Two days after the Professional Fighters’ League announced its crop of lightweights and featherweights for the upcoming 2021 season, it’s all coming into an even clearer picture. The PFL revealed a large swath of its welterweights and light heavyweights on Thursday, a group that includes some guys with a real shot at taking home $1 million.
Earlier this week, I gave you the rundown on five names to watch from 145 and 155. Now that we know some of the 170ers and 205ers, here’s five more.
Much like Anthony Pettis was for the PFL lightweight division, Rory MacDonald gives the PFL welterweight division a recognizable former UFC star to serve as both a name to build around and as a major favorite. MacDonald has already become something of a vagabond at 31 years old: after very successful runs in the UFC and Bellator, he’s now joining his third different major organization in the last five years.
When MacDonald first burst onto the UFC scene in 2010, when he was still in his early 20s, he represented something of an evolution of the sport. As commentators Mike Goldberg and Joe Rogan constantly reminded us whenever he was in the cage, he was one of the first UFC-caliber fighters to have started training in all-around mixed martial arts from a young age, rather than the traditional path of starting in one discipline and then making the transition.
As such, it’s MacDonald’s remarkable well-roundedness that has made him one of the best welterweights of the last decade. MacDonald was an established top five contender in the UFC but peaked just shy of a championship – he unsuccessfully challenged Violence God Robbie Lawler for the belt in 2015, in a brutal, bloody, heart-stopping war that may be the single greatest fight in MMA history.
MacDonald jumped to Bellator two years later, winning the promotion’s welterweight title and unsuccessfully attempting to become a two-division champ by moving up 15 pounds to challenge Gegard Mousasi at middleweight. He got knocked out in the second round, lost his welterweight title to Douglas Lima in October 2019, and now here he is in the PFL.
We haven’t seen MacDonald in the cage since the loss to Lima, but one has to expect him to shine as one of the most skilled fighters on the PFL’s roster. At the very elite levels of the UFC, MacDonald’s all-around skillset may have actually been something of a hindrance – the jack of all trades, master of none kind of thing – and he’s always been a bit robotic in the cage. MacDonald has the tools, but there’s always seemed to be a little something missing. And since the loss to Mousasi, he’s appeared a bit more hesitant to really get after it, which didn’t help him against Lima.
But against the levels of competition he’ll be facing in the PFL – good, but below the top challengers of the UFC or Bellator – you’d expect his big-fight experience and his wide range of skills to make him the favorite. Of course, it isn’t always that easy.
On his way to the $1 million welterweight prize, MacDonald will have not one, but two former PFL champions to deal with. The first is 27-year-old Ray Cooper III, one of the most consistently entertaining fighters on the promotion’s roster, and who in 10 career PFL fights has only once been to a decision.
Cooper used four straight knockout wins to reach the finals of the first PFL season in 2018 – most notably twice taking out former UFC title challenger and grappling legend Jake Shields – before returning in 2019 and winning the whole thing. Cooper entered the 2019 tournament phase as the No. 6 seed after getting knocked out by UFC vet John Howard in one of the “regular season” fights, but used his trademark knockout power to knock out another UFC vet, David Michaud, to win the gold.
Ray Cooper is what we call in the business, “a very bad, scary dude.” Cooper has explosive one-punch power in both of his hands, and he fucking knows it – he throws every single punch with absolutely evil intent, and follows up with heat-seeking abandon. He stands just 5-foot-7 but he’s got real “fuck you” strength, especially in the clinch, where he routinely bullies opponents taller than him – see what he did to Michaud before crumpling him with a body shot against the cage, or how he dominated Shields, who made himself a star with terrific top-control grappling, before putting his lights out.
How many fighters can say they’ve knocked out a real legend twice, with both hands? Ray Cooper can. And while Rory MacDonald may be a more skilled all-around fighter, Cooper has that killer instinct that MacDonald just might not have anymore at this point in his career. I really, really hope we see that matchup.
But like I said, Cooper isn’t the only former PFL champion who’s going to be going after the $1 million this year. Magomed Magomedkerimov has never lost in the PFL cage, and has won 11 fights in a row dating back to 2015. He beat Cooper with a second-round guillotine choke in the 2018 finals, and never lost his title in the cage – he was set to fight Cooper again in the semifinals of last year’s tournament, but had to pull out of the bout due to illness.
So who is Magomed Magomedkerimov? OK, so he’s from Dagestan, and his name is “Magomed Magomedkerimov.” Who do you picture? You’re picturing a dominant sambo grappler with a chinstrap beard, right? Buddy, you got it, even down to the beard.
Never get involved in a land war in Asia, never headbutt a Samoan, and never fight a dude named “Magomed.” Magomedkerimov has good takedowns and thrives in a scramble, and he’s got sharp submission skills: especially his brilliant guillotine choke, which he used to stop Cooper in 2018. But he’s also got something to offer on the feet. He’s got a good frame for the division at 6-foot-1, he enters a lot of fights with a reach advantage, and he’s shown a solid understanding of how to use it.
Magomedkerimov is an excellent top-control grappler, but it’s not the only way he knows how to win a fight. That might be crucial, especially against MacDonald, who himself is an excellent grappler. I’d love to see him face off against either MacDonald or Cooper again – with three fighters you could really see going all the way, welterweight is shaping up to be the must-watch weight class of the 2021 PFL season.
Light heavyweight is shorter on prime talent, but it does return its defending champion, Argentine finishing machine Emiliano Sordi. The 29-year-old will enter the 2021 competition as the favorite after rampaging through the 2019 PFL season, winning all five of his fights that year by stoppage – the last four in the first round.
Winning $1 million can change a man’s life, but not Sordi’s. As he tells it, he spent nearly the entire check helping feed hungry people in his home city of Rio Cuarto, Argentina, and didn’t really use any of the money that he won on himself. So now, Emiliano Sordi could once again use $1 million. Having purportedly turned down a UFC contract last year, he should have a pretty good shot.
Much like Cooper, Sordi has been an absolute knockout machine since joining the PFL, and especially in 2019. However, he doesn’t do it the exact same way. While Cooper can kill you with a single punch, Sordi’s power isn’t quite as explosive. What he does is batter you with great combinations, working the body as well as the head, and doing so with enough pop that you don’t want any more.
Sordi’s striking game is a lot more refined than you see out of many higher-weight fighters at this level of MMA, and it’s carried him to plenty of success in the UFC. As I’m about to detail, there’s some interesting names across the 205-pound division this year, but Sordi’s diverse striking attack will have him once again one of the big threats at the million.
There’s no one standout challenger for Sordi’s title at 205, but there are a few intriguing names who could make a run. Cezar “Mutante” Ferreira also had a pretty good UFC run at middleweight (and a fight at welterweight against Jorge Masvidal) from 2012-19, scoring wins over guys like Thiago Santos, Anthony Smith and Jack Hermansson. He’ll be coming off a two-year layoff and is going to be small for the division, so who knows how it’ll all translate, but he looks like a threat.
Jordan Johnson went 4-0 in the UFC before signing with the PFL last season, and reached the finals before losing to Sordi. Jordan Young looked very credible in Bellator before falling out with that promotion. There’s also Chris Camozzi, who fought 16 times in the UFC as a middleweight from 2011-17, and to be honest, I genuinely didn’t know he was still fighting.
But out of this morass of guys, the one who interests me the most hasn’t even fought regularly in years. “Filthy” Tom Lawlor was a perfectly credible UFC middleweight and light heavyweight who always seemed to love pro wrestling more than mixed martial arts – he had actually worked as an indie wrestler before starting his MMA career, and was known as the guy who would imitate Hulk Hogan and other famous wrestlers during weigh-ins and walkouts.
In 2014, while still fighting with the UFC, Lawlor restarted his wrestling career and has since focused on that much more than MMA. He’s fought only three times in the last seven years (part of that might have had something to do with, uh, a failed PED test) and has had some decent success as a wrestler, appearing regularly with New Japan Pro Wrestling and Major League Wrestling over the last few years.
I’m a big pro wrestling fan, I like him a lot in that world, and it certainly seems like he’s got something pretty decent going there. Still, the allure of $1 million is powerful, even for a guy who hasn’t had a professional MMA fight since Nov. 2018. After all that time off, I have absolutely no idea what Lawlor has left, but it’ll be a fun experiment! I’m looking forward to seeing it.
The Big Fight 