CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 132: ABORT, RETRY, FAIL
UFC Fight Night: Cejudo vs Song
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 22 FROM THE CLIMATE PLEDGE ARENA IN SEATTLE
PRELIMS 3 PM PST / 6 PM EST | MAIN CARD 6 PM / 9 PM
No, I didn't screw up the banner, they just made the text blurry for some reason. Boy, this card is a mess.
As I write this it is Sunday the 16th and this card is sitting on seven separate cancellations, the most recent of which happened this afternoon. This card was originally slated to feature Dominick Cruz's retirement bout, a top contendership match between Ketlen Viera and Macy Chiasson, a ranked Heavyweight debut and an Edson Barboza fight.
Now we have Nick Klein and Julius "Juice Box" Walker.
Is it a bad card? Honestly, no. There are some real good matches on it and we'll learn a lot about the placement of some interesting divisional prospects.
It's just also a mess.
MAIN EVENT: WHAT NOW
BANTAMWEIGHT: Henry Cejudo (16-4, #7) vs Song Yadong (21-8-1 (1), #8)
This is the kind of fight I would've liked to see Henry Cejudo have as he came out of retirement, and that's why I'm not a fight promoter.
On paper, Henry Cejudo should be a bigger deal. His combat sports career reads like a laundry list of overachievements. Gold medal in wrestling, won and defended championships at two UFC weight classes, massively successful fighting career. One of just four men on Earth who can say they beat Demetrious "Mighty Mouse" Johnson in a fight! By any objective measure, he's one of the best to ever do it.
But there's a lot of subjective space to fighting, and that space has never been kind to him. Some of it is the audience's rejection of Flyweight. Some was legacy resentment about his early-career issues cutting weight. But an awful lot of it was how much of that success came from weird gray areas.
Cejudo beat Johnson--but it was a coinflip of a split decision after Johnson had previously knocked him out, and despite being one of the best champions in the sport's history, Johnson never got a rubber match. Cejudo defended his Flyweight title--but it was against T.J. Dillashaw, who was coming down a weight class and looked like death warmed over. Cejudo won the Bantamweight title--in a vacant bout against Marlon Moraes, who was about to go on one of the most depressing slides in MMA history. Cejudo defened it against the rightful champion, Dominick Cruz--in a stoppage that really wasn't that bad but Cruz has been using his commentary job to complain about it for half a decade.
And, infamously, he followed that victory by retiring on the spot unless the UFC wanted to give him a big money match, which they completely ignored right up until three years later when they had a pair of problems they wanted solved. They didn't want Aljamain Sterling to have the Bantamweight title and they didn't want Merab Dvalishvili as their #1 contender, and Cejudo was pulled out of mothballs to beat them. He, of course, lost both fights, which is why he is now fighting someone at the edge of the top ten as a test of how much gas he has left in the tank.
Song Yadong needs this. Song Yadong has needed this for quite some time. Song's run in the UFC is nearing its eighth year, and it, too, has been a success by any measure. You do not last nearly a decade in one of the hungriest shark tanks in the sport without being good; you do not knock out most of your UFC opponents and hang around in the Bantamweight rankings without being great.
Great, unfortunately, does not get you over the hump. He's beaten prospects, he's beaten title contenders, but he just can't beat the best of the best. In 2022 it was Cory Sandhagen elbowing his entire eyebrow into pieces; this past March it was former champion Petr Yan outworking and ultimately outgrappling him. Which is eminently frustrating for Song, because he was fully in both of those contests. He never wilted, he never stopped, and he was more than willing to go fight Sandhagen for another round despite the disassembling of his eye socket.
But he still lost. That makes two failed runs at the top--three, if you count Kyler Phillips knocking him back down the ladder in 2021--and at a certain point, you start running out of bodies to climb. If Song wants to fight his way back to contention, he needs to beat a top guy, and with his longevity, there are precious few he has yet to battle.
Henry Cejudo's one of the few. Promotionally, I get the case for throwing Cejudo into top fights coming off his retirement. You don't know how long you'll have him and you don't want to risk losing his name value by risking him against prospects. Pragmatically, I don't know that the Henry Cejudo Brand is really bringing in the big bucks to such an extent that you had to give a shit about protecting it in the first place, and I suspect that if it did, you would've put up more of a fight about retaining him after his retirement in the first place.
But philosophically? I'm much more interested in how well he hangs with contenders than champions. Cejudo's a tough fight for Song. We saw Cory Sandhagen, Petr Yan and even Ricky Simón manage to give Song trouble with their wrestling, and Cejudo's far and away a better technical wrestler than all of them. Song may hit harder, but Cejudo's chin has yet to get cracked and planting long enough to land bombs on him makes it real hard to avoid the inevitable takedown coming back at you. The people who've succeeded against him have been the ones who could outwrestle, outgrapple or just plain outwork him.
Except for that one time Mighty Mouse kneed his guts out and simply destroyed him, which one well-placed bodyshot could definitely do again.
This entire year to date has been a battle between my brain and heart on fight picks, and this is no different. The trouble Song's had with pressure and wrestling makes this a favorable fight for Cejudo. He should be able to get him down and keep him stuck in the clinch. But Song is extremely hard to keep down, and as underrated as Cejudo's punches are, I don't think an extended exchange with Song is going to go his way. Over five rounds, Song'll have many chances to chip away at him and wear him down.
So I'm shooting for the moon. SONG YADONG BY TKO.
CO-MAIN EVENT: THE UNDERSTUDY
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Brendan Allen (24-6, #9) vs Anthony Hernandez (13-2 (1), #12)
I can't help reading Brendan Allen's rise and fall as a prime example of the way the UFC's current approach to growing talent ultimately fails them.
Seven fights is a monstrous winning streak for the Middleweight division. Seven wins--five of them by stoppage--should be more than enough to propel anyone high enough that they can survive a top-level win. So why, after one loss, is Brendan Allen out of main events, fighting down in the rankings, and overlooked by the audience to the point of being a +250 underdog?
Well, here are the seven men Allen beat:
Sam Alvey, who was saved only by one split draw from having the longest losing streak in UFC history
Jacob Malkoun, who'd been knocked out two fights prior
Krzysztof Jotko, who'd repeatedly washed out of contention and was released after the loss
André Muniz, a legitimately good win over a genuine contender
Bruno Silva, who had just one win after a losing streak and returned immediately to said losing streak afterward
Paul Craig, who was 1 for his last 3 and said win was also against André Muniz
Chris Curtis, a last-minute replacement rematch who was also 1 for his last 3 and almost won a split decision anyway
Coincidentally, I remember people getting really excited about Allen after that Muniz fight. It was a great performance over a great competitor! But the UFC tried to keep Allen in their back pocket as a protected contender and it ultimately hurt his momentum more than it helped. By the time they tried to book him into a genuine contendership match with Marvin Vettori things had already gotten weird; the fight falling through and leaving him with an anticlimactic coinflip split against Curtis didn't help.
And then he got run right off the tracks by Nassourdine Imavov. One decision goes against him, and Allen is all the way at the back of the line, fighting to hold onto a top ten spot against the new scrappy grappler on a big winning streak.
Anthony Hernandez almost flamed out of the UFC before his run could even start. His Contender Series win got overturned because he smoked weed, he got choked out in his debut by a guy who flamed out within a year and a half, and by the dawn of 2021 he was 1 for 3 and being fed to the massively-hyped Rodolfo Vieira, one of the best grapplers in the world, as an easy layup.
Hernandez choked him out and suddenly the entire world was paying close attention to him, which means he, of course, did not fight again for more than a year. "Fluffy" has spent almost as long not fighting as fighting at this point in his UFC tenure, in fact. He had four cancelled fights before rifling off three consecutive wins in just over a year, then once again went into rescheduling torpor until coming back for early 2024, and one win later he went right back on the shelf for most of the year thanks to hand injuries.
But he came back, and now he's looking for his own seventh consecutive win just as Allen is looking to get his momentum back, and honestly, there's a lot about this fight that works really, really well.
Not only are both men positionally complementary to one another, they're a great stylistic matchup. Allen and Hernandez have both been stunning opponents by overwhelming them in grappling exchanges, they've both proven remarkably adept at jumping on submissions given half a chance--sometimes to their own positional detriment--and most importantly, they've both demonstrated the ability to tough out difficult moments. Even in his rout of Muniz, Allen got hurt in the final round and had to switch back to his wrestling game to neutralize the attack, and even in his rank-earning performance against Michel Pereira, Hernandez got badly hurt in the first round and had to gut out bodyshots to get Pereira where he wanted him.
It's an even clash, but I like the argument for Hernandez. He's not as physically imposing as Allen and his control is arguably worse, but he's better at pushing the pace and throwing hands, and if Allen can't keep him on his back, he's going to get worn down.
That and, y'know, they already fought once in 2018 and Hernandez beat him.
ANTHONY HERNANDEZ BY DECISION.
MAIN CARD: TO BE ANNOUNCED
BANTAMWEIGHT: Rob Font (21-8, #9) vs Jean Matsumoto (16-0, NR)
This is a big, big change for both of these men. Rob Font has long been Bantamweight's premier gatekeeper, which is why it felt so particularly odd when Dominick Cruz, one of the few men in the argument for the best in the division's history, drew Font for his retirement fight. It's not that it was a bad matchup, exactly, it was just a baffling choice. Cruz beating Font would do very little for his legacy, and Font beating Cruz would have done very little to raise his profile. Font's already A Guy. He's already beaten world champions and he's already proven he's not going to get a shot at the UFC title. He's one of the most technically sound gatekeepers in the sport's history.
So it makes more sense that he's keeping the gate again. Jean Matsumoto isn't exactly undeserving of the opportunity, but he is getting rocketed to it by circumstance. After a great run down in his native Brazil and a solid victory on the Contender Series, Matsumoto rode his undefeated record right into the UFC proper with two straight wins in six months. Granted one of them was Dan Argueta, whose record is not great, and the other was the forever-embattled Brad Katona, who came real close to beating Matsumoto himself. The UFC, to their credit, was hoping to bring Matsumoto up more slowly; he was supposed to fight Chris Gutierrez at UFC 313 next month. But with Cruz out this card needed help, and a top ten shot is a top ten shot.
It's a big ask, though. Matsumoto's the betting favorite here and I understand why--it's hard to beat being young and undefeated--but he's also small enough for the division to struggle with guys like Katona and Argueta and his best successes come from scrambles. I'm just not sure I'm on the train yet. ROB FONT BY DECISION.
FEATHERWEIGHT: Jean Silva (14-2) vs Melsik Baghdasaryan (8-2)
It's hard not to see 2024 as the year of Ilia Topuria and Alex Pereira, but a whole bunch of fighters had breakout performances and Jean Silva's was one of the most fun to watch. In the space of six months he rifled off three progressively more impressive knockouts and went from boxing up a severely overmatched Westin Wilson to popping up to Lightweight on short-notice and winning a toe-to-toe brawl with Drew Dober, one of the division's scariest punchers. He's somehow cemented himself as a legitimate contendership prospect at two weight classes, and theories abounded as to how the UFC would capitalize on his success.
I don't know that anyone called Melsik Baghdasaryan. It's not that Melsik is bad! He's a real solid striker and an intriguing prospect in his own right. It's rather that Silva is riding a huge amount of momentum and Melsik Baghdasaryan has been gone for a year and a half and has only fought twice since 2021. He's just been snakebitten to the point of parody, constantly losing out on fights thanks to opponents being injured only to injure himself by the time the UFC rebooks him. He missed 2022 with hand injuries, he missed 2024 with a torn labrum, and now that he's back again, instead of a tune-up fight, he's got Jean Silva.
The matchmaking doesn't make a ton of sense outside of the likelihood that this will just be a fun fucking fight, and there's only so much I'm willing to complain about that likelihood. JEAN SILVA BY TKO is still my call, though.
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Alonzo Menifield (15-5-1, #15) vs Julius Walker (6-0, NR)
2024 was not kind to Alonzo Menifield, though. After many years as one of the Light Heavyweight division's more experienced gatekeepers, the UFC decided to reward Menifield making it five fights without a loss by testing him against guys they'd rather push instead, and those tests went very poorly. Carlos Ulberg dropped Menifield in just twelve seconds in May, and somehow, despite getting concussed, Menifield was back in the cage just 84 days later so Azamat Murzakanov could knock him out all over again. The UFC had no interest in making his life any easier here: Until a week ago he was going to fight the undefeated Oumar Sy.
But undefeated fighters are growing on trees these days. Julius "Juice Box" Walker is a 6-0 regional guy who's now fighting for a top fifteen ranking in the world. Half of his one-and-a-half-year career came against fighters with losing records and now he is fighting for a top fifteen ranking in the world. He's got a ground game that looked pretty fun against former UFC washouts like Myron Dennis, who was eliminated from The Ultimate Fighter 23 (jesus christ) all the way back in 2016 (jesus christ) and Bevon Lewis, who got knocked out by noted Welterweight Trevin Giles, and now he is fighting for a top fifteen ranking in the world.
Could he win? Sure. Fuck it, it's Light Heavyweight. The UFC's matchmaking is at this point just a reflection of the reality of what they've allowed to exist. I'm still picking ALONZO MENIFIELD BY TKO because I don't like how much trouble Walker had with Nyle Bartling, but he's got a good elbow coming out of the clinch and, additionally, nothing matters.
PRELIMS: OH, RICKY
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Ion Cuțelaba (18-10-1 (1)) vs Ibo Aslan (14-1)
Ion Cuțelaba, you angry wrestling motherfucker, I need you to do this for me. They want you out of here, and they've sent Ibo Aslan to do it, because he likes to punch people and you like double-leg takedowns. They'll never forgive you for beating Tanner Boser, Ion. He was supposed to deliver Canada. They were supposed to get that Georges St-Pierre money again thanks to Tanner Boser and his plaid shirts and his mullet, and you were on a losing streak, and you were supposed to lose, and then you destroyed him and now the UFC's great northern hope is Mike Malott. Ibo Aslan killed Anton Turkalj. He killed The Pleasure Man. And now the world is supposed to roll over and let him inherit the Light Heavyweight division, which, as we have just established, is the most legitimate spectacle of martial arts in the world.
Defend the homeland, Ion. Do it for the world. ION CUȚELABA BY TKO.
FEATHERWEIGHT: Andre Fili (24-11 (1)) vs Melquizael Costa (21-7)
It feels disrespectful to Andre Fili to describe him as a fighter who's just here for a good time, at this point, but it's also pretty accurate. He's good, he's dangerous, and as his shellacking of Lucas Almeida demonstrated, he's still more than capable of beating anyone who doesn't take him seriously. He's also almost two dozen fights into his UFC tenure, has never really threatened the rankings, hasn't had back-to-back wins in almost six years and at one point had to temporarily stop fighting because one of his eyes stopped working. If he should be fighting at all--which, I'll be honest, I still feel pretty wonky about after that last bit--he's here for either fun fights or yardstick fights, and Melquizael Costa is firmly in need of the latter. "Melk Cauthy" jumped into the UFC as a last-minute replacement at the start of 2023, and two years later his results have been, as one would imagine, mixed. He's 2-2, he'd really like to run that number up, and the last time we saw him he recovered from getting fucked up by Steve Garcia by getting wrestled just a whole bunch by Shayilan Nuerdanbieke, only to successfully scramble and choke him out in the third.
I like Costa, but I am biased in favor of anyone who decided to start fighting because they really liked the UFC video games. I, too, triple-roundhouse-kicked people with Kevin Randleman on my Dreamcast. Fili's striking is a tough match for Costa's, but I'm gonna believe in the grappling anyway. MELQUIZAEL COSTA BY DECISION.
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Mansur Abdul-Malik (7-0) vs Nick Klein (6-1)
You know Dylan Budka got cut from the UFC after losing to Edmen Shahbazyan on last week's main card? They knew what they were paying him for, just like they know what would most likely happen by giving Mansur Abdul-Malik a Contender Series bout against one of the few people to lose to Budka. Hell, they were pretty sure what would happen when they booked Mansur's UFC debut against Duško Todorović, a once-threatening prospect who had since been knocked out repeatedly and horribly injured, and Mansur obliged by knocking him out in two and a half minutes. "Blue Collar" Nick Klein is getting his own chance at a debut here, thanks to a thirty-nine second choke over Heraldo Souza, the Welterweight champion of the Standout Fighting Tournament in Brazil. For the record, this is their Middleweight champion:
Klein's groundwork is decent but he's also a late replacement, so I'm going with MANSUR ABDUL-MALIK BY TKO.
BANTAMWEIGHT: Ricky Simón (20-6) vs Javid Basharat (14-1 (1))
This is a painful one for me. I was real big on both of these guys, but few more than Ricky Simón. I have always been a sucker for scrappy, high-cardio pressure fighters, and Ricky fit that model to a T. Should I have gotten off the boat when Urijah Faber flatlined him in 2019? Probably, but I refused to let it go, and after a five-fight winning streak I felt my faith had been rewarded. And then he got punched out by Song Yadong, and then he got controlled by Mario Bautista, and then he got wrecked by Vinicius Oliveira, and now he's facing a fourth consecutive loss and almost certain release. Javid Basharat isn't in an enormously better situation, though. He, too, was riding high midway through 2023 as an undefeated prospect with a UFC winning streak and seemingly endless upside, and then all that momentum came to a halt when he punted Victor Henry in the dick, wound up with a No Contest, and complained about it endlessly. He declared Victor a coward, declared himself the boogeyman of the division, and declared that his next fight would remind everyone why he was a future champion. He promptly got outworked by Aiemann Zahabi.
I want to believe in Ricky. I have soured considerably on Javid. But my heart cannot go any further. JAVID BASHARAT BY DECISION.
CATCHWEIGHT, I'D GUESS 180ISH: Nikolay Veretennikov (12-5) vs Austin Vanderford (12-2)
This fight got added to the card on Tuesday morning and it's a weird one. Nikolay Veretennikov was originally supposed to fight Billy Ray Goff on last week's card and Islam Dulatov was supposed to fight Adam Fugitt on this week's card. Veretennikov pulled out of the Goff fight and Dulatov pulled out of the Fugitt fight, so the UFC decided to have Goff fight Fugitt this week instead. Fugitt got injured, Goff got removed from the card, and now Veretennikov is somehow available again and instead of Goff getting their original fight, the UFC has signed Austin Vanderford, who depending on your level of awareness of the sport is most famous for one or more of the following:
Getting into title contendership in Bellator only to get crushed by Gegard Mousasi in a minute and a half
Showing up in All Elite Wrestling during their extremely weird American Top Team MMA invasion angle
Being married to Paige VanZant, former UFC celebrity turned Onlyfans model and Power Slap contestant
At one point, Vanderford was looked at as an actual prospect, and then he got destroyed twice in a row and left the sport for two years. He made a successful comeback in the LFA last year, and now we have this fight between two Middleweight prospects who are both already in their mid-thirties and one of them already lost his UFC debut and the other hasn't won a relevant fight since mid-2021.
So I dunno, man. I dunno what we're doing. Vanderford is a good wrestler who can be chinny and Veretennikov is a good all-arounder who doesn't seem to have it in him to break the ceiling. AUSTIN VANDERFORD BY DECISION, but it's a bizarre fight under bizarre circumstances, so who knows.
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Nursulton Ruziboev (34-9-2 (2)) vs Eric McConico (9-2-1)
Speaking of weird fights, there's this. Nursulton Ruziboev was one of the UFC's hyped international prospects, a finishing machine with a five-year winning streak and a long line of bodies behind him, and his introduction to the Middleweight division seemed like the beginning of a potential new contender. But Ruziboev committed the Brandon Vera error of trying to fight a land war in two divisions at once, dropped down to Welterweight for a short-notice fight with Joaquin Buckley, and promptly got shut out and nearly knocked out in the last round. So now the massively hyped Middleweight knockout machine who already won two UFC bouts and was just in a co-main event is all the way down at the start of the prelims against a guy making his debut. Eric McConico isn't even a Contender Series guy. He was supposed to be fighting Randall "Braveheart" Wallace at TUFF-N-NUFF 141 this month. The UFC signed him to fill card space, I guess. Having watched McConico's tape, I admittedly don't see a ton there. I did enjoy a fight of his where he managed to land a knee to the dick and a knee to a grounded opponent and then got top position for a grappling victory by grabbing ahold of the cage with both hands.
Yeah. NURSULTON RUZIBOEV BY TKO.
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Modestas Bukauskas (16-6) vs Raffael Cerqueira (11-1)
They're never gonna love you, Modestas. You were supposed to be a guy they could have lose to their prospects and instead you beat up Tyson Pedro and Zac Pauga and Marcin Prachnio, and you did it without the decency to give them a big highlight reel knockout they could put on Twitter for ten more views and a brief moment of Dana White's attention before he goes back to Power Slap because it's the only thing that makes him alive anymore. So they've got Raffael Cerqueira instead, the guy who almost gave me a brain aneurysm when he got knocked out by Ibo Aslan last October. I refuse, categorically, to deviate from my anti-Ibo Aslan platform, and Cerqueira must pay for helping give it life.
Do the thing, buddy. MODESTAS BUKAUSKAS BY DECISION.