I love FREE MMA and the TUF 13 Finale show was entertaining for the most part. We got to see an absolute slugfest in Kyle Kingsbury and Fabiano Maldanado.
We saw a one hitta quitta as Tony Ferguson knocked out Ramsey Nijem to become the TUF 13 winner, and several other knockouts. Did I mention we got to see all the fights with the prelims being streamed on Facebook(I missed those btw). Let’s get right to the fights:
- I think Tony Ferguson is one of the better TUF winner’s we’ve had in some time, probably since Ryan Bader on TUF 8. The guy has the wrestling and boxing skills to compete in the UFC lower end of the welterweight division right now. I read somewhere that he wouldn’t mind fighting TUF 7 winner Amir Sadollah next, and I think that’s a fight he could possibly win. Well, I know he has the wrestling skills to take Sadollah down so he definitely could win if he wanted to just go the Clay Guida route. Ramsey Nijem looks like he could fight at 155.
- Clay Guida pulled a Clay Guida and I saw it coming a mile away. I picked Anthony Pettis because the kid is supremely talented and I thoughthe’d try to get back up to his feet a lot quicker when he was taken down. Pettis is still really young, so he’ll learn from this and become a better fighter. Clay Guida basically said he wanted a title shot in his post-fight interview, stating that it would be exciting to put him in there. Maybe he was referring to his walkout routine because takedowns followed by shoulder humps for strikes isn’t exciting. Jim Miller is clearly ahead of him in the UFC lightweight pecking order, and thankfully UFC president Dana White acknowledged that after Guida grinded out the win over Pettis. Maybe they should match Guida against Jim Miller for the #1 contender to the winner of Maynard/Edgar 3? Now would be a great time to matchup Pettis with Kamal Shalorus.
- Congrats to Ed Herman on his win. It’s always great to see a fighter come back from adversity to perform impressively.
- Maybe I’m crazy but I thought Fabiano Maldanado deserved to take home the win against Kyle Kingsbury. Fightmetric thought so as well. I thought the majority of Kingsbury’s strikes(mainly the knees) were blocked with Maldanado landing the cleaner shots. Also, Maldanado reversed Kingsbury on almost every take down. It was an entertaining fight though.
- Chris Cope looked much improved from his time on the show. Chuck O’Neil looked like he didn’t want to be in there. I wonder if he was pretty banged up coming into this fight or something? While Cope looked good in this fight, I don’t ever see him winning any meaningful fights in the division.
- What in the world has happened to Josh Grispi? He was like all world a couple of years ago and now he gets dominated by George Roop? Wow. The guy is still really young so he has some time to turn it around, but he might wanna make some changes in a hurry.
- Scott Jorgensen got a big win in his UFC debut and is almost always entertaining.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on the fights.