10 Things I Like at UFC 269
With a fight card this fantastic, keeping this list to 10 means leaving more than a couple things I like out of this collection
I love this card and the closer it gets to Saturday, the more excited I get.
Because I’m a fiend, I tend to be stationed in my office, Tweetdeck open, ready to get after it from the opening fight of the night most weekends, but I’ve got butterflies right now and we’re still a couple days away; that’s how jazzed I am about this fight card.
Like I said yesterday, UFC 269 is a Top 3 pay-per-view card of the year for me, and looking at it even closer over the last coupe of days, I have a feeling that we’re going to get something real special this weekend.
Every matchup has a compelling piece to it.
Every matchup is competitive.
Every matchup has the legitimate potential of ending inside the distance.
Saturday can’t get here soon enough.
The Correct Lightweight Championship Pairing
When Khabib Nurmagomedov announced his retirement after defeating Justin Gaethje last October, the obvious matchup to determine the next UFC lightweight champion was a bout between Dustin Poirier and Charles Oliveira.
It took a little longer to get there than expected, but 14 months and four fights later, we’ve arrived at UFC 269 with the right guys set to battle it out for the lightweight strap this weekend. Oliveira toppled Tony Ferguson and stopped Michael Chandler, while Poirier drew level and then ahead of Conor McGregor in their personal three-fight series, setting up this weekend’s main event, where the legacies of both men will be further shaped.
I’ve seen suggestions that Poirier’s legacy is already established and the outcome of this fight won’t change things much, but I have to disagree. Yes, he has memorable victories over many of the top names in the division at the moment and an interim title run, but an undisputed title makes his resume even more bulletproof — he goes from being someone that got almost all the way there, to unquestionably the best lightweight of his era.
Stylistically, this is such a compelling fight because both guys are capable everywhere, but bring opposite preferences, which means it should be a battle to see who can dictate the terms of engagement. We could get a five-round classic, a quick finish on either side, or anything in between, and it’s why this has been and remains my most anticipated fight of the year.
Another Chance to Watch Amanda Nunes Compete
I get that some people are tired of watching overmatched challengers step into the Octagon and get mauled by Amanda Nunes, but I’m not one of those people.
Nunes, who defends her bantamweight title against Julianna Peña on Saturday, has won a dozen consecutive fights, including all nine championship engagements over the course of her career. She’s finished Miesha Tate, Ronda Rousey, Cris Cyborg, and Holly Holm in the first round, and most recently needed less than two minutes to lock up a triangle choke / armbar combo finisher on Megan Anderson to successfully defend her other belt in March.
She’s the greatest female fighter of all time and I will ever tire of watching all-time greats do all-time great things, because at some point, Nunes will pull the plug, and when she does, I’m going to miss watching her compete.
I get that we all prefer ultra-competitive matchups filled with tension and drama, but sometimes, I’m more than okay with watching a massive betting favorite like Nunes (or Valentina Shevchenko) march into the Octagon and blow me away with how handily they can beat some very good fighters — and Peña is a very good fighter… she’s just not in Nunes’ league.
I’ve always maintained that there is an expiry date on dominant champions — that folks only want to see them be dominant for a finite number of bouts before they want to see them beaten or move on to something else — and the reception around fights like this always drive that home for me.
Personally, I’m happy to watch Nunes continue to bust up whoever wants to stand in front of her a couple times a year until “The Lioness” decides it’s time to move on.
Garbrandt’s Moment of Truth
Cody Garbrandt’s masterful effort against Dominick Cruz to claim the bantamweight title took place just under five years ago, which feels both impossible and more recent than I thought at the same time.
Saturday night, Garbrandt ventures to the flyweight division for the first time, not for a championship opportunity like he was originally going to dive into last November, but a tough assignment against Kai Kara-France in bout that feels like it will dictate whether “No Love” will ever get back to being a contender again.
And that’s crazy to consider because it was only five years ago that he absolutely styled on Cruz, while also making complete sense because even if you want to throw out the two fights with TJ Dillashaw, there are still ugly losses to Pedro Munhoz and Rob Font to contend with, plus a “just okay” performance against Raphael Assuncao that gets elevated because he connected with a fastball at the end of the second round to walk it off in style.
I likened Garbrandt to Radiohead back in the spring after he lost to Font, the analogy being both were the absolute best in the world for a moment in time, but have since fallen from that spot because no one holds it forever, and I still feel like the whole “moment in time” approach of looking at these athletes is better than trying to affix a permanent descriptor to them because for a moment five years ago, Garbrandt was the absolute best bantamweight in the world.
Now he’s a guy desperate to see if he can recapture some of that greatness, shifting divisions and saying all the right things while walking into a dangerous fight against someone that will happily engage in a striking battle and wants nothing more than to dash Garbrandt’s hopes while furthering his own ambitions.
This is a huge moment for the former bantamweight champion and I cannot wait to see how things play out on Saturday.
O’Malley Facing Someone of Substance
I have a feature coming out tomorrow over at OSDBsports.com discussing Sean O’Malley and his position in the bantamweight division, which is hard to define.
He’s a star — maybe even a superstar — but in terms of results, he feels as far behind some of his contemporaries as they are behind him in terms of popularity and overall magnetism, and that makes it difficult for someone like me that cares more about who you fought and who you beat than how many Instagram followers you have and what kind of traffic stories about you generate to reconcile the vastly different amounts of attention direction towards O’Malley and someone like Song Yadong.
But at least this weekend he’s facing someone of substance again, taking on Raulian Paiva in a “tougher than most seems to understand” pairing that should, in theory, help clarify where the talented, technicolor 27-year-old fits in the bantamweight hierarchy.
In thinking about the fawning praise O’Malley has received for his dominant wins over guys like Kris Moutinho, Thomas Almeida, and Eddie Wineland, I’m drawn to something Chris Curtis told me ahead of his fight with Brendan Allen:
“Everybody is saying, ‘He’s done this, this, and this in the UFC,’ and I’m like, ‘He’s good, but I can beat those people too; he just got here before me.’ They’re like, ‘He has so many wins in the UFC,’ and it’s like, ‘Had I been here earlier, I would have the same wins.’”
This is what I have thought about O’Malley (and the general inequitable way we talk about victories over common opponents in this sport in general) all along, and it’s why I’m thrilled to see him facing someone like Paiva on Saturday.
He may still show out because he’s a tremendously talented fighter, but he stumbled (literally, at times) in his last matchup with an ascendent fighter, and I’m curious to see what happens this time out.
Underrated Featherweight Clash
Whenever you have a card with as many big fights and established names as you have assembled at UFC 269, there are going to be fighters and fights that slip through the cracks a little and don’t get as much attention as they rightfully should merit, and the featherweight pairing between Josh Emmett and Dan Ige is one of those fights.
Emmett returns for the first time since pushing his winning streak to three with a hard-fought win over Shane Burgos last spring. Stationed in the Top 10 in the featherweight division, the Team Alpha Male representative has been just a shade below the contender class in the division for a number of years, brandishing big power and solid secondary weapons.
Ige is currently one spot behind Emmett in the UFC rankings, having alternated wins and loss over his last four, setting both a floor and ceiling for where he fits in the division at the moment with wins over Mirsad Bektic, Edson Barboza, and Gavin Tucker paired with decision losses to Calvin Kattar and Chan Sung Jung.
Both men need this win in order to build some momentum in the talent-rich division, where there are openings at the top, but a whole pack of emerging names trying their damnedest to prove they’re the best. Featherweight feels like it’s in need of a little reset at the moment — a break from having the members of the Top 5 battle each other and alternate championship opportunities — and the winner of this one could have an inside track on getting into that mix in the first half of 2022.
Ultra-Meaningful Bantamweight Matchup
Just as the clash between Emmett and Ige carries some legitimate divisional ramifications at featherweight, so too does the bantamweight matchup between Dominick Cruz and Pedro Munhoz that precedes it.
Again, the combatants are positioned right next to each other in the rankings — Munhoz at No. 8, Cruz at No. 9 — and once more, it feels like one fighter’s place in the division is firmly established (Munhoz), while the other is looking for the kind of performance that further solidifies their footing in the Top 10.
That seems weird to say about Cruz, who was the standard-bearer for the division for so long, but he’s fought just twice since that UFC 207 clash with Garbrandt, losing to Henry Cejudo before edging out Casey Kenney in his most recent appearance in March and is fighting for the second time in the same calendar year for the first time since logging three appearances in 2016. As great as he’s been over the years, bantamweight is one of those divisions where you can’t just trade on your name because there are too many talented fighters looking to take your spot, leaving Cruz in a position where he needs to show something more than he did in March if he wants to move forward again in the 135-pound ranks.
Munhoz is the perfect measuring stick for Cruz at this point — a guy that is entrenched in the Top 10, durable, dangerous in every facet, and sure get after it when you get in there with him. Jose Aldo turned a pairing against his countryman earlier this year into a “turn back the clocks” moment that he carried over into his win over Rob Font last weekend, and you can be sure that Cruz will be looking to do something similar on Saturday.
Important Moment for Tai Tuivasa
Three up. Three down. Three up again.
That’s how Tai Tuivasa’s UFC career has gone thus far, and Saturday night, the big fella from West Sydney, Australia looks to break out of that pattern by posting a fourth consecutive victory in a critical pairing opposite Augusto Sakai.
Here’s what I wrote about “Bam Bam” in the heavyweight instalment of Fighters to Watch 2021 at the start of the year:
I tend to feel like Tuivasa got hustled into the deep end too quickly while also getting high on his own supply a little, resulting in a three-fight slide that had him looking like a dude that was going to wash out of the UFC just as quickly as he rolled in.
But he got back into the win column in 2020 and is still only 27, so I’m willing to roll the dice on the man who introduced the MMA audience to “the shoey” and see if he can parlay some of the natural talent and athleticism he has into another quality run inside the cage.
Since then, Tuivasa has added first-round stoppage wins over Harry Hunsucker and Greg Hardy, while also acknowledging that he did, in fact, get a little caught up and overconfident when things were going well early.
He’s a tremendous athlete with nine UFC appearances and six victories under his belt and he’s still just 28, so it doesn’t feel at all out of the question for Tuivasa to continue building momentum and become a dark horse contender in the heavyweight division in 2022 if he gets passed Sakai this weekend.
The Return of Andre Muniz
I touched on this yesterday in greater detail, so I’m going to keep it quick and keep moving today…
I don’t understand why more people aren’t jazzed about the return of Andre Muniz, who broke Jacare’s arm and became the first person to submit him in mixed martial arts competition last time out, while pushing his record to 3-0 in the UFC and his winning streak to seven overall.
The fact that this dude is getting zero attention, has gotten zero attention, and yet folks waste their time with all kinds of dudes that have done far less is insane to me, regardless of how many Instagram followers they have or how much they talk junk about their fellow competitors.
Outstanding Battle of Prospects
The flyweight bout between Erin Blanchfield and Miranda Maverick is the preliminary card matchup I’m most looking forward to on Saturday.
Generally, I don’t like seeing young fighters on the come-up paired off against one another like this, but at this stage of their careers, with there being a path towards the Top 10 available to the winner, even I have to acknowledge that the timing makes sense, and did when it was Maycee Barber and not Maverick as originally planned as well.
This is another one of those matchups where it’s wild to me that more people aren’t talking about it more, as this is a 22-year-old prospect coming off a very impressive debut win, with a 7-1 record against good competition taking on a 24-year-old prospect coming off a narrow loss, who has also earned some solid victories and flashed a ton of upside through her first three UFC appearances.
I genuinely wonder if the interest would be as tepid if it were male fighters in the bantamweight or featherweight or lightweight divisions, because we’ve seen people get real excited about comparable prospects in less competitive, less compelling matchups a lot this year, and yet these two flyweight standouts have received a fraction of the focus given to some of their male counterparts.
Blanchfield and Maverick are two of the top prospects on the UFC roster — not female prospects, prospects, full stop — and if you’re not amped to see them compete and paying close attention, you really are missing out.
We’re Off to See “The Wizard”
Ryan Hall is just fun to watch.
From the Imanari rolls and awkward sidekicks to his patented post-fight shrug when he gets his hand raised, the guy is a complete outlier in a collection of sameness, and I really enjoy watching him compete.
Saturday’s fight with Darrick Minner should be fun because Minner is a grappler that loves to hunt finishes early, which means there is a very strong possibility that we get a bunch of entertaining, technical exchanges on the ground pretty early on, which is kind of what you want to see from someone as high-level on the canvas as Hall.
Even though his striking has improved and the awkwardness of it all is entertaining in its own way, I want to see “The Wizard” working his magic on the mat and we should get that in Saturday’s third fight of the night.