MORNING KOMBAT WITH LUKE THOMAS AND BRIAN CAMPBELL - What Mackenzie Dern Needs? | MK Extra Credit Ep 3

Episode Date: October 12, 2021

Luke Thomas is back with Episode 3 of MK Extra where he recaps all the fights from UFC Fight Night: Dern vs. Rodriguez.  (00:00:00) - Intro (00:01:15) - Marina Rodriguez vs. Mackenzie Dern (00:05:12)... - Randy Brown vs. Jared Gooden (00:08:46) - Matheus Nicolau vs. Tim Elliott (00:12:24) - Mariya Agapova vs. Sabina Mazo (00:16:00) - Chris Gutierrez vs. Felipe Colares (00:19:00) - Alexandr Romanov vs. Jared Vanderaa (00:20:27) - Damon Jackson vs. Charles Rosa (00:22:40) - Loop Godinez vs. Silvana Gomez Juarez (00:24:05) - Steve Garcia vs. Charlie Ontiveros 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  To hear more from the CBS Sports Podcast Network, visit https://www.cbssports.com/podcasts/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Introducing the new McSpicy from McDonald's. It looks like a regular chicken sandwich, but it's actually a spicy chicken sandwich. McSpicy. Consider yourself warned. Limited time only. At participating McDonald's in Canada. You hear that? Ugh. Paid.
Starting point is 00:00:18 And... done. That's the sound of bills being paid on time. But with the BMO Eclipse Rise Visa Card, paying your bills could sound like this. Yes! Earn rewards for paying your bill in full and on time each month. Rise to rewards with the BMO Eclipse Rise Visa Card. Terms and conditions apply. Hi, everybody. My name is Luke Thomas. I'm one half of the hosting duo for morning combat and it's time
Starting point is 00:00:49 for extra credit this is a podcast we do on mondays where i talk about the fights that we didn't get to with bc on regular mk first things first as always thumbs up on the video hit subscribe and as a reminder we said it on regular mk this morning but thanks to everyone who helped us get over the 100k subscriber mark uh and if you haven't done it yet what are you waiting for at this point mk is all right on a rocket ship but uh thank you thanks everyone who helped us get there we appreciate it okay well there was a big boxing fight over the weekend and there was a a undercard essentially to that we're really not going to get to it i'm not opposed to doing boxing results on this podcast but a lot of people have said they wanted an MMA only podcast. And so at least for now, we're going to keep it that way. We did get to a couple of the fights from UFC Vegas
Starting point is 00:01:35 39 or UFC Mackenzie Dern versus Hadrina Rodriguez, the fight night. So I will go over them a little bit and then we'll get to everything that we missed yeah all right so 30 minutes on the clock or less time to get to it let us do that now all right so we did talk about the main event Marina Rodriguez taking on Mackenzie Dern with 49 46s across the board I'm guessing it's the second round that the judges gave to Dern where she had ground control there. One of the things that makes Dern so formidable on the ground is that she constantly gives you two threats to think about, at least two, if not more than that, right? Where she'll do something with her hands to control where you cannot allow them to establish that, right? So if someone is doing that to you, you're the opponent facing Dern, you have to fight that grip or whatever it may be. And I'm giving a theoretical example,
Starting point is 00:02:28 but this would be one where she'll try and pin that, right? So you have to remove that pin because you want to have access to your arm. And of course, if you just let someone pin you, they're going to build on top of that. But in the process of resisting that, then she's working on something with the legs at the same time or whatever the case may be. She's creating two threats at once where you're focused on the hands or whatever she's doing. And then she's hitting a knee cut across pass or something else along those lines. And so while your hands might be occupied and not being able to push on the knee, then the knee comes up because you already have another threat that has occupied your hands that doesn't allow you to do that. So she's got a
Starting point is 00:03:04 lot of two threat attacks. She was even able to get to like a crucifix position for a little while but she didn't have great ground and pound from there i mean look to me like she's very very good dude she's gonna slice through anybody's guard right i mean just who's gonna stop the guard pass in the women's strawweight division of mackenzie der. Jiu-jitsu for jiu-jitsu. Nobody. She's getting the pass. It doesn't matter who it is. But getting that pass can take some time, right? Four minutes on the ground roughly is a long time. But if you still can't get the sub after that,
Starting point is 00:03:35 how much good is four minutes on the ground? Good for winning the round, but not so much in really getting close to a finish. She was able to get some dominant positions, but couldn't really mix in the ground pound. Why do I bring this up? There was some ground and pound with it. It's not to say it was some horrible performance. It's just that we're measuring Dern against championship level standards because she has such a decorated background and was a very decorated champion in sport jujitsu. We commented on regular morning K about the takedowns and why they need to be there and
Starting point is 00:04:04 how even that is an insufficient argument because what you really need is some kind of striking a because striking is valuable but b striking is really the is the is the is the binding ingredient for the wrestling you'd be like oh well b didn't have good striking well habib had super explosive takedowns number one right so like whatever he was lacking in the setup department there um he could kind of fudge a little bit and get away with because his takedowns number one right so like whatever he was lacking in the setup department there um he could kind of fudge a little bit and get away with because his takedowns were so overwhelming and more to the point actually his setups and his understanding of distance and everything for the most part was pretty good he had some naked shots obviously he would go from long range at times obviously nothing is perfect but a the point i'm trying to make is his standard
Starting point is 00:04:43 was better than folks realize and And B his wrestling was dominant. So he could cut a few corners at times and get away with it. You know, that's not a situation that Dern finds herself in and more to the points. Like, even if you get the fight to the floor, if the submission doesn't present itself, dude, you got to bloody these girls up. You're taking super dominant positions on them where they don't really know what to do with it. Cause she can find the back quickly.
Starting point is 00:05:03 She can move to to side control quickly. She can take mount even from a three-quarter kind of mounted pass position, which she did to Nina Nunez. There's a whole thing I want to do on that. But she's made developments in those. I thought she came in good shape. She showed good composure even into the fifth round
Starting point is 00:05:22 when she was losing. She was still making a go of it. But once the clinch breaking was there and once Rodriguez knew how to get her lateral movement dialed in that was all she wrote so to me it's not just the takedowns and how the takedowns feed off the striking it's like if you're gonna be that good on the ground yeah you're gonna win rounds that way you're gonna stop some people too with just jiu-jitsu you gotta put some hammers on her there was not a lot of time where where rodriguez got like really beat up uh underneath during that to me it's kind of a big problem okay in your co-main event it was a catch weight because jared gordon missed weight randy bound
Starting point is 00:05:54 randy brown excuse me defeated jared gordon 30 27 across the board gooden is a i said gordon i apologize it's jared good in i keep keep talking about Jared Gordon, a different person. The problem with this fight was that Brown was a much better striker than obviously Gordon is, or Gooden, excuse me. I keep saying Gordon. Gooden is. Gooden had a good leg kicks. I thought that was a pretty nice part. In fact, there was a couple moments where I thought he was going to really take advantage of it because he had situations where he would have Brown kind of putting his legs back
Starting point is 00:06:32 and looking out over his skis, so to speak, trying to get out of the way of the leg kicks. When Brian Ortega did that, Volkanovsky lit his ass up. Now, obviously, that's a very different scenario, but you are creating openings doing that that he's had four fights in the ufcs he has a ufc excuse me uh good and has he does have one one over uh nicholas stolze stolze stolze i'm not sure how you pronounce it from back in 2021 he did lose to abu bakar number gaminov and alan joban joban now retired um you know and obviously had a more or less some decent success on the regional scene. But this was a tough one for me because I think Gooden tries hard. He comes in good shape. He did have those good leg kicks.
Starting point is 00:07:11 But beyond that, he just had no answer for Randy Brown. He had no answer, particularly in boxing range. He was getting pieced up. And the only thing that really kind of saved him was maybe you could argue the game plan of Brown, but also how did he get around the fact that Brown's toes were all jacked up, either broken or dislocated or whatever the case may be. And he couldn't really plant or turn or pivot or bounce in the way that I think he wanted to. He was constantly bothered by them. I've said this before. I one time was rolling with a guy and I was trying to prevent a back take and I turned into him and I dislocated not my big toe,
Starting point is 00:07:43 but the one next to my big toe came right out and it just stood straight up like I could see that I could see almost the underside of the toe because it was coming like this and the only way to fix it was I had to it wasn't painful I wasn't it didn't hurt but I had to stop the roll and then I had to I tried to like flick it back into place and it didn't work which is what you saw him trying to. You saw him trying to use his other foot to kind of like smooth out the one that had the jacked up toes, but that doesn't work. I had to take the toe and I had to like pull it and then rearrange it to where I had to line it up with the other bones and then let it go.
Starting point is 00:08:19 And it almost like snapped into place when I did that. It took a couple of tries to do it. I'm not sure what his corner was doing or how feasible that even was, but just touching it is usually not enough to get it to go back in. You got to kind of rearrange the toes a little bit. And it was obviously quite distracting for him. So it's a good win for Brown in the sense that he looked quite dominant, especially in boxing range. But between eating all the leg kicks, the toes kind of hampering him, I don't want to say in any way it was a bad performance.
Starting point is 00:08:48 It was not. But it could have been a bigger showcase, and I don't think that it was. And for Gooden, it's just he appears to be up against it. I mean, how old is Gooden? He is 27. He's still young. You know what? Let's give him some time.
Starting point is 00:09:04 Let's give him some time let's give him some time to develop but nevertheless in this particular contest he had one good thing going he used it to about as well as you could have uh but he was just overmatched in this one really overmatched punches were coming from angles he just didn't see brown was switching stances catching him on the exit all kinds of stuff even at a catch weight of 174 pounds. At flyweight, Mateus Nicolaou defeating Tim Elliott, 29-28 across the board. I'm not sure what round they gave to Elliott. That one looked like a Nicolaou fight all the way.
Starting point is 00:09:35 Dude, Elliott looked like, especially early, he looked like he was having fun out there. He was vibing. He was flowing. He was changing stances and using all kinds of unorthodox but fun tricks you know to to for various purposes I'll just put it that way and none of it really worked on Nikolaou Nikolaou had to take downs especially in the third when he needed to he stopped all the ones for the most part that Tim Elliott wanted I don't have the numbers here in front of me let me see if I can find it actually um Mateus you know I'll put this up here Mateus
Starting point is 00:10:11 Nicolaou uh fight metric they have it in terms of the stats of this fight with Tim Elliott they gave him one takedown I think it was the one in the third Tim Elliott went one for 10 he had 10 percent takedown defensive um success in this fight which is like Mackenzie Dern's overall actually I think hers might be less at this point I'd be curious to see what hers is actually at this point sort of as a side note Mackenzie Dern's historical uh historical takedown accuracy. Yeah, it's still 10%. But you get the idea here. In the case of Nicolaou and Elliott, he stuffed all the takedowns,
Starting point is 00:10:55 and while Elliott was kind of flowing and looking good in the sense that he, you could say, you know, a fighter who feels good fights good, it just seemed like it was a lot of extraneous shit that had nothing to do with actually successfully implementing a game plan i didn't think he got off enough i didn't think he was throwing enough i mean he threw 215 shots to only 109 by nicolau but i don't recall anything super impactful landing i remember a butt nicolau was by the way
Starting point is 00:11:21 elliot was like changing stances and blah blah Nikolai kind of for the most part not entirely but for the most part stuck to his orthodox stance had good jabs to the body had good intercepting calf kicks had good straight hook combos you know he kind of kept it a little bit more basic but he had much more success with it whereas Elliott was moving and flowing and and changing stances and trying all this stuff, but it didn't amount to effective offense in the end, either in the takedown department or in the stand-up. It just seemed a little too, as the Brits might say,
Starting point is 00:11:55 a little too cheeky. It wasn't as focused and as dialed in. Nicolau, you could see, man, he looked like he was ready to take the SATs up in that bitch. What I mean to say is like, you know, the proctorctor's delivering the test he wants to get into a good college he was he was focused that kind of a thing whereas Elliott just sort of was having a good time well you can have a good time but there wasn't just just wasn't enough offense that came from it and I there was a couple moments where Nikolai got um had to get into these hand fighting situations where
Starting point is 00:12:24 Elliott was around the back. In fact, if there's sort of one note about this card, the thing to me that seems like it's really missing in modern MMA, the modern game more generally is just effective hand-fighting from the waistline. A lot of people don't really seem to know how to do that very well or just can't find themselves in a position to do it well. And as a consequence, you're. A lot of people don't really seem to know how to do that very well or just can't find themselves in a position to do it well. And as a consequence, you're seeing a lot of people take advantage of that gap.
Starting point is 00:12:50 I wonder how much longer that will last, probably for a long time, because of the way the rules are structured, but still a bit of a problem, a bit of a problem. Nice win by Nikolaou, though. Okay, Maria Agapova defeating Sabino Mazino mazo rear naked choke 53 seconds of the third round we talked about this a little bit on morning combat regular but i wanted to revisit it here mazo has had a couple of problems in her career one she just has not been quite as physically dominant and i think you know the input the lack of imposition she wants to have a skill
Starting point is 00:13:24 off and obviously she wants to get that volume going but there's there's a certain rough and rowdiness to it all that her game lacks i think that it sometimes is really needed at the at this level agapava clearly has it and the other one was she just couldn't switch gears once her basic game plan didn't work she didn't really know what to do right Right. So what she was trying to do was just get into these flow States where she could just go and touch, touch, throw switch angles, do this touch, touch, throw, you know, and then once she gets going, she becomes quite a force. That's when she starts going to the body. That's when the head kick starts getting going and
Starting point is 00:14:00 she's mixing it up, but requires volume it requires openness it requires something other than what agapava did agapava did two things really well one she just intercepted and blitzed on her she would what you saw from maza was she would want to faint to get agapava to throw and then off the throw she would counter but agapava never played that game she would either get off first or she would jab or cross with Mazo when she went. So she was going either right before her or right with her. And then, not just like landing the one shot and going, landing and continuing, staying in Mazo's face.
Starting point is 00:14:34 So she was forced to reset, forced to reset, forced to reset, forced to reset. She had her number from the word go. From the first minute, her face was getting marked up. And she just stuck to it over and over again. Alsozo's defense probably not what it should be because she opened up on that jab and ate a monster right hand why because agapava was just waiting on it agapava wasn't having to address anything else she could wait for you to open and then if your timing is good enough crack you right it wasn't like she was jabbing up top to get the hands of Agapava to go up first and then quickly transitioning to the body and then exiting out.
Starting point is 00:15:11 It was just step into you, do a little motion. None of it gets you to do anything. She opens. You just wait for her to open, and then you go. And then once you do that, you saw that right hand sit her down and then the clamp she had at the end there. That's a great demonstration of when it makes a lot of sense to follow a hurt opponent to the ground. And not just that, notice that Mazo landed on her hands and then her knees, sort of in a semi
Starting point is 00:15:37 all-fours position. You could have had Agapova just take the back and let Mazo carry the weight. That wouldn't necessarily be wrong. What did she do? She snatched her off of her base. And then when she did, the tap was immediate, immediate. That's a really nice win from Agapova. It shows, I'm not even sure who she's training with at this point because I think she got booted at ATT.
Starting point is 00:15:59 Stop sitting on your aeroplane points and get big savings so you can be somewhere you actually want to be, like on a beach. 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. Whoever she was training with, they game planned correctly. They scouted Mazzo correctly. They game planned correctly. Agapava implemented it from the word go. She had a very
Starting point is 00:16:42 disciplined approach. And what I really love about it is it didn't work immediately. The finish didn't come until 53 seconds in the third round. She had to put in two full rounds in the bank before. Now, the stoppage came pretty quickly by the time the third round came along. But you get what I'm saying. She had to implement it and implement it. And then finally, it worked. I appreciate how disciplined and focused everything about that was
Starting point is 00:17:06 from a grab of a great win by her. How about a bantamweight? Chris Gutierrez defeating Felipe Corrales. Split decision. I'm not sure why it was a split. 28-29 for Corrales. Yeah, and then two 30-27s the other way. I get Colares.
Starting point is 00:17:20 Excuse me. Colares, not Corrales. I apologize. Felipe Colares. Coleras, not Corrales. I apologize. Felipe Colares. Colares? Chris Gutierrez is super, super, super talented. Very talented young man. Very good fighter.
Starting point is 00:17:36 Great footwork. Good accuracy. Good cardiovascular conditioning. Well-rounded, well-coached. I mean, he's a great leg kicks, great kicking generally, but obviously the leg kicks are very, very good. Great reads. I mean, he does a lot of things really, really well. What kind of killed me in this fight a little bit, even though he won, was he couldn't quite get Colares off of him, right? So Colares was constantly pressuring him,
Starting point is 00:18:05 and not enough to win the rounds in my judgment, not enough to really cause a severe disruption, but for Gutierrez to take that next step, it's not just enough to, like, strike and move. You want to have the striking and the moving ultimately begin to cause problems with forward execution, Whereas here's what I mean. So as you begin to hit one, it can hurt them, right? You begin to mark them up to they begin to not be as forward on that front foot heavy by virtue of the attacks that you've successfully landed.
Starting point is 00:18:40 So now they're thinking about it or they want to pressure into you, but they're much more confused and they don't quite know on that level he was actually pretty good but even still there's probably another a level or two beyond that that he can hit whatever the case may be he was doing maybe he was doing a lot of really good things but could not land with the kind of effectiveness and thud and pop to keep colores off of him which you might understand because gutierrez's game plan seemed to center around movement not being one place too long early in the fight he was kind of getting pressed against the fence a little bit more than he was a little bit later um so there's sort of some things there that are really really good about him but i think to get him to that next
Starting point is 00:19:20 level and that last 30 seconds dude when he opened up on colares he was tearing him up in the third round the last 30 seconds were great i like a lot of what i see from gutierrez i just think the one thing that is currently missing is uh and it's a hard needled thread i don't present like i've got all the answers i don't have any of them i'm just saying the guys who can if people are going to want to for a guy who can move like him and for a guy who can move like him, and for a guy who's got all the tricks, and for a guy who kind of uses motion very effectively, people are going to try to do what Colores did. Maybe not in the exact same way, but they're going to constantly try to take him down.
Starting point is 00:19:58 They're going to try to pressure him against behind the black line. They're going to try and put him against the fence line. He's going to need to have a lot of answers for that. So this was a good experience, but there's still a level or two at which he can succeed. On the preliminary card, Alexander Romanov defeating Jared Vandera. I don't know much about Jared Vandera. I was not super impressed in this performance. He was even trying like a, he was trying a Americana on a paintbrush from guard underneath. Sorry, not even from guard. From underneath side control. He nearly got armbarred for it.
Starting point is 00:20:30 Like, if you're asking how is that even possible, like, they don't work for a reason. That was really, really bad. Now, Romanov is interesting. Big, strong guy. I think he's like 15-0. He was throwing people every which way. He got a good ground-to-pound stoppage.
Starting point is 00:20:44 He's beating Juan Espino. He's beating Marcos-pound stoppage. He's beating Juan Espino. He's beating Marcos Rogerio de Lima. He's beating Roque Martinez. He's undefeated in the UFC, and all of those came by way of stoppage. Dude is clearly good. He's clearly talented, strong, determined. This was not the most telling win about how far he can go. You got a lot of what you previously knew about him here.
Starting point is 00:21:08 I didn't see anything hardly new, but it's a decent way to push the process forward, so to speak. So good ground and pound, good control. I think he had mount for a time. He went to knee on belly for some of his ground and pound, which I really like for a big guy. Knee on belly for a big guy can be devastating for the in there in the right context um a lot to like but still you know pretty early on in his in his run damon jackson who must have left several gallons of blood in the octagon defeating charles rosa they had it 29 28 and then 2 29 27 and 30 27 i don't know which round you would give to Rosa. Maybe the third. The first
Starting point is 00:21:46 two rounds, it looked to me like Jackson was just better about initiating control. And then, you know, there was a couple times where Rosa was locking up 50-50 guard. There was a couple times where each guy was going for leg locks, and neither was all that successful. But in general, it just looked to me like Damon
Starting point is 00:22:01 Jackson was better about the takedown, better about establishing back control or getting behind him with the, again, with the locked wrists, excuse me, locked hands, I should say, even in standing position, constantly doing mat returns to Rosa, picking him up and then returning him to the mat. By the way, Romanov doing that to Vandera a lot as well. But it was just in that third round, you see Rosa hit him with that spinning back elbow and just dumped blood everywhere.
Starting point is 00:22:25 That round was a little bit more back and forth. One guy couldn't really put it on the other one. If they wanted to give Rosa that round, that's fine. But the big takeaway is, one, great composure by Damon Jackson to suffer a huge cut like that, see all that blood, not panic, not lose his way. Even if you lost that round, here's why you want to get those two good rounds in the bank, because it really helps you there. almost had a head and arm triangle at the end of the second not quite there but you know he was kind of putting it on rosa he was clearly the better
Starting point is 00:22:52 grappler and that's what i really liked about it he took you knew that rosa is going to give you that forward pressure he used that forward pressure to get takedowns and then once he got the takedowns he was just the better overall top game kind of guy. Even if at certain points he found himself looking for knee bars underneath. But, you know, Rose is tough out. He literally, I think, has won or lost in that pattern. One lost, one lost, one lost. All the way back to, I want to see here. Yeah, dating all the way back to his UFC debut.
Starting point is 00:23:20 He has won and lost alternately. So whoever he fights next, good luck with that. He's got some good wins, right? Justin Jaynes, Kevin Aguilar, Manny Bermudez, Kyle Bokniak, Sean Soriano. But then he's got losses to Yair, Shane Burgos, Bryce Mitchell, Derek Minner, and now Damon Jackson. He's not losing to scrubs, but he's kind of going that up and down, up and down, up and down thing.
Starting point is 00:23:41 This was the most dominant fighter on the card to me in terms of just what they showed, in terms of what they were up against anyway. Lupita Godinez defeating Silvana Gomez Juarez. Gomez Juarez out of Argentina, she was not ready for this one. She got worked. Godinez took away her jab immediately in this fight, immediately to it had her timing almost instantly had a better angle on her in terms of the striking almost instantly got a takedown I think I had to get a second one to keep her down but on the ground had massive advantages this was something bordering on mismatch I'm not accusing the UFC matchmakers of doing that. I don't think it qualifies for that, but Gomez Juarez was up against it here. She was up against it. This was not a fight I don't think
Starting point is 00:24:32 she could have won short of landing an errant punch kind of out of nowhere. Godinez was better everywhere in this fight and took it to her right away, which is why you see that it didn't go past the first round. I'm just saying with Godinez and Gomez Juarez, it's nice that the women's game is growing, especially through South America. Although Argentina has long been, I won't call it a powerhouse, but they've been a visible presence in MMA for quite some time. And now it's expanding to the women's side of the game, is all great but godinez the the mexican fighter here that of women's strawweight division was just way way way too much for her in literally every dimension and then last but not least steve garcia defeats charlie ontiveros at 151 of the second round so there's a good and bad here ontiveros lands an axe
Starting point is 00:25:21 kick that disrupted steve garcia but the reality is it wasn't just that. He got dropped later with just a striking exchange, got landed on cleanly. Now he had the presence and the ability to then get the takedown, get on top and do well, but then the second round starts, he gets dropped again going for a takedown. So he's got some striking defensive issues big time. It looked to me like he would kind of faint sometimes and kind of get a reaction. Like you could see he was trying to work through that problem, but it wasn't having the effect that I think he was hoping for.
Starting point is 00:25:52 So then he would just step in, and Ontiveros would crack him right from it. But then once they got to the ground, it was a totally different story. Eventually, Garcia moving to mount, bloodying up Ontiveros from an inside elbow. Dude, these elbows, man, it's not just here you can do damage. I one time closed the guy's eyes.
Starting point is 00:26:09 This is a true story. I didn't even mean to from north-south just by bringing my elbow in to cover his head, and that elbow lightly, I didn't even notice it, hit his eye, and then when we stopped the roll, his eye was almost completely blown up. Just a little-ass elbow like that can sometimes just do miracle stuff and you saw that he kind of closed the elbow a little bit and it cut uh ontiveros really badly and it was bleeding everywhere but dude garcia didn't let up so it's a nice win for garcia and then he overcame some
Starting point is 00:26:36 difficulty keeping the fight where he had the advantage and then not not relinquishing it once he did but in that distance closing moment and striking his way to get there, he obviously had some issues. See, this is what I mean taking it full circle back to Mackenzie Dern. You can have good takedowns, dude. Steve Garcia has good takedowns, and he got the win. But a little bit of extra striking know-how would make those takedowns even better, which is going to make his game that he likes to do,
Starting point is 00:27:03 which is the ground control, even better. That's what I'm talking about with D likes to do, which is the ground control even better. That's what I'm talking about with Dern. She can work on the wrestling, work on it. It's important. She needs it. No doubt about it. But there's another layer here. You've got it.
Starting point is 00:27:13 Striking is part of the wrestling in MMA when obviously the game starts on the feet and at distance. How you navigate that is extremely important. So it's not just, it's not just the wrestling. It's the ground and pound, the wrestling, and the striking. It's really quite a lot, except the jiu-jitsu. And even the jiu-jitsu, there might be some things she wants to reconsider about. Your fight of the night went to Rodriguez and Dern.
Starting point is 00:27:34 And your performance of the night went to Lupita Godinez, well-deserved, and Maria Agapova. This is the first UFC card where all of the bonus winners were women. How about that? Kind of interesting little footnote and all deserved. What are you going to say? They didn't deserve it. They really did.
Starting point is 00:27:50 So nice wins by them. Decent little card for a Saturday afternoon. And especially considering we got the Fury and Wilder three greatness later on. Okay. That's it for me. Like the video, hit subscribe. This is MK extra credit Episode 3, I believe.
Starting point is 00:28:06 And we'll be back next week getting you ready for everything on regular MK, and then we'll pick up all the things we didn't get to right back here like we always do. Thank you guys so much for watching, and until next time, enjoy the fights. you

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