SATURDAY, OCTOBER 3 FROM THE DELTA CENTER IN SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH
EARLY PRELIMS 1 PM PDT / 4 PM EDT | PRELIMS 3 PM / 6 PM | MAIN CARD 5 PM / 8 PM
I have so little joy for this that I’m just gonna get the fuck on with it.
MAIN EVENT: THE LOGICAL END
WOMEN’S FLYWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP: Natália Silva (20-5-1, #1) vs Wang Cong (10-1, #8)
I break format pretty frequently, but I very rarely break schedule. I write the main and co-main events on Sunday, the main card on Monday and the prelims on Tuesday. That’s the system that has worked for me, given how frequently the UFC changes their cards around during fight week.
When I started writing this, it was Saturda. A few hours beforehand, during the Dan Hooker vs Salahdine Parnasse event in Paris, the UFC officially confirmed an incredibly stupid internet rumor from the previous week: Valentina Shevchenko is injured, she has been stripped--sorry, I mean she, of course, completely voluntarily vacated--the UFC Women’s Flyweight Championship, and the new main event of UFC 332 on October 3 is Natália Silva vs Wang Cong for the undisputed title.
Light Heavyweight champion Carlos Ulberg got injured during his title win this past April, and knowing he would be out with an injury all year, the UFC has shrugged and twiddled their thumbs. Petr Yan got back surgery and will have been out of action for almost an entire year when he returns later this month. Kayla Harrison’s been out thanks to neck surgery, and the UFC let Women’s Bantamweight sit idle for a year and a half. But Valentina Shevchenko, arguably the best female fighter on the planet and the fourth-longest-reigning champion in UFC history, drops the belt immediately.
Good news, though: Women’s Flyweight is flush with contenders. Silva’s obviously a good choice--she’s #1 in the rankings, the UFC may have jumped her up the ladder a bit but she still won her way up there fair and square. But Alexa Grasso, Erin Blanchfield and Manon Fiorot are right there! At the time of the announcement Manon’s only UFC loss was still Valentina, Erin’s only UFC loss is still Manon, and Silva beat Alexa a year and a half ago, but since then Alexa’s notched a knockout-of-the-year candidate over the never-finished Maycee Barber and then she beat Manon, too. Any one of them would have been a solid choice. Even better news: They were all available! All three of them were booked to fight within the next month, so all you’d have to do is de-book one of those fights and slot them in!
Or, you know.
You could go with Wang Cong. Who got choked out by Gabi Fernandes two years ago, missed weight two fights ago, and got into the top ten by taking a decision over Tracy Cortez.
Who was coming off of a submission loss.
To Erin Blanchfield.
All of the discourse about Silva vs Cong as a terrible main event has been at worst grossly sexist and at best misses the point of why it sucks. This is one of the biggest reasons people don’t give a shit about mixed martial arts anymore. I’d love to tell you it’s the right-wing takeover, and that’s not blameless, but folks are more than willing to excuse a lot of shit as long as the product is good.
But we’re past the point of asking if the UFC is good or not. The answer is very clearly no. At this point we’re asking if the UFC is functional, and the answer is still no.
Every time one of these fights gets announced, every time we go through UFC booking discourse, I think back to Sean Brady beating Leon Edwards, being excited about how his new top contendership status will play into his matchmaking, and having UFC poobah-in-waiting Hunter Campbell tell him the rankings don’t actually matter and they’ll put whoever they want in title fights. That’s the kind of thing that should have to get pried out of an executive when pressed by lawyers during an antitrust hearing. That we’ve arrived at the point that the UFC is so aware of their power over the sport that they can tell fighters to their faces that nothing they do matters is precisely why we’ve arrived at the point that the sentence “Wang Cong title fight” is a reality rather than a stupid internet joke.
A few paragraphs back we compared the sleepy state of most of the UFC’s championship scene to this particular title vacation and how unusually disrespectful it was towards Valentina Shevchenko. Make no mistake, it is, but the disrespect is incidental. It being Valentina at all is incidental. We ran through the titles in short, but let’s do it a little more explicitly:
Heavyweight is spoken for: Tom Aspinall is no longer the champion and Ciryl Gane vs Josh Hokit is the main event title fight for Madison Square Garden in November
Middleweight is spoken for: The last numbered event of the year has Sean Strickland defending against Nassourdine Imavov
Welterweight is spoken for: Islam Makhachev beat Ian Machado Garry in August and that’s a wrap on him for the year
Lightweight is unavailable: Justin Gaethje is four months out from a war and negotiating what looks like his final fight and is considering retiring altogether
Featherweight is spoken for: Alexander Volkanovski is defending against Movsar Evloev at the end of October
Bantamweight is spoken for: Petr Yan is finishing his trilogy with Merab Dvalishvili on that same card
Flyweight is spoken for: Joshua Van just defended his title against Alexandre Pantoja two weeks ago
Women’s Bantamweight is spoken for: Kayla Harrison and Amanda Nunes are finally rescheduled as the co-main event of Gane/Hokit, which is its own kind of disrespectful hell we’ll talk about when we get there
Women’s Strawweight is spoken for: Mackenzie Dern just beat Gillian Robertson in August
That leaves us with two available titles to play with: Light Heavyweight and Women’s Flyweight. If you follow the UFC closely--for which you have my sympathies--you’ve probably seen the stories about Paulo Costa playing hardball with the UFC trying to book him into five-round bouts and the matchmakers having issues getting something together for the 205-pound title. Realistically, the entirety of 205 is a void right now. 25% of the top ten are injured, 25% are moving to Heavyweight, there is one fight booked in its entirety and it’s #8 Azamat Murzakanov vs #10 Dominick Reyes (Tuesday update: We got Jiří Procházka vs Navajo Stirling now, so hey, that’s two fights). Matchmaking has completely lost the division.
Women’s Flyweight, on the other hand, was already set. Val was going to fight Silva. Under any other circumstance, this would have been an interim title fight, as you do when a champion is injured.
But interim title fights don’t get as much attention as undisputed title fights. And the UFC hasn’t promoted a single women’s main event this year. Shevchenko/Silva was going to be the first--and, with Harrison/Nunes playing second fiddle to Josh Hokit, the only.
So they couldn’t let it be a women’s main event and an interim title bout, or people might have said this major, numbered card with a Wang Cong headliner was weak.
This is the incidental disrespect and the reason the product sucks now all rolled into one. There is no continuity. There is no meaning. The most celebrated active women’s champion and one of the longest-tenured titleholders in MMA history gave up the belt because the UFC is so bad at booking their cards, and so unwilling to invest in their women, that despite Erin Blanchfield, Alexa Grasso and Manon Fiorot all having done everything asked of them over the years, they are so underpromoted that Blanchfield’s wins, Fiorot’s longtime contendership and Grasso being a former fucking world champion just don’t matter. Hell, forget title contendership: Alexa Grasso vs Manon Fiorot, a former champion vs top contender matchup, wasn’t even important enough to get booked above Brandon Moreno on a two-fight losing streak vs TUF 33 champion Joseph Morales. It wasn’t even important enough to get booked above Tommy McMillen vs Marwan Rahiki.
And, ultimately, no one in the division is more important than some people in the matchmaking boardroom deciding it sure would be nice if they had a champion who could raise Brand Awareness in China again.
We talked about this during Dern vs Robertson, but after years of at least pretending to try, women’s MMA in the UFC has been horrifically underserved, and every serving has been the result of either desperation or marketing. There were only two women’s main events in 2024: Amanda Ribas vs Rose Namajunas, which happened because the UFC has always wanted Rose back in the title picture, and Erin Blanchfield vs Manon Fiorot, which happened when their intended Sean Brady vs Vicente Luque main event fell apart. That was still twice as good as 2025, when your sole women’s headliner was Mackenzie Dern vs Amanda Ribas, the final step before Dern’s coronation. Up until this card, there were none in 2026. If you want to give the UFC extra credit they tried to do Blanchfield vs Maycee Barber before it fell apart during the broadcast itself, so there were, technically, four women’s fights headlining cards over very nearly the last three years.
In what I’m sure is a coincidence, the only three of those they intentionally booked all took place in the Apex.
All of it is bullshit. None of it matters. Natália Silva hasn’t lost a mixed martial arts bout in just shy of nine goddamn years. She is a talented striker with exceptional range control who’s been frustrating opponents with an arsenal of kicks no one’s managed to figure out. Perfect 8-0 record in the company. Third-most wins in the history of the division. Second-longest winning streak in the history of the division. One way or another, was going to fight for the championship of the world.
She’s never had the chance to be in a main event. She’s only been in a co-main event once, and that was more than two years ago.
Wang Cong was only 4-0 when the UFC signed her, based more on her background as a kickboxer in China--which included beating Valentina in her last-ever kickboxing match, eleven years ago--and it’s been the marketing game ever since. Four of her six opponents had losing records. Four were coming off losses. When Gabi Fernandes shocked the world by choking Cong out in 2024, the UFC responded by featuring Cong on the upper half of the prelims for the Du Plessis vs Strickland pay-per-view against Bruna Brasil, who was 2-2 and a Strawweight, and having Gabi take on the 2-6 Julija Stoliarenko two fights into the prelims of an Apex card. When Wang won, she got another gimme fight on the prelims of a double-title-fight pay-per-view featuring the Merab Dvalishvili/Sean O’Malley rematch and Kayla Harrison’s long-belated title shot. When Gabi won, she got the prelims of a Joe Pyfer Fight Night.
Wang Cong is good. She hits hard, she’s got a sound technical approach to her striking, she learned her lesson about wading in recklessly and hasn’t done it since. She’s a solid top fifteen competitor. She’s also gotten the red carpet, more than any other Women’s Flyweight prospect.
Which is wild, because I can say that to you, and it’s true, and she’s also never been off the prelims on a continentally-timed broadcast. Not one. Not a single fucking one. Her only main-card appearance in the UFC proper was that loss to Gabi, and that was aired live from Macau in a timeslot no one in the UFC’s primary audience could watch. The cards she was on included main-card appearances from folks like Francisco Prado, Rodolfo Bellato, Marc-André Barriault and Justin fucking Tafa, but Wang Cong is going from four straight preliminary bouts to main-eventing a numbered event for a world championship.
She’s the company’s most-hyped woman in an entire division and they couldn’t even put her on a main fucking card.
I pray they do better. I pray women’s MMA still has multiple divisions in the UFC by 2030. NATÁLIA SILVA BY DECISION.
CO-MAIN EVENT: GET ON WITH IT
BANTAMWEIGHT: Deiveson Figueiredo (25-7-1, #9) vs Payton Talbott (11-1, #11)
Let’s go back to last week, when we were talking about Raoni Barcelos.
By the beginning of 2025, Raoni is close to 38, 2 for his last 6, and largely forgotten. The UFC books him as an easy win for their new marketing darling, Payton Talbott. Payton is a young Contender Series winner with an undefeated record and a near-total finishing rate. He's getting the marketing jetpack and the UFC wants to rub what's left of Raoni's credibility off on him. Payton is a -1150 favorite. Raoni schools him. The UFC's next big thing drops a 10-8 round to a fighter everyone forgot. It is a crushing loss for Payton and an incredible win for Raoni.
In his next fight, Payton is on the main card of a two-title fight pay-per-view headlined by Ilia Topuria vs Charles Oliveira. Raoni is placed on a Joaquin Buckley Fight Night under Edmen Shahbazyan. They both win. One fight after that, Payton is on the UFC's last-ever pay-per-view beating former double champion Henry Cejudo in his retirement fight. One month prior, Raoni fought Ricky Simón in the Apex. On the prelims.
It is September of 2026. Payton Talbott is on a two-fight winning streak. He is ranked #11, and in October he will fight in the co-main event of a numbered card against multiple-time champion Deiveson Figueiredo, who is 1 for his last 5, almost 39, and in the top ten. Including his victory over Payton, Raoni Barcelos is on a five-fight winning streak. He is ranked #13, and fighting the heavily-hyped Raul Rosas Jr., who is 21 years old and a fixture of the UFC's marketing plans. If Raoni wins, he stands to go up one point in the rankings.
One of the most exhausting parts of the marketing jetpack is how inherently impatient it is. I mock the UFC’s favoritism frequently, but their eye for talent--with the occasional Tallison Teixiera-shaped mistake--is usually still fairly grounded. Sean O’Malley was a talented counterstriker with an annoying but present charisma. Paddy Pimblett was a strong grappler who appealed to a big chunk of the audience. Our aforementioned Wang Cong was a very solid, well-rounded prospect.
They all stood a very good chance of making it to the top on their own. They all had the talent, they all had the skills. Letting them do it the long way wouldn’t just have been beneficial to their growth as fighters, it would have given them the chance to build grassroots cache with the audience. On a long enough timeframe, people get sick of hype. People get sick of the commentators drilling “________ Contender Series winner whose UFC career has only existed for five minutes is a superstar” into your head until you adopt it as though it were a natural part of your internal monologue.
But we are not in a phase of the sport that lends itself to longterm thinking. Half of this card’s headlining act hasn’t even been on a real main-card broadcast. Boardroom matchmaking trends towards instant gratification and immediate results.
Payton Talbott is good. He’s very good. Even a depleted, about-to-retire Henry Cejudo is a tough customer. Beating him is great. Shutting him out is even better. Getting wrestled to death by Raoni Barcelos and making Henry Cejudo go 1 for 7 on takedowns eleven months later is a genuine statement about your growth as a fighter.
None of that changes the attempt to get Payton a heartbeat away from a title fight by having him fight, in order, a guy from another weight class, a retiring 38 year-old, and another 38 year-old who should, probably, be thinking pretty hard about it.
It’s difficult to express the level of expectation people had for Deiveson Figueiredo if you weren’t there during his ascension. By the end of 2020 people had him penciled in as the kind of fighter who could challenge Demetrious Johnson’s run as the greatest Flyweight of all time. He’d only lost one fight in his life and it was surrounded by his not simply beating but mauling almost everyone he fought. He shut out Alexandre Pantoja, he choked out Tim Elliott, and people thought he might have actually murdered Joseph Benavidez. We’ve collectively forgotten how that first fight with Brandon Moreno was largely seen as a given. Figueiredo would win. It was obvious.
Nothing in his career since has been quite as obvious as one would think. He traded the belt back and forth with Moreno for two years. He went up to Bantamweight, where he was immediately one of its smallest competitors, and made it to the top five, an accomplishment that’s incredible, but tempered by having gotten there on the backs of folks like circa-2024 Cody Garbrandt.
We already spoiled the story in the quote. Deiveson, once one of the scariest fighters in the sport, has one win in the last two years. Petr Yan battered him. Cory Sandhagen shredded his knee. Umar Nurmagomedov outlanded him almost 5:1. Song Yadong wobbled him with leg kicks and choked him out in two rounds. Deiveson’s one and only win comes from beating Montel Jackson, who spent all fifteen minutes of their fight seemingly terrified of engaging--which let him lose even though Deiveson actually threw even less.
That’s the real concern, here. At Flyweight, Deiveson was a wrecking machine with the scariest hands in the division. But that wasn’t just a smaller weight class, it was back when Figueiredo was on the better side of his 30s. We talk, frequently, about the impact age has on fighters, but it’s almost always an abstract concept. It’s almost always impossible to quantify
You can quantify it here. In Deiveson Figueiredo’s last four fights, he has failed to reach double digits in significant strikes landed in a single round. In three of those four fights, he has failed to reach double digits in significant strikes landed at all.
In 2018, Deiveson Figueiredo became the only man to ever knock out Joseph Morales, a record that still stands today even as Morales is competitive with the Flyweight top ten, and everyone became justifiably terrified of Deiveson’s hands.
In 2026, Deiveson Figueiredo’s hands average 0.92 significant strikes landed per minute.
That run at Flyweight was a wonder to watch. The title quadrilogy is an exceptional legacy. The fact that he got to the top ten at a second weight class at all is a huge accomplishment. But he seems truly, profoundly done.
And the crassness of surfing Payton to the top on the bodies of broken former champions who are all at the end of the road makes this fight taste like bile to me. PAYTON TALBOTT BY TKO.
MAIN CARD: CROBOCOP
LIGHTWEIGHT: King Green (36-17-1 (1)) vs Esteban Ribovics (16-3)
At this point I'm convinced the UFC got what they wanted by jobbing King Green out to Paddy and Mauricio Ruffy and now he's part of the same non-canonical class of fighter Shara Magomedov and Michel Pereira exhibited the other week.
We just finished talking about the depressing impact of age on professional fighters, but that tends to make itself known when you’re fighting the best of the best. King Green turned 40 last month and he’s on a four-fight winning streak and that winning streak is over particularly silly competition. Lance Gibson Jr., Bellator veteran and king of Muckleshoot Fight Night. Daniel Zellhuber, one of the UFC’s fallen marketing darlings. Jeremy Stephens, who they found in a shipping crate next to the box where they keep the Ark of the Covenant. Two and a half months ago Green fought Terrance McKinney, waited patiently for his 2 1/2 minutes of battery charge to run out, and annihilated him just before the first round ended. However you slice it: Four wins, three stoppages in a row, shark tank of a division. He’s accomplished and entertaining and people know who he is. So this is where he escapes the noncanonical side of mixed martial arts, right? This is where he gets a fight that pushes him back towards the rankings?
You fool. You foolish fool. You fell into my trap. There is no hope. There is no future. There is only Esteban. Ribovics is another guy the UFC has repeatedly tried to get on track as a future star, but it just keeps failing. He barely got a split off Zellhuber, who, of course, Green beat even worse. Ribovics followed that by getting beaten by Nasrat Haqparast--who, coincidentally, Green also beat in 2022. The UFC tried to jump Esteban from a close, competitive win over Elves Brener to a top ten matchup with Mateusz Gamrot, and when Esteban got ragdolled and choked out they decided the best, most honest, most ethical thing to do, as responsible stewards of the sport, was have him fight 40 year-old half-blind 5-for-his-last-15 Edson Barboza in his retirement fight. Shockingly: Edson got knocked out. You could, in theory, have Esteban fight another of his peers and work his way back up in an attempt to wash away the stain of your own matchmaking decisions.
Or you could do this. There are roughly 115 Lightweights under the UFC’s umbrella. 8 of them are over 40. After this weekend, Esteban will have fought 25% of them in less than 3 months. Incredible how random and coincidental that is! But Green’s done better against their common opponents, he’s a bit craftier than Esteban’s straightforward approach is tailored for, and most importantly, it would be much, much funnier if he won. KING GREEN BY SUBMISSION.
WELTERWEIGHT: Roberto Soldić (21-4) vs Khaos Williams (16-5)
I’m excited for this and I’m also annoyed by it, and that serves as a reminder that while we talk about the UFC and its role in driving mixed martial arts into the ground, they’re not the only shitty drivers in the sport, they just have the biggest truck. At the end of 2021, Croatia’s Roberto “Robocop” Soldić was one of the hottest free agents in the sport. Two-division champion in Poland’s KSW, fantastic record with a score of legends under his belt. Punched out international legends like Mamed Khalidov and Michał Materla and, back in 2018, he even scored a knockout over some guy named Dricus du Plessis. When Roberto signed up with ONE Championship, it was supposed to be huge. Giant talent joins one of the UFC’s biggest competitors who, at the time, had a fucking cable television deal. Here, unabridged, is Soldić’s tenure in ONE:
August 22, 2022: Signs up with ONE as a much-ballyhooed new star
December 12, 2022: Makes his debut against the undefeated Murad Ramazanov, which ends in a No Contest after Ramazanov smashes Roberto’s dick two minutes into the fight
May 5, 2023: Wins the first round against journeyman Zebaztian Kadestam, who then shocks the world by knocking Roberto out less than a minute into the second round
February 20, 2025: Knocks out Dagi Arslanaliev in under two minutes
Leaves the company when his contract expires in August 2026
If you’re saying ‘hey, that’s only three fights in four years,’ you are correct. If you compare that against his statements about the UFC contract paying a lot less than ONE did, you may get the whole picture. ONE bid big bucks on a hot free agent because they thought they had the money to throw around, they quickly realized they were wrong, and the result was one of the most exciting fighters in the sport sitting on the bench icing his damaged groin for three years of his prime while ONE tried to pretend it wasn’t becoming a kickboxing organization. Of all things, Roberto took a sidequest between then and now to have a boxing match with former multi-time world champion Tomasz Adamek, a man who beat Eddie Chambers and lasted ten rounds against Vitali Klitschko, but got dropped in four and a half minutes by Soldić. Is this because Roberto’s a fantastic boxer? Probably less that than Adamek being almost 50.
All of which makes Khaos Williams the B-side of this matchup. Which sucks, because he’s great! He’s solid and talented and he’s hung in there at the periphery of the division for almost seven years, at this point, thanks to being absurdly tough and hitting like the big red nuclear missile carrier from Blast Corps. He’s always been a threat; he’s never been an easy out. But he’s never made it to the point of being divisionally relevant, either. Couldn’t beat Michel Pereira, couldn’t get past Randy Brown, 2025 saw him eating back-to-back losses for the first time in his career--alongside his first stoppage loss ever--at the hands of Gabriel Bonfim and Andreas Gustafsson. Even having beaten Nikolay Veretennikov this past May, Khaos is still stuck as a utility player, just consistent enough to be a threat to prospects, but not consistent enough for the company or the fans to invest in him as a prospect unto himself. He’s here to be a measuring stick.
Which makes this a surprisingly tough call. Roberto’s great, but he can be barnstormed--just ask Kadestam. His faith in his hands has gotten him cracked multiple times in his career, and Khaos is not a man you can afford to get cracked by. I still think Roberto’s got the tighter striking, and I’m still putting enough faith in him to break the no-striking-stoppages streak and knock Khaos out, but this fight could turn on a single punch. Still: ROBERTO SOLDIĆ BY TKO.
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Roman Kopylov (15-5) vs Ateba Gautier (11-1)
You had a shot, Roman. They liked you, they really did. You were a cool kickboxer with really neat combinations and just some fantastic headkick knockouts, and also you have big poofy hair so sometimes when they looked at you out of the corner of their eye they thought you were Chase Hooper and that made them happy. But you lost to Paulo Costa and they’ll never forgive you for that. They’ll use Paulo, he’s popular and fan-friendly, but they don’t like Paulo. They like his style! They like his constant being an ass on social media! But they don’t like his very publicly negotiating for his own worth, and by mid-2025 they were almost rid of him, and then you, personally, let him back into the conversation by losing to him, and now they must make you pay. That’s why they got you beat by Gregory Rodrigues. That’s why they hoped Marco Tulio would take you out, even if he failed.
And that’s why you’re fighting Ateba Gautier. Ateba was supposed to be a contender by now. He’s the big knockout guy and they threw him so many softballs in the hopes of getting over as a viral stoppage sensation they could push straight to the moon. Normally this is where I say “and then they lost,” but Ateba’s still flawless in the UFC. The problem isn’t that he lost! The problem is that he almost lost, and that spooked the crap out of management. Andrey Pulyaev was 1-1 in the UFC with a pretty unimpressive record under his belt when the UFC booked Gautier against him as a -1000 favorite so he could get another knockout, and instead Pulayev pushed him to the limit and actually won on a few media scorecards. That, alone, was enough for the UFC to send Gautier up against their favorite recurring knockout victim Ozzy Diaz, and this, too, is intended to get Gautier back in the conversation as a serious prospect.
Which is wild. He won! He won that fight. But the UFC has such a hyperfocus on marketing giant demolitions that Ateba not actually scoring a knockout was enough to demote him. Kopylov is a test. He’s right on the borderline--not so good that it would be a shock if Gautier whomps him, but just good enough that if Gautier hasn’t shored up the lack of variety and the depth of his gas tank that almost cost him against Pulyaev, Kopylov will be a problem. I am choosing to believe in that problem. ROMAN KOPYLOV BY DECISION.
PRELIMS: THE NEW REALITIES OF TALENT SCOUTING
FLYWEIGHT: Imanol Rodriguez (7-0) vs Alden Coria (13-3)
Flyweight, my beloved. They try to assail you, they try to drag you into the mud with the rest of the company, but you are bulletproof to the point that even when you are burdened with preferential marketing prospects you still give us Joshua Van. Imanol Rodriguez was another one of those favored prospects, a 5-0 fighter who got thrown onto The Ultimate Fighter 33 (jesus christ) but came up short after a split decision with eventual winner Joseph Morales, won a fight on DWCS thereafter, and was introduced to the company as a homeland hero against the 1-3 Kevin Borjas and he knocked him dead in two rounds. By contrast, Alden Coria was thirteen fights into his career as a regional standout and the UFC still only hired him because they needed a late replacement. From this, Coria has a three-fight winning streak in the company and he’s looked good every single time.
Is it unequal? Yes. Is the fight going to rule? Almost definitely. Alden seems a little too composed to fall into Imanol’s more reckless style, though. ALDEN CORIA BY DECISION.
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Damian Pinas (10-1) vs Andrey Pulyaev (10-5)
Andrey Pulyaev is doomed to be a background character in the stories of fighters the UFC likes better. His debut was a rehabilitation fight for Christian Leroy Duncan, who they are still, to this day, trying to shove into the top ten. His followup was a failed attempt to rescue Nick Klein. He got pushed up the card so he could make Ateba Gautier look good, and, as we discussed earlier, he instead made the big marketing prospect look downright mortal, and for his crimes he was sentenced to face Nursulton Ruziboev. It is late 2026 and Andrey is 1-3. Do they give him a fight on even ground? No: They give him Pinas. Damian Pinas, the new hyped knockout prospect, who is 2-0 and just took on César Almeida and knocked him out in one round. César Almeida kickboxed Alex Pereira three times, made it to a decision each time and even won once, and Pinas dropped him.
The world is not fair, and as much as I want to pick Pulyaev just for the refusal to endorse this kind of malicious matchmaking, I am kowtowing to DAMIAN PINAS BY KO.
BANTAMWEIGHT: Marcus McGhee (11-2, #15) vs Bernardo Sopaj (13-3, NR)
Marcus McGhee is a vision into the future of how the UFC will work. Right now he’s an exception, but he’s gonna be the rule. They pulled him off the regionals as a late replacement, he notched several stoppages over deeply unproven competition, and they gave him a shot at the edge of the rankings against Jonathan Martinez, who had to win ten times in the UFC to get there. But McGhee won! So they booked him, at #13, into a co-main event against former world champion and #3 contender Petr Yan, one of the best fighters on the planet, in the not-at-all subtle hope that they could replace Yan with an American fighter on an exponentially cheaper contract. This may stun you, but McGhee did not win. Do they have him fight other ranked fighters? Does he push his way up the ladder? No: He gets booked against the 2-0 Jakub Wikłacz, and when that falls through they switch him to the 1-1 John Yannis, and now, Marcus will defend the top fifteen against the assault of the 2-1 Bernardo Sopaj, who is coming off victories over no less than the 2-4 Ricky Turcios and the 2-3 Timmy Cuamba.
I worry, frequently, that my constant references to numbers and records in my writing must be at best boring and at worst grating, but this is why I do it. Joanderson Brito, who is 8-3 in the UFC, is on a three-fight winning streak and just knocked out Giga Chikadze, but there’s virtually no chance he’s getting a ranked fight next. I don’t even like Pat Sabatini, the last man to beat Joanderson, but he’s on a four-fight winning streak at Featherweight and currently unbooked. Nathaniel Wood was 11-3 and on a four-fight winning streak that included beating Losene fucking Keita and he was rewarded with an unknown debutant on the prelims of a Parisian Fight Night. The UFC wanted you to accept that Marcus McGhee vs Petr Yan was a sensible fight to make and now Bernardo Sopaj is getting a shot at the top fifteen because he beat Timmy Cuamba.
This is what it’s all going to be pretty soon. MARCUS MCGHEE BY DECISION.
HEAVYWEIGHT: Anthony Wint (8-0) vs Lucas Armand (6-0)
Hey, speaking of the terrible future of matchmaking: Remember Anthony Wint, the 5’11” Heavyweight muscleman who won a DWCS contract and then choked out a debuting guy with a terrible record on a two-week turnaround this past August? They care so much about him that they’re doing it again. Instead of taking any single Heavyweight on their roster, they want so badly to get Wint started as a prospect that they went back to the regional circuit and found themselves Lucas Armand. This is the last man Lucas fought.
Cameron is 4 for his last 20. At the end of August, he was choked out in one round by Derek Brunson-trained Nakia Stokes in his first-ever fight. It took Armand sixteen minutes to beat Cameron.
When Anthony gets up to a 4-0 record over people who’ve never won a UFC fight and gets blown out of the water by Tyrell Fortune, they will have only themselves to blame. ANTHONY WINT BY TKO.
EARLY PRELIMS: THE LONG WAY DOWN
HEAVYWEIGHT: Johnny Walker (22-10 (1), #13 at Light Heavyweight) vs Mick Parkin (10-1, NR)
Hey, speaking of the terrible future of Heavyweight: It’s This. It’s whatever This is. It’s the ongoing exodus of Light Heavyweights to somewhere, anywhere but Light Heavyweight. Johnny Walker was Light Heavyweight’s chaos elemental, a man who could score a bunch of knockouts and then injure himself doing the worm during his post-fight celebration. But for a coinflip amongst the judges, he would be in the top ten right now and preparing to fight Azamat Murzakanov. Instead? He is a big bendy Heavyweight and he gets to fuck with Mick Parkin, who rose to the border of the rankings against top competition like Mo Usman and Łukasz Brzeski before faltering against the ancient wall, Marcin Tybura, a year and a half ago. Funnily enough, Tybura just lost his own berth in the rankings against fellow fallen 205 contender Aleksandar Rakić, because the best base for mixed martial arts is always going up a weight class.
Ordinarily you worry about strength disadvantages when you move up but Johnny’s actually bigger than Parkin, along with about 3/4 of the division. If he can avoid the clinch, he’ll be fine. JOHNNY WALKER BY TKO.
LIGHTWEIGHT: Rafael dos Anjos (32-17) vs Alexander Hernandez (18-9)
Rafael, buddy, I love you, but no. Please. We can stop. You can stop. You were my favorite fighter back in the day, but that day was 2015. You are turning 42 in three weeks. You went from a world champion Lightweight and a highly competitive Welterweight contender to getting beaten by the ghost of Vicente Luque. You are 1 for your last 5. The last time we saw you was two whole years ago and your entire-ass meniscus said ‘nope’ and snapped in 90 seconds. While researching your recovery I found the interview with Helwani where you exasperatedly described needing three separate knee surgeries to repair the mistakes doctors made the first two times, and buddy, that’s not medical malpractice, that is the universe sending agents down to Earth to try to save what’s left of your expected quality of life at 50.
When I say ALEXANDER HERNANDEZ BY TKO I need you to understand that it’s not me doubting that you can still do this, it’s me hoping that you can’t, because if you can beat Hernandez it means you will stick around until the UFC can find a prospect they’re actually invested in to stripmine your bone marrow for credibility, and my heart cannot take it.
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Marvin Vettori (19-9-1) vs Ismail Naurdiev (25-8)
During the height of his power as a mixed martial artist Marvin was famous primarily for being completely delusional about his fights and wearing his shorts backwards by mistake, and the fall from said heights has somehow still been precipitous. In hindsight, Vettori’s rise up the rankings was more than a little convenient--he beat Kevin Holland coming off a loss to get his title shot--and everything since has been unfortunate. He’s 2 for his last 8, and those wins were Paulo Costa, who missed weight by twenty pounds, and Roman Dolidze, who then proceeded to beat him in a rematch two years later. Vettori used to get by on volume and aggression and now he’s dropping decisions to Brunno Ferreira. It’s tough, it’s sad, and they want to pit him out of his/their misery. Ismail Naurdiev was just exiting the UFC during his first run as a Welterweight when Vettori was on his way up, but Ismail hit the international scene as a reinvented Middleweight, came back to the UFC two years ago, and promptly returned to having middling success. He couldn’t beat the Iron Turtle, but he did knock out The Ultimate Fighter 32 (jesus christ) champion Ryan Loder when last we saw him.
And, somehow, I still have to fight the urge to pick Vettori. He’s still tough as hell, no one’s cracked his chin yet, Naurdiev isn’t always the best at managing his gas tank, and Mr. Turtle showed how a forward-pressure gameplan can shut him down. But Vettori has also just been fighting so far off from what used to make him successful that I’m not sure he still has it in him. Also, he’s an enormous asshole. ISMAIL NAURDIEV BY DECISION.
WELTERWEIGHT: Jacobe Smith (12-0) vs Bruce Whitehead (8-2)
Ah, yes, it’s our hastily-added-a-week-before-the-event -950 favorite sacrificial lamb fight. Jacobe Smith is a serious, undefeated prospect with three straight finishes in the UFC, but the audience doesn’t care yet because the people he finished were Preston Parsons, who is 2-4 and was coming off a loss, Niko Price, who is 8-11 (2) and was coming off a loss, and Josiah Harrell, who was making his UFC debut after being previously nixed because it turned out he had a deadly brain disorder that needed lifesaving surgery who is also now 0-2 in the company. So, now that it’s Jacobe’s fourth UFC fight, are we giving him a real test? Of fucking course not. Bruce Whitehead has never fought in the UFC before and his last two bouts were FuryFC gimme fights against the 9-12 Jared McLoughlin and the 7-2 Ali Abouzalam, who had, coincidentally, just come off beating 0-0 and 9-26 guys and this is the entire fucking sport now this is all it is jesus christ it’s going to take years to fix this if ever we do.
Eat your damn soup. JACOBE SMITH BY TKO.
WELTERWEIGHT: Court McGee (22-14) vs Eric Nolan (8-5)
There is no retirement plan in mixed martial arts. Court McGee has been here for sixteen fucking years. He won The Ultimate Fighter 11 (jesus christ). The list of people he’s competed against stretches all the way from pioneers of the sport who were fighting in the mid-90s to current world champions. Hell, he beat a future world champion. Twenty-five fucking fights in the UFC. All of that work, all of that effort, the decades of passion he put into the sport, the concussions, the torn muscles, the personal backstory as a former heroin addict that he let the UFC gleefully market, all of it comes to this. His retirement bout is a curtain-jerking prelim against the 0-2 Eric Nolan.
Thanks for the memories, Court. I hope you never have to get punched in the head again. COURT MCGEE BY DECISION.