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#2 Best: Women’s Strawweight suddenly looks awesome
A year ago, the Women’s Strawweight division was a very different place. Then-champion Joanna Jedrzejczyk had held the UFC title since 2015 and had basically dominated everyone in front of her – turning back the challenge of five consecutive contenders. Rose Namajunas was next in line, but she’d only won one fight leading into the challenge – to some, it felt more like she’d got the shot simply due to there being nobody else left for ‘Joanna Champion’.
That all changed when Namajunas knocked out Jedrzejczyk in the first round of their title fight, and then managed to outpoint her in a rematch. Suddenly – as with Middleweight when Anderson Silva fell in 2013, or at Welterweight when Georges St-Pierre stepped away – the division felt energized as new – and old – contenders started to rise up the ranks.
UFC 228 had two of those contenders on view and both of them delivered hugely. The next title shot simply has to go to Jessica Andrade. ‘Bata Estaca’ had been on a roll coming into the show – winning 5 of 6 fights since moving to 115lbs, but the one criticism was that she hadn’t been finishing her fights.
That changed in Dallas as she stunned Karolina Kowalkiewicz early on, and then finished her with a face-melting overhand right, all in under two minutes. One-punch knockouts like that are a rarity at Strawweight and so Andrade sent a major message last night. This is a serious threat to Namajunas’s title.
But Andrade wasn’t the only impressive fighter at 115lbs. On the prelims, Tatiana Suarez used her Olympic-level wrestling to utterly dominate former champ Carla Esparza – herself a respected grappler – destroying her on the ground throughout the fight en route to a third-round TKO.
Andrade might be the scary contender right now, but Suarez might be even more dangerous as she’s such a specialist with her takedowns and ground domination. If Namajunas manages to turn back the challenge of both of them, she’d surely go down as a true great.
