CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 107: WHAT DID YOU EXPECT
CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 107: WHAT DID YOU EXPECT
UFC 303: Pereira vs Prochazka 2
SATURDAY, JUNE 29 FROM THE T-MOBILE ARENA IN LAS VEGAS, NEVADA
EARLY PRELIMS 3 PM PDT / 6 PM EDT | PRELIMS 5 PM / 8 PM | MAIN CARD 7 PM / 10 PM
In a rare change of pace I'm not going to keep you here in the intro, 'cause everything there is to say about this card as a card is just one prolonged discussion about the main event.
All I will say here is this: Never forget the UFC has so little respect for its audience that they strung you along for an entire year and a half, and made their most dedicated fans wait until they had just one week to get refunds for their ridiculously overpriced tickets, when they knew Conor McGregor wasn't going to show up.
Fuck 'em. On with the show.
MAIN EVENT: THE TALE OF BUSTED TOES
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP: Alex Pereira (10-2, Champion) vs Jiří Procházka (30-4-1, #1)
For the past three months this main event was the already-delayed-by-a-year Conor McGregor comeback fight against Michael Chandler, and now it's not. Eleven years ago the UFC discovered Conor McGregor and mixed martial arts was forever compromised by the forbidden knowledge of the megastar.
The lure of exponential growth is the curse of all business, and combat sports have never been immune. Regional promotions can putter along for decades on divisional structure and simple demand, but your canonical MMA organizations--your Rizins, your UFCs, your Strikeforces--live through their main attractions. Pride wouldn't have come to be without Rickson Gracie and Nobuhiko Takada, Bellator wouldn't have made it off ESPN Deportes were it not for Eddie Alvarez and Joe Warren, and the UFC itself wouldn't have survived its pre-legalization days without Ken Shamrock and Tank Abbott.
Stars can be built. Arguably, more than any nobleminded thoughts of martial artistry or sporting spectacle, the entire goal of a combat sports organization's existence is building them. With time, care and a thumb on the scale, you can cultivate a Forrest Griffin or a Takanori Gomi. You can construct a Cro Cop. You can keep fans coming and keep your broadcast deals alive.
But you can't build a superstar. Superstars happen, and you just do what you can to protect them. Brock Lesnar was a superstar, but only thanks to the nigh-impossible likelihood of the most-pushed man in professional wrestling deciding to quit and start fighting for real. Ronda Rousey was a superstar, but only because another company showcased her while the UFC swore up and down women's mixed martial arts was a joke.
They're rare, but they happen. If you take care, you'll find a couple every decade. Megastars do not come every decade. Megastars will happen once, and then you will spend the next twenty years desperately chasing the high of the most money you've ever fucking seen in your life.
I will never understand why Conor McGregor is the biggest star in this godforsaken sport, but I understand why the sport folded in on itself in an attempt to keep him or recreate him. I understand why Bellator devoted more focus to Conor McGregor's tangential cageside presence at its last event than any of their actual fighters. I understand why the UFC has desperately attempted to astroturf Sean O'Malley and Paddy Pimblett and Ian Machado Garry into ersatz McGregori.
I loved Takanori Gomi. I loved Genki Sudo. I loved Buakaw Por. Pramuk and Ernesto Hoost. But they weren't in the most-watched fights in Japanese history. NFL steroid monster Bob Sapp, sumo kingpin Akebono and television comedian Bobby Ologun were.
I understand why the UFC cannot let Conor McGregor go. But this passed the point of farce some time ago and we've come all the way around to pathetic.
For sake of brevity--not ethics--let's for once put aside the issues of Conor's multiple demonstrable assaults, and other, alleged assaults, and alleged drug use and alleged addiction to partying and alleged inability to stay in fighting shape and alleged steroid abuse so bad the UFC dumped USADA over it and alleged inability to stop punching Italian DJs while chasing women off boats and beating old men for not wanting to drink his allegedly shitty whiskey. For once, let's focus on Conor McGregor the Fighter.
Conor McGregor the Fighter is the only person in UFC history to get stripped of two championships for refusing to defend them. Conor McGregor the Fighter has not defeated a ranked competitor in their division since 2016. Conor McGregor the Fighter hasn't fought at all since 2021, during which he was TKOed twice in a row by Dustin Poirier. The last time we saw Conor McGregor the Fighter he was sitting on the cage with one functional leg screaming incoherently at the man who had just destroyed his career about how he was the real winner because secretly he knew that man's wife wanted to fuck him.
Conor McGregor the Fighter spent his entire career mocking fighters who didn't want to fight hurt. Conor McGregor the Fighter pulled out of this fight because he has a broken pinky toe and doesn't think fighters should be compelled to fight injured.
Alex Pereira, who is main-eventing this card with just two weeks to prepare, has yet to heal the two broken toes he was already coping with during his last title fight just two months ago.
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.
And I don't have a lot to say about the new main event, because we already saw this goddamn fight.
Alex Pereira and Jiří Procházka already fought. We just did this. It wasn't even a year ago, it was seven and a half months. They've had exactly enough time to have one fight since then, and both of those fights were on the same night at UFC 300 back on April 13. Procházka fought Aleksandar Rakić, himself coming back from a bad injury and a two-year layoff, and Rakić kicked the shit out of him for a round and a half before Jiří abruptly knocked him out anyway, because that is what Jiří does. Pereira fought former champion Jamahal Hill, got punted in the junk, asked the referee politely to refrain from pausing the fight and effortlessly destroyed Hill seconds later.
That's it. That's the story. There is no more to tell. This fight isn't happening because Jiří Procházka has warred his way back to contendership, or Alex Pereira has taken umbrage to his presence and incurred a marketing-friendly grudge, or because something was left undecided in their first match.
They fought. Alex won. They're doing it again because they were already scheduled to do it at UFC 305 in August. They're doing it again because the UFC thinks Jiří Procházka is a profitable fighter. They're doing it again because the next top contender is Magomed Ankalaev and the UFC is inexplicably averse to giving him a title shot.
They're doing it again because Conor McGregor's toe hurts. This championship fight hadn't even been announced yet and it now exists as a short-notice afterthought, because, comparatively, that is how important it has become.
Neither man has shown any sign of changing remarkably in the last seven and a half months. I said Jiří could beat Alex by putting pressure on him and smothering him rather than fighting recklessly, but that Jiří is incapable of not fighting recklessly and it would get him countered and knocked out. He proceeded to sting Pereira, rush in for the wild-eyed kill and got countered and knocked out.
Some people think the stoppage was early. I am not one of them, but I'm pretty sure we'll get a better one this time. ALEX PEREIRA BY TKO. Again.
CO-MAIN EVENT: THE PACE OF THINGS TO COME
FEATHERWEIGHT: Brian Ortega (16-3 (1), #3) vs Diego Lopes (24-6, #14)
This fight should be fantastic, but it represents entirely different kinds of futility.
One of them is a further reflection on a thing I said last week:
I dwell on this because I spent the last couple years preemptively angry about the future of the UFC, where contendership has become entirely divorced from climbing the ladder and is now simply about when management-favored fighters get shots at the top, and, well, we're here. We were starting to get here in 2022 when Sean O'Malley got a title eliminator without touching the entirety of the top ten. We were pretty close to here in 2023 when Sean Strickland got a title shot thanks to his victory over unranked, 1-0 Abus Magomedov. We were right at the precipice of here at the end of the year when Colby Covington got a title fight for doing absolutely nothing.
And now we've got a main event fight with top contendership implications between one of the most decorated Middleweights in UFC history and a guy who was going to fight the debuting Antonio Trócoli in the Apex a week ago.
iego Lopes was brought into the UFC as a last-minute replacement for Bryce Mitchell last year, and he took on the Herculean task of meeting the undefeated and then-#10-ranked Movsar Evloev in his debut. He lost, but he put up a fantastic fight and gained a lot of fans in the process. His combination of incredibly active defensive grappling and aggressive boxing were remarkably easy to root for, and the UFC knew he had enough promise to invest in.
Over the last year he's had a regular schedule of fights that were both challenging and opportune. Gavin Tucker, Pat Sabatini, Sodiq Yusuff--all of them are accomplished, talented fighters, and all of them were struggling with recent losses, two of them in their last fights. But Lopes stopped all of them in a minute and a half apiece, and that's too impressive not to rank him.
Which is why the UFC is giving him a chance to leapfrog the entire division.
Brian Ortega was that heavily-pushed fighter, once upon a time. He's a submission ace with some of the most aggressive grappling in the entire sport, a chin that's damn near impossible to crack, and so much confidence in his ground game that he's willing to swing for the fences because he has no reason to fear the consequences. He drove himself to title shots at the two best Featherweights of his generation, and both times he put them in tremendous danger but just couldn't keep from being overwhelmed by their gameplans.
Losing two title shots is hard to come back from. Losing a top contendership fight with Yair Rodríguez when your shoulder separates in mid-grapple is even worse. But after going 1 for his last 4, after dealing with naysayers like me who worried about just how much mileage his multiple beatings had given him, Brian Ortega came back this past February, got his rematch with Yair and dominated him like he said he would the first time. He choked out the former interim champion and #3 man in the division, and that put him right back in title contention.
And he's risking it against a man all the way down at the periphery of the rankings because he doesn't actually want it.
While doing media interviews last week, Ortega spoke with MMAJunkie and was very candid about his reasoning for accepting the position-endangering, short-notice bout: He's leaving Featherweight. He had already begun preparing for his Lightweight debut at UFC 306 in September, and whether he wins or loses this fight, he's still moving up to 155 pounds afterward because he doesn't want to wait, optimistically, a year and a half while Max Holloway and Alexander Volkanovski get their inevitable title shots first. He wants to move up to better things, and if that happens to mean cutting less weight, all the better.
This is a great fight between two exceptional fighters with well-matched skillsets. It's also the matchmaking equivalent of Sam Neill's hysterical breakdown at the end of In the Mouth of Madness. Brian Ortega is putting his ranking at risk, but it doesn't matter because he was giving it up anyway. Diego Lopes, a very good fighter who was gaining great, organic momentum, is getting the chance to ignore the entire Featherweight rankings and wind up somehow ahead of the man who already beat him.
And the best-case scenario here is Lopes wins, becomes a hot new top contender at Featherweight, and then, just as Ortega predicted, he spends the next year and a half of his life either fighting down in the rankings--like, say, an Evloev rematch--or twiddling his thumbs and watching his momentum slip away while the genuinely necessary championship fights between the titans of the division take place.
And all of this was put together in two weeks because Conor McGregor's toe hurt.
BRIAN ORTEGA BY SUBMISSION. I'm rooting for worst-case scenarios this week.
MAIN CARD: THE FIGHT OF THESEUS
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Anthony Smith (37-19, #10) vs Roman Dolidze (12-3, #10 at Middleweight)
Sometimes a fight gets switched around so many times it becomes outright unrecognizable. Two months ago this was #3 Jamahal Hill's comeback fight after getting flattened by Alex Pereira, and he was going to face a fellow big puncher in the #8 Light Heavyweight, Khalil Rountree Jr. One month ago Khalil popped for steroids, so he was removed and replaced with the fast-rising #11 Carlos Ulberg. Two weeks ago Jamahal Hill announced he'd suffered a knee injury, so he was replaced by good ol' #10, Anthony Smith. One week ago Carlos Ulberg pulled out of the fight for undisclosed reasons, and he was replaced by Roman Dolidze, who hasn't fought at Light Heavyweight since 2020.
We started with a top five contendership matchup between high-powered knockout artists and we ended with cross-class bout between dueling last-minute replacements with one week to prepare.
Given how weird their career positions currently are, honestly, it kinda works. Anthony Smith is solidly mired in the void. Five years ago he was a dark horse of a top contender fighting Jon Jones for the Light Heavyweight Championship of the World, but in those five years he's been soundly and sometimes grotesquely destroyed by every hot prospect he's met. He became the you-must-be-this-tall-to-ride measuring stick by which contenders were judged, and every time he bat a Ryan Spann or Jimmy Crute it only set up another chance to get dominated by Johnny Walker or have his teeth literally punched out by Glover Teixeira. Many--including me!--had already written epitaphs for his career in 2024, but he earned himself another chance by proving he was still capable of disposing of hype jobs by making Vitor Petrino look absolutely silly just a month and a half ago at UFC 301.
Roman Dolidze is unfortunately stuck in that same silly zone. At the start of 2023 Dolidze was fresh off destroying Jack Hermansson with an incredibly cool, half-calf-slicer half-STF half-punching-the-shit-out-of-you finish, giving him not just an absolute statement of a victory over one of Middleweight's toughest tests but a four-fight winning streak in a division constantly struggling for momentum. His matchup with Marvin Vettori seemed poised to crown a new top contender, and Dolidze put up such a great fight that the media was split right down the middle, but on the only scorecards that matter Dolidze didn't get a single nod. He tried to right the ship against Nassourdine Imavov this past February but instead took the worst beating of his career, losing a decision so lopsided that Imavov being one of the rare fighters who actually got docked a point for cheating didn't change the outcome.
So the #10 Light Heavyweight fights the #10 Middleweight, and both of them are scrappy, canny grapplers with a tendency to brawl more than they should, and both are stuck outside of contendership without a really solid argument to push them forward, and both are rolling into this with no preparation whatsoever. I'm gonna say ROMAN DOLIDZE BY SUBMISSION but I need to emphasize that there is no technical aspect to this call whatsoever, and given the chaotic nature of how this came together, I am simply rooting for the funniest possible thing to happen.
WOMEN'S BANTAMWEIGHT: Mayra Bueno Silva (10-3-1 (1), #3) vs Macy Chiasson (9-3, #7)
The entirety of Women's Bantamweight is in a pit right now and I'm not sure there's any realistic way for it to recover. The UFC's inability to create new stars at the weight class left it dead in the water when Amanda Nunes retired, and Mayra Bueno Silva was the closest heir apparent. It seemed like a solid bet, too: Mayra was tearing off limbs and managed to choke Holly Holm out in five and a half minutes, and even though the fight got overturned due to an issue with Mayra taking ADHD meds they didn't strip her contendership because Mayra was the UFC's only hope for keeping its title off Raquel Pennington, whom they had desperately tried to derail for years. But Pennington won, and Mayra is now in the unfortunate position of being a top contender who's already lost to the champ in a division devoid of motion.
That lack of motion is why Macy Chiasson is here. Macy has not made a home out of any single weight class in the UFC. She joined the company by winning the Featherweight tournament on The Ultimate Fighter 28 (jesus christ), which she celebrated by immediately dropping down to Bantamweight. Three wins and four fights later, she went right back up to Featherweight, somehow missed the 145-pound limit, and lost. Two fights after that she tried to drop back to Bantamweight, couldn't make it, and settled for a 140-pound catchweight, at which she was knocked out. After a year and a half of absolutely nothing, Macy once again fought at Bantamweight this past March--because Women's Featherweight no longer exists in the UFC because we hate fun--and finally won a single fight against the 1-for-her-last-4 Pannie Kianzad.
So one of these women legally hasn't won a fight since February of last year, and the other has only competed at Bantamweight once in the last three years, and they are fighting for top contendership because Bantamweight has literally nothing else save the UFC's hope that Kayla Harrison will save them all. MAYRA BUENO SILVA BY SUBMISSION.
WELTERWEIGHT: Ian Machado Garry (14-0, #7) vs Michael Page (22-2, #14)
Man, this is a weird, weird fight to make. Ian Machado Garry has been one of the company's most-hyped, most-marketed prospects since his debut three years ago, to the point of trying to book him right into the top ten rather than fucking around with Daniel Rodriguez and Neil Magny until injuries forced their hand, and through a combination of solid matchmaking and Garry being really good at lamping people, they did the thing! Garry is in the top ten, and he's credibly in the top ten, and just one fight away from a championship match. But, uh, they're not doing that. Garry campaigned for a fight with Colby Covington, but somehow, shockingly, Colby wasn't interested, and Kamaru Usman doesn't know why he's not getting booked, and Shavkat Rakhmonov is missing in action, and Jack Della Maddalena is hurt, and Gilbert Burns is fighting Sean Brady instead.
So it's Michael Page. Michael "Venom" Page, who spent years building his legacy as a hot prospect by fighting incredibly favorable matchups, sometimes against people who spent their careers at a lower weight class altogether, and when Bellator finally tried to cash in on their years of effort and thrust Page into the top of their Welterweight division he was soundly rejected. Douglas Lima knocked him out, and then Page won a rematch thanks to a questionable split decision, and then Logan Storley outwrestled him so resoundingly that the normally placid Scott Coker cut an angry Dana White promo about wrestling being boring and stupid, and when Page tried to get his mojo back by going over to bareknuckle boxing for a holiday he got beaten, in a boxing match, by Mike fucking Perry. And none of this mattered, because this year he finally made his UFC debut and got a decision over Kevin Holland so he's a top fifteen Welterweight whether we like it or not.
The UFC has spent a lot of time talking this up as a big, stellar matchup between the two most interesting, versatile strikers in the Welterweight division, and at some level that's true, but boy, there's a really, really good chance this fight is going to kind of suck. Garry is very good at using his range to frustrate his opponents with low-output offense, and Page's most common offensive tactic is spending ninety seconds making faces and waving his hands to set up a single lunging punch or kick, and I cannot escape the likelihood that this fight could easily break feint:strike ratio records. It'll be fascinating, but it might not be good, and I'm gonna say IAN MACHADO GARRY BY DECISION feels more likely once the judges decide who wins a round where nobody lands a punch.
PRELIMS: THE GNAWING SENSE OF FAMILIARITY
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Joe Pyfer (12-3) vs Marc-André Barriault (16-7 (1))
Joe "Bodybagz" Pyfer was one of the UFC's favorite Contender Series prospects and an early portent of the series-to-contender pipeline to come, as he was very public about turning down offers of ranked fights from the UFC right after his debut. He said he wanted more time to develop before challenging the best of the best, which was about half true and half a much nicer way of saying he was waiting to run out the clock on his minimum-wage Contender Series contract before he took a step up. It wound up being a wise choice, as this past February saw his first crack at the rankings in a matchup with Jack Hermansson, and as he has done regularly for most of the last decade Hermansson outclassed another hot prospect and sent Pyfer to the back of the line, which is where Marc-André Barriault happens to live. Barriault has spent a five-year UFC tenure perpetually stuck in the periphery of the division. His power-punching and his top-game grappling are too good to see him knocked out of the company, but as much as he may dispose of the Eryk Anders of the world, he gets soundly rejected every time he tries to break the ceiling. His third attempt at pushing into numerical territory was turned away this past January by Chris Curtis, although he did scrape close to a split decision.
That said, this doesn't feel like a good matchup for Barriault. He's a wrestleboxer with solid chokes fighting a wrestleboxer with solid chokes, except Pyfer's just a bit bigger, just a bit stronger, and hits just a bit harder and straighter. JOE PYFER BY TKO.
FEATHERWEIGHT: Cub Swanson (29-13) vs Andre Fili (23-11 (1))
I am by no means not willing to call myself a quality fight analyst, but I will cop to being a combat sports scholar. I have spent too many years of my life on this shit not to accept it. I follow the oral history of mixed martial arts. I can name every UFC champion in order off the top of my head. I remember Philip Miller.
I say this so it is clear in its entirety that if you had asked me if Cub Swanson and Andre Fili have fought before, I would have sworn by it. I would have bet my life on it, and I would now be dead and writing these previews from my personal limbo. These two have been around doing their thing for so long that my brain simply took it as an obvious fact of life that, like journalists getting fired and Japanese combat sports organization losing TV deals over Yakuza drama, it was a natural part of the tapestry of our great, fake sport. This fight could have happened at any point in the past fifteen years of our lives, and somehow, it is only now, at the end of all things, that we get to see it.
CUB SWANSON BY DECISION, and you're obligated to listen to 2011 Grammy Record of the Year Winner Lady Antebellum and think about Obama's first term while it's happening.
FEATHERWEIGHT: Charles Jourdain (15-7-1) vs Jean Silva (12-2)
I was a fan of Charles Jourdain's for quite awhile. He fought a fun style, he threw his whole ass into his fights in ways other fighters refused to, and by the admittedly rock-bottom standards of professional fightsports he was less of a jerk than most of his peers. When he made it into a high-profile fight with Sean Woodson this past January, I was glad. And then he lost a split decision and took to social media to complain about how the judges decided against him because they were clearly trans liberals who hated real men like him and Sean Strickland, and I discovered he had at some point made the switch over to the angry masculinist Andrew-Tate-was-framed grift circuit that's so popular in the sport right now, and I didn't see it happen because even as someone who pays attention by god I cannot follow every fighter's Twitter account, and if I were to pick a fighter I suspected would be next to fall into the right-wing anti-trans bigotry hole, it wouldn't be the dude from fucking Montreal. The joke is on Jourdain, because he has fallen so very far down the ladder after his loss that now, in his fourteenth UFC fight, he is facing the 1-0 Jean Silva. And that one win came against Westin Wilson, whose primary strategy in their fight was to bend over at the waist and try his best not to expire. Silva won a Contender Series fight last September, like all good Contender Series winners he was one fight removed from a Brazilian record-padding association with a silly name (for the record, this one was Spartacus MMA) that matched promising young fighters up with jobbers, and as is now standard issue in our sport, he's getting his big near-ranking veterancy fight already despite his UFC career being five minutes long.
Here's the thing, though, and I'm going to try not to go too great into detail on this because I don't want to lose everyone with my deep analysis of the martial techniques we're about to see: Charles Jourdain can eat shit. JEAN SILVA BY TKO.
BANTAMWEIGHT: Payton Talbott (8-0) vs Yanis Ghemmouri (12-2)
Payton Talbott was one of the UFC's favorite Contender Series winners from 2023, and normally that's a statement of subjective marketing analysis, but for once, we get to cheat. There's this shorthand trick to figuring out who the UFC favors in a matchup, and it comes from examining momentum. Payton Talbott is on his third fight in the UFC. His first opponent, Nick Aguirre, was coming off of a loss. His second opponent, Cameron Saaiman, was coming off of a loss. If you have guessed that Yanis Ghemmouri is coming off of a loss, congratulations on passing the marketing pattern recognition test. When this comes up people tend to defend it under the logic that it's sensible matchmaking when people as inexperienced as the 6-0 Talbott are already fighting in the UFC, but the thing is, that's examining the problem in a vacuum as opposed to seeing it as one the UFC is itself making. Ghemmouri just fought a national champion in William Gomis, and now he's 0-1 and fighting a guy marketing has already made clear is A Guy in his second fight, because those are the kinds of fighters you need to have on hand when a big part of your business plan centers around outfitting the Paytons Talbott of the future.
PAYTON TALBOTT BY SUBMISSION, because that plan is probably still going to work given Payton's speed and tenacity compared to Ghemmouri's, but boy, the sentence makes me feel tired.
EARLY PRELIMS: THE THING I ALWAYS COMPLAIN ABOUT
WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT: Michelle Waterson-Gomez (18-12, #14) vs Gillian Robertson (13-8, #15)
I'm so theoretically excited for this, and I know that's probably a mistake. Michelle Waterson-Gomez and Gillian Robertson are, respectfully, both extremely unsuccessful strikers but extremely fun grapplers. Historically-speaking, this usually results in endless stalemate fights where grapplers who don't want to give the other fighter an advantageous position resort to long-distance kickboxing and fail to land anything significant for a full fifteen minutes of everyone's life. But every once in awhile, when the planets align and the stars are out, we get a beautiful grappling match between high-level stylists and by god I want this to be one of those, because I'll be honest, I don't know how much longer Michelle has in the sport. She's 1 for her last 7, man, and it's one thing when she's losing split decisions she probably should have won, but it's another when she's regularly getting finished.
I wish Atomweight were more of a thing. I wish she had the chance to participate in her best weight class at the international level. But we're here, it's 2024 and I've enjoyed her career even for its misfortune. I still think GILLIAN ROBERTSON BY DECISION is likely, unfortunately.
HEAVYWEIGHT: Andrei Arlovski (34-23 (2)) vs Martin Buday (13-2)
For like the third or fourth time in his 20+ year career, inexplicably, inadvisably, Andrei Arlovski is on the comeback trail.
That was my fourteenth write-up, just four months into my time doing this silly thing, and Andrei Arlovski was co-main eventing at the bright young competitive age of 43. He ended that night on a four-fight winning streak, and every one of the men he beat is no longer in the UFC, and he didn't even really beat one of them. His victory that night over Jake Collier was one of the worst judging decisions of the year, and were it not for that, he would, in 2024, be on a four-fight losing streak. And, man, it's okay to stop. It's okay to stop! It is okay to not get bludgeoned by guys named Salsa Boy as you approach middle age. Martin Buday isn't even a man, he's the embodiment of the concept of time. His awkward large-boy wrestling is not a martial technique, but simply the face, body and big bear hands of inevitability.
MARTIN BUDAY BY SUBMISSION. Please make another Universal Soldier movie so Andrei has something else to do.
FLYWEIGHT: Carlos Hernandez (9-3) vs Rei Tsuruya (9-0)
Sometimes the world just makes a punchline of you. Carlos Hernandez had a little bit of hype coming off his Contender Series win in 2021, but two fights into his UFC time he got destroyed by a much hotter prospect in Allan Nascimento. He scored another win--a weird one involving a headbutt, but who's counting--and got himself back in the cage just in time to get flattened by a much hotter prospect in Tatsuro Taira. Hernandez was supposed to meet Cody Durden here, but Durden got rebooked for another fight next month, and in his place, the UFC picked the only other Japanese Flyweight in the entire company. Imagine that the UFC sacrificed you to their big Japanese hope, the only one they've had for years, and when you come back to the Octagon you get told, hey, we hired another one and now you've gotta go get killed by him too. Rei Tsuruya won this year's Bantamweight Road to UFC tournament, and we want him to get a nice win on his way in, so, uh, do the thing you did last time again.
Soon Kai Asakura will make his UFC debut, and he's going to be a Flyweight, too, and somehow the UFC will have him land exactly on Carlos for his big debut. REI TSURUYA BY TKO.
BANTAMWEIGHT: Ricky Simón (20-5) vs Vinicius Oliveira (20-3)
Three fights ago, Ricky Simón was a barely-ranked fighter down in the prelims. Two fights ago, Ricky Simón was a top ten fighter in a UFC main event. One fight ago, Ricky Simón was just under the co-main and barely hanging onto his number. Today, Ricky Simón is curtain-jerking the early prelims against a 2023 Contender Series winner with one fight in the UFC. This sport has always moved fast, but this is some Order 66 shit, man. Ricky's energy and pressure are being matched against Vinicius "Lok Dog" Oliveira, who we saw for the first time this past March as he executed poor flew-in-from-Sweden-on-one-week's-notice Bernardo Sopaj in three rounds.
But Sopaj was giving him some real trouble before he gassed, for some fairly obvious reasons, and given Oliveira's struggles with pressure, I'm still favoring the UFC veteran here. RICKY SIMÓN BY DECISION.