SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 5 FROM THE ACCOR ARENA IN PARIS, FRANCE
EARLY START TIME WARNING | PRELIMS 9 AM PDT / 12 PM EDT | MAIN CARD 12 PM / 3 PM
I’ll give the UFC this: One of the benefits of fully inhabiting the Nothing Matters era of the sport is how occasionally hilarious cards can be when you’re just throwing things at the wall. Dan Hooker’s fighting international superprospect Salahdine Parnasse! Michael “Venom” Page is maybe finishing his UFC contract against Nursulton Ruziboev, for some reason! Losene Keita? He gets Muhammad Naimov, the man what got his shit broke by Mairon Santos. And Trevor Peek and his lunchbox hands are back, in Paris, fighting an Englishman.
It's fun. It's nihilistic, but it's fun.
MAIN EVENT: GOING ON THE OFFENSIVE
LIGHTWEIGHT: Dan Hooker (24-14, #10) vs Salahdine Parnasse (23-2, NR)
This was the first battle in 2027’s upcoming MMA war, and the UFC won.
When I began writing these back in 2022, the landscape of the sport, particularly in America, was very different. Bellator was promoting their eighteen-event schedule, ONE was broadcasting MMA through a cable deal with TNT, the PFL was making its biggest promotional moves, Invicta was good for a half-dozen women’s MMA cards every year and Rizin was actively courting American fighters. Over the last five years, all of that has fallen apart. Rizin recalibrated its promotional intentions. ONE lost its cable deal, lost most of its MMA fighters, and is now a medium-budget kickboxing organization in denial. Invicta fell through the cracks of the sport entirely, and its promised January/February/March 2026 relaunch came and went without a peep. Bellator failed and was eaten by the PFL, and now the PFL has failed and is, itself, being consumed by Jake Paul’s Most Valuable Promotions.
Right in the middle of all of that, the UFC failed to sign Salahdine Parnasse.
The world of international prospects has fallen on hard times, with the general apathy combat sports find themselves stuck in at the moment, but there were a handful of names on the lips of the faithful, and Salahdine Parnasse was one of the biggest. Maybe France’s best fighter, two-division champion in Poland’s venerable Konfrontacja Sztuk Walki, only two losses in his career, one of which he’d avenged, the other a noble but failed attempt to become a three-division champion after going from Featherweight to Welterweight. He was a big fucking deal, everyone wanted to see where he’d go, and when his KSW contract ended in 2024 he fielded multiple offers, including one from the UFC. Per Drake Riggs, it was exactly what you would expect.
To make things sweeter, Parnasse also extended his deal with KSW after a rather disappointing bid from UFC, according to his coach and manager, Stéphane Chaufourier.
“The seesaw is huge,” Chaufourier told RMC Sport. “You should know that I won’t give figures but we had very, very good proposals. We earn two and a half times what we used to earn. So it’s just huge. It’s largely in the six figures, yes, of course. The UFC was between 20 and 30 times less.”
Parnasse, who is not an idiot, stayed in KSW, built an even bigger name for himself, and made actual money in the process. And now, two years later, he has a UFC contract his people found satisfactory. What could possibly have changed so much in just two years, that the UFC would go from lowballing him by a factor of 20 to signing him to an apparently good contract that puts him right in the main event, fighting for a spot in the top ten?
Well, mostly, they're scared shitless of Netflix.
I'd love to tell you that they're afraid of the upcoming world of MMA in 2027 as a whole. We know there were multiple professional entities pursuing Parnasse. After all: Scott Coker's coming back! He's got investors! They're gonna do something! The GFL is going to launch, but for realsies this time! Jake Paul's MVP Promotions bought the PFL and they're gonna start running real shows and it's gonna change the world of combat sports! I would love it if UFC management had a Scott Coker alarm that started ringing in a vault somewhere and they're scrambling to prepare for his imminent return.
The reality is much simpler: The UFC promoted a multitude of multiple-title cards, the return of Conor McGregor and a live event at the fucking White House this year, and all of them got outperformed by a seventeen-second Ronda Rousey vs Gina Carano fight that happened to be on Netflix.
That's it. That's the story. The UFC has spent years not having to even think about what their competition was doing, because no one rose to the point of being credibly called competition. Bellator tried for fifteen years and couldn't pull it off. Rizin and ONE aren't trying at all. The PFL was never, ever going to get there.
But Jake Paul did it on their first night, because he has the biggest gun in the broadcast war. Just a few bouts down from the main event, Salahdine Parnasse took on unsigned Contender Series winner Kenny "The Boss" Cross, who in a decade of competition had never been stopped on strikes, and battered him to a body-shot TKO in one round.
And then he went home and waited for the phone to ring, and when the UFC called, he told them about the offers he had from Paul and Coker and how happy he would be to become the first-ever Netflix champion.
Competition is good for the industry. It is good for the fighters. It is good for the fans. It is debatable if it's good for Dan Hooker, because competition has been really giving him trouble lately.
On one hand, Dan is the kind of fighter the UFC churns through legions of human souls to find. Always exciting; always dangerous. Chases finishes, puts himself at risk to do damage, stands toe-to-toe with Dustin Poirier and goes blow-for-blow with Edson Barboza. Has a half-dozen performance awards, been around the rankings for years, able to slot into main events without any issue because he's built up that much cache with the fans for his style and his many years of mileage. The kind of fighter every company wants to have.
He's also 4 for his last 10.
Being the company man isn't good for your career, just like being the noticeably tough guy isn't actually good for your optics. Everyone knows Hooker's tough because they've seen him getting the crap kicked out of him over and over. He may have stood with Poirier and Barboza, but he absorbed a hellish amount of punishment. He got knocked out by Michael Chandler and Arnold Allen. Islam Makhachev cut through him in minutes. We just watched Hooker take a fight with Arman Tsarukyan, get his face punched and elbowed until one of his eyes swelled shut, and hop right back into the cage barely two months later to get mauled all over again by Benoît Saint Denis.
The division is passing him by. His best victories in the last six years were coinflip splits over Jalin Turner and Mateusz Gamrot--the latter is the only reason Hooker's still ranked at all--and we watched Turner get mulched by Renato Moicano, who can barely hold onto a ranking, and we're not even a month removed from Mateusz Gamrot getting surgically disassembled by Quillan Salkilld. The same grit and grime that defined Dan's style and made him a fan favorite have penned him in. He hasn't evolved at pace with the rest of his peers.
And now he's going on 37 and coming ever-closer to a 50/50 record in the UFC, and the company that's been so glad to have his services is putting him in front of their big new French star in the middle of Paris.
Hooker's still bigger. He's still rangier. But he's not faster, he's not as multifaceted, and once upon a time I would have comfortably said he was tougher, but these days, I'm just not sure that's true. Parnasse is exceptional at mixing his strikes and keeping his opponents stuck in defensive mode, and Hooker's always struggled with fighters that don't let him lead. Parnasse is the kind of fighter he used to outlast, but that was seven-eight years and three-four violent knockouts ago. In the time between that violent, legendary war with Edson Barboza and today, Hooker's taken 599 recorded significant strikes to the head. And that's just competition. No sparring or training. 599 professional athlete punches to the brain.
Parnasse will probably get that well over 600. Time is unkind, and so is fighting. SALAHDINE PARNASSE BY TKO.
CO-MAIN EVENT: THE FRENCHIEST
LIGHTWEIGHT: Farès Ziam (18-5) vs Axel Sola (12-1-1)
When I saw this fight I did a double-take, as I felt like we just got together to talk about the historical misfortunes of Farès Ziam, and as it turns out, the answer is Yes. We're not even three months removed from Ziam's fight with Tom Nolan, which we discussed, at length, as one of those pull-back-the-curtain moments where an 8-2 guy on a six-fight winning streak can't get an ascension fight under any circumstances, but a promotionally-favored Contender Series winner gets a shot at him as soon as he's ranked. And it worked out just the way the UFC wanted. Ziam couldn't beat Nolan, and now Nolan is ranked and waiting for his chance to shoot up to the top ten, and Farès is here fighting Axel Sola.
Whom we also just finished talking about. Even more recently! Axel fought Mason Jones in March, lost, moved onto Ismael Bonfim in July, won, and is back in the cage just six weeks later, because he's French. Both of these men are French. Is it medically inadvisable to cut weight, have a professional combat sports fight, get hit in the head multiple times, go homie, and do it all over again within just a matter of a handful of weeks?
Sure! But imagine how convenient it is to fight in your own country and not have to fly all the way to America and deal with DHS and ICE and the it's-a-moldy-warehouse-but-we-put-in-bench-seats-so-it's-fine-now depths of the Apex, and surely, you, too will decide that's worth shredding a bunch of your neuroepithelial cells.
None of that keeps this fight from feeling as though it's occurring from a safe, serene, seamless cell made of cotton from which nothing that matters can escape. It's rankings-adjacent, I suppose, in that the UFC would like to get Axel up there but has proven to not give much of a shit about Ziam. It's an acceptable prospect vs prospect bout, save that neither has any real momentum to impart to the other. It's not even a good Hero vs Evil Foreigner bout for the hometown crowd, because both of them are fucking French.
So I am left to be guided solely by who I have more faith in. FARÈS ZIAM BY DECISION.
MAIN CARD: ALSO, SOME STUFF
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Michael Page (25-3, #15) vs Nursulton Ruziboev (37-9-2, NR)
This is the very rare case where I have more to say about a regular main card fight than I do about the co-main event. It took the UFC to make me a fan of Michael "Venom" Page, and they achieved it through the power of pure, unadulterated spite.
His entire Bellator run infuriated me. The favorable matchmaking, the baffling style, the allergy to good wrestlers, the way that when he did get wrestled it pissed people off so much that even notoriously nice Scott Coker got hit by Rita Repulsa's staff and turned into Dana White just long enough to complain about how wrestling shouldn't count. Everything about his career was built atop astroturf, and it made it infuriatingly difficult to figure out just how good he legitimately was.
Then he joined the UFC, and it turned out he is, in fact, very, very good. And there's a very, very good chance this is the last time you'll see him in the UFC's cage, because they fuckin' hate him.
They brought him in against Kevin Holland and he won, easily. They threw him to the wolves with Ian Machado Garry, and he lost, but only narrowly. Having established himself as a top ten fighter at Welterweight, the UFC promptly sent him up to Middleweight to fight regional attraction Shara Magomedov. When MVP won that, they booked him against Jared Cannonier, fallen contender. And when Page won that--which established him as a top ten fighter at Middleweight, too--they threw him back to Welterweight against the not-even-close-to-ranked Sam Patterson. He didn't have a damn thing for Page, either.
So, after years of wondering, it turns out Page is legitimately good enough to contend at two weight classes at once. He's even ranked at Middleweight now! At #15, four slots below Jared Cannonier, the man he already beat. This is the last fight on Page's UFC contract, and in the same environment that has seen the company start throwing money around to hold down potentially important fighters again, MVP has very notably not been preemptively offered a new deal, and he is fighting the unranked Nursulton Ruziboev as the third bout down in Paris. This, I assume, is because the UFC salivated over the idea of the Michael Page that executed fighters with flying knees and spinning kicks, instead of actually watching his tape and seeing the reality of Michael Page, the ponderous, low-volume counter-striker that lands five punches per round and does it so well that, somehow, he still wins.
But if you go around the MMA internet the near-universal response to Page's interviews about this being the end of his contract are expressions of relief and glee that he won't be able to bore the audience to death anymore. I try not to play the contrarian, and I understand why MVP's style turns people off, but I gotta say: In the modern era where the UFC hires the sloppiest brawlers they can find so Michael Bisping and Jon Anik can spend another seven point five minutes in paroxysms of commentariat ecstasy about the way 4-2 Jarbo Muggins and 3-1 Billiam "Trash Shorts" Landman swinging haymakers at each other for minimum wage with no semblance of defense is an exhibition of the sport at its greatest, I now, officially, appreciate Michael Page.
It took two years of effort to prove, indisputably, that Page is one of the best fighters in the world and always belonged in the UFC. It took the same amount of time for the UFC to realize they didn't actually care. Ruziboev's the very rare bigger man in a Michael Page fight and he's capable of throwing straight punches, and they're really hoping that'll be enough to finally rub MVP's credibility off on someone they actually want.
I'm hoping they're wrong. I'm hoping they keep one of the most unique fighters in the sport on the roster, however frustrating he can be. I am hoping my slow migration into accepting that I am an MVP fan has not come right when the rest of the world gives up on him.
I am hoping we get MICHAEL PAGE BY DECISION while a lot of bored Frenchmen boo, and then he gets re-signed anyway and given fights that actually matter. But the faith I have in him to win this fight is not matched by the likelihood that we'll see him in KSW or OKTAGON or the next MVP on Netflix card instead.
WELTERWEIGHT: Daniil Donchenko (14-2) vs Punahele Soriano (13-4)
Mytykbek Orolbai tapped Uroš easily and Punahele Soriano punched his head into the third row in thirty-one seconds.
Hell, Punahele's on a four-fight winning streak. If we still believed in the UFC's line about the best rising to the top, he'd be here. He is not here. He isn't booked at all right now, actually.
That changed about a week later, when Punahele was scheduled against Daniil Donchenko for this card. Are you an aggressive fighter who fulfills the company’s hard-punching, knockout-hunting needs? Have you gone almost three years without losing? Did you knock future main eventer Uroš Medić out without breaking a sweat? Congratulations! You, too, are qualified to face the champion of The Ultimate Fighter 33 (jesus christ), who is 2-0* and just defeated no less than the man, the myth, the legend, Theodor “Simba” Berggren.
*TUF championship fights shouldn’t count. They’re fighting for a contract! The entire premise of the bout is two people are competing to see which of them is worthy of the UFC! Road to UFC fights don’t count as UFC bouts and neither should these.
People are really up on Donchenko as a horrifyingly violent triking wrecking machine, to the point that he’s actually the favorite here, and I think it’s easy to forget that competition matters. He did worse against Alex Morono than Carlos Leal, Joaquin Buckley, and Santiago Ponzinibbio did. He’s good! But I’m not sold on his full-on prospects yet.
Though I’m probably biased by my desire for matchmaking justice. Either way: PUNAHELE SORIANO BY DECISION.
FEATHERWEIGHT: Kurtis Campbell (8-1) vs Trevor Peek (9-3)
The Kurtis Campbell hype train derailed so fast most folks have already forgotten it existed at all. The world, and the UFC, believed in him. He was an undefeated British champion with an eclectic style, a sense of humor and a solid stoppage ratio, and after knocking out Demba Seck on the Contender Series, the UFC put Campbell straight onto a main card in London as a sizable favorite over promotional veteran Danny Silva. And Campbell did fine! Up until he got punched stupid as soon as the second round started. Trevor Peek made himself an instantly memorable fan favorite by fighting like a caveman that had fallen into a glacier during a mid-2000s UFC event and thawed out twenty years later, smelling of Axe, obsessed with Carrie Underwood, and throwing punches that resembled clotheslines more than hooks. It was great! It also led to him going 2 for 5. He went on the shelf with a fractured leg in 2025 and he’s been on the shelf for a year and a half, and this is his chance to make a second impression.
Realistically, Campbell should win this. He’s better-rounded and much more strategic and Peek’s been away awhile. But I’m rooting for fun. TREVOR PEEK BY TKO.
FEATHERWEIGHT: Losene Keita (16-2) vs Muhammad Naimov (13-4)
For the third time, Losene Keita is looking for a fresh start. His hype as a potential international star began to really grow in 2023 when he became a two-division champion in OKTAGON, and right as the world’s attention turned to him, he lost his undefeated streak on a fluke, breaking his foot a minute into a title unification bout. It took two more years to make it to the UFC, but by god, he got there. And then he missed weight and his debut fight got scrapped. After another half-year of waiting, this past March, he finally, finally stepped out into the spotlight of the big show, ready to announce himself as the star everyone already knew he was. And then he lost a decision to Nathaniel Wood. So, this is it. First impressions, third attempt, and if he fails, he’s Just Another Guy.
Muhammad Naimov is not here to make it easy. He’s given a half-dozen people tough fucking nights in the UFC already, with a very successful combination of angry clinch attacks, solid grappling control, head-first pressure and those up-close clipping hooks that don’t do as much damage as you’d really want them to, but they’re fast and annoying and it makes it a real pain in the ass to throw back against them. He’s tough, he’s frustrating, and he, too, has taken a good nine months to recover after Mairon Santos dealt him the first knockout loss of his entire career last December. Even that took going into the third round, though. He’s never been an easy out for anyone, and even if he’s here against a prospect the UFC would love to cultivate, he has no intention of starting now.
Keita had a lot of trouble figuring out how to pull the trigger against Wood, and I’m hoping he has his shit together a little better now, because the skills are very much there. He just needs to use them. LOSENE KEITA BY TKO.
PRELIMS: SNEAK PEEK
FEATHERWEIGHT: Morgan Charrière (21-12-1) vs Felipe Lima (14-2)
There are some guys who are just here to be fun, and at this point, Morgan Charrière is firmly stuck in that category, and that’s just fine. He was already a bit stuck in the mud when he got pulled into the UFC in 2023. No one doubted that he was good--he took on some of the best prospects in the world, put up a real fight, and ultimately went the distance with folks like Soren Bak, Jordan Vucenic and Paul Hughes. But he lost those decisions. His UFC time hasn’t been all that different. Placed against guys like Nate Landwehr, Gabriel Miranda and Manolo Zecchini, he looks like a stone-cold killer. But each of those wins is spaced out with a loss to someone just a bit better, and his 2025 ended with Melquizael Costa kicking him to death in seventy-four seconds.
He is, however: French. Felipe Lima is not. Lima’s also trying to rebound from his first loss in a decade, as just barely shy of ten undefeated years came to an end in June of 2025 when the company used Lima as a rehabilitation fight for promotional superprospect Payton Talbott. It is possible that Lima’s lifelong habit of hopping between 135 and 145 has some rough edges, and ‘fight one of the best Bantamweights we have’ did not, in fact, work out for him. One could say, in theory, that the UFC picking Lima to fight Talbott followed by a match-up with Morgan in Paris might be giving away the game just a touch about Lima being used less as a prospect than he is a utility player. But he’s good, and well-rounded, and he kicks pretty fuckin’ hard.
And I cannot help thinking he’s the kind of defensively sound fighter that gives Morgan fits. FELIPE LIMA BY DECISION.
HEAVYWEIGHT: Mario Pinto (12-0) vs Ryan Spann (24-11)
Last week, Dana White used a chunk of the post-fight presser to talk about how the Heavyweight division was finally recovering and on the rise, after years of being stale. Mario Pinto, an undefeated Heavyweight with three straight UFC wins, is fighting Ryan Spann, a Light Heavyweight washout, in an unranked bout on the prelims of a Fight Night that broadcasts in the morning. Next week, Waldo Cortes-Acosta, who has failed to grasp contendership twice, is picking the bones on a tragically aging Curtis Blaydes. One week later Tai Tuivasa has the chance to tie Tony Ferguson’s all-time UFC losing streak record when he fights Robelis Despaigne, whom the UFC cut two years ago but now wants back because he was on Netflix once. Later that night sex criminal superprospect Gable Steveson is going to fight the 0-2 Sean Sharaf, and next month, Alexander Volkov, who has been the #1 contender for more than a year, is fighting down in the rankings for the third consecutive time. The champion is out indefinitely with an eye injury the UFC publicly called him a coward over and the interim champion won his belt by beating a Light Heavyweight who is still trying to sue Herb Dean for being a bad referee. Valter Walker is breaking submission records and still being downplayed in favor of Vitor Petrino. Josh Hokit is the UFC’s great Heavyweight marketing hope and even they can barely fucking stand him.
But no, you’re right, this is way better than when you had Francis Ngannou. MARIO PINTO BY DECISION.
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Oumar Sy (12-2) vs Modestas Bukauskas (20-7)
Oumar, you were supposed to be a big French star by now. When the UFC signed him in 2024 Oumar was one of the precious few Light Heavyweights outside of the company anyone gave a shit about, a big, powerful wrestler and grappler who bounced between 205 and 265 with equal success. Then he got into the UFC and within a year he was losing to Alonzo Menifield. Seven undefeated years, and now Oumar’s 1 for 3 and coming off a pretty terrible submission loss to Ion Cutelaba, who, coincidentally, Modestas Bukauskas beat about a year ago. After Khalil Rountree Jr. kicked out his kneecap in 2021 the UFC fired Modestas and the world figured his time in the spotlight was over, but they brought him back on short notice in 2023 and it’s been the best run of his career. He did get knocked out by Nikita Krylov back in January, but he already rebounded with a split decision over Christian Edwards and as punishment for refusing to be easily disposed off, he’s gotta fight a Frenchman in Frenchland.
Oumar’s bigger, stronger, rangier, a better wrestler, and he gets the crowd participation buff. I am still going with MODESTAS BUKAUSKAS BY TKO anyway. Call it a dumb hunch.
FEATHERWEIGHT: Nathaniel Wood (23-6) vs Pavel Andrusca (8-0)
I don’t think the UFC really knows what it’s doing with Nathaniel Wood. He’s good! He’s really fuckin’ good! He’s solid and talented and tough as nails and capable of outworking damn near anyone in the world, and now he’s 7-1 in the last six years, and that winning streak includes borderline-ranked folks like Charles Jourdain and longtime veterans like Andre Fili and this week’s main-card friends Morgan Charrière and Losene Keita, and yet, Nathaniel Wood is down here. Hell, his originally scheduled dance partner for this card was Mairon Santos, champion of TUF 32 (jesus christ) and 3-0 fighter, except one of those was a massive robbery and another was a fight he missed weight for, which is a sign of just how much they value Wood. But Mairon couldn’t make it, so, on five days’ notice, Wood gets Moldova’s Pavel Andrusca, who’s been winning belts in Austria and knocking out not-that-great competition in Abu Dhabi, and having watched Andrusca’s tape, I can say he is, absolutely, a guy who exists.
He hits hard and he doesn’t do a lot of defense and he hasn’t yet gotten to the point in his career where that’s a problem. NATHANIEL WOOD BY DECISION.
FLYWEIGHT: Michael Aljarouj (13-3 (1)) vs Fabia Sintes (11-3)
A long time ago people told me that I should allow myself a bit of grace when it came to some fights and not needing to put my whole ass into them, and I’ve gotta be honest: I don’t have much ass for this fight. Fabia Sintes is the Spanish champion of an organzation that lets him fight 0-0 and 0-7 people on a recurring basis. His last title defense was against a man who’d done nothing but lose for years up until he fought a guy who’s 3-6. Michael Aljarouj is a French champion who got his shit wrecked by UFC failure Azat Maksum, and since then he’s fought a fairly random array of fighters, the most notable being Pedro Nobre, whose primary historical contribution to the sport was a scandalous No Contest in the UFC thirteen and a half years ago involving phantom blows to the back of the head. One fight ago, Aljarouj lost a decision to Romero dos Reis only for the commission to overturn it to a No Contest afterward because the referee fucked up in the fifth round.
I don’t know, man. I don’t care. I watched tape and neither guy is great and who knows if we’ll even see either of them again until the UFC’s back in the region. We exist in a system with traveling rosters now and that’s deeply tragic. MICHAEL ALJAROUJ BY DECISION.
WOMEN’S BANTAMWEIGHT: Nora Cornolle (9-4, #13) vs Klaudia Sygula (8-2, NR)
I’ll be honest, I know this is where I get up in arms about ranked women’s fights being stuck on the prelims, but I’m struggling with this one. Nora Cornolle is, technically, ranked. She’s also 3-3 in the UFC, and those three wins were Joselyne Edwards three years ago, Melissa Mullins and Hailey Cowan, and in both cases Cornolle missed weight. It has been two and a half years since she beat someone who has literally ever won a fight in the UFC, and in that time she got walked down by Karol Rosa and lost a revenge bout to Joselyne, who chucked her on her shoulder until it snapped and choked her out. Klaudia Sygula is 2-1, and that loss was, funnily enough, Melissa Mullins’ comeback fight after losing to Nora, and since then she’s beaten Irina Alekseeva, who is 1-3, and Priscilla Cachoeira, who is 5-9 and 1 for her last 6. That is a lot of numbers to express how little is happening at Women’s Bantamweight right now. They let it dry out and die and now we have this fight and we have to live with it.
NORA CORNOLLE BY DECISION.
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Matthieu Duclos (10-3) vs Luis Felipe Dias (17-5)
The end of this card is just one big Olympic gauntlet of having to struggle to care. Luis Felipe Dias lost two fights to good fighters in Brave CF, then switched tactics and fought the 2-14 Helison Cruz and the 2-4 Daniel Oliveira. This was enough to get him a shot at the Contender Series, which very helpfully fed him Donavon Hedrick, who made it all the way to DWCS without ever fighting anyone with a winning record. When Felipe won, he got a UFC bout against Yisak Lee, who, himself, had only fought one person with a winning record in years, and Dias beat him in a round. But Matthieu Duclos is a champion! In Hexagone, the same French organization we were just discussing with Michael Aljarouj a few paragraphs ago. Before that Duclos was getting the shit kicked out of him by Marco Tulio on the Contender Series. And the man Duclos beat to win his French championship? Daichi Mikami--the man Yisak Lee beat before Dias destroyed him.
The waters we are swimming in are so fucking shallow, man. You could put anything here. No one would know the difference. MATTHIEU DUCLOS BY TKO.
WOMEN’S STRAWWEIGHT: Delphine Benouaich (7-2) vs Sofia Montenegro (6-2)
Remember a couple weeks ago when we talked about Carli Judice vs Jeisla Chaves, and I wondered aloud about the virtues of getting onto the Contender Series despite never, ever fighting anyone with even a single, solitary win? Remember our collective wonder at the idea of who they could possibly find that would be worse than that? Well, ladies and gentlemen, I give you Sofia Montenegro, the woman Jeisla beat by split decision to earn her UFC contract. Her two fights prior to that were the 2-3 Anyela Perez and the 4-5 Damara “Cherry Boom” Vargas, and it’s just this, all the way down. Do you think Delphine Benouaich’s record is much better? Because I promise, it’s not. Over the last two years--by which I mean virtually her entire career--Delphine has:
Barely survived the 7-6 Anita Bekus
Lost a decision to the 9-1 Naizi Catanhede, but had it overturned by France’s MMA body because Naizi pissed hot
Knocked out the 5-2 Mileide Simplicio, which is good!
Got beaten by the 6-4 Ingrid Silva, which is bad
Got her groove back after submitting the 2-2 Lindsey “Bringer Of” Payne
I spend so much time these days thinking about numbers that only exist to hurt me. DELPHINE BENOUAICH BY DECISION.