This Saturday’s UFC 128 features five bouts of ranking interest:
Heavyweight: #12 Mirko “Cro Cop” Filipovic vs. #15 Brendan Schaub. Cro Cop has probably been responsible for breaking more fanboy hearts in recent years than any other fighter, as he’s turned in one disappointing performance after another in the UFC. He’s won just enough fights against low-level opponents to hang onto his ranking, but I suspect Schaub, an athletically gifted prospect, represents the end of the line for Cro Cop as a top-ranked fighter. Like so many other fanboys, I hope I’m wrong.
Light-heavyweight: #1 Mauricio “Shogun” Rua vs. #5 Jon Jones. This fight is hotly anticipated, and with good reason. Jones, the fast-rising young star (his career is still less than three years old), has advantages in size, strength, youth, reach, and most crucially, wrestling; Shogun, the defending champion, has the edge in striking technique and power, as well as a more seasoned Brazilian jiu-jitsu game. The X factor is Rua’s level of recovery from recent knee surgery. The last time he came back from knee surgery, he lost his UFC debut in an upset to Forrest Griffin, and then barely stopped an over-the-hill Mark Coleman in his next bout. That doesn’t bode well. Nor, for that matter, does his lack of takedown defense. It’s hard to see how Rua is going to be able to stop Jones from taking him down at will. But then again, Rua solved the Lyoto Machida puzzle when it looked like Machida was primed for a long run at the top. We shall see.
Middleweight: #4 Nate Marquardt vs. Dan Miller. Miller comes in as a late replacement for Yoshihiro Akiyama, which doesn’t bode well for him against an opponent he’d be favored to lose to regardless. Miller lost to Demian Maia in a bout that wound up being contested mostly on the feet; Marquardt is a better and more powerful striker than Maia (see the fight between those two for evidence), so Miller will most likely resort to his wrestling game here. Both Chael Sonnen and Yushin Okami showed that Marquardt can be neutralized on his back, but I’m not sure if Miller has the wrestling game to pull it off.
Featherweight: #7 Raphael Assuncao vs. Erik Koch. Two successful WEC veterans square off. I wish this were on the aired prelims.
Bantamweight: #3 Joseph Benavidez vs. Ian Loveland. One of the standout WEC bantamweights makes his UFC debut. Loveland never made it to WEC, but did debut in the UFC at 145 lbs. this past December. He makes his 135 lb. debut here. I REALLY wish this were on the aired prelims.
