UFC 200: (Editor’s note: Yahoo Sports will be rolling out a new list of its favorite moments and figures each weekday in anticipation of. UFC 200 First up was our Top 10 best fighters. Next: Top 10 trash talkers)
You don’t have to be a trash talker to be a great MMA fighter, but a great MMA fighter with exceptional trash talking abilities happens to go a long way in establishing crossover stars.
The UFC strawweight hasn’t been around long, but she sure has made an impact with her world-class trash talking abilities. Much like she has been in the Octagon, when Jedrzejczyk gets rolling, she’s absolutely relentless. She chastised the usually happy Carla Esparza before pummeling her to claim the title and then went on to verbally abuse Jessica Penne and Valerie Letourneau in title defenses. But her feud with Claudia Galdelha has reached nuclear levels on The Ultimate Fighter and has found the Polish fighter amongst the elite trash talkers in the game.
Stacked with three world title fights and the return of one of UFC’s elite superstars, the historic UFC 200 event will thrill fans around the globe. In the main event, the most intense rivalry in combat sports reaches a boiling point when Daniel Cormier defends his light heavyweight title against interim champion Jon
Main Card (on Pay-Per-View):
Daniel Cormier (c)(17-1) vs. Jon Jones (ic)(22-1)†††
Brock Lesnar (5-3) vs. Mark Hunt (12-10-1)
Miesha Tate (c)(18-5) vs. Amanda Nunes (12-4)††
Jose Aldo (c)(25-2) vs. Frankie Edgar (20-4-1) †
Cain Velasquez (13-2) vs. Travis Browne (18-3-1)
It’s a lot of MMA to digest, but there’s a lot to look forward to in these lineups. Here are the Top 10 “must-see” fights of the UFC’s second-ever marathon week.
The image of Zingano after her last fight was a lasting one. Following her 14-second loss to Ronda Rousey at UFC 184 early last year, Zingano struggled to hold back tears while miserably saying she’d do anything to get back to a second UFC title fight. Even the traditionally stone-cold Rousey expressed sympathy to Zingano that night, embracing her right after nearly tearing her arm off. That was 17 months ago. Zingano took a personal break to get her life in order and moved camps to Alliance MMA in San Diego. In the meantime, the division is wide open now that Rousey has been vanquished. Zingano faces a spark plug in Pena, who is 26 and just might be putting it all together. Yes, I do believe I’ll watch this.
UFC 200
Hendricks is 1-2 in his previous three fights, including a weight-cutting fiasco last October that nixed a meeting against current title challenger Tyron Woodley. Coincidentally, Gastelum is also 1-2 in his past three and missed weight for a fight against Woodley last year! Both now say that weight issues are a thing of the past, and both are in need of a big win. The winner will still be viewed as a legitimate title contender. The loser … who knows? The loser might be headed to middleweight.
This is a completely fine 135-pound female championship fight, all right? Nothing wrong with it whatsoever. Nunes deserves to be in this spot. She’s 5-1 in the UFC, and there’s a real possibility she will exit the weekend a UFC champion. But the championship fight at this weight class, as long as Rousey is out, is a rematch between Tate and Holly Holm. That first meeting in March, which Tate won in dramatic fashion via fifth-round submission, begged for an immediate rematch. Again, this fight is well worth your time and it’s No. 8 on a list of 35 total fights. But it should have been Tate-Holm II.
Brooks is the real deal. I mean, technically, Pearson is Ross “The Real Deal” Pearson, but figuratively speaking, Brooks is the real deal. At least, he appears to be. He was a dominant lightweight champion for Bellator MMA and holds two quality wins over the talented Michael Chandler. Pearson will give him a stern test, as he’ll be highly motivated to record his first winning streak since 2013 against a ranked opponent. No disrespect at all to Pearson, but this is a litmus test for Brooks. Get his feet wet, see if he swims and then, you’d think, drop him in the deep end.
What a time to be alive. An angel sent from the farms of Saskatchewan, Canada, (and the WWE ring) will grace UFC with his presence. Stylistically, this one, who knows? We expect Lesnar to wrestle and Hunt to “try to knock his face off” as the big man himself would say. As something of an MMA purist, I would usually say these types of things don’t interest me as much as other fights on the card, but this is heavyweight MMA. Lesnar, regardless of anyone’s personal feelings on him, is a former champion and Hunt has the occasional wrestling problem. I expect Hunt to roll, but could Lesnar summon some kind of UFC 100-esque magic? One can’t help but want to find out.
This one’s pretty simple: Dillashaw is a joy to watch. I don’t know if he beat Dominick Cruz in January for the UFC bantamweight championship, but I do know he didn’t lose. That split-decision nod to Cruz had a very “well, UFC 200 somebody’s gotta win this thing” feel to it, in my opinion. That was probably one of the closest five-round fights I’ve ever seen, and, frankly, I’m anxiously awaiting a second one. I’m also not looking past Assuncao, who is on a seven-fight win streak (but hasn’t fought since 2014). He also has a controversial win over Dillashaw from 2013. This is a critical matchup at 135 pounds, and I consider one of the men involved (Dillashaw) to be one of the best pound-for-pound fighters in the world today.
It’s hard to imagine that once upon a time dos Anjos was supposed to defend his lightweight title against McGregor in a champion vs. champion match. An unfortunate foot injury bounced RDA from that megafight at UFC 196, and the rest is pretty much history. On paper, the Brazilian looks like a relatively bad matchup for Alvarez, who has clawed his way into position with back-to-back split decisions against Gilbert Melendez and Anthony Pettis, the second of which some found questionable. What we have here, really, is a champion who has demolished five consecutive opponents going against a challenger who is widely known for his ability to take lumps and heroically find a way to get his hand raised. Makes for an interesting matchup.
Can Cormier do better than he did on Jan. 3, 2015? That’s what this comes down to. Their first fight was a grind, which can still be entertaining as long as it’s a competitive grind. But it really wasn’t all that competitive. Cormier didn’t get blown out, but he was never really in control, either. He ended up losing four of five rounds. If this fight is a repeat of that, it will be a bit of a buzzkill (like hearing someone describe the end of a great movie and then trying to watch start to finish). If we know how the marathon ends, the whole thing is a little less fun. If Cormier can hurt Jones, change the script from the first fight and make Jones look vulnerable, this fight instantly jumps to the top of the list.
There is talent (and young talent at that) in the UFC’s 115-pound female division. Having said that, Gadelha might represent the only real threat to the velociraptor of pain that is Jedrzejczyk. The Polish champion is only 28. The only difficult fight of her career came against Gadelha in a split-decision win in December 2014. Really, the difference in that fight might have been a single punch, as Jedrzejczyk was able to knock Gadelha down in the closing seconds of a close first round that ultimately played huge in the scorecards. Gadelha is 27, so both of these women will be the cream of the crop of this division for years to come. There is probably some kind of additional storyline here involving these two as “The Ultimate Fighter” coaches as well, but I’m willing to admit the only TUF I caught this season were a few fights I fast-forwarded to at the end of episodes.
As I mentioned in this week’s Five Rounds, I’ve questioned some of Aldo’s actions in the aftermath of his 13-second loss to McGregor in December. Not that I’m holding the Brazilian to some impossible standard when it comes to handling defeat, but simply from a “public’s perception” perspective, I don’t think he has done himself many favors. Chalking the knockout up as a completely lucky punch, saying he would fight McGregor anytime, anywhere … only to decline a short-notice rematch at UFC 196. I understand his reasons for not wanting that fight on short notice, but then, just don’t say “anytime, anywhere.” And then there’s the social media post of an ominous-looking photograph of himself, calling McGregor out the night he lost to Diaz. Again, Aldo can do whatever he wants, but for a fighter who never really spoke up and talked much before, it’s just made me wonder how he’s truly dealing with his first loss in 10 years. At, we’ll see if Aldo is still Aldo — because if he’s not, Edgar is running at a high enough octane right now to stomp him. I expect this to be a back-and-forth, give-and-take interim championship fight, and I do believe, unlike many others, there’s still a good chance McGregor eventually returns to face the winner.
