The Doctor's Stoppage MMA Blog

 Moving on with our previews of UFC 281, we'll be going over the co-main event, which is for the strawweight championship. Carla Esparza is set to defend her title for the first time in her second run as champion after she upset Rose Namajunas in one of the strangest and most uneventful title fights I've ever seen. She'll be taking on former champion Zhang Weili and I don't think we have to worry about a staring contest in this one. This fight is sort of flying under the radar as the other two big fights on this card are getting a ton of attention (rightfully so) and neither of these women really talk a big game. Weili only speaks a little bit of English, so her promoting this fight isn't really an option, at least to the American audience, and Carla just isn't the person to come out and talk a big game. Carla also just doesn't have too much of a fan base, partially due to her lack of public persona and also due to a grappling heavy style that the more casua...

 We've made it through a bit of a slog of Fight Nights and now we're truly in the home stretch of 2022. The UFC likes to load up these last couple of PPVs of the year and it's much needed. While UFC 280 from a few weeks ago was one of the best main cards of the year, this week's UFC 281 may be the deepest event of the year. From the first fight of the night until the main event, we'll be in for a fantastic night of competition. I'll be previewing the last three fights of the card and that starts with Dustin Poirier vs Michael Chandler. With Islam Makhachev capturing the title, that opens up all of the potential title contenders that Oliveira had defeated for another opportunity. Poirier and Chandler are two of the marquee names in the division and a win could potentially vault them into a title fight. I have thoughts on if that is actually what I want to see, but we'll save that for when the time comes. This fight has some heat on it as well since these two ...

 I feel like I've been saying this forever, but I'm really just running out of time for a lot of the early and midweek posts here. These next two weeks are when everything is coming to ahead so, after the next 10 days, everything should return much closer to normal. This weekend I will be traveling for a series of interviews that take place all of next week. That means that I probably won't be posting anything for UFC 280 until the picks and bets on Saturday morning. At the very least, I'll have picks out just for the continuity of it, but depending on how much time I actually have to write and look over lines, I could take the week off from betting. I have to be in 3 different cities over 5 days and I get way too car sick to type when it isn't my turn to drive, so there's really not any way for me to get any of those previews done. I may try to squeeze in a round up for this card if I can, but it depends on how much all of the driving takes out of me. Anyways, ...

UFC Vegas 60 is shaping up to be one of the best Apex Fight Night's of the year, at least on paper. There isn't really a clear second best fight on the card for me, but there are no fewer than 5 fights that could conceivably end up being that after the fact. It's all capped off with another leg in this run of important fights at men's bantamweight with Cory Sandhagen defending his number 4 spot against one of the top prospects in the entire sport in number 10, Song Yadong. This will be, by far, the biggest step up in competition of Song's career and a win here would have him right in the mix for a title shot. Sandhagen is trying to get back on track after a pair of tough losses and get himself back into the title picture. This should be a pretty solid night of competition and will likely be capped off by a tremendous display of talent and skill by two of the best that 135 lbs has to offer.  Song Yadong comes into this fight on a nice three fight winning streak and h...

 The UFC will be making it's debut in France after the country recently legalized the sport. Obviously, the UFC wants to try to capitalize on this new market as quickly as possible and immediately put it's most well known French fighter on the card in the main event. The homecoming will be a great moment for the former interim heavyweight champion, Ciryl Gane, but it will also be an intriguing fight for him as this is his first appearance since losing his interim belt in the unification bout against Francis Ngannou this past January. That was also the first loss of his career and saw him get exposed a bit by an improving Ngannou, so he'll be looking to bounce back into the title picture with a win here. He'll be taking on Tai Tuivasa, who is in the middle of the best run of his career. He's won 5 straight, all by knockout. Heavyweight is a bit messy right now as the top 2 contenders, as well as the champion, are all in a state of flux. Francis Ngannou is still recov...

 Last week I said that I was going to be bringing some more posts about Leon Edwards and contextualizing his win and then talking about what a fluke in MMA is and isn't. I started writing both of them and they just weren't turning out the way I wanted. I was having trouble taking the idea in my head and articulating it in the way that I envisioned, so I ended up scrapping both of them. I'm not really sure why, but the thoughts I was having weren't translating to an interesting and engaging read that flowed logically. We'll pick back up this week with UFC Paris content. We have a strange event as it provides a mix of some really fun and interesting fights with a lot of lower level fights. The co-main event will bring us a really big matchup in the top 5 of the middleweight division as Robert Whittaker makes his first appearance since losing his rematch against Israel Adesanya. He'll be taking on Marvin Vettori in a fight that was originally slated to take place i...

 The UFC is back on the schedule for tomorrow and is also back on the road as they'll be in front of a live audience in San Diego. In the post pandemic era, the UFC has been loading up the cards that are in front of fans, but this is a much more ordinary Fight Night card, but the main event makes it all worth it. At least for me, this is one of the more interesting Fight Night main events of the year with Aspinall vs Blaydes and Gamrot vs Tsarukyan coming to mind as well. I'm excited to see this fight play out because I think the margins are very thin on each side. It should be a very close and competitive fight that I'm pumped to see play out. Bantamweight is also my favorite division in the UFC and all of MMA, so any chance I get to see a big and meaningful fight in this division, I'm already sold. Let's get right into it. Dominick Cruz comes into this fight ranked lower and will be in the blue corner. To start, I have to admit that I am a fan of Cruz, so just kee...

 The UFC is back tomorrow with another Fight Night at the Apex. We'll be getting another Thiago Santos main event, this time against rising contender Jamahal Hill. As a whole, I think this card actually pretty solid. Geoff Neal and Vicente Luque probably could have been a main event of it's own Fight Night and Serghei Spivac vs Augusto Sakai isn't a horrible fight either to go with the TUF finales. I can't tell you the last time I've watched a full season of TUF, but I think the novelty of the finales is enough to make me care a little bit about two fights I otherwise wouldn't care about at all. It is a bit unfortunate that we have to get another Santos main event, but it isn't really his fault. He fights the guys they put in front of him when they tell him to. I just don't know why the UFC keeps relying on him to headline events when it is so clear that he just isn't that guy anymore. Luckily, I think Hill will bring out the most entertaining versio...

 The main event of UFC 277 this weekend is the rematch of last December's bantamweight title fight. That night, we saw Julianna Pena turn the MMA world on it's head as she was able to pull of the upset over Amanda Nunes that very few thought was even possible, let alone would've predicted. I think that result caused a lot of people to take a step back and reevaluate how we were talking about Amanda Nunes going into that fight. Amanda had built up a reputation for essentially being this unstoppable force that was just going to bulldoze her way through everyone put in front of her. That wasn't the case with Pena as after she was able to get through a rough patch in the first, Nunes didn't seem to really have anything else for her. It was an absolutely incredible fight on one of the best cards in recent memory. We are now getting to see whether that result was more of a fluke or whether Julianna is here to stay and really start to build an incredible legacy of her own ...