SATURDAY, OCTOBER 26 FROM THE ETIHAD ARENA IN ABU DHABI
EARLY START TIME WARNING: PRELIMS 7 AM PDT / 10 AM EDT | MAIN CARD 11 AM / 2
I cannot stop thinking about the disparity between the top two fights on this card. Ilia Topuria vs Max Holloway is pivot-point-of-the-future material, a battle between one of the greatest to ever do it and one of the biggest phenoms in the sport, a war to be the absolute, undeniable best in the world! Robert Whittaker vs Khamzat Chimaev is the UFC's third or fifth or seventh attempt to get a guy to the belt despite having never fought a ranked Middleweight in his life.
What can you do. It's Abu Dhabi. Let's enjoy the really good fight and also Chris Barnett.
MAIN EVENT: LEGACY
FEATHERWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP: Ilia Topuria (15-0, Champion) vs Max Holloway (26-7, #2)
It's been a wild twelve months in the UFC.
There are eleven champions in this company--twelve, if you count Tom Aspinall, which you should since he's the real Heavyweight champ--and eight of those titles have changed hands in just the last year. Entire eras of the sport ended over just the last year. The UFC spent half a decade setting up The Suga Show and his reign lasted one fight. After an incredible run as the most-hyped fighter in the sport, the door finally closed on Israel Adesanya. The new, Shevchenkoless age of Women's Flyweight came to an ignominious end.
But none were as central to the fabric of the sport as Alexander Volkanovski's time as the best Featherweight on the planet.
Everyone in the sport--everyone actually paying attention, at least--knew Ilia Topuria was special. Undefeated fighters with great backgrounds in wrestling and grappling that they largely ignore so they can punch people in the face so hard they fold like deck chairs are pretty goddamn rare, and it did not take an enormously educated eye to know Topuria was going to Matter. But most folks didn't come around to thinking of him as a genuine future champion until he destroyed Bryce Mitchell at the end of 2022, and even then, it was laced with the uncertainty of if he could take that belt from Volkanovski, one of the greatest of all time, or if he'd have to wait until Volk was done with the division.
There was no waiting. They met this past February. The first round was fully competitive and went to Volkanovski on all three scorecards thanks to his jabs and his leg kicks and his ability to evade Topuria's biggest punches. The second round ended with Volkanovski face-down and limp on the mat because just one of those big punches got through.
Alexander Volkanovski ruled the Featherweight division for almost five straight years and Ilia Topuria claimed destiny in just eight and a half minutes. The torch was not passed, it was taken by force, and it illuminated a brand new future for an entire weight class. Every time a dominant champion falls, a legion of beaten contenders rises up in anticipation of a new bite at the apple.
But it's rare that the foremost among them is the last man to wear the crown.
The only thing keeping Max Holloway from being the greatest Featherweight of the modern era is Alexander Volkanovski. The only Featherweight to defeat Max Holloway in the last eleven years is Alexander Volkanovski. He not only beat every other person he faced in the division, he humiliated damn near all of them. In the past I've referenced the way fighters are defined by the coolest thing in their career, and all they can hope is it's a thing they did to someone else as opposed to something done to them. Max Holloway has somehow, inexplicably, been one-upping himself for a decade.
In 2014, he became the first--and, still, only--man to ever knock out Clay Collard. In 2016 he ordered Ricardo Lamas to engage him in a center-of-the-cage brawl with a single gesture, which he promptly won. In 2017 he knocked out José Aldo twice in six months, and one year later he beat Brian Ortega so badly that, in the middle of their fight, he told Ortega to stop so he could grab his hand and show him how to block the long rights Max had been drilling him with all night, and Ortega let him do it.
In 2021 he took on Calvin Kattar in a fight advertised as an attempt to determine the best boxer in the UFC, and he made his case not just by battering Kattar, but by slipping his punches and counterpunching him with one hand while not even looking at him because he was busy yelling at the commentary table.
You cannot do more to demonstrate the distance between yourself and your competition. Max Holloway wasn't just a star, he was a living legend of combat sports.
But he wasn't the best. Volkanovski was. Max lost his title to Alex and lost a subsequent rematch, and after beating Kattar and Yair Rodríguez he earned his third crack at the man. The result was the most one-sided loss of Max's entire career. Their first two fights had been legendarily close; the third was an uncontested, 50-45 shut-out.
No one was sure if Max was going to stay at Featherweight now that he was eliminated from title contention or make his way up to Lightweight, least of all Max himself. As it turned out, the answer was both. He stayed at 145 to beat yet another top contender in Arnold Allen and retire Chan Sung Jung, and this past April at UFC 300, in a thing a lot of people--including me--thought was a terrible decision that presaged his doom, he went up to 155 to fight Justin Gaethje, one of the roughest, scariest knockout artists in the entire sport.
And Max Holloway, a fighter made of legendary moments, notched yet another one by not just defeating one of the best Lightweights on the planet, but dismantling him. He went punch for punch with one of the biggest hitters in the division, beat him at his own game, and just as he'd done with Ricardo Lamas eight years prior Holloway invited Gaethje to duke it out in the center of the cage in the last ten seconds of the bout, and with just one of those seconds on the clock left before the fight ended, Gaethje was prone and limp on the canvas.
You could not script it. Max could have taken it in any direction he wanted. He could have staked his claim on a Lightweight title fight and tried to become a double champion. No one would have denied him.
But that's not what he wanted.
Ilia Topuria is the best Featherweight in the world. He took the one man in Max's weight class he just couldn't beat and flattened him with ease. He's the new king in what used to be Max's kingdom.
And Max wants his god damned crown back.
It's a great story. One of the best in the sport's history, to be honest. But legends have a way of sanding the rough edges off of their stories, and as legendary as Max's career has been, it's no different.
Max beat Aldo by third-round knockout twice: The first two rounds of both fights were competitive and largely scored for Aldo thanks to his hammering Holloway's legs and body. Max crushed Ortega: He also took a whole bunch of shots and was badly hurt in their penultimate round. Max humiliated Kattar: He also took 133 strikes in return, almost all of them to the face. Max put Justin Gaethje down: He also took the first knockdown of his career (for some reason unrecorded by the UFC) after eating a right hand to the temple.
Max Holloway is an incredible fighter, but part of what makes him incredible is his durability, and that's always going to be just as much of a strength as it is a liability. No one can take hundreds of hits to the head for their entire career, and Max is at 2000+ significant strikes absorbed during his time in the UFC. No one is immune to the ravages of time and trauma.
Having a style that's largely dependent on your capacity for absorbing damage is a terrible trait to have against Ilia Topuria.
Ilia destroys people when he hits them. He's been dropping fighters like string-cut marionettes for years, and disconcertingly, he doesn't seem to lose that power under duress. His biggest career scare came in his own ill-advised short-notice trip to Lightweight, and despite giving up more than half a foot to Jai Herbert and getting repeatedly stung in the first round, he came back and demolished him in the second. Despite getting wrestled by Bryce Mitchell, he concussed and ragdolled him with ease one round later. He battered Josh Emmett for five straight rounds and every punch was painful to watch.
And he got his nose jabbed open by the one man perpetually out of Max's reach and it didn't stop Ilia from turning his lights out.
That's the central theory of this fight; the big question that needs to be answered. We could get into the weeds on the power-wrestling Ilia too-rarely uses, or his powerful leg kicks and Max's irritating tendency to not check them, or Max's clinch offensive and how he could use it to stop Ilia's blitzes, or the power guillotines Max secretly has but almost never gets a chance to use because people don't shoot on him enough.
All of those things are true. But they're the rough edges we're sanding off to mythologize it the way it deserves to be mythologized. Max has never been a one-hit knockout fighter; he breaks people by attrition and drops them when they're too beaten to resist. Ilia has never been broken. He knows his power and he almost always finds his mark, and no one has been able to stop him.
In my head, Ilia's going to do it again. Max is amazing, but he's also eminently hittable. All it takes is one of those bombs across his temple and all those years of damage will come to a head right as maybe the most effective puncher he's ever fought is teeing off on him. In my head, Ilia is more than capable of chewing up Max's legs and far too powerful not to drop Max when he gets into those phone-booth combination exchanges that dominate his style.
In my head, Ilia is the face of the new era of Featherweight and we're going to be watching him on top for years to come.
But my head thought Max would struggle with Gaethje's leg kicks and Gaethje's power and Max proved just how much he has left in the tank by thrashing him instead. My head thought Max's time as a contender was done thanks to his losses to Volkanovski.
I do not want to experience Max Holloway's fights with my head. I want to experience them with my heart.
And my heart says MAX HOLLOWAY BY TKO.
CO-MAIN EVENT: DOOMED TO DO THIS FOREVER
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Robert Whittaker (26-7, #3) vs Khamzat Chimaev (13-0, #12)
I swear to Christ, they will never stop trying to do this. Khamzat Chimaev is somehow both one of the best prospects on the planet and an absolute flaming car wreck of Circumstances, and he can barely make it into the cage to fight in the first place, and for some reason, the UFC will not stop until he is a champion.
Robert Whittaker deserves better than this, but it's pointless to make that observation because Robert Whittaker has always deserved better from the sport. He was the top contender at Middleweight cleaning up all the other top contenders while Michael Bisping refused to fight him in favor of chasing vanity matches, he was a defining talent denied his rightful record as a defending champion because Yoel Romero couldn't make weight, and he was nearly the man who ended the Israel Adesanya hype train well before Alex Pereira did.
His longevity is genuinely exceptional. He's been around long enough to have proven his worth as a top contender across three separate generations of Middleweights, from the waning days of the Strikeforce elite to the modern age of your Marvins Vettori and Paulos Costae. He's one of the goddamn best to do it.
But he hasn't been the best for awhile. He came close to beating Adesanya on that second chance, but he still didn't. He came close to a third shot, but got flattened by Dricus du Plessis instead. In an ideal world, he would be fighting Sean Strickland to determine who gets a second crack at du Plessis.
But Strickland doesn't want to fight Robthinks Rob is beneath him, and the UFC's fine with that, because god dammit, they want Khamzat, no matter how clearly they shouldn't.
We've gathered here on multiple occasions to discuss the new paradigm of UFC matchmaking--their willingness to just sort of Do Whatever We Want has never been more visible or more blatant--and Chimaev is right up there with Sean O'Malley as one of its biggest beneficiaries. Which is hard to say without feeling as though it's shortchanging the man. Khamzat is an extremely talented fighter. He's a devastating wrestler with incredibly dangerous chokes and he has on multiple occasions shown a capacity for hitting people so hard they collapse. There's nothing wrong with his skills! He's undefeated! His skills are great!
His skills are not the problem. His everything else is the problem. His everything else is so much the problem that I don't even have to go into the sociopolitics of being a personal buddy of Ramzan Kadyrov because there's too much other shit to talk about.
Khamzat has barely made it to fights in multiple years. He actually retired in mid-COVID after having a litany of health problems and was only barely coaxed back, but 2022 is the only year that's seen him make it to multiple fights in a twelve-month period, and Khamzat's 2022 ended with him nearly torpedoing an entire pay-per-view after coming in almost ten pounds overweight for a 170-pound fight with Nate Diaz. The list of people who can tank a PPV and still stay in the UFC's good graces is very, very short. Nate Marquardt got cut for fucking up a UFC on Versus card.
Khamzat was co-maining in his next appearance thirteen months later. In his Middleweight debut!
Against Kamaru Usman.
Khamzat Chimaev is fighting a former Middleweight champion in what could easily be a title eliminator. Khamzat Chimaev has not fought a Middleweight in going on five years. The last time Khamzat beat an actual Middleweight it was September of 2020, Jumanji: The Next Level was inexplicably still in theaters, and it was Gerald fucking Meerschaert. Since then it's been nothing but Welterweights. Khamzat earned this fight by taking a Middleweight fight against a Welterweight, and despite Kamaru Usman never fighting at 185 in his life, and despite Kamaru Usman coming off his two straight career-defining losses against Leon Edwards, and despite Kamaru Usman taking the fight with ten days to prepare, Khamzat still only barely scraped a majority decision that could easily have been a draw.
And the wildest thing is: This is still the less restrained reality! The UFC tried to book Khamzat into a straight-up title fight at UFC 300, and the only thing that kept it from happening was Khamzat turning it down so he could observe Ramadan.
That and he only wants to fight when the fights are in either Saudi Arabia or Abu Dhabi. Y'know.
For reasons.
The incredible gap between Robert Whittaker, who has steadfastly fought everyone they've put in front of him and turned almost all of them away, and Khamzat Chimaev, who for all his incredible skill has one of the most cherry-picked careers in UFC history, is wild, and nothing makes it wilder than the reminder that this fight was supposed to happen this past Summer. Rob vs Khamzat was intended to main event the UFC's debut in the KSA back in June. As Khamzat does, he pulled out nine days before the fight and the UFC replaced him with the incredibly dangerous Ikram Aliskerov. Rob didn't balk, he simply put his head down, took the short-notice fight against the wrecking machine on a seven-fight finishing streak, and knocked him the fuck out in a single round.
Rob winning, of course, did nothing for him positionally. It just got this fucking fight booked again.
In a vacuum, I could love this fight. Khamzat is a fantastic competitor. His grappling is almost unfathomably aggressive and his constant pursuit of a finish is incredibly fun to watch. But his career has been one continuous arc of just purestrain bullshit, and I would be lying through my teeth if I said it didn't impact my feelings about wanting to see him lose, particularly against one of my favorite Middleweights. The odds disagree with me, as Chimaev is a universal favorite.
But, even aside from my biases, I have doubts, man. I have doubts. Rob is a tough man to get out of the cage, and Chimaev's a wrecking ball--when he can successfully blitz people. When he's strangling Kevin Holland or ragdolling Li Jingliang, he's amazing. But when he's almost losing a war to Gilbert Burns? When he's eating jabs and leg kicks and getting stymied in his attempts at wrestling short-notice 185-pound Kamaru Usman? Every time someone gets him out of the first round he looks considerably diminished, and it's been more than ten years since anyone got Robert Whittaker out of the cage in a single round.
Can he bullrush Whittaker down and choke him out before his Miraclo time runs out?
I am, once again, biased. I am very aware there is a specific outcome I actively want to see, and I could easily be deceiving myself. But I remember Yoel Romero, world champion wrestler and Olympic silver medalist, having to shoot on Rob 28 times in two fights to get 7 takedowns. I remember Khamzat Chimaev looking flustered and unable to deal with Usman jabbing him repeatedly in the mouth.
And I remember I have already begun picking this card from my heart. It would be insane to stop now.
ROBERT WHITTAKER BY TKO.
MAIN CARD: THE LAND OF THE BLIND
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Magomed Ankalaev (19-1-1 (1), #2) vs Aleksandar Rakić (14-4, #5)
Previously, on the Punchsport Report:
There's an incredibly logical match to make at Light Heavyweight. It is, undeniably, the only title match to make at Light Heavyweight. Magomed Ankalaev has not lost a fight in six years. He is on a twelve-fight unbeaten streak, and I only say 'unbeaten' because of an immediately-avenged No Contest and a gratuitously bad judging decision that stuck him with a draw instead of a deserved win and a championship to his name. With Raquel Pennington, Belal Muhammad and Merab Dvalishvili all finally avenged, Ankalaev is the undisputed bannerman for passed-over contenders in the UFC.
And they're still passing him over. Magomed still doesn't have a title shot. He's facing Aleksandar Rakić at UFC 308 later this month.
Congratulations: It's later this month.
I don't know what the deal is with Magomed Ankalaev. I don't know if they've never forgiven him for the draw against Jan Błachowicz, I don't know if they just desperately want to keep Alex Pereira away from people who stand a solid chance of crushing him, I don't know if he ran over someone's dog, but two weeks after Pereira defended his title against the #8 ranked Chris Daukaus-punchingest man in the division, Magomed Ankalaev, the #1 contender, is fighting a man on a two-fight losing streak that stretches all the way back to 2021. He beat Jan and got screwed by the judges, he avenged his foul NC to Johnny Walker by knocking him out on the feet this past January, and I wish I could tell you that a victory here would secure Ankalaev's already blindingly obvious claim to a title shot, but I would bet the UFC would much, much rather get Pereira in a champ vs champ match with either the winner of du Plessis/Strickland 2 or Tom Aspinall while Ankalaev fights at least fourteen more times.
Aleksandar Rakić was up in the 'clear future champion' conversation just a few short years ago. He was 14-2, he'd notched a couple incredibly neat knockouts, his only loss in the UFC was a split decision to Volkan Oezdemir that the entire world outside of the judges scored in Rakić's favor, and hell, he beat Thiago Santos a lot more convincingly than Jon fuckin' Jones did, and in 2021, somehow, that mattered. But his shot at Jan Błachowicz ended with his leg abruptly imploding in mid-fight, and after a layoff that came just one month shy of two years, Rakić stepped back into the cage against Jiří Procházka this past April. And he looked great! He jabbed Jiří around the cage, chewed up his front leg to the point of leaving Jiří hobbling, and looked in every way as though he hadn't missed a single step. And then Jiří came out in the second round and decided to just walk directly forward while swinging wildly at his face, and it worked, because he's Jiří fucking Procházka. Now Rakić is not only coming off a two-fight losing streak across three years of career, but the first (non-injury-related) knockout loss of his entire life.
Ankalaev doesn't have Jiří's reckless disregard for human life nor his one-hitter-quitter stopping power, but he has something better: The ability to do other shit. He's been focusing on his striking lately but he is still more than capable of engaging in a good, old-fashioned clinch-grind, and given how well Rakić uses space, he may have to. Ankalaev does not traditionally do well with leg kicks and the longer he's at range, the more of them he'll have to deal with, so I envision grappling coming back into the equation here. Thus: MAGOMED ANKALAEV BY DECISION.
FEATHERWEIGHT: Lerone Murphy (14-0-1, #12) vs Dan Ige (18-8, #14)
The time has come for me to give up my doubts on Lerone Murphy. I have held his screwjob decisions over Zubaira Tukhugov and Gabriel Santos against him on his way up the ladder, but having watched him dominate Josh Culibao and shut out Edson Barboza, I can no longer deny his status as a genuine prospect. He's proven to be not just well-rounded and durable, but adaptable, which is far more impressive. Being able to adjust across separate fights to disparate styles without losing any effectiveness is an exceptionally rare trait in the sport, and more than any other, it's carried him into the top fifteen. Which must make it a little frustrating that he's moving backward for a night. Murphy was actually supposed to fight Dan Ige before he fought Edson, and Edson was, in fact, higher-ranked than Ige, but injuries scratched the match and now the UFC seemingly wants to take care of unfinished eight-month-old business.
But, boy, those eight months have been wild for Ige. At the start of the year Ige was 2 for his last 6, had been pretty categorically eliminated from any semblance of contendership and was settling into a role as a measuring stick for the men of the Featherweight division, and instead of trying to hold the door against Murphy he got to reclaim his guardian status by torching Andre Fili in a single round. But the big story is, of course, his June fight against Diego Lopes, which he took with all of three hours to prepare thanks to the tacit acknowledgment that our sport isn't real and the phrase "last-minute fill-in" is becoming progressively more literal. It was a really cool thing to do, it earned him some real good will with both fans and UFC management because it covered up their failure to make their own cards work, and he, y'know, lost definitively, so he's still here at the back of the line anyway.
This is unlikely to move him any further up. Ige's got good, solid skills, but Murphy's a more varied fighter with the kind of back-pocket wrestling that will keep Ige from finding his footwork. LERONE MURPHY BY DECISION.
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Shara Magomedov (14-0) vs Armen Petrosyan (8-3)
I have already written reams about the Shara Magomedov experiment, so rather than retreading them at length, let me simplify it down to an image you can hear:
We're just doing things, here. We're just pretending. The entirety of Shara Magomedov's UFC career is taking place in this insane pocket dimension where a one-eyed fighter who is essentially unlicensable outside of Russia, Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi is fighting an ongoing procession of randomly-drawn competitors while one half of mixed martial media gushes about his incredible kickboxing and undefeated streak and the other half asks why any of this is happening and what we're doing with our lives, and somewhere in the corner I just still want to know why no one cares that he assaults people in shopping malls. He's the living embodiment of the have-it-both-ways state of the UFC: It's a serious sport where the best of the best fight and anyone who can't hack it under the UFC's banner doesn't deserve to be taken seriously as a competitor, and also, please care about our undefeated guy who can only fight in 1.5% of the world and even then only against people on losing streaks or making their UFC debuts but by god he will be in a featured bout every single time we're there and we will not stop talking about how much he rules.
Armen Petrosyan, you are the star of this month's feeding schedule. The UFC had hopes for Armen at one point--he was only 4-1 when they brought him to the Contender Series and subsequently into the UFC, and being a real green kickboxing specialist who survived and even scraped a split decision away from Gregory Rodrigues in the middle of his early hype train made him look like a real promising prospect--but fed him to Caio Borralho instead, and it's been a bumpy road ever since. Even when he recaptured some of his hype by ending Christian Leroy Duncan's undefeated streak, he followed it up by inadvertently helping to rehabilitate Rodolfo Vieira after the world learned that, once again, the kickboxer generally loses to the BJJ black belt.
In other words, I think this fight is here because the UFC thinks Armen will primarily stand and trade with Shara. I am adopting a policy of predicting these fights with the level of contemplation my brain wants to give them, which in this case means I put a piece of turkey in front of my cats to see which one got it first. Congratulations, Callie. ARMEN PETROSYAN BY DECISION.
PRELIMS: WITHOUT REASON
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Ibo Aslan (13-1) vs Raffael Cerqueira (11-0)
I have a confession: Even as someone who writes these goddamn things, there are so many fighters and so many Contender Series winners and so many names that I, too, forget a bunch of them. When I saw the name "Ibo Aslan" cross my eyes, I felt an immediate twinge of anger, and I had to look back to remember why:
This is a rematch? Are you fucking kidding me? You got a Contender Series winner whose entire career is built around killing jobbers and you happen to have THE PLEASURE MAN Anton Turkalj still on the roster despite being on a three-fight losing streak and you're putting them back together? Did the world really need this Swedish rematch four years in the making? Were the stakes of the great BRAVE CF 40: MOCHAMED VS SHOAIB so high that you simply had to run it back in the UFC?
Burn Light Heavyweight to the ground. Salt the Earth. Remove all memory of Jon Jones from our history. Let us move on. ANTON TURKALJ BY DECISION.
That's right. This is the dude who got onto the Contender Series by beating four people with losing records and got into the UFC by beating a guy who almost exclusively fought people with losing records and then he had a rematch with the only man he lost to, who now has a losing 0-4 UFC record because despite choking Aslan out in 2020, he couldn't deal with that 2024 Ibo Aslan energy. Light Heavyweight is the twitch in the back of my brain that's going to give me an aneurysm one day. They're going to go out looking for me because I left to shovel driveway snow an hour ago and they're going to find me shaking uncontrollably on the ground while whispering about Raffael Cerqueira and his victory over Gutembergue Souza and the future championship aspirations of Artem Vakhitov if he can only beat The Hanyak, and my wife and my neighbors will tearfully agree that there's no way to save me and the best thing to do is roll me to the curb, pack snow over my body and wait for the Spring thaw so the garbagemen can pick me up and bury me in a potter's field with my last request being a little wooden plank that reads:
1985 - 20XX
MURDERED BY LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT
HOW DID IT TAKE SO LONG
And by god, they'll have been right to do it.
IBO ASLAN BY TKO.
WELTERWEIGHT: Geoff Neal (15-6, #10) vs Rafael dos Anjos (32-16, #14)
This one's going to be rough. Geoff Neal has been a man with his face pressed to the glass ceiling for years. He's great--hell, he's the last man to beat Belal Muhammad--but his solid wins are sandwiched between harsh, contendership-destroying back-to-back losses. In 2020 and 2021 it was Stephen Thompson and Neil Magny; in 2023 and 2024 it was Shavkat Rakhmonov and Ian Machado Garry. The real tragedy of it is Neal isn't getting blown out of the water. He hurt Shavkat, he took a round off Garry, but it just isn't enough to get his foot in the door. (Missing the Welterweight limit by 4 pounds in the Shavkat fight didn't help his case, either.) Rafael dos Anjos is in considerably tougher straits. RDA has been one of my favorite fighters for over a decade, his longevity in the sport is legendary and he should be lauded for still being here at all, let alone still being a tough, competitive fighter after how many miles he's put on his bones. He also has one Welterweight win in the last five years, and it was against Brian Barberena. Hell, he's only back at 170 because he got knocked out of contention at 155 by Rafael Fiziev. Much like Neal, he's still an incredibly tough out, and much like Neal he's still competitive as hell in his losses. He almost beat Luque and he took a round off Mateusz Gamrot, who was damn near title contention. But after twenty straight years of combat, he seems to finally be slowing down.
It doesn't make me not hate picking against him, though. GEOFF NEAL BY DECISION feels a lot more likely. It's not just RDA's wear and tear, it's Neal's capacity for dealing with his wrestling, clinching, throwing-in-the-pocket gameplan. But I think it'll be less competitive than it would've been with the Rafael dos Anjos of five years ago.
LIGHTWEIGHT: Myktybek Orolbai (13-1-1) vs Mateusz Rębecki (19-2)
Here, we have a collision of hype trains heading in opposite directions. Myktybek Orolbai was a last-minute replacement pickup for the UFC last November and he proceeded to pleasantly surprise the world by proving himself one of those rare cases of an only semi-tested regional champion who is, in the spotlight, still very good. He wrestled Uroš Medić to a submission victory and he grappled the shit out of Elves Brener for fifteen minutes. He's still a little shaky--he wings a lot of punches, he gets pretty wild, and he managed to lose a point for grabbing the cage to deal with Brener's own wrestling--but when he connects, it hurts, and he's gotten results. Mateusz Rębecki had the same reputation going for him right up until he didn't. Rębecki made waves as a short, tanky, hard-hitting kind of motherfucker who would ignore his own grappling abilities in favor of chucking haymakers until his opponent exploded in a shower of digits and coins, and that's exactly what the UFC gets off on, and for the first year of his tenure, that's exactly what he gave them. His three-fight winning streak and subsequent hype came to an abrupt end this past May, when he stepped in against the ever-troubled Diego Ferreira as a prohibitive, -500 favorite, and he looked every bit of it in the first round, and then, as with so many before him, he got absolutely chewed up by the underdog. Ferreira busted his face with jabs, repeatedly swept him on the ground, and ultimately pounded him out with just nine seconds left in the fight.
Now, Mateusz is the underdog and Orolbai is the favorite. After watching Ferreira gas him out and chip him down, it's not hard to see why. Orolbai is inexhaustible and he will absolutely grapple a man for fifteen straight minutes given the chance. But he does leave himself open to getting cracked, and Rębecki's wrestling is still present when he's not exhausted, and for some inexplicable reason I have faith that he will learn from his mistakes and shore up his gas tank. MATEUSZ RĘBECKI BY TKO.
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Abus Magomedov (26-6-1) vs Brunno Ferreira (12-1)
The trajectory of Abus Magomedov is so goddamn weird. He scored a stellar nineteen-second preliminary knockout over Dustin Stoltzfus in his UFC debut, then suddenly he was main-eventing in a title eliminator against Sean Strickland. He was fed to Caio Borralho, who is about to fight in his own title eliminator, and having spent an entire year in the shark tank, he was suddenly fighting Warlley Alves on a three-fight losing streak. And now, having that one win banked, it's time for Brunno Ferreira, who would be on a five-fight knockout streak were it not for Nursulton Ruziboev dropping him in barely over a minute right in the middle of the pile. Who did Brunno beat to get this fight with Abus? Dustin goddamn Stoltzfus. This fight forms a perfect circle of Middleweight meaninglessness and exists solely to see which formerly-hyped but slightly-compromised Middleweight knockout artist with somewhat questionable defense and possible gas tank issues is better. And, statistically-speaking, there's at least a 10% chance whoever wins this fight somehow winds up in a bout for title contention in the Apex sometime in February.
ABUS MAGOMEDOV BY TKO. He's going to have to avoid some heavy blitzes, but he's got a whole lot of reach and range and those front kicks are going to be a problem for Brunno's face-first style.
HEAVYWEIGHT: Kennedy Nzechukwu (12-5) vs Chris Barnett (23-8)
This is the most Heavyweight fight possible, and somehow, it's between two men who have not made Heavyweight. Kennedy Nzechukwu is trying to avert the end of his UFC tenure. He was always a scary dude--big, rangy striker, heavy elbows, secretly dangerous grappling, made Carlos Ulberg look silly--but at Light Heavyweight his chin was a problem and so was his ability to consistently capitalize on his strengths. Thus, on his second two-fight losing streak at 205 pounds, Kennedy is going up to Heavyweight, and as a sign of just how dire things are in the Heavyweight division, this was supposed to be a ranked fight. Seriously. Kennedy Nzechukwu, coming off two straight losses including a decision to the now-released Ovince St. Preux, was supposed to fight Marcos Rogério de Lima, the #14-ranked Heavyweight in the UFC. But de Lima couldn't make it, so Justin Tafa took his place, and Tafa had to drop out, and conveniently, his kid brother also lost an opponent just two weeks ago. Chris Barnett is my favorite not-great fighter. He's 5'9" and somehow still managed to weigh in over the 265-pound Heavyweight limit, his gas tank is theoretical at best, he's more likely to throw a wheel kick than a jab, and inexplicably, it kinda works. He's been a fan favorite for years thanks to his insane style and his lovable personality. Unfortunately, he's also been missing for years. Barnett's been scratched from three straight fights over the last twenty-five months, and now he's fighting a bunch of ring rust, a perilously close 39th birthday, and the added issues of dealing with Hurricane Milton wrecking his shit.
Kennedy has an eight-inch height and reach advantage. Kennedy has a much more well-rounded game. Kennedy would have to move heaven and earth to make me not heart-pick the man we used to call Huggy Bear. I would rather lose the prediction than lose my hopes and dreams. CHRIS BARNETT BY TKO.
BANTAMWEIGHT: Farid Basharat (12-0) vs Victor Hugo (25-4)
I don't really know what the UFC is doing with Farid Basharat anymore. He's one of their most promising Bantamweight prospects, he's an undefeated fighter who continues to look great despite being continually presented with genuinely challenging competition, he's on a three-fight winning streak in one of the toughest divisions in the sport and he's only ever fought on the early prelims. What's the exchange rate of fights to marketing attempts in the modern era of the UFC? Is it fully contingent on getting cool finishes or do you just have to give vaguely bigoted interviews until management decides you're marketable to the crossover of Joe Rogan listeners and PragerU fans? Farid Basharat does cool shit and should be getting pushed up the ladder, and instead he's fighting Victor Hugo three fights up from the curtain-jerking slot. And I don't even dislike Victor Hugo! He's a genuine prospect, he's a devastating striker, and he's also only fought in the UFC once. It would have been more--his actual 2023 debut got scratched after he botched his weight cut and he had to wait until this past April to try again--and this will, assuredly, be an interesting fight, with Basharat having to avoid a more powerful, more ferocious puncher.
It should be fun! It should also be a win. FARID BASHARAT BY DECISION.
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Bruno Silva (23-11) vs Ismail Naurdiev (23-7)
Bruno Silva is a victim of injustice. It was real, real weird when the UFC tapped him to fight a returning Chris Weidman this past March despite Silva being 1 for his last 5, but not nearly as weird as the fight itself, which was less of a mixed martial arts contest and more of a symphony of ocular distress. Weidman fought basically the entire fight with his fingers outstretched, poked Silva in the eyes twice without losing a point, and then, in one of the dumbest things that has ever happened in the sport, which is a sentence we seem to revisit on an annual basis, Weidman managed to drop Silva by poking him in both eyes with both hands, which was ruled a TKO victory for Weidman on the spot and then revised to a technical decision victory, rather than the correct decision, which would have been a disqualification followed by criminal charges. To be clear, Silva was losing the fight, as he loses most of his fights, but you would too if some motherfucker kept trying to turn you into Yuki Nakai instead of punching you. Ismail Naurdiev is here because he's a mainstay of Bahrain's BRAVE Combat Federation, and he, too, gets fucked up by a lot of his better competition--he had a UFC stint back in 2019-2020 that ended on the wrong side of Sean Brady's fists--but he likes to swing for the fences and throw wheel kicks and jump guillotines, and goddammit if that's not what you really need.
However much sympathy I have left for Bruno, I think my supply of faith has run out. I'm sorry, buddy. ISMAIL NAURDIEV BY TKO.
WELTERWEIGHT: Rinat Fakhretdinov (23-2-1) vs Carlos Leal (21-5)
Speaking of What The Fuck Are You Doing Down Here: Rinat Fakhretdinov! Here! I'm sure as a Russian fighter he's jazzed about not having to fly all the way across the damn world just to fight on the prelims and is consequently happy to take whatever spot he can get, but he's a giant Welterweight prospect on a nineteen-fight unbeaten streak making his sixth walk for the UFC without a loss, and he's second from the bottom of the card. (Update: While I was formatting this for publishing, they moved Ibo Aslan vs Raffael Cerqueira to the featured prelim spot, so now Rinat is curtain-jerking. Congratulations!) And that was still the schedule when he was fighting Nursulton Ruziboev, who was in a co-main event under Derrick goddamn Lewis fighting the #11 Welterweight in the world in his last match! Nothing is real, and with Ruziboev out we're taking in another oddly-placed puzzle piece, as the severely underrated Carlos Leal is finally getting his shot at the big show. Leal was one of the strongest-performing Welterweight competitors in the Professional Fighters League in both 2022 and 2023, the accuracy in his hands and his counter-wrestling game got him through a number of opponents, but he was held away from glory by two perpetual problems: The future champion Sadibou Sy, who handed Leal his only two losses in the last ten years, and his weight cut, which he managed to botch twice in sixteen months.
It's still great to see Leal in the UFC, but Rinat is a tough ask even on a full camp, and as a short-notice replacement, he's a big, big challenge. But we've also seen Rinat leave himself open to strong boxing attacks on a number of occasions, and that plus his tendency to fade late in fights gives Leal an opening to make a real big splash if he can find Rinat's chin enough times. I'm still favoring RINAT FAKHRETDINOV BY DECISION, but Leal can upset anyone given a chance.