CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 140: SIGN O' THE TIMES

UFC Fight Night: Machado Garry vs Prates

SATURDAY, APRIL 26 FROM THE T-MOBILE CENTER IN KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI
PRELIMS 3 PM PDT / 6 PM EDT | MAIN CARD 6 PM / 9 PM

I don't know which graphic design department intern just saw Piss Christ for the first time in their lives, but keep it up, you're doing great.

Weeks off from the UFC feel cleansing. As much as I may love this sport, the escalation to near-constant cards stuffed to the gills with Apex appearances and weird co-main events and Contender Series debuts can be an awful lot to deal with. In this, we are fortunate: Not only did we get a week to breathe, but we have three straight road events, and coincidentally, when they have to actually sell tickets, the cards aren't 80% bullshit. What a concept!

like, it's not bad.

MAIN EVENT: THE MULTIVERSAL FUTURE
WELTERWEIGHT: Ian Machado Garry (15-1, #7) vs Carlos Prates (21-6, #13)

This fight surprised me when it was first announced, and the more I have sat with it, the more sense it makes. Not all of that sense of pleasant.

It's not unfair to say Ian Machado Garry is one of the UFC's most-pushed fighters. He was a tall, undefeated striker from Ireland, and they wasted neither time nor effort reminding the audience to associate him with Conor McGregor, exemplified in what is, to this day, maybe my favorite-ever example of the UFC's marketing subtlety:

It would, however, be unfair to say Garry didn't earn his way up the ladder. He punched out Song Kenan, he kicked Daniel Rodriguez to death, he beat Neil Magny and Geoff Neal and Michael "Venom" Page all fair and square. That is, by any measure, a fantastic list of wins.

But it's also a pretty clearly curated list. Welterweight, as a division, is studded with sensational grapplers. Sean Brady, Kamaru Usman, Gilbert Burns, Colby Covington when he can be proven to still exist--hell, even on the lower end of the ladder you've got folks like Michael Chiesa and Rinat Fakhretdinov hanging out just waiting to fuck up someone's day. Garry casually skipped them on his way up the ladder, so when he was announced as a short-notice replacement against Shavkat Rakhmonov this past December, a lot of conventional wisdom settled on the inevitability that he would finally be blown out of the water by a good grappler.

That is decidedly not what happened. He fought Shavkat tooth and nail for five rounds, he took two of those rounds away from him, and he became the first man to ever survive to the bell against him. It may not have been the title eliminator victory he hoped for, and the eventual revelation that Shavkat was fighting with a torn MCL may have taken a little of the wind out of Garry's sails, but at the end of the day, he clearly, definitively proved he belonged at the top of the division.

So now, one fight later, he's matched up against a man who is only barely ranked.

Just as it was not unfair to examine Garry through the lens of the UFC's marketing plans three-four years ago, it's not unfair to examine Carlos Prates through the lens of the present. Four years ago the UFC was desperately trying to replicate the Conor McGregor experiment, pulling already-established international figures into the company if they felt they could market them as a big new UK superstar. They were searching for a new moneymaker.

The searching days are over. The name of the game now is manufacturing because they've settled on the system itself as the moneymaker. The Contender Series is churning the roster at unprecedented speed and if you're a knockout artist who'll fight multiple times a year without complaining about your contract, the mixed martial world is your oyster.

Few of those factory-farmed prospects have worked as well as Prates. In 2021 the UFC signed Garry to a main-roster contract despite being only 7-0: Prates was on his 23rd fight when they made him go through the Contender Series in 2023. He's only actually been in the UFC proper for fourteen months, and that was long enough to go 4-0, get into the rankings, and score a fight with a top contender.

All of this is because Carlos Prates hurts people. He hasn't seen a third round, let alone a decision, in almost six years. He punched out Trevin Giles, he destroyed Charlie Radtke's abdomen with knees, he took a man in Li Jingliang who'd never been knocked out and dropped him five times in ten minutes, the last of which left him prone on the canvas. But the fight that earned him this spot tonight was a first-round drubbing of Neil Magny.

Which is admittedly a little funny, because Ian Machado Garry also got into the top fifteen by beating Neil Magny, but he did it a year and a half earlier and he took him to a decision.

Hell, it's even funnier than that. Garry wasn't supposed to fight Shavkat Rakhmonov, he was supposed to have a more adjacently-ranked matchup against Joaquin Buckley--and Prates wasn't supposed to fight Garry, he was intended for Geoff Neal.

Garry got his shot at the top by circumstance and failed. Now the UFC is teeing Prates up to take the shot Garry couldn't finish. This is how accelerated the timeline has become.

And it's pretty neat, and I kind of hate that.

I'd like to take a stand for divisional stability, but the truth is Welterweight's fucked up, man. The top contender is out indefinitely, the former champ just got crushed two times in a row, the champ before him is ranked #4 despite having not competed in a 170-pound fight in more than two years and having failed to win one since 2021. Gilbert Burns is aging out, Colby Covington is a fading dream, Stephen Thompson is on the outs and Michael Page is a Middleweight. The class needs inertia, and this fight provides it.

It's also just theoretically fascinating. Carlos Prates is one of the most effective strikers in the sport and his flow is damned near unstoppable, but his offense is his defense, and he tanks a lot of shots unnecessarily to land his own. He, too, has gotten to skip the line on wrestlers, and as Garry proved against Magny, Page and Shavkat, his grappling game is nothing to sleep on. He's bigger and stronger and more than willing to stifle a man on the cage or fifteen minutes if it gets him a decision.

Which he might well need to. Tall as Garry is, he's giving up reach and fluidity here. His potshot sniping style is extremely effective, but it's gotten him cracked several times in his career. That wrestling may need to escape his back pocket if he wants the win, because every moment he spends striking with Prates puts him at risk.

And at this point, I'm banking on his brain. Garry's willingness to sacrifice show-stealing knockouts for smart gameplanning remains the best decision he's made as a fighter, and as terrifying as Prates is, we haven't seen him deal with top fighters or deep waters, and if he has to spend three rounds dealing with clinch grappling, he may not have those killer combinations left in him. IAN MACHADO GARRY BY DECISION with a gameplan that will probably involve leg kicks and clinching, and the crowd will boo, and I will be pleased.

CO-MAIN EVENT: THE DENTAL PLAN
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Anthony Smith (37-21, #15) vs Zhang Mingyang (18-6, NR)

I used to have a segment called Retirement Corner in the monthly write-ups. I stopped doing it because no one in MMA stays retired. This is being promoted as Anthony Smith's retirement fight, and for the love of god, I hope it sticks.

The irony is Smith's really not that old. He's 36--he'll be 37 in July--and at the more athletically lenient weight classes north of 185 pounds, careers tend to last longer. Damn near the entire Light Heavyweight ladder consists of men in their mid-thirties. Jan Błachowicz just turned 42. But as with cars, fighters and archaeologists, it's not the years, it's the mileage, and Smith's been fighting since he was 19. He was already twenty bouts deep when he made his Strikeforce debut in 20goddamn11.

And after nearly two full decades of mixed martial arts, the word that best defines his time in the sport is Almost.

He was Almost a star in Strikeforce, but his spot was taken away by the fists of the nearly-mythical Adlan Amagov. He was almost a pickup in the UFC's acquisition of Strikeforce, but he lost that chance thanks to Antônio Braga Neto. Four years later he was almost a Middleweight contender for Robert Whittaker until Thiago Santos kicked out his liver. He somehow made it to 205-pound contention, and he was almost the man who took the belt from Jon Jones--but only because Jones illegally kneed him, and Smith could have taken a DQ victory and the belt, but he refused and settled for a two-point deduction, which only means he lost a shut-out decision 48-44 instead of 50.

That decision to be a company man dictated the last stages of his career, and it made those Almosts even more dire. He almost got all of his teeth knocked out by Glover Teixeira. He almost lost the ability to walk fighting Magomed Ankalaev. He almost fought a title eliminator against Jamahal Hill, only for the company to break their engagement so the lower-ranked Hill could get a title shot while Smith got used to rebuild Johnny Walker.

Anthony Smith, the once-top contender, almost became a jobber. He walks into this final fight 2 for his last 7, and one of those two victories was a close split decision against Ryan Spann--which was particularly distressing as just a year and a half earlier, Smith had choked Spann out in a single round.

But his last bout against Dominick Reyes was by far the worst. Smith had lost his longtime friend and coach Scott Morton just three weeks before the fight, and it became clear very, very quickly that Smith should not have been fighting, as he absorbed damage, failed to land anything of consequence, and at one point dropped his hands while audibly asking Reyes to hurt him. He ultimately got knocked out in the second round. The final strike count was 172 to 24. In a better sport, there would have been an Oliver McCall-level response to the incident.

In our sport, Smith is back in the cage barely four months later against a man with a 100% finishing rate.

I feel bad making Zhang Mingyang the smaller part of this write-up. It is, in a greater sense, unfair to the man. He's a big-punching knockout artist with a lengthy winning streak and a terrifying succession of finishes and we've barely gotten a chance to really know him, because even today, being the man who knocked out Tuco Tokkos and Ozzy Diaz doesn't earn you much goodwill with the fans.

But he's an interchangeable part. The UFC already tried to do this a year ago by matching the recently knocked-out Smith against their newer, cheaper 205-pound wrecking machine du jour in Vitor Petrino. He was a -500 favorite and everyone and their uncle picked him to destroy Smith, which was, of course, the intention. Petrino was boxing Smith around the cage as intended right up until he fucked it up by charging headfirst into Smith's armpit and getting choked out in seconds. Smith yelled to the announcers that he wasn't nearly done and he might get gold around his waist after all.

Less than a year later he's in his retirement fight against another knockout puncher who's coming in at -500, and this time, it's someone who would rather die than shoot a takedown.

There is no retirement plan in this sport. The UFC will pay to put your teeth back in your head after you get them punched out, but that's not an investment in your well-being so much as a down payment on the next time they make money off your head trauma. Anthony Smith is one of the most well-traveled, well-regarded veterans of this sport, and if he'd been willing to look out for himself as starkly as the UFC looks outs for its corporate interests he would've beaten Aljamain Sterling to the punch by two years and been the first-ever UFC champion by disqualification.

Instead he has a job as a mid-segment desk analyst and a retirement fight built around the likelihood that he loses again.

I hope you stay retired, Lionheart. I hope you teach your insane tenacity to the next generation of fighters. But mostly, I hope your post-MMA life is better to you than this one was. ZHANG MINGYANG BY TKO.

MAIN CARD: LOWERED EXPECTATIONS
FEATHERWEIGHT: Giga Chikadze (15-4, #12) vs David Onama (13-2, NR)

Giga Chikadze feels like a point of divergence in the timeline of mixed martial arts. The sheer force of hype behind him at the turn of 2022 was seemingly unstoppable, and watching him destroy Cub Swanson in barely a minute and dissect Edson Barboza in three rounds made even cold-hearted wrestling-lovers like me root for him. The UFC's first event of 2022 was also the first episode of Carl's Fight Breakdowns, and I set the tone for the series by being absurdly wrong. I, as with the rest of the world, thought Giga would punt Calvin Kattar in safety and good health, and Kattar took him apart, and that was, somehow, the end of the Giga Chikadze story. He's only made it to the cage twice in the ensuing three years, he split a win against Alex Caceres and a loss to Arnold Allen, and he's a bit lost in the shuffle. He's too inconsistent to bet on, he hasn't had a great win in almost four years, and he's too high-profile to waste.

Which makes this fight a little bit of a surprise. It's not that David Onama is by any means bad, or even unworthy; 5-2 over three and a half years is a hell of a record and three straight wins at Featherweight is well worth an audition for the rankings. I've even gone to bat for Onama as a prospect, thanks to some killer straight punches and a real solid chin. But in a division with guys like Chepe Mariscal fighting in the midcard, or folks like Choi Doo-ho who're still pinned to the divisional periphery, or, hell, Steve Garcia, who's on a five-fight knockout streak and stuck in limbo after his fight in February fell apart, it feels weird to see this opportunity go Onama's way given how understated his booking has been and that whole 'blew his weight cut two fights ago' thing.

I've believed in Onama's prospects for years, but now that we're here about to test them, I find my faith faltering. His fundamentals are as rock-solid as ever, but he hasn't shown the kind of growth I was hoping to see out of his style, and even though I remember Kattar disassembling Giga with those same fundamentals, I also remember Onama nearly getting himself killed by Nate Landwehr. GIGA CHIKADZE BY TKO.

MIDDLEWEIGHT: Michel Pereira (31-12 (2), #14) vs Abus Magomedov (27-6-1, NR)

It's hard to hit the topic of aborted hype more heavily than Michel Pereira has, and it's hard not to see him as a cautionary tale about the new reality of the UFC. Pereira's jump up to 185 pounds served as a shot in the arm for his career, and buzzsawing through three men in a total of just three minutes did more to sway the audience in his direction than all eight of his previous UFC bouts had combined. But that streak was built on the backs of guys like Andre Petroski and Ihor Potieria, whom the UFC hadn't invested a thing into. So the second Pereira faced a real test in Anthony Hernandez and got the shit beat out of him, all the air left the balloon. Now he doesn't even rate a co-main event.

And now he's stuck dealing with Abus Magomedov, whose career almost painfully exemplifies that same reality. He got signed in 2021, was repeatedly rebooked and didn't make his debut until the next year, where he destroyed the 1-3 Dustin Stoltzfus in nineteen seconds. After almost another full year of rebookings, he got his second UFC bout--against the #7-ranked Sean Strickland in what wound up being an unexpected title eliminator. After becoming the only man in the last five years to get stopped by Strickland, the UFC fed him to their up-and-coming star Caio Borralho before dumping him on the prelims for a year so he could pick up a couple quiet, understated wins, and having done so, at 3-2, he's fighting to be one of the top fifteen Middleweights in the sport.

It's just silly. It's inorganic and forced and it's quickly becoming the only way the UFC knows how to book fights anymore. After watching Anthony Hernandez ground Pereira repeatedly, I have very little faith in his ability to deal with Magomedov's wrestling for three rounds. I would personally enjoy another big body kick TKO instead so I'll be rooting to be wrong, but ABUS MAGOMEDOV BY DECISION feels more likely.

WELTERWEIGHT: Randy Brown (19-6) vs Nicolas Dalby (23-5-1 (2))

Poor Randy Brown, man. For nine straight years, Randy Brown has been riding a rollercoaster that's perpetually at risk of derailing. he got off to a solid 3-1 start in the UFC before he was steamrolled by a future champion in Belal Muhammad. He racked up a pair of fantastic finishes only to get trucked by Vicente Luque. Four-fight win streak? Destroyed by Jack Della Maddalena. Brown's latest streak came to an end this past December thanks to Bryan Battle, and not only was it a painfully close split decision, it was tinged with the bitterness of Battle blowing his weight cut by half a class. Now, for the fifth time, Brown has to rebuild his momentum.

Which is an awfully difficult thing to do against Nicolas Dalby. After two UFC stints and multiple Cage Warriors championships Dalby never quite made it to the top of the mountain, but in his multiple attempts he picked up a reputation as one of the sport's more unpredictable spoilers--a man just as capable of going tooth-and-nail with Rinat Fakhretdinov or single-handedly ending the undefeated hype train of a Gabriel Bonfim as finding himself unable to get past Tim Means. He's tricky, he's experienced, and he's goddamned near impossible to stop.

But he's also giving up a bunch of size and strength against someone who can and will alternate between sharp jabs and smothering clinch grappling for however long it takes to get a decision. If Brown lets Dalby get in too often he's going to pay for it, but Dalby's own willingness to get into dogfights plays into Brown's range management. RANDY BROWN BY DECISION.

MIDDLEWEIGHT: Ikram Aliskerov (15-2) vs André Muniz (24-6)

Everything I was saying about Abus Magomedov a few paragraphs ago goes quintuple for Ikram Aliskerov. We have written about this man exactly three times. First, in May of 2023, he was picking off a Phil Hawes who had been knocked out in two of his last three fights and was just one bout from retirement. Second, in October of 2023, he was facing career Welterweight Warlley Alves, who was on a two-fight losing streak and changing his weight class for the first time in a decade. Third, and last, was June of 2024, when Aliskerov main evented a Fight Night against Robert Whittaker, the #3 Middleweight on the planet, as an interchangeable replacement for Khamzat Chimaev. When people talk about how hard it is to follow the UFC these days, this is a big part of the fucking problem. When you repeatedly treat matchmaking as though it doesn't matter, eventually, people are going to agree with you.

But André Muniz is the kind of traditional alternative the UFC would cite as an opposing example. They brought him up slow--five wins before he contended for a ranking, even in a division as shifty as Middleweight--and they fed him a mixed diet of fresh-faced prospects, veterans on their way out of the company, and even former world champions like Ronaldo "Jacaré" Souza, whose MMA career ended on the spot when Muniz handed him the first submission loss of his life and broke his damn arm in the process. They did everything right! And the second he got into the rankings he was throttled by Brendan Allen and then swept and pounded out by Paul Craig, and all that momentum dried up in the space of just six months. We haven't actually seen Muniz since he scraped a split decision off THE IRON TURTLE a year and a half ago--because they've kept trying to book this fight instead. He was supposed to fight Ikram last June and this past February and both times it fell through.

But now we're here. I see three likely scenarios here: Either Ikram blasts Muniz out on the feet two minutes into the first round, or Ikram holds Muniz down in the clinch and half-back control for most of the fight to an uneventful decision, or Muniz pulls submission wizardry out of his guard. I am desperately rooting for fun. ANDRÉ MUNIZ BY SUBMISSION.

PRELIMS: THE ONGOING HUMILIATION OF WOMEN'S BANTAMWEIGHT
FLYWEIGHT: Matt Schnell (16-9 (1)) vs Jimmy Flick (17-8)

Matt Schnell is not so much underwater as he is actively drowning. Five and a half years ago Schnell was a ranked contender on a great winning streak fighting the future Flyweight champion of the world; over said five and a half years he's 2 for 8 and five of those losses involved getting violently finished. Steve Erceg owes his persistent top-of-the-card booking to the UFC's appreciation of his knocking Schnell out because Flyweight knockout artists are considered too rare to lose. The real backhanded reality for Schnell isn't just that he's losing, though--it's that the last three people he lost to have all collectively lost all of their last twelve fights unless their opponent was named Matt Schnell. Jimmy Flick, admittedly, isn't doing much better. Flick famously made his UFC debut, scored an incredibly neat flying triangle choke, and almost immediately retired because the money was terrible and he wanted out. But as I said up top regarding Anthony Smith, retirements never last as long as they should, and after a divorce and some healthy self-reexamination Flick decided he was ready to return to the sport two years later. He promptly got knocked out twice in a row and his second lease on professional life has him at 1-3. Insanely enough, Nate Maness, the last man to defeat him, got cut from the UFC on a two-fight winning streak for being insufficiently exciting, but Jimmy Flick and Matt Schnell are still here fighting each other.

And I just don't know, man. Neither of these guys seem to have much gas left in the tank, and Flick's grappling is always a danger against someone who gets caught in shit as often as Schnell does, but I have more faith in Schnell's physicality than Flick's opportunism. MATT SCHNELL BY TKO.

LIGHTWEIGHT: Evan Elder (9-2) vs Gauge Young (9-2)

Evan Elder's UFC career is paved in wild matchmaking fortunes. He got into the UFC as a last-minute replacement after Louis Cosce got COVID, they followed it up by throwing him to the wolves against the massively-hyped Nazim Sadykhov and then abruptly changed their tune by giving Elder two gimme fights against other end-of-their-rope competitors on losing streaks, and having dispatched both men, they sought to reward him by putting him on Contender Series welcome duty against Ahmad Hassanzada. And then, just one week before fight night, Hassanzada got arrested for, uh, "lewd or lascivious acts with a child under 14." Understandably, that fight is no longer happening. So, serving as what I hope is the first and only child molestation-based late replacement fighter in UFC history, we have Gauge "Gee Money" Young, a top talent out of the Fighting Alliance Championship who is the living archetype of the regional fighter: Solid offense, decent wrestling, a really unimpressive record, and defense shaky enough that even Youtube comments are gently asking him to move his head.

If he turns it into a wrestling match I can see it working out for him, but I'm sticking with EVAN ELDER BY DECISION.

FEATHERWEIGHT: Chris Gutierrez (21-5-2) vs John Castañeda (21-7)

This fight was originally scheduled for UFC 313, but it got scratched on fight day after Castañeda got ill backstage. So enjoy this rerun from a month and a half ago, which feels so, so long these days.

BANTAMWEIGHT: Chris Gutierrez (21-5-2) vs John Castañeda (21-7)

This is your last-minute bout of the week, and it's an attempt to make good on a pair of fighters who got boned. Chris Gutierrez, he of the dishonorable execution of Frankie Edgar, was supposed to fight Jean Matsumoto on this card as a sort of gatekeeper test for Jean's ranked prospects. But Jean got yoinked as a short-notice fill-in against Rob Font last month, leaving Gutierrez afloat. John Castañeda was supposed to fight Douglas Silva de Andrade last week, but something went so wrong in Andrade's weight cut that, while he did make it to the scales successfully, the doctors refused to let him proceed. So these two waylaid fighters get a second chance against one another, and we should all be so lucky in our lives.

But I just think Chris has the better argument. CHRIS GUTIERREZ BY DECISION.

BANTAMWEIGHT: Da'Mon Blackshear (16-7-1) vs Alatengheili (17-9-2)

I did a double-take when I saw this fight, because goddammit, I wrote about Da'Mon Blackshear barely a month ago too. Blackshear just fought at Vettori vs Dolidze 2 on March 15th, where he almost got stopped on punches in the first round after a series of vicious shots to the body before reversing a takedown and snatching a kimura on Cody Gibson in the second. Which is great! I loved it! But you still almost got knocked out and wound up eating 53 strikes from a professional fighter and it's five weeks later and you are going to do it all over again, and, just, man. Do you not remember 2023? You got a twister in a UFC fight, everyone loved it, and then you tried to pull a gangster move by fighting Mario Bautista a week later and lost and all that momentum got lost with you. And I swear, if you do it again, I am picking against you in every fight you have out of sheer frustration with your decisionmaking. Alatengheili is not Mario Bautista, he's not near as solid a wrestler or striker, you've got a huge size and reach advantage over him, and you should, by all rights, be able to beat him.

But I wish you would stop tempting fate. DA'MON BLACKSHEAR BY DECISION.

BANTAMWEIGHT: Cameron Saaiman (9-2) vs Malcolm Wellmaker (8-0)

Cameron Saaiman, you are auditioning your own replacement. Saaiman had the good fortune of running into the not-long-for-the-UFC duology of Mana Martinez and Terrence Mitchell in his first two fights, but a drubbing by Christian Rodriguez and a knockout at the hands of big new thing Payton Talbott is all the indication you need to know the UFC decided he wasn't worth the investment. A year and a half ago Cameron was the undefeated Contender Series prospect and he's being marched out as the betting underdog to Malcolm Wellmaker, the new undefeated Contender Series prospect. As is so often the way, if you have read any of these, you know everything I am about to say. Malcolm Wellmaker's a successful regional fighter with good offense but untested defense whose record primarily consists of rookies and journeymen and he's here because he got a knockout on the Contender Series over a man who was only a few fights removed from a bout against an 0-6 guy who mysteriously always loses in the first ninety seconds.

I was never too high on Saaiman and I get why the UFC's on the outs with him, but it's still a shame. MALCOLM WELLMAKER BY TKO.

WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT: Jaqueline Amorim (9-1) vs Polyana Viana (13-7)

Let's just be realistic, here: Jaqueline Amorim is an almost-undefeated grappler the UFC's been trying to invest in for two years who's submitted almost everyone she's fought and just pulled off the most impressive victory of her career by armbarring Vanessa Demopoulos, a woman who's been in the cage with Loopy Godinez, Emily Ducote and Talita Alencar without having ever been submitted before. Polyana Viana is a 4-6 UFC fighter with one win in the last four years who got mauled on the ground in each of her last two fights. I'm a big fan of Viana's all-or-nothing style, but this fight was not set up for her benefit.

JACQUELINE AMORIM BY SUBMISSION.

FEATHERWEIGHT: Timmy Cuamba (8-3) vs Roberto Romero (8-4-1)

I really wonder what it must feel like to be a utility fighter. The UFC is very proud of its new marketing line about how getting into the company's high-competition atmosphere now virtually requires you to either go on the Contender Series or serve as a short-notice replacement--which has nothing at all to do with their desire to make sure no one in the sport has bargaining leverage--but it's rarely so on-the-nose. Cuamba was brought into the UFC on four days' notice to fight Bolaji Oki despite having just fought a professional mixed martial arts bout eight days prior. He made a good accounting for himself, but unsurprisingly, he lost. He got a full month to prepare for his next fight with Lucas Almeida! But he lost even harder. Roberto Romero--ironically signed to the UFC as a short-notice replacement for another, different Lucas Almeida fight--was supposed to meet Contender Series winner Alberto Montes two weeks ago, but Montes had to pull out, and the UFC wanted to make it up to the fighter they're actually interested in, so Cuamba was booked into a make-good fight for Romero to keep him on-schedule for the month.

I still think about Harry Hunsucker when I think about the reality of fighters who've devoted their lives to mixed martial arts being carefully managed for promoting other fighters. ROBERTO ROMERO BY DECISION.

WOMEN'S BANTAMWEIGHT: Chelsea Chandler (6-3, #14) vs Joselyne Edwards (14-6, #15NR)

For the second event in a row, we curtain-jerk the prelims with a ranked bout at Women's Bantamweight, and I'm running out of adjectives for the ongoing deconstruction of what was, however briefly, once one of the most popular divisions in the sport. Raquel Pennington was the champion, she got screwed out of her title and has yet to be rebooked, Julianna Peña tried her best to bury the #1 contender in Kayla Harrison and is only now begrudgingly scheduled to fight her, and rather than Pennington or any other in-house challenger, waiting in the wings for them is Amanda Nunes, who is coming out of retirement to preside over a broken class. Here's another fun fact: When I templated out this week's card, Joselyne Edwards was ranked at #15. By the time I got to this preliminary fight 48 hours later, she'd been dropped off the rankings in favor of Melissa Mullins, who hasn't fought since last November, where she missed weight--for the second fight in a row. Why is she ranked? Because she was announced for a June matchup against Darya Zheleznyakova, and a ranking will make people care about that. Is this a huge injustice? Not really, because Joselyne Edwards who has three victories at Women's Bantamweight, hasn't successfully weighed in at the class limit in almost four years. But don't worry--neither has Chelsea Chandler, who blew her first cut to the division by two pounds and her second by six.

This is a bout between two ranked or ranked-adjacent fighters who haven't even managed to make the weight for the division, let alone consistently win at it. And I hate holding that against them, because both were solid, healthy fighters--at Featherweight, which the UFC took away from them. Amanda Nunes isn't bringing Women's 145 back with her, because by god, we can barely even employ 15 Women's Bantamweights and we don't want to try any harder than we currently are. JOSELYNE EDWARDS BY DECISION.