Another fight weekend is here, baby, and we love to see it. This week once again features a relatively weak UFC card from the Apex on Saturday, while Thursday’s Bellator 252 looks pretty loaded and ONE runs again on Friday, headlined by former top UFC contender and serial weight-misser John Lineker.

As always, here are looks at the three fights I’ll be watching the closest:

Patricio Pitbull vs. Pedro Carvalho, Bellator 252

After what seemed like a billion-year break due to COVID-19, the Bellator Featherweight Grand Prix is back underway! The 16-man tournament, which started late last year, was paused in February when Bellator went on hiatus due to the pandemic, stopping in the middle of the quarterfinals.

People who have read my writing know that I’m a sucker for tournaments. I think they’re cool, dramatic, and they make stars. And while they’ve been de-emphasized a tad under Scott Coker, they’ve always been a fundamental part of Bellator’s identity. And one of the things I like about the way Bellator runs tournaments is that the champion enters them as well – every stop along the way they have to defend their belt, and if you beat the champ in the first round, the title’s yours.

We’re at last finishing up the quarterfinals on Thursday night, with the first semifinal, already set months ago, to come next week. And the main event is a big one, as Patricio “Pitbull” Freire defends his title in the main event against fast-rising Portuguese prospect Pedro Carvalho.

A two-division champion in Bellator – he won the lightweight title as well last May – Pitbull has been an integral part of the fabric of the organization for over a decade. He reached the finals of Bellator’s featherweight tournament in 2010, and won it in 2013. And since Michael Chandler finally departed for the UFC, I consider him the signature star of the promotion. He may be the best fighter Bellator has ever produced.

Pitbull is one of the hardest-hitting featherweights anywhere in the world, and while he has a very effective Brazilian jiu-jitsu game, he’s shone most brightly on the feet in recent fights. He battered and bloodied Juan Archuleta over five dominant rounds in the first round of the tournament, and before that, he needed just over a minute to knock out Chandler with a lunging right hand.

Pitbull is an absolute badass, and if the opportunity ever presented itself, I have zero doubt that he could easily jump over to the UFC and cause a ton of damage. The question on Thursday is whether he’s too much, too soon for Pedro Carvalho. The Portuguese featherweight has quickly made a name for himself in Bellator, rolling to a 4-0 record with three straight stoppages.

Carvalho mixes some very sharp kickboxing – watch his thumping body kicks – with a considerable submission acumen. Although he’s just 25 years old, he’s extremely skilled. A dark-horse contender heading into the tournament, he earned the biggest win of his career in the first round of the Grand Prix, when he survived some early danger to submit UFC veteran Sam Sicilia in the second round.

Carvalho undoubtedly has a very bright future, but Pitbull may be simply too powerful, experienced and physical for him at this stage. Either way, it could be one heck of a main event.

Yaroslav Amosov vs. Logan Storley, Bellator 252

The other quarterfinal is a little less interesting, as it features longtime Bellator fixture Daniel Weichel taking on Emmanuel Sanchez – assuming Pitbull reaches the semis, he’ll be fighting either a guy he’s beaten twice, or a guy he beat once. But the main card also has a really cool attraction: a somebody’s-0-must-go fight between 24-0 Yaroslav Amosov and 11-0 Logan Storley.

I wrote about Amosov just a few months ago, when he fought Mark Lemminger at Bellator 244. Amosov already had a gaudy record on the Russian regional circuit when he signed with Bellator in 2018, but since then he’s proven that it wasn’t a mirage – he really is that damn good. The 27-year-old Amosov is one of the best welterweight prospects in the world, a combat sambo champion with fabulous submission wrestling chops.

I’ve been kind of confused with how Amosov’s been booked – he scored some very impressive wins right out of the gate in Bellator, but the quality of his opposition has weirdly declined as of late. Lemminger was an afterthought. And even here, when you figure he should be challenging the top of the welterweight division, he’s facing another prospect in 28-year-old Logan Storley.

Not that I’m complaining. It should be a real good fight, and you figure the winner is going to get that catapult to the top. Storley is one of the most successful examples of Bellator going after elite collegiate wrestlers in recent years – an All-American at the University of Minnesota, Storley has started 6-0 in Bellator, albeit against much lesser competition than Amosov has faced.

Storley’s athleticism and wrestling ability show up on tape, but he doesn’t fight to grind out decisions – he fights to get finishes. Eight of his 11 pro wins are by TKO, and they follow the same formula: he takes you down and beats the hell out of you, like he did to A.J. Matthews a couple fights ago.

Two guys who want to get their opponents to the mat and score a finish, but who come from different backgrounds and want to achieve that goal in different ways. Amosov has had very entertaining grappling matches with high-level American collegiate wrestlers in the past – his decision win over Ed Ruth was a delight – and we could get another good scrap on the mat again here.

Abdul Razak Alhassan vs. Khaos Williams, UFC Vegas 14

This week’s UFC card is one of the weaker ones during this stand at the UFC Apex, but it still has some attractions. First off, much respect to Paul Felder for stepping up and rescuing the show, accepting a main event fight on just five days’ notice against former UFC lightweight champion Rafael dos Anjos, after scheduled opponent Islam Makhachev dropped out over the weekend.

It should be a fun fight between guys who have been UFC staples for years, but I don’t think it means much: Felder has been hinting at retirement consistently for a while, and while RDA’s run to the lightweight title after years as an under-the-radar contender was awesome to watch, I don’t think he has another one left in him.

Brendan Allen, an extremely promising middleweight grappler whom I profiled last week, is also in the cage after his scheduled fight with Ian Heinisch fell through at the last minute due to COVID, and I’m looking forward to that one too. He’s facing Sean Strickland, who successfully returned from a two-year layoff after a motorcycle crash just two weeks ago, punching Jack Marshman in the face over and over for 15 minutes while loudly encouraging his opponent to do better. That could be real good! But the fight that really draws my eye is the co-main, and it all starts with a name.

There are certain athletes who just have names for greatness. For instance, you can’t tell me that when the San Francisco 49ers drafted a quarterback named Joe Montana, they had any doubt he would be a legend. There’s no way a guy named “Joe Montana” is going to be a bum. Let’s apply this to MMA: was there any doubt that somebody named Quinton “Rampage” Jackson was going to be exactly what he was, a fire-breathing badass who slammed and punched you to pieces? Does there exist any conceivable universe where a guy named Anthony “Rumble” Johnson couldn’t kill you with a single punch?

Well, how about a guy named Khaos Williams? Is there any way a guy named KHAOS WILLIAMS isn’t going to be a killer? The 26-year-old welterweight made his UFC debut back on February, and when I saw that the UFC had booked a fighter named “Khaos Williams,” I took notice. “Damn,” I thought, “that dude sounds pretty cool.” Then he stepped into the ring with Alex Morono, a veteran on a three-fight UFC win streak, and flattened him in just 27 seconds.

When I saw his name on the card, Khaos Williams had my interest. When I saw the brutal power in his fists, he officially had my attention. Can you imagine the money in a bomb-throwing knockout machine whose name is KHAOS WILLIAMS? If Dana White can’t market that, then he’s the biggest idiot in the world.

Williams’ steamrolling of Morono has landed him a big step-up in competition, against a fighter who’s had a very interesting career path. Not too long ago, Abdul Razak Alhassan was in Williams’ spot: an exciting rising welterweight with big-time KO power. But then, in Sep. 2018 – two weeks after he knocked out Niko Price in just 43 seconds – Alhassan was indicted in Texas on two counts of rape. Alhassan was out of the cage for nearly two years fighting the charges, eventually attaining a not guilty verdict in March. He returned to the Octagon in July, only for the very promising Moroccan Mounir Lazzez to out-range him to death in a unanimous decision loss.

Alhassan lost two years of his career due to his legal issues, and he turned 35 in August. The clock is ticking. But his penchant for knocking guys out in seconds has made him a guy to always tune in for, and it’s given him a pretty sweet highlight reel.

Somebody may end up going night-night pretty quickly. In a card that is absent a ton of big names, at least this might deliver on the violence us degenerates all crave.