UFC Fight Night 150: Jacare vs. Hermansson - Predictions and Picks

#2 Greg Hardy vs. Dmitrii Smoliakov

Greg Hardy's UFC debut didn't go to plan

Quite how Greg Hardy has been given another co-main event is a mystery to me after his disastrous UFC debut in January. The former NFL star faced Allen Crowder in that fight, and while he had some success early on using pure brute force striking, he quickly got into difficulty when it turned out Crowder wasn’t as easy to knock out as his pre-UFC opponents.

By the second round Hardy looked spent while Crowder began to take over, and in the end it was a ludicrous illegal knee that turned the tide and wound up earning Hardy a disqualification.

Essentially, Hardy just didn’t look ready for even the lower level of UFC competition. But the promotion evidently still sees him as someone with star potential – despite all the bad publicity surrounding his past domestic violence charges – and so here we are.

Quite how Smoliakov compares to Crowder as an opponent for Hardy is difficult to say. Both men have similar records – Crowder was 9-3 when he faced Hardy and Smoliakov is 8-2 – and like Crowder, Smoliakov is coming into his fight with Hardy without a UFC win to his name. And in all honesty, ‘The Lifeguard’ looked terrible in both of his Octagon appearances, where he lost to Cyril Asker and Luis Henrique respectively.

But the fact is that both of Smoliakov’s UFC losses came on the ground, and in both fights – while he never truly showed any dominance or anything of the sort – he wasn’t doing terribly on his feet before his opponents got him down. We know that Hardy isn’t likely to take him down – his ground game looked diabolical against Crowder – so can he use his brute force punches to knock the Russian out?

Quite possibly I guess? Smoliakov’s chin is a total mystery and Hardy definitely hits like a ton of bricks, but we saw against Crowder that his gas tank is pretty bad and he appeared to run out of steam in his punches pretty quickly. Judging on what I’ve seen, Smoliakov isn’t going to be mistaken for Francis Ngannou any time soon, but he seems to be a competent technical striker at least.

For me this is likely to go one of two ways; either Hardy will knock Smoliakov out very early on with probably his first flurry, or Smoliakov will weather an early storm, begin to hurt the former NFL player and then take him down and finish him there. I’m going for the latter as I just wasn’t impressed by Hardy in January at all.

The Pick: Smoliakov via first round TKO