CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 155: REGIONAL APPEAL: THE REVENGEANCE
UFC Fight Night: Walker vs Zhang
SATURDAY, AUGUST 23 FROM THE SHANGHAI INDOOR STADIUM IN XUHUI, CHINA
PREPOSTEROUSLY EARLY START TIME WARNING: PRELIMS 12 AM PDT / 3 AM EDT | MAIN CARD 3 AM / 6 AM
Welcome, friends, to the annual Card 90% Of Us Won't Be Watching. Much like Petr Yan vs Deiveson Figueiredo last year, this event is programmed for the Chinese market, which means you are more likely to catch some of the beginning while up way too late than any of the main card because you are up way too early.
Which is a shame, because there are some good fights up there. Enough that it's going to drive me insane in the middle of the main card. Look forward to that!
MAIN EVENT: PUT THE LOWEST RANKED MATCH ON TOP
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Johnny Walker (21-9 (1), #13) vs Zhang Mingyang (19-6, #14)
There's a top five Featherweight match and a top three Heavyweight match on this card, and Zhang Mingyang is in the main event because we are in China and the UFC wants money. Let me spoil this ahead of time, and try not to be shocked: Zhang Mingyang is probably going to win.
Awhile back, I posited that you could get a baseline how-much-does-the-UFC-care-about-this-card reading by figuring out how many fighters were coming off losses vs wins, but I think that was a bit inexact, because careers travel in arcs, not moments. A more thoroughly fair baseline, I think, is turning each card into a conglomerated fighter. If this UFC event had the combined records of all its fighters over the last two years of their UFC careers, how would it look?
The Tatsuro Taira vs Hyun-sung Park Fight Night comes out to a workmanlike 28-24-1, which makes sense, as it was kind of a mess. Roman Dolidze vs Anthony Hernandez, in addition to looking better on paper, was better in practice: 38-27-1 (2), because Miles Johns and Cody Brundage like their No Contests. As one would expect from a pay-per-view, this past week's UFC 319 would have been a sturdy, 40-25 veteran.
Fight Night Shanghai just barely stays afloat over the 50/50 line at 29-28 with one No Contest. That NC, and two of those losses, belong to Johnny Walker, who has not won a fight since May 2023, hasn't won a fight against an active fighter since January 2023, and hasn't won a fight against an active, currently ranked Light Heavyweight since November 2018. Johnny Walker injuring himself doing the Worm during his post-fight celebration is closer to the present day than Johnny Walker winning a credibly ranked fight.
But the UFC banked a lot of marketing into him during the first 50 weeks of his tenure. Light Heavyweight is the sleepiest division in mixed martial arts, so showing up and wrecking three people in three minutes is going to justifiably get you an awful lot of attention. Sure, beating Justin Ledet and Misha Cirkunov may not have aged all that well, but fuck it, get that man his shot at contendership!
The contendership shot was week 51 and it ended with Corey Anderson punching Walker out in two minutes, which did not deter the UFC from making Johnny Walker a fixture of main events just like they'd planned. Which is especially funny, because he's never, ever won one.
Seriously! Not one. He led the Apex against Thiago Santos and got fucked up, the undeterred UFC threw him right back into another main event with Jamahal Hill in Walker's next fight and Hill iced him in one round, and just shy of two years later they gave Walker one more main event--this time a rematch against Magomed Ankalaev, who'd illegally kneed his face off three months prior--and this time Ankalaev knocked him out in a round and a half.
If you ever doubt how much of mixed martial arts is just marketing hiding behind a veneer of sport, remember that Corey Anderson destroyed Johnny Walker only to be cut by the UFC one fight later, and in the last six years Walker is 4-6 (1) and a perfect 0-3 in his main event appearances, and yet he is still here, main eventing another UFC card, despite two higher-ranked fights being booked below him.
Which is, of course, because it too serves the purposes of marketing. Every single part of Zhang Mingyang's UFC career has been a marketing effort, and this is no different. Zhang's last fight before his Road to UFC appearance was the first-round destruction of a 1-3 guy who gassed in two minutes and his audition for the big leagues was a victory over Tuco Tokkos, who was best known for repeatedly losing in Bellator as a Middleweight.
When they finally called Zhang up to the UFC proper, his debut came against Brendson Ribeiro, which was very reasonable, as Brendson was getting his first crack at the UFC too. When Zhang won that, his next matchup was Ozzy Diaz, who was not only also making his UFC debut, but was in the middle of an ill-fated attempt to get out of his normal class at Middleweight, which he returned to after Zhang killed him in two and a half minutes.
So, okay, fine. You have your new guy, you fed him two other new guys. Will his third fight be a step up against some kind of other, similarly-tiered prospect?
Of course not! It was Anthony Smith, who was 2 for his last 7, and on a two-fight losing streak, and had just been knocked out four months prior while fighting in the middle of a massive, public depressive episode, and had already preemptively announced that the Zhang Mingyang fight would be his retirement bout, because, as everyone knows, fighting as a professional pugilist when your mind is already set on quitting the sport forever is a fantastic idea that never ends poorly.
But it worked out great for Zhang. The UFC has only been to China seven times before this, and aside from the typically perfunctory finals of The Ultimate Fighter: China (耶稣基督), the main events are a who's-who of MMA superstars. Petr Yan, one of the best Bantamweights of all time. Zhang Weili, who became the Strawweight champion that night. Francis Ngannou, the real Heavyweight champion of the world. Michael Bisping, Middleweight champion. Rich Franklin, champion and one of the UFC's breakout stars.
Now Zhang Mingyang gets to breathe that rarefied air, because he beat two guys who had never fought in the UFC and one guy on a losing streak who retired in a pool of his own blood after getting repeatedly forearmed in the brainstem.
And all he has to do to justify it is knock out a man who's 0 for his last 3 and whose last great win happened a couple weeks after Red Dead Redemption 2 came out.
Johnny Walker has looked pretty bad for quite awhile. He gave up a round to late-period Anthony Smith. He got completely walked through by Magomed Ankalaev--twice, under Pride rules. He's the only man Volkan Oezdemir has knocked out in more than six years. The optics of making Zhang's fourth UFC fight a bout against yet another struggling, winless fighter are about as obvious as the choice to book it in Shanghai in the first fuckin' place. Johnny Walker is not here to test Zhang, he's not even here to put up a fight. He is here to lose.
And god, I really want to pick him anyway.
The first thing I ever wrote about Zhang Mingyang centered on his bad habit of defending punches with his face. Tuco Tokkos punched him in the head twenty-four times in three and a half minutes before Zhang knocked him out. Brendson Ribeiro actually landed more shots to the head than Zhang did en route to his own destruction. Even Ozzy goddamn Diaz smacked him repeatedly in the face. The only person who simply washed out against him was, unsurprisingly, Anthony Smith. Everyone who poses a standup threat gets to clip Zhang at least a couple times.
And Johnny Walker's entire career is built around clipping people. He's much bigger, he's much longer, and he hits harder than anyone Zhang's ever faced. A multitude of fighters can attest to just how different a Johnny Walker punch to the chin can be.
But he has to land them. And he hasn't done that in a very, very long time, at least not against anyone who poses a credible threat on the feet. Walker's losses aren't shameful--the only person in the UFC to beat him who hasn't contender for a world championship is Nikita Krylov, who's no slouch--but they are numerous, and the dent they've left in his chin is tangible, as is the degree to which they've hurt his confidence. So much of his success came from the way he flowed freely into his striking, and every time he's gotten stopped he's become just a little more stylistically reticent, and that unwillingness to take those risks is how smaller fighters get in on him and take him apart.
I have spent this year repeatedly picking with my heart, and I have been wrong almost every time. No matter how much my heart sees Walker lamping Zhang as he moves recklessly forward, in my head, Zhang's victory is absurdly obvious. Walker being too tentative and too chinny and letting Zhang get into range so he can punch him sideways is practically inevitable, and no amount of Tinkerbell wishing is going to make me believe in Walker finding his old self at an opportune moment, no matter how much Zhang leads with his face.
But I cannot resist the urge to pick against marketing this blatant, and if I ever put my picks percentage over my desire for martial schadenfreude, it means my soul is dead.
JOHNNY WALKER BY TKO.
CO-MAIN EVENT: DAMAGE IS A SCORING CRITERIA
FEATHERWEIGHT: Brian Ortega (16-4 (1), #4) vs Aljamain Sterling (24-5, #7)
Brian Ortega is the Bermuda Triangle of the Featherweight division.
Leading into his shot at Max Holloway's title in 2018, Ortega wasn't just undefeated, he'd stopped every single person the UFC threw at him. In more than twenty years of combat, two people have knocked out Clay Guida: Chad Mendes, one of the hardest-hitting Featherweights in history, and Brian Ortega. In almost thirty fights, two men have submitted Renato Moicano: Islam Makhachev, one of the greatest Lightweights of all time, and Brian Ortega. Frankie Edgar's downfall has muddied the sport's memory of him, but in 2017 Edgar was the man who'd shared the cage with José Aldo, BJ Penn and Charles Oliveira and never, ever been stopped. In 2018, Brian Ortega knocked him out after hitting him with an uppercut so hard Edgar's feet left the ground like a cartoon dog smelling a freshly-baked pie.
When Ortega walked into that matchup with Max Holloway, despite Max's stature as one of the sport's most celebrated champions, their betting odds were even. People genuinely believed Ortega might be a generational star. No one had cracked his chin, no one had gassed him out, he was knocking out legendarily durable veterans and choking out highly-touted black belts. It was completely, utterly believable that Brian Ortega could beat Max Holloway.
And then Max Holloway punched him in the head 244 times in 20 minutes.
Since then, everything's gotten weird. Ortega was undeniably a relevant top contender, but his body also started falling the fuck apart. His ACL exploded and he didn't get back in the cage for almost two years, and it'd be almost another full year before his unsuccessful second title crack against Alexander Volkanovski. Ten more months afterward he was back in the cage to fight Yair Rodríguez, which ended with Ortega's shoulder separating in one round; it would be more than a year and a half before Ortega came back to win the rematch. His return from his first victory in four years wouldn't happen for another seven months after he fell ill just before its original scheduling for the Summer of 2024--and it ultimately ended with his getting completely thumped by Diego Lopes.
Which was fine. Ortega didn't want to be at 145 at all. He'd made plans to move to Lightweight, where the UFC was trying to put him into an instant-contendership match with Mateusz Gamrot. He was very open about how much the weight cut sucked, and with no viable path to the title, he wanted a better career trajectory. Which went up in smoke the second Ilia Topuria took the Lightweight title and vowed to park it for a superfight with Islam Makhachev, who, himself, is waiting on the Welterweight title.
So Brian Ortega is floating in space. He's a top five contender with one victory in his last four fights, which collectively took four years to happen, and he's only beaten one currently active fighter since 2017, and he sometimes he looks like a submission savant and sometimes he looks like his knees are made of dust and memories, and he doesn't even want to be at this weight class anymore but there's just nowhere for him to go.
And, boy, it's weird for Aljamain Sterling to have the comparatively normal story in a matchup. That hasn't happened in a long goddamn time.
At this point, everyone knows the song of Aljamain Sterling. Remarkably good Bantamweight perpetually disliked by management thanks to his crippling addiction to things like wrestling and victories by decision, forced to work overtime to get shots that other folks received much more easily and regularly shit on during press events because nothing is better for fight promotion than telling people your best fighters are boring. When Aljo finally got his shot and Petr Yan infamously became the first champion to ever lose a UFC title by disqualification after an illegal knee, it didn't exactly help matters.
But Sterling got his rematch, and he won fair and square, with good, old-fashioned, split-decision-inducing grappling.
And the UFC punished him with one of the worst title schedules of all time.
Zhang Weili defends her Women's Strawweight Championship once per year. Jon Jones had one fight in 840 days as the Heavyweight champion. Aljamain Sterling was booked into a title defense every 100 days, and each one was the dumbest shit you've ever heard. T.J. Dillashaw won a split decision in 2021 after two and a half years of inactivity, went back on the shelf for another 15 months, and not only got a shot at Aljo, but somehow passed the UFC's stringent medical testing despite coming into the bout with a left shoulder so fucked he'd warned the referee ahead of time not to stop the fight when it inevitably came out of its socket during the first round, which it did, and the ref listened to him, because our sport is fake. Henry Cejudo, the one-time double champion, had retired in 2020 as an unsuccessful attempt to get better pay or bigger fights from the UFC: Three years later he was unretired directly into a shot at Aljo.
And the final indignity came when Aljo lost his belt to Sean O'Malley, who was so absurdly preferred by the UFC that he'd been allowed to sit out for more than a year, completely uninjured, on the back of a split decision he should have lost, so the UFC could have Sean O'Malley win the title in a main event whose instant replays were brought to you by a corporate partnership advertising campaign featuring Sean O'Malley.
But Aljo had already decided to move up to 145 pounds whether he won or lost. And his Featherweight debut was a great success! But it came against Calvin Kattar, who has had one of the hardest career downturns this side of Cody Garbrandt. The UFC threw Sterling to Movsar Evloev this past December in what I can only assume was an attempt to get them to both destroy each other in some sort of wrestling-based matter/antimatter collision so the company could be rid of all their grappling problems at once--and if you think I am overstating their distaste please bear in mind this battle between one of their most successful former champions and their undefeated, 18-0 #5 contender wasn't just on the prelims but was booked under Themba Gorimbo vs Vicente Luque and Dominick Reyes vs Anthony Smith--but despite being a really neat grappling war that saw Sterling take the first round and threaten a couple neat submissions, Evloev took the grappling advantage and the decision.
That still leaves multiple grapplers in the top ten, and by god, that's too many.
So, once again, the grapplers must grapple each other so no one else has to, and once again, we are gauging fighters more by the peaks of their past success than the conditions of their present. We just watched Aljo fail to outgrapple a Featherweight grappler and Ortega's got plenty of grappling bonafides and a strength advantage to boot; we're also only a couple fights removed from Ortega's arm breaking into pieces from the strain of defending an armbar, and once again, he's spent almost an entire year on the shelf. It's hard to shake the feeling that evaluating Brian Ortega's chances in a cage fight in 2025 comes down to predicting the state of his health as much as his strategy.
And I just don't have faith in those knees to work anymore. Ortega's a great grappler, but the majority of his best grappling is offensive. His defensive grappling has suffered the most as he's aged and gotten hurt, and his growing immobility doesn't make me think he'll be able to stop Aljo from getting him down. This will, in all likelihood, be the kind of grind I love and the company hates, and if for some terrible reason I'm awake at 7:30 on a Saturday morning, I'll be happy to see it with my bleary eyes. ALJAMAIN STERLING BY DECISION.
MAIN CARD: HEAVYWEIGHT CONTENDERSHIP AFTERTHOUGHTS
HEAVYWEIGHT: Sergei Pavlovich (19-3, #3) vs Waldo Cortes-Acosta (14-1, #6)
It's really hard not to be angry about this fight. This is a sentence I never thought I would write, for reasons both philosophical and literal, but god damn it, Salsa Boy deserves better.
At the end of July, Martin Buday was released from the UFC despite being 7-1 at Heavyweight. This was heralded by some ostensibly serious commentators and parts of the fanbase as a completely reasonable choice for the company to make, because Buday was not easily marketable or fan-friendly, he was a lumbering clinch wrestler with one finish in eight fights. Personally, I think this is an aggressively shitty standard to hold the UFC to because it excuses them from their responsibility to live up to their best-of-the-best sporting mentality in favor of embracing nihilism.
But for sake of argument: Okay. The people who deserve UFC promotion are the reliably exciting performers. That means the UFC's going to promote them, right?
Well, Sergei Pavlovich is 7-3 in the company, he's a top five Heavyweight and he's got an 80% finishing ratio, and all of those finishes are knockouts. Six of those seven UFC wins took less than a round and three of those took collectively less than three minutes. He's repeatedly proven himself to be one of the hardest, scariest punchers in the history of the Heavyweight division, and he's delivered a half-dozen highlight-reel knockouts.
Waldo Cortes-Acosta has done his best to be the UFC's ideal Heavyweight. He barely wrestles, he takes every fight they give him, he accepts late bookings and late replacements, and he boxes, endlessly, sometimes to a fault. He, too, is 7-1 just like Martin Buday was, but he's scored two neat knockouts in that time, one of them from just this past March. Hell, this marks Waldo's third fight in five months.
So this is everything the UFC could want, right? It's two immensely successful Heavyweights who are almost entirely striking-oriented. Salsa Boy is one of the most successful Contender Series winners they've ever had; Pavlovich is one of the best knockout artists they've ever seen. This is a top five fight that could easily line someone up for a shot at the world championship. When the UFC says the Martin Budays of the world don't belong here, this is the kind of thing they're envisioning.
This fight is three slots down on the middle of a card that is airing live from China. This is a top contendership fight in the biggest Heavyweight division in the entire sport and it will happen on a broadcast roughly 2/3 of the audience will not watch.
And that's fucking nihilism.
SERGEI PAVLOVICH BY TKO.
FLYWEIGHT: Sumudaerji (17-7) vs Kevin Borjas (10-3)
Sumudaerji, the times have not been kind. At one point there were some real hopes that Sumudaerji could be a real Flyweight contender for the UFC and a potential star for their Chinese marketing campaign; that point was, like, four and a half years ago. Between injuries, reschedulings and bad timing he's only made it to the cage four times in that span, and three of those were one-sided losses. On the plus side, he made it back into the win column last time out! On the minus side, it was against Mitch Raposo, who has the rare distinction of being winless across three separate arms of the UFC (he washed out of TUF 29, he got choked out on the Contender series and when he eventually got signed as a late replacement anyway he still lost), and it was a split decision, which does not raise the support you want for a third lease on professional life.
Kevin Borjas is the UFC's designated regional-marketing fall guy. After an unsuccessful debut against Joshua Van, the company tapped Borjas to go rehabilitate Alessandro Costa during their annual trip down to Rio, and Borjas was dutifully pounded out in two rounds. They tried to have Borjas fight Mexico's Edgar Cháirez at Noche UFC 2, but when that didn't pan out they struck even closer to the jugular and booked Borjas directly onto their Mexico City card this past March--against Ronaldo "Lazy Boy" Rodríguez, one of their better-marketed Mexican stars. But this time, unexpectedly, Borjas didn't just win, he dropped Ronaldo repeatedly en route to doing so. Finally, a victory! Does this free Kevin Borjas from his role as a recurring punching bag for regional marketing specialties?
Nope! Get your ass to Shanghai and be the evil foreigner again. SUMUDAERJI BY DECISION.
WELTERWEIGHT: Taiyilake Nueraji (11-1) vs Kiefer Crosbie (10-5)
I talk a lot about how difficult it can be to evaluate fighters within the regional fight scene, and China's is one of the most inconsistent nuts to crack. Taiyilake Nueraji is one of the better Welterweight prospects it has to offer, and the UFC knows it, because they already gave him a look. During the second Road to UFC season, Nueraji got a non-tournament bout against South Korean champion Han-Seul Kim, who, himself, had won a similar special feature bout during the first Road to UFC season. But the UFC didn't pick Kim up for his win, and despite Nueraji knocking Kim stupid in one round, they passed on him, too. It's not like they changed their mind because Nueraji set the regional world on fire, either; in his last appearance he was very bravely defeating Kirill Karpekin, a veteran at 1-1.
No, this was, of course, a late replacement bout. UFC stalwart Song Kenan was supposed to be here, but Song had to pull out, and by god, they already set Kiefer Crosbie up to lose to one Chinese fighter, why waste that opportunity? Crosbie was picked up by the UFC based on either the strength of his incredible back-to-back victories over 47 year-old Brian Lo-A-Njoe or old UFC road warrior Alex Oliveira, or, alternatively, because he's Irish and he sometimes knocks people out. As with so many fighters the UFC doesn't really care about, Crosbie's already been here for two years, in that entire span of time he's only fought twice and both times he got choked out in one round, and now they're really hoping he'll do them a solid and lose in a marketing-friendly way again.
Which he probably will, but I'm less confident than I was when Song was still here. Taiyilake's bigger and more imposing than Crosbie, but Crosbie's losses generally come from being outgrappled and Taiyilake's much more of a striking fan. I'm still gonna say TAIYILAKE NUERAJI BY TKO, but my confidence isn't high.
PRELIMS: THE NOC SHIFT
LIGHTWEIGHT: Maheshate (10-4) vs Gauge Young (9-3)
You will notice a theme on these prelims, and that theme is 'Chinese or China-adjacent fighters against people we are sending in to die.' The UFC really wanted Maheshate to be a thing, and it's not hard to see why. A 6' Chinese Lightweight with an iron chin, giant right hands and surprisingly good timing regarding their application? Money in the bank, baby. You just have to be careful and make sure you matchmake him carefully and ah, shit, Maheshate's 1-3 in the last three years. You got too big for your britches when he knocked out Steve Garcia and you decided to tempt the MMA gods and now he's scraped one split decision in recent memory and you've got to rebuild him by giving him much smaller guys who've never won a UFC fight. Gauge Young! You may know him as the guy who lost a fight to Evan Elder this past April. You may know Evan Elder as the guy who lost a fight to Preston Parsons three and a half years ago. You may know Preston Parsons as the guy who got flattened by Jacobe Smith in January!
All of these people are defined primarily by their losses and that's what the UFC's counting on here. MAHESHATE BY DECISION.
FLYWEIGHT: Lone'er Kavanagh (9-0) vs Charles Johnson (17-7)
This fight is like the phases of the favorability moon. The UFC wants Lone'er Kavanagh. They always have. He's an undefeated Chinese-Irish striker, you could not stop them from throwing fortune and fame his way, and that includes getting him to 2-0 in the UFC without having to fight a real wrestler. Charles Johnson? They fuckin' hate that dude. No matter how many fights he wins or how well he wins them, they refuse to promote him. When last we saw him, Johnson was on a four-fight winning streak that included not just beating but knocking out Joshua Van. Johnson's next fight was in the Apex; Van's was in The Sphere. And what did Johnson get for winning that fight? The very first curtain-jerking fight on another set of Apex prelims against Ramazan Temirov, one of the best prospects the UFC has signed in years.
And now that he's lost, he is here to put over another marketing hopeful. I refuse. CHARLES JOHNSON BY DECISION.
LIGHTWEIGHT: Rongzhu (26-6) vs Austin Hubbard (16-9)
Aside from having parents who just tried a little too hard on the name, Kody is the rare kind of Contender Series fighter I have almost no beef with. He's low on experience, but during his thus-far short time in the sport he's fought and beat genuinely experienced, decent fighters and he's looked solid doing it. He's a talented all-around fighter who uses his striking and his wrestling in concert, he's a legitimate talent and I am legitimately intrigued to see how well he will do here.
Having said that, he will, now, lose embarrassingly.
Kody Steele was an undefeated prospect with great bonafides. Rongzhu was an embattled veteran with a 1-3 UFC record who'd just been stopped by the man they call Taco. I chose to have faith in Max PowerKody Steele, and he put up a solid fight, but not enough to stop Rongzhu from dragging him through a clear decision. So congratulations, Rongzhu: You have your first UFC victory in almost four years, and they have seen fit to reward you with a battle against the man who lives on the knife's edge, Austin Hubbard, and by "the knife's edge" I do not mean anything actually cool so much as he goes to split decisions all the damn time. "Thud" is part of the graduating class of TUF 31 (jesus christ) who have already begun getting released from the company because they keep losing too much, and Hubbard's a tough, gritty, wrestler who's incredibly hard to stop and he's also 1-3 in his second lease on UFC life and desperately needs a win to keep his job.
Which is why they booked him against Rongzhu in China. RONGZHU BY DECISION.
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Michel Pereira (31-13 (2)) vs Kyle Daukaus (15-4)
Look at what you've done, Michel. You were getting the mega-push from the UFC for all your neat finishes as a newly-minted Middleweight and then you crashed into the Anthony Hernandez wall and spent the last year looking far, far too roadworn and tired for a fighter who's only 31, and the UFC lost faith in you so badly that they booked you against Marco Tulio and you were a betting underdog against Marco Tulio. But he couldn't make it, so do you know what they did? They brought back a goddamn Daukaus brother. Kyle, to be fair, was the better of the two Daukausi, and he's had a good four-fight winning streak as the champion of the Cage Fury Fighting Championship, but god damn it, I watched you get knocked out by Eryk Anders. Do you think that's a thing I can just let go of? Eryk Anders, the void of meaning at the center of all things, has an additional knockout victory on his record because of you, and you come to me asking for my support? Against a man who did a moonsault kneedrop in a legitimate fight?
Fie on you. Fie on the house of Daukaus. MICHEL PEREIRA BY TKO.
FEATHERWEIGHT: Yizha (25-5) vs Westin Wilson (17-9)
Westin Wilson, your existence is one of pain. They hired you as a horrifically overmatched late replacement for Joanderson Brito, and you got completely mauled, and then they made you a victim for the UFC debut of Jean Silva, and no one knew he was about to be a top Featherweight contender, they just knew he was the rando who punched your entire guts out. Here's the thing, though: You were supposed to let it happen again. Do you think the UFC booked you against Jeka Saragih for your benefit? No! You were supposed to help rehab the Road to UFC runner-up who punches people all the time! But you had the audacity to submit him, and now you're in China against Yizha. You are half a foot taller than Yizha. You have more UFC victories than Yizha. Yizha isn't even a striker, he's predominantly a grappler, which means he is fighting you at several large disadvantages.
He is a -1500 favorite to knock the absolute piss out of you, because people associate you with losing. I beg of you. You have the opportunity to do the funniest thing possible. I need you to deliver, Westin. I need you to reach for that spirit bomb. WESTIN WILSON BY SUBMISSION.
BANTAMWEIGHT: Xiao Long (27-9) vs Suyoung You (15-3 (2))
The UFC wanted Xiao Long bad, man. They put him on the Contender Series and he lost. They signed him for Road to UFC 1: He got sick and missed it. They brought him back for Road to UFC 2: He got injured and postponed the tournament final more than half a year, then proceeded to lose it. Chang-Ho Lee, the actual winner, wouldn't show up in the UFC until just a few months back in April; Xiao Long is already on the second fight of his contract, having knocked out Quang Le back in November. At a certain point, why even pretend. SuYoung You actually won his Road to UFC tournament--on that same card with the Quang Le fight, in fact--and they pitched him a softball this past March in AJ Cunningham, another in the endless army of late replacement fighters who really only get called on to usefully lose. You beat him and showed off a solidly-rounded gameplan in the process, and now I'm in the unexpected position of actively anticipating this fight, because these two are really evenly matched and it could be a really fun chess game.
I'm hoping for fun grappling and I'm thinking SUYOUNG YU BY DECISION feels a touch more likely.
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Uran Satybaldiev (9-1) vs Diyar Nurgozhay (10-1)
This fight is a monument to the state of the UFC and how it as an organization loathes purpose, meaning, and you, individually. If Uran Satybaldiev's name rings a bell, it's because he was hired as a 24-hours-before-fight-night replacement for Kennedy Nzechukwu, who was slated to fight Martin Buday in a ranked Heavyweight match. Buday beat Satybaldiev fairly handily, but, as we have established, Martin Buday's services are no longer required by the UFC, and yet Uran Satybaldiev is still here, back at his home division of Light Heavyweight. Diyar Nurgozhay came through the Contender Series as a massively-hyped, highly-touted undefeated Kazakh wrecking machine who finished 80% of his fights. He was the wave of the future, they said, and the odds pegged him as an overwhelming favorite in his UFC debut against Brendson Ribeiro, who had mostly just lost repeatedly. And then Diyar blew his weight cut by five pounds, and then Diyar looked tired and confused before the first round was over, and then Diyar tried to rush the fight to the ground and got tapped out immediately.
And we will just keep smashing these action figures together. URAN SATYBALDIEV BY DECISION.