Another fight weekend is in the books. Once again, the MMA delivered over the past few days, peaking with a UFC show on Saturday that was an absolute symphony of violence from beginning to end. In the main event, Yair Rodriguez put on a star-making performance, eliminating all doubts of his ability to hang with the very best – still, it wasn’t enough, as the inhuman Max Holloway out-slugged him in one of the best fights of the year. But for now, as usual, here’s a look at three fighters outside the main event that boosted their stock big this weekend:
You know what the UFC featherweight division needs? More killers. That may come across a little bit facetious, since 145 has one of the deepest talent pools in the world, but I’m actually being kind of serious here. Yes, there’s great depth. There are a ton of really, really good fighters filling the UFC featherweight division to the brim. But at the very top level, there’s a clear gap between the best of the best and the rest of the pack.
There’s champion Alexander Volkanovski and Holloway, the two best in the world, destined to meet a third time for the belt. Below them there’s Brian Ortega, who’s lost to both in world title fights but whom you’d favor over pretty much everyone else. Yair Rodriguez, the next man up, couldn’t get past Holloway. Almost everyone else in the title conversation – save for a small group of fighters still on their initial rise like Giga Chikadze and Arnold Allen – has been gatekept.
It’s tough to envision anyone breaking into that Volkanovski-Holloway conversation, but there are still a few guys that make you dream. One of them is 23-year-old Song Yadong, a superstar in the making.
As I mentioned when previewing his bout with Julio Arce this past week, Song stands out as a formidable blend of power and speed, with a tremendously well-developed stand-up game for a fighter so young. Song put all those traits on display on Saturday, putting together an excellent performance en route to a second round KO.
Song fights with such speed and quickness that he could survive just off of that, but it’s the thumping power that carries him to the next level. He doesn’t wind up big or throw KO-seeking bombs. The power just arrives naturally. And after spending over a round fighting circles around Arce – a very good striker in his own right – Song decided he had enough.
The combo that leads to the finish is sudden – a whacking right head kick followed by a right hand that Song begins throwing before his foot has even touched the ground – but the impressive part was how quickly and how furiously Song swarmed on Arce the second he realized his foe was stunned. The whole sequence only lasted about five seconds. That is the kind of thing you see out of ELITE mixed martial artists.
Song’s physical gifts are so impressive that it’s easy to focus on them and overlook the fact that his decision-making and information-processing capacity is also very high-level. His performance here – along with an excellent showing in a decision win over Casey Kenney a few months ago – is a perfect display of how he’s come along on the technical and tactical aspects of striking. He’s not perfect yet – he’s shown some takedown defense issues that I’d like to see further tested – but fighters at this age just aren’t supposed to be this good.
Again, Song Yadong is just 23 years old. How fucking good is this guy going to be in five years?
The first thing you notice about 28-year-old Spaniard Joel Alvarez is just how enormous this guy is. Despite being 6-foot-3 with a 77-inch reach – a huge frame for welterweight, and a pretty good one at middleweight, for that matter – Alvarez fights at 155 pounds, where he absolutely towers over the competition. (He even had a 2015 regional fight at featherweight, which I cannot conceive of.)
That’s a huge weight cut, probably a little bit too much. Alvarez has missed weight twice in a row now in the UFC – he was 3.5 pounds over for his win over Alexander Yakovlev last October, and was off the mark by 1.5 pounds at Friday’s weigh-in. Making weight has been a bit of a hot-button issue lately in MMA, especially after the debacle a few weeks back with Paulo Costa. Missing weight loses you respect. Missing weight TWICE is a huge no-no.
So how do you miss weight twice in a row and still wipe that out of your narrative? Well, for starters, you need to put on a performance like Alvarez did on Saturday afternoon.
Saturday was the biggest opportunity of Alvarez’s young UFC career. Riding a three-fight win streak, Alvarez was matched up with Thiago Moises, currently ranked No. 15 at lightweight – a pretty dubious ranking for a few reasons, but still there – and fresh off main-eventing a Fight Night show against ascendant superstar Islam Makhachev.
Moises is no star, but a perfectly reasonable and competent UFC fighter. Alvarez – previously known as a very prolific submission specialist – completely pummeled him, sending Moises packing in three minutes in what was easily the most impressive striking performance of his career.
Visually, the fight resembled a high school kid beating the shit out of his 11-year-old brother. Alvarez simply overwhelmed Moises with a withering stand-up attack that included all of the things I love the most: standing elbows and aggressive body work, which were two all-around highlights of the UFC show Saturday.
Alvarez picked his targets perfectly and battered Moises with every weapon that he had. It was such a potent stand-up display that you would have been shocked to learn that it was only Alvarez’s third KO win in 19 career pro victories – the other 16 have all come by submission.
That’s right, folks! 19 wins, 19 finishes. That’ll get you a ticket to the dance. And while Moises won’t be mistaken for Israel Adesanya any time soon, he’s made strides on the feet – this could be a real breakthrough moment for Alvarez. So much so that he’s not getting the pressure you’d expect from the UFC to move up to welterweight. Instead, Alvarez re-committed his future at lightweight after the fight, promising to utilize the resources offered by the UFC Performance Institute to help him hit 155 consistently in the future.
If Alvarez can get that settled, he’s looking to be another ingredient heating the lightweight division up to a feverish point. It’s a good time to be an MMA fan.
There was a slew of great finishes across the board last weekend. Nine of them in 11 fights on the UFC show, and a few real good ones on Bellator as well. To name a few: Cris Cyborg defending her featherweight title by deading Sinead Kavanagh with a right hook; Marcos Rogerio de Lima swarming Ben Rothwell and finishing him in 32 seconds; Khaos Williams reminding Miguel Baeza why he’s named KHAOS WILLIAMS; Sean Woodson, the Slenderman of the UFC, roasting Collin Anglin with some of the best body punching you’ll see this year; and Da Un Jung elbowing a hole in Kennedy Nzechukwu‘s face.
It was all pretty great. But out of all the finishes that occurred over the weekend, none were as cinematic, aesthetically pleasing, or just plain sick as what Bellator welterweight Roman Faraldo did on Friday night.
That is as clean as it can possibly get. The point, as if he’s calling his shot. The leap, swift and direct, closing the distance suddenly. The knee, which swings up with terminal velocity and impacts perfectly on the point of the chin. The way poor Robert Turnquest falls stiff and unconscious up against the cage, just upright enough to emphasize to the viewer how fucking destroyed this dude is. If you were directing a movie about MMA – hopefully one that looks better than this thing Halle Berry’s doing – and you wanted to include a scene where someone gets knocked out with a flying knee, that’s what it would look like.
And I use the term “flying knee” with some joy, because it’s an incredibly minor thing that I quibble about sometimes. It seems that every time someone leaves their feet to throw a knee it’s called a flying knee, but I feel like there should be a distinction. When someone jumps vertically to throw the knee, I feel like we should call that a “jumping knee,” not a flying knee. Cory Sandhagen on Frankie Edgar – sick knockout, but was Sandhagen really “flying” at any point in that KO? Yeah, there’s some forward movement, but it’s mostly a vertical jump.
Far be it from me, a guy who doesn’t train in any aspect of MMA, to bitch about terminology, but I’ve always found it weird that Sandhagen’s knee is categorized the same as Spencer Fisher‘s on Matt Wiman, where Fisher closed a decent distance with the jump and then knocked him out mid-flight.
But this Faraldo KO is just about the most “flying” flying knee I’ve ever seen in my years watching MMA. That man was soaring across the cage. And it’s not even the first flying knee KO Faraldo has pulled in his brief Bellator career: he hit one on Pat Casey one year to the day before he knocked out Turnquest on Friday, also very much of the flying variety.
Clearly, Faraldo has a thing. And at 6-0 in his young MMA career, with all six wins coming by KO, the 28-year-old Floridian is quickly turning into a prospect you want to tune in for. Bellator brings its prospects along relatively slowly, but keep a keen eye out for Faraldo: he may be flying in to some decently big fights pretty soon.
The Big Fight 