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There’s simply no rest for UFC fans right now, as the world’s biggest MMA promotion presents its latest card on the ESPN network this weekend, live from San Antonio, Texas, as Birmingham, England’s Leon Edwards faces off with former UFC Lightweight kingpin Rafael Dos Anjos in a major Welterweight main event.
The card overall looks pretty solid, although having three Heavyweight fights on the main card is always a risk – there’s almost bound to be at least one sloppy fight on there! Hopefully, it’ll be a good show, at any rate.
Here are the predicted outcomes for UFC on ESPN: Dos Anjos vs. Edwards.
#1 Rafael Dos Anjos vs. Leon Edwards
The winner of this one likely won’t find themselves in line for a fight with current Welterweight champ Kamaru Usman any time soon, although, with a bit of luck, they shouldn’t be too far off. That probably applies to Edwards more than Dos Anjos, as the Brazilian, of course, lost to Usman in a one-sided fight last November.
I’ll cut to the chase here; Edwards – despite hailing literally a handful of miles from my hometown – is a guy I’ve underestimated time and again during his UFC run.
Currently the owner of an impressive 7-fight win streak, he’s 9-2 in the UFC overall with his only losses being a contentious split decision against Claudio Silva, and a loss to the current champ Kamaru Usman – a fight that saw Usman pushed harder than he’s probably ever been pushed in the UFC.
Despite all this, I think I’ve picked Edwards to lose at least 3 of his last 5 fights. Essentially, the issue I’ve had with ‘Rocky’ is simply that while he’s solid in all areas, he’s not truly ‘great’ anywhere.
He’s an excellent striker with knockout power, a strong wrestler and his ground game is ever-improving – to the point where he dominated the highly-touted Gunnar Nelson on the mat – but I still wouldn’t call him an elite-level fighter in any single area.
The question here then is will Edwards’ overall skills give him enough to beat RDA? Dos Anjos’s run at Welterweight has been a bit of an up-and-down one. He debuted there in 2017 with an impressive stoppage of Neil Magny and then outstruck Robbie Lawler to put himself into title contention.
Losses to Colby Covington and Usman knocked him back out of contention, but he recently looked excellent in a win over Kevin Lee.
At his best, RDA is a threat everywhere in the fight; his striking is usually better coming forward rather than countering, and he simply overwhelmed Lawler in their fight with combinations and a swarming style based around sweeping hooks and low kicks.
He doesn’t necessarily need a lot of distance to succeed, either – he seems comfortable attacking from close range as well as from longer range.
On the ground meanwhile, he’s a genuine Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt capable of submitting opponents from all kinds of positions; his top game is probably better than his bottom but we have seen him catch opponents from the guard before, most notably Terry Etim, although that fight was back in 2010.
As far as his weaknesses go, RDA has displayed issues when opponents really push the pace; his cardio isn’t bad per se and he wore out Anthony Pettis when they fought and did the same to Lee recently, but he does struggle when an opponent forces him onto the retreat.
Covington and Usman also used their wrestling skill to dominate him, but Dos Anjos isn’t a poor wrestler by any means, he was simply up against two of the best in the division in that area.
For me, Edwards can win this fight for two reasons; firstly, he should be the bigger man when it comes to fight time, as he’s a natural 170lber rather than a blown-up 155lber as RDA is.
That means that – thrown in with Edwards’ excellent wrestling – he should be able to control where the fight goes, even if he can’t dominate in that area as Usman or Covington did. Maybe he won’t be able to take RDA down, but he probably won’t wind up on his back at any point either.
Secondly, he’s probably the best and most well-rounded striker Dos Anjos has fought since Tony Ferguson, who largely outworked him in their fight. Edwards won’t swarm and force RDA to retreat like Ferguson did, but he may well be able to avoid RDA’s own assaults and land heavy counters on him. He’s got a hell of a chin too, as we saw against Donald Cerrone.
Overall this is a tough one to pick and admittedly, Edwards is a similar fighter to Tarec Saffiedine, who was comfortably beaten by RDA. But I’m sick of underestimating the man from Erdington now and I just think this could be a coming-out party for him.
After all, I’m not sure RDA is an elite-level fighter in a single area at 170lbs – and Edwards beat one last time out in Nelson. It’s a winnable fight for RDA for sure but I think he gets outworked over five close-ish rounds.
The Pick: Edwards via unanimous decision
#2 Aleksei Oleinik vs. Walt Harris
This Heavyweight fight was scheduled for earlier in the year at one point before Aleksei Oleinik stepped in to face Alistair Overeem at Fight Night 149, a fight which saw his surprising run to the top of the division ended when ‘The Reem’ TKO’d him in the first round. So can Walt Harris – a man who’s lived on his potential for a while now – repeat the trick?
Personally, I’m not so sure he can. Sure, the difference in sheer athleticism here is huge – Harris is a massive guy even at Heavyweight, standing at 6’5” and weighing practically 260lbs.
And he throws pretty explosive strikes, as we saw when he easily took out Serghei Spivak in less than a minute in May. But he’s also 36 years old, and for all his explosiveness he also has a tendency to lull himself into plodding fights, as we saw when he fought Andrei Arlovski last December.
And sure, his loss to Fabricio Werdum might’ve happened the best part of two years ago, and Werdum is one of the best ground specialists in the division, but still – Harris simply looked miles out of his depth on the ground in that fight to the point where it was practically embarrassing for him.
Oleinik meanwhile is a slow, plodding figure in the cage, but he certainly hits hard and has sneakily good striking defence, too; he was actually landing the better shots on Overeem until the Dutchman managed to get his trademark Thai clinch and deliver some of his patented knees. And realistically, Harris isn’t anywhere near the striker that Overeem is.
‘The Boa Constrictor’ might be 42 years old right now and is clearly slowing down, but realistically he’s already slowed down and was never that quick, to begin with. He’s still tough as nails and is still one of the most deadly ground specialists in the division; he’s not as skilled in a pure sense as Werdum, but I’d actually suggest he’s better at catching his opponents off-guard in nasty positions – you don’t win fights with stuff like Ezekiel chokes and scarf holds if you’re not.
In the end, I think Harris might hurt Oleinik early on with something explosive, but I just don’t see him being good enough to put the Ukrainian away, and at some stage, Oleinik will get this fight to the ground. And when they do hit the ground, Harris will be done, another victim of one of the most surprising fighters in the UFC today.
The Pick: Oleinik via first round submission
#3 Greg Hardy vs. Juan Adams
The great Greg Hardy experiment – pushing the disgraced former NFL star as a major prospect at Heavyweight – should’ve been labelled as a bust after his first fight, a ridiculous DQ loss to Allen Crowder that saw him gas out, get taken down and then lose the plot before hitting Crowder with an illegal knee in the second round.
Somehow though – despite Hardy being roundly booed by every crowd he’s been in front of thus far – the UFC seems content to push through with it, as they booked him in a squash match with Dmitri Smoliakov in April, and sure enough Hardy delivered the goods with a quick TKO over an opponent who looked frankly terrified.
Adams, however, is another kind of beast entirely. He’s been talking up a fight with Hardy ever since he arrived in the UFC via Dana White’s Contender Series in 2018.
He won his debut fight by TKOing Chris De La Rocha in December, showing some surprising speed and dexterity for a guy who’s 6’5” and 265lbs. Sure, he lost his second fight to Arjan Bhullar, but in all honesty, there’s no shame in being outwrestled by an Olympic level wrestler, and even then there was an argument for Adams deserving the decision.
‘The Kraken’ is an excellent wrestler himself but most of all he’s a power-puncher; it doesn’t really matter to him whether he’s on the ground or on his feet, he’s throwing bombs. While we haven’t seen him hit by someone as powerful as Hardy yet, admittedly, he’s also shown a decent chin when he has been caught by a shot.
Hardy meanwhile has heavy hands but that’s about it right now; his wrestling game looked poor against Crowder and he offered nothing off his back, he blew his gas tank pretty early and his striking defence didn’t look all that good either. And what’s more, he appears to be a bully in the cage, someone who can be made to fold if the fight turns against him.
Hardy might surprise me and take out Adams in a rush; he’s an A-grade athlete after all and may pick up the game quicker than we think, but in reality he’s still a neophyte to MMA and it’s not like Adams is a bad athlete himself, and he’s also got much more experience than Hardy and is a hugely superior wrestler. The fact that he’s been so desperate for this fight should bode well for him, too.
In the end, I think Adams should win this one handily – the most likely outcome, in my opinion, is that he grounds ‘The Prince of War’ early on and simply pounds him out, perhaps getting a simple submission like a choke or a kimura if Hardy decides to give position up entirely. And fingers crossed, that’ll be the end of this experiment.
The Pick: Adams via first round TKO
#4 James Vick vs. Dan Hooker
This Lightweight clash could turn out to be the fight of the night, if both men’s previous fights are anything to go by. The last time we saw James Vick, he was losing a close fight to Paul Felder on the first ESPN show, while we haven’t seen Dan Hooker since he took a truly criminal beating from Edson Barboza last December.
The biggest reason this fight is so interesting to me is that while the 6’3” Vick usually has a huge height and reach advantage over his opponents at 155lbs, Hooker is equally lanky, standing at 6’0” and having a 75” reach to Vick’s 76”.
He’s also highly adept at using his range to his advantage, as he loves to throw the step-in knee ala Donald Cerrone and makes use of long, sweeping punches.
The New Zealand native is also no slouch on the ground; while his wrestling hasn’t looked great at times during his UFC career, his long arms make him dangerous with chokes, and we saw an example of that when he submitted Marc Diakiese back at UFC 219 in 2017.
Like Hooker, Vick has a dangerous ground game but he’s become more well-known for his striking, as he put together a run of 4 straight wins between 2017 and 2018, picking up two excellent knockouts in the process.
Worryingly though, like other tall fighters like Stefan Struve and Kendall Grove, I’m not really sure that Vick has learned exactly how to make the most of his range.
Sure, he’s got a stiff jab, but in that fight in February Felder found it all too easy to get past it to land shots, and Vick still has a dodgy tendency to lean back to avoid strikes rather than moving his head. And he’s also shown a susceptibility to leg kicks, something that Hooker – an adept kicker – must surely have noticed.
Throw in the fact that Vick’s chin has always been questionable – he was knocked silly by Beneil Dariush and Justin Gaethje for instance – and I’d have to say that this match appears to favor ‘The Hangman’.
The problem is that I’m still questioning how much Hooker can have recovered from the Barboza beating, and how much that fight took out of his career overall.
Simply put there are very few fighters who sustain the amount of punishment that Hooker took in that single fight across their whole careers. He did display a ludicrously tough chin, admittedly, but has that chin now been cracked? Vick might test that theory on Saturday and if he lands cleanly then we just don’t know how Hooker will react.
In the end, though, Hooker didn’t go down from shots to the chin – he was folded by a body shot – and that makes me think that his chin might still have some strength left in it. If that’s the case and this ends up being a striking battle, then I’m favoring him; his chin is far superior to Vick’s and ‘The Texecutioner’ still has a major tendency to get hit – and that was against smaller fighters than Hooker.
If Vick has really learned to use his range this is a winnable fight, but given he hasn’t managed it yet and he’s been around since 2012, I doubt he’s going to change any time soon. I think he walks into something nasty from Hooker midway through the fight and that’ll be that.
The Pick: Hooker via second round KO
#5 Francisco Trinaldo vs. Alexander Hernandez
This is a classic fight between a prospect and a true veteran at 155lbs, as Alexander Hernandez is one of the younger fighters in the upper echelon of the division at 26, while Francisco Trinaldo is inexplicably still seemingly improving at the age of 40.
The winner of this one should find themselves entrenched in the top ten, meaning it’s one of the bigger fights on this card.
Hernandez burst onto the scene as a late replacement in 2018, stunning everyone by knocking out Beneil Dariush in seconds. His second fight proved he was more than just a knockout artist, when he outgrappled noted BJJ whiz Olivier Aubin-Mercier, but then he bit off a little more than he could chew against Donald Cerrone, who outwrestled and outstruck him en route to a second-round TKO.
Hernandez clearly has a ton of potential and he’s a great athlete, but the Cerrone fight proved that he’s not unbeatable, and getting over that could be a bit of a headache for a young prospect. Trinaldo isn’t as good as Cerrone I wouldn’t say, but he’s almost as dangerous in every area, meaning this is a tricky test for Hernandez.
‘Massaranduba’ made his way into the UFC via the first season of TUF: Brazil and after somehow competing as a Middleweight on that show, he dropped to 155lbs and initially struggled, largely because his powerful grappling didn’t work against bigger, better grapplers like Michael Chiesa and Gleison Tibau.
He’s still a tremendously strong man of course, but his early UFC run taught him that there could be physically stronger opponents out there.
Eventually, then, he changed up his game a little and became a far more effective pressure-kickboxer, favoring the body kick and the overhand left as his weapons of choice.
And since then he’s been on a hell of a run; his only losses since 2014 have come to Kevin Lee and James Vick and he’s won 9 fights in that time, including victories over Paul Felder, Evan Dunham, Jim Miller, and Yancy Medeiros.
This one should come down to the grappling, I think. If Trinaldo can stop Hernandez from taking him down as Lee, Chiesa and Vick were able to do, then I think he wins.
Only Vick – who had a far longer reach than Hernandez – has really beaten Trinaldo on the feet, and outside of that, the Brazilian was able to outstrike vaunted kickboxers like Felder, Ross Pearson and Chad Laprise using his power, pressure and heavy strikes.
The fact that Hernandez wilted so easily under the pressure that Cerrone brought to him makes me lean towards Trinaldo here; while Lee and Chiesa both outgrappled him I’d say that both men are better than Hernandez on the ground and it’s not like ‘Massaranduba’ is clueless on the mat either – he’s a BJJ black belt who has submitted strong grapplers before such as Luis Buscape.
Hernandez might’ve outgrappled Aubin-Mercier, but then he doesn’t bring the kind of pressure game that Trinaldo does.
It likely won’t be easy for ‘Massaranduba’ but I think he’ll do enough over the three rounds – landing the heavier strikes and perhaps getting some takedowns using his brute strength – to take a decision over the youngster.
The Pick: Trinaldo via unanimous decision
#6 Andrei Arlovski vs. Ben Rothwell
It’s hard to believe that it’s now 11 years since these two first faced off under the ill-fated Affliction banner, but time evidently flies.
That fight saw Andrei Arlovski at the peak of his powers; a hugely athletic, surprisingly fast, hard-hitting Heavyweight who largely took the durable Ben Rothwell apart with his strikes, culminating in a third-round TKO. Since then, though, both men have been on long, winding paths and not necessarily good ones.
Arlovski’s questionable chin ended up catching up with him soon after the Rothwell win; he was knocked out by Fedor Emelianenko, Brett Rogers and Sergei Kharitonov, and most fans figured he was done.
A series of victories from 2011 to 2013 saw him surprisingly brought back to the UFC though, and he managed to inexplicably reel off 4 fights in a row to find himself in title contention.
A subsequent slide of 5 straight losses – including 3 TKO defeats – seemed to signal the real end of his career, but two wins then seemed to turn things around. He’s taken 4 defeats since then though, meaning this one should surely be the last chance saloon for him.
Arlovski is still relatively quick for a big man, but he’s not as sudden as he was in his prime, and his once-well rounded striking game has now seemingly been reduced to little more than a big right hand, with the odd takedown thrown in for good measure. Essentially, he’s been surviving using veteran wiles but little else in recent fights.
Rothwell meanwhile made his way to the UFC after that Affliction loss, and while he’s won 6 fights there – including impressive KOs of Alistair Overeem and Brendan Schaub and a wild submission of Josh Barnett – he’s also looked terrible at times, and has been banned twice for PED abuse.
At times he appears to be an excellent striker; he always has hit extremely hard, but he can be surprisingly fast with his combinations and is a ruthless finisher too.
But faced with better strikers he’s also looked horribly plodding and has a tendency to simply lumber forward and take punches in an attempt to land his own. That tendency led him to his most recent loss against Blagoy Ivanov, a slow-paced fight that didn’t really make either man look impressive.
A striker like Arlovski in his prime would simply eat this slower, plodding fighter for breakfast, but given Andrei’s deterioration in recent years, I find it hard to imagine that he could wing enough varied punches to keep Rothwell at bay without taking a big shot in response.
Rothwell is no world-beater but he’s definitely as good as the likes of Augusto Sakai and Shamil Abdurakhimov, both of whom recently defeated Arlovski. And given that Rothwell hits harder than both, well, you do the math.
The Pick: Rothwell via first round KO
#7 The Prelims: ESPN card
Saturday’s show appears to be broadcast completely on the ESPN network, meaning fans won’t need to change channel at all to watch the whole thing start to finish – if they’re brave enough that is!
At the top of the pile is a Featherweight clash between Alex Caceres and Steven Peterson. Caceres – AKA Bruce Leeroy – is horribly inconsistent and has a tendency to fight to the level of his opponent, but Peterson hasn’t shown much more than a rock-hard chin in his UFC run, and he was comfortably beaten by a rangy fighter similar to Caceres in Luis Pena a few months ago. Caceres via decision is my pick here.
At Bantamweight, former title challenger Raquel Pennington returns to face Irene Aldana, who recently submitted Bethe Correia and will be looking to break into the upper echelon of the division.
This should come down I think to whether Pennington can impose herself on the Mexican physically – we saw Aldana bullied by Katlyn Chookagian and Leslie Smith, for instance – but I worry about the amount of damage Pennington has taken in her career now so I’m going with the mild upset and taking Aldana to strike her way to a decision.
Light-Heavyweights Sam Alvey and Klidson Abreu clash with the Brazilian looking for his first UFC win. Basically, it depends on whether Abreu can avoid Alvey’s one big punch – the counter right hook – as ‘Smilin Sam’ is one of the most one-dimensional fighters in the UFC, but he’s also highly effective with that technique.
I may well be underrating Abreu in this fight, but he came forward a lot swinging in his debut fight and that usually isn’t the way to beat Alvey. Alvey by KO is my pick.
At Flyweight, Roxanne Modafferi faces Jennifer Maia, and the idea that the winner could be in line to challenge Valentina Shevchenko isn’t very far-fetched.
Modafferi did excellently to ground and defeat Antonina Shevchenko in her last fight, but she’s still a lower-level athlete and I worry for her here as Maia is not only an excellent striker, but also a venomous grappler. Modafferi will put up a good fight but I think Maia TKO’s her before this one is out.
Bantamweights Ray Borg and Gabriel Silva clash here, with the unbeaten Silva – who fights out of the vaunted Team Nogueira – making his UFC debut. A striker by trade, Silva is at least bigger than the former Flyweight Borg, but he lacks the experience that ‘The Tazmexican Devil’ brings to the table.
If Silva can stop the takedown then he could win this fight, but I think Borg probably has enough wrestling in his pocket to ground him for a decision, as his ground game is somewhat untested.
Also at Bantamweight, Mario Bautista faces Jin Soo Son – a protégé of the Korean Zombie who showed some ludicrous toughness to survive a beatdown from Petr Yan in the Russian’s second UFC outing.
Based on that sheer toughness I’m taking him here – it’s a bit of a guess but Bautista didn’t show a lot in his UFC debut and has less experience, too. I’ll take Son by decision.
Finally, it’s another Bantamweight fight, as Domingo Pilarte takes on Felipe Colares. Pilarte looked excellent on the Contender Series, choking out the always-tough Vince Morales, and that alone is enough to make me pick him here – Colares showed very little in his UFC debut against Geraldo de Freitas and he’s also giving up some serious range to the 6’0” Pilarte, something he isn’t used to. I’ll take Pilarte via decision.
