CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 180: CONSPICUOUS APPEAL
Carl's in Canada and the UFC is pretending this isn't an Apex card.
SATURDAY, APRIL 18 FROM THE CANADA LIFE CENTRE IN WINNIPEG
PRELIMS 2 PM PDT / 5 PM EDT | MAIN CARD 5 PM / 8 PM
I really wonder what it’s like to be a Canadian MMA fan right now. Once upon a time you had one of the hottest regional scenes in the world, multiple champions, and one of the only socially acceptable answers to ‘Who’s the best MMA fighter ever?’ Now it is 2026, everything sucks, your regional scene has been cut down to the bone (you’re trying, BFL, you’re trying), your closest thing to a global contender is either Aiemann Zahabi or Gillian Robertson, and watching them means having to pay attention to the UFC, which gleefully propagandizes for the guy who keeps talking about having America take over your country and then charges its citizens $300 for tickets to a show main-evented by Gilbert Burns and Mike Malott, and you know it sucks, but you’re getting at most two events a year and there’s a 50/50 chance this is the best one.
But Tanner Boser is coming back, so realistically, how could anyone complain?
MAIN EVENT: SOFT LAUNCH
WELTERWEIGHT: Gilbert Burns (22-9, #11) vs Mike Malott (13-2-1, NR)
Oh, right. That’s how. That’s how anyone could complain.
You can’t even really write a preamble on this one. This is just dark and cynical. This comes from the bowels of the Fuck You school of matchmaking. Gilbert Burns was, at one point, a legitimate Welterweight contender: In the present he is on a four-fight losing streak that’s included two violent knockout losses, the most recent of which took less than a round. He used to struggle with the cut to the Lightweight division, and his reinvention as a Welterweight contender made him a shining example of betting on yourself and moving to a more natural weight class despite the conventional wisdom about the necessity of size advantages.
But the whole reason he began to struggle with said cuts was the reality of aging into his mid-thirties, and now he’s a couple months away from 40. Gilbert Burns made himself seem relevant to the present by being the first man to make Khamzat Chimaev look mortal: That bout turned four years old last week.
Burns hasn’t won a fight since 2023, and that was the retiring Jorge Masvidal. Burns hasn’t beaten someone ranked in the top ten since the Summer of 2021. And with all of that mileage, suffering all of the wear and tear of time, Burns is still good enough to be eighty-seven seconds away from defeating future champion Jack Della Maddalena.
Well, he was still good enough two years ago.
The UFC’s hoping he isn’t anymore, because by god, they want Mike Malott to stick this time. They’re very, very aware of their lack of Canadian stars, and they would love to have an attraction to lock down the northern territories again, but Gillian Robertson isn’t interesting enough to them for some assuredly non-sexist reasons and Jasmine Jasudavicius lost her shot--more on that later--so it’s gotta be Mike. They already tried it once! They fed him a steady diet of digestible targets, bringing him up through the Mickey Galls and Adam Fugitts of the world, before giving him a big spotlight bout in Toronto. A shot at the rankings, a shot at moving from prospect to contender, and all he had to do was beat Neil Magny, an aging standard of the division coming off a bunch of gatekeeper losses and staring down the end of his athletic prime. It went really, really well! Malott performed in front of his Ontarian brethren and dominated Magny and showed the UFC exactly why it was right to have faith in him.
Until Magny abruptly swept him with about 90 seconds left in the fight and began pounding him senseless, and Mike broke and got stopped fifteen seconds before he would’ve won the decision that etched him into the undeniable fabric of the division. But hey: They learned their lesson about not just pushing dudes on the back of nothing victories because that’s a terrible way to establish your prospects as both known quantities and experienced fighters, right?
Sort of? Kind of? Maybe halfway. They softballed the shit out of Malott by giving him an obvious rebound fight with Trevin Giles, who was not only on a losing streak but had already lost a grappling match to Malott a couple years prior, and they turned up the heat just the slightest bit with Charles Radtke, and with two wins under Malott’s belt it was time for the big push again. Kevin Holland! Fan favorite, former contender, never boring. And Malott’s here, so that means it worked this time, right?
Once again: Kind of. He won! But it was a weird fucking fight that saw Mike get away with multiple low blows so bad that Holland spent the back half of the fight wincing and holding his crotch between attacks. Had a point been deducted, as is now thankfully becoming standard, the fight would’ve been a draw and Mike would be back at square one again.
Instead he gets to fight a former world title contender whose primary care physician has a calendar reminder to bother him about starting to get screened for colorectal cancer soon.
Mike Malott is secondary to this fight. This is a check to see if Gilbert has anything left. Yes, he just got destroyed, but that was Michael Morales, who seems like he has the potential to do that to damn near anybody. Burns survived Sean Brady on the mat, he almost beat Maddalena, and he one-sidedly stomped the same Neil Magny that took Malott to the woodshed. If he’s still got the spirit left in him, Gil should be able to beat Mike on the ground.
But it’s a big fucking if. GILBERT BURNS BY SUBMISSION anyway, because I can, at least, use my antipathy for marketing as a defensive move to keep me from asking uncomfortable questions about how washed my emotional favorites might be.
CO-MAIN EVENT: A VARIETY OF CHOICES WERE MADE
BANTAMWEIGHT: Kyler Phillips (12-4) vs Charles Jourdain (17-8-1)
There’s a sort of the-reality-that-wasn’t feeling to this fight.
We’ve talked about how “tough” and “fun” are secretly damning reputations to have as a fighter, but “prospect” is right up there alongside them. You should want to become a prospect--it’s necessary if you’re ever going to climb the ladder--but it should be a temporary status. If you’re a prospect for more than a few fights, you’re not actually achieving the prospective potential people see in you, and that’s a bad sign.
Kyler Phillips has been a prospect for almost eight goddamn years. That’s a very bad sign.
All of the tools are there. His namesake as “The Matrix” came from his defensive instincts, he’s well-rounded enough to outwrestle some opponents and drop others with headkicks, and he’s tough enough to have still, somehow, never been stopped. But we’re defining his career in reverse because going forward doesn’t get us anywhere. The momentum just never fully materialized. He had one shining moment where he beat Yadong Song and looked like a contender, and one fight later he was struggling and failing against Raulian Paiva, failed Flyweight and future Sean O’Malley victim. Kyler got past Raoni Barcelos, but not Rob Font or Vinicius Oliveira.
That’s the real damnation for prospect status. It’s not just losing--it’s losing to people who then, themselves, lose badly to the upper echelon of the division. When you struggle with Rob Font and he gets dominated by the top five, you look worse. When you get nearly knocked out by Oliveira and one fight later Mario Bautista turns him into a pretzel, that says unfortunate things about your chances anywhere near the top, especially after so many years of trying.
I’ll say this, though: At least someone, somewhere, has had those conversations about Kyler Phillips.
Charles Jourdain is fine. He’s capable and he’s fast and he’s very quick to jump on guillotine chokes if he thinks he has any shot at sticking them. He’s also here because he’s conveniently Canadian. That’s it. That’s the story. He’s never really threatened the rankings, he’s never demonstrated the kind of massive potential you’d want from a future contender, and in sixteen UFC fights his best victory, depending on what you consider important, is either choking out Davey Grant last October, beating up persistent punchline Kron Gracie in 2023, or knocking out Choi Doo-ho, on a losing streak, almost seven years ago.
Other than that? He has a long, long history of fighting all of the other almost-but-not-quite fighters and finding ways to lose to them. Andre Fili, Shane Burgos, Nathaniel Wood, Sean Woodson--Jourdain met each one and failed every time. The last one was at least a split decision! But he promptly blamed his losing said split on the judges all being transgender liberals who hated real men, which, for one, fuck off in general, but for two, motherfucker, you are from Montreal.
The running theory is Jourdain’s found his home down at Bantamweight and that’s why he’s been winning and now he’s going to be a star. I am not convinced that beating Davey Grant is the thing dreams are made of, and moreover, fuck this guy anyway. KYLER PHILLIPS BY DECISION.
MAIN CARD: SEVERAL PEOPLE YOU DON’T KNOW
LIGHTWEIGHT: Mandel Nallo (14-3 (1)) vs Jai Herbert (13-6-1)
There’s a long history of regional Canadian champions becoming UFC standouts. Ciryl Gane is your obvious present-day candidate, but you can go back through decades of memory and pull out David Loiseau, Patrick Côte, Mark Hominick and Georges St-goddamn-Pierre. In the present day, you have Mandel “Mango” Nallo, the Super Lightweight Champion of Montreal, who earned that prestigious title by beating no less than the 8-6 Robert “Maximus” Seres, who was, himself, coming off a win over the 9-9 Xavier “Spartacus” Nash and I am begging mixed martial arts fighters to read other books or watch other movies or play a video game that isn’t Call of Duty or FIFA. If you’re afraid that I’m about to launch into yet another iteration of ‘Contender Series guy who beat a bunch of nobodies,’ don’t worry, this one’s more fun, because Nallo had a run in Bellator! He fought on honest to god internationally-broadcast network television once! The fight ended in a No Contest in under two minutes because he kneed Saad Awad in the groin so badly that he almost threw up. Nallo went 50-50 in the B-leagues and went around the world fighting guys with losing records and I try so hard not to just focus on silly MMA names all the time but the Quebecois fighter went to an event called MMA Mexico and the Mexican fighter they matched him up with was named Carlos Cañada and that’s like a time traveler gave me a present three years ago and I cannot shirk it.
Jai Herbert’s here, man. I dunno. I’ve kind of given up on Jai and I think the UFC has, too. They had real hopes for him as a Cage Warriors champion who knocked everyone the fuck out, to the point that they had him headlining prelims in his UFC debut, and then this unfortunate thing happened where he just kept losing. There’s no shame in his losses, no one should ever be ashamed of getting knocked out by Ilia Topuria, and hell, Herbert unironically, indisputably gave Ilia the toughest fight of his career. But he still lost, and much to the UFC’s chagrin, he’s dealt with his multitude of losses by evolving into a safer fighter. He’s almost five years out from his last stoppage, he’s dropping split decisions to Chris Padilla, he’s closing in on 38 and being a 6’1” Lightweight, which was unusual in 2020, just doesn’t go as far as it used to. They’ve been matching him with brawlier fighters with less threatening knockout potential in the vain hope of getting their British banger machine back, but alas, Jai has chosen to learn from his past errors and, in so doing, has made himself so undesirable in management’s eyes that one fight ago he was the Englishman fighting an evil American on home soil and now he, himself, is the colonialist invader needing to be pushed back by a local hero who thinks it’s weird Canada still has the Queen on its money.
I’ll be honest: Nallo’s tape didn’t do a ton for me. He’s got a good straight right and he’s pretty accurate when he finds an opening, but his defense is really hard to distinguish from the new class of fighters who’ve come up fighting in boxing-style mismatches where offense is the only thing that matters, and that’s kind of unfortunate when you realize Nallo’s almost fourteen years into his professional career. That being said: it’s Jai, I don’t know that it’s going to matter. MANDEL NALLO BY TKO.
WOMEN’S FLYWEIGHT: Jasmine Jasudavicius (14-4, #7) vs Karine Silva (19-6, #9)
Broken prospects, this moment is thine. There was a lot of well-deserved hype around Jasmine Jasudavicius last year. After the slow-motion three-car pileup that was the Valentina Shevchenko/Alexa Grasso championship trilogy the audience wanted new blood at Women’s Flyweight, and with Manon Fiorot having already tried and failed and Erin Blanchfield inexplicably never, ever getting a shot at the top, all eyes turned to Jasmine. Five straight wins! Choked out Jéssica Andrade! Never been stopped in her life! Folks had a lot of faith in her, and after seeing the way she disposed of Andrade, theories abounded regarding her ability to potentially outgrapple Valentina. We never got to test them, because Jasmine got Manon for her contendership test and Manon annihilated her in just barely over a minute. She now enters the toughest challenge of her career: Winning enough to get another shot at the top so she isn’t consigned to gatekeeper duty.
Karine Silva’s fall from grace came a year earlier. She was a key part of the undefeated Fighting Nerds vanguard that managed to seed contenders across five separate divisions, but she was also its first to fall, predating the team’s abysmal 2025 by dropping her losing streak to Viviane Araujo back in 2024. Fun fact: The UFC fired Araujo one fight later, because fuck keeping the better fighters around when you can run a season of The Ultimate Fighter for prospects instead. Karine managed to get back in the win column after a slightly far-fetched bout with Dione Barbosa predicated entirely on Barbosa beating her in the Brazilian regionals six years prior, but the UFC decided to kill one of their contenders by having Karine serve as a comeback fight for Maycee Barber, and Maycee took an extremely clear decision.
And then proceeded to get killed three times in ten seconds by Alexa Grasso. So now Jasmine and Karine are both temporarily boxed out of contention, and only one of them can hold onto their spot. I lean towards JASMINE JASUDAVICIUS BY DECISION, as I think she’ll be able to push Karine in the clinch and I doubt Karine has enough gun to put her down, but getting knocked out for the first time also tends to do things to fighters, so we’ll see which Jasmine we get.
LIGHTWEIGHT: Thiago Moisés (19-9) vs Gauge Young (10-3)
There are no more Canadians on this main card. I will note, for the twenty-third time, that noted Canadian Gillian Robertson beat former title contender Amanda Lemos to become a top five contender last month, and they put it in the Apex, and Thiago Moisés vs Gauge Young is here, in Canada, on the main card. Thiago Moisés has one win in the last two years and just got ran through by Jared Gordon in a single round, and Gauge Young is 1-1 after beating no less than Maheshate, who seemed super promising for a minute four years ago when he knocked out Steve Garcia and now he’s 1 for 5. This makes them both sufficient to sell to a Canadian audience, who haven’t even had a Canadian main-eventing a UFC show in Canada since Rory MacDonald in 20fucking16.
So why not drop that cash on a Gauge Young fight. Who knows when you’ll get the chance to see him again? Could be years. Could be never. Someone mentioned a few weeks back that these write-ups were starting to look like the ramblings of an eldritch horror protagonist losing his mind, and I want you to know: This is what me losing my mind looks like. It’s not the literary references or the petulant screaming or the time I made all of the section headers in the write-ups Chumbawamba lyrics just to see if anyone would notice. It’s the quiet moments where I am staring into the Gaugian abyss of meaninglessness and all I can do is repeat what it is over and over because that’s the most meaning one can derive from it.
Thiago has been here for almost a decade. Gauge has been here for two fights. All things meet here, in the middle, and turn to a featureless soup. THIAGO MOISÉS BY SUBMISSION.
FEATHERWEIGHT: Dennis Buzukja (12-5) vs Márcio Barbosa (17-2)
There’s a broad difference between how hard it is to build cache in this industry and how easy it is to blow it. Dennis Buzukja tried and failed to win a DWCS contract all the day back in 2020, and to get a contract from the UFC he had to win seven straight fights in three years. He took two regional belts, he fought on both sides of the globe, and hell, he even got a second Contender Series shot right in the middle of that run, won, and was still deemed unworthy. They didn’t bring him in until 2023, and as is so often the case, they only picked him as the third or fourth straight last-minute replacement for Sean Woodson, and then they got pissy with Buzukja for being half a pound overweight despite having five minutes to prepare, and that’s just stayed indicative of his luck for the whole of his run. He got shut off by Jamall Emmers in under a minute, he beat Connor Matthews, who managed to speedrun a UFC career by losing three straight in just sixteen minutes, and Dennis topped it off by losing a decision to Francis Marshall.
And now he is here to lose to a Brazilian DWCS winner on a card in Manitoba. I am personally invested in Márcio and I want him to have a bright future, because he is a 5’6” Featherweight who fights like Wanderlei Silva taught him throwing straight punches instead of hooks is a mortal sin, and it works for him the vast majority of the time, and by golly, I appreciate everything about that. He earned his contract by punching out Damon Wilson last August, and we were supposed to get our first glimpse at Barbosa last month at the Greek tragedy that was Israel Adesanya vs Joe Pyfer, but his would-be opponent Zhu Kangjie busted his nose in training and now, as an apology for his broken cartilage, the UFC has offered Buzukja up on to be repeatedly batted about the head, chin and abdomen with a variety of fists, and if any one of them involves an elbow being straightened instead of bent, all of the seven Hells will visit themselves upon the firstborn of Amapa.
Some of those were probably words. MÁRCIO BARBOSA BY TKO.
PRELIMS: BOSER’S BACK
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Robert Valentin (10-6 (1)) vs Julien Leblanc (10-2)
This is my most-anticipated fight on this card, but that’s almost entirely for comedy reasons. We spend so much time in these write-ups evaluating fighters based on silly things like ethics and marketing and who is or isn’t smart enough to just not have a social media account, and it is very refreshing to be able to ignore all of that and say that simply, qualitatively, I don’t think either of these guys are all that good at fighting. They’re not terrible! You don’t get this far without being okay! But the UFC was ready to put their entire marketing engine behind Robert Valentin to the point that The Ultimate Fighter 32 (jesus christ), which was intended to market the threematch between Alexa Grasso and Valentina Shevchenko, essentially became The Robert Valentin Show instead, with the large, awkward cosplay viking getting more screentime than the rest of the cast combined. And then he got crushed in the final by Ryan Loder, who has spent the rest of his UFC tenure getting knocked out. And then he managed to lose a fight to Torrez Finney despite Finney only landing four significant strikes. And then they fed Rob to Ateba Gautier and he got punched flat in a minute. The original plan was to have Valentin lose tochallenge fellow troubled prospect Jackson McVey last November, but a back injury means instead he’s here, fighting Julien Leblanc, who is one of the best Middleweight prospects out of the Quebecois fight scene, and having Watched The Tape, I am forced to ask who the hell else there is at 185 up there, because if Leblanc is at the top of the heap I don’t know where on Earth the rest of the heap went but we should find them and make sure they’re okay. He throws tons of really loose leading side kicks, he wings roundhouses like he’s walking underwater, and the best victory of his career was a victory over Darian Weeks, whom the steel-trap-brained may remember going 0-3 in the UFC a few years back, and it was after Weeks dominated him for fourteen and a half minutes only for the fight to get stopped by doctors because a knee opened his eyebrow.
Leblanc’s pretty good at throwing left kicks to the body. I wish he hadn’t made everything else his dump stat. Is that still going to be enough to beat Robert? I just don’t know, man. ROBERT VALENTIN BY SUBMISSION but we’re racing to the bottom.
HEAVYWEIGHT: Tanner Boser (22-10-1) vs Gokhan Saricam (11-2)
2026 is the year of near-weekly updates about the fall of the Heavyweight division into chaos, and this is no exception. Tanner Boser is here again. We have reached the point that bringing back Tanner Boser feels like what we must do if we are to move on with our lives. For those who have already forgotten the fallen, Boser was one of the UFC’s side quests, a big brawling Bonnyvillian who was just a couple years too early to benefit from the ‘shooting takedowns gets you fired’ era of mixed martial arts. He was a middling present at Heavyweight and one of the last men to lose to living legend Ilir Latifi before dropping to Light Heavyweight in an attempt to get his groove back only to instead receive a horrifying one-round beating from Ion Cuțelaba. But Boser bounced back with a win over Aleksa Camur! And then the UFC cut them both. So, what’s happened in the last three years for Boser to get welcomed back? He fought. Once. Two years later. In the nearly three years since his release he’s had one fight, and it took two years to do it, and that fight is now also almost a year old. Funnily enough, Gokhan Saricam has essentially the same story. Got pulled out of Fight Club Den Haag, an MMA league in The Hague that somehow still booked fights between 6-2 and 12-49 people without being put in superjail, and wound up in Bellator, where he was perpetually stuck in Good But Not Great status. We’re not even talking about hanging with Linton Vassell or Ryan Bader, here, we’re talking about Said Sowma and “Tall” Steve Mowry. He was fine! And then he went into legal limbo for two years while the PFL merger shook out and they decided they didn’t want him, and I guess it’s better to serve in Canada than reign in Germany.
It’s good to see you back, Boser, but I don’t know that a ton has changed since the last time we tried this, and I don’t know how well this is going to go for you. GOKHAN SARICAM BY TKO.
WOMEN’S BANTAMWEIGHT: Melissa Croden (7-3) vs Daria Zhelezniakova (10-2)
This one’s on me. I have no one to blame but myself. When Melissa Croden made her UFC debut back in October I allowed myself to get excited about the prospect of someone who actually seemed to know how to use her range and height fighting at Women’s Bantamweight, a class defined by wild haymakers and head-and-arm throws, and her knockout over Tainara Lisboa made me think that, maybe, just maybe, we had a live one. Then she got pretty thoroughly outfought by Luana Santos, and the hype dissipated, and now she’s down to Daria. Thatcher enthusiast Zhelezniakova managed to surprise me last time by rematching Melissa Mullins, the woman who took away her undefeated streak back on the French regionals, and getting her revenge by taking Mullins to a victorious decision, thus once again proving the UFC is best served running back rivalries from fights on the other side of the world.
DARIA ZHELEZNIAKOVA BY DECISION. Croden, I’d love to have a reason to get back on the hype train.
WOMEN’S FLYWEIGHT: JJ Aldrich (14-7, #14) vs Jamey-Lyn Horth (9-2, NR)
Did you know we hit ten years of JJ Aldrich in the UFC? She was losing to Tatiana Suarez on The Ultimate Fighter 23 (jesus christ) all the way back in 2016. For a giant chunk of an entire-ass decade, JJ Aldrich was Schrodinger’s Contender, a fighter everyone agreed was a serious blue-chip prospect with all the tools who would be making it to title contention any day now. But as we said earlier, being labeled as a prospect for too long becomes a millstone, and after the fourth or fifth setback the shine wears off entirely, and now you’re the veteran who’s too tough to get rid of but just not quite up to breaking the top ten. You go from Erin Blanchfield to Veronica Hardy to Jamey-Lyn Horth. Horth hasn’t had the easiest run of it either--they brought her up in the first place just to lose to Hailey Cowan and when she succeeded they began randomly matching her up with women across the spectrum, which had the mixed results you’d imagine--but last year she beat Vanessa Demopoulos and smashed Tereza Bledá and they’re hoping the home-country appeal and the momentum of a winning streak will carry her into the top fifteen.
Chances are high. Aldrich’s strengths are Horth’s strength’s and I think Horth is just a bit better at them. JAMEY-LYN HORTH BY DECISION.
FLYWEIGHT: Mitch Raposo (10-3) vs Allan Nascimento (22-6)
They’re putting you out to pasture, Mitch. You were a late replacement signing that they expected very little from, and you managed to wrestle a bit, which they also don’t like, and somehow despite pretty clearly losing most of your fights you kept only barely dropping split decisions, which is even worse. They expected you to lose to Azat Maksum last October and help rebuild his prospects, and they were not anticipating Azat blowing his weight cut and coming in tired and unprepared. So here’s the good news, Mitch: You get another shot and it’s at a real opponent who’s damn near ranked! The bad news is he’s one of the best grapplers in the division and they are wholly intent on him strangling you.
I almost want to root for you, but Allan beat my boy Jafel Filho, so I’m honorbound to root for him. ALLAN NASCIMENTO BY SUBMISSION.
BANTAMWEIGHT: John Castañeda (21-8) vs Mark Vologdin (12-4-1)
If you recognize Mark Vologdin’s name, that’s because last year he and Adrian Luna Martinetti (whom we’ll be seeing next week) had a DWCS matchup that was immediately heralded as THE GREATEST FIGHT OF ALL TIME, to the point that’s what the UFC titled the video on their Youtube channel after signing both men, and I feel like this is just an extension of last week’s conversation about how brawls have become overvalued. Vologdin/Martinetti was fine! It was fun and sloppy, as is the current vogue of the sport, and I gotta say, I miss when we expected more. I have seen people--smart people whose opinions I deeply respect, people who’ve been at this as long as I have if not longer--talking about last week’s Curtis Blaydes vs Josh Hokit brawl as one of the greatest Heavyweight fights of all time, with multiple people likening it to the legendary 2002 hockey fight between Don Frye and Yoshihiro Takayama. Which is very accurate! But it’s also the problem. Don Frye and Yoshihiro Takayama were bad motherfuckers! But they were also professional wrestlers that nobody reasonable considered relevant to the title picture. Takayama was 0-2 and was about to end his mixed martial arts career after getting armbarred by Bob Sapp, whose listed fighting style was “NFL.” Curtis Blaydes and Josh Hokit were fighting to determine which of them is supposed to be one of the top five Heavyweight fighters on the planet.
You should not want brawling to replace technique. You should not force the brawls. Vologdin hits very hard but he’s also barely 5’3” and I think it’s going to continue to cost him. JOHN CASTAÑEDA BY DECISION.
FEATHERWEIGHT: Jamie Siraj (14-3) vs John Yannis (9-4)
Funny story: As I was writing up this week’s prelims on Tuesday evening, Diego Brandão, former UFC fighter and winner of The Ultimate Fighter 14 (jesus christ) made a post about how he had been picked to be a comeback fighter on TUF 34 (jesus christ) only to be pulled from the show at the last minute because, as a 38 year-old about to turn 39, he’s too old and the UFC doesn’t want him. Two weeks ago the UFC welcomed Kai Kamaka III back to the company, which is funny, because two fights ago Diego beat him. This week the UFC is debuting Jamie “The Gremlin” Siraj, the former Featherweight champion of Tuff-N-Uff (jesus c--never mind false alarm), and I say ‘former’ because he lost the title in 2025 after Diego knocked his head off with a spinning wheel kick. Jamie got beat by Diego and John Yannis lost his UFC debut when Austin Bashi choked him out, and Bashi, himself, lost his UFC debut.
All of that? That’s okay. That’s perfectly fine. Being 38 and beating people? That means you don’t even deserve a spot on The We Don’t Care Enough To Have Coaches Who Fight Anymore So We’re Just Having Our Broadcasting Team Do It edition of The Ultimate Fighter. Heaven forfend we try to have the best fighters on the planet. JAMIE SIRAJ BY DECISION.