The Doctor's Stoppage MMA Blog

 Alright, we finally made it to Saturday. Everyone enjoy the card and hopefully you're on the right side of things if you're someone who likes to bet on fights. To be clear, I'm not a betting expert and this isn't really  a betting guide, but if you want to use it as such, I can't really stop you. I'll just be picking an outright winner for every fight and for some of the more important ones, I may give a sentence or two about it. I will be keeping track of my overall record for each event until the end of the year and I will update this post with results once it goes official. I probably won't give an explanation for every fight, but maybe I will, it just depends what I have to say I guess. Just to be clear, my picks will be in the bolded font , and the real results will be listed next to it in italics  after the fight is official. Let's get started. Tagir Ulanbekov defeats Allan Nascimento               Result: Ulanbekov by decision (1-0)     I think U

 We finally made it to the conclusion of our preview series for UFC 267 tomorrow morning/afternoon. This all culminates with the main event for the light heavyweight championship featuring incumbent champion Jan Blachowicz and challenger Glover Teixeira. This may be the strangest title fight I can remember. Well, maybe not stranger than Bisping vs Henderson 2, but you get the point. If you had told anyone a few years ago that we would be getting this fight for the title, they would have told you that you were crazy. Jan had been a solid member of the division, spending a lot of time in the middle of the rankings, but never really being thought of as a legitimate title contender. Meanwhile, Glover was in the middle of a stretch where he was alternating wins and losses as he quickly approached his 40th birthday. So how did we get here? Let's start with Jan Blachowicz. This may sound weird for someone who is a UFC champion, but it has honestly gone way under the radar that Jan has won

As we continue with the preview series for UFC 267, we get to the co-main event for the interim bantamweight championship. I think this is the fight that I am personally looking forward to the most. Cory Sandhagen is one of my favorite fighters in the sport, so I am admittedly a little biased here. I'm also not the biggest fan of the way Petr Yan has gone about things following his DQ loss to Aljamain Sterling, but I'll keep the personal biases to as much of a minimum as possible when outlining things. I've talked about Petr Yan on this page before, so I'll start with him. This will be Yan's first appearance since he lost his bantamweight title in controversial fashion to Aljaimain Sterling this past March. Prior to that, he had been on a nice run for his entire career, with only 1 previous loss to Magomed Magomedov before either of them came to the United States and it came via a split decision. For whatever it's worth, Yan did win the rematch between them the

Over the next few days I will be outlining a few of the biggest fights from this Saturday's UFC 267 event. Incase anyone doesn't know, this numbered event isn't a pay per view as they traditionally are. The event will take place on ESPN+ with no additional cost just like the last few fight nights have been, so don't miss out. I'll finish this series on Saturday morning when I post my picks for the entire card, which I am going to start doing for every UFC event. I'll keep my record and we'll see how I do by the end of the year. I considered doing the same thing for Bellator, but I honestly just don't know the bottom of their roster well enough to be useful or helpful. I won't be doing outlines like this for every fight, but maybe in my picks I will give a sentence or two for the fights that I don't do a full post for. I'll also be doing a preview series for UFC 268 next week so be prepared for those. Be sure to comment your thoughts so I can

The UFC 267 preview series will continue with the next matchup between Islam Makhachev and Dan Hooker. Honestly, this fight feels like a higher level version of what I just talked about in the Li Jingliang versus Khamzat Chimaev preview. At it's core, this is the unstoppable prospect against the respected veteran. The only difference is that this fight takes place in the top 6 of the divisional rankings instead of number 11 against unranked. Either way, let's get into it and start with Islam Makhachev.  If you're not familiar with Islam Makhachev, this is a fighter who has been billed as the successor to Khabib Nurmagomedov for a few years now. Makhachev has trained with Khabib and his dad for years and they know each other very well. It doesn't take hours of film watching to realize this either as there are a lot of similarities in their styles. Islam heavily uses his wrestling as Khabib did, but Islam is a little more refined on his feet. While his striking is a littl

 In the midst of my weeklong absence due to midterms, there was a huge announcement. I told myself I wasn't going write anything about it until closer to the actual date, but I just can't help myself. This fight is too much fun and too good not to talk about. We've had a "Judy Bagwell on a forklift match", so I don't feel bad at all calling this the "three piece and a soda match". At this point, we've all seen the video and all heard the phrase "three piece and a soda" ad nauseum, but we are all so ready to see this fight. Both of these guys have wanted to fight each other for a long time and I'm honestly surprised it's taken this long to get it. I'm not going to analyze this fight technically, which I don't do anyways, but I'm just going to sort of outline it and maybe inject my opinion on certain things when I feel necessary.  We'll start with Jorge Masvidal. Gamebread is the biggest star in terms of fanbase an

 I saw on Twitter that this past Sunday, October 24, was the one year anniversary of the retirement of former UFC lightweight champion Khabib Nurmagomedov. Khabib is one of my personal favorites, so I just wanted to take a moment to reflect on his career and maybe a little bit of what has happened since he left. I remember Khabib's last fight very well. If you haven't seen the posts where I mentioned it in passing or read the "About Me" section or if you're just new here, I am still in college. I won't say where, but last October, the university that I was at was still doing all virtual classes to due COVID-19. I'm no longer at that university, but due to the online nature, we were given a take-home exam that we had to complete over a 24 hour window at some point during the weekend. I wanted to do it Friday because the Khabib vs Justin Gaethje fight was the next day and I just wanted to get it over with. It turns out that my biochemistry professor was abso

 For the first time in a couple of weeks, we finally have a UFC main event that is interesting. I think I was as interested in seeing Dern vs Rodriguez as anyone, but that card left a little to be desired still. Last week was Ladd vs Dumount and I haven't posted about that at all because the most interesting talking point of the entire event was Aspen Ladd's coach (shoutout to Jim Miller and Andrei Arlovski though). This is the first time I am doing a look ahead type of post so, the format is far from a sure thing at this point. With that said, let's preview tomorrow's main event of Paulo Costa vs Marvin Vettori. At the beginning of the week, this fight was slated to be a matchup of highly ranked middleweight contenders who are both coming off of a loss to current champion Israel Adesanya. For Costa in particular, a win over Vettori would have put him on a short list with Derek Brunson and Jared Cannonier as potential next contenders for the middleweight strap (assuming

 If you didn't read yesterday's post about Mackenzie Dern and Marina Rodriguez, then you missed that I said my gap in posts was due to midterms and then I took this past weekend to recover, but I will be back to posting regularly now. I know this fight was a few weekends ago and I also said that I wouldn't likely be commenting on it but here we are. I'm not here to talk down on Deontay Wilder as some have done and if you are someone who reads my posts, you know I am not a fight analyst type. I have been open in saying that I don't like boxing as much as MMA nor do I know as much about the sport itself or the fighters. However, what I wanted to comment on was largely a talking point of the broadcast in the lead up to the fight. At least for the American broadcast, they kept mentioning that this fight had a lot to say about Deontay Wilder's legacy and that if he were to lose then they seemed to imply that we would only remember Wilder as the guy who lost to Tyson

 Hey everyone. It's been awhile since I posted. I had midterms last week so I got pretty busy and then needed a weekend to recover. I watched all of the fights in real time and now that I am on my normal schedule again, I should be back to being active. I know this fight is well out of the news cycle, but I did want to discuss what happened a couple of Saturdays ago between Mackenzie Dern and Marina Rodriguez.  I'll start with Rodriguez because I think her path is a little easier and more straight forward. Rodriguez is now ranked 4th after the win and her next fight will likely be a number one contender fight vs Carla Esparza to fight the winner of Rose vs Weili II. If Rose wins, the Rodriguez vs Esparza winner would be virtually guaranteed a title shot, if Weili were to win, things would get a little messier. However, that's too many if's for right now to go through to talk in great detail about. Rodriguez did call out former champion Joanna Jedrzejczyk for her long ab

 First of all, if you're reading this the day it goes live, enjoy the Dern vs Rodriguez card that is this afternoon. The most hype in the combat sports world today will be surrounding the heavyweight boxing matchup between Deontay Wilder and Tyson Fury, which I am really looking forward to. I chose not to write about it because I honestly just don't have much insight to offer on the topic. Admittedly, I don't know as much about boxing as I do MMA and even then, this fight has had so much coverage from so many people, most of which are both more talented and more insightful than I am, that anything I said would have already been covered way more effectively by someone else anyways. I will just be enjoying this one as a fan and unless there's something unforeseen, probably won't be writing about it afterwards. Anyways, I mentioned in my post about the scheduling of Ngannou vs Gane and Oliveira vs Poirier that I would probably be making posts on the outlook of both the

 Hey everyone, decided to double up on posts today with a shorter one. I just saw the news about the rumored main event for the first UFC card of 2022. Reports are out that Calvin Kattar will be making his return to the octagon against fellow featherweight contender Giga Chikadze in January. I suggested the Giga could get the next shot at Volkanovski's title in my post about Volkanovski's future shortly after his win over Brian Ortega, but clearly the UFC has other plans for both Volkanovski and Giga. I'll get more into this fight when we get closer to the event, but my initial reaction to this news was "man, Kattar just can't get a break." I almost feel a little bad for him to be honest. I know MMA in general and the UFC more specifically doesn't give "tune up fights" the way boxing has and still does, but if there was ever a time for one, wouldn't it have been for Kattar in this situation? Kattar's last appearance came this past January

 UFC Fight Night Dern vs Rodriguez is this Saturday afternoon and if we're being honest, that card leaves a little to be desired. I am very interested to see how the main event plays out, but I really don't have much to say about it before hand. So what can we talk about before we have any results to discuss? Why not the recently rumored UFC title fights that sound like they are agreed upon but not yet 100% official. This post will discuss both the heavyweight unification bout between Francis Ngannou and Cyril Gane as well as the lightweight title matchup featuring Charles Oliveira and Dustin Poirier.  After Gane's TKO victory over Derrick Lewis at UFC 265 in August, we all knew his next fight would come against current champion Francis Ngannou. The news isn't in that this is the matchup, but rather that we finally have a date that is being targeted. According to ESPN's Brett Okamoto, the fight has been agreed upon, but is not official and is scheduled to take place

 I mentioned in my "The UFC's Bantamweight Division is Kind of a Mess" post earlier this week that I was considering doing this one. If you haven't read that post, I would recommend that you do, but it's not a prerequisite for understanding this post. I am going to attempt to outline the whole situation between Aljamain Sterling and Petr Yan that started when they were booked to fight for the bantamweight title in December of last year. I don't want this post to just be a timeline, so I will try to briefly outline what happened and then get into their exchanges after.  After Yan captured the vacated title on Fight Island against Jose Aldo, his first title defense was booked for December of 2020 against Aljamain Sterling, who was coming off of his own very impressive submission victory over Corey Sandhagen. The fight didn't happen as scheduled after Yan pulled out citing personal reasons and the fight was rescheduled for March of 2021. Once they were both a