This coming weekend is a good one for competition between top-ranked MMA fighters. Though UFC 127 is being looked at as a minor card for the promotion, it’s got six bouts with top-15 competitors; add in the main event of Saturday’s British Association of Mixed Martial Arts (BAMMA) show, and you’ve got seven ranking-relevant fights in one night. Let’s take a look:
Light-heavyweight: #14 Alexander Gustafsson vs. James Te-Huna.
I’ve been tossing around the idea of doing a series of short posts about weak points in my rankings–not, not points where I’ve made a mistake (perish the thought), but points where top-15 slots are occupied by fighters whose ranking does not appear commensurate with their current level of fighting ability (because they’re on the slide, or because they only got there by winning highly favorable style match-ups they’re not likely to get again, or for some other reason).
Had I started doing this before this past October, I would have zeroed in on Cyrille Diabate, a noted striker with a meager ground game who made it to the top 15 by knocking out Luis Arthur Cane in a fight which cemented Cane’s reputation as particularly susceptible to southpaws. Diabate was (and remains) a prime target for a competent grappler looking to break into the top 15 (pretend for a moment that anyone cares about my top 15, OK?).
But Alexander Gustafsson beat me to it, defeating Diabate by submission at UFC 120. Only one fight prior, he had been fodder for rising prospect Phil Davis; now he’s ranked well above him. Ironically, Gustafsson himself would now likely be viewed as a weak link the light-heavyweight top 15. For proof, consider that his fight is being aired only on ION TV. Anyway, enough rambling. Gustafsson is a heavy favorite and will probably win.
Middleweight:
- #13 Riki Fukuda vs. Nick Ring. Come to think of it, Fukuda might also go on a “weak links” list. He got his spot not by beating a top-ranked fighter, but by beating someone who drew with a top-ranked fighter (Ryuta Sakurai and Mamed Khalidov, respectively). He’s spent most of his career in Pancrase and DEEP shows (he’s the current DEEP middleweight champion), against fairly low-level competition. On the other hand, he’s distinguished himself by actually winning most of those fights, and he’s scored a couple wins on bigger stages too, going 1-1 in EliteXC and defeating Murilo Rua in DREAM. I’ve never seen him fight, and there’s only so much you can tell from someone’s record on paper. Still, his placement on the card (on the Facebook-streamed prelims against a UFC debutante and “Ultimate Fighter” alum) indicates that the promotion is hedging its bets. No idea what to expect from this fight; I didn’t watch TUF this past season either.
- #15 Michael Bisping vs. Jorge Rivera. Bisping is, in a way, the opposite of Fukuda: he’s a known quantity who’s undoubtedly more talented than his ranking might suggest; he tends to bounce between opponents who do little for his ranking or reputation, and higher-level challengers, to whom he tends to lose. There’s little doubt in my mind that Bisping could beat, say, #7 Alessio Sakara or #9 Ronaldo Souza. There’s also little doubt that he’ll beat Rivera, who falls squarely in the “little benefit to ranking or reputation” category. (No offense intended to Rivera, a fighter not unaccustomed to winning upsets.)
Welterweight
- #2 Jon Fitch vs. #3 B.J. Penn. You’d think that a #2 vs. #3 fight would be a number-one contender bout, but alas, life just isn’t that simple. Fitch and Penn have both lost decisively to champion Georges St-Pierre, to the point that many regard rematches with Fitch and Penn as uninteresting. Add in St-Pierre’s hinted-at move to middleweight to take on Anderson Silva, and no one has any idea where the winner of this fight really lands. It’s a fascinating style match-up, though: Penn’s superior boxing and jiu-jitsu against Fitch’s considerable advantages in size and wrestling (not to mention Fitch’s greater propensity for consistency in performance). Too close to call.
- #14 Chris Lytle vs. Brian Ebersole. Ebersole is a late replacement for #8 Carlos Condit. A Lytle win can be safely expected, but Ebersole is technically undefeated at welterweight, so he’ll rocket into the top 15 if he scores an upset.
- #15 Paul Daley vs. Yuya Shirai (at BAMMA 5). I’ve also never seen Shirai fight, but based on the fact that he’s a little-known fighter going against Daley in Daley’s home country, I’m guessing he’s being brought in to lose. (UPDATE: Paul Daley failed to make weight for this bout, coming in at 171 lbs. [this is a title fight, so the limit was a strict 170]. Shirai made weight, so a win will count the same for him; if Daley wins, it will not be recorded as a welterweight victory on his P3Y ledger.)
Lightweight: #9 George Sotiropoulos vs. Dennis Siver. Speaking of fighters being brought in to lose, I have to assume that that’s the rationale behind booking Sotiropoulos vs. Siver in Sotiropoulos’s native Australia. Not that Siver is a bad fighter–I’ve got him just outside the top 15–but rather that he’s another in a series of strangely low-profile opponents for Sotiropoulos, one of the few fighters at lightweight who stands out as a potential near-term title challenger. Sotiropoulos has won all of those fights with aplomb, and is probably expected to the same here.
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