Another fight weekend is in the books. Last weekend’s UFC show looked weak, and next’s is worse. But we saw a new strawweight contender elevated to elite status, and a few other impressive performances. So, as usual, here’s a look at three fighters who boosted their stock the most on Saturday:
At every turn, Marina Rodriguez has simply been impressive. Here is a fighter who seems to have a clear view of her tools – sharp striking, sharp movement, punishing clinch work – and knows how to implement them in the cage. And as a result, she’s only kept rising. Rodriguez has been one of the UFC’s top breakout stars of 2021, and her latest win, a five-round unanimous decision over Mackenzie Dern in Saturday’s main event, has delivered her to the doorstep of a strawweight title shot.
Rodriguez didn’t do anything exceptional on Saturday night. Nothing particularly flashy. She was just a better, more complete martial artist, with more ways to win a fight than Dern. Dern is one of the elite grapplers currently walking the Earth, but doomed by the fact that MMA fights don’t start on the ground. They start on the feet, where Rodriguez had a massive advantage.
Rodriguez’s striking is extremely impressive – there’s that word again – and a major boost in a division that has a number of great grapplers. She comes from a Muay Thai background and uses all eight limbs well, effectively fighting from distance – she has good range for the division and has very solid vision and movement – and punishing opponents in close.
That’s what she did all night against Dern, who’s only been a professional mixed martial artist for five years and simply did not have the technical skill needed to match Rodriguez. Dern has had a quick rise to become one of the top strawweights in the world, but Saturday exposed her as frustratingly one-dimensional at this stage of her career: her striking was ineffective, and while she’s one of the best jiu-jitsu competitors alive, she has no takedowns.
Dern’s only hope to get the fight to the ground was either to pull guard – which she didn’t do – or run in and hope that she could create some sort of scramble. She managed to pull off the latter trick a couple times, direly threatening Rodriguez a couple of times on the ground, including a dominant second round that should have been scored a 10-8. But Rodriguez earned a lot of respect by spending time on the ground with Dern and living to tell the tale, escaping the shark’s jaws and reasserting control of the fight.
The UFC strawweight division has been frustratingly stalled by the organization’s insistence on booking a rematch between Rose Namajunas and Zhang Weili, after Namajunas knocked Zhang out in just over a minute to win the world title back in April. Carla Esparza, the only fighter to ever beat Rodriguez and the overwhelmingly deserving challenger, has been passed over. Now, Rodriguez has continued to level up – she’s won three straight since her split decision defeat to Esparza – and has joined the elite group in the deepest women’s division in the UFC.
Once Namajunas and Zhang get resolved, there’s a lot of different directions this thing could go. Marina Rodriguez is at the end of quite a few of them.
In 2018, the UFC flyweight division was on death’s door. A number of really good 125-pounders – including future world champion Brandon Moreno – were cast aside after one or two losses, further fueling heavy speculation that the UFC was planning on ditching the weight class entirely.
Even up until early last year that seemed an eventuality, but the efforts of Moreno and Deiveson Figueiredo seem to have brought flyweight back from the brink. Some of those old wrongs from 2018 are starting to be righted. And that includes the re-emergence of 28-year-old Matheus Nicolau, one of those flyweights who was so cruelly cast aside three years ago.
A Brazilian who’s solid in basically every area of the game, Nicolau made his way to the UFC after appearing on The Ultimate Fighter Brazil 4 in 2015, reaching the semifinals of the tournament and later winning his first three UFC fights. But his first UFC loss came at the worst possible time – a first-round KO loss to Dustin Ortiz in July 2018 was all the justification the UFC needed to cut him. (Ortiz followed him five months later after losing to Joseph Benavidez, and has barely fought since.)
Nicolau kept working, winning two fights back home in Brazil before returning to the big show in March, beating Manel Kape by split decision in his first UFC fight in almost three years. All of a sudden, after all that, Nicolau entered his fight with Tim Elliott on Saturday ranked as the No. 11 flyweight in the UFC. That was quick, huh? And after three rounds of action on Saturday, his arrow is still pointing up.
Elliott has always been a difficult matchup for most flyweights because of his cardio and his fighting style: he’s not especially skilled, but fights with constant pressure, always coming at you, being frenetically weird. That’s not always easy to deal with, even when you have him outgunned.
But even after losing the first round, Nicolau kept his head. He’s been a pro since he was 17 – he’s a grizzled young vet. He’s seen situations like this before. He responded with deft movement and counter work throughout the rest of the fight, solving the problem his opponent posed for him, and landing a key late takedown in the third that sealed the fight.
Nicolau was aided, undoubtedly, by Elliott’s poor fight IQ and coach James Krause‘s uncharacteristically strange corner advice – Krause told Elliott he was up two rounds after he had unanimously lost the second, perhaps making Elliott comfortable stalling the rest of the fight out from the bottom after Nicolau’s third round takedown.
It’s impressive, however, how little time Nicolau has wasted re-establishing himself as an upper-tier UFC flyweight. He hasn’t wasted his second chance. This win will put him back in the top 10, and he’ll soon be getting shots at some of the best flyweights in the world. This is a thinner division – due mainly in part to the events of a few years ago – but the top level has some really great talent. I’m really looking forward to seeing where Nicolau slots in.
For many MMA fans, Mariya Agapova will be remembered as the recipient of one of the biggest upsets in UFC history. Last August, Agapova – a talented young flyweight prospect from Kazakhstan – somehow found a way to lose to Shana Dobson, who entered the fight with a 3-4 pro record. Dobson was a +800 underdog, the biggest underdog to ever win a UFC women’s fight – matching Holly Holm when she knocked out the nigh-invincible Ronda Rousey.
At the time, Agapova was just 23 years old. It seemed like the kind of humiliation that could derail a promising young career. But after taking over a year off from competition, Agapova re-emerged on Saturday and gave us a glimpse of just why she was so highly regarded.
Agapova thoroughly outclassed 24-year-old Colombian Sabina Mazo – who up until recently was herself considered a top prospect at flyweight – by staying smart and rocking her with counters all night long, before a highlight finish that earned her Performance of the Night honors early in round 3. Agapova sat down on a clubbing counter right hook that knocked Mazo to the floor, before impressively jumping on an immediate rear-naked choke that finished the fight just moments later.
Most importantly, Agapova showed that she had learned a most important lesson from the Dobson fight: conserve your energy. Agapova gassed embarrassingly quickly against Dobson, one of the major reasons she lost the fight. Against Mazo, she stayed within herself the entire fight, letting her talents show while never over-extending. It was a 180-degree turnaround, and exactly what we needed to see.
Perhaps Agapova goes on to a great career, and that loss to Dobson winds up just being one of those weird footnotes – Anderson Silva lost to Daiju Takase, after all. But one thing’s for sure: after a most humiliating loss, Mariya Agapova came out of Saturday’s fight looking much better than she did when she went in. That, at the least, is something.
The Big Fight 