SATURDAY, AUGUST 15 FROM THE XFINITY MOBILE ARENA IN PHILADELPHIA
EARLY PRELIMS 2 PM PDT / 5 PM EDT | PRELIMS 4 PM / 7 PM | MAIN CARD 6 PM / 9 PM
There’s been a lot of rumbling about this card being kind of bad, and having templated it all out: Yeah, pretty much. It’s not great. But it’s in the tradition of how the UFC tended to book these cards. When they knew they had a strong headline up at the top of the card, they did not give a dang about anything else. Every MMA fan from the mid-2000s remembers GSP armbarring Matt Hughes and Chuck Liddell winning his long-awaited showdown with Wanderlei Silva: No one remembers the fight just before that was Eddie Sanchez vs Soa Palelei.
Here’s the thing, though. Underneath that fight, you had Lyoto Machida, Rameau Thierry Sokoudjou, Rich Clementi (remember when he was almost a thing?) and Luiz Cané. The cards coasted on the value of their headliners, but they were constructed to impart that value to lesser-known but extremely serious prospects.
This card is trying to impart its value to Jose Ochoa (EDIT: not anymore!), Mansur Abdul-Malik, and Esteban Ribovics.
But we’ve got two title fights to get through first, and only one and a half of them bum me the fuck out, so it could be worse.
MAIN EVENT: FEMINISM, VOL. ONE
WELTERWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP: Islam Makhachev (28-1, Champion) vs Ian Machado Garry (17-1, #1)
The things that get you scorned in mixed martial arts in 2026 are outright hilarious.
Up until 2024, Ian Garry was the universally-acclaimed face of the future. He was exclusively attached to pay-per-views and the extremely rare network television broadcast, he was given a healthy diet of reasonable-but-not-insurmountable challenges on his way up the ladder, he was compared to Conor McGregor as many times as the UFC possibly could thanks to the many likenesses between them, up to and including Being Irish, and the internet liked him. He was young, he was talented, he was the next big thing.
At the end of 2024, Ian Garry lost a fight for the first time in his career. This is the jumping-off point for most fighter bandwagons, really. Fighters turning out to be mortal depresses fanbases, and if you doubt it, look at how Khamzat Chimaev fell from the scariest man in the sport to an afterthought thanks to a single coinflip split decision going against him. Sure, Ian lost against one of the best of the best in Shavkat Rakhmonov, but it was still a loss, and at the end of the day, losing kills your fanbase li--
Oh, I’m sorry. I am being informed that what pissed off Ian’s fanbase was the discovery that he loves his wife.
He wasn’t Ian Machado Garry when he got started in the UFC. Machado was his wife’s maiden name, and he adopted it because he wanted her son from her first marriage to not feel disconnected from their family. This baffled people. Changing names is what girls do, and fighters are supposed to be ultra-masculine, and within months you had multiple fighters, particularly perennial poop elemental Sean Strickland, cracking on Garry with the best jokes about cuckolding, homosexuality and emasculation 1996 had to offer.
In the press leading up to this fight, in one of the seemingly endless arrays of podcast interviews every fighter is now obligated to do, Ian made a comment about how the almost universally male leadership of the world has really fucked everything up, and if we turned leadership over to women for a change things would probably be a lot smoother. This has turned the majority of the discourse around this fight into the worst commentary on gender politics you have ever heard in your entire fucking life, and it leaves me fascinated by where we are right now in the moral arc of mixed martial arts.
Islam Makhachev, who generally does not give a shit about press, took time out of his schedule to talk shit about Ian’s feminism. Islam periodically trains with and is a close friend of Umar Nurmagomedov, who’s about two months removed from engaging in public denial of the Holocaust; that did not require any comment. We’re only a couple years removed from human dryer chute Strickland sitting at a press dais next to Mayra Bueno Silva and Raquel Pennington and using the UFC’s on-screen press time to discuss women’s MMA being worthless, and that barely got a peep. Adjudicated sex offenders are all over the UFC’s roster and the company just took a $30 million bath so it could get a four-hour photo-op with Donald Trump’s White House, but Ian Machado Garry is a vegan who thinks women are good, and it turns out that’s what it actually takes to get the UFC fanbase to hate you now.
It’s also just incredibly weird that this feels like it’s the only fucking thing to talk about when it comes to the story of this fight.
Like, the UFC just plain gave up. You have Islam Makhachev, possibly the greatest mixed martial artist on the planet, against Ian Machado Garry, his top contender and one of the most accomplished Welterweights in the world, and the UFC ran promo packages for it during last week’s fight night that were essentially just file footage of the Conor McGregor vs Khabib Nurmagomedov advertisements but with Islam and Ian added in. That’s what they’ve got. The best fighter of a generation against a huge threat to his legacy, 29 UFC bouts between them, and marketing dug deep into its Mind Palace and came up with “What if we just say it’s like Khabib vs Conor 2?” because they know fully well that they’ve done such a shit job of promoting these men that Islam, a two-division champion with victories over the champions of three weight classes, is simultaneously one of the biggest draws they have and still a drop in the bucket of mainstream awareness compared to fooling people into thinking this fight has fuck-all to do with Conor McGregor.
Which is a shame, because aside from how goddamn hard it is to grapple Ian effectively, aside from how mobile Ian is and how much of a size and range advantage he has, this fight is deeply intriguing because it represents something Islam’s legacy really needs: After four years of holding gold, it’s the first time Islam will ever get to defend a title against a top contender.
After he beat Charles Oliveira for the belt back in 2022, his first defense wasn’t a rematch or a bout against Dustin Poirier or Justin Gaethje, but a cross-weight class challenge against Featherweight king Alexander Volkanovski. After winning, Islam was supposed to fight still-#1 Oliveira, but a gash in training scratched him from the fight, and instead, we got an incredibly unnecessary, short-notice Volkanovski rematch. By mid-2024 Arman Tsarukyan was the top contender and Gaethje had knocked out Poirier, but the UFC didn’t like either of those ideas, so they booked Islam against Poirier instead, who had fallen halfway down the ladder. Islam was booked against Arman to kick off 2025, but that went squirrelly the night before the pay-per-view and Islam wound up destroying the #10-ranked Renato Moicano instead.
None of this is Islam’s fault. He didn’t bust Oliveira’s eyebrow, he didn’t make the UFC give him Poirier, he didn’t make Arman fuck up his weight cut. Islam’s done everything he can, given the cards dealt to him by fate and the matchmakers that, even as we speak, are conducting arcane rituals below the surface of the Earth to figure out how to get Paddy Pimblett back into title contention. But there’s a thing about success: The more of it you have, the more scrutiny your legacy starts to receive. Anderson Silva is still the man most people think of as the ideal champion, and he’s still held to task for fucking around too much in multiple title fights. Jon Jones is indisputably the most accomplished Light Heavyweight in MMA history, but between all his drug busts, his close scrape with Dominick Reyes and his refusal to take a rematch, his record is as much controversy as content. Fedor Emelianenko, still held by many as the best Heavyweight to ever do it, only actually defended his title three times in fourteen fights, and spent more of his prime battling professional wrestlers and engaging in freakshow fights than he did taking on top contenders.
When you’re the best in the world, every single choice you make matters. People are going to dissect your career for decades to come. When your definitive victories are last-minute replacements and Moicanos, you need every Ian Machado Garry you can get, no matter how good you are.
But Islam is very, very good. Everyone expected him to outwrestle Jack Della Maddalena; very few expected Islam to outstrike him, too. Jack’s legs had been kicked apart before the fight was halfway through. Islam learned a lot of lessons from Khabib, but I’m not sure any were as valuable as the awareness that having no fear of the grappling game means being able to really commit when it’s time to fuck someone up on the feet. He floored Oliveira, he kicked Volkanovski in the face, and he went punch for punch with Poirier. He’s proven his bonafides.
Which might be the biggest threat to his success, here. Islam hasn’t spent a lot of his career dealing with bigger men, and when he has, it’s been folks like Dan Hooker that can be taken down and submitted by a stiff breeze. Shavkat struggled to get Ian down. Belal Muhammad struggled to get Ian down. He’s proven absurdly difficult to control in grappling situations, and that, combined with Ian having damn near half a foot of leverage, makes this potentially very interesting. Ian’s not a Della Maddalena, he’s not going to leave himself in striking distance while he waits for Islam to pick his legs apart because his striking requires close proximity. He’s got the range and the footwork to control their engagements, and with the right gameplan and the right takedown defense, he can force Islam to rush him if he wants to have any hope of getting his takedown game going.
It is, however, Islam Makhachev we’re talking about. He trains with the best there has ever been at rushing takedowns. If Ian winning this fight means pitching a perfect game against one of the best clinch grapplers in the history of mixed martial arts, Islam just has to hit more than he misses. I am not betting against that likelihood. ISLAM MAKHACHEV BY DECISION.
CO-MAIN EVENT: FEMINISM, VOL. TWO
WOMEN’S STRAWWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP: Mackenzie Dern (16-5, Champion) vs Gillian Robertson (17-8, #5)
We’ve been writing about this fight for awhile without directly referring to it.
Two weeks ago, I tried to quantify it, finishing some math that good buddy, Pagoda columnist and android kidney superhero Jess Hudnall started.
Wanna hear something fun? This is the 25th UFC held this year, and presuming it doesn’t face any last-minute cancellations, by the time it’s over, there will have been 140 main-card fights broadcast in 2026. Seven of those main-card slots went to women. That’s five percent.
Last week, I tried to encapsulate it.
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 would 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.
I wanted to see just how accurate that worry was, so much to the deep chagrin of my English student brain, I did a little more math. The first women’s main event in UFC history--the first women’s fight period, after plans for Erica Montoya vs Shelby Walker in 2005 fell through--was Ronda Rousey vs Liz Carmouche back on February 23, 2013. Despite the new, revised version of history wherein the UFC took to gender equality in the sport on the spot, we still had aways to go before it was to any extent normalized. But if you go through the logbook, and you count out how many main events women actually got over the years, you can see a funny little pattern form.
2013: 1
2014: 1
2015: 5
2016: 6
2017: 5
2018: 2
2019: 5
2020: 4
2021: 4
2022: 5
2023: 5
2024: 2
2025: 1
We’re eight and a half months into 2026. Cards have been announced through mid-September. There hasn’t been a single women’s main event yet this year. I had some hope that Noche UFC 4 on September 12 would finally break the drought--they announced Alexa Grasso vs Manon Fiorot, it’s a top contendership match by default, both are former title contenders, one’s a former champion, and both women scored incredible knockouts in their last fights. It would’ve been an excellent way to finally get women in the main event.
The actual main event of Noche UFC 4 got announced on August 4. It’s Yair Rodríguez, who has one fight in the last two and a half years, against Jean Silva, who got clocked by Diego Lopes one fight ago.
This is the only women’s title fight of 2026 thus far. Kayla Harrison won the Bantamweight belt in June of 2025, and between neck injuries and waiting on Amanda Nunes, she’s been champion for 427 days and counting without a defense. Valentina Shevchenko dominated all-time great Zhang Weili last November, and despite having Fiorot, Erin Blanchfield, and #1 contender Natália Silva on an eight-fight winning streak all waiting and ready to go, Fiorot’s fighting Graso, Blanchfield’s fighting Jasmine Jasudavicius, and Silva’s fighting nobody.
A ten-year campaign to make Mackenzie Dern a star, one that saw the UFC paying her before she had fought a single mixed martial arts bout, finally came to fruition last October when, despite having losses against half of her division’s top five, Mackenzie got the call to fight for the vacant Strawweight title against Virna Jandiroba, the one and only top contender she had, conveniently, already beaten once before. It was cynical, it was obvious, and it was effective. They caught the car. Mackenzie Dern: UFC World Champion. Congratulations, boys, you finally got the big giant marketing star you’ve been salivating over for a decade. What’re you gonna do with her now?
Why, you’re going to sit her on the shelf for ten straight months and then make her the co-main event, obviously.
And you’re conveniently going to book all of the top contenders who’ve already beaten her before into competitive matchups with other people. Amanda Lemos just failed prospect duty against Alexia Thainara last week. Yan Xiaonan, despite being #4, is facing the barely-ranked Denise Gomes at the end of the month.
But Gillian Robertson can make it to the show.
She’s earned her way here. I would never say she hasn’t. Gillian’s quietly one of the longest-tenured fighters in the UFC--she actually started back in 2017 as part of The Ultimate Fighter 26 (jesus christ), the season that birthed Women’s Flyweight and gave us Nicco Montaño, the essentially unbeatable forever-answer to the “who’s the worst UFC champion of all time?” trivia question--and after a rocky start up at 125, her career resurgence as a Strawweight contender has been a joy to watch. Flyweights tossed her around and made her miserable; Strawweights, by and large, have gotten strangled. Since making the switch at the start of 2023 Gillian’s 6-1, the only blemish coming against Tabatha Ricci, who looked like a sure thing once upon a time.
Other than that, it’s been dominance. She just about broke Piera Rodriguez’s arm, she pounded out Polyana Viana, she outworked Luana Pinheiro and retired both Michelle Waterson-Gomez and Marina Rodriguez, and this past March she fought what was more or less a title eliminator against the aforementioned Amanda Lemos and finally got that seat at the top she’s always wanted.
Except most of those seats were in the dark. Only two of those seven Strawweight fights made it off the prelims--and both of them were in the Apex. Gillian’s victory over Luana Pinheiro was gently cradled right inbetween Mansur Abdul-Malik vs Duško Todorović and Gaston Bolaños vs Cortavious “Are You Not Entertained?” Romious, and her last fight--the fight that made her a world title contender--was an Apex co-main event, right beneath Kevin Vallejos knocking out Josh Emmett.
It’s funny: I spent so much of Gillian’s ascent through the division complaining about their repeated refusal to put Gillian, a Canadian from Canada who reps the Canadian flag, on any UFC card in Canada, ever, despite frequently being booked to fight within weeks of one, that I neglected to complain about none of her fights ever making the main broadcast. But that’s women’s MMA, right? Just like we said up top. It gets booked into the background because the UFC doesn’t think anyone wants to watch it, and after refusing to invest in it for so long that even their hand-picked chosen savior of the division can’t get a main event for her first title defense, why on Earth would we expect them to care enough to build a title challenger?
After all, she’s here to lose.
You didn’t think it was a coincidence that they picked her, did you? Gillian’s a grappler-type Pokemon. She succeeds through her jiu-jitsu. In ten years of professional competition, she’s never scored a knockout on the feet. I don’t think she’s even gotten a knockdown. Her entire gameplan lives and dies by her ability to get her opponents on the ground and simulate murdering them. Mackenzie’s one of the best grapplers in the history of women’s mixed martial arts. She once nearly hit a kimura on Tecia Pennington while hanging horizontally in the air by way of a single foot on the fence. Over the course of years, much like we just said about Islam, Mackenzie’s even been able to build an effective striking game out of complete lack of fear she has about being taken down. If she’s wildly punching you and you shoot a double to stop her, all you have done is given her the chance to do the shit she’s actually good at.
Last week I said Quillan Salkilld was going to destroy Mateusz Gamrot, and I was picking Gamrot anyway, because that’s what my heart wanted. I think this is a really bad matchup for Gillian. She’s a great grappler in her own right, I’ve loved watching her just bread-and-butter her way through the division, but I think Mackenzie’s jiu-jitsu is another level above hers, and Gillian’s striking has never been effective enough that I see it changing the way this bout goes. I think Mackenzie’s going to outwork her on the feet, I think Mackenzie’s going to outplay her on the ground, and I think we’ll see Gillian’s first submission loss in eight years.
But that’s not what I want. I want Gillian to chuck the apple cart off the Florida coast. I want her chip-away boxing to wind up being more effective than Mackenzie expects. I want her solid, conservative grappling game to defuse Mackenzie’s sub attempts. I want Mackenzie to get worn down on the ground and I want GILLIAN ROBERTSON BY SUBMISSION.
And then you can do the stupid fucking rematch in Canada.
MAIN CARD: GIVING UP
FLYWEIGHT: Charles Johnson (19-9) vs Jose Ochoa (9-2)Eduardo Chapolin (15-2)
Congratulations, Charles! You’re in the featured bout on a numbered show with two title fights! Did they give you a main card berth when you were on a four-fight winning streak and looked like a serious prospect? Nope! They had you curtain-jerk the prelims at the Apex. Did they bump you back up to the main card after you knocked out Lone’er Kavanagh? Of course not! That spot was reserved for Salsa Boy. When DID they finally give you a featured spot? Why, it was your last fight, when you were a giant underdog against Asu Almabayev in the middle of Azerbaijan and you got turned into a human pretzel. So why, do you suppose, are they putting you in your highest-profile UFC slot ever, despite coming off a two-and-a-half round submission loss where you got punched in the head dozens of times all of 49 days ago?
Why, indeed. Why would they be trying to trade you out for a 25 year-old on a Contender Series-tier contract with a near-total finishing rate? He’s smaller than you, he is less successful than you, he lost to Kavanagh, unlike you, and the best win of his career is either Clayton Carpenter or Cody Durden, and brother, neither of those make for great news. But he’s cheaper and younger and not yet ruled out of reaching the top. Charles is 8-7 in the UFC. He’s had multiple shots and unfortunately biffed them all. Jose is 2-2. He has room to grow into the easily-paid Peruvian punching machine of their dreams. All he has to do is beat a guy who’s outperformed him in several head-to-head matchups while also possessing a sizable advantage in size, range, and technique.
In other words: Charles, if you lose this one, I’m giving up on you for good. CHARLES JOHNSON BY DECISION. UPDATE: Wednesday afternoon as I was editing this for publishing, Ochoa got pulled and now this is a 130-pound catchweight fight between Charles and Eduardo Chapolin, the LFA champion and a man who got choked out of The Ultimate Fighter 33 (jesus christ) in the first round. Flip a coin at your leisure from here on out.
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Mansur Abdul-Malik (9-1-1) vs Dustin Stoltzfus (16-8)
The UFC keeps trying to get Mansur Abul-Malik in the prospect conversation, and things just keep going wrong. When they brought him in through DWCS in 2024 he was the exact story we’ve repeated hundreds of times over the course of our long watch: Undefeated, knocks everyone out, never fought anyone with a winning record, doomed to an extremely foreseeable future fall. They booked him against the softest targets they could find, but good ol’ Cody Brundage failed to produce a highlight-reel stoppage because Mansur headbutted the crap out of him and the fight was eventually ruled a Draw for particularly dumb reasons. This past March the UFC finally threw Mansur in the cage with Yousri Belgaroui, his first competitor to have more UFC wins than losses, by which I mean he was 1-0, and Mansur got knocked the fuck out.
So do you try to keep Mansur vital? Do you give him another test? Of course not! You have him fight Dustin Stoltzfus, who is 3-7, has been knocked out repeatedly, hasn’t won a fight in almost two years, is traditionally a grappler who poses very little threat on the feet, and was last seen losing a fight to 2025-level Kelvin Gastelum. It feels like shit every time I reduce a fight down to “fighter y is here to lose to fighter x.” It makes me think of Harry Hunsucker, of all people. Harry was a big ol’ dude who devoted his life to studying martial arts, and the UFC gave him a DWCS shot in 2020 and he got the shit beaten out of him, but they brought him in anyway, because they needed a late replacement to get the shit beaten out of them. He proceeded to stick around for a year and a half and three fights, all of which involved getting more shit beaten out of him, and they lasted a grand total of just under four minutes. An entire life of studying the arts you find fascinating and participating in the sport you love, and your only utility to the uppermost reaches of the sport was serving as a really convenient way for the UFC to go “hey, we need that guy who always gets the shit beaten out of him.”
I hope you don’t get the shit beaten out of you, Dustin. It’d be a lot more gratifying if you won. MANSUR ABDUL-MALIK BY TKO.
LIGHTWEIGHT: Edson Barboza (24-14) vs Esteban Ribovics (15-3)
Speaking of people the UFC will not stop trying to get over: We are well and truly stuck with Esteban Ribovics. And, like, it could be worse. He’s not terrible. He has some very fun fights! He is also not going to make it in this division. He only barely won a split decision against Daniel Zellhuber, who has spent the subsequent two years losing repeatedly. Esteban only barely lost a split decision against Nasrat Haqparast, who has, himself, been stuck at the periphery of Lightweight since 2017. But it was this past April’s attempt to jump Esteban all the way from a one-fight winning streak and nowhere near ranked to the top fucking ten against Mateusz Gamrot that truly gave away the UFC’s game, and it blew up in their faces, as Gamrot proceeded to ragdoll Ribovics and choke him out in two rounds--which is even more damning now that Charles Oliveira and Quillan Salkilld have proven, pretty definitively, that Gamrot’s never making it to the top of the Lightweight ladder, either.
But does that mean we stop trying? Of fucking course not. Not when we have 40 year-old Edson Barboza, on a three-fight losing streak, 2 for his last 7, coming off a knockout loss and openly talking about the likelihood that his career is over and it’s time to retire. Does a 32-fight veteran who provided some of the most memorable knockouts in the history of the sport get a good send-off? No, a handful of people still remember his name and that means he is philosophically and ethically obligated to go out there and get starched by whatever unproven prospect the UFC is inexplicably attached to this week so their past marketing efforts don’t go to waste. They did it with Lerone Murphy back in 2024 just in case Edson was done, they did it with Jalin Turner at the end of 2025 should he decide not to come back, and by god, we need to wash the taste of all of that filthy wrestling out of our mouths by letting Esteban kick a man until he falls over so we can pretend he has a shot at being a divisional contender again.
There is no retirement plan in mixed martial arts. Edson, if I see you in BKFC, I will be very, very sad. ESTEBAN RIBOVICS BY TKO.
PRELIMS: INEXPLICABLY, WHERE THE PROSPECTS LIVE
WELTERWEIGHT: Chidi Njokuani (25-12 (1)) vs Joel Álvarez (23-4)
You know what the UFC likes? Tall people. Are you a pair of 6’3” Welterweights, a division once ruled by short king Matt Serra? Then the UFC wants you, so long as you will promise to hit people a lot and hopefully not lose to any stinky grapplers. Joel, at least, has only fallen victim to their wiles. Six and a half years in, the only people who’ve beaten him have been capable of grounding and controlling him. Is this because Arman Tsarukyan and Yaroslav Amosov are exceptionally good? Definitely. Is it because between them Joel’s fighting guys like Marc Diakiese and the ghost of Vicente Luque? Probably also a factor. But that’s still a step up from Chidi, who is very, very good when he can beat up on Jared Gooden, but got choked out in a minute flat by Jake Matthews and liberally battered by Carlos Leal. If you are a tall boy and you do tall boy striking and you get outwrestled, that’s fine, they’re not going to hold that against you, because wrestling is illegal and the bouncers should’ve stopped the wrestlers from entering the octagon in the first place. But if you get outpunched? By a short? You must be disassembled.
All of this is to say I am not enormously invested in this fight, but generally-speaking, Chidi vs someone who is just as big as he is but also knows how submission holds work seems like a bad night for him. JOEL ÁLVAREZ BY SUBMISSION. Also, it’s super cool and not at all annoying that Amosov choked Joel out and Joel’s already booked again while Amosov is twiddling his thumbs.
LIGHTWEIGHT: Jalin Turner (15-9) vs Kauê Fernandes (11-2)
This match-up is absolutely fucking fascinating, because both of its component parts could be really, really good, and despite having plenty of fights with the company, we have no way of presently knowing. We knew, in the past tense, that Jalin Turner was a competitive Lightweight: But for the minds of a single judge he would’ve won split decisions against Mateusz Gamrot and Dan Hooker and wound up near title contention years ago. In our version of reality he lost, his confidence broke and he ultimately retired after a 1-for-5 skid. He un-retired this past December and smashed Edson Barboza in two and a half minutes, and that’s great, but it’s also Edson Barboza, who, as we’ve already discussed, is basically done, so just how good Jalin’s doing these days remains a question mark. Kauê Fernandes is in a much weirder position. He’s four fights into his UFC tenure, and outside of kicking that run off by dropping a split decision to Marc Diakiese, he’s on a three-fight winning streak. But every one of those wins is kind of fucked up. He knocked out Mohammad Yahya, but Yahya very visibly did not belong there and kept getting booked anyway because the UAE liked him. He beat Guram Kutateladze, who at one point was a serious Lightweight contender, but by the time Kauê got to him Guram’s body and career had fallen apart, he looked exhausted and immobile, and he got cut immediately afterward. Kauê was supposed to fight Farès Ziam, which would’ve been a great test, but after Ziam’s grandmother died he pulled out and got replaced by Harry Hardwick, a Cage Warriors Featherweight making a short-notice debut at a higher weight class who also seemed to have no idea what leg kicks were and got disassembled in three and a half minutes.
So we still haven’t gotten to see Fernandes get tested, just as we haven’t seen a full accounting of how Turner’s doing after his retirement. Both men need to prove they can handle offensive pressure coming back at them, and their styles are both built on moving forward all the time, so they’ll probably get the chance. Still think we’ll see JALIN TURNER BY DECISION, though.
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Donte Johnson (8-0) vs Eric McConico (11-4-1)
I gotta be honest: This is one of those fights my eyes just refuse to focus on. Just a few fights ago Donte Johnson was on DWCS as a Heavyweight, and then he choked out Sedriques Dumas, which should have earned him my undying loyalty, but then he won the barest split decision against Cody Brundage and my interest waned. Which is funny, because, hey, you know who else only barely got past divisional journeyman Cody Brundage by split decision? Eric McConico! Sure, he gets knocked out a lot, but he can beat Cody and Rodolfo Vieira, so who’s to say if he’s good or bad? Me. You. Our lying eyes. There are two Middleweight divisions. One of them is populated by fighters who, however frustrating, are rounded competitors who’ve demonstrated the ability to hang and potentially contend. The other is a swirling vortex of bodies and names all fighting to consume each other in the hopes that one of them, one day, will get the opportunity to lose to Brendan Allen on an Apex show, which will be the highlight of their career.
But don’t worry, the duality’s only temporary! Eventually it’ll just be the vortex. Until then, DONTE JOHNSON BY DECISION.
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Vicente Luque (24-12-1) vs Tresean Gore (6-4)
Thinking about Vicente Luque reminded me of just how close we came to a reality where Vicente Luque and Nick Diaz had a professional mixed martial arts fight in 2024. However dumb, dark and decrepit our timeline might be, at least, at least, it isn’t the one where Vicente Luque and Nick Diaz had a professional mixed martial arts fight in 2024. Instead, Luque got bounced out of Welterweight, went up to 185 pounds, and proceeded to choke out Kelvin Gastelum, the living embodiment of unrealized potential. Tresean Gore is still here because there’s always someone there to bail him out. He was a finalist on The Ultimate Fighter 29 (jesus christ), but he had to be replaced in the final. Instead of cutting him, the UFC signed up to have the UNFINISHED ULTIMATE FIGHTER BUSINESS angle, which was ruined when he promptly lost twice in a row. But instead of getting fired, he beat Josh Fremd and Antonio Trócoli, both of whom lost their way out of the company. And then Gore lost two more in a row and massively blew a weight cut, so that could’ve been that! But instead he came in as a massive underdog against Azamat Bekoev and choked him out in the third round.
We are just spinning in these circles over and over until someone sets us free. I value Welterweight more than I do Middleweight, so VICENTE LUQUE BY TKO it is.
EARLY PRELIMS: THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF MAGNY
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Rafael Tobias (14-2) vs Lucas Fernando (13-3)
Here’s a fun one for you. Remember Azamat Bekoev, our friend from the last paragraph that couldn’t hack it against Tresean Gore? How about Diyar Nurgozhay, last week’s Light Heavyweight prospect that got trashed in two rounds by the 17-11 Brendson Ribeiro? What if there was a pair of men that had lost to each of them? What if the UFC signed both of them and put more of the future of the sport on their shoulders? What if Light Heavyweight has to burn through bodies to survive? What if it doesn’t matter how capable those bodies are so long as they throw more punches than they do takedowns? Did you know that of the 46 fighters signed off Contender Series bouts last season, a grand total of four, or 8.7%, were women? Fortunately, there’s space for Lucas Fernando.
I just do not have the joy in me for this, so I flipped a coin, and the coin said LUCAS FERNANDO BY TKO.
WELTERWEIGHT: Neil Magny (31-14) vs Ramiz Brahimaj (13-6)
There’s a really acute sense of tragedy to this fight. Neil Magny was supposed to be a big deal, man. He was a giant Welterweight before 6’3” Lightweights became common; he was a cardio king when fighters still struggled to finish three active rounds; he was a good, chip-away striker with a surprisingly underrated grappling game. Hell, he’s still fine! He wadded Mike Malott up and threw him in the damn garbage two and a half years ago! But his dreams of making it to the top of the mountain died a little more every time one of his winning streaks ended, and now it’s 2026, and he just turned 39, and he has double-digit losses, and the UFC is pushing Malott anyway because they can make more money off of him than Magny, and it’s better to let him fight other coulda-been-a-contenders like Ramiz Brahimaj instead, because they’ve already let Magny get crushed by all the Welterweights they currently care about marketing.
I wish things had been different, Neil. I hope you can still keep doing this long enough to invest in an index fund. NEIL MAGNY BY DECISION.
WELTERWEIGHT: Jeremiah Wells (13-4-1) vs Myktybek Orolbai (16-2-1)
Alright, this kinda sucks. Myktybek Orolbai has been killing it. He’s 5-1 and his only loss was a war of a split decision down at Lightweight, he’s undefeated at his proper home in the Welterweight division, and some of those wins are really fucking good. Jack Hermansson, the man who beat Joe Pyfer and damn near beat Sean Strickland? Orolbai knocked him out in less than three minutes. Chris Curtis, the Schrodinger’s contender of Middleweight that gave Brendan Allen fits? Orolbai pitched a shut-out against him. Remember two weeks ago when the UFC organized an entire event around coronating Uroš Medić as Welterweight’s big new ranked knockout artist? Myktybek Orolbai tapped him out in two rounds. He’s very, very good, he’s on a three-fight winning streak and he deserves a spotlight. Which is why he is curtain-jerking the prelims against a man with one fight in the last two and a half years and one win in the last three and a half. Every fight is a risk, and the UFC is so disinterested in Orolbai that they’re willing to risk him against an unknown veteran with zero upside who’s turning 40 in October as the very first fight on the early preliminary section of a card they didn’t even bother putting together a real featured bout for.
But, of course: He’s a grappler, so. MYKTYBEK OROLBAI BY DECISION.
I am old - not real old - old by MMA fan standards. So I remember when the first fighting arcade games arrived (consoles were just a thought experiment then). First Street fighter and then Mortal Kombat…
When Edson Barbosa wheel kicked Terry Etim my brain just shrieked “Fatality” and I screamed with joy at the beauty of it and I screamed with fear that I had seen a man killed.
I still remember it and, like all fans who saw it, I have been ride or die Edson ever since. So bring him out, show the highlights, shake his hand and give him a gold watch. Just don’t make him fight anymore- because people like Edson never say no to a fight - even when they should. Vale’ Edson