Midnight Mania! A Career Ending Knockout Loss?

Welcome to Midnight Mania!

Alex Pereira fought well at UFC 287 last weekend (Sat. April 8, 2023). The Brazilian striker was doing real damage to Israel Adesanya’s lead leg, hampering the lanky kickboxer’s movement and seemingly hurting him midway through the second. When Pereira attempted to follow up with a flurry — very similarly to how he finished their first MMA fight — it was Adesanya who struck back, stunning then finishing “Poatan” with a pair of heavy right hands.

Pereira has been quick to move forward from the loss, announcing that his next bout will take place at Light Heavyweight. For now, the Pereira vs. Adesanya rivalry is indeed over, and there’s a slew of 205-pounders lining up to introduce Pereira to the division.

Will it be the same Pereira that quickly ran through the Middleweight division? Tristar coach Firas Zahabi isn’t so confident. Coach to top MMA fighters like Georges St. Pierre, Rory MacDonald, and one half of tomorrow night’s main event, Arnold Allen, Zahabi has been in the game a long now, and he’s concerned Pereira won’t come back the same from the knockout.

“I think that that knockout, the way he fell, the way he was out, the way he got hit three times – that could be one of those career-ending fights,” Zahabi said on his YouTube channel (via MMAJunkie). “Like, he might win a few fights, lose a fight – he might never be the same.

“Once you get knocked out really badly like that – like for instance, I’ll tell you, when Aldo got knocked out by McGregor, he was never the same again. When Georges TKO’d B.J. Penn, when he gave him that beating (at UFC 94) – it was just a really bad beating – he was never really the same again.”

It’s worth-mentioning that Pereira was stopped twice in his kickboxing career, though both defeats are listed as technical knockouts rather than a total loss of consciousness like what happened at UFC 287. As we recently saw with Kamaru Usman, a bad knockout at 35 years of age can absolutely change a fighter, and there’s no real way to tell until Pereira is back in the cage.

Insomnia

Twitter is a crazy place.

While on that Alexander Volkanovski vs. Islam Makhachev note, that was such a great and technical fight!

RIZIN’s programming can bounce around for US viewers, but their upcoming events will be on FITE.TV.

I like Aaron Bronsteter, but I find this take to be awful. UFC consistently puts Flyweights on the “Prelims” because they don’t believe the division is marketable or worth promoting — there’s no sneaky genius promotion going on here.

Either way, just watch Royval vs. Nicolau tomorrow, because it should be great.

All week, people have discussed the card placement of this fight, which:

a) draws attention to it being a great fight

b) reminds people to watch the fight

c) makes people tune into the card at the time the fight airs

d) maximizes viewership for a longer chunk of the card https://t.co/Ng4nGVrmgK

— Aaron Bronsteter (@aaronbronsteter) April 13, 2023

Anderson Silva getting some boxing sparring in! Who should “The Spider” box next?

It’s interesting and surprising to me that Nate Diaz plans on returning to UFC.

Slips, rips, and KO clips

Jumping switch kicks are so cool when they land.

Normally, if a choke doesn’t secure the tap or nap in the first 10-15 seconds, it’s unlikely to work. Fuller did nice work transitioning between the high-elbow and RNC grip guillotine to prove himself the exception!

Morozov definitely lost control of the elbow but somehow managed to recapture it. Impressive!