UFC Vegas 43 Fighter to Watch: Adrian Yanez
Emerging bantamweight has been lights out through his first three starts, and faces a veteran test in Davey Grant on Saturday
Name: Adrian Yanez
Nickname: N/A (for now)
Record: 14-3 overall; 3-0 UFC
Division: Bantamweight
Team: Metro Fight Club
Opponent: Davey Grant (13-5 overall, 4-4 UFC)
Unlike stick and ball sports, the UFC doesn’t have a set yearly schedule where the season starts in one month and runs for a set amount of time, providing fans and media with an easy way to track individual yearly tallies and keep tabs on a rookie season.
Fighters debut throughout the year, and while their individual rookie campaign runs for the 12 months that follow, that doesn’t always line up with the actual calendar, creating situations where talented newcomers haven’t logged enough fights to merit “Rookie of the Year” consideration towards the end of December, but then don’t qualify for the same award the following year when they’ve logged a few more fights.
Even though they’re still in their first 12 months on the roster, that stretch has spanned two years, and therefore, they end up stuck in limbo — too experienced to be considered a rookie or newcomers without having gotten that recognition earlier because they didn’t have enough fights.
That’s where Adrian Yanez finds himself as he readies for the fourth fight of his UFC career this weekend against Davey Grant, less than a month into his sophomore year on the UFC roster.
Yanez debuted on Halloween, two months and change after earning a contract on Dana White’s Contender Series with a 39-second shellacking of Brady Huang. He waltzed into the Octagon and knocked out Ray Rodriguez in the first round, clobbering him with a high kick as Rodriguez looked to circle out and find space.
That one performance earned him Honorable Mention status in our 10 Best Newcomers of 2020 list over at the UFC website, but in the rest of his first 12 months on the roster, the 27-year-old continued to show out.
In March, he scored a third-round finish over Gustavo Lopez, who questioned why Yanez was getting a ton of hype and the level of competition he’d faced ahead of their matchup, getting his comeuppance in the cage a couple days later. Then in July, Yanez rallied after dropping the first round to Randy Costa, finishing “The Zohan” in the second in a fun, bloody, back-and-forth battle, collecting his third straight Performance of the Night bonus for his troubles.
So while his first year on the UFC roster was 2020 and produced one victory, Yanez’s first 12 months competing on the biggest stage in the sport resulted in three wins, three finishes, and three Performance of the Night bonuses. While it’s not the best rookie campaign of all time, it’s a pretty damn good first calendar year in competition, and provided a ton of reasons to be excited about the emerging bantamweight.
The finishes are great — you love to see it — but it’s been what leads into those finishes that has really impressed me about Yanez to this point.
Catching Rodriguez with a high kick as he’s exiting out is just great timing and spatial awareness — he knew he had him hurt, saw where he was going, and cut him off at the pass. It sounds simple, but how many fights have we seen where fighters have their opponents hurt, but either can’t keep them hemmed in on the fence or let them exit out without being able to make them pay?
In the Lopez fight, Yanez was forced to make reads and figure out Lopez’s off-rhythm movements, and the fact that he was perfectly content to win a “death by a thousand cuts” decision was the kind of IQ play you love to see from a younger fighter. Yanez wasn’t in there hunting for big shots, chasing down a finish — he stayed technical, stuck with what was working, and when he got Lopez hurt, he got him out of there in a hurry.
And the Costa fight started badly — like really badly — and yet he managed to navigate the kicks, and the jabs, and bloodied nose to turn things around late in the first and finish things in the second. There were moments in the first round that would have broken the spirit of lesser fighters, periods of one-way traffic that would have put them on the defensive for the rest of the night, but Yanez took it all and turned the tables before the round was over before dominating and getting the stoppage two minutes into the second.
That’s heady stuff for a relatively young fighter.
The other thing that has be fully on the bandwagon is the conversation I had with Yanez ahead of this fight.
The story will be up later in the week on the UFC website, but I can sum it up thusly: Adrian Yanez gets it; he just does.
Some dudes in his position would be salty about facing Davey Grant, coming off a loss, but Yanez knows that Grant is a quality veteran, who won three straight before dropping a competitive, entertaining decision to Marlon Vera last time out, and he knows that this is the kind of fight a guy in his position needs to win in order to take the next step forward.
We’ve seen prospects that think fights like this are beneath them and that they should be hustled into high profile pairings, but this dude understands he needs to keep working his way up the ladder and welcomes the opportunity with genuine excitement and joy. He loves every bit of this, especially putting on entertaining scraps, and you can’t help but root for someone like that… at least I can’t.
Grant’s a tough out with good power, plus he’s going to stay in your face the entire time, so this is a perfect follow-up to the Costa fight for Yanez, and I’m super-curious to see how it plays out.
Bantamweight is absolutely loaded at the moment, and there are a ton of talented up-and-comers working their way towards the rankings, with Yanez need the front of that pack.
If he goes out and collects another finish and another bonus on Saturday, it’s going to be hard to not stick him in there with a Top 15 opponent next time out.
Not bad for a guy that just started his sophomore year on the UFC roster.