Another Sports Podcast
UFC 308 Reaction
All right, guys, what a crazy day of fights, and it's over. Thankfully, at friggin 5 p.m., I'm able to do this. I didn't do a preview for this, obviously. I didn't think I really had much to say to be honest with you, if I'm for once in my life, if I'm being truthful. I had no idea what the hell was going to happen on this card, and it definitely lived up to the hype. Maybe had a couple of disappointing finishes in there, but it definitely lived up to the hype, and obviously the best part about it was that it was at 2 p.m. It could have been a complete snooze festival card, and I would have been happy because it's at 2 p.m., not 11.30 at night watching two dudes have a boring fight. I will take a boring fight at 2.30 in the afternoon if I need to. But this fight card definitely lived up to the hype, and was probably one of the more entertaining ones of the year. Obviously, it gets capped off by Ilya Teporia knocking out Max Holloway in the third round, and one of the craziest fights of the year so far, almost at the end of it. What can you say about Ilya Teporia? I mean, the man kind of comes up with this cocky, confident personality, and I think it really turns off. It's turned off a lot of people, but the man has done nothing but back it up since he came into the UFC, so love him or hate him, he's him. And after knocking out Alex Volcanovsky and Max Holloway and back-to-back fights, good luck beating that guy. And the sad part, the crazy part is that we haven't even seen his grappling, really. I mean, he showed it in the Bryce Mitchell fight, but other than that, I mean, these top fights, his last three, he hasn't really had to use it, so other than he took Max down in the middle of that first round, Max was able to get back up. Really nice takedown, and just goes to show he has a whole layer of his game that he really doesn't rely on that much. I mean, his grip, his striking is so good, his striking is so dangerous. But he had to weather a little bit of a storm here in this fight, he was really successful at the start of the first round, for much of the first round, and then Max started to turn it on somewhere around the middle, and I think that that first round could have gone either way. I mean, the scorecards that they showed on the screen from tweets coming in, I didn't really look on Twitter, but they were going both ways. I think he really could have scored it either way. I think Max won round two, and it really felt like Max was fine in the groove, and then to Poria was able to just disrupt it, big right hand, that was, he was looking for it, the whole fight, the whole fight that overhand right was a threat, and you just knew that at some point, to Poria was going to land a good one, it was just sort of a matter of whether or not it was going to be enough to put Max away. Max was able to survive a bit of a barrage, quite impressively, but he was still rocked, you could definitely tell, and then to Poria crashes in, lands back to back hooks, throws one, gets blocked, throws another one, and knocks Max all the way out, the first guy to do it, and yeah, it's just definitely a big feather in Iliad to Poria's cap, for sure. At just 27 years old, he's the world champion, and he's knocked out two of arguably the best of all time in that division, and it looks like he's going to end up facing a rematch with Alex Volcanovski, which I don't really care for, I don't know, I'm not really thrilled to see that fight, you know, it's hard to deny Volk the title shot, given how his status of what he was when he was a champion, but I don't know, I'm not really itching to see that fight, I'd rather see Diego Lopez just throw some new blood in there, that's just me, I don't know if Diego is more likely to beat him or not, but I would rather see some new blood in that 145 pound title picture, but man, I don't know, I think I think Ili is about to build a bit of a resume here, that's what it feels like, feels like we're on the cusp of a great title reign, and I don't usually say that about a lot of guys, I usually am one of those types of people, because you know what happens, guys win the belt, they win a couple fights, and then all of a sudden it's this guy is going to hold on to the belt forever, and yada yada yada yada, and it almost never comes to fruition, you know, usually you get about three in and then you get caught, and that sort of has been the trend, you know, the last guy that really held the belt for a long, long, long time was Mighty Mouse, and you know, we're years and years and years and years, not years and years and years, but we're a solid amount of time removed from that, and you know they just, guys that defend the belt nine, ten times just don't grow on trees anymore, and I feel like people think that they do, I think Ili might be the exception here, I think he might, you know, hold on to this belt for a while, he's probably going to go up and challenge at 155 at one point, it really feels like we're on the beginning of seeing someone's a great legacy being built, yeah, this dude's for real, he's as well rounded as you could be in mixed martial arts, no real glaring weaknesses, he's got great cardio, I mean he's won five round fights before, and he's obviously got probably the best boxing in the UFC, and he's got really good grappling, so you know, good luck being beat in this guy, but you know, as for Max, obviously I was kind of cheering for Max, big fan obviously, who isn't, it's a little bit of a downer for him, I don't know where he really goes from here, it really feels like he's the only direction is up, you know, he's lost to both Volcanovski and now Tuporia, and you know, you got to sort of wonder if he's really going to be, I mean the only, his really only hope at another title shot would be if Diego Lopez somehow got the belt, but you'd have to at least win one fight if not two, so you know, you got to assume that he's going to go up to 155 and take some fresh meat, have some fights he hasn't been able to have at 155 against dudes he hasn't faced before, and you know, maybe go up and try to get that belt, but I mean, I want to pull this stat, I didn't look it up beforehand because I'm curious, I want to see my reaction to it, he just cannot get that belt, it almost feels bizarre to think about the fact that he hasn't had the title since December of 2019, that was last time he was champion, it almost feels like he's been an uncrowned champion this whole time, but so since then he has had one, two, three, four title fights, he's 0 and four, if you want to look at his career as a whole in title fights, he's got one win, two, three, four, five, and if you count the Dustin Porrier one for the interim title, he's five and five in title fights, and six and five if you want to include the BMF title, so very weird legacy with Max Hallway, it almost feels like you know, you kind of picture of him this unbeatable guy, but man, just in those titles, he just cannot get his hands on that belt, it just slips away from him every single time, it feels like, so just was not destined to be today, and maybe he's just, and it really just feels like that's it, he's never gonna get that 145 pound belt back, which is sort of crazy to think about, it feels like his lasting legacy is a little bit more than what you would think as a champion, you know, he beat Aldo for the belt once, and then he beat him again, and then he defended it against Ortega, defended it against Frankie, and then he lost it, you know, so he only had three title defenses, it almost feels like he sort of deserves to be a six time defending champion, but it just doesn't, it just hasn't worked out for him, he hasn't been able to get that belt back, he wins every other fight, he wins every other fight, he just cannot, his only losses, his only losses, dating back to his last loss against Conor McGregor, that loss against Conor McGregor, over 10 years ago now, his only losses are in, in championship fights, so, you know, it's a real shame, and it's, it's, it's, it's just funny because it's like, you know, you can't have him hanging around at 145, just beating all these contenders, but he can't get the belt, and you know, man, it's just disappointing to us, just a, as just a max hallway fan and a max hallway observer, and you know, he's still only 32, will be 33 next month, so he's still got some time left, I'd like to see him, to have some legacy fights at 155, have some fun up there and, you know, try to make one last run at gold, but man, it's just, yeah, it's just disappointing, he never is going to get that two time featherweight champion distinction. Also on the card, in the Komean event, Hamza Chamayev, takes care of Rob Whitaker rather quickly, wasn't even really a competitive fight from the beginning, Hamza takes him down, immediately chokes around Whitaker, well, didn't really choke him out, he dislocated his jaw somehow in the picture of Whitaker's jaws insane, and Hamza was just mentioning in the post-fight press conference that he was here, and clicks when he was squeezing on it, I mean, that's just, that's just insane, that's terrifying. So you got to look at it as he's going to get the next title shot at 185, whether that's after Sean Strickland fights Driscus to Plessis, or whether Sean's going to get passed over, but you got to assume that next time that we see Hamza, which is not very often, we don't usually see him very often, which is kind of why he's lost a lot of his sort of star power per se, it's going to be in a championship fight. And I'm excited to see how that goes. I know that they sort of talked about him, I saw, there was a question of him getting asked about fighting in South Africa, I know there was some controversy that came up this week about his ability to get a visa in the United States, he did fight in the United States before, but he seemed to clear that up instead of it wasn't a issue, so, you know, I guess that's sort of a concern if you're going to be the world champion that you can't really defend it all over the world. But nevertheless, as that was the most real win he's had, obviously the Usman fight, you know, was impressive, that was his best win, but Usman took the fight on short notice, older guy, Whitaker still definitely passes prime, but he's still fighting at a high level, and he just absolutely doglocked him, he just completely took him down, it wasn't even a competitive fight, which is again, another sad thing, another big Rob Whitaker fan, not a good day for my favorite fighters at all today, but, you know, Whitaker is a little long in the tooth now, probably was to be expected that, you know, a young up-and-coming big huge dude like Comzat was going to ragdollum, but man, you just hoped that that anti-wrestling was going to work, and it just didn't, and then obviously what happened to his face was just crazy. Elsewhere on the card, Laurent Murphy and Danny Gay, also fought, that was a pretty competitive fight for most of it, Yige had Murphy in trouble on multiple points in that fight, I thought that Murphy was going to piece up Danny Gay, if I'm being truthful with you, but Laurent had to dig deep, and find a way to win that one. Also we had Magamad Akalayev and Alexander Rockich, as well, and Akalayev wins kind of a insignificant, you know, not the most exciting fight there. I gotta tell you, no disrespect to Alexander Rockich, but a little sick of just, he popped offs up, seems like every six months in a big-flight heavyweight fight, never seems to get the job done. I'm a little, I'm a little Alexander Rockich-ed out anytime I see him in a big fight, I kind of just assume that he's going to lose. So Akalayev ends up beating him, probably he's going to end up fighting Alex Bahia. We'll see though, I can't admit, I don't think the UFC brass is a big fan of him, considering they keep pushing off, they keep having people jump him to fight Alex Brere. So we'll see, he's definitely not getting the Dagestani privilege, that some people believe is out there. Also Shara Magamadov with an insane knockout over Armin Saruz. I'm going to butcher his name so I'm going to look it up, it's, oh, Petruson, Petruson, Armin Petruson, he knocks out Armin Petruson with a spinning backflip after throwing a spinning backflip. He throws a spinning backflip and comes back and hits him with another one, insane highlight real knockout. He was a little bit in trouble early on in that fight, and I had a hedge with him and Shamaev on a Whittaker bet. So I kind of needed Shara to come through for me there and he did, but it looked a little sketchy at first and then he sort of found his rhythm midway through the first and then he was definitely winning that second round and then right before the end of the round it's an insane highlight real knockout so that obviously big win for him would like to see him fight a wrestler. I don't think that that's going to happen, I think they're just going to keep throwing him strikers and I think he's going to keep fighting all the way over there in the United Arab Emirates or Saudi Arabia or wherever and yeah, I don't think we'll see him really get tested with a grappler for a little while at least. Also we had a bit of a disappointing finish to that, Jeff Neill, RDA fight, RDA on what I believe was his 40th birthday, blows his knee out somewhere in that first round. Not that I think the fight was going to have any different results, it seemed like Jeff Neill was already getting off a lot of good strikes and is winning by TKO because RDA definitely threw out blue out his knee. Not the only knee that got blown out tonight, Chris Barnett famously jumping during his introduction, blows his knee out throwing a spinning back kick as well in the middle of the fight and that's a big dude, so you know, not a good night for knees, not a good night for people's jaws, but it was a good night if you'd bet all the favorites. So there you go, and if you're a fan of fights. So just thought I'd throw this out there, you know, do a little recap right before the Bruins game tonight and yeah, take care guys.