CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 175: TERMINAL VELOCITY
UFC Fight Night: Emmett vs Vallejos
SATURDAY, MARCH 14 FROM THE IRREPARABLE HOLE IN THE WORLD THAT IS THE APEX
PRELIMS 2 PM PDT / 5 PM EDT | MAIN CARD 5 PM / 8 PM
Sure does feel like things are turning a little bit, doesn't it?
A huge fight for a bullshit belt that ended in beautiful, grapplocentric domination that everyone's pissed about because the fanbase has been successfully trained to hate everything that isn't fisticuffs. A White House card barely anyone wanted in the first place that has been hyped for a full year only to turn out to be a mandatory title defense, the fourth interim Heavyweight title match in the last four and a half years, and, of course, a Bo Nickal fight.
And now we're in the Apex and our main event doesn't even clear the top ten.
UFC, baby. We've never been more back.
MAIN EVENT: SQUEEZING THE ROCK
FEATHERWEIGHT: Josh Emmett (19-6, #11) vs Kevin Vallejos (17-1, #14)
I mean, honestly.
We’ve talked about the Apex as the beginning of the end of the sport for quite some time, but every year we underline the death sentence all over again. In 2020 and 2021? Completely understandable COVID precaution. Every year since? Spiraling doom. The death of meaning itself. Ordinarily this is where I’d go down memory lane and talk about the annual lowering of expectations, but we’re not measuring in years anymore, we’re down to weeks. Whatever complaints I am about to lodge regarding this fight are a fun little appetizer for three weeks from now, when we return to the Apex for no less than Renato Moicano vs Chris Duncan.
It’s a worse fight than this one! But it doesn’t feel as bad as this one does.
One of the phrases I have used so often I have come to kind of hate it is “value extraction,” but some of that hatred stems from having never really defined it. If fighters and their fortunes can be traditionally broken down into Champions, Contenders, Prospects, Gatekeepers, Journeymen and Jobbers, value extraction is the intentional process that demotes them down the line. It’s how you keep BJ Penn employed as he goes from one of the greatest fighters alive to competing midway through the prelims. You, as a promoter, spent so long cultivating his name, his brand, his worth, that the moment it seems like he’s on a downward slide the most profitable thing to do is impart as much of his remaining value to other fighters as you can, while you can. Do you have a realistic hope that a BJ Penn who failed to tackle Dennis Siver is going to do a damn thing to Ryan Hall? Of course not. Do you even think Ryan Hall, himself, is going to be a star? Probably not! But the remaining shreds of BJ’s credibility will live within Hall until Ilia Topuria releases them by smashing his face, and then the subatomic particles of the man who once took Georges St-Pierre to his limit will pay off for you one more time.
Josh Emmett wasn’t supposed to have much value to impart. Hell, as of 2019, he had largely been disposed of. He’d won but missed weight in his first-ever UFC co-main event, he’d come back three months later and (somewhat controversially) gotten knocked out by Jeremy Stephens, who was already something of a relic, it would be more than a year before he returned to the sport, and for most of the fanbase that seemed like the end of the Josh Emmett story. He was gritty and tough and had a fun, hard-knock style; he was also a 5’6” Featherweight entering his mid-thirties who seemed boxed out of the top ten.
Which made the resulting run to a title fight something no one really saw coming. Emmett was an underdog in damn near every fight he had, and it didn’t stop him from battering his way into the top five. And it was great! It’s always great to see a veteran of the sport defy expectations and punch their way out of a bad spot and back into main events. It’s always great to see someone get their laurels.
But in hindsight, those laurels were awfully spotty.
Michael Johnson is one of the most inconsistent fighters in MMA history. Mirsad Bektić was on the doorstep of retirement. Shane Burgos was about to hit his combat sports ceiling. Dan Ige is the most consistent doorman the Featherweight division has ever seen. Beating Calvin Kattar, though? That seemed like a really big deal. Kattar was a top contender, a man who’d only lost against the best, and even if it was a split decision involving some real screwy scoring, Emmett earned the biggest win of his career and his spot at the top.
Calvin Kattar proceeded to lose his next four straight fights and folks are talking about his career being over. Josh Emmett is only one step ahead of him.
Choked out by Yair Rodríguez. Outworked by Lerone Murphy. Caught a life-altering beating from Ilia Topuria. If you have observed that all three of those men have been cultivated as prospects by the UFC, you’ve caught onto the game. They wanted Emmett to help rehabilitate accomplished Hitler enthusiast Bryce Mitchell in the middle of that run, too, but in one of the rare moments of positivity in our godforsaken sport Emmett crushed him with one of the best one-punch knockouts we’ve ever gotten to enjoy with the whole of our hearts. But then that Murphy loss was followed by Youssef Zalal snatching Emmett’s arm in 98 seconds, and if getting knocked out by Jeremy Stephens in your mid-thirties made your future a hard sell, being 1 for 5 on the precipice of 42 is a whole lot worse.
It’s a long story, and it’s not the happiest story, but hell, it’s a story. Kevin Vallejos has been here for like five minutes and goddamn near every fight he’s had in the UFC has just been a different permutation of this one.
One of our most persistent punching bags in these write-ups has been Samurai Fight House, the Argentinian record-padding organization the UFC has been gleefully using as a feeder league for Latin-American talent because sourcing fighters from a company that cultivates them through constant squash matches is a feature and not a bug. This hasn’t changed in the past four years, for the record--their last card was headlined by the now 15-2 Omar Artega retaining his Super Featherweight championship against the now 4-2 Nicolas Jorge--and it was the case for Vallejos, who rode his way into the Contender Series on the back of a reign as the champion at both 140, 145 and 155 down there. (For the record: The 140-pound title fight was against a guy who was 1-5, the 145-pound title win came against a man who was 7-14, and the competition for his historic third weight class win was 6-4.)
Unfortunately for Vallejos, his DWCS competition was Jean Silva. It’s a credit to Kevin that he survived to the bell against the butcher, but he still lost the decision. So it was back to the Fight House, and back to beating people with no hope of defeating him, and after returning to the contract show for a second shot in 2024 and finding that now it, too, was willing to match him up with someone who only had half his experience, he won and sailed into UFC success.
Well, success of a sort. The same way we defined value extraction at the start of this essay, we can define prospect protection by looking at the way Kevin’s been booked. Did they book him against another prospect they had high hopes for? Of course not! He got Choi Seung-woo, who was 1 for his last 5 and coming off a knockout loss, which Vallejos dutifully added to with another first-round stoppage. After that? A step up to Danny Silva, who was an undefeated 2-0 in the UFC! Granted both fights were skin-of-his-teeth split decisions over people with negative UFC records, but hey, who’s counting. After that, though? Giga Chikadze, baby! The hottest title prospect of 2021! Who was, at the end of 2025, 1 for his last 4 and coming off two losses, a weight miss, and his thirty-seventh birthday. Vallejos knocked him dead in six and a half minutes.
One year. Kevin Vallejos has been in the UFC for one year, and he’s fighting for potential admission to the top ten, and--should he win--he’ll have beaten only one man who wasn’t or isn’t on a losing streak, and it’s Danny fucking Silva. That’s how you become a title prospect now. We never actually stopped touching base with Samurai Fight House. We didn’t need to. We’re slowly adapting its model instead.
Look, you do not need me to tell you Kevin is probably going to win this fight. He’s fast, he’s strong, he hits really fucking hard, he’s genuinely quite good at mixing up his striking techniques and, notably, he was born in this century. They know what they’re doing with this match-up and they’re almost certainly going to get what they want. But my fandom is at this point subsisting on spite and hope, so it’s JOSH EMMETT BY KO.
CO-MAIN EVENT: REVERSED PRIORITIES
WOMEN’S BANTAMWEIGHT: Amanda Lemos (15-5-1, #5) vs Gillian Robertson (16-8, #8)
The UFC has been struggling to find Canadian talent for years. The last time the UFC had a Canadian card main-evented by an actual Canadian was Rory MacDonald all the way back in 2016. Gillian Robertson was born in Canada. There is a UFC pay-per-view in Canada next week. Presuming you believe in her chances you could have had Gillian Robertson, who has struggled for years to get noticed, beating a very visible top contender and finally getting the win that legitimizes her in front of a crowd of Quebecois sports fans who are currently feeling extremely fucking patriotic. There are, as of now, only eleven fights booked for that entire show.
We're doing this again! Against all reason, we are doing this again. The UFC is making a trip to Winnipeg next month, and there are only eight fights booked thus far and they're trying so hard to get Canadians on it that they honest-to-god rehired Tanner Boser, and here's Gillian Robertson, Ontarian turned Floridian, fighting in the Apex.
In a top ten women's match with a former world title contender.
Under a Kevin Vallejos fight.
The best part? This is an improvement. We were supposed to see this bout back in December for the final card of the year, and not only was that, too, in the Apex, it didn't even qualify for the main card. Amanda Lemos and Gillian Robertson, either of whom could compete for the championship of their division after this fight, were going to meet in the preliminary headliner. Kevin Vallejos, Cezary Oleksiejczuk, Marcus Buchecha and Lance Gibson Jr. all qualified as main-card attractions, but #5-ranked former title contender Amanda Lemos and #8-ranked, four-fight-winning-streak-bearing Gillian Robertson were stuck on the prelims.
In the Apex.
You know, Mackenzie Dern is almost half a year into her title reign with nary a word about her first challenger. Valentina Shevchenko beat Zhang Weili four months ago and there's no news about the future of Flyweight. Kayla Harrison went down for neck surgery and the same company that forced Jiří Procházka to abdicate his Light Heavyweight championship over a shoulder injury has simply shrugged and let Women's Bantamweight continue to spin its wheels with no end in sight.
But hey: Women's Strawweight is half the roster of The Ultimate Fighter 34 (jesus christ) featuring coaches To Be Announced vs To Be Announced (jesus christ), so I'm sure everything's going to be just fine.
Anyway, they're not putting any more effort into this match-up, so neither am I. Here's a rerun of the writeup from when it was a prelim, which is mostly me complaining about the same shit I just spent several paragraphs complaining about.
I had someone tell me once that my persistent bitching about ranked women being stuck on the prelims was silly, because that could be a position of prominence. People need reasons to watch the prelims, and if you’re headlining the prelims, why, that means the UFC sees more in you than the people in random spots on the main card! Respectfully: This is backward as fuck. What this actually means is the UFC sees utility in you for them as an attraction just important enough to help the company fill out the part of the card the audience doesn’t want to watch, but not important enough to receive the benefit of actual promotion. As a case in point: Two fights ago, Amanda Lemos was on the main card of an Alex Pereira pay-per-view. And she won! As payment for her efforts, she and Tatiana Suarez got to fight midway through the prelims at this year’s Noche UFC. It was a fight between the #2 and #4-ranked women in the division. The prelim headliner was Duško Todorović vs José Medina. Amanda lost. For losing, she now gets to headline the prelims against Gillian Robertson. Gillian Robertson is on a four-fight winning streak that includes retiring Marina Rodriguez and Michelle fucking Waterson-Gomez, one of the best-known Strawweights in the world. It’s almost all been on the prelims, too. The UFC has been desperate for Canadian stars, and they held a show at Bell Centre in Montreal this past May, and instead of booking Gillian, maybe the most accomplished Canadian currently on the roster, to compete in her home country and get the promotional push that could make her a thing, they set her up on the previous week so she could fight on the prelims in Des Moines. But don’t worry: The preliminary headliner was a women’s fight!
It was Miesha Tate vs Yana Santos.
This shit is so tiresome. I’m aware I am ranting a lot more than I typically do, but goddammit, it’s the end of the year and there is so much that could have been done better. A couple months ago I would’ve been rabid for Gillian to win this fight just to see her get her shot at the top after Lemos failed to get it done against the top five, but now we’re in the bizarre position where the champion is someone Lemos very recently beat the stuffing out of. We’ve seen her repeatedly troubled by strong grapplers, so I’m still hoping for GILLIAN ROBERTSON BY DECISION, but at least there’s life at the top for Lemos now.
MAIN CARD: WOOF
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Oumar Sy (12-1) vs Ion Cuțelaba (19-11-1 (1))
And just like that, we are in the negative zone. The UFC lists 44 active fighters in their Light Heavyweight roster (technically 48, but their database is a mess that includes folks like Ryan Spann, the just-resigned Tanner Boser and the just-vacated Alex Pereira, all of whom are now Heavyweights, and, for some inane reason, Cub Swanson, who hasn’t even touched the Lightweight division in twenty years) right now, and of those 44 only 18 are currently coming off of a win, and of those 18, only 7 are currently ranked. Imagine being one of those eleven men, operating in arguably the thinnest Light Heavyweight division of all time, and your victory isn’t enough to get you a number by your name. Now imagine you’re Oumar Sy and a lot of folks thought you’d be a champion by now. Sy was supposed to excel. He was in the running to start challenging for regional titles at Heavyweight before he got the call up to the UFC as an undefeated man in a division of smaller, more vulnerable men. And it was all going well right up until last June, when his streak was snapped by Alonzo Menifield, the man who’s been knocked out in all three of his last losses and only barely eked out a split decision against no less than Julius “Juice Box” Walker. It’s one loss in thirteen fights, but being unable to beat Alonzo Menifield circa 2025 is a really, really hard thing to battle back from.
Which is why he has Ion Cuțelaba. In the land of the quickly-cut, Cuțelaba is king. We have just three months before we hit a decade of Ion in the UFC. This is his twentieth fight with the company. And in all that time, across all that mileage, his longest winning streak is two fights--and he’s only done it twice. He has no ranking, he has no cache, he simply Is. Once upon a time he was a reliable berserker that would either run opponents into the ground and butcher them in minutes or die trying, and now, in his ancient dotage as a man of thirty-two, he has learned, and adjusted, and matured, which is how he now loses split decisions to Modestas Bukauskas and only barely squeaks by Ivan Erslan. He is the gatekeeper the 205-pound division deserves. He is here to shoot vague takedowns and maybe throw some hooks, but these days, only if he feels like it, and if you can beat him, it means you’re either ready for the top fifteen, if you’re a Johnny Walker, or the UFC is going to cut you, if you’re Philipe Lins.
OUMAR SY BY DECISION.
FEATHERWEIGHT: Andre Fili (25-12 (1)) vs Jose Delgado (10-2)
If Ion is a spirit of constancy, Andre Fili is its living extreme. We’re closing in on year thirteen of Fili’s time here, but more importantly, we’re going on our seventh straight calendar marked by Fili never, ever getting back-to-back wins or losses. He refuses. He’s incapable. He would rather die than allow history to repeat itself. Which he came irritatingly close to, once, as a few years back Fili’s long career led to a brief hiatus after he suddenly lost vision in one eye thanks to, you know, all of the punching, but fortunately it’s perfectly fine and was never spoken of as a problem again because zero UFC fighters have ever suffered longterm consequences from not retiring after their eye got fucked.
Anyway, he’s here to lose. That’s the job. Jose Delgado is younger and cheaper and the UFC got dollar signs in their eyes after they saw him blast the legitimately decent Hyder Amil out of his gourd in twenty-six seconds last year. They threw Delgado on the annual money-making pay-per-view trip to Abu Dhabi and gave him Nathaniel Wood as a credible if still-rightfully-disfavored competitor to help Jose make it a bit closer to the top fifteen, but Wood ruined those plans by beating him. Is it a sign of favoritism that Delgado is fighting a known quantity with a recognizable name on a main card? Is it a sign of punishment that Wood, for his victory, is buried in the prelims next week fighting the debuting Losene Keita?
It is neither. Do not give more emotional importance to things than the matchmakers themselves did. You do not have to live in this tar pit with me. You can be free. JOSE DELGADO BY TKO.
FEATHERWEIGHT: Marwan Rahiki (7-0) vs Harry Hardwick (13-4-1)
I mean...no. I can say no, right? I still have that option?
What are we doing here, man? Marwan Rahiki was just on the Contender Series in October, where he got nearly knocked the fuck out twice in one round by Ananias Mulumba, who got his shot at the show by defeating a man who is 10-12 with those victories all coming over fighters with no more than one win, and after Mulumba gassed out from beating the absolute shit out of Rahiki he got stopped in the second round, because 23 year-olds are better at recovering than you are. Harry Hardwick was supposed to be a big pickup last year, a Cage Warriors champion out of England who hadn’t lost a fight since 2020, and in one of the only times I have ever successfully looked smart in these write-ups I watched enough footage to say ‘it sure seems bad that this dude never moves his head or defends strikes’ and he proceeded to get completely destroyed by Kauê Fernandes in one round.
This is a UFC fight. This is a fight in the UFC. This isn’t even a random prelim, this is a main card UFC fight. The 0-0 guy who barely survived his DWCS appearance is fighting the 0-1 guy who had his legs smashed to bits by a man who couldn’t get past Marc Diakiese, and Charles Johnson and Chris Curtis and Brad Tavares and Bia Mesquita and even Eryk Anders are all stuck on the prelims. Do you have any idea how dire the matchmaking has to become for me to feel like the UFC is being unfair to Eryk Anders?
I don’t fucking care. I DON’T FUCKING CARE BY DECISION. Let’s say that means Harry Hardwick, I guess, but Jesus Christ, man. What are we even doing anymore?
HEAVYWEIGHT: Vitor Petrino (13-2, #15*) vs Steven Asplund (7-1, NR)
You know what’s especially fucking crazy? This is fine! After all of that, I think this is, somehow, an actually okay matchup.
Granted, we are grading on the curve of the current state of Heavyweight, because Vitor Petrino washed out of the Light Heavyweight division pretty hard. Getting choked out by pre-retirement Anthony Smith and flattened by Dustin Jacoby kills your title chances about as efficiently as anything possibly could. But the best base for mixed martial arts is saying ‘cutting weight is for chumps’ and simply moving up to a more natural division, and Heavyweight has treated Vitor very well. Are the people he beat particularly great? No! Austen Lane is 1 for 5 and is, himself, dropping to 205 in a desperate attempt to rescue his career, and Thomas Petersen got beat by Jamal god damned Pogues and it still took a third round for Petrino to get him out of there. But in today’s Heavyweight division, being able to simply throw effective punches past the six-minute mark is notable.
Throwing a bunch of punches is, coincidentally, also why Steven Asplund is here. He only made his UFC debut in December, and it sure wasn’t the quality of win that got him noticed--his opponent was Sean Sharaf, who is now 0-2 in the UFC, 4-2 overall, and 1-2 against people who have ever won more than one mixed martial arts bout. With respect to Sean, who works very hard and could beat up 99% of the people you know, besting him in a UFC fight is not that big of a deal. Beating him by throwing 292 strikes in eight and a half minutes? By the standards of the Heavyweight division, that’s an absolute miracle. Can he wrestle? Who knows. Does he have a chin? We haven’t had a chance to find out. But he can throw combinations for ten minutes without looking like he wants to keel over and die, and by god, that means he must be protected at all costs.
So don’t you dare ruin this for us, Vitor. STEVEN ASPLUND BY TKO.
*A NOTE FROM THE EDITING DESK: In the 48 hours between writing this and actually posting it the UFC updated its rankings, and now Vitor Petrino, who is on a two-fight winning streak, is no longer a ranked Heavyweight, and taking his place at #15 is Tai Tuivasa, who is on a six-fight losing streak that stretches back more than four years. Would it have been easier to just remove the ranking rather than writing all of this? Much. But then I would lose the chance to remind you that no matter how stupid the Heavyweight division is, we haven’t actually hit the bottom yet.
PRELIMS: MISSED OPPORTUNITIES
FLYWEIGHT: Charles Johnson (18-8, #14) vs Bruno Silva (15-7-2 (1), #15)
Let’s go back two weeks to when the UFC suddenly needed a Flyweight in their main event.
Hell, a multitude of Flyweights campaigned for this fight, but no one more visibly than the #13-ranked Charles Johnson. Sure, he just got knocked out by an overweight Alex Perez, but he still privately and publicly threw his hat in the ring and begged for the opportunity. After all, new champion Joshua Van only has one loss in the UFC, and it came from Charles Johnson flattening him. He's always had the ability. Despite my lifelong InnerG fandom I thought it was a terrible idea the UFC should turn down, because booking people to fight just four weeks after they got knocked out is a terrible idea.
And then they booked Johnson for a random Apex bout with Bruno Silva two weeks from now, and announced Bruno Silva's original opponent Lone'er Kavanagh was taking the Moreno fight instead. Lone'er Kavanagh, who is coming off of not just the first loss of his career, but a knockout loss.
Against Charles Johnson.
It's a perfect storm for everything the UFC loves and everything I hate. Charles Johnson got dropped three times in three minutes and punched out so hard he did a Ric Flair faceplant and then tried to rush across the cage to simultaneously shoot a very wobbly double and escape the referee tendering his condolences on the official end of his hopes as a prospect, and now he's fighting laterally through the rankings with no hope of ascension just forty-nine days after earning his latest concussion, and Joshua Van, whom he destroyed, is the world champion, and Lone'er Kavanagh, whom he destroyed, is the #6-ranked Flyweight in the world.
There's this urge to think of combat as the great equalizer of sports. Teams will always have weak links, balls are influenced by the wind; two people fighting is the most honest competition of skill possible. But every fight is an opportunity, and when you roll the dice enough times, Things Happen. Uriah Hall spinkicks Gegard Mousasi. Matt Serra knocks out Georges St-Pierre. Kazuyuki Fujita almost punches Fedor Emelianenko's head into the fourth row. Every match-up you see is an explicit choice, just like having guys fight within a month and a half of a knockout loss is a choice.
I am hoping it does not pay off for them, because it's gross as hell. CHARLES JOHNSON BY TKO.
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Brad Tavares (21-11) vs Eryk Anders (17-9 (1))
A few years ago I watched/re-watched The X-Files. I loved it as a kid, as did so many nerds, but like them I, too, fell off it around the time David Duchovny decided to dip, and that led to the remarkably strange experience of the uncanny, familiar-yet-new excavation of a thing from my ancient past I had not, in fact, seen as much of as I thought. More importantly, though: I had never seen Millennium, and in preparation for the crossover episode that had gone entirely over my head as a child, I had to fix that. It was the occult horror mystery companion piece to the alien conspiracies of the X-Files, and for two seasons it's an uneven but persistently interesting romp where Lance Henriksen looks confused all of the time. The bit that stuck with me most comes from the second season's finale, which sets aside a full 10% of its runtime for a character's lengthy, wordless mental breakdown as depicted through psychedelic visions of apocalypses both personal, global and galactic across all 9:36 of "Land" by Patti Smith. It's brave and weird and there is very little like it in the history of television. And then the third season retools the show to be easier and more marketable and the ratings collapse and it gets cancelled and all you're left with is lost media you have to find on the Internet Archive because it didn't leave enough of an impression for Fox to figure out how to stream it legally.
"Oh, Carl," you say, "I see what you're doing. Referencing unearthed pieces of the otherwise well-trod past is just an oblique commentary on how crazy it is that Eryk Anders and Brad Tavares have dozens of UFC fights stretching back decades and somehow, they've never fought each other. Bringing up the ultimate failure of Millennium is just an analogy for how both men failed to ever really taste relevance in the grand scheme of their division. And focusing on the breakdown scene is just another way to make your usual joke about what Eryk Anders fights do to your brain!"
To which I say: No, man. I'm just talking about things I would rather think about than the twentieth Eryk Anders fight of my life. BRAD TAVARES BY DECISION.
WELTERWEIGHT: Chris Curtis (32-12 (1)) vs Myktybek Orolbai (15-2-1)
I'm not sure there's a single fight booked this year that emphasizes how thin the margins are in MMA sport like this one. Two years ago Chris Curtis was a single point on a scorecard away from taking a split decision over Brendan Allen, the #6-ranked Middleweight in the company; one fight later Curtis was one second away from potentially winning a ranked decision when he got called out on a walk-off TKO that he is still deeply upset about. Two years ago, Myktybek Orolbai was eating his first UFC loss against Mateusz Rębecki, and in response he essentially gave up on the cut to the Lightweight division and moved up to Welterweight, where he took on Jack Hermansson, a man who's derailed numerous Middleweight prospects--including Chris Curtis!--and knocked him cold in one round. In exchange for almost-but-not-quite reaching Middleweight greatness, Chris Curtis is now a struggling Welterweight, and in exchange for destroying Middleweight's great gatekeeper, Myktybek Orolbai is a former Lightweight in search of heavier ground under his feet.
Curtis beat Max Griffin the last time we saw him, but as is so often the case he only barely managed it, and I'm not sure his meditative style is going to play well against Orolbai's ability to push the pace. MYKTYBEK OROLBAI BY DECISION.
LIGHTWEIGHT: Bolaji Oki (10-3) vs Manoel Sousa (13-1)
Let's indulge in a series of fun facts. Bolaji Oki is 2-2 in the UFC, and of the two men he beat, Timmy Cuamba is closing in on being borderline-ranked thanks to a well-booked winning streak and Michael Aswell Jr, whom Oki beat fairly handily last May, is in the co-main event of next week's card in London. Manoel Sousa is the only man to ever knock out Mauricio Ruffy, and Sousa's only career loss came against Archie Colgan, the #3-ranked Lightweight in the Professional Fighters League. Both of these men are legitimate talents who could have had very long reigns on the regional scene and I guess I can't blame them for picking the UFC instead, but it sure is a bummer to see their contemporaries about to main-event shows while they're here in the Apex on the prelims.
Oki's shown a persistent issue with fatiguing as fights go on and I don't think he'll be able to get away with it against Sousa, especially after watching Mason Jones crush him last time out. MANOEL SOUSA BY TKO.
BANTAMWEIGHT: Luan Lacerda (13-3) vs Hecher Sosa (14-1)
I said "every match-up you see is an explicit choice" a few paragraphs back, but sometimes that choice is just the choice to kind of shrug. The UFC had hopes that Rinya Nakamura could be a contender at Bantamweight, and then Muin Gafurov went and ruined that for him and they've been playing catch-up ever since. Luan was here to continue the Rinya rehabilitation tour, because Luan is notable for losing to everyone he fights that the UFC sees anything in, but Rinya couldn't make it. There are ninety-ish other Bantamweights on the roster, but they aren't brand new Contender Series winners, so come on down, Hecher Sosa, the UFC wants you to win. Hecher's is the same goddamn DWCS story I have told you a thousand times, right down to the regional title (in his native Spain!) in a promotion with a name so masculinized it's unintentionally silly (THE WAY OF WARRIOR FIGHTING CHAMPIONSHIPS!) that books people who really shouldn't be there (Hecher's last fight before DWCS was a title defense against Yaman Mjahed, who had 3 professional fights and is now 3-2). He beat Mackson Lee to win his contract, and if you needed to ask if Mackson had the same exact story, it means there is hope in your heart not yet crushed, and you should hold onto it as tightly as you can.
I don't think Luan is as bad as they think he is and I like Hecher's commitment to his wrestling offense, but he really likes to throw himself headfirst into things in ways that make me worry he'll inevitably get caught. LUAN LACERDA BY SUBMISSION.
WOMEN'S BANTAMWEIGHT: Bia Mesquita (6-0) vs Montse Rendon (7-1)
When Bia Mesquita popped into the UFC five months ago I expressed a mixture of hope and concern about her future. The second she entered Women's Bantamweight she became its greatest grappler, as a multiple-time world champion in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, but she also became its second-smallest fighter at 5'4", and eventually, that's the kind of thing that starts to matter. I was also pretty sure Irina Alekseeva wasn't going to be the woman to make her regret it, and unsurprisingly, Bia choked her out in two rounds. The UFC wants her to take care of one of their problem areas next. Montse Rendon represents a confluence of issues for the company: She doesn't appear to be up to the task of rising into contendership, but she's too solid to be trusted to lose, and worst of all, every fight of her professional career, win or lose, has gone to a decision. She's their greatest fear, and she must be eliminated.
Bia has the chops to end that streak and finally submit Rendon, but it's a lot funnier if she doesn't. BIA MESQUITA BY DECISION.
BANTAMWEIGHT: Elijah Smith (9-1) vs SuYoung You (16-3 (2))
Last week we wrote about SuYoung You, and how he beat Xiao Long and got stuck here while Xiao got a fight with former world champion Cody Garbrandt in a preliminary headliner, and if that was funny seven days ago, it is hilarious after Xiao essentially won the fight only to still lose on point deductions thanks to his crippling addiction to hitting men named Cody in the testicles. So now it's You, with his 3-0 run in the UFC, against Elijah Smith, who was last seen re-enacting Quinton Jackson vs Ricardo Arona by powerbombing Toshiomi Kazama into unconsciousness as a quick way to escape a triangle choke. I know we complain about the UFC having completely lost the plot when it comes to actually marketing fighters, and that's obviously true for You here, too, but it's really underlined by the fact that Elijah Smith is everything they want--young, cheap, tons of finishes--and he just scored the kind of knockout so rare and violent that most longterm MMA fans can still only remember one or two of them, ever, and to capitalize on that success he is here, two fights into the prelims of an Apex card with a barely-top-fifteen headliner.
Things could be better, man. SUYOUNG YOU BY DECISION.
WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT: Piera Rodriguez (11-2) vs Sam Hughes (11-6)
There was a point at which I wasn't sure if we'd see Piera Rodriguez in the UFC ever again, and on one hand she's on a two-fight winning streak, so that's proving me wrong, and on the other hand she's on a two-fight winning streak and still curtain-jerking the Apex in a rematch with a woman she just beat four fights ago, so she may not, in fact, have survived that bus crash. Piera had the makings of an actual prospect after that 2022 win over Sam Hughes, and then she got her arm yanked off by Gillian Robertson and followed it up with the exceptionally rare, thoroughly-deserved disqualification loss after intentionally headbutting Ariane Carnelossi, being warned by the referee to not do it again, and immediately doing it again. She's back to winning, thanks to the misfortunes of Josefine Knutsson and Ketlen Souza, but the fact that she's here means the company still clearly doesn't quite know what to do with her. That's preferable to being stuck in the Sam Hughes position, which is more or less permanent enhancement talent. Sam was 3-4 in the company when they booked her against the undefeated Victoria Dudakova, and when Sam upset the odds and came away with a decision they kept her stuck in the prelims against Stephanie Luciano, a woman they only initially signed in the hopes that she would lose to Shauna Bannon, and after Sam beat her, too, they just booked Sam against Shauna Bannon. They are perpetually hoping she will lose, and giving her a rematch with a woman who already defeated her would indicate this has not changed.
So you know what I'm gonna say. SAM HUGHES BY DECISION.