SATURDAY, AUGUST 22 FROM THE GOLDEN 1 CENTER IN SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA
PRELIMS 2 PM PDT / 5 PM EDT | MAIN CARD 5 PM / 8 PM
It’s Sunday and this card still isn’t finalized. I am, once again, relying on the wisdom of Marcel Dorff to guide how this card is set up, because the company can’t be bothered to clarify what’s a prelim, what’s a main and who actually gets the co-main slot. But I hope this is correct, half because I don’t want to have to redo it, and half because co-main event Vitor Petrino would be fucking hilarious.
MAIN EVENT: MUSICAL CHAIRS
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Anthony Hernandez (15-3 (1), #6) vs Gregory Rodrigues (19-6, #11)
This is a real darkest-timeline kind of main event.
We came so close to the Anthony Hernandez dimension. An eight-fight winning streak in a division as tumultuous and stupid as Middleweight is a hell of an achievement, especially one that included knocking out kickboxers, choking out jiu-jitsu world champions and finishing the previously unfinishable. His getting a title eliminator made sense. His being a favorite against former and future champion Sean Strickland made sense. Everyone saw it.
I wholly include myself in this instance of Everyone. I was on the goddamn train, man. I knew he was sloppy, I knew his defense was a bit on the porous side, but he was so tough, so aggressive and so well-conditioned that everyone who’d tried to take advantage of it had found themselves broken down and exhausted within minutes. His ability to walk his opponents down and punch the fight out of them was best-in-class. Did I think he’d have an easy time against Strickland? Absolutely not. Did I think he’d win? Sure! I watched Hernandez walk through heavier strikers, I fully believed he was capable of dragging Strickland through Hell and maybe tapping him out at the end of the bout.
One of the greatest sources of agony and ecstasy in mixed martial arts is the thin, thin margin that separates success and failure. There are just whispers of space between an awful lot of wins and losses. Uriah Hall can knock out Gegard Mousasi with the most Ong Bak shit you’ve seen in your life on Monday and Mousasi can dust him in one round by Friday. Matt Serra dropped Georges St-Pierre and got his ribs turned to powder in the rematch. We just saw Islam Makhachev, arguably the best mixed martial artist on the planet, win a fight with Ian Machado Garry that, in the eyes of one judge, turned entirely on the basis of one takedown. Part of the excitement of the sport, and part of why promoters roll the dice on prospects so often, is just how unpredictable fights can be.
Hernandez/Strickland was not one of those fights.
Sean Strickland is not traditionally a demolisher. He’s a point fighter. He jabs, he teeps, he throws one-twos and he keeps himself defensively sound. It’s where his success comes from. Which is why it was so disarming when he demolished Hernandez. Outlanded him 2:1, laughed off his attempts at grappling, busted his ribs with knees and finished him in two and a half rounds. It was the kind of fight you could have rerun one hundred times without getting a different result.
It was dark. It was depressing. It damned us to the timeline where Sean Strickland is a world champion again and Anthony Hernandez is fighting Robocop in a desperate attempt to stay in the top ten.
Which is really fucking funny. And I love Gregory Rodrigues! We’ve spent many paragraphs here together discussing my deep-seated appreciation for him and his many foibles. His deep well of judo skill he typically ignores in favor of bludgeoning people. His forward-pressure style that continues even when there’s a hole in his face big enough for an artery to slip out. His inexplicable use of “Robocop” as a nickname when it really seems like he meant “Terminator” but now it’s decades later and it’s too late to look back.
He’s fun! He’s fine! He’s never not a good time!
He also got knocked the fuck out by Jared Cannonier in the very recent past.
To be clear on this point: Jared, who turns 43 in March, only has one win in the last five fights and three and a half years of his life. It’s Robocop. Everyone else has made Jared look various shades of confused, old, or only partially conscious. The UFC tried to feed their oldest, most vulnerable top-ten-ranked Middleweight to their big brawling marketing machine and it failed. So how’d Gregocop get back here?
Well,
He knocked out Jack Hermansson, who hadn’t had back to back wins since 2019 and was coming off a year and a half on the shelf
He got a decision over Roman Kopylov, the man responsible for letting Paulo Costa back into the world, and who had once been choked out by, oh, Anthony Hernandez
He knocked out Brunno Ferreira, a man one fight divorced from beating no less than Jackson McVey himself
And now it’s back to the top ten. Bo Nickal? Ikram Aliskerov? Never heard of ‘em. What’s that? Reinier de Ridder, a more logical step up, is fighting on this very card?
Fuck that. Put the striker in the top fucking ten.
I don’t think this is a great fight. Rodrigues is a very straightforward fighter who succeeds through power and looks visibly drained whenever a fight makes it past a second round; Hernandez is a cardio machine who takes people apart if they can’t stop him from chipping away at them. If Robocop can smash him with big bazooka punches then this will all look very silly, but it’s difficult to imagine this fight not being some permutation of Hernandez exhausting and battering an increasingly immobile Rodrigues. ANTHONY HERNANDEZ BY TKO.
CO-MAIN EVENT: A TOP TEN BOUT AT THE HEAVYWEIGHT DIVISION
HEAVYWEIGHT: Serghei Spivac (18-6, #6) vs Vitor Petrino (14-2, NR)
Serghei Spivac versus Vitor Petrino for the number six spot in the Heavyweight division. Serghei Spivac is fighting Vitor Petrino, and at stake is the title of sixth-best Heavyweight in the world.
Serghei Spivac, who just lost a decision to Waldo Cortes-Acosta and got run through by Jailton Almeida, will compete in a mixed martial arts bout against Vitor Petrino, who dropped consecutive stoppage losses to Anthony Smith and Dustin Jacoby an entire weight class down from here less than two years ago, to be five men away from the Heavyweight Championship.
Serghei “The Polar Bear” Spivac, a man whose career best victory after twelve years of competition as a professional cage fighter is either Ante Delija, post-crisis Derrick Lewis, or domestic violence enthusiast Greg Hardy, will battle, on camera, for money, against Vitor Petrino, whose entire all-time Heavyweight record consists of wins over Thomas Petersen, who has a losing record with the company, Steven Asplund, who just barely scraped his way to 2-1 a couple weeks ago, and former NFL player Austen Lane, who got cut from the company after going 1-5 (1), to determine which man deserves to be ranked as the #6 Heavyweight on the planet Earth.
If you’re wondering why the UFC is going all-in on Josh Hokit: This is why. This is where we’re at. This is how far we have fallen.
You know what’s funny? In the blitz of fight announcements they made over the last week, one that flew under the radar was Alexander Volkov vs Rizvan Kuniev. Volkov went on a four-fight winning streak that included former titlist Sergei Pavlovich, and then he got screwed out of a decision against Ciryl Gane that the UFC swore they’d make up to him, and instead of a make-up fight they booked Volkov down the ladder against Jailton Almeida, and after he won that they booked him down the ladder again, this time with the aforementioned Waldo Cortes-Acosta, and now that Volkov’s won that, they’re booking him even further down the ladder against Kuniev, who is ranked #8.
To be clear: Alexander Volkov, the top contender in the Heavyweight division, is fighting over a worse position in the rankings than Vitor Petrino, the currently unranked man whose best victory is Thomas Petersen.
I don’t know who’s going to win this fight because none of it means anything. Sometimes Vitor is a wrecking machine and sometimes he charges headfirst into a grappler’s armpit. Sometimes Serghei remembers he’s a wrestler and sometimes he throws bad haymakers. We can call it SERGHEI SPIVAC BY SUBMISSION, but that’s not the point. The point is that sometimes to grow as a human being, to acknowledge your mistakes, shed your skin and become the person you feel like you could be when you’re in the shower in the morning, you have to burn the Heavyweight division to the ground, put its ashes in a box, bury that box in a field, and wait twenty years for it to blossom into a brand new Heavyweight division that isn’t terrible.
MAIN CARD: UNANNOUNCED AS OF A WEEK BEFOREHAND
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Reinier de Ridder (21-4, #9) vs Roman Dolidze (15-5, #15)
We touched on the failing fortunes of prominent Middleweights in the main event, but by gosh, no one has fallen so far as Reinier de Ridder. In 2022, RDR was the double-champion kingpin of ONE Championship: By 2024, he had been knocked out twice in a row (by the same guy!) and was fighting in the UAE to wait out his contract. By mid-2025, Reinier was 4-0 in the UFC, had derailed superprospect Bo Nickal and outlasted former champion Robert Whittaker, and was being theorized by many to be a solid counter to then-unbeatable top dog Khamzat Chimaev. Reinier was big, a great grappler and an extremely hard out, which made him a good matchup for Chimaev’s slightly gassy wrestling--as long as you weren’t already familiar with RDR’s career. If you’d followed him in ONE, you knew the fall was coming. Reinier was supposed to fight Anthony Hernandez, injuries led to Brendan Allen stepping in on short notice, and after one and a half solid rounds RDR’s year of hyperactivity caught up with him and he fell apart. Allen dismantled him on the ground, RDR threw in the towel between rounds, half a year later RDR was put opposite Caio Borralho and lost a close but clear fight, and just as quickly as he rose, Reinier de Ridder fell to Earth.
Except he’s also climbing? If you fall out of Middleweight so hard you end up in the Light Heavyweight division, did you fall upwards or simply collapse the ground and wind up in Hell? RDR (correctly) thinks 205 will be better for his body, and the UFC is trying to make that jump just a bit gentler on him by setting him up against Roman Dolidze, a man without a weight class. Everyone in the UFC got to know Roman for his Middleweight success, but he actually debuted in the company at 205 before dropping down in the hopes that his terrifying beef jerky muscles and weirdly effective offensive grappling would work better against smaller men. And it did! Kind of. Sometimes. For every real-life STF he pulled off on a Jack Hermansson, Roman got battered about by a Marvin Vettori. When it became clear he wasn’t getting to title contention anytime soon, Roman took a replacement-for-a-replacement-for-a-replacement berth against Anthony Smith at Light Heavyweight, and through winning he opened the doors to brand new opportunities! Which is fortunate, because he lost his last two fights at 185 in a row and he could really use a win.
He probably won’t get it. Roman succeeds by virtue of outlasting, out-toughing and out-grappling his opponents, but RDR’s ganglier, grapplier and--hopefully!--will have his body sorted without having to cut an extra twenty pounds. REINIER DE RIDDER BY DECISION.
LIGHTWEIGHT: MarQuel Mederos (11-1-1) vs Mason Jones (18-2 (1))
One fight ago, MarQuel Mederos lost to Chris “Taco” Padilla. It wasn’t the world’s most eventful bout, and Padilla got some scorn for missing weight, but it was clear and obvious enough that 100% of media scorecards had Padilla taking the decision, and that was without even taking into consideration that Mederos lost a point for gouging Padilla’s eye. This being mixed martial arts, this was, of course, meaningless. Two out of three judges scored it 28-28--meaning Mederos would have won a split decision, were it not for the deduction--and now Mederos is here on the main card, fighting Mason Jones, and Padilla’s down on the prelims where the UFC knows half as many people, at best, will be paying attention.
Which is fine for the UFC’s purposes, as Mederos is mostly here to, optimistically, lose. Mason Jones is a guy the UFC’s wanted to be a thing for awhile, now, as a prominent fighter from the UK, but the first time he was in the company they made the mistake of matching him up against a bunch of difficult motherfuckers. Mike Davis? Difficult. Ľudovít Klein? Super difficult! So when they brought Mason back last year they decided to go as far down the difficulty curve as it is humanly possible to travel, and had him fighting 2025-era Jeremy fucking Stephens. After Jones, shockingly, won that fight? The embattled Bolaji Oki. It’s only now that Jones is on a winning streak that they’re comfortable giving him guys like Axel Sola and Marquel Mederos.
But make no mistake, Mederos is here to put Jones over. MASON JONES BY DECISION.
WOMEN’S FLYWEIGHT: Carli Judice (6-2) vs Jeisla Chaves (7-0)
Today, I am an enormous hypocrite. I have devoted so many paragraphs to complaining about how few opportunities women get to shine on the main card in the UFC. I had a whole research project about it last week numerically demonstrating how far removed women have become from the spotlight. I kvetch constantly about the lengths the matchmakers go to bury their female talent. And when I saw this fight on Marcel Dorff’s listing for the main card, my immediate response was “Really?”
Carli Judice is...okay? She’s okay! She can hit pretty hard when she lands cleanly and she has some solid counter-grappling. She is also six fights deep into her UFC tenure and this is the first time she will fight someone with a winning record in the company, except that someone is Jeisla Chaves and that record is 1-0. And said victory was a split decision over Yuneisy Duben, one of the precious few female fighters I have ever been willing to simply say did not belong here, as a fighter who made it to the Contender Series despite never fighting anyone with a single professional fight to their credit. Yuneisy still got into the UFC, and made her debut in 2025--against Carli Judice, who knocked her out in a single round.
Jeisla, to her credit, can say that unlike Yuneisy, she fought multiple women with past professional records on her way to DWCS. She cannot say any of those women had ever won a fight. Jeisla’s only fights against people with any wins, ever, have come under the UFC’s promotional auspices, and both times she scraped by with split decisions despite both women being, objectively, not very good at this.
And that’s why this is on the main card. Carli knocked a woman out once and the literal only way the UFC can market anyone anymore is with either outright bigotry or knockout clips, so they’re hoping Carli puts an shin upside Jeisla’s head and says something shitty about some random nationality. Luana Santos vs Karol Rosa was on the Apex prelims, but by god, there’s a chance this might get a knockout. CARLI JUDICE BY DECISION. Sorry.
HEAVYWEIGHT: Anthony Wint (7-0) vs Terrance Chatman (5-1)
or
HEAVYWEIGHT: Kennedy Nzechukwu (14-6-1) vs Shamil Gaziev (14-3)
So: As of this writing, it’s 2:26 AM on Tuesday, which means that a) My sleep schedule is terrible and b) There’s only three days before fight day. This card still isn’t finalized. According to the UFC’s unfinished event listing, Kennedy vs Shamil is the last main card bout. According to the schedule the UFC gave to ESPN--and Marcel’s report--it’s Wint vs Chatman. Instead of waiting to see how long it takes for the UFC to fix its shit, we’re going to talk about both of them in a brief discussion I’m naming Heavyweight Is Delivered To Us From The Eighth Circle of Hell.
One side of this equation is either Kennedy Nzechuwku or Anthony Wint. Kennedy is 8-6-1 in the UFC, having washed out of Light Heavyweight twice. Not only did he lose repeatedly, he was losing to dudes like Nicolae Negumereanu, who would be retired one year later, and Ovince St. Preux, who, uh, also retired one year later. But that’s okay, because Kennedy’s 2-0-1 at Heavyweight! His wins were Chris Barnett, who got cut one year later, and Łukasz Brzeski, who got cut one year later, and the last time we saw Kennedy he had a worst-of-the-year tier fight with Marcus Buchecha, who has yet to win a fight and generally just looks terrible, and Kennedy still only got a Draw out of it. Anthony Wint is a 5’11” Heavyweight. He’s never fought a legitimately successful fighter in his life. But he has multiple 30-second knockouts! He got them by running forward winging haymakers because up to about the top thirty at Heavyweight you can just do that, and if you’re sufficiently athletic, it has a good chance of working. Also, he just won his DWCS contract on the 11th, so this is his second fight in two weeks, because why not.
Your b-side choice here is either Shamil Gaziev or Terrance Chatman. Shamil was ranked! briefly. He got there by knocking out Martin Buday, which was nice, but he also got the stuffing beaten out of him by Jairzinho Rozenstruik and then the UFC released Rozenstruik and tried to pretend none of it ever happened and it didn’t matter because Gaziev was about to miss almost an entire year and then get knocked out in back-to-back fights because ‘being dense’ and ‘throwing punches’ eventually hits a wall when it comes to defining traits as a fighter. Terrance Chatman is 5-1 and he’s never beaten a fighter with a winning record. He got here by beating the 8-17 Juan “El Martillo” Torres. In fact: If your memory is good, you may remember a guy I’ve mentioned a couple times now, Myron “Lightskin Dynamite” Dennis. He’s a 22-14 journeyman and he’s been there to help a number of not-great fighters punch their tickets to the UFC. No less than Tuco Tokkos and Julius “Juice Box” Walker themselves stopped Myron. It’s a rite of passage for joining the big leagues. Myron beat Chatman. Terrance Chatman is demonstrably worse at this than Tuco Tokkos.
And yet he is here. They’re both here. Everyone is here, because Heavyweight needs as many fucking bodies as it can get as long as they’re cheap. If you’re Jairzinho Rozenstruik, and you’ve been around for a decade and you’re not going to win the title but you’re clearly too good to trust with prospect elevation duty, then fuck you, it doesn’t matter that you’re one of the fifteen best Heavyweights on the planet, we can replace you with someone who can’t beat Myron Dennis for $12k.
KENNEDY NZECHUKWU BY TKO and/or ANTHONY WINT BY TKO and I think both fights are going to be bad.
PRELIMS: WE’RE JUST...DOING THIS
FEATHERWEIGHT: Jamall Emmers (22-8) vs Lerryan Douglas (14-5)
I want to be angry on behalf of Jamall Emmers, because he’s on a winning streak for the first time in six and a half years after getting boned pretty badly by the judges and he probably deserves better, but this fight is, in total fairness, rad as hell. When Lerryan Douglas made his debut this year I wasn’t as sold on his prospects as a lot of other folks. His offense looked good, but it looked good the way offense does when it’s been trained on years of opponents incapable of defending it. For all we know, that might still be accurate! But his debut came against Julian Erosa, so it didn’t matter, because Lerryan smashed him in three and a half minutes. Jamall’s always had solid striking and real power, but he’s just as capable of being knocked out, as Nate Landwehr proved.
End of the day, even if he didn’t get my initial endorsement, LERRYAN DOUGLAS BY TKO is the call nowadays.
LIGHTWEIGHT: Chris Padilla (17-6-1) vs Nasrat Haqparast (18-6)
If Jamall Emmers probably deserves better, Chris Padilla and Nasrat Haqparast definitely deserve better. The UFC likes to have their commentators flog the idea that signing up for short-notice bouts is a great way to gain yourself an opportunity in the UFC, but not all opportunities are created equal, and the man they call Taco knows this better than most. Padilla jumped into the UFC on short notice against James Llontop, choked him out as a huge underdog, and is undefeated across 5 bouts--including his last one, which, as we mentioned, was an absolute robbery of a draw against MarQuel Mederos--and all that gets him is stuck on the prelims. Up until this past October, Nasrat Haqparast was on a five-fight winning streak that included two performance bonuses, one for dusting Jamie Mullarkey in two minutes, the other for a fight-of-the-night win over Esteban Ribovics. Funnily enough, both men proceeded to fight top lightweights after that. Esteban got a shot at Mateusz Gamrot; Nasrat tested Quillan Salkilld. Both of them got crushed. Esteban, after his crushing, was given a main card slot against a retiring Edson Barboza under a card with two title fights and some of the UFC’s biggest names. Nasrat is on the prelims of a card main evented by Robocop.
Do not forget that everything is marketing. CHRIS PADILLA BY DECISION.
FEATHERWEIGHT: Márcio Barbosa (18-2) vs Ryan Kuse (9-2)
Some days, I don’t feel like I need to say very much. Four months ago, when Márcio Barbosa made his UFC debut, I noted my personal fandom for him based on his strict policy of throwing angry Wanderlei Silva hooks all the time while still somehow being a capable all-arounder. I said he would stomp Dennis Buzukja and he did, taking him out in all of eighty seconds. Ryan Kuse is a sanitation worker who trains with Asim “President Awesome” Zaidi, the head of Karate Combat, and he got the call up to the UFC for beating the 7-9 Leandro Camargo. Do you remember Cameron Smotherman? The guy who lost three straight in the UFC and had a weight cut go so badly that he passed out in mid-stride and faceplanted seconds after leaving the scale, which the UFC denied had anything to do with weight-cutting?
He beat Kuse. MÁRCIO BARBOSA BY TKO.
LIGHTWEIGHT: Gauge Young (11-3) vs Stan Dorsainvil (5-0)
This is the game, right here. It may sound silly, but genuinely: This fight is why things are bad right now. Gauge Young joined the UFC in 2025 as a short-notice replacement fighter against Evan Elder. Elder beat him, which put Elder on a three-fight winning streak. He got scratched from a September fight with a leg injury, recovered, and has yet to be booked again. In that time, Gauge, himself, ran up back to back wins. The first was against Maheshate, their once-upon-a-time big Chinese marketing prospect, and the second came against Thiago Moisés, an eight-year, sixteen-fight veteran of the company who’d shared the cage with everyone from Islam Makhachev to Jared Gordon. So they tried to book him against Kody Steele, a 1-1 fighter, whose only victory was against Road to UFC winner Dom Mar Fan, who hadn’t had a real, official UFC bout yet, and when Kody couldn’t make it, they replaced him with short-notice debutant Stan “The Drill” Dorsainvil, who has five professional fights, ever, all of which were against fellow people who haven’t really fought anybody.
Is Stan a good prospect? I don’t know, and anyone who says they do is lying to you. He can wrestle and he can hit pretty hard and he has yet to fight anyone who could really stop him from doing either of those things, because he has five professional fights. It doesn’t actually matter if Stan is good, just like it didn’t matter if Gauge was good. The point of the UFC is no longer to figure out who’s good, bad or even the best, but to use the athletic equivalent of seat filler to maintain a steady flow of Content until marketing figures out who they like this year. Upward momentum is granted, not earned, and the best you can do is spurn strategy and hope for viral moments, and the fact that meta-gaming the concept of winning fights is now a necessary tool for advancement in the sport is the most damning condemnation of its not-a-sport status as any I can think of. GAUGE YOUNG BY DECISION.
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Wes Schultz (9-3) vs Jackson McVey (7-2)
I didn’t intentionally line things up so that rant would lead right into Wes Schultz vs Jackson McVey but it’s painfully appropriate. Wes Schultz got knocked silly by Damian Pinas and booked to fight again two months later because fighter safety is dead and buried, but his opponent was an Australian accustomed to fighting guys who aren’t very good, so Schultz tapped him out. Jackson McVey is another in the growing army of fighters that made it to the UFC despite having only ever competed against one person with a winning record, he proceeded to lose repeatedly, and then he rescued his career by choking out Sedriques Dumas. That loss made four straight winless bouts for Dumas, but don’t worry: The UFC re-signed him and we’ll be talking about him next month because everything is terrible.
Including this. Including everything about this. JACKSON MCVEY BY SUBMISSION.
WOMEN’S STRAWWEIGHT: Shanelle Dyer (7-1) vs Elise Reed (8-5)
Elise, I’m sorry, but we are long past the point where they see you as a utility player. Everyone you’ve beaten in the UFC was marked as not long for the world of mainstream sports; everyone who’s beaten you has gone on to better things. You are a gatekeeper for Women’s Strawweight, but the gate you are keeping is the one for general entry to the park. Shanelle Dyer was supposed to take the MMA world by storm after she went viral for headkicking poor Mariam Torchinava to back in 2024, but as it turns out, the PFL can only really take you so far, which is why they’re now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Whatever The Fuck Jake Paul Wants To Do. Shanelle got her DWCS shot, lost, and got signed anyway, and they dutifully had her destroy Ravena Oliveira, who is one of the worst fighters to ever get multiple shots in the company.
Shanelle’s bigger, younger, more athletic and more marketing-friendly than Elise, and more than any of that Elise, while very tough, is also kind of slow. SHANELLE DYER BY TKO.