MORNING KOMBAT WITH LUKE THOMAS AND BRIAN CAMPBELL - Charles Oliveira and Aljamain Sterling Have Changed MMA Wrestling | Extra Credit Ep. 23

Episode Date: June 28, 2022

Luke Thomas is back with Episode 23 of Morning Kombat Extra Credit to break down his five favorite fights from the weekend. Luke breaks down his favorite fights from UFC Vegas 57 and Bellator 282. (1:50) - Thiago Moises vs. Christos Giagos (9:25) - Chris Curtis vs. Rodolfo Vieira (16:20) - Carlos Ulberg vs. Tafon Nchukwi (20:40) - Alexander Shabliy vs. Brent Primus (26:35) - Abdoul Abdouraguimov vs. Karl Amoussou Morning Kombat’ is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Castbox, Google Podcasts, Bullhorn and wherever else you listen to podcasts.    For more Combat Sports coverage subscribe here: youtube.com/MorningKombat   Follow our hosts on Twitter: @BCampbellCBS, @lthomasnews, @MorningKombat    For Morning Kombat gear visit:morning kombat.store   Follow our hosts on Instagram: @BrianCampbell, @lukethomasnews, @MorningKombat Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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It is time for a little extra credit. Morning Combat Extra Credit, episode 23, I believe. Hello, everyone. I am one half of your regular Morning Combat duo. My name is Luke Thomas. I'll be the host of this program. Thank you very much. Of course, I'm joined by Brian Campbell on regular Morning Combat.

This is where we get to some of the fights that we didn't get a chance to get to on Big MK, which I recommend that you watch as well, but I thank you for joining me. So, if you are here on YouTube, thumbs up on the video, hit subscribe. If you are listening on a podcast platform, give us a nice review. We always appreciate that. Today on the docket, three events we're going to talk about. Really two, and then I'm going to mention one fight from another organization. We're going to go over UFC Vegas 57 from the weekend. We're going to go over Bellator 282 from the weekend.

And I'm going to give a bit of a brief nod to Aries FC 7, which was on the weekend as well over in France. Just one fight on that. Now, the way I like to do this program is I like to pick the top five fights of the weekend that I like or cared about the most. These may not be your top 5. You may have a very different one. If you do, leave a comment below. What were the 5 fights that you cared about the most? Or what was a fight that maybe I didn't get to that you liked?

Would love to see it in the comments. So let me know there. But these will be my 5. And I'm actually going to go not 5 to 1. I'll go 1 to 5. Then I'll give a little bit of an honorable mention there at the end. I could go for much longer, obviously. There was a lot of sort of content that we just didn't get a chance to get to on regular MK,

and even this one, we could go up and down the UFC court if you wanted, but that's really not what I want to do today. All right, without that going on any longer, let's get to my top five fights of the weekend. We start with number one, again, for me. And of course, if you don't know where this podcast works, this will be like not just the stuff we didn't get to on MK but usually for the UFC and Bellator stuff non-main event non-co-main event stuff with that preamble out of the way number one for me I'm going to start with Tiago Moises taking on Christos Giagos this was at UFC Vegas 57 it was on the main card

and I really wasn't sure why they were going to put it there. Moises is talented. Uh, Giagos has been, I think, significantly improved of late, but the reason why I ended up putting it here, despite not misgivings, but I didn't really think a whole lot about it pre-fight, was the way in which Moises won. Now, not just the rear naked choke by which he won, but I also want to talk about something else that I saw. He did something in this fight, by far not the only one, but now that he is doing it, and again, Moises is a very talented fighter, but what I mean to say is the guys I'd previously seen doing it were literally both champions, which isn't to say that only champions have been doing it. I'm just trying to point out, usually what happens in MMA is sometimes you'll see a groundswell of technique bubble up from the

regional scene, not to the UFC, but you just kind of, it has a weird entry, just kind of spreads normally. But there's a lot of techniques that spread top down. For example, Anderson Silva's front kick to the face. You had seen this in other kinds of striking martial arts, but when he did in the UFC the first time, that was a bit of a, oh, we could maybe try that. And now you're beginning to see a lot, you actually saw a lot of front kick KOs after that. And they had different setups, they came from different styles of fighters, blah, blah, blah.

But after he did it, the prevalence of them became much more well-known. Tiago Moises did something in this fight that really I wanted to bring attention to. Namely, it's something I've been talking about. It's something I specifically talked about in the Aljamain Sterling versus Peter Jan fight, which is creating back exposure. One of the ways that a takedown is not defined, but a good way to think about it, is you have to turn their hips over. Right?

So think about that rationally. If their hips are still facing the mat, did you really finish the double leg? You probably didn't. If you want to finish the double leg, you have to kind of level change, penetration step, then you have to cut the corner, and then you want to have them flat on their back. That would be an ideal scenario, right? So now their hips are not facing the mat, their hips are facing the ceiling. You have turned their hips over. But that's a lot of work. It's hard to get a double leg on someone, and especially hard to get a double leg now in MMA, where the wrestling, offensive and defensive, is as good as it is. So what I have noticed is the people, the fighters, who can wrestle pretty well,

or really well, depending on it. They don't have to be expert wrestlers, but they have good wrestling, let's say. And, and this is the key, good grappling. This is what they're doing. They are going for a takedown a lot of times off a single leg, although not exclusively, but a lot of times off a single leg. And one of the main ways in which you can push away from a single leg is you can post on the shoulder, you can turn away so you can kick your leg out, right? You, I mean, there's more ways to get out of it than just that, but you have seen people turn away, pull their leg out so they can go in the opposite

direction and get away. But what they're doing is they are, the fighters going for the takedown, they're just trying to hold on long enough or pull up on the back of the leg long enough to get the person's hips not to turn over their hips can still face the mat but to plant their hands uh habib did something like this to just engage although he had him down to his knees so that's a little bit different but here you're seeing somebody trying to escape a single leg they don't get their hips turned over but they're trying to literally get away in this case giagos is trying to get away from mois, but in the process of turning away from Moises and moving away, he creates back exposure. From that, Moises is able to immediately take his back.

This is becoming a technique I'm seeing more and more of. Charles Oliveira, another good example of someone who does this, who I would say has good wrestling and obviously phenomenal jiu-jitsu grappling, right? He goes for a takedown off and off a single leg. They turn away to escape, get away. They are in the course of escaping, tripping, fumbling, trying to catch their base on their hands. And that leaves just enough time for the person who has maybe held on to one of the legs or lifted the leg, some kind of way to slow or forced their hands to the mat to then hop onto the back. So that's the first thing I noticed. I really want you guys going

forward, if you're paying attention, wait for someone to put their hands on the mat off of escaping a single leg and see if the other person takes the back. I have a feeling this is going to become very common. It's actually not easy to do. In fact, you may even argue that's a little bit more complicated to teach from scratch than it would be for a double leg. And that's probably true. But if I was trying to teach a jiu-jitsu black belt how to do a takedown and a double leg wasn't immediately available to me,

boy, it seems like this might be a great option. So that was one thing I noticed in this fight that really caught my attention. Not just he's the first one, but it's beginning to spread. The other thing that I noticed was, of course, the way in which he finished the rear naked choke itself. He had it one-handed, and he didn't have a bicep grip or the traditional gable grip. I don't know if you can do a C grip from a rear naked choke. I suppose you could, yeah, because you can actually grab your own glove. But the two most common ways you see a rear naked choke finished is high on the bicep.

I can't do it because I'm wrapping my microphone, but it's not low on the bicep. It's high on the bicep, and then the hand comes in front, or you can get palm to palm. You can get a gable grip. And of course, there's all kinds of details about where your squeeze is, where your elbow is, where the hands are. I'm not going to get into that, but those are the two main grips. He didn't have that. What he had was the one arm through, and then he reaches across with the other hand to grab the elbow, and then he pulls the elbow across. Now, someone asked me, how much of a squeeze do you have to have to have

a one-armed rear naked choke? By training with this particular experience, having someone who had a one-armed and the other hand was fighting and then the choke was tight, to me it wasn't so much a squeeze issue. You can see Rick Story, go back on UFC Fight Pass and watch Rick Story fighting Brian Foster, and you'll see him finish Brian Foster with a head and arm triangle inside Brian Foster's guard. That, ladies and gentlemen, is Herculean strength. I just cannot explain to you how strong you have to be to do something like that. This is not exactly that. Most of the time I've ever dealt with someone doing that. And you should consult someone who knows a lot more about Jiu-Jitsu than I do.

But in my limited experience with that, it was just someone who had a real good knack for finding the groove where the arm needed to be to really accomplish that choke. But of course, you don't have to get it even all that way. You have to get it tight with the choking arm. But grabbing the elbow across, it's really nifty because I don't think a lot of folks are expecting it. It doesn't seem like something that would be all that hard to do in a hand fighting sequence, especially if they're really sort of focused on the hand creeping up. And a lot of times they'll grab the trap behind the neck to pull, you know, that kind of a thing.

So it was an unusual finish by grabbing the elbow and bringing it across, and the takedown itself, single leg off the escape, creating back exposure. Now the back is facing the ceiling. Before, on a real takedown, on a double leg, you want their hips to turn over, you want their hips to face the ceiling. Now by creating back exposure, you just want their back facing the ceiling with their weight planted to give you a structure to essentially mount, climb, and that's what he did. So, I love the takedown itself, or at least the, if you want to call it a takedown, I loved the

path to the back, and I loved the path to the finish itself. That was really nice from Tiago Moises. Good job by him. My second favorite fight from the weekend. How about Action Man? Chris Curtis taking on Adolfo Vieira. This was, again, at UFC Vegas 57. I believe this opened the main card on the event. A couple of reasons why I wanted to talk about this one. The first one I would say is, you know, Adolfo Vieira, if you're not familiar with his career in jujitsu, I don't have his medals here in front of me, but you should basically believe me when I told you he has more or less won everything of note and probably then some. I remember, I think it was at Copa Podio when he beat Leandro Lowe. This was a gi match, and I watched it with a buddy of mine. Shouts to Seth Smith over at Upstream BJJ in Richmond,

Virginia. Seth is a wealth of knowledge and has really helped me a lot in understanding sport jiu-jitsu. And he walked me through all the various steps. The guy doesn't just look like he is carved out of stone. He is an absolute technician in the most minute details of sport jiu-jitsu. And there was one other thing about his sport jiu-jitsu game that made him somewhat unique. Namely, he didn't have like judo levels for judo competition, but he had good judo relative to his jiu-jitsu peers. You would see him do a lot of throws,

trips, typically in the Gi, obviously, although he does have significant achievements in no Gi as well, just to be clear. But most of those I'd seen were from no-gi. They don't appear to be at all part of his MMA game, which makes me wonder if they were really just a function of the grips from the gi itself. I've long believed that there should be some other MMA promotion out there that allows people to use gis because the amount of actual new submissions and new techniques you could use by function of the gi would make it a lot better. That's a topic for a different time. But the thing that really blew my mind on this one was

he was a guy who could, yes, if Adolfo Vieira needed to pull guard in jiu-jitsu, he obviously could, but he did a lot of great takedowns and getting on top. He could be a mobile passer if he needed to, but he was really a bit of a grinder, a top-heavy kind of guy, a pressure passer. That was really what he was kind of known for at the time. You just don't, and this never got there because Chris Curtis had great takedown defense. How do you know he had great takedown defense? Obviously, he defended all of them. I think it was 20-plus that he had defended, but just go back and look at it. You can see Hidalgo coming in on one line, and Chris Curtis was good at getting at a perpendicular angle with his hips to drive, obviously, the head, shoulders down, head away from Hidalgo Vieira.

So he was really not giving him anything to work with there. It was a great job by him. I want to be very clear about that. I don't want to just say this is a function of what Vieira did or didn't do. Chris Curtis made him suffer in this way. But it's really interesting to me that the guy in sports jiu-jitsu had a pretty formidable takedown game that just doesn't appear to be at all part of his jiu-jitsu game and takedown game in modern MMA. And it sort of reminded me of one thing. A, I wanted to make this point. B, in a different era, you should know

that Adolfo Vieira would have absolutely run through MMA. If he had had the skills he has now, and granted, some of the stuff he had was a function of modern jiu-jitsu, like baron bolos or whatever, but if he had competed in a different era, there isn't a doubt in my mind he would have been a UFC champion. His jiu-jitsu is that good. There is a big bifurcation that has been happening for a while, obviously, but it's really happening now. You can see, jiu-jitsu used to be not only a good base for MMA, it used to be the base for MMA. Then it became a good one. Now, I'm not really sure how to classify it. Obviously, it's valuable to have those skills. We just talked about Tiago Moises defeating Christos Kiagos, but there is a

real limit to it. And it also tells you, MMA has become, it's still obviously mixed martial arts, but it has become much more of a striking sport by virtue of some of the rules as well. But also because jiu-jitsu has gone off in a direction. I don't want to dissuade anyone from training. Like if you need it for self-defense, if you need it for that kind of a thing, it would still be incredibly valuable to you. Plus the cardiovascular conditioning, plus the community. Like there might be a lot of great reasons to still do jiu-jitsu. And of course, I'm not telling fighters not to train jiu-jitsu.

Again, you need it. If you don't have it, you're going to suffer. All of these things are valuable, but the relative degree to which it is valuable, I do think has declined, and declined somewhat substantially. This is a guy, again, who would have been an absolute nightmare a generation of fighters ago, and now he couldn't get a takedown

on a guy who got cut from the contender series. Now, again, I don't think Chris Curtis should have been cut from the contender series. I had him on my SiriusXM radio show at the time. And it was something that really kind of bothered me, but neither here nor there, he couldn't get anything on there. There's a bifurcation between how applicable jujitsu is in sport jujitsu and how applicable it is in MMA, there's always been a gap. The gap has widened significantly, and I think it's going to continue to widen. And so for a guy like Adolfo Vieira, who was known, it wasn't like this was a guard, like a, you know, there's a lot of guys that get flagged for the double guard pull. They're just guard pullers all the time.

I'm not going to say Adolfo Vieira never pulled guard. He did. But this was a guy who has, I mean, phenomenal takedowns in sport jiu-jitsu, gi and no-gi. And the way it works in modern MMA, for him, and especially in this fight, it's been a rough go. The other part to me that was kind of interesting was Habib Nurmagomedov has a study. Shouts to BJJ Fanatics, but he has a study on there. And it was really something that caught my attention. Namely, the tape would speak to this, but he kind of articulated it more forcefully. He loves the single leg.

All the Nurmagomedovs. You saw Umar Nurmagomedov on this card. He was the single leg to perfection as well. But Habib loves the single leg. And there's a reason why. When they have their base spread, let's say, against the fence, they've got a foot in front of them and a foot behind them as you're defending the takedown. Both your feet on the ground. You have the fence there as well.

You know, your balance, it's spread a little bit, but it's right underneath you. But if you have a single leg, now you have to balance on that leg. And the key there is not just picking up the leg, it's putting the opponent in motion. You grab the leg and then you push him backwards. You pull him to you, you run him in a direction, then you run him the opposite direction and vice versa. You play with space. You force them to hop on it. You kick out the post leg. What was really strange to me in this fight was that Vieira was able to get the single leg. That was nice. Get Curtis back to the fence.

Also nice. But he never really made him balance and work through motion to keep it. I was surprised by that. Again, you'd be like, oh, he didn't have the same takedown level as Habib. Okay, nobody does, basically. That's hardly a crime. But I guess I'm just sort of pointing out, look in the future and see when someone grabs a single leg how much work they do to make them balance through motion on it. And I think that's going to tell you who's better at using the single leg

versus not. A big feature here was Vieira was able to get two positions that were like halfway to the takedown, but the rest of it required motion. It required all those extra parts, kicking up the post leg, direction changes, and it just didn't seem to be there at all. Very surprising. All right, we stay with UFC Vegas 57, and we go to Carlos Olberg, one of City Kickboxing's finest, taking on Tufan and Chukwi. I hope I'm not saying that too incorrectly. Tufan and Chukwi are here not too far from where I live. He's from Camp Springs, Maryland, just outside the city of D.C.

This was an interesting one. I was a little surprised it went as quickly as it did, but you got to give credit to Olberg. He looked to be, first of all, he always is in pretty good condition that didn't change here at all. How did he do it? Uh, basically what happened was he was constantly faking, constantly fainting. All of those city kickboxing guys, as you well know, are very good at that. And he faked like he was going low to the body, and you can see Tufan had a real high guard. What you can see him do is bring down his right hand, either for a circle or a down parry. But really, what was happening was he was biting on the feint. He was biting on it. Because what Olberg ends up doing is, like he's going to go low,

there comes the right hand parry. And instead instead he just brings it over the top landed clean and Chukwui didn't see it coming at all it rocked him he Olberg follows up and finishes him off but what aids that was not just I mean by the way that's just great work from Carlos Olberg I mean very very sharp work from him so that's a great thing that he did I want to be very clear about that but the part that was also aided by it was that style that he has, right? Where he kind of hangs that hand out in front of him, almost like he's trying to cast the spell with his lead hand. Because you can't quite get a timing on it because sometimes it's up here. Sometimes he'll lower it a little bit more. Sometimes he'll put a fake and a feint behind it. He'll put a step feint. He'll put a shoulder

feint. He'll put a foot feint behind it. And then the hand is moving. So it gives him the option where if it's going up here, he can time a jab. He can lower it and go to the body. Right? He had also been jabbing to the body a little bit before that. So by the time he goes to fake to the body, or to feint rather in this particular case, you get the bite from Enchukwu, and then he just comes over the top and drills him. The commentary team didn't mention it.

I wasn't really sure why. They had talked about the type of punch that it was, and they were right. It wasn't like a full hook, and it wasn't a jab. It was a fake low, or fake like you're going to go low, and then come up to the top. So the trajectory is not that wide, and of course the knuckles are turned over.

They got that part right, no doubt about it. But I was a little bit surprised they didn't talk about the fake and the feint, the body work he'd been doing before, how that lead hand plays into it, and then the right hand parry. Go back and watch the fight. Watch how hard Ntukwe bites on that feint. The hand comes way down, so it left it wide open. This is what I always talk about when I say pay attention. Very, very elite fighters. Now, this is less true in MMA than it is in boxing. But in boxing, pay attention to how many times you ever see, like, a really, really good fighter get hit clean. Especially to the face.

Pay attention to the... I mean, okay, from his last fight with Bivol, okay, it's not so much. But, like, go watch the Billy Joe Saunders fight. Go even watch the Caleb Plant fight. Go watch any of Canelo's more recent fights where he's really coming to his own, especially in the weight class where I think he belongs, 160, 168. Pay attention to how many times Canelo gets hit real clean in the face. It's very rare.

Very rare. It happens. It's boxing. It happens. But you don't see really good boxers get hit clean all that often. And when you do, the results are usually quite dramatic, right? You see someone get dropped really bad. You can see someone get put out with one shot. They just don't get hit clean that often. Even if it lands, they usually kind of roll with it or

whatever. Pay attention how many times you've ever seen Canelo more recently, again, outside of the Bivol fight, get hit clean. It's just very rare. In MMA, this is less true because the gloves are smaller and all that kind of stuff. But in general, I do really want you to understand it is extremely, extremely rare to see, or not rare, it's difficult to hit a very good fighter clean. It's very difficult. You have to make them believe that they have to transfer their defense for a very important purpose. And that's not easy to do. And he did it. And he did it. Like, Carlos Ulberg has had up and down moments in the octagon, no doubt about it. But his up moments are real nice. This was a really good one. This was a really good one. Short work. I think it was a minute and some change. And it was

all set up off that style that he's got, the body work, the fakes, the feints, goes low, and popped him high. That was good work. All right. We go to one fight that I really wanted to get to here a little bit. Bellator 282. It was on the prelim card. You might have missed it. Brent Primus is a former Bellator lightweight champion. You might remember him as the guy that beat Michael Chandler at Bellator NYC. They had a rematch, which Chandler was able to kind of grind out a win.

But Brent Primus is good. He's very good. And he didn't have much for Alex Chablis. I think that's how you say his name. Almost like a cheap wine. Chablis. I think that's how you say his name, almost like a cheap wine. Chablis is talented. And the story of this fight was the counterboxing and the better foot positioning. This was a really, really important fight to understand balance and footwork.

Why do I say that? In the first round, go back and look at the face of Brent Primus. He gets hit a lot to his left side. What was happening was Chablis was just timing a right over the top of the aggressive attacks, the aggressive jabs from Brent Primus. And so he was getting hit over the top. Now there was some stance switching going on from Chablis. He was actually able to switch it up to a left hook later in the first round. But what you should understand about the first round was that Brent Prima started out hot, the fight kind of settled, and then the counterboxing, the counter striking of Chablis really was the big difference there. It wasn't hugely dramatic, but it definitely was his round

at that point. Second round, what I really want you to pay attention to is the finishing sequence. And this is all available on YouTube. You don't even have to have a Fight Pass account or an ESPN Plus account. This is all free on YouTube. Go back and look at this, and I want you to note how the ending happens. Yes, it's a left hook, but the left hook is not the story. The story is that Primus from very far away lunges in with a huge combination. One, that's somewhat telegraphed. I mean, obviously Brent Primus is very athletic. But a guy like Chablis, it's not a question of whether or not Brent Primus could beat your ass or mine.

Yes, of course he could. It's against a guy who's very skilled, who he's up against. Can you do those kinds of things and get away with it? And quite obviously, he could not. He lunges in from very, very far away. And what ends up happening with that is, one, his head stays in the center.

That's the one part. So at the end, most of the stuff that he was actually attempting and even Chablis was attempting, a lot of it did not land. Although Chablis was actually able to slip off the initial attack and then come over and around. But it was finally the left hook that finished. So the head was on the center

line. Again, slip encounter. We've talked about this with Adrian Yanez already, how big and important that is. But that's really not what I want you to pay attention to. What really kind of matters in this story is the big difference. The big difference is he lunges in so far that he kind of, by the time he gets to the position where he wants to be, his weight has to be planted. Think about if you jumped a small spot.

You could probably jump back pretty easily. If you jumped a small spot, you could jump to your left. If you jumped a little bit in front, you could jump to your right. It still keeps you mobile. You're not lunging. But if you jump, let's say, as far as you can from your back foot to your front foot, your front foot is going to have to catch and hold for you to stabilize for a second. That's partly, by the way, why his head stays where it stays. It's hard to maneuver yourself in and out or at angles if your weight is so heavily planted from lunging that far out. That's why they tell you not to lunge. It's not just that it can be telegraphed and you can see it because it's quite literally further away, right? It's easy to see something coming when it's further away. But the other part is it affects your balance. It affects your ability to move.

And you actually see Chablis slide back when he lands the left hook. So that's one part of the story. But then right after that, Chablis hits him with the left hook, and that was big enough. And so now Premis is in trouble. But Chablis finishes him off by double jabbing his way into range. He double jabs, cross, and I think he finished him off with a hook. That was the big difference. Rather than Chablis doing what Primus did,

which was kind of not jumping, but leaping very far away. Again, I'm saying the word jump. He did not jump. Stepping very far away, a big step in one fell swoop. Instead, Chablis kind of kept his balance, slides in the pocket, and when he wants to make that forward pressure, bop, bop. What does a double jab allow you to do? It allows you to set up other punches that might come behind it. It allows you to set up an angle change. Another thing it allows you to do is if you're having trouble getting into range, the double jab helps set that up because you can bring your feet behind the initial jab and then you can throw on the second, behind the second one, obviously. It allows you to cheat the steps. It allows you to cheat the distance. And that's what Chablis did. So by the time he was landing punches, he had all of his weight under him.

That's the other part. Yes, you can throw as you take a big step and you can land. Maybe the first punch will be there. But you're not going to have super efficient mechanics under you to really get your weight under you, to sit down on your punches, to really go. That was the big story here. Chablis in the first round kind of countering over the top, some stance switching. But in the end, That was the big story here. Chablis in the first round, kind of countering over the top, some stance switching, but in the end, it was the footwork, it was the balance,

and it was aided by better positioning. Pay attention when you watch fights going forward. Who has their balance under him? I'll tell you a good example of this, even though he's moving around so much. He's fighting this weekend at UFC 276, the champion, Israel Adesanya. Bro, he's got phenomenal balance. Phenomenal balance. Jose Aldo, phenomenal balance. Max Holloway, phenomenal balance. Alexander Volkanovsky, just crazy balance. Right? Because they bring their feet with them. They bring everything together. And that's not easy to do, man. It sounds like I'm here like, oh, I could do better. I could not do better. I could do far worse. But I'm just saying, if someone gets knocked out, something went wrong.

Something happened, and it's worth examining. I think it went wrong for him by virtue of the fact that I don't think there was enough feints in the first round. I will say that Primus had better feints in the second. But the distance management and not bringing everything behind him, it caused everything to get kind of screwed up afterwards. And Chablis just read it like a book and was able to do it a little bit better in the end. Solid, solid win by him. And then last but not least, this went under the radar, I think, by most American audiences, by a lot of MMA fans. I want to tell you a name. Someone told me to look out for him, so I decided to do it, and I was very impressed. His name is Abdul.

I'm going to have to read it here because it's still kind of a strange name to Americanize. Abdul Abduragimov. He does speak English, by the way, because they interviewed him after he won in the main event of Ares FC7. If you're asking who's the next European prospect, he might be it. He might be it. Someone told me about him, so I decided to check him out. This is not me figuring it out on my own. I am merely repeating to you a recommendation, but I did double check the recommendation, and it proved fruitful. Abdul Abduragimov fought Karl Amosu. You guys might remember Amosu if you watched Bellator back in the

Bjorn Rebny days. I think they called him Psycho. I think it was his actual name. Kind of a French MMA legend. Had a judo background, actually, by the way. So he does have good judo. He has like sort of, you know, you know how the judo guys have sort of like different kind of ground games, but similar kind of ground games? He's kind of like that.

But, you know, Karl Amosu, he's been in the game a while. I mean, he's long in the tooth. But Abdul Abduragimov looked like he knew exactly what to do. This dude is completely more than UFC ready. He's about 170 pounds. He looks to be the genuine article. Now, how far can he go? I mean, he hasn't fought in the UFC yet, so let's all pump the brakes. You should watch this fight. It's on Fight Pass. It was the main event over the weekend. And basically, Abduragimov gets Karl Amosu back to the fence, takes him down off a body lock on the opposite direction while blocking him.

Gets him to half guard. Takes his time with the ground and pound. And at the end of the first round, goes on a blitz that left Amosu absolutely hanging on for dear life. The bell sounds and then he goes to the corner and then the doctor's like, nah, I've seen enough. Check out this dude, Abdul Abduragimov. He is almost certainly... If UFC doesn't sign him, Bellator will. And if Bellator

doesn't sign him, one will. It is a matter of time before he is in the Ultimate Fighting Championship or a top-level promotion. He is, as I mentioned, fully ready. We didn't get the full sense of his game, but you could really just kind of tell that

he had... Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. You know, he just made smart, almost veteran-like decisions, if that makes any sense. Like, you know, you don't realize how green someone is until you see them go through the paces of a full fight or even a full round against someone, you know, sort of a little bit more established. And you have to see what choices that they make. And he made all of the very best choices. And then when you see his takedown ability, it was smooth.

And his ground and pound and top level positioning, I'm not going to call it perfect, but very, very, very solid. And then the ground and pound at the end, that blitz, knowing that the bell is coming. I'm not talking the last 10 seconds. I'm talking like the last 30. He goes on this unreal buzzsaw of a ground-and-pound blitz and put Karl Amesu away.

I'll say it one more time. Abdul Abduragimov, and it's spelled a little bit strangely, but it's Ares, A-R-E-S-F-C-7. You got to check this dude out. He looks like he is on his way to the Ultimate Fighting Championship and could be another exciting addition to that welterweight group that we've already seen. Now, is he going to be a top-level contender? One never knows, but you've already got Shavkat Rachmaninoff, who did what he did over the weekend. You've got, obviously, Sean Brady there. You've got

Hamzat Shumayev and some other ones as well. We'll see. We'll see, but you might be adding Abdur Raghimov to that list as well. He's an interesting fighter. My honorable mentions for the week, just a few of them. We'll go through these very quickly. Mario Bautista defeating Brian Kelleher via rear naked choke. That one surprised me. Bautista's very, very good, but I have a lot of respect for Kelleher. Shouts to him because, obviously, he's the only fighter who's ever sitting on the MMA beat panel.

I do think Kelleher is talented, but he tends to have some uneven performances, which, again, you're fighting tough guys. They're fighting you, too. You know, it's not always going to go your way. But when he's on, he's on, you know. This just wasn't his night. It was a good job by Bautista, and the choke was nasty, too. And the hand fighting was great to get there, or at least the final slide of the choke.

Back to Bellator, Anatoly Tokov defeating Muhammad Abdullah. Again, this was again Bellator 282. This was on the prelim card. I complained about this a little bit on regular MK that like this guy is probably the next one to get a title shot and he was fighting on the prelim card, which I understand. Like, you know, you only want to put on four fights. You have two from the Grand Prix, you have the main event, and then Brendan Ward kind of is the Connecticut guy. The fights were in Connecticut. He's going to sell more tickets. He's going to be an all-action fighter. You would understand why you would want him on the main card,

but it's just like you couldn't put Tokov on another card that he could have been on the main card of because I don't know that they're going to give him a title shot, but I don't know who the hell it would be in that organization that has a better resume to this point to deserve one. Anyway, Abdullah gets backed up, slips on a, I think it was like a front kick. And, you know, he tries to sit up and then turn. And it's like, the instant that he turns, the instant that he turns, Tokov took his back like it was nothing. And then from there, just pounded him out, like literally just went to work on him. I don't think

he even went for any wrist rides. He just punched the whole time so sort of a lesson there like if you fall you know there might be a case at times let's say at times to actually stay on your back and fight from guard rather than trying to turn and escape and again back exposure this was a different way of getting back exposure. This was kind of just luck a little bit. But once he saw back exposure, then he had the presence of mind to then finish it off. No luck involved there. Great job by Anatoly Tokov. And then last but not least, Kat Zingano at Bellator 282 defeating Pam Sorensen. She appeared to be injured at the end of it, which was not great. But this was actually one of Zingano's

better performances recently. I thought Sorensen might be, you know, Sorensen's good in Victor Champ, but Zingano was able to control the distance, control the takedown, control the grappling exchanges, had good ground-and-pound the whole time, and Sorensen really couldn't do much to stop it in this particular fight. So I don't know exactly what happened with Zingano. I don't know exactly how injured she is, but it is worth saying, putting that aside just for the moment, I've been wondering exactly where Kat Zingano is in her career. She's like nearly 40 years old or potentially even older than that. Let me see. Just to be clear here, she is, as I stand here before you, she is currently, let's see, she's 39. So she's almost 40 years old. That's old for fighting.

But she looked good here. Turned about the clock really well. I know there were some other fights on the card. Alejandro Lara had lost on the Bellator card. I know there's some controversy about the Demopolis-Ginufrey fight. We talked about that a little bit today on regular MK. Umar Nurmagomedov looked amazing. You get the idea. But those are the ones that matter to me the most. So you tell me what mattered to you the most in the comments below. And I appreciate you guys watching. If you have any questions, shoot me an email. LukeThomasNews at gmail.com. Thumbs up on the video. Hit subscribe. Appreciate y'all. If you're out in Vegas, come see us at the Beer House on Friday.

And until then, enjoy the fights.