CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 45: WAIT, WHAT TIME IS IT

UFC Fight Night: Lewis vs Spivac

FEBRUARY 4TH, 2023 FROM THE UFC APEX ARENA IN LAS VEGAS, NEVADA

FUCKED UP STARTING TIME WARNING: PRELIMS 7:00 PM PST/10:00 PM EST VIA ESPN+ | MAIN CARD 10 PM PST/1 AM EST VIA ESPN+

So here's what happened. Towards the end of November, news surfaced that the UFC was targeting their first card back in Seoul, South Korea since the pre-pandemic days, with international superstar "The Korean Zombie" Chan Sung Jung headlining. Unfortunately, on December 7th, Jung announced he had dislocated the shit out of his shoulder and wouldn't be able to compete. The UFC, uncertain about their ability to fill a stadium without their regional hero, cancelled their not-yet-even-announced travel plans but decided to keep the Korean-appeal card they'd planned intact--along with its original, Korea-friendly broadcast time. And that is how we arrive at this weird Frankenstein's Monster of a card: An American show, airing out of the Apex arena in Vegas, with a card almost entirely populated by non-American fighters except for a main event plucked out of its last-minute scratching two months ago, and its main event will be starting around the time its home state goes to bed.

2023, everyone. It's only going to get weirder from here.

MAIN EVENT: THANKSGIVING LEFTOVERS
HEAVYWEIGHT: Derrick Lewis (26-10, #7) vs Serghei Spivac (15-3, #12)

This fight was originally scheduled to headline the Fight Night on November 19th of last year, but the fight was scratched while its own card was airing after Lewis was hospitalized with stomach issues. Reportedly Lewis checked himself out of the hospital and tried to come back to the arena to fight regardless, but saner heads prevailed and the world just had to make due with UFC Fight Night: Nzechukwu vs Cuțelaba.

So who cares that it's February, we still have some Thanksgiving turkey wrapped up in the back of the fridge and we're reheating it whether you like it or not. Neither the circumstances nor analysis of this fight have changed, so I'm joining the UFC and airing a re-run. Here's the breakdown I wrote for the fight:

Two weeks ago, in recognition of a fight that ultimately wound up not actually happening, I wrote this about the heavyweight division:

“I rag on the heavyweight division on an almost weekly basis, and to be clear, there's a very good reason--it's bad--but aside from the world's obsession with large men doing large man things, the heavyweight division isn't bereft of value. The zero-sum game of fighting at heavyweight is in its own way an example of purity in mixed martial arts technique. When leaning into a punch or allowing someone to take your back can be an instantaneous fight-ender just because they're so fucking big and strong that a single mistake puts you in an intractable position, every single maneuver matters that much more. There's a reason the Cro-Cop high kick and the Ngannou rip-your-goddamn-head-off haymaker become part of the mythological core of the sport.”

That's still inherently true. Heavyweight, and the lack of room for mistakes at heavyweight, lends itself to a certain sort of ultra-determinism. It's a big part of why heavyweight fighters even from past eras can still feel vital in ways the standouts of other divisions just don't. A 2001-era Dave Menne would be compacted into an easily portable size by essentially anyone on the UFC's middleweight roster altogether, but the Josh Barnett who won the heavyweight championship in 2002 could still make the top ten. Hell, the Josh Barnett of today who's 45 and hasn't fought in six years would have a fairly reasonable shot. Fedor Emelianenko is still disposing of Bellator heavyweights, Alistair Overeem and Andrei Arlovski are in their third decades of combat sports competition and Dan Severn was fighting and ragdolling regional heavyweights into his mid-fifties.

They still win fights--some of them, anyway--because as long as you still have power and some semblance of your athleticism left, all it takes at heavyweight is your opponent making a mistake. If Timothy Johnson charges in with his hands down it doesn't matter that Fedor is old enough to remember when Zimbabwe was Southern Rhodesia, he can still punch fast and hard enough to knock him out.

But there's a key here: You have to be able to do multiple things. 45 year-old Josh Barnett is still an incredibly dangerous catch wrestler. Alistair Overeem can still knee the armor off a tank in the clinch. An aging heavyweight's ability to punch people to death is in some part predicated on how realistic it is that their opponent is worried about them doing literally anything else.

Derrick "The Black Beast" Lewis is only 37. He's only lost three of his last eight fights, and two of those losses came against top contenders. One of his wins was an incredibly violent knockout victory of another, different top contender. By any metric, he's still a very, very successful heavyweight. And a lot of people are already writing his career's eulogy anyway, because boy, Derrick Lewis really only does the one thing, and the moment that one thing seems to stop working, it becomes incredibly difficult to imagine him sticking around.

And that, in itself, is a very strange feeling, because Derrick Lewis feels like he's been around forever. His ridiculous knockout power has been a staple of the UFC's heavyweight division since 2014, and between then and now, there's only been one calendar year in which Lewis didn't knock at least one person completely fucking stupid with his hamhock fists. When Derrick Lewis scored his first UFC knockout, Cain Velasquez was the UFC champion and Fabrício Werdum was just a handful of months away from knocking out Mark Hunt to become his top contender; nearly a decade later Mark Hunt is closing in on 50 and having boxing exhibitions with rugby players, no one knows if Fabrício Werdum is retired, Cain Velasquez had enough time to retire, have a professional wrestling career and get arrested for attempted homicide, and Derrick Lewis is still goddamn here, in the top ten, where he's been all this time.

But 2022 isn't just the second year he hasn't knocked anyone out, it's the first year he hasn't won a single fight. In February he got knocked out cold by Tai Tuivasa in two rounds; in July, he got faceplanted by Sergei Pavlovich in under a minute. There's no shame in this, both men are prolific knockout artists, but they represented a terrifying new reality in his career. Derrick Lewis has been knocked out multiple times, but those losses were either against perceived physical specimens like Matt Mitrione or, more commonly, much more technically capable strikers. Shawn Jordan's hook kicks, Mark Hunt and Junior dos Santos's boxing expertise, Ciryl Gane's masterful kickboxing technique: There were clear throughlines, both mechanically and narratively, for how they successfully outclassed Lewis and his brawling style.

Tai Tuivasa didn't outclass him, he stood in his face and went blow for blow with him until Lewis stopped moving. Sergei Pavlovich didn't defeat Derrick Lewis with technical prowess and his reach advantage, he charged right into him and punched him loopy.

That's where the fear sets in. If Derrick Lewis is losing because of the holes in his style, that's just the normal way of the sport. If Derrick Lewis is losing because other fighters can be a better Derrick Lewis than him, what is there left for Derrick Lewis to be?

This is, in all likelihood, why the UFC is trying to stave off this existential crisis for a few more months. After four straight fights against dangerous striking stylists, Lewis gets to fight Sergey Spivac, which the UFC has decided to spell with a Y and C instead of an I and K this month because Cyrillic transliteration is a fun game. Spivac's been in the UFC for three and a half years and this is his first main event, primarily because it's the first time he's had a real argument for any kind of burgeoning divisional relevancy. His first two years in the UFC were characterized by give and take, narrow decisions, and getting blown out of the water by the hype train that was Tom Aspinall.

Spivac didn't get much of a spotlight until the UFC tried to use him as a do-or-die stepping stone for Dana White's favorite domestic assault enthusiast Greg Hardy--and Spivac manhandled Hardy so thoroughly the UFC gave up on him completely, automatically making Spivac the greatest heavyweight to ever live. He followed this up with a similarly complete domination of the once-highly-touted Augusto Sakai, a kickboxing specialist who had fallen on hard times, doling out a ground-and-pound clinic that ultimately stopped in the second round when the referee decided a 50-2 striking differential was probably a good reason to call the fight off.

There's an obvious throughline here: Spivac is exceptionally dominant as long as he can get fights to the ground. When he's crushing people with his top control and his relentless ground and pound and threats of arm triangles, he's a killer. He tapped out Tai Tuivasa, he pounded out Jared Vanderaa, he even threatened grapple grandpa Aleksei Oleinik himself with chokes on the floor between elbowing his face open. The ground is his home. Every time he has not been able to successfully control his opponent in grappling positions, he's lost.

In other words: This fight isn't a referendum on if Derrick Lewis can still survive a brawl, it's a referendum on if Derrick Lewis can still stay on his feet.

The oddsmakers have Spivac as the favorite and Lewis as a +150-200 underdog. I get why--repeated knockouts lower anyone's stock--but, respectfully, I think they're crazy. We're only a year and a half out from Derrick Lewis facing one of the fastest, most powerful wrestlers in the division in Curtis Blaydes, stuffing his first three takedown attempts with his own defensive wrestling and stuffing his fourth and final takedown attempt by uppercuting his head into the god damned sun. Sergey isn't an iron-chinned brawler like Tuivasa or a hulking punching machine like Pavlovich, he's a pretty conventional grappler who's gotten repeatedly knocked out, and while I will always love him for ridding us of Greg Hardy, I don't think this is going to go well for him at all. Derrick Lewis by KO.

CO-MAIN EVENT: FINDING THE CEILING
LIGHT-HEAVYWEIGHT: Da-Un Jung (15-3-1) vs Devin Clark (13-7)

Sometimes you test a prospect to see how they rank against the top fifteen of a division and they just don't make it. When they fail, you're left with a choice: Try to rehabilitate the prospect, or extract as much value from them as you can on their way down. This fight is, unmistakably, the UFC sending a one-man team into the deep jungles of the Apex with a singular mission in mind: Save Da-Un Jung.

Da-Un Jung, who got the nickname "Sseda" from his trainers at Korean Top Team (it means "Strong," which, IJ have to be honest, is disappointingly normal and non-animal-based for a roster that sports monikers like "Mr. Shark," "Iron Turtle" and "Diadem Spider") was one of the top prospects out of the entirety of Korea until a couple of years ago. Aside from two losses during his rookie year of competition, Jung had rattled off ten straight victories across heavyweight and light-heavyweight alike across South Korea, China and Japan. On one hand, ten wins in a row and a regional championship are difficult under any circumstance. On the other, the competition above 170 pounds gets very, very thin when you get to the regional scene of the Eastern Hemisphere, and when you're eight fights into your professional career and doing battle with the 0-3 Hyun Soo Lee, or the 0-5 welterweight Yuto Nakajima, or a debuting fighter who never competed again known only as Hulk, it's easy to doubt your skills.

So when the UFC flew him over in 2019 and he immediately choked out M-1 champion Khadis Ibragimov and beat the stuffing out of Contender Series winner Mike Rodriguez, the world breathed a sigh of relief. Da-Un Jung looks like the kind of light-heavyweight prospect everyone loves: 6'4", defensively sound, technically sensible boxing, quick grappling. The UFC had stars in their eyes at the prospect of a Korean contender in their favorite weight class, and as with so many prospects before him, they booked Jung against their favorite springboard, the at the time 0-4 Sam Alvey. And Sam Alvey did the only thing he does better than losing: Ruining everything. Alvey's leg kicks and footwork outpaced Jung for the first two rounds, and while Jung dropped and wobbled him in the third, Alvey had a fairly clear claim to a decision--but some unusually generous judging handed down a split draw. Sam Alvey got screwed. I take no pleasure in reporting this.

But Jung was still, technically, undefeated in the UFC. Management, minding the speedbump, gave him a gentle step up with muscle golem William Knight in his next bout, but after passing that test, Jung scored his best UFC performance yet by meeting a solid prospect in Kennedy Nzechukwu, who at 9-1 had never been knocked out, and crushing him in three minutes with standing elbows. It was a huge victory, it announced him as one of the stiffest knockout threats in the division, and it punched his ticket to a top fifteen matchup. And he got it last July when Dustin Jacoby dropped him for the first knockout loss of his career in, funnily enough, three minutes. Jung and his corner protested an early stoppage, but no one bit. Suddenly South Korea's top prospect, who went five fights in the UFC's premier division without a loss, is fighting on his back foot for the first time in seven years.

And that's where Devin Clark comes in. "Brown Bear" has been bouncing around the UFC since mid-2016, giving him a longer tenure than half the male champions in the company, and it's been an eclectic run that's seen him compete as low as middleweight and as high as heavyweight. He's battled jobbers and top contenders, he's dined with saints and sinners, he even won a round against a world champion once. And after that long, winding journey through the waving tides of martial combat, he is a perfectly balanced 7-7 in the UFC. He is so committed to that centralized balance that he has continually fought to protect it: After most of a decade of competition in the biggest combat sports organization on the planet, Devin Clark has somehow managed to never string together more than two consecutive wins or losses. He is the take-a-penny, give-a-penny of facepunching.

Which is, quite frankly, a perfect encapsulation of his identity as a fighter, not just for his place in the canon but his style. Devin Clark relies on physicality. He's okay at a distance--his leg kicking game is a little underrated--and he's very good up close, where he can bully people into the pocket, shoot power doubles and beat them up in the clinch. But filling the distance between them is an exercise in wild, swimming hooks and awkward approaches. He's gotten absolutely chewed up in exchanges in the middle distance in a half-dozen fights--even a couple that he won!--because once he's in motion, he plows forward even if it means getting his face punched shut, or diving into a guillotine, or having his liver surgically removed by a left hook.

His fights are, most often, pass/fail bullying exams. If he can force someone into the fence, if he can drag them to the ground, if he can bother them with half-aimed haymakers, he can win. In 2018 he almost stopped future top contender Aleksandar Rakić in what would have been by far the best victory of his career, but he couldn't stop himself from wading forward and throwing wildly and it got him backfisted and dropped facefirst to the canvas. That is Devin Clark in a nutshell: Durable, gritty, but too predictable for his own good.

That's why the UFC keeps putting him up against the prospects they care about. Ryan Spann, Alonzo Menifield, Azamat Murzakanov; Clark is a fighter they can count on to lose to most of the really good people while carrying enough credibility to boost people they want to market. Da-Un Jung could have fought Marcin Prachnio or Nicolae Negumereanu or Maxim Grishin. But that wouldn't have served the right purposes.

And it should work. Clark has trouble with distance and Jung is a distance fighter. His best performances come from sticking out the jab, frustrating people into coming forward and cracking them with his back hand. He's tough to take down, he's tough to control in the clinch and he's a much more dangerous boxer. Clark's durable as hell and his mobility could give Jung fits if he gets the chance to use it, but honestly--I doubt it. Da-Un Jung by decision.

MAIN CARD: MEN OF VARYING SIZE
HEAVYWEIGHT: Marcin Tybura (23-7, #10) vs Blagoy Ivanov (19-4 (1), #14)

I know I regularly say heavyweight fights are going to be bad just by virtue of being at heavyweight, but that would be shortchanging these fighters. This fight is going to be dreadful to watch and they're accomplishing it all on their own.

Marcin Tybura is somehow both on the best run of his UFC career and on a skid. The first half of Tybur's UFC tenure was a less than stellar 4-5--it turns out being a big, physical wrestler whose success is almost solely tied to getting people down and pounding on them doesn't work nearly as well when you're fighting Fabrício Werdum or Derrick Lewis--but thanks to the slightest tightening of his standup and some shaky competition, Tybura is 6-1 over the last three years. The only blemish on his record comes from an overmatched performance against Alexander Volkov, but Tybura also got a gift decision in his last fight against Alexandr Romanov, which was near-unanimously scored a draw by media. This is the zero-sum nature of the Marcin Tybura gameplan. If he can drag you to the floor and get on top of you, he'll almost always win. If he can't, he's left clinching you against the cage and hoping to run out the clock before you hit him too much.

Blagoy Ivanov is destined to never get his roses. "Baga" has, objectively, had an incredible career. Before Fabrício Werdum made it fashionable, Blagoy Ivanov was ending Fedor's undefeated streak by beating him in Combat Sambo. He was en route to becoming Bellator's heavyweight champion when he was stabbed in the chest during a bar fight, nearly died twice, was in a coma for two months and ultimately lost almost all of his muscle mass; just over a year later he was winning mixed martial arts fights again. He made it to the Bellator tournament finals before taking the first loss of his career, he dominated the World Series of Fighting, and as a UFC heavyweight in his mid-thirties he's defeated a top contender in Tai Tuivasa, taken Derrick Lewis to a split decision and gotten screwed out of another. There is a world where Blagoy Ivanov was a world champion more than a decade ago. Instead, he is a borderline-ranked fighter struggling to stay afloat, and his athleticism has deteriorated enough that his primary offense is clinching.

In other words: We have two grapplers, both of whom are almost certainly good enough to not get taken down by the other, both of whom are visibly uncomfortable with prolonged striking exchanges, and both of whom have a Plan B of cage clinching to run out the clock. This is, almost certainly, going to be a very difficult fight to sit through. Blagoy Ivanov by decision, as I believe his clinch game is a bit stronger, but I'm not expecting anything, here.

FEATHERWEIGHT: Doo Ho Choi (14-4) vs Kyle Nelson (13-5)

This, on the other hand, should be fun. But I cannot sufficiently stress the 'should,' because no one will know what Doo Ho Choi we're getting until he's in the cage.

"The Korean Superboy" Doo Ho Choi was at one point a massively, massively hyped featherweight prospect, a 13-1 wrecking machine with a six-year undefeated streak and a laser beam for a right hand. He had a wrestling and judo background that could theoretically help him deal with grappling challenges, but after three straight UFC victories by effortless first-round knockouts, he really didn't seem to need them. But it was his fight-of-the-year candidate against Cub Swanson, a back-and-forth battle that saw both men repeatedly nearly finishing one another, that made Choi a real name in the mixed martial arts community. Even in finally losing, the world was open to him. And then he got injured and disappeared for more than a year, and got knocked out twice in a row while struggling to schedule his state-mandated military service, and then said service kept him out of action for two years, and then he got injured on the comeback trail and was out of action for another year and a half.

In other words: He's Schrodinger's Superboy. He looked like an incredible fighter in 2016, but 2016 was three Presidents ago. Doo Ho Choi's last mixed martial arts fight was more than three years ago. It's not enough to say no one he's beaten is in the UFC anymore: No one he's beaten has been in the UFC for the past six years. The last time Choi was in the cage, Joker was taking the cinematic world by storm. The last time Choi was successfully relevant, George Michael was alive.

And that's why the UFC is giving him a tune-up. Kyle "The Monster" Nelson was brought to the UFC in 2018 as a last-minute replacement FOR a last-minute replacement, and like so many before him, he took the deal because it meant a contact with other, better opportunities in the biggest combat sports organization on Earth. Four and a half years later, he's gone 1-4, his career's saving grace a 2019 knockout over the briefly promising but brawling-addicted Polo Reyes. Nelson's defining feature in the UFC is his ability to take punishment, which is, as always, the single worst defining feature any fighter can have. Ironically, Nelson's last appearance was by far the best he's looked in the UFC--a three-round fight with the bigger, scarier Jai Herbert, where Nelson worked behind leg and body kicks and managed to avoid getting dropped or stopped against a legitimate knockout puncher.

But he still lost. The UFC is hoping he's going to lose again. On paper, it's a solid bet. Choi's got better boxing, better grappling and more than enough stopping power to put Nelson on his face. Or--he did. Does he still have that now, three years of inactivity later? I have no Earthly idea, and anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar. It's fully feasible Choi looks like he never missed a step and this fight is over in ninety seconds. It's fully feasible that Doo Ho Choi was getting lit up by Jeremy Stephens and Charles Jourdain before his departure and that trend will only worsen after his three years on Monuriki. I'm still picking Doo Ho Choi by TKO, but I'd be lying if I told you it was from an analytical perspective. I just want him to be as good as he promised to be when I was still in my twenties.

WELTERWEIGHT: Yusaku Kinoshita (6-1) vs Adam Fugitt (8-3)

Yusaku Kinoshita's great flaw is being too in love with hitting people. He's a big-punching welterweight who was on the verge of a shot at the King of Pancrase championship in his native Japan, but passed it up to instead fight on the much more prestigious Dana White's Contender Series, and to be honest, that sentence is factually accurate and it makes me want to cry. Logistically, Kinoshita is a perfect 7-0; his one loss comes from a disqualification in his sole appearance with Rizin, where he destroyed Ryuichiro Sumimura, punched him into near-unconsciousness and finished the job by repeatedly stomping on his head. To be clear, the head-stomping was perfectly fine--but while slamming his entire bodyweight down onto a man's head with his heel he maintained his balance by steadying himself with a grip on the fence and that is just unacceptable.

The UFC still hasn't quite figured out what they're doing with Adam Fugitt. He's a regional talent who was barely on the UFC's radar--in ten professional bouts he'd only actually fought one person with a winning record who wasn't a rookie--but he was picked up as a last-minute replacement for major prospect Michael Morales, and he put up a solid fight and at one point even scored a takedown on the seemingly superior grappler, but, uh, it was 1 out of his 8 attempts, and he got knocked down twice in the process before getting stopped in the third. As happens so often, Fugitt is a warm body on the roster to test people the company finds interesting, and the UFC doesn't really have any great plans for him unless he begins trashing their marketable prospects.

It's not likely here. Fugitt is gritty and tenacious, but he's also hittable. He spams kicks to the body and gets sniped for them on a regular basis, and against someone who hits as furiously as Kinoshita, that's going to get him caught all over again. Yusaku Kinoshita by KO.

PRELIMS: THE ROAD TO UFC STARTS IN ABU DHABI AND ENDS IN LAS VEGAS

This is a little different than usual. Last summer the UFC ran a tournament series named Road to UFC intended to scout talent out of the eastern MMA scene. Now, months later, it is coming to an end on this random card in Las Vegas because of scheduling conflicts. Your top four prelims, consequently, are the finals for each of the four Road to UFC brackets:

LIGHTWEIGHT FINAL: Anshul Jubli (6-0) vs Jeka Saragih (13-2)

It's very likely this is a mismatch. Anshul "King of Lions" Jubli is one of the best MMA prospects India has to offer, the kind of all-around fighter whose broad focus carries the potential for a very, very high ceiling, and his bout against South Korean prospect Kyung Pyo Kim demonstrated this. It also, unfortunately, demonstrated how he hasn't quite seasoned any of those skills specifically enough to be threatening. The striking was dead even, Jubli landed big right hands that didn't seem to carry a great risk of ending the fight, and he ultimately walked away with a very close split decision. Jeka Saragih did not have this problem "Si Tendangan Maut"--The Deadly Kick--is one of the best fighters out of Indonesia, and he showed it by mauling the shit out of his two Road to UFC opponents, knocking the first out with a spinning backfist and the second with the internationally accessible Big Right Hand. He came up fighting in the bareknuckle Pencak Dor scene, and his vicious power and surprising suplexes are a testament to just how many people he left laying on his way up.

Jubli's much bigger, undefeated, and considerably more well-rounded. He's also most likely getting punched in the head until he falls over. His defense leaves a lot to be desired and Jeka is poised to make him pay for it. Jeka Saragih by knockout.

FEATHERWEIGHT FINAL: Zha Yi (22-3) vs Jeong Yeong Lee (9-1)

Zha Yi was pegged as the favorite to win this tournament, thanks to his massive experience advantage. As often happens in Chinese MMA, however, that record is a bit of a mirage. 16 of Yi's 22 victories came against people with records that were at best 50/50 and at worst openly deplorable. When it's your 16th professional fight and you're facing a guy who's 0-3-1, the value of your evaluation is specious at best. This played out in the tournament, as Yi's grappling-centric style got him in trouble and forced him to settle for a split decision victory over karateka and former ONE championship titlist Koyomi Matsushima. Jeong Yeong Lee, meanwhile, didn't really get tested for a single second during his two tournament bouts; he pulled off a 36-second armbar from the guard in the first round and followed it with an only marginally longer, 42-second knockout in the second. On one hand: He's clearly got power and grappling chops. On the other: He didn't have to deal with much in the way of adversity, and Zha Yi is, if nothing else, a tough, aggressive fighter who will be happy to get in his face.

This is, I believe, destined to become a grappling war. Lee's hands are dangerous and Yi would be wise to avoid them, but Lee's guard game clearly isn't safe either. This is going to be a race to see if Yi can get to back control before Lee can buck him off or threaten him with a submission. That said: Jeong Yeong Lee by TKO. I think Yi's going to have too much trouble keeping Lee down and advancing position, I think the grappling will return to the feet repeatedly, and I think one of the exchanges ends with Yi getting got.

BANTAMWEIGHT FINAL: Rinya Nakamura (6-0) vs Toshiomi Kazama (10-2)

Welcome to what will almost certainly be a squash match. Both of these fighters are grappler-type pokemon, with Kazama's strength laying in a background in judo and Nakamura's coming from freestyle wrestling, and their results are, uh, drastically different. Kazama is an inexhaustible grappler, but that's because he desperately pursues reckless takedowns and tries as hard as possible to avoid exchanges on the feet, and that lack of discipline shows in his Road to UFC victory (he only needed one, he got a bye in the second round when his opponent missed weight), as he dominated the grappling, but only actually landed two out of thirteen takedown attempts. Rinya Nakamura will engage on the feet, use hooks and front kicks to set up his shots, and hits almost all of them once he picks them out, which is how he tore his first-round opponent's arm off with an Americana and knocked the second out. In some ways, it's destiny--Nakamura's father was Kozo Nakamura, one of the architects of the 1990s Japanese MMA scene. He was raised in the bloodsport. He's been preparing for it his whole life.

The real irony is Nakamura's vulnerabilities were also made abundantly clear by his fights. He throws hard, but he leads with his head, his defense is very lax, and his primary method of avoiding strikes is jumping directly backwards. At a weight class as good as bantamweight, that's inevitably going to get him in trouble. But today is not that day. Rinya Nakamura by submission.

FLYWEIGHT FINAL: Hyun Sung Park (7-0) vs Seung Guk Choi (6-1)

This should be very, very good. Park and Choi are two of the best flyweights in South Korea--Tapology's algorithm even has them ranked #1 and #3, respectively--and while like all flyweights they're good at everything, their applications of skill are very different. Park likes to work behind sharp jabs and a refreshingly defensive guard, hunting, pecking and looking for reversals to sneak his ultra-quick positional passes into--in fight research I watched him reverse a belly-to-belly suplex into back control in midair and it fucking ruled--and it works fantastically for him, but leaves openings for opponents to dictate pace. Seung Guk Choi, in a stark and quite frankly disrespectful refutation of his teacher, Chan Sung Jung, moves forward behind those darned hands of the legs, his feet. He whips out kicks to the legs and head with reckless abandon, using them to both keep fighters on their back foot and force them into the cage, which is where his best takedowns come into play. This has also been a wildly successful tactic, but it is almost entirely offensively-oriented and leaves him open to being picked off by counters.

Betting odds have picked Park as a solid favorite, but I think this is a pick 'em. Park's technique is more defensively sound than Choi's, but it leaves him open to Choi's offensive spam. Choi's reliance on kicks is thoroughly vulnerable to Park's crisp boxing. I'm siding with Hyun Sung Park by decision but this feels like it could go either way.

And now, preliminary programming as usual.

WOMEN'S FLYWEIGHT: Ji Yeon Kim (9-6-2) vs Mandy Böhm (7-2 (1))

Poor, poor Ji Yeon Kim. Kim was on the wrong side of a very close decision against Joselyne Edwards in her last fight and got out-and-out screwed against Priscila Cachoeira right before that. In an adjacent reality, 2022 was Kim's best year in the UFC and a showpiece for her striking-focused attacks; in this one, she's on a four-fight losing streak and almost certainly facing a pink slip if she loses here. Mandy Böhm, too, has had a deeply unfortunate time in the states. She left Germany as one of its best female fighters, became a champion up in Canada's TKO and slid down to the UFC as a late replacement only to have her replacement bout and her following two reschedulings of said bout cancelled, and once she finally got some god damned fights, she was immediately overwhelmed by KSW champion Ariane Lipski and Contender Series winner Victoria Leonardo. Böhm's just visibly had difficulty adjusting to UFC-level competition; her all-around attack gets her outgrappled by stronger wrestlers and outstruck by better strikers.

Ji Yeon Kim is, definitively, a better striker. Böhm could smother her with clinch attacks, but Kim's offensive output is more than enough to stifle her. Ji Yeon Kim by decision.

MIDDLEWEIGHT: Jun Yong Park (15-5) vs Denis Tiuliulin (11-6)

Jun Yong Park does not have fights that aren't complete struggles, and it's part of what makes him so memorable. "The Iron Turtle" isn't much of a standup threat--he's got a decent jab, but his gameplan centers entirely around using it to dig into clinch range and drag people to the ground where he can grapple them to death. This has taken him to a 5-2 UFC record, but it also gets him in trouble in virtually every fight he has, even when he ultimately wins anyway. Dennis Tiuliulin occupies the opposite end of the spectrum. He desperately wants to walk his opponents down behind his hands so he can finish them in the pocket, and unsurprisingly, five of his six career losses have come against people who saw this tactic coming and tanked the damage en route to taking Tiuliulin down and overwhelming him on the floor.

Jun Yong Park is good at two things: Absorbing punishment and forcing fights to the floor. They made this fight for a reason. Jun Yong Park by submission.

FLYWEIGHT: Tatsuro Taira (12-0) vs Jesus Aguilar (8-1)

Our opening fight is either going to be a completely one-sided styling-upon or it's going to be really, really fun. Tatsuro Taira is a well-hyped prospect out of Japan, and the UFC clearly sees an investment to be made because they're taking their sweet-ass time building him, as this will be his third fight in the company and, rather than stepping him up to the shark tank that is flyweight, they're setting him against a debuting Contender Series baby. Jesus Aguilar is a wonderful throwback to the bulldog style that was real, real popular in mid-2000s mixed martial arts meta: Hunched shoulders, tight, high guard, wild, sweeping hooks, power doubles and guillotine chokes, and by god, nothing else is allowable. For him, the violent lunging style is a necessity, as his 62.5" reach gives him the second-shortest range in the entire UFC--and the only fighter shorter is 5'1" women's strawweight Jéssica Andrade. Aguilar has to aggressively close distance or his attacks will never land.

But they may not land here at all. We've seen Taira snipe people with straight punches and we've seen Taira use his ground game from both top and bottom to submit people extremely quickly. Aguilar's standup style is made for walking into punches and his aggressive wrestling nearly got him submitted multiple times on the Contender Series. Tatsuro Taira by submission.