SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 26 FROM THE FULMINATING BURROW OF THE APEX
PRELIMS 2 PM PDT / 5 PM EDT | MAIN CARD 5 PM / 8 PM
Boy, last week’s card was great. Great! Plenty of dumb shit too, but what a good main/co-main combination, and what a great way to deliver on the myriad promises of mixed martial arts. High level technical competition! Cathartic failure! Heavyweights being terrible! Couldn’t have asked for a better ribbon on 200 episodes.
And I hope you enjoyed it while it lasted, because to kick off the next 100, here’s our main and co-mains for the next four weeks:
Main event Raul Rosas Jr. vs Raoni Barcelos / Co-main event Rodolfo Vieira vs Robert Bryczek
Main event Natália Silva vs Wang Cong / Co-main event Payton Talbott vs Deiveson Figueiredo
Main event Brendan Allen vs Christian Leroy Duncan / Co-main event Loopy Godinez vs Ketlen Souza
Main event Joaquin Buckley vs Mike Malott / Co-main event Erin Blanchfield vs Jasmine Jasudavicius
And I could almost be okay with Blanchfield/Jasudavicius if Wang Cong wasn’t fighting for the title two weeks beforehand. Welcome to the doldrums, baby.
MAIN EVENT: BECAUSE WE SAID SO
BANTAMWEIGHT: Raul Rosas Jr. (12-1, #12) vs Raoni Barcelos (22-5, #13)
I want to tell you about four men with two stories.
Raul Rosas Jr. signs up for the Contender Series in 2022. He has 5 fights and 5 wins, and all of his opponents have losing records. Rosas wins his UFC contract three weeks before his 18th birthday. He makes his UFC debut two months later as the preliminary headliner for a pay-per-view card that features Jan Błachowicz, Magomed Ankalaev, Paddy Pimblett, Dricus Du Plessis and Ilia Topuria. Raul’s opponent, Jay Perrin, is an 0-2 fighter the company signed as a late replacement. Rosas wins easily, and commentary labels him as the sport’s next big thing and a surefire future champion. His next fight is no longer a prelim, but a main card bout on another pay-per-view, this time along Jorge Masvidal’s retirement fight and Israel Adesanya vs Alex Pereira 2, one of the biggest matches the UFC could possibly make. Rosas is given a great deal of hype, and his opponent, the 1-1 Christian Rodriguez, goes largely unmentioned.
Christian proceeds to beat seven shades of hell out of Raul. It is a slaughter of historical proportions. By the time the final bell rings, Rosas is 3 for 16 on takedowns and has been outstruck 83 to 2. The defeat is staggering, but a learning experience, and a great way for the company to recalibrate their expectations and plans.
They do not recalibrate their expectations or plans. In his next fight, Rodriguez is banished to the Apex to battle Cameron Saaiman on a card main evented by Sodiq Yusuff. Raul is put in the featured bout of the main card on the UFC’s heavily-advertised Noche UFC event under Alexa Grasso vs Valentina Shevchenko for the Women’s Flyweight Championship and his opponent is Terrence Mitchell, the man Cameron Saaiman knocked out in one round.
Rosas wins. Rosas wins a lot. Coincidentally, over the next three years only one of the five men placed in front of Rosas is coming off of a victory, and only one has a winning record in the UFC. By the Summer of 2026, Raul Rosas Jr. is the #12 Bantamweight on the planet, and his path to the rankings bulldozes its way through a shared UFC record of 21-30 (1). Christian Rodriguez has fought seven times. Five of them were in the Apex.
Raoni Barcelos gets into the UFC the hard way. It’s 2017, the Contender Series has only just begun, and Raoni, the 11-1 Featherweight champion of the Resurrection Fighting Alliance, is picked up as a last-minute replacement to make sure that Boston Salmon--who was on the Contender Series--stays on a card. Salmon pulls out, ultimately goes 0-2, and is now losing in the Dirty Boxing Championship. Raoni does not make his debut for another nine months, and when they finally dig him out of mothballs, he proceeds to violently wreck three men in a row. He knocks out future TUF champion Kurt Holobaugh, strangles a future UFC fixture in Chris Gutierrez, and pounds out an overmatched Carlos Huachin. It is a sensational three-fight winning streak and establishes him as a genuine prospect.
For this, Raoni is given a spot on the prelims of a UFC card in Korea that airs unseen to the vast majority of its audience. He beats Said Nurmagomedov, but the pandemic kills the UFC’s plans for the immediate future, and Raoni is left to twiddle his thumbs until he is finally given a main card bout against Khalid Taha almost a year later. Barcelos wins again. He is 5-0 in the UFC and a major prospect who, with good matchmaking, can be a contender. He is instead given Timur Valiev, who has one win in the UFC. Valiev wins. He is fired one fight later and never returns to the UFC.
Raoni falls into prospect duty. Victor Henry, Kyler Phillips. Umar Nurmagomedov hands him the first knockout loss of his career. By the beginning of 2025, Raoni is close to 38, 2 for his last 6, and largely forgotten. The UFC books him as an easy win for their new marketing darling, Payton Talbott. Payton is a young Contender Series winner with an undefeated record and a near-total finishing rate. He’s getting the marketing jetpack and the UFC wants to rub what’s left of Raoni’s credibility off on him. Payton is a -1150 favorite. Raoni schools him. The UFC’s next big thing drops a 10-8 round to a fighter everyone forgot. It is a crushing loss for Payton and an incredible win for Raoni.
In his next fight, Payton is on the main card of a two-title fight pay-per-view headlined by Ilia Topuria vs Charles Oliveira. Raoni is placed on a Joaquin Buckley Fight Night under Edmen Shahbazyan. They both win. One fight after that, Payton is on the UFC’s last-ever pay-per-view beating former double champion Henry Cejudo in his retirement fight. One month prior, Raoni fought Ricky Simón in the Apex. On the prelims.
It is September of 2026. Payton Talbott is on a two-fight winning streak. He is ranked #11, and in October he will fight in the co-main event of a numbered card against multiple-time champion Deiveson Figueiredo, who is 1 for his last 5, almost 39, and in the top ten. Including his victory over Payton, Raoni Barcelos is on a five-fight winning streak. He is ranked #13, and fighting the heavily-hyped Raul Rosas Jr., who is 21 years old and a fixture of the UFC’s marketing plans. If Raoni wins, he stands to go up one point in the rankings.
We spend a lot of these essays going through comedy and melodrama and hair-pulling frustration to properly express the depths of the current state of the UFC. This is the real gift of today’s smart, streamlined product: Most of the time, you don’t actually need to anymore. You can simply point at something and describe it, exactly as it happened, and the net result will be an unequivocal “Wow, that sucks.” Because it does, in fact, suck. The wild variation in opportunities sucks. All roads leading back to the Apex sucks. Prospects that cannot be allowed to fail suck.
There’s a pretty good chance this, too, will suck. Raoni’s grappling and wrestling are his most consistent weapons; Raul is younger, faster, and arguably a better wrestler. He has learned and stepped up his game since the beating Rodriguez handed him three and a half years ago. Raoni, as great as he is, is also getting old. He’s turning 40 in May and the toll it’s taken on his pace and his chin have been visible. Montel Jackson almost finished him, Ricky Simón almost outlasted him, and his weapons just aren’t as sharp as they used to be.
Raul will probably win. It makes much more sense if Raul wins. On paper, Raul has every possible advantage save experience. It would be aggressively silly if Raul could not defeat a laborious, aging wrestler nearly twenty years his elder.
So. Y’know.
RAONI BARCELOS BY DECISION.
CO-MAIN EVENT: NO, REALLY
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Rodolfo Vieira (11-5) vs Robert Bryczek (18-7)
I’m glad we got the serious approach out of the way up in the main event, because I cannot take this seriously. Rodolfo Vieira vs Robert Bryczek? As a co-main event? Are you sure, Hunter Campbell? Do you need help? Blink if you need help.
As I say so often: I do not mean this as a statement of disrespect to either of these fighters. Neither is terrible. Rodolfo is a legend of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and at 6-5 he is, technically, afloat in the UFC. Robert Bryczek was a champion in his native Poland and a standout in OKTAGON MMA, one of the top B-leagues in the world.
MMA is hard. Getting to the UFC is--well, it’s not quite as hard as it used to be, but it’s still pretty hard. Rodolfo and Robert both deserve to be lauded for their talent.
Now, with that out of the way: What the fuck are we doing here?
Rodolfo Vieira is 1 for his last 4. We’re one fight removed from his losing a decision to Eric McConico, who was last seen getting nuked in ninety-eight seconds by 5’8” Middleweight Donte Johnson. To find a Rodolfo Vieira winning streak you have to go back three and a half years, and it has to run through no less than Cody Brundage and the 9-7 (overall! not just in the UFC!) Armen Petrosyan.
And Robert Bryczek? He’s 1-2 in the company, and that includes a loss to Ihor Potieria. Ihor, who served for years one of the UFC’s most reliable jobbers of all time. Ihor has exactly two victories in the UFC. One of them is Shogun Rua in his retirement bout, who by 2023 was 21 years into a combat sports career that took him from an all-time great and former world champion to tapping to strikes against career grappler Paul Craig. The other is Robert Bryczek. It’s very rare that a single loss can so firmly place someone on the measuring stick of mixed martial arts, but respectfully, when you lose the significant strike battle 2:1 against Ihor Potieria, a man who got finished in 5 of his 6 UFC losses, you have to make a really, really, really good argument if you want to be taken seriously as a prospect again.
Robert Bryczek, in turn, is one fight removed from getting blown out of the water at a 125:39 striking differential by Cam “Battle Giraffe” Rowston.
Like, did something fall through? Were there grand plans in the background that never emerged from the shadows? There aren’t any cancelled fights on this card, as of the 20th. There’s no missing puzzle piece where the real co-main event was supposed to be. For christ’s sake, Norma Dumont and Ailín Pérez have a top five fight on this card, but they’re women, so they’re all the way down on the prelims between Alatengheili and Sedriques Dumas while Rodolfo Vieira and Robert Bryczek are out here losing their way into co-main events.
And this is the Apex! It’s not even fucking good! We are arguing about the dignity of getting a semi-prized berth on the barely-marketed fight nights they put on in a warehouse with Mark Zuckerberg’s name on it. The point is not to venerate and treasure the exposure of the Apex: The point is that the women of the UFC can’t even get those.
RODOLFO VIEIRA BY SUBMISSION is my wishful hope so we’re spared a full fifteen minutes of having to think about the state of the sport.
MAIN CARD: (JESUS CHRIST)
THE ULTIMATE FIGHTER 34 (JESUS CHRIST) BANTAMWEIGHT FINALE: Mehemmedli Osmanli (12-1) vs Ilimbek Akylbek (10-3)
Tell me, honestly. You are reading this, which means either a) You are into mixed martial arts enough to read essays about it on the internet, or b) You are one of my close friends who reads this just because you like me, for which I am abjectly sorry. Either way: You are connected to this sport. Did you know there was another season of The Ultimate Fighter happening? Did you know that it already happened?
I said this to a friend who follows the sport and their response was ‘yeah, it’s Cormier vs Sonnen, right?’ And I had to tell them: Nope! That was last season, The Ultimate Fighter 33 (jesus christ). This season was The Ultimate Fighter 34 (jesus christ), Cormier vs Bisping. TUF has fallen so far that the people who edit its Wikipedia page haven’t even bothered with episode recaps since the 2023 season with McGregor and Chandler, which infamously ended in Conor backing out of the coach fight and winners Brad Katona and Kurt Holobaugh both eventually being released again. The UFC barely even acknowledges TUF’s existence these days. It’s just more Apex fodder.
Thus, we arrive here. If you asked me to come up with the least casual-friendly sentence the UFC could possibly promote, “a TUF Bantamweight finale between UAE Warriors veteran Mehemmedli Osmanli and ONE Championship washout Ilimbek Akylbek Uulu held in the Apex on a card main evented by Raoni Barcelos” is, like, top five. Which is a shame, because there was some decent talent on this season’s roster. Artem Belakh was one of the best prospects outside of the UFC and Osmanli tapped him in one round. Sean Mora was a decorated Cage Fury Fighting Championships titleholder and Ilimbek ground him out. They’re both good. A lot of people were good!
But they were on a show that can barely be proven to definitively exist. MEHEMMEDLI OSMANLI BY DECISION.
THE ULTIMATE FIGHTER 34 (JESUS CHRIST) WOMEN’S STRAWWEIGHT FINALE: Melissa Amaya (8-0) vs Valesca Machado (15-4)
Today, I am a hypocrite. I have spent years telling you about the futility of being emotionally invested in The Ultimate Fighter--I just wrote you three more paragraphs about how it has continued its descent into even further depths of irrelevance--and I am here to tell you this fight matters more than any other on this card, because Valesca Machado, better known as Tina goddamn Black, is in it.
It’s been a long, dark time without Invicta, y’all. Carlos Silva, the president of giant sports holding company Anthem that owns Invicta as well as lustrous properties like TNA Wrestling, the promotion that simply will not die, and Game+, Canada’s premier television network for fantasy sports and gambling, promised a splashy relaunch for the only real American all-women’s MMA league in February or, at the latest, March. It is damn near October. We haven’t had an Invicta since May of 2025 and no one’s said a thing about its potential future, and that is a tragedy for the entire sport. Four years ago, Tina Black won a one-night tournament to become Invicta’s Strawweight Champion. Did she lose it one fight later? Sure. But Jennifer Maia is kickboxing, Angela Hill is a borderline-top-ten institution and the UFC is too lazy to create an Atomweight division.
So it’s all up to you, Tina. You are carrying the spirit of Invicta on your shoulders, and with it, all of our hopes and dreams. To Melissa Amaya, I am very sorry. You seem very competent and you had a solid run in Combate and even if most of your wins weren’t all that great, knocking out Megumi Sugimoto is an accomplishment. I hope you stick around and you have a good, solid career, too.
But for the greater good of the sport, you must fall. Invicta never die. VALESCA MACHADO BY DECISION.
BANTAMWEIGHT: Rinya Nakamura (10-1) vs Brady Hiestand (8-2)
In a number of weird ways, this is a near-mirror match. Both Rinya and Brady got their start in the UFC thanks to underpromoted tournaments, with Rinya running the table in the first season of the Road to UFC and Brady coming in as the runner-up on The Ultimate Fighter 29 (jesus christ). Both men have scored enough solid victories and memorable stoppages to get over the hump as recognizable prospects. Both are also still haunted by a loss to someone the UFC audience sees as particularly unimpressive, with Rinya’s undefeated streak ending in an upset loss to Muin Gafurov, who’s only 2-3 overall, and Brady losing his TUF tournament to Ricky Turcios, who’s 2-4. Between scheduling and injuries, both men are also fighting off lengthy vacations, with Rinya making his first appearance since knocking out Nathan Fletcher over the Summer of 2025 and Brady last seen choking out Garrett Armfield in June 2024.
That said: Rinya’s a big ol’ favorite, and I get it. Brady is a bread-and-butter fighter who’s been missing in action for almost two and a half years, Rinya’s faster and just a bit defensively better and people, y’know, remember him. Gafurov demonstrated how to take Nakamura apart with clean striking, but Gafurov also had bigger punches and a lot of creative kicks, and I don’t think Brady has that in him.
Or maybe I’m still just desperate to keep the dream of a Japanese champion alive. RINYA NAKAMURA BY DECISION.
PRELIMS: A TOP FIVE CONTENDERSHIP BOUT IN A WOMEN’S DIVISION, OF COURSE
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Rodolfo Bellato (13-3-1) vs Christian Edwards (8-5)
Rodolfo Bellato has saved his UFC career. Up until this past March, he was the 1-1-1 (1) guy whose only UFC victory was over our previously-if-accurately-maligned Ihor Potieria, and in the three years since he had managed to fight to a draw with Jimmy Crute, get himself a No Contest (which probably should’ve been a DQ) after illegally kicking the shit out of Paul Craig, and dropped a decision to Navajo Stirling, which admittedly looks less bad now that Sterling’s the #5 man in the burning wreckage of the Light Heavyweight division. But, at last, Bellato won again! He even got a knockout! And all he had to do was beat promotional newcomer Luke Fernandez, who made it to the Contender Series with one good win in his short, five-fight career. Who did Luke beat? Why, Christian Edwards, of course. Christian Edwards lost to Luke two fights ago, knocked out the 4-0 Glendal Whitney on the regional scene, and got signed to the UFC as a late replacement so Modestas Bukauskas could stay on the card. Modestas beat him pretty handily and still only won a split decision, because sometimes the judges just plain don’t like people.
But the net result is a matchup between one guy who lost to a guy that the other guy destroyed, and ordinarily I’m not a big proponent of MMA math, but Christian’s fight with Modestas was profoundly underwhelming and I just don’t expect much to change. I remember watching him in Bellator six years ago and thinking that his main skill was Being Large, but he was an 0-0 rookie and just 21, so I figured he would develop more. I don’t feel like it’s really happened yet. There’s still time and he’s got promise, but for now, RODOLFO BELLATO BY TKO.
LIGHTWEIGHT: Josiah Harrell (11-1) vs Elves Brener (16-6)
We’re in major misplaced puzzle piece land, here. Elves Brener had a big jump in his career back in 2023 after winning back-to-back underdog bouts, first in a split decision over Zubaira Tukhugov--which was an absolute robbery, but that wasn’t Brener’s fault--and then in knocking out Guram Kutateladze, then considered a serious Lightweight contender. The UFC responded to their suddenly prominent prospect by booking him against DWCS debutant Kaynan Kruschewsky, because they are assholes, but Elves put him away too, and with that, a new Lightweight contender lived! For, like, five more minutes. The following three years were Elves getting ground to dust by the new generation of Lightweights, and after three consecutive losses, Elves is right back to facing people with zero UFC wins. Josiah Harrell, in fairness, is thankful he gets to fight at all. He was supposed to meet the then-new Jack Della Maddalena back in the Summer of 2023, but during his pre-fight medical testing he learned he had moyamoya disease, a brain condition that makes strokes more likely, especially under head trauma. After surgery and a year and a half to recover, he went right back to work and snapped off four more wins, and when the UFC needed a late replacement to keep DWCS winner Jacobe Smith on television, Harrell finally got his ticket back to the big show this past February. Smith put Harrell in the crucifix and elbowed him into unconsciousness in three minutes and it was totally not at all uncomfortable to watch someone I knew had fairly recent brain surgery get pounded out.
This is probably part of why Josiah is dropping from 170 to 155 for the first time since 2022. Unfortunately, Elves is also bigger than him, hard to wrestle, and hits real, real hard. ELVES BRENER BY TKO.
BANTAMWEIGHT: Montel Jackson (15-4) vs Ricky Simón (22-7-1)
This is how quickly you can fall in this sport. Just eleven months and two fights ago Montel Jackson seemed like a sure thing. Big as hell for Bantamweight. Rangy and knew how to use it. Multiple first-round knockouts, some of them earned with a single punch. Six-fight winning streak, which is impressive as hell at 135. But the UFC put faith in Montel when they gave him a co-main event slot against Deiveson Figueiredo last year, and in the biggest fight of his career, in his chance to jump into the top five, Jackson choked. I do not, traditionally, like that word when it comes to evaluating fighters. Fighting is hard as hell and it’s extremely disrespectful to break down a performance that way. But, sometimes, you have to be honest, and Jackson choked. Against a Figueiredo who was barely throwing back, Montel was so concerned about his wrestling disadvantage that he only exceeded 10 landed strikes in one round, and he ultimately lost a deeply disappointing decision, which he doubled up after getting wrestled to death by Raoni Barcelos this past April. So the UFC is demoting him all the way back to 2019, when a young Montel lost his undefeated record in his UFC debut--against Ricky Simón. In hindsight, the wrestling weakness has been around for a long, long time. Ricky ragdolled him in 2019, Brett Johns did it in 2020, and Figueiredo and Raoni neutralized him with it in back-to-back fights. Ricky, himself, desperately needs the win. Once upon a time he was a real Bantamweight contender, but in 2026 Ricky is 1 for 7 and his only wins in 4+ years came against two men the UFC cut soon after in Javid Basharat (whose firing was total bullshit) and Cameron Smotherman (who, I’m sorry to say, was probably a sensible cut). He only barely managed a draw with Adrian Yañez this past March, and given how aggressively the UFC has been pruning their older, pricier contracts, Ricky’s probably fighting for his job.
If you’d asked me just one year ago who I’d favor in a Jackson/Simón rematch I would have laughed, because I rely too hard on record comparisons to be trusted. Montel’s proven he still has just as much trouble dealing with wrestling as he always did, and the big intercepting punches that stopped opponents from trying just haven’t been there in awhile. I hope he’s put his head back together after these last couple losses and he’s ready to deal with Ricky’s wrestling, because if he isn’t, it’s RICKY SIMÓN BY DECISION all over again.
WOMEN’S BANTAMWEIGHT: Norma Dumont (13-3, #4) vs Ailín Pérez (13-2, #5)
Do you remember the way I used to regularly give you a shorthand for how much the UFC cared about the construction of a card by breaking down how many fighters on it were coming off of a win in the company? I stopped doing that because the average fell so low that it no longer seemed like relevant information. But I still calculate it every time I start writing, so for the record, it’s 27%. 73% of this card’s participants are coming off either a loss, a draw or a No Contest, or have never fought in the UFC before. The co-main event, as discussed, is collectively between fighters with a 3-5 UFC record in the last three years.
And here’s Norma Dumont and Ailín Pérez, top five fighters at Women’s Bantamweight, buried halfway down the prelims.
Thanks to Joselyne Edwards, Norma just had her first and only loss in four years. During that span she beat world champions and title contenders. Ailín hasn’t lost at all since 2022. She’s on a six-fight winning streak that includes Joselyne, who is now the #3 Women’s Bantamweight in the UFC. They’re world-class fighters, either of whom could win the championship given a shot on a good day. If the UFC hadn’t shuttered Women’s Featherweight, Norma would’ve been a champion already. Ailín has a clear claim on a match right at the top of the Bantamweight division with one of the only women--at any weight class--the company has bothered to give any marketing oxygen.
None of which means a damn thing. You can’t market women’s MMA, after all; it doesn’t sell. Does that have anything to do with our habit of refusing to market it? Answering that question would endanger the budget we reserve for randomly giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to Youtubers you’ve never heard of and lobbying congress to make a new law that says we get to dick boxers around the same way we’ve always done with mixed martial artists. Marketing? For women? Olympic gold medalist and world champion Kayla Harrison is fighting the greatest female fighter in UFC history in Amanda Nunes in November and it’s a co-main event under Josh fucking Hokit.
Why would you ever mistake us for a company that cares about women?
NORMA DUMONT BY DECISION.
BANTAMWEIGHT: John Castañeda (21-8-1) vs Alatengheili (17-10-2)
You know, right alongside things like “washed” and “choked,” the phrase “housecleaning fight” has come to feel like a mark of disrespect. It sucks to take something someone put a life of passion into and reduce it down to the cruelty of business. John Castañeda is, by the standards of the sport, a great success. Six years in the UFC, 4-4-1 overall, victories over a lot of really solid competition--hell, we just talked about Muin Gafurov upsetting Rinya Nakamura up on the main card, and John beat him handily. Alatengheili’s right up there with him! 5-3-1, scrappy as hell, never even been knocked down in the UFC let alone stopped. He knocked Kevin Croom out faster than Justin Gaethje did! They’re both solid as hell.
But in the cold reality of money, John’s winless in his last three fights and only barely made it to a draw with Mark Vologdin, and Alatengheili has only fought three times in the last four years, and he lost two of them. Whoever loses this fight is probably gone, and I hope they make a wonderful living back on the regional circuit. JOHN CASTAÑEDA BY DECISION.
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Mickey Gall (7-7) vs Sedriques Dumas (10-5 (1))
Honestly, this is incredible. We’ve talked about bad events and bad cards and bad signings, but this might be, conceptually, the worst fight we’ve covered. The UFC hired Mickey Gall as a 1-0 rookie back in 2016 because they thought he might, conceivably, be capable of losing to CM Punk, and it turned out the answer was ‘stop, stop, he’s already dead,’ and now it’s a decade later and instead of getting to develop in a rational way Gall spent all but his very first professional fight in the UFC, so he’s 7-7, and if there’s some lesson to had here about the inevitable fate of Contender Series rookies, don’t worry, they have no intention of learning it. And Sedriques Dumas! Sedriques Dumas, the only man to ever pull out of a UFC fight because he couldn’t get his ankle monitor off in time, the man the UFC just kept booking even though he just kept both getting arrested and losing, repeatedly. They actually let him go this Summer! For one brief moment in time, sanity prevailed, and after going four straight fights without a win they released him and all of the jokes about the UFC just keeping Sedriques Dumas around to make a point to all of the internet fans that they don’t give a shit about their opinions finally fell silent.
And then they came back again, twice as hard, because they fucking re-signed him. Every time someone says something about how Michael Page or Jailton Almeida or Ketlen Vieira got cut because they were too boring and finish-averse to keep around, you tell them the UFC looked at Sedriques Dumas, a man whose only UFC win in just shy of three years was not only the 11-10 Denis Tiuliulin but Dumas was the only person in the company who beat him without finishing him, and they not only re-signed him, but they gave him Mickey Gall, who loses constantly, hasn’t fought in two years, and hasn’t fought above Welterweight since his amateur days back in twenty-fucking-fourteen. Because it’s not a real sport. But that also means we get to root for silly outcomes. MICKEY GALL BY SUBMISSION.
WOMEN’S STRAWWEIGHT: Yazmin Jauregui (11-2) vs Vanessa Demopoulos (11-8)
Let us finally return to the biggest rollercoaster of the Strawweight division. Four years ago, the UFC signed Mexico’s Yazmin Jauregui and Brazil’s Iasmin Lucindo, two of the best female prospects in the world, and had them debut against each other as the featured bout on a real, honest to god road card. By the standards of how little they care about women’s MMA it was an honest to god hype exhibition, the fight was a lot of fun, and in the battle of Yazmin and Iasmin, Yazmin won. She was supposed to go on to greatness, and when the UFC made one of their early pitches at the Mexican market by having a double title night, with Alexander Volkanovski unifying the Featherweight title against Yair Rodríguez and Brandon Moreno defending his Flyweight belt opposite Alexandre Pantoja, the UFC had Yazmin right there as a big favorite against the 1-1 Denise Gomes--broadcast live on network television, all thanks to ABC. But Volk mauled Yair, Pantoja outlasted Moreno, and in the biggest upset of the night, Denise walked through Yazmin and knocked her out in twenty seconds. Yazmin came back to beat Sam Hughes half a year later, but Ketlen Souza choked her out in September of 2024 and that’s the last we’ve heard from her. Vanessa Demopoulos, meanwhile, is a grappling stylist who got famous less for her fighting than for somehow repeatedly winning decisions so bad that she was on the shortlist for robbery of the year in three consecutive years. Unfortunately for her career, the last one was in mid-2024, and since then she’s dropped three straight, and now they’re teeing her up to rehabilitate Yazmin.
Which, as a Kanako Murata fan, I am perfectly fine with for purposes of sweet revenge. YAZMIN JAUREGUI BY DECISION.