Another fight weekend is here, baby, and we love to see it. This week’s action features another ESPN+ card from the UFC’s stay on Fight Island on Saturday night, and Bellator has a show on CBS Sports Network earlier that afternoon. KSW is also back in action, featuring a middleweight title rematch between Scott Askham and Mamed Khalidov.

As always, here are looks at three of the fights I’m going to be watching closest this weekend:

Marlon Moraes vs. Cory Sandhagen, UFC Fight Island 5

This weekend’s UFC card hasn’t received that much hype, and it’s probably at least partly because of the lack of mainstream name recognition of the two guys on top. But for those in the know, this is a damn good fight, matching two of the very best bantamweights in the world in a critical bout in the 135-pound division.

It appears more or less evident now that Aljamain Sterling will finally receive his long-overdue shot at Petr Yan‘s bantamweight title next, and with a win, Moraes is the obvious choice to face the victor. To be honest, it’s rather ridiculous that Moraes hasn’t already gotten a shot at Yan. After losing in a bantamweight title fight against then-flyweight champion Henry Cejudo last June, Moraes faced off against the legendary Jose Aldo in a back-and-forth fight in December that Moraes won by split decision.

It was a razor-close bout, and most media scorecards were basically split down the middle. Moraes got two out of three judges’ scores – he is, by rule, the victor. But because Dana White disagreed with the decision – and, most likely, because Jose Aldo will sell more pay-per-views than Marlon Moraes – he gave Aldo, not Moraes, a shot at the bantamweight title when Cejudo retired and vacated the belt. Yan summarily beat Aldo’s ass, and Moraes had to unhappily watch from the sidelines.

Moraes is certainly deserving of another look at the gold. He’s an ace kickboxer with some of the most explosive power at the bantamweight division. He’s also the last man to beat Sterling, knocking the elite grappler completely unconscious with a vicious knee in 2017. Every shot he throws can put your lights out, and when he’s placed you on your ass with a punch or a kick, he’s not afraid to go to his black belt BJJ skills to finish things off.

He’s absolutely elite, and one shouldn’t forget that he also had a dominant start in his shot at Cejudo before the flyweight champ rallied to win. It’s about time he gets his second chance. He’s also a massive opportunity for the 28-year-old Sandhagen, a top-five contender who had his rapid rise halted in June when Sterling choked him out in 88 seconds.

Like Moraes, Sandhagen also likes to throw some hands. He comes from a kickboxing background, having won a World Kickboxing Association amateur world title before embarking on his MMA career. But while Moraes is all thunder and malice, Sandhagen is more of a volume striker – he’s very technically sound and is able to keep up an impressive rate of activity over a full fight.

Sandhagen is going from a one-sided loss to Sterling – he was never really in the fight, as Sterling almost immediately took his back and grabbed a rear-naked choke – to arguably an even better fighter. A win will resubmit Sandhagen’s name right back at the top of the heap at bantamweight.

Knowing these two fighters, it looks likely this one is going to stay on the feet, and we may see some sparks fly. This should be a real good one.

Edson Barboza vs. Makwan Amirkhani, UFC Fight Island 5

Saturday’s co-main is one of the very rare fights that got more interesting to me after a fighter had to pull out. One of the most punishing Muay Thai kickboxers in UFC history, Barboza was originally scheduled to face Sodiq Yusuff, a rising featherweight contender who has won his first four fights in the Octagon. Yusuff dropped out of the fight for undisclosed reasons a couple of weeks ago and was replaced by Makwan Amirkhani, a tantalizing talent who can score the biggest win of his career on Saturday night.

Yusuff will get another chance at a fighter like Barboza, who after a thrilling start to his career has become entrenched as one of the UFC’s top gatekeepers at 145. But this is an unexpected opportunity for Amirkhani, a Kurdish-born Finnish featherweight with an excellent ground game.

Amirkhani has flashed truly high-level ability in his UFC career. He debuted with an eight-second knockout of Andy Ogle in Jan. 2015, and has since established himself as one of the most skilled and entertaining grapplers in the organization. However, he’s been hampered, maybe more than anything else, by shoddy cardio – Amirkhani has talked in the recent past about how for much of his career, he was more focused on partying than training. He says he has a new level of focus on fighting, and I’m fascinated to see if that comes through against Barboza.

In my heart, I’ll be rooting for Barboza, however, who has been one of my favorite UFC fighters to watch over the last decade. Barboza is universally hailed as one of the most vicious kickers in the history of the sport, and while his game has always been too one-dimensional to ever become a champion, he’s stayed scary for 10 years now in the Octagon.

You know what you’re going to get with Edson Barboza. If you’re not careful, he will either roast you with barbaric leg kicks or find another, cooler way to kill you. Case in point: his knockout of then-highly regarded Terry Etim in 2012, in what may be the single most awe-inspiring KO in UFC history.

He also could really use something good to get off the schneid. Barboza is on one of the most hard-luck runs of five losses in six fights that I’ve ever seen. Since losing to absolute savage Justin Gaethje last March, Barboza has dropped decisions to two top fighters – Paul Felder and Dan Ige – in fights that almost everyone who watched agreed that he should have won. Before that, he was agonizingly close to knocking out Kevin Lee with an absolutely gorgeous wheel kick in April 2018. Those losses have been interspersed with an absolute pummeling of elite lightweight Dan Hooker in Dec. 2018, indicating that Barboza still has a lot of violence left in the tank.

It’s a classic striker vs. grappler matchup. If Amirkhani has truly focused up, he could take this.

Michael Page vs. Ross Houston, Bellator Paris

After many years in the wilderness, mixed martial arts is finally legal in France – fittingly, the first fully-regulated and sanctioned MMA event in the country’s history, which took place on Thursday, began with a guy kicking another guy in the balls.

And French MMA fans won’t have to wait long for the first major promotion to come to their part of the world. Bellator has a show in Paris on Saturday afternoon, and it’s fittingly headlined by Cheick Kongo, the venerable heavyweight who has had the most successful career of any French-born fighter, and who after nearly 20 years will get to fight in his home country for the first time.

Kongo – despite his infamous tendency to blast opponent’s testicles – has given us a lot of entertainment over the years, and I wish him well. But the fight I care about the most on that show isn’t Kongo’s rematch with UFC vet Timothy Johnson, whom Kongo knocked out in a minute two years ago. No sir, we’ve got ourselves a Michael “Venom” Page fight on the card.

MVP is one of the few Bellator fighters whom I always make sure to tune in for. Say what you will about the quality of his competition – I don’t think you can argue that Page has been at least somewhat protected during his long Bellator run – he’s one of the most sui generis strikers we’ve seen in the sport in a long time, having syncretized point kickboxing, karate, kung fu and incessant showboating into a style completely his own.

He typically fights with his hands at his sides, bouncing in and out of range, luring opponents in and punishing them when they get too close – and using his exceptional movement to keep himself generally out of harm’s way. Page has a flair for highlight-reel finishes, and in a lot of his fights, he’ll just give you things you’ve never seen before. He’s a master of crunching you with a flying knee the second you commit to moving forward, as he did to the insanely outmatched Richard Kiely last year:

It’s Page’s first fight since last December, when he annihilated UFC veteran Shinsho Anzai in front of over 25,000 fans in a co-branded Bellator/Rizin show at the Saitama Super Arena in Japan. Page was in complete control, and it was an extremely impressive performance.

Saturday’s meeting with Scottish prospect Ross Houston will be another step towards Page’s stated goal: revenge on Bellator welterweight champion Douglas Lima, who last year became the only man to ever beat Page in maybe the single most visually hilarious knockout in the history of the sport.

Houston is an undefeated wrestler who has been in the cage with some pretty good fighters, but Page should – should – be a cut above on Saturday. If he wins, it’ll have been four straight victories since the loss to Lima, and well past time for him to once again fighting some of the real opposition in the Bellator welterweight division.