MORNING KOMBAT WITH LUKE THOMAS AND BRIAN CAMPBELL - Islam Makhachev: Next UFC Champion? | MK Extra Credit Ep. 6

Episode Date: November 3, 2021

Luke Thomas is back with Episode 6 of Morning Kombat Extra Credit. Luke breaks down 5 fights from UFC 267 that we didn't get to recap in Episode 223 of Morning Kombat. (2:15) - ISLAM MAKHACHEV vs. DAN HOOKER (10:00) - MAGOMED ANKALAEV vs. VOLKAN OEZDEMIR (15:35) - ALBERT DURAEV vs. ROMAN KOPYLOV (22:05) - ELIZEU ZALESKI DOS SANTOS vs. BENOIT SAINT-DENIS (28:00) - LERONE MURPHY vs. MAKWAN AMIRKHANI 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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My name is Luke Thomas. I'm the host of this program. This is where we go over all the, well not all of them, but some of the big and important fights that we never get to on regular Morning Combat, which is hosted with me and Brian Campbell, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 11 a.m. in the East. You know the drill. So we're going to get to five extra fights today that we did not talk about on Morning Combat yesterday.

Of course, first things first, you can see the social graphic below. Like this video. Subscribe to Morning Combat. And if you want to give us a follow, even though BC's not on this podcast, give him a follow on Twitter or Instagram, just the same. We appreciate it. Now, I did something different over the weekend to sort of get the pulse of what everyone was thinking.

I asked you guys to tell me on Twitter. I put up the social graphic one more time, if you don't mind here, my producers putting all this together. If you, right there, at LThomasNews on Twitter. So on Sunday, I put up a post or a tweet on Sunday saying, hey, what are some non-main event, non-co-main event fights of the weekend? Not even necessarily just UFC, although UFC having a pay-per-view kind of changed things.

A free one for us in North America. And I asked people to tell me what they thought were the best or most intriguing. I'm trying to follow along with that as best I can. I didn't agree with all the choices that some of you guys made, but I definitely try to tailor my answers a little bit more towards what you guys were looking for. Let's put the graphic about what we're going to talk about here today if we can. All right, so there you have it. This is the entire UFC 267 fight card. The highlighted ones are the ones I would like to look at just a little bit more. Obviously, we never even got to Makachev versus Hooker.

We'll talk about Ankhalaya versus Uzdemir. Those are two from the main card. I did want to talk about Albert Dariyev taking on Roman Kopolov. I thought that was a very interesting fight. The Dos Santos-Saint-Denis fight we'll talk about, but I didn't think the fight itself was all that interesting. We'll talk about some of the refereeing choices there when we get to that. And then last but not least, quietly, quietly, Lerone putting uh together a

nice run the ufc this time beating makwan amir khani we will have a little bit of uh honorable mention for two more fights at the very very end but with that preamble out of the way let's get things started first fight i want to talk about on morning combat here extra credit episode six will be islam makachev defeating Dan Hooker. The results of this, of course, 225 of round one via Kamara from side control. Okay, what can we say about this bout? Kind of easy for Makachev. I have great respect for Dan Hooker. I find him to be quite the talent. I think he will be a force in this division for some time to come. I think he is hardly done getting great wins. This is not so

much an indictment really of Dan Hooker. Dan Hooker is still as good as you thought he was and probably will get even better over time. More, it's just a recognition about Islam Makachev. I mean, this was not hard for him. I hate to say it that way, but it is kind of true. How did he do it? I still go back and look at it. He was throwing a right hook, kind of like a jabby hook at the time. Well, no, I guess it was from the right-handed step.

I have to go back and look exactly how it worked. But the point being is he was throwing a punch as hooker was throwing hooker was trying to get lead outside foot position a lot and sort of angle off of makachev pretty consistently and so he was trying to maintain that sort of outside kicking position as a way to stay out of potential trouble be low enough on the body where you couldn't necessarily be caught and some other stuff but he didn't he didn't quite execute i think up to his own standards as he was a there was a Makachev was able to reach down grab it and then sort of dive into the takedown all in once and get him down you saw Hooker try and sort of scoot his way backwards to the fence but it didn't really matter as Makachev did a great job of laying him flat

now what Makachev did these guys guys are amazing. They're very good. He and Habib and a lot of these Smash Factory guys are very good at about wrapping the collar or at some way kind of immobilizing the head, neck, and shoulders. And there's a variety of ways they do that. And then they try and leg wrestle their way into a better position. You saw him try to move with that. I think he had a hook around the back of the head of Hooker, a collar tie of sorts. Well, more than that, almost, I think he was like elbow deep.

In any case, he tried to move to mount. And what you see Hooker do is, I think the best he could have done given the circumstances. And it's one thing I really like in modern MMA. One of his legs got past. The other one, he had a butterfly hook in. And the butterfly hook just had that instep on the thigh. The reason I like that kind of a setup is not that that one hook by itself is especially dominant, especially if you're laying flat.

I mean, you have to understand something about butterfly guard. Butterfly guard is, I don't know if completely this way, but almost completely this way, is a sit-up guard. You've got to be sitting up to a strong degree to make any of those things kind of work. I mean, think about a basic butterfly hook sweep. It's you're sitting up. So the reason I like it is because I think those are the kinds of little details when someone's trying to pass and you put that in step in with the butterfly hook that will allow you to elevate an opponent when it comes to that now it didn't come to that here in fact there are some weaknesses with that position but i think as a general rule i like it when we see something like that sort of

an inserted butterfly hook um even if in this particular case it didn't work out so well for him so from there what you see is basically makache, who if this is the head of Dan Hooker, he was here. He moves over to here. Now, you have to understand something about that position. Once you abandon the head and you're going to isolate one of the arms, there's a trickery to that position. You need to know how to balance once you're off of the head and now onto the arm. If you go back and you look at Makachev, he's got live toes the whole time. His big toes are pressing into the canvas.

He's doing that to push into Hooker to kind of flatten him over as best that he can. And then you see Hooker with a deep, deep, deep underhook because you can see Makachev trying to fish for it to get it. He eventually does get it, of course, and he's able to isolate from there. And then the bad part about having that single butterfly and then being open on the other side is that Makachev can just move right into side control. There's nothing, if you go back and look at the footage, there's nothing that is physically stopping him. You could maybe

put a hand there, but like once he lifts that leg that could potentially be elevated by the butterfly hook, he just whips it around into side game over. He's already in side control. So once you're in side control, he has the arm isolated, by the way, before moving to side control. He moves to side control and then, of course, he steps over the head and finishes it. Now, I was on Twitter yesterday and I saw some folks who, listen, I make it very clear about this. I do have a fair amount of training time in my life in the last 20 years or so. I've spent about half of that in gyms. But certainly I don't pretend to be any kind of all-knowing authority, far from it. But I saw

some folks saying, oh, you can hear in Russian, Khabib yells to Makachev to step over the head to finish the Kimura. And I saw people being being like wow what an adaptation by and a read by uh habib that's pretty impressive listen habib is an impressive grappler maybe the best we've seen for mma purposes in some ways makachev if he's behind him he's not too far behind him they are extremely talented don't misunderstand me but but you can look at that and you can look at who liked my initial post and subsequent ones. There's a bunch of fighters who all agreed with me in there. Stepping over the head is well known. That is not in any way new. And I have a thread from fights 15 years ago where guys are talking about stepping over the

head. What I mean to say is Habib was right to highlight it, to shout it out. He stepped over the head and it worked. Don't get me wrong. There's like literally nothing bad about that. That's all textbook, but it's not an impromptu innovation. He didn't just think of it on the fly or it was something he knows that nobody else knows. This is the common way in which all Kimuras from that position are taught. Stepping over the head prevents them from sitting up and you getting rolled. It also allows you to stamp down and then torque if you have to. Now, there's a lot of ways that people will teach you to finish Kimuras that don't necessarily involve torquing.

But in a modern grappling context, sometimes that can be all you need to finish. And, of course, it was in this particular case. Now, whether or not Makachev will get the title shot, I don't know. But dude, the guy just beat Dan Hooker, and I'm not sure he broke a sweat doing it. His grappling is phenomenal. In this particular case, it was completely overwhelming. As I mentioned, I hate to say this because I have such high esteem and respect for Dan Hooker, but that was not hard for Islam Makachev.

And I said this on the post-fight show. I do wonder what might be more interesting if in fact he does get a title shot Makachev versus Poirier or Makachev versus Charles Oliveira, who would be somebody you would want to see a ground battle between them. And again, Makachev, I think has much better striking than Habib on the feet, but Oliveira's striking is dramatically improved. So I have, you know, the fan in me, to the extent that I try to keep that alive at all, would kind of like to see Poirier get gold around his waist before it's all said and done.

But thinking about a good matchup for Makachev next, I think Oliveira would actually be a better matchup for what I'm looking to see, which would be, in this case, some of the limits of what, or potential not limits, I suppose, but some of the things you think that could potentially trip Makachev up for somebody who is as good as he is. You would want to see him tested in that way, I suppose. But a phenomenal win by him.

All right, so we go to our next bout. This one opened the main card. Magomed Ankhalaev defeating Volkan Uzdemir. He wins 30-27, 30-27, and 29-28. I thought that Uzdemir did a good job at first, but Ankhalaev, dude, he's 29 years old, Greco-Roman background in terms of wrestling, and his striking from a Southpaw standpoint is just it's just so crisp it's so crispy he dropped Uzdemir in the first with that sort of jab but he kind of took an angle with the jab so then he that left was right down the pipe and he drilled him with it and dropped it Uzdemir rallied I thought Uzdemir did a much better job like what makes Uzdemir a tricky opponent is that sometimes he has these blitzes. He has really fast hands. He's quite accurate. He can throw in volume. And so all of a sudden, you get hit with one shot, and then he just runs all over you. On Koliyev, his major achievement in this bout was not that he wowed everyone necessarily with

this particular skill set or that, although overall I thought his boxing was quite exceptional, but rather he forced that out of Uzdemir. Uzdemir, you could tell this was not the Uzdemir of maybe a couple of years ago who was getting into trouble pretty consistently running into these kinds of things, although also having success with that. But, you know, against better opposition, that kind of style will cost you. He dialed it back a little bit, but even in the first round, he tried that flying knee and whatever else.

What did Ankhalaev do? He clinched with him and pressed him against the fence, beat him up on the clinch breaks. By the way, Ankhalaev might have the best strikes on the clinch breaks I've ever seen. He's so good at it. But he just made Uzdemir more than thread the needle. What do I mean?

Uzdemir was trying to thread the needle between what are some of the things I could keep that make me successful that won't necessarily make me overly susceptible to some attacks, and also what are some things I can do to just be generally responsible. I want to bring some of my dynamism with some more of my conventional safety, not first approaches, but not getting in trouble that can and should be avoided. That's the balance he was trying to strike. And what Ankhalaev did was, let's take away all of your spontaneity. Let's take away all of your ability to just create magic out of nowhere, your explosivity. And you saw that predominantly with the jab.

The boxing combinations were phenomenal. If you look at some of the numbers on Kalayev going 30% to the body, now 45% of the attacks from Uzdemir were targeted to the leg. So half of the strikes he landed were leg attacks. But this is what I mean. It's like, dude, if you're going to have the leg attacks and you're going to go to the body, whatever you're going to do, that's not headhunting. And again, you don't necessarily want to headhunt obviously, but it has to have a meaningful impact. Those leg kicks landed. I'm sure they hurt, but to your memory, or you can review the tape yourself. Do you recall the leg kicks meaningfully slowing or adjusting or forcing Uncle I have to adjust what he was doing to

account for it? I don't, I don't see that on the tape. So they land. I don't want to take that away from him. I think that's actually the smart approach for a guy who's going to barrel down on you with a jab-heavy kind of approach. It's actually the right call, but there has to be more to it than, oh, I threw a bunch. Shouldn't that count?

He has to be visibly slowed. I didn't see that. He has to be visibly slowed. I didn't see that. He has to be visibly changing course because it's causing him problems. I didn't see that. And so for me, that's sort of what I come back to. Now, overall, they threw a similar amount of significant strikes, 108 to 102 on Koliak to Uzdemir, but the successful percentage of significant strikes, 61 to 47, do 61% of your significant strikes finding the mark is, that's pretty good.

That's really, really good. That's an extremely high number. So he went one for four on takedowns, which is not too high, but he didn't look for so, so many of them. In terms of control time, 54 seconds for Ankalayev in the second, 45 in the first. Some of that will be cage time, just six seconds in the third. But the real sort of story here is while Uzdemir had a better second round

than he did anyplace else, he had a bad first round getting dropped, and then Ankalayev picked back up where he left off in the third, literally doubling the overall significant strike output behind some of that crisp boxing. So if you're looking for a guy at light heavyweight, and you're saying to yourself, who is on the come up that we should be paying attention to at 205 pounds, Magomed Ankhalaev is that guy.

The one blemish on his record was something of a Hail Mary submission from Paul Craig, I think deep into the third round of their bout, and since then he hasn't really looked back. And again, dropping Uzdemir in this contest. I thought it was an improved performance from Uzdemir. But as he transitions to a more thoughtful way of fighting, less reliant on speed, explosivity, spontaneity, that kind of thing, this was a tough opponent to try that against.

And I don't think it worked out necessarily so well for him. Although there were some things to take from that that weren't all so bad. So those are the two fights on your main card. Now, I know a lot of folks want to talk about the Hibas-Genji-Robo fight. Briefly, I'll consider that honorable mention. I'll just say I didn't find that fight overly interesting, but I will acknowledge that was an important win for Hibas, especially coming off that Rodriguez fight.

You know, not super noteworthy one way or the other, but a decent to good performance and an important win just the same. All right, so let's talk about this one. Albert Duraev fighting Roman Kopolov. I was expecting Kopolov to go and just get absolutely beaten down. And to a point, he did. To a point, he got his ass whooped. There was a lot of that, actually, mostly in the second round. But this was a weird fight. First of all, on the feet,

I thought Kapilov looked pretty good, actually. He looked calm for the most part. He was game even when he was getting his ass kicked in the second, coming back out for the third. So he had good durability, good composure. I thought his takedown defense for the most part was excellent. The thing that really cost him was he held on to the fence. And so the referee stopped the action. I believe it was Jason Herzog.

I have to go back and double check here. Who was it? Yes, it was Jason Herzog. And then started them back at the point which he had just grabbed, although this time without the grab. And if you notice, Kopolov's feet are at that point together, and then Duraev takes him down, moves him out, and basically demolishes him in a 10-8 round.

Look at the numbers here. 31 significant strikes landing for Duraev. A total of 174 strikes attempted. Kopolov, 7. 7 in the second round. He has credited Dariyev with four minutes and 25 seconds. Why did I pick Dariyev? Dariyev is, I think, out of Extreme Couture,

but one of these guys who came off the Contender Series. I think this is his first bout since the Contender Series. And sometimes you see guys in the Contender Series, and you're like, yeah, you know what? Give him a contract. Like, that's fine. He earned it. And then there's guys like Dariah who are like,

okay, this guy is 1 billion percent UFC ready. Let's put him in there already. But what I found interesting about this bout was Dariah won. He looked like he had his left eye socket broken because Koppelov was landing decent shots, even if he was numerically kind of outstruck in all three rounds, except for the third. But the thing that made me,

the reason I wanted to pick this fight out was, one, other refs wouldn't have done that for Dariah. I think Herzog made the right call, but I don't think that's a call you're going to see all that consistently. So what does that mean? Well, Kapilov was almost about to step out of the takedown it would have bare minimum had a good chance of probably stopping that effort and maybe he just like the first round doesn't really get taken down at all in fact the only takedown that Dariyev got

in that whole fight was the one that the referee assisted again the referee made the right call I don't want to hear to think that they didn't, but Herzog is going to make some calls, bold ones at times that other referees are not going to. So if no referee assists them there, does he ever get the takedown? And if he doesn't get the takedown, does he win? Maybe, maybe he wins. He kind of won the first round probably, or at least debatable. He certainly landed more. And then in the fifth round, he failed on five of those takedowns. Kopolov getting his own, by the way, at the end there.

And then again, numerically outlanding him. Here's why I bring all of this up. It's like, dude, I thought Dariyev was going to go in there and just boss him around. And to be clear, Dariyev, I want to give him a big compliment in just a second. He has phenomenal ground and pound. I think he is UFC ready. I think he's going to beat good fighters. But it definitely seems to me like distance closing,

using strikes as a way to facilitate your wrestling is still in need of some work that this fight kind of hit a spotlight on. So I still have a high view of Dariab. I still think he will go far. But this was a bit of, there is some prospect dialing back that needs to happen here. The one thing for Daryev that I want to say, and I do think it is somewhat common among these Smish Factory guys, in as much as they are some commonalities across a wide region of the earth, they look for mount, and if they get it they hold it now kapalov didn't do a great job at all uh once he was in mount of trying to fight it now of course easier said than done a lot of mount escapes are taught in a way where your hands do nothing to the other person's hands in fact they are often about getting a forearm across their hip line and then one on their knee if If you do it in jiu-jitsu, that's fine, right?

Because you can push on the hip, you can push on the knee, you can, you know, shrimp out and get one of your knees back, and then you can go to full, hey, all's well that ends well. But in MMA, you got a big-ass guy from the smash factory on top of you, you're going to get knuckled into the ground. So what I mean to say is these are not easy areas to get out of, but there are different kinds of mount. The kind of mount that Dariah had was, go back and watch the tape again. Don't take my word for anything here. Dariah was sitting on top of the hips of Kapilov. If someone is sitting on your hips, that's actually good for you underneath. Now, again, being in mount is terrible, but among the conditions in mount, where would you rather have them? Right up under your armpits

like this, or would you rather have access to pushing motions? And if they're on your hips, that means when you buck your hips, they're attached to them. It gives you the most amount of push underneath. It gives you the most amount of space you can create and the highest amount of elevation you can possibly have if they're sitting far back on your hips. So Khabalov didn't do a great job of getting out of that. However, I just want to say I love how some of these Smech Factory guys, even if they don't get to mount, A, a lot of them appear to be active passers, number one. And number two, they are constantly at least looking for the mount. You know, you go back to the Makachev fight. He was looking for the mount. He got stopped, but he's always trying to get here. These guys are in their own kind of way, either threatening or at a bare minimum,

reprioritizing the mount in a way that's kind of been lost in modern MMA. I really liked what I saw from Duraev in that sense. Let's get to the mountain. Let's just fucking own this position. And again, maybe he wanted to be in that one because he didn't think Kopolov was much of a threat and he had more position to strike from there. Maybe he's more comfortable there. Could be a lot of reasons. But good things for Kopolov. And I thought overall his takedown defense was really great. I thought his striking was very impressive. Obviously, the fence grab really cost him. But for Duraev, tough as hell, phenomenal ground and pound, great pursuit of the fight, but there are definitely some defensive issues on the feet to work on and also distance closing,

strike setting up, takedowns kind of scenarios that are in need of some work there, to be clear. Moving down the card here, just a little bit past the Dariyev and Kopolov fight, let's talk about the referee not intervening in the Eliza Zalesko-Dos Santos-Benoit-St. Denis fight. Now, the referee in this particular case, who was ultimately relieved of his duties, is Vyacheslav Kiyoselev. Now, if you watch any Russian MMA, this gentleman you have seen before, I don't pretend to be an expert in his overall body of work, but I know folks who are, and I have seen him in other places get much worse than this also I would say in general but in particular this time what can we say about his refereeing well Santani was just constantly leaving his head for the right hand of Dos Santos I mean he just

was getting drilled over and over and over and over and over again I watched this fight um I missed it live actually so I went back and I watched it with no commentary because I wanted to hear, like, are they overreacting? Was there something to it? And sure enough, they were not overreacting. I had the exact same reaction almost at the exact same time because then I watched it a second time with their commentary so I could hear it.

And I had, at all the punctuated moments, the same response. There was a moment there in that, I guess it was the second round I think yeah where by the way he took 94 significant strikes in the second round 94 where you see him not just covering up but then excuse me but then turning off to the side and once he does that turn to me that fight is over you are now turning away from your opposition and covering up and the referee just let it go for whatever reason. I guess they thought he was still standing. So that counts.

I don't, I don't, I don't know what the hell that guy was looking at, but yeah, that was really, really bad. Want to own part of the airline you flew with on your last vacation or part of the company that makes your favorite triple shot latte with extra foam. What about owning part of a company that one day could send you on a tour of outer space? Now you can. With partial shares from TD Direct Investing,

you can own part of your favorite companies. Just pick a stock and decide how much to spend on the share. It's a piece of cake. Learn more at td.com slash partial shares. TD, ready for you. And then there was a point where he has a cut uh santani that they had to get uh that probably should have had a oh no he got poked in the eye excuse me he got poked in the eye tells the referee i can't see and the referee doesn't

call the doctor in to have a look at it just fucking sends him back out there to go fight and dude credit to santani this guy they said he was french special forces i believe it uh whiffed on five takedowns on the first got one of four in the third excuse me got one of four in the first and then one of five in the in the second but the point i want to make here was this guy went and fought his fucking heart out on autopilot. I would love to talk to him to see how much he remembers past the second round because he was visibly rocked a number of times. And as I

mentioned, I think it's actually the point at which Cormier begins to scream at him where he covers up and then turns. And then, you know, Dos Santos is just fucking letting him go at that point. One of the more egregious reffing jobs you'll ever see. I make this point a fair bit.

Listen, there's all kinds of ways to try and improve safety to mitigate dangers. Sometimes we are not in our rules establishment consistent across the board. Some rules that we allow for or some tactics that we allow for can be quite dangerous. Other ones we don't. And there isn't necessarily a consistent line. But the general argument is it's better to have some of these safety measures than others rather than having a coherent system of safety overall. Some things we're just not comfortable with. A lot of people are not comfortable with knees to the head of a downed opponent, for example, right? But the thing I try to tell folks is you can have concerns about what

PEDs might be doing in sports. I don't think it's altogether an unfair criticism, although the data appears to suggest that there is not much in the way of identifying that it makes a whole lot worse. Still, one thing that I want to point out to folks is as a present danger, not so much for the UFC. If you watch UFC, performances by referees like this is pretty rare. But what I would say is on the come up on the regional scene whether in your state or for a national promotion that's you know regionally based but has that kind of level of attention of cffc lfa they might have access to referees uh somewhere in that chain where you're just just starting out or before the ufc where you're going to get this i i have not only have I seen worse than this,

I've actually called fights in the amateur division that were worse than this. I had a guy who was on all fours and another guy was standing over him, punching him in the face. He wasn't moving at all. The referee wouldn't stop it. And it turns out the referee in this particular case was the training partner of the guy getting beat. I mean, a total conflict of interest, but the lack of regulatory oversight,

either for certain amateur systems in certain states or whatever the case may be, allowed this to happen. So he was like, oh, I know my boy. He can take this. And the guy wound up taking a fucking epic beating. I think that was the last time I called a fight for that organization. I don't know if they let me go because of that or maybe it was something else. I don't know. But I was screaming at of that or maybe it was something else. I don't know. But I was screaming at the guy to stop the fight.

Eventually, they did. So as a warning to young fighters out there, as a heads up for fans, I'm not here to defend this, but I want to be clear. When we think about dangers in MMA, the not best referees, so the ones you don't see in the UFC, they could be good in certain cases. They could be great in certain cases. They're just not known.

But what I'm trying to point out is the level of regulatory oversight and the training that referees get who have not elevated themselves to the UFC level. But if you've got complaints about Herb Dean, I have terrible news for you. It gets a lot worse when you start going down the rabbit hole. And this was a clear example of somebody terribly out of his depth. And, uh, Santani took, you know, you could, this is, uh, we'll see what happens to him long-term from this, but this is how people get killed. This is how people get killed. Everyone's worried about what guys are taking, EPO and whatnot. This is how people get killed. Okay, and then last but not least, I don't know if this was the most interesting fight

for all of you, but it was for me. Lerone Murphy defeating Maquan Amirkhani in just 14 seconds of the second round. Maquan Amirkhani getting five of seven takedowns, I think in just the first round, if I'm not mistaken, five of six, because he attempted the seventh and that was the one that did him in. He looked good for the most part, right? The takedowns were authoritative. He stepped in, couldn't quite get it off the initial entry, stepped around, got the trip, pushed him against the fence. From there, I thought Murphy did a mostly admirable job of not letting the situation. He didn't let it get too much worse. He never meaningfully improved his situation. I mean, certain positions you could say because he was flat on his back for a time and he was able to sort of get to at least a knee or a foot in certain cases. He kept it moving. What I mean to say is he couldn't extricate himself from the top control and pressure of a guy like Amir Khani.

In that sense, he didn't improve it, although there might have been minor positional changes that were better. Again, if you're flat on your back and you have to get to standing, you're not going to get there, for the most part, in one motion. It's going to be a series of small steps you take to get there. So he might have had some of those. You can go back and judge for yourself. But what did he do in the second round? You can see Amirkhani

feint a shot, and the right leg of Lerone Murphy, which I think was standing forward at that time, he brings it back reacting to the feint. Amirkhani goes, aha, I like what I see him. He's biting on my feints. Maybe he wanted to come up top or whatever.

But then he just shoots again. He doesn't set it up with anything else, and he wasn't super close although he's probably close enough but it was Murphy pushing into him and he just eats a well-timed knee and that was all she wrote dude Lerone Murphy has a quietly impressive resume I keep saying this he has the stoppage winner for Amerikani he beat Douglas Silva de Andrade. He was a good fighter. He beat Ricardo Ramos, and he has, in his UFC debut, the split draw with Zubaira Tugugov, who's also on this card, who's a very good dynamic fighter.

Dude, this guy is talented. He's talented. Now, keep in mind, there's a lot of, like, some strikers he's faced, some guys who are grapplers, blah, blah, blah. But you get the idea. He's undefeated. He's 30 years old. He just needs a chance to get out there a little bit more. I was very impressed by what I saw. Still plenty of work to do in the grappling department. You should always know there's a difference between guys who can defend takedowns or not let positions

get too bad on the whatever situation they're in, the fence or the ground and then there are the guys who can meaningfully extricate themselves it appears that second gear still needs some work but um he's on his way and obviously if you fuck around and shoot from way outside or they were talking about some of the stance changes although he i didn't quite understand that from dc because if you go back and you watch he got taken down when they were opposite stance not not that staggered stance which i didn't quite understand what dc was talking about there i mean i know what he meant like if you're here you go for the single if you're here you go in between and go for the double but that can be a little bit harder depending on the distance they're usually

managing but neither here nor there not not relevant um aquan got amer uh, I'm your Connie got to take down in the first and whatnot. Going back to, I'm your Connie. Um, you know, that's three in a row for him that he's lost. He came out and won three in a row in his UFC campaign, beating Mike Wilkinson, Masio Fulon, and Andy Ogle.

None of whom are in the UFC anymore. He lost to Arnold Allen. No shame. Arnold Allen's awesome. He has wins over Jason Knight and Chris fish gold. I don't know if either of those guys are in the UFC anymore. I know Knight is not. He has a loss to Shane Burgos via KO.

All right, Shane Burgos is a beast. He has a win over Danny Henry, and then Barboza, Kamuela, Kirk, and then Lerone Murphy. He lost. I think a lot of folks were hoping he would take that next step. It looks to me like he hasn't done that yet, and perhaps may not get a chance to, given some of the losing streak. Although, perhaps he is relevant for the UFC for overseas markets.

We'll have to see. One more of these that I want to highlight that I thought was worthy of praise. Oh, the opening bout. The Tagir Ulan-Bakal versus Alan Nacimento flyweight opener. Just very quickly honorable mention on this one i thought nasiamento won this fight he was taken down and underneath the entire time uh ulan bakal was credited with four takedowns he only won via split so it was some you know one of the judges saw it for nasima but if you haven't seen this go back and watch to me this

is textbook better fighting from underneath nasiento did one thing that's really great. How do you guys know to lock up a triangle, right? You go one leg around the back of the neck, one underneath the arm, and then they lock up behind it, then the arm comes in, right? So it's not if both arms are in, no triangle. Both arms are out, no triangle. If one arm is in, triangle. And by the way, of course, you had P-Boss attempting a head scissors

against Genji Robbo which is a very it can work but it's pretty low percentage but what i want to point out here is and this i had a guy show me this years ago if you are very good at wrestling with your legs which is an acquired skill that just you have to try it in the mats you have to work on it that kind of a thing what you can do is you can lock up like halfway towards a triangle, right? Where you lock up behind them with your legs, but they might get a good posture. So there's no real threat of a submission there. But if you're somebody and you got one leg around your, you know, the back of your neck and you got one underneath, you need

to be mindful of that. You can't just, you're not, you're not going to get submitted just like this, like you're bench pressing. It doesn't work that way. Some level of coming over the top is required. And you could bring someone down with a collar tie after that, or even just bringing your legs to you because they're pretty powerful to do that. If you want to break someone's posture, one way to do that is you can just bring your legs, usually from full guard, but you can bring your knees to you and they'll come down if you can break their hands open like that. So it just automatically puts someone on the back foot, even though the submission's not really all that close, they can't get going necessarily. And he was doing this plus a whole lot more than that constantly, constantly. I really thought that

he won this contest from underneath. He had two submission attempts that were pretty good. And I thought the judges got it wrong in that one. So it's still one of those lessons that, you know, trying to win about from underneath an MMA is by no means the easiest thing to do. It can be done. Probably an argument to be made that there's still a little bit of room to go with that, but I was impressed with Nasty Amento. I think that's a textbook case in how to use wrestling with your legs from guard underneath to, if you can't fully control a position, kind of take the sting out of it and put the other guy on the back foot, even though you're on your back.

Okay? That's it. That was it. What a great card, huh? Phenomenal. One of the best free cards if you're a North American, or I should say an American because the Canadians, I think, had to pay for it. But for us folks here in Los Estados Unidos, wow, what a phenomenal card.

What was your favorite fight on the card? What did you enjoy about all of the extra fights? Leave a comment below, like the video, hit subscribe, tell me what you liked, tell me what you didn't, and what fight mattered the most to you, what technique mattered the most to you, all right? I would love to hear it from you, and I will read the comments on these, okay? So I appreciate it. You guys have a great day. Thank you so much for waiting.

I know, by the way, one last note. We usually put these out on Monday, but because we had the Canelo resume review and the rooftop chat with Chuck Mendenhall, we didn't have time for it, but it's here right now. I appreciate your patience, and until next time, enjoy the fights.