SATURDAY, JUNE 10 FROM THE ROGERS ARENA IN VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA
EARLY PRELIMS 4 PM PST/7 PM EST | PRELIMS 5 PM PST/8 PM EST | MAIN CARD 7 PM PST/10 PM EST VIA PAY-PER-VIEW
You know, there have been some decent pay-per-views in the Ultimate Fighting Championship this year. Multiple championship fights, multiple #1 contendership bouts, prospects on the verge of breaking out, returning legends of the sport--it hasn't all been great, but on average, I'd say it's been solid. Acceptable. A decent first five months of big shows.
We're at the halfway mark of the year. The UFC has two pay-per-views next month, and that means at least one card has to suffer. And who better to pick than the card headlined by the ladies? Amanda Nunes is a star, right? She doesn't need much lower card support. Wait, we lost Stephen Thompson vs Michel Pereira and Hakeem Dawodu vs Lucas Almeida and Chris Daukaus vs Khalil Rountree? Well, that's unfortunate, but--what, replace them? No, no, we're not doing that. Put Mike Malott vs Adam Fugitt third from the top. It'll be fine.
This is a Bad Pay-Per-View. It's not that the fighters are bad: I'm a big fan of many. But the UFC is asking you to pay eighty currency units for the privilege of watching an Eryk Anders fight.
So I'm going to get my Ya Boi-induced fugue state out of the way ahead of time while I write this. Hopefully, that will let me be gentler, and fairer, and a little more kind to the UFC as it sits struggling in its time of need.
MAIN EVENT: RESUMING THE REIGN
WOMEN'S BANTAMWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP: Amanda Nunes (22-5, Champion) vs Irene Aldana (14-6, #5)
I am already done being gentle and fair and kind. The UFC's inability to make stars anymore is an incredible shame and they have only themselves to blame for their deeply unfortunate booking situations.
In case you did not already know: This fight was not supposed to happen. This show's main event was to be Amanda Nunes vs Julianna Peña Part Three. Julianna did a bunch of interviews about carrying a boring champion like Nunes and the entire UFC on her back, and then the Divine Ironic Punishment division scored a grazing hit and she went down with a rib injury. The UFC had booked a maybe-or-maybe-not-we're-not-committing-to-it title eliminator between Raquel Pennington and Irene Aldana for mid-May, but in the wake of the injury Aldana got tapped to be the new title contender, despite being the lower-ranked fighter, and Pennington was picked as the backup should one of them be unable to compete.
And now we're here. Irene Aldana is on a two-fight winning streak, neither win was actually contested at bantamweight--once because she missed weight, once because she and her opponent agreed to not even try--and her last losses were to Holly Holm, who is ranked above her and not fighting for a title, and Raquel Pennington, who is ranked above her, on a five-fight winning streak, and even more exceptionally not fighting for a title.
And even this is only happening because the weight of Julianna Peña's bad opinions broke her ribcage. And the funny thing is--according to Peña, who also thinks COVID-19 is a conspiracy and lesbian mothers don't count, so, y'know, grain of salt--the UFC was so insistent on the trilogy that they ultimately had to threaten to strip Amanda Nunes, the woman they are (correctly!) advertising for this show as the greatest female mixed martial artist in history, of her championship to force her to agree to the threematch.
Which is a baffling sentence. Baffling!
Until you realize that it's really not baffling at all. They just have absolutely nothing fucking left.
Ronda Rousey was a massive windfall for the UFC. Dana White spent years using the UFC's platform to shit on the very concept of women competing in MMA after EliteXC and Strikeforce began promoting the first women's divisions in the major American leagues, and then a funny thing happened: The sport had a megastar, and not only was she not in the UFC, she couldn't be in the UFC, because there was nowhere for her to go. That changed real fuckin' fast: Ronda Rousey's first televised appearance with Strikeforce was in August of 2011, and by February of 2013 she was the champion of a UFC division that hadn't existed until that night. And she did absolute gangbusters for business!
And most of it was with women Strikeforce had put on the map.
Make no mistake: When Holly Holm destroyed Ronda, the UFC was upset, but it wasn't that upset. A marketable, UFC-grown striker as champion? Fantastic. And when Miesha Tate beat her just one fight later? Fantastic! The UFC's second-favorite female fighter, who already had a huge fanbase AND had a perfect return angle for Ronda? Things could not have worked out better.
But then Amanda Nunes killed her. They didn't even remotely change their plans--they just had Rousey come back and fight Nunes instead in the hope that Rousey could reclaim her throne and bring back the easy money-printing machine. Nunes punched Rousey out in under a minute and she never fought again.
Amanda Nunes went on to accomplish an unprecedented feat in the sport: She established herself as the best of all time not by abstract theorycrafting or professional analysis, but by beating every other champion there had ever been. She beat every Women's Bantamweight champion, she beat the best Women's Flyweight champion, and she went up to Women's Featherweight and beat the two titleholders there too just for good fucking measure. Even when Nunes finally lost her bantamweight title she rallied back for a rematch and handed the first post-Nunes champion in UFC history the worst beating of her life.
And the UFC did a funny thing: They gave the fuck up. They stopped trying to build challengers and they simply let Nunes go out there and do whatever she was going to do. It has for so long been a point of mockery that the very act of pointing it out is a dated joke, but I'm going to state it earnestly because it deserves to be earnestly reflected: The UFC has promoted a Women's Featherweight Champion for more than six years and has never even attempted to put together a set of rankings for its division. Multiple Women's Featherweight fighters, after being released from the UFC, talked openly about the company's constant attempts to force them into Women's Bantamweight fights.
And why wouldn't they? They don't care about the division. It only ever made money because of Cris Cyborg. Who's Amanda Nunes?
Oh, and lest you think I'm putting Julianna Peña forth as a promotional favorite, don't worry--they didn't give a shit about her either. She wasn't even supposed to fight Nunes, she was supposed to fight Holly Holm. Peña had only been off the preliminary side of cards twice in the half-decade before her championship fight--and she lost both very, very badly. She was a warm body for Nunes, as indifferentiable as any other, right up until she won.
It didn't matter that Nunes absolutely crushed her in their rematch. The third fight was inevitable--because what on Earth does the UFC have left? They haven't built anyone. They don't have any contenders. The clearest top contender is Raquel Pennington, and the UFC was tripping and falling all over itself to keep her away from the belt in favor of more marketing-friendly fighters with more marketing-friendly fighting styles.
Suddenly--and in entirely too familiar a manner--we wind up right back here, again. Irene Aldana, a fighter on a two-fight winning streak with zero victories at this weight class in the last three years, who in her last two brushes with contendership got controlled by Raquel Pennington and shut out to the point of dropping 10-8 rounds to Holly Holm, is getting a title shot because she beat Macy Chiasson, a featherweight who hasn't appeared at bantamweight since March of 2021.
And the UFC, as it does, is rushing to finish its project the day before it's due. The promo packages for Aldana try their hardest to make her sound like the obvious top contender with a perfect resume, but the marketing is so blunt that the first shot of Aldana's side of the official trailer is just a giant Mexican flag waving over a Mexican cityscape before they roll the Irene Aldana highlight reel. Her devastating knockout of Ketlen Vieira! Which was four years ago, featuring those terrible early-generation Reebok uniforms. Her violent ground and pound finish of Yana Santos! Which was actually sort of lackadaisical and more based on the ref worrying about a broken nose than a concussion. Her thrilling comeback from-the-ground upkick liver shot knockout of Macy Chiasson!
Which, to be clear, I don't have a single bad thing to say about. That completely ruled. But it's not great that she was two minutes away from losing a decision to Macy Chiasson.
Can Irene Aldana beat Amanda Nunes? Absolutely! For one, Aldana's got solid hands, and for two, we live in a post-Julianna Peña world. We're still only one fight removed from watching Nunes walk into jabs and get crossed and dropped like it was her first night of boxing practice. Aldana has more than enough power and accuracy to hurt Amanda if she fights reckless and stupid again.
Will Irene Aldana beat Amanda Nunes? Probably not! Aldana's boxing expertise is inversely proportional to how well her opponents can pressure her in non-boxing areas. Against fighters like Holly Holm and Raquel Pennington and even Macy Chiasson who can make her work on the feet AND force her to deal with grappling problems, things get a lot more difficult. As much as we always focus on Amanda Nunes and her ability to punch people, she has proven more than happy to toss and pretzel her opponents instead.
And that's where this starts to feel like a rerun again, because at a certain point we're not talking about the title-contender abilities of Irene Aldana and her boxing and her grappling and her ability to Kill the Queen--we're talking about if Amanda Nunes is going to miss a step again. And we probably will be for the foreseeable future, until either she falls apart and can't win anymore, she retires on top and goes home to her family, or the UFC finally succeeds in raising up an intriguing challenger--and they're currently trying to get Holly Holm back to a title shot, so I wouldn't hold your god damned breath.
AMANDA NUNES BY SUBMISSION. Let's just go home.
CO-MAIN EVENT: THIS FIGHT BEING THREE ROUNDS IS A CRIME
LIGHTWEIGHT: Charles Oliveira (33-9 (1), #1) vs Beneil Dariush (22-4-1, #4)
Now, I'm not saying this should have been the main event. Championship matches SHOULD main event cards. I'm saying this fight should have been five rounds and everyone who had the opportunity to make it a five-rounder and chose not to should be considered a mortal enemy of the people.
Charles Oliveira is trying to keep from being steamrolled by history. Oliveira's rise to the lightweight title was the stuff of motivational sports movie legend--a prospect laden with great expectations who let people down one too many times to carry their belief any longer finally puts it together, becomes unquestionably the greatest lightweight in an era of killers, and finishes almost everyone in his way? Jiu-jitsu grappling extraordinaire Charles Oliveira winds up knocking out Michael Chandler and dropping Justin Gaethje? Come the fuck on. These things don't happen in real life. Only Do Bronx could make that kind of Rudy bullshit a reality.
Unfortunately, reality also crashed down on his reign like a ton of bricks. Oliveira didn't lose his belt to a man, he lost it to a scale. Half a pound of weight ended his reign, and Islam Makhachev took care of the rest. But when Poirier and Gaethje are about to fight for a made-up belt, and Chandler is chasing a dream match with a living cocaine elemental, and Makhachev himself is waiting in the wings for a compelling contender who actually fights at his weight class, a title eliminator becomes more important than ever, and Charles Oliveira, a man who has lost only once in the last five years, would love to get his baby back.
But by god, Beneil Dariush has been waiting an awful long time to get his shot at number one contendership. Dariush is also riding an eight-fight win streak, Dariush has also not known defeat for more than half a decade, and most importantly, Dariush has been trying to get to the fucking title for years. He was supposed to fight Charles Oliveira all the way back in October of 2020, but COVIDundisclosed reasons prevented it from happening. He was supposed to fight Islam Makhachev in a title eliminator in February of 2022, but he broke his ankle ten days before the fight. Even this very match got pushed back a month as one final little insult.
And that's absolute torture when you're on a streak as hot as Beneil's. The UFC made no bones about his wrestling-centric style holding him back, so he decided to get attention by snapping off four consecutive finishes at the outset of his streak, including the only knockout loss of Drakkar Klose's career and an incredibly cool spinning backfist knockout over Scott Holtzman. But it wasn't until he was thrashing Diego Ferreira and Tony Ferguson and Mateusz Gamrot that the world finally gave him his propers, and it wasn't until Islam Makhachev was champion that said world began wondering what an iron-fisted wrestler like Dariush could potentially do to him.
Provided, of course, he can beat Charles Oliveira. I'll just skip to the punchline, here: CHARLES OLIVEIRA BY SUBMISSION. I like Beneil Dariush (as a fighter, anyway; the person seems like the kind of horrorshow almost every fighter is but we sublimate that awareness into a fine, well-distributed powder because the constant active reminder is mind-numbingly terrible), but I foresee bad things happening to him here. Oliveira's striking has tightened considerably, and Dariush likes to throw the kind of looping hands that open him up for clinch counters. Which is, ordinarily, fine, because he can outwrestle everyone. Wrestling Charles Oliveira is Not Safe. Letting Charles Oliveira strike with you in the clinch isn't even safe--ask Dustin Poirier's liver. Dariush's wrestling works so well because it's quick and ragged and scrambly, and those are bad choices to make against someone who can choke you out as quickly as Charles Oliveira can.
MAIN CARD: THINGS FALL APART
WELTERWEIGHT: Mike Malott (9-1-1) vs Adam Fugitt (9-3)
I don't even dislike Mike Malott or Adam Fugitt. They're both fine fighters. But Mike Malott was beating up Mickey Gall on an undercard two fights ago. He WOULD have been on the prelims again in his last fight, but it was the impossibly cursed Krylov vs SpannMuniz vs Allen Fight Night where so many people pulled out they started recruiting people out of catering to fill the void. Adam Fugitt is a 1-1 fighter who got punched senseless in his debut and pounded out Yusaku Kinoshita back in February. And they're third from the top. And I couldn't figure out why--until I realized the UFC is out of Canadians.
Canada was a hot market for the UFC once upon a time! They turned Patrick Côté into a title contender! Now you've got, what--Tanner Boser? Hakeem Dawodu? Charles goddamn Jourdain? Mike Malott is third from the top because by god, we need a Canadian who might one day be in title contention on this card, and Mike Malott is what we've got. And he's perfectly fine! There's nothing wrong with his fighting and he seems like a perfectly nice guy, but seriously, fuck.
The ongoing argument, fueled by UFC matchmaker Mick Maynard's shitty tweets about MMA media daring to complain about their product, centers on the idea that it's wrong to call a card bad when the card could have entertaining fights. Here's the thing: Any card can have entertaining fights. The UFC isn't special because only it can provide fun. You could go down to your local five-dollar fight nights promotion and be almost guaranteed to have a good time. The UFC is special because it, in theory, represents the best of the best. The dream. You, as a fighter, as supposed to see the UFC as the aspirational goal at the end of the rainbow, and saying you fought and won in the UFC is supposed to carry the idea that even if you never made it to the very top, you got on the damn mountain. You, as a fan, are supposed to see the UFC's flagship shows as a guarantee not just of quality fights, but quality divisions, quality contenders and quality presentation.
If you want to chip away at that to boost your profit margins? That's perfectly fine. But at least be open about what you're mortgaging and why. MIKE MALOTT BY DECISION.
FEATHERWEIGHT: Dan Ige (16-6, #13) vs Nate Landwehr (17-4, NR)
This should fucking rule, though. Dan Ige is a long-suffering contender trying to right the ship. After years as one of the best featherweights on the planet Ige spent most of the last few years coping with getting knocked all the way back down the totem pole: Battered by Calvin Kattar, outfought by the new generation of Movsar Evloev and Josh Emmett, and just for good measure, getting completely shut down by Chan Sung Jung. His boxing never stopped being sharp and technical, nor did his skills seem to fail him--he was just repeatedly outclassed. The UFC tested the waters by throwing Damon Jackson at him this past January and Ige knocked him cold in two rounds, proving he still had gas in the tank.
But that doesn't get him out of the prospect-testing woods yet. Nate Landwehr has been getting the hints of a promotional push from the UFC, thanks as much to his aggressive style and slick submission game as his being a goofy promo-cutting crowdpleaser who talks about his biceps like he's Scott Steiner. Cutting promos and finishing people is about 90% of what the UFC wants out of its contenders, so if Landwehr can do it again here he'll be top five by the end of the month. He's still got the spectre of getting knocked out by Julian Erosa and Herbert Burns hanging on his back, but he's erasing it bit by bit.
He's got a real tough ask here, though. Ige is a tough opponent with much cleaner striking and much sharper defense. His trouble with high-pressure gameplans is going to be the real question mark here--Landwehr can get wild, but that wildness comes from a stifling attack, and if he can stifle Ige's movement and force him out of his comfort zone he's got a real good chance. NATE LANDWEHR BY DECISION.
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Marc-André Barriault (15-6 (1)) vs Eryk Anders (15-7 (1))
The line between reasonable criticism and memey internet fighter-bashing is thin. Fighters are human beings with incredibly difficult jobs, and the skill and heart it takes to do that job is incredibly rare. And, truthfully--most complaints the world has about fighters aren't even with the fighters themselves but the way their organization is using them, be it the steady line of cans Michael Venom Page crushed for years or Sean O'Malley being catapulted to title contention or Fedor Emelianenko only defending the Pride heavyweight championship in four out of his twelve Pride fights after capturing it.
So I mean this with the utmost level of respect: In a company that regularly cuts fighters for extremely specious reasons, for the life of me, I do not understand why Eryk Anders is still here. The last two times I wrote about Eryk Anders I did so in the form of exasperated jokey-jokes about how easily people forget about his fights and how inexplicable his UFC career has been, and it's more than a year later and we're still having this conversation. He dropped a decision to The Iron Turtle and kicked Kyle Daukaus out of the UFC and no one remembers any of it and we're still having this conversation.
I don't even think it's enormously disrespectful to opine about why Eryk Anders is still here, because the UFC doesn't seem to think he should be either--because no one he beats is still here. The one and only win on the Eryk Anders record to still be in the UFC is Gerald Meerschaert, and that was--sing the words if you know the chorus--a very poor split decision virtually the entire media scored against him. He loses more than he wins, he's never so much as smelled a ranking, his fights bounce off the human consciousness like soundwaves disappearing into a cave and the UFC seems to be convinced anyone he can beat doesn't actually belong on the roster.
And he's still here. And he doesn't seem to be going anywhere. And I cannot help feeling we are to be cursed with this continuing yet longer. ERYK ANDERS BY DECISION.
PRELIMS: THE ACTION MAN HOUR
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Nassourdine Imavov (12-4, #12) vs Chris Curtis (30-10, #14)
Honestly? I'm just disappointed in both of you. Nassourdine Imavov, you were supposed to stop the endless march of Sean Strickland this past January. And did you do it? No! You got jabbed two hundred times and lost a decision and now we're stuck with that human 4chan post in yet another god damned main event next month. You could have saved me from having to write another set of multiple paragraphs about Sean Strickland, and you didn't, and I will never forgive you. Chris Curtis, you were on the way up, man! You were supposed to unseat Kelvin Gastelum and give us some new blood in the top fifteen. And not only did you lose, you lost AND Kelvin left the weight class. Your fall was for nothing.
You know how Chris Curtis has a reputation as one of the few non-shitty MMA fighters to follow on social media, in terms of not being constantly inundated with the worst cultural takes on the planet? He started a podcast! With Sean Strickland! They made it through one half of one episode before Curtis was laughing along with Strickland talking about women's MMA being dumb and Amanda Nunes looking like an inhuman monster and the effects of steroids on Gabi Garcia's sex organs, and it's like a single, perfect encapsulation of how easily being friends with shitheads can turn you into a shithead.
But, y'know, we needed more of that in the world, I guess. Thanks, Chris. NASSOURDINE IMAVOV BY DECISION.
WOMEN'S FLYWEIGHT: Miranda Maverick (11-4, #15) vs Jasmine Jasudavicius (8-2, NR)
Miranda Maverick should be in the top ten, and it will never stop angering me that she isn't. Maverick is only now escaping the impact of her two losses in 2021, but one of those losses was a decision to perennial judging favorite Maycee Barber that stands as one of the worst decisions in UFC history, and the other was a decision loss against Erin Blanchfield, who was last seen absolutely running through JJ Aldrich, Molly McCann and Jéssica Andrade in a goddamn row. Maverick's clinching and swarming are effective as hell, and her grappling defense--well, it held up to three rounds of Erin Blanchfield trying to murder her. But Jasmine Jasudavicius presents problems for her, half because she is also a strong, talented grappler who will be happy to control her on the floor given a chance, half because she's like half a foot taller and has an awful lot of leverage.
Which would be great if Maverick were the kind of fighter to jab and move! But she likes the pocket and she likes the clinch, and those are opportunities for Jasmine to get the fight where she wants it. JASMINE JASUDAVICIUS BY DECISION.
BANTAMWEIGHT: Aiemann Zahabi (9-2) vs Aoriqileng (24-9)
We have a quandary. I am on the record as categorically not believing in Aiemann Zahabi. I believe he's got solid defense, and I believe he fights at a steady clip of exactly once a year and will thus struggle to go anywhere even if he begins winning consistently, and I believe there's a solid limit on how high he'll go in the rankings. But I said that last July when he fought The Ultimate Fighter 29 winner Ricky Turcios, and Aiemann played a successful matador and landed three or four glancing blows per minute and got the crowd to boo lustily as he took home a decision no one was happy with. Points to the man! Aoriqileng has been much busier, but his 2-2 record in the UFC bears out the difficulty he's had making that schedule count. His wrestleboxing is efficient and effective, but its limitations have been fairly clearly shown--faster fighters and stronger wrestlers give him fits.
Aiemann is not a stronger wrestler. He is faster, cleaner and difficult to take down, and that's going to make implementing the dualsided gameplan difficult. I'm still leaning towards AORIQILENG BY DECISION but my confidence is low.
FEATHERWEIGHT: Blake Bilder (8-0-1) vs Kyle Nelson (13-5-1)
It's feeding time, baby. Blake "El Animal" Bilder was one of the big new Contender Series babies of 2022, and as is so often the case, he was given a nice, slow softball over home plate for his promotional debut this February in the form of Shane Young, a 13-7 fighter coming off two straight losses and a two-year layoff. Bilder, unsurprisingly, won. Does that mean it's time for a stiffer test? No! It's time for Kyle Nelson, who has one victory in his last six fights across five years, and whom we last saw getting the crap beaten out of him by Doo Ho Choi only to take a truly inexplicable draw. Given that Bilder's best wins come by submission and Nelson was just thoroughly wrestled by a boxer, I cannot help wondering if this fight is, to some extent, revenge.
Nelson's a tough fucking guy, but this is a bad matchup for him. BLAKE BILDER BY SUBMISSION.
EARLY PRELIMS: THE CONTINUING SUFFERING OF FLYWEIGHT
FLYWEIGHT: David Dvořák (20-5, #10) vs Steve Erceg (9-1)
We're doing this again? We're doing this a-fucking-gain. God dammit, man, come on. Come on.
We got a flyweight main event last week, despite the UFC's best attempts to keep it from happening, and here we are, one week later. This fight was supposed to be the #10-ranked Dvořák against the #8 ranked Matt Schnell--and it was STILL on the fucking prelims--but Schnell had to pull out about two weeks before fight night, and the UFC searched high and low for a replacement, and they found Steve "AstroBoy" Erceg, a flyweight prospect out of Australia who's held the Eternal MMA title for his last couple fights.
Is Steve Erceg bad? I don't necessarily think so. He has some patient grappling entries, he's good at locking down position and, like any decent flyweight, he can sneak a left hook into an opening a couple seconds wide. Should Steve Erceg, who was fighting 4-2 guys in the regionals a few months ago and who the UFC initially planned to book against a fellow rookie, be fighting to be the tenth best flyweight on the planet? Probably not.
Should the tenth best flyweight on the planet be determined on the early prelims nobody watches? I have to ask the question often enough that the answer, whether I like it or not, is apparently yes, and that makes me all the gladder Demetrious Johnson got the fuck out while he was young. DAVID DVOŘÁK BY DECISION.
WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT: Diana Belbiţă (14-7) vs Maria Oliveira (13-6)
There's a good chance this is our housecleaning fight for the night. Diana Belbiţă and Maria Oliveira are both riding the fine line of employment--Belbiţă is already 1-3 in the UFC and that one win saw her almost knocked out, and Oliveira is 1-2, but that one win was a real close split decision--and it took almost four years for Belbiţă to clear those four fights. It's not that either woman is an inherently bad fighter, they've both got talent. Belbiţă is incredibly tough and will walk through fire if it means scoring a right hand; Oliveira is a flak-cannon fighter who will throw hundreds of strikes to land several dozen.
But you might notice those are pretty backhanded compliments. Diana Belbiţă just cannot make most of her offense connect, and when she does, it invariably gets her hurt, too. Maria Oliveira isn't TRYING to make most of her offense connect, just enough to pull out a decision, and it turns out judges don't like it when you miss twice as many strikes as you land. MARIA OLIVEIRA BY DECISION, still, but I'm not sure it'll be all that fun to watch.