THIS IS THE ULTIMATE DUN DUN DUN DUN-DUN-DUN-DUN-DUN #13 EPISODE 4 OR 5 OR SOMETHING
Ramsey Nijem and Charlie Rader are fighting and hey, its the best fight the season has produced thus far on paper! Brock and Co. note that Rader is a state champ wrestler. Hey, that's nice. Nijen wrestled in college with real dudes and ends up dominating the fight. He comes at Rader with wild shots Rader isn't prepared to counter or defend, gets the clinch, gets takedowns, works dirty boxing, and submits him. The editing makes Rader out to be a quitter for the purpose of drama and who cares. Len Bentley leaves because, shit, he did fight his ass off.
BELLATOR 41:
We open with Daniel Straus taking on Kenny Foster - Good win for Straus. Shows solid grappling with some decent shots, good leg kicks, nice judo throws, and gets a guillotine late in the third round. He kept the pace up and wore out Foster against he cage and on the mat, eventually leading to Foster being unable to compete with Straus in the scrambles and leaving his neck out for the submission. Straus looks really good all around. One caveat though - his striking often leaves him super open and Foster got tagged a couple times.
Chad Robichaux is in a superfight! Who? Against Zach Makovsky? Who is a champ? Or something? Both guys with glitzy records at bantam. Who deserves his? Well, Makovsky. Robichaux seems a decent fighter who is hopelessly outsized here and needs to hope for a 125lb weight class to come into existence. Makovsky repeatedly gets takedowns and dominant positions. Sure, Robichaux gets out of some subs, but he gets smashed out with punches. Is that really much better?
Patricio Pitbull Friere and Wilson Reis rematch and we get a pretty interesting fight as a result. Reis and Friere end up in a sort of standup battle most of the time with Friere landing the more effective blows in rounds one and two when the fight would be at a distance. When on the mat, Reis was the technically superior grappler (as expected) and Friere was the physically stronger man (as expected) - what's nice about Friere is that he knows his strengths and works to them. Against a great grappler like Reis, he looks to control the upper body and holds at the waist rather than try to fish for singles and doubles against the cage. Control and wearing down your man is a better option than trying for takedowns you can't get. Thanks to that smart gameplan, Reis ends up eating punches late in the fight and ends up getting highlight reel KOed with a combination against the cage forcing the stoppage. Very good performance from Friere.
Marcos Galvao and Joe Warren end the night in a three round fight. If you haven't heard, this was supposedly a terrible decision that Warren didn't for a second deserve. So let's talk about what I saw in this fight: Both rounds one and two were generally won by Galvao, but were close rounds in which while he appeared to land the more effective shots, Warren was able to force him to the cage repeatedly during takedown attempts and also was able to land straight right hands thanks to Galvao's unchanged interest in moving straight back in the cage with his hands down. That in turn led to takedowns at the end of both rounds, to which Warren was unable to do anything particularly effective. So what do you score these rounds on?
Well, both guys honestly landed a similar number of shots - Unfortunately there are no fightmetric reports, but I do have Compustrike to base what I saw on: In round 1, it was 14-13 landed in favor of Galvao for standing strikes. In round 2, it was 20-15 in favor of Galvao. We're talking tight numbers here. Warren landed the only strikes on the mat in round two (one of which was a clean and effective right hand to the jaw through the guard of Galvao), but in round one, clearly the more effective shots came in the first 30 seconds on the mat as Galvao had Warren turtling up while he wailed away. So who cleanly wins the round? Does Galvao win for having defended takedown attempts over and over or does he lose them for getting tagged with right hands standing while being pushed around and taken down in spots?
I would probably have scored this fight like everyone else - 29-28 Galvao. When I think back to the moments of the fight where someone did the most damage or really hit the highlight reel, I think of Warren diving into 3 flying knees in the second round and Galvao beating the tar out of him in the first minute of the round. Its the highlight reel stuff where everyone goes "oooh" and its not like Warren then went to so comprehensively win the remainder of those rounds that he bounces back in my eyes. If anything, the rest of the round is generally even with only his takedowns to go on. But this was not an easy fight to score, and I can see just about any score in this fight but 30-27 Galvao given Warren's comprehensive top control in the final stanza.
PREDICTIONS PREDICTIONS PREDICTIONS:
Last Week: 2-0
Overall for the Year: 25-10
BELLATOR 42:
Hale is, as I've said in the past, a very big dude. But he's a big dude I know nothing about. He's got submission skills judging from the Fekete fight, but how real are they? Was it a fluke? He's gonna tower over Lindermann, who is a tough guy and is very good at wearing bigger men out. I'm going to predict DJ Linderman by second round KO, being the feel good story of the Bellator tourneys. Hale just isn't going to be more effective with submissions than past Linderman opposition and being so big and cutting so much, he too will tire and feel the pain of looping punches raining on him.
Carpenter is a strong grappler and M'Pumbu is, well, not a great wrestler to be frank. If you can't wrestle, you can't win at a certain level, and this is that level for M'Pumbu. In spite of his cool record and the fact that he looks scary, I have to pick against M'Pumbu and treat this like a heavyweight boxing contest: robotic European can't beat a more dynamic American!
Ronnie Mann is fighting a 6-9 fighter to fill up space on the card. I could say "Hey, I predicted a fight right!" and pick Mann, but that is stupid. Of course Mann is going to win. Like fishing with dynamite.
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