Another fight weekend is here, baby, and we love to see it. This week’s action features offerings from some of the biggest promotions in the MMA world, starting with a Bellator show on Thursday night, a big ONE show early Friday morning, and finished by a UFC card from the Apex in Las Vegas on Saturday.

There’s a lot of good stuff this weekend. As usual, here are three fights that I’ll be watching the closest over the next few days:

Gegard Mousasi vs. Douglas Lima, Bellator 250

I’m a big fan of pro wrestling, and it would have taken a very, very packed weekend of fights for me to leave a Jake Hager fight off of this column. But that’s exactly what we have. And Bellator’s show on Thursday night – one of the first really big ones since the move to CBS Sports Network – has two of its best and most recognizable fighters in a main event bout for the promotion’s vacant middleweight title.

It’s a complete shame that this title is even up for grabs to start with. Brazilian jiu-jitsu ace Rafael Lovato Jr. completed his rise to the top last year by beating Mousasi for the championship, but soon after, he had to relinquish the belt after being diagnosed with a cerebral cavernoma in his brain. His retirement became official with Bellator released him earlier this week, and it sucks – Lovato Jr. is in his late 30s, but you got the feeling that he was just getting started in the sport, and he walks away undefeated.

So Mousasi, the venerable Dutchman who has been fighting at a high level for over 15 years, is back challenging for the title he lost to Lovato Jr. They picked one whale of an opponent for him: welterweight champion Douglas Lima, an absolute badass who’s fighting at middleweight for the first time in a decade, and is trying to join Joe Warren, Ryan Bader and Patricio “Pitbull” as the only two-division champs in Bellator history.

Lima has been one of the stars that has defined Bellator for almost its entire existence. A three-time champion at 170, he holds the record for most knockout wins in Bellator history, and has beaten many top-tier fighters along the way. I’ve long thought Lima was one of the promotion’s homegrown scrappers who could easily slide over and beat the UFC’s best. Nine years since he first rose to prominence in Bellator, I still think it.

And still just 32 years old, he may be reaching his peak. Lima has turned in some of the best performances of his career in recent fights: he finished a trilogy by choking Andrey Koreshkov unconscious in Sep. 2018, then followed that by explosively derailing the hype train of Michael “Venom” Page, and then avenging a previous defeat to former top UFC contender Rory MacDonald last October.

I’m aware I post this fight a lot, but it’s one of my all-time favorites. Watch how the previously-undefeated Page flops to the floor like a dead fish when Lima hits him with that right hand:

Lima is a terrifically well-rounded fighter, and he carries all sorts of danger when you get in range: aside from his power and his sharp striking, he’s a BJJ black belt who’s well schooled on the ground. The highlights have been the big KOs, but that’s not all there is to Douglas Lima. He can beat you a ton of different ways, and he has the type of big-fight experience that very few can match.

In the end, he may simply have too much juice for Mousasi, who has, for a very long time, been one of the most underappreciated fighters on Earth. Mousasi has the distinction of being one of only a handful of mixed martial artists to have fought in Pride and are still relevant today, having participated in the 2006 Pride Welterweight Grand Prix. A calculating, skilled technical striker with a black belt in judo, Mousasi won fight after fight in the UFC, but routinely had to take a back seat in the title conversation. Frustrated, he jumped to Bellator, where he’s continued to have success: the narrow title loss to Lovato Jr. is his only defeat in the last five years.

He has some positive history in these types of situations. The last time he fought an elite welterweight trying to move up to 185, he absolutely lasered the shit out of MacDonald before ground-and-pounding him until his face was spewing blood all over the ring.

Mousasi-Lima should be a great display of the fact that the UFC isn’t the only place to find the world’s best fighters. Both guys are terrific, seasoned veterans with years and years of main event experience, and they have a lot on the line. I expect to enjoy this one.

Aung La Nsang vs. Reinier de Ridder, ONE Championship: Inside the Matrix

ONE has been quietly holding shows regularly over the past few months, but this is the first one to really feel like a big deal. The organization has loaded up its show Friday with four title fights, headlined by what could be a really, really fun main event. Really, I’m just glad I can actually care about ONE again.

And when Aung La Nsang is fighting, I usually try to find a way to tune in. The Burmese-American almost never goes the distance, and he’s established himself as one of ONE’s top stars since signing with the promotion in 2014. After years of ups and downs on the American regional scene, Aung La found a groove, and he’s been savaging people ever since.

Aung La seems physically, mentally and spiritually incapable of having a boring fight. He has a crazy chin and thumping power in his hands, and in many cases, he’ll just walk down his opponents, throwing bombs and eating their best shots until he finally gets them. You’ve heard of the Korean Zombie – now meet the Burmese Zombie. Aung La is an absolute nut, and for the last two years, he’s been ONE’s middleweight AND light heavyweight champ.

It’s the middleweight belt that’s on the line Friday, and the challenger is one of ONE’s best prospects, at any weight class. 30-year-old Dutchman Reinier de Ridder is undefeated at 12-0, 11 of them finishes. An ace grappler with a slew of submissions on his record, de Ridder is adept at mixing in ground-and-pound and knows how to take full advantage of legal knees to the head of a grounded opponent, as he did against the obviously-on steroids Gilberto Galvao last June.

This should be a fun clash of styles, and I’m looking forward to see if de Ridder can avoid the Aung La Chaos Machine and showcase his talent.

Bryce Mitchell vs. Andre Fili, UFC Vegas 12

The main event of the UFC’s Saturday night show is a middleweight fight between the legendary former champion Anderson Silva and glass cannon Uriah Hall, in what has been purported to be Silva’s final UFC fight. Silva is universally regarded as one of the greatest fighters to ever live, and for a long time was more or less undisputed as the GOAT. Watching Silva in his prime helped me fall in love with the sport. But he’s 45, a shadow of himself, and I don’t know if I can bear to watch him to lose to a guy like Hall that, a decade ago, he would have murdered with something he saw in a Tony Jaa movie.

But the co-main’s got something I’m actually very interested in. Bryce Mitchell is a good ol’ boy from Arkansas with a pair of camo shorts, one hell of a local car dealership commercial (“When I ripped my testicles open with a drill, I had to drive myself to the hospital in a pick-up truck. I really wish I had this Corvette, I woulda made it on time”), and a grappling skill that borders on the supernatural.

The 26-year-old featherweight has rapidly become one of my favorite UFC prospects in any division. Mitchell burst onto the scene last December when he scored the first twister submission in the Octagon in over eight years, and in May, he ran an absolutely ridiculous jiu-jitsu clinic on Charles Rosa, himself a black belt in BJJ.

He’s like Demian Maia with a funny Twitter account. Mitchell could be one to watch for years to come, and he’ll really be in business if he can get past Fili, an established veteran with heavy hands who could prove a stern test for Mitchell’s striking.

If Fili can keep himself out of the grappling torture chamber – a feat not yet achieved against the 13-0 Mitchell – he could do some work. Fili has been apt to go for takedowns in the past, but I doubt he’ll want to engage Mitchell in that world – meanwhile, Mitchell, a former all-state wrestler, has some decent takedowns of his own.

I just want to see Mitchell do some more work on the ground. I’ve very quickly become a big fan.