SATURDAY, OCTOBER 31ST FROM THE APEX, WHICH DOESN’T DESERVE A HALLOWEEN JOKE
PRELIMS 2 PM PDT / 5 PM EDT | MAIN CARD 5 PM / 8 PM
Boy, last week was great. Did you know that if you make important fights between the best fighters you have, your fanbase will be happy and people will talk about it? It’s a fucking crazy concept, but it turns out having top people compete against each other is the basis for the way sports work.
Anyway here’s an Apex card with a Tom Nolan main event and a Jacobe Smith co-main and Mickey Gall is on it and hey where are you going come ba
MAIN EVENT: WHERE THE MONEY’S MADE
LIGHTWEIGHT: Renato Moicano (21-7-1, #12) vs Tom Nolan (11-1, #14)
I would love Renato Moicano if he weren’t an insane anarcho-capitalist.
Seriously. Fun fighter. Never hard to watch. Tried to get everyone to call him “Money” with a public support campaign on pre-crisis Twitter that included videos of him shooting a flamethrower while screaming at the top of his lungs. After Dan Hooker got destroyed by Arman Tsarukyan he called for a fight with Moicano, citing the fact that they both clearly sucked and were thus evenly matched, and instead of the usual angry trash talk, Moicano’s response was:
He's right. I fucking suck, he sucks, but the only thing he's missing is that he's way, way worse than me, you know? No knockout power, doesn't have wrestling, you know. Unfortunately for both of us, UFC's not gonna do this matchup. I think the fans would love to watch me and Hooker fight, but I don't think the UFC's making that fight. Because, let's be honest, we're both old, and they probably want to feed us to, like, young contenders, prospects, you know, to get in the rankings. Right now, Dan Hooker is the easiest way to get to the top of the rankings, you know, and I'm #10, too. So, I don't think they would do that. I think what they would do is BSD against Dan Hooker, that's the move. That's what they want.
Lucid, funny, and completely dead-on in both analysis and prediction, as two months later Benoît Saint Denis was beating the heck out of Hooker. In the extended version of that quote (which also includes four or five more “you know”s), Moicano notes that the reasoning is obvious: The UFC wants BSD in a contendership position, they were already hoping to pull it off when BSD and Moicano fought back in 2024, and Moicano spoiled it by actually, genuinely breaking Benoît’s face in front of an ashen crowd of Parisians.
And I want to love all of that! So much of this industry subsists on its fighters ingesting a steady diet of delusional levels of self-belief and slavish dedication to the idea that big organizations will reward you for your work. Moicano, in his twelfth year with the UFC, still competing with the top fifteen at 37, talking bluntly, honestly and even comedically about the realities of the industry?
That should be a gift. That should be fantastic. Watching him march into Paris and completely ruin the UFC’s hopes for their next big international star should be one of my favorite things in years!
Except then he picks up the microphone and uses his post-fight interviews to talk about how democracy is a failed concept and we need to revert to evangelical leadership and everyone needs to read von Mises and understand the Austrian school of economics, because ‘we all need to accept Jesus and his teachings into our hearts’ and ‘radical self-interest is the only acceptable engine for running society’ are in no way mutually exclusive concepts and Paris was in no way weirded out by some dude throwing their favorite fighter in a trash can before talking about how the French Revolution was bad because it tried to kill Jesus and, like, do you remember when it was notable and weird that Rich Franklin was a Young Earth Creationist?
It’s hard to avoid how much worse the sport has gotten when it makes a point out of showcasing it at every turn. Tom Nolan, I’m very sorry, but you are a symptom, too.
Thankfully, not out of a deep love of libertarianism. I have never seen a Tom Nolan political opinion, I don’t think he even has a Twitter account, and at this point in the state of the sport, that’s about as Lawful Good as it gets. Tom Nolan is only problematic in that the UFC really, really wants him to win because he’s a tall, young, cheap Australian guy and right now that’s one of their most prized sets of traits.
He came in through the Contender Series as a 5-0 23 year-old. His contract opponent, Bogdan Grad, was half a foot shorter than him and now fights at Featherweight. For his UFC debut he got Nikolas Motta, who was, at the time, 1-2 (1) and coming off a knockout loss and a No Contest. And Motta smashed Nolan! Knocked him down and pounded him out in sixty-three seconds. Great shot, great learning experience for Nolan, and a great chance for the UFC to give Motta his dues.
If you’ve read any of these before, you know how the next paragraph goes. In his next fight Motta was curtain-jerking the prelims in Macau against a man coming off a win, while Nolan was headlining the prelims in the Apex against Victor Martinez, who’d just spent more than a year on the shelf after getting knocked out. Motta, for winning that fight, got one of the toughest prospects in the sport in Nazim Sadykhov: Nolan got Alex Reyes, who was 0-2 in the UFC and recorded his last win in 2017. After that it was the 3-3-1 Viacheslav Borshchev. After that? The 2-1 Charlie Campbell, who credited 50% of his UFC wins to a victory over--if you guessed this, give yourself a point--Alex Reyes.
For beating those men, Nolan got a top fifteen matchup against Farès Ziam. Ziam had to spend four years fighting for that ranking. He had to knock out the aforementioned Sadykhov to get it. He fought competition like Mike Davis and Matt Frevola to get it. Nolan got his shot because he beat Charlie Campbell.
And now he’s got a shot at moving up the ranks against an aging former Featherweight who’s 1 for his last 3 and self-identifies as a guy who fucking sucks.
This fight feels like a check on Moicano’s ego. Nolan’s a big, lanky, offensively-minded fighter, and like a lot of big, lanky, offensively-minded fighters he gets taken down a lot. If Moicano focuses on using his jiu-jitsu advantage to punish Nolan on the ground, the same way he did to BSD and Jalin Turner, he could, and should, take this pretty handily. But Moicano doesn’t always fight to his strengths, and his tendency to throw looping shots could get him caught easily by Nolan’s range.
That said: Nolan’s reputation as a knockout artist is a little iffy, too. He has one stop in his UFC tenure, and it was Victor Martinez, who lost almost exclusively by knockout. It’s been almost six years since Moicano was stopped on strikes, and it took Rafael Fiziev to do it.
I do not think Nolan is a Fiziev. RENATO MOICANO BY SUBMISSION.
CO-MAIN EVENT: FAKE FIGHTS FOR REAL FIGHTS
WELTERWEIGHT: Randy Brown (20-8) vs Jacobe Smith (13-0)
You know what I’ve been thinking about, lately? The last time I got to write about the Diaz brothers. It felt like writing about the history of the sport in microcosm: An arc that started in the pre-mainstream breakout days of mixed martial arts, traveled through the WEC and The Ultimate Fighter and the competitive boom of Strikeforce, and ended in the modern post-buyout The Rock’s Shitty Shoes era of the business. It told a story. It was a story. The Diaz brothers, for all their ups and downs, were two of the most compelling figures the industry had to offer, and being a parasocial part of their struggle for decades was a big part of that appeal. Telling those stories was a big part of the fun of doing this.
We’re quickly running out of stories, because all of the stories are collapsing into one singular corporate monomyth.
Jacobe Smith was an undefeated twentysomething on the Contender Series two years ago. Jacobe Smith has been repeatedly highlighted by the UFC and given such favorable matchmaking that he’s 4-0 despite never once fighting anyone coming off of a UFC victory. Management was already hoping to pump him up by having him beat Kevin Holland, but Holland couldn’t make it, and the best substitute they could find was regional fighter Bruce Whitehead, who, unsurprisingly, got destroyed in a minute and a half.
From this, Jacobe gets to fight Randy Brown, the perpetually borderline-ranked veteran the UFC has kind-of sort-of given up on because he’s kept choking in his big fights. Belal Muhammad in 2017, Vicente Luque in 2020, Jack Della Maddalena in 2023, even Bryan Battle and Gabriel Bonfim and Holland himself. Brown’s had a lot of chances to turn the corner and hit his true potential as a contender, but he’s never quite gotten there. So instead, they use him to measure their prospects.
Their prospects who they keep trying to push to the top without having to deal with the potential speedbumps of the Belals and Bonfims in their respective peer groups.
You may already see the problem. Sans the socioeconomic nonsense, this is basically the same story as the main event. And that was the same story as Joaquin Buckley vs Mike Malott two weeks ago. And Brendan Allen vs Christian Leroy Duncan the week before that. And Raul Rosas Jr. vs Raoni Barcelos at the end of September. And Quillan Salkilld vs Mateusz Gamrot in August. And Magomed Ankalaev vs Bogdan Guskov in July. And like 2/3 of the White House card in June.
And all of that was skipping about a half-dozen other examples over the same timeframe.
We’re fully and totally entrenched in the assembly-line era of the UFC. Is Randy Brown a step up from Bruce Whitehead? Absolutely. Hell, that’s part of the tragedy: In a vacuum, I don’t even hate this fight. Randy is an embattled veteran on his first-ever losing streak who needs to cling as hard as he can to his spot in the division. Jacobe Smith is a seemingly solid prospect in need of a real test to figure out where he falls in the pecking order. In a vacuum, this match-up makes sense.
But it isn’t happening in a vacuum, it’s happening over the backdrop of this being the only thing we really do anymore, and that makes the product worse than exhausting: It makes it indistinguishable. When everything the Play-Doh Superstar-Maker extrudes looks the same, nothing stands out.
For ruining my ability to enjoy a big angry wrestler who ragdolls people and punches them until they explode into a shower of coins, I cannot forgive the company. Consequently, I choose spite. RANDY BROWN BY DECISION. Randy’s takedown defense is solid and his range advantage is substantial, and the last time Jacobe had to fight into a second round Niko Price gave him some trouble. I’m gonna hope Randy can do better.
MAIN CARD: VIOLENT NEUTRALITY
FLYWEIGHT: Ode’ Osbourne (13-9 (2)) vs Cody Durden (18-11-1)
Last year we talked about Cody Brundage vs Julian Marquez as an example of the UFC sometimes just shrugging and having the guys they keep around to lose to other people fight each other to see which one survives. This is the Flyweight equivalent. Ode’ Osbourne is 2 for his last 8. Cody Durden is 2 for his last 9. It’s already difficult to call any mixed martial artist at the UFC level Bad--although not as difficult as it used to be, unfortunately--and it’s especially crazy to do so at Flyweight, where even the least successful competitors are more well-rounded than most of the Light Heavyweight top fifteen.
But losing is still losing. Ode’ can be incredibly fast and when he lands cleanly he’s a really effective striker. Hell, he’s the only person to ever knock out Luis Gurule, and that man is a living brawling elemental. Cody Durden is a bruising wrestler who broke my heart this year by beating Jafel Filho, which means I am legally incapable of saying anything bad about him. Both Ode’ and Cody beat Charles Johnson, who holds knockout victories over major contender Lone’er Kavanagh and literal world champion Joshua Van. That’s Flyweight. Even its least successful fighters are good enough that they can compete with the best of the best.
Unfortunately, that means consistency is key, and when you’re so inconsistent in your performances that you fall below a 50/50 record with the company, you wind up here. Durden’s tougher than he gets credit for and Ode’s good as hell, but I think Ode’s tendency to get rolled by strong grapplers will cost him if Durden remembers to wrestle. CODY DURDEN BY DECISION.
WOMEN’S BANTAMWEIGHT: Yana Santos (17-8 (1), #6) vs Luana Santos (11-2, #7)
I mean, sure, it’s a top ten fight in a division that barely gets oxygen between a former title challenger and a rising prospect and both women are on solid three-fight winning streaks over top ten competition, but have you considered that neither of them are Jacobe Smith and therefore they don’t deserve a co-main event in the Apex? Have you considered that there might be bigger priorities than figuring out contendership at a division whose first title fight in almost a year and a half is only two weeks away? Gosh, it’s like you’re not even trying.
In fairness: Both women in this Santos v Santos situation may be on winning streaks, but they do give away how unfortunate things have gotten around Women’s Bantamweight. Yana’s a goddamn seventeen-year veteran of the sport who’s shared the cage with numerous champions, but in the present, her three-fight streak not only spans more than three years, it includes Chelsea Chandler, who only just recorded her first actual 135-pound wins in 2026, and Miesha Tate, who is 2 for 7 across the last decade. She did beat Macy Chiasson! But Macy, once right on the verge of a title shot, is now on a lengthy losing skid and struggling to make weight for the division.
Luana’s newer and fresher and has a greater tendency to get the finishes the UFC must feed upon to sustain their defiance of nature and reason, and at 6-1 overall she’s a sizable favorite, but those numbers, too, are iffy on closer examination. My unironic Juliana Miller fandom does not make her any less of a 50/50 fighter. Stephanie Egger is still 8-6. Mariya Agapova is winless in her last eight matchups across four separate combat sports. Tainara Lisboa hasn’t beaten anyone who’s recorded a UFC victory in the last half-decade. I still want to boost Melissa Croden, but two weeks ago I watched her beat up Chelsea Chandler before walking right into a submission loss and I’m still mad about it. Like Yana, Luana’s best win is her last against former contender Karol Rosa, but like Macy, Karol’s on a bad run to the point that it’s been five years since her last pair of back-to-back victories.
But one of said victories was a split over Yana, so by the transitive properties of MMAth, Luana should have this in the bag. I can’t help rooting for Yana--I’ve been following her for too long--but her takedown defense has always failed her, to the point that there’s only actually one person in her entire UFC career who failed to take her down in a fight if they bothered to try. (It was Julija Stoliarenko. Sorry, Julija.) Luana is too solid a wrestling threat not to make Yana struggle with it for fifteen minutes. LUANA SANTOS BY DECISION.
WELTERWEIGHT: Jean-Paul Lebosnoyani (11-2) vs Farman Hasanov (5-0)
I’ve seen people kind of upset about this match-up, and all of them are doing it because they think Jean-Paul Lebosnoyani is a serious prospect who deserves a serious challenge. And I get it! But, for once, I get the UFC’s take, too. Lebosnoyani is 2-0 in the company and he’s already demonstrated a lot of promise, but the case for him is still pretty shaky: One of those two was Phil Rowe, which despite Rowe’s fairly middling UFC run came down to a split decision, and the other was Seokhyeon Ko, who was coming off a victory...over Phil Rowe.
Neither win was bad! But neither was hype-inducing. So the UFC’s taking another bite at the apple, and they’re using Farman Hasanov to do it. Farman got hired as a conveniently local short-notice participant for the UFC’s annual trip to Baku this year, despite having only four fights (or five, if you count Baku’s Iron Fist Fighting Championship, a short-lived organization the Tapology database has flagged en masse for fight-fixing), and he battled main eventer Tom’s older brother Eric Nolan and beat him by taking him down seventeen times in fifteen minutes.
You can, through reading that sentence, understand why the UFC would like to use him as a stepping stone instead of allowing him to gain any momentum. Jean-Paul’s takedown defense has held up, statistically-speaking, but that’s very easy to say when he’s only had three fights and only one of them involved defending takedowns at all. JEAN-PAUL LEBOSNOYANI BY DECISION still feels like the call, given the one-dimensional nature of Farman’s assault, but if he puts on another wrestling clinic, I would take a grim satisfaction from it.
PRELIMS: OUT OF JUICE
LIGHTWEIGHT: Francis Marshall (10-3) vs Dakota Hope (11-2)
Sometimes you just have to keep winning and hope they eventually let you stop spinning your wheels. Francis Marshall should be on a four-fight winning streak right now, but he lost a split decision to TUF 32 (jesus christ) champion Mairon Santos that was widely agreed to be the worst robbery of 2025, and since then he’s been on random puzzle-piece duty. He was supposed to fight 0-1 DWCS winner Austin Bashi, when that fell through he got the 0-2 Erik Silva instead, after beating him it was the newly-debuting Lucas Brennan, after beating him he was supposed to face the at least moderately successful Gaston Bolaños, but when that fell through it became Dakota Hope, who made his debut this past April and promptly dropped a decision to Kai Kamaka III. Marshall has 4 UFC wins that should be 5, and for the third time in a row he’s facing someone who’s never won a fight in the company.
There is nothing wrong with the matchmaking department. FRANCIS MARSHALL BY DECISION.
WELTERWEIGHT: Rodrigo Sezinando (8-2) vs Theodor Berggren (8-4)
Speaking of both weird matchmaking and The Ultimate Fighter, there’s whatever the hell this is. Rodrigo Sezinando was the runner-up for TUF 33 (jesus christ) last year after a successful run as the Welterweight champion of Canada, which remains a sentence that somehow feels like a backhanded compliment, but the universe chose to balance the scales by seeing him brutally knocked out by Daniil Donchenko in the TUF finals. A hair under a year later, having already made a successful debut on the main roster, Donchenko was supposed to fight Andreas Gustafsson during the company’s trip to Baku. Pre-fight medicals revealed Andreas had a potentially fatal heart condition, which led to his retirement. Instead Donchenko fought Theodor Berggren, a journeyman who’d had a cup of coffee in Cage Warriors. Unsurprisingly, Donchenko outstruck him almost 3:1 and knocked him out in the second round.
So now the UFC has two guys whose entire body of work in the company is ‘got knocked out by Daniil Donchenko,’ and they have decided they should fight each other to see who goes home with the lineal Got Knocked Out By Daniil Donchenko championship. RODRIGO SEZINANDO BY SUBMISSION.
FEATHERWEIGHT: Julian Erosa (31-13) vs JeongYeong Lee (11-3)
This is the end of the road for Julian “Juicy J” Erosa. He’s not broken down in his old age or facing harsh truths after getting repeatedly knocked out in boxing matches: He’s 37, training is getting harder, he just had a child and he wants to move his family out of Vegas and move on with his life. For someone whose fighting style was built around wild finishing rushes and flying knees and leaping on chokes every time he thought he had a chance, it’s one of the sanest retirement pitches I’ve heard in the sport. There’s some really good feathers in that cap, too. He may not have made it to contendership, but managing to not just beat but stop Jamall Emmers, Nate Landwehr, Charles Jourdain, Christian Rodriguez and Sean Woodson is an exceptional accomplishment. Hell of a competitor, hell of a run, and I am always happy whenever a fighter decides they’ve simply had enough and it’s time to cash out while they still have their health and their future.
He said he almost hopes he loses, because it’s a lot easier to call it quits on a loss than a win. For sake of the memories, I’m going to hope life makes it hard on him one more time. JULIAN EROSA BY TKO.
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Zach Reese (10-4) vs Mickey Gall (7-7)
(Editing note: This was on the main card, and then Azamat Bekoev passed out in the middle of a CVS from anaphylaxis and his fight with Andre Petroski got scratched, and despite having the entire week to find a replacement they just cut the main card to five fights and plopped this down in the middle of the prelims. Enjoy this oversized prelim writeup.)
Yeah. Yeah, okay. Sure.
Last month we talked about the UFC setting up Sedriques Dumas vs Mickey Gall in what I called quite possibly the conceptually worst fight we’ve ever covered. It got scratched 48 hours before the event when Gall’s pre-fight medicals turned up a brain aneurysm, and in the intervening month that turned out to be a misdiagnosis of what are in reality just oddly sized brain-veins. But Sedriques took a last-minute fight with Luis “The Stache” Hernandez--which, you will be shocked to hear, he lost almost instantaneously--so the UFC moved up to the other lanky Middleweight who loses too much that they really want to see get a win, Zach Reese, who currently stands at 4-4 (1), with the sole No Contest coming from, in fact, Sedriques Dumas, who couldn’t continue after Reese kicked him in the jimmy less than a minute in. Reese dropped a split decision to the recently-released Michel Pereira at the start of the year and got knocked out by Ryan Gandra three months ago, which means it’s time to make him fight again, clearly.
And then, there’s Mickey. Oh, Mickey. They hired you to lose to CM Punk, and when that didn’t work they tried to get you to lose to Sage Northcutt, and when that didn’t work they kind of gave up. Go make Randy Brown look good. Go become the last person Diego Sanchez ever beat. Go fight Mikes Perry and Malott. Go move up to Middleweight so Sedriques Dumas has a reason to be here. Gall’s always been a solid grappler and there’s a permutation of reality wherein he got a chance to really develop as a fighter and turned into a contender. But here, in the prime universe, Mickey was brought into the fold as part of a dumb publicity stunt and then they had a 23 year-old with four professional fights on the roster and went ‘have him start fighting guys with five times his experience.’ It got scratched for injuries before fight day, but when Gall was 6-2 and just one fight separated from that Diego loss the UFC scheduled him against Carlos fucking Condit.
Dude hasn’t had an easy fight booked since 2016. Dude only has one win since 2019. Dude hasn’t competed at 185 pounds since an amateur fight in 2014. The very openly stated intention here is for Reese to destroy him, which he absolutely should have no problem doing. Thus, MICKEY GALL BY SUBMISSION.
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Nick Klein (6-3) vs Joe Kropschot (9-3)
The Contender Series gets a lot of hype trains, but few felt as out of place as Nick Klein’s. When he won his contract back in 2024 there was a strange amount of social media energy put into him--how much was intentional astroturfing and how much was people squinting and thinking he was Sean O’Malley, I do not know--but I looked at him, saw a guy who got his shot at a contract for beating the 22-22 Cory Simpson in the main event of a card named Thanksgiving Throwdown that consisted almost exclusively of people with losing records being used to pad the resumes of rookies, and wondered what we were collectively doing. Klein proceeded to spend his 2025 getting repeatedly knocked out. After more than a year on the shelf, his return is against 2026’s model of DWCS winner, Joe “The Land Animal” Kropschot, whom I must appreciate from a nickname perspective alone. The record’s a bit shaky, with all of his losses coming from a three-fight skid during 2019-2021 that included stoppage losses to eventual UFC washout Orion Cosce and current journeyman Cody Brundage, but Kropschot’s career was young, and sticking to it after a losing streak like that is a sign of success in itself. Granted, he, too, got on the radar for beating Bellator veteran Mauricio Alonso when he was 44 years old, but he wrangled the LFA’s Middleweight title afterward, which is already more than most folks do before getting the call up.
Both men are grappling stylists, so there’s a chance Kropschot runs into a wall here, but I think he’s the better fighter overall and I’m hoping for some neat jiu-jitsu exchanges before we eventually get to the ground-and-pound. JOE KROPSCHOT BY TKO.
WOMEN’S STRAWWEIGHT: Talita Alencar (8-1-1) vs Piera Rodriguez (12-2)
Ordinarily, when you talk about how much it can take for a fighter’s career to recover from a loss, you are talking about a particularly devastating knockout or a really neat submission or the kind of badly-timed, momentum-killing reversal of fortune that that leaves someone having to rebuild their career. In a sport as young as mixed martial arts, you are only ever as good as the last thing people remember you for. It took two and a half years and three wins for Piera Rodriguez to stop being the lady who got DQed for headbutting Ariane Carnelossi, pausing as the referee told her not to do it again, and immediately doing it again. It is one of the most blatant fouls in modern MMA history, and it is, still, incredibly funny that she blames Carnelossi for it. But now she’s on a winning streak, and she just beat Sam Hughes for the second time in the UFC, for some reason, so now she gets to fight a real prospect again. Talita Alencar got off to a bit of a rough start in the company herself, thanks to a really bad decision victory over Invicta champ Rayanne dos Santos and a loss to Stephanie Luciano, but since then it’s been three fairly solid wins--including, funnily enough, a submission over Carnelossi.
On paper, I think Piera takes this. She’s bigger, she’s stronger, she fights a lot meaner, and the only person to really legitimately beat her was Gillian Robertson, one of the best grapplers in the division. She should be able to control Talita. In practice? Weird hunch I refuse to let go of. TALITA ALENCAR BY SUBMISSION.
WOMEN’S BANTAMWEIGHT: Tainara Lisboa (7-4) vs Lucia Szabová (12-0)
Hey, remember way back in the main card when we talked about Tainara Lisboa, and how she hasn’t beaten anyone with a UFC win in the last half-decade, and she’s now seemingly in a position where they trot her out just to lose to women they’re actually interested in? Lucia Szabová is the undefeated champion of Poland’s OKTAGON, one of the literal only international prospects at Women’s Bantamweight that anyone has heard of, and a historically strong wrestler and grappler who’s really good at mauling people, including UFC veteran Lucie Pudilová, whom she beat this past August. Guess who the UFC gave Szabová for her debut?
Thanks, predictability. LUCIA SZABOVÁ BY TKO.