziário, the 9-10 Aaron “The Alaskan Bull Worm” Phillips, the 7-5 Aireon Tavarres, and my personal favorite, Marcus Hardaway, an 0-2 fighter whose last fight was against the man with the best name in the entire sport, Here Dudes? And you’re putting him against Levan Chokheli, who, himself, is known almost solely for losing to Goiti Yamauchi and Lorenz Larkin in Bellator?

You know what probably would have been a better idea? HIRING GOITI YAMAUCHI OR LORENZ LARKIN. You cut Lorenz Larkin a decade ago on a two-fight winning streak over Jorge Masvidal and Neil Magny! You could still get him! It isn’t too late!

Except, y’know, for how late it is. LEVAN CHOKHELI BY JESUS CHRIST, WHATEVER, I GUESS TKO, FUCK.

FEATHERWEIGHT: Shane Collins (7-0) vs Otari Tanzilovi (10-1)

No biting cynicism on this one, I’m looking forward to it. Shane Collins may still be a bit lacking in professional experience, but he had a long run as a successful amateur, he’s done well for himself down in Urijah Faber’s promotion, and he’s already pretty solid at wrestling, stringing together combinations and breaking livers, which puts him a step ahead of the rest of his peers. Otari Tanzilovi’s a Georgian striker who spins possibly more than he should and craves nothing more than the feeling of ribs breaking under his feet to the point of overcommitting, but he’s taken out a couple good fighters and he was a coinflip away from beating Josias Musasa on the Contender Series in 2024, so he almost made it to the big show already.

Of course, Musasa has proceeded to go 0-2, and Tanzilovi is being brought in as an underdog prospect, which is indicative that the house knows who it’s going for, here. SHANE COLLINS BY DECISION.

SUNDAY, JUNE 14 FROM THE WHITE HOUSE
MAIN CARD 5 PM PDT / 8 PM EDT

I've been thinking about this for months and I'm still not entirely sure what I want to say. Rather: I know what I want to say, but it's a bit of everything and I don't know where to start.

At least, I didn't until today, which, as of this writing, is Monday the 8th. Ariel Helwani, the Only MMA Journalist That Matters, decided to chime in on the White House card with his enlightened point of view:

After my eyes stopped spontaneously spewing blood in three-foot arcs I went back to my giant folder of .txt files and deleted my notes on the spot, because I have never felt such a need for the honesty inherent to stream of consciousness.

So, if you are here for a breakdown of the fights as per usual: My apologies, we are not doing that this week, but Jess has you covered in her usually perfect style. If you are here for purely angry ranting, we’re not doing that here, either, but Eric’s gonna have you covered tomorrow.

If you are here to try to make sense of your persistent bewilderment about why, exactly, any of us are still here: You have come to the right place.

PART ONE: EVERYTHING IS BAD

I’m just so tired, man.

This card doesn’t fucking matter, so let’s just dispense with the idea that it does. We’ll just get it out of the way; it won’t take long. You’ve got a Lightweight title fight where the top contender is a guy who already lost to both of the actual top contenders but it’s fine because he beat Paddy Pimblett, a Heavyweight title fight where one guy has failed to win the title on three separate occasions and the other has never fought at the weight class and is on a winning streak of One, Sean O’Malley against The Only Remaining Top Contender They’re Confident He Can Beat, multiple-time retiree Derrick Lewis vs Josh Hokit, the only man too insufferable for the current state of things who also just got hit 214 times two months ago, a damaged Lightweight contender in Mauricio Ruffy getting some attempted rehab against Michael Chandler, who is inexplicably still ranked despite his only win in the last five and a half years coming against Tony Ferguson, a damaged Middleweight contender in Bo Nickal against Kyle Daukaus in the most “he plays golf with Trump and is vaguely bigoted so we need to find a space for him” matchup possible, and Diego Lopes, who lost two title fights in ten months, against Steve Garcia.

That’s it. That’s what this whole giant democracy-destroying fuckfest is giving you. Two bullshit title matches that exist solely for marketing reasons and a bunch of managerially-favored prospects in intentionally lopsided contests and then there’s one fight that’s Actually Neat so it’s the one getting the least attention or care. For the Biggest UFC Event Ever, it is bloodless and cynical.

Which makes it the perfect encapsulation of this moment in the sport.

I started writing these in January of 2022. For almost five years, we have been watching mixed martial arts die. The UFC has become a parody of itself, a ramshackle organization that has spent those years casting off its veneer of respectability or legitimacy in favor of turning into a gaping tumorous mass formed from sheer corporate id. There’s no semblance of meritocracy anymore. The head of the company beats his chest at public press conferences about sidelining #1-ranked competitors out of personal discontent. Veterans, successful prospects and even undefeated top contenders get fired if management dislikes them. Titlists are crowned by fiat. The last two Heavyweight champions of the world left the company in mid-reign, and with the growing acrimony between the UFC and Tom Aspinall, we appear to be heading for a hat trick.

But it’s not just them. The rest of the sport has been choked out in parallel. The American B-leagues of MMA are a smoldering crater. Bellator, the second-best we could do, is dead. The Professional Fighters League, the slouching trash compactor that consumed it, is such a mess that in 2026, the year they realized their huge, ambitious plans of jettisoning their tournament format and embracing life as a Real Organization with standing champions and a roster, they’ve only managed seven events in the first half of the year, and that’s with such big headline fights as Jay-Jay Wilson vs Darragh Kelly and Logan Storley vs Florim Zendeli. But don’t worry! More than a full month after their last card they’re coming back in style, featuring no less than Salamat “No Wikipedia Page Necessary” Isbulaev in their main event. Invicta FC, the only major women’s MMA promotion in stateside history, has been MIA for the last thirteen months while the company that owns it focuses on getting deeper into bed with the WWE, and, thus, TKO and the UFC.

And the international scene isn’t doing all that great! When I started writing these ONE Championship was genuine international competition with a major cable broadcast deal and now it barely promotes the sport. Rizin is fun as hell and doing their best to keep the flame alive for Japanese MMA, but the business has had to draw down to stay healthy, and over the same timeframe that turned ONE into a dead husk, Rizin has gone from thirteen shows a year to eight. The UK has been trimmed down to feeder leagues. Brazil has been fragmented to hell. Absolute Championship Akhmat is chugging along in Russia, but its only big move in years has been signing Jailton goddamn Almeida.

So when I see Ariel Helwani, the canonical voice of mixed martial arts journalism, extol the virtues of ignoring the political ramifications of the UFC holding an event at the White House in favor of celebrating just how far the sport has come, my second reaction was to say, motherfucker, that was ten years ago. The sport has come so far back down over the last decade that we’re swimming in the same primordial muck it started in, back when fans were stabbing Renzo Gracie through the cage and Gerard Gordeau was gouging out Yuki Nakai’s eye. Back when the presence of rapists and Nazis was not only accepted but expected. Celebrating the success of the sport in the present is like throwing a birthday party for a corpse.

But, again: That was my second reaction.

My first was to say, dude, you know perfectly well why you don’t feel the need to view this as a political event.

PART TWO: NOTHING IS REAL

I have not forgotten the years of keep-politics-out-of-sports discourse that came up every time someone dared to imply that anything happening in mixed martial arts had any significance outside of people punching each other for money. I have not forgotten the attempt to talk down Dana White’s early flirtations with promoting Trump or his first speech at the Republican National Convention that he ludicrously described as an apolitical act of friendly support. I have not forgotten the way the sport and pundits treated Fallon Fox as MMA’s only visible transgender competitor, nor the way that we have somehow fallen so far backwards that once upon a time the UFC disciplined Matt Mitrione for being transphobic and now Sean Strickland posts AI-generated bigotry violence porn of himself beating up Dylan Mulvaney to peals of laughter from the worst people on the internet.

I have not forgotten Dana White’s decade-and-a-half-old proto-cancel-culture woe-is-me video blogs about how he was silenced for throwing around the calibre of slurs I’m not going to type here, or repeatedly calling reporter Loretta Hunt a “dumb fucking bitch,” or his simpering “I’m sorry I offended the gay and lesbian community” non-apology afterward that apparently burned his ass so badly that he held onto it for more than a decade before gleefully joining the hell-march of 2020s CEOs celebrating that culture is back where it’s supposed to be because now they can shit on people with the forbidden words again without having to pretend they care, or ever cared, about anything past whatever sparked a couple picograms of dopamine in their wealth-rotted brains.

I have not forgotten the way fighter conduct used to matter so deeply to the UFC that Ultimate Fighter finalists would get made public examples of for being drunk and disorderly, and now the UFC roster proudly boasts litanies of bigots, domestic abusers and sex criminals, and Conor McGregor, a man who is on camera assaulting numerous people, a man who nearly destroyed a UFC pay-per-view by hurling a loading dolly through a bus window, a man who was found liable for the rape of Nikita Hand by multiple juries, is having the red carpet rolled out for his grand return against one of the sport’s biggest stars.

If that seems like a strange aside after two paragraphs of sociopolitics: It shouldn’t. They’re the same goddamn thing. Every abdication of responsibility, every cut contender, every piece of outrage marketing, every cost-cutting Apex event, every Contender Series fighter shoved sidelong into the rankings, every sordid fighter-abusing negotiation tactic, every side-eyed poke by a commentator at Tom Aspinall’s cowardice for wanting his eyes to work more than he wants to defend the UFC Heavyweight Title for 1/10th of what he’s worth, every Elon Musk ringside reaction camera angle they’ve ever shot, every octagon winner who’s ever had extra minutes tacked onto their post-fight interview because they chose to spend them singing the praises of special guest Donald Trump as he sat perpetually half-aware of his surroundings. The continuum of who-gives-a-shit that brought you the TKO merger and the cessation of so much as the appearance of sport is the continuum that brought you Perennial Title Contender Colby Covington and It’s Okay Because He Didn’t Actually Successfully Rape Anyone Gable Steveson is the continuum that tells you a UFC event held on a fucking Sunday on Donald Trump’s birthday on the lawn of the fucking White House can be in any way construed as an apolitical event.

Being unable to watch the UFC without being a part of that continuum is the reason most of the people I know who used to passionately love mixed martial arts can’t stand it anymore.

A little over a year ago, UFC veteran Bryce Mitchell started a podcast and failed to get more than one episode in before immediately going off on a rant about the way Adolf Hitler was a misunderstood hero who loved his country and simply wanted to save Germany from the perfidious Jews who were trying to turn all of its men gay. (Also, the Holocaust was a lie indoctrinated into us by the corrupt system of public education.) In response, the UFC pulled Bryce from a grappling match they’d agreed to let him do at Karate Combat and instead speed-booked him onto a pay-per-view against Jean Silva, because if anyone was going to capitalize on his controversy, it’d be them.

At the time, in the end, I said this.

By and large, I do not care what entertainment you like nearly as much as I care about what you do. Some of the best political demonstrators I know are fans of the WWE. One of the most tireless advocates for trans rights I've had the pleasure of knowing is a Harry Potter fan. Even in the right-wing cesspit of the mixed martial arts fandom I've made friends with a number of queer activists, leftists, and simply good people.

What you do and what you are matters more than what you watch. If something sparks joy in a cold world, I think that's worth keeping.

But I cannot help understanding why anyone outside of the WWE, or MMA, or the NFL, or the World Cup, would be horrified by the idea that people still enjoy them.

And as someone who dreamed of mixed martial arts before they knew it existed, as someone who has passionately loved it for most of their life, I cannot help wondering how many pieces of that joy will be tarnished by what it has become, or how permanent some of those stains will ultimately be.

I cannot help thinking about how incredible it is that here, at the nadir of this sport, we're adjacent to the nadir of another one from that quote. Even as we prepare to deal with the complete corruption of mixed martial arts into an engine for propaganda, the World Cup is about to start, and the world's single biggest sporting event has been thoroughly pissed on by Trumpism before it could even begin. FIFA, whose primary identifying traits are "corrupt" and "pathetic," somehow managed to debase itself even further by inventing its own equivalent to the Nobel Peace Prize just to kiss up to the emperor. After an entire year of ICE threatening to hound tourists, players and their families, hotels are reporting disastrous booking figures, fans are less motivated to watch the only sport that matters than I have ever seen them, and in the most passive-aggressive bit of pants-pissing dominance possible, America won't actually let the Iranian team stay in the country. They get to sleep in Mexico, fly into America every time they have a game, and fly right the fuck back out when it's done. And even that's a step above referee Omar Artan, who was turned away at Miami and forced to leave the country because he happens to be from Somalia and the government currently requires you to believe that all Somalians are thugs and thieves if you want to have a job.

And there, once again, is that continuum. The UFC isn't the end-all and be-all, it's just our beat. One more arm of the same media octopus that strangled the Washington Post or hired Bari Weiss to hollow out CBS News; that turned Facebook into a platform that enables genocide and twisted Twitter to the ego of a man who stokes hatred against immigrants, trans people, and anyone else whose misery could earn him a nickel.

The continuum of who-gives-a-shit ruins lives. It erodes institutions. It strangles decency and lets you shrug away suffering and death and vote for Trump or Brexit because, hell, it sounds funny, and really, who gives a shit about anything else?

It entrenches itself in things you love and demands that you accept it. It's not crazy! We're not doing anything wild, here. It's just a little speech at the RNC. It's just a walkout for Donald Trump. It's just the tacit endorsement of bigotry. It's just the open endorsement of bigotry. It's just the active advertising of bigotry as a desirable and marketable trait. It's just the insistence that if you don't love bigotry, you're the one who's wrong. After all, it's been this way for years. It's been this way forever. Anyone who tells you it wasn't always this way is wrong.

And even if it's not: So what?

Why can't you just enjoy mixed martial arts as a celebration of the sport and its fighters?

PART THREE: WHAT YOU GIVE AWAY

I mean, you can. No one's stopping you.

The problem with Ariel's viewpoint is not that it is invalid. The problem is that Ariel Helwani is the one saying it. As the foremost figure in mixed martial arts journalism, you should have more to say about the UFC putting on a White House propaganda show. One would hope that after almost a quarter-century of covering combat sports as its most cherished little media guy, and after repeatedly selling off your credibility to get paid gigs from the same companies you're supposedly objectively reporting on, you'd have something, anything to say about this outside of the most obvious 'oh golly gee why can't we just enjoy the sport' point of view that most definitely has nothing to do with the event's political values conveniently aligning with your own.

But that's Ariel. That's not the average person who remembers Anderson Silva or Brock Lesnar and wonders aloud once every five years if Ultimate Fighting still exists. That's not you.

Just like it's not me.

I started watching mixed martial arts because I liked professional wrestling and heard it was like that, but real. I liked Bruce Lee and Joe Frazier and the Surf Ninjas, but the idea that there was a thick line separating "fighting" and "grappling" seemed counterintuitive in ways I had neither the knowledge or experience to explain. My first full MMA event was a Blockbuster VHS rental of UFC 6; my first fight was Tank Abbott destroying John Matua in seconds before mocking his seizing body. Oleg Taktarov disassembling Tank and choking him out in the finals of the night's tournament taught me about the missing pieces of technique I had been dreaming of.

I loved MMA before I knew it existed. I wound up loving the community I found from it, too, but that community wasn't the Ed Hardy-wearing Just Bleed crowd the sport was trying to cultivate, it was the outsiders on its fringe. People who, as members of societal out-groups, found a sympathetic experience in following a societally-shunned sport that was trying as hard as it could to be accepted. One of the closest, dearest friends of my entire life is a non-binary jiu-jitsu black belt who used to love talking about martial arts, mixed and otherwise. They're married to a trans woman now. The sport went from making them feel accepted and interested to openly propagandizing for their destruction.

Around the same time the UFC took off, I got sucked into the world of working for tech companies, which I eventually narrowly escaped. Someday, when there aren't much more important things going on, we may tell that story in full. But I never stop thinking about the years I spent stuck in rooms with wealthy executives, a truly disconcerting number of whom are now billionaires, listening to them talk openly about minimizing the entirety of the world down to profit. People, minorities, concepts, societies. Rich fucks who have since positioned themselves as moral arbiters for America, if not the world, that used to openly discuss the joy they took in watching other people try to care about things like media consumption and ethical standards.

I have not forgotten the glee they took in watching people fight each other over how best to live ethically in the world they were buying out from under them.

Over the past couple of weeks, the UFC has been getting an unusual amount of attention. This was, of course, the deal. Trump, who is in reality whiny and pathetic, gets his big birthday fight party that cements him as The Most Masculine President for his base; the UFC, which is in reality ice-cold and ignored by the public, gets an unprecedented and unignorable level of spectacle that makes people perceive them as huge again. For the first time in years I've found myself talking to regular people about the sport--not for the sport itself, but for the reporting they read on noble heroes like Sean Strickland or Bryce Mitchell who've taken ethical stands against the White House card thanks to America's alliance with Israel or the Trump cabal's support for pedophiles.

Attempting to say 'hey, as someone who still watches the UFC, please do not ally yourself with temporarily convenient bigots who hate everything you actually care about' to people, as it turns out, almost universally ends in the same question:

"Why should I listen to someone who still watches the UFC?"

And: It's a fair question. When I see the old guard of MMA journalism--the actual journalists--talk about their relationship to the sport these days, it's almost always somewhere between heartbroken and antagonistic, and even that’s reflective of a fall-off that started in a basement. MMA has never been a place of honor. Whether it was UFC broadcasts on Spike TV sandwiched between commercials of slow-motion boobs and things exploding or watching pirated Pride broadcasts live from Japan at 4 in the morning and absorbing racist stereotypes you didn't grow up with enough to parse automatically, or seeing Oplot Challenge go from a small little livestreamed fight club in Ukraine to a foothold for Russian ultranationalists to try to take over a country, this sport has been immoral and terrible far, far more often than it's been a force for good.

But that's not what MMA, by its nature, is. That's what MMA is made to be by the terrible people who run it. MMA, even the UFC, can just as easily be a place of inclusion as exclusion. We know that, definitively, because that's what Dana and the Fertitta brothers spent years trying to make it, right up to the point that it became more profitable to change their minds and turn the sport into something backed by so much right-wing money that they don't have to care if they drive fans away in droves. They get their $7.7 billion streaming deal no matter what.

Eventually, that, too, will change. All of this, the bravado, the spectacle, the sheer audacity of putting on a UFC event at the fucking White House--that is, once again, that continuum. The one that demands you accept that it is an immortal, unstoppable force of nature. The one that desperately wants you think of it as the new normal, forever, rather than a handful of CEOs and apartheid billionaires celebrating a decrepit rapist's 80th birthday while desperately hoping their stranglehold on society outlives him.

The one that wants consuming its media to be synonymous with supporting it, while it laughs in boardrooms and smoking lounges about getting the people it hurts to hurt each other.

As I said above: I don't care what you watch, I care what you do, but I understand why anyone else would. It is particularly impossible to ignore that at this moment in time, when an entire sport swirls its way into a party at the bottom of the sewage tank that is America's present political climate. But what you do isn't just what you are doing with your life, it is self-awareness about what you are consuming and why, and that includes the awareness of what you are giving away every time you consume it. In a perfect world, it should just be time and attention. But when you expunge that self-awareness, on a long enough timeframe, you run the risk of becoming the kind of person that looks at an event named "UFC Freedom 250" on the White House lawn on Donald Trump's birthday and says "I am perfectly fine seeing this as an apolitical event devoid of meaning."

One day, as hard as it is to presently imagine, the sport, and the world, will not be this. One day we will have to again wrestle with the reality of things mattering, and one day the engines of bigotry will have cooled down to prepare for their next attempt to find a way to rebrand white nationalism, and one day the UFC will be run by an entirely new set of clueless corporate suits who are just as mystified by whatever the hell a Josh Hokit was as we are today. The phrase "hey, remember that one really stupid fucking time they held a UFC event at the White House?" will be a gag. And if you watched it, maybe you'll have a funny anecdote about it. Maybe it will have been a timeless clusterfuck. Maybe you shared it with other friends who laughed at how craven and awful it was.

Or maybe you'll be the guy who tried to convince everyone it was fine to view it as just another day in the sport.

I'm skipping this one. It costs too much for me. If you watch it, go with god, but please do not let them rifle through your heart while you're there.

SATURDAY, JUNE 6 FROM THE CAREER ASSASSINATION DESTINATION THAT IS THE APEX
PRELIMS 2 PM PDT / 5 PM EDT | MAIN CARD 5 PM / 8 PM

I cannot help feeling like the next two weeks are one interconnected reckoning with the current nature of the UFC, and, thus, MMA. Next week is the White House card, the moral nadir of the sport’s history, and I’m still not entirely sure what I want to say about that one, but it’ll probably be long and unpleasant.

This week? A world champion two fights ago is in the Apex, a top contender is fighting an unranked man, a top prospect is fighting a Contender Series guy, a man who was just in a de facto title eliminator is on the prelims, and a Nazi walks among us.

I miss when this all brought me more joy than exhaustion.

MAIN EVENT:
WELTERWEIGHT: Belal Muhammad (24-5 (1), #5) vs Gabriel Bonfim (19-1, #11)

When this fight got announced back in March it provoked a forum discussion about whether Belal Muhammad being stuck in the Apex after losing two fights in a row was exceptional or not. My argument, at the time, was this:

Here’s the list of everyone (I think!) in the Apex era that lost a title fight, either defending or challenging, and proceeded to also one-sidedly lose their followup fight:

• Sergei Pavlovich

• Jamahal Hill

• Paulo Costa

• Israel Adesanya

• Colby Covington

• Jorge Masvidal

• Kamaru Usman

• Leon Edwards

• Belal Muhammad

• Alexander Volkanovski

• Renato Moicano

• Max Holloway

• Brian Ortega

• Petr Yan

• Henry Cejudo

• Brandon Moreno

• Steve Erceg

• Kai Kara-France

• Mayra Bueno Silva

• Alexa Grasso

• Rose Namajunas

Here’s who, out of that list, got relegated to the Apex in their next fight:

• Belal Muhammad

• Renato Moicano

• Rose Namajunas

Putting “welterweight champion who was one round away from beating Jack Della Maddalena” in an exclusive fuck-you club alongside “woman who had one of the worst championship fights of all time” and “guy who is only here because we needed a replacement on 24 hours’ notice” parses as pretty exceptional to me.

The mile of crap Belal had to wade through just to get his title shot was already the stuff of legend when we discussed it back in 2022, and even then, they moved Heaven and Earth to get Jorge Masvidal, Colby Covington or Khamzat Chimaev into position instead. Despite being their top-ranked contender, despite having not taken a loss in five years, despite knocking out Sean Brady before it was cool, the UFC wanted to keep Belal and his hard-scrabble wrestling away from the title picture until they no longer had any preferable options. When they did finally relent and book his shot at then-champion Leon Edwards, it wasn’t for Belal’s sake, but Leon’s. They went back to Manchester and put on a big ol’ British special with all the top UK stars they could muster. Arnold Allen got a win. Paddy Pimblett got a win. Tom Aspinall avenged his only (technical) UFC loss. After years of strife the UFC had accepted Leon as one of their next British stars and they wanted that main event to cement him as the top Welterweight on the planet.

Belal outstruck him, outwrestled him and dumped him on his head just to make a point, and that was fortunate, because his title reign was more or less doomed after that.

Shavkat Rakhmonov was supposed to get the first crack at Belal, but first Belal was injured, and when he was healthy, it was Shavkat’s turn. Instead, the UFC turned to Contender Series darling Jack Della Maddalena, who had established himself as one of the best boxers in the sport. I thought Jack, with his previous issues against good wrestlers, would get ground to dust by Belal’s endless double-legs. Instead, Belal boxed. He still tried to wrestle, but not as aggressively or constantly as in his past efforts. Maybe it was Jack’s massively improved counter-wrestling forcing Belal out of his gameplan. Maybe it was latent injuries. Maybe it was a desire to be marketable. It was a game effort, and Belal was only one round away from getting the decision, but it’s the single rounds that kill you. A followup bout with fellow darling Ian Machado Garry went even worse, with Belal getting shut out on scorecards for first time since 2019.

He made it to the top, he fell to two of the best Welterweights on the planet, and now he’s in the Apex.

Gabriel Bonfim? Well,

• He got signed off the Contender Series in 2022 and made a lot of noise by being undefeated and winning his first two UFC fights, which were against the 2-2 Mounir Lazzez and the 7-7 Trevin Giles

• He lost his undefeated streak after getting knocked out in two rounds by living enigma Nicolas Dalby, who went on to lose his next two fights

• The UFC embarked on a rehabilitation quest by giving Bonfim Ange Loosa, who had once lost to Lazzez, and Khaos Williams, a solid but inconsistent prospect

• Bonfim’s jump into the rankings came from a fight with former title contender Stephen “Wonderboy” Thompson, who was 1 for his last 5 and hadn’t beaten a ranked opponent in almost five years; Thompson proceeded to outland him, nearly knock him out and win 12 out of 14 media scorecards, only to lose what would ultimately be considered the second-worst decision of 2025

• The UFC followed this by booking one of the worst Apex cards of all time, with Bonfim having his first ever main event against the unranked Randy Brown on a one-fight winning streak, whom Bonfim stopped in the second round

This? This is why this sucks.

For all that I complain about it, bringing up talent is difficult. Margins are slim, fighter availability is questionable, turnover is harsh. There are arguments for putting your underheralded prospects up against your established quantities. There are reasons to book Belal vs Bonfim that aren’t inherently awful.

But those reasons are only less awful in a vacuum. In the context of the UFC’s Welterweight matchmaking? Michael Morales and Leon Edwards are unbooked despite having not fought since November. Sean Brady suffered one loss and is back to spinning his wheels in the bottom half of the top ten. Kamaru Usman, lifetime Welterweight, is leaving for the Middleweight division and an instant shot at its #2 contender. Joaquin Buckley has lost two consecutive fights without his #9 ranking changing. Mike Malott got into the top fifteen by beating a retiree. Uroš Medić got into the top fifteen by beating a man who was still #12 despite having one win in the last four years, which was over a man who also only had one win in the last four years. Michael Page is tied for #13 at Welterweight, but they had him fighting at Middleweight for the last two years, and when they finally brought him back to 170 it was to battle Sam Patterson, who was unranked and had never fought anyone remotely close to a ranking.

The talent at the division is incredible. The booking is gross. It is impossible to separate the context of giving Gabriel Bonfim a shot at the top five from the context of demoting Belal Muhammad as fast as is humanly possible, in front of as few people as humanly possible, and seeing it as a positive movement for the weight class gives me hives.

Besides, as I put it during our rankings special:

If Belal Muhammad cannot defeat a man who got knocked out by Nicolas Dalby, I am quitting mixed martial arts and the next time we meet we are going to be ranking competitive snorkeling.

Please don’t fuck it up. BELAL MUHAMMAD BY DECISION.

CO-MAIN EVENT: DON’T DO THEM ANY FAVORS
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Brendan Allen (26-7, #4) vs Edmen Shahbazyan (16-5, NR)

I started this section with “Brendan Allen, fire your fucking manager,” and then I decided to do a little research. The conclusion is still the same, but the reasons are different.

Initially, I just thought this was an irresponsibly stupid fight to take. And it still is! Brendan Allen has been struggling to make it as a top Middleweight for the last six goddamn years, and every time something’s gotten in the way, be it Sean Strickland or Chris Curtis or Brendan’s own inability to not tweet weird things about how child abuse is an ethical good. The last couple years weren’t much kinder: Allen got a rematch with Curtis and only barely managed to beat him, then dropped all the way down the ladder thanks to back-to-back losses against Nassourdine Imavov and Anthony Hernandez, both of whom would end up stuck in contendership amber themselves.

But the rest of 2025 wound up working out extremely well. Allen took on Marvin Vettori, who was on his own rapid descent, and managed to beat him when that still meant something. Much more importantly: Allen took a big risk by agreeing to be a short-notice fill-in for a main event with Reinier de Ridder. If Imavov and Hernandez were two points on the rising-contender triangle, RDR was the third: He hadn’t even been in the UFC for a year but had already worked up a four-fight winning streak that included choking out Kevin Holland, knocking out Bo Nickal and just barely winning a decision against former champ Robert Whittaker. Many people thought Reinier would get elevated straight to a title eliminator with Khamzat Chimaev, but his bout with Hernandez was just as logical a contest, and when Hernandez dropped out and Allen stepped in, most of the world looked at his grappling strengths against Reinier’s, thanked Allen for his service, and prepared to move on to RDR’s title shot in 2026.

And then Allen just beat the shit out of him.

The first round looked just the way people had anticipated, with de Ridder flinging Allen down, controlling him easily, and nearly submitting him several times. Midway through the second Allen took over, and Reinier fell apart on the spot. After three full rounds of Allen doing damn near whatever he wanted, hammering de Ridder with ground and pound, RDR’s corner threw in the towel rather than letting their man come out for the fifth. It was the best win of Allen’s career, it could not have been timed better, and it teed him up for instant relevance at the top of the division.

So he’s fighting Edmen Shahbazyan in a co-main event in the Apex.

Edmen Shahbazyan! Edmen Shahbazyan, the third-most exciting Middleweight striking prospect of 2019. Famed Ronda Rousey training partner Edmen Shahbazyan. Got-completely-destroyed-by-Derek-Brunson Edmen Shahbazyan. Edmen Shahbazyan, who lost four out of five times in a four-year span, took a year off from the sport, and was greeted with a rehabilitative matchup against AJ Dobson, one of the company’s least successful fighters. Edmen Shahbazyan, who promptly got strangled by Gerald Meerschaert in the latter’s only victory in his last six fights. Edmen Shahbazyan, whose best and most recent win is a 1-for-his-last-5 André Muniz whom the UFC cut immediately afterward. Edmen Shahbazyan, a man so tertiary in his importance that an official onscreen graphic once misspelled his nickname as “The Doglden Boy.”

Edmen Shahbazyan, who is going straight from that unranked victory to battling for a spot in the Middleweight top five.

Even by the UFC’s standards this is baffling matchmaking, and they know it, because Edmen was supposed to fight the unranked Iron Turtle himself, Jun Yong Park, this past April. Park got injured, they couldn’t find a replacement, and now, instead of a middle-of-the-pack bout against a man who only barely beat Brad Tavares, Edmen is fighting to be one heartbeat away from the world championship.

I wondered what kind of shit-ass manager Brendan Allen must have, to either encourage or simply allow him to take this kind of fight--no upside, all risk--and, after looking into it, it was, of course, Ali Abdelaziz, a man so notoriously unethical that Conor McGregor during his living cocaine elemental era was still able to score legitimate conversational points against him. I also wanted to know who could be managing Edmen Shahbazyan, that he gets booked so persistently well.

It was, of course, Ali Abdelaziz.

I’ve written a lot of words about the way folks like Dana White, Joe Silva, Hunter Campbell, Ari Emanuel and essentially every c-suite that’s ever existed in the mixed martial arts space have helped harm the sport, and they deserve it, but they couldn’t exert their total control without having an iron grip on its fighters, and they wouldn’t have that grip on the fighters without the complete obeisance of their management. The promoters who sign their promotions up to be feeder leagues; the managers that advocate for the UFC’s best interests instead of the fighters they’re supposed to be cultivating. Ali Abdelaziz alone constitutes half of that problem. He manages hundreds of fighters, he very openly pits them against each other for the UFC’s benefit, he was named as part of the antitrust lawsuits that are still plaguing the company, and when last I saw an update in February he was refusing to cooperate with a court order to turn over records of their negotiations with the UFC. But you can’t blame the corrupting influence of the big show, because when Ali was the matchmaker for the World Series of Fighting he was also managing a bunch of its fighters, which was perfectly fine and in no way a conflict of interest.

And you can’t even blame the corrupting influence of mixed martial arts, because before he even touched the sport, he got out of being convicted of forgery by working as an FBI snitch reporting on The Muslims of America, which the government was just certain were secretly harboring terrorists, for some strange reason.

When this fight was announced, Ali put out a tweet praising Brendan Allen for giving “a young guy” like Edmen an opportunity. Brendan is less than two years older than Edmen, and Edmen was fighting with the UFC a year before Brendan was even signed. There’s no mention of his representing both of them, no mention of the circumstances of the fight. He doesn’t even spell their fucking names correctly. He calls them “Edmund” and “Brandon Alan.”

But where’re you going to go when there’s only one game in town, and only a handful of people who can get you there?

Burn this sport to the ground and start over with something made by human beings again. BRENDAN ALLEN BY SUBMISSION.

MAIN CARD: A SERIES OF WHYS
LIGHTWEIGHT: Farès Ziam (18-4, #14) vs Tom Nolan (10-1, NR)

I don’t hate this matchup quite as much as Allen/Shahbazyan, but it’s not as far away as I’d like it to be. It took six and a half years for Farès Ziam to get here, and that’s after he spent the last four of them quietly assembling one of the best winning streaks in the Lightweight division. Michal Figlak was an undefeated Cage Warriors contender: Ziam beat him. Jai Herbert was a knockout threat who’d just come inches from beating the hideously underrated Ľudovít Klein: Ziam beat him. Claudio Puelles was a grappling threat that’d almost torn Dan Hooker’s knee apart, Matt Frevola flattened Drew Dober, Mike Davis hadn’t lost a fight in five years. Ziam beat every one of them. When last we saw Farès back in December he was in the cage with Nazim Sadykhov, the Ray Longo prodigy who hadn’t lost a fight since his debut in 2018. Ziam didn’t just beat him, he knocked him out. And half of those fights--including that last, biggest victory--happened buried in the prelims.

Tom Nolan’s been in the UFC for just a touch over two years. This is his UFC career, unabridged:

• Got knocked out in his debut by Nikolas Motta, who is 3-3 (1), hadn’t won a fight in years at the time, and, fun fact, got flattened by Nazim Sadykhov in his last matchup

• Was rehabilitated by a bout with recent knockout victim Victor Martinez, who is now 0-3 in the company; Nolan is the only man in the UFC who didn’t finish him

• Beat Alex Reyes, who is now 0-3 in the company and took seven years to accrue said three bouts; Nolan is the only man in the UFC who didn’t finish him

• Got a decision over Viacheslav “Slava Claus” Borshchev, who, as much as I love him, is 3-6-1 in the company and has one split decision victory since mid-2023 (although he did go to a draw with the aforementioned Sadykhov, which is very funny)

• Choked out Charlie Campbell, by far his best win in the company; Campbell is 2-1 and his best win was, and this may shock you, Alex Reyes

Ziam had to claw his way through a half-dozen genuine prospects over almost half a decade to make it to the rankings. Nolan got a series of layups, some of whom were defined solely by losses to men he’d already beaten, and two years later he’s got a shot at the top fifteen. If you hadn’t already guessed: Farès Ziam was signed back in 2019 as a short-notice injury replacement and Tom Nolan was a 2023 Contender Series winner.

The opportunities are not even, and most of the time they’re not even opportunities. FARÈS ZIAM BY DECISION.

BANTAMWEIGHT: Bryce Mitchell (18-3) vs Santiago Luna (8-0)

In some way, to some extent, I have to be grateful for Bryce Mitchell’s existence. We talk a lot about the barrel-bottom of ethics the sport is currently swimming in, and with the fucking White House one week away lord knows we’ll be discussing it even more this month, but in a sport where the Middleweight champion tells female competitors with whom he’s sharing a press desk that they belong in the kitchen and the head of the company was caught on camera slapping his wife, there is, still, a desire to maintain some semblance of the idea that there are limits somewhere. To kill that notion, we have Bryce Mitchell, who used a podcast to talk about how Adolf Hitler was a great man who loved his country and just wanted to stop the Jews from turning everyone gay, and in the year since he has been booked more consistently than just about any other point in his career. He is the living reminder that there has never been a worse time to be a mixed martial arts fan.

There’s a good side to that, though: I never, ever have to wonder who I’m picking in a Bryce Mitchell fight. He was supposed to fight Victory Henry here, the man known mainly for getting choked out by Charles Jourdain and punted in the crotch by Javid Basharat, and Bryce would almost certainly have beaten him, and by god, I would’ve picked Henry anyway. But Henry’s hurt, so with just a touch over a week’s notice, he’s been replaced by Santiago “Borderboy” Luna, a man whose entire UFC career thus far came from two fights: A wild back-and-forth one-round affair where he knocked out Quang Le, who was 1-2, and a measured 30-27 victory against Angel Pacheco, who was 0-1. Did he look amazing in either performance? Not really. Have we seen him deal with any kind of significant grappling threat? Nope. Does he have a wealth of pervious experience to draw on? Not even a little! He’s 21 and only barely three years into his career and he was fighting 4-6 guys before he joined the UFC. We just watched him struggle with the wrestling game of a man who got soundly outgrappled by Caolán Loughran. There’s absolutely no reason to think he’s prepared for a Bryce Mitchell level of competition.

But the alternative is picking Bryce Mitchell, which means life is simple, clean, and serene. SANTIAGO LUNA BY TKO.

CATCHWEIGHT, 130 POUNDS: Matt Schnell (17-10 (1)) vs Alessandro Costa (15-5)

Flyweight is still coming to save us, even if it’s not technically Flyweight anymore. Matt Schnell is clinging to life in the UFC by the worn-down tips of his fingernails. At one point he was a genuine contender at both Bantamweight and Flyweight, and he’s picked up a collection of good wins--maybe none more than Naoki Inoue, former Rizin champion--but that was quite awhile ago, and over the last five years he’s 2 for 9. Those wins have been just well-timed enough to keep him afloat, with the one over Jimmy Flick in April last year pulling him out of a three-fight losing streak, but immediately after that win he got himself choked out by Joseph Morales, so he’s right back in the danger zone.

They know it, too, because the original plan was to get Schnell put out to pasture by Imanol Rodriguez, the 26 year-old Morales choked out to win The Ultimate Fighter 33 (jesus christ) who is still technically undefeated because TUF fights aren’t real, but Imanol couldn’t make it, so with about 10 days of prep time it’s Alessandro Costa’s turn to get a win, which is why we’re fighting at pretendweight. His UFC career came from late replacement fights, his career losses keep coming from late replacement fights, he did, in fact, lose to Steve Erceg while replacing Schnell himself once, and now he craves the kind of revenge that comes only from finding the person in your office who keeps rescheduling meetings and getting paid an insufficient amount of money to punch them on camera.

Just send a fucking e-mail next time, Matt. ALESSANDRO COSTA BY TKO.

LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Iwo Baraniewski (8-0) vs Junior Tafa (7-5)

You know, at this point, 130 pounds is closer to being a real division than Light Heavyweight is. Look at this. Look at what has become of Forrest Griffin’s division. Iwo Baraniewski is on a two-fight winning streak, which makes him one of the seven out of forty-three signed 205-pounders with multiple consecutive wins. Said victories? Ibo Aslan, who has dropped three in a row, and Austen Lane, who just retired from the sport after a 1-5-1 (1) UFC run. Junior Tafa is 3-5 in the company, it has been almost three years since he beat anyone with a single win in the UFC, he once assaulted Valter Walker in mid-cage because he was upset he got submitted, and even he is only here because Billy Elekana, the owner of a three fight streak in the division, couldn’t make it.

Who, you might ask, did Billy beat to earn that high acclaim? Junior Tafa. Who did Billy beat to earn his shot at Junior? Kevin Christian. You know who Junior Tafa beat to be here? Kevin Christian! More than half of the men to hold the Light Heavyweight title over the last decade vacated the belt, a statistic that might get even sillier if Carlos Ulberg’s injury is sufficiently severe, three people in the top fifteen are departing for the Heavyweight division and three more are sidelined with serious leg injuries, there are two ranked fights currently scheduled in the entire top fifteen and one of them is Nikita Krylov against the division-debuting Robert Whittaker, who used to fight at fucking Welterweight. But who can blame him, because he already holds a recent victory over the newly-minted #7 205-pounder in the world, Paulo Costa, who went from only barely surviving at the periphery of Middleweight to one fight away from the 205-pound belt.

It’s not enough to say that the division is cursed. The division is dead. There are zero up and coming prospects, there are no points of interest, the only person left in the top fifteen anyone in the audience cares about is Jiří Procházka and he’s already had three title shots in two and a half years and he got dumpstered in every single one of them. The UFC can’t even pretend to care about these non-prospects because they just have them fighting each other in an endless circle. IWO BARANIEWSKI BY TKO and then the ground opens up and swallows every fighter above 170 pounds and the WEC takes over the world.

PRELIMS: THE BIG DIP
BANTAMWEIGHT: Marcus McGhee (10-2) vs John Yannis (10-4)

Eleven months ago, the UFC made a really obvious, really gross attempt to jump a cheap, favored fighter into title contention by having Marcus McGhee, who was ranked #13 and only barely, at that, suddenly take on Petr Yan, former world champion, current world champion, man who has only ever lost against world champions, and, at the time, the #3 contender. It was blatant, it was nihilistic, and all it did was kill McGhee’s momentum so badly that he went from a man being talked about as a genuine prospect to so completely and wholly forgotten that he fell from sharing a co-main event with the best Bantamweight alive to the Apex prelims against John fucking Yannis. It was supposed to be Jakub Wiklacz, which would be better, but on the other hand, Wiklacz is an unranked dude with two UFC fights. Hell, the fact that McGhee is unranked is, itself, hilarious. It’s not like he fell off the ladder because an up-and-comer beat him! They threw him in there with Petr fucking Yan, he completely unsurprisingly lost, and the entirety of the matchmaking department went ‘ah, yeah, you got us, we had to try’ and over the next few months he just slowly slid down the ladder and out of sight and now he’s fighting the guy who got choked out by Austin Bashi. And don’t you dare fucking tell me you remember who Austin Bashi is. I barely remember who Austin Bashi is.

This is how it’s going to be for the next few years: People they think stand the slightest chance of surviving getting jumped up the ladder getting completely unearned shots at the big time, and if they make it, awesome, and if not, chuck them all the way to the back of the line again. Prepare for Top Ten Tommy McMillen, because it’s coming. MARCUS MCGHEE BY TKO.

FLYWEIGHT: Bruno Silva (15-8-2 (1), #15) vs Edgar Cháirez (13-6 (1), NR)

Good fighters getting ground to death by an extremely tough division is one of the oldest tales in combat sports. There is nothing wrong with Bruno Silva. He’s fast, he’s aggressive, he’s damned good at catching necks when given half a chance, and he’s also fighting to keep his job, because if he loses this one he’s 1 for his last 5. And that sucks, because those three losses were Manel Kape, the #2 contender, Joshua Van, the current champion, and Charles Johnson, the man that knocked said champion out. And hell, the Johnson fight was close! But when you have as many losses as you do wins, being close isn’t enough. Close gets you Edgar Cháirez. They’ve wanted Edgar in the rankings for awhile. Hell, they want him there so badly that this is the first time in five fights and three years that they haven’t booked him on the Noche UFC/Mexico City circuit, because they cannot miss the opportunity. Fortunately: He deserves it. He’s never boring, he’s always tough, and he’s only two fights removed from taking Van the distance and actually stumbling him on the feet.

Not all rankings churn is bad, just like not all marketing focus is unethical. Good fighters being booked well is a thing to be praised. EDGAR CHÁIREZ BY TKO.

WOMEN’S BANTAMWEIGHT: Chelsea Chandler (6-4) vs Priscila Cachoeira (13-8)

Every single time we talk about Women’s Bantamweight I sing you the same song about how terribly mistreated it is; how underserved and poorly-matched; how all of its athletes deserve better. And it’s always true! Except here. Except this one, single time. Chelsea Chandler is 1-3 in the last three years, she’s only successfully made the Bantamweight limit once, and her only victory even technically at the division came over Josiane Nunes, the 5’2” Featherweight who collapsed the moment the 145-pound division closed. Priscila Cachoeira is 1-4 in the last three years, she has been outfought and often outright destroyed in each of those losses, and even that comes from a past history as a notoriously unsuccessful Flyweight. And her only win in this terrible time period? Also Josiane Nunes. If it weren’t for Josi somehow still having a contract these would be the two least relevant women in the least-healthy division in the world.

Which means it’s the perfect matchup. CHELSEA CHANDLER BY DECISION if they even make it to the cage.

FEATHERWEIGHT: Jordan Leavitt (13-3) vs Joanderson Brito (18-5-1)

Look, man. You know what we’re doing here. You know about me and Brito. He’s never going to win the big one and I’m going to keep picking him and my inevitable disappointment is a crop I will harvest like wheat left past its time. I will place my faith in him and emotionally overidentify with his successes and failures until they hold an unprecedented, outsized emotional impact on my day, which will in no way be a projection of my overall experience with this era of mixed martial arts. Eventually I will lose track of where the genuine fandom begins and my commitment to the bit ends, and I will become the same kind of irony-poisoned monster I have been trying to avoid aligning with for my entire adult life. My barometer for sense will fade, my ability to parse my feelings for earnestness will dissolve, and they will find me dead in my office, a victim of perpetual stillness, crumbling into rot.

And that’s still not enough to make me pick Jordan Leavitt. JOANDERSON BRITO BY SUBMISSION.

WOMEN’S FLYWEIGHT: Jeisla Chaves (7-0) vs Yuneisy Duben (6-1 (1))

When Yuneisy Duben made her UFC debut in March 2025 I had a brief conniption about the way things had fallen so far that Duben made it to the Contender Series as a 5-0 (1) fighter whose opponents, before fighting her, had a combined record of 0, as every single one of them was making their professional debut. I wondered aloud how it could, and inevitably would, get worse. Like clockwork, I give you Jeisla Chaves of Bahia, Brazil, who walked into the Contender Series with a body of work consisting of seven opponents with a combined record of 0-8. That’s right, baby: Not a single fucking win among them. As a matter of fact, Jeisla’s last pre-DWCS matchup came from Bahia’s Demo Fight organization on a card wherein, out of fifteen matches, seven were people with winning records against people with no wins and the main event was an extremely competitively booked contest between the 28 year-old, 9-0 Joseilton Santos and the 45 year-old, 19-17 Nilton dos Santos. This is where your talent is coming from. This is the trajectory of the sport. We can’t get you Dakota Ditcheva or Liz Carmouche or Taila Santos, but we’ve got Jeisla Chaves and Yuneisy Duben, and what more could a division possibly need.

Yuneisy got knocked out in her debut. Chaves only barely beat Sofia Montegro, and I’m not going to insult you by telling you about her competition, too. I didn’t have faith in Yuneisy, and having watched Chaves I don’t have a ton in her either, but she seems to at least know where her hands should go when she strikes. JEISLA CHAVES BY TKO.

WOMEN’S STRAWWEIGHT: Ketlen Souza (16-6) vs Ariane Carnelossi (15-4)

Choose your fighter carefully. On one side: Ketlen Souza, former Flyweight queen of Invicta, who is coming off a victory against journeywoman Bruna Brasil, has one definitive UFC loss in the form of a kneebar at the hands of Karine Silva and who has since become maybe the only person to ever lose a dodgy split decision against Angela Hill and nearly beat Piera Rodriguez. On the other: Ariane Carnelossi, who has never directly defeated anyone with a victory in the UFC and whose one and only victory in the last four and a half years was a disqualification after the aforementioned Piera repeatedly, inexplicably headbutted her. Not really a hard decision, is it?

Well, more the fool you, because this is a rematch, motherfucker. Ariane and Ketlen fought back in Brazil in 2019, and Ariane knocked her out in the third with a deceptively gentle-looking push-kick to the body. So ask yourself this: Is seven years, Ketlen’s reinvention as a better, more well-rounded fighter, and Ariane’s years of terrible performances enough of a reason to make you pick the obviously correct choice, or are you a bad enough dude to side with the cyclical reoccurrence of comedy?

Be brave, not wise. ARIANE CARNELOSSI BY TKO.

Welcome to June. It's not gonna be great. There are zero PFL title fights, there's barely anything from ONE, Rizin's real weird this month, and out of four UFC events one is in Baku, two are in the Apex, and the fourth is at the fucking White House. It is time to end this suffering, and I do, in fact, need a minute to myself.

THIS MONTH’S PUNCHSPORTS EVENTS

• UFC Fight Night: Muhammad vs Bonfim, June 6

• UFC Freedom 250, June 14

• UFC Fight Night: Kape vs Horiguchi, June 20

• UFC Fight Night: Fiziev vs Torres, June 27

• PFL Africa 2: Adeshina vs Campos, June 13

• PFL San Diego: McKee vs Isbulaev, June 27

• ONE Fight Night 44: Jarvis vs Rungrawee II, June 26

• Rizin Landmark 44: Ougikubo vs Shinryu, June 6

IS THERE ANY NEWS

After years of rumors, spitballs and false starts, Netflix hosted its first MMA event last month thanks to Jake Paul, who is, impossibly, one of the least odious promoters in combat sports. Was MVP MMA 1 a smooth experience? Not really: Like most organizations in their early days, its pacing was glacial. Were the fights great? Also no: For every Adrian Moraes vs Phumi Nkuta there were five horrible mismatches, including a main event that ended in seventeen seconds.

Was it a success?

According to a release from MVP, viewership peaked at 17 million for the featherweight headliner between Ronda Rousey and Gina Carano while drawing an average of 12.4 million viewers globally. In the United States, the fight card averaged 9.3 million viewers with a peak of 11.6 million for the evening’s headliner, making it “the most watched MMA event ever in the U.S,” per a release.

Should you be skeptical of those numbers? Of course! It’s a corporate press release about how great they are. Are they legitimate? Probably. It’s Netflix, they have like three hundred million subscribers, seventeen of them deciding to watch Ronda Rousey makes sense to me. It proves, if nothing else, that the audience is there. They just have to decide how much they want to invest in it. I cannot imagine MVP is ever going to want to be a fully-featured fight promotion with a full bench of fighters, but the UFC has left enough talent out there that they can run a solid handful of shows without having to put too much effort into it.

At least, as long as they don’t have competition.

On one hand, Scott Coker is the second-most heralded mixed martial arts promoter in American history. He made Strikeforce and took it from a little-known local kickboxing promotion to an international MMA organization that competed with the UFC. He spent a decade in charge of Bellator and helped it transition into a Spike-broadcast company with a year-long format. By any measure, he’s a success.

By similar measures, he is a failure. Strikeforce’s pocketbooks ran wild and it got bought out by the UFC. Bellator limped its way to a death that seemed simultaneously untimely and belated, acquired and buried by the PFL. Coker is widely agreed to be one of the fairest, kindest fight promoters, and he still complained about wrestling, and he still overbooked tournaments, and he kept fucking signing Fedor.

But the industry has never needed him more, and at the end of May, Coker announced that he’d attracted $60 million in funding--a chunk of it, for some reason, coming from Tony Hawk--for the purposes of launching a new global MMA league in 2027. Details are scarce and the majority of them are currently gleaned from a Zoom interview he gave from the front seat of his car, which is sort of tonally perfect for this moment in history, but if he wants to throw his hat back in the ring, that’d be dandy. I have never wanted him back more.

Just don’t fucking sign Fedor again.

In darker news, just a couple weeks after participating in and winning the main event of PFL Sioux Falls on May 2, Logan Storley, NCAA wrestler, Bellator titlist and PFL tournament finalist, was arrested on the 18th after allegedly being witnessed committing sexual battery on a woman in a street. When reached for comment, the PFL somewhat perplexingly said that despite being in said main event, he had been fired from the organization days earlier, which they offered no additional comment on or details about.

This shouldn’t be industry news. It is, obviously, news of a terrible crime, and the industry is not at all the point. That said: I cannot help reflecting on how far things have fallen that a top-ranked main-event fighter for the #2 promotion in America getting caught red-handed trying to sexually assault a woman, and being immediately disclaimed by the company that employed him, barely even lasted a day as a Reddit thread, let alone a news story. He bonded out, and I wouldn’t be shocked if we never get an update again, barring some random MMA journo like Luke Thomas or Suzie or, christ alive, me, chasing down the records.

WHAT HAPPENED IN MAY

We kicked off May on the 2nd with UFC Fight Night: Della Maddalena vs Prates, an attempt to appeal to the Australian crowd that went tragically wrong at the end. Your undercard bouts included Kody Steele making me a permanent booster of his by heel-hooking Dom Mar Fan, Jonathan Micallef beating and retiring Themba Gorimbo, Wesley Schultz choking out Ben Johnston, Colby Thicknesse narrowly outpointing Vince Morales, Jacob Malkoun winning the slow wrestle-off with Gerald Meerschaert, Junior Tafa knocking out Kevin Christian, and Cameron Rowston taking a one-sided call over Robert Bryczek. On your main card, Louie Sutherland won a pretty sad decision over Tai Tuivasa, Brando Peričić punched out Shamil Gaziev in two rounds, Marwan Rahiki crushed Ollie Schmid in one, Steve Erceg won a competitive but clear decision over Tim Elliott, and Quillan Salkilld did his job by destroying poor Beneil Dariush in three and a half minutes. But all of Australia’s hopes laid in former champion Jack Della Maddalena’s main event bid to maintain contendership against Carlos Prates, and unfortunately for Perth, Prates just beat the absolute brakes off him, ultimately handing Jack his first TKO loss since his debut fight a decade prior.

But the day also had PFL Sioux Falls: Storley vs Zendeli, which is extremely unpleasant given that a couple weeks later Storley would be arrested for rape. So we’re not gonna talk about the main event. But Taila Santos kicked Yan Qihui’s innards out in two minutes and Magomed Magomedov won a split over Leandro Higo and Sergey Bilostenniy continued the fall of Renan Ferreira by knocking him out in the third and Simeon Powell kneed Emiliano Sordi flat and Gadzhi Rabadanov managed to beat Aleksandr Chizov, and nothing else after that is important.

UFC 328: Chimaev vs Strickland came a week later on the 9th, and with it, we are back in the worst timeline. Your early prelims saw Baisangur Susurkaev choked out Djorden Santos while Jose Ochoa, Pat Sabatini and Roman Kopylov all picked up decisions--Sabatini’s was against William Gomis, which is fairly impressive--and your regular-flavor prelims were an all-finishes special, with Jim Miller guillotining Jared Gordon, Grant Dawson RNCing Mateusz Rębecki, Ateba Gautier punching out Ozzy Diaz, and Yaroslav Amosov absolutely styling on Joel Álvarez en route to suplexing and arm triangling him. On the main card of what would once have been pay-per-view, King Green destroyed an inexplicably present Jeremy Stephens, Sean Brady dominated Joaquin Buckley to the tune of multiple 30-25s and Alexander Volkov took an unsurprising decision over Waldo Cortes-Acosta. The co-main event was fight-of-the-year material, as Tatsuro Taira showed absurd levels of grit in a back-and-forth war with Joshua Van, but he ultimately lost it after getting TKOed in the fifth round. In the main event, Khamzat Chimaev and Sean Strickland turned in the dictionary definition of a coinflip fight, in part because neither managed to really accomplish that much, with Strickland avoiding most of the wrestling after the first round and Chimaev never really being in trouble from Strickland’s jabs, but with media scorecards split straight down the middle, Strickland won the great judging coinflip and is, once again, the UFC Middleweight Champion, god help us all.

Rizin 53 was later that night, and after the all-out blitz that was Landmark 13 last month this was a bit lower-key--and dotted with things like, say, the 12-13-3 Daiki Tsubota choking out the 2-0 Genji Umeno, or the 9-8 Keito Oyama beating 7-10 Katie Perez, or Shinobu Ota getting rehabilitated from his losing streak by beating the now 16-16-23 Yuto Hokamura, but, y’know, it’s Japan. But Sho Patrick Usami knocked out Tatsuya Saika, and Ren Hiramoto went to a draw with Koji Tanaka, and in the main event, Ilkhom Nazimov, the brand new champion who dethroned Satoshi Souza, lost his belt in his first defense after Luiz Gustavo knocked him out in two minutes.

ONE had a pair of events split across the 15th, as they continue to spiral into ever-weirder organizational decisionmaking. There were some kickboxing things of note, including Superlek getting beaten by Abdulla Dayakaev, and it should matter that Kade Ruotolo beat Hiroyuki Tetsuka, but the thing that mattered was the Heavyweight championship rematch between Reug Reug and Anatoly Malykhin. The fight was just as bad as the first time around, but this time, Malykhin found the exhausted energy necessary to knock Reug Reug out in the fourth round and reclaim his triple-champion status, at which point he immediately retired, which means 1/3 of ONE’s mixed martial arts championships are now vacant.

But the 16th was the big day for the month. ONE came back with ONE Fight Night 43, which was, as always, 1/3 MMA to 2/3 kickboxing, and for once, the kickboxing wasn’t too notable and the MMA took center stage. Lito Adiwang annihilated Eko Roni Saputra in just about thirty seconds with a flurry of punches, Fabio Henrique extendd former Shooto champion Yosuke Saruta’s losing streak to a painful five fights in as many years after Saruta busted his elbow, and in the main event, Tang Kai recorded his first victory in more than two years and successfully defended his Lightweight title after stopping Shamil Gasanov on leg kicks in four rounds.

The UFC’s offering was UFC Fight Night: Allen vs Costa, and it was, despite its Apex-flavored nature, actually ass pretty good time. Nicolle Caliari choked out Shauna Bannon, who is still here, Luis Gurule finally notched his first UFC win over Daniel Barez, Alice Ardelean managed to submit Polyana Viana with the incredibly rare capsule lock, Cody Brundage overcame the odds again and knocked out Andre Petroski, Ketlen Vieira beat Jacqueline Cavalcanti and then got released anyway because the UFC sucks shit, Tommy Gantt made his debut by pounding out Artur Minev, and Ivan Erslan took a decision over Tuco Tokkos only for Ivan, too, to be released following the weekend. On the main card, Khaos Williams dropped Nikolay Veretennikov in a round, Bernardo Sopaj absolutely ran through Timmy Cuamba on the ground en route to a rear naked choke, Modestas Bukauskas got a split decision over late replacement Christian Edwards, Juan Díaz pitched an upset by choking out the now-floundering Malcolm Wellmaker, and Dooho Choi overcame a tough first round and took out Daniel Santos in the second with some beautifully painful body punching. The main event was one of the most pleasantly competitive 50-45s I’ve seen, as Melquizael Costa put up a good fight against Arnold Allen, but was just a touch too outclassed.

For once, however, the UFC was not the big show of the weekend. That honor went to MVP MMA 1: Rousey vs Carano, the debut of mixed martial arts on Netflix, and it was a supremely goofy card with a lot of silly shit on it, and boy, did that not matter at all. For every Brandon Jenkins beating Chris Avila or David Mgoyan vs Albert Morales, there was Jason Jackson destroying Jeff Creighton in twenty-two seconds. You had Namo Fazil choking out Jake Babian and Aline Pereira taking a split over Jade Masson-Wong, but you also got one of the most controversial fight endings of the year, as Adriano Moraes notched a submission win over Phumi Nkuta that had to be called retroactively, as Nkuta didn’t go out until after the bell had ended the final round. The main card was mostly silly, though. Robelis Despaigne knocked out Junior dos Santos, which was tragically predictable. Salahdine Parnasse punched out Kenny Cross’s liver, which was also predictable but a lot less tragic and a lot more cool. Francis Ngannou returned to MMA and left poor Philipe Lins motionless on the mat in one round. Mike Perry battered Nate Diaz to a corner’s stoppage because all of his blood was coming out and he kept falling down repeatedly. And, in your main event, Ronda Rousey ended ten years of retirement and Gina Carano ended seventeen years of middling acting to have what was promised to be an epic fight that ended exactly the way anyone who’s actually paying attention could have told you it would: Ronda immediately, effortlessly taking Gina down and armbarring her in seventeen seconds. It is officially the most-watched MMA broadcast in American history. Congratulations.

The UFC’s week off left a hole for the PFL, and they tried to fill it with the greatest of MMA matchmaking choices: Today’s hot prospects destroying people who should really be retired. PFL Brussels: Habibora vs Henderson on May 23 was another of those events that are ultimately hasrd to recommend to people who aren’t real diehards of the sport--do you know who Movsar Ibragimov is, because if you say you do, I don’t believe you, but he choked out Shane Campbell, so hey. The thing that caught on most from the cart wasn’t even a cool finish, but rather the ending of kickboxer Donegi Abena’s MMA debut vs circa-2015 Bellator Kickboxing standout Joe Schilling, wherein Abena got Schilling on the floor and headbutted him--incredibly blatantly!--and when the referee attempted to restart them without making Abena sacrifice his position, Schilling cussed him out and simply left the cage. On one hand: Real bullshit judgment and Schilling got screwed. On the other: Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. The main card also saw former Rizin champ Naoki Inoue win a close split decision after a war with Marcirley Alves, Taylor Lapilus taking a lopsided decision over Jake Hadley, and in the main event, Patrick Habibora, who is 25, undefeated, has a near-total finish rate and is widely considered one of the best prospects in the world, fought former WEC and UFC champion Benson Henderson, who is 42, had been retired from the sport for three years, and arguably hadn’t won a ranked fight in a decade. Habibora knocked him out in twenty seconds.

PFL came back one day later for PFL MENA 9: Pride of Arabia, and, as is often the case, I’ll be honest, I’m not gonna make you read this. You don’t know who Hamza Kooheji is. I don’t know who Hamza Kooheji is. When I looked up Hamza Kooheji and saw that he was 15-4 I stopped to think about my assumptions and if I should be more critical of my lack of knowledge when it comes to MMA in the EMEA, and then I went through his record and realized almost all of his victories are people at, near or below 50/50 records, which they earned against people who, themselves, barely beat anyone, and it’s all just one giant fucking circle. The best way to put it: Do you remember Mohammad “The UAE Warrior” Yahya? The guy who got booked on UFC cards every time they went to Abu Dhabi, even though he got his ass kicked in progressively more and more embarrassing performances? He was in the main event. his opponent had only two fights against people with winning records, and Yahya lost a split decision that had 30-27 scorecards in either direction. MENA: Not even once.

And the 30th ended the month on UFC Fight Night: Song vs Figueiredo. It was the UFC’s return to China after last August’s run to Shanghai failed to deliver the Chinese superstardom they’d hoped for, and I’m deeply appreciative, because it went even fucking worse. They threw every Chinese fighter they could at the card and almost all of them failed. Zhu Kangjie got knocked out in two minutes by Rodrigo Vera, Aoriqileng got his liver kneed out by Cody Haddon, Ding Meng dropped a split decision to José Henrique, Yisak Lee got knocked out by Luis Felipe Dias, Jingnan Xiong made her UFC debut but got completely outclassed by Angela Hill, Sumudaerji was actually about to beat Alex Perez but he kicked him in the dick and drew a No Contest instead, and the co-main event was an attempt to rehabilitate their Light Heavyweight star from China, Zhang Mingyang, after Johnny Walker beat him in two rounds last year, and they fed him an even less successful fighter in Alonzo Menifield, and all it accomplished was Menifield chucking Zhang in a dumpster in 4:15. In other comedy on the card, Jaqueline Amorim nearly snapped Loma Lookboonmee’s arm, Rei Tsuruya made short work of a Luis Gurule who’d just been in a three-round fight two weeks prior, Jake Matthews took a really obvious decision over Carlston Harris, Kai Asakura knocked out Cameron Smotherman, and the UFC’s latest attempt to elevate Tallison Teixeira into a top ranking ended with Sergei Pavlovich walking through him in thirty-nine seconds. But the main event, at least, went right to plan: A progressively older-looking Deiveson Figueiredo got in the cage with Song Yadong and got himself beat up and choked out in two rounds.

WHAT’S COMING IN JUNE

We start where all terrible things live: The Apex. UFC Fight Night: Muhammad vs Bonfim is on June 6, and it features a bunch of fights that should be somewhere else. Jordan Leavitt vs Joanderson Brito should be in front of a crowd. Priscila Cachoeira vs Chelsea Chandler should be in Invicta. Bruno Silva vs Édgar Cháirez should be in Mexico. Bryce Mitchell vs Santiago Luna should be in a garbage can. Brendan Allen vs Edmen Shahbazyan should be on a drawing board, being reconfigured into two much more sensible fights. And your main event, Belal Muhammad vs Gabriel Bonfim, should be in a court record as Exhibit B in the UFC’s active sabotage of Belal’s career.

That night also brings us Rizin Landmark 14, which continues Rizin’s recent trend of having slightly lower-key cards with a couple big matches up top. This time around, your anchoring fights include Black Panther Beynoah vs GRACHAN champion Bilal Kai Haga, Yusuke Yachi vs Isao Kobayashi, a very funny Heavyweight matchup between 15-14 former DEEP champion Ryo Sakai and 3-4 former sumo Takakenshin, and a co-main event slot featuring former contender Yuki Motoya taking on Rizin’s favorite Canadian, Tony Laramie. In the main event, Flyweight champion Hiromasa Ougikubo defends his belt against Shinryu Takahashi, whom he already beat in July of 2024.

June 13 brings us PFL Africa 2, the quarterfinals of this year’s African tournament, and I’d like to tell you that I am selling it to you because of the immense drawing power of Wasi Adeshina and Ignacio Campos, but in truth? I talk a lot about how dire things are for women’s MMA right now, and this is a deeply unfortunate example. Elisandra Ferreira is Invicta FC’s Atomweight champion. Fantastic fighter, great all around. But Atomweight doesn’t exist anywhere else but Rizin, and their opportunities are few and farbetween, and having an Invicta belt isn’t even enough for a ticket to the UFC anymore, and Invicta, itself, appears to be in a coma. So Elisandra is stepping up to Strawweight so she can fight Juliet Ukah, a former Featherweight who is half a foot taller than her, and it’s on the prelims of this PFL Africa card. Not even headlining the prelims. It’s bad out there, man.

UFC Freedom 250 is on the 14th.

Six days later, the UFC is back in the Apex for UFC Fight Night: Kape vs Horiguchi. There’s a really irritating number of solid matches on this card that are stuck in the fucking fight warehouse. Karol Rosa vs Luana Santos, Farid Basharat vs Ethyn Ewing, Allan Nascimento vs Mitch Raposo, Bia Mesquita vs Melissa Mullins, André Lima vs Kevin Borjas, Hyder Amil vs Christian Rodriguez, Vinicius Oliveira making his 145-pound debut against Giga Chikadze--all of that is really, really good. And the main event, a Rizin rematch betweeen Manel Kape and Kyoji Horiguchi, is stellar. So it fucking sucks that it’s all in the godforsaken Apex.

That day also brings us ONE Fight Night 44: Jarvis vs Rungrawee II, and like all ONE events, the card is not yet fully announced despite being less than a month away--which is less of a big deal than, say, ONE Friday Fights 158 on the twelfth, which as of this writing is less than two weeks away and has no fights announced--but it has three MMA matches, including a Heavyweight bout between Paul Elliott, best known for being 1-2 (1) in the company, and Regan Upshaw, who has never had a professional fight, a 125-pound bout between Karen Ghazaryan and Hisashi Ezaki, and former champion Ok Rae Yoon taking on Lucas Gabriel. Your main event is a Muayu Thai rematch between George Jarvis and Rungrawee Sitsongpeenong, for people who are into that.

And this weird, terrible fucking month ends with the UFC in Baku for UFC Fight Night: Fiziev vs Torres on June 27, which is a suitably weird fucking card. Ikram Aliskerov, on a two-fight winning streak, faces Brunno Ferreira, who just got knocked unconscious three months ago. Asu Almabayev, who is on a two-fight winning streak including choking out Alex Perez, is facing Charles Johnson, who is just a handful of months separated from getting knocked out by Alex Perez. Shara Magomedov and Michel Pereira are fighting in the UFC’s non-canonical Middle Eastern-only series. Rizvan Kuniev, who just became the UFC’s #8 Heavyweight after earning his first UFC win, is battling Tyrell Fortune, who just became the UFC’s #10 Heavyweight after his first UFC fight. And in the main event, Rafael Fiziev, who is 1 for his last 5 and just got knocked out in February, is facing Manuel Torres, the guy who knocks everybody out.

CURRENT UFC CHAMPIONS
Heavyweight Champion, 265 lbs

Tom Aspinall - 15-3 (1), Either 1, 2 or 0 Defenses Depending On How You Look At It

You know, once upon a time, the UFC would’ve killed for a Tom Aspinall. Entire years of UFC events were spent desperately trying to get a Dan Hardy or Darren Till or Jimi Manuwa into championship pictures so they could cash in on UK superstardom. And somehow, Tom Aspinall just fell into their lap. They didn’t go out of their way to softball him, they didn’t put a ton of effort into marketing him, they just let him mulch everyone in his path. In 2025, Tallison Teixeira has a main event in just his second UFC bout: In 2022 Tom Aspinall had to notch five straight stoppages to get his first crack at the top of the card against Curtis Blaydes, and it ended with his knee imploding fifteen seconds into the fight. When he lost that fight, Francis Ngannou was the reigning UFC Heavyweight Champion of the World. By the time Tom returned in the Summer of 2023, it belonged to Jon fucking Jones. Within one fight Aspinall was a top contender again, and with Jon comically scheduled to defend his title against Stipe Miocic, who hadn’t fought in two and a half years, Aspinall was left in a holding pattern--until Jon injured himself in training. With barely two weeks to prepare, Tom Aspinall fought Sergei Pavlovich for an interim championship. Sergei was the most devastating knockout artist in the Heavyweight division: Tom knocked him out in sixty-nine seconds. Not only did it give him gold, it gave him a golden ticket. The sole purpose of an interim champion is to one day reunify the belts, and that meant Tom had a shot at Jon Jones, one of the biggest fighters in the history of the sport. All he had to do was wait. And wait. And wait. Tom waited so fucking long the UFC made him defend his interim title in a rematch with Blaydes--which he won easily, knocking him out in 60 seconds--on July 27, 2024. Four months later, Jon Jones returned and had his fight with Stipe, who by that point had been effectively retired for almost four years. Unsurprisingly, Jon won. Equally unsurprisingly, Jon and the UFC refused to commit to fighting Aspinall. Jones reportedly held the UFC up for a huge payday, and when they shockingly agreed, he changed his mind. In the end, the most obvious pair of conclusions happened: On June 21st, during the press conference after Fight Night Baku, Dana White announced Jon was retiring and Tom was being promoted to Undisputed Champion; an hour later, coincidentally, news broke that Jon was being summoned for arraignment in July on charges of leaving the scene of an accident after drunkenly crashing another car and leaving another heavily-inebriated half-naked woman behind in it and also threatening the police over the phone when they called him. It is the only way the Jon Jones story could possibly have ended. Tom Aspinall was an interim champion for 588 days, and he made his first undisputed one against Ciryl Gane at UFC 321 on October 26--and, because this division is fucking cursed, it ended in a No Contest after Gane poked him in both of his eyes at once. The UFC has decided this is mostly Tom’s fault, which has nothing at all to do with Tom’s dad talking about how he shouldn’t sign a new contract. A rematch has been vowed, but Tom had to get eye surgery to regain his sight and the UFC doesn’t want to wait when there’s marketing to be done, so Ciryl Gane and Alex Pereira will fight for an interim title at the godforsaken White House.

Light Heavyweight Champion, 205 lbs

Carlos Ulberg - 14-1, 0 Defenses

It’s so hard not to skip to the punchline on this one. Carlos Ulberg’s combat sports career is more mixed than MMA alone would lead one to believe. He started as a mixed martial artist all the way back in 2011, but after winning his debut fight, he decided to give fighting a break for almost half a decade. Then it was boxing, and then it was MMA again, and then it was kickboxing, and for a brief period of time it was both at once. The rise of Israel Adesanya led the UFC on an all-out talent search for big, credible strikers from Oceania, and that is how despite being just 3-0 as a mixed martial artist, Carlos wound up on the Contender Series in 2020, and just a few months later, in March of 2021, he was debuting in the UFC. They hyped him, they gave him a spot on the pay-per-view prelims, they booked him against the 1-1 Kennedy Nzechukwu and despite having half his experience Ulberg was the heavy betting favorite, because everyone knew they wanted him on top. Which was unfortunate, because Kennedy knocked him out in two rounds. Carlos described the loss as the most important moment of his career--half for the lesson of the loss itself, half for the $50,000 bonus that gave him his first taste of actual profit as a professional. He vowed to take his career more seriously, he vowed to prepare for his fights as though every one mattered rather than simply being happy to be in the UFC, and four years later, he was the top contender for the Light Heavyweight crown. A testament to determination and a good mindset? Absolutely! But also a bit of a testament to the careful cultivation and protection of a prospect. Carlos did his job and beat everyone the UFC put in front of him, but the people put in front of him tended to be carefully picked. At one point he beat a genuine prospect in Nicolae Negumereanu, and the UFC followed it up by giving him Ihor Potieria, the man Nicolae had just knocked out in his previous fight. Stiff prospects like Aleksandar Rakić and Azamat Murzakanov flew past in the background, but Da Woon Jung and Alonzo Menifield had to be destroyed. The UFC spent a year and a half trying on three separate occasions to book Ulberg against Dominick Reyes, and by the time they finally got there, it was, somehow, impossibly, a title eliminator. But Ulberg won, just as he’d won every fight since his meeting with Kennedy Nzechukwu, and he proceeded to his title fight with Jiří Procházka for the championship Alex Pereira had left behind to try his hand at the Heavyweight division. It was fun, it was fast, it was dramatic and it was definitive. In just a hair under four minutes, Jiří was flat on the canvas and Carlos Ulberg, five years after his debut, was the Light Heavyweight champion of the world. He also very visibly tore his ACL in half right in the middle of the fight and could barely move. If Jiří had simply backed away, hacked a few leg kicks and kept his distance, the fight would’ve been stopped between rounds, but he chose to engage and got flattened by a left hook counter for his troubles, and the result was a brand new titleholder who proceeded directly to the emergency room after the fight and had knee surgery less than a week later. For the third time in six title reigns, the new champion has an injury so bad it will prevent them from defending their title for at least the rest of the year. Will we get an interim title? Will yet another champion have to give up the gold? Will Paulo fucking Costa wind up technically a 205-pound champion? Stay tuned.

Middleweight Champion, 185 lbs

Sean Strickland - 31-7, 0 Defenses

After all of that time, we are back where we were. When Sean Strickland got his first shot at the UFC Middleweight Championship back in 2023, it was under particularly thin circumstances. Strickland had just come off back-to-back losses against Alex Pereira and Jared Cannonier, his title prospects seemed slim, and a short-notice victory over the then-unheralded Nassourdine Imavov and one-fight UFC veteran Abus Magomedov seemed unlikely to get Strickland anywhere. But then Dricus du Plessis wanted another month to prepare for Israel Adesanya, and the UFC wanted to keep their pay-per-view main event, and suddenly, Sean Strickland was beating one of the sport’s biggest stars and becoming its top Middleweight. It was a stellar performance, it was a career-defining victory, and it was one of the shortest title reigns in UFC history, as just four months later Strickland lost the belt to du Plessis in his first defense. But it was a split decision, so his argument for a rematch was sound, and after a pretty dubious win over Paulo Costa, Strickland got du Plessis back in the cage, where he vowed vengeance, justice, and a return to greatness. Dricus beat him 50-45. It would be a full year before Strickland returned, and in that time, the Middleweight division had changed shape. Nassourdine Imavov was in pole position. Israel Adesanya was a shadow of his former self. Anthony Hernandez was the fastest-rising contender in the class. And Strickland’s nemesis Dricus du Plessis had lost his title to Khamzat Chimaev. On February 21, 2026, on the back of a bunch of bigot bullshit that was growing ever-more tired by the day, Sean returned to the cage and walked right through Hernandez, not just beating him but knocking him out in the third round, and just like that, Imavov’s work didn’t matter, Dricus beating Sean twice didn’t matter. The UFC has its favorites, and Sean got the shot. Khamzat, as he did, hadn’t fought in nine months, and had been busying himself making threats about moving to Light Heavyweight and chasing a superfight with Alex Pereira, who had, himself, already moved up to Heavyweight altogether. Chimaev swore he would outwrestle Sean, smash him, and move on with his life. And for one round, he looked completely correct. After the first, suddenly, Strickland evened things up. Khamzat was never able to assert his wrestling game again, so the rest of the title fight became a boxing match, and in that sense, it was surprisingly even, with Khamzat arguably landing the bigger punches but Strickland landing at a higher clip, and the scorecards were split right down the middle. But the coinflip went Sean’s way. For the second time, Sean Strickland is a world champion, and we are all bastards for it. A rematch seems almost inevitable, but Sean has a shoulder injury to rehabilitate, so we’ll see what the future holds.

Welterweight Champion, 170 lbs

Islam Makhachev - 28-1, 0 Defenses

The prophecy has been fulfilled. Khabib Nurmagomedov was considered by many to be the greatest Lightweight of all time, but in the later stages of his career he began to repeatedly reference his lifetime friend and training partner Islam Makhachev as not just his successor, but the man who would break the mold he’d left behind. And the fanbase was more than willing to buy another Abdulmanap Nurmagomedov protege coming in and wrecking shop--until he got knocked out by Adriano Martins. Khabib’s aura of invulnerability came from the simple, so-obvious-more-people-should-try-it factor of simply never losing a damn fight. When Islam got torched in under two minutes by a man that couldn’t beat Donald Cerrone, that aura vanished. A lot of folks still thought he could be a champion, but most felt the greatest-of-all-time lane was closed to him. It turns out there’s another way to regain that sense of unbeatable awe, though: Just don’t lose for so goddamn long people forget it ever happened. In the ten full years since that Martins bout, Islam has not lost a single fight. Most of the time, he hasn’t even lost a round. He worked his way up the Lightweight ladder and began to rack up incredible achievements. He tore through top prospects with virtually no effort, he choked out one of the best MMA grapplers ever in Charles Oliveira, he outlasted and later knocked out one of the two men with a claim to the all-time Featherweight crown in Alexander Volkanovski, he choked out Dustin Poirier and he broke the Lightweight title defense record after stomping Renato Moicano. And then he traded in his record-breaking reign to challenge for Welterweight gold. Jumping divisions is always difficult, but the 15-pound leap from Lightweight to Welterweight is a mountain, and no Lightweight champion had ever managed it. Even BJ Penn, the canonical first man to hold gold at both, had to do it in reverse: He failed at both of his attempts to win Lightweight gold and shocked the world by abruptly taking it at Welterweight instead, and it would be five more years before he finally got his shit together and won a title in the division that made him famous. His subsequent attempts all ended in defeat, half because Matt Hughes and Georges St-Pierre were both great and half because BJ was just a Lightweight. Even though Islam was Islam and widely agreed to be a monster in the cage, Jack Della Maddalena had won the Welterweight title with some of the cleanest boxing the UFC had seen, and his championship victory over wrestler Belal Muhammad had people convinced that Islam, at best, would struggle. They met in the main event of UFC 322 on November 15, 2025, and there was absolutely no struggle. Islam kicked Jack’s leg to pieces, landed some surprisingly big punches, and took the fight to the ground almost at will, and by the time the fight ended, it felt like Jack never had a chance. The shadow has been stepped out of. Islam Makhachev is a two-division champion. And now he has a brand new horde of contenders beating down his door.

Lightweight Champion, 155 lbs

Ilia Topuria - 17-0, 0 Defenses

One of the most exciting things about following mixed martial arts is picking which prospects you really, truly believe in. There are hundreds of fighters across history that you will enjoy watching, and you may have some hopes for their future, but you don’t necessarily expect the world from them. When Ilia Topuria showed up in the UFC in 2020, if you were paying attention, you knew he was going to be special. The combination of wrestling, grappling and absolutely murderous striking was almost immediately visible, but what really set him apart was the unshakable confidence with which he used it. Even when he went up to 155 pounds on short notice and almost got knocked out by Jai Herbert he survived the onslaught, recovered, came right back at him as though he was utterly unfazed and destroyed Herbert seconds later. That was the truly exceptional danger of Ilia Topuria: His belief in his technique was so absurdly complete that it came across as absurdly silly arrogance and it made huge swaths of the audience disdain him and then he’d somehow always find a way to just go do the damn thing anyway. He outgrappled Ryan Hall. He submitted Bryce Mitchell. He beat Josh Emmett so badly he got a 50-42 scorecard out of it. And on February 17, 2024, he ended Alexander Volkanovski’s historic, nearly-four-year reign as the king of Featherweight by knocking him out in two rounds. When Ilia followed that up by saying he was going to become the first man to ever knock out Max Holloway--a thing Volkanovski, Dustin Poirier, José Aldo and Conor McGregor failed to do--even with his title victory, the audience was still particularly skeptical. He did it anyway. Once again, Ilia walked into a fight with supreme confidence, and once again, it ended with his opponent on the floor, this time in three rounds. Ilia Topuria had knocked out the two greatest Featherweights of the generation and seemed poised for a longer title reign than either of them. And then he quit the division. One of those first overconfident boasts of his had been the desire to move up to Lightweight and knock out Islam Makhachev to become a double champion. The MMA world thought he was talking about a far-away future, but he wanted it and he wanted it now. Unfortunately, so did Islam. Right as Ilia vacated the Featherweight title to move up to Lightweight, Islam vacated the Lightweight title to move up to Welterweight. So Ilia was left to fight for his destiny against Charles Oliveira instead. Oliveira’s always been incredibly tough and dangerous, and he hadn’t been knocked out in almost eight years, and even then it wasn’t unconsciousness but rather because a Paul Felder elbow had broken part of his face. That streak ended on June 28, 2025 when Ilia Topuria punched him limp in two and a half minutes. The UFC may not do double-champions anymore out of sheer promotional frustration, but in any rational sense, Ilia is the king of Featherweight and Lightweight, which gives him a horde of contenders like Arman Tsarukyan, Justin Gaethje, Dan Hooker and Mateusz Gamrot. So he appears to be fighting Paddy Pimblett next. If you ask Ilia, he’s just killing time until Islam wins the Welterweight title, because his destiny is to take his 5’7” frame all the way up to Welterweight so he can kill the king and be the first ever three-division champion in UFC history. Does it sound aggressively silly and arrogant? Of course it does. Do you feel comfortable ruling it out? Then you haven’t been paying attention. Ilia is, however, dealing with some personal issues related to his divorce, so he’s going to be out of action until the Spring, which means the UFC made an interim title bout between Justin Gaethje and Paddy Pimblett for UFC 324 on January 24. Yes, really. How’d that one wind up going, you ask?

Interim Lightweight Champion

Justin Gaethje - 27-5, 0 Defenses

One of the foundational subjective mixed martial arts questions, right alongside ‘who’s the pound-for-pound best’ and ‘what if Cro-Cop ducked that kick,’ is ‘Who’s the best fighter to never win a championship?’ There are different answers for every generation, and one of the complicating factors is the inevitable debate over whether interim titles count. Was Carlos Condit a UFC champion? What about Colby Covington or Yair Rodríguez? It’s still an incredible achievement, but it’s just not quite real the way an undisputed title is. And I cannot imagine what sort of a backhanded career accomplishment it is to be the only person in UFC history to win their division’s interim title twice. Justin Gaethje has been right on the edge of the top for so long he’s got two half-championships in his closet. Back in 2020 he fought Tony Ferguson, then arguably the scariest Lightweight in the world, and beat him so horrifically that his career never recovered, and that netted Gaethje his first interim belt, which he promptly lost to Khabib Nurmagomedov in the latter’s retirement bout. Two years later, Gaethje got his second shot at the undisputed title against Charles Oliveira and he wound up strangled in three and a half minutes. Three and a half years after that, Gaethje was still right there at the precipice of the top, Ilia Topuria needed a break from the sport, and the UFC needed an aging veteran to propel their marketing star Paddy Pimblett to the top, and at UFC 324 on January 24, 2026, they threw Paddy’s big party and Justin crashed it. The UFC will tell you the fight was close, and it was in the sense that it went the whole way and one judge only gave Justin three rounds, but Paddy got brutally beaten and dropped repeatedly. Once again, Justin Gaethje is the interim champion, and because everything sucks, he’ll try to unify the belt against Topuria at the White House.

Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs

Alexander Volkanovski - 28-4, 1 Defense

And just like that, 2024 never happened. For eleven years Alexander Volkanovski was the best Featherweight on the planet, and most of that time was simply waiting for everyone else to notice. He was short and he won by decisions a lot and the world was entirely into Max Holloway so he skated under the radar right up until the moment he finally beat Max. And that wasn’t enough to convince people, so Volkanovski beat him again. And that somehow made the world doubt him even more, so he beat Max a third time. By 2023 Volk was second only to all-time great José Aldo in Featherweight title defenses--and he’d beaten Aldo in a fight, and his only actual loss was an all-timer of an effort against Islam Makhachev that still stands as the closest Islam has come to losing his title as the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world, so it was very, very easy to accept Alexander Volkanovski as the greatest Featherweight on the planet. And then he took a rematch with Islam with only one week to prepare and got knocked out in three minutes, and then he came back less than four months later and got flattened by Ilia Topuria, and in the space of two fights the audience went from celebrating him as the best around to calling for his retirement. Volkanovski took an entire year off to heal and rebuild, which was enough time for Ilia to get bored and vacate the belt to go chase Lightweight greatness, and the Topuria/Volkanovski rematch became Volkanovski vs Diego Lopes at UFC 314 on April 12 to fill the vacant throne instead. It was somehow both close and clear. Lopes gained steam in the middle stanza of the bout and at one point dropped Volk, but Volk got right back up and resumed punching him in the face, and by the end of the bout he’d outlanded him more than two to one. The judges sided with him, the audience sided with him, and Alexander Volkanovski became not just one of the rare few to win back a UFC title, but the first man over 35 to ever win a UFC belt in the sub-170 weight classes typically reserved for young lions. His logical next contender should’ve been Movsar Evloev, but the UFC was busy trying to get him to fight an unranked, debuting Aaron Pico, thus clearing the way for a rematch with Yair Rodríguez in Guadalajara for Noche UFC 3 in September. Except the Arena Guadalajara wasn’t done yet, so Noche UFC 3 got moved to the most Mexican of places, Las Vegas, in October, and Alex’s manager said he had an eye injury that needs time to heal, so he took the rest of 2025 off. Good news, though: That left time for the UFC to get new contenders going. Lerone Murphy wound up fighting and knocking out Pico! Aljamain Sterling beat Brian Ortega! Hell, Movsar Evloev is still right there! The UFC looked at all of them and gave them all the finger. At UFC 325 on January 31, fresh off his title victory over Diego Lopes, Alexander Volkanovski had his first title defense against Diego Lopes. Unsurprisingly, the guy who beat Diego Lopes beat Diego Lopes again. The UFC had Evloev and Murphy fight in March and Evloev won a contentious decision, and now Jean Silva is lobbying as hard as possible for the fight, so we’ll see who gets it.

Bantamweight Champion, 135 lbs

Petr Yan - 20-5, 0 Defenses

Petr Yan’s road to the top has been incredibly circuitous. When Yan initially won the Bantamweight title back in 2020, no one was particularly surprised. He’d been one of the best in the world for years, he’d put together a six-fight winning streak on his road to the title shot, and the UFC had fed aging legend Urijah Faber to him in an attempt to make him a known quantity. Felling an even greater legend in José Aldo and taking the belt felt like an entirely expected passing of the torch, and a long reign as the division’s standardbearer seemed all but assured. And then, as they so often do, things went wrong. In quite possibly the most infamous title change in UFC history, Yan became the first champion to ever lose his title by disqualification after drilling Aljamain Sterling in the face with an illegal knee. Yan’s team cried foul and the world turned on Sterling, but when they had their rematch a year later, Sterling beat him by decision and that was that. But it was a split decision, and it was close, so the UFC gave Yan another theoretical title eliminator with Sean O’Malley, and this time the world was almost unanimously convinced Yan won--except for two of the three judges, who split in O’Malley’s favor. To top it off, Yan’s attempt to stay in the contendership conversation ran into the brick wall that was the rising Merab Dvalishvili, who handed him the most one-sided loss of his entire life. In the space of two years, Petr Yan went from being perceived as a generational champion to 1 for his last 5 and seemingly eliminated from contendership. After a year off to cope with injuries, reassess his career and figure out how to turn things around, Yan proceeded to take the path that most commonly leads to success: Just fucking beating everyone. He battered Song Yadong, he outpunched Deiveson Figueiredo, he won an exceedingly weirdly-booked matchup with Marcus McGhee, and suddenly, he was on a winning streak and right back in contendership. It might have taken him longer to get an actual title fight were it not for Merab Dvalishvili being a crazy person. Merab was on the greatest championship run the division had ever seen, and after clearing out most of his to contenders and recording a blistering three defenses in a single year, he announced his intention to break a UFC record and cement himself as the greatest 135-pounder of all time by recording a fourth--just two months after the last one--and Petr Yan was available and ready. The world saw the fight as a foregone conclusion, given how one-sided their first match had been, and the world was wrong. Yan put on the best performance of his career, not just battering Merab but outwrestling him, and in one of the best career comebacks we’ve seen, almost five years after he’d given it away, Petr Yan got his title back. He’s on top of the world again, and in all likelihood, the rubber match with Merab will be next. But it’s gonna have to wait until the second half of the year, because Yan’s having back surgery.

Flyweight Champion, 125 lbs

Joshua Van - 17-2, 1 Defense

It would be disrespectful as hell to Joshua Van to say that no one saw this coming, as many people perceived it as a possibility, but I don’t think anyone saw it coming like this. Van was the Flyweight champion of the Fury Fighting Championships when the UFC came calling, as a 21 year-old regional titleholder with a penchant for collecting knockouts despite fighting at 125 pounds so thoroughly ticks all of their boxes that Van couldn’t have been a more perfect fit without also having a history of racist tweets, and his Contender Series debut was set for August of 2023. But the UFC needed someone to fill in against Zhalgas Zhumagulov, so Van got called up to the big show early and proceeded to justify their faith by beating Zhalgas, and then beating the man he was originally slated to Contend against, and then facing off with Legacy Fighting Alliance champ Felipe Bunes and handing him the first TKO loss of his entire career. In the space of six months, Van went from a little-known regional fighter to a borderline-ranked Flyweight in the UFC. And then he got atomized by Charles Johnson. It was the second loss of Van’s career, the first time he’d ever been knocked out, and the snapping of an eight-fight winning streak, and in many cases, that would’ve permanently ended his momentum. But Van was smart enough to learn from his mistakes, and the UFC was invested enough in him to bring him back up to speed with a gentle hand, and eleven months later he was on a four-fight winning streak again and had successfully made his way to the top ten after knocking out Bruno Silva, which left him in the perfect position to take advantage of an abrupt opportunity. Top contender Brandon Royval had just lost his opponent and needed a replacement, and Van was game to fight for the second time in three weeks if it meant a shot at the belt. It was a close bout, and if Van hadn’t knocked Royval down at the end of the third round he may well have lost, but he did, so he didn’t, and suddenly the prospect was next in line for the title. All but one month of Joshua Van’s UFC career took place during Alexandre Pantoja’s reign as the Flyweight king. His streak was monstrous and he was a sizable favorite coming into his defense against Van, but many were waiting to see if Van’s boxing could defuse Pantoja’s aggression. As it turns out: We’re gonna have to wait a bit longer. Twenty-six seconds into the bout Pantoja busted his own arm on the mat after a head kick gone awry. So Van’s the champion, but it’s under some real weird circumstances, and it means a number of people are immediately gunning for him. Alexandre Pantoja presumably has a rematch as soon as he’s back, but Tatsuro Taira just pounded Brandon Moreno out and got his crack at Van at UFC 327 on April 11. It was an amazing fight, but ultimately, Van got the knockout in the final round.

Women’s Bantamweight, 135 lbs

Kayla Harrison - 19-1, 0 Defenses

Every once in awhile the inevitable turns out to actually be inevitable. Ronda Rousey parlayed a 2008 bronze medal in Judo into mixed martial arts stardom; Kayla Harrison took the gold medal in 2012 and 2016. The world was already asking her about MMA before the second. The UFC made a play for her, but there was a problem: By the standards of female fighters Kayla was huge. Ronda had competed at 70 kg in the Olympics, which translated to about 154 pounds, well within the range of weight cutting for the insane standards of combat sports and Women’s Bantamweight. Kayla competed at 78 kg, which was almost 172 pounds. Even at a twenty-pound weight cut, her division simply did not exist in major mixed martial arts organizations. So she had to find one that would build it. The Professional Fighters League needed star power, and Kayla was their gal. They founded the first Women’s Lightweight division in a major American organization, and it was populated mostly by Bantamweights and Featherweights who were trying the best they could. For four straight years, Kayla was their recurring, undefeated champion. She won the 2019 and 2021 tournaments, and in 2022 she made it to the finals and looked poised to take it for a third time, as her only competition was Larissa Pacheco, whom she’d already beaten twice. In a massive upset, Larissa took a decision off of her. It was shocking, it was unexpected, and it was also more or less fine, because Kayla was more or less done with the PFL. She took one more fight against Aspen Ladd as a one-off, but her future was with the UFC. Even with her loss to Pacheco, the world was sure she was a future UFC champion--as long as she could stomach the weight cut. And it did, visibly, kill her! But she made it. She choked out Holly Holm in her debut, she took a decision over Ketlen Vieira in a title eliminator, and all she had to do after that was wait. Julianna Peña was a +500 underdog in her own title defense against Kayla, and that turned out to be just about right. On June 7, 2025, at UFC 316, Kayla achieved the inevitable, ragdolled Peña and tapped her out in just two rounds. She’s the best in the world and she’s going to get her shot at the superfight everyone wanted in the first place, as Amanda Nunes is coming out of retirement to face her later this year--actually, this got delayed so much it’s only now finally booked for UFC 324 on January 24, 2026--maybe never? A couple weeks before the superfight Kayla had to pull out for apparently fairly major neck surgery. No word on when she’ll be back or what on Earth happens now.

Women’s Flyweight, 125 lbs

Valentina Shevchenko - 26-4-1, 2 Defenses

After almost two years of suffering, we have gone back to the start. At the end of 2022 Valentina Shevchenko was so thoroughly ensconced as The Greatest Women’s Flyweight that a sizable segment of the fanbase had built an honest-to-god antipathy for her over it. Sure, she won, all the time, and sure, her only losses in almost a decade and a half came to the greatest of all time in Amanda Nunes, and sure, Shevchenko arguably won their second fight, but familiarity breeds contempt, and after watching the purported greatest struggle with a split decision to Taila Santos that could easily have gone the other way, too, a big chunk of the mixed martial world was ready to move on from Val. And then, unexpectedly, it did. Valentina was a -900 favorite when Alexa Grasso shocked the world, choked her out, and took her title away on March 4, 2023. An instant rematch was obligatory, given Val’s long history on top, so half a year later they ran it back at Noche UFC in 2023, and, awkwardly, it ended in a draw. If the rematch had been obligatory, the threematch was mandatory, but a hand injury on Val’s part and the UFC’s desire to put an entire season of The Ultimate Fighter behind their promotion meant a full twelve months passed before they got back in the cage. That’s a long goddamn time, and it left a lot of air, and that air was filled by doubt. Alexa won the first fight, after all--but she was on her way to losing a decision before Valentina made a costly mistake, threw one of her trademark nowhere-close-to-landing spinning back kicks, and got immediately jumped on and choked out for her troubles. Alexa didn’t lose the second fight--but based on the scorecards, she should have, and would have, were it not for one judge handing her a completely indefensible 10-8 in the final round. When the third fight came on September 14, 2024, it was seen as Alexa’s chance to cement her legacy: Either she was the superior fighter and the herald of a new generation for Women’s Flyweight, or the whole thing was just a weird episode. Unfortunately for Alexa, it was the latter. Valentina dominated her. She outstruck her and outwrestled her with almost comical ease, the fight was a complete shutout, and despite their series being now tied at 1-1-1, no one has any doubts about the winner, nor any desire to see them fight again. Once again, much to the internet’s chagrin, Valentina Shevchenko is a champion. And--only two years late--she defended her title against Manon Fiorot at UFC 315. It was close, it was contentious, and it was also a fight the audience does not want to see again. Her next fight was a long-awaited champion vs champion affair against Zhang Weili at UFC 322 on November 15, 2025. After years of watching Zhang dominate her competition, the world felt she had genuine double-champ potential and could be the woman to unseat Valentina. As it turned out: Not even close. Val dominated her in every aspect of the game, Zhang got completely shut out, and her Flyweight hopes are dead in the water. Valentina has multiple title defenses again and is now tied with Amanda Nunes and Anderson Silva for the fourth-most wins in title fights in UFC history. We’ll have to see who they give to her next, but Natália Silva feels like a safe bet.

Women’s Strawweight, 115 lbs

Mackenzie Dern - 16-5, 0 Defenses

On a long enough timeline, the house always wins. Mackenzie Dern signed with the UFC as a 5-0 fighter all the way back in 2018 and they’ve been trying to get a belt on her ever since. She came into mixed martial arts with a pre-existing pedigree as one of the more decorated women in the history of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu: Gi championships, no-gi championships, pan-Am championships, Asian open championships, world championships, ADCC championships, she took them all. And the UFC marketed her as a grappling champion who was bringing some of the best submission offense in the sport to the Strawweight division! But they also marketed her as an extremely conventionally attractive woman who frequently wore bathing suits. It was one of the touchiest things to comment on with her career: Where other women would have to struggle for their matchmaking and featured spots, Mackenzie’s opportunities kept coming, and they were almost always on the main broadcast and, on multiple occasions, in the main event slots women almost never received. And she needed them, because despite being legitimately quite good, she just wasn’t great. She could make it into the top fifteen, and sometimes even brush the top ten, but every time they tried to get Mackenzie into title contention, she’d falter. It was Amanda Ribas in 2019, it was Marina Rodriguez in 2021, and between 2022 and 2024, Mackenzie had the worst run of her life, winning only one out of four bouts, getting shut down by Yan Xiaonan and Amanda Lemos, and taking the first stoppage loss of her career after being knocked out by Jéssica Andrade. She managed to get her way back up the ladder again by outgrappling Loopy Godinez and submitting a struggling Amanda Ribas in a six-years-belated rematch, but with so many losses to top contenders, her path to the title still seemed closed. Then a funny thing happened: Zhang Weili gave up the Strawweight belt to move up to Flyweight and challenge Valentina Shevchenko. Suddenly, the door was wide open. And conveniently, the UFC had booked all the women who beat Mackenzie into other matches, leaving Mackenzie with just one contender left--and it was Virna Jandiroba, a career grappler whom Mackenzie had already beaten back in 2020. The two met at UFC 321 on October 25, and after seven years of effort, the UFC finally got its way. Mackenzie beat Virna again, fair and square, in a close and hard-fought but ultimately clear decision. She is, at last, the Strawweight Champion of the World. And she’s in the exceptionally weird position of being a newly-minted champion that has very recently lost to several of her own top contenders. If Zhang Weili fails to beat Valentina Shevchenko, it’s very likely the UFC will try to pressure her back down to 115 for a money match with Mackenzie, in which case Dern would almost certainly be a big underdog in her own first defense. If not, at this point, it’s either a rematch with Yan Xiaonan, a grappling match with Tatiana Suarez, or the UFC stops pretending entirely and has Mackenzie beat Contender Series women until she turns a profit.

NOTABLE CHAMPIONS ACROSS THE WORLD

Rizin Lightweight Champion, 156 lbs

Luiz Gustavo - 16-4, 0 Defenses

Sunrise, sunset. Luiz Gustavo is not new to Rizin. He made his debut all the way back in 2018, when he was an undefeated, 8-0 22 year-old who’d only barely started fighting real competition down in Katana Fight. Rizin threw him straight into a main event in the hopes of completing the ascension of their rising star Yusuke Yachi, who’d just capped off a six-fight winning streak that included torch-passing matches with Japanese legends like Satoru Kitaoka and Takanori Gomi. Gustavo was supposed to be Yachi’s victim. Instead he knocked Yachi out in two rounds. Suddenly, Gustavo was the star and the man folks had flagged as Rizin’s next big Lightweight champion. He proceeded to go 1-3 over the next year, which culminated in the first knockout loss of his life against Patricky Pitbull and, ultimately, an almost three-year hiatus while the world struggled with COVID. When Rizin tried to get back to its wholly-international ways in 2022, they had Yusuke Yachi waiting for a rematch, and once again, Gustavo knocked him dead in two rounds. In two years Luiz had a winning streak and a shot at longtime champion Roberto “Satoshi” de Souza, and the world expected a classic striker-vs-grappler clash. Satoshi shocked him with a right hand and knocked him out in twenty seconds. Having lost his shot, and followed it with an unsuccessful bout against Shunta Nomura, Gustavo’s hopes for the top of the heap were so distant that Rizin booked him into a fight with living legend Kazushi Sakuraba’s son, the 2-1 Taisei. Gustavo punched him out in seven and a half minutes. Barely two months later, Rizin needed a challenger to stand opposite Ilkhom Nazimov, the man who had unseated Satoshi during their big New Year’s Eve special, and Luiz was available. Once again, the world underestimated him, and once again, they were wrong. Luiz punched Nazimov out in two minutes to finally take his title home.

Rizin Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs

Razhabali Shaydullaev - 18-0, 3 Defenses

I asked how long the second reign of Kleber Koike Erbst would last, and as it turns out, the answer was sixty-two seconds. Razhabali Shaydullaev’s rise through the sport has been impressively meteoric. Four years ago he was a rookie fighting on Batyr Bashy cards in Kyrgyzstan as a predominantly grappling-based fighter. Three years ago he was disposing of journeymen in the developmental leagues of Russia’s Absolute Championship Akhmat. Two years ago he was choking out top contenders in South Korea’s Road FC. One year ago he got signed to Rizin. In just six months he choked out a DEEP champion, submitted a Bellator champion and smashed through a K-1 Kickboxing champion with virtually no resistance. He was the favorite against Erbst, but few thought it would be an easy night, with Erbst having been finished only once in his entire career, and even that was an armbar all the way back in 2009 when he was still a rookie. Shaydullaev, as he has been doing for the entirety of his run thus far, destroyed Erbst. He walked through him and flattened him in just barely over a minute. Rizin’s got another gaijin champion, and given how good he’s looked, they may be stuck with him for awhile--or, worse, they might lose him to the UFC sooner than later. With Mikuru Asakura’s victory over Chihiro Suzuki on the same night he’s the logical next contender, but that would just be stupid, so instead it was Shaydullaev making his first defense against Viktor Kolesnik at Rizin 51 on September 28: He knocked Kolesnik out in just thirty-three seconds. His successful murders got him the main event of 2025’s Japanese New Year’s MMA special, where Rizin secretly hoped their big national star Mikuru Asakura would get the job done; Shaydullaev chain-suplexed him, grounded him, and laid an unconscionable amount of ground and pound on him in one of those Japan-likes-to-let-its-heroes-die moments before the ref finally called the fight in just shy of three minutes. Shaydullaev’s the best guy in the company, and now there’s a question of what’s left for him to do. For now, inexplicably, the answer was carrying the murder of the 5-2 Yuta Kubo at Rizin Landmark 13 on April 11, which is wild because they already fought at the end of 2024 and Shaydullaev destroyed him in seven and a half minutes. Try to control your shock: This time it only took Shaydullaev four.

Rizin Bantamweight Champion, 135 lbs

Danny Sabatello - 18-4-1, 1 Defense

When Naoki Inoue won Rizin’s Bantamweight title I wrote that Rizin was one step closer to its dream of an all-Japanese championship roster, and it’s fitting that as gaijin once again take over the majority of the championship belts in the biggest organization in Japan, Danny goddamn Sabatello is one of the men to do it. Sabatello has been dogged by a reputation as a grinding wrestler without a ton to offer since 2020, when he got the call to compete on Dana White’s Contender Series, won, and was notably not offered a contract on the grounds of Boring Grappler. He made the move to late-stage Bellator instead, where he attempted to establish himself as their own personal Chael Sonnen: An indefatigable wrestling machine whose mouth ran just as hard as his double-legs. But it never quite caught on. The talk seemed a bit forced, the wrestling wasn’t that fun to watch, and all his 1980s wrestling promos about the bums in Bellator’s Bantamweight Grand Prix ended with an elimination at the hands of Raufeon Stots. Sabatello swore he’d won and that he’d get revenge; instead he ended his Bellator tenure getting choked out by Magomed Magomedov, decisioned again by Stots, and losing out on a shot at the PFL after going to a draw with Lazaro Dayron, who would’ve won the decision were it not for a point deduction. It was a bit of a shock when Sabatello signed with Rizin in 2025, but it seemed to have paid off when he scored his first knockout in six years during his debut against Shinobu Ota and swore he’d reinvent himself as Japan’s new American superstar. Then he went back to wrestling. It was still enough to get him his shot at Inoue’s belt at 2025’s New Year’s special, and despite the common wisdom of judging favoritism, a very close split decision went Danny’s way. It took three years longer than he intended, but Danny Sabatello is holding gold. Now we see if he can, in fact, become Big In Japan. His first title defense was against Joji Goto at Rizin Landmark 13 on April 11, and, unsurprisingly, he wrestled Goto to a broad decision.

Rizin Flyweight Champion, 125 lbs

Hiromasa Ougikubo - 30-8-2, 0 Defenses

It’s been an incredibly long road to gold for Hiromasa Ougikubo. He was a teenager when he made his professional debut all the way back in 2006, and even at 19, he was notable for the tough, gritty way he handled his grappling. Within a year he was a Shooto rookie tournament winner, within a dozen fights he was a regional champion, and a year later, he was Shooto’s Bantamweight World Champion. And then he immediately lost it after getting choked out by some guy named Kyoji Horiguchi. Having faced a level of force he didn’t feel he could contend with, he dropped down to Flyweight, where he was an immediate success, winning the Vale Tudo Japan tournament and, ultimately, the 125-pound Shooto title. That win got him called over to America for the most talent-rich season of The Ultimate Fighter ever, 2016’s Tournament of Champions, where he distinguished himself as one of the best fighters in the house and even beat a young Alexandre Pantoja on his way to the finals. Unfortunately, he couldn’t get past Tim Elliott. He returned to Japan, where, in his absence, Rizin had been reborn in the ashes of Pride FC, and as one of Japan’s best fighters, he got immediately called to the show--where he was immediately defeated by some guy named Kyoji Horiguchi. Ougikubo went back up to Bantamweight and fought his way to a title shot at company star Kai Asakura, but Asakura lanced him with a knee and ended his title hopes again. Undeterred, Hiromasa entered Rizin’s 2021 Bantamweight Grand Prix and stormed the bracket, winning four fights in a year and two in the same night, including the sweet revenge of a championship final where he defeated Asakura and staked his claim as the best Bantamweight in Japan. And then South Korean Kim Soo-chul beat him. So Ougikubo dropped back down to Flyweight for 2022’s massive Bellator vs Rizin supercard--where he was, for the third time, beaten by some guy named Kyoji Horiguchi. Someone should find out if that dude’s any good at fighting. Ougikubo still got his shot at Rizin’s Bantamweight title, but Juan Archuleta beat him, and for the first time in seventeen years of fighting, Ougikubo found himself on a three-fight losing streak. But Horiguchi, Rizin’s Flyweight champion, left the company to return to the UFC, and with the throne empty, Ougikubo wanted one more shot. He went back down to 125 pounds, he entered the 2025 Flyweight Grand Prix, he ran the table one more time, and at the 2025 New Year’s Special he faced and defeated Yuki Motoya to win the tournament and, with it, the vacant belt. It took several tries and almost twenty years, but by god, Hiromasa Ougikubo is the world champion. He’ll try to defend the belt for the first time against Shinryu Takahashi at Rizin Landmark 14 on June 6.

Rizin Women’s Super Atomweight Championship, 108 lbs

VACANT - The source of life and death

The world has long wondered who or what could beat Seika Izawa, and as it turns out, the answer is childbirth. At Rizin Landmark 13 on April 12, 2026, Seika took to the ring and announced her pregnancy and, accordingly, her hiatus from the sport. After four straight years as the undisputed best Atomweight in the world, the queen has abdicated the throne. She vowed to one day return and take back the belt from whichever unlucky woman gets it in her absence, but obviously there’s no timeline for said return, nor should there be. All eyes now turn to the rest of Rizin’s Atomweight division, which is, like, four people. Ayaka Hamasaki’s back in Rizin, but she got armbarred pretty easily by the debuting Natasha Kuziutina. Moeri Suda and Saori Oshima are always around on loan from DEEP. I’m sure they’d love to belt up RENA, but she spends half of her time closer to Strawweight. It’s a loss for mixed martial arts, we are all happy for Seika and wish her well, and god bless Rizin, which can never, ever have a full complement of champions.

ONE Heavyweight Champion, 265 lbs

ONE Light Heavyweight Champion, 225 lbs

ONE Middleweight Champion, 205 lbs

VACANT - The inevitable end of hubris

We were always destined to end here. ONE’s heavier title belts have always been more suggestion than reality. All three have seen at most five champions apiece in their decade-plus of existence--in Light Heavyweight’s case it’s just four, which makes sense, as after ten goddamn years there have been exactly five Light Heavyweight title fights. The belt-padding era began in earnest when ONE made Reinier de Ridder the double-champion over a division that barely existed, and when he fell on hard times with ONE management, they one-upped him by having Heavyweight champion Anatoly Malykhin drop to 225 and 205 thereafter just to beat him out of the company entirely. Over the past two years there was exactly one championship fight across all three weight classes, and it saw Oumar “Reug Reug” Kane take Malykhin’s Heavyweight title away, and it was a portent of the future that Marcus Buchecha won #1 contendership on that same night and opted to leave the company rather than fight for its title. Kane and Malykhin wouldn’t have their scheduled rematch until May 15, 2026, when Malykhin got his revenge by knocking out an exhausted Kane in the fourth round. Having won back his belt, he retired immediately, and in so doing rendered 1/3 of ONE’s MMA championships vacant. I’d bet we will, eventually, see another Heavyweight champion in ONE; I doubt we’ll ever see the other two belts again.

ONE Welterweight Champion, 185 lbs

Christian Lee - 18-4 (1), 0 Defenses

ONE Lightweight Champion, 170 lbs

Christian Lee - 18-4 (1), 1 Defense

It 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. After the passing of his younger sister Victoria, Christian took the whole of the year to, understandably, grieve. ONE planned his comeback for February of 2024, but, y’know, that clearly did not happen. ONE held an interim title fight between Alibeg Rasulov and Ok Rae Yoon to welcome him back--but that didn’t exactly happen either, as Rasulov failed hydration tests, became ineligible to win the title, then won the fight anyway. Lee vs Rasulov was scheduled for October. And then November. It finally happened on December 7, 2024--and it ended in a No Contest after two rounds thanks to Christian unintentionally gouging Rasulov’s eye. They ran it back almost a full year later at ONE 173 on November 16, and this time Lee knocked him out in the second round, marking Lee’s first win in three years.

ONE Featherweight Champion, 155 lbs

Tang Kai - 20-4, 2 Defenses

Tang 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. And then, absolutely nothing else happened. It took ONE almost a full year to book another match for Tang Kai, and it was just an instant rematch with Thanh Le with no fanfare, and it was delayed by eight full months thanks to an injury. So after more than a year and a half without a fight, Tang Kai finally fought Thanh Le again, and this time, he knocked him out in three rounds. Congratulations, Tang Kai: You are back at square one. His position hasn’t improved much, either. He was supposed to defend his title against Akbar Abdullaev on January 10, and Abdullaev pounded him out in the fifth round, but he also missed weight by a pound and a half and thus was ineligible for the championship. So, hey: Still a world champion! You just got knocked out a little bit. It’s fine. ONE cut Abdullaev anyway rather than give him another shot. After almost another year and a half of inactivity Tang Kai finally defended his title on May 15, this time knocking out Shamil Gasanov.

ONE Bantamweight Champion, 145 lbs

Engh-Orgil Baatarkhuu - 14-3, 0 Defenses

By god, ONE had an MMA title change hands in 2025. Enkh-Orgil Baatarkhuu is one of the precious few success stories for ONE’s feeder system. He was a 5-2 champion in the small (but competitive!) regional scene in his native Mongolia, which put him on ONE’s talent-scouting radar for their Warriors of the Steppe tournament in 2022. Enkh won two fights in six days to earn his contract with ONE, where he quickly discovered that no matter where you go in the wide world of sports, being a grappler-type Pokemon makes companies less invested in promoting you. Enkh went 6-1 across two years--8-1, if you count those aforementioned tournament wins--and finished most of his opponents, but title contention eluded him in no small part thanks to ONE’s turn away from mixed martial arts as a whole. It wasn’t until December 6 that Enkh finally got his long-belated shot at Fabricio Andrade’s Bantamweight title, and the first round and a half looked pretty thoroughly one-sided in Andrade’s favor, as most had figured it would be given the gap in Enkh’s striking game, and Andrade battered him to a near-stoppage on a couple occasions. But Enkh, as it turns out, is tough as shit. He weathered the storm and used his grit, his power and his wrestling to turn the tables, and towards the end of the fourth round, an exhausted Andrade gave up the ghost and got himself strangled. Enkh-Orgil Baatarkhuu is ONE’s Bantamweight champion, and his very first act as a champion was to call for a cross-class title match with Tang Kai, because weight classes aren’t real.

ONE Flyweight Champion, 135 lbs

Avazbek Kholmirzaev - 16-2, 0 Defenses

There’s a certain kind of tragedy in winning a championship during what certainly seems to be the waning days of a promotion’s time with mixed martial arts. Avazbek Kholmirzaev is by no means new to ONE, his title victory came a whole eleven fights into his time on their roster, but he spent a great deal of that time nigh-unto invisible. He got his start in his native country’s Uzbekistan MMA Association, but like so many of his countrymen, the successes that built his career came from the bigger, more popular Alash Pride FC, Kazakhstan’s biggest promotion, which is large, well-populated, and also the kind of bullshit record-padding organization that books main events between promising prospects and 5-11 guys who mysteriously always lose within three minutes. But he was on the positive side of the equation, and he knocked people out with spinning kicks, so ONE scouted him for their expansion across the East and he proved to be a natural fit--for the prelims. Avazbek almost never left the first few fights of the cards he was booked on, right up to his championship-opportunity-earning victory over no less than the 11-10 Jeremy Miado this past December curtain-jerking an Amazon Prime card, and an unkind man would probably intimate that his shot at Yuya Wakamatsu’s Flyweight Championship was an attempt to get Yuya a win, being as it was ONE’s big Ariake Arena show in Tokyo and they were attempting to showcase as much of their Japanese talent as possible. It was going well for Yuya right up until he ate a spinning elbow to the dome and went down in a heap just moments before the second round was about to end. Avazbek is a champion and he should be duly proud, and now we’re just left to see what being an MMA champion in ONE means in 2026.

ONE Strawweight Champion, 125 lbs

Joshua Pacio - 23-5, 1 Defense

It’s been a difficult couple of years for Joshua Pacio. “The Passion” stands as a true veteran of ONE Championship, having made his debut--and his first, unsuccessful attempt at winning the Strawweight title--all the way back in 2016. Pacio established himself as both a fan favorite and a solid promotional favorite for the company, and when he lost his second bid for the title against Yosuke Saruta in 2019, ONE, in a trick they’d become very friendly with over the years, gave him an instant rematch anyway. Pacio knocked Saruta out in the rematch and became easily the greatest 125-pound champion in ONE history, ultimately defending the title three times--including a trilogy match against Saruta. By 2022, Pacio was a crown jewel for ONE’s lineup. Which is when he promptly got wrestled into paste by UFC cast-off Jarred Brooks. Rather than having him defend the title, ONE booked Brooks into grappling matches, and in the meantime Pacio fought and defeated undefeated prospect Mansur Malachiev to earn himself a rematch. Multiple delays ensued, but on March 1, the Brooks/Pacio rematch finally came. Fifty-six seconds in, Pacio attempted a standing kimura on Brooks, who hoisted him off the ground, suplexed him, and knocked him out. Unfortunately, this was a problem. Under ONE’s ruleset, slams that land headfirst are illegal. ONE has been regularly criticized for this--less for the rule itself as for ONE’s tendency to selectively enforce the rule, using it to benefit fighters they would like to succeed. ONE, of course, denies this vehemently. However you draw your own conclusions, at the end of the day Jarred Brooks was disqualified, and thus, by DQ, Joshua Pacio is now a three-time Strawweight champion. He almost immediately announced he has torn his ACL and was out for an entire year. On February 20th, 2025, Pacio and Brooks finally fought again and it was weird, but definitive. Jarred Brooks seemingly exhausted himself after a round and Pacio pounded him for the entire second round, which eventually elicited a mercy stoppage from the ref. ONE has only one 125-pound champion again. So he, of course, challenged for the 135-pound title next. Pacio vs Wakamatsu happened at ONE 173 on November 16 and ended in Pacio getting smashed in six minutes.

ONE Women’s Atomweight Champion, 115 lbs

Denice Zamboanga - 12-2, 0 Defenses

Denice Zamboanga, to be clear, is not the problem with ONE’s women’s divisions. She’s a good fighter. She’s been trucking along in ONE since 2009, she’s proven herself repeatedly as a solid all-around competitor. She’s tough, she’s talented, she’s never been finished. She’s also never beaten a top fighter. She’s fought 0-0 rookies, she’s beaten journeywomen on losing streaks--in a dozen fights with ONE, she’s only beaten someone coming off a victory at all twice. She was also notably defeated by Seo Hee Ham, the top Atomweight contender and former Rizin champion, twice in a row. It was consequently a bit of a surprise to Ham when ONE announced an interim title fight to make up for Stamp’s injury absence and she wasn’t in it. Instead of her, the #1 contender whose only loss in ONE was to Stamp herself, it would be Denice Zamboanga, the woman she beat, against Alyona Rassohyna, a woman she also beat and who, as a bonus, had not fought in ONE since September of 2021--when she lost to Stamp Fairtex. This was all supposed to end in a unification match with Stamp at ONE 173 on August 1, but in early May, ONE announced that Stamp had reinjured her knee and was going to miss at least the rest of 2025. With the awareness that it would have been close to two and a half years between title fights, Stamp ‘voluntarily relinquished’ her title. This wound up being even more infuriating when ONE failed to rebook Denice for so long that upon finally scheduling her again, they chose ONE 173 on November 16, where Stamp Fairtex, who is now healthy, will be fighting a completely unrelated kickboxing match. Denice will face Ayaka Miura. Rather: Denice was going to face Ayaka Miura, but at the end of August she announced medical issues will prevent her from fighting. So they made an interim title fight for Stamp’s return against a non-#1 contender, and then they stripped Stamp for being unable to compete, and then they didn’t schedule the next championship fight until the card where Stamp was making her return anyway, and now Stamp is healthy and fighting but the Atomweight champion isn’t. Stamp lost and Denice has yet to be rebooked. Just fucking stop already.

Invicta Bantamweight Championship, 135 lbs

Jennifer Maia - 23-10-1, 0 Defenses

It did not take Jennifer Maia long to find her way back home to Invicta after the UFC cut her in 2023, and it only took a year for her to reclaim gold in the company she left behind. This is, in fact, Maia’s third stint with Invicta: The first time around was back in 2013, when Invicta was barely a year old and Maia was only a couple years and nine fights into her career, and it saw Maia distinguishing herself as a hot prospect but failing to get past the top ranks. She came back in 2016 as a more seasoned fighter and captured its Flyweight championship, but, as is the fate of all regional champions, she traded the belt for a ticket to the UFC. Her half-decade in the big show was by no means bad--she even fought Valentina Shevchenko for the UFC’s 125-pound title--but she still couldn’t crack the top of the mountain, and eventually, the UFC got tired of her derailing prospects and let her go. It only took two fights for Maia to dethrone Talita Bernardo and gain her second Invicta gold. Hopefully she sticks around this time.

Invicta Atomweight Championship, 105 lbs

Elisandra Ferreira - 9-2, 1 Defense
The only major Atomweight division in America is back, and as happens so often, it belongs to Brazil. Elisandra “Lili” Ferreira started competing as an amateur at 19, lost all of her amateur fights, and proceeded to turn pro anyway, because giving up sucks. She spent the first third of her professional career fighting at Strawweight simply because Atomweight opportunities are few and farbetween, but she made the turn to the lower weight class in 2021 and never looked back, and boy, it’s worked out for her. With one exception--a loss to Anastasia Nikolakakos, maybe the best Atomweight on this side of the globe--Ferreira’s cleaned house on the division. She made the jump to Invicta in 2023, and a year and a half later she’s 4-0 and the new bannerwoman for its most unique weight class, thanks to a hard-fought decision over Andressa Romero on September 20, 2024. Invicta’s 2024 comeback has reclaimed its first lost title; now we just have to see who they line up to test Ferreira over the next year of its renaissance. Her first at-bat came against Ana Palacios at Invicta FC 61 on April 4, and Ferreira earned a near-shutout on the scorecards.

PFL Heavyweight Championship, 265 lbs

Vadim Nemkov - 19-2 (1), 0 Defenses

When the PFL announced that it was going to crown a standing Heavyweight champion, they had a raft of interesting options. Oleg Popov, their 2025 tournament champion, had a strong argument. Denis Goltsov, 2024 champion and the only man in almost ten years to beat Popov, could’ve called dibs. Hell, the PFL still technically has Francis Ngannou, the best Heavyweight on the planet, under contract. They, of course, did not choose any of those men. They chose Renan Ferreira, the 2023 tournament champion whose only fight in almost two years was a TKO loss to Ngannou, and Vadim Nemkov, Bellator’s best Light Heavyweight. Nemkov, a Fedor protégé, hadn’t lost since 2016, when he got himself punched out by Jiří Procházka and narrowly edged out by Karl Albrektsson, and it’s a testament to both his skills and the world’s dim view of the Heavyweight division that when the PFL acquired Bellator and Nemkov announced he was leaving 205 for the 265-pound world, instead of the expected fretting about how a 6’1” man would contend in the world of the big boys, more or less everyone said “Yeah, that’s fine.” And lo: It was. Nemkov choked out 2021 PFL champ Bruno Cappelozza, and then he choked out the ever-pained Timothy Johnson, and when he fought Renan Ferreira at PFL Champions Series 4 on December 13, 2025, shockingly, he choked him out, too. Nemkov’s now the only major Heavyweight champion in American MMA outside of the UFC. Hopefully it pays off.

PFL Light Heavyweight Championship, 205 lbs

Corey Anderson - 20-6 (1), 0 Defenses

One of the best Light Heavyweights in the world isn’t in the UFC, and they have only themselves to blame. Corey Anderson was the precise kind of fighter the UFC wanted when they first got ahold of him in 2014: Big, young, athletic, talented, undefeated. He had all the makings of a future champion, and his victory on The Ultimate Fighter 19 (jesus christ) cemented him as a prospect to watch. Unfortunately, he had also barely been in the sport for a year and only had four professional fights to his name. In short order he’d suffered his first loss, and a couple years later, a pair of back-to-back knockouts in 2017 sent him to the realm of afterthoughts. But a recommitment to his wrestling style, an extremely well-aged victory over Glover Teixeira, and a devastating knockout over Johnny Walker got Anderson back in the title picture, and in 2020, he fought Jan Błachowicz to determine the #1 contender to the soon-to-be-vacated belt. They’d done battle once, five years prior, and Corey had won a clear decision. This time, Jan flattened him in three minutes. Despite his top-ten ranking and the four consecutive fights he’d just won, the UFC decided to dump Corey, sending him from main event to unemployment in a week. Corey went straight to Bellator and proceeded to become one of its best stars, and he would have become the first man in America to beat Vadim Nemkov had they not banged their heads together and ended the fight prematurely. Corey lost the rematch, but he became the last man to hold Bellator’s Light Heavyweight title after beating Karl Moore, and on October 3, Corey had a champion vs champion match against the PFL’s 205-pound tournament champion, Dovletdzhan Yagshimuradov. Corey had pounded him out in Bellator four years prior, and while he didn’t get the stoppage in the present, he did get the win, and in so doing he became the inaugural PFL Light Heavyweight Champion. What that actually means going forward, we’ll have to see.

PFL Middleweight Championship, 185 lbs

Costello van Steenis - 18-3, 1 Defense

For years, the Professional Fighters League has threatened to crown standing champions. Did they carry through any of their major tournament winners? Nope. Did they bring out their holdout Bellator champions? Not exactly! Did they at least make a big hubbub about finally going through with it? Of course not. Instead, just five days before PFL Champions Series 2, their promotional debut in South Africa, they abruptly announced that Bellator champ Johnny Eblen was suddenly the first-ever PFL Middleweight Champion, and his match with Costello van Steenis was the first-ever defense of the title. Costello, himself, was a Bellator veteran who’d been absorbed in the PFL buyout, but he’d always played second fiddle in the organization, unable to get through the John Salters and Douglas Limas of the world, and thus said world was mostly overlooking him as a challenger. The first three rounds of Eblen gradually grinding him into dust bore out that expectation, but then a funny thing happened: The inexhaustible wrestler got tired. Eblen found himself punched up by van Steenis in the fourth round, and he seemed to be pulling it together again in the fifth, but right before the bell could ring van Steenis managed to take his back and sink in a choke, and with just seven seconds separating him from an almost-certain decision victory, Eblen passed out. Costello van Steenis is the first man to truly hold a standing PFL Championship, and he became the second man to defend one after knocking out Fabian Edwards on March 20.

THE PFL WELTERWEIGHT CONUNDRUM

Yeah, I don’t quite know what to do here. On February 7, the (technically) final Welterweight champion of Bellator, Ramazan Kuramagomedov, beat 2024 PFL tournament champion and undefeated favorite Shamil Musaev and became the first official PFL Welterweight Champion. In his post-fight interview he immediately retired. On one hand, the PFL still lists him as their officially reigning champion. On the other, the PFL’s Youtube channel has a video on it named RAMAZAN KURAMAGOMEDOV ANNOUNCES THIS WAS HIS LAST FIGHT and in their own description phrase it as “announcing his retirement.” Does the PFL have a Welterweight champion? I don’t think even they know. So, as of March 1, 2026, I’m leaving ol’ Matthew Lesko here until the PFL clarifies its own title situation and I am on pins and needles to see how long it’ll take before I remove this section. UPDATE, JUNE: The PFL has announced that Ramazan has officially been stripped, which sure does feel like a ‘you can’t quit, you’re fired’ kind of move, and Thad Jean vs Shamil Musaev on July 25th will crown the second Welterweight champ. Matty Lesks can stick around for another two months, as a treat.

PFL Lightweight Championship, 155 lbs

Usman Nurmagomedov - 21-0 (1), 1 Defense

The Nurmagomedov family is trying to run the sport, and Usman is their B-league beachhead, but that assault has proven to be an awful lot rockier than the rest. As the kid brother of Umar and the cousin of Khabib, Usman had great expectations thrust upon him very early in his career, and he dealt with them the way regional talents with great camps traditionally do: Squashing severely overmatched competition until you get a contract from one of the big companies. Bellator won the Usman bidding war and brought him over in 2021, and he proved to be one of the breakout stars of their final days, blitzing his way up the Lightweight ranks, knocking off several contenders and ultimately beating Patricky Pitbull to win the 155-pound championship and securing his reign by retiring former star and UFC champ Benson Henderson. It was 2023, and even though Bellator’s upcoming death was clear, Usman was a name and widely considered one of the best Lightweights in the world. Unfortunately, then, things got weird. He was a massive, -2200 favorite to beat Brent Primus in the waning days of Bellator, and he did--and it became the first non-win of his career after failing a drug test for something that was never disclosed. He carried Bellator’s title over into its new life as a colony of the PFL, and he immediately ran into controversy after barely scraping a majority decision off of Irish superprospect Paul Hughes. The world wanted a rematch for the inaugural PFL Lightweight Championship fight, and on October 3, at the PFL’s big Dubai show, they got it--and this time, it waws even closer, with media scorecards split right down the middle. This, by itself, is not that unusual, nor is one fighter winning a controversial decision unusual. It is unusual when the decision is not only unanimous, but one judge scores the entire fight as a 50-45 shut-out. So Usman’s last two wins were dubious, and his future as part of the PFL depends on how they treat their own championship, but for now, he is the damn champion. He notched his first title defense by choking out Alfie Davis on February 7.

PFL Women’s Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs

Cris Cyborg - 29-2 (1), 1 Defense

Are you noticing how all of the inaugural PFL champions are just Bellator’s champions? Funny, that. Cris Cyborg is the greatest Women’s Featherweight of all time, and we all just kind of have to deal with that, because Women’s Featherweight has only barely ever existed. Strikeforce set the standard back in 2006 because Gina Carano was one of their biggest stars, and that star lasted right up until 2009, when they attempted to put a belt on her and failed because Cris Cyborg punched the shit out of her. In the following sixteen years Cyborg’s only lost one mixed martial arts fight, and it took Amanda Nunes, the greatest Women’s mixed martial artist of all time, to do it. Aside from that one loss, she’s run the table. She was the Strikeforce Featherweight Champion until it closed, and then she was Invicta’s Featherweight Champion until they let the UFC have her, and then she was the UFC’s Featherweight Champion until Amanda dropped her, and Cyborg promptly went to Bellator and won their title, too. When the PFL brought her over in the Bellator buyout, they set her up for an interpromotional superfight against Larissa Pacheco, a two-time PFL tournament winner and the only woman who’d ever beaten Kayla Harrison. On one hand, Pacheco’s one of just six women to ever make it to the final bell with Cyborg. On the other, she lost 4-1. In the ultimate act of promotional cowardice, the PFL promoted Cyborg to champion status three days before her appearance at the PFL Champions Series on December 13, 2025, meaning her fight with Sara Collins was, technically, a title defense. It was as one-sided as you’d expect. In theory, this is great! The biggest female fighter outside the UFC has a belt and the PFL is bringing back a division the UFC threw in the garbage. In practice, Cyborg didn’t even get out of her post-fight interview without noting that after her next fight she’s going to retire from MMA in favor of focusing on her boxing career. So welcome back, Women’s Featherweight. I hope you still exist by 2027.

SATURDAY, MAY 30 FROM THE GALAXY ARENA IN MACAU, CHINA
EARLY START TIME WARNING | PRELIMS 1 AM PDT / 4 AM EDT | MAIN CARD 4 AM / 7 AM

Western viewers, welcome to your second Card You’re Probably Not Gonna Watch of the month. It’s not quite the annual trip to Macau, as they skipped 2025, but they took Deiveson Figueiredo and Zhang Mingyang to China in 2024 and by god, they’re gonna do it again. If you are staying up until 7 AM to watch Jake Matthews, god bless you.

MAIN EVENT: ROUNDING OUT THE RANKS
BANTAMWEIGHT: Song Yadong (22-9-1 (1), #5) vs Deiveson Figueiredo (25-6-1, #7)

When Song Yadong fought Henry Cejudo back in 2025, I wrote about the troubles of never quite making it to the top of the mountain.

Song Yadong needs this. Song Yadong has needed this for quite some time. Song's run in the UFC is nearing its eighth year, and it, too, has been a success by any measure. You do not last nearly a decade in one of the hungriest shark tanks in the sport without being good; you do not knock out most of your UFC opponents and hang around in the Bantamweight rankings without being great.
(...)
But he still lost. That makes two failed runs at the top--three, if you count Kyler Phillips knocking him back down the ladder in 2021--and at a certain point, you start running out of bodies to climb. If Song wants to fight his way back to contention, he needs to beat a top guy, and with his longevity, there are precious few he has yet to battle.

Song beat Henry Cejudo that night, albeit with the controversy of an extremely weirdly-officiated eye-poke-based loss, but it was enough to earn him that third or fourth shot at Bantamweight's pole position. It took almost an entire goddamn year, but this past January, Song walked into the cage with Sean O'Malley and gave it his best effort, and the result was an extremely close bout that split public and media scorecards right down the middle.

You can, I hope, surmise for yourselves who wins a close decision in a Sean O'Malley fight.

Cheap shot? Cheap shot. Probably a cheap shot. It's not Sean O'Malley's fault that his path to the title was astroturfed by some of the most egregious marketing and matchmaking favoritism in memory, nor that his title eliminator win over Petr Yan was a robbery, and in either case, the Song fight was no robbery. It was close, it was even, and as so often happens, the cosmic coinflip just happened to go the way of the wide marketing favorite.

And that means Song Yadong is stuck on the outside looking in, yet again. There's this unfortunate phenomenon with trying to prove yourself as a contender: Every time you fail, it becomes harder to envision your success. After a certain point you stop looking like a contender and you start looking like a gatekeeper.

But that point comes for some fighters sooner than others, and I think Deiveson Figueiredo is already there.

People had high hopes for Figgy as a Bantamweight, as they generally do whenever a former world champion decides to take on another weight class, but as much as I enjoy Deiveson as a fighter, I was skeptical from the beginning. At Flyweight he was a physically imposing, power-punching monster that could hurt anyone he touched. At Bantamweight he was the second-smallest man in the division and already entering the back half of his thirties. But he snapped off a three-fight winning streak, and just like that, he proved that he belonged in the contendership conversation.

Except said streak came against Rob Font, the division's peripheral gatekeeper, and Cody Garbrandt, a fallen champion at the tail end of going 3 for 10--one of those losses coming at the hands of, hilariously enough, Rob Font--and Marlon Vera, who is now 1 for 6, and even that victory was a widely derided decision. Over the year and a half he's spent fighting competitively relevant Bantamweights, Deiveson's gotten beaten handily by Petr Yan, had his knee shredded to pieces by Cory Sandhagen, and lost a wide decision to Umar Nurmagomedov after blowing his weight cut by three and a half pounds.

His sole victory, the only thing keeping him afloat in the top ten, was a split decision over Montel Jackson that stands as one of the most baffling fights I have ever seen, a match-up that bordered on performance art in its sheer tribute to the power of negative space, where only one man landed double-digit strikes in one, single round, and somehow, he was the one that lost.

That's it. That's the only good news for Deiveson in the last two years. He won a fight that only barely qualified as a fight, and since then he's gotten trashed by a top contender after failing--badly--to make the divisional limit despite being one of the shortest Bantamweights in the sport. He is losing frequently, he's looking awful even when he wins, he's struggling to get his body where it needs to be, and at the end of this year he'll be 39 at one of the fastest weight classes in the sport.

Deiveson's dream has all the hallmarks of being over. It was beautiful while it lasted, but it is quickly gathering dirt, and if he wants to get it back he needs a win that is both big and definitive.

Which is why the UFC has booked him against the one and only ranked Chinese man on the entire roster during their trip to China.

Song is an enormous favorite and he should be. He's bigger, he's faster, he hits harder, he hits more often, his only stoppage loss in the last decade came because the referee refused to let him keep fighting when his entire eyebrow was falling off of his face. Song landed 36 significant strikes in his fight with Sean O'Malley, arguably the best striker in the division, which is just one less than Deiveson scored in his last three fights combined. He can wrestle, he can box, he can tank punches and he does not appear to be actively, visibly crumbling more and more into dust every time we see him fight.

Figueiredo's still absurdly tough, and I think this is the fight where that's going to cross the Rubicon from "impressive" to "uncomfortable." SONG YADONG BY DECISION after what could be depressingly lopsided.

CO-MAIN EVENT: TAKE TWO
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Zhang Mingyang (19-7, NR) vs Alonzo Menifield (17-6-1, #15)

The last time the UFC was in China was much like this one: Sergei Pavlovich was risking his top contendership against an undeserving but managerially-beloved Heavyweight, Sumudaerji was being positioned for a jump into the rankings, and Zhang Mingyang was being fed a chronically troubled Light Heavyweight in the hopes of making him a contender.

Johnny Walker has looked pretty bad for quite awhile. He gave up a round to late-period Anthony Smith. He got completely walked through by Magomed Ankalaev--twice, under Pride rules. He's the only man Volkan Oezdemir has knocked out in more than six years. The optics of making Zhang's fourth UFC fight a bout against yet another struggling, winless fighter are about as obvious as the choice to book it in Shanghai in the first fuckin' place. Johnny Walker is not here to test Zhang, he's not even here to put up a fight. He is here to lose.

And god, I really want to pick him anyway.

I’ve noted on several occasions that my insistence on choosing winners with my heart rather than my head has cost a pretty sizable chunk of my picks percentage, but in this cursed era of the sport, the hope means more to me than the average. And buddy, I’ll tell you: Waking up and seeing that Johnny Walker ruined the entire event by knocking Zhang out in a round and a half? That’s worth every lost pick for the entire damn year.

They moved Heaven and Earth to get Zhang on the safest possible path to the rankings. His contract fight was against Tuco Tokkos, who was known mainly for getting knocked out in Bellator. His followup was Brendson Ribeiro, who the UFC still employs despite being 2-5 with four stoppage losses because they know exactly why they chose to employ him in the first place. After that? Ozzy Diaz, a man who was getting knocked out on the Contender Series at Middleweight. And to earn his number? Anthony Smith, a retiree on his final fight with a long history of terrible losses. All Zhang had to do to finish the job was beat Johnny Walker, who’d been doing nothing but getting knocked out over and over for two full years.

And he couldn’t fucking do it. He is Walker’s one and only win since the Spring of 2023.

Which means they have to try again, and they’re being so thoroughly unsubtle about it that despite their longstanding tradition of organizing their cards by standing--the highest-ranked fighter first, the lower-ranked fighter second--Zhang Mingyang is first as Hell on this card listing, and Alonzo Menifield, the #15 Light Heavyweight, is second.

Which, if we’re being really honest, is fine. It’s absolutely fine. I was a big Menifield booster once upon a time. I liked his aggression in the pocket, I liked his composure, I liked the way he teased the world into thinking Jimmy Crute could still be relevant only to effortlessly smash him in a rematch. But the last couple of years haven’t been kind to Alonzo.

Crushed by Carlos Ulberg in twelve seconds? He’s the champion now, so I guess that’s less embarrassing than it could be. Atomized by Azamat Murzakanov? Tarnished a little after watching Azamat lose to Paulo Costa, but it could be worse. Just barely beating Julius “Juice Box” Walker by split decision? That’s not great.

But getting punched completely stupid by Volkan Oezdemir in one round? That’s when they single you out as a reliable loss machine. And we know this, because the last thing Johnny Walker did before they booked him against Zhang was, shockingly, get uppercutted to death by Volkan in two and a half minutes.

The mistake from their first attempt at propping Zhang up was evident. Johnny Walker is a talented, multifaceted striker with a big range advantage. He was able to hobble Zhang with leg kicks before he could even begin to pose a threat. Alonzo’s shorter and less technical and his best wins come from overpowering his opponents. He can’t play the range game and his crushing attacks in the clinch are a liability because using them means staying right where Zhang wants the fight to be.

Every part of this is built for Zhang to win.

So. Y’know.

ALONZO MENIFIELD BY TKO.

MAIN CARD: GIVING UP ON PRETENDING
HEAVYWEIGHT: Sergei Pavlovich (20-3, #3) vs Tallison Teixeira (9-1, #15)

So we’re just done, right? We’re just giving up completely on even pretending to have a functional Heavyweight division?

Like, we did this already. We did this specific thing with both of these specific guys. Sergei Pavlovich is one of the best knockout artists in Heavyweight history, but he got beat by Tom Aspinall and Alexander Volkov and the UFC decided he was persona non grata. Despite being the #3 man in the division, despite his only losses in almost eight years coming against the champion and his top contender, in the past sixteen months, Sergei has been booked to fight exactly twice. The first time was the last time the UFC went to China, where he was placed up against the #6-ranked marketing darling Waldo Cortes-Acosta. Pavlovich won an extremely clear decision, which is why since said fight he’s been stuck on the shelf while Waldo got booked all the way to a Heavyweight title eliminator. On the plus side: Sergei easily beating him looks even better now, right? That means Sergei beat a man the UFC considered was worthy of a top contendership bout, so he’s going to get a top-tier matchup now, right?

Nope! It’s Tallison fucking Teixeira. We’re gonna recap the complete Tallison Texeira UFC career arc, because it takes roughly thirty seconds:

• Wins his contract on the Contender Series by knocking out Arthur Lopes, who has one win over a man with a winning record; said man fights at Welterweight

• Makes his UFC debut by knocking out Justin Tafa, who is 7-5, unranked, and hasn’t won a fight in almost three years

• Gets immediately booked into a top ten main event against #8-ranked Derrick Lewis, who effortlessly destroys Tallison in thirty-five seconds

• Rebounds with a main-card bout against the #12-ranked Tai Tuivasa, who has the longest losing streak in UFC Heavyweight history; Tallison beats him in one of the gassiest, least impressive Heavyweight fights in years

• Is rewarded with a fight against the #3-ranked man in the Heavyweight division

I’ve talked about an awful lot of marketing pushes in my time doing this, but Tallison’s is one of the most blatant. He’s the Typhoid Mary of the We Want Less Expensive Heavyweights experiment. He managed to look good once, and it was against a man that once managed to lose a fight to Jared Vanderaa. Tallison’s victory over Tuivasa was so uninspiring that it spawned thinkpieces around the internet regarding the ethical need to shut down the Heavyweight division until we figure out where on Earth we all collectively went wrong, but he’s tall, he’s statistically likely to get a knockout, and he’s on a cheap-ass Contender Series contract, and buddy, in this terrible era of corporate capture, that plus maybe a little conversational bigotry is all the matchmakers could ask for.

And it’s Heavyweight, so it’s going to work every once in awhile. You roll the dice enough, you wind up with Top Ten Tyrell Fortune. Sergei can be clipped, Tom Aspinall proved it, and if a 6’7” guy can sneak just one good punch in there, suddenly, a title match costs 1/10 as much to book as it used to.

Don’t you love being a mixed martial arts fan right now? Isn’t it great to watch an already-borderline sport get driven into the dirt by men in boardrooms that have already made billions but just won’t be content until titles are handed out by marketing fiat, rankings are built by ChatGPT and the roster is paid in company scrip?

Push back the dawn, even if just for a few more hours. SERGEI PAVLOVICH BY TKO.

BANTAMWEIGHT: Kai Asakura (21-6) vs Cameron Smotherman (12-6)

For as much as I chide the UFC for their business practices, I must also acknowledge that sometimes they do everything right and, as happens in sports, it still doesn’t work out. Kai Asakura was an excellent pickup. 135-pound champion in Rizin, half of the Youtube-famous Asakura brothers, one of three men on Earth to ever stop Kyoji Horiguchi in a fight, just a fantastic bit of talent poaching. Which made it weird when he announced his intention to fight at Flyweight, a weight class he hadn’t participated in since 2017. Did it sap him? Probably! Would it have stopped him from getting wrestled and strangled by Alexandre Pantoja and Tim Elliott? I dunno how much of a difference those ten pounds would make when it comes to some of the best grapplers in the game.

Fortunately, Kai is no longer fighting said grapplers. When I first wrote about Cameron Smotherman in 2024 I cursed the gods for naming a man Smotherman while allowing him to stylistically focus on striking, and true to form, he has not shot a single takedown in his time under the UFC’s corporate banner, and for denying the gift the Gods gave him, he is 1-2 and probably fighting to keep his job. At this point, his only victory was as a late-replacement opponent for Jake Hadley, who got cut after Smotherman took him to a particularly punchy decision. Other than that, Smotherman dropped a fight to Serhiy Sidey, got beat up by Ricky Simón, and, more famously than any of his actual bouts at this point, he had a matchup with Ricky Turcios cancelled this past January after his weight cut went so badly that, seconds after stepping off the scale, he passed out in mid-stride and fell facefirst on the stage.

But don’t worry, the UFC assured everyone that there’s nothing wrong with cutting weight and he probably just got nervous. No, really. Dana White said that shit. They are here in the hopes of quietly sweeping Smotherman into a corner so they can forget they ever had to be embarrassed, and if Kai can’t pull it off, he probably shouldn’t be here. KAI ASAKURA BY DECISION.

WELTERWEIGHT: Jake Matthews (22-8) vs Carlston Harris (19-7)

I don’t know why we’re here. I really don’t. Jake Matthews is entering year thirteen of his UFC tenure, and he enters it having once again failed to overcome his perpetual not-quite-a-gatekeeper status, with his latest winning streak having gone down the tubes after Neil Magny choked him out in September, meaning Matthews is, yet again, not ready for primetime. Carlston Harris was signed up for the legendarily cursed Michelle Waterson-Gomez vs Marina Rodriguez card back in 2021, an event so plagued with replacements that initially Diego fucking Sanchez was supposed to be on it, and now it’s 2026, and Harris is a month and a half away from turning 39, and he’s only fought twice in the last three years and both times he got brutally knocked out.

And this is on the main card. In China. Jake Matthews vs Carlston Harris is a match the UFC decreed deserving of a main card berth. Angela Hill, one of the longest-tenured fighters in UFC history across any gender, and Jingnan Xiong, one of the best female fighters outside of the UFC and one of the best Chinese fighters on the planet, are fighting on this card, in China, for a spot in the rankings, and it’s six fights down from here, buried in the preliminary section.

And we’re here. Jesus wept. JAKE MATTHEWS BY DECISION.

FLYWEIGHT: Alex Perez (26-10, #11) vs Sumudaerji (19-7, NR)

Sometimes, all it takes is one good win to make people forget about the rest of your career. Alex Perez has been the dwindling afterthought of the Flyweight top fifteen for the last six goddamn years. Until this past January he wasn’t just 1 for his last 6, he had been, more often than not, completely trashed. If getting choked out repeatedly wasn’t enough, having Tatsuro Taira climb his body and break his knee in mid-backpack was more than enough for most people to write him off entirely. But this past January saw Perez take on Charles Johnson, a man with knockout victories over multiple top contenders and even the current champion, and Perez blew him out of the water and punched him out in three minutes. Fantastic win! So good people forgot that he also botched the shit out of his weight cut. But who cares? He’s back, baby.

The UFC cares. The UFC would rather someone more reliable get the spot. I’m not complaining one bit, though: Sumudaerji has more than earned another shot at a ranking. He wasn’t quite up to the task in 2022, and after very nearly flunking out of the company on the heels of a subsequent three-fight losing streak he came into 2025 angry and active, and having snapped off three straight wins in eleven months and not dropped a single round in the latter two, he’s finally ready to try again. He hits hard, he wrestles fast, he’s never been knocked out, and after years of practice with the shirtless battle-monks of Urijah Faber’s Team Alpha Male, he has reached partially-nude enlightenment and knows, inwardly, that the path to progress is paved with punches.

That or I’m just kind of bored of writing about him not really making it and I want him to win the big one already. SUMUDAERJI BY TKO.

PRELIMS: GENUINELY, WHAT IS IT GOING TO TAKE
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Yisak Lee (8-1) vs Luis Felipe Dias (17-5)

Let me lay this preliminary headliner on you. In one corner: Luis Felipe Dias de Assis, who is no less than the Shooto Brasil champion! At Welterweight. Two fights ago he had his first Middleweight bout in years, and it was against the incomparable Helison “Nego Velho” Cruz, who is 2-14 and so clearly fraudulent that the Tapology database doesn’t even count him as a real fighter. He fought one more time in July--three years ago--and choked out a 2-0 man who is now 2-4, and that earned him his Contender Series shot last October, where he defeated no less than Donavan Hedrick, who on that night had his first-ever bout against a fighter with a winning record. And Hedrick almost won! Until he didn’t. In the other corner: South Korean prospect Yisak Lee, who has a whopping two victories against men with winning records so long as you don’t mind that one of them is 8-5-1 and the other is 5-3, and if you need to ask me if the 5-3 guy had, himself, battled anyone with a positive career ratio, you have not been paying attention to the rest of this paragraph.

I obsess over records because they’re the easiest, simplest shorthand for understanding where a fighter has been, what they’ve had to deal with, and how those experiences may have helped them grow as competitors, but they’re never the whole story. Really good fighters can have really unimpressive records. When Merab Dvalishvili entered the UFC he was three years into a 7-2 career with only three decent fights under his belt, on paper. Numbers aren’t everything and sometimes you have to watch the tape to know when someone’s better than their record would indicate.

But, in this case, I have watched tape on both guys and I am completely unimpressed. YISAK LEE BY DECISION.

WELTERWEIGHT: Ding Meng (35-9) vs José Henrique (8-1)

When I talk about the degree to which numbers lie, this ostensibly lopsided fight where one guy has five times the experience of the other is a case in point. In some ways, China has one of the bigger, more vibrant regional mixed martial arts scenes in the world, between companies like Kunlun and Wu Lin Feng and, in today’s most relevant case, Jue Cheng King, better known as JCK MMA. The bulk of Ding Meng’s career, and the stuff that brought him to the UFC’s attention, came from JCK. And ten of his sixteen JCK opponents had less than ten wins. Five of them had, at most, two. When Ding Meng tried out for ONE Championship during their 2019 Chiense trials, he got knocked out in a round by an opponent with 1/5 as many fights as he did at the time; when the UFC brought him in for the Contender Series in 2024 he got beaten by Rami Hamed, who noticeably did not get a contract. José Henrique’s record is much shorter, but there’s a solid argument to be made that just by hanging out in Shooto Brasil and the Legacy Fighting Alliance and the Centurion Fighting Championships he’s fought consistently tougher competition.

At least, I hope he has, because the last time anyone here saw him it was when Yusaku Kinoshita knocked him the fuck out on the Contender Series four years ago, and Kinoshita went on to wash out of the UFC in a year, so fingers crossed that he’s learned his lessons. JOSÉ HENRIQUE BY TKO.

BANTAMWEIGHT: Aoriqileng (26-12 (1)) vs Cody Haddon (8-1)

Forget China vs America, forget veterans vs prospects, this is a rubber match against the entire institution of Codies. Aoriqileng’s second-ever UFC fight back in 2021 was a decision loss to Cody Durden, and that left a burning fire of vengeance in his belly that took four years to quench. When last we saw him this past October, Aoriqileng enacted his need for justice by knocking out Cody Gibson with one punch in twenty-one seconds. It wasn’t too long ago that we talked about Daniel Santos and his inexplicable war on every South Korean fighter in the Featherweight division: There are four Codies at Bantamweight, and right now, Aoriqileng is 1-1 against them. He needs this tiebreaker. He needs this glory.

I do not care that Haddon is a big favorite. I do not care that Haddon is probably going to win. This is about more than mixed martial arts. This is about fate. AORIQILENG BY DECISION.

BANTAMWEIGHT: Rei Tsuruya (10-1) vs Luis Gurule (11-3)

I really hate this shit, and I hate that it comes up so often. Rei Tsuruya isn’t the problem here, he’s fine, I’m sure they want to rehabilitate him after he finally losing his undefeated streak when last we saw him--more than a year ago, jesus--but it was Joshua Van and he’s the Flyweight champion now, so honestly, if you’re gonna lose to anyone, it might as well be him. Luis Gurule is the problem. Gurule was on a three-fight losing streak and competing to, in all likelihood, keep his job, but he finally managed to put it together and notch a solid win over Daniel Barez so now, after four attempts, he finally has momentum! Which would be great! Except the distance between that fight and this one is fourteen days. This wasn’t a quick knockout or a first-round submission, it went the distance. A professional fighter struck Luis Gurule 113 times just two weeks ago, seventy-nine of which went straight to the dome, and the world of mixed martial arts has no problem with sending him right back out there.

It’s completely baffling that this is normal now. REI TSURUYA BY DECISION.

WOMEN’S STRAWWEIGHT: Angela Hill (18-16, #14) vs Jingnan Xiong (19-2, NR)

I feel like I am running out of words to properly express my exasperation about ranked women’s fights being stuck on the prelims, and this is one of the most maddening cases.

We already talked about this during the main card, but I’m going to repeat it, because it bears repeating. Angela Hill is the greatest journeywoman in UFC history. She was there for the debut of Women’s Strawweight. She shared the cage with its first-ever champion in 2014 and its current champion almost ten years later. When she makes her walk this weekend, it’ll be her thirtieth UFC fight, which ties Jéssica Andrade for the most in UFC history and puts her just two bouts behind Max Holloway, Dustin Poirier and Diego Sanchez. Jingnan Xiong was the greatest female fighter in the history of ONE Championship, the UFC’s Singaporean competitor. In eight years and eleven fights she went 10-1, with her only loss coming from a failed attempt to drop a weight class and become a double-champion opposite ONE’s other best female fighter, Angela Lee, who Xiong ultimately went 2-1 against, beating her both times they fought at her home in the 125-pound division.

The UFC is happy to spend half of every given year acting as a regional promotion these days. Get paid to come to Australia; stack your card with Australians, even if it means an Ollie Schmid sneaks through. Fight night in Abu Dhabi? Time to book Mohammad “The UAE Warrior” Yahya, even though he’s never won a UFC fight. Despite being arguably the world’s only major global promotion, they book these events like a regional promotion trying to get regional attention, because, for that one night, that’s what they are and what they’re desperately trying to do.

Jingnan Xiong is one of the greatest Chinese mixed martial artists on the planet. This is her UFC debut after a near-decade as a reigning world champion. She is fighting one of the best-known women in the company on a Chinese card airing on Chinese time for a Chinese audience.

They’re three fights into the prelims.

Jake Matthews vs Carlston Harris is on the main card.

At a certain point I think you just have to stop pretending and add a No Girls Allowed sign to the main card graphics. Both women deserve better. I’m very, very worried about Xiong cutting back down to 115 after all of her success in ONE came at 125 and I hope it doesn’t bite her in the ass. That said, JINGNAN XIONG BY DECISION.

FEATHERWEIGHT: Zhu Kangjie (21-4) vs Rodrigo Vera (21-1-1)

Welcome to your third, final, and probably best double-debut fight of the night. Zhu Kangjie was 2025’s Featherweight Road to UFC winner, which everyone has forgotten because, for one, all three of his tournament wins were decisions, for two, the tournament took an entire goddamn year, ended an entire goddamn year ago, and an entire goddamn year later Zhu is only now making his UFC debut, and for three, it’s Road to UFC and the company practically stopped acknowledging its existence after its inaugural season. Ramon Taveras was supposed to be here, but he possibly wisely decided not to head off to China to fight a Chinese tournament winner while already on a two-fight losing streak, so in his stead, the UFC hired Rodrigo Vera, who I am weirdly excited to see get a shot at the big show. Vera has, for the most part, been fighting and performing well against very legitimate competition in Mexico, Brazil and his native Peru. Moreover, he’s sporting one of my favorite fighting styles: High-pressure, up-close, in-the-pocket you-will-breathe-when-I-allow-it work, whether it’s grinding takedowns, phone-booth boxing or some particularly vicious clinch knees.

Prospects I actually care about are a rare and finite resource these days. RODRIGO VERA BY DECISION.

WOMEN’S STRAWWEIGHT: Loma Lookboonmee (10-4) vs Jaqueline Amorim (10-2)

Oh, Loma. I believed in you, Loma. I knew Alexia Thainara was probably going to beat you back in September but I just didn’t have the heart to pick against you, and now we’re in Macau and you’re an underdog again. Jaqueline, even if I did not already hold it against you that being an English student has poisoned my brain so badly that I have to backspace over the C I put in your name one out of every four times I type it, I would be obligated to root against you because the world is better when Loma Lookboonmee is ranked. Granted, the world would be much better if the UFC had a damn Atomweight division, but it’s more important that we budget that money and card space for Contender Series Middleweights named things like Joseph “The Land Animal” Kropschot.

For the record, that’s not one of the ones I made up. You can go look. We are all bastards now. LOMA LOOKBOONMEE BY DECISION.

SATURDAY, MAY 16 FROM THE MANDATED NECESSITY OF THE APEX
PRELIMS 2 PM PDT / 5 PM EDT | MAIN CARD 5 PM / 8 PM

Wasn’t that big double-championship plus title eliminator plus inexplicable Jeremy Stephens appearance last week fun? Isn’t it nice when things matter?

Well, I hope you enjoyed it while it lasted. This week we’re back in the Apex for a fight card with two ranked fights, multiple debuts, and Tuco Tokkos booked above a top-five women’s fight. Next week we’re off because everyone needs a goddamn break. The week after that the UFC’s in Macau, which means it’s another post-midnight special for the stateside audience and will go largely unwatched. The week after that? We’re back in the Apex for a card with the attempted deconstruction of Belal Muhammad featuring a Bryce Mitchell fight.

And after that it’s the White House, capping off a bad month in MMA with the single most cursed event ever to make air.

We are in the Apex. We never left the Apex. We will never leave the Apex, no matter where we go.

MAIN EVENT: PASSING TRAINS
FEATHERWEIGHT: Arnold Allen (20-4, #7) vs Melquizael Costa (26-7, #12)

This is not the future Arnold Allen was meant for.

Allen spent years as the Featherweight heir apparent. At the height of Conormania, when the UFC was so desperate for UK talent that for a terrible moment in time Paddy Holohan was in a main event, Arnold Allen was there. Top contender in Cage Warriors, regional champion in the lesser English circuit, nearly undefeated altogether--he was a perfect candidate for furthering the UFC’s international expansion, and audiences already bought him as a serious prospect after just his debut fight.

In 2015.

Eight months passed before the world saw him again. And he won! But it was another thirteen months before his third UFC appearance. Fourteen to the next one. Another year, after that. This became the patch on Allen’s career: He was unanimously agreed to be one of the best Featherweights in the world, he was well-rounded, iron-chinned and capable of imposing his gameplans on everyone he met, but he couldn’t stay healthy or active, and by the time 2021 rolled around he was about to enter the top ten and thanks to the odd span of his inactivity the best victory of his career was over Gilbert Melendez, who had been a top Lightweight a decade prior, hadn’t won a fight in six years, and retired immediately afterward.

It wasn’t Arnold, it was his timing, and he was as frustrated by it as anyone. By 2022 he managed to notch multiple fights in a year again--just the second time in his then-seven-year run in the UFC--and after obliterating Dan Hooker and psychically causing then-contender Calvin Kattar’s knee to collapse in midfight, he was finally ready to get the shot at the top he’d been meant for back in 2015.

As it turned out: Eight years wasn’t long enough to prepare for Max Holloway. That’s okay, though! That’s not the end of the world. It’s Max Holloway, he did that to goddamn near everyone, and Arnold put up a very good fight and even held Max to a one-round margin on one of the scorecards. Max was bound for Lightweight soon enough, the space would open, and Arnold would have his chance to shine again.

At least, he would have a few years prior. Lost opportunities were perceived as the curse of Allen’s strength of schedule, but that missed the true danger of how the division had changed around him. When Allen joined the UFC, Dennis Bermudez was a top ten Featherweight. By the time he broke into the single digits, Allen’s peers in the top ten had shifted, but they still included aging fighters like Chan Sung Jung and Edson Barboza.

By the turn of 2024, the new generation was on its way in. Ilia Topuria was about to be the champion. Killers like Movsar Evloev, Lerone Murphy, Diego Lopes and Jean Silva were beginning to churn through the rankings. The Brian Ortegas of the world were falling to pieces.

While no one was looking, Arnold Allen became the veteran standing in the middle of the tides of time, and they were no kinder to him than any of the hundreds who came before him. Between his professional debut in 2012 and his top contendership match in 2023, Arnold Allen went 19-1. In the last three years, he’s 1-3, and that sole victory came against Giga Chikadze, who is, himself, nearing 40 and seemingly on his way out. Allen couldn’t outgrapple Movsar, just like he couldn’t outgun Jean Silva.

But he’s never looked terrible. He hung in there with Movsar and even won the fight on a handful of media cards. He went toe to toe with Jean and won the first round. He isn’t dying in the cage, he isn’t humiliating himself, he just hasn’t quite been able to hang, and in some ways that’s so, so much worse. When a fighter is simply washed up, when BJ Penn is out there dropping decisions to Dennis Siver, it’s easy. It’s painful to watch, but it’s easy to recognize that someone is simply done. When a top fighter is still so, so very close to still being a top fighter and they just aren’t quite there anymore, you have to embark on the difficult journey of figuring out how much they have left and where they belong.

That’s where opportunity comes for the fighters who need it. Melquizael Costa needs it, because he was never supposed to get this far in the first place.

There was no deeply intentional marketing plan for Melk. The UFC had scouted him, they were well aware of his appearances in the Legacy Fighting Alliance and his wins in Mexico, but he wasn’t signed because they had big things in mind for him, he wasn’t plucked out of the ether as a special attraction, he wasn’t even contracted for the Contender Series. Lightweight veteran Thiago Moisés was supposed to fight top prospect Guram Kutateladze at the start of 2023, Guram had to pull out two weeks ahead of time, and Melk was conveniently available. Just another in the increasing army of short-notice contracts the company relies on these days to fill the holes in their schedule.

Which is a fucking shame, because Melk’s story is the kind modern dreams are made of. He was a poor kid in Brazil who grew up dealing with constant ostracization thanks to his vitiligo--though he’s noted that his fellow kids didn’t really give a shit, it was their parents who constantly pushed him away for fear that he was diseased, because no matter where you are in the world, parents just don’t understand--and he found his will to be out in public thanks to the combination of a love of martial arts and the only great mixed martial arts fighting game ever made, 2011’s UFC Undisputed 3. A fifteen year-old Melk saw WEC veteran and fellow vitiligo case Scott Jorgensen in digital form, and learning that someone like him could be a star in the sport helped Melk find both his confidence and his dream.

It’s a great background! It did not stop him from getting strangled by Thiago or pounded out by Steve Garcia a couple fights later, and by the turn of 2024 Costa was already 1-2, banished to the early prelims and being placed in fights that could easily have ended his contract. As it turns out, after the mile of crap he dealt with to get here, he was not prepared to let go that easily.

Melk turned his fortunes around and became the first person in the UFC to tap out Shayilan Nuerdanbieke, a name I deeply miss typing on a regular basis. He didn’t get another fight in 2024 (because the UFC, emphasizing their disinterest, didn’t actually offer him a new contract until the end of the fucking year) and he made up for it by scoring a ridiculous four wins in nine months over the course of 2025. If you were watching the sport, once every 73 days you saw him show up and batter progressively tougher opponents in progressively wilder ways. He out-gritted Christian Rodriguez, the man who slew Raul Rosas Jr. He out-crazied Julian Erosa, who throws more flying knees than jabs. He took on Morgan Charrière, owner of some of the heaviest kicks in the division, and put a shin upside his forehead in barely over a minute.

But he didn’t legitimize himself as a threat to the division until this past February. Dan Ige has been Featherweight’s gatekeeper for damn near a decade, and in that time he’s shared the cage with a laundry list of greats, from aforementioned contenders like Barboza and Kattar and Jung to the new guys like Lopes, Murphy and Evloev. Ige hadn’t always won, but he’d always made a solid accounting for himself, and in all of those ring-hours with all of those men he had been beaten, but never stopped. Not by Josh Emmett’s punching power, not by Bryce Mitchell’s grappling. In eight years and twenty fights, win or lose, Dan Ige always made it to the final bell.

Seconds before the first round could end, Melquizael Costa hit him square in the face with a spinning kick and pounded him out.

He wasn’t supposed to be a martial artist. He wasn’t supposed to be in the UFC. He was such an afterthought that the matchmakers let him dangle in the wind, unsigned, as a successful UFC veteran in the prime of his career. Now he’s the first man to ever kick the Featherweight door down, and he has a shot at becoming one of the top ten in the entire world. It’s a great addition to an already great story, and a great shot in the arm for one of the best divisions in the sport, and a great main event in a place that is often stuck with the dregs, and a great opportunity for an underserved fighter who has more than earned it.

All of which makes me really sad that I’m picking ARNOLD ALLEN BY DECISION. I would love to be wrong about this one. I’ve been rooting for Costa since that first matchup with Moisés, but a lot of his success comes from the looseness of his style. He’s mobile and lanky and he keeps himself open so he can jump on guillotines or swing wild kicks into tight spaces, and that works really well on competitors that don’t can’t take advantage of it. Allen does not have this problem. He boxed with Max Holloway, wrestled with Movsar Evloev, and brawled with Jean Silva. He’s extremely composed and extremely adaptable, and as much as I’d like to see Melk pull another spinning kick out of his ass and shock the world again, I don’t think Allen’s time in the top five is done yet.

CO-MAIN EVENT: GETTING KIND OF UNCOMFORTABLE
FEATHERWEIGHT: Dooho Choi (16-4-1) vs Daniel Santos (13-2)

So this is weird, right? This is really fucking weird?

I don’t mean Dooho Choi. Nothing is weird about Dooho Choi. He was the second-most-promoted South Korean fighter next to Chan Sung Jung himself, he had one of the best fights in UFC history with Cub Swanson, he had a bad streak of knockout losses afterward that included somehow getting knocked out by Jeremy Stephens, he went off for his mandatory national military service, came back after four and a half years and had his grand return spoiled by a point-deduction draw with Kyle Nelson, a man best known for Having A Beard and Getting Knocked Out Regularly, and he’s only back to his winning ways thanks to a knockout over a man who makes train noises and a white guy from Pennsylvania who calls himself Señor Perfecto.

See? Completely normal. By the standards of mixed martial arts this is breakfast at an IHOP. Dooho Choi is not the problem.

Daniel Santos isn’t the problem, either. At least, not intentionally. It’s a little weird that he’s only managed five UFC fights in five years, and it’s a little weird that he went from losing to Julio Arce to breaking John Castañeda’s face, and it’s a little weird that he’s a Brazilian fighter nicknamed after the creepy fucking cat-children from Thundercats except they spelled it “Willycat” for what I assume are please-don’t-sue-us reasons because god only knows how vicious the lawyers in charge of Thundercats are, but he shares a division with a guy named Nate Wood, so honestly, who’s throwing stones. All of that? That’s fine. That’s all just fine.

As of now, there are about one hundred Featherweights signed to the UFC. There’s a bit of number-fudging there, as it’s counting some Contender Series folks and some only semi-active folks and the like, but 100 is a lot more satisfying than “ninety-something” so we’re gonna stick with it. Out of those one hundred fighters, exactly three hail from South Korea: Dooho Choi, Jeongyeong Lee, and JooSang Yoo.

And it’s very easy to put all of their names together, because as of this weekend, Daniel Santos will have fought all three of them in consecutive bouts.

That’s weird! That’s fucking weird, right? This fight was supposed to happen back in September and it was already weird then because Santos had just fought and beat Lee, after Choi got injured the UFC made it even weirder by rebooking Santos into a fight with Yoo on the following weekend, and now, seven months later, they’re finishing the job by rebooking this fight. South Koreans make up roughly 3% of the Featherweight roster and in just a few days Daniel Santos will have fought all of them in a row.

I don’t know what kind of 2026 Alex Stiebling shit we’re onto, here, but boy, it’s a series of weird choices. Both of these men could use fights to push them up the ladder after their long periods of inactivity, but you probably didn’t need to have them do it against each other, especially with the possibility that, should he win, Santos will have defeated 33% of the entire South Korean contingent in the UFC.

Save us from the sweep, Superboy. DOOHO CHOI BY TKO.

MAIN CARD: KETLEN VIEIRA VS JACQUELINE CAVALCANTI IS IN THE MIDDLE OF THE PRELIMS
BANTAMWEIGHT: Malcolm Wellmaker (10-1) vs Juan Díaz (15-1-1)

Living by hype means dying by hype. Malcolm Wellmaker was one of the UFC’s big breakout prospects of 2025, an undefeated man with a near-total finishing rate who kept getting big right hook knockout finishes that inevitably got reposted by the 60-70% bot population of social media, which is, as we know, the best possible route for success. It was impressive, it was exciting, and it was also thoroughly astroturfed. His first opponent was Cameron Saaiman, a fellow former Contender Series prospect now stuck on a losing streak, and his second, even more hilariously, was Kris Moutinho, who was 0-2 in the UFC and known solely for catching hideous beatings. They intended to step him up a little with Serhiy Sidey, who did, at least, have a couple wins, and when he pulled out it was going to be Cody Haddon, a veteran of one UFC fight, and when he couldn’t make it either they threw up their hands and pulled out the old matchmaking special: Picking up a regional guy who fights at a lower weight class with less than a week to prepare so the marketing guy can still get his win. Unfortunately for them, they picked out Ethyn Ewing, who turned out to be really fucking good at fighting.

So now Ewing’s knocking on the door of the rankings and Wellmaker’s stuck fighting debutants in the Apex. As Wellmaker and Saaiman before him, Juan Díaz is this year’s model of Contender Series Guy. He’s relatively young at 27, he’s kicked around Mexico’s regional circuit for the last few years with a bunch of success--the only man to beat him, Rodrigo Vera, is making his own UFC debut at the end of the month--and, as a sign of just what the exchange rate is like out there these days, Juan holding the Bantamweight Championship of the Lux Fight League, which regularly runs intentionally mismatched record-padding cards out of gymnasiums built for 3,000 people, entitled him to a shot at the Contender Series opposite Kwon Won-il, who spent six years in ONE Championship and unsuccessfully fought for their 145-pound title last year. Whatever the economics of the fight, from a skill perspective, it was apparently entirely apt as Juan crushed him. He outjabbed him, outkicked him, stumbled him with several big right hands and knocked him out with that spinning back elbow that’s quickly becoming a part of the overall MMA meta the same way calf kicks did a decade ago.

Great performance, solid offense, Juan’s got a lot of promise as a fighter, MALCOLM WELLMAKER BY KO. For all of his offensive prowess, Juan also keeps his head on a stick and takes punches to land them. All it’s gonna take is one.

LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Modestas Bukauskas (19-7) vs Rodolfo Bellato (13-3-1) Christian Edwards (8-4)

The Modestas Moment came and went. Khalil Rountree Jr. kicking his kneecap out back in 2021 took away both a year of his career and his UFC contract, but by 2023 the UFC needed a warm body to keep Tyson Pedro on an Australian card, and Modestas came back fully recovered, better than ever, and prepared to take the entire world by storm. Up until half a year later, when Vitor Petrino knocked him right the fuck out again. But two more years and four more victories and not only was Modestas right back in the mix, he was fighting for a long-awaited spot in the top fifteen! Which was denied to him when Nikita Krylov knocked him out just three seconds before the final bell. 2021 is 2023 is 2026, and like so many who’ve known trauma, Modestas is stuck in the cycle of reliving his pain.

Rodolfo Bellato is on the opposite end of the philosophical spectrum, existing in a persistent cycle of comedy. Seven years ago Bellato was a big, promising prospect out of São Paulo’s regional scene, but his run came to an end when our last-paragraph buddy Vitor Petrino knocked him cold. Three years and three wins later, Rodolfo got his shot at the Contender Series and found himself fighting for a UFC contract against, of all possible people, Vitor Petrino, who knocked him out again. Three more fights later Bellato finally made it to the big show, and got a nice soft target in comedy jobber Ihor Potieria for his debut, after which everything got real weird. A majority draw with Jimmy Crute. A No Contest with Paul Craig after Craig landed an illegal upkick that had the audience (unfairly) questioning Bellato’s heart. A loss to Navajo Stirling, the most featureless of Light Heavyweight prospects. And there, at the end of all things, Bellato saved his contract by knocking out Luke Fernandez, which happened two months ago and I will bet everything in my pockets that you already forgot it happened.

There is nothing in my pockets, just as there is nothing keeping the Light Heavyweight division from falling into the lake of fire. MODESTAS BUKAUSKAS BY DECISION. UPDATE: Rodolfo got pulled from the fight on Tuesday and replaced by Christian Edwards, who is debuting for the company despite being 50/50 in the last five years and being one fight removed from losing to Luke Fernandez, the man Bellato destroyed, so we’re trading up to MODESTAS BUKAUSKAS BY TKO.

BANTAMWEIGHT: Timmy Cuamba (10-3) vs Bernardo Sopaj (12-3)

One of the most pernicious aspects of the modern UFC is the way damn near every fighter goes through the same Play-Doh press. I would love to tell you about Timmy Cuamba’s long history in the B-leagues, or Bernardo Sopaj’s time with Bahrain’s BRAVE Combat Federation, but they resolve in exactly the same way. Both men got brought up in 2024 as short-notice replacement signings to keep one of marketing’s players on an event--in Cuamba’s case it was Bolaji Oki and in Sopaj’s it was Vinicius Oliveira, so one of those straws was decidedly shorter than the other--both men dutifully lost, and both have been spinning their wheels ever since. Cuamba lost another fight before winning two, Sopaj sat on the sidelines for a year before winning his next fight and this time he’s been out of action for sixteen months.

“Why don’t people care about the UFC like they used to” is one of those recurring questions that’s very easily answered by the most sparing glance at its sociopolitical perspective, but this, here, is maybe the best example of its fundamental issues as a functional organization. Both of these men were signed and booked as afterthoughts, and now Cuamba’s on a two-fight winning streak and Sopaj has only managed one cagewalk in the last two years, and these two things are considered sufficiently equal enough that they’re putting them together, and they’re doing it in the Apex where they know half of the audience won’t be watching, and all of that is, itself, still being booked more notably than a top five fight at Women’s Bantamweight.

I hate the UFC’s politics, and I hate the era of favoritism we’re stuck in, but as tempting as it would be to blame all of the sport’s woes on its crippling addictions to fascism and bigotry, it’s a lot simpler: You cannot ask the audience to care when the company itself very visibly could not care less. No one is buying that the matchmakers are in any way invested in Cuamba/Sopaj, nor that there’s any hope it will lead anywhere. BERNADO SOPAJ BY DECISION.

WELTERWEIGHT: Nikolay Veretennikov (14-7) vs Khaos Williams (15-5)

I actually didn’t do this on purpose, it’s a fun kind of serendipity, but on the extremely appropriate topic of the UFC’s complete lack of giving a shit we have this fight. Nikolay Veretennikov is a five-fight UFC veteran who just came off his best performance in the company, having punched and elbowed the shit out of poor Niko Price this past February. Khaos Williams is a former prospect who has fallen into the danger zone, having taken two consecutive losses for the first time in his entire career. This is a battle of legitimate veterans with fifteen UFC bouts between them.

As I write this, it is 10:34 PM EDT on Monday, meaning this event takes place in about four and a half days. This fight has not been officially posted. It wasn’t on their TV breakdown, it’s not on their social media, and it’s not on the UFC’s official card, which, coincidentally, still lists multiple fights that have been publicly scratched by injuries. Several databases list this happening, but they have it as a prelim. I am relying on Marcel Dorff, a Dutch journalist, whose twitter account is, inexplicably, the most consistently accurate source for card news on the entire internet. Not the UFC, the canonical organization in the annals of mixed martial arts, but one load-bearing reporter everyone relies on.

I wish this was a real sport. KHAOS WILLIAMS BY DECISION.

PRELIMS: FUCK YOU, DUDE
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Tuco Tokkos (11-5) vs Ivan Erslan (14-6 (1))

With the greatest of sadness, I must announce that this is, officially, the end of our streak of weekly updates on the ongoing humiliation of the Heavyweight division. For the first time since March 7 we have zero Heavyweight fights on the docket. We’ll pick it back up for Sergei Pavlovich vs Tallison Teixeira out in Macau, but for this one tragic moment in time, we must content ourselves with Heavyweight Junior, which is nearly as bad. Tuco Tokkos is 1-2 in the UFC and that one victory came against Junior Tafa, which is almost worse than having never won. Ivan Erslan can attest: He’s 0-3. I know my particular neurodivergent obsession with fight records can get grating because fighters aren’t always reducible to numbers, but two fights before he was in the UFC Tuco was beating up the 1-13 Brian “Stone Handz” Jackson, a man who mysteriously loses almost all of his fights by TKO within 90 seconds. Ivan was, at least, fighting and competing with slightly credible folks out in KSW.

That does not mean that they should, necessarily, be here, but you go to war with the Light Heavyweight division you have, not the Light Heavyweight division you want. IVAN ERSLAN BY DECISION.

LIGHTWEIGHT: Artur Minev (7-0) vs Tommy Gantt (11-0 (1))

On the ongoing topic of short-notice replacement signings and the way the Contender Series is running the shape of mixed martial arts through the Amigara Fault hole, we have this fight. Tommy Gantt is one of those ideal things DWCS lives on: Guys who look great if you aren’t fully paying attention. An undefeated 11-0, 10 of them finishes, and at Lightweight, the best division in the game? Surely, that’s a future star and if you look at the records of the men he fought absolutely nothing weird will jump out at you.

Ah. Right. Obviously. Was one of those guys 10-40? Jesus fucking christ.

The first time I put Tommy Gantt’s name into my high-tech tape research machine it fed me a video of him going almost two and a half rounds with Josh Henry. Josh Henry is the 11-7 in that long string of numbers and he fights at Lightweight despite being 5’4”. Do you remember Kyle Prepolec, the late replacement signing the UFC made last year who got destroyed repeatedly during their trips to Canada? Prepolec knocked Henry out in two minutes. Gantt took eleven. He was supposed to fight Trey Ogden tonight, and Ogden couldn’t make it, so instead the UFC went out and hired Fury FC prospect Artur Minev, who is also undefeated, also finishes almost everyone he fights, and also has fought nothing but jobbers and rookies and only in the last year has moved up in the world to dealing with competitors with double-digit loss counts.

I focus so much on the numbers because I still believe in the idea that the UFC should, in theory, be a place for people who have already proven they belong here, and the closer it comes to being the same kind of talent training ground the regional scene represents, the closer it comes to no longer having a reason to exist at all. TOMMY GANTT BY DECISION.

WOMEN’S BANTAMWEIGHT: Ketlen Vieira (15-5, #5) vs Jacqueline Cavalcanti (10-1, #11)

I don’t think Women’s Bantamweight is going to survive Kayla Harrison’s retirement. We’ve been talking about the UFC’s sheer disregard for the division for what feels like eons, there’s barely thirty women signed to the class and that includes a couple retirees and folks that haven’t fought in years and the Mayra Bueno Silvas and Hailey Cowans of the world that are almost assuredly on their way out, so realistically it’s closer to 25. The next title fight is built around a champion who’s ready to leave the sport and a hall of famer coming out of retirement for what could easily be a Georges St-Pierre one-night-only special. The closest thing the UFC has to a woman getting a push at 135 is Joselyne Edwards, and even that is in the form of a five-fight winning streak that’s only gotten off the prelims once. Ketlen Vieira is one of the best women in the weight class, it’s been five years since she lost to someone who wasn’t either a world champion or a top contender; Jacqueline Cavalcanti is a perfect 5-0 in the UFC , which leaves her tied with Edwards for the second-longest winning streak in the division.

But both women combine for a grand total of one stoppage victory in the UFC. So this top five fight is buried in the prelims of an Apex card between Cody Brundage and Tommy Gantt. This is how inherently worthless Women’s Bantamweight is to management, and once Kayla’s gone and Amanda’s back in the history books, I fear they’ll put it in the same potter’s field Women’s Featherweight got dumped in. JACQUELINE CAVALCANTI BY DECISION.

MIDDLEWEIGHT: Andre Petroski (13-5) vs Cody Brundage (11-9-1 (1))

Cody Brundage may not be long for this MMA world, being on a three-fight losing streak and a sizable (and sensible) underdog here, so I want to take this moment to give him his laurels for what might be one of the funniest UFC careers of all time. Fifteen fights. Hell, fifteen fights in just under five years. That’s silly, and that silliness was pretty defining for our man Cody. In all, in order:

• After getting knocked out in a 2020 Contender Series fight against William Knight, one of the UFC’s other funniest men, Cody gets signed in September 2021 as a short-notice replacement to keep Nick Maximov’s UFC debut alive; Maximov wins and is cut a year later after going 2-2

• Brundage rebounds in March and July with two upset stoppages, the first against Dalcha Lungiambula, who is cut at the end of the year after going 2-5, and the second over Tresean Gore, who is still around and kicking today at 3-4

• Cody proceeds to lose his next three fights, getting knocked out in one round by Michał Oleksiejczuk and choked out in two by Rodolfo Vieira, and is served up as a victim to rehabilitate UFC marketing project Sedriques Dumas, who is now 3-5 (1), hasn’t won in two years, and is also still here

• In one of the funniest things to happen in quite some time, Brundage rescues his contract from the void by beating Jacob Malkoun in September of 2023 after Malkoun blows a wildly one-sided 10-8 round by elbowing Cody in the brainstem, which draws an immediate disqualification

• In a somehow even funnier moment, Brundage is once again called upon to pump up a DWCS prospect, this time the undefeated 6’4” finishing machine Zach Reese, whom Cody knocks out with a powerbomb in under two minutes

• For scoring one of the best knockouts of the year, Cody is rewarded by being served up to -1600 favorite Bo Nickal on UFC 300, who chokes him out in two rounds

• Undaunted, a second Brundage Comedy Special occurs, this time as a trilogy: In July 2024 Cody is served up to knockout machine Abdul Razak Alhassan as a rehabilitation fight, only for Brundage to get a No Contest after he, too, elbows Cody in the back of the head, after which Cody is iced for almost a year only to return in March 2025 for a knockout victory over Julian Marquez, the man who once parleyed a UFC victory into fumbling Miley Cyrus (no, really) and was now four years removed from his last victory, and having scored an actual, uncontroversial victory, Cody is thrown to the wolves once again, this time for the undefeated Mansur Abdul-Malik, only for that, too, to end in what ultimately became a No Contest after Mansur headbutted him into a knockdown

• As with so many of our best performers, Brundage’s magnum opus was followed by disappointment, as the last nine months have been a split decision loss to Eric McConico, a brutal knockout loss to Cam Rowston, and another split decision loss to Donte Johnson, the 5’8” Middleweight

These are the things dreams are made of. Those dreams are generally confusing and unpleasant and a way to cover up the sport eating the rare long-term enhancement talent alive, but as Norman McCay once said, it’s flattering to be remembered somehow. If this goes the way it most likely will and this is the end of the ballad of Brundage, then godspeed to you, Cody. May you and your manager-trainer-wife move on to the Elysian fields of one of the several bareknuckle fighting organizations that exist where the B-leagues used to be. ANDRE PETROSKI BY DECISION.

WOMEN’S STRAWWEIGHT: Alice Ardelean (11-7) vs Polyana Viana (13-8)

Strawweight has kind of formed itself into a pair of tracks. In one, whether you’re winning or losing, you are within the relevant artery of the division and you will, eventually, get somewhere. In the other, you are swimming through the sea of irrelevance and hoping to hang on long enough that someone throws you a ladder. Alice Ardelean is 2-2. The two women she lost to are 2-2 and 1-2 and the two women she beat are 0-3 and 1-4. Polyana Viana is 4-7 and the four women she beat combine for a grand total of 5 UFC wins in 17 bouts. She hasn’t won a fight in almost four years and she’s been stopped in every subsequent attempt. Whoever wins this fight is still completely lacking in momentum and will still exist to be preyed upon when marketing decides the next Hailey Cowan needs a winnable match, but by god, it’s better than losing, I suppose.

That said: Only one of these women lost a fight to Shauna Bannon and the streets do not forget. POLYANA VIANA BY DECISION.

FLYWEIGHT: Daniel Barez (17-7) vs Luis Gurule (10-3)

We may have lost last week’s episode of Heavyweight madness, but we are carrying on its theme of Flyweights in desperate straits, and if they offered me that trade on any kind of regular basis we would never see a Tafa brother again. Daniel Barez has been in the UFC for three years, he is only just now passing three fights, and two of those ended with his getting choked out. Management saw enough potential in Luis Gurule and his angry swinging haymakers to make him the rare Flyweight to go straight from Contender Series to main-card attraction, and one year later he’s 0-3. Neither man has a particularly comfortable grip on his contract and both have been betrayed by the weaknesses of their game, with Barez suffering against superior grapplers and Gurule troubled by people who’ve figured out that punches can travel in straight lines.

Whoever loses, may you go on to have a fun time in Rizin. DANIEL BAREZ BY DECISION.

WOMEN’S STRAWWEIGHT: Shauna Bannon (7-2) vs Nicolle Caliari (8-4)

What did I just say about the god damned streets. The company’s spent the last three years trying to find people that could feasibly lose to Shauna Bannon, whose presence as a Paddy Holohan student out of Ireland means I have now referenced Paddy Holohan twice in a single write-up and will punish myself accordingly after you see yourself out. The last time we saw Shauna they gave her Sam Hughes, which was both understandable, as Hughes is a 6-6 journeywoman by UFC standards and thus a logical jump, and predictable, as she mauled Shauna on the ground and choked her out. This means there is no way to go but backward, and in this case she is backing directly into Nicolle Caliari, whose entire UFC career is a pair of losses. It is a testament to the world’s feelings about Shauna’s fighting chops that she is, definitionally, far more successful in the UFC than Caliari, and Caliari is still the favorite to win because Shauna Bannon is Shauna Bannon.

Which almost makes me want to pick her. Having seen her lose repeatedly I’ve somehow come around the bend and almost feel the need to root for her success. I am not going to, the call is still NICOLLE CALIARI BY SUBMISSION, but the urge is there, and if Shauna wins this one, y’know what, good for her.

SATURDAY, MAY 9 FROM THE PRUDENTIAL CENTER IN NEWARK, NEW JERSEY
EARLY PRELIMS 2 PM PDT / 5 PM EDT | PRELIMS 4 PM / 7 PM | MAIN CARD 6 PM / 9 PM

This feels like it should be a killer of a show. Khamzat Chimaev is one of the biggest fighters in the sport, the UFC has been endlessly marketing Sean Strickland for what feels like my entire adult life, Flyweight is perpetually amazing, there’s two belts and a Heavyweight title eliminator and a Yaroslav Amosov fight. Everything here should be great.

But the event isn’t sold out. Khamzat is very likely to vanish for another year. Sean’s schtick has never felt more tired. Middleweight is ignoring its top contender, Flyweight turned on an injury, and the Heavyweight title barely exists.

And Yaroslav Amosov is on the prelims, but Jeremy fucking Stephens is on a main card broadcast in 2026.

MAIN EVENT: THE WORST OF BOTH WORLDS
MIDDLEWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP: Khamzat Chimaev (15-0, Champion) vs Sean Strickland (30-7, #3)

It feels like we briefly made contact with another dimension wherein the Middleweight division was good, and we slaughtered everyone in it to cover up the shame of our reality.

We’re not even a year removed from the most promising moment in the weight class since Izzy’s heyday came to an end. Dricus du Plessis was an active, regularly defending champion. Khamzat Chimaev was ascendant as the scariest Middleweight contender the sport had seen in years. Sean Strickland had been boxed out of title contention, but was still vital at the top of the pecking order. Nassourdine Imavov, Anthony Hernandez, Caio Borralho and Reinier de Ridder were all knocking on the door to the top five. Israel Adesanya, Robert Whittaker and Jared Cannonier were all functional filters of aging veterancy. Things were messy and silly and gross and disappointing, as the Middleweight division so often is, but by god, there was a genuine sense of promise.

It is mid-2026. Khamzat Chimaev won the title nine months ago and went right back to fighting once a year. Dricus du Plessis went from the first defending champion since 2022 to completely unbooked and rumored to be fighting Kamaru Usman. Anthony Hernandez’s rise up the ranks was brutally halted by Sean Strickland, Reinier de Ridder fell apart against Brendan Allen, and Caio Borralho fell off in the great Fighting Nerds failure of 2025. Izzy’s body turned to dust in realtime. Rob got his teeth broken on live television. Jared was inexplicably thrown at a Welterweight.

But Nassourdine Imavov’s still good, though! He beat Jared, he beat Allen, he beat Caio, and he became the only person other than Alex Pereira to ever knock Izzy out on his feet. Five-fight winning streak, destroyed a living legend, hasn’t had or lost a shot at the top yet, conveniently French and thus a treasured commodity for the UFC’s marketing department, #2 in the division behind only former champ Dricus, big adherent of the company’s house style of cheating a bunch and getting away with it. Sure, the rest of the division’s hopes and dreams may have burnt to the ground, but at least the sport did its job and gave us an undeniable, indisputable top contender to the Middleweight crown.

He is, of course, not in this fight.

The last time we had to deal with a Sean Strickland fight I made a shitty Animorphs photoshop of his slow turn into the new Colby Covington by virtue of his ever-sadder attempts to be offensive and attention-grabbing to stay relevant in an era of the sport where the UFC has a camera angle devoted to Kash Patel’s Knockout Reactions Corner, but little did I know that it would, instead, portend the return of the era where the UFC picks a guy they just cannot fucking stop giving title shots. Back in his competitive prime, Colby infamously got three shots at the belt in six fights, and they were earned by beating Robbie Lawler, Tyron Woodley and Jorge Masvidal respectively.

Seanby Stricklington is about to get his third shot in seven fights, thanks to his having, y’know, actually won and defended it once. Definitively, he’s the better model. How do his shot-earning fights stack up, compared to Colby beating on former champions?

Well, he got the initial shot at Izzy by beating Abus Magomedov back in mid-2023, and Abus was a grand total of 1-0 with exactly 19 seconds of fight time in the company. So that’s not a great look. After losing the belt to Dricus, in a division awash with contenders, Sean--by his own admission!--turned down bouts with Rob and instead got his rematch by beating no less than Paulo Costa himself, who had one victory in the past five years and it was over Luke Rockhold, who, himself, had only one victory in the last seven.

That’s pretty bad! Funnily enough, Sean got here with his only victory in years that was worth a damn. Anthony Hernandez was on a great run as the baddest motherfucker in the division, a cardio king with killer combinations and aggressive chokeholds and an eight-fight winning streak, and, because God is dead, Sean Strickland fucking destroyed him. Completely outclassed him and knocked him out midway through the third. The kind of fight you could have run back ten times with exactly the same result.

Great performance. Great victory!

Imavov still should’ve gotten the shot.

Strickland and the UFC have defended his getting yet another title fight by, obviously, noting his victory over Imavov back in 2023. It’s true! It was also a short-notice fight three and a half years ago. Strickland at that time was one for his last three, coming off a loss to Jared Cannonier, and only barely more separated in time from getting knocked the fuck out by Elizeu Zaleski as a Welterweight. They already spent two years trying to keep Sean on top. He lost his belt to Dricus, he got fast-tracked right back to Dricus, and he got beat way worse the second time around. Anyone who isn’t a Strickland, a Colby or a Ciryl Gane would have to bust their ass all the way across the division to get another stab at it. Strickland beat Imavov? Khamzat beat Dricus, get back in fucking line.

And it’s particularly galling because, honestly, presuming Chimaev wins--spoilers for my pick here, I suppose--who the fuck knows when we’ll get another Middleweight Championship match?

When we assembled for Chimaev’s shot at Dricus back in August I painted a picture of Khamzat as simultaneously inevitable and unavailable. By 2025 the UFC had already been trying to matchmake Chimaev into championship opportunities for years, and it was his own schedule that tended to fuck it up. He couldn’t make it to a title eliminator with Leon Edwards because of COVID, he couldn’t get his shot at Izzy because he wanted to be a Welterweight, he couldn’t fight for Welterweight contendership because he could no longer make Welterweight, he couldn’t take on Dricus at UFC 300 because of Ramadan.

I have seen many grapplers in my time with combat sports. Khamzat is one of the scariest. Any idiot who watched him casually converse with people at ringside while deadlifting Li Jingliang or throw Kevin Holland around by his neck could have told you about Khamzat’s title potential. The only question marks dogging him were historical issues with his gas tank and his own inability to show up more often than once per calendar year.

The Khamzat that showed up against Dricus very visibly had zero fucking problems with his gas tank. I, like most, worried that either Khamzat needed a finish in the first round and a half or Dricus would drown him in the championship rounds, and instead, Khamzat just rolled him for twenty-five minutes. How thorough a domination was it?

Many were dismayed and disappointed by Khamzat’s performance, because we have so destroyed all forms of meaning in the mixing of the martial arts that taking a guy who’d burned through damn near the entire Middleweight division including four separate world champions and dominating him so badly you outland him by more than a 10:1 ratio is disappointing because it was all wrestling and he didn’t finish him. Fighting a living chaos elemental like Dricus du Plessis and controlling him for five full rounds was the biggest possible testament to Khamzat having addressed his cardio issues.

Sure is a shame about the ‘never showing up’ part, though.

This is a problem with the UFC as a whole at the moment. Tom Aspinall is out of action and can’t defend his belt thanks to Ciryl Gane’s lust for eye jelly. Carlos Ulberg just won the Light Heavyweight title last month and he’s going to be out for at least the rest of the year with a torn ACL. Islam became the Welterweight Champion in November and he isn’t scheduled yet; Ilia nabbed the Lightweight belt in June and his first defense will be this June, just barely shy of twelve months later. Petr Yan and Joshua Van both won their championships on December 6, and Van is only now defending his half a year later, and Yan got fucking back surgery at the end of January. The only male champion with a defense to his name is Alexander Volkanovski. If you expand this to the women you increase the count to two defending champions, thanks to Valentina Shevchenko, but you add two more to the MIA column, with Kayla Harrison about to hit a year post-title win thanks to her own neck surgery and Mackenzie Dern sitting on her Strawweight title since October.

Khamzat is not the only inactive champion. But he is a historically inactive fighter.

Which puts me in the terrible position of almost wanting Sean Strickland to win.

In a perfect world, I would enjoy both of them somehow losing, because buddy, it’s not like Khamzat’s social persona is any better than Sean’s, as the unbelievably tiring ‘I’m gonna beat you up’ ‘no I’m gonna beat YOU up’ ‘well me AND my friends are gonna beat you up’ ‘well I’m gonna SHOOT YOU with my GUNS’ press tour for this godforsaken fight has demonstrated. Let there be no doubt that both of these men are terminally lame. But by god, Sean Strickland will, at least, show up to work more than once a year.

Unless you want him to fight Robert Whittaker, in which case combat sports are suddenly beneath him.

This fight feels very much like a binary check on wrestling. Khamzat can punch, but his approach to striking has never been particularly technical. He isn’t a jabber, he doesn’t really care about combinations, he just likes to throw really, really hard. That’s the kind of thing Strickland feeds on. His complete disassembly of Anthony Hernandez served as a potent reminder just how good he is at his brand of defensive striking, and how easily he can take someone apart if they don’t have anything better for him than winging punches and bad entries. If this fight stays standing, Sean has the poise and the gas to cruise to a decision.

But as much as he and his training partners tout his secret reputation as Middleweight’s dark horse grappling king, we already saw Strickland get wrestled, repeatedly, by Dricus. The only reason Dricus didn’t ragdoll him just as much in their rematch was his having figured out Sean’s striking rhythm well enough that he no longer had to. We already have firsthand experience with Sean’s trouble with aggressive, powerful wrestling.

And we already have firsthand experience with just how much better Khamzat is at that game than Dricus was.

KHAMZAT CHIMAEV BY SUBMISSION. And then we can all gather here next January for Chimaev/Strickland 2 after Sean wins another title shot by valiantly vanquishing Gregory Rodrigues.

CO-MAIN EVENT: THE MAIN EVENT
FLYWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP: Joshua Van (16-2, Champion) vs Tatsuro Taira (18-1, #3)

The story of the Flyweight division is the story of squeezing some of the best stuff in the history of the sport out of perpetually weird situations.

Like, down to the roots. The very first Flyweight fight in UFC history was Demetrious Johnson vs Ian McCall back in 2012, it was supposed to kick off a tournament to crown the first champion, and Johnson’s announced victory was actually a tabulation error by the judges. Had they scored it correctly the fight would’ve been a draw, and as a tournament bout--to this day, the last tournament held in the UFC proper--that meant it would have gone to an exceedingly rare extra round.

Johnson eventually won the tournament and the title. He would go on to become, numerically, the greatest UFC champion of all time. He presided over an eleven-fight reign as a champion who was funny, charismatic, amazing at everything, occasionally did shit no one had ever seen in a fight before, and always, always won. The weird part of this isn’t DJ, it’s the way this infuriated the UFC. Dana White spent most of his time as champion gnashing his teeth about his mere presence, to the point that towards the end of his run he was being pushed so hard to fight a champ-champ match with Bantamweight kingpin T.J. Dillashaw that he was repeatedly threatened with the entire division being shut down just to spite him.

And when he lost the title? The UFC traded him to ONE Championship in exchange for Ben Askren. Then the man who beat him, Henry Cejudo, threw the Flyweight title away. Then Deiveson Figueiredo tried to win it but was ineligible because he missed weight. Then he did win it, but went to a draw with Brandon Moreno after losing a point for hitting him in the dick, which turned into a two-year, four-fight odyssey that saw both men hot potatoing the title back and forth three separate times. And when Moreno finally came out of their series the victor, he immediately fell to Alexandre Pantoja, a man who’d already beaten him twice before, and Pantoja became the first man since Demetrious Johnson to defend the belt multiple times. By the end of 2025 he was the second-best Flyweight in UFC history, a fighter with a great chin, fantastic grappling and sheer, indomitable grit such that no one was sure who could take the belt away from him, or, for that matter, how.

And then, twenty-six seconds into fighting Joshua Van, Pantoja slipped and fell and broke his arm.

So, hey: Congratulations, Joshua Van! Second-youngest champion ever, right after Jon Jones! Went from barely-ranked at #14 to top contender and champion in the space of two fights!

Which was three fights after he got knocked out by Charles Johnson, the #13-ranked man in the division.

Van is presiding over a profoundly weird time for Flyweight. The matchmaking is all over the place, with prospects and veterans being jumped back and forth with little rhyme or reason. Longtime divisional stalwarts like Brandon Moreno and Tim Elliott are falling down the ladder while rookies like Lone’er Kavanagh are springboarding off of their bodies. The UFC has been repeatedly raiding Japan for Flyweight talent with mixed results. Rizin Bantamweight champ Kai Asakura tried, failed, and is now off to 135 pounds again. Rizin Flyweight champ Kyoji Horiguchi returned, succeeded, and has a title eliminator with Manel Kape booked in June.

And Tatsuro Taira is here, getting a shot at becoming the first Japanese champion in UFC history.

Everyone expected this to happen a year and a half ago. By mid-2024 Taira was already 6-0 in the UFC and he’d displayed all the tools necessary to be a contender. Any doubts about his ability to strike had been resolved with his laser-beam knockout over Carlos Hernandez; any doubts about his ability to hang with the top ten were settled when he managed to destroy Alex Perez’s knee with a takedown. Taira walked into his second main event against Brandon Royval as an undefeated favorite.

He walked out demoted. It was a hell of a fight, one of the better bouts in 2024, but he still lost. And this is where the matchmaking parallelogram of Flyweight starts to bring that weirdness back into things.

See, Joshua Van was a UFC project. They brought him in as a short-notice signing, but they took an immediate shine to his style, his attitude, and his lack of any form of leverage thanks to his being all of 21 and more than willing to take whatever they give himyouthful vigor. But Van lost to Charles Johnson. Johnson, despite being at the periphery of the rankings, now has knockout victories over both the champion and Lone’er Kavanagh, now ranked #6 after beating Brandon Moreno, who Taira previously beat to get this very shot because Moreno was, himself, pushed out of contention after losing to Brandon Royval. Royval was up at the top of the division after beating Taira, but he lost his title eliminator to Van and got flattened in one round by Manel Kape. Kape, now #2, was beaten by both Horiguchi, Asakura and Pantoja, but his UFC momentum had been halted by undefeated wunderkind Muhammad Mokaev, who was promptly fired for the sin of wrestling.

So the #1 contender is out indefinitely, the #2 contender has a loss to the only top contender the UFC fired, the #3 and active title contender is barely removed from losing to the guy the #2 contender who isn’t getting the shot just knocked out, the #4 is 2 for his last 5 and has lost fights to everyone who’s held the belt in the last four years, the #5 guy has been back in the UFC for less than a year and is already one bout away from the belt, and the #6 guy is on the precipice of title contention despite just getting knocked out by the #13 guy.

The same guy who also knocked out the champion.

Who won his belt because of a cartoon pratfall.

It’s all silly and capricious and it’s all, secretly, amazing. Every one of those guys is a great fucking fighter with an identifiable style and personality. Pantoja is an unstoppable hunter who is very publicly courageous about his missing father issues. Kape is a sometimes-too-flashy-for-his-own-good knockout hunter who fucking loves slurs and being weird about genetics. Royval is a haymaker-winging madman who loves brawling just a bit more than his career allows him to. Horiguchi is a humble athletic wonder who darts in and out swinging punches and takedowns too fast for anyone to stop him.

Joshua Van is a stoic striker so solid in both offense and defense that providence cannot help but shine upon his efforts. Tatsuro Taira is an ultra-technical grappler whose calm approach belies the absolutely terrifying ways he can hurt people.

It’s Flyweight. It’s the best shit in the sport. Has been since day one, will be until they shut it down because people refuse to stop taking each other down and it’s harshing the TKO c-suite’s ketamine buzz. Until then: I have had faith in Taira this whole time and I absolutely refuse to stop now. TATSURO TAIRA BY SUBMISSION. Break the fucking curse.

MAIN CARD: HE CAN’T KEEP GETTING AWAY WITH IT
HEAVYWEIGHT: Alexander Volkov (39-11, #2) vs Waldo Cortes-Acosta (17-2, #4)

Sometimes you have to accept that they just don’t fucking like you. Alexander Volkov is one of the longest-tenured Heavyweight contenders left in the sport--we’re closing in on his fourteenth consecutive year of being relevant to the top fifteen, let alone the top five--and is only now putting in some of the best work of his career. He outboxed and knocked out top striker Jairzinho Rozenstruik, he outgrappled PFL finalist and wrestling monster Alexandr Romanov and pounded him out in two minutes, he took down pre-crisis Tai Tuivasa and outworked wrecking ball Sergei Pavlovich, and as the capstone to a beautiful run, he won a title eliminator against Ciryl Gane. Except for the part where he lost. 90% of fan scores and 95% of the media cards went Volkov’s way, but, in a familiar refrain, one of the consensus worst decisions of the year went to Gane. It was so bad that Dana White pulled out his signature “we’ll make it up to him” catchphrase in the post-fight press, and, predictably, their idea of making it up to Volkov was having him fight the lower-ranked Jailton Almeida on the same card where Gane was getting his title shot, and after beating Almeida, the UFC gave Volkov this.

Hi, Waldo. They really like you. You are their beautiful Contender Series child and they must make you a success. Three years ago, Waldo’s undefeated record and debut winning streak were both snapped by the unranked Marcos Rogério de Lima, and two fights later de Lima was cut from the organization--off of a win over Junior Tafa, who is also still here--and Waldo was fighting former champion Andrei Arlovski. A hair under one year ago, the UFC gave Waldo a shot at the top three and Sergei Pavlovich outfought him easily. Three fights later, Waldo is competing in a title eliminator and Sergei is booked for Macau later this month where he will fight the #13-ranked Tallison Teixeira. As it turns out, when you almost never shoot takedowns, try to punch everyone and take every fight the UFC gives you, you, too, can be a top contender. And Waldo’s been busy! Winning three fights in three months is a particularly crazy schedule. But he did it to Ante Delija, in a bizarre fight that was almost a knockout loss and an eyepoke-based no contest before Waldo turned it into a knockout win, and Shamil Gaziev, who has been looking steadily worse and worse for the last year, and Derrick Lewis, who appeared to be actively melting into the floor out of exhaustion after one and a half rounds.

Regardless of what happens here the future is Josh Hokit vs Salsa Boy for the Heavyweight Championship. Please prepare yourselves accordingly. ALEXANDER VOLKOV BY DECISION.

WELTERWEIGHT: Sean Brady (18-2, #6) vs Joaquin Buckley (21-7, #9)

There are few Welterweights I feel worse for than Sean Brady. After Leon Edwards and Belal Muhammad got their long-belated cracks at the top of the mountain, Sean became the last man standing for the ranks of the underappreciated 170-pound contenders. 8-1 in the UFC with Belal as your soul loss is a hell of a record. Going to London, dominating Leon in front of a home crowd and becoming the first man to ever finish him is a hell of an accomplishment! Being #2 in arguably the most talent-rich division in the sport right as it gets its most visible champion in years? Hell of a position. But, as I have referenced a couple times, Brady learned a valuable lesson about the true nature of the sport once he fashioned his seat at the table.

“I even said that to (UFC matchmaker) 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.’”

Unfortunately, the Welterweight division now has people in it who are really, really good at knocking people out, and you are a wrestler and a grappler, and they already have enough of those. Sean got stuck fighting all the way down the rankings against Michael Morales, and Morales crushed him in one round, and just like that, Brady is fighting to stay in the top ten at all.

Joaquin Buckley is behind the eight-ball in a slightly more organic and slightly more deserved way. He struggled mightily to make an impact at Middleweight, but dropping down to the Welterweight division reinvigorated his career and turned him into a genuine contender! But when you look at the people they put in front of him, a pattern emerges. Alex Morono. Vicente Luque. Stephen Thompson. Colby fucking Covington. The UFC gave Buckley a steady diet of old, fading veterans to propel him up the ladder, to the point that he was initially slated to face Ian Machado Garry before the company went ‘wait, jesus, what are we thinking’ and split them so Garry could face a relevant contender and Buckley could pull Colby out of the giant freezer full of microwavable leftovers Panera Bread keeps their food in, and it was working perfectly well right up until it turned out Kamaru Usman is still actually better at fighting than most of the division. Buckley lived by the old man sword and died by the old man sword, and now his space in the pecking order is gone and he has to fight someone more his speed.

The cynical nature of matchmaking aside, though: I’m into it. Buckley is a big power guy, more muscle and strength and giant takedowns than any particular focus on out-techniquing his opponents; Brady is a technique guy who wants his fights on the floor so he can methodically break people down and, eventually, strangle them. It’s an interesting clash of styles. I’m siding with SEAN BRADY BY DECISION but Buckley’s likely to have more chances to actually end the fight.

LIGHTWEIGHT: King Green (34-17-1 (1)) vs Jeremy Stephens (29-22 (1))

We’re breaking the format here because what the fuck are we doing with our limited time on this bitch of an Earth.

When the UFC brought Jeremy Stephens back last May I, like most of the mixed martial arts world, was perplexed. Jeremy Stephens was a 50/50 journeyman enjoying an unexpected late-career contendership resurgence almost an entire damn decade ago in 2018, and after a lengthy winless streak he got cut for it. Over the course of those eight subsequent years, across multiple organizations, Stephens is one for his last ten, and that one win was a PFL bout against Myles “Thundercat” Price, an Irish fighter who is 11-10 and had just been choked out by the equally aged Anthony Pettis and was about to be finished just as badly by 2017 UFC washout Marcin Held. Stephens beat him by split decision. At the time of his re-signing he hadn’t even had an MMA fight in almost three years, having spent his time instead fighting for the Bareknuckle Fighting Championship. You could not get less relevant if you tried.

But, hey: The card was in Des Moines, where Stephens was born, and they had an opening, and the recently re-signed Mason Jones needed a name for his return, and a handful of people still remember Jeremy Stephens from his UFC highlights, which include getting verbally eviscerated by Conor McGregor at a press conference, cheating to beat Josh Emmett and somehow getting away with it, and knocking out Rafael dos Anjos in 2008 which is dangerously close to being twenty fucking years ago. It’s not less stupid, but stupid things happen, so sure. Fine. Fine! I get it.

King Green is on a two-fight winning streak. King Green is borderline-ranked. King Green just became the first person to ever knock out UFC marketing darling Daniel Zellhuber back at the end of February. In exchange for this, he gets to fight a man whose last UFC win happened four days before MythBusters got cancelled. This fight is not in Des Moines, it’s in New Jersey. The UFC is no longer quietly kneecapping their competition, they already let Jeremy go fight in BKFC again after his return. King Green isn’t Mason Jones, he isn’t an unknown who needs a push, he’s as old as Jeremy.

Tatiana Suarez was stuck on the prelims. Gabriella Fernandes was stuck on the prelims. Bia Mesquita was stuck on the prelims. Douglas Silva de Andrade was stuck on the prelims. Carlos Leal was stuck on the prelims. Alex Perez and Charles Johnson were stuck on the prelims. Two fights down from here you will find Joel Álvarez and Yaroslav Amosov stuck on the prelims. Mason Jones, the man they fed Jeremy Stephens to in the first place, spent his last fight stuck on the fucking prelims.

King Green vs Jeremy Stephens is a main card fight on a numbered, two-title show.

KING GREEN BY DECISION.

PRELIMS: REPAVING THE ROAD
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Ateba Gautier (10-1) vs Ozzy Diaz (10-3)

Generally, when we use the phrase ‘rehabilitation fight’ around these parts, we’re talking about the time-honored tradition of taking a marketing prospect who finally lost a fight and fixing them up by giving them a nice, easy win so they get back on track. This is no longer sufficient for the UFC, so we’re innovating a hot new matchmaking technique this week: The “you didn’t win the right way” rehabilitation fight. Ateba Gautier has been one of the company’s biggest up-and-coming knockout punchers for a year, now, and he has been dutifully destroying every victim sent his way, but this past January the matchmakers made the terrible mistake of deciding four fights was enough time to give him his first opponent to have ever actually won a fight in the UFC. Ateba still won, but he was a -1000 favorite against Andrey Pulyaev and not only did Ateba have to take him to a decision, he looked confused, exhausted, and thoroughly mortal by the end of the night. Such a victory is unbecoming of the man corporate has ordained as the next big knockout king, so congratulations, Ozzy Diaz, as a man whose three losses all came from big power-punching guys bumrushing you up close and crushing you in the first round, you are here to make Ateba look good. They are, in fact, so set on this fight that this is the second time they tried to book it! Ateba was supposed to crush Ozzy last October and Ozzy was injured and couldn’t make it, and in the time since Ateba has won two fights and Ozzy is only now coming off the shelf, and they want this knockout so fucking bad that they just rebooked it anyway.

I am picking against you because I know the law of averages, but Ozzy, if you wanted to sling the best punch of your life and just completely ruin matchmaking’s day, I would appreciate you for it forever. Until then, ATEBA GAUTIER BY TKO.

WELTERWEIGHT: Yaroslav Amosov (29-1, #14) vs Joel Álvarez (23-3, NR)

First, a note, for both transparency and a pet peeve: Yaroslav Amosov is only kind-of sort-of ranked #14. As of this writing, this is how the UFC’s official Welterweight rankings end:

That’s not how rankings work. That’s barely even how numbers work. For christ’s sake, fix your shit before you give me an aneurysm.

Everyone had some level of concern about Amosov’s UFC debut last December. To some extent this was because of his status as one of the last beloved B-league champions standing, what with his background as the embattled Bellator champion who took a hiatus to go defend his homeland of Ukraine against Russia; to another, it was a reflection of the latent awareness that Amosov is heading into his mid-thirties and Patrício Pitbull has taught people to leave beloved memories in the past rather than allow themselves to feel the crushing pain of hope. But when Yaroslav met the inevitable measuring stick that is Neil Magny, he easily outwrestled him, controlled him, and choked him out in a single round, proving that sometimes faith does, in fact, endure. And now he’s in the top fifteen at the hottest division in the company and there isn’t a lick of dead space to be found and as an import from another company who favors wrestling they’re not gonna make a damn thing easy on him. Joel Álvarez is a dude the company has wanted on their ladder for seven goddamn years. He was the UFC’s figuratively and literally big Spanish star, a 6’3” Lightweight with flying knees and armbars and reach enough to take out everyone in the division, except, as a 6’3” Lightweight, making weight damn near killed him and it turns out being huge doesn’t keep Arman Tsarukyan from wrestling you to death. Joel had a spot in the top fifteen last year, and the UFC teed him up for a big fight with Benoît Saint Denis, and then Joel thought about cutting to 155 to fight another guy who stood a really good chance of wrestling him and decided to go to Welterweight again, where, fortunately for him, there are no wrestlers to worry about.

YAROSLAV AMOSOV BY DECISION.

LIGHTWEIGHT: Grant Dawson (23-3-1) vs Mateusz Rębecki (20-4)

Grant Dawson, you will never know justice. Dawson notched nine undefeated fights in the UFC across 145 and 155 pounds but only barely scraped a ranking. People like to say it was because he had weight management problems, but we know from experience they don’t really care about that unless they choose to, and one look at a Grant Dawson performance, all double-legs and the grinding, long-term pursuit of a rear naked choke, is enough to remind you that wrestling is the true enemy of the matchmakers. When King Green notched a big upset by blowing up Dawson with a single punch it was all they needed to derail him for good. It took three fights for Dawson to get back in the ranks and upon arriving he was immediately destroyed by Manuel Torres, thus proving his weakness to punch-type Pokemon. There’s a not-so-subtle hope that vulnerability will rear its ugly head again here, as Mateusz Rębecki is a best bout machine with short, stocky boxing and giant, swinging haymakers and he’s also one for his last four because it turns out we’re still a couple more years of roster dilution away from ‘hits really hard’ to be enough of a skillset to make it through the rankings. But Mateusz can also wrestle, and he’s got a chin, and the plan is that those two traits will be enough to keep Dawson from implementing his gameplan.

I am choosing to have faith in the double. GRANT DAWSON BY DECISION.

LIGHTWEIGHT: Jim Miller (38-19 (1)) vs Jared Gordon (21-8 (1))

Here, we have our elder council of combat. Jim Miller is the veteran of veterans, a man that made his professional debut when Rich Franklin was still the best Middleweight on the planet and the Lightweight division didn’t even exist in the UFC, and he is no longer any particular threat to the rankings or the pecking order but he’s fan-beloved and increasingly likely to abruptly destroy his peers who are aging less gracefully. It would be tempting to say that Jared Gordon is in a similar position--he’s only a bit younger, he only started fighting a couple years later, he is equally adrift in the world of mixed martial arts--but, as anyone with eyes knows, Gordon beat Paddy Pimblett at the end of 2022 and got screwed out of a decision for reasons that are definitely rooted in judging incompetence and in no way whatsoever indicative of corporate corruption, which means Jared Gordon is at least as good at fighting as the man who just competed for an interim world title. Which makes it very embarrassing for the UFC that Gordon got pounded flat by Rafa García the last time we saw him and I’m sure there will be some real soul-searching in the depths of TKO over their awareness of talent.

I will always appreciate Jim Miller The Fighter, and the recent news that his absence over the last year was spent helping his son fight and beat rhabdomyosarcoma was wonderful and indicative that he has his priorities correctly aligned, and I also think he’s probably going to get punched a lot and lose. JARED GORDON BY DECISION.

EARLY PRELIMS: SUDDENLY, SABATINI
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Roman Kopylov (14-5) vs Marco Tulio (14-2)

They wanna trade you in, Roman. They’ve soured on you. You were their fancy new kickboxing toy seven years ago, and now you’re one loss away from a 50/50 record in the UFC, and they are tired of it. When it was Albert Duraev, sure, whatever, Duraev did that to a lot of people and he’d still be doing it today if he hadn’t vanished into dust and dreams. When it was Anthony Hernandez three years later, well, hell, that’s fine, too, Fluffy’s great and in a better universe he’d be fighting for the title tonight. But you’re the reason we’re stuck with Paulo Costa. You are the man who made him relevant again. You were Paulo’s first ranked victory in six fucking years, and now it’s a year later and you’re on two straight losses and Paulo is one steroid bust or charity basketball game away from the Light Heavyweight title and the UFC wants to feed you to Marco Tulio and forget you ever existed.

This is the last chance, Roman. You will either kick this man or you will be condemned to the trash can. I urge you to remember that you are actually really good at this. ROMAN KOPYLOV BY DECISION.

FEATHERWEIGHT: Pat Sabatini (21-5) vs William Gomis (15-3)

On one hand: I deeply appreciate the talents both of these men possess, even if I do so begrudgingly in the case of Pat Sabatini, the singular wrestler who has never once done anything for me. They’re extremely solid and Gomis in particular has fantastic defense and they both have amassed far better records here than the UFC would lead you to believe. Either of these men could be ranked. Either of them could beat a David Onama or Brian Ortega tomorrow. Pat, Billy, you are the exact kind of unheralded, underappreciated talents that form the foundation of this sport, and in that, I love you. But you also both beat my beautiful baby boy Joanderson Brito and for committing this unforgivable sin you must be destroyed.

The canvas will turn to lava. The lighting struts will rain from the sky. Conor McGregor will begin throwing loading dollies into the ring until everyone inside of it is dead. The judges will evaluate the carnage and decide on WILLIAM GOMIS BY DECISION before sealing away all memory that he ever existed.

MIDDLEWEIGHT: Baisangur Susurkaev (11-0) vs Djorden Santos (11-2)

Management went all-in on Baisangur Susurkaev last Summer. He, as you may very dimly recall, is the man who knocked out Murtaza Talha on the Contender Series, made his UFC debut four days later, and choked out Eric Nolan. Great story! The UFC made him a damn preliminary headliner on the Chimaev/du Plessis pay-per-view over it! Except, if you read the fine print, Talha was a Contender Series loser who got his second shot at the show by beating the 0-8 Oleg Klimov, and Nolan was hired specifically to fight Susurkaev despite being a career Welterweight, so when they tried to step Susurkaev up to the real competition of Eric McConico, a man coming off a knockout loss and an absolute coinflip of a split decision against Cody Brundage, who is 5-8-1 (1) in the UFC, they were anticipating another big highlight stoppage. And, to his credit, Baisangur did knock McConico out! But he lost the first round, and he punched McConico in the dick in the third before finally stopping him a minute later, and he looked pretty tired and decidedly mortal in the process. So what do you do with your prospect now?

Remember the conversation we were having back in Gautier/Diaz about giving successful fighters match-ups designed less to challenge them and more to hopefully make them succeed they way they were initially supposed to? You find the one guy Ozzy actually beat and you hope your new guy can beat him even worse. BAISANGUR SUSURKAEV BY TKO.

FLYWEIGHT: Clayton Carpenter (8-2) vs Jose Ochoa (8-2 (1))

There is something to be said for the joy of Flyweights fighting out of desperation. There may not be a single division in the sport with as little wasted space as 125, damn near everyone is exceptional in some way, and it’s a sign of just how painful that can be that Clayton and Jose are fighting to avoid having three losses in the UFC, but the four men they lost to are Tagir Ulanbekov, who is perpetually in the top ten, Jafel Filho, one of the scariest grapplers in the company, Asu Almabayev, who is 6-1, and Lone’er Kavanagh, who is #6 and a win away from top contendership. Everyone on that list fucking rules. Damn near everyone at Flyweight rules.

But not everyone can rule the mountain. CLAYTON CARPENTER BY DECISION.

Welcome to May. If you are a more internationally-situated UFC fan: Congratulations! This month is going to rule for you. If you're part of the UFC's mostly-stateside audience you can just go back to sleep, as half of this month's events start at 4 in the morning and they're taking the weekend of the 23rd off entirely. But Anatoly Malykhin/Reug Reug 2 is scheduled and Benson Henderson is coming out of retirement for the third time in the PFL and fucking Rousey/Carano is this month, so really, what else could matter?

THIS MONTH’S PUNCHSPORTS EVENTS

• UFC Fight Night: Della Maddalena vs Prates, May 2

• UFC 328: Chimaev vs Strickland, May 9

• UFC Fight Night: Allen vs Costa, May 16

• UFC Fight Night: Song vs Figueiredo, May 30

• PFL Sioux Falls: Storley vs Zendell, May 2

• PFL Brussels: Habirora vs Henderson, May 23

• PFL MENA 9: Pride of Arabia, May 24

• ONE Friday Fights 154: Kane vs Malykhin, May 15

• ONE Fight Night 43: Tang vs Gasanov, May 25

• RIZIN 53: Nazimov vs Gustavo, May 10

• MVP MMA 1: Rousey vs Carano, May 16
  

IS THERE ANY NEWS

“I don’t know what the hell is going on with ONE Championship” is a recurring sentence in these reports, but at this point, I really, genuinely don’t know what the hell is going on with ONE Championship.

April was supposed to be a big, eventful month for ONE. ONE 174, their first main-line, numbered event since November! The announcement of fights for their return to America in June! The debut of ONE Samurai, their new major fight series, along with the rematch between star players Rodtang and Takeru, their two biggest stars!

But just before the end of March, ONE 174 was quietly cancelled. The same goes for that stateside visit to Denver, which was, itself, a rescheduling after its initial cancellation last year. No announcements, though--just the silent removal of the events from their website. But, hey: Samurai’s still on, and no matter what else is happening, ONE always has Rodtang!

Up until two weeks before the event, when ONE announced that it was suing Rodtang.

Despite being their star player, Rodtang and ONE have not seen eye to eye in awhile. ONE gets mad about Rodtang missing weight and being unprofessional; Rodtang gets mad about his contract status. In the weeks leading up to Samurai 1, Rodtang began publicly discussing his understanding that he was no longer contracted to ONE and was acting as a free agent, and ONE, and its lawyers, disagreed. The threat of a lawsuit led to Rodtang publicly accusing ONE of hiding his contract from him, only providing it in English, and tricking him into signing it in the first place.

Your mileage may vary as to whose case was more accurate, but I would, in general, advise you not to believe in Chatri Sityodtong. The two sides ultimately came to peace long enough for Samurai 1 to happen, which had subsequently become a double swansong: ONE and Rodtang seemed to agree that whatever happened he’d be out of his contract afterward, and Takeru, who did ultimately knock Rodtang out and win, was adamant about retiring afterward. (Chatri took time out of the post-fight presser to insult Rodtang for letting fame and money go to his head, because every promoter is secretly Dana White.)

So it’s all going fine, except they’re so poorly administrated that their biggest main event of the year was a double retirement match and half of it had to be sued into performing, and multiple events are getting wordlessly cancelled, and their longest-ever-tenured Women’s Champion is making her UFC debut this month because ONE shut down her entire division, and despite having scheduled cards advertised through the end of the year there are currently zero announced fights after May 22.

But everything’s great at ONE.

WHAT HAPPENED IN APRIL

The month was SUPPOSED to start with ONE 174 on the 2nd, but it was quietly cancelled with no announcement a week and a half beforehand because ONE is a healthy, well-administrated company.

So instead we kicked it off on April 4 with UFC Fight Night: Moicano vs Duncan, a particularly weird and unfortunate night in the Apex. Kai Kamaka III came back and won a split decision over Dakota Hope, Dione Barbosa beat Melissa Gatto, Tresean Gore notched a comeback submission over Azamat Bekoev who continues his tumble to the bottom, Alice Pereira knocked out Hailey Cowan with a big knee, Darrius Flowers busted Lando Vannata up in six minutes, Alessandro Costa punched out Stewart Nicoll's liver, and Thomas Petersen took an extremely Heavyweight decision over Guilherme Pat. Up top, José Mauro Delano got the nod over Robert Ruchała, Tommy McMillen got the full marketing press from the UFC in a real sloppy knockout win against Manolo Zecchini, Ethyn Ewing counterpointed it with a genuinely pretty and comprehensive punching of Rafael Estevam, Abduyl-Rakhman Yakhyaev managed to choke out Brendson Ribeiro, and Virna Jandiroba outscored Tabatha Ricci while commentary got mad at her for not finishing the fight. Your main event was, on paper, an inexplicable mismatch between Renato Moicano and Chris Duncan, and as it turns out that was also the case in practice, as Moicano did more or less whatever he wanted and tapped him in the second.

The 10th brought us PFL Africa 1: Pretoria, and I always feel bad that I don't have enough awareness of the African fight scene to be able to speak on it with any sense of authority or experience, and then I noticed that the PFL's main social media channels made zero mention of PFL Africa, nor did they post a single highlight of it after it happened. They reserved it for the PFL Africa account, which (unironically, mathematically correctly) has 1/100th its followers. I don't know what they want, nor do I know if they have a plan. But Nkosi Ndebele won again, and that's always nice.

The same night also got us ONE Fight Night 42: Mann vs Dzhabrailov, and technically that's a regular card main evented by an MMA bout, which mostly makes me wonder what the fuck they're doing being as in the same month they fired their MMA executives. Joshua Perreira knocked out Gilbert Nakatani, Hiroba Minowa choked out Karen Ghazaryan, and in the main event, Dzhabir Dzhabrailov punched out Chase Mann in half a round.

One day later, we got PFL Chicago: Pettis vs McKee, a night of much wrestling. Down on your prelims Valanti Atsas took a decision over Nate Jennerman, Biaggio Ali Walsh got his contractually obligated easy meal by knocking out Dash Harris in under a minute, Alexandr Romanov continued to quietly be a good Heavyweight by grinding and ultimately choking out Rodrigo Nascimento in two rounds, Paulina Wiśniewska justified her own hype by just savaging Kana Watanabe with ground and pound until a mercy stoppage halfway through the second, Omar El Dafrawy knocked out James Vake in about a minute, and Jena Bishop pretty easily choked out Borena Tsertsvadze. Your main card was every promoter's nightmare, an Oops! All Decisions special. Gabriel Braga beat Cheyden Leialoha, Viviane Araujo outdid Shanna Young, Renat Khavalov outpointed Raufeon Stots, and despite everyone's craving for more random spinning shit, Mitchell McKee stayed undefeated by outwrestling Sergio Pettis.

But we weren't done with the weekend, as the 11th brought us UFC 327: Procházka vs Ulberg, and, boy, it was a lot. Three early prelims included Charles Radtke beating Francisco Prado, Vicente Luque choking out Kelvin Gastelum, and Chris Padilla going to an absolutely inexplicably scored draw with MarQuel Mederos that is currently under appeal. Your main prelims saw Tatiana Suarez survive an early scare to choke out Loopy Godínez, Mateusz Gamrot unsurprisingly dominating and getting an arm triangle against Esteban Ribovics, Kevin Holland shutting out Randy Brown, and Aaron Pico outworking a very tired-looking Patrício Pitbull. Up top, Cub Swanson retired after pretty easily knocking out Nate Landwehr, Dominick Reyes won an absolutely-nothing-happened split decision over Johnny Walker, Josh Hokit took a big giant sloppy brawl with Curtis Blaydes, and Paulo Costa won a back-and-forth with Azamat Murzakanov after knocking him out in the third. The main event saw longtime prospect Carlos Ulberg meeting fan favorite Jiří Procházka to fill the vacant 205-pound throne, and Ulberg managed to very visibly tear his ACL in half a couple minutes into the fight and still lure Jiří into a left hook counter that floored him and won Ulberg the belt. Unfortunately: He still doesn't have an ACL. Look forward to more championship bullshit.

And a very long 48 hours of MMA ended with Rizin Landmark 13, which, despaite Landmark's usually svelte nature, was a 16-fight card with two title fights and a bunch of wild shit. A bunch of two-round special bouts in the prelims! A kickboxing bout between Ryusei Imamura, who mostly does special-rules bouts under the Knock Out brand, and Yu-ki, who mostly just loses constantly! Weird acts of promotional malfeasance! Seika Izawa announcing temporary retirement to go have a baby! Do you remember James Gallagher, the guy Bellator hired as their Conor McGregor understudy? He was there! He got choked out. Ayaka Hamasaki came back and got tapped in a round by Natasha Kuziutina and the crowd was very quiet about it. Shinryu subbed King Shaka, which would beu more impressive if he had won any fights in the last two years. Azizbek Temirov knocked out Ryuya Fukuda and then Kaleo Meheula knocked out Kenka Bancho himself Kyohei Hagiwara, but the last one didn't count because Meheula missed weight. Yoshinori Horie only barely scraped a split decision off Patricky Pitbull, Danny Sabatello defended Rizin's Bantamweight title by soundly outwrestling Joji Goto only to get chastised and threatened with a pink slip by CEO Nobuyuki Sakakibara for not finishing his fights (which, for some reason, isn't a problem with Hiromasa Ougikubo), and in the exceedingly obvious main event, Razhabali Shaydullaev destroyed Yuta Kubo in a single round, defended Rizin's Featherweight title, and then admitted he's not sure if there's any competition for him left there and he might need to go to the UFC.

April 16 brought the PFL's return to Ireland in PFL Belfast: Kelly vs Wilson. It was supposed to be a big Paul Hughes main event, but Hughes couldn't make it and without him, admittedly, the card was a little bit dire. Like, "your next most visible bout is Dovlet Yagshimuradov beating Tyson Pedro" dire. Chelsea Hackett beat Andrea Vázquez, I guess, and you had a TUF 32 reunion as Giannis Bachar showed up to get choked out by David Martinez while Omran Chaaban knocked out Chequina Pedro, and one-time Bellator title contender Pedro Carvalho was there to beat Sergio Cossio, but yeah, if you like people with Wikipedia pages, it was rough. Ireland got a couple, with Caolán Loughran stopping Alan Philpott, Eoin Sheridan beating Chris Mixan and Rhys McKee getting a decision against Alex Lohoré, but all eyes were on the new main event, where slightly troubled Kiwi prospect Jay Jay Wilson had his Paul Hughes bout replaced by a fight with another huge Irish prospect in the undefeated Darragh Kelly, who vowed to put himself right beside Hughes in the international conversation. Instead, Jay Jay knocked him cold in thirty-seven seconds.

A couple days later saw the 18th and the UFC's return to Canada for UFC Fight Night: Burns vs Malott. They packed 2/3 of the Canadians on the roster onto the show and hired a couple more for good measure, but the prelims didn't go the Great North's way, with the Canadians going 1 for 5, including John Yannis knocking out Jamie Siraj, JJ Aldrich outworking Jamey-Lyn Horth, Gokhan Saricam smashing Tanner Boser and Robert Valentin choking out Julien Leblanc, but Melissa Croden managed to outpoint Darya Zheleznyakova for the lone Canadian win, and in unrelated fights, John Castañeda went to a draw with Mark Vologdin and Márcio Barbosa knocked out Dennis Buzukja in just barely over a minute. The main card started off with an internationally irrelevant fight, as Gauge Young got the split nod over Thiago Moisés, and Canada suffered one more hit when Jai Herbert knocked out Mandel Nallo, but the three big fights went their way, as Jasmine Jasudavicius outworked Karine Silva, Charles Jourdain narrowly edged Kyler Phillips, and in the main event, Mike Malott knocked out a very tired Gilbert Burns in two and a half rounds, prompting Gil's belated retirement.

But the UFC's month didn't come to an end until the 25th and UFC Fight Night: Sterling vs Zalal. It was a very long night in the Apex with just two finishes in thirteen fights, one on each side of the event, so rather than keep using the words 'outpointed' and 'outworked' like I constantly do, we'll say on the prelims Talita Alencar, Victor Valenzuela, Francis Marshall, Cody Durden, Michelle Montague and Eric McConico all got their hands raised in a respectable manner by delicious points based victories while Jackson McVey had to resort to scandalous, barbarous violence and choke out Sedriques Dumas, which is actually just fine. Up top, Ryan Spann got the main card's only finish by punching out Marcus Buchecha, while Raoni Barcelos got his long-belated entry into the rankings against Montel Jackson, Davey Grant turned away newcomer Adrián Luna Martinetti, Rafa García got past Alexander Hernandez, and Joselyne Edwards jumped the line by beating Norma Dumont. The main event was, in fact, a fun grappling fight with Aljamain Sterling and Youssef Zalal, but most of the fun was Sterling styling on him en route to a wide decision victory.

And the month as a whole capped off with ONE Samurai 1: Rodtang vs Takeru 2 on the 29th, which is just too goddamn many numbers for one label. It was ONE's biggest swing in a long time--new branding for a new event series, a big splashy showing in Tokyo, a fifteen-fight card--so it pissed them off just a touch that all anyone could talk about leading up to it was their suing star player Rodtang over contract issues to make sure the main event actually happened. They made it to launch, the card was about 40% MMA to 60% kickboxing, zyour MMA highlights included Kanata Nagai beating Atsuya Kanbe, Keito Yamakita armbarring Ryohei Kurosawa, former DEEP champ Tatsumitsu Wada squeaking past Seiichiro Ito, Itsuki Hirata choking out Ritu Phogat, Chihiro Sawada continuing a great run by becoming the first person to ever submit former title challenger Ayaka Miura, and in the co-main event, Avazbek Kholmirzaev scored an upset knockout over Yuya Wakamatsu to win the Flyweight title. For once there were more decisions in the striking sport than MMA, but in the biggest matches, Marat Grigorian torched Kaito Uno in two minutes, Jonathan Haggerty defended his Bantamweight Kickboxing title against Yuki Yoza, Nadaka Yoshinari held onto the Atomweight Muay Thai Championship against Songchainoi Kiatsongrit, and in the big main event, Takeru knocked out Rodtang to avenge his earlier loss and win an interim belt that super doesn't matter because he had been clear that he was retiring and, despite ONE trying to nudge him into changing his mind, he insisted he was now very retired.

WHAT'S COMING IN MAY

We kick off the month with a double-header on May 2, and first blood goes to UFC Fight Night: Maddalena vs Prates, because Australia's government has finally paid the UFC enough to run an Australian fight card in Australian time, meaning it will air in America at 4 AM Eastern. For those braving the time zone dilemma, you are getting all the Australianism you can stomach, including the return of Dom Mar Fan, Colby Thicknesse vs Vince Morales, a wrestle-off between Jacob Malkoun and Gerald Meerschaert, Junior Tafa vs Kevin Christian in a battle of people who both lost to Billy Elekana, Tai Tuivasa vs Louie Sutherland, Shamil Gaziev vs Brando Peričić, Tim Elliott vs Steve Erceg, Beneil Dariush being excuted by Quillan Salkilld, and in your main event, Jack Della Maddalena returns from his title loss against Carlos Prates.

Your American card of the night instead belongs to PFL Sioux Falls: Storley vs Zendeli. It's a weird goddamn card that swings between unknown prelims like Brett Bye vs Taylor Michels and bigger ones like Taila Santos vs Yan Qihui, but your main card sees Magomed Magomedov take on Lenadro Higo, Renan Ferreira attempt to get his groove back with Sergey Bilostenniy, Simeon Powell vs Emiliano Sordi, Gadzhi Rabadanov vs Aleksandr Chizov in what could be a Lightweight title eliminator, and in your main event, former Bellator interim champ Logan Storley takes on PFL 2024 European champ Florim Zendeli.

The 9th brings us UFC 328: Chimaev vs Strickland, because Sean Strickland needs another title shot and nothing else matters. The prelims have some highlights, including Roman Kopylov vs Marco Tulio, Pat Sabatini vs William Gomis, Grant Dawson vs Mateusz Rębecki and Joel Álvarez vs Yaroslav Amosov and Jared Gordon vs Jim Miller, but of course, none of those are the prelim headliner, Ateba Guatier and Ozzy Diaz are. Your top-card includes King Green vs Jeremy Stephens, for some reason, Sean Brady vs Joaquin Buckley, Alexander Volkov having to defend his contendership against Waldo Cortes-Acosta, and at the tippy-top you have a championship double-header, as Joshua Van defends the Flyweight title against Tatsuro Taira and Khamzat Chimaev deigns to show up and defend the Middleweight belt against Sean Strickland.

The weekend also gets Rizin 53, which is a little odd. After throwing damn near everything they had at their big Landmark show last month the river's a little dry, so a lot of their fights on hand are lower-key--like, Shinobu Ota vs Yuto Hokamura as a co-main event lower-key--but Ren Hiramoto vs Kouzi should be a good time, and Ryo Takagi vs Li Kaiwen should be fun, and putting Japanese standout Kouki Nakagawa against the 4-3 Japanese-American Jake Wilkins is very funny, and your main event will have Ilkhom Nazimov making his first defense of Rizin's Lightweight title against Luiz Gustavo will be unironically great.

The 15th brings us ONE Friday Fights 154, and in one of those 'what are we doing' situations the card is only a couple weeks away, the main event is the year-and-a-half-belated Heavyweight title rematch between Reug Reug and Anatoly Malykhin, and it's on a random Friday card that currently only has two other things announced, and they're a Muay Thai match with Superlek and Kade Ruotolo having an MMA match with Hiroyuki Tetsuka, the main who retired Shinya Aoki (again).

But the same day brings us another, second ONE event, and this time it's ONE Fight Night 43: Tang vs Gasanov on Prime Video. Why is the Heavyweight fucking Championship not on Prime? I don't know. Instead you get Alibeg Rasulov vs Lucas Marques, Yosuke Saruta vs Fábio Henrique, and Tang Kai defending his Lightweight title against Shamil Gasanov.

On May 16, it's back to the Apex for UFC Fight Night: Allen vs Costa. Do you want to see Tuco Tokkos fight Ivan Erslan? Do you crave Modestas Bukauskas? Have you missed Cody Brundage, Trey Ogden, Timmy Cuamba and Alice Ardelean? Are you prepared for Shauna Bannon vs Nicolle Caliari to be inexplicably booked higher than all of them? All this, plus Choi Doo-ho vs Daniel Santos, Jeremiah Wells vs Nicolas Dalby, Malcolm Wellmaker vs Juan Diaz and your main event of Arnold Allen and Melquizael Costa, coming to a fight warehouse near you.

But the big story of the month belongs not to the UFC, Rizin or even the PFL, but to Jake goddamn Paul and Netflix. MVP MMA 1: Rousey vs Carano will kick off their first run at the world of mixed martial arts, and honestly, all things considered, it's a pretty fuckin' good card. You've got a couple inexplicable bits, like Chris Avila coming out of the shadows to have an MMA match with Brandon Jenkins, David Mgoyan meeting Albert Morales, Alex Pereira's sister Aline challenging Jade Masson-Wong and no less than Namo Fazil vs Jake Babian, but those are still acceptable prospect fights, and besides, the main card is oddly stacked. Former Bellator champion Jason Jackson takes on Jeff Creighton, Muhammad Mokaev faces former ONE champion Adriano Moraes, UFC Heavyweight champ Junior dos Santos is going to try to punch Robelis Despaigne, French star Salahdine Parnasse is facing Tuff-N-Uff champion Kenneth Cross, Francis fucking Ngannou will most likely do terrible things to Philipe Lins, Mike Perry and Nate Diaz are somehow going to fight a five-round match, and in your incredibly funny main event, Ronda Rousey comes out of ten years of retirement to face Gina Carano, who has not fought since 2009.

On the 23rd, PFL Brussels: Habirora vs Henderson is just going to be so fucking weird. Do you remember Joe Schilling? The kickboxer who was supposed to help Bellator and GLORY popularize kickboxing in America a decade ago but he kept getting shithoused by Hisaki Kato? After seven years away from everything but Karate Combat, he's back to fight Donegi Abena, GLORY's Light Heavyweight kickboxing champion, except it's an MMA fight. 2025 PFL Bantamweight champion Marcirley Alves is back, and he's fighting Naoki Inoue, who was Rizin's Bantamweight Champion until December. Two-time UFC cast-off Jared Gooden is here! He's fighting Boris Mbarga Atangana, the undefeated PFL Europe standout. Taylor Lapilus is here, on a three-fight PFL winning streak, to meet Jake Hadley, who is 1 for his last 3 and coming off a loss. And your main event is Patrick Habirora, the undefeated 25 year-old PFL phenom, vs Benson Henderson, who was a UFC and WEC champion a decade and a half ago and is now 42 and coming off his second or third retirement.

One day later it's PFL MENA 9: Pride of Arabia and, like, look, I know I shit on the Emirati cards a lot, but no joke I can make is more devastating than this: Do you remember Mohammad "UAE Warrior" Yahya? The guy who kept getting booked every time the UFC went to Abu Dhabi and every time he just got beat up worse and worse, three times in a row? He's in the main event. Good luck, guys.

Our long-ass month finally ends on the 30th with UFC Fight Night: Song vs Figueiredo, the company's annual trip to Macau, China, which means this, too, airs at like 1-4 AM if you live in America. Which is a shame, because there's actually some really good shit on it. Loma Lookboonmee vs Jaqueline Amorim, Aoriqileng vs Cody Haddon, Rei Tsuruya vs Jesús Aguilar, Alex Perez vs Sumudaerji, Muslim Salikhov vs Jake Matthews, Angela Hill vs Xiong Jingnan, Sergei Pavlovich vs Tallison Teixeira, Zhang Mingyang vs Alonzo Menifield--a lot of that genuinely doesn't suck and I would love to watch it, but I'll tell you, man, not wake-up-at-4-AM love. Your main event is Song Yadong vs Deiveson Figueiredo to see who still has a shot at sticking around in the top five and it'll be interesting, but with how Figgy's been fighting lately I would not be confident enough to say it'll be great.

CURRENT UFC CHAMPIONS
Heavyweight Champion, 265 lbs

Tom Aspinall - 15-3 (1), Either 1, 2 or 0 Defenses Depending On How You Look At It

You know, once upon a time, the UFC would’ve killed for a Tom Aspinall. Entire years of UFC events were spent desperately trying to get a Dan Hardy or Darren Till or Jimi Manuwa into championship pictures so they could cash in on UK superstardom. And somehow, Tom Aspinall just fell into their lap. They didn’t go out of their way to softball him, they didn’t put a ton of effort into marketing him, they just let him mulch everyone in his path. In 2025, Tallison Teixeira has a main event in just his second UFC bout: In 2022 Tom Aspinall had to notch five straight stoppages to get his first crack at the top of the card against Curtis Blaydes, and it ended with his knee imploding fifteen seconds into the fight. When he lost that fight, Francis Ngannou was the reigning UFC Heavyweight Champion of the World. By the time Tom returned in the Summer of 2023, it belonged to Jon fucking Jones. Within one fight Aspinall was a top contender again, and with Jon comically scheduled to defend his title against Stipe Miocic, who hadn’t fought in two and a half years, Aspinall was left in a holding pattern--until Jon injured himself in training. With barely two weeks to prepare, Tom Aspinall fought Sergei Pavlovich for an interim championship. Sergei was the most devastating knockout artist in the Heavyweight division: Tom knocked him out in sixty-nine seconds. Not only did it give him gold, it gave him a golden ticket. The sole purpose of an interim champion is to one day reunify the belts, and that meant Tom had a shot at Jon Jones, one of the biggest fighters in the history of the sport. All he had to do was wait. And wait. And wait. Tom waited so fucking long the UFC made him defend his interim title in a rematch with Blaydes--which he won easily, knocking him out in 60 seconds--on July 27, 2024. Four months later, Jon Jones returned and had his fight with Stipe, who by that point had been effectively retired for almost four years. Unsurprisingly, Jon won. Equally unsurprisingly, Jon and the UFC refused to commit to fighting Aspinall. Jones reportedly held the UFC up for a huge payday, and when they shockingly agreed, he changed his mind. In the end, the most obvious pair of conclusions happened: On June 21st, during the press conference after Fight Night Baku, Dana White announced Jon was retiring and Tom was being promoted to Undisputed Champion; an hour later, coincidentally, news broke that Jon was being summoned for arraignment in July on charges of leaving the scene of an accident after drunkenly crashing another car and leaving another heavily-inebriated half-naked woman behind in it and also threatening the police over the phone when they called him. It is the only way the Jon Jones story could possibly have ended. Tom Aspinall was an interim champion for 588 days, and he made his first undisputed one against Ciryl Gane at UFC 321 on October 26--and, because this division is fucking cursed, it ended in a No Contest after Gane poked him in both of his eyes at once. The UFC has decided this is mostly Tom’s fault, which has nothing at all to do with Tom’s dad talking about how he shouldn’t sign a new contract. A rematch has been vowed, but Tom had to get eye surgery to regain his sight and the UFC doesn’t want to wait when there’s marketing to be done, so Ciryl Gane and Alex Pereira will fight for an interim title at the godforsaken White House.

Light Heavyweight Champion, 205 lbs

Carlos Ulberg - 14-1, 0 Defenses

It’s so hard not to skip to the punchline on this one. Carlos Ulberg’s combat sports career is more mixed than MMA alone would lead one to believe. He started as a mixed martial artist all the way back in 2011, but after winning his debut fight, he decided to give fighting a break for almost half a decade. Then it was boxing, and then it was MMA again, and then it was kickboxing, and for a brief period of time it was both at once. The rise of Israel Adesanya led the UFC on an all-out talent search for big, credible strikers from Oceania, and that is how despite being just 3-0 as a mixed martial artist, Carlos wound up on the Contender Series in 2020, and just a few months later, in March of 2021, he was debuting in the UFC. They hyped him, they gave him a spot on the pay-per-view prelims, they booked him against the 1-1 Kennedy Nzechukwu and despite having half his experience Ulberg was the heavy betting favorite, because everyone knew they wanted him on top. Which was unfortunate, because Kennedy knocked him out in two rounds. Carlos described the loss as the most important moment of his career--half for the lesson of the loss itself, half for the $50,000 bonus that gave him his first taste of actual profit as a professional. He vowed to take his career more seriously, he vowed to prepare for his fights as though every one mattered rather than simply being happy to be in the UFC, and four years later, he was the top contender for the Light Heavyweight crown. A testament to determination and a good mindset? Absolutely! But also a bit of a testament to the careful cultivation and protection of a prospect. Carlos did his job and beat everyone the UFC put in front of him, but the people put in front of him tended to be carefully picked. At one point he beat a genuine prospect in Nicolae Negumereanu, and the UFC followed it up by giving him Ihor Potieria, the man Nicolae had just knocked out in his previous fight. Stiff prospects like Aleksandar Rakić and Azamat Murzakanov flew past in the background, but Da Woon Jung and Alonzo Menifield had to be destroyed. The UFC spent a year and a half trying on three separate occasions to book Ulberg against Dominick Reyes, and by the time they finally got there, it was, somehow, impossibly, a title eliminator. But Ulberg won, just as he’d won every fight since his meeting with Kennedy Nzechukwu, and he proceeded to his title fight with Jiří Procházka for the championship Alex Pereira had left behind to try his hand at the Heavyweight division. It was fun, it was fast, it was dramatic and it was definitive. In just a hair under four minutes, Jiří was flat on the canvas and Carlos Ulberg, five years after his debut, was the Light Heavyweight champion of the world. He also very visibly tore his ACL in half right in the middle of the fight and could barely move. If Jiří had simply backed away, hacked a few leg kicks and kept his distance, the fight would’ve been stopped between rounds, but he chose to engage and got flattened by a left hook counter for his troubles, and the result was a brand new titleholder who proceeded directly to the emergency room after the fight and had knee surgery less than a week later. For the third time in six title reigns, the new champion has an injury so bad it will prevent them from defending their title for at least the rest of the year. Will we get an interim title? Will yet another champion have to give up the gold? Will Paulo fucking Costa wind up technically a 205-pound champion? Stay tuned.

Middleweight Champion, 185 lbs

Khamzat Chimaev - 15-0, 0 Defenses

Yeah, this was probably inevitable. When Khamzat Chimaev showed up in the UFC in the middle of the Fight Island pandemic era and wrecked two people in ten days at two different weight classes, the world was prepared to believe he was special. When he ended Gerald Meerschaert with one punch less than two months later, all doubt was cast aside. The fighters, the audience, and the UFC itself were all true believers in the championship future that lay ahead for Khamzat Chimaev. Khamzat, in response, retired from mixed martial arts. As it turns out, fighting in the middle of a COVID pandemic makes it more likely you’re going to get COVID. Who’dve thunk? After a year, some prodding from Dana White and reportedly a lot more personal prodding from Ramzan Kadyrov, the dictator in charge of Khamzat’s native Chechen Republic, Khamzat returned to the sport a year later. His dominance continued unabated, but his schedule never recovered--in fact, it worsened. After a particularly unfortunate 2022 episode involving Khamzat torpedoing his own pay-per-view main event against Nate Diaz after missing weight by almost ten pounds and very nearly cancelling the event altogether, he instead wound up strangling Kevin Holland, taking another year off, moving permanently to Middleweight, and adopting a new schedule whereby he fought only once every twelve months, and every time he appeared, something bizarre would happen. In the first episode of New Khamzat he showed up in 2023 for what was supposed to be a long-awaited showdown with Paulo Costa, but Costa, as he is wont to do, pulled out and resulted in Welterweight champion Kamaru Usman stepping in with just days to prepare. Even weirder: He gave Khamzat the closest fight he’d ever had. One judge scored the fight a damn draw. Khamzat’s struggle with a career Welterweight gave a lot of folks pause when, one year later, he returned to face Middleweight kingpin Robert Whittaker. Rob was universally respected as one of the best 185-pound fighters in UFC history, and while he’d lost, he’d lost only to the best and never easily. Khamzat steamrolled him in three and a half minutes. He face-cranked him so hard it snapped a previous palate injury and left Rob’s bottom teeth floating in his mouth. By the time Khamzat came back in 2025 for his long-awaited shot at the belt, Dricus du Plessis had etched his spot in the record books as one of just five men to ever defend the Middleweight championship multiple times. He’d beaten everyone the UFC put in front of him, and he was still a betting underdog. The conventional wisdom was Khamzat would choke Dricus out in the first two rounds or Dricus would drag him through a difficult back half of the bout. As it turned out: Everyone was wrong. Khamzat did hand out one of the most one-sided championship victories in UFC history, but rather than destroying Dricus, he just outwrestled him for five straight rounds. He didn’t engage on the feet, he didn’t land much in the way of heavy ground-and-pound, and he isn’t even credited with a single submission attempt. Khamzat landed 529 strikes and only 37 of them were considered significant. But Khamzat won, unquestionably and easily, and now he has the belt everyone long assumed he’d get. Despite the multiple assurances that Nassourdine Imavov was the #1 contender, the UFC unsurprisingly, booked Sean Strickland. They’ll meet at UFC 328 on May 9.

Welterweight Champion, 170 lbs

Islam Makhachev - 28-1, 0 Defenses

The prophecy has been fulfilled. Khabib Nurmagomedov was considered by many to be the greatest Lightweight of all time, but in the later stages of his career he began to repeatedly reference his lifetime friend and training partner Islam Makhachev as not just his successor, but the man who would break the mold he’d left behind. And the fanbase was more than willing to buy another Abdulmanap Nurmagomedov protege coming in and wrecking shop--until he got knocked out by Adriano Martins. Khabib’s aura of invulnerability came from the simple, so-obvious-more-people-should-try-it factor of simply never losing a damn fight. When Islam got torched in under two minutes by a man that couldn’t beat Donald Cerrone, that aura vanished. A lot of folks still thought he could be a champion, but most felt the greatest-of-all-time lane was closed to him. It turns out there’s another way to regain that sense of unbeatable awe, though: Just don’t lose for so goddamn long people forget it ever happened. In the ten full years since that Martins bout, Islam has not lost a single fight. Most of the time, he hasn’t even lost a round. He worked his way up the Lightweight ladder and began to rack up incredible achievements. He tore through top prospects with virtually no effort, he choked out one of the best MMA grapplers ever in Charles Oliveira, he outlasted and later knocked out one of the two men with a claim to the all-time Featherweight crown in Alexander Volkanovski, he choked out Dustin Poirier and he broke the Lightweight title defense record after stomping Renato Moicano. And then he traded in his record-breaking reign to challenge for Welterweight gold. Jumping divisions is always difficult, but the 15-pound leap from Lightweight to Welterweight is a mountain, and no Lightweight champion had ever managed it. Even BJ Penn, the canonical first man to hold gold at both, had to do it in reverse: He failed at both of his attempts to win Lightweight gold and shocked the world by abruptly taking it at Welterweight instead, and it would be five more years before he finally got his shit together and won a title in the division that made him famous. His subsequent attempts all ended in defeat, half because Matt Hughes and Georges St-Pierre were both great and half because BJ was just a Lightweight. Even though Islam was Islam and widely agreed to be a monster in the cage, Jack Della Maddalena had won the Welterweight title with some of the cleanest boxing the UFC had seen, and his championship victory over wrestler Belal Muhammad had people convinced that Islam, at best, would struggle. They met in the main event of UFC 322 on November 15, 2025, and there was absolutely no struggle. Islam kicked Jack’s leg to pieces, landed some surprisingly big punches, and took the fight to the ground almost at will, and by the time the fight ended, it felt like Jack never had a chance. The shadow has been stepped out of. Islam Makhachev is a two-division champion. And now he has a brand new horde of contenders beating down his door.

Lightweight Champion, 155 lbs

Ilia Topuria - 17-0, 0 Defenses

One of the most exciting things about following mixed martial arts is picking which prospects you really, truly believe in. There are hundreds of fighters across history that you will enjoy watching, and you may have some hopes for their future, but you don’t necessarily expect the world from them. When Ilia Topuria showed up in the UFC in 2020, if you were paying attention, you knew he was going to be special. The combination of wrestling, grappling and absolutely murderous striking was almost immediately visible, but what really set him apart was the unshakable confidence with which he used it. Even when he went up to 155 pounds on short notice and almost got knocked out by Jai Herbert he survived the onslaught, recovered, came right back at him as though he was utterly unfazed and destroyed Herbert seconds later. That was the truly exceptional danger of Ilia Topuria: His belief in his technique was so absurdly complete that it came across as absurdly silly arrogance and it made huge swaths of the audience disdain him and then he’d somehow always find a way to just go do the damn thing anyway. He outgrappled Ryan Hall. He submitted Bryce Mitchell. He beat Josh Emmett so badly he got a 50-42 scorecard out of it. And on February 17, 2024, he ended Alexander Volkanovski’s historic, nearly-four-year reign as the king of Featherweight by knocking him out in two rounds. When Ilia followed that up by saying he was going to become the first man to ever knock out Max Holloway--a thing Volkanovski, Dustin Poirier, José Aldo and Conor McGregor failed to do--even with his title victory, the audience was still particularly skeptical. He did it anyway. Once again, Ilia walked into a fight with supreme confidence, and once again, it ended with his opponent on the floor, this time in three rounds. Ilia Topuria had knocked out the two greatest Featherweights of the generation and seemed poised for a longer title reign than either of them. And then he quit the division. One of those first overconfident boasts of his had been the desire to move up to Lightweight and knock out Islam Makhachev to become a double champion. The MMA world thought he was talking about a far-away future, but he wanted it and he wanted it now. Unfortunately, so did Islam. Right as Ilia vacated the Featherweight title to move up to Lightweight, Islam vacated the Lightweight title to move up to Welterweight. So Ilia was left to fight for his destiny against Charles Oliveira instead. Oliveira’s always been incredibly tough and dangerous, and he hadn’t been knocked out in almost eight years, and even then it wasn’t unconsciousness but rather because a Paul Felder elbow had broken part of his face. That streak ended on June 28, 2025 when Ilia Topuria punched him limp in two and a half minutes. The UFC may not do double-champions anymore out of sheer promotional frustration, but in any rational sense, Ilia is the king of Featherweight and Lightweight, which gives him a horde of contenders like Arman Tsarukyan, Justin Gaethje, Dan Hooker and Mateusz Gamrot. So he appears to be fighting Paddy Pimblett next. If you ask Ilia, he’s just killing time until Islam wins the Welterweight title, because his destiny is to take his 5’7” frame all the way up to Welterweight so he can kill the king and be the first ever three-division champion in UFC history. Does it sound aggressively silly and arrogant? Of course it does. Do you feel comfortable ruling it out? Then you haven’t been paying attention. Ilia is, however, dealing with some personal issues related to his divorce, so he’s going to be out of action until the Spring, which means the UFC made an interim title bout between Justin Gaethje and Paddy Pimblett for UFC 324 on January 24. Yes, really. How’d that one wind up going, you ask?

Interim Lightweight Champion

Justin Gaethje - 27-5, 0 Defenses

One of the foundational subjective mixed martial arts questions, right alongside ‘who’s the pound-for-pound best’ and ‘what if Cro-Cop ducked that kick,’ is ‘Who’s the best fighter to never win a championship?’ There are different answers for every generation, and one of the complicating factors is the inevitable debate over whether interim titles count. Was Carlos Condit a UFC champion? What about Colby Covington or Yair Rodríguez? It’s still an incredible achievement, but it’s just not quite real the way an undisputed title is. And I cannot imagine what sort of a backhanded career accomplishment it is to be the only person in UFC history to win their division’s interim title twice. Justin Gaethje has been right on the edge of the top for so long he’s got two half-championships in his closet. Back in 2020 he fought Tony Ferguson, then arguably the scariest Lightweight in the world, and beat him so horrifically that his career never recovered, and that netted Gaethje his first interim belt, which he promptly lost to Khabib Nurmagomedov in the latter’s retirement bout. Two years later, Gaethje got his second shot at the undisputed title against Charles Oliveira and he wound up strangled in three and a half minutes. Three and a half years after that, Gaethje was still right there at the precipice of the top, Ilia Topuria needed a break from the sport, and the UFC needed an aging veteran to propel their marketing star Paddy Pimblett to the top, and at UFC 324 on January 24, 2026, they threw Paddy’s big party and Justin crashed it. The UFC will tell you the fight was close, and it was in the sense that it went the whole way and one judge only gave Justin three rounds, but Paddy got brutally beaten and dropped repeatedly. Once again, Justin Gaethje is the interim champion, and because everything sucks, he’ll try to unify the belt against Topuria at the White House.

Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs

Alexander Volkanovski - 28-4, 1 Defense

And just like that, 2024 never happened. For eleven years Alexander Volkanovski was the best Featherweight on the planet, and most of that time was simply waiting for everyone else to notice. He was short and he won by decisions a lot and the world was entirely into Max Holloway so he skated under the radar right up until the moment he finally beat Max. And that wasn’t enough to convince people, so Volkanovski beat him again. And that somehow made the world doubt him even more, so he beat Max a third time. By 2023 Volk was second only to all-time great José Aldo in Featherweight title defenses--and he’d beaten Aldo in a fight, and his only actual loss was an all-timer of an effort against Islam Makhachev that still stands as the closest Islam has come to losing his title as the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world, so it was very, very easy to accept Alexander Volkanovski as the greatest Featherweight on the planet. And then he took a rematch with Islam with only one week to prepare and got knocked out in three minutes, and then he came back less than four months later and got flattened by Ilia Topuria, and in the space of two fights the audience went from celebrating him as the best around to calling for his retirement. Volkanovski took an entire year off to heal and rebuild, which was enough time for Ilia to get bored and vacate the belt to go chase Lightweight greatness, and the Topuria/Volkanovski rematch became Volkanovski vs Diego Lopes at UFC 314 on April 12 to fill the vacant throne instead. It was somehow both close and clear. Lopes gained steam in the middle stanza of the bout and at one point dropped Volk, but Volk got right back up and resumed punching him in the face, and by the end of the bout he’d outlanded him more than two to one. The judges sided with him, the audience sided with him, and Alexander Volkanovski became not just one of the rare few to win back a UFC title, but the first man over 35 to ever win a UFC belt in the sub-170 weight classes typically reserved for young lions. His logical next contender should’ve been Movsar Evloev, but the UFC was busy trying to get him to fight an unranked, debuting Aaron Pico, thus clearing the way for a rematch with Yair Rodríguez in Guadalajara for Noche UFC 3 in September. Except the Arena Guadalajara wasn’t done yet, so Noche UFC 3 got moved to the most Mexican of places, Las Vegas, in October, and Alex’s manager said he had an eye injury that needs time to heal, so he took the rest of 2025 off. Good news, though: That left time for the UFC to get new contenders going. Lerone Murphy wound up fighting and knocking out Pico! Aljamain Sterling beat Brian Ortega! Hell, Movsar Evloev is still right there! The UFC looked at all of them and gave them all the finger. At UFC 325 on January 31, fresh off his title victory over Diego Lopes, Alexander Volkanovski had his first title defense against Diego Lopes. Unsurprisingly, the guy who beat Diego Lopes beat Diego Lopes again. The UFC had Evloev and Murphy fight in March and Evloev won a contentious decision, and now Jean Silva is lobbying as hard as possible for the fight, so we’ll see who gets it.

Bantamweight Champion, 135 lbs

Petr Yan - 20-5, 0 Defenses

Petr Yan’s road to the top has been incredibly circuitous. When Yan initially won the Bantamweight title back in 2020, no one was particularly surprised. He’d been one of the best in the world for years, he’d put together a six-fight winning streak on his road to the title shot, and the UFC had fed aging legend Urijah Faber to him in an attempt to make him a known quantity. Felling an even greater legend in José Aldo and taking the belt felt like an entirely expected passing of the torch, and a long reign as the division’s standardbearer seemed all but assured. And then, as they so often do, things went wrong. In quite possibly the most infamous title change in UFC history, Yan became the first champion to ever lose his title by disqualification after drilling Aljamain Sterling in the face with an illegal knee. Yan’s team cried foul and the world turned on Sterling, but when they had their rematch a year later, Sterling beat him by decision and that was that. But it was a split decision, and it was close, so the UFC gave Yan another theoretical title eliminator with Sean O’Malley, and this time the world was almost unanimously convinced Yan won--except for two of the three judges, who split in O’Malley’s favor. To top it off, Yan’s attempt to stay in the contendership conversation ran into the brick wall that was the rising Merab Dvalishvili, who handed him the most one-sided loss of his entire life. In the space of two years, Petr Yan went from being perceived as a generational champion to 1 for his last 5 and seemingly eliminated from contendership. After a year off to cope with injuries, reassess his career and figure out how to turn things around, Yan proceeded to take the path that most commonly leads to success: Just fucking beating everyone. He battered Song Yadong, he outpunched Deiveson Figueiredo, he won an exceedingly weirdly-booked matchup with Marcus McGhee, and suddenly, he was on a winning streak and right back in contendership. It might have taken him longer to get an actual title fight were it not for Merab Dvalishvili being a crazy person. Merab was on the greatest championship run the division had ever seen, and after clearing out most of his to contenders and recording a blistering three defenses in a single year, he announced his intention to break a UFC record and cement himself as the greatest 135-pounder of all time by recording a fourth--just two months after the last one--and Petr Yan was available and ready. The world saw the fight as a foregone conclusion, given how one-sided their first match had been, and the world was wrong. Yan put on the best performance of his career, not just battering Merab but outwrestling him, and in one of the best career comebacks we’ve seen, almost five years after he’d given it away, Petr Yan got his title back. He’s on top of the world again, and in all likelihood, the rubber match with Merab will be next. But it’s gonna have to wait until the second half of the year, because Yan’s having back surgery.

Flyweight Champion, 125 lbs

Joshua Van - 16-2, 0 Defenses

It would be disrespectful as hell to Joshua Van to say that no one saw this coming, as many people perceived it as a possibility, but I don’t think anyone saw it coming like this. Van was the Flyweight champion of the Fury Fighting Championships when the UFC came calling, as a 21 year-old regional titleholder with a penchant for collecting knockouts despite fighting at 125 pounds so thoroughly ticks all of their boxes that Van couldn’t have been a more perfect fit without also having a history of racist tweets, and his Contender Series debut was set for August of 2023. But the UFC needed someone to fill in against Zhalgas Zhumagulov, so Van got called up to the big show early and proceeded to justify their faith by beating Zhalgas, and then beating the man he was originally slated to Contend against, and then facing off with Legacy Fighting Alliance champ Felipe Bunes and handing him the first TKO loss of his entire career. In the space of six months, Van went from a little-known regional fighter to a borderline-ranked Flyweight in the UFC. And then he got atomized by Charles Johnson. It was the second loss of Van’s career, the first time he’d ever been knocked out, and the snapping of an eight-fight winning streak, and in many cases, that would’ve permanently ended his momentum. But Van was smart enough to learn from his mistakes, and the UFC was invested enough in him to bring him back up to speed with a gentle hand, and eleven months later he was on a four-fight winning streak again and had successfully made his way to the top ten after knocking out Bruno Silva, which left him in the perfect position to take advantage of an abrupt opportunity. Top contender Brandon Royval had just lost his opponent and needed a replacement, and Van was game to fight for the second time in three weeks if it meant a shot at the belt. It was a close bout, and if Van hadn’t knocked Royval down at the end of the third round he may well have lost, but he did, so he didn’t, and suddenly the prospect was next in line for the title. All but one month of Joshua Van’s UFC career took place during Alexandre Pantoja’s reign as the Flyweight king. His streak was monstrous and he was a sizable favorite coming into his defense against Van, but many were waiting to see if Van’s boxing could defuse Pantoja’s aggression. As it turns out: We’re gonna have to wait a bit longer. Twenty-six seconds into the bout Pantoja busted his own arm on the mat after a head kick gone awry. So Van’s the champion, but it’s under some real weird circumstances, and it means a number of people are immediately gunning for him. Alexandre Pantoja presumably has a rematch as soon as he’s back, but in the meantime, Tatsuro Taira just pounded Brandon Moreno out to make himself a top contender and he’s going to get his crack at Van at UFC 327 on April 11.

Women’s Bantamweight, 135 lbs

Kayla Harrison - 19-1, 0 Defenses

Every once in awhile the inevitable turns out to actually be inevitable. Ronda Rousey parlayed a 2008 bronze medal in Judo into mixed martial arts stardom; Kayla Harrison took the gold medal in 2012 and 2016. The world was already asking her about MMA before the second. The UFC made a play for her, but there was a problem: By the standards of female fighters Kayla was huge. Ronda had competed at 70 kg in the Olympics, which translated to about 154 pounds, well within the range of weight cutting for the insane standards of combat sports and Women’s Bantamweight. Kayla competed at 78 kg, which was almost 172 pounds. Even at a twenty-pound weight cut, her division simply did not exist in major mixed martial arts organizations. So she had to find one that would build it. The Professional Fighters League needed star power, and Kayla was their gal. They founded the first Women’s Lightweight division in a major American organization, and it was populated mostly by Bantamweights and Featherweights who were trying the best they could. For four straight years, Kayla was their recurring, undefeated champion. She won the 2019 and 2021 tournaments, and in 2022 she made it to the finals and looked poised to take it for a third time, as her only competition was Larissa Pacheco, whom she’d already beaten twice. In a massive upset, Larissa took a decision off of her. It was shocking, it was unexpected, and it was also more or less fine, because Kayla was more or less done with the PFL. She took one more fight against Aspen Ladd as a one-off, but her future was with the UFC. Even with her loss to Pacheco, the world was sure she was a future UFC champion--as long as she could stomach the weight cut. And it did, visibly, kill her! But she made it. She choked out Holly Holm in her debut, she took a decision over Ketlen Vieira in a title eliminator, and all she had to do after that was wait. Julianna Peña was a +500 underdog in her own title defense against Kayla, and that turned out to be just about right. On June 7, 2025, at UFC 316, Kayla achieved the inevitable, ragdolled Peña and tapped her out in just two rounds. She’s the best in the world and she’s going to get her shot at the superfight everyone wanted in the first place, as Amanda Nunes is coming out of retirement to face her later this year--actually, this got delayed so much it’s only now finally booked for UFC 324 on January 24, 2026--maybe never? A couple weeks before the superfight Kayla had to pull out for apparently fairly major neck surgery. No word on when she’ll be back or what on Earth happens now.

Women’s Flyweight, 125 lbs

Valentina Shevchenko - 26-4-1, 2 Defenses

After almost two years of suffering, we have gone back to the start. At the end of 2022 Valentina Shevchenko was so thoroughly ensconced as The Greatest Women’s Flyweight that a sizable segment of the fanbase had built an honest-to-god antipathy for her over it. Sure, she won, all the time, and sure, her only losses in almost a decade and a half came to the greatest of all time in Amanda Nunes, and sure, Shevchenko arguably won their second fight, but familiarity breeds contempt, and after watching the purported greatest struggle with a split decision to Taila Santos that could easily have gone the other way, too, a big chunk of the mixed martial world was ready to move on from Val. And then, unexpectedly, it did. Valentina was a -900 favorite when Alexa Grasso shocked the world, choked her out, and took her title away on March 4, 2023. An instant rematch was obligatory, given Val’s long history on top, so half a year later they ran it back at Noche UFC in 2023, and, awkwardly, it ended in a draw. If the rematch had been obligatory, the threematch was mandatory, but a hand injury on Val’s part and the UFC’s desire to put an entire season of The Ultimate Fighter behind their promotion meant a full twelve months passed before they got back in the cage. That’s a long goddamn time, and it left a lot of air, and that air was filled by doubt. Alexa won the first fight, after all--but she was on her way to losing a decision before Valentina made a costly mistake, threw one of her trademark nowhere-close-to-landing spinning back kicks, and got immediately jumped on and choked out for her troubles. Alexa didn’t lose the second fight--but based on the scorecards, she should have, and would have, were it not for one judge handing her a completely indefensible 10-8 in the final round. When the third fight came on September 14, 2024, it was seen as Alexa’s chance to cement her legacy: Either she was the superior fighter and the herald of a new generation for Women’s Flyweight, or the whole thing was just a weird episode. Unfortunately for Alexa, it was the latter. Valentina dominated her. She outstruck her and outwrestled her with almost comical ease, the fight was a complete shutout, and despite their series being now tied at 1-1-1, no one has any doubts about the winner, nor any desire to see them fight again. Once again, much to the internet’s chagrin, Valentina Shevchenko is a champion. And--only two years late--she defended her title against Manon Fiorot at UFC 315. It was close, it was contentious, and it was also a fight the audience does not want to see again. Her next fight was a long-awaited champion vs champion affair against Zhang Weili at UFC 322 on November 15, 2025. After years of watching Zhang dominate her competition, the world felt she had genuine double-champ potential and could be the woman to unseat Valentina. As it turned out: Not even close. Val dominated her in every aspect of the game, Zhang got completely shut out, and her Flyweight hopes are dead in the water. Valentina has multiple title defenses again and is now tied with Amanda Nunes and Anderson Silva for the fourth-most wins in title fights in UFC history. We’ll have to see who they give to her next, but Natália Silva feels like a safe bet.

Women’s Strawweight, 115 lbs

Mackenzie Dern - 16-5, 0 Defenses

On a long enough timeline, the house always wins. Mackenzie Dern signed with the UFC as a 5-0 fighter all the way back in 2018 and they’ve been trying to get a belt on her ever since. She came into mixed martial arts with a pre-existing pedigree as one of the more decorated women in the history of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu: Gi championships, no-gi championships, pan-Am championships, Asian open championships, world championships, ADCC championships, she took them all. And the UFC marketed her as a grappling champion who was bringing some of the best submission offense in the sport to the Strawweight division! But they also marketed her as an extremely conventionally attractive woman who frequently wore bathing suits. It was one of the touchiest things to comment on with her career: Where other women would have to struggle for their matchmaking and featured spots, Mackenzie’s opportunities kept coming, and they were almost always on the main broadcast and, on multiple occasions, in the main event slots women almost never received. And she needed them, because despite being legitimately quite good, she just wasn’t great. She could make it into the top fifteen, and sometimes even brush the top ten, but every time they tried to get Mackenzie into title contention, she’d falter. It was Amanda Ribas in 2019, it was Marina Rodriguez in 2021, and between 2022 and 2024, Mackenzie had the worst run of her life, winning only one out of four bouts, getting shut down by Yan Xiaonan and Amanda Lemos, and taking the first stoppage loss of her career after being knocked out by Jéssica Andrade. She managed to get her way back up the ladder again by outgrappling Loopy Godinez and submitting a struggling Amanda Ribas in a six-years-belated rematch, but with so many losses to top contenders, her path to the title still seemed closed. Then a funny thing happened: Zhang Weili gave up the Strawweight belt to move up to Flyweight and challenge Valentina Shevchenko. Suddenly, the door was wide open. And conveniently, the UFC had booked all the women who beat Mackenzie into other matches, leaving Mackenzie with just one contender left--and it was Virna Jandiroba, a career grappler whom Mackenzie had already beaten back in 2020. The two met at UFC 321 on October 25, and after seven years of effort, the UFC finally got its way. Mackenzie beat Virna again, fair and square, in a close and hard-fought but ultimately clear decision. She is, at last, the Strawweight Champion of the World. And she’s in the exceptionally weird position of being a newly-minted champion that has very recently lost to several of her own top contenders. If Zhang Weili fails to beat Valentina Shevchenko, it’s very likely the UFC will try to pressure her back down to 115 for a money match with Mackenzie, in which case Dern would almost certainly be a big underdog in her own first defense. If not, at this point, it’s either a rematch with Yan Xiaonan, a grappling match with Tatiana Suarez, or the UFC stops pretending entirely and has Mackenzie beat Contender Series women until she turns a profit.

NOTABLE CHAMPIONS ACROSS THE WORLD

Rizin Lightweight Champion, 156 lbs

Ilkhom Nazimov - 13-3, 0 Defenses

After four and a half years we finally have the second-ever Rizin Lightweight Champion, and it feels a little bit like he came out of nowhere. Up until the 2025 New Year’s event, most folks had only seen one Ilkhom Nazimov fight. He’d been operating out in the Russian regional scene, which has the unfortunate crossover of being a) low-visibility and b) notoriously tough, and no matter how good you are, there just isn’t going to be a lot of international broadcast attention on the Tyumen Extreme Sports Expo. Nazimov didn’t get his first real taste of the spotlight until he made it to UAE Warriors, one of the biggest leagues in the middle east; unfortunately, that spotlight included him getting knocked out in eight seconds. Despite the loss, Rizin was in need of locally-appealing talent for their 2023 foray into Azerbaijan--for the folks who aren’t into flags out there, Nazimov’s representing Uzbekistan--and Nazimov was present, ready, and more than capable of beating “The Crazy Cameroonian” Jaures Dea. It was a good win, but it was also on Rizin’s Landmark series, the lesser-advertised prospect showcases. He’d get pulled up to the main show long enough to pound out Sora Yamamoto, but demoted back down to Landmark duty for a win over Sugaru Nii. Those three wins were enough to get him booked for 2025’s New Year’s special--but against the man they call Blackpanther Beynoah, a 5-3 Lightweight. It wasn’t until DEEP champion and Japanese prospect Shunta Nomura had to pull out of his championship bout with Roberto de Souza that Nazimov got his shot at the belt. Given Souza’s years of dominance as the only man to hold the belt in Rizin’s history, Nazimov’s status as a relative unknown and the short-notice nature of his move up the card, the odds were both figuratively and literally against him. He intercepted a de Souza takedown with a knee and knocked him cold in thirteen seconds. However unknown he was last week, he’s one of the most visible Lightweights in the world now. He’ll defend his belt against Luiz Gustavo at Rizin 53 on May 10.

Rizin Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs

Razhabali Shaydullaev - 18-0, 3 Defenses

I asked how long the second reign of Kleber Koike Erbst would last, and as it turns out, the answer was sixty-two seconds. Razhabali Shaydullaev’s rise through the sport has been impressively meteoric. Four years ago he was a rookie fighting on Batyr Bashy cards in Kyrgyzstan as a predominantly grappling-based fighter. Three years ago he was disposing of journeymen in the developmental leagues of Russia’s Absolute Championship Akhmat. Two years ago he was choking out top contenders in South Korea’s Road FC. One year ago he got signed to Rizin. In just six months he choked out a DEEP champion, submitted a Bellator champion and smashed through a K-1 Kickboxing champion with virtually no resistance. He was the favorite against Erbst, but few thought it would be an easy night, with Erbst having been finished only once in his entire career, and even that was an armbar all the way back in 2009 when he was still a rookie. Shaydullaev, as he has been doing for the entirety of his run thus far, destroyed Erbst. He walked through him and flattened him in just barely over a minute. Rizin’s got another gaijin champion, and given how good he’s looked, they may be stuck with him for awhile--or, worse, they might lose him to the UFC sooner than later. With Mikuru Asakura’s victory over Chihiro Suzuki on the same night he’s the logical next contender, but that would just be stupid, so instead it was Shaydullaev making his first defense against Viktor Kolesnik at Rizin 51 on September 28: He knocked Kolesnik out in just thirty-three seconds. His successful murders got him the main event of 2025’s Japanese New Year’s MMA special, where Rizin secretly hoped their big national star Mikuru Asakura would get the job done; Shaydullaev chain-suplexed him, grounded him, and laid an unconscionable amount of ground and pound on him in one of those Japan-likes-to-let-its-heroes-die moments before the ref finally called the fight in just shy of three minutes. Shaydullaev’s the best guy in the company, and now there’s a question of what’s left for him to do. For now, inexplicably, the answer was carrying the murder of the 5-2 Yuta Kubo at Rizin Landmark 13 on April 11, which is wild because they already fought at the end of 2024 and Shaydullaev destroyed him in seven and a half minutes. Try to control your shock: This time it only took Shaydullaev four.

Rizin Bantamweight Champion, 135 lbs

Danny Sabatello - 18-4-1, 1 Defense

When Naoki Inoue won Rizin’s Bantamweight title I wrote that Rizin was one step closer to its dream of an all-Japanese championship roster, and it’s fitting that as gaijin once again take over the majority of the championship belts in the biggest organization in Japan, Danny goddamn Sabatello is one of the men to do it. Sabatello has been dogged by a reputation as a grinding wrestler without a ton to offer since 2020, when he got the call to compete on Dana White’s Contender Series, won, and was notably not offered a contract on the grounds of Boring Grappler. He made the move to late-stage Bellator instead, where he attempted to establish himself as their own personal Chael Sonnen: An indefatigable wrestling machine whose mouth ran just as hard as his double-legs. But it never quite caught on. The talk seemed a bit forced, the wrestling wasn’t that fun to watch, and all his 1980s wrestling promos about the bums in Bellator’s Bantamweight Grand Prix ended with an elimination at the hands of Raufeon Stots. Sabatello swore he’d won and that he’d get revenge; instead he ended his Bellator tenure getting choked out by Magomed Magomedov, decisioned again by Stots, and losing out on a shot at the PFL after going to a draw with Lazaro Dayron, who would’ve won the decision were it not for a point deduction. It was a bit of a shock when Sabatello signed with Rizin in 2025, but it seemed to have paid off when he scored his first knockout in six years during his debut against Shinobu Ota and swore he’d reinvent himself as Japan’s new American superstar. Then he went back to wrestling. It was still enough to get him his shot at Inoue’s belt at 2025’s New Year’s special, and despite the common wisdom of judging favoritism, a very close split decision went Danny’s way. It took three years longer than he intended, but Danny Sabatello is holding gold. Now we see if he can, in fact, become Big In Japan. His first title defense was against Joji Goto at Rizin Landmark 13 on April 11, and, unsurprisingly, he wrestled Goto to a broad decision.

Rizin Flyweight Champion, 125 lbs

Hiromasa Ougikubo - 30-8-2, 0 Defenses

It’s been an incredibly long road to gold for Hiromasa Ougikubo. He was a teenager when he made his professional debut all the way back in 2006, and even at 19, he was notable for the tough, gritty way he handled his grappling. Within a year he was a Shooto rookie tournament winner, within a dozen fights he was a regional champion, and a year later, he was Shooto’s Bantamweight World Champion. And then he immediately lost it after getting choked out by some guy named Kyoji Horiguchi. Having faced a level of force he didn’t feel he could contend with, he dropped down to Flyweight, where he was an immediate success, winning the Vale Tudo Japan tournament and, ultimately, the 125-pound Shooto title. That win got him called over to America for the most talent-rich season of The Ultimate Fighter ever, 2016’s Tournament of Champions, where he distinguished himself as one of the best fighters in the house and even beat a young Alexandre Pantoja on his way to the finals. Unfortunately, he couldn’t get past Tim Elliott. He returned to Japan, where, in his absence, Rizin had been reborn in the ashes of Pride FC, and as one of Japan’s best fighters, he got immediately called to the show--where he was immediately defeated by some guy named Kyoji Horiguchi. Ougikubo went back up to Bantamweight and fought his way to a title shot at company star Kai Asakura, but Asakura lanced him with a knee and ended his title hopes again. Undeterred, Hiromasa entered Rizin’s 2021 Bantamweight Grand Prix and stormed the bracket, winning four fights in a year and two in the same night, including the sweet revenge of a championship final where he defeated Asakura and staked his claim as the best Bantamweight in Japan. And then South Korean Kim Soo-chul beat him. So Ougikubo dropped back down to Flyweight for 2022’s massive Bellator vs Rizin supercard--where he was, for the third time, beaten by some guy named Kyoji Horiguchi. Someone should find out if that dude’s any good at fighting. Ougikubo still got his shot at Rizin’s Bantamweight title, but Juan Archuleta beat him, and for the first time in seventeen years of fighting, Ougikubo found himself on a three-fight losing streak. But Horiguchi, Rizin’s Flyweight champion, left the company to return to the UFC, and with the throne empty, Ougikubo wanted one more shot. He went back down to 125 pounds, he entered the 2025 Flyweight Grand Prix, he ran the table one more time, and at the 2025 New Year’s Special he faced and defeated Yuki Motoya to win the tournament and, with it, the vacant belt. It took several tries and almost twenty years, but by god, Hiromasa Ougikubo is the world champion. He’ll try to defend the belt for the first time against Shinryu Takahashi at Rizin Landmark 14 on June 6.

Rizin Women’s Super Atomweight Championship, 108 lbs

VACANT - The source of life and death

The world has long wondered who or what could beat Seika Izawa, and as it turns out, the answer is childbirth. At Rizin Landmark 13 on April 12, 2026, Seika took to the ring and announced her pregnancy and, accordingly, her hiatus from the sport. After four straight years as the undisputed best Atomweight in the world, the queen has abdicated the throne. She vowed to one day return and take back the belt from whichever unlucky woman gets it in her absence, but obviously there's no timeline for said return, nor should there be. All eyes now turn to the rest of Rizin's Atomweight division, which is, like, four people. Ayaka Hamasaki's back in Rizin, but she got armbarred pretty easily by the debuting Natasha Kuziutina. Moeri Suda and Saori Oshima are always around on loan from DEEP. I'm sure they'd love to belt up RENA, but she spends half of her time closer to Strawweight. It's a loss for mixed martial arts, we are all happy for Seika and wish her well, and god bless Rizin, which can never, ever have a full complement of champions.

ONE Heavyweight Champion, 265 lbs

Oumar Kane - 7-1, 0 Defenses

The triple championship days are over, and we can go back to appreciating ONE’s Heavyweight division for just how silly it really is. Oumar Kane’s origins are very serious: He grew up near Dakar, the capital of Senegal, and established himself as an undefeated star of Laamb, better known as Senegalese wrestling, a particularly harsh form of the sport that takes place on sand or turf and is fought in tiny shorts. As a giant 6’4” muscle monster with a wrestling background, Kane was an internationally visible talent, and ONE picked him up just one fight into his MMA career and promoted him as an undefeated monster of African wrestling. And it was true! For two fights. In his third bout with ONE, “Reug Reug” lost his undefeated streak in 2021 after gassing just two rounds in against Kirill Grishenko, but the actual ending of the fight was a bizarre sequence involving Grishenko throwing a punch right at the bell that appeared to graze Kane’s chin, only for Oumar to motion that he had been illegally punched in the throat after the bell and collapse onto the mat. After replays showed the punch barely connecting, the fight was ruled a TKO, and Oumar was accused of pulling a soccer dive. He spent three years building a three-fight winning streak--including a kickboxing match with “Boucher Ketchup” Mamadou Kamara, who is not a fighter but an influencer, and who fought exactly the way that sounds--and eventually that led him to a November 9, 2024 showdown with triple champ Anatoly Malykhin. The resulting fight was, to be gentle, pretty dreadful. Malykhin didn’t know how to get in on Kane, Kane repeatedly backed himself into a corner to focus on countering, and outside of the first round and a bit of the fifth, very little actually happened. But a takedown in the first round, a yellow card on Malykhin’s part for grabbing the ropes and a flash knockdown in the fifth were enough for Kane to win the title by split decision. “Reug Reug” is the champion. ONE was trying to position Marcus “Buchecha” Almeida as the top contender, but given that Kane beat him to get his title shot in the first place--and, uh, Buchecha left the company after the fight--and they don’t have any other fucking Heavyweights except, like, Kirill Grishenko--unsurprisingly, ONE decided to just book a rematch an entire year later. Kane vs Malykhin 2 was scheduled for ONE 173 on November 16, 2025, but Reug Reug managed to get concussed in a car accident and the fight had to be postponed. It'll now happen on May 15, 2026.

ONE Light Heavyweight Champion, 225 lbs

Anatoly Malykhin - 14-1, 0 Defenses

ONE Middleweight Champion, 205 lbs

Anatoly Malykhin - 14-1, 0 Defenses

For the second time in as many title reigns, ONE has managed to put a ton of hype behind a champion only to squash them prematurely. Anatoly Malykhin is one of the most successful marketing campaigns ONE ever ran: An undefeated, heavy-punching Russian Heavyweight with a 100% finishing rate. He knocked out everyone he faced, he carried ONE’s Heavyweight division as an interim champion while standing champion Arjan Bhullar was having contract issues, and when Bhullar finally re-entered the fold, Malykhin destroyed him with ease. But ONE had greater hopes for Malykhin as their spearhead for real international notoriety: They would make him the first three-division champion in the history of mixed martial arts. And it’d be real easy, because the other two belts were held by one guy. Reinier de Ridder had been their superstar double-champion, but his relationship with ONE had soured, and they cashed in by having de Ridder face Malykhin, twice, at both his weight classes. Malykhin destroyed him and became the first-ever 265, 225 and 205-pound champion the sport has ever seen--admittedly easier when you consider 225 is not a division that exists in almost any other federation on Earth. But he did it! And then they organized his first-ever title defense by having him put the Heavyweight belt on the line against Oumar “Reug Reug” Kane, and he lost a split decision, and now he is a lowly two-belt schmuck. It’ll be interesting to see what they do with Malykhin now, given that the last 205-pound fight ONE promoted was Malykhin’s bout against de Ridder, and the last 225-pound fight ONE promoted was Malykhin’s 2022 bout with de Ridder. He was hoping to get the Heavyweight title back at ONE 173, but with Reug Reug injured, Malykhin was left waiting until their new date on May 15.

ONE Welterweight Champion, 185 lbs

Christian Lee - 18-4 (1), 0 Defenses

ONE Lightweight Champion, 170 lbs

Christian Lee - 18-4 (1), 1 Defense

It 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. After the passing of his younger sister Victoria, Christian took the whole of the year to, understandably, grieve. ONE planned his comeback for February of 2024, but, y’know, that clearly did not happen. ONE held an interim title fight between Alibeg Rasulov and Ok Rae Yoon to welcome him back--but that didn’t exactly happen either, as Rasulov failed hydration tests, became ineligible to win the title, then won the fight anyway. Lee vs Rasulov was scheduled for October. And then November. It finally happened on December 7, 2024--and it ended in a No Contest after two rounds thanks to Christian unintentionally gouging Rasulov’s eye. They ran it back almost a full year later at ONE 173 on November 16, and this time Lee knocked him out in the second round, marking Lee’s first win in three years.

ONE Featherweight Champion, 155 lbs

Tang Kai - 19-4, 1 Defense

Tang 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. And then, absolutely nothing else happened. It took ONE almost a full year to book another match for Tang Kai, and it was just an instant rematch with Thanh Le with no fanfare, and it was delayed by eight full months thanks to an injury. So after more than a year and a half without a fight, Tang Kai finally fought Thanh Le again, and this time, he knocked him out in three rounds. Congratulations, Tang Kai: You are back at square one. His position hasn’t improved much, either. He was supposed to defend his title against Akbar Abdullaev on January 10, and Abdullaev pounded him out in the fifth round, but he also missed weight by a pound and a half and thus was ineligible for the championship. So, hey: Still a world champion! You just got knocked out a little bit. It’s fine. After almost another year and a half of inactivity Tang Kai will get another shot at defending his title on May 15, this time against Shamil Gasanov.

ONE Bantamweight Champion, 145 lbs

Engh-Orgil Baatarkhuu - 14-3, 0 Defenses

By god, ONE had an MMA title change hands in 2025. Enkh-Orgil Baatarkhuu is one of the precious few success stories for ONE’s feeder system. He was a 5-2 champion in the small (but competitive!) regional scene in his native Mongolia, which put him on ONE’s talent-scouting radar for their Warriors of the Steppe tournament in 2022. Enkh won two fights in six days to earn his contract with ONE, where he quickly discovered that no matter where you go in the wide world of sports, being a grappler-type Pokemon makes companies less invested in promoting you. Enkh went 6-1 across two years--8-1, if you count those aforementioned tournament wins--and finished most of his opponents, but title contention eluded him in no small part thanks to ONE’s turn away from mixed martial arts as a whole. It wasn’t until December 6 that Enkh finally got his long-belated shot at Fabricio Andrade’s Bantamweight title, and the first round and a half looked pretty thoroughly one-sided in Andrade’s favor, as most had figured it would be given the gap in Enkh’s striking game, and Andrade battered him to a near-stoppage on a couple occasions. But Enkh, as it turns out, is tough as shit. He weathered the storm and used his grit, his power and his wrestling to turn the tables, and towards the end of the fourth round, an exhausted Andrade gave up the ghost and got himself strangled. Enkh-Orgil Baatarkhuu is ONE’s Bantamweight champion, and his very first act as a champion was to call for a cross-class title match with Tang Kai, because weight classes aren’t real.

ONE Flyweight Champion, 135 lbs

Avazbek Kholmirzaev - 16-2, 0 Defenses

There's a certain kind of tragedy in winning a championship during what certainly seems to be the waning days of a promotion's time with mixed martial arts. Avazbek Kholmirzaev is by no means new to ONE, his title victory came a whole eleven fights into his time on their roster, but he spent a great deal of that time nigh-unto invisible. He got his start in his native country's Uzbekistan MMA Association, but like so many of his countrymen, the successes that built his career came from the bigger, more popular Alash Pride FC, Kazakhstan's biggest promotion, which is large, well-populated, and also the kind of bullshit record-padding organization that books main events between promising prospects and 5-11 guys who mysteriously always lose within three minutes. But he was on the positive side of the equation, and he knocked people out with spinning kicks, so ONE scouted him for their expansion across the East and he proved to be a natural fit--for the prelims. Avazbek almost never left the first few fights of the cards he was booked on, right up to his championship-opportunity-earning victory over no less than the 11-10 Jeremy Miado this past December curtain-jerking an Amazon Prime card, and an unkind man would probably intimate that his shot at Yuya Wakamatsu's Flyweight Championship was an attempt to get Yuya a win, being as it was ONE's big Ariake Arena show in Tokyo and they were attempting to showcase as much of their Japanese talent as possible. It was going well for Yuya right up until he ate a spinning elbow to the dome and went down in a heap just moments before the second round was about to end. Avazbek is a champion and he should be duly proud, and now we're just left to see what being an MMA champion in ONE means in 2026.

ONE Strawweight Champion, 125 lbs

Joshua Pacio - 23-5, 1 Defense

It’s been a difficult couple of years for Joshua Pacio. “The Passion” stands as a true veteran of ONE Championship, having made his debut--and his first, unsuccessful attempt at winning the Strawweight title--all the way back in 2016. Pacio established himself as both a fan favorite and a solid promotional favorite for the company, and when he lost his second bid for the title against Yosuke Saruta in 2019, ONE, in a trick they’d become very friendly with over the years, gave him an instant rematch anyway. Pacio knocked Saruta out in the rematch and became easily the greatest 125-pound champion in ONE history, ultimately defending the title three times--including a trilogy match against Saruta. By 2022, Pacio was a crown jewel for ONE’s lineup. Which is when he promptly got wrestled into paste by UFC cast-off Jarred Brooks. Rather than having him defend the title, ONE booked Brooks into grappling matches, and in the meantime Pacio fought and defeated undefeated prospect Mansur Malachiev to earn himself a rematch. Multiple delays ensued, but on March 1, the Brooks/Pacio rematch finally came. Fifty-six seconds in, Pacio attempted a standing kimura on Brooks, who hoisted him off the ground, suplexed him, and knocked him out. Unfortunately, this was a problem. Under ONE’s ruleset, slams that land headfirst are illegal. ONE has been regularly criticized for this--less for the rule itself as for ONE’s tendency to selectively enforce the rule, using it to benefit fighters they would like to succeed. ONE, of course, denies this vehemently. However you draw your own conclusions, at the end of the day Jarred Brooks was disqualified, and thus, by DQ, Joshua Pacio is now a three-time Strawweight champion. He almost immediately announced he has torn his ACL and was out for an entire year. On February 20th, 2025, Pacio and Brooks finally fought again and it was weird, but definitive. Jarred Brooks seemingly exhausted himself after a round and Pacio pounded him for the entire second round, which eventually elicited a mercy stoppage from the ref. ONE has only one 125-pound champion again. So he, of course, challenged for the 135-pound title next. Pacio vs Wakamatsu happened at ONE 173 on November 16 and ended in Pacio getting smashed in six minutes.

ONE Women’s Atomweight Champion, 115 lbs

Denice Zamboanga - 12-2, 0 Defenses

Denice Zamboanga, to be clear, is not the problem with ONE’s women’s divisions. She’s a good fighter. She’s been trucking along in ONE since 2009, she’s proven herself repeatedly as a solid all-around competitor. She’s tough, she’s talented, she’s never been finished. She’s also never beaten a top fighter. She’s fought 0-0 rookies, she’s beaten journeywomen on losing streaks--in a dozen fights with ONE, she’s only beaten someone coming off a victory at all twice. She was also notably defeated by Seo Hee Ham, the top Atomweight contender and former Rizin champion, twice in a row. It was consequently a bit of a surprise to Ham when ONE announced an interim title fight to make up for Stamp’s injury absence and she wasn’t in it. Instead of her, the #1 contender whose only loss in ONE was to Stamp herself, it would be Denice Zamboanga, the woman she beat, against Alyona Rassohyna, a woman she also beat and who, as a bonus, had not fought in ONE since September of 2021--when she lost to Stamp Fairtex. This was all supposed to end in a unification match with Stamp at ONE 173 on August 1, but in early May, ONE announced that Stamp had reinjured her knee and was going to miss at least the rest of 2025. With the awareness that it would have been close to two and a half years between title fights, Stamp ‘voluntarily relinquished’ her title. This wound up being even more infuriating when ONE failed to rebook Denice for so long that upon finally scheduling her again, they chose ONE 173 on November 16, where Stamp Fairtex, who is now healthy, will be fighting a completely unrelated kickboxing match. Denice will face Ayaka Miura. Rather: Denice was going to face Ayaka Miura, but at the end of August she announced medical issues will prevent her from fighting. So they made an interim title fight for Stamp’s return against a non-#1 contender, and then they stripped Stamp for being unable to compete, and then they didn’t schedule the next championship fight until the card where Stamp was making her return anyway, and now Stamp is healthy and fighting but the Atomweight champion isn’t. Stamp lost and Denice has yet to be rebooked. Just fucking stop already.

Invicta Bantamweight Championship, 135 lbs

Jennifer Maia - 23-10-1, 0 Defenses

It did not take Jennifer Maia long to find her way back home to Invicta after the UFC cut her in 2023, and it only took a year for her to reclaim gold in the company she left behind. This is, in fact, Maia’s third stint with Invicta: The first time around was back in 2013, when Invicta was barely a year old and Maia was only a couple years and nine fights into her career, and it saw Maia distinguishing herself as a hot prospect but failing to get past the top ranks. She came back in 2016 as a more seasoned fighter and captured its Flyweight championship, but, as is the fate of all regional champions, she traded the belt for a ticket to the UFC. Her half-decade in the big show was by no means bad--she even fought Valentina Shevchenko for the UFC’s 125-pound title--but she still couldn’t crack the top of the mountain, and eventually, the UFC got tired of her derailing prospects and let her go. It only took two fights for Maia to dethrone Talita Bernardo and gain her second Invicta gold. Hopefully she sticks around this time.

Invicta Atomweight Championship, 105 lbs

Elisandra Ferreira - 9-2, 1 Defense

The only major Atomweight division in America is back, and as happens so often, it belongs to Brazil. Elisandra “Lili” Ferreira started competing as an amateur at 19, lost all of her amateur fights, and proceeded to turn pro anyway, because giving up sucks. She spent the first third of her professional career fighting at Strawweight simply because Atomweight opportunities are few and farbetween, but she made the turn to the lower weight class in 2021 and never looked back, and boy, it’s worked out for her. With one exception--a loss to Anastasia Nikolakakos, maybe the best Atomweight on this side of the globe--Ferreira’s cleaned house on the division. She made the jump to Invicta in 2023, and a year and a half later she’s 4-0 and the new bannerwoman for its most unique weight class, thanks to a hard-fought decision over Andressa Romero on September 20, 2024. Invicta’s 2024 comeback has reclaimed its first lost title; now we just have to see who they line up to test Ferreira over the next year of its renaissance. Her first at-bat came against Ana Palacios at Invicta FC 61 on April 4, and Ferreira earned a near-shutout on the scorecards.

PFL Heavyweight Championship, 265 lbs

Vadim Nemkov - 19-2 (1), 0 Defenses

When the PFL announced that it was going to crown a standing Heavyweight champion, they had a raft of interesting options. Oleg Popov, their 2025 tournament champion, had a strong argument. Denis Goltsov, 2024 champion and the only man in almost ten years to beat Popov, could’ve called dibs. Hell, the PFL still technically has Francis Ngannou, the best Heavyweight on the planet, under contract. They, of course, did not choose any of those men. They chose Renan Ferreira, the 2023 tournament champion whose only fight in almost two years was a TKO loss to Ngannou, and Vadim Nemkov, Bellator’s best Light Heavyweight. Nemkov, a Fedor protégé, hadn’t lost since 2016, when he got himself punched out by Jiří Procházka and narrowly edged out by Karl Albrektsson, and it’s a testament to both his skills and the world’s dim view of the Heavyweight division that when the PFL acquired Bellator and Nemkov announced he was leaving 205 for the 265-pound world, instead of the expected fretting about how a 6’1” man would contend in the world of the big boys, more or less everyone said “Yeah, that’s fine.” And lo: It was. Nemkov choked out 2021 PFL champ Bruno Cappelozza, and then he choked out the ever-pained Timothy Johnson, and when he fought Renan Ferreira at PFL Champions Series 4 on December 13, 2025, shockingly, he choked him out, too. Nemkov’s now the only major Heavyweight champion in American MMA outside of the UFC. Hopefully it pays off.

PFL Light Heavyweight Championship, 205 lbs

Corey Anderson - 20-6 (1), 0 Defenses

One of the best Light Heavyweights in the world isn’t in the UFC, and they have only themselves to blame. Corey Anderson was the precise kind of fighter the UFC wanted when they first got ahold of him in 2014: Big, young, athletic, talented, undefeated. He had all the makings of a future champion, and his victory on The Ultimate Fighter 19 (jesus christ) cemented him as a prospect to watch. Unfortunately, he had also barely been in the sport for a year and only had four professional fights to his name. In short order he’d suffered his first loss, and a couple years later, a pair of back-to-back knockouts in 2017 sent him to the realm of afterthoughts. But a recommitment to his wrestling style, an extremely well-aged victory over Glover Teixeira, and a devastating knockout over Johnny Walker got Anderson back in the title picture, and in 2020, he fought Jan Błachowicz to determine the #1 contender to the soon-to-be-vacated belt. They’d done battle once, five years prior, and Corey had won a clear decision. This time, Jan flattened him in three minutes. Despite his top-ten ranking and the four consecutive fights he’d just won, the UFC decided to dump Corey, sending him from main event to unemployment in a week. Corey went straight to Bellator and proceeded to become one of its best stars, and he would have become the first man in America to beat Vadim Nemkov had they not banged their heads together and ended the fight prematurely. Corey lost the rematch, but he became the last man to hold Bellator’s Light Heavyweight title after beating Karl Moore, and on October 3, Corey had a champion vs champion match against the PFL’s 205-pound tournament champion, Dovletdzhan Yagshimuradov. Corey had pounded him out in Bellator four years prior, and while he didn’t get the stoppage in the present, he did get the win, and in so doing he became the inaugural PFL Light Heavyweight Champion. What that actually means going forward, we’ll have to see.

PFL Middleweight Championship, 185 lbs

Costello van Steenis - 18-3, 1 Defense

For years, the Professional Fighters League has threatened to crown standing champions. Did they carry through any of their major tournament winners? Nope. Did they bring out their holdout Bellator champions? Not exactly! Did they at least make a big hubbub about finally going through with it? Of course not. Instead, just five days before PFL Champions Series 2, their promotional debut in South Africa, they abruptly announced that Bellator champ Johnny Eblen was suddenly the first-ever PFL Middleweight Champion, and his match with Costello van Steenis was the first-ever defense of the title. Costello, himself, was a Bellator veteran who’d been absorbed in the PFL buyout, but he’d always played second fiddle in the organization, unable to get through the John Salters and Douglas Limas of the world, and thus said world was mostly overlooking him as a challenger. The first three rounds of Eblen gradually grinding him into dust bore out that expectation, but then a funny thing happened: The inexhaustible wrestler got tired. Eblen found himself punched up by van Steenis in the fourth round, and he seemed to be pulling it together again in the fifth, but right before the bell could ring van Steenis managed to take his back and sink in a choke, and with just seven seconds separating him from an almost-certain decision victory, Eblen passed out. Costello van Steenis is the first man to truly hold a standing PFL Championship, and he became the second man to defend one after knocking out Fabian Edwards on March 20.

THE PFL WELTERWEIGHT CONUNDRUM

Yeah, I don’t quite know what to do here. On February 7, the (technically) final Welterweight champion of Bellator, Ramazan Kuramagomedov, beat 2024 PFL tournament champion and undefeated favorite Shamil Musaev and became the first official PFL Welterweight Champion. In his post-fight interview he immediately retired. On one hand, the PFL still lists him as their officially reigning champion. On the other, the PFL’s Youtube channel has a video on it named RAMAZAN KURAMAGOMEDOV ANNOUNCES THIS WAS HIS LAST FIGHT and in their own description phrase it as “announcing his retirement.” Does the PFL have a Welterweight champion? I don’t think even they know. So, as of March 1, 2026, I’m leaving ol’ Matthew Lesko here until the PFL clarifies its own title situation and I am on pins and needles to see how long it’ll take before I remove this section.

PFL Lightweight Championship, 155 lbs

Usman Nurmagomedov - 21-0 (1), 1 Defense

The Nurmagomedov family is trying to run the sport, and Usman is their B-league beachhead, but that assault has proven to be an awful lot rockier than the rest. As the kid brother of Umar and the cousin of Khabib, Usman had great expectations thrust upon him very early in his career, and he dealt with them the way regional talents with great camps traditionally do: Squashing severely overmatched competition until you get a contract from one of the big companies. Bellator won the Usman bidding war and brought him over in 2021, and he proved to be one of the breakout stars of their final days, blitzing his way up the Lightweight ranks, knocking off several contenders and ultimately beating Patricky Pitbull to win the 155-pound championship and securing his reign by retiring former star and UFC champ Benson Henderson. It was 2023, and even though Bellator’s upcoming death was clear, Usman was a name and widely considered one of the best Lightweights in the world. Unfortunately, then, things got weird. He was a massive, -2200 favorite to beat Brent Primus in the waning days of Bellator, and he did--and it became the first non-win of his career after failing a drug test for something that was never disclosed. He carried Bellator’s title over into its new life as a colony of the PFL, and he immediately ran into controversy after barely scraping a majority decision off of Irish superprospect Paul Hughes. The world wanted a rematch for the inaugural PFL Lightweight Championship fight, and on October 3, at the PFL’s big Dubai show, they got it--and this time, it waws even closer, with media scorecards split right down the middle. This, by itself, is not that unusual, nor is one fighter winning a controversial decision unusual. It is unusual when the decision is not only unanimous, but one judge scores the entire fight as a 50-45 shut-out. So Usman’s last two wins were dubious, and his future as part of the PFL depends on how they treat their own championship, but for now, he is the damn champion. He notched his first title defense by choking out Alfie Davis on February 7.

PFL Women’s Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs

Cris Cyborg - 29-2 (1), 1 Defense

Are you noticing how all of the inaugural PFL champions are just Bellator’s champions? Funny, that. Cris Cyborg is the greatest Women’s Featherweight of all time, and we all just kind of have to deal with that, because Women’s Featherweight has only barely ever existed. Strikeforce set the standard back in 2006 because Gina Carano was one of their biggest stars, and that star lasted right up until 2009, when they attempted to put a belt on her and failed because Cris Cyborg punched the shit out of her. In the following sixteen years Cyborg’s only lost one mixed martial arts fight, and it took Amanda Nunes, the greatest Women’s mixed martial artist of all time, to do it. Aside from that one loss, she’s run the table. She was the Strikeforce Featherweight Champion until it closed, and then she was Invicta’s Featherweight Champion until they let the UFC have her, and then she was the UFC’s Featherweight Champion until Amanda dropped her, and Cyborg promptly went to Bellator and won their title, too. When the PFL brought her over in the Bellator buyout, they set her up for an interpromotional superfight against Larissa Pacheco, a two-time PFL tournament winner and the only woman who’d ever beaten Kayla Harrison. On one hand, Pacheco’s one of just six women to ever make it to the final bell with Cyborg. On the other, she lost 4-1. In the ultimate act of promotional cowardice, the PFL promoted Cyborg to champion status three days before her appearance at the PFL Champions Series on December 13, 2025, meaning her fight with Sara Collins was, technically, a title defense. It was as one-sided as you’d expect. In theory, this is great! The biggest female fighter outside the UFC has a belt and the PFL is bringing back a division the UFC threw in the garbage. In practice, Cyborg didn’t even get out of her post-fight interview without noting that after her next fight she’s going to retire from MMA in favor of focusing on her boxing career. So welcome back, Women’s Featherweight. I hope you still exist by 2027.

SATURDAY, MAY 2 FROM THE RAC ARENA IN PERTH, AUSTRALIA
EARLY START TIME WARNING | PRELIMS 1 AM PDT / 4 AM EDT | MAIN CARD 4 AM / 7 AM | EARLY START TIME WARNING

Remember all those various comments over the last few years about the Australian government getting in on the bribe-the-UFC-for-shows game? Congratulations, Australians! Your tax dollars have finally convinced the UFC to program your shows for your own time zone. Welcome to a new era of fight cards that start at shitty times for the rest of the audience instead of you, for once, as well as a level of regional appeal so wide in its scope that for the first time ever we’re going to be using a new metric to track it. It’s going to be very subtle, so make sure you keep your eyes peeled.

MAIN EVENT: SWIFT RECOVERY
WELTERWEIGHT: Jack Della Maddalena (18-3, #1) vs Carlos Prates (23-7, #5)

Despite the UFC’s best attempts to drag everything down into the muck, the Welterweight division is still really fucking cool.

They’re working on dragging it down--look out for the rise of Make Malott--but for now, for however long anything good can last, this is one of the last bastions of quality in the UFC. Everyone’s good, everything’s fun, there isn’t a single bad fighter or outright hype job in the top ten. Hell, half of said top ten have held the championship, and out of the half that haven’t you’ve got a good three and a half guys that are right there orbiting the title picture.

Jack Della Maddalena is the half. For three straight years JDM was damn near everything the UFC could possibly want. A complete striker with some of the best boxing in the business and virtually no desire to wrestle, a career finisher with beautiful liver punches, a young man on a Contender Series contract with plenty of longevity and virtually no leverage, and he even had the courtesy to hail from Australia, the territory the UFC was actively trying to conquer. Had Jack also dabbled in using his free time to post about bigotry and libertarianism on the internet, he would have been their perfect starchild.

As it was, they had to simply settle for watching him punch everyone, and punch everyone he did. Between his Contender Series fight in 2021 and his title win in 2025 Jack fisting his way up the ladder made him one of Welterweight’s hottest prospects, and he was aided in no small part by the rare and welcome decision not to softball him. Ramazan Emeev is a hard draw for your second fight in the UFC. Randy Brown is a tall order at any point. Hell, the UFC wanted Jack in the cage with Sean Brady all the way back in 2023, and they should be thankful to this day that Brady had to pull out and Jack wound up dealing with a lesser grappling in Bassil Hafez, because Hafez damn near won and Brady would probably have tied 2023 Jack into a pretzel. Instead, watching him struggle to climb the ladder didn’t just him good will with the fanbase, it forced Jack to round out his gameplan and fix his weaknesses.

The Jack Della Maddalena that almost got wrestled to death by Bassil Hafez in 2023 was an entire league apart from the Jack Della Maddalena that shut down Belal Muhammad and won the Welterweight Championship in 2025.

Unfortunately, the Islam Makhachev that beat Jack six months later was an entire league apart from him, too.

This is the problem with being #2 with a bullet. You can punish prospects, you can crush contenders, you can win against world champions, but when you meet a man you can’t do a goddamn thing against, it kills your prospects. Islam didn’t just beat Jack, he shut him out. By the midway point of the match Jack looked visibly frustrated and he still had another twelve and a half minutes of getting outstruck and outwrestled to go. 4 for 4 on takedowns, 140 to 30 in the striking, 50-45 on every scorecard. When you lose a title that badly, you don’t get a second shot unless the man who beat you no longer has the belt or there’s no one left between the two of you, and that means holding onto your spot at the top of the division with every erg of strength in your fingertips.

Carlos Prates is an excellent example of how this can be inverted. When you get to the top and then you lose, it’s a big, big problem. When you lose on your way up, as long as you didn’t get smashed, no one really gives a shit.

Some part of that, I think, is the lesser toll associated with failing at jumping the line. By 2025, Carlos Prates was already a big fan favorite of a prospect. “Guy who knocks everyone out” is still the single most successful schtick in the sport, and in a single calendar year Prates went from his UFC debut to 4-0 with a perfect record of striking stoppages, and it’s damn near impossible not to get a great deal of hype from the fanbase when you keep flooring everyone you face.

But where the UFC brought Jack up the hard way, Carlos got the softer road. Trevin Giles was coming off a stoppage loss when Prates debuted and knocked him out. Charles Radtke was 2-0 when Prates got ahold of him, and neither of the two were world-beaters. Li Jingliang was coming off a loss, a spinal injury, and two years on the shelf when he walked into a Carlos Prates left hook. Neil Magny wasn’t just coming off a loss, he was coming off a TKO loss just 77 days before the UFC asked him to fight the scariest knockout puncher at Welterweight. Everyone knew Carlos was a big threat; everyone knew Carlos had been carefully cultivated.

Accordingly, when the UFC booked Ian Machado Garry, the #7 man in the division, against Carlos Prates, then stuck at #13, it was a surprise up until it wasn’t. Garry had just lost his undefeated streak to Shavkat Rakhmonov and the UFC wanted him to fight another striker; Prates was a much better finishing machine and the house likes to hedge its bets. Garry took Shavkat to the limit but still lost a decision, and Prates put up a solid fight and nearly finished Garry in the home stretch, but couldn’t stop Garry from grappling him for the first three and a half rounds.

Ian stumbled on his way up, then picked up a couple solid victories over difficult opponents and now he’s in title contention--because Shavkat’s out of the picture with an injury. Carlos stumbled against Ian, then took out his anger with back to back knockouts over Geoff Neal and Leon Edwards, and now he, too, is fighting to be in title contention, and he, too, would benefit deeply from the rumors of Islam’s next defense being against Garry, as if Garry loses, his victory over Carlos is no longer a roadblock.

It’s a great fight. It’s a great clash of styles, from Jack’s in-and-out up-close combination boxing to Carlos’ long-range nukes.

And it’s still just a little bit of an existential bummer, because it’s hard to imagine either of these guys beating Islam. If Jack wins, he’s orbiting a man who dominated him so badly a rematch would seem like a completely foregone conclusion. If Carlos wins, he has to deal with one of the best grapplers in mixed martial arts after getting outwrestled by Garry and nearly choked out by Edwards. In the vacuum of combat, this is an excellent match that could provide one of the most fascinating striking battles the UFC can currently offer. In the context of the difficulty cliff that currently looms over the Welterweight division, whoever wins, good fucking luck in your future endeavors.

I can’t help picking the underdog this time out. As much as I love Jack’s technique, he’s been using it at a perpetual advantage. Gilbert Burns isn’t going to outstrike him. Belal Muhammad isn’t going to outstrike him. Randy Brown has always been too loose to be as dangerous as his potential. The last time we saw Jack fight someone with a similar size, reach and power advantage it was Kevin Holland, and Jack won--more clearly than the split decision would lead one to believe--but he still struggled with the fire coming back his way. Prates burns a lot fucking hotter and with how unlikely Jack is to mix wrestling as effectively into his assault as Garry did, I see big left hands dancing in my head. CARLOS PRATES BY TKO.

CO-MAIN EVENT: CASHING OUT
LIGHTWEIGHT: Beneil Dariush (23-7-1, #12) vs Quillan Salkilld (11-1, NR)
LOCAL FIGHTER AGAINST A FOREIGNER COMING OFF A LOSS COUNTER: 1

Now this is just uncouth.

Let’s not beat around the bush on this one, either: This is an attempted execution. This is an attempt to jump Quillan Salkilld in line on the corpse of a former contender who appears to be on his way out. This is the theoretical end of the story of Beneil Dariush, a man who has looked 40 since 2018 and is only now closing in on it.

Until recently, that agelessness had defined him. We’re only a few years past when Beneil was supposed to fight Islam goddamn Makhachev, and we’re eleven years past Beneil’s first appearance as a top-ten ranked Lightweight. When Beneil hit #8, the top Lightweights in the UFC were Rafael dos Anjos, Anthony Pettis, Donald Cerrone, Eddie Alvarez, and Khabib Nurmagomedov. That’s how many generations of Lightweight hopefuls he’s hung on through. That’s just how long he’s been turning away prospects, from Charlie Brenneman to Mateusz Gamrot.

And sure, every once in awhile he’d get got. Michael Chiesa, Edson Barboza, Alexander Hernandez. When Beneil’s five-year undefeated streak finally ended at the hands of Charles Oliveira, no one really batted an eye, because it’s Charles fucking Oliveira. After Arman Tsarukyan knocked Beneil out in one minute, the world shrugged, because Arman’s quite possibly the best Lightweight in the world right now. Routing Renato Moicano last June made it even easier to believe the Dariush cycle was simply coming around all over again.

Belief in Beneil bottomed out in November. He got matched up with Benoît Saint Denis, the kind of big-swinging wrestleboxer he’d turned aside repeatedly in his career, but this time Beneil came in overweight, walked into the cage looking tired before the fight even began, and got knocked out in one punch. Ten years of contendership called into question in sixteen seconds.

Which means it’s open season on dying stars. Quillan wasn’t the UFC’s first choice--it was supposed to be fellow knockout artist Manuel Torres--but injuries cost Torres his shot, and by god, there’s Australian pandering to be done, and an Australian kickman to boost into the stratosphere.

I can’t say shit about Quillan Salkilld being bad. You do not destroy Nasrat Haqparast in two and a half minutes if you’re bad. You don’t outwrestle Yanal Ashmouz for three straight rounds or choke out Jamie Mullarkey if you aren’t really good at what you’re doing. Quillan’s skills are extremely legitimate and the UFC is not at all wrong to want him up the rankings sooner than later.

But, as always, it’s not the destination so much as the journey. We just discussed the joy of fighters working their way up the ranks organically; Quillan got here by dumpstering Nasrat Haqparast and then dumpstering a man who was, himself, dumpstered by Nasrat Haqparast. Like Prates, this is an attempt to jump the line on a hard-hitting knockout artist by surfing on the body of a fallen contender before his bones calcify completely.

And like Prates, I think it’s gonna work. I would love to see another vintage prospect-destroying performance, but I think that time has passed. Quillan seems like the real deal and Beneil’s career seems to finally be catching up with him, and that makes QUILLAN SAKILLD BY TKO seem almost academic.

MAIN CARD: JESUS CHRIST, HEAVYWEIGHT
FLYWEIGHT: Tim Elliott (21-13-1, #11) vs Steve Erceg (13-4, #12)

Despite how often the greater consciousness of the fanbase tends to overlook him, Tim Elliott is on a pretty solid run. Most folks don’t really perceive it, because Tim’s career is defined as much for being a huge weirdo who moonwalks in mid-fight as for losing all of his big fights. He almost choked out Demetrious Johnson, but then he lost. He got his shots at Deiveson Figueiredo and Brandon Royval, but he got choked out by both of them. He was supposed to prospect-check Muhammad Mokaev back in 2023, and Mokaev outgrappled and submitted him, too. His tendency to fall short in fights of consequence made everyone’s eyes glaze over when it came to his many midcard wins, which made it something of a jolt when the UFC picked him to rehabilitate former Rizin champion Kai Asakura after his failed attempt to challenge Alexandre Pantoja for the Flyweight title this past August, and instead of Kai fulfilling his odds as a massive favorite Tim outgrappled him with ease and guillotined him in two rounds, at which point the world went “oh, right, Tim Elliott, I remember that guy.”

Said world has been unable not to remember Steve Erceg, because the UFC ran him into the ground in their repeated attempts to make him a main event talent. There are two sides to the Steve story. In one, he is almost inarguably Australia’s best Flyweight, an extremely solid fighter with crisp boxing, underrated (if underutilized) wrestling, and tight enough defense that running up three UFC wins in under a year came as no surprise to anyone paying attention. In the other story, he’s maybe the most overpushed 125-pounder in the company. After knocking out a Matt Schnell with one win in three years and earning the #10 ranking in the division, the UFC shot Erceg straight to a title match. When he failed, they put him in a pay-per-view co-main event title eliminator with the returning Kai Kara-France. When Kai knocked him out in four minutes flat, they threw Erceg into a main event with the even higher-ranked former champion Brandon Moreno. It was only after his third consecutive loss that the company finally relented and let Erceg go back to fighting regular competition, and having beaten Ode’ Osbourne, a man who is currently 2 for his last 8, it’s time for Erceg to get the chance to climb the ladder again with the benefit of a home field advantage.

My head and heart are at war with this one and even as I write this sentence, I’m still not sure which I’m going to side with. On paper, it seems very hard for Erceg to lose this fight. The striking game is extremely clearly in his favor, and while Tim may be a better grappler, I don’t think he’s going to have a lot of luck submitting Erceg where Alexandre Pantoja failed. Tim’s also absurdly difficult to knock out, so there’s a good chance he’ll have multiple chances to get Steve where he wants him, but taking Tim over Steve here seems like the kind of decision that will serve only to sadden me by reminding me of my tendency to cling to false hope and try too often to live in the world I want rather than the one that is.

But, like Popeye, I am what I am. TIM ELLIOTT BY DECISION.

FEATHERWEIGHT: Marwan Rahiki (8-0) vs Ollie Schmid (4-2)

Previously, in March’s locus of frustration:

What are we doing here, man? Marwan Rahiki was just on the Contender Series in October, where he got nearly knocked the fuck out twice in one round by Ananias Mulumba, who got his shot at the show by defeating a man who is 10-12 with those victories all coming over fighters with no more than one win, and after Mulumba gassed out from beating the absolute shit out of Rahiki he got stopped in the second round, because 23 year-olds are better at recovering than you are.
(...)
This is a UFC fight. This is a fight in the UFC. This isn’t even a random prelim, this is a main card UFC fight. The 0-0 guy who barely survived his DWCS appearance is fighting the 0-1 guy who had his legs smashed to bits by a man who couldn’t get past Marc Diakiese, and Charles Johnson and Chris Curtis and Brad Tavares and Bia Mesquita and even Eryk Anders are all stuck on the prelims.

Marwan Rahiki was supposed to fight Jack Jenkins on this card in one of those 'technically both fighters are at least semi-local but one of them is ethnically White and the other isn't and that's definitely not going to lead to an awkward crowd reaction' specials the UFC loves so much, but Jack got hurt and I sat there with "Marwan Rahiki vs TBA" on my template because I knew, inside, that they would not be so kind to my sanity as to simply cancel the fight. Four days before the event, they proved me right.

I have seen people react to Ollie Schmid's signing with excitement. With respect: Ollie Schmid has been fighting professionally for three years, he is 4-2, three of those victories were against men with zero wins, two of them were men with zero fights, and his most recent win, the only exception, was a fifteen-second knockout over the 5-6-3 Jeffrey "JRock" Mesa. Ollie isn't here because he's amazing, he's here because he's part of the Adesanya/Ulberg/Hooker City Kickboxing team and he's conveniently Australian and he never takes anyone down. This isn't a feelgood story about a good prospect getting his chance--it barely has anything to do with Ollie. It's the progressively lowering bar of admission meeting the needs of regional marketing.

Splitting the difference between being happy for fighters getting what they want and being sad for the sport on the whole is uncomfortable and exhausting. OLLIE SCHMID BY TKO.

HEAVYWEIGHT: Shamil Gaziev (14-2, #15) vs Brando Peričić (6-1, NR)
LOCAL FIGHTER AGAINST A FOREIGNER COMING OFF A LOSS COUNTER: 2

One week ago.

You know, I didn’t intend for Every Week Heavyweight Strays Further From God’s Light to be an ongoing, recurring segment in these write-ups. I really didn’t! But as it turns out, there is, indeed, always more, and it is, in fact, always worse.

Not only are we doing this all over again this week, it is a two-parter told across back to back fights. In your first Heavyweight bout of the night you've got Shamil Gaziev, who was competing in a main event for a spot in the top fifteen after just one fight in the UFC, and Jairzinho Rozenstruik, the man that beat him so badly Shamil had to quit between rounds because he could no longer see, was deemed no longer relevant to the UFC's interests two fights later and released. Shamil proceeded to reach incredible heights like 'beating Don'Tale Mayes' and 'knocking out Thomas Petersen,' and then the company spent half a year trying and failing to get him in the cage with Serghei Spivac, and when that failed they gave him a last-minute replacement bout with Waldo Cortes-Acosta, who dropped him in a minute and a half.

Which is how he is now defending his spot as a ranked Heavyweight against "The Balkan Beast" Brando Peričić, a man who made it into the UFC on the back of two straight victories over men with zero professional fights, but he knocked out no less than Muckleshoot Fight Night veteran Elisha Ellison and the now 0-2 Louie Sutherland, which means he's ready for fucking primetime. We have fully regressed to the point that the Heavyweight division is now openly auditioning ranked men whose primary skillsets are Is Large and Has Enough Gas To Punch For One Round, and if there are Heavyweights better than these men out there but they do things other than knock people out and/or cost more to employ than the lowest possible professional salary, fuck 'em, we don't need 'em.

It's painful and we somehow haven't even gotten to the actual pain yet. SHAMIL GAZIEV BY TKO.

HEAVYWEIGHT: Tai Tuivasa (14-9) vs Louie Sutherland (10-5)
LOCAL FIGHTER AGAINST A FOREIGNER COMING OFF A LOSS COUNTER: 3

Oh, yeah. This is where the pain lives. Tai Tuivasa is on a fucking six fight losing streak. The last time he scored a win was a month and a half into 2022. The last time he fought at all it was a gas-out with Tallison Teixeira so deeply tragic it made Teixeira look worse even in victory, and now a man who was one fight away from meeting Jon Jones is unranked and on possibly the worst slump in UFC Heavyweight history. Funny story: Tai Tuivasa also lost against Jairzinho Rozenstruik just two fights ago, and somehow, Tai is the one who is still here. They were going to try to get him back on track, too--he was supposed to fight Sean Sharaf, the 0-2 man who's gotten knocked out in both of his UFC bouts thus far. But Sean broke his nose, and the UFC had to ask itself if they had any other 0-2 guys in their pocket that Tai could hopefully knock out.

If you read the last fight, you already know the answer. Louie Sutherland's two-fight UFC career just barely exceeds three minutes. Valter Walker tore his knee up, Brando Peričić punched his face in, and now he's fighting a man who was, a few eyeblinks ago, one of the top Heavyweight contenders in the world. And I mocked Heavyweight then, because Tai climbed the mountain on the backs of names like Greg Hardy and Harry Hunsucker, but by god, at least he climbed it. I don't know what to call this. I don't have words for the current state of the division, where Things just Happen and we rebuild our homes in the craters left behind by the madness. If Louie wins, is he now borderline-ranked by beating a man who's been losing so badly it led to public calls for the division to be shut down? If Tai wins, do we have to do this all over again?

I hope not, but I do think, even now, he's a better brawler than Louie. TAI TUIVASA BY TKO.

PRELIMS: THE SHOWROOM
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Cam Rowston (14-3) vs Robert Bryczek (18-6)

There's a certain level of casual disrespect that goes into breaking a fighter down to a single loss, but it's important not to dodge reality just because reality feels unkind. Robert Bryczek has been around the globe, he's won regional championships, he's beaten some solid fighters and he was, at one point, one of the best Middleweights in Oktagon, the Czech Republic's biggest league and one of the best Eurofight organizations there is. He also lost a UFC fight to Ihor Potieria. In eight trips to the cage, Iggy Pots beat exactly two men: The four hundred and seventeen year-old Shogun Rua, who was finally prepared to retire just ten years too late, and Robert Bryczek, who wants us to focus on his subsequent knockout over Brad Tavares instead, but Brad Tavares was also, according to my notes, at least ninety-one years into his combat sports career when Robert knocked him out, and I think that should probably be illegal.

In any case, Cam Rowston is an Australian who knocks everyone out on an Australian card against a guy who is smaller, older and slower, and the intention is not in doubt, nor the likelihood. CAM ROWSTON BY TKO.

LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Junior Tafa (6-5) vs Kevin Christian (9-3)
LOCAL FIGHTER AGAINST A FOREIGNER COMING OFF A LOSS COUNTER: 4

Words cannot properly express how hard it was not to make this paragraph even more self-quoting, but I've overindulged this week as it is. Four months ago I wrote about the way my desire not to root for fighters to lose their jobs was called into question by Junior Tafa's 2-5 UFC record and love of post-fight assaults, but the company was in Australia, so he showed up and got choked out by Billy Elekana in two rounds. Three months before that, I wrote about the impending debut of Kevin Christian, a Contender Series winner with a record that looked good on paper but was questionable in practice and my belief that his predominant fighting ability might simply be He's Very Tall, and he dutifully filed into the Apex, where he was choked out by Billy Elekana in one round. This fight is predicated on a) both men coming off the same loss to the same man, b) one man being booked every goddamn time they go to Australia, and c) how far being tall can take you in combat sports.

This place is not a place of honor. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. JUNIOR TAFA BY TKO.

MIDDLEWEIGHT: Jacob Malkoun (9-3) vs Gerald Meerschaert (37-21)
LOCAL FIGHTER AGAINST A FOREIGNER COMING OFF A LOSS COUNTER: 5

Jacob Malkoun is serving penance for his perceived sins. Malkoun was another potential Australian contender a few years back in Izzy's heyday--the streets remember how dangerously close he came to beating the currently #4-ranked Brendan Allen--but he was, damningly, a wrestler, and for his sins he was persistently underbooked, and when Malkoun got disqualified for clocking Cody Brundage with an elbow to the brainstem, he went from a promising prospect to the UFC's double agent, dispatched to stop other wrestlers before they, too, can become problems. They used him to beat Andre Petroski, they used him to beat Torrez Finney, and now, they want him to put Gerald Meerschaert out to pasture. GM3 has long been one of my favorite flavors of wrestleboxer, the kind of fighter who looks exhausted in a round and a half and often throws punches like he's walking underwater but wins anyway because he's just so dang scrappy, and we had one more hurrah when he beat persistent marketing darling Edmen Shahbazyan in mid-2024, but the subsequent two years have been cold, dark, and brutal. He got his shot at the rankings and Reinier de Ridder; he failed. He had a contest of classic veterans with Brad Tavares; he failed. He's coming off two straight stoppage losses, a thing that hasn't happened since 2020, but unfortunately, there's a world of difference between being a fresh-faced 32 year-old getting knocked out by some new guy named Khamzat and a grizzled 38 year-old veteran getting blown out of the water by Kyle Daukaus.

I have loved you for years, Gerald. I have treasured every moment of our time together. I hope against hope that there are more yet to come. But the carriage is leaving and I have lost your shoe. JACOB MALKOUN BY DECISION.

BANTAMWEIGHT: Colby Thicknesse (8-1) vs Vince Morales (16-10)
LOCAL FIGHTER AGAINST A FOREIGNER COMING OFF A LOSS COUNTER: 6

See if you can figure out the algebra on this fight. In one corner: Colby Thicknesse, a young 26 year-old wrestler from Wollongong with a 1-1 record in the UFC who's finished half of his wins and has only fallen short against Ilia Topuria's brother, Aleksandre, who appears to be pretty solid. In the other: Vince Morales, a 35 year-old veteran who is 3-8 in the UFC after two tenures across eight years, coming off three consecutive losses, and has a career-long problem with getting regularly outwrestled to the point that, just one fight ago, the company booked him against a -480 favorite Raul Rosas Jr. to put more hype behind his marketing.

COLBY THICKNESSE BY DECISION.

MIDDLEWEIGHT: Ben Johnston (5-1) vs Wes Schultz (8-3)
LOCAL FIGHTER AGAINST A FOREIGNER COMING OFF A LOSS COUNTER: 7

Welcome to your other UFC debut of the evening. Ben Johnston is, and this may shock you, Australian, he's been fighting for 16 years but he took twelve of those off so he's only got six bouts, and this may shock you, but most of them were against people with rookie, losing, or 50/50 records, and now despite having a middling fight career and already being in his mid-thirties he's made it to the big show because, and this may shock you, he trains part-time with City Kickboxing. Wes Schultz is smaller and American and just got repeatedly dropped and ultimately knocked out in one round in his first and only UFC fight, and that was just 63 days ago, so, and this may shock you, this fight should be illegal as hell and everyone involved should be brought up on charges and god dammit I miss fighter safety mattering so much.

But Schultz did a Suloev stretch on the Contender Series, so I am honorbound to root for him. WES SCHULTZ BY SUBMISSION.

WELTERWEIGHT: Jonathan Micallef (9-1) vs Themba Gorimbo (14-6)
LOCAL FIGHTER AGAINST A FOREIGNER COMING OFF A LOSS COUNTER: 8

It's an opportune time to trade one prospect for another. The UFC had some real hopes for Themba Gorimbo--we're only two fights and a year and a half away from the attempt to get him ranked at Welterweight over Vicente Luque's aging bones--but after he got stomped in less than a minute the shine wore off, and after losing to the on-the-bubble Jeremiah Wells in what was supposed to be a rehabilitation fight, the clock has officially run all the way down. Now Themba's on local job duty, and Jonathan Micallef is the Australian here to look good in front of his countrymen. He beat Kevin Jousset and he choked Oban Elliott unconscious, and that's already a better pair of wins in just two shots in the UFC than Themba's managed in seven. Drawing one of France's best fighters for your debut is a touch tougher than Pete "Dead Game" Rodriguez.

I think the chips are getting cashed in. JONATHAN MICALLEF BY SUBMISSION.

LIGHTWEIGHT: Dom Mar Fan (9-2) vs Kody Steele (7-1)
LOCAL FIGHTER AGAINST A FOREIGNER COMING OFF A LOSS COUNTER: 9

I have beef with Kody Steele. I have Steele beef. When Kody made his debut all the way back in February of 2025 I cited him as one of those rare Contender Series prospects I was actually a fan of: Young in the sport but already well-rounded and well-proven and ready for a shot at the big show. He proceeded to lose his debut to Rongzhu. Rongzhu's a good fighter! Hell, Rongzhu was supposed to fight Quillan Salkilld this past January. But a loss is a loss, and every loss hurts, and dropping your debut is how you go from a marginally hyped prospect with a spot as a big favorite on the pay-per-view prelims to fighting Road to UFC 4 winner Dom Mar Fan as, uh, still a slight favorite. Man, how much must it suck to be the Australian on the Australian card who just won a big Australian fighting tournament in Australia and you're still an underdog against the random Contender Series guy who lost his only UFC fight more than a year ago?

Make it count, Kody. KODY STEELE BY DECISION.

SATURDAY, APRIL 25 FROM THE LIVING ERROR OF THE META APEX
PRELIMS 2 PM PDT / 5 PM EDT | MAIN CARD 5 PM / 8 PM

I’ll say this: The UFC has at least realized having back-to-back Apex events is a death curse, because thus far, there’s at least one buffer event of some kind between all of this year’s trips to the fight warehouse. We went to Florida and we got to see Trump get booed by a bloodthirsty MMA crowd in a portent of the future, we went to Winnipeg and we got to see Mike Malott win a super-patriotic victory for Canada only for the UFC’s event staff to keep him from carrying their flag lest it cover up their far more important sponsors, and now, we get to see two extremely interesting fights with serious implications for title contention in their divisions.

In the Apex.

MAIN EVENT: A HIDING PLACE WHERE NO ONE EVER GOES
FEATHERWEIGHT: Aljamain Sterling (25-5, #5) vs Youssef Zalal (18-5-1, #7)

Honestly, if Aljamain Sterling was ever going to have another path to a UFC title in him, it was inevitably going to run through this dark, terrible place. There are two corporate narratives for Aljo. In one, he’s the best Bantamweight champion of an entire generation, an incredibly creative, technically sound grappler who beat prospects and legends alike, had the second-longest title reign in the division’s history, and became the first man since Renan Barao almost a decade earlier to notch three title defenses. In the other, he’s the boring wrestler and marketing pariah who committed the ultimate sin of winning his title by disqualification, and his reign was one giant setup for the rise of Sean O’Malley.

Both are true! It’s also true that his title reign was over whether the UFC got what it wanted or not. Sterling was very open about the way cutting weight to 135 pounds was killing him, and win or lose, he was giving up the belt so his buddy Merab Dvalishvili could run the division while he went up to Featherweight. The UFC has rewarded their Greatest Bantamweight Champion Of A Generation by ensuring that his first two Featherweight fights were preliminary broadcasts and the only one to make it to a main card aired live from Xuhui, China, meaning 90% of the UFC’s audience could not/would not be watching.

As someone who is sufficiently into this sport to be reading these: Did YOU know Aljamain Sterling was 2-1 at Featherweight? Did you know he’s basically one win away from top contendership? If not: That was their plan and it worked extremely well.

That’s a step up from Youssef Zalal, though. The UFC barely had a plan for him at all. Hell, a year and a half ago he didn’t even work here.

But he used to! Youssef was actually in the UFC back in 2020, but by mid-2022 he got cut after dropping three in a row--including going to a decision with some UFC debutant no one had ever heard of named Ilia Topuria--and going to a draw with Da’Mon Blackshear. Zalal was clearly very skilled and very tough, but he hadn’t quite put it all together yet, and the UFC cut him so he could go get more experience on the regional circuit and/or because they got bored and wanted to spend more time building golden idols to men with bad tattoos and terrible opinions.

And Youssef rounded out his game in the most literal way possible: A one-night, eight-man, cross-sport tournament named THE KING OF SPARTA, in which the quarterfinals were contested in boxing matches, the semifinals in kickboxing, and the final in mixed martial arts. Is that conceptually fascinating? Absolutely! But, in the cold light of reality, Youssef Zalal was a UFC veteran with 20+ bouts under his belt who’d gone the distance with one of the greatest in combat sports history, and his opponents were an 0-2 boxer who eventually retired having never won a fight, a 4-1 mixed martial artist that had never fought anyone with a winning record, and his fellow finalist, Vadim Zadnipryanyi, who’d only competed in one professional bout of any kind before that night, and it was a kickboxing match, and it was five years prior, and he lost.

Silly? Yes. Pointless? Pretty close! The exact kind of paean to preposterousness that combat sports truly deserves? You could not ask for better. Youssef won, and became The Spartiest, and a few months later in March of 2024 the UFC needed a last-minute fill-in for Billy Quarantillo and Youssef was right back in the mix, and he’s done a great job wrecking everyone in his way. Five fights in a year and a half, four submissions and victories over guys like Jack Shore, a really solid prospect that had unfortunately lost two of his last three fights, and Calvin Kattar, the one-time top contender on a five-fight losing streak, and Josh Emmett, who was 1 for his last 4 and on the verge of retirement, and, boy, it’s hard not to notice the pattern once you see it, huh?

I mean, it’s a great deal for Youssef. And it’s not like tapping Josh Emmett is easy. He’s putting in fantastic work. But there’s an unmistakable process wherein he’s being gradually pushed up the rungs of a ladder built out of the bones of people the UFC would be pretty happy to get out of the way, and while he’s the most successful of the fighters Youssef’s faced in his second lease on life, there’s no one the UFC would be happier to get rid of than Aljamain Sterling.

Fortunately: It’s also a great fucking fight.

Genuinely! It makes a ton of sense. Aljo’s a former champion boxed out of title contention by his loss to Movsar Evloev, Youssef’s a rising star in need of a breakout victory, and both are two of the best grapplers in the entire division. Positionally, technically, theoretically, this is an enormously interesting contest that will answer multiple questions about the pecking order at Featherweight.

Which makes it all the more grating that it’s in the fucking Apex.

Youssef probably wants to keep this one standing, as he’s faster and more fluid on the feet than Aljo’s historically labored striking tends to be, but after watching Jack Shore outwrestle Zalal I think there’s a real good chance we still wind up on the floor, and it’s very, very hard for me to pick anyone short of Movsar against Aljo in a grappling battle. ALJAMAIN STERLING BY DECISION, but if Youssef somehow snatches an armbar on Aljo and no one sees it because the UFC decided it wasn’t good enough for a road card, I will be angry for months.

CO-MAIN EVENT: “KATHY, I’M LOST,” I SAID
WOMEN’S BANTAMWEIGHT: Norma Dumont (13-2, #3) vs Joselyne Edwards (17-6, #11)

Oh, right! I’m already angry all of the time.

Let’s go back to November for a second.

At a certain point, what do you even fuckin' say?

The main event of this card is Steve Garcia vs David Onama. The main event of this card is Steve Garcia vs David Onama. We are in the Apex in the dead of November on a card main evented by Steve Garcia and David Onama, and we're having a top contendership match for a women's division all the way down here on the prelims under Sedriques fucking Dumas. Ketlen Vieira was fighting Kayla Harrison on pay-per-view one bout ago. Norma Dumont's last appearance was an incredible scrap that saw her breaking Irene Aldana's entire goddamn face open. Vieira's a top contender with wins over multiple world champions and Dumont's on a five-fight, three-year winning streak. One of these women is going to win this fight and be in a position to either challenge for the title or determine who will, and they will have done so in an empty warehouse on the part of the broadcast half the audience skips and then we'll get to have yet another conversation about how the women don't get promoted because no one wants to watch them while Bo Nickal gets his fifth pay-per-view spot in six UFC fights at the end of this month.

Actually, we're not done with that write-up. I try not to be overindulgent when it comes to self-quoting because it feels masturbatory and lazy, but there's another bit to that angry rant that is irritatingly important.

This shit sucks. It sucks even on a good card, but it sucks so much more when you can't bring yourself to say "yes, this fight between two of the best Women's Bantamweights on the planet should probably have a higher place of esteem on this card than Isaac Dulgarian." Yeah, it's probably going to a fucking decision. That's fine. You will survive if you have to promote fighters who do things other than swing haymakers until they die. Stop nihilistically sabotaging your own goddamn product every time women are involved. NORMA DUMONT BY DECISION.

Norma Dumont did, in fact, win a decision. This was not a particularly lofty or dangerous assumption to make. Norma’s 9-2 in the UFC and all nine of those victories came by decision. She’s not a finisher, she’s not a killer, she’s not flashy. She’s a tank that marches people down, grinds them into the fence and punches them until they regret their life choices. That aforementioned Irene Aldana fight ended with Norma hitting her 159 goddamn times. She’s beaten world champions at multiple weight classes, she hasn’t lost in damn near four years, she’s tied with Ailín Pérez for the longest winning streak in the division, and she just recorded a win over the #4-ranked woman in the division, which should easily have justified her getting a shot at her division’s championship, or, at least, #1 contendership.

You may have noticed that Joselyne Edwards is not #1. There are two ones there. That’s #11. Joselyne Edwards does not have an eon since her last loss--she dropped two in a row a couple years ago. She doesn’t have an amazing winning streak, either. I mean, she IS on a streak, four straight victories is nothing to sneeze at, but it’s over folks like Tamires Vidal, who went 1-3, and Chelsea Chandler, at 2-3, and Priscila Cachoeira, who’s an inspiring 5-8. Numerically, Joselyne’s best win is her most recent one this past February, where she beat the 3-3 Nora Cornolle, and that’s a hell of an achievement, because Nora Cornolle’s best UFC win was a victory over Joselyne Edwards.

It’s not exactly a stellar set of wins. She wasn’t supposed to be here, either. Norma was planned to match up with Yana Santos, which would still have been fighting a couple slots down in the division but at least not as dramatically so as all the way to #11, but Yana pulled out a month ago and Joselyne got the call. And why, you might wonder, would the UFC want Joselyne in there so badly?

Because each of those four aforementioned victories was a finish. She choked Tamires out, she punched Chandler flat, she mauled Priscila, and she broke Nora’a collarbone with a slam so violent the bone snapping was actually audible on the broadcast and still choked her out too, just for good measure. Norma and Joselyne both fought Chelsea Chandler, and one of them got a decision and the other a knockout, and that’s all the reason the UFC needs to want to replace one with the other on the great ladder.

Just. Y’know.

In the Apex.

We’ve spent so many words here on the smoking crater that is Women’s Bantamweight over the years, and I thought shoving a women’s top contendership fight into the ass-end of Apex prelims was the nadir of that conversation, but somehow, this feels worse. That top contendership fight didn’t actually get its winner into contendership, even under ideal circumstances they had her spinning her wheels here in the Apex fighting down in the rankings, and they’re rolling the dice on one of their highest-momentum prospects by chucking her into a short-notice fight with one of the toughest women in the division and even in an ideal circumstance it still won’t do enough to help raise a contender, because for one, it’s the fucking Apex, and for two, nothing at the top of the division matters right now.

Kayla Harrison is still out recovering from neck surgery, by the time she comes back a full year will have passed since the last title fight and she’s going to be defending against Amanda Nunes, who is, of course, retired. Kayla is already talking about needing a change if she wins because cutting to 135 is killing her. Nunes doesn’t know if she’ll stay or retire again if she wins. Julianna Peña is MIA and has already had multiple career-threatening surgeries. Raquel Pennington is injured and by the time she fights again--IF she fights again--she’ll have been out of action for two years. Ketlen Vieira hasn’t had back to back wins in almost five.

All of my complaints about Norma fighting down in the rankings are betrayed by the awareness that there’s no one above her that she can fight. This is all the division has. Women’s Bantamweight lives in the void. The void is its home. NORMA DUMONT BY DECISION.

MAIN CARD: ALL LIES AND JEST
LIGHTWEIGHT: Rafa García (18-4) vs Alexander Hernandez (18-8)

Thinking about this fight made me realize just how much of a toll the current trajectory of things has taken on my appreciation for mixed martial arts. In the infinite world of reasons people like the silly shit they do, you can still minimize the appreciation of combat sports down to three basic forms of joy: The simple joy of combat, the subjective joy of bias, and the abstract joy of meaning. Bias is, oddly enough, the easiest, because it’s the least dependent on the others. Picking favorites is elemental. Everyone’s got their own Matt Serra or Joanderson Brito that they just need to see succeed at all costs, and if the day ever arrives that you realize you don’t have any of those people left, it’s probably time to take a break.

It’s the relationship between combat and consequences that’s eating at me. When this fight was announced, I was, for a moment, genuinely excited. Rafa and Alexander are both big-punching, chin-forward fighters with just enough grappling offense to back up their assaults, and they match up extremely well. Alexander’s more adept at hunting for knockouts; Rafa’s better at fighting mean. They’ve both been on the precipice of breaking the rankings on several occasions; they’ve both been shut down each time. Putting them across from each other makes perfect, logical sense, and they’re the kind of stylistic match that’s nearly guaranteed to be a good time.

And a moment later I was reminding myself that victory here carries no importance. If Rafa punches Alexander’s ribs into dust or Alexander knocks Rafa cold with a right cross and it gives the UFC a neat viral knockout clip then maybe, maybe, they’ll get a preliminary slot on a show that isn’t happening in a warehouse that used to store digital slot machines. But there’s no guarantee of that, and even less so should one of them simply Win. It took this fight--the exact kind of prospect vs prospect clash that used to excite me as the real lifeblood of the sport--to make me realize how much harder it is for me to appreciate the simpler joy of people hitting each other when the reasons they’re doing it can no longer be taken for granted.

We are in dark times and fisticuffs are as much plague as panacea. RAFA GARCÍA BY TKO.

BANTAMWEIGHT: Davey Grant (15-8) vs Adrian Luna Martinetti (17-1)

Sometimes I feel like the death of meaning goes both ways. We’re at thirteen years of Davey Grant in the UFC, and at this point he’s about as known a quantity as you can possibly get. He’s tough, he’s scrappy, the danger he poses is perpetually underrated, and he also turned 40 in December and, at 8-7, is just one loss away from falling to a 50/50 success rate at the big show. Everyone was hoping his late-career move from England to Nevada last year would give him a new lease on life, but it mostly saw him getting guillotined by Charles Jourdain in a single round. But hey, Jourdain’s almost ranked now, and Grant had just gone 4 for 5 and that loss was one of 2023’s worst judging decisions, so he’s still in the “canny veteran” camp rather than the “everyone is uncomfortably waiting for them to retire” camp, and at this stage in his career, that’s a statement.

By contrast, Adrian Luna Martinetti is 17-1, and the vast majority of those victories came against people with losing records, to the point that--you guessed it--the fight that got him picked up for the Contender Series last year was a win over a man with a grand total of zero professional fights. That gave him the chance to fight Mark Vologdin, the 5’3” Bantamweight you just saw repeatedly getting nearly killed by John “Sexi Mexi” Castañeda last week who still managed to scrape a draw thanks to a point deduction, and despite having half a foot of height and reach on him, Adrian had to fight for his life to make it to the bell.

In the modern estimation of mixed martial arts, these things are even. That logic isn’t completely without merit--the point of keeping veterans who are never going to make it to title contention is to serve as a yardstick for your up-and-coming prospects--but there’s a certain kind of wild extreme in saying Davey’s loss to Jourdain means he’s now stuck on DWCS debut duty, just as it’s really dangerous to take Martinetti, a promising brawler who only barely survived his contract fight, and stick him in there with one of the most experienced fighters in the company. But then, Adrian’s not a fresh-faced rookie, he’s eleven years and eighteen fights into his career--he’s only new by the standards of the UFC and his style is, at this point, just his style.

But DAVEY GRANT BY DECISION still feels both very probable and like an excellent way to fuck up a new guy.

BANTAMWEIGHT: Montel Jackson (15-3, #14) vs Raoni Barcelos (21-5, NR)

But some new guys fuck up all on their own. All of our conversations about promotional malfeasance are pointless if we do not honestly admit when a fighter blows an opportunity, and Montel Jackson blew it at nearly historic levels. Between injuries and rebookings and the perils of matchmaking it took years for him to get a shot at relevance, but last October, Montel’s moment finally arrived. No more prelims, no more unknowns: A big, splashy co-main event slot in Rio right under Charles Oliveira, an honest to god shot at the top ten, a dance partner who used to be a world champion. And he turned in a performance so slow, so lackadaisical and so low-volume that he managed to actually lose a decision to Deiveson Figueiredo despite Figgy landing even less than he did. That’s how you don’t just lose a fight, you lose the opportunity for ascension altogether. Had Jackson gone out there and gotten his head spun or his neck snatched in one round, he’d probably still be in the mix. When you finally get your shot and you lose it because you couldn’t break double digits in two out of three rounds?

That’s how you wind up being tapped to balance the scales of justice. Raoni Barcelos is on a four-fight winning streak that includes prospects, world champions, and Payton Talbott. Two fights after losing to Raoni, Payton was on pay-per-view retiring a Henry Cejudo who hadn’t won a fight in five and a half years: Payton is now ranked #11. Three fights after dominating Payton, Raoni is fighting a damaged prospect in the Apex for a shot at the periphery of the rankings, because privilege is a hell of a thing, as is being a young, exciting prospect instead of a veteran with a decade and a half of wear and tear who’s turning 39 in a couple weeks. Raoni’s shorter and slower and older and he’s been chinned before and a single good punch could flatten him, but right now he’s in that very rare, very dangerous place the best late-career runs come from. His experience has honed his style to a razor’s edge, he is fully aware of his capabilities and how to best use them, and he has all of the confidence of a longtime fighter without yet knowing the fear of his body betraying him. If he’s going to embark on the Robbie Lawler dream of a title run as an elder statesman, this is the moment.

And damned if I am picking against him. RAONI BARCELOS BY DECISION.

HEAVYWEIGHT: Marcus Buchecha (5-2-1) vs Ryan Spann (23-11)

You know, I didn’t intend for Every Week Heavyweight Strays Further From God’s Light to be an ongoing, recurring segment in these write-ups. I really didn’t! But as it turns out, there is, indeed, always more, and it is, in fact, always worse. I think someone in the UFC got spooked by all the ‘close the Heavyweight division for being terrible’ thinkpieces that bloomed across the internet over the past couple of months, because last week the commentary team could not stop discussing how “Heavyweight is great again,” and to be clear, their two points of reference for Heavyweight’s newfound greatness were a) the Josh Hokit/Curtis Blaydes barroom brawl from the 11th and b) that week’s Gokhan Saricam vs Tanner Boser fight. Somehow, Tanner Boser’s return was cited as proof that Heavyweight was Back, Baby, and the ground did not open and swallow everyone present for their collective sins against truth, which means Reddit atheists were right and when we die we lay screaming in our graves or ceremonial urns for all eternity as our consciousness slowly merges with the dirt and air.

All of which is to say: Marcus Buchecha got signed by the UFC and lost to Martin Buday and went to a draw with Kennedy Nzechukwu one fight later, and Buday got fired, but Buchecha and Kennedy are still here. Ryan Spann moved up to Heavyweight after a particularly unsuccessful run at 205 pounds, and he got crushed by Waldo Cortes-Acosta but scored a win over no less than Łukasz Brzeski, the 1-6 wonder. Neither of these men is where they were intended to be. Buchecha was supposed to fight Max Gimenis, but Gimenis busted his foot, and Spann was supposed to meet Rizvan Kuniev last February but couldn’t make it, which is how Kuniev wound up fighting and beating Jailton Almeida, who was also promptly cut despite being 8-3 and a top ten fighter. So now the world-class jiu-jitsu ace who went to a draw with a man Valter Walker tapped out in under a minute and the guy who lost to Anthony Smith twice in the last five years are going to fight to determine which of them is the true heir to the future of the big boy division.

By which I mean HEAVYWEIGHT IS GREAT AGAIN. IGNORE ALL PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS AND WRITE 1200 WORDS ABOUT THE POPULIST APPEAL OF JOSH HOKIT AND WHY IT’S ACTUALLY GOOD THAT SO MUCH OF THE HEAVYWEIGHT TOP FIFTEEN ONLY HAVE ONE WIN IN THE UFC. RYAN SPANN BY TKO.

PRELIMS: NOW THE SUN HAS DISAPPEARED
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Rodolfo Vieira (11-4) vs Eric McConico (10-4-1)

I’ve seen people joking-but-not-really-joking about matchmaking happening by way of ChatGPT these days, and if any fight stands as a testament to the plausibility of that theory, it’s this fucking one. In one corner you have a world-class grappler who’s barely managed a troubled 6-4 record; a man of many chokes but insufficient cardio; a man who just got headkicked to death by Bo Nickal but can say that, at least, he beat Cody Brundage. In your other corner, a man who got called up to get murdered by right hooks by Nursulton Ruziboev and Baisangur Susurkaev and god only knows how many other names that end in -V in the future, but he is not winless in the UFC, for he, too, beat Cody Brundage. It’s a 6-4 guy fighting a 1-2 guy and both of them beat Brundage and this is the preliminary headliner. There is a ranked Women’s Bantamweight fight two slots down from here but we gotta make sure we spotlight Eric McConico and his exciting record of one victory by split decision.

Once upon a time I ran a virtual MMA league and I would matchmake it by randomizing contrasting lists, and if I’d known I was inventing a professional standard I would’ve patented it. RODOLFO VIEIRA BY SUBMISSION.

MIDDLEWEIGHT: Jackson McVey (6-2) vs Sedriques Dumas (10-4 (1))

Let’s go back to October again for a second.

After three straight years of endlessly pushing the man, Sedriques Dumas is 50/50 in the UFC and his greatest accomplishment is either being the only man in the UFC to beat Denis Tiuliulin and not finish him, using his victorious post-fight interview to tell his doubters that anyone accusing him of criminal behavior is ignorant because all of that is in his past, or being unable to make it to a fight this past June because his very much continuing behavior meant he couldn't get a judge to remove his ankle monitor in time.

Sedriques, the 6’2” Middleweight, got choked out by Johnson, the 5’8” Middleweight, which brought Sedriques to an incredible 1 for his last 5. He is still here. Not only is he still here, but that aforementioned fight from that quote? The one he missed because of his ankle monitor? This is that fight. The UFC plucked Jackson McVey from the regional scene, fresh off his first and only victory over a man with a winning record, so he could go lose tohave a completely balanced fight with Sedriques last Summer. He wound up getting booked against Brunno Ferreira and Zach Reese instead, he was submitted each time, and now they want him to finish out his contract by doing the job they picked him for in the first place, because for some increasingly bizarre reason, they are fixated on Sedriques Dumas and will continue to do this until it is no longer physically possible.

They’re both bad, man. Neither man is great at this. Sedriques has the reach advantage over most of the division but he’s too loose and unimposing to use it, Jackson can rough people up in the clinch but for how much hype he had for repeatedly catching people with chokes his ground defense has been his constant undoing, neither man is setting the world on fire and it’s baffling that we are still talking about Sedriques Dumas fights despite all logical and ethical reasons not to. JACKSON MCVEY BY TKO.

WOMEN’S BANTAMWEIGHT: Mayra Bueno Silva (10-6-1 (1), #12) vs Michelle Montague (7-0, NR)

Sometimes I have to admit defeat. All of my complaints about women being underbooked would be undermined by dishonesty if I said Mayra Bueno Silva is a wise investment at this moment in time. Four fights ago when she was the fresh, exciting new world title contender who’d just choked out Holly Holm? Absolutely. But Mayra lost all four of those fights, and they’ve been a real rough four, to the point that nowadays we’re talking about being two years removed from winning a round, let alone a fight. Hell, this whole fight is the UFC seeing if it’s time to wholly divest themselves from the Mayra Bueno Silva game. This isn’t a battle with a veteran or a momentum-laden prospect, this is Michelle Montague, who just got here last September on the back of her time in the Professional Fighters League as that lady what choked everyone out. That was enough to make her a pretty sizable favorite against Luana Carolina, and Michelle DID win, but not before getting repeatedly nearly knocked the fuck out. Is it, in its own way, more impressive to still get the victory when you almost got your head punched off? Absolutely! But it sure raises questions about what happens when someone more skilled than Luana Carolina starts hitting you.

Is Mayra more skilled than Luana at this point in their careers? I really, really want to say yes, but I just don’t know, man. She used to punch real hard and she used to jump on submissions and it seems like losing over and over has done a number on her ability to pull the trigger, because she’s just been sleepwalking through the end of her own career. Even now I want to pick her, but for once, the brain must override the heart. MICHELLE MONTAGUE BY DECISION.

FLYWEIGHT: Jafel Filho (17-4) vs Cody Durden (17-10-1)

It’s that time again, Jafel. Are you ready f--

No.

What do you mean ‘no’?

I don’t want to be a catchphrase. I do not want to be your song-and-dance routine. I am a man of God and combat and I deserve better than this.

Deserve better than what?

Better than being an afterthought. Better than being an unranked man in a division that barely even has a top thirty. Better than being constantly shoved off on replacements and substitutions. I was supposed to be fighting Lucas Rocha tonight. Lucas is a champion, a prospect, a man of regard. Do you know who they gave me, instead? Do you?

Cody Durden.

Cody. Durden.

I mean, look, Cody’s not bad! He’s got some good wins, he beat Charles Johnson once, the man’s proven he can hang in there with some real tough guys, so I don’t know that it’s all that--

Do not excuse their decisions. Do not pave over the truth. Cody Durden has one win in his last seven fights. He just got outgrappled and outstruck and hit dozens of times by Nyamjargal Tumendemberel. He was outwrestled by a man nicknamed ‘Art of Knockout.’ I almost beat Muhammad Motherfucking Mokaev. You know this is madness. You know this is meaninglessness made manifest. You know there is only one way out of this unending Hell, for you, for me, for him. You know what it is. You know the words. Say the words.

Breaking a man’s fucking leg?

Breaking a man’s fucking leg.

JAFEL FILHO BY SUBMISSION.

FEATHERWEIGHT: Francis Marshall (9-3) vs Lucas Brennan (11-2)

The coolest part about this fight is that Lucas Brennan is the son of “The Westside Strangler” Chris Brennan, one of those pioneers of mixed martial arts the world has forgotten about because most of his best work came in the days before anyone paid attention. The least cool part is the way it was put together six days before the event because they decided twelve fights was just one too few. Francis Marshall is a man perpetually shat upon by the judges, the owner of a 3-3 UFC record that could be 5-1 had it not been for the whims of the anointed elite; Lucas is a guy who hung around in Bellator for years choking out a bunch of people but bizarrely never got pushed higher up the card despite going 9-0 under their banner. Fantastic grappler, incredibly creative and dangerous, has a tendency to throw strikes like heavy bags are a mystery. Tape study provided some of the oddest footwork choices I have ever seen.

My hopes are not high. FRANCIS MARSHALL BY DECISION.

WELTERWEIGHT: Max Griffin (20-12) vs Victor Valenzuela (13-4)

It’s hard not to read some sort of tragedy into Max Griffin’s career. Ten years with the UFC, multiple fights with world champions, damn near ranked on a couple of occasions, goes down in history as the man who retired Carlos Condit--dude did everything shy of reaching the top of the mountain. Hell, he damn near elbowed a man’s ear off his skull. And here he is, nineteen fights into his tenure, going on forty-one, in the twilight of his career, and he’s just sort of a footnote. No Cub Swanson retirement special, no Michael Chiesa sendoff fight, just second from the bottom in the Apex against a debuting fighter who actually lost on the Contender Series and made it here anyway because he knocks people out and that is the only thing that matters.

Make ‘em pay, Max. Go get another ear. MAX GRIFFIN BY DECISION.

WOMEN’S STRAWWEIGHT: Talita Alencar (7-1-1) vs Julia Polastri (14-5)

You know what’s really great? Having two Strawweight prospects, and they’re both decent, and they could both hit the edge of the top fifteen with another win, and they’re both coming off stoppages, with Talita choking out Ariane Carnelossi and Julia kicking Karolina Kowalkiewicz’s head off, and then taking those two talented fighters with the exceedingly precious gift of momentum and having one of them knock the other off as the curtain-jerking fight on your Apex prelims. That’s awesome and in no way deeply frustrating or self-defeating and definitely is in no way indicative of a pattern that is slowly sapping the fanbase’s ability to care about anyone, which is itself definitely not at all an intentional choice that will result in a roster of interchangeable fighters that can be swapped out for rookies without anyone caring.

Please continue to care. JULIA POLASTRI BY DECISION.

SATURDAY, APRIL 18 FROM THE CANADA LIFE CENTRE IN WINNIPEG
PRELIMS 2 PM PDT / 5 PM EDT | MAIN CARD 5 PM / 8 PM

I really wonder what it’s like to be a Canadian MMA fan right now. Once upon a time you had one of the hottest regional scenes in the world, multiple champions, and one of the only socially acceptable answers to ‘Who’s the best MMA fighter ever?’ Now it is 2026, everything sucks, your regional scene has been cut down to the bone (you’re trying, BFL, you’re trying), your closest thing to a global contender is either Aiemann Zahabi or Gillian Robertson, and watching them means having to pay attention to the UFC, which gleefully propagandizes for the guy who keeps talking about having America take over your country and then charges its citizens $300 for tickets to a show main-evented by Gilbert Burns and Mike Malott, and you know it sucks, but you’re getting at most two events a year and there’s a 50/50 chance this is the best one.

But Tanner Boser is coming back, so realistically, how could anyone complain?

MAIN EVENT: SOFT LAUNCH
WELTERWEIGHT: Gilbert Burns (22-9, #11) vs Mike Malott (13-2-1, NR)

Oh, right. That’s how. That’s how anyone could complain.

You can’t even really write a preamble on this one. This is just dark and cynical. This comes from the bowels of the Fuck You school of matchmaking. Gilbert Burns was, at one point, a legitimate Welterweight contender: In the present he is on a four-fight losing streak that’s included two violent knockout losses, the most recent of which took less than a round. He used to struggle with the cut to the Lightweight division, and his reinvention as a Welterweight contender made him a shining example of betting on yourself and moving to a more natural weight class despite the conventional wisdom about the necessity of size advantages.

But the whole reason he began to struggle with said cuts was the reality of aging into his mid-thirties, and now he’s a couple months away from 40. Gilbert Burns made himself seem relevant to the present by being the first man to make Khamzat Chimaev look mortal: That bout turned four years old last week.

Burns hasn’t won a fight since 2023, and that was the retiring Jorge Masvidal. Burns hasn’t beaten someone ranked in the top ten since the Summer of 2021. And with all of that mileage, suffering all of the wear and tear of time, Burns is still good enough to be eighty-seven seconds away from defeating future champion Jack Della Maddalena.

Well, he was still good enough two years ago.

The UFC’s hoping he isn’t anymore, because by god, they want Mike Malott to stick this time. They’re very, very aware of their lack of Canadian stars, and they would love to have an attraction to lock down the northern territories again, but Gillian Robertson isn’t interesting enough to them for some assuredly non-sexist reasons and Jasmine Jasudavicius lost her shot--more on that later--so it’s gotta be Mike. They already tried it once! They fed him a steady diet of digestible targets, bringing him up through the Mickey Galls and Adam Fugitts of the world, before giving him a big spotlight bout in Toronto. A shot at the rankings, a shot at moving from prospect to contender, and all he had to do was beat Neil Magny, an aging standard of the division coming off a bunch of gatekeeper losses and staring down the end of his athletic prime. It went really, really well! Malott performed in front of his Ontarian brethren and dominated Magny and showed the UFC exactly why it was right to have faith in him.

Until Magny abruptly swept him with about 90 seconds left in the fight and began pounding him senseless, and Mike broke and got stopped fifteen seconds before he would’ve won the decision that etched him into the undeniable fabric of the division. But hey: They learned their lesson about not just pushing dudes on the back of nothing victories because that’s a terrible way to establish your prospects as both known quantities and experienced fighters, right?

Sort of? Kind of? Maybe halfway. They softballed the shit out of Malott by giving him an obvious rebound fight with Trevin Giles, who was not only on a losing streak but had already lost a grappling match to Malott a couple years prior, and they turned up the heat just the slightest bit with Charles Radtke, and with two wins under Malott’s belt it was time for the big push again. Kevin Holland! Fan favorite, former contender, never boring. And Malott’s here, so that means it worked this time, right?

Once again: Kind of. He won! But it was a weird fucking fight that saw Mike get away with multiple low blows so bad that Holland spent the back half of the fight wincing and holding his crotch between attacks. Had a point been deducted, as is now thankfully becoming standard, the fight would’ve been a draw and Mike would be back at square one again.

Instead he gets to fight a former world title contender whose primary care physician has a calendar reminder to bother him about starting to get screened for colorectal cancer soon.

Mike Malott is secondary to this fight. This is a check to see if Gilbert has anything left. Yes, he just got destroyed, but that was Michael Morales, who seems like he has the potential to do that to damn near anybody. Burns survived Sean Brady on the mat, he almost beat Maddalena, and he one-sidedly stomped the same Neil Magny that took Malott to the woodshed. If he’s still got the spirit left in him, Gil should be able to beat Mike on the ground.

But it’s a big fucking if. GILBERT BURNS BY SUBMISSION anyway, because I can, at least, use my antipathy for marketing as a defensive move to keep me from asking uncomfortable questions about how washed my emotional favorites might be.

CO-MAIN EVENT: A VARIETY OF CHOICES WERE MADE
BANTAMWEIGHT: Kyler Phillips (12-4) vs Charles Jourdain (17-8-1)

There’s a sort of the-reality-that-wasn’t feeling to this fight.

We’ve talked about how “tough” and “fun” are secretly damning reputations to have as a fighter, but “prospect” is right up there alongside them. You should want to become a prospect--it’s necessary if you’re ever going to climb the ladder--but it should be a temporary status. If you’re a prospect for more than a few fights, you’re not actually achieving the prospective potential people see in you, and that’s a bad sign.

Kyler Phillips has been a prospect for almost eight goddamn years. That’s a very bad sign.

All of the tools are there. His namesake as “The Matrix” came from his defensive instincts, he’s well-rounded enough to outwrestle some opponents and drop others with headkicks, and he’s tough enough to have still, somehow, never been stopped. But we’re defining his career in reverse because going forward doesn’t get us anywhere. The momentum just never fully materialized. He had one shining moment where he beat Yadong Song and looked like a contender, and one fight later he was struggling and failing against Raulian Paiva, failed Flyweight and future Sean O’Malley victim. Kyler got past Raoni Barcelos, but not Rob Font or Vinicius Oliveira.

That’s the real damnation for prospect status. It’s not just losing--it’s losing to people who then, themselves, lose badly to the upper echelon of the division. When you struggle with Rob Font and he gets dominated by the top five, you look worse. When you get nearly knocked out by Oliveira and one fight later Mario Bautista turns him into a pretzel, that says unfortunate things about your chances anywhere near the top, especially after so many years of trying.

I’ll say this, though: At least someone, somewhere, has had those conversations about Kyler Phillips.

Charles Jourdain is fine. He’s capable and he’s fast and he’s very quick to jump on guillotine chokes if he thinks he has any shot at sticking them. He’s also here because he’s conveniently Canadian. That’s it. That’s the story. He’s never really threatened the rankings, he’s never demonstrated the kind of massive potential you’d want from a future contender, and in sixteen UFC fights his best victory, depending on what you consider important, is either choking out Davey Grant last October, beating up persistent punchline Kron Gracie in 2023, or knocking out Choi Doo-ho, on a losing streak, almost seven years ago.

Other than that? He has a long, long history of fighting all of the other almost-but-not-quite fighters and finding ways to lose to them. Andre Fili, Shane Burgos, Nathaniel Wood, Sean Woodson--Jourdain met each one and failed every time. The last one was at least a split decision! But he promptly blamed his losing said split on the judges all being transgender liberals who hated real men, which, for one, fuck off in general, but for two, motherfucker, you are from Montreal.

The running theory is Jourdain’s found his home down at Bantamweight and that’s why he’s been winning and now he’s going to be a star. I am not convinced that beating Davey Grant is the thing dreams are made of, and moreover, fuck this guy anyway. KYLER PHILLIPS BY DECISION.

MAIN CARD: SEVERAL PEOPLE YOU DON’T KNOW
LIGHTWEIGHT: Mandel Nallo (14-3 (1)) vs Jai Herbert (13-6-1)

There’s a long history of regional Canadian champions becoming UFC standouts. Ciryl Gane is your obvious present-day candidate, but you can go back through decades of memory and pull out David Loiseau, Patrick Côte, Mark Hominick and Georges St-goddamn-Pierre. In the present day, you have Mandel “Mango” Nallo, the Super Lightweight Champion of Montreal, who earned that prestigious title by beating no less than the 8-6 Robert “Maximus” Seres, who was, himself, coming off a win over the 9-9 Xavier “Spartacus” Nash and I am begging mixed martial arts fighters to read other books or watch other movies or play a video game that isn’t Call of Duty or FIFA. If you’re afraid that I’m about to launch into yet another iteration of ‘Contender Series guy who beat a bunch of nobodies,’ don’t worry, this one’s more fun, because Nallo had a run in Bellator! He fought on honest to god internationally-broadcast network television once! The fight ended in a No Contest in under two minutes because he kneed Saad Awad in the groin so badly that he almost threw up. Nallo went 50-50 in the B-leagues and went around the world fighting guys with losing records and I try so hard not to just focus on silly MMA names all the time but the Quebecois fighter went to an event called MMA Mexico and the Mexican fighter they matched him up with was named Carlos Cañada and that’s like a time traveler gave me a present three years ago and I cannot shirk it.

Jai Herbert’s here, man. I dunno. I’ve kind of given up on Jai and I think the UFC has, too. They had real hopes for him as a Cage Warriors champion who knocked everyone the fuck out, to the point that they had him headlining prelims in his UFC debut, and then this unfortunate thing happened where he just kept losing. There’s no shame in his losses, no one should ever be ashamed of getting knocked out by Ilia Topuria, and hell, Herbert unironically, indisputably gave Ilia the toughest fight of his career. But he still lost, and much to the UFC’s chagrin, he’s dealt with his multitude of losses by evolving into a safer fighter. He’s almost five years out from his last stoppage, he’s dropping split decisions to Chris Padilla, he’s closing in on 38 and being a 6’1” Lightweight, which was unusual in 2020, just doesn’t go as far as it used to. They’ve been matching him with brawlier fighters with less threatening knockout potential in the vain hope of getting their British banger machine back, but alas, Jai has chosen to learn from his past errors and, in so doing, has made himself so undesirable in management’s eyes that one fight ago he was the Englishman fighting an evil American on home soil and now he, himself, is the colonialist invader needing to be pushed back by a local hero who thinks it’s weird Canada still has the Queen on its money.

I’ll be honest: Nallo’s tape didn’t do a ton for me. He’s got a good straight right and he’s pretty accurate when he finds an opening, but his defense is really hard to distinguish from the new class of fighters who’ve come up fighting in boxing-style mismatches where offense is the only thing that matters, and that’s kind of unfortunate when you realize Nallo’s almost fourteen years into his professional career. That being said: it’s Jai, I don’t know that it’s going to matter. MANDEL NALLO BY TKO.

WOMEN’S FLYWEIGHT: Jasmine Jasudavicius (14-4, #7) vs Karine Silva (19-6, #9)

Broken prospects, this moment is thine. There was a lot of well-deserved hype around Jasmine Jasudavicius last year. After the slow-motion three-car pileup that was the Valentina Shevchenko/Alexa Grasso championship trilogy the audience wanted new blood at Women’s Flyweight, and with Manon Fiorot having already tried and failed and Erin Blanchfield inexplicably never, ever getting a shot at the top, all eyes turned to Jasmine. Five straight wins! Choked out Jéssica Andrade! Never been stopped in her life! Folks had a lot of faith in her, and after seeing the way she disposed of Andrade, theories abounded regarding her ability to potentially outgrapple Valentina. We never got to test them, because Jasmine got Manon for her contendership test and Manon annihilated her in just barely over a minute. She now enters the toughest challenge of her career: Winning enough to get another shot at the top so she isn’t consigned to gatekeeper duty.

Karine Silva’s fall from grace came a year earlier. She was a key part of the undefeated Fighting Nerds vanguard that managed to seed contenders across five separate divisions, but she was also its first to fall, predating the team’s abysmal 2025 by dropping her losing streak to Viviane Araujo back in 2024. Fun fact: The UFC fired Araujo one fight later, because fuck keeping the better fighters around when you can run a season of The Ultimate Fighter for prospects instead. Karine managed to get back in the win column after a slightly far-fetched bout with Dione Barbosa predicated entirely on Barbosa beating her in the Brazilian regionals six years prior, but the UFC decided to kill one of their contenders by having Karine serve as a comeback fight for Maycee Barber, and Maycee took an extremely clear decision.

And then proceeded to get killed three times in ten seconds by Alexa Grasso. So now Jasmine and Karine are both temporarily boxed out of contention, and only one of them can hold onto their spot. I lean towards JASMINE JASUDAVICIUS BY DECISION, as I think she’ll be able to push Karine in the clinch and I doubt Karine has enough gun to put her down, but getting knocked out for the first time also tends to do things to fighters, so we’ll see which Jasmine we get.

LIGHTWEIGHT: Thiago Moisés (19-9) vs Gauge Young (10-3)

There are no more Canadians on this main card. I will note, for the twenty-third time, that noted Canadian Gillian Robertson beat former title contender Amanda Lemos to become a top five contender last month, and they put it in the Apex, and Thiago Moisés vs Gauge Young is here, in Canada, on the main card. Thiago Moisés has one win in the last two years and just got ran through by Jared Gordon in a single round, and Gauge Young is 1-1 after beating no less than Maheshate, who seemed super promising for a minute four years ago when he knocked out Steve Garcia and now he’s 1 for 5. This makes them both sufficient to sell to a Canadian audience, who haven’t even had a Canadian main-eventing a UFC show in Canada since Rory MacDonald in 20fucking16.

So why not drop that cash on a Gauge Young fight. Who knows when you’ll get the chance to see him again? Could be years. Could be never. Someone mentioned a few weeks back that these write-ups were starting to look like the ramblings of an eldritch horror protagonist losing his mind, and I want you to know: This is what me losing my mind looks like. It’s not the literary references or the petulant screaming or the time I made all of the section headers in the write-ups Chumbawamba lyrics just to see if anyone would notice. It’s the quiet moments where I am staring into the Gaugian abyss of meaninglessness and all I can do is repeat what it is over and over because that’s the most meaning one can derive from it.

Thiago has been here for almost a decade. Gauge has been here for two fights. All things meet here, in the middle, and turn to a featureless soup. THIAGO MOISÉS BY SUBMISSION.

FEATHERWEIGHT: Dennis Buzukja (12-5) vs Márcio Barbosa (17-2)

There’s a broad difference between how hard it is to build cache in this industry and how easy it is to blow it. Dennis Buzukja tried and failed to win a DWCS contract all the day back in 2020, and to get a contract from the UFC he had to win seven straight fights in three years. He took two regional belts, he fought on both sides of the globe, and hell, he even got a second Contender Series shot right in the middle of that run, won, and was still deemed unworthy. They didn’t bring him in until 2023, and as is so often the case, they only picked him as the third or fourth straight last-minute replacement for Sean Woodson, and then they got pissy with Buzukja for being half a pound overweight despite having five minutes to prepare, and that’s just stayed indicative of his luck for the whole of his run. He got shut off by Jamall Emmers in under a minute, he beat Connor Matthews, who managed to speedrun a UFC career by losing three straight in just sixteen minutes, and Dennis topped it off by losing a decision to Francis Marshall.

And now he is here to lose to a Brazilian DWCS winner on a card in Manitoba. I am personally invested in Márcio and I want him to have a bright future, because he is a 5’6” Featherweight who fights like Wanderlei Silva taught him throwing straight punches instead of hooks is a mortal sin, and it works for him the vast majority of the time, and by golly, I appreciate everything about that. He earned his contract by punching out Damon Wilson last August, and we were supposed to get our first glimpse at Barbosa last month at the Greek tragedy that was Israel Adesanya vs Joe Pyfer, but his would-be opponent Zhu Kangjie busted his nose in training and now, as an apology for his broken cartilage, the UFC has offered Buzukja up on to be repeatedly batted about the head, chin and abdomen with a variety of fists, and if any one of them involves an elbow being straightened instead of bent, all of the seven Hells will visit themselves upon the firstborn of Amapa.

Some of those were probably words. MÁRCIO BARBOSA BY TKO.

PRELIMS: BOSER’S BACK
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Robert Valentin (10-6 (1)) vs Julien Leblanc (10-2)

This is my most-anticipated fight on this card, but that’s almost entirely for comedy reasons. We spend so much time in these write-ups evaluating fighters based on silly things like ethics and marketing and who is or isn’t smart enough to just not have a social media account, and it is very refreshing to be able to ignore all of that and say that simply, qualitatively, I don’t think either of these guys are all that good at fighting. They’re not terrible! You don’t get this far without being okay! But the UFC was ready to put their entire marketing engine behind Robert Valentin to the point that The Ultimate Fighter 32 (jesus christ), which was intended to market the threematch between Alexa Grasso and Valentina Shevchenko, essentially became The Robert Valentin Show instead, with the large, awkward cosplay viking getting more screentime than the rest of the cast combined. And then he got crushed in the final by Ryan Loder, who has spent the rest of his UFC tenure getting knocked out. And then he managed to lose a fight to Torrez Finney despite Finney only landing four significant strikes. And then they fed Rob to Ateba Gautier and he got punched flat in a minute. The original plan was to have Valentin lose tochallenge fellow troubled prospect Jackson McVey last November, but a back injury means instead he’s here, fighting Julien Leblanc, who is one of the best Middleweight prospects out of the Quebecois fight scene, and having Watched The Tape, I am forced to ask who the hell else there is at 185 up there, because if Leblanc is at the top of the heap I don’t know where on Earth the rest of the heap went but we should find them and make sure they’re okay. He throws tons of really loose leading side kicks, he wings roundhouses like he’s walking underwater, and the best victory of his career was a victory over Darian Weeks, whom the steel-trap-brained may remember going 0-3 in the UFC a few years back, and it was after Weeks dominated him for fourteen and a half minutes only for the fight to get stopped by doctors because a knee opened his eyebrow.

Leblanc’s pretty good at throwing left kicks to the body. I wish he hadn’t made everything else his dump stat. Is that still going to be enough to beat Robert? I just don’t know, man. ROBERT VALENTIN BY SUBMISSION but we’re racing to the bottom.

HEAVYWEIGHT: Tanner Boser (22-10-1) vs Gokhan Saricam (11-2)

2026 is the year of near-weekly updates about the fall of the Heavyweight division into chaos, and this is no exception. Tanner Boser is here again. We have reached the point that bringing back Tanner Boser feels like what we must do if we are to move on with our lives. For those who have already forgotten the fallen, Boser was one of the UFC’s side quests, a big brawling Bonnyvillian who was just a couple years too early to benefit from the ‘shooting takedowns gets you fired’ era of mixed martial arts. He was a middling present at Heavyweight and one of the last men to lose to living legend Ilir Latifi before dropping to Light Heavyweight in an attempt to get his groove back only to instead receive a horrifying one-round beating from Ion Cuțelaba. But Boser bounced back with a win over Aleksa Camur! And then the UFC cut them both. So, what’s happened in the last three years for Boser to get welcomed back? He fought. Once. Two years later. In the nearly three years since his release he’s had one fight, and it took two years to do it, and that fight is now also almost a year old. Funnily enough, Gokhan Saricam has essentially the same story. Got pulled out of Fight Club Den Haag, an MMA league in The Hague that somehow still booked fights between 6-2 and 12-49 people without being put in superjail, and wound up in Bellator, where he was perpetually stuck in Good But Not Great status. We’re not even talking about hanging with Linton Vassell or Ryan Bader, here, we’re talking about Said Sowma and “Tall” Steve Mowry. He was fine! And then he went into legal limbo for two years while the PFL merger shook out and they decided they didn’t want him, and I guess it’s better to serve in Canada than reign in Germany.

It’s good to see you back, Boser, but I don’t know that a ton has changed since the last time we tried this, and I don’t know how well this is going to go for you. GOKHAN SARICAM BY TKO.

WOMEN’S BANTAMWEIGHT: Melissa Croden (7-3) vs Daria Zhelezniakova (10-2)

This one’s on me. I have no one to blame but myself. When Melissa Croden made her UFC debut back in October I allowed myself to get excited about the prospect of someone who actually seemed to know how to use her range and height fighting at Women’s Bantamweight, a class defined by wild haymakers and head-and-arm throws, and her knockout over Tainara Lisboa made me think that, maybe, just maybe, we had a live one. Then she got pretty thoroughly outfought by Luana Santos, and the hype dissipated, and now she’s down to Daria. Thatcher enthusiast Zhelezniakova managed to surprise me last time by rematching Melissa Mullins, the woman who took away her undefeated streak back on the French regionals, and getting her revenge by taking Mullins to a victorious decision, thus once again proving the UFC is best served running back rivalries from fights on the other side of the world.

DARIA ZHELEZNIAKOVA BY DECISION. Croden, I’d love to have a reason to get back on the hype train.

WOMEN’S FLYWEIGHT: JJ Aldrich (14-7, #14) vs Jamey-Lyn Horth (9-2, NR)

Did you know we hit ten years of JJ Aldrich in the UFC? She was losing to Tatiana Suarez on The Ultimate Fighter 23 (jesus christ) all the way back in 2016. For a giant chunk of an entire-ass decade, JJ Aldrich was Schrodinger’s Contender, a fighter everyone agreed was a serious blue-chip prospect with all the tools who would be making it to title contention any day now. But as we said earlier, being labeled as a prospect for too long becomes a millstone, and after the fourth or fifth setback the shine wears off entirely, and now you’re the veteran who’s too tough to get rid of but just not quite up to breaking the top ten. You go from Erin Blanchfield to Veronica Hardy to Jamey-Lyn Horth. Horth hasn’t had the easiest run of it either--they brought her up in the first place just to lose to Hailey Cowan and when she succeeded they began randomly matching her up with women across the spectrum, which had the mixed results you’d imagine--but last year she beat Vanessa Demopoulos and smashed Tereza Bledá and they’re hoping the home-country appeal and the momentum of a winning streak will carry her into the top fifteen.

Chances are high. Aldrich’s strengths are Horth’s strength’s and I think Horth is just a bit better at them. JAMEY-LYN HORTH BY DECISION.

FLYWEIGHT: Mitch Raposo (10-3) vs Allan Nascimento (22-6)

They’re putting you out to pasture, Mitch. You were a late replacement signing that they expected very little from, and you managed to wrestle a bit, which they also don’t like, and somehow despite pretty clearly losing most of your fights you kept only barely dropping split decisions, which is even worse. They expected you to lose to Azat Maksum last October and help rebuild his prospects, and they were not anticipating Azat blowing his weight cut and coming in tired and unprepared. So here’s the good news, Mitch: You get another shot and it’s at a real opponent who’s damn near ranked! The bad news is he’s one of the best grapplers in the division and they are wholly intent on him strangling you.

I almost want to root for you, but Allan beat my boy Jafel Filho, so I’m honorbound to root for him. ALLAN NASCIMENTO BY SUBMISSION.

BANTAMWEIGHT: John Castañeda (21-8) vs Mark Vologdin (12-4-1)

If you recognize Mark Vologdin’s name, that’s because last year he and Adrian Luna Martinetti (whom we’ll be seeing next week) had a DWCS matchup that was immediately heralded as THE GREATEST FIGHT OF ALL TIME, to the point that’s what the UFC titled the video on their Youtube channel after signing both men, and I feel like this is just an extension of last week’s conversation about how brawls have become overvalued. Vologdin/Martinetti was fine! It was fun and sloppy, as is the current vogue of the sport, and I gotta say, I miss when we expected more. I have seen people--smart people whose opinions I deeply respect, people who’ve been at this as long as I have if not longer--talking about last week’s Curtis Blaydes vs Josh Hokit brawl as one of the greatest Heavyweight fights of all time, with multiple people likening it to the legendary 2002 hockey fight between Don Frye and Yoshihiro Takayama. Which is very accurate! But it’s also the problem. Don Frye and Yoshihiro Takayama were bad motherfuckers! But they were also professional wrestlers that nobody reasonable considered relevant to the title picture. Takayama was 0-2 and was about to end his mixed martial arts career after getting armbarred by Bob Sapp, whose listed fighting style was “NFL.” Curtis Blaydes and Josh Hokit were fighting to determine which of them is supposed to be one of the top five Heavyweight fighters on the planet.

You should not want brawling to replace technique. You should not force the brawls. Vologdin hits very hard but he’s also barely 5’3” and I think it’s going to continue to cost him. JOHN CASTAÑEDA BY DECISION.

FEATHERWEIGHT: Jamie Siraj (14-3) vs John Yannis (9-4)

Funny story: As I was writing up this week’s prelims on Tuesday evening, Diego Brandão, former UFC fighter and winner of The Ultimate Fighter 14 (jesus christ) made a post about how he had been picked to be a comeback fighter on TUF 34 (jesus christ) only to be pulled from the show at the last minute because, as a 38 year-old about to turn 39, he’s too old and the UFC doesn’t want him. Two weeks ago the UFC welcomed Kai Kamaka III back to the company, which is funny, because two fights ago Diego beat him. This week the UFC is debuting Jamie “The Gremlin” Siraj, the former Featherweight champion of Tuff-N-Uff (jesus c--never mind false alarm), and I say ‘former’ because he lost the title in 2025 after Diego knocked his head off with a spinning wheel kick. Jamie got beat by Diego and John Yannis lost his UFC debut when Austin Bashi choked him out, and Bashi, himself, lost his UFC debut.

All of that? That’s okay. That’s perfectly fine. Being 38 and beating people? That means you don’t even deserve a spot on The We Don’t Care Enough To Have Coaches Who Fight Anymore So We’re Just Having Our Broadcasting Team Do It edition of The Ultimate Fighter. Heaven forfend we try to have the best fighters on the planet. JAMIE SIRAJ BY DECISION.

SATURDAY, APRIL 11 FROM THE KASEYA CENTER IN MIAMI, FLORIDA
EARLY PRELIMS 2:30 PM PDT / 5:30 PM EDT | PRELIMS 4 PM / 7 PM | MAIN CARD 6 PM / 9 PM

As of Saturday morning I had planned to write a blurb about the draw of multiple title matches on a single card and the inherent weirdness of size inequality, as despite Joshua Van being an undisputed champion fighting one of the best fighters from Japan, his Flyweight title defense against Tatsuro Taira was scheduled to play second fiddle to a match for a vacant belt featuring no less than Carlos Ulberg himself. Then, in the middle of the star-studded extravaganza that was Renato Moicano vs Chris Duncan, the UFC announced Van was out and the fight was being delayed to May, where it will now play second fiddle to Sean Strickland.

So, instead, let me say:

What the fuck do you mean Tatiana Suarez and Loopy Godinez are curtain-jerking the prelims.

MAIN EVENT: THE RICE-PAPER TITLE
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP: Jiří Procházka (32-5-1, #2) vs Carlos Ulberg (13-1, #3)

When the UFC finally broke into the mainstream back in 2005, it did so on the strength and majesty of the Light Heavyweight division. The first season of The Ultimate Fighter (jesus christ) was half-Light Heavyweight, it featured Light Heavyweight coaches in Chuck Liddell and Randy Couture, and it chose its Light Heavyweight final between Forrest Griffin and Stephan Bonnar for its conclusion. Even the mostly-forgotten actual main event of that very first finale was Rich Franklin, who typically fought at Middleweight, and Ken Shamrock, a career Heavyweight, meeting in the middle at 205 pounds.

Light Heavyweight used to mean something. Pride’s Middleweight tournaments inspired thousands. Chuck Liddell embodied an entire era of mixed martial arts. We are still stuck with Jon Jones thanks to the things he accomplished in the Light Heavyweight division.

And the division is still cursed by the memory of his presence.

Two and a half years ago I wrote a longform, worldwide history of the division named The Sins of the Snowball King, but being as it’s been a minute and no one wants to go read 21,000 words about it again, let’s just recap the current era of Light Heavyweight in the UFC:

• Daniel Cormier chucked the 205-pound belt to go be a Heavyweight instead

• Jon Jones, having previously been stripped of the belt three times over conduct and drug offenses, relinquished it voluntarily midway through 2020 because he didn’t want to fight Dominick Reyes again and also intended to move to Heavyweight

• Jan Błachowicz won the vacant belt, but the UFC chose to use his reign to try to make Israel Adesanya a double champion instead, which failed when Jan beat him, much to their displeasure

• Glover Teixeira won the belt despite being in his mid-forties and close to retirement, then lost the belt in his first defense against Jiří Procházka in what was one of the best championship fights of all time and set both men up for the UFC’s most anticipated rematch in years

• Jiří promptly destroyed his shoulder in training and had to vacate the title instead

• Glover offered to rematch Jan on short notice, the UFC demanded it be Magomed Ankalaev instead, so Glover walked

• Jan and Ankalaev fought, Ankalaev was almost unanimously agreed to have won on media scorecards; the judges instead rendered a draw, leaving the title vacant

• Rather than a rematch or reusing either man, the UFC booked Glover Teixeira vs the #7-ranked Contender Series veteran Jamahal Hill, in what was also Glover’s retirement fight; Hill won and the UFC celebrated the DWCS era of champions and Hill’s long reign to come

• Hill promptly destroyed his ankle playing basketball and had to vacate the title instead

• Middleweight marketing darling Alex Pereira, who had just lost the 185-pound title, got pushed to the championship after one close split decision victory over Jan

• Pereira won and proceeded to have the first successful Light Heavyweight title defenses against actual Light Heavyweights in more than four years

• ...except Magomed Ankalaev, the #1 contender, was continually pushed down the card while Pereira fought Jamahal Hill, rematched Jiří Procházka, and was matched up against the barely-ranked Khalil Rountree Jr. instead

• After making him wait a year and a half, Magomed Ankalaev got his title shot and beat Pereira

• Instead of booking him against any of his top contenders, the UFC iced Ankalaev until Pereira was ready for a rematch, whereupon he knocked Ankalaev out

• Alex Pereira, like Daniel Cormier and Jon Jones before him, promptly threw the belt in the garbage to go up to Heavyweight

There have been six title vacations across its last eight reigns. If you count the draw between Ankalaev and Jan, we’ve made it all the way to 7 for 8. We’ve almost reached numerical parity between meaning and the void, and in 2026, that feels entirely appropriate. Combat sports likes to throw terms like “paper champion” around whenever the gold goes on someone they don’t like, but what do you do when all the gold gets melted out of the belt itself? At what point does a championship absorb the essence of the trash can it’s been chucked into a half-dozen times?

When you lose credibility, how hard and how long do you have to work to get it back?

And does it matter when the promoter doesn’t care?

Because, boy, they really don’t care. Jiří Procházka got knocked out by Alex Pereira--twice--easily--and he’s still here, right at the doorstep of the title. Carlos Ulberg earned this shot by squeezing just the barest sliver of a decision out against Jan Błachowicz. Magomed Ankalaev? The only Light Heavyweight to beat Alex Pereira?

He is not in this fight. He is not currently booked for any fight. For almost two years, now, his only bookings have been centered around what was convenient for Alex Pereira, and with Pereira gone, they have no need for him. Jiří has striking wars and kills people with spinning elbows. Carlos knocks people out and only rarely tries to wrestle.

All Magomed Ankalaev does is continue to be the best Light Heavyweight in the UFC.

And what kind of company would care about something like that?

No one can hate Jiří Procházka. It is impossible. He’s a Czech kickboxer whose passion for combat marches to a tune that’s 50% The Book of Five Rings and 50% button-mashing in Tekken. Just to be clear: That’s not me making a silly culture joke. Jiří has multiple interviews about being inspired by Tekken and Mortal Kombat. He runs around in the woods with a katana and he spent years of his career sporting one of its weirdest hairstyles as part of his attempt to pay tribute to the chonmage topknots samurai would wear. There are hundreds of fighters across the annals of combat sports that proudly declare mixed martial arts saved them from a lifestyle of following their passions that would have landed them in jail: Jiří is the only man in the UFC* who can say it probably saved him from just being a cosplayer.
_{*Outside the UFC, Yuichiro Nagashima still has this wrapped up.}

But Jiří was boxed out of contendership with Alex on top. Hell, he only barely survived Glover Teixeira. Jiří’s entire style is predicated on ignoring his strengths and engaging in brawls, to the point that his best knockouts have tended to come not from technical mastery or careful planning, but from outlasting his opponents and using all of that carefully-honed martial knowledge to capitalize on chaos. Glover was beating him until he wasn’t. Aleksandar Rakić was lighting Jiří up before getting slugged out in the second round. Jamahal Hill was battering Jiří’s body before he caught a left upside the head. Khalil Rountree Jr. was two minutes away from winning a unanimous decision when Jiří walked him down and stopped him in the third. As much as he may not deserve top contendership the way Magomed does, Jiří’s heart, grit and madness made him inarguably the biggest fan favorite in the division, and he richly deserves it.

Despite several half-hearted attempts at marketing by the UFC, Carlos Ulberg just hasn’t caught on the same way. It’s not for lack of success or insufficient highlights--he’s punched his way across the division, he hasn’t lost a fight since his UFC debut back in 2021, and he’s stopped most of his opponents along the way. He gets the knockouts. He looks like one of those really expensive G.I. Joe Hall of Famer dolls from the early 90s with the overly detailed abs was brought to life and forced to fight people to maintain its grasp on sentience. By all rights, he should be a star.

And maybe he is--for the definition of how the UFC makes stars now. Light Heavyweight has never been a bounty of talents, but his road up the rankings was carefully curated. He avoided the gatekeeping Dustin Jacobies of the world, he was carefully maneuvered away from the Nikita Krylovs, but they found space for him to fight Alonzo Menifield. At one point he beat a genuine prospect in Nicolae Negumereanu, and the UFC followed it up by giving him Ihor Potieria, the man Nicolae had just knocked out in his previous fight. Even in his run-up to the belt, after Carlos notched that aforementioned win over Jan, the UFC followed it up not with a Rountree or a Murzakanov, but with Dominick Reyes--a man ranked halfway down the division who’d only just gotten back on the winning track after a four-year-long losing streak.

It’s the top-competition comparison that really makes the difference clear. If there’s a martial aspect to why people love Jiří, it’s his unwillingness to change his style in the face of danger. Whether he’s fighting C.B. Dollaway or Alex Pereira, he is essentially the same man and he performs the same way. Carlos is a dangerous knockout artist--when he’s fighting the outmatched. He’ll happily knock out a Reyes or a Menifield, but he couldn’t get Volkan Oezdemir out of there, and he beat Jan by the barest of calls.

I would love to tell you that I am picking Jiří because I think he’s the better fighter. I think he’s the gutsier fighter. I think history has proven if you do not have enough gun to put him flat on his back he will rise from whatever grave you temporarily lower him into and viciously murder you with a series of elbows. He responds to adversity by kicking that adversity in the abdomen. Ulberg’s approach towards adversity has been to double down on trying to stay smart and defensively sound, even if that means halving his offensive output and hoping in vain that his enemy will wander into one of his (very good!) counterpunches. That approach working on Jiří is extremely feasible. Jiří has never met a punch he would not march willingly into if he thought it would give him an opening to spin several times while throwing two to four consecutive backfists.

There’s a very good chance Carlos and his focus on minimalism work as a hard counter to Jiří’s tendency to throw caution to the wind. It’s hard not to picture him getting clocked charging in.

But Light Heavyweight needs Jiří. If we’re not going to have a credible division, then by god, we can at least have one that people give a shit about. Do it for the children. JIŘÍ PROCHÁZKA BY KO.

CO-MAIN EVENT: THE POINTS ARE MADE UP AND THE RANKINGS DON’T MATTER
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Azamat Murzakanov (16-0, #6) vs Paulo Costa (15-4, #14 at Middleweight)

It’s actually really appropriate that this is the co-main event now instead of Van/Taira, because this fight is essentially the second verse of the funeral dirge for the Light Heavyweight division.

When you ask yourself how hard it is for the UFC to cultivate prospects, I want you to consider Azamat Murzakanov. 16-0. Undefeated. Has battered damn near everyone put in front of him. Knockouts in five of his six UFC fights. The only man other than Jiří to ever knock out Aleksandar Rakić, and Murzakanov did it in half the time and only needed three punches. He is doing this while being the shortest fighter in the entire division. He is shorter than most of the Welterweights in the UFC, and yet, he is atomizing men with flying knees and right hooks and, apparently, the scariest jab in the weight class. His Contender Series win was a violent, three-minute knockout over Matheus Scheffel, who would go on to be a championship finalist at Heavyweight in the Professional Fighters League.

They’ve had him for almost five years. He’s a half-dozen fights into his time with the company. His prospects have been clear since the moment he set foot in the cage, and now he’s right at the precipice of title contendership. Azamat Murzakanov has been mulching men for half a decade and he now just needs that last promotional push to justify his place at the top of the division. A title contender, a top five prospect, a former champion--the UFC has them. They have them all. They could have booked any of them.

Azamat Murzakanov is fighting Paulo Costa.

Paulo Costa is not ranked at Light Heavyweight. Paulo Costa has not fought at Light Heavyweight. Paulo Costa had one fight that was technically contested at Light Heavyweight, but that was because he was so drastically unprepared for his cut to Middleweight for a bout with Marvin Vettori that Costa decided he would only accept it if the weight limit was pushed up twenty whole pounds, and he still lost.

In his entire UFC tenure, which dates all the way back to 2017, Paulo has seven victories. Those victories are, in order,

• Garreth McLellan, who was cut immediately after for being 1-4 and retired one fight later

• Oluwale Bamgbose, who was cut one fight later for also being 1-4

• Johny Hendricks, a former Welterweight champion turned 5’9” Middleweight who retired from MMA after losing to Costa because he was 1 for his last 6

• Uriah Hall, who after the Costa fight was 1 for his last 5 and who left the sport in 2022 for the greener pastures of Karate Combat

• Yoel Romero, by far Costa’s best career victory and a genuine feather in the cap, who is also an absurdly frustrating fighter who competes to answer questions like ‘can I win without ever throwing a punch’

Let’s pause for a second. That last win was in the Summer of 2019. That is damn near seven years ago and we’re already at 5 out of 7. Who the hell did Paulo beat in the last seven years to justify being here?

• Luke Rockhold, who had been retired for three years after getting knocked out three times in four fights, returned to retirement after the fight, and then un-retired again to do bareknuckle boxing, where he immediately got his teeth knocked out

• Roman Kopylov, a frustratingly inconsistent, borderline-ranked kickboxer who is 6-5 in the UFC and fighting to avert getting cut

That’s it. Luke Rockhold and Roman Kopylov paved Paulo’s way to a battle for top contendership at the Light Heavyweight division.

If the UFC’s attempt to numb you hasn’t completely worked, you may remember Gregory Rodrigues knocking out Brunno Ferreira last month. That was supposed to be Paulo in there against Brunno. Up until the end of the year, Paulo Costa was scheduled to fight the lowest-ranked Middleweight in the company, a man who’d been repeatedly knocked out and pushed out of contendership and was slowly rebuilding himself on the back of stars of the sport like Jackson “The Moose” McVey.

Instead, Paulo’s fighting the most successful Light Heavyweight prospect in the world for the chance to be one win away from a shot at a world championship. That’s how important contendership is in this division. That’s how much matchmaking matters.

I dunno, man. I don’t know anymore, and I’m convinced they don’t either. We’re just chucking darts, here. AZAMAT MURZAKANOV BY TKO because I want the world to make a semblance of sense again.

MAIN CARD: BLAYDES MUST DIE
HEAVYWEIGHT: Curtis Blaydes (19-5 (1), #5) vs Josh Hokit (8-0, NR)

Oh, I’m sorry, did you think we were done talking about the extent to which nothing matters?

Curtis Blaydes is one of the greatest Heavyweights of this generation. The only people to ever beat him are huge-punching knockout monsters, every single one of whom either won or challenged for the title, and across twenty UFC fights he’s notched wins over five champions. He knocked out Jailton Almeida, he broke Alistair Overeem’s face open with one elbow, and he made Tom Aspinall’s knee explode in fifteen seconds using his secret telekinetic abilities. Given his unfortunate tendency to run facefirst into haymakers every time he gets a shot at the top, he is destined to become one of the canonical answers to the equally generational “Who is the best fighter not to win the title” question right alongside Liz Carmouche, Dan Henderson and Joseph Benavidez. He’s been a staple of the class for ten goddamn years.

The UFC spent all of 2025 trying, across three separate occasions, to book him against the debuting, unranked Rizvan Kuniev. I wrote about the conflict I felt over making one of your best, highest-ranked Heavyweights risk it all against a guy with no cache, but I still understood: Kuniev was one of the best Heavyweights outside of the UFC and the division is so perpetually unfortunate that it’s hard to blame them for not wanting to waste time with someone we already objectively know to be a contender. It was close, Blaydes scraped a decision, and for putting his top ranking up against an unranked guy who posed essentially no benefit to him, the UFC has repaid Blaydes by taking him back off the shelf after nearly a year of inactivity so he can fight another unranked guy, only this time instead of one of the most proven Heavyweights in the world it’s Josh Hokit, a man who’s almost exclusively fought the bottom of the barrel to the point that his two UFC fights thus far came against one Heavyweight that’d never even fought a man with a winning record and one Heavyweight who lost a mixed martial arts bout to Johnny Eblen, who fights at 185 pounds.

But he got a couple knockouts and he cuts reheated 1980s pro-wrestling promos with the cadence and vigor of a first-generation Youtuber that have a tendency to drift into weird bigot fantasies about hurting trans people, and, coincidentally, Curtis Blaydes is on a classically structured contract that has been seeing steady negotiations for years while Josh Hokit is only two fights into a Contender Series deal and offers them the chance to get yet another person into title contention who costs 1/10 as much to book.

Nothing matters anywhere, at this point, but good god, does it matter the least at Heavyweight. Between Kuniev, Teixeira, Fortune and Hokit we’re seeing a full assault on the rankings in the hopes of changing the guard and importing as many cheap competitors as possible, but it’s the big boy division and Blaydes is going on 36, so who knows. CURTIS BLAYDES BY TKO because I want to stand before the flow of entropy and deny it.

LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Dominick Reyes (15-5, #10) vs Johnny Walker (22-9 (1), #12)

With as much respect as possible for what is an inherently disrespectful statement: This is the battle to crown the jester king of the Light Heavyweight, the true People’s Champion, and I am here for it.

Six years ago, Dominick Reyes was the man who did the impossible, beat Jon Jones, and was denied his rightful victory by the judges. He protested this injustice through a radical act of civil disobedience: Forgetting how to fight and getting knocked out over and over for four straight years. The Dominick Reyes Career Revival Act of 2024 was one of our nation’s last positive achievements, even if, like so much civil infrastructure, it was built on the undue, untreated suffering of others--the streets will not forget Anthony Smith fighting through grief over losing his coach, visibly weeping during his entrance and egging on his own knockout loss by begging Reyes to hit him--and it ended in Dom getting utterly destroyed by a New Zealander, which kills my the-fall-of-America metaphor because lord knows Kiwi politics aren’t doing much better these days.

Johnny Walker has been a 205-pound chaos elemental for so long that his initial wave of hype came from the certitude people felt that as a 6’6” knockout machine he was the man to finally unseat Jon. Then it turned out beating Justin Ledet wasn’t an enormously helpful measuring stick and Johnny spent most of his time up among the division’s elite getting repeatedly knocked into an approximation of the ragdoll physics deaths from The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Then, in a twist of fortune, he snapped off a three-fight winning streak that put him right up against Magomed Ankalaev for top contendership! Except his streak, hilariously, was also built on a victory over Anthony goddamn Smith, and it didn’t work for him, either. Our malevolent management matchmakers just tried to dispose of Walker as a big underdog to the streaking Zhang Mingyang, their desired Chinese star, in the UFC’s first event in Shanghai since 2017, and Walker promptly ruined their night by hobbling Zhang with leg kicks and punching him out in two rounds.

You know what the real funny thing about this is, though? I can’t in good conscience say “so, obviously, neither of these men will be a champion,” because look at my fucking division, man. Are you going to tell me Johnny Walker couldn’t knock out Khalil Rountree Jr. again? Do you think Dominick Reyes incapable of beating a Jamahal Hill coming off his seventh ankle/knee surgery?

Anything can happen. We live in a world of wonder and torment. JOHNNY WALKER BY TKO.

FEATHERWEIGHT: Cub Swanson (30-14) vs Nate Landwehr (18-7)

I’m not sure what to make of how little I feel about Cub Swanson’s retirement.

As an obnoxiously online fan I was aware of the existence of World Extreme Cagefighting, but like the near-entirety of the audience I didn’t actually watch a WEC event until the company was bought out by Zuffa in 2006 and turned into the UFC’s kid brother. Those Versus network cards were lousy with future stars of the sport, with Dominick Cruz, Urijah Faber, Carlos Condit and even Demetrious Johnson getting his start in their waning days, but Cub Swanson was one of the guys the crowd got invested in. His constant attempts at jumping on chokes, his oddly loose punching style, the unorthodox footwork that made him look perpetually at risk of losing his balance; all of them were indicative of a fighter who was just too noticeably different to ignore.

That style carried him through twenty goddamn years of combat sports. It was an exceedingly weird twenty years, too. On his best nights, Cub was one of the most creative strikers in the sport. He outpunched Dustin Poirier. He knocked out Charles goddamn Oliveira. Even right on the verge of retirement in 2024 he could take on legendarily durable guys like Darren Elkins and Billy Quarantillo and spin their heads around. He’s also the only man Jens Pulver beat during the legendary 1-for-9 run that ended his time in the spotlight. José Aldo made his name in the American mainstream by crushing Cub with a flying knee in eight seconds. The same looseness and creatively that made Cub memorable also kept him vulnerable. He never made it to a title shot. He didn’t last in the top ten.

Which makes this appropriate, right? Cub’s retirement has been on the books for months, and of all the dance partners he could have gotten--a whole lot of folks were hoping for a rematch with Choi Doo-ho, in the hopes of getting another crack at one of the most celebrated brawls in UFC history--he’s got Nate Landwehr, a Good But Not Great fighter on a losing streak. He’s exciting, he’s an aggressive kind of striker and it should be a fun fight, but it’s hard not to see it as an anticlimax. Landwehr isn’t a legend, a star or even a contender, he’s just a guy the UFC tried and failed to push over the last few years. It’s tempting to think of this as a cynical attempt to get the new guy over, but not only has Landwehr’s ship already sailed, dude’s turning 38 in June.

There’s no last verse. This is one of those songs that just repeats until it fades out. Thank you for your twenty years of service: Here is your random match-up and an emotional video package about how much more memorable things used to be. CUB SWANSON BY TKO one last time.

PRELIMS: ARE THERE EVEN EARLY PRELIMS ANYMORE
FEATHERWEIGHT: Patrício Pitbull (37-8, #13) vs Aaron Pico (13-5, NR)

I just don’t get it. You spend decades establishing your global hegemony over mixed martial arts and denigrating every part of your competition as second-rate and undeserving of attention and now it’s 2026 and you are putting on a fight that could have headlined a Bellator card seven years ago. The UFC’s use of both of these men has been baffling. Patrício Pitbull walked into the company as both inarguably one of the best fighters who’d never been in the UFC and a man entering his late 30s and operating on a timeframe a huge part of the fanbase thought might already be up, which was not aided by a debut against Yair Rodríguez in which Pitbull looked slow, tired, and outright confused. He rescued himself from the Patchy Mix pits by beating Dan Ige and securing a hold on the outer reaches of the rankings, but now he has to defend it against Aaron Pico, the sport’s least successful and yet most recurring gold rush. Bellator signed him as a teenaged amateur wrestling superprospect a decade ago; he lost his professional debut in twenty-four seconds. They immediately set about rebuilding him in an attempt to take him from an 0-1 rookie to a title contender in the space of two years; the second he fought top competition he got knocked out twice in a row. The third time around he busted his own shoulder; Bellator didn’t live long enough for a fourth. And the UFC looked at this talented but perpetually uneven prospect now going on 30 and declared, “This is preferable to Movsar Evloev or Lerone Murphy,” and when the inexplicable attempt to shove him right into top contendership ended with Pico unconscious on the mat, they decided to match him against the other Bellator Featherweight standout they have on the roster so he had another shot at a ranking.

Daniel Santos is on a four-fight Featherwieght winning streak and they’re matching him up with his fifth straight unranked competitor (and his third straight South Korean, which is getting kind of uncomfortable). William Gomis is 5-1 and has yet to even sniff a ranked fight. Aaron Pico was anointed and he must be allowed chances until either he finally wins a championship or the universe reaches heat death. PATRÍCIO PITBULL BY TKO.

WELTERWEIGHT: Kevin Holland (28-15 (1)) vs Randy Brown (20-7)

There’s an alternate reality where both of these guys have been world champions, and we live here, in the timeline where they’re fighting each other as a preliminary footnote. They both have absurd reach advantages over virtually everyone in their division, they both hit like a truck when they land cleanly, and they’re both capable of just enough self-marketing to set themselves aside from the pack. They both also have this problem with losing every time they get a big fight. We’re now so many years and so many cycles deep into the Holland-Brown Alliance faltering at their greatest moments of opportunity that describing it again feels redundant. However: Brown, at least, got beaten fair and square this last time after Gabriel Bonfim knocked him out. Holland got fed to Mike Malott, got punted in the groin repeatedly and would’ve had a draw if referee Dan Miragliotta had correctly taken a point, but then the Canadian marketing darling wouldn’t have won in Canada and we wouldn’t be having Mike Malott vs Gilbert Burns as a main event in Winnipeg next week. Yes, really. Yes, Canada, that is how little they think of you.

At this point I have learned to anticipate both men fighting against their own strengths rather than competing with any kind of sense, so I’m flipping a damn coin, and the coin says RANDY BROWN BY DECISION.

LIGHTWEIGHT: Mateusz Gamrot (25-4 (1), #8) vs Esteban Ribovics (15-2, NR)

Fights like this are why we have the ‘who gets opportunities and why’ conversation. Mateusz Gamrot is an extremely good Lightweight who also happens to be a wrestler, and that means the world hates him. When he has close split decisions that probably should have gone his way, they will tip towards the non-wrestler. When he makes himself a fixture of the top ten, he will be repeatedly called upon to fight unranked men rather than given a chance at ascension. And when one of those opportunities does miraculously, serendipitously come up, as when Rafael Fiziev had to abruptly pull out of a main event with Charles Oliveira this past October, he will be given one chance, and if he gets, say, choked out? It’s all the way back down the ladder. Esteban Ribovics has won primarily by close, difficult decisions, and he couldn’t get past the Nasrat Haqparasts of the world, and one fight ago he was having a close-as-hell war with Elves Brener, who in loss hit a three-fight losing streak. But unlike Mateusz, Esteban is a striker. That means he gets to fight to be in the top ten now. Haqparast beat Esteban and his next fight was against the unranked, 2-0 Quillan Salkilld; Esteban got the guy on a skid and now he’s gunning for a spot near the top.

These are the rules and we will defeat them one single-leg takedown at a time. MATEUSZ GAMROT BY DECISION.

WOMEN’S STRAWWEIGHT: Tatiana Suarez (11-1, #2) vs Loopy Godinez (14-5, #6)

Here is a short selection of fights the UFC has deemed main card-worthy in 2026.

• Curtis Blaydes vs Josh Hokit

• Luke Riley vs Michael Aswell Jr.

• Tommy McMillen vs Manolo Zecchini

• Lerryan Douglas vs Julian Erosa

• Marwan Rahiki vs Harry Hardwick

I do not get a lot a feedback on these columns, so when it happens, I tend to fixate. One piece I think about most often related to how I over-focus on card placement and the predicament of women being stuck on the prelims. Their point, in short, was that fight placement now operates on an economy of action, and if women are being pushed down the card, it’s not because of sexism or promotional failure, it’s because their fights are bad.

I said it then, I will say it now: How quickly people have forgotten Colby Covington.

Here’s my real hot take, though: The UFC should push fighters who have bad fights.

It isn’t hard to find brawls in combat sports. They’re actually pretty common. The reason good brawls were such a coveted part of UFC broadcasts wasn’t scarcity, it was placement. When you pride yourself on having the best fighters in the world, the most skilled martial artists, you will, on average, get boring fights, because strong technical skills lead to strategic performances. We’re not seeing more brawls on UFC broadcasts because the sport is getting better, we’re seeing them because we’ve arrived at a point where we’re firing Muhammad Mokaev and Jailton Almeida and replacing them with Tommy McMillen, and that is, ultimately, incredibly unhealthy for the long-term future of the sport. You have always been able to tune into the Legacy Fighting Alliance or Combate to see 5-0 prospects whose martial output is primarily Bart Simpson windmilling. You can find brawls anywhere.

You cannot find Tatiana Suarez anywhere else. You cannot watch Loopy Godinez test herself against the top of the mountain anywhere else. The main feature of the UFC is, and has always been, having the best mixed martial arts stars in the world. Even the astroturfed superstars needed to climb that ladder of credibility for the audience to buy into them. Alex Pereira needed Sean Strickland, Conor McGregor needed Chad Mendes, and Mackenzie Dern needs contenders, and she won’t get any that matter if no one knows they’re here because they’re fighting their top contendership matches on the fucking prelims just above Chris “Taco” Padilla.

You are not improving the product, you are just making it cheaper, and one day it will be indistinguishable from everything else and your brand identity will be dead. TATIANA SUAREZ BY DECISION.

EARLY PRELIMS: THEY DIDN’T DEFINE THIS SECTION UNTIL TUESDAY
LIGHTWEIGHT: MarQuel Mederos (11-1) vs Chris Padilla (17-6)

We here at the Punchsport Report would like to tender our apologies to Chris “Taco” Padilla for using him as a punchline in the previous section, because he, too, is kind of getting boned. They didn’t want Taco. They had no desire to put on the Ritz. They brought Padilla into the fold as a replacement for a replacement, a warm body at +400 odds against the debuting James Llontop, who was widely seen as a star prospect. Chris choked him out in a round. Llontop is no longer in the UFC, but Chris is 4-0, and not only has he won, he has stopped everyone save Jai Herbert. Hell, in his last fight Padilla became the first person to stop Ismael Bonfim on strikes, a thing wildmen like Terrance McKinney and Benoît Saint Denis failed to do and Nazim Sadykhov came legally close to thanks to a doctor’s stoppage. For his efforts in building a winning streak in the UFC’s biggest, most competitive division, Chris Padilla gets to fight MarQuel Mederos. MarQuel Mederos has only fought three times in the last two and a half years, every fight went to a (victorious) decision, and the last time we saw him, he was up against Mark “The Shark” Choinski, who got to the UFC by beating a 9-10 man in the Anthony Pettis Fighting Championship, America’s answer to the Samurai Fight House.

These things are equal now. Every statement about rewarding action is a lie. CHRIS PADILLA BY DECISION.

MIDDLEWEIGHT: Kelvin Gastelum (20-10 (1)) vs Vicente Luque (23-12-1)

Honestly? Refreshing. This is refreshing. We spend so much time here discussing how the sport is depressing because of politics and matchmaking and corruption and malfeasance and it’s so terribly refreshing to be reminded that sometimes the sport can just be depressing on its own terms. Kelvin Gastelum could and should have been a world champion at Welterweight, but discipline problems led to him coming in off-weight so often that he got kicked out of the division and forced to fight as a 5’9” Middleweight, and now he can’t even reliably make 185. Vicente Luque was one of the UFC’s most reliable best bout machines, an all-action fighter with an incredible style who is, still, the only man to ever stop Belal Muhammad, and now he’s put so much mileage on his bones that he’s old and broken down at just 34. There was a window of time where both of these men could have held gold, and now it’s just too damn late, and there’s nothing left to do but fight until they can’t anymore. These were main-event fighters and now they get 203 words at the bottom of the write-up.

That’s legitimate depression. That’s home-grown, sourdough-starter depression. KELVIN GASTELUM BY DECISION.

WELTWERWEIGHT: Charles Radtke (11-5) vs Francisco Prado (12-4)

Sometimes you just get stuck in the loop. Both Francisco Prado and ol’ Chuck Buffalo are acceptably solid guys who just can’t get anywhere, and they’d both be gone already if there weren’t even more troubled, forgotten fighters in their way. Do you remember Daniel Frunza or Matthew Semelsberger? Radtke’s win record does. If you’ve been watching the UFC steadily, you’ve seen Francisco Prado fight five times. Do you remember any of them? If you do, it was probably just for knocking out Ottman Azaitar, the only thing that has kept Prado employed. And if you do remember Ottman Azaitar, let me ask you: Why?

FRANCISCO PRADO BY TKO.

SATURDAY, APRIL 4 FROM THE GREAT WASTES OF THE APEX
PRELIMS 2 PM PDT / 5 PM EDT | MAIN CARD 5 PM / 8 PM

There are three ranked fighters out of twenty-four on this card, the highest-ranked ones aren’t in the main event, and Tommy McMillen vs Manolo Zecchini is a main card fight.

I could write more, but I don’t know that a better joke exists.

MAIN EVENT: A HEADLINER IN ANY ARENA
LIGHTWEIGHT: Renato Moicano (20-7-1, #10) vs Chris Duncan (15-2, NR)

One of the most interesting parts of following this sport since its inception has been witnessing multiple generations of fans find their points of entry, frustrate themselves to the point of departure, and see their era of the sport wiped away by revisionist history. Fans of the nascent no-rules bloodsport days were bored by MMA’s turn towards regulation and professionalism and saw their era written out of the sport’s origin story because it was barbaric, ugly, and, most importantly, impossible to attribute to the business genius of Dana White, protagonist of the world. The mainstream fan boom from the drama of The Ultimate Fighter led to fans who were widely maligned as uninformed casual viewers (because lord knows everyone who watches sports has to be an expert) and the era of sterile corporate genericizing drove them away and deemed their time with the sport as embarrassing and insufficiently profitable. The McGregor Era brought in a massive new audience and the most money mixed martial arts had ever seen, but the trade-off was having to deal with Conor fucking McGregor, and as the UFC desperately chased more of him rather than building new stars, they lost those eyeballs entirely.

We bid farewell to the ESPN era at the start of this year. It wasn’t a particularly fun time to be a mixed martial arts fan. There were high points--there always are--but the reduction in card quality, the growth in antipathy towards the fanbase and the open embrace of the right wing all sapped a great deal of the joy out of following the UFC. And yet, when we learned that the ESPN era was ending and ushering in the Paramount era, one that would give the UFC its biggest operating budget ever and give them greater connection to the fans by killing the boundaries of pay-per-view, instead of celebrating, I was deeply concerned.

I really hope this leads to something good. There's no reason it can't! This could easily lead to increased fighter pay, an emphasis on higher-quality cards and better, less sterile production. After all, they just made seven point seven billion fucking dollars. There's no reason everything shouldn't get better!

Except that they already made seven point seven billion fucking dollars.

I hope I am wrong but I think things are on a trajectory to get worse than they have ever been.

We're only now settling into the Apex era of the sport, and as more and more longtime fans fall away from the sport in its current state, I have noticed a growing sentiment amongst the modern-day faithful that older fans are, in fact, whiny babies. The UFC isn't worse, we are, and instead of paying attention to what's actually happening and getting invested in the Contender Series we only care about old, retiring fighters. Our complaints about card quality have nothing to do with the actual quality of said cards, and are, instead, a sole measurement of our own disenchantment with a sport that has outgrown us.

I respect it. I respect standing up for the validity of the era in which you, yourself, found a passion for something. When I fell in love with mixed martial arts Keith Hackney was a star, I understand digging your heels into the dirt and defending what you care about, however ugly it might be. "Things were better back in my day" is one of the rustiest axioms there is. Some things will always be better in the past. Some things will always be worse.

But all of those things are collectively irrelevant, because you are defending the era that gives us Renato Moicano vs Chris Duncan as a main event.

This wasn't an accident. This isn't one of those cases where Derrick Lewis gets sick or Maycee Barber has a seizure and suddenly you're stuck with Main Event Ion Cuțelaba. They intended to do this. They did this on purpose. We're only three out of eighty-four months into this bright new no-pay-per-view era of the sport and already, just 3.6% of the way into it, we are at the point where a fight between a man who's only ever main evented as a B-side against a man who isn't even close to a ranking is a completely sensible headliner.

That is how little they think of their cards. That is how little they think of you.

Renato Moicano has never been the guy. They've given him chances, they've tested the waters, and every time he's been thrown into them he's drowned. Brian Ortega was choking him out damn near a decade ago. Chan Sung Jung was already in the twilight of his career when he flattened Moicano in a single minute. Rafael Fiziev destroyed him. Rafael dos Anjos destroyed him. Renato Moicano is, canonically, the last person José Aldo ever knocked out in combat sports.

Hell, the single biggest moment of his career was a mistake. He was slated to have an outer-top-ten fight with Beneil Dariush the week Arman Tsarukyan infamously fucked up the main event of UFC 311, and despite Dariush being right there and higher-ranked, the UFC decided to give Moicano the shot. And he talked his shit, and he vowed to shock the world, and then, as one does, he got choked out in a single round. Five months later they gave him his originally-planned shot at Beneil's ranking anyway, Beneil beat him, and they were going to have The Rematch Of The Guys Who Keep Losing by giving Ortega his long-awaited Lightweight debut against Moicano but Ortega's body won't stop imploding so instead, we're here.

With Chris Duncan.

Chris Duncan is a good fighter. Yes, getting knocked out by Slava Claus is a little unfortunate, but having a funny loss in your background is a prerequisite for greatness in mixed martial arts.* Duncan hits hard, punches straight, and has gotten very, very good at jumping on chokes when the opportunity presents itself. A four-fight winning streak is a great accomplishment at any division, let alone Lightweight.
_{*Khabib, you know as well as I do what happened in the Gleison Tibau fight.}

But the best person Duncan beat during that streak was either Terrance McKinney, who got knocked silly by Ismael Bonfim, or Mateusz Rębecki, who got his lights shut out by a going-on-40 Diego Ferreira. Your other two choices are Bolaji Oki, who stands now at a whopping 2-3, and Jordan Vucenic, whom the UFC valued so highly that they cut him right after Duncan submitted him.

Funny story. Beneil Dariush, the man who beat Renato Moicano? His next fight after that was a match-up with Benoît Saint Denis, whom Moicano had recently destroyed. Chris Duncan's last loss came at the hands of Manuel Torres back in 2024, and now Duncan is fighting for a spot in the top ten, and the UFC tried to book him into a fight for #12 against--once again--Beneil Dariush.

It's okay if you like this. It's great if you like this. Combat sports can be a beautiful thing and they exist to provide joy. But don't let them convince you they're not breaking that beauty down into the cheapest possible chunks they can before they sell it to you, nor that your fandom, in the post-pay-per-view age, isn't being measured in terms of what the absolute minimum value is that they can possibly give you before the joy you derive is no longer worth the time you spend, just as it did for your forefather fans.

Set your own value as a fan of the sport. Don't let the sport dictate it for you. I may like Duncan but I cannot stop seeing the way Torres wrapped him up in the back of my eyelids when I think about this fight. RENATO MOICANO BY SUBMISSION.