Welcome to "Shots After The Bell," our new post-event wrap-up that hits on all the random odds and ends to come out of UFC on FOX: “Shevchenko vs. Pena.” This fine Sunday morning we'll be speculating on the prospects of the victorious main card fighters, questioning how one ref seems to get so many strange stoppages, and guaging the toll Denver's altitude took on the card as a whole. Here we go!
Slow And Steady Wins The Title?
As far as Valentina Shevchenko's win over Julianna Pena goes, I went from being a bit down on her performance initially to thinking it could set the scene for a victorious rematch over Amanda Nunes. Watching the fight live, it seemed like Pena was getting her grind on against the cage and might be on her way to winning that second round on the scorecards by doing it. Shevchenko seemed too passive, jockeying for position against the cage and closing guard off her back rather than trying to break free from Pena's grip to establish her own offense. But re-watching with the hindsight of knowing Valentina wins the fight (see it here), her game comes across as patient and calculated. She takes all the pressure Pena throws at her and never loses her cool, still getting her knees and elbows in at every opportunity.
It's this trait that could make her a dangerous opponent for women's bantamweight champion Amanda Nunes. Nunes had previously talked about moving up to 145 pounds to fight the winner of UFC 209's inaugural women's featherweight title fight, but that terrible post-fight exchange in the cage seems to indicate a rematch between Nunes and Shevchenko is imminent. In their first fight, 'The Lioness' dominated 'Bullet' for the first two rounds, earning two 10-8s for her efforts in the second. But her well-established cardio problems came to the forefront in round three, allowing Shevchenko to take the third on all three scorecards.
While there's no doubt Nunes has been working hard to improve her gas tank, she's never been taken into championship rounds. In fact, the three times her fights have made it into the third, she's lost that round -- twice on the scorecards and once by TKO. That's obviously bad news if Shevchenko can weather the storm that Nunes brings early, something she managed to do in their first fight not even a year ago. Of course she's improved her cardio. But how much? If Nunes can't last 25 minutes, she could be in trouble. And she's going to find Valentina Shevchenko a much harder target to hit cleanly than Ronda Rousey or Miesha Tate.
Is Jorge Masvidal Gamebred For Consistency?
Stylistically, this fight with Jorge Masvidal was always a bad match-up for Donald Cerrone. You could go so far to say if you wanted to punish "Cowboy" for some reason (like, say, his involvement in an upstart fighter's organization demanding reparations), booking him against "Gamebred" wouldn't be a bad way to do it.
That's not to take anything away from Masvidal, who looked phenomenal from the moment the fight started to both points where he ended it. But rather than getting excited that Jorge may finally be taking his rightful place amongst the top five of the welterweight division, I just wonder whether this is another rare glimpse of perfection from a fighter who has struggled to use his skills consistently.
All too often, Masvidal has inexplicably taken his foot off the gas in fights and let his opponents survive and sometimes even steal a win from him. It's frustrating to watch, and it's hard to imagine this win over Cerrone marks a leaf turned for Jorge when he's been doing it for the past five years. We can certainly hope it might, though. I want to see this Jorge Masvidal again.
The Dean of the Unforeseen
Herb Dean has a reputation as one of the best refs in the business. That being said, he's also involved in a lot of fights where things just seem to go sideways in a variety of unique ways. The most obvious recent example of this is the Anderson Silva versus Michael Bisping fight, where Silva dropped Bisping with a flying knee and started celebrating on top of the cage despite the fact that Herb Dean hadn't actually stopped the fight. Not exactly Herb's fault, but he did end up looking silly trying to get Anderson back in the Octagon while Michael Bisping lay dazed on the canvas, unable to stand back up.
Now we have a situation where Jorge Masvidal knocked Donald Cerrone to the canvas with a vicious combo with seconds left in the first round. As Masvidal worked Cerrone over with ground and pound, it looked like Dean had seen enough. He stepped in to (presumably?) stop the fight, actually making contact with Masvidal before the end of the round sounded. But when the horn sounded a half second later, he ended up declaring the round over rather than the fight.
.@HerbDeanMMA stops this before the buzzer. This is a TKO stoppage for @GamebredFighter #UFCDenver pic.twitter.com/DVVTmCYAPY
— #Dizz © (@TalkMMA) January 29, 2017
Who knows, maybe he was stepping in because he was counting down the final seconds in his head and knew exactly when the round was done. Maybe it's because while Herb was already stepping in to stop the fight, his hands only motioned to stop it after the horn started sounding. But even if those generous interpretations were the case, it still looked bad. It looked like Dean stepped in to stop the fight, and then just erred on the side of letting it continue. It was a messed up situation, one you hate to see happen. And at a certain point, when weird stuff like this keeps happening to Herb Dean, you have to wonder whether he's just unlucky or there's something about how he calls fights that needs fixing.
Don't Sleep On Francis Ngannou
UFC on FOX cards often work as a kind of showcase for the UFC. While you've obviously got the name fighters that are booked to attract viewers, there's always a couple of serious prospects attached to these events that the UFC wants to expose to the world. This was Francis Ngannou's second "Big FOX" fight, and while his first one (a quick but less than electrifying finish of newcomer Bojan Mihajlovic) didn't manage to make people sit up and pay attention, this win over Andrei Arlovski should do the trick. Not only did Ngannou starch a respected name even casual fans are familiar with, he did it in highlight reel fashion, bouncing his monster fists off Arlovski's dome and jaw and leaving "The Pitbull" in a huddle on the canvas.
Sure, Arlovski's best days are probably behind him. Should we be shocked that a heavy hitter like Francis Ngannou managed to hit him on the button? No. But we can still be impressed and excited for this new blood to show up in the heavyweight division. Dana White is super keen on this kid, saying he could be the guy to finally hold onto the heavyweight title for a while. I'll hold off on that level of hype, but I'm just happy to see a fresh face with an interesting skillset added to the somewhat stale round-robin going on at the top of the division.
Is 2017 The Year Of The Crank?
At Bellator 170, Tito Ortiz finished off his illustrious MMA career by securing a neck crank submission win over Chael Sonnen. Really, it was more of an attempted rear naked choke that didn't manage to get under Chael's chin, but rather than readjust, Tito just squeezed until Chael turned purple and tapped. It's an outcome so rare in the upper echelons of MMA that a lot of fans started throwing around accusations of a fix or a dive. Yet here we are a week later and Jason Knight just finished Alex Caceres off with a similar not-quite rear naked choke. What's going on???
For all the talk that the neck crank is just an uncomfortable position not worthy of a tap, I don't think that statement has been fully tested against the latest crop of athletic freaks populating mixed martial arts these days. It seems like more fighters are willing to really commit to cranking the crank these days. And lo and behold, we're starting to see taps even in UFC and Bellator events. Is this going to become a trend?
The Mile High Club
Denver is a city that sits a mile above sea level, making it a fun place to drink but less fun to fight. Even legendary cardio beasts like Cain Velasquez have been defeated by elevation, so you know that biz is for serious. We've come a long way from the early days of the sport where any event at significant altitude was likely to be a gas-tacular affair, but you could still see the effects on all the fights that went to decision. Sam Alvey versus Nate Marquardt and Rafael Assuncao versus Aljamain Sterling both suffered. Luis Henrique da Silva looked completely zonked in his fight with Jeremy Johnson. And even the flyweights weren't impervious to the cardio sapping effects of Denver: after a frantic two rounds, Alexandre Pantoja and Eric Shelton both faded hard in the third.
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