CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 166: WHERE BREAD IS BUTTERED

UFC Fight Night: Tsarukyan vs Hooker

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 22 FROM THE ABHA ARENA IN DOHA, QATAR
EARLY START TIME WARNING: PRELIMS 7 AM PST / 10 AM EST | MAIN CARD 11 AM / 1 PM

Normally, the Fight Night after a really good pay-per-view is a time of loneliness, heartbreak, and co-main events featuring people you’ve never heard of. Fortunately, mixed martial arts is a pit of moneyed vipers, so this random television card is built to impress the rich men of Doha. Thanks for financing a Bogdan Grad fight, Qatar.

(For people who DO miss the Apex slop, don’t worry, our last event of the year is in the fight warehouse and its current co-main is Giga Chikadze vs Kevin Vallejos.)

that hermansson/orolbai fight is the visual equivalent of the record scratch in a mid-90s jon lovitz comedy

MAIN EVENT: EARNING IT, AGAIN
LIGHTWEIGHT: Arman Tsarukyan (22-3, #1) vs Dan Hooker (24-12, #6)

#1 contendership sure is a more complicated conversation than it used to be.

To some extent, we’re already lying to ourselves by saying that. Contendership-as-marketing-mirage has been a thing since the dawn of MMA championships. Fights being promoted as title eliminators only to get passed up for more managerially desirable outcomes have been the rule, not the exception, and if you want proof, you can reach across decades of history and ask Brandon Vera, Jon Fitch or Justin Gaethje.

But all of those had a corporate excuse. Brandon Vera wanted a better contract before he got into contention. Jon Fitch didn’t want to sign away his likeness rights in perpetuity for the UFC’s video games. Justin Gaethje wants his god damned title shot and he doesn’t want to sign another fight until he gets it. The uncomplicated fucker-to-fuckee relationship the UFC typically enjoys was harmed by a fighter demanding some form of equity, and generally-speaking, it worked out very poorly for them.

Arman Tsarukyan fucked up a pay-per-view main event. He was not the first to do so; he will not be the last. But they’re still real pissed about it, and if they could get him out of the way, that’d be swell, and Arman’s leverage has been slipping with every passing month.

On paper, it’s a fantastic career. Two losses in an entire decade is an insanely difficult thing to do in mixed martial arts, but never moreso than at Lightweight, arguably the most talent-rich division in the entire sport. One of those two losses was even a questionable decision--most of the media scored his drag-out match with Mateusz Gamrot in Arman’s favor, but as always, ours are not the scorecards that count. If Arman hadn’t had his UFC debut against Islam Makhachev, if Arman hadn’t been sharing air with one of the best to ever put on the gloves, it’s extremely likely he’d have been a world champion already.

Because he’s earned it, man. He’s beaten champions, he’s beaten top contenders, and for the UFC has inexplicably supported a reputation that labels him as a boring fighter, he’s got four knockouts in his last six wins. Hell, one of those came against Joel goddamn Álvarez, a wrecking machine so big and scary he’s now borderline-ranked at Welterweight. Arman took him out in seven minutes. By the time he beat Charles Oliveira his claim on top contendership was undeniable, and the world was ready for the rematch.

And he fucked it up. On the eve of his UFC 311 title shot, Arman pulled out. His team says it was back spasms, conspiracy theories run the gamut from panic attacks to covering up a botched weight cut to complications from an affair with Nina Drama because the internet cannot ever be normal about women, but in the end Arman was out and Renato Moicano was in. When Ilia Topuria needed a dance partner to fill the throne Islam left behind in his move to 170, the UFC didn’t call Arman--they called Oliveira, the man he’d beaten.

Ordinarily, this is where I talk about the audience’s anger or the clear philosophical injustice of a rightful contender being passed on, but to be honest, no one’s really that upset. Some of that is the parasocial relationship between the UFC and its audience and how they’ve agreed to be mad at Arman for blowing his shot and a pay-per-view; some of it is the fact that Arman’s run to the title aged very poorly, very quickly. Beating Damir Ismagulov was cool, but one fight later he was out of the UFC. Beating Joaquim Silva was always an extremely odd booking choice. Knocking out Beneil Dariush is neat! But now Beneil’s been knocked out in three of his last four fights and one of them took sixteen seconds. Beating Charles Oliveira is an incredible feat, but Arman got away with a close split decision whereas Islam choked Oliveira out in two rounds and Ilia knocked him out in one.

That said: It’s really funny to hem and haw about Arman Tsarukyan’s accomplishments and if they really deserve to justify his claim on top contendership when he’s defending it against Dan fuckin’ Hooker.

I do not want to shit on Dan Hooker. Dan Hooker is a lot of fun to watch. Dan Hooker is an extremely tough motherfucker. Dan Hooker traded blows with Dustin Poirier for five rounds and lived to tell the tale. Edson Barboza inflicted enough damage to fell a Hessian platoon on Dan and he took it until his body gave out on him. He’s one of the company’s best brawlers and his record as a fan favorite reflects just how much mileage he’s put on himself as a yearslong beater of men.

But he’s been man-beaten an awful lot. We’re only a few years removed from the particularly disastrous stretch that saw Hooker go just 1 for 5. He survived Poirier, but he got effortlessly destroyed by Michael Chandler in two and a half minutes. He took a short-notice match-up with a not-yet-champion Islam Makhachev and had his arm torn off in, uh, two and a half minutes. He made a short trip down to Featherweight in an attempt to rejuvenate his career only to get trounced by Arnold Allen--in two and a half minutes. I hadn’t really thought about how stopwatchy that era of Hookerdom really was.

But: That was the past. Hell, that last loss was all the way back in March of 2022, and Dan jumped back up to 155 and now he’s on a big, hot winning streak, right?

Kind of! Sort of. He’s won fights! But, boy, if we’re talking about stretches, Dan’s lanky-ass arms are stretching about as far as they can to claim contendership. He beat Claudio Puelles, whose best UFC win ever was, uh, circa-2022 Clay Guida, and Puelles hasn’t won a fight since. He beat Jalin Turner, who proceed to go 1 for 5, retire because he didn’t feel like he could do it anymore, and be coaxed into un-retiring most of a year later (we’ll see you in a couple weeks, buddy). He beat Mateusz Gamrot! It was a split decision that was the absolute definition of a coinflip, and Gamrot has since been strangled easily by Charles Oliveira.

And that was more than a year ago. Both of these men have been inactive as hell. Dan Hooker has three wins in three years and the last was a split decision in August of 2024; Arman Tsarukyan’s been a lot more successful, but thanks to his weight miss and the UFC icing him out, he hasn’t gotten in the cage since April of 2024. This is a title eliminator between men whose last victories happened while Joe Biden was still the President.

We said it at the start of this fight, though: Managerially-desirable outcomes rule the day. Dan Hooker is preferable to Arman Tsarukyan. His style is more crowd-friendly and his fights are easier to market--which is if anything an indictment of the UFC’s marketing department, as Dan’s only knocked one man out in the last six years while Arman’s been stacking bodies--and years of goodwill have made him a crowd favorite. The UFC wants Dan Hooker in a main event. Arman’s placement is at best obligatory.

It’s silly to ever count Dan out of a fight, and I am going to allow myself to be wholly silly by doing it. He’s tough and springy and difficult to keep down, but his best skills come from his range and pressure, and Arman’s dealt with rangier, more threatening fighters, and he’s put more pressure on scarier guys. Dan could find the right hook, Dan could snag a high guillotine, Dan could survive to the late rounds and punish Arman down the closing stretches, but I cannot help seeing Arman grinding Dan into paste on the floor.

And then he can be the number one contender to a title that’s probably getting vacated in the first quarter of 2026.

ARMAN TSARUKYAN BY TKO.

CO-MAIN EVENT: OPERATION ‘KILL THE WRESTLER’ IS GO
WELTERWEIGHT: Belal Muhammad (24-4 (1), #2) vs Ian Machado Garry (16-1, #6)

I’m mad I burned my ‘#1 contendership is hard’ opener already, because hoo, boy, the Welterweight division’s in a wild spot. All of a sudden, most of the top ten is full of fighters who are all, at worst, within one win of gaining top contendership.

• Jack Della Maddalena just lost his title and, in so doing, his first fight in nine years, but that means he’s the #1 contender until someone takes it away from him

• Belal Muhammad, the man he beat, is separated only by that loss from a six-year winning streak that includes the world title and victories over multiple top ten contenders

• Shavkat Rakhmonov, who has never lost and was last seen ending Ian Machado Garry’s undefeated streak, has been derailed by a year’s worth of injuries and is ready to come back

• Kamaru Usman, former forever champion, just ground Joaquin Buckley to paste and appears to have enough tread left on his tires for another run at the belt

• Ian Machado Garry, sans the loss to Shavkat, has beaten everyone in front of him and is still marked by many as a future champion

• Carlos Prates, who lost his own UFC streak to Garry this April, just became the first man to ever knock Leon Edwards out and leapfrogged Garry in the process

• Michael Morales, who is also undefeated, just made the UFC extremely happy by effortlessly destroying Sean Brady, which makes him a new top-three title prospect

And that’s without addressing top guys with setbacks like Brady and Buckley, or up-and-coming contenders like Gabriel Bonfim and Joel Álvarez, or that hot new kid on the block they call Neil Magny. Welterweight has an embarrassment of riches, and even if the future of the title is kind of questionable--Islam Makhachev may be waiting on Ilia Topuria and he’s already talked about his desire to retire within the next couple years--there are contenders enough for the next generation of title fights.

And I wonder how much it sucks for Belal Muhammad to see so many people getting so much momentum when he had to work so goddamn long for a moment in the sun that wound up being so goddamn short.

It feels like it was already an entire era ago, but that’s because Belal’s road to the title took six goddamn years. The UFC tried to derail him multiple times, with my personal favorite being the time they booked him into a short-notice top-contendership bout while he only had one working ankle only to then give the next title shot to a Colby Covington who had one win in the last three years instead, but Belal dutifully wrestled everyone in his path until he was wholly undeniable. When the UFC finally gave him his long-belated rematch with Leon Edwards, Belal outstruck him, outwrestled him and at one point just dumped him on his skull to make a point.

It took more than half a decade, but Belal got his belt. He silenced the doubters, he beat the naysayers, he stuck it to management. He was, indisputably, the best Welterweight on the planet.

And then he got injured in training and sat out for ten months and immediately lost the title to the biggest marketing prospect in the division when Jack Della Maddalena shut out his wrestling and boxed him up.

Which is funny, because that was supposed to be Ian Machado Garry’s job.

For the first couple years of his UFC run, you could not possibly miss Garry’s hype train. He got the advertising, he got the marketing, he got the solid matchmaking, he got the Conor McGregor impersonation interviews, he got name banners like this which I keep reposting over and over because I will never not laugh my head off at the extremely blunt attempts to get the audience to associate the two of them:

He was their big, young, undefeated blue-chip knockout-machine hyperprospect. The UFC was all about him.

And in a sign of the frailty of those hype trains, it didn’t even slow down because he lost. It slowed down because he stopped killing people.

Where Ian had been knocking out opponents left and right on his way to the rankings, once he got there, he shifted to more strategic gameplanning. He became reserved and thoughtful and took far less risks. He’s the only Welterweight prospect in the last five years to pass the Neil Magny gatekeeping exam without finishing him. He squeaked by Geoff Neal in an astonishingly close fight that wound up sandwiched between Neal’s most devastating stoppage losses. Garry ended Michael Page’s Welterweight title hopes without hitting double-digit significant strikes in a single round.

But then Shavkat ended Garry’s hopes, and he found himself back on the outside looking in. They experimented with trading in the old hype model for the new by having Garry fight Carlos Prates this past April, and Garry won, but not without nearly getting his head repeatedly punched off in the last two rounds. He had to hold on for dear life to make it to the bell.

And now they need him to get rid of their old bugbear to prove he still has what it takes to get to the belt.

I’m sure this will not shock anyone that has read any of these: BELAL MUHAMMAD BY DECISION. I said Belal was underrated before, I meant it, and I still mean it. He got beat by Della Maddalena, but he also went toe to toe with him for five rounds and busted up his face. Ian’s real fuckin’ hard to take down, but it can be done, and the trouble he’s had with opponents who keep enough pressure on him to deny his long counters and his attempts to slow down the fight in the clinch mean Belal’s got a great shot at stifling his best weapons.

Just please, for the love of god, wrestle more this time.

MAIN CARD: WE PUT RANKED PEOPLE HERE BECAUSE THEY PAID US
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Volkan Oezdemir (20-8, #9) vs Alonzo Menifield (17-5-1, #14)

After two straight fights about top contendership, up-and-coming prospects and red-hot divisions, returning to Light Heavyweight feels like wading back into the primordial muck to embrace devolution and return to being sarcopterygii. Having just broken down at length the exciting world of Welterweight contenders in the last fight, let’s take an equally trenchant look at the state of the 205-pound division:

Ah, yes. Lovely.

These men are flies in amber. Volkan Oezdemir used to be a top contender, but that time was back in the 2010s. In the 2020s he’s the guy who keeps the gate to the top ten and loses to everyone else. The highest-profile win he’s had in the last two presidential terms was either about-to-turn-Middleweight Paul Craig or just-got-trounced-by-Magomed-Ankalaev-twice Johnny Walker. Alonzo Menifield had a five-fight unbeaten streak, which sounds impressive until you realize that streak included a retiring Middleweight, the Count Dante of Kuala Lumpur himself Askar Mozharov, and Jimmy Crute twice in a five-month period. Then he fought two actual contenders and got punched the fuck out. Alonzo did rob Oumar Sy of all of his hype by beating him, which was very, very funny, but it doesn’t quite a title run make.

So it’s just two guys. No one will learn anything. No one will grow. We will simply watch these punches land in a Qatari vacuum and go about our lives while trying to ignore the growing awareness of a hole in our hearts. VOLKAN OEZDEMIR BY TKO.

WELTERWEIGHT: Jack Hermansson (24-9) vs Myktybek Orolbai (14-2-1)

The Jack Hermansson career arc continues to be deeply unpredictable. His vacillations between being a notorious prospect killer and falling short of getting anywhere have been as frustrating as a fan as they must be as a matchmaker. You can trust him to almost beat Sean Strickland, but not Marvin Vettori. He can make Kelvin Gastelum look awful, but he’s going to get turned into a pretzel by Roman Dolidze. He derailed Joe Pyfer and then got thrown in a dumpster by Gregory Rodrigues. After nine straight years of toiling away at Middleweight, Jack just hasn’t been able to maintain enough momentum to get past the starting line. So where do you go when you’re getting dangerously close to 40 and your body can’t hack it with the monsters of Middleweight anymore?

You start cutting to 170, and apparently, Myktybek Orolbai comes up in weight to join you. Orolbai was a solid addition to the Lightweight division back in 2023, a Kyrgyz wrestler who’d already successfully transitioned to winning stateside fights in the Legacy Fighting Alliance, and on paper, the move is a curious one. He’s 3-1, his only loss was a close split decision and he just notched one of the best victories of his career after welcoming Rizin star Tofiq Musayev to the UFC by ripping his arm off in a single round. He’s done extremely well for himself in the Lightweight division! Except for the part where he can’t seem to make the Lightweight limit. Both of his last two fights had to be changed to 160 and 165-pound catchweights after he simply couldn’t cut weight anymore. There’s a long history of fighters whose careers are sabotaged by their bodies more than their skills--we did just talk about Kelvin Gastelum--and Orolbai’s wagering it’ll be better to move to 170 than kill himself to make 155.

Philosophically, I support this, because weight cutting sucks rocks. Pragmatically? I dunno, man. Orolbai’s best advantages are his granite chin and his crushing grappling, and he’s moving to a division populated by much harder hitters and much better wrestlers. We have to see what Jack has left in the tank at this point in his career and after cutting to Welterweight for the first time in his life, but I’m still expecting JACK HERMANSSON BY DECISION.

HEAVYWEIGHT: Serghei Spivac (17-6, #7) vs Shamil Gaziev (14-1, #11)

You know, there was a window of opportunity for Serghei Spivac. Three straight wins, the incredibly rare submission victory over Derrick Lewis, the impossible good will garnered by stopping the Greg Hardy experiment in its tracks, all of it earned him his shot at the top. All he had to do was wrestle Ciryl Gane. That’s it. Jon Jones did it! Francis Ngannou did it! Serghei, you just had to do the thing you have always done to a large French man with a penchant for poking eyes. And you failed. You shot one takedown and got punched seventeen thousand times and now they’re grinding your bones to dust to feed the prospects who are starving in the depleted fields of the Heavyweight division. First it was Jailton Almeida outgrappling you, then it was Salsa Boy kiting you for three rounds.

And now it’s Shamil Gaziev. Shamil Gaziev, who got kicked into quitting on the stool against Jairzinho Rozenstruik. Shamil Gaziev, who couldn’t get Don’Tale Mayes out of the cage. They want to see Shamil punch Serghei so badly that they’ve been trying to book this fight since May, and it just keeps falling apart, and they just keep rebooking it. Shamil Gaziev is the dark truth of Heavyweight. He’s good but not great, he can make it three rounds but he kind of looks like he wants to die from doing it, and they’d rather cut people like Rozenstruik who are demonstrably better than him than get rid of him, because he is cheaper. Shamil’s first three opponents are already out of the company and his last opponent is a 2-3 Thomas Petersen that just got knocked out by a Light Heavyweight, and this is a top ten fight, because we live in Hell.

But he can throw punches, and traditionally, Serghei cannot. I’m going to keep rooting for humor and say SERGHEI SPIVAC BY SUBMISSION for funsies, but this will probably be either a short punching or a long grinding.

FLYWEIGHT: Alex Perez (25-9, #8) vs Asu Almabayev (22-3, #9)

We briefly got to enjoy Alex Perez’s career not being horrendously depressing, and for a time, it was nice. We’ve spent more words on Perez failing to make it to fights over the last three years than we have on his actual fighting skills. As it stands, since 2017 he’s racked up thirteen UFC fights and fourteen UFC fight cancellations. When he knocked out Matheus Nicolau in April of 2024 it was an incredible moment that finally let off some of that misfortune and seemed to promise him a new life as a renewed contender. And then he fought Tatsuro Taira and had his entire knee shredded and he was out injured for more than a year and then he reinjured himself training for Steve Erceg and god, it’s just like old times all over again.

Asu Almabayev has had his own form of bad luck, and it’s shaped like Manel Kape’s fingertips. It’s been an almost entirely successful two years in the UFC for Asu. He’s been gleefully wrestling everyone he can get his hands on, he’s pushed his way into the top ten and he very well deserves it, he’s made good on everything the UFC signed him for. But his bid for contendership ended because Manel Kape is kind of an asshole. Asu was going to lose their fight anyway--Kape was just too fast and clean to get wrestled--but all of the current furor about eyepokes going unpunished feels extremely grating when Asu’s one UFC loss happened because Kape managed to chain multiple fingers to the eyes together into some kind of Three Stooges routine involving trying to blind a man in a cage and a referee watched it and said “doesn’t look like anything to me” and gave him a TKO for it.

If Alex actually makes it to this fight, which is rarely a safe bet, he will be sacrificed on the altar of justice. ASU ALMABAYEV BY DECISION.

PRELIMS: WELCOME BACK, KYOJI
FEATHERWEIGHT: Bogdan Grad (15-3) vs Luke Riley (11-0)

There’s a very good chance this is going to rule. Bogdan Grad is a DWCS two-timer--his first time around he was fighting at Lightweight and he made the unfortunate discovery that Lightweight fighters are allowed to be more than half a foot taller than he is, but the second saw him beat Michael Aswell, who was also signed within a year anyway because these days the entry point for the UFC is just a pair of those big swinging saloon doors from the old west. Bogdan’s fun and athletic and also already 50/50 in the UFC after two fights, which is why instead of fighting upward, he is welcoming someone to the company. Luke Riley is the rare fighter that gets to skip the Contender Series and proceed straight to the UFC because he is a) British, b) a Cage Warriors veteran and c) punches people instead of grappling with them. He does not like wrestling, he does not appreciate being wrestled, and he has repeatedly and successfully responded to attempts to wrestle him by establishing boundaries and defending them with multiple blows to the head.

Of this, stars are born. I am, however, honorbound by my allegiance to fellow MMA wordster Jessica Hudnall to root for Bogmen. BOGDAN GRAD BY DECISION.

LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: AbdulRakhman Yakhyaev (7-0) vs Raffael Cerqueira (11-3)

One of the oddest things to watch as the Contender Series has metastasized has been its use as a hype platform. You get a Baisangur Susurkaev or a Tallison Teixeira on it and they get a solid knockout, you get people to rate them highly and get invested in their UFC debut. That, funnily enough, has made DWCS even worse, because now even it has favorite matchmaking. Who did Susurkaev score his big knockout over? Murtaza Talha, who had been knocked out on DWCS two years prior and whose only fight in that span was a stoppage over Oleg Klimov, a career jobber with nothing but losses across multiple combat sports. AbdulRakhman Yakyaev certainly appears to be a legitimately talented fighter. He held gold in France, he’s shown off both decent striking and wrestling, he’s looked altogether impressive if not yet wholly tested. Who does the UFC put in front of him for his contract test? Alik Lorenz, who’s been fighting guys with losing or near-losing records in the LFA for almost his entire career. Shockingly, Lorenz got knocked out in thirty seconds. How do you follow that up in Yakhyaev’s debut?

You feed him Raffael Cerqueira, who’s already 0-3 in the UFC and has gotten knocked insensible in two of those performances. Sorry, Raffi. ABDULRAKHMAN YAKHYAEV BY TKO.

FLYWEIGHT: Tagir Ulanbekov (17-2, #12) vs Kyoji Horiguchi (34-5 (1), NR)

Kyoji god damned Horiguchi. Tagir, I’m sorry, you’re good, it really wouldn’t be a surprise if you won this fight, but we’re not here to talk about you today. KYOJI HORIGUCHI. It has been nine fucking years since one of the best Flyweights in the entire world was in the UFC. He didn’t leave because he couldn’t hack it, he went 7-1 and the only man who beat him was Mighty Mouse himself. He went home to Japan to fight both a better schedule and in front of his cancer-stricken master (god bless you, martial arts), he won Rizin’s Bantamweight championship, he came back to America to fight for Bellator, he won its Bantamweight championship, and for a brief, beautiful moment, Kyoji Horiguchi had the stature in MMA he’d always deserved. And then it immediately crashed down when Rizin made him fight while injured and he got trucked and missed an entire year of his career, and then Sergio Pettis did some spinning shit and knocked him out in a huge upset, and then Patchy Mix outwrestled him because the universe had to remind Kyoji that amazing as he may be, he’s also 5’5”. So he spent the last three straight years making up for it. He talked Bellator into starting Flyweight divisions--and then Bellator’s title died before it could live when its inaugural fight got cancelled and its replacement ended in an eyepoke No Contest in twenty-five seconds, so Rizin made one instead and Kyoji won it immediately and easily. He even popped back up to 135 just to get revenge on Sergio! But he’s getting older and he wants that UFC belt he was previously denied before he retires.

This was supposed to happen in June and Kyoji got hurt, and now we are here, and Tagir, I’m sorry, but you must be destroyed. It’s for the greater good. You’re an excellent fighter and you’re well-rounded as hell and you’ve never been stopped and you’re actually an incredibly stiff test for Kyoji’s return and none of that matters because the universe needs you to fall down. KYOJI HORIGUCHI BY TKO. Get it the hell done.

BANTAMWEIGHT: Bekzat Almakhan (12-2) vs Aleksandre Topuria (6-1)

I’m oddly intrigued by this one. Bekzat Almakhan wasn’t a big intentional pickup for the UFC, he was brought in just to keep Umar Nurmagomedov on a card and he lost successfully. But he followed it up by fighting Brad Katona, a man who’d shared the cage with Merab Dvalishvili and made it to the bell, and Bekzat knocked him out in a damn minute, which is extremely interesting. Aleksandre Topuria was brought into the UFC at 5-1 after having sat idle for almost two whole years based entirely on the strength of his slightly more famous younger brother, as before that, his best victory was the 3-2 Johan “Does What Nintendon’t” Segas. Aleksandre proceeded to dominate a genuinely solid prospect in Colby Thicknesse, which is also particularly interesting.

I wasn’t sure about Aleksandre last time and he proved me wrong, but gosh darnit, I really want Bekzat to become something, so BEKZAT ALMAKHAN BY DECISION as we begin 2026’s fall of the Topuria clan a few weeks early.

MIDDLEWEIGHT: Ismail Naurdiev (24-8) vs Ryan Loder (7-2)

The way periods of time collide in a sport as comparatively short-lived as MMA has been is constantly disarming. Ismail Naurdiev is thirteen years deep into his career (at just 29, which is wild), but instead of any of his present fights, when I think of him, I think of retiring Siyar Bahadurzada back in 2019. Siyar was a fucking standard of the sport. World Victory Road Sengoku was one of the first attempts to revive Pride after it died, and Siyar was right there at its first event. And he fought men who’d been around since the 90s. Hell, we just talked about Kyoji Horiguchi, and that’s a man that fought guys like Kiyoshi Tamura and Royce fucking Gracie. For all the extremely understandable frustrations we have with mixed martial arts as a den of corruption and villainy, tonight, we’re still such a baby of a sport that we’re still just seeing fighters who are one degree of separation away its origins, and sometimes I have to remind myself that we need more patience than we necessarily get.

All of this is to say that I have an incredibly difficult time caring about this matchup. Naurdiev’s a Middleweight who got ragdolled by Welterweights and Loder’s a Twenty Twenty Four The Ultimate Fighter 32 Jesus Christ champion who proceeded to get completely destroyed in his first fight. We are treading water in the shallow end. But I am willing to spot one more night of faith in an attempt to make my months of watching TUF worth it. RYAN LODER BY TKO.

LIGHTWEIGHT: Nurullo Aliev (10-0) vs Shem Rock (12-1-1)

Sometimes, you get a fighter’s story before you get the fighter themselves. Shaqueme Rock, much better known and now formally entered in the UFC as Shem Rock, was internet-notable for his life before his victories. He achieved some celebrity in the European scene as the man who fled his native Liverpool for Asia to escape prosecution for crimes he didn’t commit, he discovered martial arts and his affinity for them while he was on the run and, in plying his trade, got notable enough to get extradited. He was, ultimately, acquitted, and now he trains with Paddy Pimblett and more or less steals his gimmick by having both voluptuous hair and a gameplan built around being a really aggressive grappler who relies on being lanky and flinging out lots of range-finding attacks to keep people from punching him. Nurullo Aliev, much less interestingly, is just an undefeated fighter from Tajikistan that keeps grinding people into dust on the floor because no one can get him off of them.

I like Shem’s story! I also think it’s a little rough to go from barely scraping split decisions off journeymen in Prague to fighting really good wrestlers in Doha. NURULLO ALIEV BY DECISION.

WELTERWEIGHT: Nicolas Dalby (23-6-1 (2)) vs Saygid Izagakhmaev (22-2)

Gosh, this is a weird one. I mean, Nicolas Dalby is always weird. He’s the kind of guy who can beat Daniel Rodriguez one day and drop a decision to Tim Means the next. He fought the undefeated Gabriel Bonfim and knocked him out, and then Dalby fought Randy Brown and got knocked out, and then Bonfim fought Brown and knocked him out, and if anime has taught me anything, this means all three of them now have to date. Saygid Izagakhmaev is only weird because, like so many fighters, he’s been stuck in the inexplicable vortex of ONE. Asia Singapore Bangkok’s favorite money burning scheme combat sports promotion picked Saygid up from Eagle FC back in 2022, and within a year he was 3-0 in the company and he’d just scored the most notable win of his career by punching out the asshole legend himself, Shinya Aoki, in under a minute and a half. And then, nothing happened. As ONE constantly does they kept him in contract Hell, he spent a year complaining about their total unwillingness to book him, and after finally releasing him it still took a year and a half for shit to calm down enough that he could sign with the UFC.

So we’re making up for lost time, here. SAYGID IZAGAKHMAEV BY DECISION.

HEAVYWEIGHT: Marek Bujło (6-0) vs Denzel Freeman (6-1)

And it wouldn’t be an international fight card without an international Heavyweight fight with the potential to be very, very funny. On paper, This is about as good as it gets for the big boys outside of the spotlight: Undefeated Polish Heavyweight grappling champion, barely-tarnished American finishing machine and current LFA champion, you could do so, so much worse. This is not an endorsement, it is an indictment. Marek’s got two wins in 2025, they were against guys who are 3-7 and 13-15, and they both ended in under a minute. Denzel’s professional loss came to a man who fights at Light Heavyweight and, even funnier, his sole amateur loss back in 2016 was to former Bellator Middleweight Champion Johnny Eblen. When you watch their tape there’s a lot of talk about how promising they are as the next generation of Heavyweight fighters. Denzel just turned 34. Marek, at 32 years of age, has one win over a man with a winning record, and that record is 6-5.

The damning thing isn’t that they’re wrong: The damning thing is that they’re right. DENZEL FREEMAN BY TKO after Marek gets tired from having the first fight of his life that lasts longer than two minutes.