MORNING KOMBAT WITH LUKE THOMAS AND BRIAN CAMPBELL - UFC 295 Standouts: Cuts, Judging and Joshua Van | Morning Kombat Extra Credit Ep 34

Episode Date: November 14, 2023

Luke Thomas is back with Episode 34 of Extra Credit. Luke breaks down the preliminary fights from UFC 295. (00:00:55) - Lupita Godinez vs. Tabatha Ricci (00:04:55) - Mateusz Rebecki vs. Roosevelt Roberts (00:09:35) - Nazim Sadykhov vs. Viacheslav Borshchev (00:15:30) - Jared Gordon vs. Mark Madsen (00:21:10) - Joshua Van vs. KevinBorjas Morning Kombat is available for free on the Audacy app as well as Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts 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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Right now you can save up to 25% in Aeroplan points when you book a trip to one of 180-plus Air Canada destinations worldwide. So stop sitting on your next trip and start saving on one. Don't miss out. Your chance to save in points ends February 23rd. Book at AirCanada.com. Conditions apply. to them here on this podcast. About 30 minutes or less. Thank you guys so much for watching. I greatly appreciate it. As always, a bit of a business here. If you haven't already, please give a thumbs up on this video. Hit subscribe. It's free. It doesn't cost you nothing. Why not do it? All right. So we are now in the shadow of UFC 295, which took place over the weekend at Madison Square Garden in New York, New York. I usually do about

five fights or so, five points anyway, that I want to make on this podcast. So let's do that now without further ado, get this whole thing started. Okay, I'm going to go from the top of the preliminary card down, not in order, but like reverse chronological order if I can a little bit. The biggest one I wanted to get to was Lupita Godinez taking on Tabitha Ricci. Obviously, Lupita Godinez wins via split decision. One of the scorecards was a 30-27 for Ricci from Judge Brian Miner, which was basically incomprehensible. The interesting part about it was one judge at least gave Ricci a 10, or the round anyway, in all three rounds. So one judge, I think Miner gave her the, I have to go back and look at the scorecard,

but Miner gave her the first, one of the other two judges gave her the second, and then one of the other two judges gave her the third. So there's like this accumulative sense where it's like, well, could you see it for the first? Could you see it for the second? Could you see it for the third? And I understand that argument, but I got to tell you,

I just, if you look at some of his other stuff where he didn't give Sadikov a 10-8, we'll talk about that in a second. He gave Mackenzie Dern round number one, even though she got dropped. And it's not necessarily that if you always get dropped, you always lose the round. There are obviously greater context to everything, what happened before, what happened after, how bad was the drop. There's just lots of things going on. But I just want to point out, there was a consistent inability to evaluate fairly the performance of certain people. I did not feel like he had a great, Judge Brian Miner, a great sense of what Godinez had done. I do not believe he fully understood the significance of Andrade knocking her down. I do not believe that a 10-9 round is justified for

Sadakova in round two. So it was just a weird thing where he was not acknowledging some of the performance that I thought needed to get acknowledged. I'm not saying there was any kind of inherent bias. I don't think that's necessarily true. So while I can understand that you can find a way to give Ricci each of those rounds, the accumulative way in which he gave her all three, to me, the problem becomes greater than the sum of its parts, right? So putting that aside, I thought Godinez looked pretty great on this one. Again, there was a little bit back and forth. Ricci had her moments, but basically Ricci could not be in control of the takedown, which she usually is.

I think that cost her here. And then Godinez has gotten consistently better, not just at wrestling. She's always been pretty good at that. Her sister, who's also an outstanding wrestler, was also in her corner. But more to the point, there wasn't a huge difference in how much she had scored, at least numerically. But I thought the quality of her shots, there was a big difference. You could just kind of see her edge as the fight went along, especially. So 30-27 to me was very unfair. 29-28, I guess you could get um but the right person won so it didn't really matter all that much in the end but i think for me godina is now really doing special

stuff and then 115 pound weight class and we're talking about you know how this you know 135 is a bit of a wasteland for women's mma 125 has gotten significantly better 115 has always been good now but i think it hit a lull for a little while, and now it's picking back up again a lot. Let me pull up the rankings here, if I can, for the women at 115 pounds, and what you'll see is something pretty special, if you ask me. So at strawweight, you have Esparza sitting at, this is number one ranked contender. She's not really active, but she's sitting at one.

Jan Schoen on at two. Tatiana Suarez at three. Lemos at four, Andrade at five, she's coming off of the big win, I think her number will jump, Janjiroba, Dern, Rodriguez, Pinheiro, and then Tabatha Ricci, Godinez was sitting at 13, so I think she's going to enter the top 10 with this one, but at the top of that division with Jan Schaunan and Suarez, I really feel like you've got some fun, interesting opportunities to see some growth in this division. We'll see ultimately what it does. But great win for Godinez, great win for Mexican MMA, great win for Lobo Jim. I think they had two winners, both her and Diego Lopez won on

this contest, I believe on this night. So a great showing by her. Not a great showing from the judge. Didn't matter in the end. But what I wanted to see was defend the takedown, be more methodical over time in the striking. And that's basically what Godinez did. Good win for her. Very good win for her. Roosevelt Roberts filled in on short notice.

Supposed to be 155. He missed weight. It was very short notice. And so they did it at 158 against Mateusz. and I'm sure I'm going to pronounce this name wrong, Mateusz Rombeski. It's spelled Rebecki, but that's obviously not how it's pronounced. So if I'm getting that wrong, please forgive me. But for point number two here, dude, this guy looks like an absolute hammer. He wins at 308 of round number one with an armbar. Did you notice how he did the armbar? So all the ingredients of an armbar matters. How far their elbow is past your hip line?

Are your knees pinched together? Are you engaging your hamstrings to control their posture? But the two legs that you use for an armbar technically have somewhat different application. And I would argue, especially in MMA where you might have to make some compromises to technique to get where you want to go, you have to decide which pieces of the puzzle are the most important ones. The leg over the face is often going to be the more important one to really finish an arm bar. And the reason why is because if you're on top and you're going, let's say you're in mount and you want to spin for an arm bar, it's the leg over the face that prevents them from sitting up.

And you can just do this with a partner. Don't do anything crazy. But if you want to just try the mechanics, take your leg off of their face, just have one across their chest, and then try and hold them down with just your legs. You can pinch your ankles closest to your rear end as you want. You can flatten them out if you want. Just try and keep them pinned with just your legs. You can pinch your ankles closest to your rear as you want. You can flatten them out if you want. Just try and keep them pinned with just that. It's very, very difficult. But if you have two legs over,

or even just the one over the face, you'll realize that's the one that prevents them from sitting up. It's very easy to keep someone pinned to the floor once they're already there. Now, if they're starting to sit up, it's a little bit harder. The game changes a little bit, but the one over the face, the leg over the face to me is much more important. Now, he wasn't on top. He was underneath. So what do you notice that Rombeski did? He got the leg across the face. It took him a couple of tries, but he got the leg over the face. And what that did to Roberts was it pushed his head over and then his posture down.

So now he's not in a strong position. This is a strong position. This is a weak position, your spine being curved over. No one hits max depth on deadlift or bench or squat or anything that requires strength of purpose like this. It's a weak position. He then, keeping that leg over the face, takes the far side leg, pushes into the fence, because they were close to it, and he uses that to push off and then off balance Roosevelt Roberts,

and then he can really begin to crank hard into it by bringing both of the legs back together in the end. It was real, real clever. The guy is short. How tall is Ron Beske? He currently is listed, by the way, 1901 record, 31 years of age. They've got him at 5'7". Not a tall gentleman, but he's built like a little tank. And that was a nice arm bar from him. Really, really cool how he knew what the most important essential ingredient was, the leg over the face to control posture and to control spine, then use the other leg to off-balance the other guy,

and then when they don't have balance, they don't have weight, they don't have gravity assisting them in any kind of way, then you can really lean into it. He got the verbal tap right afterwards. That was slick. That was real nice from him. I really enjoyed what he was able to do. Now he comes into this fight. He's got a win on the contender series, and he's had three fights

since. He beat Nick Fiore, Loic Radzabov, and then, I'm sure I'm saying all these names wrong, and then Roosevelt Roberts. I think he's due for a big step up in this weight class. Obviously, you know, Roberts did the best he could on short notice. It is what it is. But nice, nice win for Ron Beske. You don't see a lot of arm bars from the guard in MMA finish guys. You don't see that very often. It's actually very difficult to do that.

It ended up being slightly different with the positioning and how it went. But arm bars from the guard is a hard thing to hit on someone. Didn't love how Roberts kind of didn't move, although I think going back, he might have been somewhat limited by his position relative to the fence. But in the end, the creativity, the creativity, and I would argue, frankly,

the offensive fundamentals from Rombeski to know the important ingredients to hold and then whip. I'm going to control posture first, then I'm going to off balance, and then I'm going to really sink this arm bar. And he did exactly that. Really, really, really strong work from him. He moves now to 19 and 1. Awesome job by him. I mean, I don't know what you want to say about Nazim Sadikov taking on Vyacheslav Borshov. They pronounced it Borshov.

It looks like it's pronounced Borshev, but I guess it's just Borshov. What a fight. What a fight. Let me say something. First of all, it ended in a draw, which I got to tell you, I don't mind. I really don't mind. I think more fights need to end in draws, if I can just be perfectly honest with you. There's this thing where we want some finality,

and I would agree that in a title fight, or in a grudge match, or there can be circumstances, I can fully grant that there are circumstances that exist in fight sports where we arrive at a draw and even if you can agree that that's the right scoring, it somehow feels unsatisfying. Your mileage may vary. I did not feel that way about this fight. I felt that a draw was not only the fair score, 10-9, 10-9, 10-8 to Sadikov in the middle, but I felt like, you know what? That actually is an emotionally satisfying score. I don't really know who the winner is. Sadakov had Borshov at the brink of defeat for that large portion of the second round,

but Borshov was basically winning and at times putting it on him in the first and third round. Like, that's kind of how it should all work out in the end. It should be a draw that not only reflects the accuracy of what happened, but I feel like in this case, that's the emotionally resonant one. Because if no one gave, or if enough guys didn't give Sadakov the 10-8 in the second round, you'd feel wronged by that. If somehow he had won one of the other rounds, you'd also feel wronged by that.

This one was that rare one where the drawing and the scoring actually did set the tone for how we should feel about the draw in general. So I'm not going to be one of these people that's like, we should have a million more draws in MMA. I don't know if that's necessarily true. But is there a case where a draw is sometimes not merely the fair result, but the emotionally satisfying one? I would submit to you this lightweight contest was exactly that. Nazeem Sadikov and Azari out of the Ray Longo

team in Long Island, and then Borshov. What team does he fight out of? He is currently out of Team Alpha Male, which I did not realize. They call him Slava Claw. Slava Claw, excuse me. Obviously. Listen, for the majority of the fight, Borshov was better. His kicking game was absolutely dynamic. But it was more than that.

He was being able to switch stance. He was using great footwork and lateral movement. His kicking, first of all, he had good kicks and he had good hand combinations. And his ability to go from one to the other was also pretty pronounced. The guy is a very talented striker. They had called him a kickboxing world champion. Double checking that with some of the folks who are into the kickboxing space. They weren't quite sure how true that was, but he did have a couple things

I told me on his resume that definitely stood out as special. It's not super elite, but certainly special. The tape kind of shows you he's got real ability, but he ends up taking, I think it was ultimately a big punch

and then a big kick that drops him in the second round, and he had to hang on for dear life. He got tuned up like a guitar for a long stretch of the second round to the point where he goes back to the corner at the end of the second round, and he has a cut over his eye that looked like a change purse. I mean, it looked like you could have fit a kind of coin that they don't even print anymore.

I mean, it was huge, this thing. And the cut man managed to find a way to limit the damage. And then credit to Borshev. What a push back in the third round. Not merely that did he win the third round, not in 10-8 territory, but what I really sort of observed here was that he got back to the game that he had in the first round, which was a game that was, for the most part, defensively not cautious, but defensively

responsible, but I would say more offensively oriented. So he didn't start just brawling with Sadikov in the third round, but did he get back to a game that showed the same kind of athletic courage that he had before he got rocked? Yes, he did. Yes, he did. So what a nice marriage of skill. What a nice marriage of skill and athletic courage. Great job by the cornerman in that fight to not let the cut ultimately decide the outcome because it was a bad cut and it was right over the eye. There were a lot of ways that bout could have gone real poorly for Borshev,

but he rescued himself. The cut man did a great job. And I also have to say for Sadakov, there are some things to work on. His hand combinations were great, but he was a little bit more hittable. He was creating more openings. He wasn't as active, I think, as he needed to be.

Borshev kind of won a little bit on, or I should say they draw, but he won two of the three rounds, to me, a little bit on volume. And it was more than just volume, but the volume, I think, did play a role as well. Now, partly volume is going to be a function of just being able to find your range and your timing and being kind of a gifted,ly oriented striker but nevertheless putting in the work the work rate sufficient to get it done um so credit to satakov for doing everything i thought he could with the skill set and opportunity he had at this moment really took borshev to the brink of defeat but borshev rescuing himself in the way that he did. Salute. Not many

guys are going to be able to come back from something like that. And of course, it brings us to Jared Gordon defeating Mark O. Madsen, Mark Madsen. This happened at 442 of the very first round. You'll notice that the left-handed collar tie, obviously Madsen having a background of Greco-Roman, he's going to be a body lock, grip, collar tie kind of guy. Any kind of wrestler is going to be a collar tie kind of guy. But a Greco-Roman Olympic silver medalist, and he walked out to the Olympic theme, which was kind of interesting as well. A guy like that is going to heavily favor collar ties. But collar ties, like anything, have to be done in a certain way and in a certain context. And what you'll notice is for large parts of this fight, he's got this collar tie in a way where Gordon's posture is affected.

To an extent, Gordon's motion is affected, which is really pulling him forward and down at the same time. Or to the side, he's getting pulled. It's getting pulled so it's directing Gordon's hands in a certain way or his balance in a certain way Which was opening up Madsen to go in a lot of different directions He was really using that collar tie To very strong effect and they also talked about how it can wear on your neck it can wear on your lower back as people are constantly pulling on your neck All of that is true, but of course in any kind of situation like that with an opponent you have to be careful about

When you have the collar tie where the head is placed So if you have a collar tie and it's just open like this you're gonna be hit all day long If it's a collar tie and I have my head on the opposite side of the collar tie. I'm usually a lot safer, right? What you'll notice is he actually keeps the left-handed collar tie for long stretches, but you'll see that Gordon is able to create a little bit more space. And what ends up happening is Madsen just holds on to the collar tie without the same pulling mechanism. It's not so much that every collar tie has to be here and in tight. You can have a little bit of space. You don't want too much, obviously, but you can have a little bit of room.

But even if you have room on the collar tie, it has to be done with intention. There has to be literal tension on the collar tie. And you can see he's just holding the back of the neck. It's not pulling, which means, one, Gordon is much more rooted in a way to do offensive work. And two, this is so defensively weak. He just brings a right hand over the top, cracks him and drops him, and that's all she wrote. Now, he was injured a little bit more before that. So, a couple of things.

Number one, great job by Gordon and his team getting ready for a guy who you knew was going to be pulling on you in the way that he was. He didn't panic. He showed veteran savvy. He was getting landed on, you know, through a large stretch of that fight. It nearly went the full distance of the first round. Several minutes of that, Madsen was landing on him with great effect. I mean, this is a strong guy. He's older.

Madsen, currently out of Denmark, sits at 39 years of age. You know, he's not a young guy anymore, but still a very good athlete. Strength is the last thing to go. And he's got literally decades of wrestling experience under his belt. His collar tie is going to be pretty good. So they knew what they had to do. He didn't panic. He did take some shots. He worked through it. And he began to find his own openings.

And this weakened all of the sort of architecture that Madsen was working on until finally he got this far out where he's just holding the collar tie. He's not pulling the collar tie or he's not redirecting balance. Because remember, if your balance is going all different directions, you're not going to have real punching power.

You're certainly not going to have maximum punching power. And if you're stationary and I'm just cupping the back of your neck, well, you can set someone on fire that way. And that's exactly what he did. Great, great win by Jared Gordon. He goes to 20 and 6. And he sits at 35 years of age.

This puts him now on a win streak after the Bobby Green fight was a no contest and he had lost to Patti Pimblitt before that, beating Leonardo Santos before that. So he's got some good names on his resume. He beat Joe Selesky. He beat Leonardo Santos. He beat Mark Madsen. Jared Gordon's put together a very respectable resume. And, you know, I said this on Normal MK. He said he was doing drugs in the basement of Penn Station. So Penn Station is no longer the main train station underneath Madison Square Garden. It used to be.

You could catch, I used to catch, when I did the MMA Hour and all those shows at SiriusXM, I would catch the trains there. Now you catch them across the street at the Patrick Moynihan train station. So that's like the new Penn Station. Penn Station still exists. And you can catch the New York City subway from there. There's a lot of different spots on the west side of town. So you can usually catch, you know, I think like ACE. You can catch the 23 there.

But I don't know if they can catch the 1 there anymore. It doesn't matter. It's a disgusting place. So you go in, and that used to be the Amtrak platform, and then you go down a level, and that would be like the subway platform. Although you'd have to go down to catch your Amtrak train as well, but they're slightly different places where you board and where the floor is. It's so disgusting.

I one time saw a homeless man shaving his pubic hair in the sink there at Penn Station. So if you're doing drugs in Penn Station, you've hit rock bottom. So for him to go there and then all the way back to the point where he's now stopping Olympians in the first round with very clever, when I say rehearsed, I mean like they trained a lot for these kinds of scenarios, very rehearsed performances. Very great job. Really, really, really stud. A very good job to do something like that. That was, I'm not going to say completely unexpected, but certainly nice to see. Very, very nice to see. And then on the fifth point, if I can on this card, there's some other ones you could go to.

I really have to say the Joshua Vann and Kevin Borjas fight. First of all, a phenomenal contest. Phenomenal contest. Joshua Vann wins via unanimous decision, which is the right call. These two guys are unranked bantamweights, and they put on a hell of a performance. Just shows you the depth that bantamweight is absolutely extraordinary. Joshua Vann, by the way, he is a Burmese fighter, I think, by birth, 22 years old. You know, when folks get really high on Raul Rosas Jr., and again,

the jury is out. We just don't know how that's going to go. But 18, 19 is very, very young for the UFC. 22 to me is a little bit different depending on how long you've been training. Look at how developed his striking game was and how much he went to the body on Kevin Borjas. And Borjas rocked him badly in the first round. And then he found a way, nevertheless, to rally and push into Borjas, make him fight off of his heels, stay away from some of the spinning stuff, and then the rib roasting from Joshua Vann after that. This was an eye-opening, frankly eye-catching performance from him. Really, really good job out of him. Joshua Vann, if you're not

familiar with him, he trains out of the 4-Ounce Fight Club out of Houston, Texas, I guess. He has one loss to Devin Jackson, which happened back at Fury FC in 2021. But since then, he hasn't lost. He has a fight over Zalgis Zumagulov, which happened earlier this year. And now this fight. Dude, two fights in a row. He fought tough customers who don't necessarily have the biggest names in Zumagulov and now Borjas. Keep your eye on Joshua Vann. When someone is this

dedicated and effective a body puncher, number one, this young, and listen, was it a flawless performance? It was not. It was not a flawless performance. He got wrecked a little bit in that first round. But how about at 22 years of age without even, he's only got, this was his 10th MMA fight, 10th pro MMA fight. His record climbed to nine and one. To have the kind of presence of mind necessary, and frankly, the skills necessary to not panic, to persevere after being badly hurt in the first round, this is a gentleman to keep your eye on. It's still very early in his development. I don't know exactly how far he can go. But he looks to me like he might have some special nights ahead of him.

It's very rare to see someone who's got the kind of diversified targeting that he does at his age. Most guys in any kind of combat sports, a couple things happen. They learn offense before they learn defense. That's first. And in the striking, they're all headhunters, leg kicker slash headhunters. Body attacks tend to happen much more unevenly, whether with punches or with kicks. And in the case of Van, where he's using most of the body work he had done was with the hands, that's even rarer to find. Guys don't want to get that close to fire those kinds of shots. where he's using it. Most of the body work he had done was with the hands. That's even rarer to find. Guys don't want to get that close to fire those kinds of shots that consistently. And I'm not talking about jabbing to the body.

I'm talking about ripping shots to the body, combinations, multi-punch combinations to the body. That's what he was throwing at age 22. Whoever is training Joshua Vann, and I don't want to take anything away from him, obviously he has put in the work to get himself here, make no mistake about it, but whoever is training him is doing a very good job.

Whoever is training him understands they've got a guy whose aptitude for fighting is high, whose ability to learn quickly is high, and they're giving him a ton of offensive tools that will very valuably serve him as he begins to build on them. When you see somebody who can target the body this effectively, and this was their 10th pro MMA fight and they're 22 years old, you should put a little mark around his name being like, okay, the next time he fights, I want to see exactly what he does. UFC has not given him two easy fights to get into the UFC. They've given him some tough fights, and he has answered them,

I would say, you know, first round of this fight notwithstanding, but in general, he has answered it with flying colors. Very, very, very impressive young man. 22 years old. Super impressive guy. So keep that in mind. Now there were other winners on this card. Jamal Emmer's got a fantastic win at just 49 seconds over Dennis Buzukia, dropping him with a right hand. Buzukia didn't make weight. It was a 147 kind of situation. He also, I think, was filling in on short notice, so it didn't quite go his way. John Castaneda taking on Kyung Ho Kang, not a great fight. I think there was a weight miss here as well, but John Castaneda taking the three-round decision over him. And then Steve Erceg got out to a nice

lead on Alessandro Costa and won, ultimately, a decision. But he got stung a couple times. He is well-rounded. I'm still high on Steve Erceg. He's just 11-1 in his career. He's also fairly young at 28 years of age from Australia. So I'd be curious to see what he's got in front of him. Still high on him, but if I could honestly say if there was one name to me that really stood out on this card, Rumbeski or Rumbeumbeki or Rumbeski or however the hell you say his name, he would be one for sure, but the big one would be Joshua Vann. Joshua Vann looked tremendous in the bigger picture of things. A lot to like about his game and what he showed. So, again, we talked about it on MK. The main card delivered all finishes. How about this card as

well? The prelim card. It delivered big time. You didn't get every fight being great. As I mentioned, Erseg and Costa, not what we had hoped. Castaneda and Kyungho Kang could have been better. But basically everything else was great. Great, great card. Overall, UFC 295, one of the best shows of the year. Really enjoyed watching this.

Really enjoyed covering it. And I'd be curious to know who stood out to you on the prelim card. Give me a thumbs up on this if you haven't already. Thank you guys so much for watching. This has been episode whatever it is of Extra Credit. A little bit of coverage of that prelim card. I'm Luke Thomas. We'll catch you guys on Wednesday's MK. And until then, enjoy the fights.