CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 177: FORCING IT
The UFC has written Israel Adesanya's swan song, and Carl is begrudgingly reading it.
SATURDAY, MARCH 28 FROM THE CLIMATE PLEDGE ARENA IN SEATTLE
PRELIMS 2 PM PDT / 5 PM EDT | MAIN CARD 5 PM / 8 PM
This has nothing to do with mixed martial arts, but upon reading the phrase “The Climate Pledge Arena” I immediately had to go a-searching to learn which horrifying multi-billion dollar conglomerate had originated the name. It’s from the Global Optimism group that helped sign the Paris Agreement! No one bad could have chosen to support that, right?
It was paid for by Amazon in 2020, and if you search, one of the first results you’ll get is Amazon using the arena’s name to advertise their new, AI-driven approach to Amazon Web Services.
Amazing how much worse things can get in just a handful of years.
Speaking of which,
MAIN EVENT: JACK’S LAMENT
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Israel Adesanya (24-5, #4) vs Joe Pyfer (15-3, #14)
I feel like I don’t even need to say anything about this fight. I feel like you can peer through your glowing rectangle of choice and see the look of resignation on my face and, really, that’s enough.
Hell, we don’t even have to go through the whole story to get to the favoritism at work here. You can see the #4 and #14 up top. You know the deal already. You know what they are doing, intuitively, before I say a goddamn thing, because matchmaking has degenerated to the point that it’s the expected course of action now. Remember five months ago when Brendan Allen, a solid Middleweight whose only losses in the last five years have been against top contenders, took a short-notice fight with Reinier de Ridder, who at the time was ranked #4 and one fight away from the world title? Remember how Allen surprisingly trounced him and presumably usurped his spot at the top of the division?
They only lifted him to #6, and as the #6 Middleweight in the world, Allen’s next fight is an Apex co-main event where he’ll be defending his spot against the unranked Edmen Shahbazyan.
Joe Pyfer, at #14 and coming off victories over no less than Marc-André Barriault, the 2025 edition of Kelvin Gastelum, and Abus Magomedov, is fighting the biggest mixed martial arts star of the last generation.
But that star has fallen an awful long way. Over the first ten years of his MMA career, Israel Adesanya managed a staggering 22-1 record that took him through champions, contenders and outright legends of the sport, and the only blemish on any of it came from an ill-advised, ill-prepared strike at Light Heavyweight gold, and even then, he went the distance with a newly-crowned Jan Błachowicz that had been stopping most of his opponents. It was a wild run, particularly given that he took virtually no time off. In the modern age of champions parking their belts for 8-12 months on a regular basis, Izzy’s time at the top of the sport saw him in a title fight, on average, every 145 days for four and a half consecutive years.
That’s an absurd schedule to maintain at any level of combat sports, let alone one that keeps you perpetually engaged with the best of the best.
It also probably has something to do with why the first ten years of his career were nearly flawless and the last four have seen him go 1 for 5 and get stopped repeatedly.
The competition’s still up there, obviously. Getting torched by Alex Pereira is nothing to be ashamed of, particularly when you knock him out right back a few months later. But getting dropped by Sean Strickland, choked out by Dricus du Plessis and punched limp by Nassourdine Imavov all in a row is the kind of thing that indicates your time as the sport’s top Middleweight is well and truly over. When so much of your success comes from your ability to control range and speed, and you wake up one day on the south side of your thirties and find you’ve burnt yourself to cinders fighting two to four times a year for as long as the sport’s short memory can recall, the future starts to get dim.
And that’s when they send in whoever their Joe Pyfer of the moment happens to be. Unfortunately for those of us who live in this moment, right now, the Joe Pyfer is, in fact, Joe Pyfer.
They’ve wanted this for years. Pyfer got on the Contender Series all the way back in 2020 and got his arm busted by a Dustin Stoltzfus takedown, and they had him back on the show one fight later. By Pyfer’s own admission the UFC started offering him ranked fights almost immediately, and he turned them down half because he didn’t feel he had the experience to hang with the best and half because he didn’t want to be on a minimum-wage, no-leverage DWCS contract while doing battle with the best fighters the company had to offer. Which turned out to be wise, as a year and a half into his tenure they tried to coronate him as a new contender with a main-event showcase against perpetual gatekeeper Jack Hermansson and it ended with a rattled, exhausted Pyfer getting outstruck 52 to 6 in the final round en route to a unanimous decision loss.
By the time Hermansson fought again Pyfer had already notched two wins, but the latter wasn’t great. In the highest-profile fight of his career Pyfer fought Kelvin Gastelum all the way below the co-main event of a double-title-fight Sean O’Malley-headlined pay-per-view. Once upon a time, Kelvin was a huge prospect with championship potential; in mid-2025 he was an inconsistent Welterweight wash-out known more for his constant inability to make weight than his fighting. The last time he’d recorded a memorable victory was eight years prior, and that involved knocking out a one-eyed Michael Bisping who’d just lost a fight three weeks beforehand and retired immediately afterward.
Kelvin had long passed into the annals of the great What Ifs of the sport. In the modern age he was a sizable underdog to the promotional favorite.
And he still almost beat Pyfer.
Kelvin, who was two fights removed from getting destroyed by a Welterweight, survived multiple knockdowns in the first round, took over the back half of the fight and repeatedly stumbled Pyfer in the final round. It was the biggest win of Pyfer’s career, but it left a lot of questions, to the point that when Pyfer fought Abus Magomedov this past October my conlcuding thoughts were that however good his chances were, I had very little faith in either man to make it past the top ten.
I cannot help thinking after watching Pyfer’s path through the division the UFC secretly agrees with me, because they’re not taking the chance. They know his strengths are his overhand punches and what of his top game exists while he has the energy to use it. They know the likelihood that he gets outlasted by an Anthony Hernandez or a Gregory Rodrigues, or that what remains of Jared Cannonier could still knock him through the cage.
This is the end run. This is Paddy Pimblett getting an interim title match. Either Izzy proves he still has life left in his bones or Pyfer is able to do as Imavov did, harness the combined powers of youth, grit, and marketing favoritism, and march down the man who used to be the best striker in the sport because now he’s just too damned tired to avoid the big right hand.
As much as I hate to say it: It’s a solid bet. If you’ve watched MMA for any length of time, this story isn’t new to you--you saw it in Lyoto Machida, you saw it in Anderson Silva. When your greatest strengths come from your ability to capitalize on small spaces and land counters, the second your capacity for moving or thinking fast enough to navigate those spaces starts to go, your career goes with it. Seven years ago Izzy could time out Robert Whittaker, one of the best darters in the sport, and floor him in the pocket while only barely taking a punch in response. Three years ago Izzy put his back to the fence and absorbed a half-dozen strikes from Alex Pereira, but still found the slip and counter that won back his world title.
Two and a half years ago Izzy only barely survived Sean Strickland. One year ago Nassourdine Imavov took him out because he just couldn’t run anymore.
It’d be easy to say ISRAEL ADESANYA BY TKO is based solely on my disdain for Joe Pyfer as both a career and a personality, but while those do play into it, I am, in truth, not quite ready for Izzy’s story to be over. I hope he’s got the spark left. I hope finally taking a full year off for the first time in his MMA career helped him find it. I hope he survives long enough for Pyfer’s Pac-man power pill to wear off and spends two and a half rounds just kicking him while he looks progressively sadder.
But mostly, I just hope he doesn’t die.
CO-MAIN EVENT: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST
WOMEN’S FLYWEIGHT: Alexa Grasso (16-5-1, #3) vs Maycee Barber (15-2, #5)
Half a year ago Erin Blanchfield was supposed to have a main event against Maycee Barber--in the Apex, naturally--and it was infamously cancelled just as Erin was about to walk out to the cage after Maycee had medical issues at the last possible second. Erin noted what utter bullshit this is, particularly as it marked the second time Maycee cancelled a fight with her on short notice, and the UFC, as always, assured everyone she would get treated well. So now she’s fighting halfway down the rankings against a dangerous opponent in the middle of the prelims. Maycee is, of course, headlining next month’s prelims. This is the game, and you cannot beat it.
The last time we saw Maycee, we didn’t. She very visibly and infamously pulled out of a main event with Erin Blanchfield seconds before it was set to begin back in May, a fight the UFC was not-so-subtly hoping would get her into title contention after their multiple attempts to previously do so were derailed by either poorly-timed injuries or terribly underestimating Roxanne motherfuckin’ Modafferi. Apparently someone got a little mad at her, though, because just a few weeks ago this was headlining the prelims and now it’s busted down to the midway. Still, for someone who hasn’t fought in almost two years and torpedoed a main event, which they still have yet to forgive multiple other fighters for, sticking around for a top ten fight against Karine Silva is a pretty solid deal.
So, funny story: Maycee Barber is fighting former world champion Alexa Grasso for a top three spot in the co-main event of a road show headlined by Israel Adesanya and Erin Blanchfield is not currently booked.
Alexa being the underdog here is indicative of just how far her star has fallen. Three fights ago she was the world champion, the woman that slew Valentina Shevchenko; today Maycee Barber is favored against her. This is one of those cases where looking at something on paper belies how it really went.
On paper, Alexa not only beat but stopped Val, wrested away her title, and embarked on a year-and-a-half-long trilogy of fights that saw them going tooth and nail until Val finally got her belt back. In reality? Alexa was five and a half minutes away from losing a wide decision in their first fight and Shevchenko gave her a gift by more or less falling into position to get choked out, their second fight was a draw only because judge Michael Bell rendered an impossible scorecard that saved Alexa’s title reign, and the third was such a one-sided fight that even though Valentina’s win technically brought their series to a perfectly balanced 1-1-1 that the UFC could have wrung a tiebreaker out of, they had seen more than enough.
What little hope Alexa had left as a contender was dashed last May when the UFC used her as a measuring stick. Natália Silva had risen to prominence as the new dark horse contender at Flyweight while the terrible trilogy played out, and given her preference for striking over grappling, management was eager to get her in the mix. Alexa was, in theory, a solid counter for Natália, an equally agile boxer with some quick takedowns in her pocket. In practice, she had no answer for Silva’s kicks or her range and got completely shut out.
Which did not free her from her bondage. The UFC had planned on Alexa fighting Rose Namajunas this past January in their neverending quest to get Rose back into a title fight, but Grasso couldn’t make it.
Instead: It’s Maycee Barber. That’s a plethora of fights and a rollercoaster of a journey for Alexa to have embarked on over the last couple years. How about Maycee?
Well, since 2024, Maycee has:
Failed to make it to a fight with Rose Namajunas
Failed to make weight for her main event with Erin Blanchfield
Pulled out of said main event at the literal last minute thanks to unspecified medical issues
Never really clarified what said medical issues were
Fought the #9-ranked Karine Silva, winner of 1 straight fight, and won a competitive decision
So, obviously, it’s time for her to be nose-close to a title eliminator.
Maycee is not a bad fighter. Hell, she deeply surprised me with her absolute shellacking of Amanda Ribas, which stands as one of the better ground-and-pound maulings in memory. But I can’t say recent memory, because that was already almost three years ago. Her only other victory before her hiatus was a competitive decision with Katlyn Cerminara, who had been virtually retired for almost two years and went right back to the shelf afterward, never to return.
Other than that? It’s been two straight years of medical no-shows, none of which were ever explained past a ‘trust us, it’s totally fine that someone we told you was having seizures in the locker room can fight without any issues now,’ followed by a clear if slightly lackluster victory over a borderline-ranked woman whose last victory was against the 2-2 Dione Barbosa. This is how you get a fight with former champion and multiple-time main eventer Alexa Grasso.
And maybe it only grates on me so much because Alexa, uh, already beat Maycee. They did this already! They fought in 2021, Maycee outwrestled her but Grasso outgrappled and outstruck her, and Alexa won a completely uncontroversial 29-28. Nothing about their skillsets has really changed all that much, this rematch simply hinges on the idea that Maycee is now the ascendant contender and Alexa is the waning light ready to be extinguished by a salivating marketing department.
And I’m going to be the idiot that says ALEXA GRASSO BY DECISION. Maycee’s best weapons are her hand speed and her ability to bully people with her wrestling, and unlike Shevchenko and Silva, those play into Alexa’s strengths just like they did five years ago. Maycee may have tightened up her striking, but Alexa’s also gotten better at evading and counter-grappling, and she was already good enough at it the first time to give Maycee fits. I’m banking on it happening again.
MAIN CARD: OTHER VARIOUS STORIES OF VARYING SUCCESS
WELTERWEIGHT: Michael Chiesa (19-7) vs Niko Price (16-10)
These fights take place in an alternate universe and, honestly, that’s fine. Having a separate subcontinuity within the UFC for its aging, near-retirement veterans where they can fight each other for funsies is a lot better than pretending it means something when Paddy Pimblett beats a Tony Ferguson who’s seven fights into a losing streak. Coincidentally: You know who beat Tony next? That’s right: Michael Chiesa. Over the last three years Chiesa has taken part in and won three fights, and they were Tony, Max Griffin and Court McGee, which is about as specific a path through the UFC’s stock of Welterweight 40somethings as you can possibly take. And that’s fine! He’s made it clear he’s been just sort of fucking around on his way out the door, this is explicitly his retirement fight, and if the UFC treated all their retirees as respectfully it’d be a much more pleasant sport to follow.
His swan song came with a little luck, though. He was originally scheduled to bid his farewells against Carlston Harris, who is also pushing 39 and hasn’t won a fight in a couple years, but visa problems kept Harris from getting here, so instead we’ve got Niko Price. Is Niko also in the 40ish club? Not quite! Despite being a decade deep into his UFC tenure he’s a spry young 36. He’s also 2-7 (1) in his last ten fights and he just got knocked out by Nikolay Veretennikov in February. Like, 49 days ago. Niko Price got knocked out 49 days ago. 49 days ago Niko took part in a professional mixed martial arts bout that ended with him slumped and weightless against a cage while an angry man repeatedly struck him in his motionless skull, and now he’s fighting again, 49 days later, because we live in Hell.
The good news is Chiesa has literally never knocked anyone out. The bad news is there’s always time to start. MICHAEL CHIESA BY TKO.
FEATHERWEIGHT: Julian Erosa (31-12) vs Lerryan Douglas (13-5)
Gotta say: It’s hard not to stick Julian Erosa into that vaguely disrespectful alternate-reality UFC conversation these days. We’re on the fourth iteration and eighth year of the ‘Julian Erosa beats a bunch of guys before getting the door of relevance slammed in his face’ story arc, and ordinarily that’s when you begin discussing fighters as gatekeepers, but the trouble is for every top ten fighter Erosa lets through the velvet rope, he also fails to bounce a Fernando Padilla or a Choi Seung-woo. Losing a fight to Alex “Bruce Leeroy” Caceres? Not that big a deal! Being the only person in 30 UFC fights Caceres knocked out? That’s the stuff. That’s the kind of inconsistency that keeps Erosa out of the gatekeeping conversation and firmly stuck in the ‘I dunno, throw someone at him and see what happens’ conversation.
Like, say, taking an Erosa who just got beat by Melquizael Costa, a man about to fight for a spot in the top ten, and placing him up against Lerryan Douglas. Lerryan is coming off a brief but pleasant moment as the Featherweight champion out in the Legacy Fighting Alliance, and having watched a bunch of his tape, I am surprisingly devoid of things to say. I don’t have any of my ‘he’s a wild-eyed brawler who throws caution to the wind’ criticisms nor any ‘he’s quietly really good’ praise. He seems perfectly fine. He seems like the exact caliber of fighter that should, rightfully, make it to the UFC, but that you expect little to nothing from outside a standing appointment to wave every 4-5 months as he walks out for his regularly scheduled spot on the prelims until the day he stops showing up and you realize his last win was two and a half years ago.
He’s got solid fundamentals and he’s got good composure when he gets cracked and I still think JULIAN EROSA BY TKO is more likely.
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Mansur Abdul-Malik (9-0-1) vs Yousri Belgaroui (9-3)
They’re still a little mad at you, Mansur. You were supposed to be their big new star, with the long reach and the scary muscles and the undefeated record and the 100% finishing rate, and that’s why they were trying so hard to book you to debut against Antonio Trócoli, who, even a year ago, was clearly not The Guy. They wanted so badly for you to get those wins that when Antonio couldn’t make it they made it up to you a fight later with Cody Brundage, the company’s favorite enhancement talent, and you fucked it up by headbutting him into a faux-stoppage that got overturned to a draw, which means now you have failed to beat Cody Brundage, which is actually the less embarrassing narrative for the UFC than the part where you lost rounds to Cody Brundage. They still got you in there with Trócoli this past December for that easy victory, but they’re still just not sure.
Which is why Yousri Belgaroui is here. Yousri is another guy they’re not sure about, and they need your help figuring out which of you to choose. Yousri got his first shot at the big show on the Contender Series three years ago, and nothing is as clarifying about the UFC’s relationship with its contract mill as the fact that three years ago Yousri lost a DWCS decision to Marcio Tulio that was so ultimately uneventful that management passed on both men, and a year later they were both back on DWCS fighting much worse competition and were both promptly welcomed into the company. Yousri had his big-show debut this past October against the perpetually confusing Azamat Bekoev, whom he carved up and ultimately stopped in the third round. He was tall and he had okay takedown defense and he took out an extremely solid prospect, and you can’t really ask for more.
Personally, as someone who still thinks Mr. Bean is funny, I appreciate it every time there’s a matchup like this where one man (Yousri) is considerably taller (4”) but the other (Mansur) has longer arms (80”!). Biology is weird and so is knowing how to use your punching distance. MANSUR ABDUL-MALIK BY TKO.
LIGHTWEIGHT: Terrance McKinney (17-8) vs Kyle Nelson (17-6-1)
We were just discussing the dangers of inconsistency in a fighting career, and Terrance McKinney is the one and only man who stands in both worlds at once. On one hand, he is the most inconsistent wrecking machine in the division, a man capable of atomizing Matt Frevola in seconds or choking out the nearly-ranked Fares Ziam, yet somehow, also more than willing to go get crunched by Drew Dober and Nazim Sadykhov. On the other: He is such a highlight machine, win or lose, that he’s about to hit a baker’s dozen of fights in the UFC and you can watch that entire run in twenty-four minutes. He will kill a man or he will be killed by a man, and that is why he will be employed, no matter what, until the day he dares reach a final bell.
Kyle Nelson would just like his momentum back. Nelson was 1 for 5 and a wholly forgotten Featherweight quantity when the UFC booked him as the fall guy for Choi Doo-ho’s grand return to the sport in 2023, and thanks to a gutsy performance, a point deduction and some controversial judging, Nelson got a draw and ruined the party. The company passive-aggressively punished him with a recurring prospect-testing duty, and Nelson had the unmitigated gall to get a three-fight winning streak instead. Eventually they shrugged and booked a genuinely fascinating fight between Nelson and the equally surging Steve Garcia, and it was, finally, Kyle’s chance to show everyone what he was made of. Which is why he missed weight and got knocked out in four minutes. Now he’s a Lightweight and he’s coming off a win over the distressingly roadworn Matt Frevola and he wants another chance.
And, honestly? Probably gonna get it. Terrance is so goddamn strong and fast that there’s always a chance he simply busts through Kyle in the first three minutes, but what Terrance has in power he lacks in composure, and the only man to ever get Nelson out of there early is the most consistently on-target knockout artist we’ve seen in years. I think we’re gonna get a wild set of exchanges and then KYLE NELSON BY TKO will surface in the second or third round.
PRELIMS: HACK THE GIBSON
LIGHTWEIGHT: Ignacio Bahamondes (17-6) vs Tofiq Musayev (22-6)
Embers of hype have fallen dark, and only blood can renew them. We’ve been right on the cusp of Ignacio Bahamondes: Lightweight Contender a couple times, now, but every time he’s reached his entrance exam, he’s failed. Back in 2023 it was Ľudovít Klein proving Bahamondes wasn’t quite ready for the top ten; this past June, it was Rafael Fiziev proving more than half a foot in size just isn’t enough to overcome getting repeatedly kicked in the legs and body. Tofiq Musayev was one of the precious few international prospects left in the sport when the UFC picked him up last year, a former Lightweight champion out in Rizin with a penchant for knocking out almost everyone he beat, and even though the implosion of Bellator left him in the lurch for a year and a half, the UFC still values punchmen who punch. They gleefully signed him and had him debut on that same aforementioned card where Ignacio got Fizieved, being as it was their big debut in Baku and Musayev is one of the precious few Azerbaijani fighters of note out there, and it made it real awkward when Myktybek Orolbai--who had also badly missed weight--ran right through him and ripped his shoulder apart in one round.
I’d love to see Musayev turn it around here and remind everyone why he mattered despite lacking the promotional engine of the UFC. I’m entirely unconvinced he’s going to be able to bully Ignacio the way he needs to for his gameplan to work. IGNACIO BAHAMONDES BY DECISION, but I’ll be rooting for Tofiq.
LIGHTWEIGHT: Chase Hooper (16-4-1) vs Lance Gibson Jr. (9-2)
If there is an ongoing theme of the failed hype machines threading through tonight’s event, never forget that men like Sage Northcutt and Chase Hooper crawled through the primordial ooze of getting signed to the UFC too young and badly astroturfed into prominence so Raul Rosas Jr. could run. Hooper was a proud child soldier in the combat sports wars, but after getting smashed repeatedly by his tougher peers the UFC decided to give him a two-year rebuilding program that saw him facing either grapplers with unthreatening striking, strikers who didn’t know how to grapple, or retirement circuit competitors like Clay Guida and Jim Miller. After five straight UFC victories they deemed Hooper ready to return to active duty against an actual peer again, and Alex Hernandez punched his face through his skull in one round. So now it’s Lance Gibson Jr.’s turn, because I don’t think the UFC knows why they hired him, either. Gibson was only 2 for his last 3 when the UFC hired him last year, and those two victories came over the 5-7 “Scrappy” RJ Hoyt and the truly impressive, 22-51 Charon “The Dreamcatcher” Spain, both of which happened at our beloved and somehow regularly-referenced MUCKLESHOOT FIGHT NIGHT, and that was enough for the UFC to not just sign him directly to the promotion, but give him a fight with the recently-ranked King Green. Shockingly, Gibson lost and accomplished almost nothing in the process, and now we get at least two more contractually obligated fights with him.
Generally-speaking, I really don’t have a lot of faith in Chase. He’s an extremely tricky, creative grappler and he has improved given how loose his striking used to be, but now as much as you’d want him to after nearly a decade. Chase dragging out another decision here is extremely likely. But I feel one of those almost-always-incorrect feelings about this fight, and I must obey the inscrutable exhortations of my soul. LANCE GIBSON JR. BY DECISION.
HEAVYWEIGHT: Marcin Tybura (27-10, #8) vs Tyrell Fortune (17-3, NR)
Every week I say something about the ongoing humiliation ritual that is the fall of the Heavyweight division, and every week they find a way to make it either funnier, worse, or both, and this is definitively both. Marcin Tybura hits ten years in the UFC next month, and in the whole of that decade he’s never gotten close enough to sniff a shot at the title, but he’s been a perpetually reliable gatekeeper and he’s won far more than he’s lost. That, of course, means he is a liability, as he keeps beating people like Jhonata Diniz and Mick Parkin and Greg Hardy that they’d much rather make money off of. So despite being the #8-ranked man in the division, despite being one of their most reliable fighters, when Valter Walker pulled out of this fight with a leg injury, they decided to just put in Tyrell Fortune. Tyrell Fortune’s last year and a half of competition includes stellar victories over the 21-13 Myron “Lightskin Dynamite” Dennis, the 9-7 “Super” Demoreo Dennis, and journeyman of journeymen Tony “Kryptonite” Lopez, who is 65-34. The last time Tyrell scored a solid win was three years ago, and it was back when Bellator was still an independent organization, and it was a disqualification after Sergey Bilostenniy rabbit-punched him a dozen times, and they had a rematch a year later and Sergey tapped him out in two minutes.
Sergey Bilostenniy is in the PFL. Tyrell Fortune is here, and debuting directly into a top ten fight in the UFC. If Fortune wins, it will mean 30% of the top ten Heavyweights in the UFC have one victory in the company. There is no stupid joke I can make that is worse than our current reality. MARCIN TYBURA BY SUBMISSION.
WOMEN’S FLYWEIGHT: Casey O’Neill (10-2, #12) vs Gabriella Fernandes (11-3, #14)
Your reward for paying attention enough to recognize Gabriella Fernandes is your regularly scheduled reminder that all of the rankings and matchmaking are made up. Macau hosted the UFC a year and a half ago and booked as many of their Chinese stars for the occasion as they could manage, and one of the foremost among them was Flyweight sensation Wang Cong, who was set up as almost a -1000 favorite to get coronated as the next big thing. Gabriella kicked her in the head, punched her to the floor and submitted her in two rounds. In the time since Cong has been booked three times, has never fought higher than #13, and is now ranked #11 on the back of her winning streak, and Gabi, the woman who choked her unconscious, has been booked once and is ranked beneath her. Casey O’Neill is 1 for her last 3, has only won one fight since 2022 and hasn’t won a ranked fight since, and is somehow still above Gabi.
There is no justice but the justice we make. GABRIELLA FERNANDES BY DECISION.
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Navajo Stirling (8-0) vs Bruno Lopes (14-2)
Every week the UFC reminds its audience that winning is no longer sufficient to succeed at sports and you must instead be an exciting knockout machine (unless management likes you), and Navajo Stirling is feeling this pinch. Navajo was brought into the the company just 15 months ago as a big new undefeated Light Heavyweight knockout artist, and they had enough faith in him to throw him straight onto main cards on road shows, and now, three fights later, he is all the way down at the bottom of the prelims. He has won all of those fights! But all of them went to a decision, and in the modern meta, that’s simply unacceptable. Sure, he’s good at fighting, and sure, Light Heavyweight is such a clusterfuck that Paulo Costa is about to debut in the division with a shot at the top ten, but going to a decision is a sin. Bruno Lopes is 1-1 and coming off getting knocked stupid by Dustin Jacoby in a hair under two minutes and these two fighters are, in the modern world, roughly equivalent.
NAVAJO STIRLING BY DECISION.
BANTAMWEIGHT: Ricky Simón (22-7) vs Adrian Yanez (17-6)
Ricky Simón, you, too, are forsaken. You knocked Javid Basharat the fuck out in a single round and they didn’t even let you off the prelims for it. You were sacrificed to Raoni Barcelos, who is now, himself, an avatar of the wronged, and now you’re almost curtain-jerking the prelims on a Joe Pyfer card against an Adrian Yanez that’s gone 1 for 3 in the last three and a half years. At one point, Yanez was one of the brightest prospects the Bantamweight division had to offer, thanks in no small part to his utter destruction of Tony Kelley, one of the sport’s more gladly forgotten racists. But Adrian’s appointment with the gatekeeper ended with Rob Font planting him in three minutes, and then Jonathan Martinez kicked his legs to pieces and Daniel Marcos nabbed a decision from him and Yanez’s only win in the modern age comes from a Vinicius Salvador who got cut immediately afterward for going 0-3.
RICKY SIMÓN BY TKO. Grow the mullet back out and you’ll be top ten again in no time.
WOMEN’S STRAWWEIGHT: Alexia Thainara (13-1, #13) vs Bruna Brasil (11-6-1, NR)
Sometimes I’m not sure what these write-ups should be anymore. The idea, four years ago, was to subvert the samey ‘here are some dudes and here’s who’s gonna win’ thing everyone else did by talking about the full story of a fight--the competitors, the promotion, the bias, all of the details both positive and negative. I’m not sure if any of that is useful now, because so much of it is just the same goddamn story over and over. One year ago nearly to the day, Molly McCann, for better or worse the most prominent British fighter in any of the women’s divisions in the UFC, retired in front of her hometown crowd. The UFC chose to have DWCS winner and promotional newcomer Alexia Thainara fill in on short notice, and, as happens so often in retirement fights, she choked McCann out with relative ease. To capitalize on Thainara’s defeat of a genuinely popular fighter on a big stage, the UFC booked her to curtain-jerk the prelims a few months later against Loma Lookboonmee, who was, herself, a ranked fighter on a four-fight winning streak inexplicably demoted to the bottom of the card. And now we’re here, again. How did we get here?
Well, you see, Nicole Caliari, who is on a two-fight losing streak, was supposed to be kicking off these prelims against promotional newcomer Carol Foro. But Caliari couldn’t make it, so she was replaced by Stephanie Luciano, who got a contract despite going to a draw on the Contender Series and has since gone 1-1. Then Foro tested positive for illegal diuretics, so they pulled her from the fight and replaced her with Alexia Thainara, at which point Stephanie Luciano pulled out citing previously unstated injuries, so they replaced Luciano with Bruna Brasil, who is unranked and coming off a loss but choked Thainara out almost six and a half years ago down in the Brazilian regionals.
And this is why so many of these write-ups turn into the literary equivalent of fart noises. Alexia Thainara is a good fighter. She’s outperformed ranked fighters and top contenders, and, hell, the last woman she beat was herself still riding high off beating Bruna. We talk about them not caring, but it’s not enough anymore to just say that they don’t care. It’s obvious that they don’t care. But Alexia Thainara is a ranked fighter on an eleven-fight winning streak and instead of saying ‘hey, maybe we should bump her up from the curtain-jerking prelim slot we’ve had her stuck in all year,’ they are treating her as so interchangeable that she serves the same purpose as a replacement for a replacement for a replacement who’s never fought in the UFC, and the best justification anyone can give for it is its nature as the rematch of a fight so dated it happened while Game of Thrones was still on television.
That’s what working your way through the UFC means now. It means listening to the company speak through one side of its mouth about meritocracy while the other books Joe Pyfer into the top five. It means watching the fanbase put the onus of promotion entirely on the roster while the professional promoters who run the company look at the woman they intentionally chose for a prominent competitor’s retirement bout, shrug, and do nothing with her, and that nothingness is the shared point of origin for most of these stories now, and we’re only a couple years of retirements away from that “most” becoming “all,” and after that I don’t know that we’ll have anything left to talk about.
ALEXIA THAINARA BY DECISION.