UFC 251 was a decent event. We had three title fights for the featherweight, bantamweight and welterweight championships with all three of those fights having an interesting dynamic to them. Max Holloway definitely should’ve beaten Volkanovski. I had that fight 3-2. Yan showed his quality in a fight in which he dominated against legend Jose Aldo. And Usman defeated Masvidal but ‘Gamebred’ displayed some positives in terms of his wrestling against the champion. However, I think the most interesting news to come out of UFC 251 comes from the two female fights on the main card.
Namajunas vs Andrade was incredible and I’d love to see a trilogy fight between those two one day, hopefully, if the situation presents itself, for the title. Yet, that strawweight division is stacked so we’ll have to wait and see if Namajunas will fight Zhang next or if we’ll see Joanna Jedrzejczyk get a rematch for the Strawweight belt. Nevertheless, the Women’s strawweight division is really heating up and I can’t wait to find out what will happen in the next couple of months in the division.
We also got Paige VanZant vs Amanda Ribas a fight in which we all know who was going to win. In my predictions, I predicted that Ribas would dominate VanZant and win by submission and that’s exactly what she did. VanZant just isn’t good enough and I don’t think she’s committed to MMA. Watching her fight on the ground against Ribas was hard to watch and it looked like Ribas barely broke a sweat.
VanZant is also a model and with over 2.6 million Instagram followers, I personally think she should focus on that. Dana White also took a jab a VanZant after the loss saying, she ‘Got smoked.’ I think her time in the octagon is done. She’s a talented kickboxer but if she doesn’t work on her grappling and wrestling then she going to continue to lose fights against talented fighters. If you were to look at VanZant’s wins, you’d notice her wins all come against women with a 50/50 record or negative record. I have the utmost respect for ’12 gauge’ for even stepping in the octagon but if she’s going to be great, she’s got to focus solely on MMA.
Anyways, over the next month leading up to UFC 252 we’ve got some big fights such as Kattar vs Ige, Figueiredo vs Benavidez 2, Kelvin Gastelum returns after his poor 2019 against Hermansson and Robert Whittaker returning after losing his middleweight title to face off against Darren Till. I’m looking forward to the end of July!
TheWrestlingFallacy 