SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 27 FROM THE RAC ARENA IN PERTH, AUSTRALIA
PRELIMS 4 PM PDT / 7 PM EDT | MAIN CARD 7 PM / 10 PM
It’s funny that just one event ago we focused completely on the UFC’s attempts at regional marketing, and now we’re here in Perth and the card is so loaded with regional talent that only one out of fourteen currently booked fights doesn’t include a fighter from either Australia or New Zealand fighting an evil foreigner. This is, if anything, the most thorough attempt at regional appeal the UFC has done. Noche 3 didn’t have this many Latin fighters, Imavov/Borralho didn’t as many French competitors, and even Walker/Zhang in Shanghai failed to compete for the Chinese market as hard as this card is trying to court good ol’ Oceania.
But Australia doesn’t rate a fancy title or custom graphics, I guess. Or more than two ranked fights. Or co-headliners better than Ivan Erslan and Ramon Taveras. So maybe this should be more of a regional apology.
MAIN EVENT: REYES RETURNS
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Carlos Ulberg (12-1, #3) vs Dominick Reyes (15-4, #7)
Last week we had a discussion back on Somethingawful’s wrestling/MMA forums about the ongoing heat death of the Heavyweight and Light Heavyweight divisions and which was worse. I said 205 had an absolute dearth of up-and-coming contenders and went through the entire top fifteen in the process, and when I got to Carlos Ulberg, all I had to say was this:
Carlos Ulberg is the next big title prospect and no one gives a fuck about him
I was so much more brusque and immature at 39. Fortunately, one week later I am legally in my forties, which means I get to talk about nothing for even longer.
Carlos Ulberg is the only man in the top seven that hasn’t already had a title fight. He’s on an eight-fight winning streak, he’s got five stoppages within it, he hasn’t lost a fight in more than four years and he looks like someone turned one of those really expensive G.I. Joe Hall Of Fame dolls into a full-sized human being. Even his kickboxing history and his striking-centric style play into the current grappling-is-for-losers zeitgeist of the sport. By all rights, Carlos should be one of the UFC’s biggest stars.
So why isn’t he? The UFC has clearly seen money in Carlos Ulberg for quite some time, but he’s never been on a pay-per-view’s main card, he’s been stuck on television, and it’s only now, one fight away from a title shot, that he’s getting his first-ever main event. What’s taken them so long?
Some of it is the way his style hasn’t survived its excursion into the top ten. Ulberg was an exciting finishing machine when he was fighting Ihor Potieria, but when you’re up against the Volkan Oezdemirs and Jan Błachowiczs of the world, you have to be much more concerned about defense. It’s impossible to ignore the lackluster performances Ulberg put forth when faced with top competition and fans have been particularly brutal about them.
Some of it is matchmaking. The UFC had big enough plans for Ulberg that they had him debuting on pay-per-view prelims after his Contender Series win all the way back in 2020, and, somewhat infamously, Ulberg got absolutely torched by Kennedy Nzechukwu. The UFC immediately switched tracks and took the safe route up with their big prospect, and the aforementioned Ihor Potieria fight is, oddly, the best example: After three successful knockout victories Ulberg had just picked up the best win of his career by defeating a genuine prospect in Nicolae Negumereanu, and to follow up on it, management gave him Potieria, who had, just one fight prior, been knocked out by...Nicolae Negumereanu.
Hell, this current run of top ten opponents that solidified Ulberg as a credible if unexciting contender? It wasn’t even supposed to happen. The UFC wanted to book Ulberg a ticket straight to the top. He was supposed to fight the recently-deposed Jamahal Hill last Summer in an effort to make an instant top contender, but Hill reinjured himself and Ulberg wound up pulling out of his replacement bout with Anthony Smith, and for daring to inconvenience the matchmakers, he went to the back of the line.
But that wasn’t even his first matchmaking trouble in the year. For the first quarter of 2024, the UFC repeatedly tried and failed to get Carlos Ulberg in the cage with the man they felt could really give him a shine:
Dominick Reyes.
Who was on a four-year, four-fight losing streak that had most of the world begging him to retire.
For most of the last half-decade in combat sports, Dominick Reyes has existed as a cautionary tale about how fleeting success can be. At the start of 2020 Dominick Reyes was an undefeated top contender. He lost both his shot and his undefeated record to Jon Jones, but the loss was close, controversial, and in the eyes of most of the audience, it should’ve been a victory. In just two months, Dominick Reyes became, in the eyes of many, the best Light Heavyweight in the world.
In just two years, he would be an afterthought.
Jon Jones infamously turned down the Reyes rematch so hard he temporarily retired over it, and when he returned, it was at Heavyweight. There wasn’t much of a Dominick Reyes left to duck in 2023, unfortunately. Reyes had his shot at the vacant title and Jan Błachowicz: Jan knocked him out. Reyes was back eight months later for a fight with future champion Jiří Procházka: Jiří knocked him out. A year and change after that, a fight with the less accomplished Ryan Spann ended with a deer-in-headlights Dom getting dropped in eighty seconds--by a jab.
Going from arguably beating Jon Jones to getting knocked out by a Ryan Spann jab in the space of two and a half years was a bridge too far for most of the audience. The world didn’t want to see Dominick Reyes suffer anymore.
The UFC, of course, wanted him to lose to Carlos Ulberg.
Instead, we’ve seen one of the least likely and at times weirdest career resurgences in the modern memory of mixed martial arts. Reyes has somehow not just won three fights, but recorded three extremely clear knockouts in just fifteen months. One of those was an incredibly uncomfortable mauling of Anthony Smith, who was one fight away from retirement and just a few weeks removed from the abrupt death of his coach. He walked to the cage in tears, at one point stood in front of Reyes with his hands down while getting repeatedly punched in the face, and ultimately lost a TKO after the second round saw a striking differential of 119 to 0. If it were a better sport that’d be our Oliver McCall moment, but Smith got marched out and slaughtered again four months later, so, y’know.
Because the house always wins, the UFC is finally getting that Ulberg/Reyes matchup and it’s a far, far better matchup than it would’ve been the first time around. Carlos Ulberg beating Dominick Reyes in 2024 would’ve been just another victory over a guy on a losing streak; somehow, one year later, this is a legitimate title prospect matchup between the only men in the top ten with any actual championship-grade momentum.
And it’s so, so likely that this is Carlos Ulberg just swatting Reyes down, and I refuse to pick it.
Dominick Reyes seems to have rediscovered his confidence, his athleticism and his power, but a big part of what made those traits work so well for him was a fortuitous combination of dogged aggression and people who couldn’t make him pay for it. Ovince St. Preux wasn’t going to outwork him. Light Heavyweight Chris Weidman wasn’t going to counterpunch him. Jon Jones, for all his talents, didn’t have the power to push him back. But Jan and Jiří did. Even Anthony Smith smacked him with a couple counter-hooks in their exchanges before Reyes started repeatedly backing a Mack truck over his depressed body.
Ulberg’s counters are some of his best punches. Hell, his entire highlight reel was built on people showing him insufficient respect while moving into his striking range. Those interest-degrading matchups with Jan and Oezdemir were uneventful precisely because they both knew better than to rush him. If Reyes succeeds by punching through his opponents, the odds are incredibly high that Ulberg punches through him instead.
But I do not have it in me to vote for the comeback to stop now. DOMINICK REYES BY TKO.
CO-MAIN EVENT: THE SHORTEST CO-MAIN WRITEUP I’VE EVER DONE, I’M GUESSING
FEATHERWEIGHT: Jack Jenkins (13-4) vs Ramon Taveras (10-3)
The last time I complained about co-main event quality it was the waning days of July and Chris Duncan was about to beat Mateusz Rębecki. As I put it then:
Which makes this essentially two slightly dented prospects trying to out-prospect one another. Which is fine! There’s nothing wrong with it. But you’ve got a ranked women’s fight two spots down from here, and hell, Neil Magny and Elizeu Zaleski are still co-main-worthy and far better-known names on an advertisement.
Somehow, hilariously, this event also has a ranked women’s fight on it, and also has a Neil Magny fight on it, and somehow we’re right back here anyway and it’s dumber than ever.
I like Jack Jenkins. I do. He’s got really clean leg kicks, his combinations flow when he lets them go, and being nicknamed “Phar” makes me think of the Keenspot era of webcomics. But the last two-ish years of Jack Jenkins, in order, goes like this:
Wins a robbery-of-the-year candidate of a split decision over Jamall Emmers
Gets his arm horrifically broken in a fight with Chepe Mariscal
Beat Herbert Burns, who hadn’t won a fight in four years and has one of the only TKO (Exhaustion) losses in modern UFC history
Got dominated and ultimately choked out by Gabriel Santos
But how about that Ramon Taveras, though? Is he the reason for the season?
He got knocked out by Serhiy Sidey on the Contender Series in a vaguely wonky stoppage and won his contract on a subsequent attempt
The UFC booked him into a UFC rematch with Sidey because the Contender Series matters more than the big show at this point
Taveras missed weight by almost five pounds, lost the fight on 100% of media scorecards and won a universally-derided robbery
Taveras came back eleven months later, got dominated by Davey Grant, and hasn’t been seen since last December
And that’s it. That’s your co-main event. Jack Jenkins is 3-2 in the UFC, one of those wins should’ve been a loss, and he’s coming off his second official loss in his last four fights; Ramon Taveras is 1-1 in the UFC, one of those wins should’ve been a loss, and he’s coming off his second official loss in his last four fights. Neither of these men has any momentum, neither is anywhere close to being ranked, and the men who beat them are toiling away on the prelims or, in the case of Gabriel Santos, haven’t been booked at all.
But Jack Jenkins is, of course, Australian.
So, congratulations, Jack. This co-main event exists specifically for you to get a crowd-pleasing win. Please feel corporately valued. JACK JENKINS BY TKO.
CO-MAIN EVENT, PART TWO: DEFINITIONALLY NO LONGER SHORT
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Jimmy Crute (13-4-2) vs Ivan Erslan (14-5)
So, as I do when I’m on schedule, I wrote up the main and co-main events on Sunday evening. Around 8 PM on Monday, word leaked that the UFC had changed their minds and now Jimmy Crute vs Ivan Erslan was the co-main event. The official card listing, of course, does not reflect this. As far as the UFC’s concerned, Jenkins vs Taveras is still second from the top. (Editing note: They finally switched it late on Tuesday.)
Will that still be the case by Saturday? Almost assuredly not. I trust Marcel Dorff an awful lot more than I trust the UFC. So I considered, for a moment, erasing all the work I did on Jenkins/Taveras and putting these two fights in their most likely correct order and being a good, sensible professional.
And then I saw the reported card shuffle also moved Loma Lookboonmee vs Alexia Thainara, the ranked women’s fight, to the curtain-jerking slot at the start of the prelims.
So these two fights are presented out of order and with equal amounts of rambling, because I cannot believe that I still care more than the UFC does.
Also? This actually sucks more than Jenkins/Taveras as a co-main. Genuinely, this is terrible. Jimmy Crute busted his leg fighting Anthony Smith, he got pasted in under a minute by Jamahal Hill, he got whomped by Alonzo Menifield but got away with a draw thanks to a point deduction whereupon he immediately got whomped by Alonzo Menifield way worse in the rematch, he barely managed to survive a draw against Rodolfo Bellato, and finally, this past July, he scored his first victory in five years by tapping Marcin Prachnio. One victory across three different Presidential terms.
And that’s one more UFC victory than Ivan Erslan has. Lots of fighters get picked up for their regional championship history or their long winning streaks: When the UFC nabbed Ivan Erslan he hadn’t recorded back-to-back wins in years and he was less than two years removed from his second unsuccessful attempt to win the 205-pound title in Poland’s KSW. He wasn’t a short-notice fighter, either! They picked him up two full months before his debut, which was enough time to lose a decision to Ion Cuțelaba, and eight more months passed before he got beaten again by Navajo Stirling.
If you’re paying attention, that means Jimmy Crute failed to beat Rodolfo Bellato and Ivan Erslan lost a unanimous decision to Navajo Stirling.
Navajo Stirling and Rodolfo Bellato are four fights down from here, headlining the prelims.
Loma Lookboonmee, who is 7-2, on a four-fight winning streak and ranked in the top fifteen, is stuck in the first fight of the night.
And Jimmy Crute vs Ivan Erslan, who combine to a truly incredible record of 1-5-2 during their collective last half-decade in the UFC, is in the co-main event, because much like Jack Jenkins, Jimmy Crute is Australian.
I don’t know, I struggle to care, and all I can hope for is sorrow. IVAN ERSLAN BY TKO.
MAIN CARD: CEASING TO PRETEND
WELTERWEIGHT: Jake Matthews (22-7) vs Neil Magny (30-13)
Hey, look at that! It’s a fight between a notable Australian on a solid winning streak and he’s facing a well-known multiple-time main-eventer! WHAT A FANTASTIC CO-MAIN EVENT THIS WOULD HAVE BEEN.
Jake Matthews has been trying to break through for ten goddamn years. He’s been a solid, dependable, not-quite-ranked fighter through multiple generations of talent, and I cannot imagine how frustrating that is. Dude’s got fights with everyone from Michael Morales to Li Jingliang to Olivier Aubin-Mercier to Diego damn Sanchez--and that was in 2020, which is just an unconscionably late year for Diego Sanchez to be fighting anybody. But in all those years, Matthews has never gotten more than three UFC wins in a row. Every time, the momentum carried him into competition he just couldn’t handle. For the fourth time, Matthews has lined up three consecutive wins, and for the fourth time, he’s getting tested to see if he’s finally ready for a step up to the big leagues.
So it’s only sensible that the UFC has pulled out their most reliable measuring stick. Neil Magny has been testing prospects since the dawn of time. Neil Magny has more retired men on his record than our tragically desecrated Social Security system. Neil Magny pulled off a D’arce choke on Moses. Neil Magny is also, for all reports of his demise, still a bad motherfucker. He’s got more losses than wins lately, but those losses are coming against folks like Carlos Prates and Ian Machado Garry and Shavkat goddamn Rakhmonov. I was one of the many writing his career epitaph when he fought fellow wizened veteran Elizeu Zaleski dos Santos a month and a half ago, and Magny reminded us just who the hell he is by pounding Elizeu out in two rounds.
I can’t help wondering if Magny having fought so recently is part of the motivation for getting him out there in the hopes of putting Matthews over. I like Jake, I always have, but he’s an enormous favorite in this fight and that seems more than a little wild to me. Jake’s strengths are his all-around skillset and his solid cardio; Magny is just as good as an all-arounder, famously indefatigable, and much larger. I’m just not sold on his ability to get it done here. NEIL MAGNY BY DECISION.
HEAVYWEIGHT: Louie Sutherland (10-3) vs Justin Tafa (7-5 (1))
I watch tape on every fighter I’ve never seen before so I have at least some vague idea what I’m writing about, and the first fight of Louie Sutherland’s I saw was his most recent, a three-minute knockout against Luke Newland. As I was trying to take note of his footwork and his strange way of trying to strip the front hand, thirty seconds into the bout, Sutherland feinted a front kick that barely reached his own waist, and one of the commentators was astonished by the way a 6’3” man can get his leg up so high and so quickly. I had a small aneurysm and I am recovering in my sickbed, thinking about if a bar can still be considered a bar if it’s so low as to be inseparable from the ground.
On which topic: Justin Tafa. Justin Tafa is still here. Justin Tafa has a double-digit quantity of UFC fights now despite having lost most of them: Justin Tafa is still here. Justin Tafa’s UFC wins have a collective company record of 6-14 (1), and 4 of those wins were just Parker Porter: Justin Tafa is still here. Four of the five men who beat Justin were cut from the UFC for not being good enough to stay on its roster: Justin Tafa is still here. The last time the UFC sent him out it was to get slaughtered by their shiny new toy, Tallison Teixeira, and he obligingly obliterated Justin in thirty-five seconds, which is very funny, because a few months later, Derrick Lewis destroyed him in thirty-five seconds, and somehow, at the end of this great, pointless circle, Justin Tafa is still here.
LOUIE SUTHERLAND BY DECISION.
LIGHTWEIGHT: Tom Nolan (9-1) vs Charlie Campbell (9-2)
Realistically, Tom Nolan is not a bad prospect. He’s enormous for a Lightweight, he hits real hard, and he owns knockout victories over 50% of the UFC’s supply of men named Bogdan. I should, realistically, enjoy him. It would be very easy to qualify my distaste for the man solely as a product of the incredibly soft targets the UFC has been serving him and my general antipathy for marketing prospects. But in my heart of hearts, it’s because he beat Slava Claus. Tom Nolan went four fights under Dana White’s purview without shooting a single takedown, but the second he gets in the cage with my perfect kickboxing child? 8 takedown attempts, just to crush my dreams.
The devil take you, Tom Nolan. Charlie Campbell, I’m sorry, the UFC wants you to die. They signed you as a late replacement almost exactly two years ago and you’ve had two fights in that whole time. That short-notice debut where you destroyed Alex Reyes was fun! But they wanted you to lose to Trevor Peek, and you didn’t, and that’s why they tried to book you straight to your death against Mauricio Ruffy, and when you dropped out of that fight, they just sort of left you behind. A year and a half later you get to come back, and what do they have for you? A fight against a 6’3” Australian in Australia. And you could win this! You could!
But I am not sure that you will. TOM NOLAN BY TKO.
PRELIMS: LOOKING FOR LOMA
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Navajo Stirling (7-0) vs Rodolfo Bellato (12-2-1 (1))
Remember all that stuff in the main event about the doomed state of the Light Heavyweight division? This is ground zero. This is the graveyard of the future. Navajo Stirling is one of the UFC’s big hopes for the 205-pound future, and they threw him on DWCS when he’d only had four fights, and they’re giving him a procession of winless or near-winless fighters in the hopes that he builds himself into a star, and meanwhile, he cannot finish off Tuco Tokkos. Rodolfo Bellato needed two stabs at the Contender Series before he got through, they gave him company punching bag Ihor Potieria for his debut, and since then he has managed to A) go to a draw with Jimmy Crute and B) get a No Contest after being knocked loopy by an illegal upkick against Paul Craig. This is your preliminary headliner and your view into the next five years of Light Heavyweight contendership: A fearsome knockout artist who struggles with Tuco Tokkos and an almost-winless prospect who is trying to escape the shadow of multiple losses to Vitor Petrino, the last man Anthony Smith ever beat.
I miss Seth Petruzelli. NAVAJO STIRLING BY DECISION.
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Andre Petroski (13-4) vs Cam Rowston (12-3)
The life of a mid-tier Middleweight is one of wild swings. At the turn of 2024, Andre Petroski was getting blown out by Michel Pereira and somehow rendered unconscious by Jacob Malkoun’s thigh. For most of the last year and a half, he was on a winning streak that included Rodolfo Vieira, one of the most decorated grapplers in jiu-jitsu. Now? He has lost all of his momentum to Edman Shahbazyan, the most promising Middleweight striking prospect of 2019, and Andre is forced to try to get it back by fighting a man named “Battle Giraffe.” When Cam Rowston got his first shot at the Contender Series he was on a five-fight winning streak, and said streak came over men with records of, in order, 3-3, 4-9, 1-1, 0-0, and 3-6. Rowston was denied his UFC contract at the hands of Torrez Finney, the 5’8” Middleweight you may remember as the man who beat Robert Valentin by decision after landing 4 significant strikes in 15 minutes. So Rowston returned to the regional scene, where he beat men with records of 1-3, 3-1, and 4-3, which earned him his second DWCS shot against Brandon Holmes, who had 5 fights to Rowston’s 14 and, himself, had been dining on a string of numbers just as depressing to watch in sequence.
We are watching the Pain Worm eat its way backwards through the roster. Andre Petroski must tame the pain worm. ANDRE PETROSKI BY DECISION.
WELTERWEIGHT: Jonathan Miccallef (8-1) vs Oban Elliott (12-3)
It’s nice to have little things I’m looking forward to. The last time we saw Jonathan Miccallef he was kicking the absolute shit out of Kevin Jousset’s legs, ribs and head at varying rhythms and patterns, and ultimately bruised him up enough that the UFC, as they are wont to do, let Jousset go despite being a perfectly solid talent. Oban Elliott has long been one of the better Cage Warriors prospects in the UFC, but a combination of bad luck and a bunch of decision victories souring the matchmakers on him led to his being stuck treading water and awaiting a matchup that could move him somewhere. Unfortunately, he got it in the form of a preliminary headliner against Seokhyeon Ko at UFC Baku this past June, and it ended with Ko shutting him out in both striking and wrestling. Oban’s eight-fight streak is gone, and he’s fighting off a loss for the first time in four years.
It’s secretly one of the most interesting fights on the card. Miccallef’s sharp as hell and the beating he put on Jousset was very fun, but he also flagged by the third round. Elliott doesn’t get all that tired and he’s a better wrestler than Jousset was. I’m still leaning towards JONATHAN MICCALLEF BY DECISION but this could be close.
LIGHTWEIGHT: Jamie Mullarkey (17-8) vs Rolando Bedoya (14-4)
This? This is a junction of depression and tragedy. If this fight were a painting, it would be Nighthawks. Jamie Mullarkey was an extremely promising brawler once, a gunfighter with a solid chin and great recovery when it seemed to fail him: He’s now 5-6 in the UFC, he’s 1 for his last 4, and he’s been knocked out in all of his last four losses. Rolando Bedoya was a hyped prospect for the UFC, an international champion out of Peru with a sterling record, a great mixture of finishes and eight years without a loss. He’s 0-3 in the UFC. Both of these men were looked at as potential contenders when they got called up to the big show and now there’s an extremely good chance whoever loses this is getting shown the door.
And I’m just not sure how much tread Mullarkey has left on his tires. ROLANDO BEDOYA BY TKO.
BANTAMWEIGHT: Colby Thicknesse (7-1) vs Josias Musasa (8-1)
Where one fight ago we talked about fallen prospects, here, we have a pair who failed to get out of the garage. Colby Thicknesse was the young, undefeated champion of Australia’s HEX Fight Series when he got called up to the UFC and immediately had his victory streak snapped by Ilia Topuria’s older brother Aleksandre, but the world expected that to happen, largely based on the (apparently correct) inference that surnames denote talent. Josias Musasa was the knockout-happy pride of the Congo, an undefeated Bantamweight marvel who’d stopped every man he faced right up until his Contender Series debut. He was an enormous, -800 favorite in his debut, because everyone knew about his knockout streak. In one of my rare bits of correct analysis, I thought Carlos Vera would be too much for him, and he proved me right by choking Musasa out in one round.
We’re left with two prospects, both genuinely talented, both forced into the spotlight without a chance to grow into better competition, both derailed before they could get started. Colby’s gotta show he can deal with a better, stronger striker as he failed to do against Aleksandre; Josias has to demonstrate his ability to handle an all-around fighter as he failed to do against Vera. I’m siding, as I almost always do, with grappling. COLBY THICKNESSE BY SUBMISSION.
WOMEN’S BANTAMWEIGHT: Luana Carolina (11-4) vs Michelle Montague (6-0)
This past week Ronda Rousey posted videos of her boxing training for the first time in years, and teasingly talked about falling back in love with mixed martial arts, and I have hives. Women’s Bantamweight ground to a halt after Amanda Nunes retired, to the point that there have been only three title fights in the last two and a half years, a record somehow outstripped by the Heavyweight division, whose belt was infamously held hostage by a madman with a fetish for fighting retirees. The UFC tried to get people excited about Nunes coming out of retirement to fight Kayla Harrison for the title--and that was already almost four months ago and there’s so little word about if/when the fight will happen that Kayla is publicly discussing moving on from it. There are no contenders beating down the door, and in their stead, we have fights like this. Luana Carolina is a Bantamweight because she kept missing the Flyweight limit and her best UFC win came against a Strawweight. Michelle Montague has a half-dozen fights and her claim to fame is either winning a few rookie fights in the Professional Fighters League or choking out Karolina Sobek in the post-merger corpse of Bellator.
I pray Michelle wins so we can get excited about literally anyone in the division. MICHELLE MONTAGUE BY SUBMISSION.
HEAVYWEIGHT: Brando Peričić (4-1) vs Elisha Ellison (5-1)
I try, very hard, not to get into the endlessly ranting, overly negative headspace about mixed martial arts. Part of this is because I have spent a quarter-century watching people try to one-up each other in acts of performative negativity for internet clout and I think it is aggressively tiresome. But the other part is the hope that when I tell you writing about a fight makes me feel like the guy from the video for Nine Inch Nails’ “Pinion” who is tied up and force-fed the downflow from a toilet’s sewage line, you will know that I mean it. Brando Peričić has four wins, two of them were against people who’d never fought before in their lives, and they were his two most recent bouts. Elisha Ellison has five wins, two of them were against people who were 1-1 and 0-1, and his most recent victory came against a man in his forties who has been fighting professionally for ten years and somehow, in those ten years, has only ever beaten one fighter with a winning record. This was supposed to be a Contender Series fight, and the UFC looked at this, and looked at their own Heavyweight division, said “well, beggars can’t be choosers,” and decided to just sign them both instead and have them debut straight into the big show.
We have fallen so far that the roster is becoming literally interchangeable with Contender Series fights. Ellison’s nickname is “Snack Panther.” Do you know what it means, that a man can be nicknamed “Snack Panther” and I look at him and feel nothing but sadness? I have watched tape, I do not think either of these men are great, Brando has zero defense, Ellison is a 5’11” Heavyweight who leads with his head, we live in Hell and I want to take a nap. ELISHA ELLISON BY TKO.
WOMEN’S STRAWWEIGHT: Loma Lookboonmee (10-3, #14) vs Alexia Thainara (12-1, NR)
What do you even do when the social contract of sports ceases to exist? Loma Lookboonmee keeps winning, and every time she wins, somehow, she gets demoted. She beat a live prospect in Denise Gomes who’s currently on her way up the rankings, and for her efforts she was given the 2-2 Elise Reed. She choked out Reed: They gave her the 1-1 Bruna Brasil. For notching her third consecutive victory she got the 0-5 Istela Nunes. Having beaten Nunes and become a ranked fighter by, essentially, brute force? She gets Alexia Thainara, who has fought in the UFC exactly once, and the opportunity to curtain-jerk the prelims. If consistently beating everyone the UFC puts in front of you results in your receiving progressively lower and lower-profile matchups, what’s the god damned point of pretending things like rankings or divisions even exist?
Loma’s much smaller, horrendously outranged, and very likely to lose. I do not care. LOMA LOOKBOONMEE BY DECISION.