The Doctor's Stoppage MMA Blog

 Ok, so this is going to be the start of a series where I'm going to go through each UFC weight class and sort of do like a tier list or a category sorting type of exercise. It will make more sense once I start, but at the end, it should serve as sort of a summary of what's to come for the division in 2022. Let's get into it. Champion - Rose Namajunas          We'll start at the top of the division and that is Rose Namajunas. Rose is a strong champion and is coming off of a year with 2 wins over Zhang Weili. These champion sections will probably end up being pretty short for the most part as I'm not going to do a full preview for them, but just sort of my assessment of their stability as champion. I think Rose is a strong champion who isn't going to be easy to unseat. Title Challenger - Carla Esparza          The first challenger in this division should be Carla Esparza. She's earned the title shot and her history with Rose makes her the most compelling chal

 I've seen like two different youtube videos on this exact topic come out today, so I guess that's my sign that I'm supposed to do this post today specifically. It goes without saying that I'm not copying what everyone else is saying, just being honest with what I want to see. Also, I'm not ranking them from 1-10, just putting the number 10 on things to keep things clean. As with everyone else, I'm not including fights that are already booked because a few of those would definitely be high on my list of want to see. Let's get into it. 1. Valentina Shevchenko Pursuit of Double Champ Status          I list it this way because I assume that we will be getting Pena vs Nunes II first. I don't care who wins that fight, I want to see Valentina get the opportunity to become double champ after. Valentina has been absolutely dominating her competition for basically every fight she's been in that involved the title and hasn't even been mentioned as a candid

 Now that I'm finally done talking about UFC 269, we can get a little creative going forward until we start getting live events again in a few weeks. My first installment of those more creative ideas is to do my own version of the yearly awards that so many people do. If you're a returning reader, you probably know that I'm pretty committed to watching and listening to a lot of Ariel Helwani's content, so I wanted to get my awards out before his just to avoid any claims of copying what he said. Lucky for me, he did release the categories that he will be using, so I will be using those and maybe adding one or two of my own. Without further ado, here are my 2021 MMA awards. Male Fighter of the Year - Kamaru Usman          Obviously there are a lot of great male fighters and champions across all of MMA, but I think Usman became the clear winner after Dustin Poirier lost at UFC 269. Usman went 3-0 this year with knockout wins over Gilbert Burns and Jorge Masvidal, while get

 This will be my last post regarding UFC 269 finally. I'm going to do a combined post for both Josh Emmett vs Dan Ige and Geoff Neal vs Santiago Ponzinibbio because I don't think I have enough to say about each in order to do a full write up for each fight. Both of these fights took place within the rankings though, so they do have an effect on the future of their respective divisions.  I'll start with Ige and Emmett. This was actually a pretty big fight in the featherweight division, especially after Josh Emmett got the win. Emmett was returning after an injury and surgeries kept him out for well over a year and he bounced back nicely. That wasn't the best version of Josh Emmett I've ever seen, but he did enough to get the win and he looked very powerful. This puts him in the top 6 and with the Holloway and Volkanovski saga looking like it's finally nearing it's conclusion, the division is going to need some future contenders. Giga Chikadze is one guying ma

 It's not very often that we get some movement in the heavyweight rankings as the division moves so slowly. Whenever it does happen, it is notable and that's what we have here as a result of Tai Tuivasa defeating Augusto Sakai at UFC 269 a couple of weeks ago. This fight was two guys going in opposite directions, which isn't the UFC's typical way of making fights, but like I said, heavyweight moves so slowly that they don't have a choice at times. Tuivasa was the guy with the momentum coming in and he kept that rolling with yet another knockout victory. Sakai unfortunately continues to slide as he is finished for the third time in a row.  It's hard not to feel good for Tai Tuivasa because he is as well liked as anyone in MMA. Both his style and personality lend him to being a fan favorite. Tuivasa's career has been one of streaks and this is his best winning streak. He started his UFC career 3-0 before losing his next 3. Since that 3 fight losing streak, he&

 If you saw my post yesterday about Kai Kara France and Cody Garbrandt, you know I am going back and revisiting some of the fights from UFC 269 that I didn't get to talk about in the week immediately following the event. Today, we're going to discuss what the result of Dominick Cruz vs Pedro Munhoz has on the bantamweight division. This very well may have been the best fight on the entire card, which is really saying something given how great that card was from beginning to end. Dominick Cruz looked like he was fully back to his old self. The movement was there, the striking was there, we didn't get to see a ton of wrestling from him, but he at least tried to mix it up a few times, which I thought was a good plan. I thought Munhoz was a good opponent for him to sort gage where Cruz is at in his career and he definitely past the test. Cruz basically dominated the entire fight from beginning to end, except for a couple big shots towards the end of the first round that swung t

Ok, I know these are late, but I still want to talk about so many fights from this card. I didn't want to rush them and short change the fighters I'm talking about, but I didn't want to disregard this past weeks card and not do previews for Belal vs Wonderboy and Lewis vs Daukaus, so it pushed some of these reactions farther out. However, I was willing to do so because we now have a month off without any fresh events, so we're going to need some things to talk about for the next few weeks. The UFC 269 main card opened with Sean O'Malley vs Raulian Paiva and was then followed with the flyweight debut of Cody Garbrandt against Kai Kara France. This fight was highly anticipated due to Garbrandt being a relatively popular fighter and former champion who is down on his luck switching to a smaller weight class. More knowledgeable fans knew Kai Kara France was going to be a legitimately tough fight for him, even though I don't think his name carries much weight with a

 I think this is the most surprising result from Saturday for me. I don't think I need to explain myself, but I will incase someone sees this who isn't a returning reader. I said in my preview for this fight that I think Belal Muhammad is a good fighter and I still believe that. I just thought Wonderboy Thompson was a really bad matchup for him. I think Belal's toughest matchups will come against specialists or someone who is a really high level fighter in one particular area. Belal is a sort of jack of all trades type of fighter. He's pretty solid at everything, but he's not an unstoppable force at anything, or at least we thought. The way I chose to interpret it is that Belal doesn't have the area of strength to really impose his will on someone. In reality, what happened, is that Belal not having a traditional "strength" means he doesn't have to find a way to game plan his style. He can simply analyze his opponent and attack his weaknesses becau

 What a card to finish the year. 2021 was a great year for the UFC and this card capped off the year in a really nice way. The main event ended rather abruptly with Derrick Lewis cashing as the underdog by knocking out Chris Daukaus with a flurry of punches in the latter half of the first round. This fight kind of went how we thought it would, except Lewis was way more aggressive this time than he was in his last fight against Cyril Gane. In that fight he was very tentative and waited for Gane to come to him in hopes to land his big right hand. This time, Lewis was moving forward and was able to force Daukaus up against the cage where he forced Daukaus to attempt to swing his way out of it. Daukaus did a better job than most do and actually survived the initial exchange. He got off the fence and it was in a secondary clinch exchange that he first got clipped. This forced him to back up against the cage again where he covered up before ultimately being dropped and finished with a couple

 I wasn't really planning on doing this, but here I am. It's almost 1 am during my winter break and I'm about to write a post about how Jake Paul knocked former UFC welterweight champion Tyron Woodley out cold. I almost can't even believe I'm saying that. I don't anticipate this post being that long, but I feel like I have to say something after what we just saw. I'm just going to get into it in a similar style to my traditional fallout posts. Look, I'm not really a huge boxing fan and I'm not afraid to admit that. I say that every once in awhile whenever it comes up, but for anyone new here, keep that in mind. I'm in no way a boxing purist and quite frankly, I'm far from it. All of that to say, I've never had a problem with Jake Paul entering the boxing realm. He's not taking food out of anyone's mouth and if anything, he's making money for the other fighters on his cards. For me, boxing has just never had the same level of e

 For one final time this year, I will be picking each fight on the UFC card taking place later today. I didn't start this at the very beginning of 2021, so the raw totals won't be very high, but we will use this winning percentage to compare to all future years of this website. It's been a bit of a bumpy road this year, but we did a good this past week at UFC 269 and are looking to finish this year out strong. 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 do it one more time. By the way, this card is really tough to pick. So many fights I feel could go either way, which means I could end up doing really poorly or maybe really well. Jordan Leavitt defeats Matt Sayles                              Result: Leavitt by submission (1-0)          This should be a close one. Leavitt relies heavily on getting his takedowns, which he gets at a 40% rate and averages over 3 per