CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 194: IN THE DARK
Carl is in the Apex for UFC Fight Night: Gamrot vs Salkilld. Why aren't you helping Carl get out of the Apex?
SATURDAY, AUGUST 8 FROM THE COLDEST COLD OF THE APEX
PRELIMS 2 PM PDT / 5 PM EDT | MAIN CARD 5 PM / 8 PM
I hope you enjoyed your month and a half off from Apex duty, because we’re back and we’re back so fucking hard that as of this writing we’re less than a week out from this event, there are only eleven fights slated for it, no one knows what the bout order is, and fifteen of the twenty-two people on it are either coming off a loss or making their debut. But Darren Elkins is back, so that’s what matters.
MAIN EVENT: THE GOOD SON
LIGHTWEIGHT: Mateusz Gamrot (26-4 (1), #8) vs Quillan Salkilld (12-1, #12)
Wake up, everyone, it’s time to try to kill Mateusz Gamrot again.
At this point, this is Gamrot’s job. Has he earned his spot as one of the best Lightweights on the planet? Not a shred of doubt about it. But he is, above all else, a wrestler, and that means the UFC will always be one loss away from plotting his demise, and at this point in his career Gamrot’s got more than one unfortunate loss and said losses are starting to overtake his wins.
I mean, not numerically. Numerically, he’s doing gangbusters. But realistically, his best win in the last four years was Rafael Fiziev, and that happened because Fiziev’s knee quit the fight seven minutes in. Over those four years he’s beaten Rafael dos Anjos, who, much as I love him, is aging into a relic, Ľudovít Klein, who really could have been something but the UFC kept him on matchmaking ice until he got eaten alive by Tofiq Musayev, and Esteban Ribovics, which was about as blatant an attempt to get Gamrot out of the picture in favor of a marketing favorite as there’s yet been.
Between them he lost a coinflip of a decision to Dan Hooker, who has spent his subsequent time getting repeatedly murdered, and last October Gamrot got the short-notice fill-in shot at the top against Charles Oliveira only to find out Oliveira is really fucking good. He got dominated, he got choked out, and with that loss, I think the UFC’s just kind of done with him. Gamrot could still run up the scoreboard and make himself impossible to ignore, but as a grappler with one non-injury finish in the last half-decade, management would be much happier if he simply went away.
Esteban couldn’t pull it off. Quillan Salkilld has a much better chance. At least, they’re really hoping he does.
It’s no secret the UFC has been taking a lot of money from the Australian government to promote more events down their way, and in an attempt to make it worth Australia’s while, the company keeps trying to push their Oceanic fighters up the card. Tom Nolan went from Viacheslav Borshchev and DWCS loser Charlie Campbell to a berth in the Lightweight top fifteen. Steve Erceg became a fixture of the Flyweight main event scene despite losing every one of them. Navajo Stirling just got bumped from barely-ranked to the top five thanks to a short-notice fight against a man who’s almost 44. The UFC still employs Junior Tafa.
They want successful marketing darlings for the region. They want to get more of that Australian grant money. But they want their Oceaniac manpunchers to actually punch men. They want finishes. That is the only goddamn thing the UFC cares about. By that metric, Quillan’s everything they could ask for.
Four finishes in five UFC fights. Three violent knockouts, one submission, and just one decision. That’s a fantastic highlight reel for any weight class, but Lightweight is one of the hardest to consistently net finishes in. Being able to punch and headkick and choke your way to Lightweight stardom is worth its weight in gold.
Unfortunately you gotta do it against competition that impresses people, and the UFC has been soft-pedaling Quillan just a touch too much for him to catch fire naturally. The man he submitted, Jamie Mullarkey, was a 6-6 veteran who’d spent most of the last three years getting knocked out repeatedly. That headkick knockout came against perpetual gatekeeper Nasrat Haqparast. And that big right-cross punchout that put Quillan on the map? Why, that was over Anshul Jubli, a man who once lost a UFC fight because his opponent began barking like a dog and he got confused.
Even the fight that got him ranked was a setup. After four straight wins, the UFC--on a card in Australia, naturally--gave Salkilld a bout with Beneil Dariush, a former contender who, in the present, is nearing 40, is 1 for his last 5, and had showed up to his last fight tired and overweight and gotten himself knocked out in sixteen seconds.
Quillan crushing him in one round wasn’t a surprise, either. They want Quillan to succeed. They want a reliable Oceanic knockout artist at the top. They tried, repeatedly, with Dan Hooker, and now he’s on prospect duty and it’s Quillan’s time to shine. And, sure: Gamrot represents a challenge he hasn’t had to face before. Quillan beat Dariush’s ghost, but that ghost still took him down twice, and Beneil may have been a better technical wrestler than Gamrot, but he isn’t half as athletic anymore, nor a tenth as tenacious.
But the matchmakers aren’t stupid, either. Gamrot’s one of the best grinders in the sport, but between Jalin Turner and Dan Hooker, he has a pattern of struggling against tall, lanky strikers. His style is dependent on being able to rush down his opponents and crowd them to the ground, and the more range he has to rush through, and the harder he can get hit while he’s doing it, the less successful he’s been. Quillan’s just as tall as Hooker and just as rangy as Turner, and thus far, he’s been able to consistently find his targets.
And I absolutely cannot stop myself from rooting for wrestling to ruin everyone’s plans again. In my head, if I’m letting my inner analyst pilot the spaceship, Sakilld’s gonna salkill Gamrot. Different levels of competition or no, Gamrot’s trouble dealing with range and Salkilld’s ability to heap on damage really, really fast form a terrible combination. But you don’t explore space with math or science, you do it by pure heart, and a willingness to ignore the safety of the rules that govern the universe. MATEUSZ GAMROT BY DECISION.
CO-MAIN EVENT: ON FUCKING PLUTO
LIGHTWEIGHT: Billy Quarantillo (18-7) vs Diego Ferreira (19-7)
This is ordinarily where I say “yeah, we’re not doing this,” but I can’t say that this week, because that would presuppose that we already know what This is.
We don’t know for sure if this is the co-main event. The UFC has announced no bout order whatsoever. The official card website (as of this writing on Sunday) doesn’t even have the prelims listed as a separate entity. But Marcel Dorff is still the most reliable card reporter in the game, and he says this is the main card order he’s been told, though the prelims aren’t set.
So, in theory, this is the co-main event of this UFC Fight Night. Not the top ten-ranked Women’s Strawweight bout between Amanda Lemos, a former title contender with a definitive victory over current champion Mackenzie Dern, and Alexia Thainara, the young, rising contender on a three-fight winning streak who retired major marketing star Molly McCann. Why, that would require us to market a woman, and heaven fucking forfend we do that for more than two women at a time, if even that.
No, that fight is apparently randomly thrown on the main card under Darren Elkins (PRE-PUBLISHING UPDATE: Now technically more important than Darren Elkins!), and the co-main event is--apparently--Billy Quarantillo vs Diego Ferreira. Billy Quarantillo is 6-5 and very close to turning 38. His best win in 7 years under contract came against Alexander Hernandez. Edson Barboza, a title contender from more than a decade ago now almost unanimously agreed to be tragically washed up at 2 for his last 7, has exactly one stoppage victory in the last five years: It’s Billy Quarantillo. Diego Ferreira has been in the UFC since the Summer of 2014, and you can make him sound very impressive by pointing out the way he once submitted Anthony Pettis, but that was already almost seven goddamn years ago. He turns 42 this January. Both men are on two-fight losing streaks. Both men are at the absolute periphery of the weight class.
And this is our co-main event, I guess. So, let me restate: If this is what we’re doing, then yeah, we’re not doing this.
I have this persistent feeling that we’re seeing the slow winding down of women’s MMA. It’s not like it’s conspiracizing or catastrophizing to say the UFC woulkd do it: They already did it, right in front of your face. Women’s Featherweight was a real division with real fighters who really competed at their chosen weight class, but the UFC never bothered to fill it, and once Amanda Nunes retired, instead of trying to promote anyone to fill the void, they let the division wither and die on the vine. They never announced anything, they never put out a press release, there was no commemorative video package set to “Leave the Memories Alone” with footage of Megan Anderson getting choked out. They just pushed the fights down the card, and started booking them less and less, until one day they vanished altogether.
Luckily, nothing like that is happening right now.
We’re just getting Billy Quarantillo vs Diego Ferreira co-main events because that’s what’s best for the sport.
I hope I have to rewrite this at the last minute because Marcel had the unbelievably rare miss and they change their minds at the eleventh hour (PRE-PUBLISHING UPDATE: Nope). I hope, but I doubt. I think we’re getting this and I think we’ll be lucky if we get a single women’s main event this year.
As for this actual fight, I say this with all possible respect to both of these men: Not even the UFC cares. It’s the unfinalized co-main event of an unfinished Apex card put on as a throwaway the week before a numbered event. You are both veterans of the sport and you, too, deserve better. BILLY QUARANTILLO BY TKO.
MAIN CARD: SOMEHOW EVEN MORE INSULTING
WOMEN’S STRAWWEIGHT: Amanda Lemos (15-6-1, #8) vs Alexia Thainara (14-1, #12)
Hey, look at that: It’s the co-main event. My focus on numbers and career comparisons and “____ is x for their last y” statements has to be carefully metered, because sometimes, if you don’t look close enough, they will lie to you. Amanda Lemos is 2 for her last 6. Subjectively, that’s a terrible record. Objectively, every one of those losses--hall, all of her losses since mid-2017--came against world champions or #1 contenders. Losing fights to Virna Jandiroba, Gillian Robertson and Tatiana Suarez is nothing to feel ashamed of. Hell, as we discussed earlier, she beat Mackenzie Dern all of two and a half years ago. Damn near killed her in the second round, too. If Amanda had beaten Gillian this past March, there’s a solid chance she’d be getting that shot at Dern next week. But she didn’t, and she’s not, and that means she’s playing gatekeeper.
It is entirely accurate to say Alexia Thainara is one of the two best prospects Strawweight has right now. Hasn’t lost a fight since her rookie days back in 2019, currently riding a three-fight win streak, the last time we saw her she actually avenged that old loss because old foe Bruna Brasil happened to also be in the UFC. It’s great! It’s also another case of having to look past the numbers. Bruna Brasil is 3-5 in the UFC. Alexia’s wins before that were Loma Lookboonmee, who has existed at the periphery of the division for years, and Molly McCann, who was about to retire as a 7-7 journeywoman who just couldn’t stop getting tapped out. Winning is better than losing! Hell, the lines are thin and grey. Loma beat Denise Gomes and Denise has a shot at the top five later this month. But it shows the lack of elite competition Alexia’s faced.
That doesn’t have to doom her. She’s well-rounded, she’s capable, and she’s also more than a decade younger than Amanda. If Lemos is aging out, Alexia is entirely capable of taking advantage of the dust in her bones. But I don’t think Lemos is quite finished yet, and I don’t think Alexia’s going to challenge her enough in the grappling or striking to get her on the floor. AMANDA LEMOS BY DECISION.
WELTERWEIGHT: Ty Miller (7-0 (1)) vs Billy Ray Goff (9-4)
We’re gonna play a game, you and I. Neither of these men are debuting. Ty Miller made his debut last January. This is Billy Ray Goff’s fourth fight in the UFC. If you can name any of their previous fights off the top of your head, stop reading for a second and post it before you move on. Literally any of them. One of those opponents is about to hit a double-digit record in the UFC next week!
Yeah. It’s hard for me, too. That double-digit opponent was Ramiz Brahimaj, who choked Goff out in one round more than a year ago. What’s even funnier: The fight before that, Goff lost a decision against Trey Waters. Trey went on to not get booked for almost a year and a half, after which he got knocked out by Sam Patterson and was promptly cut from the company despite being 2-1. So, as usual, Trey, who won, is gone, but Goff, who lost--and then lost again!--is still here. Ty Miller’s only UFC opponent, for the record? Adam Fugitt, who was 10-5, 2-3 in the company, and had been viciously stopped in all three of his losses. But Fugitt was kept around just long enough for Miller to starch him! Because the UFC needs people they can reliably trust to lose or their marketing plans will fall apart.
Billy: This is why you’re here. Please prove them wrong and fuck up their plans. That said, TY MILLER BY TKO.
FEATHERWEIGHT: Darren Elkins (29-12) vs Yadier del Valle (10-1)
Darren Elkins! We are still doing Darren Elkins. The last time Darren Elkins beat a man with more wins than losses in the UFC it was Dennis Bermudez and it was 20goddamn17. I remember watching Cub Swanson wheelkick Darren Elkins to death and thinking ‘that should probably be it for both of these guys, honestly,’ and that was already five years ago, and Cub retired this past April, but Darren is still here. You know the way we’ve regularly discussed how bad it is to be known primarily for your toughness in fightsports, because it means more than winning, you are renowned for getting the shit kicked out of you on a regular basis? Darren has had this reputation for thirteen fucking years. He’s going to be 43 in May. The last time we saw him was already almost a year and a half ago and that was just so he could get completely demolished by Julian Erosa in one round, and Julian Erosa is also a journeyman in his late thirties who loses frequently.
But Yadier del Valle was a Contender Series guy, and they really liked the way he was choking out everyone he faced, and after watching him cut through Connor Matthews and Isaac Dulgarian in one round apiece the matchmakers were salivating about the idea of seeing him rise in the ranks as the rare grappling finishing machine. But they tried to Pimblett him, and they paid for it. He was matched up with Jordan Leavitt, a canny grappler with a tendency to wilt against bigger, better grapplers like Pimblett and Chase Hooper, but the matchmakers and the betting odds both overlooked that del Valle was neither bigger nor better than Leavitt, and despite being a -400 favorite he lost. So the UFC is jumping the entire roster and pulling Darren fuckin’ Elkins out of mothballs to make sure del Valle gets the win.
And I absolutely refuse to stop myself from rooting for comedy over common sense. DARREN ELKINS BY SUBMISSION.
PRELIMS: LOWERED EXPECTATIONS
HEAVYWEIGHT: Steven Asplund (7-2) vs Guilherme Pat (6-1)
You know, there was a brief moment when Steven Asplund looked like he had prospect potential. In total fairness: Being a Heavyweight, having a basic understanding of throwing in combinations and being able to do so for more than five minutes already places you above most of the sport. But he fell victim to the great migration of failed Light Heavyweights to the biggest of big boy divisions, and Vitor Petrino--a man whose previous greatest achievement was giving Anthony Smith his final career victory--managed to outlast Asplund and steal his place as the large punchman du jour. Guilherme Pat is already on his third UFC fight in less than a year with the company, and those three fights have taken him through a win over Allen Frye Jr., with just one bout ever against anyone with a winning record, and a loss against Thomas Petersen, who himself has repeatedly proven to be particularly middling.
So you’d better goddamn win this one. STEVEN ASPLUND BY TKO.
WOMEN’S FLYWEIGHT: Juliana Miller (4-4) vs Ravena Oliveira (7-4-1)
Sometimes the act of rooting for a fighter crosses the boundary from meme to reality. Do I actually like Juliana Miller, or do I like the irony of rooting for Juliana Miller despite the statistical likelihood that she will badly lose any fight she’s in? Does it adjust the math at all when she’s up against Ravena Oliveira, who, generally-speaking, also loses her fights very, very badly? We make a lot of jokes here about the things that don’t matter, but this is Juliana, who peaked in 2022 by winning The Ultimate Fighter 30 (jesus christ) and has mostly lost since, and Ravena, who’s 0-3 and two of those losses were at Strawweight. Is it more correct to say this truly, genuinely doesn’t matter, or more correct to say the existence of this fight proves that evaluating fights based on whether or not they matter is a flawed concept because every fight matters to the people who are fighting it?
Philosophy cannot get us out of dealing with this. Fortunately, while I may not know if my appreciation for Juliana is genuine or ironic, whichever it may be, it is real. JULIANA MILLER BY SUBMISSION.
HEAVYWEIGHT: Louie Sutherland (11-5) vs José Montanha da Silva (6-1)
Because fight databases get confused and José Montanha da Silva fights under that name rather than his real name, some folks got him mixed up with the other Brazilian Heavyweight named Montanha, who only has one win in the last decade. Don’t worry, we’re not that hard up! We got the good Montanha. You know, the one who’s only had three bouts in his life against people who’d fought at all before, and one of them is 1-1 and the other is 3-2, and the third is Richard “Boss Baby” Jacobi, who is a respectable 10-3-1. Boss Baby beat Montanha easily, but only because he didn’t get into the UFC after Austen Lane--Austen Lane--knocked him out in one round on the Contender Series. So don’t worry! It’s just a guy who was worse than a guy who was worse than Austen Lane against a Louie Sutherland who’s more than a dozen fights into his career with a similarly awful-looking record but he just beat former top contender Tai Tuivasa so who’s to say if Heavyweight is actually bad or if we all just need to shut up and accept the inevitability of the heat death of the universe.
Everything: It’s bad. LOUIE SUTHERLAND BY DECISION.
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Diyar Nurgozhay (11-2) vs Bruno Lopes (14-3)
Remember a couple weeks ago when we were in Abu Dhabi and we discussed the complete and utter destruction of the Light Heavyweight division, and one piece of that conversation was a man named Brendson Ribeiro? The 2-6 guy who just kept getting booked to lose, over and over and over again? Well, if you count the Contender Series, he actually beat three people under the UFC’s corporate banner. Bruno Lopes and Diyar Nurgozhay are two of them. Brendson didn’t just beat both of these men, he finished them. He starched Lopes on DWCS in one round and he submitted Diyar in two. Bonus points: Diyar missed the 205-pound weight limit by almost five pounds. This is a contest between two Light Heavyweights who are both 1-2 and both worse at fighting than Brendson goddamn Ribeiro and we have no choice but to accept that this is the best we can collectively do.
BRUNO LOPES BY SUBMISSION.
FEATHERWEIGHT: Miles Johns (15-5 (1)) vs Jessie Rosas (8-1)
If you’ve been reading these for any real length of time, you’re already very familiar with my feelings on Raul Rosas Jr. and the way the UFC tried to usher him into the upper ranks of the sport with a series of carefully-curated matchups. Suppose Raul had a brother named Jessie. Suppose Jessie didn’t beat a single person with a winning record until just this past June, and suppose that record was 23-11. Suppose Jessie got a UFC contract anyway, and suppose that the UFC decided Miles Johns, who is coincidentally on a three-fight losing streak, was the right man to welcome him to the company, for some strange reason. How do you think I would feel about that, and who do you think I would pick?
Thank you for knowing me so well. MILES JOHNS BY TKO.
LIGHTWEIGHT: Manoel Sousa (14-1) vs Richie Miranda (13-1)
This is a rad fight between two legitimately good Lightweight prospects who both deserve a shot at the spotlight, and aside from it being in the sucking void of the Apex, I don’t have a bad thing to say about it. Manoel’s a really good all-arounder who carved out a solid run in the PFL, has only ever lost against Archie Colgan, who just got a title shot at Usman Nurmagomedov, and already hopped into the UFC this year by blasting Bolaji Oki out on his feet. Richie Miranda has spent almost his entire career growing up in the Legacy Fighting Alliance, one of the few regional promotions left that’s actually pretty goddamn legitimate, and even held its Lightweight title for the last year. He’s more grappling-focused, but he’s solid and dangerous enough to snatch a goddamn bulldog choke with it in the present day, which just should not happen.
I inch towards MANOEL SOUSA BY DECISION, but both of these guys belong on this roster and I hate how pleasantly unusual that feels in this era of the sport.
WOMEN’S STRAWWEIGHT: Carol Foro (9-1) vs GiGi Canuto (7-1)
This fight got added on Tuesday evening, and by ‘added’ I mean it was reported by Brazilian journalist Leo Guimaraes. The UFC didn’t acknowledge it until Wednesday, presumably because GiGi Canuto was on this season of The Ultimate Fighter 34 (jesus christ) up until this week, when, I am told, she got elbowed to death on the ground after exhausting herself in the first round. It feels like it should mess with the format of an everyone-competes-for-a-contract tournament if people who lose midway through the season are getting promoted to the big show before the little show is even over, but on the other hand, caring about this would require things to matter, which, we are aware, they do not. Besides, this fight is 90% for Carol Foro, a Muay Thai knockout artist the UFC’s had signed since last September, but they keep trying to book her and the fights keep falling apart, so what’s better than throwing her in on four days’ notice against a woman who got elbowed in the face until she stopped moving a few months ago during the taping of a reality show.
Sports: They’re good for you. CAROL FORO BY TKO.