CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 109: BEGRUDGING SUCCESS

UFC 304: Edwards vs Muhammad 2

SATURDAY, JULY 27 FROM THE CO-OP LIVE IN MANCHESTER
EARLY PRELIMS 3 PM PDT / 6 PM EDT | PRELIMS 5 PM / 8 PM | MAIN CARD 7 PM / 10 PM

Ordinarily I only make a gag poster if the UFC cancels a main event, but in this case I just couldn't abide the real poster. Look it up, it's terrible.

I have spent the last two and a half years deep in research on the influences of the occult on mixed martial arts. The persistent returns to the Apex are hated by fighters, advertisers and fans alike, so they had to have a point.

I have discovered it, and it is this. Every Natan Levy and Ricky Glenn who gets ground to death in the gnashing teeth of the dark is a sacrifice; a transfer of flesh to resource, a piece of a soul punched out and fed to the eldritch monster that is the United Kingdom to power the annual UK supercards in the hopes that one day the great gumball machine in the sky will spit out another Conor McGregor and the UFC can turn their permanent money printer back on and never have to think about anything again, rather than struggling to make do with Paddy Pimbletts and Sean O'Malleyii.

They have charged the infernal feeding tubes and it is once again time to flood the fighter-slaw into the gaping mouths of English Nyarlathotep.

Completely unrelatedly, I went to the ER for what wound up being kidney stones today (as of this writing, we call it Sunday), and boy, as it turns out, oxycodone sure is a thing.

all the stars are here

MAIN EVENT: LONG BELATED
WELTERWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP: Leon Edwards (22-3 (1), Champion) vs Belal Muhammad (23-3 (1), #2)

It's such a weird feeling to finally write about this fight.

There has been such a concerted effort for so long to keep this fight from happening. There's been a concerted effort to keep top contender fights from happening at the Welterweight division for years, to be honest. Kamaru Usman is rightfully considered one of the best Welterweights in the history of the sport not just for his very obvious skills but for tying Matt Hughes and accruing the second-most defenses of the UFC's championship, but his place in the historical record is marred by the matchmaking the UFC surrounded him with. Hughes took on a who's-who of worldwide talents in the early years of the division and Georges St-Pierre would nearly double his defenses and beat damn near every feasible contender on the planet during his time on top, but Usman spent four of his five defenses on the same two people in Jorge Masvidal and Colby Covington.

All the while Leon Edwards was there, a Welterweight climbing the ladder and getting stuck on its rungs, continually told that it wasn't enough to win six, seven, eight fights in a row, it wasn't enough to beat top contenders, it wasn't enough to be a top fighter from Britain while the UFC was constantly desperate for UK stars. There was simply too much money to be made giving Jorge back-to-back title shots or trying to get Colby back into the spotlight. The UFC wanted Leon to fight Tyron Woodley. The UFC wanted Leon to fight Khamzat Chimaev on three separate occasions. The UFC wanted Leon to fight Colby, and Colby was the one who refused. After promoting Leon Edwards vs Nate fucking Diaz as a title eliminator, the UFC went back on its word and told Leon he had to fight Jorge Masvidal while the actual title shot went to, unsurprisingly, Colby Covington.

And when Leon finally did get his shot, it was coincidentally after booking plans had to change thanks to Jorge suckerpunching Colby in real life and both of them becoming either medically or legally unavailable.

After six straight years of winning--with one asterisk which will, unsurprisingly, come up again shortly--Leon Edwards, the undisputed #1 contender, got his shot at Kamaru Usman, the undisputed champion, and knocked him out in the fifth round. An immediate rematch was academic, but Edwards beat him again and cemented his status as the top Welterweight on the planet. New champion, new era, new chance to do everything right.

So the UFC immediately booked him against Colby Covington. Which was especially funny, because by that point, there was a new Leon Edwards, and it was Belal Muhammad.

By the time Leon finally won the belt, Belal was also on an eight-fight undefeated streak. He'd also taken out multiple contenders, he'd also forced his way into the rankings despite being poorly booked, and he'd also been given the it-doesn't-matter runaround. He hadn't beaten top contenders, so he dominated Stephen Thompson and Vicente Luque, after which he found himself booked to fight down in the rankings rather than up. He was too boring to invest in, so when his top 5 position was put up against the undefeated Sean Brady, he made a point out of beating him senseless and stopping him in two rounds. He was finally promised a title eliminator, and all he had to do was fight fellow top contender Gilbert Burns with just under three weeks to prepare while fighting with one functioning ankle.

And he did it!

And then Leon vs Colby happened anyway.

The match was almost universally panned as a ridiculous example of corporate favoritism given Belal's clear status as the top contender, an opinion shared by one Leon Edwards, who spent months excoriating the company over the choice and steadfastly refusing the matchup on grounds that it was "Dana White privilege" and Colby needed to earn his spot the same way he and Belal had. He was correct, of course, but it was also irrelevant. The match happened despite all reason, Colby looked completely lost against Leon, and one unanimous 49-46 decision later the travesty was over and we could finally get back to the Leon vs Belal fight.

Right?

Of course not! Of fucking course not. The UFC tried as hard as possible to book any fight but this fight. They tried Leon vs Khamzat Chimaev again, they tried Leon vs Shavkat Rakhmonov, they went cross-class and tried to book Leon against Lightweight champion Islam Makhachev. There were even discussions about Leon vs Middleweight champion Dricus du Plessis. Leon Edwards asked them to book the Belal Muhammad fight and they declined because he just wasn't a big enough name for UFC 300.

As a reminder: The main event of UFC 300 had Jamahal Hill in it.

But we got here. It took trying every single thing other than this to get here, but by god, we got here. Which is where we hit that aforementioned asterisk: We were already here once and it went very poorly.

In 2021 the UFC's third straight attempt to book Edwards vs Chimaev went up in flames and they responded by throwing Belal Muhammad in. A fight between the two future best in the division happened with less than a month for Belal to prepare. It went pretty fucking poorly for him. There was some trading back and forth early in the first round, but a pair of high kicks wobbled Belal and left him in survival mode, eating punches and gritting his way through near-knockout danger on multiple occasions. But he made it to the horn and came out for the second round ready to get revenge.

And then the fight ended in a No Contest eighteen seconds into round two after Leon jammed a finger so deeply into Belal's eye it left him temporarily blind.

It's been three and a half years and both men are still pissed about it. Leon's angry the fight got fucked up and he holds it against Belal because fighters are bad at admitting fault for things. Belal's angry the chance to continue was taken away from him and so many people have written off his chances against Leon thanks to the first round.

That first round is awful hard to ignore, though. Belal has pointed out that he tends to start slow in first rounds and Leon tends to be at his best in first rounds, and this is extremely true, but it isn't actually a counter-argument to almost getting knocked out repeatedly in five minutes. Belal's ability to be gritty and rough and force opponents to worry too much about his wrestling to defend against his punches can't be understated, but it can be impeached by Leon making Kamaru Usman go 9 for 29 on takedown attempts across their two fights.

Leon already proved how much faster and stiffer a striker he is. The biggest surprise of his title reign hasn't been his ongoing supremacy as a kickboxer, but the way he's upped his grappling game to compete with the high-level wrestlers at the top of the division. When you look at Kamaru Usman making Khamzat Chimaev struggle to outgrapple him at an entirely different weight class, going back to that first title fight and watching Edwards suddenly trip Usman straight to mount and almost choke him out illustrates just how well his skillset has grown.

But it hasn't made him bulletproof. Usman still got him down in both fights. Leon may have dominated Colby, but Colby still took him down twice and won the last round of their fight in the process. Belal's skillset hasn't visibly changed all that much in the last few years, but his intensity has. He went toe-to-toe with Vicente Luque at the height of his power and won, he chased down an undefeated Sean Brady bursting with confidence and punched him out, he went five rounds with one of the best in the world in Gilbert Burns on short notice and never slowed down his gameplan.

That gameplan was, of course, 1-2s, body kicks and threatening wrestling, and that is, of course, why we had the 'Belal isn't getting the shot' conversation.

The virtues of being an exciting all-action fighter are and have always been obvious. Long-term fans of the sport will all recall Jon Fitch having to run up an eight-fight winning streak of wrestling-heavy performances before finally being granted his crack at the champion. Merab Dvalishvili is still dealing with it as we speak. Mixed martial arts has always been a sport desperately struggling against its own desire for spectacle, whether you're talking about World Champion Brock Lesnar or Fedor Emelianenko not wanting to fight Bob Sapp or Muhammad Ali taking permanent leg damage from Antonio Inoki's devastating buttscoot kicks or Jack Dempsey fighting professional wrestlers for beer money. The sport is ever-eager to deny that it is a sport, and it is only the occasional swings towards temporary desires for legitimacy that make it ever take itself more seriously.

But those gasps of legitimacy are what keep the sport alive. Attractions are transitory, structure is not, and only by pursuing both in concert do you find those sport-elevating presences like St-Pierre and Alexander Volkanovski and José Aldo and Amanda Nunes. "x fighter is boring" is the dumbest reason in the world to keep them out of contention and we will all be better off the day the ethos dies.

Being good for the sport does not, however, necessarily translate into victory. Leon's striking and counter-wrestling have looked better and Belal still got picked apart in the first round of their aborted fight. If Belal comes out looking for those 1-2s and body kicks again, he's going to get lit up. If he comes out looking for high-pressure wrestling and forces Leon to fight the fight Usman had him struggling with, he's got a chance. I can't really disagree with the odds having Leon as a solid favorite here. Intellectually, I agree. Leon Edwards is extremely likely to win this fight.

But I must obey the inscrutable exhortations of my soul.

BELAL MUHAMMAD BY DECISION.

CO-MAIN EVENT: REAL WORLD'S CHAMPION
INTERIM HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP: Tom Aspinall (14-3, Interim Champion) vs Curtis Blaydes (18-4 (1), #4)

There's only been one other time in almost twenty years that an interim title has been actively defended in the UFC's Heavyweight division. Back in 2008 the company had a big snag, as divisional champion and legitimate star Randy Couture tried to leave the UFC and wound up spending a year fighting the company in court. The UFC had Antônio Rodrigo Nogueira and Tim Sylvia fight for an interim championship, and by the time Randy Couture had ultimately failed to get what he wanted in court and decided to come back, they'd already started running The Ultimate Fighter 8 (jesus christ) and booked Nogueira against fellow star Frank Mir for a title defense.

It was a bit of a clusterfuck--any time you find yourself having to explain why a healthy, defending champion doesn't negate the need for an interim belt, you're already operating off your back foot--but it was an understandable one. Aside from the UFC not wanting to do a thing to let Randy out of his contract, the Heavyweight division was on fire. Randy's comeback had reignited fan interest that had waned in the wake of Tim Sylvia's reign. Brock Lesnar had instantaneously become the UFC's most popular Heavyweight of all time, and Frank Mir had made himself a major player by defeating him. The UFC had bought out Pride FC the previous year, meaning fighters like Nogueira, Mirko Cro Cop and Fabrício Werdum threatened the rankings. Hot prospects like Cain Velasquez, Junior dos Santos and Shane Carwin had just started to make waves.

There was a lot going on. Even if it wouldn't have happened without the shitty legal issues, there were enough exciting things going on in the division that the world was temporarily fine with two belts being simultaneously defended.

I went slightly harder than I intended to on the very last fight of last week's card, and about 80% of the way through writing it I realized it was because I was actually writing the introduction to this fight.

I want to really drill down, here, to emphasize the Sisyphean nightmare the up-and-coming Heavyweight ranks currently are. There are no fresh, rising Heavyweight contenders. None. Everyone in the top fifteen either already got their shots, already got multiple shots, or has never been anywhere remotely near one and looks unlikely to ever get there. The average ranked Heavyweight is 35, there is in fact only one ranked Heavyweight below 30, and it's Serghei Spivac, who's 29, already got the shit kicked out of him by both Tom Aspinall and Ciryl Gane, and is about to spin his wheels in a no-stakes rematch with Marcin Tybura, who is directly adjacent to him in the rankings. The Heavyweight champion Jon Jones is 1-0 in the division and has fought once in the last four years, and when he comes back he'll be defending against Stipe Miocic, who has also only fought once in the last four years, and the odds-on likelihood is both retiring afterward. Derrick Lewis is 39, has retired twice, and is still the division's most popular fighter. None of the UFC's Heavyweight bets have paid off. None of their prospects have flourished. There is no one waiting in the bullpen to save the division.

So when I joke about fights like this being the future of the UFC's Heavyweight division, I need you to understand that I am not, in fact, joking, I am whistling in a graveyard.

The division has an interim champion not because of legal disputes, but because the top champion wants to twiddle his thumbs and the UFC just plain doesn't care. The #2 contender Ciryl Gane just got booked into a rematch with the #3 Alexander Volkov, whom he already easily beat five fights ago. Sergei Pavlovich and Jailton Almeida, the closest things the division had to sweeping, rising stars, both got violently and easily ejected from contendership.

The best--the only--unequivocally successful prospect the UFC has cultivated at Heavyweight in years is Tom Aspinall. They've done an excellent job both protecting and building him into contendership and he's done an even better job supporting their attempts with his skills. In a division that someone still prides itself on one-dimensional excellence, Aspinall has excelled at everything. He's a killer striker with excellent range management, he's a powerful wrestler with a nigh-unstoppable charging takedown when he commits to it, and he's aggressive enough in the grappling to hand Volkov his first submission loss in twelve years. The short-notice interim championship match with Pavlovich was Aspinall's final exam, and he aced it by going toe-to-toe with the scariest puncher in the sport and knocking him out in sixty-nine seconds.

A funny thing happened after that: He asked the Heavyweight champion for a fight and the champion said no.

Jon Jones is unquestionably one of the greatest fighters of all time, but the greatness of a resume invites extra scrutiny, and there's a persistent scrutinization of his tendency to not take especially timely or dangerous fights. In some cases, this can be debatable; there's only so upset you can be about not rematching an Alexander Gustafsson. In others--say, becoming the presiding champion of the Heavyweight division, having an active interim champion who is unquestionably the top contender, and saying 'he doesn't deserve it, I'm going to fight the 42 year-old who hasn't won a fight in 4+ years' instead--it's outright ludicrous. But that is what Jon Jones has done, and that leaves Tom Aspinall dealing with the one spot of unfinished business he has left in the division.

I have been a Curtis Blaydes fan for a very long time. I love the wrestling acumen, I love the presistent pressure behind his takedowns, I love the ground-and-pound, I even love the leg kicks he does just to infuriate me intead of wrestling. I believed in him in 2016 when he was making his UFC debut against some unnkown guy named Francis Ngannou. I believed in him in 2018 when he used his elbow to open Alistair Overeem's face like a can of tomatoes. I believed in him in 2021 when he got his title eliminator against Derrick Lewis. I have always been a big proponent of his.

And I picked against him when he fought Tom Aspinall in 2022.

There's this fan conception that Curtis has a weak chin. I do not think this is at all true. I think what he has is a tendency to catch punches with his face, and when you happen to be sharing a moment in time with several of the hardest hitters in Heavyweight history, you're going to have the knockout losses to show for it. By the time Curtis fought Tom he'd already gotten shithoused by Francis Ngannou (twice!) and Derrick Lewis, and Aspinall had already showed off the ability to be quick, accurate and tow-truck powerful.

At the time, I said this:

Aspinall's speed and accuracy are solid standup advantages against Blaydes' power punching, and his clinch strikes in particular make prolonged grappling on the fence inadvisable.

The x-factor here is time. Tom Aspinall is very, very good, but he's also never had a professional fight reach a ninth minute. He's amazing at being the hammer; he's untested as the nail. If Blaydes can get him down, hold him there and wear on him, it's fully feasible by the third round Aspinall will be a dead fish and Blaydes will be able to do whatever he wants.

But I'm not convinced it'll get there. Tom Aspinall by TKO.

We famously did not get to find out. Like a lot of fighters, Tom Aspinall had been fighting and training with a preexisting injury to his MCL and meniscus. Fifteen seconds into the fight Aspinall completed the hat trick by tearing his ACL. He collapsed in a heap, his undefeated UFC run ended on an injury TKO, and Aspinall missed an entire year of his prime.

For both men, it's two fights later. Blaydes ate another knockout loss and derailed a prospect. Aspinall killed the man who killed Curtis and now he's the Heavyweight champion of the world in all but name. Nothing has really changed in the math of this fight, nothing has happened in either fighter's career to make me feel any differently about their respective chances. Aspinall still hasn't had a fight go long, Blaydes still wrestles well but struggles with power punchers, and Aspinall has proven just how thoroughly capable he is of boxing heads.

TOM ASPINALL BY TKO. What's left for him afterward, I don't know.

MAIN CARD: IT'S A DIFFERENT WORLD, CHARLIE BROWN
LIGHTWEIGHT: King Green (32-15-1 (1), #15) vs Paddy Pimblett (21-3, NR)

That is correct: Bobby "King" Green got tired of the quotation marks and decided to just legally change his name to King. He's King Green now. Never get between a fighter and their ability to be relentlessly weird. Green's had a profoundly rollercoastery year. Midway through 2023 he had been knocked out twice in a row and dropped a No Contest after hitting Jared Gordon with an E. Honda headbutt and people were writing his career obituary. In the chaos of the ensuing year, Green picked off Tony Ferguson's slowly decaying corpse, notched a truly shocking one-punch knockout over Grant Dawson to suddenly become a ranked fighter again, got steamrolled by Jalin Turner just two weeks later to drop back to the periphery of the division, and butchered poor Jim Miller on the prelims of UFC 300. The twin powers of defensive counterstriking and pervasive counter-wrestling continue to protect the man, but when you're facing a bigger gun like Turner, you're going to need more.

Paddy Pimblett's year was much simpler and much dumber, which is kind of incredible, given that it pivots on two of the same exact points. By now everyone should be able to recite this by heart, but for clarity's sake, Paddy Pimblett went from the UFC's most-hyped Conor-replacement Lightweight fighter to a really bad joke right at the end of 2022 when he fought Jared Gordon. He was outstruck, outgrappled and fairly thoroughly controlled to the point that 23 out of 24 media scores easily gave Gordon the fight, but, of course, none of the official judges did. Having won the fight but lost an awful lot of hype thanks to the consensus worst decision of 2020 Pimblett elected to take the rest of the year off, and in a great grasp at credibility, when he did finally return 371 days after the Gordon fight it was to do battle with Tony Ferguson, who by that point was riding a six-fight win streak and had last seen victory all the way back in 2019. To Paddy's credit even he acknowledged it was a stupid fight, but he still took it, won and celebrated, so that credit does not go very far at all.

I can't even pretend that this pick has anything to do with fight analysis. My decades-long fandom of King Green, quotations and otherwise, is long noted, and my distaste for Paddy Pimblett and the marketing engine around him is legion. I do think Paddy's sweeping hooks and too-loose standup make him liable to get picked off by Green's straight counters and I also think Green's tendency to walk himself back into the cage makes him susceptible to Paddy's lust for the clinch, but it would be dishonest to say any of that figures into any part of my picking. Nothing guides my hand but my craving for marketing to go up in flames, and this time around, those flames are tinged with the smoky flavor of British disappointment. KING GREEN BY DECISION.

MIDDLEWEIGHT: Christian Leroy Duncan (10-1) vs Gregory Rodrigues (15-5)

It's sink-or-swim time for Christian Leroy Duncan, which is funny, because it wasn't really supposed to be. CLD has been another recipient of the UFC's British scouting-and-protection program, a Cage Warriors champion who came to the UFC as an undefeated superprospect. To their credit, they tried to give him a solid start by booking him against the troubled but solid Duško Todorović and the new-but-promising Armen Petrosyan, but Duško's leg abruptly exploded two minutes into their fight and Petrosyan outworked CLD completely, at which point the company said fuck it and began booking Duncan exclusively against people with losing records. He's made the most of it, having gotten two solid stoppages in as many fights, and this was slated to be a similarly one-sided fight against Robert Bryczek, whose only UFC fight involved somehow losing to the remarkably unsuccessful Ihor Potieria. But Bryczek had to pull out, and there's only one man whose batteries were charged enough to step in to take his place.

That's right, baby: It's Robocop time again. Gregory Rodrigues and his too-tough-to-quit gimmick have both had their own ups and downs in the UFC--win a fight despite a major artery hanging out here, get knocked out by Brunno Ferreira there--but his implacable approach to fighting and his ability to put hands on everyone he fights regardless of their abilities remains outright inspirational, and it's earned him a solid following as one of the division's more fun fighters to watch. He's also coming off arguably the best moment of his UFC tenure thus far, having fought just this past February and done what multiple UFC champions were unable to do by knocking out Brad Tavares thanks to his endless, baby food-driven punching algorithms. Do any of these Robocop jokes actually land in 2024? Does Robocop's presence in modern pop culture extend past the 'Robocop shooting people in the dick' meme? Maybe it's just basic awareness of the name these days.

Anyway, GREGORY RODRIGUES BY TKO. This is the stiffest test of Duncan's career thus far, and I'd say he has a speed and conventional wrestling advantage against Rodrigues, but he's not tougher, he's not stronger, and he's not as good at dealing with bad positions. Duncan's a killer when he's on offense, but it's very, very hard to stay on offense against Gregory Rodrigues, and when the tables turn it's going to be trouble.

FEATHERWEIGHT: Arnold Allen (19-3, #6) vs Giga Chikadze (15-3, #10)

It's outright bizarre to talk about Arnold Allen being on a skid. It feels incorrect. The story of Allen's entire near-decade in the UFC has been one of slow, unstoppable ascension. Between his debut in 2015 and the very end of 2022 he ran up a ten-fight winning streak with the company, which is even more impressive when you consider it happened in the neverending shark tank of the Featherweight division and outright wild when you consider his victory list includes folks like Mads Burnell, Dan Hooker, Sodiq Yusuff and Calvin Kattar. It was an absolutely insane run, but, as all runs do, it ended. Allen got his shot at the top in 2023, but like every single Featherweight not named Volkanovski he found himself thoroughly worked by Max Holloway instead, and his attempted comeback against the UFC's new most-hated wrestler Movsar Evloev ended in an awful lot of takedowns and an awful lot of people who are still mad about the idea that wrestling counts. After twelve years of fighting, Arnold Allen is suddenly on an honest-to-god losing streak, and his hold on his ranking is slipping.

Giga Chikadze is trying to climb out of the other side of this cavern. Giga's rise up the UFC's rankings was much, much quicker, going from debuting prospect to thoroughly-hyped future title contender in just two years, but that happens when you both fight at a blistering three-to-four-fights-a-year pace and you are a marketing darling as a weird martial arts kickboxing machine who destroys people with liver kicks and surprisingly slick counterpunching. The support train behind him was so great that the UFC's other contendership darling Calvin Kattar was a +200 underdog against Giga in his coronation fight in early 2022, and despite having years of evidence of Kattar's talents, the world was shocked when he he completely shut Giga out of their contest by punching through his combinations, busting his eyes and throwing in just enough wrestling to keep him guessing. If that loss wasn't enough to kill his hype, going missing for more than a year and a half certainly was. Some if it was injuries, some of it was booking--Giga publicly expressed his frustration with the UFC's inability to find him a damn fight--but by the time he stepped back in the cage to defeat Alex Caceres it had been 588 days since the Kattar fight, and hell, by the time this event starts it'll have been 336 since that one. At one point he was the UFC's next title contender and now he's had one fight in more than two and a half years.

Unless Arnold Allen has been deeply shaken by his losses, this shouldn't do much for Giga either. Allen's just as solid a counterstriker as Kattar and secretly a better grappler, too. Giga does his best work against people who'll give him space to work his long, tricky kicks and combinations, and Allen is too smart to let him get away with it. ARNOLD ALLEN BY DECISION.

PRELIMS: FISH IN A BARREL
FEATHERWEIGHT: Nathaniel Wood (19-6) vs Daniel Pineda (28-15 (3))

There is so much circularly terrible luck surrounding this fight. Nathaniel Wood has been trying to get off the ground as a major UK prospect for six years now, but there is always someone or something there to get in his way. First it was John Dodson, then it was Casey Kenney, and finally it was by far his worst opponent: Bad mat placement. A high-profile UK vs UK matchup with Lerone Murphy got scratched in early 2023 after Wood tore his leg open on a gap between grappling mats in his gym. He eventually came back with a victory over a one-eyed Andre Fili, but his happy comeback was spoiled by Muhammad Naimov just three months later. Once again, Wood is coming off a loss, and one again, we haven't seen him in most of a year. Daniel Pineda, by contrast, is just perpetually awash in a sea of misfortune. He was a high-rolling member of the 2019 Professional Fighters League season, but after failing a steroid test he had all his fights changed to No Contests and was summarily fired. He popped up in the UFC less than a year later, but he was getting knocked out by Cub Swanson just one fight later. Six months after that, he contributed to the aforementioned Andre Fili's circular eyeball karma after Fili damn near poked his eye out. We wouldn't see Pineda again for more than a year and a half, at which point he scored a submission over Tucker "Nothing Good Rhymes With" Lutz and lost a decision to Alex Caceres, and hell, that was more than a year ago, at this point.

So both guys are coming off losses, neither has fought in nearly a year, one has more No Contests than victories in the past half-decade and this is your preliminary headliner. Sometimes it's hard to know what to do with the bounty we receive. NATHANIEL WOOD BY DECISION.

WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT: Molly McCann (14-6) vs Bruna Brasil (9-4-1)

Molly McCann has been through a very, very funny wringer. Towards the end of 2022 Molly was one of the UFC's breakout stars, a hard-hitting Women's Flyweight with the crucial combination of Paddy Pimblett-tied marketing and multiple incredibly cool spinning elbow knockouts. And then, after building her off extremely beatable fighters for an entire year, the UFC suddenly threw her to the wolves by letting Erin Blanchfield tear her in half down on the prelims. The rehabbing began as soon as the UFC went back to London: Gone were the serious opponents and in their stead was Julija Stoliarenko, who was 1 for her last 5 and had just been knocked out in her last fight. Easy pickings for the -210 favorite in McCann! Except she got armbarred in under two minutes. When last we saw Molly she was dropping down to the 115-pound division, and in recognition of her effort the UFC had her fighting Diana Belbiţă, who was 2 for her last 6, coming off a loss, and, as a bonus, had already lost to Molly in the UFC. Molly defeated her dinner plate with ease, but management is clearly not quite ready to ramp her up all the way again, because Bruna Brasil is just about as unsuccessful. After barely over a year in the company she's already potentially on her way out as a 1-2 fighter, with one loss coming through Denise Gomes simply walking her down and pounding her silly and the other by way of an exceedingly uneventful yet somehow still one-sided domination by Loma Lookboonmee, who despite being on a three-fight winning streak somehow hasn't been booked again yet and by god I will burn down this entire building.

Bruna's got some solid kicks and that's really the best thing going for her in this fight. Molly punches harder and wrestles better and there's very little reason to think this doesn't wind up being MOLLY MCCANN BY DECISION.

BANTAMWEIGHT: Caolán Loughran (9-1) vs Jake Hadley (10-3)

You might think from my previous writings that I don't like Caolán Loughran, but let me tell you: I appreciate him deeply now. Loughran came into the UFC as yet another massively-hyped undefeated Cage Warriors destroyer of people with terrible records, and he beat his chest and shouted his pride in his never-say-die stand-and-bang attitude and swore to continue smiting everyone he faced with his mighty fists and his chin in the air, and then Taylor Lapilus beat him in his debut fight and Loughran immediately said Fuck this, I'm a Wrestler Now. He wrestled Angel Pacheco all night in his second outing. He came out for a third round in which Pacheco's leg was visibly barely working, and instead of giving into the urge to return to his old ways, he said no, if anything, I am going to wrestle you more. That is the kind of sensibility the sport needs. Loughran was supposed to fight Ramon Taveras here, but in one of the seven thousand injury replacements of 2024, he's got Jake Hadley instead. Hadley is most famous for missing weight for his 2021 Contender Series fight only for Dana White to overrule the entire corporate assemblage and offer him a contract anyway because he's white and British he just knew with his attitude and his amazing wrestling and boxing he was a star in the making. So, of course, it is now three years later and Jake Hadley is 2-3 and on a two-fight losing skid that includes being completely outwrestled by Cody Durden and completely outboxed by Charles Johnson. Hell, Johnson made Hadley go 0 for 11 on takedowns, so really, he outwrestled the shit out of him, too.

All of that being said: I think Hadley's a solid underdog pick here. Recency bias has made Loughran a big favorite, but we're not that far removed from watching him get one-sidedly tuned up, or being unable to finish a one-legged man who's barely fought anyone with a winning record. Hadley's on a skid, but his bodywork is still devastating and his wrestling's still solid enough to deal with Caolán's Irish double-legs. JAKE HADLEY BY DECISION.

LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Modestas Bukauskas (15-6) vs Marcin Prachnio (17-7)

This is a battle of men who got beaten silly by Vitor Petrino. The world of Light Heavyweight has collapsed to so small a circle that we can now group everyone together based on who they mutually lost to and how embarrassing those respective losses happened to be. Modestas Bukauskas got released from the UFC after a 1-3 stint back in 2021, came back as a late replacement against Tyson Pedro and ruined the marketing plans by beating him in front of a deeply displeased hometown crowd, which remains one of my favorite memories of the last couple years. Bukauskas managed to string together a second win after similarly flummoxing the runner-up on The Ultimate Fighter 30 (jesus christ), Zac Pauga, but then it was Petrino's turn, and Bukauskas got flattened by a hook in six minutes. Marcin Prachnio is one of the precious few fighters the UFC ever poached from ONE Championship, and his time in the UFC has just been weird as shit. He got knocked out by Sam Alvey, Magomed Ankalaev and Mike Rodriguez, but then he somehow beat Khalil Rountree Jr. He almost got cut again after losing to Philipe Lins, but he was saved after William Knight turned in one of the most bafflingly inactive performances in the history of the sport, essentially standing against the fence for fifteen straight minutes while a visibly confused Prachnio alternated between hitting him and looking around as if to make sure what he was doing was not, somehow, a crime. He paid for it one fight later when he, too, got steamrolled by Vitor Petrino. On the plus side, he lasted to a third round! On the minus, he took the first submission loss of his career. Prachnio's got one more win to his credit since then thanks to the forever confusing Devin Clark, but I had nearly forgotten that fight happened, as, I imagine, did many.

Prachnio is the cleaner striker and his leg kicks are particularly nasty, but I simply am not done irrationally believing in Bukauskas and his ability to stifle people. MODESTAS BUKAUSKAS BY DECISION and don't you dare make me sad again.

EARLY PRELIMS: CONSPIRACY THEORIES
WELTERWEIGHT: Oban Elliott (10-2) vs Preston Parsons (11-4)

I am tentatively excited for this fight, which may well be a foolish choice given that the last time we saw Oban Elliott he managed to get an entire arena's worth of Anaheimians to boo him, but for one, I will always approve of people who are willing to wrestle even despite a crowd's roaring disapproval, and for two, as a born denizen of Northern California, it is my duty to appreciate Southern California's misery. Oban's a Welsh Chael Sonnen tribute act, and if you can't appreciate that sentence for just what it is, I say there is insufficient joy in your heart. Preston "Pressure" Parsons, or "Pressure" Preston Parsons, or the Preston Parsons Project, is a similarly traditional American wrestling stylist who will spam a half-dozen takedowns or more per fight before chucking a single haymaker, and the day I am unwilling to root for that, I am dead and in the ground. Before you say it: I know. I know! I know every time I talk about matchups between two wrestlers I discuss how it virtually always turns into a tentative kickboxing match between people afraid to test what could be their opponent's greatest strength. I acknowledge this, as I have always acknowledged it. But just this once, I am choosing to ignore it. I want to believe in mutual wrestling. I want to believe this fight will be like the original, pre-crisis version of the XFL, where possession was determined by two football players running at full speed and diving into each other in a human car crash that virtually always led to an injury.

Am I saying I want Oban Elliott or Preston Parsons to get injured? No. Am I saying I miss the XFL? Not even remotely. I am saying wrestling fucking rules, and I will root for anyone who still does it despite class traitor Daniel Cormier's hemming and hawing over it. PRESTON PARSONS BY DECISION.

FLYWEIGHT: Muhammad Mokaev (12-0 (1), #6) vs Manel Kape (19-6, #8)

Okay, something screwy is going on here. It's very common for the UFC to reconfigure their cards throughout fight week, much to my chagrin, but typically you can at least sensibly predict fight order. When I set the template for this card on Saturday the 20th, this fight was on the main card, as befitting a top ten Flyweight clash between two popular fighters. When I revisited it to begin writing after getting out of the ER the following evening, it had been demoted to headlining the televised prelims, which is sort of dopey, but hey, get people to watch the prelims, I get it. By the time I reached my writing day for the prelims, it wasn't even headlining the early prelims. Once again: This is a fight between Muhammad Mokaev, an undefeated superprospect the UFC could and arguably should have already slotted into a championship fight, and Manel Kape, a knockout artist on a four-fight winning streak who's been trying to get into contention for years. A number of folks have theorized that the UFC decided not to give Kape a spotlight given his avid use of homophobia and slurs, and my friends, I love you for your optimism, but I don't know what company you think you're watching. Others point to the way Kape rather infamously destroyed his last fight after missing weight and pulling out of its rescheduling, which was notable less for Kape's failure than for the schadenfreude of seeing it happen after months of Kape complaining about missing opponents being cowards with defective genetics, and wonder if the UFC thinks he's about to do it again and are just bracing for impact. Mokaev has been public about this being the last fight on his UFC contract, and while he would like to re-sign, he wants a better deal; it's feasible this is just the UFC trying to lower his profile.

Could be anything, could be nothing. Could be they know something we don't. If the fight does in fact happen, I'm still pulling for MUHAMMAD MOKAEV BY DECISION, but things feel particularly off, here.

WELTERWEIGHT: Sam Patterson (11-2-1) vs Kiefer Crosbie (10-4)

I say "I hate the marketing, not the fighters" an awful lot, and it's important to me to emphasize just how much I mean that. When Sam Patterson made his UFC debut in 2023 as yet another in the endless procession of massively-hyped UK fighters that came so thoroughly out of a printing press that his nickname was "The Future," I didn't dislike him, I disliked the way the company positioned and remarked on him as the guy you were obviously supposed to know would win, and that made it particularly gratifying when Yanal Ashmouz took him out in just barely over a minute. The UFC wanted to continue the pattern, too--they were ready to completely ignore his failed debut and throw him right back in the cage against the borderline-ranked Nasrat Haqparast. Patterson made the much wiser choice of pulling out of the fight and taking some time to retool his gameplan and his body, knocking off the ridiculous weight cut that let him fight at 155 pounds despite being six foot fucking three, and the Welterweight Sam Patterson who showed up this past January was smarter, better about his defense, and grappling-focused enough to choke out Yohan Lainesse in two minutes. And--smartest of all--instead of fighting Nasrat fucking Haqparast, he gets to deal with guys like Lainesse and, say, Kiefer Crosbie. What did I say about him last time, again?

But then I see that the fight that put Kiefer Crosbie on the map, yet another Irish hopeful of out John Kavanagh/Conor McGregor's SBG Ireland, was a mid-2022 bout with Brian Lo-A-Njoe. Which is a name I recognize not because of silly anglophile name humor, but because I've been seeing it for decades! Because Brian Lo-A-Njoe has been fighting since 1998, and is now damn near 50 years old and 6-13-3 and getting concussed by prospects who were watching cartoons when he was fighting in Japan.

Oh, right! That guy. SAM PATTERSON BY SUBMISSION.

HEAVYWEIGHT: Mick Parkin (9-0) vs Łukasz Brzeski (9-4-1 (1))

Can I just paste that "the Heavyweight division is a corpse" section again? Would that be too cheap? Would it be any cheaper than this goddamn fight? Mick Parkin should be a thing, man! In a UFC that is constantly desperate for undefeated fighters, Heavyweights and UK standouts, Mick Parkin is not only a three-in-one special, he's already on a three-fight winning streak! What does it say to you that an undefeated British Heavyweight who could tie Alexander Volkov for the longest active streak in the division is down here, two fights from the bottom? What does it say to you that he's fighting Łukasz Brzeski, who pissed hot for clomiphene on his Contender Series fight, got signed anyway, promptly lost three fights in a row and is only still with the company because he managed to beat Johnny Walker's kid brother Valter three and a half months ago in a coinflip decision?

Like, what's the big corporate hope, here? Parkin wins, maybe through a finish for once, and suddenly they go "by the by, here's our new star, the undefeated Heavyweight on a massive streak, ignore that you've never seen him on a main card because he Matters now" and then he fights Rodrigo fucking Nascimento and everyone goes home happy?

MICK PARKIN BY DECISION and then we brick Heavyweight up in the same sarcophagus they used to seal Chornobyl and leave it alone for twenty years in the hope that life finds a way.

WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT: Shauna Bannon (5-1) vs Alice Ardelean (9-5)

And then, we come to this. One year ago we assembled here to discuss the UFC debut of one Shauna Bannon, who by that point wasn't even a year and a half into her professional mixed martial arts career, as she faced our old friend from several paragraphs ago, Bruna Brasil. I didn't have a great deal of faith in Shauna, but I had even less in Bruna, who had looked, to be delicate, not quite ready for primetime in her own UFC debut just three months earlier, and given Shauna's performances in Invicta and Bruna taking a fight almost immediately after being knocked out, I thought Shauna would have the edge. She did not. She looked outclassed for 2/3 of the fight, and outside of a tiny rally late in the fight that at least had two judges giving her a single round, she got trounced. Shauna was supposed to meet up with Ravena "Kenoudy" Oliveira here, another fighter whose nickname alone gave me an existential crisis, but thanks to injuries we've got Alice Ardelean instead. I spend a lot of time talking about how difficult it becomes to scout certain parts of women's MMA past a certain point, but this presents us with a unique opportunity to illustrate said point. There's a pretty lively mixed martial arts scene in Romania, which makes sense: It's got a history with combat sports and a population of damn near twenty million. Tapology is the most exhaustive and well-kept database of fighter information on the internet, and one of the nice things it does is link fighters together by region. When you look at Alice Ardelean's Tapology profile, you see a funny thing on it:

Seven women. Across all tracked women's weight classes. If you look a little closer, three of the women on that list have only fought as amateurs and three other women have had exactly one professional fight each. Alice Ardelean is the only woman on that list with multiple professional fights, and she's only 9-5, and the combined record of the women she's beaten is 10-14. Her last three fights were, from past to most recent, against an 0-1 Englishwoman who is now 0-4, a 2-0 South African woman who appears to have left the sport for boxing, and an 0-3 woman from Honduras who is now 0-5. And as an 0-5 fighter? She's still ranked above 265 of the recorded female mixed martial artists in Europe.

Fighting is hard. Finding fighters is hard. Finding fighters who've only fought like this is a crapshoot. I have watched as much of Alice Ardelean's career as exists on publicly available video, and she looks exactly like every fighter who's fighting people who don't really know what they're doing, which is to say: Fine. SHAUNA BANNON BY DECISION.