UFC lightweight Paddy Pimblett calls out Renato Moicano for a matchup this Summer.
Despite not making it to the top-15, Pimblett finds himself on the receiving end of call outs from numerous 155lbers’, even those ranked above him. Now 5-0 under the UFC banner, it seems now that Pimblett will likely now have to take the step up in class and face someone in the top-15.
Mandatory Credit: Zuffa LLC
Pimblett has his eyes set on one fighter in particular – No.13 ranked Mociano after having had some recent back-and-forth online. Pimblett would call would call out the Mociano in his latest YouTube video.
“I saw something the other day on Twitter – that I’m meant to be fighting Renato Moicano at UFC 301. No, no. [Pimblett shakes his finger]. My kids will be about two weeks old. I’m not fighting that soon,” Pimblett said. I’m not going to be fighting until June or July. But that is who I want next, Renato Moicano. “Money Moicano, you owe me money, lad. I’m coming for you. You little sausage.” (H/T MMA Mania)
Should Paddy Pimblett vs. Renato Moicano be next?
Moicano is currently booked to face No.10 ranked Jalin Turner on the upcoming UFC 300 card. While this may seem like an obvious problem, if he comes out reasonably unscathed a late Sumer matchup against Pimblett can makes sense after either result.
If Moicano does lose, it’s unlikely that he will drop out of the top-15 and any number next to Pimblett’s name is all he needs out of his next outing.
Mandatory Credit: Jeff Bottari – Zuffa LLC
‘Money’ Mociano has also begun to show off some of his fun personality, building his profile in the process. The 34-year-old would be happy to engage Pimblett is some trash talk, and with a high-level grappling game could result in both a fun build-up and stylistic matchup.
Photo by Kate Green/Getty Images for Prime Video UK
Conor McGregor had fun playing a bad guy in a big Hollywood production with his role in the upcoming Road House reboot. But more than anything, he’s anxious to back to work at his real job in the UFC.
Over the past couple of weeks, the Irish superstar has promoted the film alongside many of his castmates at festivals like South by Southwest in Texas, as well as a premiere for the movie in London.
The next stop for the promo tour is New York, and then Road House actually debuts on Prime Video on March 21.
After his obligations for the film are wrapped up, McGregor said he’s ready to put his full focus back on his fight career. He hopes to book a return to the UFC sooner rather than later.
“I’m looking forward to getting back and regressing, resetting and recalibrating and remapping my return to the octagon,” McGregor said during a press conference to promote Road House. “I’m eager for that. We’re in the first quarter of 2024. There’s still a good chunk of the year left.
“I’ve got two fights left on my contract. Negotiations are ongoing. When the promotional work of the movie comes to an end, when the St. Patrick’s day festivities come to an end, it’s isolation and it’s focus, and move toward a return to the octagon.”
While he’s spent the majority of his time recently promoting Road House, McGregor rarely escapes questions about his next fight. Sadly, he doesn’t really have any answers.
McGregor has repeatedly said he wants to return at the upcoming UFC 303 card on June 29 for International Fight Week 2024, but it seems like that won’t happen. UFC CEO Dana White said he’s hopeful McGregor will return by the fall, but he hasn’t offered any further updates on an actual date for his expected fight against Michael Chandler.
White often touts McGregor’s extreme wealth as a reason why his return keeps getting delayed. But the former two-division UFC champion doesn’t sound like that’s preventing him from fighting again. His promotional duties for Road House likely prevented him from competing on the historic UFC 300 card on April 13. But outside of that, he seems ready to fight.
As far as returning for another acting role in the future, McGregor isn’t totally opposed to the idea, though he’s not racing back to a movie set any time soon.
“Right now, not at this time,” he said of accepting another role. “I’m going to regroup after all this work, I’ll leave it to the professionals. It’s hard work. It was very hard work.
“After [my fight], maybe next year or something, I do not know — I will not say never say never because I had such a great time, and I met some friends for life here, and I enjoyed the process. Even Amazon have been absolutely amazing to work with. Who knows what the future holds for sure in this industry.”
It took about three months, and booking the main event was a saga unto itself, but the blockbuster UFC 300 fight card is finally final. No more tinkering, no more TBA at the top – 13 matchups are headed to T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. Two real titles are on the line – light heavyweight champ Alex Pereira defends against ex-champ Jamahal Hill, and strawweight champ Zhang Weili faces Yan Xiaonan — and a pseudo-title goes up for grabs when “BMF” champ Justin Gaethje faces ex-featherweight champ Max Holloway.
Now that everything is finalized, how does the fight card stack up with the UFC’s other centennial events, UFC 100 and UFC 200? Is it worthy of the extra hype? And most importantly, is it worth $ 79.99 on pay-per-view?
MMA Fighting’s Jed Meshew, Mike Heck, and Steven Marrocco sit down in the virtual war room to grade the UFC’s product.
Photo by Sarah Stier/Getty Images
Jed Meshew: For those of you unaware, in 2023, I debuted a new system for rating fight cards dubbed “The Meshewlin Guide.” The premise is simple and based on the Michelin Guide’s system for grading restaurants:
1 Star = A very good restaurant (fight card)
2 Stars = Excellent restaurant (fight card), worth a detour (short trip to attend)
3 Stars = Exceptional restaurant (fight card), worth a special journey.
UFC 300 is the most 3 Star fight card in the history of stars, the galaxy, and the universe in general. There has literally never been a better fight card put together (on paper, at least). Two title fights, the presumptive “Fight of the Year,” two possible No. 1 Contender fights, an astonishing 13 (!) UFC champions on the card, plus a two-time Olympic gold medalist. When the worst fight on the card has a likely future champion in it (Bo Nickal), the card is more stacked than David Blaine’s deck of cards.
Literally the only bad thing about this card is that by putting all the good fights on it, every fight card for the next month is terri-bad as a result. But that’s a price we should all be willing to pay (along with the $ 79.99) because events like this simply don’t come around often.
Now, that’s not to say that the event will deliver on all its promise. This is the fight game, and anything can happen. But even that seems fairly unlikely given the matchups.
I give the UFC a ton of crap (and should give them more, if we’re being honest), but not only have they done a great job of loading up this card, they’ve done it with fighters that rarely deliver duds. Meaning that they have created two possible outcomes for UFC 300: either the greatest night of fights in combat sports history, or a very good night of fights.
When the floor for an event is still great, you know you’ve got something special.
Grade: A+++++ (so many pluses it would wrap around the Earth)
Photo by Paul Rutherford/Getty Images
Mike Heck: I don’t like to be too judgy with this stuff, but if you aren’t grading this at least an A, your expectations were completely unreasonable (even though it certainly didn’t help that Dana White promised us a main event that, while still freaking excellent, didn’t knock socks off around the world, but I digress).
UFC 100 and UFC 200 came at times when the promotion — and the sport as a whole — was gaining buzz, gaining notoriety, and a lot of that was based on larger than life stars getting them to that point, guiding newer eyeballs to check out the product. Brock Lesnar was a gigantic part of the success of both of those previously mentioned events. Star power sold.
But that was then.
This is now, a world where the letters U-F-C shine the brightest on the marquee, where the best fighters in the world compete but are not the stars of the show. The two biggest stars that are on the UFC roster right now have only fought a combined three times since 2021 in Conor McGregor and Jon Jones, and the UFC — to their credit — has only gotten more popular and are hotter than ever.
This card appropriately represents what the UFC is in 2024 — tremendously talented fighters who are incredibly fun to watch, but no big superstars to be found. And that’s totally OK, because this card is absolutely ridiculous. Every fight matters, every fight has meaning, and there’s high divisional stakes to just about all of them — outside of the Bo Nickal vs. Cody Brundage fight, which will end very quickly either way.
Here’s just a few highlights: Pereira vs. Hill was already on my list for fights I need to see in 2024; Zhang vs. Yan is historic; Gaethje vs. Holloway is my everything; my all-in on Tsarukyan prediction for this year will either age tremendously or turn into ash very quickly; fascination with Kattar vs. Sterling. Then there’s the rest of the card – it’s so damn good.
If UFC 100 and 200 represented where the UFC was in those times, and UFC 300 absolutely does the same. Yet this might be the best card top-to-bottom the UFC has ever put together.
Grade: A+
Photo by Chris Gardner/Getty Images
Steven Marrocco: UFC shill alert!
Pound for pound, this is the best centennial card the UFC has assembled to date. The reason for that, in my mind, is the level of intrigue in just about every fight on the card. There are burning questions so many of these matchups promise to answer about the competitors and where they stand in their careers.
For example: Can Jamahal Hill recapture gold at 205? Who’s the bigger BMF, Gaethje or Holloway? Is Arman Tsarukyan championship material? Does Charles Oliveira have another title run in him? Is Bo Nickal the uncrowned 185-pound champ? Jiri Prochazka’s comeback, Aljamain Sterling’s featherweight debut, Kayla Harrison’s UFC crucible, Figueiredo and Garbrandt’s inevitable shootout, and as Mr. White says, the list goes on and on…
Then combine that with the competitive stakes of the two title bouts at the top, and I think this card beats UFC 100 and UFC 200. Maybe I’d feel different if Jon Jones didn’t USADA himself in the foot, but I see more relevant matchups with more interesting storylines on the April 13 fight card than its predecessors. We don’t need big Brock Lesnar to take an event over the top – we need UFC stalwarts that bring rich history to the fights. In that, UFC 300 really has it all. The only knock to this card is the unrealistic expectations set by White in the first place.
My only quibble? The MS Paint, junior graffiti artist event poster. Seriously, my dog could have done better.
Isaac Dulgarian may have coughed up his undefeated record last night (Sat., March 16, 2024) during UFC Vegas 88, but he didn’t do so without controversy.
In fact, Dulgarian dominated Christian Rodriguez for at least five minutes. That much is undisputed. All three judges agreed, awarding Dulgarian a 10-8 on the first round scorecards. Dulgarian threw “CeeRod” all over the cage, spent a lot of time in mount (and back mount), and really appeared to be breaking down Rodriguez. He landed a healthy amount of strikes, threatened submissions, and according to UFC Stats — the source for all the numbers I’ll be using in this post — spent but 12 seconds of the round in control positions.
Sounds like a 10-8!
Let’s fast-forward to the third frame for a moment, in which the script was entirely flipped. Dulgarian was tired, and Rodriguez was kicking his butt all around the cage. Rodriguez was fatigued as well, which is the reason no finish materialized, but it was still dominant work. Rodriguez landed some hard shots on the feet, reversed takedowns, and nearly finished the fight from flattened-out back mount on a couple of occasions.
All told, 74 Rodriguez strikes landed compared to five from Dulgarian, as well as 3:14 of control. That also sounds like a 10-8, and again, all three judges agreed. That’s a lot of agreement and clear-cut scoring for a bizarre scorecard, but all the strangeness is packed into the middle frame, that pesky second round.
Dulgarian vs. Rodriguez scorecard pic.twitter.com/u4HyCUEF3M
— MMA Mania (@mmamania) March 17, 2024
The judges were split on the second. Two awarded Rodriguez the 10-9 nod, while judge Anthony Maness dissented and gave the round to Dulgarian. The correct party is dependent upon how strictly you follow the judging criteria, which remains an eternally gray area open for interpretation.
According to the current scoring criteria, damage is prioritized over control, and striking is prioritized over grappling. For wrestling and jiu-jitsu to score, it has to result in meaningful offense. From this point of view, and taken entirely black-and-white, Rodriguez is the winner, because he landed three more strikes than his opponent (18 vs. 15 total, 12 vs. 8 significant).
And, in fairness, his landed shots were also the harder ones, which does matter.
The problem is that Dulgarian landed four takedowns and controlled four entire minutes of the fight. That makes the situation at least a little gray, right? I’ve been punched and taken down in professional fights, and I have to say, the average takedown hurts at least as badly as an average punch.
It’s kind of an absurdly strict following of the rules. I am inclined to argue too strict. While I’m in favor of the damage preference overall, we cannot pretend that Rodriguez wasn’t manhandled for long portions of the round, and he didn’t win the striking differential by all that much. In lots of other fights, a four strike difference is considered VIRTUALLY IDENTICAL, forcing the judges to weigh in the other facts like grappling, Octagon control and aggression.
Rodriguez/Dulgarian was the 5th split decision in UFC history with 28-27, 27-28, 28-27 scorecards, but the first without a point deduction.
— MMADecisions.com (@MMADecisions) March 17, 2024
Truthfully, we don’t know exactly how Rodriguez’s lands compare to Dulgarian’s. Measuring a strike’s significance is not an exact science. Innocent looking jabs can hurt. A chipping ground strike from Demian Maia was probably written down as a total strike (not significant), yet it stunned the famously durable Carlos Condit.
Is one hard low kick worth more than one hard jab? Who f—king knows!
It’s a judgement call, and in this case, the judges decided that the guy who won four minutes out of five in a round lost the round. Barring exceptional circumstances, that seems silly, and four strikes do not make for particularly exceptional circumstance.
My personal bottom line is this: I don’t think Rodriguez deserved the decision according to the current judging criteria. Admittedly, I also don’t have a problem with him getting his hand raised, because Dulgarian deserved to lose a point for fingering Rodriguez’s gloves in the third round, which may have presented a technical knockout stoppage.
It was a close fight, so in many ways, a close decision is an appropriate result one way or the other. Still, it’s one of the most bizarre scorecards in recent memory, the most standout moment in a standard Apex event.
It was allegedly a little greasy, too.
For complete UFC Vegas 88: “Tuivsasa vs. Tybura” results and play-by-play, click HERE.
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