SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 6 FROM THE ACCOR ARENA IN PARIS, FRANCE
EARLY START TIME WARNING | PRELIMS 9 AM PDT / 12 PM EDT | MAIN CARD 12 PM / 3 PM | EARLY START TIME WARNING
Hope you enjoyed your week off, everyone. We've even got another one this month! It's like Christmas in September.
The world tour is still in full swing. Last time we were in Shanghai, this week we're in Paris, on the 28th we're going to Perth, and over three weeks in October we're going to Rio, Vancouver and Abu Dhabi. So start times, main events and matchmaking will all be pretty weird for the next couple months. How weird, you may ask?
One week from now two Brazilians will fight in the main event of the annual Mexican Independence celebration, three weeks from now we have a Light Heavyweight title eliminator featuring Dominick Reyes, in October Charles Oliveira is in a main event despite being violently concussed barely three months prior, that month ends with the first Heavyweight title fight of the post-Jon Jones era featuring the guy he wadded up and threw in a garbage can in two minutes, and tonight, there's a top ten Heavyweight contendership fight buried in the middle of the prelims and the main card is anchored by Bellator's best-ever fighter battling the debuting double-champion of the Czech Republic's Oktagon for a ranked berth at Featherweight.
We're nearing the end of the pay-per-view era and we're only getting stranger on its way out.
MAIN EVENT: I GUESS IT'S A TITLE ELIMINATOR
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Nassourdine Imavov (16-4 (1), #2) vs Caio Borralho (17-1 (1), #7)
It's hard not to feel as though the math on Middleweight has changed.
I have directed a great deal of mockery towards Middleweight, and in the future I will assuredly give it even more, but shockingly, the UFC's 185-pound scene has been hopping. Dricus du Plessis was an active, regularly defending champion, and after years of agonizingly slow churn, the rankings managed to surface Nassourdine Imavov, Reinier de Ridder, Anthony Hernandez and Caio Borralho as title prospects, all of whom were just a good win away from a scrape at gold.
Last month, Khamzat Chimaev ground du Plessis into dust over a five-round wrestling clinic. He vowed to be improve his one-fight-per-year schedule and even called out Reinier de Ridder for a clash in Abu Dhabi at the end of October.
That fight is not happening. Khamzat, shockingly, will not be fighting twice in a calendar year for the first time since 2022. It is entirely within the realm of possibility that, like Jon Jones and Zhang Weili before him, the Middleweight division will fall to a very sparse schedule of title defenses. Which means it's now incumbent upon the UFC to ratchet down to the contenders who really, truly matter. Thus: Instead of four potentially interesting title prospects, we're narrowing our scope down to two. A month and a half from now the crowd favorites, Reinier de Ridder and Anthony Hernandez, will meet to determine the true grappling challenge for our new ultra-wrestling champion.
This week, in Paris, we're sorting out the much weirder contenders.
Aside from the just-deposed champion, Nassourdine Imavov is the top guy in the division. On paper, it makes sense. Hasn't lost in almost three years, four-fight, all-ranked winning streak, multiple stoppages, and his only loss in recent memory came against Sean Strickland, who was just eight months away from becoming the world champion. He's been dismantling his foes, he's enormously credible, he's got international appeal and he finally realized he should cut his nickname from "The Russian Sniper" to just "The Sniper" what with the, y'know, everything, which is more common sense than ninety percent of mixed martial artists will ever exhibit. He's the guy! Right?
Well, here's the thing: Almost all of those fights were at least sort of weird. Imavov was supposed to fight Kelvin Gastelum; Sean Strickland replaced him five days before the fight. Imavov was supposed to beat Chris Curtis; it went to a No Contest after Imavov smashed him with his forehead. And those four ranked victories that justified Imavov's spot on top?
The first was a decision against Roman Dolidze that saw Imavov lose a point for blasting Dolidze in the face with a blatantly illegal grounded kick
The second was a TKO over Jared Cannonier, but the stoppage was so wonky referee Jason Herzog had to apologize for it after the fact
The third was a close fight with Brendan Allen, which was perfectly fine!
...but the fourth was a knockout over an Israel Adesanya who was 1 for his last 5
Knocking out Israel Adesanya should be great! What's left of Adesanya's legendary status is the entire reason Imavov has the ranking he does now. But there's something to be said for diminishing returns. When Alex Pereira knocked Izzy out, it was downright shocking. When Sean Strickland dropped Izzy--one of just two knockdowns to his credit in the last five years--it became a little less novel. When Dricus barnstormed Izzy and choked him out, it started to get a little uncomfortable.
When Nassourdine knocked Izzy out, it mostly made people publicly ask for Izzy to retire.
It's great to beat a legend! But when people react to your dramatic, career-defining knockout victory less with excitement towards you and more with the kind of sadness for your victim that's usually reserved for conversations about sending your grandfather to an assisted living facility because ever since his eightieth birthday he just isn't all there anymore, it's hard to position yourself for a title shot. You need a win someone can feel good about.
Luckily, there's Caio Borralho. And hey: He sure looks like a much more credible contender. Sixteen-fight winning streak! Hasn't lost since his rookie year in 2015! 7 straight UFC wins! Hell, he's even a Contender Series winner! How can you have all of those marketing-preferable traits and not be a title challenger yet?
Part of it is the curse of being a grappler. It is not at all a coincidence that after spending the first 2/3 of his UFC career as an extremely successful jiu-jitsu practitioner, he did not really commit to a single takedown attempt in his last three high-profile fights. Part of it is that winning streak of his, uh, goes places. Beating Armen Petrosyan and Makhmud Muradov doesn't do much for your title hopes. But let's afford Caio the same grace we just offered to Imavov and look at the four fights that got him here. How good were they?
He choked out Michał Oleksiejczuk, who was unranked and riding the glory of beating no less than Sam Alvey and Cody Brundage
He got a decision over Abus Magomedov, who was unranked and had just been trounced by Sean Strickland a few months beforehand
He punched out Paul Craig, who was somehow ranked #13 despite having one victory in his last five fights, which is now 1 for 7
He won a war with Jared Cannonier, who, you may recall, had just lost to Nassourdine Imavov two months prior
You know how we just discussed the declining return on interest for beating Israel Adesanya? Having a guy you'd like to push beat Jared Cannonier 77 days after the other guy you'd like to push got a wonky TKO over him isn't just some real dirty matchmaking work, it's a real tarnished way to get a rub.
Plus: That was more than a damn year ago.
It was already difficult enough that the UFC followed up Imavov's huge, high-profile victory by putting him back on the shelf until an opportunity they liked came through. Caio Borralho earned his spot by beating Cannonier in August of 2024. I can't even say "Last August" anymore because it's fucking September now. The UFC spent years trying to make Caio another of their big Contender Series stars, and they finally got close to it and iced him out for four whole seasons.
And now you have two contenders coming off the biggest wins of their careers who, despite being right at the cusp of main eventing a pay-per-view against one of the UFC's most notable stars, still need rehabilitation.
My instinctual inkling here leans towards it finally being Caio's time. Imavov has struggled with wrestling to the point that even Sean Strickland took him down, and jiu-jitsu has always been the glue holding Caio's style together. But Caio made the unfortunate decision to stop sniffing glue, and where he used to drag people through chain-wrestling Hell, now he's boxing with Jared Cannonier and getting his face broken, even in victory.
Boxing with Imavov seems like an exceptionally bad idea. Caio has proven he has power, but he strikes like someone who spent most of his career on the mats. Imavov is faster, straighter, and much more defensively sound, and in a prolonged striking exchange it's real likely he'll carve Caio up.
I do not want to doubt the Fighting Nerds, who have made hay on great gameplans across multiple years and multiple divisions, but unless Caio gets his grappling groove back, I think this is NASSOURDINE IMAVOV BY DECISION.
CO-MAIN EVENT: THE NEW MODEL
LIGHTWEIGHT: Benoît Saint Denis (14-3 (1), #13) vs Mauricio Ruffy (12-1, #15)
It's amazing how much one year changes things.
At the start of 2024, Benoît Saint Denis was the UFC's guy-in-waiting: An all-action, stoppage-happy, marketing-friendly Frenchman in one of the company's biggest shark tanks. He was ridiculously tough, his best defense was more offense, and despite being a grappler by trade he would sling leather and headkicks with wild gunmen, and best of all, he'd do it three times in four months. The company could not possibly ask for more, and that made it only a surprise to folks who weren't paying attention when they jumped Saint Denis from Matt Frevola to Dustin goddamn Poirier in a title eliminator. And Benoît was the betting favorite! People were sure he was going to smash Dustin and be the big, dangerous new championship prospect Islam Makhachev needed. 2024 was going to be the year Benoît Saint Denis would finally break through as a top Lightweight.
2024 wound up being the year Benoît Saint Denis got essentially eliminated from title contention.
That first round against Poirier was good! Then Dustin beat him senseless and knocked him out. Six months later Benoît was back as an even bigger betting favorite against Renato Moicano in a fight so blatantly set up to rehabilitate Benoît that they held it in Paris. It was a massacre. Moicano outstruck him, outwrestled him and broke his face so badly that it was frankly surprising the fight made it to a second round--and it went no further, because after that second round, Benoît could no longer see out of one eye. What was supposed to be a return to form as a hometown hero wound up with Benoît covered in blood while Moicano cut an insane post-fight promo about Democracy being a lie.
To twist the knife even further, thanks to happenstance, both Poirier and Moicano got shots at Islam's Lightweight Championship immediately after beating Benoît, and both failed, making his championship aspirations an even harder sell for the audience. We've said here on multiple occasions that you can tell if the UFC cares about a fighter's future based on how they match them after a rough patch. If you get a gimme fight: Congratulations! You're a made man with management. If you get someone dangerous? They're prepared for you to fail.
Benoît got Joel Álvarez, a 6'3" finishing machine whose only loss in six years came against Arman Tsarukyan. And when Joel had to pull out, they tried to replace him with Mateusz Gamrot, who they don't even like very much. It was only after Saint Denis very understandably turned down a short-notice fight against one of the trickiest grapplers in the division that the UFC settled on no less than Kyle Prepolec, the killer himself, who'd lost 2 UFC fights half a decade prior and was coming off a valiant win over a guy who was 25-28. Shockingly, Benoît won with almost no effort. So everything's fine again, right? Benoît's next match is going to get him back on track, right?
Nope! It's Mauricio Ruffy. Welcome to the pile of old toys, Benoît.
The UFC loves Mauricio Ruffy. He is yet another of the murder machines being turned out by the Fighting Nerds, the same team that's currently bringing you Caio Borralho, Jean Silva, Carlos Prates and Karine Silva, and like so many of his teammates, he's on the fast track up the ranks. It's not hard to see why. He's a One Piece-obsessed anime nerd with brutally effective striking who's only ever won one fight without knocking his opponent out, typically in beautiful and terrifying fashion. Much like Saint Denis, Ruffy racked up his two UFC wins in just six months, and much like Saint Denis, you can tell a lot about the UFC's intentions for Ruffy by how they matchmade his first swipe at the rankings. Lightweight is never lacking a murderer's row of active competition, after all. Did Ruffy get a young prospect, or a fellow rising contender, or even a dangerous gatekeeper?
Nope! He got King Green. King Green, who at 38 years young had just been choked out by Paddy Pimblett and knocked out by Jalin Turner within his last three fights. Ruffy was a nearly prohibitive favorite, and unsurprisingly, he knocked Green cold with a spinning heel kick in like two fucking minutes. Lightweight has a new murderous striking prospect and the rest of the world has a problem.
I haven't said this in awhile, but I have to give the UFC credit for this fight. Is it slanted towards Ruffy? Obviously, yes. But I've opined far too often about missing the days of smart, strategic, the-house-always-wins matchmaking, and the topline of this card is an excellent example of it. Whether Nassourdine Imavov or Caio Borralho win the UFC comes away with a credible top contender, and no matter who takes this co-main event, the UFC gets what they want. If things go as planned, Mauricio Ruffy immolates a notable Lightweight, nets the best win of his career, and emerges as a serious threat to everyone. If Benoît Saint Denis beats both Ruffy and the odds, he's immediately rehabilitated by a fantastic victory in front of a hometown crowd that will absolutely lose their shit for him.
It'd be a great story! I'd love to see it! MAURICIO RUFFY BY TKO after he punches Benoît's nose through the back of his skull.
MAIN CARD: WAIT, WHERE DID ALL THE FRENCH FIGHTERS GO
LIGHTWEIGHT: Bolaji Oki (10-2) vs Mason Jones (16-2 (1))
Nothing is more French than a battle between a half-Zimbabwean, half-Belgian man and his extremely Welsh competition. Bolaji's run in the UFC, thus far, has mostly been fuckin' weird. He earned his Contender Series shot by beating up an 8-13 man in his native Belgium, his UFC debut was a slightly lackluster but definitive victory over Timmy Cuamba that was inexplicably rendered as a split decision, his second shot out saw his six-year winning streak end after a Chris Duncan guillotine choke, and after multiple pullouts he notched his second UFC victory over Michael Aswell, who took the fight three days before it happened. So we're two years and three fights into the Bolaji Oki UFC arc, and all we really know about him is he hits hard, but not quite hard enough, and his submission defense is questionable, as is his luck.
But his overt weirdness isn't any wilder than that of Mason "The Dragon" Jones. It's hard to remember now, but when Jones was initially signed back in 2020, he skipped the DWCS line entirely because there was genuine hype around him. An undefeated Cage Warriors champion, a grappler who was beating people with three times his experience during his rookie year--people had high hopes for Jones. He lost his undefeated streak in his first UFC fight, his second turned into a No Contest after he poked his opponent in the eye, and two fights later he lost again and got cut and sent back to the UK. Jones immediately cleaned up in Cage Warriors again, and four fights later the UFC wanted him back so he could fight the man, the myth, the legend himself: Jeremy Stephens, who was returning to the UFC on the strength of his being 2 for his last 10 mixed martial arts bouts. Jones won, which is good, because if he'd lost against Jeremy Stephens in 2025 I think the cops would've put him in jail.
I've been waiting for Bolaji to impress me, but it just hasn't been happening. He seems tentative and afraid of prolonged grappling exchanges, and if Jones wants to get him there, I think he'll be more than able. MASON JONES BY DECISION.
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Modestas Bukauskas (18-6) vs Paul Craig (17-9-1 (1))
Modestas, by god, you are making the most of this second lease on life. The world moved on from Modestas Bukauskas after Khalil Rountree Jr. kicked him out of both his kneecap and the UFC back in 2021, but he fought his way back and he refuses to be put away again. With the inclusion of one knockout loss against Vitor Petrino back in 2023, Modestas is 5-1 in his current run, and his wins keep getting better. He choked out Marcin Prachnio, he punched Raffael Cerqueira flat in two minutes, and he, uh, barely scraped a split decision from Ion Cuțelaba in a fight that saw judges scoring 30-27s in opposite directions. But Modestas still won! Technically. But it wasn't a good enough win to keep him from falling into the vortex of mixed martial comedy.
Because, Paul Craig, buddy, I'm sorry, but you're it now. Tony Ferguson won a fight, and even if it was a celebrity boxing match against whatever a Salt Papi is, it still counts. Once upon a time, Paul Craig, you were the only man to beat Magomed Ankalaev: Now you are 1 for your last 7 and your fights keep ending in progressively funnier ways. You managed to make Caio Borralho look like a knockout artist, and then you managed to make Bo Nickal's victory over you so profoundly unlikable that it cost him half his fanbase and left the other half to be surgically removed by Reinier de Ridder's knees, and three months ago the UFC asked you to be a company man and get Rodolfo Bellato back on the winning track, and instead, you managed to knock him into a loopy No Contest with an illegal upkick that the bloodthirsty audience still thinks was a soccer dive. You have destroyed multiple prospects without winning a single fight. I have never loved you, or possibly any man, more.
So I am sorry to say MODESTAS BUKAUSKAS BY DECISION.
LIGHTWEIGHT: Kauê Fernandes (10-2) vs Harry Hardwick (13-3-1)
Well, this got weird. Kauê Fernandes, up until about seventy minutes ago (as of this writing, which is 12:03 AM on 9/2 because sleeping is a foreign concept), was being set up for a big test, here. Kauê's hard-scrabble style hasn't always worked out in his favor, but he hit the lottery with a pair of really helpful matchups. First, the UFC matched him up with Mohammad Yahya, the UAE's favorite fighter, during a 2024 trip to Abu Dhabi, and Kauê unsurprisingly beat the absolute piss out of him, because Mohammad Yahya isn't actually very good. Kauê was supposed to have a stiff matchup with Jared Gordon afterward, but injuries scratched him from it, and instead he got Guram Kutatelaedze, who appears to have aged ten years in the last three and simply cannot keep up anymore. So Fernandes is on the best pair of wins in his career, and the UFC, once again, wanted to follow up with a launchpad.
That was supposed to be France's Fares Ziam, a rising Lightweight prospect with a great winning streak, but Ziam pulled out on Monday after the death of his grandmother. First off: Congratulations on having your priorities straight, Fares, that's way better than most fighters manage. Second off: Welcome to the UFC, Harry Hardwick. British MMA fans have been talking about the Hardwick brothers as UFC prospects for some time, but younger brother George, who up until this year was the Lightweight Champion out in Cage Warriors, was the first one to get a shot at the Contender Series, and it ended in his losing and getting sent back to Britain. Harry's been running the table as the 145-pound champion while waiting for his turn to trade a belt for a bus ticket, and as happens so often, it's short-notice convenience that wins the day. Harry is, pretty thoroughly, a grappler-type Pokemon. He likes to suffocate and outlast his opponents, and as he hasn't lost a fight in five years, it's been working very well for him.
I just cannot escape noticing that he never moves his goddamn head. He gets caught with so many punches, and against a guy like Fernandes, that's a rough hole to have in your defense. We are, in fairness, just two fights separated from watching Kauê fall victim to aggressive British wrestling against Marc Diakiese, so it wouldn't be any sort of surprise if Hardwick manages to just trip and control him for fifteen minutes. But I cannot stop thinking about the stationary target that is his chin. KAUÊ FERNANDES BY TKO.
FEATHERWEIGHT: Patrício Pitbull (37-8, #11) vs Losene Keita (16-1)
Patrício, buddy, this is kind of nuts. This is a fucking value-extraction schedule. When the UFC announced Patrício Pitbull's signing at the start of the year, the reaction was somewhere between adulation and anxiety. He's the best Bellator fighter ever! People have wanted him in the UFC for years! But it was, arguably, slightly too many years, as now he's 38 and nearing his fiftieth professional bout. When his UFC debut saw him spend fifteen minutes staring blanky as Yair Rodríguez kicked him into pieces, a lot of folks thought the Pitbull ride was over. Three months later, Pitbull was back in the cage winning a decision over Dan Ige to both nab a top fifteen ranking and prove his tires were not yet fully bald. It was a solid win, and with Pitbull now actively on the Featherweight ladder, the world waited to see which top ten fighter he got a shot at next.
The answer, of course, is fucking none of them. It isn't even two months later and Pitbull's back, meaning he's currently fighting a UFC fight, on average, once every 49 days, and they have him playing welcoming committee to a heavily-hyped international prospect. Losene Keita is a very, very good signing. On a roster growing more and more composed of Contender Series rookies by the week, Keita might be the highest-profile international talent they've snatched since Kai Asakura last year. Keita's been both Featherweight and Lightweight champion over in Oktagon, he's been fighting real, legitimate competition, and he's beaten virtually all of them. That sole blemish on his record is as close to a fluke as you get in MMA--while trying to reunify the Featherweight title he broke his own foot during a routine grappling exchange. He throws hooks with his whole body, he's really quick at chaining headkicks into his combinations, and he gets his shots on target astonishingly quickly.
It's that quickness that worries me here. Pitbull is enormously more experienced, immeasurably more seasoned, and inarguably has the much more well-rounded game. The simple fact that Pitbull throws jabs instead of lead left hooks means he has the tools to stick Losene every time he tries to throw one of his looping strikes. But we just saw Pitbull get stymied by a faster fighter with a rangier kicking game, and even Dan Ige gave him an awful lot of trouble with kicks in the third round of their fight. I would love to be wrong on this one so we can see the Pitbull The UFC Contender story continue, but my heart feels prepared to break. LOSENE KEITA BY TKO.
PRELIMS: HERE THEY ARE, APPARENTLY
FEATHERWEIGHT: William Gomis (14-3) vs Robert Ruchała (11-1)
You know the stuff we were just saying about Losene Keita a minute ago? Robert Ruchała gets some of that good-international-signing credit, too. Ruchała's not just the Featherweight champion (well, repeated interim Featherweight champion, it's a weird situation) for his native Poland's KSW, he's a high-pressure knockout machine whose only career loss came against Salahdine Parnasse, one of the single biggest international stars outside of the UFC. It is not a stretch to assume, despite William Gomis being their hometown hero, they would vastly prefer it if Ruchała won this fight. Gomis is very, very good at fighting. He's defensively clean, he's good at utilizing his reach, his kicks are deadly if you leave yourself open to them, and he's remarkably difficult to rattle. He's also having a lot of trouble giving the UFC what it wants. Four out of his five UFC fights have gone to either split or majority decisions, sometimes for him, sometimes against, half because he tries to stay too defensively sound to sit down on all of his strikes, half because he struggles mightily with higher-pressure fighters who can swarm him and grind their way through his offense.
But Parnasse also showed how you can keep Robert on his back foot by answering his pressure with pressure. But for one, Salahdine Parnasse is Salahdine Parnasse, and for two, Robert still nearly knocked him out for his trouble. ROBERT RUCHAŁA BY DECISION.
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Oumar Sy (11-1) vs Brendson Ribeiro (17-8 (1))
Heavyweight Jr., this is what you deserve. Oumar Sy was supposed to be one of the great saviors at 205 pounds--undefeated wrestling monster, big for the division, stopping almost all his opponents, French as hell--so maybe it should've been a warning sign when he couldn't finish Da Woon Jung, a man who hasn't won a UFC fight in four years and, most disgracefully, should probably have lost a decision to Sam Alvey. It didn't stop Oumar from being a prohibitively massive favorite in a matchup with Alonzo Menifield this past June. Of all the people the UFC doesn't know what the fuck to do with, they have the last knowledge and fucks alike for Alonzo. Early Contender Series winner, more than half a decade in the company, twice as many wins as losses? Have him fight Jimmy Crute twice in a row and then get murdered repeatedly by striking dynamos. He's still here? Fuck, I don't know, have him fight Julius Walker for no reason. He's still here and somehow he's also ranked? Fuck it, give his number to Oumar. That should be easy enough and then we c--wait, what do you mean Oumar whiffed on 4/5 of his takedowns and lost a decision? That wasn't supposed to happen. What do we do now?
Oh, right, we book Brendson Ribeiro, the 2-3 guy who keeps getting outwrestled and outstruck by all the good people we throw at him. OUMAR SY BY DECISION.
HEAVYWEIGHT: Marcin Tybura (27-9, #7) vs Ante Delija (25-6, NR)
In an unusually dense night of talent signings, this is one of the most unusual, and I cannot help feeling it also indicates just how unfortunate things have become in the Heavyweight division. By all rights, this fight should be a really big deal. Marcin Tybura's been hanging around in the UFC for almost ten years. He's beaten world champions, he's turned away prospects, he went the distance with names like Alexander Volkov and Fabrício Werdum, he is, as we speak, the #7 Heavyweight in the entire damn company. Ante Delija is one of the most successful Heavyweights to come out of the Professional Fighters League. He made it to the tournament finals in 2021, he won the whole damn thing in 2022, he's big and well-rounded and the only man to beat him in years was a Bellator champion. There's even a revenge angle: A decade ago, a much younger Marcin Tybura was the Heavyweight champion of M-1 Global back in Russia, and he defended his title against a 25 year-old Ante Delija after checking a leg kick so hard it snapped Delija's tibia. Ante wouldn't make it back into a fight for almost three years, and by then, Tybura was already a UFC contender. In other words, this match has everything that should genuinely matter. It's a top ten Heavyweight bout between one of the company's most decorated big-man veterans and a debuting star from another company that's also a grudge match ten years in the making, and whoever wins has a genuine claim on growing dark horse contendership.
This fight is buried midway through the prelims under a Brendson Ribeiro fight on an early-start card that isn't even getting broadcast on ESPN proper. You know what ESPN's putting on the air while this fight's happening? College Football Scoreboard. This is how low we have fallen. MARCIN TYBURA BY DECISION.
WELTERWEIGHT: Rhys McKee (14-6-1) vs Axel Sola (10-0-1)
You finally made it, Rhys. "Skeletor" needed five attempts across two stints in the UFC, but this past April, by the grace of all the combat sports gods, he finally got his first win in the big show. His UFC opponents list also now reads like a downward spiral in the rankings. Khamzat Chimaev, Alex Morono, Ange Loosa, Chidi Njokuani--there is no shame in losing to any of these people. But battering Daniel Frunza's eye closed? That's how you rescue yourself from the brink of a second release. Unfortunately, now you get to go back to the difficult shit. Axel Sola is yet another in the weirdly stacked arsenal of international champions on this card. He's the reigning Lightweight king of the ARES Fighting Championship, another Parisian organization that's been turning out a number of solid prospects in the last few years, and Sola's brand is rooted in being young, athletic, tough as hell, and big on wrestling.
Which is good, because a lot of the tape on him involves watching him get punched in the face. Sola's a pitbull of a fighter and I enjoy just how scrappy and forthright his style can be, but that forthrightness also goes for his chin, which forthrightly runs itself into right hands fairly frequently. If he can stay inside on McKee and drag him to the ground repeatedly, he'll do just fine, but that's a difficult range battle he's going to have to fight, and I'm not confident about his chin holding up. RHYS MCKEE BY SUBMISSION after a club-and-sub.
WELTERWEIGHT: Sam Patterson (13-2-1) vs Trey Waters (9-1)
Speaking of tall, lanky motherfuckers, we've got ourselves a genuine lank-off. Sam Patterson came into the UFC as a 6'3" Lightweight with longer reach than 2/3 of the UFC's Heavyweight champions, and after losing his debut and asking himself what on Earth he was doing, he moved up to Welterweight and immediately looked stronger and healthier and no longer gave onlookers the kind of anxiety you feel when you can see that a tree is about to fall over but it just isn't quite there yet. And now he gets to fight the only Welterweight taller than he is! Trey Waters was scouted by the UFC as a Contender Series prospect all the way back in 2022, but they decided there was nothing at all wrong with throwing a 6-0 guy who'd only fought one fighter with a winning record up against Gabriel Bonfim, a 12-0 Legacy Fighting Alliance champion. Waters got choked out in a round. Fortunately, the UFC is perpetually in need of short-notice signings, so Waters was in the company half a year later anyhow. His activity is a little lacking, though. He made his debut in April of 2023, he didn't come back until May 2024, and now, almost a year and a half later, we're getting around to his third fight in 28 months.
It'd be weird, but this is also going to be the mixed martial arts equivalent of watching giraffes try to bludgeon each other into submission by swinging their heads around like medieval flails, so who's going to complain. In the proper spirit of this contest I picked by throwing two of those really long gumball-machine sticky hands at the wall and just thinking quietly about life while waiting for one of them to fall down. Congratulations, America. TREY WATERS BY TKO.
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Brad Tavares (21-10) vs Robert Bryczek (17-6)
Brad Tavares is like a living punchline about the nature of the modern UFC. When last we saw Brad it was April 5, he'd just beaten Gerald Meerschaert, and in so doing he'd tied Michael Bisping's record for the most fights and most wins in Middleweight history. The commentators touted this achievement and gushed about the possibility that, the next time we see him, Brad Tavares could become the winningest Middleweight the company had ever seen. And then they removed him from the UFC roster. The company never offered any form of clarification on this, so it wasn't until a month later that we learned it was the last fight on his contract and once it was complete the UFC automatically kicked him out of all of their systems until he signed a new one. Everything, as always, is the silliest and stupidest it could possibly be. But they still clearly like him, because they gave him Robert Bryczek as his potentially record-breaking opponent. I would like to tell you that Bryczek is remembered for his long run in Oktagon, or his championship wins in Poland, or his Achewood-tier creepy abs. But none of that is true anymore. Now, he is remembered for being one of just two men to ever lose to Ihor Potieria in the UFC. The fact that the two answers are 'Maurício "Shogun" Rua, one of the greatest to ever do it up until he got old and tragic' and 'Robert Bryczek' makes me feel very strange and uncomfortable.
Also, it's very, very funny that this historically notable Middleweight record would theoretically be set three fights deep on the prelims of this random card. Do the damn thing. BRAD TAVARES BY DECISION.
WELTERWEIGHT: Andreas Gustafsson (12-2) vs Rinat Fakhretdinov (24-2-1)
I think I have to get off the Rinat Fakhretdinov train. I think this is me handing in my membership card. When the UFC signed him back in 2022 I was entirely into it and I saw in his mixture of power, wrestling and unflappability a potential title contender, but the arc has just been too goddamn strange. First it was the short-notice Bryan Battle fight, then it was inexplicably being picked to welcome Kevin Lee back to the UFC when he very, very clearly needed to retire, and then Rinat was barely surviving to a draw against Elizeu Zaleski, and then he only barely got a coinflip split decision against Nicolas Dalby. But the real indignity came last October, when Carlos Leal signed with the UFC as a short-notice replacement with less than a week to prepare for Rinat and promptly put up the fight of his life. He outstruck Rinat, he wobbled Rinat, he stuffed 17 of 19 takedown attempts and won the fight, clearly, on every single scorecard. In the worst robbery of the year, Rinat got a unanimous decision that one judge thought was a shut-out. And that was already almost a goddamn year ago. I am over it. I am breaking up with you, Rinat. I need people who punch like they still care.
I also seriously question if this is going to play right into Rinat's hands, since Andreas is a big cage-wrestler and pocket puncher and both work directly to Rinat's strengths and it's entirely possible he just shuts Andreas down and I am forced to crawl back. But I'm making my stand. ANDREAS GUSTAFSSON BY DECISION.
WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT: Shauna Bannon (7-1) vs Sam Hughes (10-6)
At some point, I must accept that some things are not for me. I didn't really like trap music, I fell off Star Trek: Discovery after the third season, I still think the first Mass Effect was the best one, I would rather keep rooting for the San Jose Sharks than pick an east coast team despite now living close to folks who have actually won the Stanley Cup, and every Joe Rogan podcast clip I've ever seen makes me want to re-enact the penultimate scene from Pi. Some of these things, I know, are subjective. Some are not. Subjectively, Shauna Bannon is not doing the sort of harm to the world Joe Rogan is. Objectively, this is the list of women the UFC has had her contracted to fight:
Bruna Brasil, who had been violently knocked out barely three months prior; Brasil won anyway
Stephanie Luciano, who had only one non-rookie win and had gone to a draw on the Contender Series; Bannon pulled out
Ravena Oliveira, who had only one non-rookie win and had lost her UFC debut; Oliveira pulled out
Alice Ardelean, who filled in for Oliveira on two weeks' notice having never beaten anyone with more than three wins; Bannon scraped out a split decision
Puja Tomar, who had exactly as bad a record as this list would lead you to expect and who got an enormous robbery of a decision win in her UFC debut; Tomar almost knocked her out with a headkick but jumped into Shauna's guard and got armbarred
And I just don't get it. Is there a secret wellspring of stardom hiding in Shauna Bannon? Do they prognosticate amazing things in her future? "It's because the UFC wants more Irish stars" used to be enough of a reason, but they've really cooled down on the Conor-chasing since they made billions of dollars in media deals and realized they don't have to care about anything anymore. I struggle to understand how they couldn't be arsed to keep Women's Featherweight around, but CM Punk levels of matchmaking went into years of Shauna Bannon in the UFC.
If Sam Hughes does not win I will watch TUF next year again. Sam: Please do not do this to me. SAM HUGHES BY DECISION.