BTG 195 - UFC Freedom 250

Welcome to Breaking the Guard. On today's episode, we're going to talk about UFC Freedom 250, the White House card. I'll say a few things just about the production itself. Pretty amazing. They went way over the top. They had jets flying over doing things. It was It was just uh insane level of production, which I imagine must have been a huge loss for the the company as far as production values. But, it was top-notch. I will also say less fights on the card made it much better. They had seven fights on the card, I believe. Yes. So much easier to watch than when it's 12 fights. It's just too many fights to watch. And then, sometimes you feel that you're you're missing out. But, on the other hand, it's a lot of fights to watch. You're You're talking about hours. Whereas, this one I actually thought I was starting at 7:00, so I tuned in around like 6:40 or so. And I only missed the first two fights, which I was able to replay back and watch them while the live stream was going on. Uh so, makes a lot more sense. You don't have to commit 5 hours of your day to watch the UFC. You can commit like 2 hours. Uh that's a that's a much more reasonable ask. I also think it allows the fight quality to be a lot higher, cuz you're not forcing fights to happen. It also allows you to build story better, because you don't have to split up among 12 fights. Now, it's seven. So, I think that's also a big win. The fights itself, now, I will tell you they all finished. Which, again, doesn't happen often. I don't know if that's ever quite happened. Everybody got finished. Great from a matchmaker's perspective, in a way, but I will also say a good amount of what I felt were mismatches. Now, I'm going to spoil this card. So, if you haven't watched it yet, tune out, come back later. Otherwise, I had picked all the fights right, except the final two. >> [laughter] >> And I'll talk about why I think that is. I think the first fights, to me, were fairly obvious. I'm looking through my phone here. Uh Diego Lopez, Steve Garcia. This was one of the more competitive fights on the card. And Steve Garcia was actually doing quite well. He was using his reach well. He was piecing up Diego. However, he made the fatal mistake of trying to trade with Diego towards the end of the round. I think Diego was visibly frustrated. And at the end of the I think it was end of round one, or maybe it was round two, he started just throwing. And he connected a couple solid shots that hurt Garcia. But, rather than Garcia try to recompose, or go into a clinch, he decided to stand in in the the pocket and throw with him. That was a big mistake, cuz they went lights out pretty fast and it was a finishing TKO where the fight was stopped. I don't know why you would think it would be a great idea to trade with Diego. Diego has shown he has a notoriously tough chin. And heavy hit heavy hands, so this is one of the matches I felt where the experience was off and this is why I think if Steve Garcia with more experience could have outpointed you know, possibly finish, but like you're not going to rush the finish on someone like Diego Lopez. He stood in there with all sorts of killers and he's not finished. So, I think Steve Garcia was a bit too optimistic on trying to get a quick finish. He needed to win a decision on that on a guy like Lopez, which would have been an incredible win for his record. But he was trying to rush it and I think there was just an experience mismatch. Not necessarily a skill mismatch, but an experience mismatch. Um the next fight, Bo Nickal Kyle Daukaus. This was a uh a good match up on paper as both have grappling skills. And Bo was able to score really nice takedown early, no surprises. Kyle defended himself well on the ground, didn't really allow anything to happen. They got back up to his feet. And then Bo knocked him out. First round also. Yeah, another impressive win uh by Bo Nickal is showing that he's got knockout power. In his legs and his hands. So, kudos to him. I don't know if I would say if I would say this was a mismatch. Possibly. But getting knocked out is part of the game, too. So, hard to know. This next match is definitely a mismatch, which was Maricio Houfi and Michael Chandler. And you know, I've had the pleasure of training and coaching Chandler long time ago. But this was not a match he was meant to win. Houfi is just so good on his feet. I will say he did try to fight a smart game. The critique I always have of Chandler is that he's there to entertain people and always going for knockouts. Which ends up more than likely him losing. He did try to wrestle. He just didn't have the tools to get in there. And Houfi was just popping him. Chandler is 40 years old. And so, he's like 4 years younger than me. It's a long time to be fighting. So, it's amazing the physique that he has and the explosiveness that he has. But he doesn't have the timing and I think there's a good skill gap as well. Realistically, he needs to put him up. He's taking a lot of punishment. And you only get one brain and that brain does not heal. So, you can't just keep getting yourself knocked out. And uh it's unfortunate, but it's the reality of the fight game. He needs to step out. I feel like for his long-term health, just leave where you're at. You got to fight on this White House card. It's not the red panty night you wanted, but it is an historic fight nonetheless. Uh Houfi looked amazing. Hands are really sharp. He was able to stop a couple of takedown attempts like nothing. Like I said, pretty expected. Uh but he still looked great. We then move into the next fight, Josh Haket and Derrick Lewis. This is another fight that I thought was uh pretty obvious with Josh Haket winning just because of conditioning and momentum, which clearly was the case. Derrick looked very slow. Like he could barely move, it seemed like, and Josh was piecing him up on the feet, was way faster than him, and it didn't take long for Derrick to get rocked by Josh Haket. And his slow movement became staggered movement. To me, it seemed like Josh was playing with him. Mhm, kind of like how you see a cat playing with a dog. Like the cat's so much faster that it can tease a dog, get right in his face, then back out, because Derrick was throwing some scary haymakers, and Josh would just see them and get out of the way, and then return fire. He even took Derrick down, mounted him, went into an armbar. And now this is a puzzling one, and again, I'm not sure if he was joking, because he had an armbar, and he didn't drive his hips in. He was just yelling a lot, which again doesn't make sense, either. Uh cuz he wasn't really grinding his hips into the the armbar. A classic mounted armbar finish. A part of me thinks that he wanted to put him down with hands. And I think he was playing like WWE antics on the armbar, like acting like he's going to finish it. My whole thing while I was watching him fight is that he's playing with his food. He's got to be careful because Derek is a guy who can put you out. One punch, it's over. But Josh was able to play with his food and eat it because round two came and he was able to put a beating on him and get the TKO finish. So, Josh now keeps his unblemished record. Looked very clean, didn't get tagged. But Derek was to be blunt, embarrassing. He was so tired after round one. He was just staggering around. Not to mention he was really hurt. Just a awful performance from Derek, really. He's another guy that maybe needs to put it up because if fighting at the White House wasn't motivation enough to get you in shape, man, I don't know what's going to be. And the next fight here, Sean O'Malley vs. Zhavkabi. This is one that I thought, again, experience mismatch. Sean O'Malley's been a champion. He's fought some of the best guys. Zhavkabi is a talent, but he in my opinion, hasn't really been tested at the higher levels. And fighting a former champ is a big level jump. And to me, watching this fight, it's clear he understood that and felt it because he looked very tentative, uh very gun-shy. He was backing up a lot. O'Malley was able to just tee off on him. Wasn't really landing anything significant early on. But, he didn't really give O'Malley anything to worry about. And he was throwing some leg kicks that the commentating team was going crazy about. I'm like, I don't think that's doing too much, honestly. Uh and it didn't seem wrong because O'Malley caught him with a couple hands. Another knockout TKO finish. And I think it's just somebody that wasn't ready for that level jump. I know they say he's been in the wings for a while, but he fighting a former champ and someone as dangerous as O'Malley is not like your trivial fight. This is a big fight. And to me it's clear he wasn't ready for it just by his posture. Maybe skill-wise and physically, but mentally he wasn't. And to me now, all five fights, all TKO finishes, these are all ones that I picked and I felt like these were all obvious fights. Now, the final two, I also thought they were going to be pretty straightforward. But, a big curveball was thrown. And when we go to Alex Pereira and Ciryl Gane, this fight starts. And Alex is patient, but also very ineffective. Ciryl is out-landing him. Looking like he's controlling the action. And Alex is not really getting off. And it's it's funny now because the I had saw a weird comment that Sugar Sean said that it looked like Alex Pereira had a BBL, a Brazilian butt lift. You know, typically women do that. But once you see him fighting and then like it kind of does look like that cuz his ass is huge. It's like clearly all the weight went to his legs that he put on cuz he was actually heavier than Cyril Gane. It was 253 to 240 something, I believe. But Cyril Gane still seemed like he was more imposing. Whereas normally Alex has that aura in the cage and he's the one that's imposing, marching people down. But in this fight Cyril had the the aura, if you will. And I believe it was around two also that he was able to put him away with strikes. He Now, there is a asterisks on this. Cyril caught him clean on the feet, dropped him. And Alex went to wrestling right away, had like a single leg. I think it was a head outside single. And Gane elbows him 11 times in the back of the head. Clean back of the head shots. Herb Dean does nothing about it. It just lets it slide. And these are clearly back of the head shots. I'm not talking about uh he's getting him in the ear. No, he's catching him right back here. It's impressive that Alex was able to stand up eating those shots. Back of the head shots are brutal. It's usually you go lights out. Your shuts off your optic nerve, you can't see anything. And maybe he was not seeing >> [laughter] >> cuz he took a hell a lot of elbows to the back of the head. That's one of the things I don't like about Gane. Like it's like he's always fighting dirty in some way with the eye gouging and you know, these back of the head shots. Now, does that change the fact that he got dropped to begin with? No. I'm not sure it changes the impact of the fight either. Because it wasn't going his way either way, but it is there. He did take a good amount of shots to the back of the head. But Cyril ended up getting the finish. It was like a standing TKO because Alex got back up to his feet, but he was just being supported by the cage. And it was a good stoppage at that point. I just I If you're an Alex fan, you're probably yelling at Herb Dean for not warning and stopping the back of the head shots. It wasn't just one or like, you know, because fighters move their head around. So, if you move your head into a direction that you're going to take a shot to the back of the head, that's on you. But Alex's head was specifically pointed down and Cyril was just warming straight over the back of his head. Pretty dirty in my opinion. Then we move into the main event, Ilia Topuria and Justin Gaethje. You had a lot of people, including myself, who were saying Topuria is Is this his fight to lose? The one thing that I thought, like well, if you want an American to win this, is that one, home field advantage for Gaethje being an American fighting in the White House, that helps. The bigger factor is Topuria has had a lot of upheaval in his personal life, which could play a factor. And two, I think the bigger factor, overlooking his opponent. Thinking that like us, this is his fight to lose. And being too confident. Going again against someone like Gaethje, who's a dog. And will fight just to hurt you. Doesn't even care to win, but he just wants to put a beating on you. I think the latter is what happened here, because Topuria just marched straight into Gaethje. And was staying in boxing range the whole fight. Justin is significantly bigger than Topuria. Not just in height, but you can see in the width of his back. He's the bigger man. He was landing lots of jabs and some good right hands in round one that Topuria just sits there and eats them. And he's landing his own good shots. And it looks like they both hurt each other, but it's a clear round one win for Justin, in my opinion. The damage that Gaethje did on round one is impressive, because you could already see his whole eye is black, swollen. He's bleeding round one, and Justin looks like nothing happened yet. Round two rolls in, and Topuria drops Gaethje, gets on top of him, lands some punishment. It looks pretty bad for Gaethje, but he's able to survive, get back up to his feet. But it was a clear round two for Topuria. Round three comes in. Now Gaethje drops Topuria. Puts a beating on him. Topuria is able to survive. But at this point he is really battered. And it seems like his brother in the corner is trying to stop the fight cuz he keeps saying he can't see. He can't see. Get the doctor. He can't see. Now, if you don't know in the fight world, if you tell a doctor that you can't see, the fight's stopped. So that to me was his brother trying to protect him from taking further damage. The doctor came in at one point was going to wave it off. But it looked like the ref kind of said, "No, he wants to keep fighting." They asked Topuria if he wanted to keep fighting. They let it play on. Round four comes along and it's actually a good round for Topuria. Who got essentially an extra minute of rest between rounds because of the whole doctor mess. But the end of the round was not great for Topuria, which may have been the finishing blow because I forget if he got dropped or he just had a failed shot but end up in a sprawl. And Justin was on top of him, threw a knee right into the rib cage that just landed really flush. And visibly winced. And that was like the end of the round. And the moment he walks into the corner, the brother says the fight's finished. Where Oh, he No, he said, "We're finishing this fight." Now he's speaking in Spanish, oh, I believe. So the translation theme is not getting it right. Or maybe he was speaking English and he says broken English. But everybody in the commentary team understood it as uh they want to go to round five cuz they want to finish this fight. Where what their brother was really saying was that this fight's finished. He's done. We're not going back out to round five. Cuz there's some confusion understanding this as well. But Topuria was battered. He I mean if you looked at him, he looked like he got devastated physically. Whereas Gaethje despite taking an enormous amount of punishment looked fine. It's crazy. He was joking about his genetics not being uncuttable and having hard bone structure and like he might not be wrong, man, because he took some vicious shots. I'm He might If you didn't watch this fight and you just heard me talking about it, I'm glossing over the fact that Topuria landed a lot of shots, particularly body shots. Like towards the end of round two, I believe, Topuria was just digging at the liver shots. And it's crazy that Gaethje was able to eat those and continue to move forward. Uh a lesser man would have been broken by those body shots. So, hats off to Gaethje for eating the type of punishment he did without really showing it. What I will say on these last two fights, something that can't be overlooked, which I did. Both of these fights are champions at a lower weight class stepping up to a higher weight class. Weight classes exist for a reason. And all because you could put on the weight doesn't mean you belong at that weight class. When we look at Topuria, I see people online saying, "Well, how did Justin eat all these shots when Max was able to put him down?" And well, Max actually belongs at this weight class, whereas Ilia might not. Uh and even if he does, his power is not going to be the same at this weight class because now he's fighting bigger people. I think fighters forget sometimes that power is different at every level of the game. And not just yours, but your opponent's. So, you might not be used to getting hit that hard because nobody in the prior weight class had that type of ability to generate power. So, I I think with Ilia, there's a good amount of that. His In other fights, you could see Ilia touches people and they drop. And I think it's because he was in a weight class where it made sense. His power was just ridiculous. When he moves up a weight class against someone like Justin Gaethje who has a very strong chin, now those shots that were kill shots are just big shots now. He doesn't have one-touch power anymore. And also now his opponents have significant power. And to Topuria's credit, great chin, he never got knocked out. He got dropped, but never completely out of the fight. So, his chin held, but I'm sure he wasn't used to that type of power. And he was visibly smaller. So, I think the move up is a mistake based off of this. But, I think the bigger factor is psychologically, he underestimated the threat, just like I did. Uh but I'm not fighting him. >> [laughter] >> I wasn't fighting Justin Gaethje. So, I wouldn't be underestimating it. I would be treating it like the biggest fight of my life, because it was. Um but it seemed like at least in the lead-up, Ilia looked too confident going in there. It's fine being confident, but if that confidence comes from not respecting your opponent, it's a big problem. And I think that's what happened. On Alex Pereira with Ciryl Gane, a similar thing. He moved up significantly. Remember, this guy fought at 185 and was a 185-lb champion. Now, he's 250 lbs. He put on an immense amount of weight. Now, I'm sure he was cutting a lot of weight. He was probably a 220-ish guy. So, 185 was a hard cut, 205 easy cut. But, soaking up that much weight doesn't mean you have the power at that weight. And I think that has to be a factor. He's also not used to as much getting hit by someone with that much power. And just the fact that Cyril Gane is is a very tough guy to fight. Very powerful. I think you need to wrestle a guy like him, like Jon Jones did quite easily, right? Uh He must be laughing somewhere. Uh Jon Jones because this guy just is wiped out. What could have been a three division champion uh was completely housed within a round by Jon Jones out of shape. To me, this says a few things. One, the skill gap in the heavyweight division between everyone else and Jon Jones and arguably the whole UFC really. It's a damn shame Jon Jones is such a delinquent because his skill was out of this world. And I think if you look back, it's like, "Wow, like he made Cyril look like a novice out of shape." Imagine a motivated in shape Jon Jones. There wouldn't be anyone to challenge him. It's a real head scratcher how you could ruin the career that way. But it's not my career to to worry about. But it it does leave he could have had some generational runs as far as he would have had the staying power. Like things that Michael Chandler and you know Derrick Lewis who are staying in there trying to get their glory that realistically wasn't there for them. Jon Jones had the ability to do that. He could be just winning every fight and been more legendary than he is now. Mind you, he's still pretty legendary. He has fought in his era all the best fighters, beat them all. He had a couple close fights, couple wars. But you imagine if he was able to say he had wins over Alex Pereira and the rest of them. I I I don't I don't know. It didn't really change much to be honest because based off these fights he could still see that he is probably the the greatest of all time. However, there's a giant asterisks on the cheating, steroids, and PEDs. But outside of that, skill-wise, the the guy that he is is the greatest of all time. Like if we don't care about cheating, we just say we need one human representative against a alien race, who's your best fighter in MMA? It's going to be Jon Jones. We don't really have anyone else on his level that can do what he did. I think some people might have thought, you know, Pereira was working up to that or Topuria was working up to that, but those two hype trains just got derailed. So, in summary, UFC Fight Night card, great production. I like less fights on a card. Seven fights is way more manageable than 12 fights. They would have been better with better matchmaking. Don't get me wrong, all finishes is interesting, but a lot of these fights were pretty one-sided. So, you you when you get a finish on a one-sided fight, it's it's cool seeing it the first time, but seeing five of them lopsided is not cool. Then it's like, "Oh, I'm I'm just watching all mismatches." You want struggle. So, like to me, like I didn't complain too much about the Steve with Diego Lopes. Although it was an experience mismatch, skill-wise, Garcia was doing really well. He was outpointing and outlanding Diego. He just got a little too feisty. And he he you know, he ate a big shot. And that was a reversal of fortune. All right, so that was interesting because it wasn't going his way at all. But when you look at the Josh Emmett or uh Sean O'Malley, these were one-sided. Uh they could have been better matched in my opinion. But anyhow, that's all I have for you guys. On some personal news, I'm going to be going to Miami, Florida this week. So, I'll be gone for the next week or so. Um you can if you're in Miami or in South Florida, you can catch me there. I'll be teaching at my my at the Freestyle Fighting Academy on Friday and Monday at 6:00 p.m., I believe. But, um you can check me out there. Otherwise, I will catch you next week.