UFC 317 - A Bull In The Bronx

Thoughts on how Oliveira can perhaps take Topuria's 0, and on the other interesting fights on the card

Brief personal interlude - my apologies for a fairly long absence, and thank you to everyone who’s stuck around since the last time I wrote anything (in fact, that was the last Topuria fight week). One week after the last event I talked about, I flew to Boston to see about a girl, and in the months since, I’ve married her — as a result, I hadn’t the time or much inclination to commit time to any longform work on Waldo Cortes-Acosta that I may or may not have had in the tank. Hope to get more regular moving forward!

No need for a very long intro here. As a result of the Contender Series and the ESPN deal, the routine UFC event has gotten more and more forgettable; however, that does mean that when they have a reason to put together a deep card, it’s especially noticeable (granted, this is a rather tortured attempt to be positive about a spectacularly watered-down product). UFC 317 is one such event — one of those “International Fight Week” cards that usually has a lot going on. In this case, it’s a vacant title fight at lightweight between its premier action king and an undefeated lower-weight champion, as well as Brazilian stalwart Alexandre Pantoja looking to turn back another top flyweight gunning for his belt — and more than just important fights, UFC 317 has several great ones. Let’s jump right in.

Ilia Topuria vs. Charles Oliveira - Lightweight Championship

Ilia “El ‘La Leyenda’ Matador” Topuria has surprised me once again — it’s not to say that I expected the great Spaniard to completely fail at a high level, as he was such an obviously bright prospect, but more that I’d hoped fights against Alexander Volkanovski and Max Holloway would push him out of his comfort zone (win or lose, and I picked against him for both). After all, that’s how most successful MMA prospect paths go, at least for fighters who are more than flashes in the pan — they cut through decent-ish competition via pure athletic potential and a defined A-Game, they run into a conceptual ceiling at some point before they hit the very top, and that kind of struggle informs their development in a variegated sport that doesn’t really allow for fighters to never have a bad style matchup. However, Topuria has become arguably the pound-for-pound #1 in the world through a path that (appropriately, for his skillset) resembles that of a boxing prospect more than an MMA one — where an anointed undefeated fighter rips apart the previous beltholder generation, and looks for more belts rather quickly. As opposed to the prospect being forced to broaden their skillset as a result of facing different style matchups, Ilia Topuria simply hasn’t found an equal for his confident and straightforward (and up to now, nigh-inevitable) process — even while facing the erstwhile two best fighters at the best division, and arguably two of the best fighters to ever live.

Several writers I hold in high esteem have discussed Topuria’s skillset in a more granular way; to summarize my own thoughts on him in much less complete fashion, Topuria’s most unique and important skill is his ability to punish his opponent’s exits with incredible alacrity and efficiency. Topuria’s five-round destruction of Josh Emmett is maybe the best example; the older puncher could occasionally punish Topuria’s love of power-punching to the head when he stood his ground in his stance — but more often, Emmett would get his big rear hand drawn out at a most inopportune time by Topuria’s pressure, and Topuria’s ability to patiently eat up space and keep his own positioning while closing distance quickly would enable him to be right on top of Emmett as Emmett looked to move around and reset. Through his campaign against featherweight elites, Topuria has improved at the auxiliary skills needed for this kind of game as well — developing a tricky jab and outside low-kick to compete at long range and cut off lateral movement, hiding his big entries and pressuring behind an almost Canelo-ian approach of constant and threatening weightshifting within his stance, and most importantly, getting a lot better at punishing non-committal offence behind a superb crosscounter and hopstepping counters — to the point where even Alexander Volkanovski heard the Siren song of sticking and moving (and met his end because of it). At a high level, most fighters understand that trying to approach such a versatile and potent combination-hitter in a purely defensive way just means that he’ll get as many opportunities as he needs to find the gaps — but Topuria is a phenom at inducing the small moments where even elites commit their positioning to avoidance at the cost of dissuasion, and punishing those moments with extreme prejudice.

Ilia Topuria finds his elite opponents being silly with their feet

This makes Charles Oliveira very interesting for him — in a way that’s extremely high-risk or extremely high-reward for the great Brazilian, assuming that the fight isn’t just Oliveira being either way too big or way too old. Oliveira would not appear to be able to hang in the pocket for very long with Topuria — Topuria’s mechanics and decisionmaking as a pocket-puncher are fantastic, and Oliveira’s often narrow and upright stance exposes him to the bodywork of the Spaniard as well as leaving him at a positional disadvantage in longer trades. However, as opposed to Topuria’s prior opponents, Oliveira makes a living taking away the pocket offensively rather than defensively — often to his own detriment, which means it’s fairly likely that even Oliveira fighting the right fight in the big picture loses it instantly in a detail. These considerations are (in ascending likelihood of being a problem for Topuria, in my estimation) —

1. Oliveira’s own counters in the pocket, where he can dig down in his stance and punch with Topuria — this doesn’t seem like a sustainable approach in the long term where Topuria is so much more mobile on the inside and comfortable in longer exchanges, but having a tight left hook as a bigger man is a decent place to start against a marauding pressure fighter to making him think twice.

2. Oliveira’s kicking game, where Topuria’s stance and attack patterns do leave him vulnerable in theory — Oliveira attacking the wide stance of Topuria with lowkicks, and maintaining the range with his frontkick, are both ideas that Oliveira has implemented (see Poirier) and which Topuria has been held off by (against both Volkanovski and Holloway in spots). Oliveira’s stance, while poorer for a pocketfight, seems better equipped for a protracted kicking match — the question is forcing it.

3. Oliveira’s clinch and transitional work. Oliveira (and this was even clearer in his last showing, the rematch against Michael Chandler) is often even willing to take a hit to establish the clinch, where he’s an absolute demon — Topuria’s height disadvantage lends itself well to Oliveira’s collartie game, and his love of swinging big to the head in exchanges makes it a rather natural approach for Oliveira to attempt to turn it into a transitional exchange in response (which, again, Dustin Poirier ran into when attempting to impose exchanges on Oliveira with distance-covering offence). Most importantly, the clinch is a great way for Oliveira to end trades without letting his feet go to pot or necessarily backing up linearly in ways that give Topuria his usual openings — he can close distance and threaten Topuria rather than give ground and respond.

Oliveira avoids giving ground to Poirier as Poirier tries to draw that out to shift at him — grabbing him instead and turning the exchange around

All of these considerations should (ideally) work to take away the pressure of Topuria — make it more difficult for him to take ground for free and pin Oliveira to the fence, and therefore push the young champion into nearly unknown territory of being forced onto the backfoot by a long attritional threat who can force errors and finish fights with them. All that said, I will be favoring Ilia Topuria by knockout — even Oliveira’s ideal fight runs a lot of risk, requiring him to push back a massive hitter who’s danger on the counter, and every fight where Oliveira has succeeded at that has required him to go through several knockdowns in the process (particularly dangerous here when looking to grab a dangerous combination-puncher, which did get him dropped by Poirier’s right hook — Topuria’s varied combination-punching poses similar threat). Oliveira’s inability to assertively pressure Arman Tsarukyan — an actively poor pocketboxer — due to the takedown threat also seems notable; Topuria has turned to that route in tougher fights (Holloway, Youssef Zalal in his short-notice UFC debut, etc.), and if that or anything else gets Oliveira backing up or letting up on the pressure, the fight seems all but over. -400 is far too wide given the nature of cross-weight fights, and Oliveira’s unique positioning as a tricky style matchup for the former featherweight king — but only one of them seems to have much scope for a uniformly dominant performance, and it’s always a tough spot when the older and more worn fighter needs to create chaos to win. I suspect Topuria struggles a lot early at long range, but Oliveira slips up and (somewhat like he did when Makhachev took him down) loses the confidence he’d need to impose his will on Topuria in the open — and when that happens, it’s Topuria’s to lose.

Alexandre Pantoja vs. Kai Kara-France - Flyweight Championship

The rest of these will be meaningfully shorter. Alexandre Pantoja has been a rare bright spot among a fairly turbulent championship landscape, defending his title three times in fights that alternated between being wild brawls and decisive clinics. More surprisingly, this came for Pantoja meaningfully past-prime — well after taking a brutal beating from the great Deiveson Figueiredo, a loss in his favored kind of scramblefest to Askar Askarov, and needing to pull a win out of the fire (via unforced errors) in the first Brandon Royval meeting. Ever since, however, Pantoja has been a picture of focus, for better or worse — pairing a Wanderlei-style aggression behind flurries and collarties with the rare ability to control flyweights from on top and work towards finishes. At 35 years old, even welterweights are falling apart a little — for a flyweight to be coming off a performance like Pantoja’s against Kai Asakura, it takes something rather special.

That said, Pantoja also hasn’t been flawless — while Asakura was as close as Pantoja gets to a surgical performance, thumping him with punch-kick combos and snatching his back, Pantoja has often needed to gut through exhaustion and damage as a function of a style that’s often more effortful than artful. Nowhere was this more evident than in his fight against one Steve Erceg (who, in my opinion, defeated both Pantoja and Brandon Moreno only to give up the optics in both) — Erceg eventually did a wonderful job stepping in and meeting Pantoja’s two-handed flurries with short intercepting weapons, needling him with a jab in between Pantoja’s offensives to keep the bursts contained and keep the champion busy. Similarly, the fast linear weapons of Brandon Moreno irked Pantoja in their third meeting — Pantoja eventually started jabbing with him and making the striking more competitive as Moreno’s defensive footwork became a bigger liability, but it took him a while and his reactions are a notable weak spot he has to work around when dealing with fast noncommittal volume.

However, despite defeating Erceg (the only one in the UFC to do so decisively), Kai Kara-France does not fight this way — in fact, in most ways, Kara-France seems like a matchup that’s a little ill-equipped to deal with the champion. Something like a 125 Josh Emmett, Kara-France is a massive hitter for the weight with a frame and habits that make him difficult to take down — however, his attack patterns and his boxing are largely extremely high-commitment rushes forward, and opponents who make it long enough to adjust to his approach often don’t find a whole lot else to deal with. He’s essentially built entirely to punish linear retreats under blitzes, and his closing speed and shot selection help a lot there, but the more comfortable his opponent gets holding their ground, the fewer options Kara-France has. Kara-France being less of a scrambly FLW and more of a straightforward defensive-wrestly FLW is an interesting challenge for Pantoja, who is a rather solid anti-scrambler due to his many routes to the back and his ability to retain it in novel ways (the crab rides, the use of the fence, etc.) — however, my worry for Kara-France here is that he somewhat leaves it to a Hail Mary on the feet.

Pantoja is very liable to get hit very hard one day soon and shut off — he’s 35, he doesn’t fight safe, and Kara-France is well-positioned to be threatening until Pantoja gets him out of there. However, my impression of the striking is that Kara-France loses a lot of effectiveness when he’s pushed backwards, and his footwork patterns leave him vulnerable to the tools that Pantoja used to topple Kai “other Kai” Asakura. Much has been made of Pantoja’s 5-0 record over Brandon Moreno and Brandon Royval — however, what I find more relevant is how that pair ended up a combined 3-0 over Kai Kara-France. Moreno turned around both fights by putting Kara-France on the backfoot and catching Kara-France backing off with his longest weapons — Moreno 1 saw Kara-France start well only for Moreno to chain together combinations into switch-kicks over and over, and that same combination finished KKF in the rematch. Royval was similar — Kara-France could drop Royval, only for Royval to chain punches off knees and knees off punches and catch Kara-France moving around in wide arcs. The issue I see here is that Kara-France isn’t much of a counterpuncher — he works largely in leaping at his opponent and catching them stepping back, but is completely fine resetting and moving around when his opponent responds. Pantoja has shown several times that he’s shrewd about exploiting this sort of discomfort over and over, and I haven’t really seen Kara-France adjust to it (not within a specific fight nor over the course of his career), so I’ll go with Pantoja by submission, round 4 (with a little consternation but more about Pantoja’s form than about KKF overperforming).

Beneil Dariush vs. Renato Moicano

Originally booked for UFC 311, Beneil Dariush vs. Renato Moicano fell apart due to (like most good things in MMA) the crimes of one Arman Tsarukyan — as he pulled out of his title fight against Islam Makhachev, the other lightweight fight on the card was cancelled to allow for Moicano/Makhachev. Shockingly, top pound-for-pounder Islam Makhachev was able to make short work of the former featherweight shoved into a titlefight on one day’s notice — but in a rare example of the UFC being kind, Moicano hasn’t lost any matchmaking ground, and is back into the top-10 opportunity he was afforded by his four-win streak prior. This is rather fortunate as Dariush/Moicano is about as perfect a crossroads fight as one can find between two fighters who are basically the same age — ignoring Moicano pointlessly becoming a sacrificial lion, he’s finding unlikely new life as a 155er right as Dariush seems to be winding down after the abrupt end of a fantastic winstreak.

Momentum aside, though, it’s difficult to see where Moicano holds much of an edge over Dariush — as Moicano has generally required absolute grappling dominance to find success at 155. This is quite a departure from his approach at 145, which relied significantly more on cagey striking — but without the length advantage inherent to his 145 showings, Moicano’s biggest weakness of poor reactions and mechanics in pocket trades comes into sharper relief. Moicano is at his best as a striker at his own jabbing range, for a few reasons — he’s got a tricky jab with a lot of different applications, and his opponent having a need to close distance with their feet gives Moicano options that his stiff reactions in trades otherwise wouldn’t give him. A fantastic example would be Moicano’s best showing, a dominant win over Calvin Kattar — Kattar would prove to be far less vulnerable to kicks than Moicano seemed to suggest, but Moicano could chip away expertly at Kattar’s ability to box into range with Dutch combinations and counter-kicks, and his length advantage allowed him to set up more freely while also forcing Kattar to show his intentions with his feet and get check-hooked before being able to play any tricks with his shot selection. However, up at 155, far worse strikers than Calvin Kattar have been stunning Moicano with frequency — as they can just reach Moicano from their stance, fighters like Turner and Dober and Herbert have been testing Moicano’s shoddy reactions more than his cleverness as a mover and setup artist. The bailout for him has been his fantastic grappling and sneaky ability to set up takedowns from the clinch — but his wins at 155 have usually seen him look rather vulnerable on the feet, with a scary moment for every crafty one.

Beneil Dariush also isn’t a defensive savant by any means — but he’s a big southpaw comfortable with attacking with his longest weapons (the round kick off the left side), he’s an absolutely phenomenal grappler who I don’t expect Moicano to throw around physically, and he’s far more comfortable and capable than Moicano in an all-out firefight in close-range. While he’s a rather simple fighter in broad strokes — solid open-stance jab, good at the southpaw double-attack, aggressive if loopy in longer trades — Dariush at his peak was an extraordinarily well-studied and versatile fighter who was always more than the sum of his parts; while never a top-level athlete for 155, Dariush went on a long winstreak at a fantastic division largely by approaching his fights extremely well, swarming the swarmer in Carlos Diego Ferreira one fight removed from cagily shutting down the volume of Mateusz Gamrot off the handfight. Where Dariush has largely run into trouble has been against extremely dynamic opponents, where Dariush would either win minutes and then lose the fight (Edson Barboza, arguably Michael Johnson) or just lose the fight very quickly (Alexander Hernandez, Charles Oliveira, Arman Tsarukyan) despite almost always being the more thoughtful party.

Moicano isn’t really very dynamic at all, though — he’s almost always been the one on the wrong side of that equation, even down at 145, as a lanky and somewhat fragile technician not enormously blessed with punching power. In fact, while both are massively flawed pocketfighters, Moicano seems flawed in a much more dangerous way here — where Dariush is a scary hitter throwing ugly overhands with insane confidence, Moicano in an outright firefight is much more about slapping hook combinations as he bails out, and that seems like a much bigger problem when Moicano likely doesn’t have the traits to coast from the outside. My only real worry for Dariush here is that he’s been out for a while, he’s physically never been very far from a cliff that makes competing at the LW top 10 level nigh-impossible, and he’s been knocked out twice in a row very quickly — not in ways that were remotely unlikely for him even at his peak, but that does take a toll. Moicano is something of a gift matchup for Dariush at his best, but at this stage of his career, there are no gift matchups — that said, I’ll take Dariush inside the distance. I expect Moicano to compete at long range with his jab and kicks, but Dariush to take over with the double attack (as dos Anjos did), win the wrestling, and/or just have the presence of mind to immediately make Moicano uncomfortable at the prospect of a big lightweight in his space throwing overhands and flatten him.

Brandon Royval vs. Joshua Van

Originally Brandon Royval vs. Manel Kape — a much more binary fight between the former’s suicidal enthusiasm and the latter’s depressed ennui — Kape’s withdrawal has made room for a fight that doesn’t make much ranking sense but is interesting enough for that not to matter too much. Fresh off what could be considered his most impressive all-around performance in the UFC — wresting away the 0 of a tough matchup in Tatsuro Taira — Royval looks to derail one of the best prospects in the UFC as a whole in Josh Van, who only fought a few weeks ago in a demolition of the solid Bruno Silva. Van has looked like a top-5 in waiting for his entire UFC career, but (and this may spoil the pick) Royval has always seemed to be the matchup that would ask questions of the 23-year-old that he hasn’t yet answered — even outside of questions on Van’s level of competition relative to the #1 contender, Royval is well-positioned to test whether Van has made the requisite improvements following his only UFC loss.

That loss for Joshua Van, it must be said, isn’t anything embarrassing — in fact, Van vs. Charles “Inner-G” Johnson was a fantastic fight, and the path of a good prospect (as mentioned earlier) usually flows through that kind of crafty veteran challenge. To his credit as well, Van has responded wonderfully — not just getting sharper and sharper as a pocketboxer (his A-Game), but also starting to add some rudimentary tools on the outside in ways that show he knows why he lost that fight. Johnson — a long and awkward fighter — spent the entire Van fight floating around the outside, keeping Van at bay with a high volume of kicks and darting left hands; while it didn’t work entirely reliably and Van fought his way back into it, Johnson did effectively show that Van’s ferocious combination work can be cut off at a few nodes for a while. For one, Van is much more of a swarmer than a pressurer — while he’s already rather comfortable on the counter and his shot selection on the inside is dazzling, he doesn’t really have the corralling weapons or footwork to force an opponent to engage in those trades when they don’t want to. For another, it takes a decent amount of information for Van to really be able to play the game he wants — while his use of the counter-jab and his comfort responding in the pocket often lends him the space to make those reads of distance and habits, it does mean that there’s a slow start for a crafty opponent to exploit, and denying Van extended exchanges (as Johnson did, going in-and-out while not giving Van many opportunities to open up as a function of his footwork) can make that seemingly-inevitable barrage a lot more evitable. The fight ended when Johnson found his own spot to build instead of Van — when Van was stuck fighting at range rather than in the pocket consistently, Johnson could use that darting left straight to his own ends, and Van just never got comfortable enough to punish it.

These are very common issues for a fighter who mostly works as a swarmer in close-range — for instance, Shane Burgos was an extremely underrated pocket-demon who ran into the exact same problems, down to getting knocked out by a slick ranger’s uppercut in the same way as Van in the opening minute of round three. However, that does mean they’re difficult problems to entirely fix for the archetype as a whole; despite getting more active with kicks at long range and jabbing more, Van is still fairly reliant on an opponent conceding his range to look at his best, letting him play the counterjab game into the slips-and-rips without putting much load on his feet to catch an opponent first. Glimpses of the same issues have reared their head when he struggled to compete with the lengthy Edgar Chairez’s jabs and lowkicks early in their fight, as well as when Rei Tsuruya simply circled southpaw-ly for the entire fight — Van won both of those fights, which is nothing but a credit to him, but there are just some matchups where the boxy swarmer is always going to have to be OK with having a little less success than usual.

I think this is where Brandon Royval comes in — an often unreliable decisionmaker, but whose skillset seems otherwise perfect to test all the things that Van has struggled with so far. Royval isn’t the defensive fighter Johnson was — but he’s a long southpaw who’s almost always playing with kicks and knees through the open side, making it difficult to impose sustained pocket-swarming. By default, Royval hangs out far away — not insanely sound, but with the length and mobility to make it difficult for Van to simply create exchanges whenever he wants without becoming a more nuanced pressurer. As importantly, Royval’s pace never ceases — he doesn’t tire over five rounds, let alone three, where many of Van’s fights have snowballed when opponents simply can’t play keep-away forever and start eating bodywork (thinking here of Van vs. the slick Kevin Borjas, who did some very nice countering and pivoting but got torn apart by straights to the body as soon as his movement slowed an iota). Royval is off one of his more consistent striking performances, and while Van is almost the exact opposite of Tatsuro Taira as a fighter, Royval showing the focus and consistency he did in that fight makes him a handful for Van’s likely need for Royval to concede the pocket on his own. Any consistent Royval attrition to the body is also a new question for Van to deal with, as a fighter so reliant on both pushing a hard pace and keeping the front foot — and with such a hard matchup in front of him, it does seem noteworthy that Van is fighting so often and didn’t have a proper camp for this one. I’ll say Brandon Royval by decision — in a fight where Van eventually gets a decent amount done, Royval makes at least one baffling decision for no actual reason and gets in trouble, but the #1 contender keeps Van at bay through the open side for a fairly long time and makes the talented prospect work very hard for very little.