CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 183: CIRCLES
UFC 328: Chimaev vs Strickland
SATURDAY, MAY 9 FROM THE PRUDENTIAL CENTER IN NEWARK, NEW JERSEY
EARLY PRELIMS 2 PM PDT / 5 PM EDT | PRELIMS 4 PM / 7 PM | MAIN CARD 6 PM / 9 PM
This feels like it should be a killer of a show. Khamzat Chimaev is one of the biggest fighters in the sport, the UFC has been endlessly marketing Sean Strickland for what feels like my entire adult life, Flyweight is perpetually amazing, there’s two belts and a Heavyweight title eliminator and a Yaroslav Amosov fight. Everything here should be great.
But the event isn’t sold out. Khamzat is very likely to vanish for another year. Sean’s schtick has never felt more tired. Middleweight is ignoring its top contender, Flyweight turned on an injury, and the Heavyweight title barely exists.
And Yaroslav Amosov is on the prelims, but Jeremy fucking Stephens is on a main card broadcast in 2026.
MAIN EVENT: THE WORST OF BOTH WORLDS
MIDDLEWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP: Khamzat Chimaev (15-0, Champion) vs Sean Strickland (30-7, #3)
It feels like we briefly made contact with another dimension wherein the Middleweight division was good, and we slaughtered everyone in it to cover up the shame of our reality.
We’re not even a year removed from the most promising moment in the weight class since Izzy’s heyday came to an end. Dricus du Plessis was an active, regularly defending champion. Khamzat Chimaev was ascendant as the scariest Middleweight contender the sport had seen in years. Sean Strickland had been boxed out of title contention, but was still vital at the top of the pecking order. Nassourdine Imavov, Anthony Hernandez, Caio Borralho and Reinier de Ridder were all knocking on the door to the top five. Israel Adesanya, Robert Whittaker and Jared Cannonier were all functional filters of aging veterancy. Things were messy and silly and gross and disappointing, as the Middleweight division so often is, but by god, there was a genuine sense of promise.
It is mid-2026. Khamzat Chimaev won the title nine months ago and went right back to fighting once a year. Dricus du Plessis went from the first defending champion since 2022 to completely unbooked and rumored to be fighting Kamaru Usman. Anthony Hernandez’s rise up the ranks was brutally halted by Sean Strickland, Reinier de Ridder fell apart against Brendan Allen, and Caio Borralho fell off in the great Fighting Nerds failure of 2025. Izzy’s body turned to dust in realtime. Rob got his teeth broken on live television. Jared was inexplicably thrown at a Welterweight.
But Nassourdine Imavov’s still good, though! He beat Jared, he beat Allen, he beat Caio, and he became the only person other than Alex Pereira to ever knock Izzy out on his feet. Five-fight winning streak, destroyed a living legend, hasn’t had or lost a shot at the top yet, conveniently French and thus a treasured commodity for the UFC’s marketing department, #2 in the division behind only former champ Dricus, big adherent of the company’s house style of cheating a bunch and getting away with it. Sure, the rest of the division’s hopes and dreams may have burnt to the ground, but at least the sport did its job and gave us an undeniable, indisputable top contender to the Middleweight crown.
He is, of course, not in this fight.
The last time we had to deal with a Sean Strickland fight I made a shitty Animorphs photoshop of his slow turn into the new Colby Covington by virtue of his ever-sadder attempts to be offensive and attention-grabbing to stay relevant in an era of the sport where the UFC has a camera angle devoted to Kash Patel’s Knockout Reactions Corner, but little did I know that it would, instead, portend the return of the era where the UFC picks a guy they just cannot fucking stop giving title shots. Back in his competitive prime, Colby infamously got three shots at the belt in six fights, and they were earned by beating Robbie Lawler, Tyron Woodley and Jorge Masvidal respectively.
Seanby Stricklington is about to get his third shot in seven fights, thanks to his having, y’know, actually won and defended it once. Definitively, he’s the better model. How do his shot-earning fights stack up, compared to Colby beating on former champions?
Well, he got the initial shot at Izzy by beating Abus Magomedov back in mid-2023, and Abus was a grand total of 1-0 with exactly 19 seconds of fight time in the company. So that’s not a great look. After losing the belt to Dricus, in a division awash with contenders, Sean--by his own admission!--turned down bouts with Rob and instead got his rematch by beating no less than Paulo Costa himself, who had one victory in the past five years and it was over Luke Rockhold, who, himself, had only one victory in the last seven.
That’s pretty bad! Funnily enough, Sean got here with his only victory in years that was worth a damn. Anthony Hernandez was on a great run as the baddest motherfucker in the division, a cardio king with killer combinations and aggressive chokeholds and an eight-fight winning streak, and, because God is dead, Sean Strickland fucking destroyed him. Completely outclassed him and knocked him out midway through the third. The kind of fight you could have run back ten times with exactly the same result.
Great performance. Great victory!
Imavov still should’ve gotten the shot.
Strickland and the UFC have defended his getting yet another title fight by, obviously, noting his victory over Imavov back in 2023. It’s true! It was also a short-notice fight three and a half years ago. Strickland at that time was one for his last three, coming off a loss to Jared Cannonier, and only barely more separated in time from getting knocked the fuck out by Elizeu Zaleski as a Welterweight. They already spent two years trying to keep Sean on top. He lost his belt to Dricus, he got fast-tracked right back to Dricus, and he got beat way worse the second time around. Anyone who isn’t a Strickland, a Colby or a Ciryl Gane would have to bust their ass all the way across the division to get another stab at it. Strickland beat Imavov? Khamzat beat Dricus, get back in fucking line.
And it’s particularly galling because, honestly, presuming Chimaev wins--spoilers for my pick here, I suppose--who the fuck knows when we’ll get another Middleweight Championship match?
When we assembled for Chimaev’s shot at Dricus back in August I painted a picture of Khamzat as simultaneously inevitable and unavailable. By 2025 the UFC had already been trying to matchmake Chimaev into championship opportunities for years, and it was his own schedule that tended to fuck it up. He couldn’t make it to a title eliminator with Leon Edwards because of COVID, he couldn’t get his shot at Izzy because he wanted to be a Welterweight, he couldn’t fight for Welterweight contendership because he could no longer make Welterweight, he couldn’t take on Dricus at UFC 300 because of Ramadan.
I have seen many grapplers in my time with combat sports. Khamzat is one of the scariest. Any idiot who watched him casually converse with people at ringside while deadlifting Li Jingliang or throw Kevin Holland around by his neck could have told you about Khamzat’s title potential. The only question marks dogging him were historical issues with his gas tank and his own inability to show up more often than once per calendar year.
The Khamzat that showed up against Dricus very visibly had zero fucking problems with his gas tank. I, like most, worried that either Khamzat needed a finish in the first round and a half or Dricus would drown him in the championship rounds, and instead, Khamzat just rolled him for twenty-five minutes. How thorough a domination was it?
Many were dismayed and disappointed by Khamzat’s performance, because we have so destroyed all forms of meaning in the mixing of the martial arts that taking a guy who’d burned through damn near the entire Middleweight division including four separate world champions and dominating him so badly you outland him by more than a 10:1 ratio is disappointing because it was all wrestling and he didn’t finish him. Fighting a living chaos elemental like Dricus du Plessis and controlling him for five full rounds was the biggest possible testament to Khamzat having addressed his cardio issues.
Sure is a shame about the ‘never showing up’ part, though.
This is a problem with the UFC as a whole at the moment. Tom Aspinall is out of action and can’t defend his belt thanks to Ciryl Gane’s lust for eye jelly. Carlos Ulberg just won the Light Heavyweight title last month and he’s going to be out for at least the rest of the year with a torn ACL. Islam became the Welterweight Champion in November and he isn’t scheduled yet; Ilia nabbed the Lightweight belt in June and his first defense will be this June, just barely shy of twelve months later. Petr Yan and Joshua Van both won their championships on December 6, and Van is only now defending his half a year later, and Yan got fucking back surgery at the end of January. The only male champion with a defense to his name is Alexander Volkanovski. If you expand this to the women you increase the count to two defending champions, thanks to Valentina Shevchenko, but you add two more to the MIA column, with Kayla Harrison about to hit a year post-title win thanks to her own neck surgery and Mackenzie Dern sitting on her Strawweight title since October.
Khamzat is not the only inactive champion. But he is a historically inactive fighter.
Which puts me in the terrible position of almost wanting Sean Strickland to win.
In a perfect world, I would enjoy both of them somehow losing, because buddy, it’s not like Khamzat’s social persona is any better than Sean’s, as the unbelievably tiring ‘I’m gonna beat you up’ ‘no I’m gonna beat YOU up’ ‘well me AND my friends are gonna beat you up’ ‘well I’m gonna SHOOT YOU with my GUNS’ press tour for this godforsaken fight has demonstrated. Let there be no doubt that both of these men are terminally lame. But by god, Sean Strickland will, at least, show up to work more than once a year.
Unless you want him to fight Robert Whittaker, in which case combat sports are suddenly beneath him.
This fight feels very much like a binary check on wrestling. Khamzat can punch, but his approach to striking has never been particularly technical. He isn’t a jabber, he doesn’t really care about combinations, he just likes to throw really, really hard. That’s the kind of thing Strickland feeds on. His complete disassembly of Anthony Hernandez served as a potent reminder just how good he is at his brand of defensive striking, and how easily he can take someone apart if they don’t have anything better for him than winging punches and bad entries. If this fight stays standing, Sean has the poise and the gas to cruise to a decision.
But as much as he and his training partners tout his secret reputation as Middleweight’s dark horse grappling king, we already saw Strickland get wrestled, repeatedly, by Dricus. The only reason Dricus didn’t ragdoll him just as much in their rematch was his having figured out Sean’s striking rhythm well enough that he no longer had to. We already have firsthand experience with Sean’s trouble with aggressive, powerful wrestling.
And we already have firsthand experience with just how much better Khamzat is at that game than Dricus was.
KHAMZAT CHIMAEV BY SUBMISSION. And then we can all gather here next January for Chimaev/Strickland 2 after Sean wins another title shot by valiantly vanquishing Gregory Rodrigues.
CO-MAIN EVENT: THE MAIN EVENT
FLYWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP: Joshua Van (16-2, Champion) vs Tatsuro Taira (18-1, #3)
The story of the Flyweight division is the story of squeezing some of the best stuff in the history of the sport out of perpetually weird situations.
Like, down to the roots. The very first Flyweight fight in UFC history was Demetrious Johnson vs Ian McCall back in 2012, it was supposed to kick off a tournament to crown the first champion, and Johnson’s announced victory was actually a tabulation error by the judges. Had they scored it correctly the fight would’ve been a draw, and as a tournament bout--to this day, the last tournament held in the UFC proper--that meant it would have gone to an exceedingly rare extra round.
Johnson eventually won the tournament and the title. He would go on to become, numerically, the greatest UFC champion of all time. He presided over an eleven-fight reign as a champion who was funny, charismatic, amazing at everything, occasionally did shit no one had ever seen in a fight before, and always, always won. The weird part of this isn’t DJ, it’s the way this infuriated the UFC. Dana White spent most of his time as champion gnashing his teeth about his mere presence, to the point that towards the end of his run he was being pushed so hard to fight a champ-champ match with Bantamweight kingpin T.J. Dillashaw that he was repeatedly threatened with the entire division being shut down just to spite him.
And when he lost the title? The UFC traded him to ONE Championship in exchange for Ben Askren. Then the man who beat him, Henry Cejudo, threw the Flyweight title away. Then Deiveson Figueiredo tried to win it but was ineligible because he missed weight. Then he did win it, but went to a draw with Brandon Moreno after losing a point for hitting him in the dick, which turned into a two-year, four-fight odyssey that saw both men hot potatoing the title back and forth three separate times. And when Moreno finally came out of their series the victor, he immediately fell to Alexandre Pantoja, a man who’d already beaten him twice before, and Pantoja became the first man since Demetrious Johnson to defend the belt multiple times. By the end of 2025 he was the second-best Flyweight in UFC history, a fighter with a great chin, fantastic grappling and sheer, indomitable grit such that no one was sure who could take the belt away from him, or, for that matter, how.
And then, twenty-six seconds into fighting Joshua Van, Pantoja slipped and fell and broke his arm.
So, hey: Congratulations, Joshua Van! Second-youngest champion ever, right after Jon Jones! Went from barely-ranked at #14 to top contender and champion in the space of two fights!
Which was three fights after he got knocked out by Charles Johnson, the #13-ranked man in the division.
Van is presiding over a profoundly weird time for Flyweight. The matchmaking is all over the place, with prospects and veterans being jumped back and forth with little rhyme or reason. Longtime divisional stalwarts like Brandon Moreno and Tim Elliott are falling down the ladder while rookies like Lone’er Kavanagh are springboarding off of their bodies. The UFC has been repeatedly raiding Japan for Flyweight talent with mixed results. Rizin Bantamweight champ Kai Asakura tried, failed, and is now off to 135 pounds again. Rizin Flyweight champ Kyoji Horiguchi returned, succeeded, and has a title eliminator with Manel Kape booked in June.
And Tatsuro Taira is here, getting a shot at becoming the first Japanese champion in UFC history.
Everyone expected this to happen a year and a half ago. By mid-2024 Taira was already 6-0 in the UFC and he’d displayed all the tools necessary to be a contender. Any doubts about his ability to strike had been resolved with his laser-beam knockout over Carlos Hernandez; any doubts about his ability to hang with the top ten were settled when he managed to destroy Alex Perez’s knee with a takedown. Taira walked into his second main event against Brandon Royval as an undefeated favorite.
He walked out demoted. It was a hell of a fight, one of the better bouts in 2024, but he still lost. And this is where the matchmaking parallelogram of Flyweight starts to bring that weirdness back into things.
See, Joshua Van was a UFC project. They brought him in as a short-notice signing, but they took an immediate shine to his style, his attitude, and his lack of any form of leverage thanks to his being all of 21 and more than willing to take whatever they give himyouthful vigor. But Van lost to Charles Johnson. Johnson, despite being at the periphery of the rankings, now has knockout victories over both the champion and Lone’er Kavanagh, now ranked #6 after beating Brandon Moreno, who Taira previously beat to get this very shot because Moreno was, himself, pushed out of contention after losing to Brandon Royval. Royval was up at the top of the division after beating Taira, but he lost his title eliminator to Van and got flattened in one round by Manel Kape. Kape, now #2, was beaten by both Horiguchi, Asakura and Pantoja, but his UFC momentum had been halted by undefeated wunderkind Muhammad Mokaev, who was promptly fired for the sin of wrestling.
So the #1 contender is out indefinitely, the #2 contender has a loss to the only top contender the UFC fired, the #3 and active title contender is barely removed from losing to the guy the #2 contender who isn’t getting the shot just knocked out, the #4 is 2 for his last 5 and has lost fights to everyone who’s held the belt in the last four years, the #5 guy has been back in the UFC for less than a year and is already one bout away from the belt, and the #6 guy is on the precipice of title contention despite just getting knocked out by the #13 guy.
The same guy who also knocked out the champion.
Who won his belt because of a cartoon pratfall.
It’s all silly and capricious and it’s all, secretly, amazing. Every one of those guys is a great fucking fighter with an identifiable style and personality. Pantoja is an unstoppable hunter who is very publicly courageous about his missing father issues. Kape is a sometimes-too-flashy-for-his-own-good knockout hunter who fucking loves slurs and being weird about genetics. Royval is a haymaker-winging madman who loves brawling just a bit more than his career allows him to. Horiguchi is a humble athletic wonder who darts in and out swinging punches and takedowns too fast for anyone to stop him.
Joshua Van is a stoic striker so solid in both offense and defense that providence cannot help but shine upon his efforts. Tatsuro Taira is an ultra-technical grappler whose calm approach belies the absolutely terrifying ways he can hurt people.
It’s Flyweight. It’s the best shit in the sport. Has been since day one, will be until they shut it down because people refuse to stop taking each other down and it’s harshing the TKO c-suite’s ketamine buzz. Until then: I have had faith in Taira this whole time and I absolutely refuse to stop now. TATSURO TAIRA BY SUBMISSION. Break the fucking curse.
MAIN CARD: HE CAN’T KEEP GETTING AWAY WITH IT
HEAVYWEIGHT: Alexander Volkov (39-11, #2) vs Waldo Cortes-Acosta (17-2, #4)
Sometimes you have to accept that they just don’t fucking like you. Alexander Volkov is one of the longest-tenured Heavyweight contenders left in the sport--we’re closing in on his fourteenth consecutive year of being relevant to the top fifteen, let alone the top five--and is only now putting in some of the best work of his career. He outboxed and knocked out top striker Jairzinho Rozenstruik, he outgrappled PFL finalist and wrestling monster Alexandr Romanov and pounded him out in two minutes, he took down pre-crisis Tai Tuivasa and outworked wrecking ball Sergei Pavlovich, and as the capstone to a beautiful run, he won a title eliminator against Ciryl Gane. Except for the part where he lost. 90% of fan scores and 95% of the media cards went Volkov’s way, but, in a familiar refrain, one of the consensus worst decisions of the year went to Gane. It was so bad that Dana White pulled out his signature “we’ll make it up to him” catchphrase in the post-fight press, and, predictably, their idea of making it up to Volkov was having him fight the lower-ranked Jailton Almeida on the same card where Gane was getting his title shot, and after beating Almeida, the UFC gave Volkov this.
Hi, Waldo. They really like you. You are their beautiful Contender Series child and they must make you a success. Three years ago, Waldo’s undefeated record and debut winning streak were both snapped by the unranked Marcos Rogério de Lima, and two fights later de Lima was cut from the organization--off of a win over Junior Tafa, who is also still here--and Waldo was fighting former champion Andrei Arlovski. A hair under one year ago, the UFC gave Waldo a shot at the top three and Sergei Pavlovich outfought him easily. Three fights later, Waldo is competing in a title eliminator and Sergei is booked for Macau later this month where he will fight the #13-ranked Tallison Teixeira. As it turns out, when you almost never shoot takedowns, try to punch everyone and take every fight the UFC gives you, you, too, can be a top contender. And Waldo’s been busy! Winning three fights in three months is a particularly crazy schedule. But he did it to Ante Delija, in a bizarre fight that was almost a knockout loss and an eyepoke-based no contest before Waldo turned it into a knockout win, and Shamil Gaziev, who has been looking steadily worse and worse for the last year, and Derrick Lewis, who appeared to be actively melting into the floor out of exhaustion after one and a half rounds.
Regardless of what happens here the future is Josh Hokit vs Salsa Boy for the Heavyweight Championship. Please prepare yourselves accordingly. ALEXANDER VOLKOV BY DECISION.
WELTERWEIGHT: Sean Brady (18-2, #6) vs Joaquin Buckley (21-7, #9)
There are few Welterweights I feel worse for than Sean Brady. After Leon Edwards and Belal Muhammad got their long-belated cracks at the top of the mountain, Sean became the last man standing for the ranks of the underappreciated 170-pound contenders. 8-1 in the UFC with Belal as your soul loss is a hell of a record. Going to London, dominating Leon in front of a home crowd and becoming the first man to ever finish him is a hell of an accomplishment! Being #2 in arguably the most talent-rich division in the sport right as it gets its most visible champion in years? Hell of a position. But, as I have referenced a couple times, Brady learned a valuable lesson about the true nature of the sport once he fashioned his seat at the table.
“I even said that to (UFC matchmaker) Hunter, I was, like, talking about the rankings, and he said, ‘The rankings really don’t matter.’ He was like, ‘At the end of the day, the UFC is gonna put whoever they want in there for the belt.’”
Unfortunately, the Welterweight division now has people in it who are really, really good at knocking people out, and you are a wrestler and a grappler, and they already have enough of those. Sean got stuck fighting all the way down the rankings against Michael Morales, and Morales crushed him in one round, and just like that, Brady is fighting to stay in the top ten at all.
Joaquin Buckley is behind the eight-ball in a slightly more organic and slightly more deserved way. He struggled mightily to make an impact at Middleweight, but dropping down to the Welterweight division reinvigorated his career and turned him into a genuine contender! But when you look at the people they put in front of him, a pattern emerges. Alex Morono. Vicente Luque. Stephen Thompson. Colby fucking Covington. The UFC gave Buckley a steady diet of old, fading veterans to propel him up the ladder, to the point that he was initially slated to face Ian Machado Garry before the company went ‘wait, jesus, what are we thinking’ and split them so Garry could face a relevant contender and Buckley could pull Colby out of the giant freezer full of microwavable leftovers Panera Bread keeps their food in, and it was working perfectly well right up until it turned out Kamaru Usman is still actually better at fighting than most of the division. Buckley lived by the old man sword and died by the old man sword, and now his space in the pecking order is gone and he has to fight someone more his speed.
The cynical nature of matchmaking aside, though: I’m into it. Buckley is a big power guy, more muscle and strength and giant takedowns than any particular focus on out-techniquing his opponents; Brady is a technique guy who wants his fights on the floor so he can methodically break people down and, eventually, strangle them. It’s an interesting clash of styles. I’m siding with SEAN BRADY BY DECISION but Buckley’s likely to have more chances to actually end the fight.
LIGHTWEIGHT: King Green (34-17-1 (1)) vs Jeremy Stephens (29-22 (1))
We’re breaking the format here because what the fuck are we doing with our limited time on this bitch of an Earth.
When the UFC brought Jeremy Stephens back last May I, like most of the mixed martial arts world, was perplexed. Jeremy Stephens was a 50/50 journeyman enjoying an unexpected late-career contendership resurgence almost an entire damn decade ago in 2018, and after a lengthy winless streak he got cut for it. Over the course of those eight subsequent years, across multiple organizations, Stephens is one for his last ten, and that one win was a PFL bout against Myles “Thundercat” Price, an Irish fighter who is 11-10 and had just been choked out by the equally aged Anthony Pettis and was about to be finished just as badly by 2017 UFC washout Marcin Held. Stephens beat him by split decision. At the time of his re-signing he hadn’t even had an MMA fight in almost three years, having spent his time instead fighting for the Bareknuckle Fighting Championship. You could not get less relevant if you tried.
But, hey: The card was in Des Moines, where Stephens was born, and they had an opening, and the recently re-signed Mason Jones needed a name for his return, and a handful of people still remember Jeremy Stephens from his UFC highlights, which include getting verbally eviscerated by Conor McGregor at a press conference, cheating to beat Josh Emmett and somehow getting away with it, and knocking out Rafael dos Anjos in 2008 which is dangerously close to being twenty fucking years ago. It’s not less stupid, but stupid things happen, so sure. Fine. Fine! I get it.
King Green is on a two-fight winning streak. King Green is borderline-ranked. King Green just became the first person to ever knock out UFC marketing darling Daniel Zellhuber back at the end of February. In exchange for this, he gets to fight a man whose last UFC win happened four days before MythBusters got cancelled. This fight is not in Des Moines, it’s in New Jersey. The UFC is no longer quietly kneecapping their competition, they already let Jeremy go fight in BKFC again after his return. King Green isn’t Mason Jones, he isn’t an unknown who needs a push, he’s as old as Jeremy.
Tatiana Suarez was stuck on the prelims. Gabriella Fernandes was stuck on the prelims. Bia Mesquita was stuck on the prelims. Douglas Silva de Andrade was stuck on the prelims. Carlos Leal was stuck on the prelims. Alex Perez and Charles Johnson were stuck on the prelims. Two fights down from here you will find Joel Álvarez and Yaroslav Amosov stuck on the prelims. Mason Jones, the man they fed Jeremy Stephens to in the first place, spent his last fight stuck on the fucking prelims.
King Green vs Jeremy Stephens is a main card fight on a numbered, two-title show.
KING GREEN BY DECISION.
PRELIMS: REPAVING THE ROAD
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Ateba Gautier (10-1) vs Ozzy Diaz (10-3)
Generally, when we use the phrase ‘rehabilitation fight’ around these parts, we’re talking about the time-honored tradition of taking a marketing prospect who finally lost a fight and fixing them up by giving them a nice, easy win so they get back on track. This is no longer sufficient for the UFC, so we’re innovating a hot new matchmaking technique this week: The “you didn’t win the right way” rehabilitation fight. Ateba Gautier has been one of the company’s biggest up-and-coming knockout punchers for a year, now, and he has been dutifully destroying every victim sent his way, but this past January the matchmakers made the terrible mistake of deciding four fights was enough time to give him his first opponent to have ever actually won a fight in the UFC. Ateba still won, but he was a -1000 favorite against Andrey Pulyaev and not only did Ateba have to take him to a decision, he looked confused, exhausted, and thoroughly mortal by the end of the night. Such a victory is unbecoming of the man corporate has ordained as the next big knockout king, so congratulations, Ozzy Diaz, as a man whose three losses all came from big power-punching guys bumrushing you up close and crushing you in the first round, you are here to make Ateba look good. They are, in fact, so set on this fight that this is the second time they tried to book it! Ateba was supposed to crush Ozzy last October and Ozzy was injured and couldn’t make it, and in the time since Ateba has won two fights and Ozzy is only now coming off the shelf, and they want this knockout so fucking bad that they just rebooked it anyway.
I am picking against you because I know the law of averages, but Ozzy, if you wanted to sling the best punch of your life and just completely ruin matchmaking’s day, I would appreciate you for it forever. Until then, ATEBA GAUTIER BY TKO.
WELTERWEIGHT: Yaroslav Amosov (29-1, #14) vs Joel Álvarez (23-3, NR)
First, a note, for both transparency and a pet peeve: Yaroslav Amosov is only kind-of sort-of ranked #14. As of this writing, this is how the UFC’s official Welterweight rankings end:
That’s not how rankings work. That’s barely even how numbers work. For christ’s sake, fix your shit before you give me an aneurysm.
Everyone had some level of concern about Amosov’s UFC debut last December. To some extent this was because of his status as one of the last beloved B-league champions standing, what with his background as the embattled Bellator champion who took a hiatus to go defend his homeland of Ukraine against Russia; to another, it was a reflection of the latent awareness that Amosov is heading into his mid-thirties and Patrício Pitbull has taught people to leave beloved memories in the past rather than allow themselves to feel the crushing pain of hope. But when Yaroslav met the inevitable measuring stick that is Neil Magny, he easily outwrestled him, controlled him, and choked him out in a single round, proving that sometimes faith does, in fact, endure. And now he’s in the top fifteen at the hottest division in the company and there isn’t a lick of dead space to be found and as an import from another company who favors wrestling they’re not gonna make a damn thing easy on him. Joel Álvarez is a dude the company has wanted on their ladder for seven goddamn years. He was the UFC’s figuratively and literally big Spanish star, a 6’3” Lightweight with flying knees and armbars and reach enough to take out everyone in the division, except, as a 6’3” Lightweight, making weight damn near killed him and it turns out being huge doesn’t keep Arman Tsarukyan from wrestling you to death. Joel had a spot in the top fifteen last year, and the UFC teed him up for a big fight with Benoît Saint Denis, and then Joel thought about cutting to 155 to fight another guy who stood a really good chance of wrestling him and decided to go to Welterweight again, where, fortunately for him, there are no wrestlers to worry about.
YAROSLAV AMOSOV BY DECISION.
LIGHTWEIGHT: Grant Dawson (23-3-1) vs Mateusz Rębecki (20-4)
Grant Dawson, you will never know justice. Dawson notched nine undefeated fights in the UFC across 145 and 155 pounds but only barely scraped a ranking. People like to say it was because he had weight management problems, but we know from experience they don’t really care about that unless they choose to, and one look at a Grant Dawson performance, all double-legs and the grinding, long-term pursuit of a rear naked choke, is enough to remind you that wrestling is the true enemy of the matchmakers. When King Green notched a big upset by blowing up Dawson with a single punch it was all they needed to derail him for good. It took three fights for Dawson to get back in the ranks and upon arriving he was immediately destroyed by Manuel Torres, thus proving his weakness to punch-type Pokemon. There’s a not-so-subtle hope that vulnerability will rear its ugly head again here, as Mateusz Rębecki is a best bout machine with short, stocky boxing and giant, swinging haymakers and he’s also one for his last four because it turns out we’re still a couple more years of roster dilution away from ‘hits really hard’ to be enough of a skillset to make it through the rankings. But Mateusz can also wrestle, and he’s got a chin, and the plan is that those two traits will be enough to keep Dawson from implementing his gameplan.
I am choosing to have faith in the double. GRANT DAWSON BY DECISION.
LIGHTWEIGHT: Jim Miller (38-19 (1)) vs Jared Gordon (21-8 (1))
Here, we have our elder council of combat. Jim Miller is the veteran of veterans, a man that made his professional debut when Rich Franklin was still the best Middleweight on the planet and the Lightweight division didn’t even exist in the UFC, and he is no longer any particular threat to the rankings or the pecking order but he’s fan-beloved and increasingly likely to abruptly destroy his peers who are aging less gracefully. It would be tempting to say that Jared Gordon is in a similar position--he’s only a bit younger, he only started fighting a couple years later, he is equally adrift in the world of mixed martial arts--but, as anyone with eyes knows, Gordon beat Paddy Pimblett at the end of 2022 and got screwed out of a decision for reasons that are definitely rooted in judging incompetence and in no way whatsoever indicative of corporate corruption, which means Jared Gordon is at least as good at fighting as the man who just competed for an interim world title. Which makes it very embarrassing for the UFC that Gordon got pounded flat by Rafa García the last time we saw him and I’m sure there will be some real soul-searching in the depths of TKO over their awareness of talent.
I will always appreciate Jim Miller The Fighter, and the recent news that his absence over the last year was spent helping his son fight and beat rhabdomyosarcoma was wonderful and indicative that he has his priorities correctly aligned, and I also think he’s probably going to get punched a lot and lose. JARED GORDON BY DECISION.
EARLY PRELIMS: SUDDENLY, SABATINI
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Roman Kopylov (14-5) vs Marco Tulio (14-2)
They wanna trade you in, Roman. They’ve soured on you. You were their fancy new kickboxing toy seven years ago, and now you’re one loss away from a 50/50 record in the UFC, and they are tired of it. When it was Albert Duraev, sure, whatever, Duraev did that to a lot of people and he’d still be doing it today if he hadn’t vanished into dust and dreams. When it was Anthony Hernandez three years later, well, hell, that’s fine, too, Fluffy’s great and in a better universe he’d be fighting for the title tonight. But you’re the reason we’re stuck with Paulo Costa. You are the man who made him relevant again. You were Paulo’s first ranked victory in six fucking years, and now it’s a year later and you’re on two straight losses and Paulo is one steroid bust or charity basketball game away from the Light Heavyweight title and the UFC wants to feed you to Marco Tulio and forget you ever existed.
This is the last chance, Roman. You will either kick this man or you will be condemned to the trash can. I urge you to remember that you are actually really good at this. ROMAN KOPYLOV BY DECISION.
FEATHERWEIGHT: Pat Sabatini (21-5) vs William Gomis (15-3)
On one hand: I deeply appreciate the talents both of these men possess, even if I do so begrudgingly in the case of Pat Sabatini, the singular wrestler who has never once done anything for me. They’re extremely solid and Gomis in particular has fantastic defense and they both have amassed far better records here than the UFC would lead you to believe. Either of these men could be ranked. Either of them could beat a David Onama or Brian Ortega tomorrow. Pat, Billy, you are the exact kind of unheralded, underappreciated talents that form the foundation of this sport, and in that, I love you. But you also both beat my beautiful baby boy Joanderson Brito and for committing this unforgivable sin you must be destroyed.
The canvas will turn to lava. The lighting struts will rain from the sky. Conor McGregor will begin throwing loading dollies into the ring until everyone inside of it is dead. The judges will evaluate the carnage and decide on WILLIAM GOMIS BY DECISION before sealing away all memory that he ever existed.
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Baisangur Susurkaev (11-0) vs Djorden Santos (11-2)
Management went all-in on Baisangur Susurkaev last Summer. He, as you may very dimly recall, is the man who knocked out Murtaza Talha on the Contender Series, made his UFC debut four days later, and choked out Eric Nolan. Great story! The UFC made him a damn preliminary headliner on the Chimaev/du Plessis pay-per-view over it! Except, if you read the fine print, Talha was a Contender Series loser who got his second shot at the show by beating the 0-8 Oleg Klimov, and Nolan was hired specifically to fight Susurkaev despite being a career Welterweight, so when they tried to step Susurkaev up to the real competition of Eric McConico, a man coming off a knockout loss and an absolute coinflip of a split decision against Cody Brundage, who is 5-8-1 (1) in the UFC, they were anticipating another big highlight stoppage. And, to his credit, Baisangur did knock McConico out! But he lost the first round, and he punched McConico in the dick in the third before finally stopping him a minute later, and he looked pretty tired and decidedly mortal in the process. So what do you do with your prospect now?
Remember the conversation we were having back in Gautier/Diaz about giving successful fighters match-ups designed less to challenge them and more to hopefully make them succeed they way they were initially supposed to? You find the one guy Ozzy actually beat and you hope your new guy can beat him even worse. BAISANGUR SUSURKAEV BY TKO.
FLYWEIGHT: Clayton Carpenter (8-2) vs Jose Ochoa (8-2 (1))
There is something to be said for the joy of Flyweights fighting out of desperation. There may not be a single division in the sport with as little wasted space as 125, damn near everyone is exceptional in some way, and it’s a sign of just how painful that can be that Clayton and Jose are fighting to avoid having three losses in the UFC, but the four men they lost to are Tagir Ulanbekov, who is perpetually in the top ten, Jafel Filho, one of the scariest grapplers in the company, Asu Almabayev, who is 6-1, and Lone’er Kavanagh, who is #6 and a win away from top contendership. Everyone on that list fucking rules. Damn near everyone at Flyweight rules.
But not everyone can rule the mountain. CLAYTON CARPENTER BY DECISION.