CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 87: THE STRENGTH TO ACCEPT

UFC 297: Strickland vs du Plessis

SATURDAY, JANUARY 20 FROM THE SCOTIABANK ARENA IN TORONTO, ONTARIO, CANADA
EARLY PRELIMS 3:30 PM PST / 6:30 PM EST | PRELIMS 5 PST / 8 EST | MAIN CARD 7 PM / 10 PM

This is a card of firsts. The first pay-per-view of the year! The first Middleweight championship match not to involve Israel Adesanya since 2019! The first Women's Bantamweight Championship match not to involve Amanda Nunes in almost eight years!

And, of course, the first title defense of Sean Strickland's career.

Last week, I talked about the quiet, internal ponderance I did regarding my relationship with mixed martial arts during our long, cold month without a UFC. Some of that pondering, knowing this event was coming, centered around Sean Strickland and his place in the sport.

Whether I like it or not--if you've been reading, you already know the answer--Sean Strickland is the world champion. I have focused so much on his bigotry and shitheadedness and his symbolizing this particular cultural era in America, and all the while, he has successfully etched his name into the living history of combat sports. He is, at this moment, the top Middleweight on the planet.

So I sat in my office, and I stared at the blinking caret in Notepad, and I wondered if it was time to stop writing about Sean Strickland the person and, instead, focus on writing about Sean Strickland the fighter. I wondered if it was time to accept him as a champion.

I wondered if it was time to let it go.











CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 87: A NEW NOPE

SATURDAY, JANUARY 20 FROM THE FUTURE HOME OF AMERICAN ASYLUM SEEKERS
SOME FIGHTS 3:30 PM PST / 6:30 PM EST | OTHER FIGHTS 5 PST / 8 EST | FIGHTS THAT COST MONEY 7 PM / 10 PM

I didn't wonder for very long.

one day canada will have main eventers again

MAIN EVENT: GRADUALLY DEGRADING
MIDDLEWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP: Sean Strickland (28-5, Champion) vs Dricus du Plessis (20-2, #2)

I mean, honestly.

Before we get into anything else, let's just recap the last year-ish that brought each fighter here. Sean Strickland:

• Lost a tepid decision to Jared Cannonier, which he professed to be a great injustice against him

• Won a tepid decision over Nassourdine Imavov, who was preparing for Kelvin Gastelum until a week before the fight

• Knocked out Abus Magomedov, who was 1-0 in the UFC and is now 1-2

• Became the world champion.

The stuff dreams are made of. How about du Plessis?

• Had a big scare against Darren Till, who hadn't won a fight in years and was released afterward, but still won

• Almost got submitted by Derek Brunson, who hadn't won a fight in years and was released afterward, but still won

• Knocked Robert Whittaker the fuck out after having absolutely no trouble with him

• Would have fought Adesanya instead of Strickland, but wanted more than a month to prepare.

This is your world champion and top contender. It's a weird fuckin' sport.

I spend a lot of words on the deterioration of the UFC's championship scene, and a lot of that goes into favoritism--who's getting the good matchups, who's getting the jetpack--but arguably a bigger part of that conversation is the general standard it takes to get there. Why, in my day, Robert Whittaker had to damn near clear out the division and Georges St-Pierre had to beat up BJ Penn!

Here's the harsh truth: That rule has never reliably applied over 170 pounds. Rich Franklin got his shot at the belt in 2005 for knocking out Ken Shamrock at a different weight class. Michael Bisping was one fight removed from a coinflip split over Thales Leites when he played spoiler to Luke Rockhold. Alex Pereira is a double champion after just seven total UFC wins and he may be fighting for the Heavyweight title in a few months. Brock Lesnar's first championship match for that selfsame belt came when he was 2-1 in his entire goddamn career.

These are the marketing belts. The good times are the aberrations and you should enjoy them, particularly because, as world champion Sean O'Malley shows, the days of non-marketing belts existing are dwindling.

Having said all of that: Sean Strickland deserves to be the champion, and Dricus du Plessis deserves his shot.

He hasn't lost a fight in going on five years, he's stopped five out of his six UFC opponents, as much as I mock Brunson he WAS a top ten opponent and Dricus punched him out, and he knocked out Robert Whittaker. I had full faith in ol' Bobby Knuckles outfighting du Plessis fairly easily, and I, and most of the world, was exceptionally wrong. He outworked him, he outwrestled him, and he brutalized him. In fifteen fights over a full decade at 185 pounds, exactly two men have stopped Robert Whittaker: Israel Adesanya and the guy who keeps saying crypto-racist stuff about him.

Oh, goddammit.

I said the secret word and now we have to talk about everything else. Everything else about this fight fucking sucks.

It sucked when Sean Strickland wasn't even involved and Dricus was going to fight Adesanya--not just because he deserved it, but because the UFC was really, really into Dricus deciding to start talking trash about how Israel Adesanya, a Nigerian-born man whose parents moved to New Zealand when he was ten, wasn't a real African. Dricus has criticized the characterization of these comments as inaccurate, and that's true! It would be more accurate to say Dricus said Adesanya, Kamaru Usman and Francis Ngannou weren't real Africans. Not like him and Cameron Saaiman. You know, for reasons. Definitely not racist reasons! Dricus du Plessis is very, very mad you think there's anything at all racist about an Afrikaner calling himself a "real African" in comparison to multiple men born in Ghana and Cameroon.

But Dricus cannot hang with Sean Strickland, who is, undoubtedly, the pound-for-pound champion of saying dumb shit all of the time because no one even pretends to care about there being standards anymore. Transphobia? Without a doubt. Homophobia? Plenty. Sexism? Constantly, including to the women co-main eventing this card! But the brand new card in his deck this time around is self-victimization, because now he is unhappy that Dricus has said things about his personal life and his trauma with his father that he thinks should be off-limits. Has Sean Strickland said these things about opponents in the past, you may ask?

No. You didn't ask. You know already.

I don't, generally, talk about other MMA media in these writeups. For one, I think intra-media beef is the lamest thing in the world, for two, I have several dozen readers so who could possibly care what I think about someone who actually gets paid to do this, and for three, most MMA media, like most enthusiast media, is pretty unfortunate. But Bloody Elbow has for quite some time been one of the best sources of journalism in combat sports, and that's why it bugs the shit out of me when I think they post something dumb. In this case, it was grand poobah Nate Wilcox's article about Mayra Bueno Silva taking umbrage with Strickland's insults about their drawing power:

UFC middleweight champ Sean Strickland epitomizes the TKO era star: he talks constantly via his own platforms and says all kinds of crazy stuff. Now that he’s champ he has even more opportunities to get press with cheap soundbites. The access yuppies are lapping it up for controversial clickbait headlines.
(...)
“Look, on paper, my fight with Raquel is not a good fight,” she said during an ESPN interview “But on paper, Sean Strickland and Dricus Du Plessis is a good fight? No. Sean talks too much. He thinks he is a big star. But he is not a big star. I believe my fight and Sean’s fight, one helps the other.

“On paper, two bad fights for fans. But when we enter the Octagon, I do a good fight and Du Plessis does good fights, too. I don’t watch good fights from Sean Strickland. I don’t remember a good fight.”

Bueno Silva has a pretty solid response but I wonder if she considered the alternative: not talking about Strickland’s stupid bull****. Or maybe it was ESPN interviewer Marc Raimondi pushing the conversation in that direction so he would have an excuse to get Strickland in the headline. It’s what I would have done. ; )

Here's the thing: Nate isn't dumb. He is, in fact, one of the smartest people in MMA journalism. 'Sean Strickland said dumb shit, and boy, it's so dumb to write articles about the dumb shit Sean Strickland said, so here's our article about someone ELSE reacting to the dumb shit Sean Strickland said' is incredibly obvious. The problem isn't the hypocrisy at the spine of the coverage, because it's not hypocrisy--it's the dance you do when you cover this idiot sport. You have to talk about it, and you would, ideally, like people to consume your coverage, and guess what: When the champions of the canonical organization in the sport do dumb shit to get attention, you are, inevitably, going to give it attention.

But you get tired of it. I get tired of it! Everybody gets fucking tired of it. It's so rankly transparent and stupid that, at a certain point, it's easier to make it into a joke. Colby Covington showed up to a pre-fight presser dressed like George Washington. How on Earth is anyone supposed to take any of this fucking seriously?

So you don't.

And then, before you realize it, you're writing articles like this:

Whoops! You stopped taking it seriously and now you're both-sidesing the bigot. Crazy how that happens! Crazy how, when you stop caring, shitty things suddenly become normalized. Crazy how not taking things seriously means serious things suddenly stop mattering.

And that, inevitably, is the problem. You should take it seriously. It should matter that nothing matters anymore. It should matter that the UFC's heavily-marketed Middleweight champion is saying sexist shit about his coworkers and co-main event contenders. There's this constant urge to self-distance from the bullshit and point and laugh at the idea that someone else fell for the outrage marketing, but the thing is, you should be outraged by bigotry, and the more it's just accepted with a sigh and a shrug in this sport, the easier it is to get to a point like this fight, which is being marketed around Sean Strickland actually assaulting Dricus du Plessis in the crowd at the previous UFC. Things used to matter! We used to think it was kind of racist that Chael Sonnen said Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira tried to feed a carrot to a bus because he thought it was a horse! Matt Mitrione had to release a public apology for his horrible transphobia and that was just a decade ago! And now the Middleweight champion says women belong in the kitchen and jokes that gay children come from weak men and hey, we're all shitposters here, so what's a little idiot bigotry in our sport? What, the female fighters got offended that there's absolutely no pushback on their male counterpart saying they shouldn't exist?

How silly of them.

If ANYONE is going to care--if anyone is going to remind people that it's actually cool and good to care about the standards of this sport--it has to be the media, because god knows the UFC is riding this flaming train wreck all the way to Hell.

At least, that's probably better than tut-tutting one of the best female fighters on the planet for being mad someone said sexist bullshit about her.

Which just about covers the Everything Else aspect of this fight. You may notice that everyone's coverage--mine, the media's, even the UFC's--focuses on the Everything Else instead of the Fight. That is because the is-it-real-or-not non-argument the MMA communtiy always has about fighters being assholes to each other (while ignoring footage of them laughing and hugging in their off-time) is the much more interesting side of things. Sean Strickland's specialty is hypnotizing people into letting him gently cross them up for three to five rounds. He knocked Israel Adesanya down and hit him in the head eighty-five times, and Izzy barely had a mouse under his eye after the fight. The UFC tries very, very hard to get you to focus on Sean Strickland's personality because his fighting style is exactly the kind of technically sound but casually uninteresting boxing they otherwise try to discourage.

Dricus du Plessis wins fights by being a weird madman. I wrote this before du Plessis/Brunson:

It's hard to say this without feeling like I am insulting the man, so I want to be clear that the following is a compliment: He is remarkably adept at looking terrible and somehow still completely winning fights. He'll spam leg kicks and get repeatedly countered, he'll blitz wildly forward and get torn up on entry, and even while winning striking exchanges he eats fists upside the head. The two times we've seen him reach the third round of a fight, he's looked exhausted. And he wins anyway, and I cannot overstate how impressive that is. He's so determined in his approach to fighting that his appearance of weakness becomes itself a strength, allowing him to draw opponents in only to overwhelm them and drown them in offense.

Despite Robert Whittaker being the toughest opponent of his career, it was by far the most comprehensively good du Plessis looked. He still had the awkward movement, he still had the spammy offense, but he used it to expertly pressure Whittaker and break him. But overwhelming Sean Strickland is a difficult concept. Strickland's endurance and general unflappability are genuinely impressive, and have really only failed him when faced with people like Cannonier or Pereira who can simply walk through his offense.

If du Plessis can interrupt Strickland's idiot cobra technique he's got a real good shot at flattening him. If Strickland can circle him and jab him until he forgets he can breathe through his other nostril now, he's got a real good shot at wearing him down the way he has worn down a legion of reporters. And maybe, one day, I can move on to talking about completely unproblematic Middleweight contenders like Khamzat Chimaev, Jared Cannonier, Marvin Vettori, and Brendan Allen.

Fuck.

DRICUS DU PLESSIS BY TKO.

CO-MAIN EVENT: REFORGING A CROWN
WOMEN'S BANTAMWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP: Raquel Pennington (15-8, #2) vs Mayra Bueno Silva (10-2-1 (1), #3)

I am going to do the most self-indulgent self-quoting these writeups have yet seen. This was last January.

But after a couple years of aimlessly wandering in the woods, Pennington is back in the top ten on the strength of a four-fight winning streak. She beat up Marion Reneau, she beat up Pannie Kianzad, she went up to 145 pounds on short notice to choke out a then-surging Macy Chiasson and she gave Aspen Ladd what would ultimately be her last UFC bout. While it had to span across two weight classes, Pennington's on the longest winning streak in the top fifteen of the division.

She is, in fact, on one of the only winning streaks in the division.

This was in May.

Two months ago, Raquel Pennington was supposed to fight Irene Aldana. The UFC wound up rescheduling the fight and booking the (also rescheduled) Marlon Vera vs Cory Sandhagen fight as a headliner instead, with Pennington and Aldana rebooked as this card's main event. Logically, it was a sure-thing title eliminator--Raquel Pennington is ranked #2 at Women's Bantamweight and has its longest winning streak, and Irene Aldana, at #5, is coming off two knockout victories.

But the UFC refused to commit to either woman getting a title shot with a victory. All the title hype went instead to the threematch nobody asked for, Amanda Nunes vs Julianna Peña 3, with the championship's future thereafter left uncertain. One month out from the fight, disaster struck: Peña broke her ribs in training and the UFC was out a main event. For once, though, it shouldn't have been a difficult problem to solve. Pennington is, after all, ranked #2 in the division and is conveniently available.

The UFC did not pick her. They picked Irene Aldana. Fun fact: Irene Aldana's last two losses? Holly Holm and, uh, Raquel Pennington.

And this was June.

It didn't matter that Nunes absolutely crushed (Julianna Peña) 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.

That's not even a comprehensive recitation of how many times I have banged on this drum. I could make this entire writeup out of my complaints about how the UFC has booked Women's Bantamweight and, more specifically, Raquel Pennington over the last two years, but that would be cheap, and boy, I would hate to be cheap about Women's Bantamweight, because, boy, it needs all the help it can get right now.

Which isn't the fault of any of the fighters. There's plenty of talent here. Raquel and Mayra are top-class. Ketlen Vieira's great. Irene Aldana just had a fantastic battle with Karol Rosa last month. Germaine de Randamie is finally coming back in April. Julianna Peña, once she heals, will be an immediate title contender. The fighters exist. The fights exist.

But the UFC is remarkably disinterested in supporting them. And the universe sure isn't doing them any favors. Mayra Bueno Silva's first couple years in the UFC were deeply troubled--get derailed by COVID, drop a couple bad decisions at Flyweight, fail to get past Montana de la Rosa--and then, in 2022, she stopped cutting down to 125 and settled on 135 instead, and suddenly, she was a wrecking machine. She beat Yanan Wu, she (somewhat controversially) armbarred Stephanie Egger, she retired Lina Länsberg after tearing her knee apart. A year prior she'd been 2-2-1 and on the verge of getting cut; now she had one of the best winning streaks in the division and was ready for her contendership test against Holly Holm.

There are many, many things one can say about Holly Holm. Fortunately, she's not fighting tonight, so I won't! Instead, I will simply celebratorily record that after twelve years of mixed martial arts competition, Holm took her second submission loss--and only her third stoppage loss overall--when, twenty seconds into the second round, Bueno Silva squeezed her head off with a standing ninja choke. Beating Holm is a prerequisite for an awful lot of title challengers, but the only person to ever crush Holly Holm was Amanda Nunes, the greatest of all time. Miesha Tate submitted Holly, but it took four rounds of struggling. Mayra choking her out that easily made her an immediate title challenger.

Which is why it's deeply unfortunate that it no longer technically happened.

Mayra Bueno Silva failed a drug test for Concerta. It's a medication she takes for Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. She provided documentation and prescriptions to the point that USADA, an organization almost universally derided by fighters for its draconian policies, had no problem with it. But Concerta is an extended-release form of Ritalin, and Ritalin is considered a performance-enhancing drug, and for whatever reason, Nevada's athletic commission decided to make an example of her. So Mayra Bueno Silva never beat Holly Holm. It's the (1) in her record.

The UFC cared so much that they ignored it and gave her the title fight anyway. At this point you've probably seen me wail and gnash my teeth about people getting undeserved title fights a half-dozen times, so the fact that I don't care about someone getting a championship bout on the heels of a No Contest is testament to just how silly this shit is.

But it's not as silly as how long it took to get Raquel Pennington here. If that trip down memory lane was insufficient, Raquel Pennington is on a five-fight winning streak, the longest in her division, her only losses in the last ten years came against world champions, she beat the last woman to fight for the title, and no one goddamn else had a better claim. But the UFC did not want her. She's a wrestler, she wrestles, she wins most of her fights by wrestling-based decisions or--offensively--split decisions.

And there's only room for one woman who only wins by anticlimactic decision to get contendership around here, and goddammit, it's Holly Holm.

Raquel Pennington was supposed to fight Irene Aldana. Despite being ranked higher than her and despite having beaten her, when the UFC needed a new title challenger for Amanda Nunes, they picked Aldana and made Pennington the backup. When Amanda Nunes demolished Aldana and retired, leaving the throne vacant, despite Pennington being right there, the UFC spent half a year pursuing other options. Erin Blanchfield could come up to 135! Julianna Peña could come back from injury early!

Or, you know, we could've just treated the sport like a sport and done this in the first fucking place.

Now that we're here, at last, it's a potentially fascinating fight. Both women prefer to take grappling approaches, both women win through submission far more often than their striking, but where Raquel is a grinder who wants to wear her opponents down and choke them out once they're vulnerable, Mayra is an opportunist. She dives on armbars, she dives on kneebars, she dives on chokes. And she's so goddamn good at getting them that Raquel, having been submitted just once in her career--more than eleven years ago--is still a betting underdog.

Which, frankly, makes sense. Mayra's younger and faster, she's got better and more recent finishes, she seems to hit an awful lot harder when she does deign to punch people, and, y'know, people know who she is. Thanks to the UFC's certainty that Raquel can't draw attention she's been sitting on the shelf for an entire year. No tune-up, no marketing, just twelve months of nothing and then, congratulations, here's your title shot; go fight the lady who keeps tearing everyone's body parts off.

On paper, Mayra being the favorite is entirely correct. In practice, it is, still, fairly correct. But in my heart?

A buddy I've known since kindergarten has a friend who trained with Raquel Pennington. He, and through him my friend, have been adamant that Raquel would be a world champion since just about 2018.

I can see Raquel not getting choked out. I can see her forcing Mayra to work for three rounds and drowning her in the fourth and fifth. I would like it to happen. I would like my friend to be happy. RAQUEL PENNINGTON BY DECISION.

MAIN CARD: ARNOLD ALLEN'S ATTEMPT AT AVERTING ANGUISH
WELTERWEIGHT: Neil Magny (28-11, #13) vs Mike Malott (10-1-1, NR)

Poor Neil Magny has entered the 'extracting value' stage of his UFC career. The last time we saw Neil Magny I wrote about how legitimately great his career has been and how few people have ever had longevity like him to stay ranked and relevant for a whole decade; I also wrote about how he was visibly deteriorating and Ian Machado Garry was going to beat seven layers of hell out of him, and unfortunately, both things were correct. Magny didn't get knocked out, he made it to a decision, but he was outstruck 3:1 and even outwrestled just to add to the humiliation. This is, unfortunately, the new normal for Neil Magny. He's no longer credible as a challenger, so he's become the gatekeeper who tests--or rebuilds--the company's prospects. Max Griffin's on a three-fight streak? Send in Magny. Shavkat Rakhmonov is eating the world? Call Magny. We're in Canada, we desperately need a relevant Canadian fight, and there's literally only one single Canadian fighter in the Welterweight division on any kind of winning streak? God dammit, man: Get Me Magny.

It's a big leap for Mike Malott, though. Ian Machado Garry had already made a pretty solid claim to a ranking when he fought Neil Magny. Mike Malott is 3-0 in the UFC, but, respectfully, those three are Mickey Gall, the winner of the CM Punk sweepstakes, Yohan Lainesse, who is 1-2 and way down on the early prelims this week, and Adam Fugitt, who is 1-2 and holds that victory over someone who actually managed to get disqualified in Rizin, the land of headstomps and grounded knees. None of which is to say Mike Malott is bad! He's very technically clean, he's showcased some real solid defense, he's got some surprisingly tricky entrances off an aggressive kicking game and the time he's spent learning from the shirtless masters of Team Alpha Male have given him some fantastic chokes. His offense is great! We just haven't really seen his defense tested since his time in Bellator and the World Series of Fighting, and at this point those fights were most of a decade ago. He's not the same fighter and this is his first chance to demonstrate himself against a Welterweight of record.

As usual, Neil Magny has a huge reach advantage, and as usual, Neil Magny should have a big advantage in the clinch, and as usual, I want to vote for Neil Magny winning the day and returning to glory, and as usual, I am picking against him. Malott may have a 7" range deficit, but he hits a lot harder and he closes distance much faster, and Neil just seems like he is, unfortunately, slowing down. As wild as it is to say it after he survived three rounds with Garry, I have a sinking feeling about a MIKE MALOTT BY TKO result here.

MIDDLEWEIGHT: Chris Curtis (30-10 (1), #13) vs Marc-André Barriault (16-6 (1), NR)

Sometimes, man, you just have a bad fucking year. Midway through 2022 Chris Curtis was on a three-fight winning streak and looked for all the world like a hot new contender, and even when Jack Hermansson upset his momentum like he's done to so many before--please earmark this sentence for next month--Curtis beat the stuffing out of Joaquin Buckley and got it right back. 2023 was supposed to be the year of the Action Man! And then his big coming-out party against Kelvin Gastelum got upset, half because of Gastelum having a good night and actually outworking Curtis, half because Gastelum (unintentionally) headbutted the shit out of Curtis in the second round and almost knocked him out. Curtis tried to rebound again, this time against Nassourdine Imavov, and once again, he was having trouble, and once again it wound up not mattering, because once again, in the second round, Imavov rammed an unintentional headbutt right into Curtis and busted his right eye too badly to continue. What was supposed to be a banner year for the man wound up being a loss, a No Contest, and two headbutts to the face.

Marc-André Barriault, by contrast, had a fantastic year. After a shaky 2022 saw Barriault go 1-2, including getting blown out in sixteen seconds by Chidi Njokuani and choked out by the ever-tricky Anthony Hernandez, Barriault spent 2023 putting together the best pair of victories of his career. In March, he took on Julian "The Cuban Missile Crisis" Marquez, a fighter known less for his octagon success than for his somehow, inexplicably, fumbling the bag with Miley Cyrus, and Barriault added insult to cocaine-tinged injury by stopping Marquez on the feet in two rounds. That Summer Barriault moved on to face the living void of memory and feeling that is Eryk Anders, and he not only beat Anders, he escaped the event horizon into which all things fall by defying the laws of physics and nature and getting Eryk Anders to fight a genuinely memorable, entertaining slugfest of a bout. If we gave out medals of valor in mixed martial arts, by god, "Powerbar" would get a dozen.

But I'm not convinced this is a great matchup for him. Barriault is at his best when he's dragging people into brawls and punishing their attempts to escape them; escaping brawls isn't really a thing Chris Curtis does. Curtis is one of the hardest punchers in the division and his chin is still solid enough that multiple charging headbutts to the face didn't actually take him out, and I just don't see Barriault managing to chip him down before Curtis makes him pay for trying. CHRIS CURTIS BY TKO.

FEATHERWEIGHT: Arnold Allen (19-2, #3) vs Movsar Evloev (17-0, #9)

Boy, if either of these guys were Canadian this would've been an incredibly obvious top-of-the-card fight. I introduced this event as a night of firsts, and that's true here, too: After almost nine years in the company, this is the first time Arnold Allen will have to defend his position after a loss. Thanks to the bad luck and inactivity that plagued his career, despite being undefeated in the company, despite having knockout power, fantastic defense and underrated grappling, it took 2,856 days for Arnold Allen to get his shot at the top of the ladder. His fight with Max Holloway last April was his chance to cement his place as a top Featherweight once and for all by felling the undisputed second-best 145-pound fighter in the world. Unfortunately: Max Holloway is really, really good at fighting. Allen put up a solid performance, but like every goddamn Featherweight not named Alexander Volkanovski, Max still styled on him and outstruck him almost 2:1. Now Allen is stuck in the morass with every other contender-in-waiting.

And that means having another contender breathing down his neck. Movsar Evloev, in some ways, is a good modern cipher for Allen. He joined the UFC in 2019 already regarded as one of the best Featherweights in his country and had the regional championship to prove it, he established himself as a serious prospect almost instantaneously, he racked up an undefeated record right off the bat, and then he proceeded to have his momentum repeatedly chopped out from under him when circumstance ruined his strength of schedule. A motorcycle accident meant he only fought once in 2020, COVID kept him on the shelf for another half-year afterward, injuries saw him back to only fighting once in 2022 and he only made the single cagewalk in 2023, and it was against a last-minute replacement after Bryce Mitchell's spine collapsed under the weight of his terrible opinions. What's more, said replacement was Diego Lopes, whom we NOW know to be an awfully impressive fighter and a prospect in his own right, but at the time, it looked like Evloev almost getting pantsed by a guy no one had ever heard of.

Arnold Allen needs to win this fight if he wants to stay in the title mix he spent nine years clawing his way into. Movsar Evloev needs to win this fight to jump the line and become a top contender overnight. Both of these men are fantastic fighters and their styles make for an exceptionally interesting matchup. Evloev is every bit a grappler and his success comes predominantly from working through his opponent's guard on the ground; Allen hasn't been taken down since 2018. Allen is a defensively-minded fighter with deceptive power in his hands; Evloev has never been stopped (or beaten!) in his life. Neither man is likely to let the other operate in their comfort zone, and that's what makes this fight so goddamn interesting. I'm leaning towards ARNOLD ALLEN BY DECISION just because he's so good at being a granite block and stifling his opponents, but Evloev could break him. He'll almost certainly have to get him down first, though, and that's not in any way a guarantee.

PRELIMS: THE REST OF THE CANADIANS
BANTAMWEIGHT: Brad Katona (13-2) vs Garrett Armfield (9-3)

2023 saw the birth, life and death of the doleful journey that was The Ultimate Fighter 31 (jesus christ), a pair of tournaments between previously unseen prospects and veterans who'd all been cut from the UFC within the last few years in which every single prospect got eliminated before the semi-finals were over, the broad favorites won in thoroughly expected fashion, the coach-fight between Michael Chandler and Conor McGregor got postponed for an entire year and, ultimately, the UFC killed its drug testing program. But it wasn't without value, because we got Brad Katona back. Katona actually won The Ultimate Fighter 27 (jesus christ) back in 2018, but he was cut after dropping back-to-back decisions to Merab Dvalishvili, maybe the best Bantamweight on the planet, and Hunter Azure, who, himself, would get cut despite being 2-2 shortly thereafter. It was a silly decision based less on Katona's worthiness and more on the UFC's antipathy towards wrestling-style Pokémon, but hey, now Katona's not only back, he's the only two-time TUF winner in history, which is maybe the most dubious honor in mixed martial arts. Garrett Armfield is a beneficiary of the I Wasn't Even Supposed To Be Here Today program. He was brought into the UFC as a last-minute fill-in against David Onama back in the Summer of 2022--which was particularly funny because Onama had already defeated him as an amateur--and after being disposed of in fairly short order, he proceeded to go on the shelf for more than a year. A staph infection scratched him for the rest of 2022, an opponent in the beginning of 2023 fell through, and the UFC just didn't rebook him until last August, where he beat the absolute shit out of Road to UFC runner-up Toshiomi Kazama.

Which was, honestly, more than I thought he'd get out of his time in the UFC. He did a fantastic job of neutralizing Kazama's offense and brutalizing him with boxing. But Katona is an entirely different league of fighter. BRAD KATONA BY SUBMISSION to finally, after seven years, give Katona a UFC stoppage.

FEATHERWEIGHT: Charles Jourdain (15-6-1) vs Sean Woodson (10-1-1)

It took Charles Jourdain three years to build some real traction in the UFC, but by god, he made it. Jourdain's aggressive style cost him as many fights as it won him, but it also made him fan-friendly enough that the UFC didn't dare cut him, and after spending 2022 racking up back-to-back losses for the first time he rebounded with the two highest-profile victories of his career. Last May he put a prolonged, one-sided beating on Kron Gracie, and in September he welcomed the long-missed Ricardo Ramos back from a year on the shelf by out-scrambling him and catching him in a guillotine choke in just three minutes. Sean Woodson is my Schrödinger's Fighter. When I think about Sean Woodson, I think about the 6'2" boxer with really good reach management and timing I thought he was back in 2021. But when I watch Sean Woodson--which isn't too often, because he's only made it to the cage once a year since--I see a guy who had trouble dealing with Luis Saldaña kicking him repeatedly and struggled enough with Dennis Buzukja's forward pressure that he resorted to outwrestling him instead. Sean Woodson, to be clear, is still good. But even though, in my heart, I still think of him as a future championship contender, in my head I'm starting to ask unfortunate questions.

I still favor him here. A fair bit of Jourdain's success comes from stinging opponents at range and catching them in the ensuing chaos, and 9" is a whole lot of range to cover and a whole lot of clinch advantage to negate. SEAN WOODSON BY DECISION after pecking at him for three rounds.

BANTAMWEIGHT: Serhiy Sidey (10-1) vs Ramon Taveras (9-2)

We have reached the point in this sport where the preliminary bouts of a UFC card are being used to settle beef from Dana White's Contender Series. This is the way things have inverted. The rain falls upward, and we are damned to watch it flee our Earth. Last September, Serhiy Sidey and Ramon Taveras fought on the Contract Mill Variety Hour. Just about two and a half minutes into the first round, Sidey jabbed Taveras in the face and, in a very slick exchange, parried his return fire and countered it with a 1-2 that sent Taveras assfirst to the floor. Sidey jumped on Taveras and began hammerfisting, and veteran referee Kevin MacDonald immediately stopped the fight, which Taveras equally immediately protested. It wasn't a great stoppage, but honestly, we see worse at least a couple times a year. But those stoppages don't interfere with Dana White's Weekly Eat Shit Bitch Bloodfest, and that cannot be allowed. Dana called it the worst stoppage he'd ever seen and rebooked Sidey for an appearance on the show just four weeks later, and after knocking out Cortavious "Are You Not Entertained" Romious in twenty-nine seconds, which is just a delightful arrangement of words, Taveras was in the UFC.

That's right: Welcome to Sidey vs Taveras 2, the hotly-anticipated rematch. Those dastardly refs aren't there to save Serhiy Sidey anymore! But Sidey's also a pretty smart, controlled fighter and Taveras is more of a Bart Simpson windmill technique kind of guy, and honestly, this rematch feels a lot more Ankalaev/Cuțelaba than Serra/GSP. SERHEY SIDEY BY TKO.

WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT: Gillian Robertson (12-8) vs Polyana Viana (13-6)

At this point, my being in the tank for Gillian Robertson is a matter of public record. I like grapplers, I like underdogs, I like people who upset the UFC's plans, and by god, she consistently ticks all three boxes. When last we saw Gillian, unfortunately, she was continuing her career-long trend of never racking up more than two consecutive wins. I picked Gillian to beat Tabatha Ricci in the hopes that she'd pull out a grappling upset, and she put up a hell of a fight and neutralized most of Ricci's attempts, but she still got outworked for most of the fight. Polyana Viana presents the opposite problem. "Dama de Ferro" is not an outworker. Over a nineteen-fight career, Polyana has, in fact, only won a fight outside of the first round once--and that was her second-ever bout all the way back in 2014. She has crushing power in her hands and an intensely dangerous squeeze when she jumps on submissions, but in every other fight in her career, if she does not win within the first five minutes, she loses.

Gillian Robertson is real, real tough to stop. It's only happened twice: Once an armbar against your co-main event title challenger Mayra Bueno Silva, once a standing TKO against Maycee Barber that was more than a little dubious. Viana can knock out anyone in the division if she catches them cleanly, it's always possible, but if Robertson survives the first round and grinds her down from the top, it won't matter. GILLIAN ROBERTSON BY SUBMISSION.

EARLY PRELIMS: LITERALLY EVERYONE HERE IS COMING OFF A LOSS
WELTERWEIGHT: Yohan Lainesse (9-2) vs Sam Patterson (10-2-1)

This is a battle of lanky prospects whose enormous limbs could not catch enough branches to avert their falls from grace. Yohan Lainesse is the regular flavor of tall, a 6'1" Welterweight who fought his way through the contract show only to have a UFC tenure that has, as of yet, been less than ideal. He got knocked out by Gabe Green, he just barely scraped a split decision win off of Darian Weeks, and Mike Malott ragdolled and choked him out in a single round. Sam Patterson was supposed to be one of the UFC's Next Big Things in 2023--a 6'3" Lightweight from the UK who virtually always won by stoppage and is so on-the-nose poised for marketing that he's one of thirty-four fighters currently nicknamed "The Future"--and the UFC did their best to give him a soft target in his debut, matching him up with Yanal Ashmouz, a regional fighter who, at 5'9", was giving up almost a foot in reach. And Ashmouz crushed him. Patterson pumped a couple jabs, threw a few kicks, and then got fucking smashed. His UFC debut ended in 1:15 and he spent almost as long trying to half-consciously pull the referee into half-guard.

Oddly, this is the fight I feel the least certain about on the card. I'm fully accustomed to being frequently incorrect, but typically, that incorrectness stems from having a solid feeling about a fight. Here, I dunno. Both guys have tended to look sort of bad, and Yohan's tendency to let opponents pace his fights is just as self-destructive as Patterson's tendency to ignore his own defense. But Patterson's fighting up a weight class for the first time in his life, and Yohan's got some solid kicks in his back pocket, and if that's all the hunch my brain will give me, I am obligated to take it. YOHAN LAINESSE BY DECISION.

WOMEN'S FLYWEIGHT: Jasmine Jasudavicius (9-3) vs Priscila Cachoeira (12-5)

Down here, second from the bottom, we have the most lopsided odds of the entire card, and, honestly: Yeah. Jasmine Jasudavicius is a deeply underrated fighter with an incredibly tough, scrappy grappling game. She's never been stopped, she's rarely even been in danger, she went the distance with rampaging killing machine Natália Silva, and while she lost her last appearance against Tracy Cortez it was an extremely close fight that had a third of the media scores split, meaning Jasudavicius was a couple changed minds away from having a top ten ranking right now. Priscila Cachoeira, by contrast, has not. She joined the UFC back in 2018 and took an absurd beating from Valentina Shevchenko, she went on to drop three in a row and somehow not get cut, and she scored back-to-back TKOs in her next two fights, which is real impressive until you remember they were against Shana Dobson and Gina Mazany, who were, respectfully, two of the least successful fighters in the UFC. Things have been up and down since then--get choked out by Gillian Robertson here, screw Ji Yeon Kim out of a decision there--but her modern career is justified by her inexplicably flattening Ariane Lipski in a minute, which I cannot say a single bad thing about. That was awesome.

But this is one of the few fights dictated by MMAth. "Fighter X beat Fighter Y who beat Fighter Z, therefore X will beat Z" is a long-standing bit of spitball logic in this sport, and it's usually very silly. Fights happen across years, fighters change over time, styles make fights, etc. etc. But, every once in awhile, it proves reliable. In this incredibly unusual edge case, both of these women fought Miranda Maverick, in 2023, forty-nine days apart. On June 10, Jasmine Jasudavicius comprehensively outfought Maverick, outgrappling her on the ground and outstriking her on the feet en route to a unanimous decision victory. On July 29, Miranda Maverick put a ludicrously one-sided beating on Priscila Cachoeira, outstruck her 105 to 13, outgrappled her for two and a half rounds and submitted her midway through the third.

As an English student I'm not supposed to say this, but sometimes math is good. JASMINE JASUDAVICIUS BY DECISION.

FLYWEIGHT: Malcolm Gordon (14-7) vs Jimmy Flick (16-7)

Every card needs a 'the loser is probably getting cut' fight, and unfortunately for these two extremely talented fighters, this is it. Malcolm "X" Gordon is a fast, technically skilled Flyweight who ran the table in his native Canada, but since hopping over to the UFC in 2020 he's been struggling heavily. He's been choked out twice and knocked out twice, and while he managed to sandwich two solid wins in the middle, that doesn't keep him from coming into this bout on a two-fight losing streak, and both losses were stoppages, and he missed weight in the most recent one, which the UFC especially hates. Jimmy "The Brick" Flick looked like a tremendous Flyweight prospect back in 2020 when he was the Legacy Fighting Alliance champion who debuted in the UFC with a flying goddamn triangle choke, but then he, uh, retired. His heart wasn't in it, his personal issues with his family were legion, he was turning 30 and fighting for peanuts, the joy was gone. Which was tragic, but understandable. And then he unretired in 2023, and it proved to be tragic for entirely different reasons, as his unretirement comeback tour has, thus far, consisted of getting repeatedly knocked out. Charles Johnson and Alessandro Costa both put vicious beatings on him, and now he's 0-2 since 2020 and his retirement might be imposed rather than chosen.

But Malcolm Gordon has this knack for getting himself into really poor positions that wind up costing him submissions, and Jimmy Flick is still very, very good at finding them, and I'm banking on it happening again. JIMMY FLICK BY SUBMISSION.