UFC 244: Masvidal vs. Diaz - Predictions and Picks

#4 Derrick Lewis vs. Blagoy Ivanov

Derrick Lewis hits as hard as any other fighter in the UFC

You could say this for most Heavyweight fights, but this one is likely to go one of two ways: either one of these two behemoths will land a huge shot and finish the fight off early, or they’ll both gas and we’ll be presented with a sloppy brawl that’ll be fun to watch, or a horribly slow-paced slopfest that everyone can’t wait for the ending of.

Thus far, Ivanov’s fights have fallen largely into the latter category. He was largely picked apart by Junior Dos Santos in his UFC debut although he had his moments when he was able to draw ‘JDS’ into a brawl, and while he’s since beaten Ben Rothwell and Tai Tuivasa, both fights were slow-paced with Ivanov just about doing enough to win.

Lewis, on the other hand, has had a wild mix of basically everything in his time in the UFC. He’s an odd fighter in that he looks absolutely terrible at times, and yet he has such incredible power in his punches that he’s literally only ever one moment away from finding a knockout shot.

Take his fight with Alexander Volkov, for instance; Lewis was being destroyed for basically 15 minutes straight until he uncorked a ludicrous right hand and finished the Russian soon after. That wasn’t even an outlier, either; he was losing badly to Travis Browne and Shamil Abdurakhimov too before somehow finding the big shot to pull off the win.

Ivanov definitely has ways to win this fight; Lewis is not a good fighter from his back at all and the Bulgarian can definitely wrestle even if he hasn’t really shown it in his UFC career thus far. He’s also powerful enough to hurt Lewis standing, and can probably out-do him in the clinch, too. Having said that, Lewis has made a career of beating guys like this in strange ways, and even though he hasn’t been winning recently, it’s still tricky to pick against him.

I’m going to go with a typical Lewis fight here then. Ivanov will probably have a lot of success early, appear to be beating Lewis up with body shots in particular and maybe even get a couple of takedowns, but in the end ‘The Black Beast’ will land a huge shot and seal the deal soon after. Who knows what kind of fun we could be in for during the post-fight interview? It’s been a while, after all!

The Pick: Lewis via third round knockout