SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 19 FROM THE CRYPTO.COM ARENA IN LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
EARLY PRELIMS 2 PM PDT / 5 PM EDT | PRELIMS 4 PM / 7 PM | MAIN CARD 6 PM / 9 PM
Two hundred of these. Good lord.
The UFC’s currently running one hundred events just under every two and a half years, so I went back to look at my 100th write-up, and couldn’t help noticing how much of it was spent remarking on how rough the last two years had been, and the optimistic hope that soon, things would be better.
In May of 2024.
If the first couple years of this experiment were long, the last couple have lasted roughly a decade. Everything has changed, and so much of it has been for the worse, and it is all so, so very exhausting. The flaming shambles of the rest of the world aside, between episodes 100 and 200 I moved to the East Coast, and let me tell you, if there are two things I desperately miss, it is being saturated with taquerias and MMA events ending in God’s perfect time zone, Pacific. Staying up until 4-6 AM to watch Japanese MMA? Painful, but doable. Staying up until 9? Being as I also entered my forties in the last two years--this card is actually on my 41st birthday, which, hey, UFC, thanks for giving me a Tai Tuivasa fight for my birthday, you dicks--the pain is real.
It’s not as real as the exhaustion, though. But I’m not exhausted the way I thought I would be.
In the early days of writing these, one of the most common bits of feedback I got was a warning not to let myself get burnt out on the sport. There’s always so much, and following all of it and trying to pay attention to all of it can kill your love for it, so don’t let the need to write about Ronnie Lawrence vs Saidyokub Kakhramonov sap your will to care about mixed martial arts.
Thing is: That never happened. I’m not at all tired of MMA. After we’re done here we get to discuss Joshua Van vs Alexandre Pantoja, which is one of my most-anticipated fights of the entire year, and I love the idea that we get to discuss it. I love talking about this sport.
But over these last two and a half years, more and more, I feel like the sport has been slipping away.
Like, look at where we are. You don’t even need to wade into the right-wing sludgepile to feel disgusted anymore. Fighters with barely any professional experience have become a common fixture of the UFC. People getting booked within 90 days of a stoppage loss used to be rare and scandalous, and now Dan Hooker walks into co-main events on two-month turnarounds with facial injuries that haven’t even healed yet. There are two mutually exclusive sets of rankings, one of which is created by perpetually hallucinating Facebook AI, the other voted on by a media panel that only barely covers the sport, and neither of them actually matter because UFC management proudly, publicly boasts about their willingness to ignore them and do whatever they want. Two and a half years ago we were clinging to just the vaguest remnants of dialogue about the idea that fighter conduct was important, and now there are people with pasts, presents and extremely likely futures of abuse, assault and even rape on the UFC’s cards.
It’s all bad. It’s all exhausting.
But if I’m being honest--with you and with myself--what’s really tiring is the silence.
The MMA community as I knew it is essentially dead. When I started doing this it was already in dire straits, but folks like Bloody Elbow were trying to keep the lights on. Those creekbeds are bone-dry now and even the good folks left are finding other things to do. Luke Thomas is a political commentator. Zane Simon just rebranded as an internet video store (which you should check out). Bloody Elbow was purchased and turned into a clickbait aggregator. Prominent voices in the MMA field have been replaced by Youtubers who are all out to out-offend each other in a desperate attempt to grab what little of the attention economy hasn’t been eaten by robots.
It’s not just them, though. It’s the general audience. The lion’s share of decent fans left for greener pastures when it became clear the sport was hurtling into the cesspit of right-wing propaganda, but the second exodus was folks filing out of the auditorium when it also became clear the UFC had just sort of given up. I do not get casual inquiries about the sport anymore; I do not even hear people paying attention to it. The UFC spent months ginning up an unprecedented, once-in-a-lifetime propaganda night on the lawn of the fucking White House and it didn’t even outperform that week’s episode of Landman, the show about mans on lands. Hell, when I started posting these writeups on SomethingAwful we got 20+ pages of monthly discussion on the UFC. By episode 100 in 2024, we were down to a dozen. These days we rarely hit 8.
And who can blame anyone? The great moments are great, but by and large, this shit sucks. By and large, even if you divorce it from the horrible things it endorses--which you shouldn’t, but even if--the product has never been worse, and we’re not even done watching it decline yet. WME and Ari Emanuel have not yet begun to finalize their plans to wring the UFC dry of quality. The state of mixed martial arts is so dark that the Paul brothers might well be the only hope for anything to improve in the next half-decade, and that sentence, alone, is more than enough justification for anyone with a soul to stay as far the fuck away from mixed martial arts as is humanly possible.
It’s been almost five years and I’m not burnt out on MMA, but MMA is burnt out on itself, and recounting it is heartbreaking.
And what I keep clinging to is the angry mission statement I yelled off the cuff back in 2023:
As the UFC has drifted even further to the right and become an out-and-out platform for total bullshit, it has made me more determined to stick around. I'm not ceding the space of this sport to some of the worst motherfuckers on the planet just because they got louder and more desperate. I was renting UFC on VHS before Dana White was here and I'll still be watching the day after he wakes up in Hell.
I have seen a number of old, reliable voices in the MMA community either give up or, worse, fall into the new orthodoxy of nothing mattering, and more and more, in MMA and the world as a whole, I am coming to understand the value and necessity of continuing to exist as a reminder that things weren't always this bad, and they don't actually have to keep getting worse.
But right now they sure are, and we are riding this train through the Earth's core if we have to, and we will not stop talking about the bigotry and the graft and the madness inherent to still choosing to care about this horrible, fake, bullshit sport, and I hope that when we gather here again for another one of these in 2029, we are in a much better world watching a much better sport than the one we are all suffering in.
Until then: Thank you for continuing to suffer with me.
MAIN EVENT: THE ANSWER
FLYWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP: Joshua Van (17-2, Champion) vs Alexandre Pantoja (30-6, #1)
In the interests of full disclosure, I did almost make this write-up just the essay I wrote about it in 2025, verbatim, unedited, before deciding that was too much of a smart-ass thing to do.
Crazy shit happening is one of the best parts of mixed martial arts. Many people--I am often guilty of this--like to think of combat sports as a set of predictable outcomes. Fighters have strengths and weaknesses, which they will use to the best of their abilities, fights will happen in a rational, sensible way, and the most skilled fighter will, in the end, be the victor. Because that’s how sports work. That is their primary function.
Which is an opinion any fan who’s been around for more than a few years, let alone decades, can only hold onto by refusing to acknowledge that combat is chaos. This is precisely why the UFC keeps banking on having unproven, inexperienced and consequently much cheaper fighters hop into the deep end against ranked veterans: When you take people with real potential and you roll the dice, sometimes, the universe bends your way.
Good-but-not-great Lightweight Matt Serra’s bicep slaps greatest-of-all-time Georges St-Pierre across the dome. Perpetually motionless Uriah Hall catches uncrowned Middleweight great Gegard Mousasi in the face with a jumping spinning heel kick. Career wrestler Kevin Randleman floors kickboxing star Mirko Cro-Cop with a left hook.
Alexandre Pantoja, the second-greatest Flyweight in UFC history, sees an 882-day, four-defense title reign come to an end against Joshua Van after he slips recovering from an intercepted headkick and dislocates his arm 26 seconds into the fight.
That’s the sport, man. That’s mixed martial arts. Sometimes shit’s just gonna happen, and you have to see the beauty in it.
But it does put us in a bit of a narrative pickle. Ordinarily when we talk about title rematches, we talk about how the fighters have grown and changed since their first outing; why things went the way they did, how they could go differently. We do not have that luxury here. Alexandre Pantoja didn’t get outstruck or outgrappled, he landed wrong, and for the last year he’s had nothing to do but recover, get healthy, and get back into fighting shape. Nine months with nothing to do but wait and stew in the frustration of watching Joshua Van walk around with his belt.
Van’s made the most of it, too. The world, itself, was uncertain what to make of Champion By Mistake Joshua Van, but he made no apologies, claimed himself as clearly the better fighter, and said he would continue to defend his spot in the division until Pantoja was ready to run it back. And, by god, he did it.
Tatsuro Taira was the heir apparent to the Flyweight throne. The UFC was in the process of guiding the undefeated monster to a 2025 shot at Pantoja, but it wound up going to Kai Kara-France instead after Taira lost a skin-of-his-teeth split decision to Brandon Royval. Taira spent 2025 rebuilding his momentum, and the UFC moved on to Flyweight knockout king Manel Kape as their new top contender. Kape was supposed to fight a title eliminator against Royval, but he busted his foot a couple weeks out, and Van took the fight on short notice in the hopes of also taking his spot. Van won, and got the shot at Pantoja that was once supposed to be Taira’s. But just before Van’s title victory, Tatsuro Taira walked out to the cage and handed former champion Brandon Moreno the first TKO loss of his career. No one was going to stop Taira from finally getting his all but predestined stab at the top of the mountain.
Van was there to stop him from reaching it. When we get to December and people begin talking about the best fights of the year it’s inevitably going to be drowned in a deluge of devastating stoppages and dramatic brawls, but Van/Taira deserves its place in the conversation. It was a fantastic, high-level title bout with some of the best back-and-forth swings you’ll ever see. Taira ran the table in the first round, Van dominated and nearly finished him in the next two, Taira came back and almost submitted Van in the fourth, Van hit the gas and ultimately stopped Taira on his feet in the fifth. It was so goddamn close that if Taira had somehow managed to pull away and win the fifth round, going by the scorecards at the end of the fourth, Ricardo Almeida would’ve given it to Taira 48-47, Eric Colon would’ve gone to Van 48-46, and Sal D’Amato would’ve landed on an even 47-47. We were that goddamn close to Van’s injury title win being followed by a split draw in his first defense.
But that’s what champions do: They adapt, improve, and find a way to win. Van took Taira and the judges out of the contest and used his post-fight interview to yell at Alexandre Pantoja to get healthy so they could finally finish their business.
It’s four months later. Pantoja’s ready. He’s been chomping at the bit for the chance to get his belt back. He’s never been hungrier. He’s just as good as he ever was.
After all, no fighter ever came back diminished from an unexpected injury layoff, right?
I said I almost copy-pasted my write-up from the first time again. I’ll spare you that, but I am going to note the way it concluded.
Van's got some real good boxing and some real good leg kicks and he's an enormous pain in the ass to keep off of you. He also gets taken down a lot. Maintaining top position on Van has proven to be real, real difficult for most people, but Alexandre Pantoja is not most people, and as good as Van's striking is, he doesn't actually finish people with it all that often, and Pantoja's proven to have one of the toughest chins in the sport.
If Van can keep Pantoja off him and cross him up for five rounds, he's gold. If Van's been drilling nothing but wrestling defense and he can stuff Pantoja's trips, he's gold. If Van kicks Pantoja repeatedly in the head while Dana White holds his feet from the bottom of the cage like Bobby Heenan and Herb Dean pretends he can't see it, he's gold.
But ALEXANDRE PANTOJA BY SUBMISSION feels a lot more likely.
The question is: Having seen Van survive a great grappler in Tatsuro Taira, do I still think that's true?
Taira's more technically apt than Pantoja, but he also struggles if he can't get strong positional control. When he's on top of you, he's a killer, but his ability to deal with scrambles has cost him repeatedly. Pantoja's grappling approach is more loose, but that also makes it more flexible and, traditionally, more exhausting. He relies on his chin and his gas tank to overwhelm his opponents with stifling striking and really aggressive trips.
He has to land them, though. He was able to walk through Kai Asakura's striking because Kai sits down on his punches, but we saw Pantoja struggle a bit with Steve Erceg, who's a much better comparison for Van. Both men like to bounce, peck and only flatten their feet and commit to power punches when they know they have an opening. That mobility and that speed are problems for Pantoja's style.
Moreover: Pantoja just spent almost a year on the shelf, he's coming off an arm injury, and he's closing in on his 37th birthday in April. Flyweight is notoriously cruel to age and Pantoja's a guy who's been fighting multiple times a year in almost every non-pandemic calendar year of his career. Most champions slow down when they finally win the belt: Pantoja booked five title defenses in two years. Staying active has been a hallmark of his success.
The universe made him slow down. Is he going to be too slow for Championship Van?
I think the first couple of rounds are going to be pretty rough for Pantoja, I think if he isn't diminished he's still going to be able to deal with Van's punches and start dragging him down once he gets his timing, and I think he's going to find the same opportunities Taira did when Van starts to slow down towards the end of the fight. And I'm keeping the faith and choosing to believe he'll capitalize on them. ALEXANDRE PANTOJA BY SUBMISSION.
CO-MAIN EVENT: THE EXCUSE
LIGHTWEIGHT: Arman Tsarukyan (23-3, #2) vs Mauricio Ruffy (14-2, #7)
Wasn't that nice? Doesn't it feel spiritually cleansing to talk about genuinely good, important, high-level fights with an absolute minimum of bullshit dragging them down? Don't you wish we could just do that all the time?
Tough shit, motherfucker. Welcome to Ass Junction, population: Us.
Every single year we have at least a couple fighters who are blatantly being passed up for title shots, but none have ever been so blatantly sidelined by the UFC as Arman Tsarukyan. The man has one loss in the last seven and a half years, it was a split decision against Mateusz Gamrot most of the media scored in his favor, and he followed it by snapping off a five-fight winning streak that really should've gotten him to the belt by three. Tsarukyan was already a top five fighter after crushing Beneil Dariush at the end of 2023. But the UFC decided to leave Tsarukyan to fight Charles Oliveira instead.
He won, and then, two months later, Islam Makhachev defended his title against Dustin Poirier, who was who was 2 for his last 4. Islam won, unsurprisingly, and they iced both men for the rest of the year. But Islam vs Arman 2--a rematch of a competitive fight Islam won back in 2019--was booked as the first pay-per-view of 2025. Justice would be served.
Justice was, of course, not served. 24 hours before showtime, Arman pulled out. His team says he had a back injury, the popular theory holds that he was going to miss weight and wanted to save himself the embarrassment, Makhachev's coach Javier Mendez says Tsarukyan was going to botch his weight cut BECAUSE he had a back injury, and either way, that got Arman on the blacklist. Giant swaths of the MMA fanbase have decided all of this is proof Arman doesn't deserve the shot and the UFC is right to keep their thumb on him because he ruined an event, and to them, I would like to note that Conor McGregor, Jon Jones, Dan Henderson, BJ Penn, Alistair Overeem, Khamzat Chimaev, Paulo Costa and Nate Marquardt were all, apparently, perfectly fine, but Arman is where the company draws the line.
So he's been shoveling shit for the last two and a half years while the UFC keeps trying to derail him. They sent in Dan Hooker last November in the desperate hope of transferring Arman's credibility to someone they actually liked, and Arman just completely wrecked him, and the UFC insisted that he still wasn't deserving of a title shot.
Which is how we come to Arman Tsaruykan, undisputed top contender and previously-booked title challenger, with one matchup in the last 29 months, fighting down in the rankings for the second consecutive time against Mauricio Ruffy, whom the UFC sure would like to get in there for a title shot, please and thank you.
Ruffy was yet another of the innumerable members of the Fighting Nerds Combat Club the UFC brought in through the Contender Series. Savage knockout artist! Wild-eyed striker of spinning back kicks and sharp, winging haymakers! Took his last name from One Piece and used it to motivate himself to hit people until they stopped moving! He was really good at knocking people out and the UFC did their best to boost him up the ladder by very helpfully booking him only against people coming off losses until he had amassed a three-fight winning streak that gave him enough credibility to challenge for a real spot in the rankings.
Unfortunately for Ruffy, no one they'd put in his way up to that point knew how to wrestle. Benoît Saint Denis did, and he ragdolled Ruffy at will and ultimately cranked his jaw until he tapped in the second round. Devastating, momentum-destroying loss, but hey: It's a learning experience. This is when you go prepare to fight more wrestlers to round out your game, right?
Of course not! This is when the UFC goes back to booking you as favorably as possible. Mauricio started his 2026 by knocking out a Rafael Fiziev who was 1 for 4, then rounded it out by winning--as a -600 favorite--against a 40 year-old Michael Chandler who was 1 for his last 6, and that one victory came against Tony Ferguson, owner of the longest losing streak in UFC history, and also, Ruffy killing Chandler was done on the lawn of the fucking White House during the UFC's most-advertised event in years.
It's basically A Tale of Two Cities, but for people who hit each other for money. Are you a formerly destitute striker who tries to be a good company man and you are also conveniently on a much cheaper, Contender Series-derived contract? Enjoy your red carpet. Are you a grappling stylist whose family worked to become wealthy, meaning the UFC can't yank you around because you don't actually need their cash? Welcome to years of the most irritating negotiations of your life while your boss constantly negs you in public.
Like, we couldn't even get to the fight, itself, before they gave the game away. Dana White used the post-fight press conference for Hooker vs Parnasse on the 9th to say the winner of this match-up wasn't necessarily guaranteed a title fight with a victory, which is, of course, the world's least subtle code for "If Ruffy wins we will book him vs Gaethje as fast as we possibly fucking can." You think they're going to waste Justin Gaethje's retirement fight on a guy they don't even like? They would book five straight Paddy Pimblett rematches first.
The math on this match is not hard to read. Benoît Saint Denis is a worse wrestler and grappler than Arman Tsarukyan and he essentially sawed Ruffy in half. Ruffy had an acrimonious breakup with the Fighting Nerds and left to go train with Alexander Volkanovski in Australia again, and boy, that's a legitimately smart career move, given the plateau the Nerds seem to have reached, and how poorly they prepared him to deal with a grappler. If anyone is going to get Ruffy ready to run with Arman, it's Volk's team.
But I just don't think, no matter how hard Dana tries to dream it into being, they're going to be able to do enough to save him. ARMAN TSARUKYAN BY SUBMISSION.
MAIN CARD: THE FRINGE
FEATHERWEIGHT: Patrício Pitbull (37-9, #15) vs Dooho Choi (17-4-1, NR)
Oh, Patty Pits. We have come so far together, you and I, but with every moment that passes, I fear our time is drawing to a close. You are damn near 40 and you just got rolled by Aaron Pico and the UFC is prepared to cash out on you as a ranked competitor, and once upon a time I'm pretty sure you could've been a goddamn champion. Explaining this to people is like trying to explain 1980s synth sounds to people born in the 21st century. Pitbull once fought at 135 pounds and he still knocked the shit out of Michael Chandler and beat A.J. McKee, man. Even now, even diminished by age and nearing the end of his career, it is important to recognize that Pitbull was a top ten ranked Featherweight sixteen goddamn years ago, before Featherweight even existed in the UFC, and damn near all of his peers from the time period are retired, and the worst you can say is Pitbull is still competitive with the top ten, two whole generations of the sport later. That's fucking bonkers. That should not happen.
No one is more emblematic of that which should not be than The Korean Superboy. Dooho Choi was supposed to be a thing back in 2016. The UFC had plans. He had only ever lost once, he had a killer cross and no one could stop him from knocking them dead. No one but Cub goddamn Swanson. Their bout is one of the most beloved brawls in the sport, to the point that, technically, Choi's already in the UFC Hall of Fame thanks to the odd abstract concept of their fight wing. But as good as it was, Dooho still lost, and he lost to a man who had already been eliminated from contention, and that signaled the fall of the house of Choi. Over the next seven years he only made it to the cage twice and he got knocked out both times, and in the middle of that he just kept getting injured, over and over. On the plus side, that got him out of his mandatory military service. On the minus, he is only now, ten years later, on a winning streak again.
But that streak was over folks like Bill Algeo and Daniel "Willycat" Santos, and I don't know that he's going to be able to pull the same power-punching tricks on Pitbull. PATRÍCIO PITBULL BY DECISION.
HEAVYWEIGHT: Gable Steveson (4-0) vs Sean Sharaf (4-2)
Up until Monday night, this was supposed to be Renato Moicano vs Brian Ortega, which was also a silly fight for a bunch of reasons that you will now never get to hear about, because Ortega had to pull out after showing up to fight week events with a giant late-90s Diamond Dallas Page bandage conspicuously covering a gash over his eyebrow. Instead of a replacement, Moicano is now going to headline the Apex--again--against Tom Nolan at the end of October, and Gable Steveson vs Sean Sharaf, which was previously banished to the prelims out of an entirely correct sense of shame, has been promoted to the main card. Not former title contender Marlon Vera vs borderline-ranked Charles Jourdain, not previous co-main eventer Edmen Shahbazyan vs Brunno Ferreira, not the top fifteen Women's Flyweight fight between Casey O'Neill vs Eduarda Moura, but Gable Steveson vs Sean Sharaf, because we are going to get Gable over no matter how many people keep talking about his history as a sex criminal.
And it's tempting to just do that again here, because realistically, there's very little else to talk about. This is barely a fight. Gable is a -1900 favorite, and I am not adding a second 0 by mistake. He's one of the greatest wrestlers in American history, a freak athlete, and a solid smashing machine in mixed martial arts. Sean Sharaf has never beaten a fighter with a winning record, is 0-2 in the UFC, and started his time under the spotlight getting knocked out by Junior Tafa. In this, we have part of the injustice of combat. Sean is a seemingly nice dude who's used his time in the UFC to talk about Palestine; Gable is a pro-Trump asshole who is partially responsible for causing Minnesota's legislators to tighten their laws about prosecuting rape; unless something very, very funny happens, Gable is going to stomp Sean flat in one round because the world is not built out of morality.
Sometimes I understand why we still love comic book movies. GABLE STEVESON BY TKO.
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Alonzo Menifield (18-6-1, #14) vs Iwo Baraniewski (9-0, NR)
They're never gonna respect you the way you deserve, Alonzo. You're the stepping stone now. You beat guys like Dustin Jacoby and Paul Craig and the living legend Askar "Fake Record" Mozharov, and what that earns you is the chance to get smashed by potential contenders until the UFC has scraped all the marrow out of your bones. So they try to feed you to Oumar Sy, who absolutely everyone knows is going to beat you, and then you win, but you got clocked by Volkan Oezdemir immediately so it doesn't matter and they return you to the feeding trough. China! Co-main event! Zhang Mingyang, a killer puncher who is almost assuredly going to beat you! They cannot possibly lose! You knock out Zhang in one round. This does not endear you to them. It infuriates them.
But the good news is: Light Heavyweight is fucking terrible. See, here, the case of Iwo Baraniewski. He got to the Contender Series at 5-0, knocked out a man whose best victory was over 2-5 former UFC Welterweight Jared Gooden, and is now on a three-fight winning streak at 205 thanks to a string of the best competition you can possibly imagine. Ibo Aslan, who was on a two-fight losing streak and coasting on his 2024 victory over Anton "The Pleasure Man" Turkalj. Austen Lane, 1 for 6, who was, also, on a two-fight losing streak. The man, the myth, Junior fucking Tafa, who is 3-6 and has only beaten one person who ever won a UFC fight. The Tafa-Brother-to-Ranked-Fight pipeline lives on, against all better judgment, and Alonzo is its next victim.
Light Heavyweight, you are still, easily, the worst division. ALONZO MENIFIELD BY DECISION.
PRELIMS: THE DISGRACE
BANTAMWEIGHT: Marlon Vera (23-12-1, #10) vs Charles Jourdain (18-8-1, NR)
In my long angsty preamble I touched on how aggressively silly the UFC's current two-rankings system is, and no fight exemplifies how broken both of them are than this one. Charles Jourdain is unranked by the media rankings the UFC actually uses, but in the Meta AI rankings he's #12, thanks to his April victory over Kyler Phillips, who is tough, talented, and on a three-fight losing streak. Marlon "Chito" Vera is unranked by Meta's shitty computers, but in the canonical media rankings he's the tenth best Bantamweight on Earth, and that's even dumber, because he's 1 for his last 6, he hasn't won a fight in more than three years--a decision over Pedro Munhoz that 80% of the media scored for Pedro--and he's still coasting on the success of beating Dominick Cruz back in 2022, who never fought again. Farid Basharat is ranked below Marlon Vera. Raoni Barcelos is ranked lower than Marlon Vera AND Payton Talbott, whom he beat. And I am the fool staring into the sun and crying that it was once the moon.
Whatever belief I once had in Marlon has more or less evaporated. It's been half a decade of watching his fights with the phrase 'he could be a champion if he was just more active' on the back of my tongue and it just doesn't seem like it's going to happen. He is who he is, and Jourdain is younger, faster and more than able to outland someone for fifteen minutes. If there's another abrupt end-of-the-fight knockout in Marlon I will painfully ask him to do it here, because fuck Jourdain, but CHARLES JOURDAIN BY DECISION seems painfully inevitable.
HEAVYWEIGHT: Tai Tuivasa (14-10) vs Robelis Despaigne (6-2)
Less than one month ago, Dana White happily said the Heavyweight division, which had been stale for years--which he of course denied during those years, but, y'know, liars--was finally back on the rise and everything was going great. This Monday, Tom Aspinall relinquished the UFC's Heavyweight Championship because Ciryl Gane poked him in the eyes so badly he still can't see. Gane has now been promoted to undisputed champion, thanks to his interim title victory over Alex Pereira, who had never fought at Heavyweight before. Despite the UFC letting successful Heavyweights like Alexandr Romanov, Jairzinho Rozenstruik and Jailton Almeida go, Tai Tuivasa is still here on a seven-fight losing streak, and, should he lose, he will tie Tony Ferguson's all-time record at eight. The UFC hired Robelis Despaigne back in 2024, when he was a plucky young 35 year-old who'd gone 4-0 mostly by knocking out people who'd never won a fight, and by the end of 2024 they had let him go, too, after he lost consecutive bouts to Waldo Cortes-Acosta, who is now in their top ten, and Austen Lane, who lost against every single person he fought in the UFC that wasn't Robelis Despaigne. So why is he back now? Is it his incredible victory over Karate Combat Heavyweight Champion Sam Alvey?
No, it's because MVP MMA put Robelis on Netflix once and had him destroy a 42 year-old Junior dos Santos and the UFC freaked out about the idea that they might sell tickets with him. Besides, they've been steadily kicking 9/10 of the wrestlers out of the division, so as long as no one puts him in a cage with anyone who can shoot a double, it'll be fine. Robelis still isn't very good, and he's still one-dimensional, and he's still incapable of fighting more than six or seven minutes without looking exhausted. But he's fighting Tai Tuivasa, who also has a round and a half of gas, also can't wrestle, and is giving up most of a foot of reach to a man who decapitates people with single punches. ROBELIS DESPAIGNE BY KO and we all get sad.
FEATHERWEIGHT: Michael Aswell Jr. (11-5) vs Joosang Yoo (9-1)
I've written about the Harry Hunsucker problem before, wherein you dedicate your life to martial arts, make it to the UFC and discover you're nowhere close to competitive with your ostensible peers, and how painful it must be to deal with that realization. Michael Aswell Jr.'s place might be worse. He's a perfectly fine competitor, he's as well-rounded and tough as you're supposed to be, and he's just successful enough to stay at the show, but not enough to ever be comfortable. He lost on the Contender Series, but that put him on the UFC's late replacement radar, and when they signed him as one, he lost that, too. But he knocked out Lucas Almeida! ...who was released immediately afterward for losing too much. Mr. Maswell the Second is 1-3, if he drops this one he's on a three-fight skid and is probably gone, and Joosang Yoo is a very good fighter who is out for revenge after losing his undefeated streak during his last fight when he got too into playing you-can't-touch-me with Daniel Santos and got knocked out.
JOOSANG YOO BY DECISION.
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Ryan Gandra (10-1) vs Ozzy Diaz (10-4)
Shame flows from every pore of this. Ryan Gandra is one of the UFC's favorite new undefeated knockout dudes, and you can tell because they had him debut against José Medina, who was 0-3 and had been finished twice in his last two fights. When Gandra dusted him in forty-one seconds they brought in Zach Reese, who was their big hyped undefeated knockout dude in 2023, and then it turned out he wasn't actually up to the task of winning on a regular basis against solid competition. But you know who he did beat? José Medina. So the UFC had itself a battle of the Medina batterers, and Gandra won in 75 seconds, and now to follow it up he gets to fight Ozzy Diaz, who is notable for--wait for it--getting knocked out repeatedly by people the UFC likes. Joe Pyfer? Zhang Mingyang? Ateba Gautier? Send in Ozzy and get him killed.
Ozzy's bigger and longer and he deserves better than the knockout he is almost certainly going to suffer. RYAN GANDRA BY TKO.
EARLY PRELIMS: THE SHADOW
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Edmen Shahbazyan (16-6) vs Brunno Ferreira (15-4)
When I say things like "nothing matters," this is what I mean. Edmen Shahbazyan was on a three-fight winning streak, but that streak consisted of Dylan Budka, who fell to 0-3 and was promptly released, Andre Petroski, who had just also fought and beat Budka, and André Muniz, who at one point was a contender but was now 1 for 5 and promptly also cut loose. For beating these men, this past June, Edmen was given an Apex co-main event slot opposite Brendan Allen, the #4 Middleweight on the planet. The UFC and Allen's management extolled his virtues as a real fighter who was willing to take on any challenge. Allen, unsurprisingly, won. For being a good company man, for doing the UFC such a big favor, Allen's reward is an Apex main event next month against Christian Leroy Duncan, who is ranked six slots beneath him. And Edmen, who just one fight ago was judged worthy of being one heartbeat away from a shot at the Middleweight championship? Now he's fighting Brunno Ferreira, who is unranked, 6-4, and on a two-fight losing streak. So many of these fights go nowhere. They build to nothing. They have no purpose but to fill a gap in a schedule.
Nothing is real. EDMEN SHAHBAZYAN BY DECISION.
WOMEN'S FLYWEIGHT: Casey O'Neill (11-2, #12) vs Eduarda Moura (12-2, #13)
We are here, live, reporting from the smoldering crater that is Women's Flyweight. This top fifteen match, which is of course less important than Ryan Gandra and Iwo Baraniewski, is between Casey O'Neill, who is back on a winning streak after two years spent wandering through the mire during which she lost to Jennifer Maia and Ariane Lipski, both of whom are no longer in the company even though she still is. Funnily enough, Casey's coming off the two best wins of her career, having unseated Luana Santos, who is now top ten up a weight class at Bantamweight, and knocked out Gabi Fernandes, who famously choked out Wang Cong who is apparently now good enough to fight for the championship. Eduarda Moura, too, is coming off a fight with Cong, but Moura lost and missed weight in the process. Once upon a time I would have a deeper wellspring of anger for this, but the title is vacant, the top contenders are being passed up and Moura can't even reliably make weight, so fuck, man, it is what it is.
CASEY O'NEILL BY DECISION.
FEATHERWEIGHT: Joanderson Brito (19-5-1) vs Giga Chikadze (15-6)
That's right, baby, it's the real main event. Joanderson Brito, forever champion of my heart, destined to be a quintuple-division titleholder. Is he much smaller than Giga? Yes. Have Giga's recent string of losses all been to very good, top-fifteen fighters? Also yes. Even in his dotage, does Giga know more about how to hit people than Joanderson has ever demonstrated in his life? Without a doubt. Is Joanderson going to win? Yes, just like he has won every fight of his life, even the ones he lost. He will knock Giga out in the first round, he will submit Giga in the second round, and he will puppet his unconscious body for the duration of the third so he can win the first ever 30-21 decision in UFC history. And then all of my favorite video game, movie, television and comic book characters will rush into my house for my birthday and we'll all play Daggerfall.
JOANDERSON BRITO BY SUBMISSION EVEN THOUGH I THINK THERE'S A PRETTY GOOD CHANCE GIGA'S GOING TO BE ABLE TO KICK HIM FOR FIFTEEN MINUTES AND I'M GONNA GET REALLY SAD ABOUT IT.
happy birthday!
and thanks for refusing to go away. (i miss bloody elbow, too.)