CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 173: THE THEORY OF TRYING
Carl goes to Mexico for UFC Fight Night: Moreno vs Kavanagh and jesus christ Lone'er Kavanagh is in a main event what are we doing
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 28 FROM THE ARENA CDMX IN MEXICO CITY
PRELIMS 2 PM PST / 5 PM EST | MAIN CARD 5 PM / 8 PM
Last year we talked about the way the UFC prioritized their huge Mexican-appeal attempts at the Noche UFC cards while getting weirdly understated about the cards they actually put on in Mexico. Last year’s Noche UFC was a Sean O’Malley/Alexa Grasso championship double-header at the Sphere and their visit to Mexico City was Brandon Moreno vs Steve Erceg and Manuel Torres vs Drew Dober.
This year’s Noche UFC 3 was a blockbuster Fight Night headlined by Diego Lopes vs Jean Silva. This year only 6 out of the 26 fighters booked on this Arena CDMX show are coming off of a UFC win. But good news: Both of them have David Martínez in the co-main slot, which means we’re closer than ever to quality parity!
Bad news: That parity includes 2-1 Lone’er Kavanagh in the main event and that’s portentous for the future.
MAIN EVENT: THE FAST WAY UP
FLYWEIGHT: Brandon Moreno (23-9-2, #6) vs Lone’er Kavanagh (9-1, #15)
I’ve been laughing about this since they announced it, but it’s that kind of laugh that comes from a place of pain deep under your ribs. Let’s get the good side of this matchup out of the way before we get to the dark comedy: Brandon Moreno is in a really tough spot right now, and that’s saying something, because he’s been in a really tough spot for, like, the last five years.
Moreno was not supposed to be a Thing. He came up second on The Ultimate Fighter 24 (jesus christ) back in 2016, he had a good-but-not-great 3-2 run before the UFC cut him, and his return to the company in 2019 started off on a split draw. Nothing about him screamed title contender, but a couple wins, a serendipitous last-minute replacement and busting Brandon Royval’s shoulder got him into the championship picture a year later anyhow. He was a virtual afterthought, a +300 underdog against the force of Flyweight nature that was defending champion Deiveson Figueiredo, a man the entire MMA world had picked out as a future great we’d talk about right alongside Demetrious Johnson one day.
Realistically: Moreno would’ve lost the fight if Deiveson hadn’t gotten a point deducted for low blows. But he did, and that meant it, just like Moreno’s return, was a draw, and that locked them into a progressively more insane series of rematches that didn’t end until they’d fought four times in twenty-five months. The second time, Moreno choked Figueiredo out. The third time, Figueiredo dropped him repeatedly and won a decision. The fourth and final time, Moreno punched Figueiredo’s eye shut in three rounds and Figgy hugged him and left the Flyweight division. Brandon won the rivalry, won the belt, and won the respect he’d been denied by the UFC the first time around.
Unfortunately, he had a bogeyman. When he’d been choked out of TUF seven years prior, it’d been at the hands of Alexandre Pantoja. When the UFC cut Moreno in 2018, it was after a loss to Alexandre Pantoja. As the champion, Moreno’s #1 contender was, once again, Alexandre Pantoja, and barely half a year after Moreno ended the most exhausting rivalry of his career, his true nemesis beat him again. It was only a split decision, but with three career losses to the new champion getting a rematch was going to require a run through all the top contenders Flyweight had to offer, and Moreno’s rebound against fellow rematch fanatic Brandon Royval ended in another split decision loss. Moreno was stuck on the outside looking in, and when you’re as notable as he is, that means having to repeatedly beat back your own replacements.
At first he was supposed to be a way to potentially rehabilitate the perpetually-injured, 17-1 Amir Albazi; instead Moreno trounced him with ease. Then he was supposed to help get the UFC’s favorite Australian Steve Erceg back into title contention; instead Moreno carried the banner for their ride into Mexico City by winning a wide decision. It wasn’t until this past December that the company finally got what it wanted. Tatsuro Taira was supposed to be the UFC’s big hope for their first-ever Japanese champion, but he’d been set back by his first-ever career loss thanks to our old friend Brandon Royval. At the last pay-per-view of the year--the last UFC pay-per-view ever, as of now--Taira finally got to the top of the heap after becoming the first person (outside of TUF) to ever stop Moreno, pounding him out in a round and a half.
Was the stoppage a little early? Yes. Did Taira still outwrestle him and punch him in the head 24 times in twenty seconds? He sure did. It was an entirely fair win, and it left Moreno fighting to stick to the top ten for the first time in six years. But he’s still the UFC’s best hope for headlining Mexico, so despite what was technically a TKO loss just 84 days ago, they booked him to main event the Arena CDMX against the rising Asu Almabayev, either giving the crowd another big local hero victory or rubbing off a little more of Moreno’s notability on another, cheaper prospect.
Then Asu had to pull out, and things got really fucking silly.
I’m gonna quote from November of 2024 real quick.
And here, we have the fight the company is really invested in. Lone’er Kavanagh reads like he was drawn up in a UFC marketing department: An undefeated Chinese-Irish striking artist who finishes almost all of his fights, kills people with spinning heel kicks, and would rather drop people on the Contender Series and sign the dotted line than gamble on free agency. He’s the precise ideal of what their entire contract mill enterprise is out to find, and they would desperately like him to win this fight.
Lord knows the UFC has options. Tim Elliott’s right there, and he just choked out former title contender Kai Asakura. Steve Erceg’s coming off a win again, they could have run back the rematch. Hell, a multitude of Flyweights campaigned for this fight, but no one more visibly than the #13-ranked Charles Johnson. Sure, he just got knocked out by an overweight Alex Perez, but he still privately and publicly threw his hat in the ring and begged for the opportunity. After all, new champion Joshua Van only has one loss in the UFC, and it came from Charles Johnson flattening him. He’s always had the ability. Despite my lifelong InnerG fandom I thought it was a terrible idea the UFC should turn down, because booking people to fight just four weeks after they got knocked out is a terrible idea.
And then they booked Johnson for a random Apex bout with Bruno Silva two weeks from now, and announced Bruno Silva’s original opponent Lone’er Kavanagh was taking the Moreno fight instead. Lone’er Kavanagh, who is coming off of not just the first loss of his career, but a knockout loss.
Against Charles Johnson.
This fight is like the phases of the favorability moon. The UFC wants Lone’er Kavanagh. They always have. He’s an undefeated Chinese-Irish striker, you could not stop them from throwing fortune and fame his way, and that includes getting him to 2-0 in the UFC without having to fight a real wrestler. Charles Johnson? They fuckin’ hate that dude. No matter how many fights he wins or how well he wins them, they refuse to promote him. When last we saw him, Johnson was on a four-fight winning streak that included not just beating but knocking out Joshua Van. Johnson’s next fight was in the Apex; Van’s was in The Sphere. And what did Johnson get for winning that fight? The very first curtain-jerking fight on another set of Apex prelims against Ramazan Temirov, one of the best prospects the UFC has signed in years.
Lone’er Kavanagh is 2-1 in the UFC. Those two victories were decision wins over Jose Ochoa, who is 1-2, and Felipe dos Santos, who is 1-3. That was still enough to get him ranked in the top fifteen. The day before he was ranked, the #14 Flyweight in the UFC was Joseph Morales. He’d just won TUF 33 and followed that up by choking out former top-ten contender Matt Schnell in a single round. Then the rankings updated to include the newly-returned Kyoji Horiguchi, and mysteriously, Morales was out and Lone’er, who hadn’t won a fight in almost a year and was coming off a huge loss, was in.
Morales isn’t booked to fight again, yet. Neither are Brandon Royval, Tagir Ulanbekov, Rei Tsuruya or Tim Elliott.
But Lone’er Kavanagh has a main event against the most visible Flyweight in the UFC. Michael Bisping is going to tell you about Lone’er Kavanagh’s stardom and fanbase and how his path to the top was entirely natural and in no way astroturfed, and he does not care if you believe him.
Ronda Rousey had an interview with Jim Rome this week regarding the UFC’s refusal to book the spectacle fight between herself and Gina Carano, and she made the point a lot of pundits, activists and insufficiently-subscribed-to bloggers have been making for the last several years: The UFC has completed its journey out of the fan business. They no longer need to attract you. They got their deal. They made their billions. Their money doesn’t come from your views anymore. They now have exactly one goal: Get their preferred marketing favorites to the top of the card as fast as possible, while their contracts are still cheap. They’d love it if you wanted to see Lone’er Kavanagh! But your participation is not required for their purposes, because they’re going to do it anyway.
It is nihilistic and short-sighted and deeply, deeply destructive for the sport, and that is the age we are going to be in for the next seven years, and we’re only two months into that near-decade era and we’re already getting Lone’er Kavanagh contention bouts, so buckle the fuck up, because where we’re going, they won’t need buys to see.
I like Charles Johnson. I’m pretty sure Moreno is still better than him. BRANDON MORENO BY DECISION.
CO-MAIN EVENT: THE SLOW WAY DOWN
BANTAMWEIGHT: Marlon Vera (23-11-1, #9) vs David Martínez (13-1, #10)
Oh, Chito. I think we’re getting close to the end.
We’re really not that removed from a time when World Champion Marlon Vera felt like a possibility. At the end of 2022, Chito was the people’s goddamn champion. He battled for his family, he treasured his daughter, he was too rough for marketing but too charismatic to ignore. He fought with an incredibly odd, sniping style that eschewed volume in favor of opportunism, and somehow he could make it work. He would get outstruck almost 2:1 and still win decisions because after absorbing dozens of punches he would land one shot that almost killed his opponent. He executed Frankie Edgar. He retired Dominick Cruz. He made himself a part of the contendership conversation.
And then it turned out ‘what if I fight a low volume style and wait for my opponents to make mistakes’ doesn’t work at the highest level of the sport. Vera’s 1 for his last 5 and even that win was a questionable decision. Cory Sandhagen dominated him. Sean O’Malley dominated him. Deiveson Figueiredo outgrappled him. It wasn’t until Aiemann Zahabi took him to a decision loss this past October that most folks accepted it was simply over. The knockdowns aren’t there anymore. The gameplan hasn’t adjusted. People have figured him out, and the UFC has extracted his value, and now he’s been fighting his way down the rankings as a test for the next class of contenders.
David Martínez is in that class now, and it’s very funny, because he really wasn’t supposed to be. He had the typical path to the Contender Series--hang around the regional circuit, beat a 2-0 guy nine fights into your career, win a C-level championship, trade it in for a shot at the contract mill against someone with half your experience--and when he unsurprisingly won, they snatched him up in a heartbeat. His debut was only eleven months ago, and it came against Saimon Oliveira in the great churn of former DWCS prospects for new DWCS prospects that’s going to dictate the entire span of the sport for the next terrible era of history. Unsurprisingly, Martínez nuked him in a round, and the UFC set him up for a step up against the 1-1 Carlos Vera.
But Vera couldn’t make it, so instead it became a fight with the 1-2 Quang Le. And then Quang Le couldn’t make it, and coincidentally, the UFC was making an attempt to exchange longterm Bantamweight Cerberus Rob Font for their child soldier Raul Rosas Jr. that fell through when Raul pulled out, too. So David Martínez, at 1-0 in the UFC, wound up fighting Rob Font, who has been ranked for damn near a decade, in the co-main event of Noche UFC 3. And he won! It was a close fight and Font might have been en route to yet another 29-28 decision win until Martínez dropped him in the waning seconds of the bout. Font survived to the bell, but Martínez got the third round and with it the well-deserved decision, and suddenly, after just two fights in the UFC, he was in the top ten.
Now there’s just the rest of the climb up the ladder. Martínez and his style seem more than capable of beating the Chito Vera of 2026, but if we’re being depressingly honest, that seems like most of the Bantamweight top fifteen. Vera’s already been beaten by most of the people ranked above him, and the people below aren’t that much less scary. Is Payton Talbott going to get stymied by fear of Vera’s headkicks when he hits just as hard? Will Vinicius Oliveira’s looping style leave him open to counters when he eats punches for breakfast? If Montel Jackson and Marlon Vera wind up in the cage together will they simply stare at each other while circling intensely for fifteen minutes?
I really wanted Champion Chito to be a thing. I’m sad we’ve wound up here instead. But when you keep doing the same thing over and over again, the world is going to catch on. DAVID MARTÍNEZ BY DECISION.
MAIN CARD: PREEMPTIVELY NOTING THAT THIS WEEK’S RANKED WOMEN’S FIGHT ISN’T UP HERE BUT IMANOL RODRIGUEZ IS
LIGHTWEIGHT: Daniel Zellhuber (15-3) vs King Green (33-17-1 (1))
Speaking of prospects that cannot be allowed to fail: Hi, Daniel. This isn’t even the first time we’ve had this conversation about you. If you have a long memory for these endless essays, you may remember all the way back in 2023 when we discussed the way Zellhuber got beat by Trey Ogden and got booked into nice, comfortable, visible rehab matches while Ogden got just a touch buried, because losing had no relevance on the UFC’s plans to make the man literally nicknamed ‘Golden Boy’ a central part of their plans to invade Mexico. And he got a three-fight winning streak out of it! Sure, it was over Lando Vannata, Christos Giagos and Francisco Prado, bringing the total UFC records of said streak to an incredible 11-19-2, but he won, so that’s what matters! And then he got just barely beat by Esteban Ribovics, which wasn’t really the plan, and then he got beat again by a seventy-two year-old Michael Johnson, which definitely wasn’t the plan, and now his rehabilitation campaign has been replaced by a losing streak.
Which is why he’s on a main card fighting King Green, the master of prospect-enabling. Green’s been the UFC’s most valuable player when it comes to boosting the guys they want boosted and stopping the guys they want stopped. Islam Makhachev, Drew Dober, Jalin Turner, Paddy Pimblett and Mauricio Ruffy have all made hay out of Green’s head over the last four years and gone on to give the company the business it wanted. But Jared Gordon, in exchange for beating* Paddy Pimblett, got a King Green headbutt to the jaw, and Grant Dawson, for the sin of wrestling, got punched out in under a minute. Green’s own losing streak got snapped this past December with a decision over Lance Gibson Jr., an unexpected import from the Bellator graveyard, which means his prospect-popularizing powers have recharged and it is time to once again book him against a bigger, younger, more marketable fighter so he can impart a modicum of momentum based on being one of the few remaining fighters anyone actually remembers from the days before the company stopped caring about marketing most of the roster.
Zellhuber’s bigger and stronger and younger and faster and he’s got half a foot of reach in his direction and I am choosing to stand obstinately in the flow of the river of time and deny it. KING GREEN BY DECISION.
*We have eyes.
FLYWEIGHT: Edgar Cháirez (12-6 (1)) vs Felipe Bunes (14-8)
We talk about how fighters are becoming utility players as the UFC gets more explicit in their targeting, but I want to be clear: This is all they have for Edgar Cháirez to do. His initial debut was a regular-ass fight card, and I guess losing made them realize he was worth more for targeted marketing than actual contention, because he’s stuck on the Mexican-appeal circuit and they’re never letting him go. Noche UFC, Arena CDMX, back and forth, every year. The only reason he wasn’t on this September’s Noche was an untimely leg injury. Is he going anywhere yet? Not really, he has yet to string together two wins or two losses. He simply Is, and as long as his Isness is helpful for advertising, he has a job.
Felipe Bunes is more of a convenience. They picked him up back in 2023 as a potential foil for Zhalgas Zhumagulov, he got hurt, and in a scramble to rebook Zhalgas the UFC found some assuredly unimportant prospect named Joshua Van, and three years later, unintentionally giving the world Van is still Felipe’s biggest contribution to the sport. He ironically fought Van and got smashed, he came back to submit Jose “You Can’t Pluralize Lone Ranger” Johnson a year later, eight months after that he put up a solid fight against a considerably overweight Rafael Estevam but still got outworked, and it’s been a half-year and that’s about it. Three years, three fights, one win and it came against a guy who got knocked out by Mana “Manaboi” Martinez.
Bunes has a tendency to get outgrappled and out-muscled, and Edgar’s probably not gonna have a lot of trouble with either. EDGAR CHÁIREZ BY DECISION.
FLYWEIGHT: Imanol Rodriguez (6-0) vs Kevin Borjas (10-4)
Awhile ago someone asked me how I didn’t understand that main card fights are built to be fun and women’s MMA fights aren’t, which is why they get stuck on the prelims while prospects get main card slots, and my response was a) first off, fuck you, Sean Strickland, and b) everything the UFC does is an explicit choice and the reasons for those choices matter, and reducing them down to ‘fun’ or ‘not fun’ is missing the forest for a bunch of weirdly misogynistic trees. Imanol Rodriguez has six professional fights. His one Contender Series fight constitutes 17% of his career. And they wanted him before that--he was pulled onto TUF 33 (jesus christ) where he got beat by eventual champion Joseph Morales. But Imanol fights wild and he knocks people out and he’s in his mid-twenties and he has no leverage in the sport and he’s from Mexico and consequently he is everything they want to maximize their potential return on interest, which is the only thing that matters now.
You can underline that point by their having him debut against Kevin Borjas. Borjas, too, has been a recurring part of the Latin-American push, but as he is Peruvian and thus not the marketing-optimal nationality he tends to be the B-side. He was supposed to fight Edgar Cháirez at Noche 2, he was supposed to lose to Ronaldo “Lazy Boy” Rodríguez at last year’s Mexico show only to make things awkward by daring to win, and the UFC was so thrilled with his efforts that they sent him to Shanghai to fight Sumudaerji as another, different flavor of disfavored foreigner and this time he dutifully and correctly lost. He’s 1-3 in the company, he’s been an underdog in every single fight he’s had, and their expectation is that he will, once again, get beaten to make the crowd cheer for a local hero because matchmaking has regressed to the days of the WWF making Sergeant Slaughter an Iraqi sympathizer.
In other words: I am choosing to be stubborn against the odds and believe in Borjas. KEVIN BORJAS BY DECISION.
BANTAMWEIGHT: Santiago Luna (7-0) vs Angel Pacheco (7-3)
The last time we saw Santiago Luna--naturally at Noche UFC 3, because of course it was--I was complaining about how he was being booked on the main card despite being a UFC debutant with a definitionally unremarkable record while Tatiana Suarez and Amanda Lemos, the #2 and #4 Women’s Strawweights, were fighting in a top contendership bout midway through the prelims. More the fool me, because Suarez, who is still #2 and has only ever lost to Zhang Weili, is fighting the #6-ranked Loopy Godinez next, and now there’s another, different ranked women’s fight stuck in the middle of the prelims, and Santiago Luna is still here on the main card even though the UFC cut Quang Le, the man he beat in his one and only fight in the company, after Luna knocked him out. Are they going to give him a better fight this time?
Nope! Angel Pacheco has been signed to the UFC for two and a half years and he has one fight and it was all the way back in March of 2024, and not only did he lose, but the man he lost to, Caolán Loughran, got released two fights later. Even though Loughran won his last fight, and the man he beat, Nathan Fletcher, is still signed. Angel didn’t even win his Contender Series fight--he dropped a decision to Danny Silva, but Pacheco was ‘just so tough,’ so they signed him anyway. It is 2026 and he’s either 0-1 or 0-2 in the company depending on if you count DWCS, and before his shot at the bigtime he was beating up a 9-14 guy, for the second time, in the main event of BUDWEISER’S BUD BRAWL II. He hasn’t won a fight since the Summer of 2022. The last time we saw him he got outstruck almost 2:1 and thoroughly outwrestled. He’s a guy from Minnesota in his mid-thirties and the UFC is employing him specifically to lose.
It’s funny how the record-padding I complain about in DWCS is just becoming the UFC now. SANTIAGO LUNA BY TKO.
PRELIMS: YEAH, I KNOW, ME TOO
MIDDLEWEIGHT: José Medina (11-6) vs Ryan Gandra (8-1)
Like, you’re just doing this to fuck with me, right? The top ten women’s fight is one slot down from here, it’s almost the headliner, but god forbid, because we need to make that space for José Medina, who is 0-3 and that’s not counting the Contender Series fight he also lost, and Ryan Gandra, who is making his debut and whose standout skills include “throws punches” and “can kick someone in the dick twice and then get mad at them for it,” which is the kind of stuff I really like to see when I do tape review. They’ve already thrown Medina into the meat grinder of prospects they are explicably or inexplicably invested in--Zach Reese, Ateba Gautier, even Duško Todorović--and he’s been beaten by all of them and finished by most, so why not chuck him in with the new guy they want to knock people out? It worked so far, it can work again. Fun fact: Gandra’s UFC contract came from beating Trent “The Terminator” Miller, who earned his DWCS spot by beating the 7-10 Said-Magomed Abdulgaziev, whose best victory was over a Russian fighter named Magomed “Molodoy” Magomedov who had only fought twice in the previous six years.
Only the best of the best for our UFC. RYAN GANDRA BY TKO.
WOMEN’S BANTAMWEIGHT: Ailín Pérez (12-2, #7) vs Macy Chiasson (10-5, #8)
It’s just the complete refusal to even entertain the idea of fixing Women’s Bantamweight that baffles me. Ailín Pérez is from Argentina, which means with Irene Aldana missing in action she’s the closest thing the UFC has to a demographically-desired marketing star in the weight class, and she’s on a five-fight winning streak, which is the second-longest the division has to offer. Hell, there’s only one other woman in the back half of the top fifteen with a smidge of momentum, and it’s Joselyne Edwards, and Ailín already beat her a year and a half ago. She’s good, she’s fun, she’s got an active top game, and they’re clearly setting her up for success here because Macy Chiasson has been struggling ever since the company got rid of the Featherweight division, and now she’s down two fights in a row, she’s repeatedly failing to make weight, and she exists to get other women up above her in the rankings. This fight is tailor-made for Ailín to ascend off a known quantity and ensconce herself as an actual contender. Which is why it is on the fucking prelims under Imanol Rodriguez and Ryan Gandra.
There’s a part of me that wonders if they aren’t just going to give up on Women’s Bantamweight eventually the same way they did Featherweight. Kayla Harrison’s gonna be 36 in July and just had neck surgery, Amanda Nunes may just retire again after their fight, the only other woman they’ve marketed in years is Julianna Peña and she too is 36 and has already had multiple major injuries. There’s no one left to fill that void. Is the UFC going to suddenly market Norma Dumont and Yana Santos, who are also already 35 and 36? Are they going to beg Miesha Tate to come out of retirement for the sixth or seventh time? There’s no one left, because the UFC hasn’t done a god damned thing with any of them. No pushes, no prospects, no one in the pipeline. The Contender Series provides virtually all of the UFC’s roster replacements nowadays, they’ve signed somewhere around 400+ contracts off it--not including random late replacement signings--and about 250 of those were in just the last five years. Do you know how many of those 250 contracts went to fighters at Women’s Bantamweight?
One.
They signed Hailey Cowan four years ago and then she lost and they gave up. Gave up on her, gave up on the division. They never officially announced the end of Women’s Featherweight, you know. No video package, no Jon Anik speaking with respectable solemnity about the legacy of the sport, no on-screen graphic an intern made that misspells ‘de Randamie’ in the title history, no thanks-for-your-hard-work office pizza party. It was a division built by two of the greatest fighters in the history of women’s combat sports and they just stopped marketing it, stopped creating prospects for it, stopped booking title fights for it, and then, one day, they simply stopped talking about it altogether, and now it’s gone.
But I’m sure it was a fluke and they’d never do something like that again. AILÍN PÉREZ BY DECISION.
BANTAMWEIGHT: Cristian Quiñonez (18-5) vs Kris Moutinho (14-7)
Some fighters are put here to suffer, and Kris Moutinho is one of the kings of suffering. He was brought into the UFC in 2021 because Sean O’Malley desperately needed a replacement, he got punched in the head hundreds of times, and then he got his revenge not by winning, but by facing a 42 year-old, 8-6 Guido Cannetti who effortlessly knocked him out in two minutes, because fuck you, Sean O’Malley, that’s why. The UFC cut Moutinho immediately, and after five regional wins over the next three years they finally brought him back--because they had a new big-punching prospect in Malcolm Wellmaker and they needed someone to lose to him, and Kris obliged by getting smashed in one round. It is only now, almost five years on, that Kris has a fight that isn’t built entirely on comedy. He is, of course, still supposed to lose, because Cristian Quiñonez is from Mexico and he hasn’t won a fight since 2022 and he hasn’t fought at all in the last two years and it’d be very convenient if he channeled the energy he once used for knocking motherfuckers out and got his hype back by destroying one of the company’s favorite punching bags.
I haven’t had a chaos pick on this card yet and I’m spending it here. The chips must fall Moutinho’s way one day and there is no day but today. KRIS MOUTINHO BY TKO.
FEATHERWEIGHT: Douglas Silva de Andrade (29-6 (1)) vs Javier Reyes (22-5)
We passed twelve years of Douglas Silva de Andrade in the UFC this month. Twelve goddamn years. DSDA’s been in there with everyone from Lerone Murphy to Petr Yan to Renan Barão, and once upon a time he was a wonderful violence elemental who seemed like he could beat anyone if you caught him on a good day. Those good days seem like they’re just a touch behind him. In 2026 “D’Silva” hasn’t been in the cage in almost two years, hasn’t won a fight in almost three, and hasn’t beaten a ranked opponent in multiple presidential terms. He’s still absurdly tough, but that toughness used to be backed up by effective aggression, and the aggression’s still there, but the effectiveness has waned. He doesn’t land as much or as hard anymore, he doesn’t wrestle as well or as often anymore, and he just doesn’t do all that much winning anymore. So Javier Reyes is here to take what’s left of his time in the sport. Ordinarily I take this opportunity to complain about DWCS and the thin nature of fighter scouting, but Reyes is one of the rare, welcome exceptions. He’s been in the sport since 2014, he’s gone around the world, he’s got a ton of experience and he’s proven himself worthy of a shot in the spotlight. Does he still catch punches with his face? Sure, but at this point that’s just his damn style, and he’s got a funky way of looping his right hands into spaces where they just don’t seem like they should fit.
If DSDA had about eight years less mileage on his bones I think he’d be able to pressure Reyes back and break him. Now? JAVIER REYES BY DECISION.
WOMEN’S FLYWEIGHT: Ernesta Kareckaite (6-1-1) vs Sofia Montenegro (6-2)
For as much as I excoriate the UFC for falling down on the job when it comes to women’s MMA, I cannot help feeling a sense of ennui about the prospects for whom I, personally, feel nothing. Ernesta Kareckaite came into the UFC with a little bit of hype as an undefeated striker, and then people said ‘does it really count as being undefeated if you had a draw and all of your wins are split decisions,’ and lo and behold, the past became the future. She squeaked past Carli Judice with a split on the Contender Series, she got beat by Dione Barbosa in her promotional debut, and she just barely survived a split decision against Nicole Caliari a year ago, who, coincidentally, went on to get brutally fucked up by Carli Judice one fight later. Sofia Montenegro is her heir apparent. She, too, got on DWCS thanks to a kickboxing background and victories over people with iffy records that I promise you’ve never heard of, and she, too, went to a split decision--except Sofia lost hers. The UFC signed both her and her opponent Jeisla Chaves, who I’m looking forward to talking about one day because up until DWCS she had an incredible zero fights against anyone who’d ever won in their lives, but Jeisla is Brazilian, so she doesn’t get to come to the Mexico City party.
There are cases where there are prospects the UFC is insufficiently pushing and there are cases where the prospects that should be there aren’t. ERNESTA KARECKAITE BY DECISION.
FEATHERWEIGHT: Erik Silva (9-3) vs Francis Marshall (8-3)
Even here, on the regional appeal cards, we have potential pink slip battles. Erik Silva got picked up for beating a 3-0 (now 5-6!) guy on the Contender Series three and a half years ago and in the time since he’s only fought twice, and the first time he got choked out by TJ Brown, who got cut in 2023, and the second time he fought Muhammad Naimov and got his leg crumpled in forty-four seconds. That’s it. That’s the run. Francis Marshall is also 1-3 in the company, which is especially unfortunate because a) one of those three losses was an absolute coinflip of a decision that could’ve gone either way, b) one of those losses was a TKO to Isaac Dulgarian who has since been implicated in a fight-fixing scandal and c) the most recent loss was a split decision to Mairon Santos that was voted the #1 robbery of 2025. It’s been a fucking snakebitten run, and now both of these men are colliding in a match where the loser could very plausibly get cut.
Marshall’s so much better than his record indicates or the judges allow. I’m hoping he gets to show it. FRANCIS MARSHALL BY SUBMISSION.
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Wes Schultz (8-2) vs Damian Pinas (8-1)
Do you remember Dylan “The Mindless Hulk” Budka? The guy who kind of looked like pre-injury Darren Drozdov, got pushed so inexplicably by the UFC that despite doing nothing but losing he somehow still worked his way up from early prelims to televised main cards, and ultimately got drummed out of the company after going 0-3 and managing the incredible statistic of landing an average of just 6 strikes per fight? That guy beat Wes Schultz, and it cost Schultz his first shot at a UFC scouting opportunity. A year and a half later he got a second shot through the Contender Series, and Mansur Abdul-Malik smashed his head in. Another year and one fight later he was back and he finally got his contract thanks to one of the raddest submission holds in the world, the Doink the Clown stump pullerSuloev stretch, and that’s why it saddens me that they are putting him here against a fuckin’ Nova União prospect with a 90% knockout rate in the clear hopes that he’ll punch Schultz until he forgets what grappling is and thus removes one more obstacle to the UFC’s plans of world domination.
DAMIAN PINAS BY TKO. But I’d prefer more neat submissions if possible.