Even though COVID-19 canceled damn near half the bouts on Saturday’s UFC card (and robbed me of my precious Alexander Romanov debut), we still got some fights this weekend. In the main event, Alistair Overeem outlasted the much younger Augusto Sakai to win with some brutal ground-and-pound – I’ll have more on Overeem this week.
But as always, today I’m taking a look at three fighters outside the top fights who helped their stock this past weekend:
Hey, Zelim Imadaev. What did the five fingers say to the face?
It’s a testament to just how bizarre and entertaining a fighter Michel Pereira is that he did multiple Showtime kicks and a rolling thunder overhead somersault kick, danced two Irish jigs and also literally pimp-slapped his opponent and it was still by far his most focused and restrained performance in the UFC.
But it was, and it got heads turning. The slap itself has gone viral – hilarious retribution for Imadaev taking a swipe at him during weigh-ins Friday night – but Pereira’s overall outing in a third-round submission win at the UFC Apex showed that the Brazilian welterweight is a really talented fighter underneath all the weird theatrics.
Imadaev has struggled to find purchase in the UFC, but his calling card has been his very good technical boxing. Pereira hardly let the the Chechen touch him on Saturday, controlling the range and pace and seemingly tagging Imadaev whenever he wanted, with whatever he wanted.
But the third, Pereira was just clowning around, but he was completely in the driver’s seat. And in the final minute of the fight, he scored one of the coolest finishes we’ve seen in a while, a German suplex into a rear naked choke.
After the fight he called out Jorge Masvidal and expressed his desire for a shot at the BMF belt, because OF COURSE he did. There are few fighters who would be a better fit for a made-up championship for the UFC’s dumbest scrappers. Pereira is already a 37-fight veteran at the age of 27, and he reinforced his status as one of the most tantalizing and idiosyncratic welterweights around. He’s tall for the division and very athletic, and he’s clearly got a high level of skill on the feet and on the ground. But you also have no idea what you’re getting with him: he is, first and foremost, a showman, and even when he reins himself in, he’s gonna do weird shit because he feels like it.
Pereira always seems to have a smirk on his face, like fighting in the UFC is just a little joke to him. He’d rather lose and have fun than win and not have fun. And that’s cool! MMA has always been a home for oddballs, and it doesn’t have to be a serious thing. At the end of the day, sports are supposed to be fun.
And there’s nothing more fun than watching a fighter who is so talented and so strange that you have no idea what’s going to happen. There’s such a wide range of possible outcomes. Pereira is just 2-2 in the UFC – he was dominating Diego Sanchez before being disqualified for an illegal knee in February – but he’s shown that he has really high-level talent and physical ability. Will he ever have the focus, discipline and seriousness needed to ever become a true contender? I have no idea. But all I know is, every time Michel Pereira is fighting, my eyes are going to be glued to the TV. And in the end, there’s always value in guys like that.
There are few things I love more than watching great submission artists work their magic in mixed martial arts, but at times it feels like it’s starting to disappear at the highest level. The average skill level has increased so much that wrestlers and strikers generally have much better submission defense than they used to.
At the UFC level, you hardly ever see submissions out of guard anymore. The days of guys like Fabricio Werdum winning all the time by dropping to their behinds and performing mystical grappling arts are gone. It is what it is – a natural byproduct of fighters getting better – but I kind of miss it.
So imagine my excitement when Andre Muniz – a Brazilian middleweight best known for his submission acumen – pulled guard against Polish takedown machine Bartosz Fabinski and tapped him out with a lightning-quick triangle armbar. For me, it was a kind of turn-back-the-clock moment that made Saturday’s thin UFC card worth watching.
Fabinski is a powerful wrestler who wins essentially by spamming double-leg takedowns and laying on top of you. It’s largely worked: he came into the night having won four of five since signing with the UFC. And it’s exactly what he tried to do to Muniz, who spent the first two minutes of the fight with his back against the cage and Fabinski around his waist.
Eventually Muniz, a second-degree Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt, got bored. So he willingly gave up the takedown, postured up, threw up his legs and bam, it was over. You can’t do it much better: he locks in the submission so quickly and so smoothly that Fabinski has no idea it’s coming until it’s too late.
Not only was it aesthetically pleasing, it was a really big win for Muniz. Counting his two appearances on Dana White’s Contender Series, the Brazilian is now 4-0 in the Octagon, with Fabinski easily being the most impressive scalp he’s taken. Any fighter with finishing skills that slick will earn some cred, especially if they keep busting out highlights like that. It might be time to pay some attention to Andre Muniz.
I profiled Zviad Lazishvili’s LFA fight with Ricky Steele the other night on Three Fights to Watch, and it wasn’t because of name recognition. It was because history showed that there was a good shot you’d see the winner in the Octagon in the near future: it was a title fight between two undefeated prospects in an organization that has been a major feeder for the UFC over the last few years.
And if one of these two gets to hear Bruce Buffer call his name in the coming months, it looks like it’s going to be Lazishvili, who had little trouble running through Steele in a first-round submission win.
The native of Georgia (the country, not the state) knew exactly wanted to do against Steele and he executed it, taking his opponent down early, moving to his back after a brief scramble and finishing him off with a rear-naked choke. It was as tidy as it comes: Steele, a karate black belt who has been on the UFC radar for several years, was never really in the fight.
There’s not a ton of recent tape on Lazishvili – he had a four-and-a-half-year layoff before he beat Josh Huber last November – but he’s shaken off whatever rust he might have had, and he appears to be a really promising wrestler and submission grappler who can implement his style against good competition. Steele’s kicks and his constant movement generally do well to keep takedowns at bay, but they didn’t hinder Lazishvili one bit.
The Georgian is now 13-0 in his pro career, which is about the kind of record where bigger organizations start to take a good look. If Zviad Lazishvili hopes to be fighting on TV soon, he’s moving in the right direction.
The Big Fight 