CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 124: A MATTER OF TIME
UFC Fight Night: Yan vs Figueiredo
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 23 FROM THE GALAXY ARENA IN MACAU, CHINA
RIDICULOUSLY EARLY START TIME WARNING | PRELIMS: 12 AM PST / 3 AM EST | MAIN CARD: 3 AM / 6
Friends of the UFC's general American audience: This card is Not For You.
It's not a bad card! The main and co-main are great, Salikhov/Song should be a lot of fun, Wang Cong is always a good time and the world will get to see if Carlos Ulberg is real. The prelims live or die based on how invested you are in the Road to UFC tournament, but they should still be fun.
Fun enough to get up at 3 in the morning for? Probably not.
That's right: It's China, baby. The UFC hasn't been back to China since 2019, and the last time they hit Macau was an entire decade ago for Bisping vs Le, from which only one fighter is still in the company: A debuting Colby Covington.
Ten years ago, Macau cursed us all. Let's see what it does to us this week.
MAIN EVENT: PARALLEL TRACKS
BANTAMWEIGHT: Petr Yan (17-5, #3) vs Deiveson Figueiredo (24-3-1, #5)
Being second best is a combat sports curse, especially after you've been heralded as the next big thing.
It's easy to forget now, but in the long, long-ago times of 2021 Petr Yan was considered not just the best Bantamweight on the planet, but one of the best fighters on the planet altogether. Definitively avenging your sole loss, going on a ten-fight winning streak and taking on incredibly tough men like Douglas Silva de Andrade and making them quit on the stool builds your credibility, but scoring back-to-back knockouts against durable legends like Urijah Faber and José Aldo launches you into the stratosphere. His boxing and his downright mean style made Yan a fan favorite and talk of events in Russia boomed with his rise.
Right around the same time the Flyweight throne had been abdicated, and Deiveson Figueiredo was its heir apparent. The world's most violent hairdresser had already suffered his one career loss in the UFC, but his reputation for destroying people had been well-established beforehand and it took less than a year to recapture it. Deiveson also found himself launched into fame on the strength of back-to-back destructions of a legend, but in his case, it was singular. He crushed Joseph Benavidez, but it couldn't be for the title on account of Deiveson missing weight, so he was forced to immediately do it again only this time even harder.
The UFC was thrilled with both of them. The lighter weight classes have a (dumb) reputation for being lower-action affairs: Having two living avatars of violence who'd butchered their way to gold did a lot to please management and the fans alike. Both men were seen as being leagues above their competition; both men were figured for long, dominant title reigns.
Neither man made it a single year, and both had only fouls to blame.
Petr Yan took on top contender Aljamain Sterling, Bantamweight's best grappler, and despite a shaky start to the bout Yan found himself firmly in control halfway through. Sterling was fading, Yan was landing at will, and with only five and a half minutes left, Yan was ahead on the scorecards. He then, infamously, kneed the absolute shit out of Aljo while he was on the ground. It was the foul that launched a thousand hot takes from only the must studied of MMA twitter users with regards to Aljo's bitch/not bitch status, but it put Yan in the history books as the only person to ever lose a UFC championship by disqualification. He'd wear gold again--a Sterling injury meant an interim title fight against Cory Sandhagen, which Yan won--but a rematch was necessary, and this time Sterling controlled Yan on the ground and won without the asterisk.
Deiveson Figueiredo notched a title defense against Alex Perez, but he made the career-altering decision to do the UFC a solid by stepping into another championship match just three weeks later when their pair of pay-per-view main events fell through. Figueiredo was a prohibitive favorite against Brandon Moreno, and while Moreno put up more of a fight than expected, Figueiredo would have won a solid, unanimous decision--if he hadn't lost a point for kicking Moreno in the groin. That one errant kick not only turned the fight into a majority draw, but locked Figueiredo into what ultimately wound up being two and a half years of rematches. The next time they met, Moreno choked him out and took away his title. One fight later, Figueiredo got his belt back by the absolute skin of his teeth. But their final chapter saw Moreno punch Deiveson's eye shut and take his title for good.
But for one knee and one kick, Yan and Figueiredo would have won their title defenses and continued on their predestined roads. They wouldn't have needed to rematch their rivals; they wouldn't have had rivals at all. But Figueiredo had somewhere to go: He had long since tired of the weight cut to 125 pounds and was ready to test Bantamweight. Yan was still comfortable with his weight class, and ultimately, that proved to be the real trouble for his legacy.
That and, y'know, perfidy. Mostly perfidy. While the Yan/Sterling psychodrama played out the UFC had put all of their marketing ducks in a row behind Dana White's aspirational dream of youth, Sean O'Malley, and despite not having any wins in the top ten O'Malley got a shot at Yan, and despite Yan winning the fight on 96% of the media's scorecards O'Malley somehow won a decision. The house got its future champion, Yan wound up on gatekeeper duty instead of contendership, and, like everyone else in the division--including, eventually, O'Malley--Yan was steamrolled by the endless wrestling of Merab Dvalishvili. In the space of two years, Yan went from prognostications of lifelong greatness to 1 for his last 5. Yan took a year off, and it's only this past March that he finally returned and reclaimed his place in the mix thanks to a hard-fought win over Song Yadong.
It's that entire paragraph of chaos that let Deiveson into the division. With O'Malley as a protected champion, Sterling up in the Featherweight division, Merab having wiped the floor with a large swath of the rankings, Cory Sandhagen locked into an entire year of waiting for Umar Nurmagomedov and Yan on sabbatical, Bantamweight was suddenly aching for new blood, and blood was always Figueiredo's trade. He launched his 135-pound quest just last December, and in less than a year he blitzed his way into the top five. He answered concerns about being undersized for the division by dominating Rob Font, he quelled questions about his chin by easily handling Cody Garbrandt, and he cemented himself as a contender by not just beating a former title contender in Marlon Vera, but becoming the first man in 24 UFC fights to score a knockdown against him.
Two paths followed one another closely, diverged dramatically, and somehow reconnected here, at the precipice of contention. Three years ago this could have been posed as a superfight--champion vs champion, two of the scariest finishers their divisions had ever seen, violence elementals testing just how well punching power translates across weight classes. Six fights later, they're both just Bantamweight contenders fighting at a timeslot 90% of the audience isn't going to watch after a huge chunk of the target market has lost interest because Yan Xiaonan's match already happened.
The sport's fast, and so are both of these dudes. Figueiredo's success at Bantamweight has been inspiring, but it's also necessitated a change in his style. At Flyweight, he was a heavy puncher who used wrestling to disrupt opponents and get their guard down so he could hurt them; at Bantamweight he's been making up the size and strength gap by focusing first and foremost on his takedowns. That may not necessarily be a terrible choice here, either. Yan's a mean grappler in his own right, but his takedown defense--which, in an example of the lying nature of numbers, has been massively inflated thanks to Merab's machine-gun takedown attempts giving Yan 38 defenses in a single fight--has historically been a problem for him. Merab, Aljo, Sandhagen, Yadong and even John Dodson had real success dragging Yan down to the mat. Of course, three of those five men couldn't keep him there and ultimately got their heads boxed in.
And that boxing is Deiveson's biggest concern. Figueiredo is almost certainly the bigger power puncher, but Brandon Moreno was able to show just how a fluid, combination-focused attack could wind its way through Figueiredo's attacks and repeatedly sting him while he shot bigger, slower counters. Half the reason people have grappling success with Yan stems from the reality that standing and trading with him is generally a big fucking mistake. He has some of the cleanest, most economical boxing technique in the game; the likelihood that in an extended exchange he finds a way to flit into range is very, very high.
In my heart, I want Figueiredo to win and provide an interesting new challenge for the logjam at the top of the division. In my head? PETR YAN BY DECISION. I just don't think Figueiredo's takedowns will be enough to overcome Yan chipping away at him for five rounds.
CO-MAIN EVENT: RELOADING THE GUN
WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT: Yan Xiaonan (18-4 (1), #2) vs Tabatha Ricci (11-2, #10)
I really do not know how you, as a fighter, digest the reality of getting completely trucked in a title fight and having the total audience reaction somehow still be "Wow, she did a lot better than we thought she would."
Yan Xiaonan earned her title shot the hard way. Back-to-back losses left some doubting Yan's place in the division, and the UFC attempted to capitalize on it by sacrificing her to Mackenzie Dern's endless marketing push:
But Marina Rodriguez is still the #3 in the division, and she's on a four-fight win streak, and her last two victories were over both of these women, so she's on deck for a title eliminator, right?
No, my friend, she is fighting the #8-ranked Amanda Lemos, winner of one straight fight, at a random fight night next month that the UFC currently doesn't even advertise on its website.
Mackenzie Dern, whom she beat, is fighting Xiaonan Yan, whom she beat, to get into pole position for a title shot. ...if Dern wins. Because, after all, Xiaonan is riding a two-fight losing streak, so she'd need another win.
But Mackenzie'd be fine.
For some strange reason.
an was a +250 underdog to get her bones picked by Dern, as these things generally go. Instead, after an incredibly hard-fought battle that saw her shut down 9 of 11 takedown attempts and almost double Dern on significant strikes, Yan walked away with an incredibly close decision. A followup match with eternal wrecking machine Jéssica Andrade wasn't looked at much more favorably for Yan, and she blew those expectations out of the water by punching Andrade out in two and a half minutes. After two straight underdog overperformances, Yan was right at the top of the division and ready for a shot at the belt.
Which took eleven months. Some have theorized it was a failed attempt to schedule the China vs China title fight the UFC had wanted for years in China itself, but Zhang vs Yan got booked for the co-main event of UFC 300 instead, which is an awful good consolation prize. Once again, Yan was a big underdog, and once again, she pledged to shock the world.
And, well, she did, but not the way she wanted to.
The fight was not close. In the first round Zhang choked her out--like, unconscious--but Yan didn't actually go out before the round ended and she was able to recover, so the fight continued. In the second round Yan got pounded to the tune of a 54:4 strike differential and could very easily have eaten a TKO loss, but referee Jason Herzog gave her an exceptional amount of leeway and she, once again, survived. In the third, she paid off that faith by somehow dropping Zhang and briefly looking like she was ready to score the comeback of the century, but she couldn't finish the job, and in the fourth and fifth Zhang went right back to completely controlling the fight.
The final strike differential was 256 to 73. One media scorecard landed on a 49-42. But Yan had hung in for the duration, and that was a hell of a surprise. But it wasn't a win, and when you get beaten that badly by the champion, you have to make a statement to get another shot.
Tabatha Ricci's story is still searching for that kind of climax. It isn't for lack of trying: Ricci has been exceptionally successful at carrying her grappling credentials into mixed martial arts, and were it not for a deeply, deeply unfortunate short-notice up-a-weight-class UFC debut against Manon Fiorot, of all people, she'd be completely clear of stoppage losses across her career. She tapped Jessica Penne, she outgrappled Gillian Robertson, she's 6-2 in the UFC on the whole and her only loss at this weight class was a split decision. So why isn't Ricci a thing already?
The entirety of the last twelve months have been one big test for Ricci's contendership hopes, and the results have been pretty thoroughly mixed. Her first defense of her top-ten berth against Loopy Godinez was a wake-up call, as for the first time in her Strawweight career, Ricci could not take her opponent down. When they did inadvertently grapple Ricci had a slight advantage, but she came up empty on 6 separate attempts at forcing the issue, and Loopy was outstriking her just enough all the while to get on the right side of a split decision. Now out of the top ten, Ricci had to defend having a ranking at all, as Tecia Pennington (née Torres) was back from two years of maternity leave and ready for a challenge.
It was not a great night for Ricci. Once again, she could barely get her wrestling game going, ultimately striking out on 9 out of 10 takedown attempts; once again she couldn't match her opponent's volume on the feet and lost the significant strike battle in every single round. But the judges smiled on her chain-wrestling attempts, and despite losing on a bunch of media cards, Ricci swayed a split her way to a decidedly mixed crowd reaction. Ricci needed a foothold again, and as the UFC does seemingly every time they need to check a Strawweight, they called Angela Hill.
At risk of redundancy: It was, once again, real, real close. Hill narrowly outstruck her, Ricci outwrestled her but couldn't muster any submission attempts, and once again the decision was extremely close--and, numerically, should have been a split, had Eric Colon not somehow scored the clearest Hill round for Ricci--but Ricci came away with the win and a return to a winning streak.
It's a good streak! But it's left a lot of questions about her capacity to deal with the real top contenders of the division. Ricci has struggled with everyone she cannot dominate on the ground, and at the top levels of Women's Strawweight, there really isn't anyone left she can muscle around on the floor. Yan Xiaonan just successfully dealt with the ground games of Mackenzie Dern and Zhang Weili--is Ricci going to be any different?
It's a huge jump for Ricci, aided in no small part by Strawweight itself being in a bit of a pickle, with Tatiana Suarez once again injured and most of the top five having already fallen victim to the champion. I also think it might be a bit too much for her. Yan isn't a volume striker, she's not going to swarm Tabatha the way Hill or Godinez did, but she also hits a lot harder, and if Ricci can't isolate her on the ground, those big punches are going to become a concern. Ultimately, I'm going with YAN XIAONAN BY TKO.
MAIN CARD: HONORARY CHINESE CONTENDER CARLOS ULBERG
WELTERWEIGHT: Muslim Salikhov (20-5) vs Song Kenan (22-8)
It's tough times for Muslim Salikhov. The once-promising, nearly-ranked Dagestani Sanda stylist hit the rocks in 2022 after getting knocked out for the first time in mixed martial arts career, and even his successful attempts at righting the ship have been mixed. He knocked out Andre Fialho, but with all of the respect in the world to Andre Fialho: He's Andre Fialho. Everyone does that. It didn't stick, either, as Salikhov followed it with the first back-to-back losses he'd suffered outside of Sanda, and while he averted the dreaded three-fight losing streak by squeaking a split decision past Santiago Ponzinibbio, it was a real, real close call that most of the audience felt should've gone the other way. Muslim seems like he's slowing down, and as he stares down a 41st birthday next June, the writing on the wall is becoming harder to avoid.
Song Kenan is doing a bit better, but not by much. After getting stomped in one round by Max Griffin back in 2021 Kenan took almost two years off from the sport, and when he returned as a stepping stone for the UFC's Conor McGregor revival project, Ian Machado Garry, he almost ruined everything by dropping Garry flat on his face in the first round. But Garry came back and took Song apart, and he still hasn't really professionally recovered. He took on a spirited but outmatched Rolando Bedoya and smacked him with counters for three rounds, but it didn't stop him from getting thoroughly outstruck by Kevin Jousset, and while Song's back in the winning column again thanks to a victory over Ricky Glenn, he's the only participant in Glenn's three-fight losing streak not to knock him out, and given Song's big-punching history, that has raised concerns about his own future.
Salikhov's a favorite here, and I understand, as he's definitely the more versatile striker, but I don't like how much trouble he's been having with timing over his last several fights, and even a depleted Song still counters harshly enough to shake Muslim up given a chance. Calling for a SONG KENAN BY TKO upset.
WOMEN'S FLYWEIGHT: Wang Cong (6-0) vs Gabriella Fernandes (9-3)
The UFC's got real, real big plans for Wang Cong. She's an undefeated kickboxing star who beat Valentina Shevchenko almost a decade ago, she successfully transitioned into MMA and has not just beaten but blown through most of her opponents, she calls herself The Joker and wears the facepaint and kicks people in the head and the company knew exactly what it was doing by debuting her against Victoria Leonardo, a +750 underdog with three stoppage losses in her last four fights. Cong dutifully destroyed her in a minute, and they sure would love to let her do it again.
Gabriella Fernandes is not quite as looked-down upon as Leonardo was, but at around +500 as of this writing, the world's pretty clear in its expectations for her. "Gabi" came into the UFC as an almost-undefeated LFA champion, but like so many before her, the transition from 10-10-1 fighters to UFC roster members wound up being a bit too much. She was thoroughly handled by Jasmine Jasudavicius, she was outwrestled by Tereza Bledá, and she pulled out a fight-of-the-night split decision against Carli Judice this past June to rescue her contract, but that also means she only barely survived a 3-2 fighter who is, herself, on the bubble.
The intention here is pretty clear. By the numbers, Cong should crush Gabi, and an upset would massively upset the matchmakers and their future plans. Which makes it awfully tempting to root for it, frankly. Still: WANG CONG BY TKO.
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Volkan Oezdemir (20-7, #8) vs Carlos Ulberg (10-1, #10)
Volkan is back on the mountain, baby. "No Time" became a brief sensation back in 2018 for repeatedly punching opponents out in the first minute of his fights, but Daniel Cormier turned him aside during his shot at the gold and Volkan's been meandering around the division ever since. His record has by no means been shameful--Nikita Krylov is the only man he's lost to in the UFC who hasn't fought for the title--but by 2023 he was an even 6-6 in the company, he'd been finished several times and he hasn't stopped anyone since 2019, and the show seemed to be over. And then he choked out Bogdan Guskov and knocked out Johnny Walker, and baby, when you're a Light Heavyweight, that's all it fuckin' takes.
Carlos Ulberg has been on the cusp of a coronation all damn year, and scheduling difficulties keep taking it away from him. He had a lot of hype when the UFC brought him in on the strengths of being a) an undefeated kickboxer who rarely shoots takedowns and b) built like one of those foot-tall G.I. Joe dolls, and aside from a stumble in his debut he's been spotless, stopping all but one of his opponents and earning the kind of knockouts that make the UFC decide to jump you from the periphery of the rankings to a title eliminator. But Ulberg lost his shot at Jamahal Hill when Hill busted his knee, and Ulberg pulled out of his own replacement fight against the lesser-ranked Anthony Smith, and now, rather than jumping the ranks, he gets a much more fitting test.
This is difficult for me. Volkan's proven how hittable he can be and Ulberg is very clearly good at finding his targets, but Volkan's an old favorite of mine, and most of Ulberg's feasting has been on lower-tier competition. Ulberg could spark him, but I'm sticking with my heart and picking VOLKAN OEZDEMIR BY TKO.
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Zhang Mingyang (17-6) vs Ozzy Diaz (9-2)
When Zhang Mingyang made his UFC debut against Brendson Ribeiro this past February I doubted him, characterizing him as a brawler who liked catching punches with his face. I was right: In the first 90 seconds he managed to get socked in the face 14 times until he'd been stumbled repeatedly and was bleeding from the mouth. He also won by knockout eleven seconds later anyway. For a man who once ran an internet game called the Tank Abbott Tournament, I am a great fool for doubting the power of wild-eyed brawling and reckless disregard for your own healthy.
Ozzy Diaz has felt this reckless disregard and been permanently altered by it. His entire professional career was spent dealing with the physical struggles of being a 6'4" Middleweight, but when his shot came at the Contender Series in 2022, Joe Pyfer punched him so hard he decided to stop cutting weight about it. He took two years off, he let himself become a bigger, badder brawler, and he came back to the LFA this year as a 205-pound punching machine. He's on a two-fight winning streak! But one of those fights was Bevon Lewis, whom you last saw in the UFC getting knocked out by a Welterweight.
Regional fights are weird. I refuse to learn my lesson regarding mistrusting Zhang's brawling tendencies. OZZY DIAZ BY TKO.
PRELIMS: THE ROAD TO UFC FINALS AND ALSO SOME OTHER STUFF
ROAD TO UFC BANTAMWEIGHT FINAL: Baergeng Jieleyisi (19-5) vs Suyoung Yu (13-3 (2))
I cannot help feeling the Road to UFC has fallen in stature, and boy, it really didn't have far to fall in the first place. The UFC's inaugural 2022 tournament to scout predominantly Asian talent--which definitely had nothing to do with the fear that ONE Championship was gaining ground in the region--didn't get a ton of press, but they did advertise it on their main shows. Season two was arguably thicker with talent, but it got less attention from the organization and was barely mentioned on-air. I cannot remember even a single mention of this third season that wasn't related to explaining where Wang Cong's contract came from. I went back and watched most of it to make sense of these matchups, and if season 2 was on the stronger side of the talent pool, season 3 feels a bit shallower. Suyoung Yu's record is outright weird: He came into the tournament on the back of a four-fight run consisting of one win, one knockout loss, and two No Contests--not because of fouls, but because the referees erroneously had him fight a fourth round, which was not allowed and yet somehow happened twice. Baergeng only has one loss in the last four years, but that loss was to Shuya Kamikubo in last year's Road to UFC, and Kamikubo was, himself, eliminated in the semi-finals. And both men had to fight their asses off to survive to the finals of this tournament. It's rough out there, man.
Yu likes his clinch throws and throws more in hooks, Jieleyisi favors straight punches and conventional wrestling, and both men got taken down a lot during the tournament. But, for one, Jieleyisi seems to be more allergic to defense and keeping a healthy guard, and for two, Yu's nickname is "Yu-Jitsu" and I cannot help supporting that. SUYOUNG YU BY DECISION.
ROAD TO UFC FLYWEIGHT FINAL: Kiru Sahota (12-2) vs Donghun Choi (8-0)
I'll be honest: After watching their tournament bouts, I'm not too big on either of these dudes. That is particularly unfortunate for Kiru Sahota, because being big is kind of his whole deal. Fighting at Flyweight when you're 5'10" is an exhausting concept, and I want to give him credit for winning multiple 125-pound championships in his native UK, but they're the kind of belts put on by organizations that match up-and-coming prospects against guys with more losses than wins who seem to drop first-round finishes with odd regularity. Sahota's got the length, but he's inexplicably addicted to throwing spinning wheel kicks instead of jabs. Donghun Choi is a much more traditionally compact wrestleboxing hard-nosed face-first kind of fighter, but he only barely scraped split decisions in both of his tournament bouts and it's largely because he likes to find counterpunches by simply tanking hits as they come. I am intimately familiar with Choi's face-blood after just two fights. But he hits hard when he connects, and he is very, very hard to keep down.
With discipline and a good gameplan, there's no reason Sahota shouldn't be able to keep Choi stuck behind an almost 8" reach advantage and a lot of stiff jabs. Having watched him actually fight? DONGHUN CHOI BY TKO.
ROAD TO UFC WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT FINAL: Shi Ming (16-5) vs Feng Xiaocan (10-2)
This is the only final with visibly lopsided betting odds, and it's not hard to see why. Shi Ming's run in the tournament was by no means bad, but it wasn't particularly impressive, either, and a large part of that is Ming simply being really small for an already small division. At 5' flat she's tied as the second-shortest Strawweight in the UFC, so it shouldn't surprise that she used to fight down at the Atomweight division that unfortunately does not exist here, and for as quick and tenacious as she can be about her pitbull fighting style she struggled with the greater physicality her opponents brought to the game. Feng Xiaocan is tied as the tallest Strawweight in the company, and she's one of the rare fighters who actually knows how to use that advantage. She stays at range, she hobbles her opponents with outside leg kicks, she sticks them with long jabs and crosses when they desperately try to close the gap, and if they're still standing, she jogs away and resets. Somewhere, Semmy Schilt is smiling.
I'm with the odds on this one and I don't think it'll be pretty. I admire Shi's angry charging hooks-and-takedowns style, but she was getting tagged by opponents who were both much smaller and much less technically sound than Feng. If Shi can force a complete wrestling pace and refuse to allow Feng any room to breathe she's got a chance, but if she can't close the distance she's getting blown out of the water. FENG XIAOCAN BY TKO.
FLYWEIGHT: Nyamjargal Tumendemberel (8-0) vs Carlos Hernandez (9-4)
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.
Brandon Royval didn't want another shot at the belt on short notice, so Kai Asakura is getting the rare debut-fight title shot next month. Instead, Carlos Hernandez is fighting another Road to UFC prospect. Nyamjargal Tumendemberel was already being scouted by the UFC, which is why he fought as a special guest during the second Road to UFC season, and his two wins got him an actual contract. While Tumendemberel should be in jail for fraud thanks to being nicknamed "Art of Knockout" despite having 5 submissions to just 2 TKOs, he was instead condemned to the harder challenge of debuting against André Lima this Summer, but injuries forced him to go back on the shelf for another five months.
Hernandez is by no means a bad fighter, and getting crushed by high-level competition like Taira is perfectly normal. But he does seem to struggle with the aggressive approach, and that's what he's going to be dealing with. Still, I'm erring on the side of belief in a fellow Carl derivative. CARLOS HERNANDEZ BY DECISION.
FLYWEIGHT: Lone'er Kavanagh (7-0) vs Jose Ochoa (7-0 (1))
And here, we have the fight the company is really invested in. Lone'er Kavanagh reads like he was drawn up in a UFC marketing department: An undefeated Chinese-Irish striking artist who finishes almost all of his fights, kills people with spinning heel kicks, and would rather drop people on the Contender Series and sign the dotted line than gamble on free agency. He's the precise ideal of what their entire contract mill enterprise is out to find, and they would desperately like him to win this fight. Which makes it kind of surprising that they didn't put him in with a bum. Jose Ochoa's record isn't the best--he's undefeated, but most of those victories came down in organizations like BISON KOMBAT fighting the kinds of people I have come to complain about so frequently in these write-ups that even I am tired of it--but he passed his LFA debut with flying colors, choking out the legitimately good Juscelino Pantoja in a single round.
By the odds, this is Kavanagh stomping Ochoa with ease. It's very possible this will be much more competitive than that, given just how dangerous Ochoa can be. LONE'ER KAVANAGH BY TKO remains the safe bet, but I'm hoping to see both men test each other.
BANTAMWEIGHT: Xiao Long (26-9) vs Quang Le (8-1)
Xiao Long waited quite awhile to get his shot at the UFC, and none of it has worked out as planned. His long history at the top of China's WLF Wars got him a shot at the Contender Series in 2021: He lost. They brought him back for the 2022 Road to UFC tournament: He fell ill, got injured, and missed the whole thing. He was back again in time for Road to UFC 2, and he made it to the final: Said final was ultimately delayed half a year thanks to rescheduling and yet more injuries. The 2023 final didn't happen until June of 2024, and having finally made it, Xiao promptly lost to ChangHo Lee. It's indicative of how badly the UFC has wanted Xiao that Lee, the winner, has yet to be booked again, but Xiao, who failed in his third consecutive attempt at joining the UFC, is, uh, in the UFC anyway. You may remember Quang Le as the guy who got called up from the regional circuit to serve as a last-minute fill-in against the nearly-ranked Chris Gutierrez. I was mad about it--not for Quang himself, who is more than fine, but for how awful the matchmaking department has become--and assumed Le would put up a decent fight but ultimately get leg kicked to death. I was half-right; he did put up a decent fight and even won the second round, but he did eat a million leg kicks and limped to a decision loss.
And now he's a betting underdog to Xiao. I'll be honest: I don't see it. QUANG LE BY DECISION.
LIGHTWEIGHT: Maheshate (10-3) vs Nikolas Motta (14-5 (1))
Oh, Maheshate. But for a flip of a coin, you probably would not be here. Maheshate joined up as a near-undefeated mononymic man-puncher who was inspired to fight by seeing Robbie Lawler vs Rory MacDonald when he was 15 years old (if this gave you a horrible awareness of age: same, buddy, same), and he chose to dedicate himself to that level of violence. And it almost worked! He made his UFC debut with an extremely well-aged knockout victory over the currently-streaking Steve Garcia. But then Rafa García outworked him, and Viacheslav Borshchev outstruck him, and the narrowest of split decision victories over Gabriel Benítez just barely kept Maheshate in the company. Nikolas Motta hasn't been much luckier. His debut got pushed back almost a year thanks to injuries and COVID, he arrived just in time to get blasted to death by Jim Miller, he traded knockout wins and losses back and forth for the next year, and he averted a clear decision loss to Trey Ogden thanks to a stunning referee error rendering it a No Contest instead. He, too, might be gone were it not for a huge upset knockout over the heavily-hyped Tom Nolan at the start of this year.
The like factor here is the regularity with which Motta gets punched in the head. Maheshate's primary skill is a straight right hand, and I think he'll land it early and often here. MAHESHATE BY TKO.