Author: Anton Tabuena

Jake Paul vs Nate Diaz next?

Jake Paul still has to fight Tommy Fury this weekend, but he already has his next opponent in mind. According to the YouTuber turned boxer, his next fight will likely be a big one against UFC superstar and new free agent Nate Diaz.

“I think (Nate Diaz’s team is) ready. I’m getting through Sunday (against Tommy Fury) and we’re gonna line that one up ASAP. I think that’s next,” Paul said on the MMA Hour. “Probably mid-year, maybe sometime summer.

“I think that’s what the fans want, and that’s who I want. There’s been a lot of back and forth, we’ve said our stuff, but it’s time to get down to business,” he said.

Paul, who previously said he’d fight Diaz both in boxing and MMA, claims he’s actually serious about the idea.

“I want to do one fight boxing, one fight MMA, but I’m not sure if Nate’s team is like fully aligned on that yet. Or I don’t know if they realize how serious I am about that,” Paul said. “I think they thought I was just doing it for hype, but I’m dead ass.”

Paul is 6-0 in boxing and will be a lot younger at 26-years-old, while the 37-year-old Diaz is 21-13 in MMA. Before any of that can happen though, Paul still has to handle business this Sunday, when he finally faces the 8-0 Fury in Saudi Arabia.

It was David vs Goliath in Spain.

We’ve seen quite a number of freakshow fights and open weight matches throughout MMA history, and that tradition continued in Barcelona, Spain.

Friday night, in a promotion aptly called “Dogfight Wild Tournament,” the Spanish MMA promotion put on a David vs Goliath bout. It was a 5-foot-4 flyweight in Raymison “Formiga” Bruno taking on a much bigger 6-foot-6 heavyweight Roger “Goliat” Dalet.

Formiga has a 12-4 record, while Dalet is a basketball player that doesn’t have any pro bouts, at least on his online record.

Could that significant skill advantage overcome an insane amount of size and strength?

It was a hilarious visual seeing two men with such a big size difference, but on this occasion, skill beat size. Formiga closed the distance, took him down, and dominated on the mat against a strong, but clueless opponent on the ground.

Watch video of the fight below, courtesy of the inimitable Caposa:

Although it won’t be on their official records as it was an exhibition match, Formiga won the match by armbar at 3:16 mark of the very first round.

Can Nonito Donaire become world champion again?

Back in 2021, Nonito Donaire became the oldest to win a bantamweight world championship, at age 38. Can he keep fending off Father Time and beat his own record at age 40?

The legendary four-division champion has been stopping fighters much younger than him in recent years, and only lost his WBC title after running into Naoya Inoue again, who is arguably the pound-for-pound fighter today.

After Inoue became a rare undisputed world champion by winning every single bantamweight world title in 2022, the undefeated Japanese knockout artist decided to move up a division and vacate all his titles. As the sanctioning bodies try to shape the post-Inoue landscape at bantamweight, Donaire will get another opportunity at winning a world title.

With Donaire being the WBC’s number one ranked bantamweight, Mauricio Sulaiman announced that they have given approval to have the 40-year-old Filipino star get a shot at their vacant title. Donaire will face Alexandro Santiago on a date yet to be determined.

Filipino Reymart Gaballo will also take on Thailand’s Nawaphon Kaikanha in a bout that will likely determine the next challenger for that WBC belt.

As for the rest of the titles Inoue vacated, our friends over at Bad Left Hook summed up what’s next:

Takuma Inoue will face Liborio Solis for the WBA belt on April 8th.

The IBF has ordered the aforementioned Rodriguez to fight Vincent Astrolabio, the latter of whom recently burst onto the international stage with an upset of Guillermo Rigondeaux.

Moloney, Astrolabio, and Rodriguez are the top three WBO contenders, followed by Gaballo. If Astrolabio elects to fight Rodriguez and Gaballo goes the WBC route, Melvin Lopez would be next in line.

Donaire, 40, is 42-7 in his Hall of Fame-worthy career. His next opponent, Santiago, is only 27-years-old and is fresh off a stoppage win over Antonio Nieves that improved his overall record to 27-3-5.

A doctor says it’s “ridiculously easy” to cheat ONE Championship’s system claimed to have supposedly solved weight cutting.

In 2015, Chinese fighter Yang Jian Bing passed away, reportedly due to a bad weight cut for a bout in ONE Championship. Less than two weeks after his death, the promotion instilled a new weight cutting policy that involved hydration testing, multiple weigh-ins, and renaming divisions.

ONE Championship’s been known to push hyperbole and questionable claims, and what first seemed like a quick way to avoid bad PR in China and the rest of Asia, was eventually marketed as a “revolutionary system” that supposedly solved a longstanding issue in MMA and combat sports.

“We don’t use the term weight cutting because there is no cutting,” ONE VP Rich Franklin boasted in 2017.

ONE executives, fighters, and even personalities like Joe Rogan have since advocated for it to be widely adopted in MMA, but is this system actually as good as they say it is?

Well, apart from a very concerning lack of transparency for years, there’s really been numerous situations with fighters dropping multiple divisions and admitting to cutting weight. There’s also horror stories of repeated cutting and hydrating throughout the day, allegedly under advice of ONE officials.

Numerous experts on the field were interviewed by Jason Hartley of MMA on Point on this matter, including Dr. Oliver Barley, who has published multiple research papers on sports science, hydration, and weight cutting specifically for combat sports. Barley, who holds a master’s degree and PhD in exercise physiology, believes that ONE Championship’s weight cutting policy and hydration testing is “not good” at all.

“Right now, the usage of hydration testing, especially urine testing, in trying to regulate weight cutting is a unanimous bad, a unanimous negative,” Dr. Barley told Hartley.

“People don’t really trust ONE Championship’s weight cutting policy, and I think it’s their public image overall. I think people do see it as dubious,” he said. “Now if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.”

According to Barley, who has written papers on the matter, the science just isn’t there when it comes to hydration testing and its accuracy, especially for athletes. He also has an issue with ONE Championship’s lack of transparency, along with the promotion using what he calls an “arbitrary” cut-off limit of 1.025 to mark those who are “dehydrated.”

“I’m not convinced that urinary test hydration testing is a great measure in almost any situation, but I am extremely not convinced that it’s useful in the case of weight cutting,” he said, pointing out how these tests were only made for patients in a hospital setting. “These hydration tests were not designed for someone who is going to specifically aggressively dehydrate themselves and then rehydrate themselves.

“If we pulled in 100 people off the street, my guess is 40 percent of them would probably fail a urinary hydration test. People typically walk around, according to a urinary test, with at least some mild to moderate dehydration,” he said. “There’s actually a good chance that you’ll be declared dehydrated even if you’re not.

“The thing that confuses me the most, is that (ONE) had years where I was not aware of a single fight being canceled due to urinary hydration test failing, which to me is so unbelievable that I don’t even know how to describe it,” Dr. Barley said.

In a separate video, nutritionist Tom Coughlin also brought up other studies that discussed the “problematic” use of hydration tests for sports. He pointed out how the test can have a number of factors to give an inaccurate result such as diet, drug interactions, and muscle mass, and how it needs far more research before being implemented in sports.

Apart from detailing how these tests clearly aren’t fit for weight cutting scenarios, Dr. Barley also described how it is also “ridiculously easy” to cheat. Interestingly enough, he even admits to helping some “big names” in ONE pass hydration tests even with weight cuts.

“I’ve been involved in helping fighters trick this test. It’s not been difficult, at all,” he admitted.

“Tricking the test is super easy,” Dr. Barley explains. He says it simply has to do with drinking distilled water at certain points to trick your body in thinking you’re over-hydrated. “You put the fluid back in but not the electrolytes, so then the concentration of your blood really plummets and the kidneys actually think you’re over-hydrated and they start emptying urine out and the urine comes out clear.

“It’s ridiculously easy. Currently, I am batting 100 percent in getting people to trick the test. I have (a short) instruction thing on my phone that I just copy and paste and send it to them whenever anyone asks me.”

As for why he is willing to share and expose these details now, Barley hopes that revealing its significant flaws just gets the entire system changed.

“The fact is, huge amounts of athletes are doing it anyway, and as these tests get bigger and bigger, people are going to work out how to do it. Me telling everyone how to do it just rips that band-aid off, and moves us away from an ineffective solution, and tries to make us do something more productive,” he said.

“People are going to make larger cuts (knowing that) that they can trick these tests.”

ONE Championships also has a rule that fighters are only allowed to gain 5% of their weight on fight day. That follow up weigh-in is also concerning for health and safety, according to Barley, as it could lead to people not recovering properly.

“They just eat food, they’re already at that five percent,” Barley stated. “You’ve (also) reduced someone’s rehydration. They’re not going to rehydrate as well, and then what you get are people competing possibly more dehydrated than they would have been if you just let them cut the weight and not check them a second time.”

As for anyone saying “then don’t just cut weight,” Barley responds that the problem isn’t simple and fighters are always going to look for an edge.

“Talk to a fighter. It is obvious that they will sacrifice a lot to win. They will sacrifice a lot more than being kinda hungry, or being slightly dehydrated. Relative to everything they do, that’s tiny. Relative to the pain they put themselves through in training, the pain they go through in fighting, the discipline and effort they have to have — this is nothing to them.

“Also, this runs the risk of making fighters think they’re smarter by tricking it. Going ‘you know what, everyone else is now probably cutting less weight, so if I do it and I trick the test, I will now get a bigger advantage.’”

At the end of the day, weight cutting is a complex problem in combat sports. As Dr. Barley and others explained, it certainly wasn’t magically solved by a policy seemingly rushed out less than two weeks after a tragic death.

“How could 12 days possibly be enough time? While hydration tests sound like they fit the bill perfectly, almost like a great marketing slogan — I mean it’s called hydration testing, it just sounds good — but nothing I’m able to find on this subject backs up those claims,” Hartley concluded in his report.

“With the confounding factors surrounding the testing methods, relative ease of being able to game the system, and the subsequent dangers around manipulating electrolyte balance, (ONE’s system) poses its own very real set of risks,” Coughlin stated. “This is not the fix that MMA has been asking for.”

“The problem is that everybody wants simple answers to complicated questions,” Dr. Barley said. “Hydration testing is a relatively simple answer to what people think is a simple problem, but it’s actually an extremely complicated problem.”

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About the author: Anton Tabuena is the Managing Editor for Bloody Elbow. He’s been covering MMA and combat sports since 2009, and has also fought in MMA, Muay Thai and kickboxing. (full bio)

This is UFC 284 in a few short tweets.

The champion vs champion, number 1 vs number 2 pound-for-pound super-fight actually delivered at UFC 284.

Islam Makhachev and Alexander Volkanovski put on a highly technical, and back-and-forth affair over 25 minutes, with both champions each having great moments. In the end, the lightweight champion in Makhachev was tested and forced to show layers to his game we previously didn’t see, but he did manage to keep his belt.

In the co-main event, Yair Rodriguez showcased his sharp kicks, but also an improved guard game to win the interim featherweight title.

Below, we analyze the pros and cons of each of the key bouts, with a quick twitter thread that’s short and fitting for people’s social media era attention spans:

And that’s about it. For more social media musings, follow me on twitter over at @antontabuena, and of course you should do that for Bloody Elbow’s official twitter account as well.

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About the author: Anton Tabuena is the Managing Editor for Bloody Elbow. He’s been covering MMA and combat sports since 2009, and has also fought in MMA, Muay Thai and kickboxing. (full bio)

Islam Makhachev vs Alexander Volkanovski was a fun, high level affair.

This was top pound-for-pound number 1 vs number 2, and it really ended up looking that way. Islam Makhachev and Alexander Volkanovski went back and forth in a highly competitive and very technical affair.

Volkanovski looked sharper, faster, and had more layers to his striking game early, with Makhachev clearly having a power advantage after wobbling him with short shots. That wasn’t really the complete story of the fight though, as Volkanovski managed to hurt him multiple times on the feet as well, and by the latter rounds, Makhachev also showed beautiful reads with counter strikes and reactive takedowns in a truly high level affair.

Whether or not Makhachev did it to make a statement, the lightweight champion willingly veered away from “Father’s Plan” and decided to play Volkanovski’s game on the feet for long stretches. It may not have been the best idea, but he did well enough and it made for a close and entertaining contest.

Volkanovski showed the tremendous Fight IQ he’s been known for, and even came up big to win the fifth round, but in the end it wasn’t enough. He was able to scramble and impressively avoid damage on the ground, but he did lose key rounds to those grappling exchanges.

The fight had such big ramifications, and while it didn’t seem to get marketed enough to a wide casual audience, the fight truly delivered.

Makhachev was pushed and he showcased real layers of his game that we didn’t see before. He answered a lot of people’s questions on just how good his overall game is, and in my opinion, Makhachev passed a real test with flying colors.

On the other hand, Volkanovski once again displayed why he deserves his top spot in the pound-for-pound list. He came up short, but Volkanovski didn’t look out of place at 155 lbs, and I would have a hard time picking against him against most lightweights.

Next up for him though, will probably be Yair Rodriguez.

• In the co-main event, Rodriguez won the interim featherweight belt, with his first UFC submission win over Josh Emmett. He survived one big punch from the hard hitter, and just won everywhere the fight went. Rodriguez’s body kicks were so sharp and folded and hurt Emmett repeatedly, but it was also impressive how he did so well on the guard. Emmett couldn’t land any offense, and Rodriguez kept landing hard elbows from bottom en route to a triangle finish.
• It’s not exactly a real belt, but it was a fun fight and a great performance for Rodriguez, who will at least get a champion’s contract and better pay on his next bout, which should be a title unification.
• Jack Della Maddalena looked fantastic in his hometown win. Randy Brown was trying to stay long and control distance early, but Della Maddalena remained patient and immediately pounced the moment he pressured and got him to the fence. A short shot face-planted Brown, and eventually finished with a rear naked choke. The hype seems justified, and that marks four first round finishes in a row, clearly deserving a top contender next.
• Justin Tafa got his second straight KO win, winning in his home country in just one minute. It was a pretty step back counter shot as Parker Porter was reaching, and he put him out cold immediately.
• Jimmy Crute’s heart was on full display after surviving being dropped repeatedly, but it was just terrible Fight IQ and decision making from Alonzo Menifield, who kept clinching and making him recover. Perhaps he was gassed, but Crute was in far worse shape and he should’ve kept it standing to end it. Add that to the fence grab that cost him a point, and it really was just bad decision over bad decision that went from a sure win to a draw.
• We all know Loma Lookboonmee has a killer clinch and Muay Thai game. Tonight, she showcased overall MMA improvements and the work she’s been doing with the Hickman brothers, taking a quality submission. It was her first ever submission win in the UFC, making her one of the biggest standouts during the prelims.