Author: Mike Chiappetta

For the longest time, Jose Aldo ruled the featherweight division with the iron fist of a despot. Since then, everything has changed. Conor McGregor stands atop the heap, but no one’s quite sure if he is coming or going, and below him the division is in flux, with young talent flowing into the talent pool with designs on the king’s crown. 

Over the weekend, Mexico’s Yair Rodriguez made another step toward establishing himself into the upper echelon of the division, topping Alex Caceres in a victory that was much wider than the official split-decision result indicated.

At just 23 years old, Rodriguez is an intriguing talent, a mix of athleticism, versatility and daring that has paired himself with one of MMA’s great coaching teams in Greg Jackson and Mike Winkeljohn. The hope is that his creativity combined with their coherent game-planning can lead to a polished finished product.

But he’ll have many obstacles ahead. The featherweight youth movement is booming. Aside from Rodriguez, there’s Max Holloway (24), Brian Ortega (25), Dooho Choi (25), Mirsad Bektic (25) and Charles Oliveira (26), all in the Top 15.

So who’s the best of these prospects? Joining me to discuss “The Question” is Bleacher Report MMA Lead Writer Chad Dundas.

Mike Chiappetta: In a strange way, I feel a bit conflicted about this abundance of young talent, mostly because featherweight has been one of the few divisions to have stability over the years. Recently, the changes in the UFC have been dizzying. Champions can’t seem to hold on to a belt, and the company was recently sold. So maybe it would be nice to keep familiar names like McGregor and Aldo at the top. 

These kids are knocking on the castle door, though. All of them bring specific strengths and threats, but to start with Rodriguez, since his performance is fresh in mind, I see star power but have my doubts about his long-term title potential, mostly because his wildness appears bound to get him in trouble as he faces opponents who are more technically precise and unaffected by unorthodox methods. 

Good luck spinning so many times against Aldo without getting your legs chopped down, or against Edgar without getting your back mashed into the mat.

Basically, you get the feeling Rodriguez is being flashy for no rhyme or reason, and while it’s fun to watch, it’s a tactic with too much risk attached for continued long-term success. Rodriguez would be wise to find a happy medium, but with such a quick move up the rankings—he’s currently No. 13—he’s running out of time to make adjustments before he reaches the division’s upper echelon.

Chad Dundas: It’s amazing how far the featherweight division has come since the introduction of Conor McGregor back in 2013. The 145-pound class had long been a favorite of hardcore fans—especially those of us lucky enough to remember it back in the old WEC days—but under Aldo’s long, dominant leadership it had struggled to find a foothold with a larger audience. 

A few short years later, it’s arguably the most interesting division in the entire UFC, and with this crop of young talent now coming into its own, it might just have the brightest future, too. 

For the moment, I’m inclined to agree with you about Rodriguez, Mike. I love the kid’s flash and marvel at his potential, but he also feels like a really talented rookie race car driver who has yet to actually pass his driver’s test. He can floor it and go from 0-60 in three seconds—but can he parallel park?  

Frankly, the wattage of Rodriguez’s future may well depend on how the UFC treats him. He could turn out to be the linchpin to its planned expansion into the fight-friendly Mexican market. If that’s the case, then I think he’ll get the McGregor treatment and get matched against three or four more hand-picked fall guys before vaulting into a high-profile title fight.

At some point, though, someone will suffocate the glitzy, long-range offense and force him into a dogfight. When that happens, Rodriguez will need to prove he has the grappling and boxing fundamentals to back up the sizzle. Especially now that most—if not all—of his fights will likely be five-round main events, his margin for error might be slim.

Until Rodriguez proves his style can find succees at the highest level, I still think Max Holloway is the bluest of the blue-chip featherweight prospects.

Do you agree?

Mike: Ranked No. 3, Holloway is a compelling talent and is definitely the closest toward contending for a championship, but as for the top blue-chip prospect, I will cast my vote for the forgotten man in the group, Mirsad Bektic, who has been out for over a year after a knee injury that required surgery. 

After watching him compete in the UFC a few times, he has clearly showcased a complete game that is built to excel in today’s dynamic sport. Bektic has power, speed and athleticism, as well as a bully mentality that will serve him well as he moves onward and upward.

He has a powerful wrestling game that will allow him to control where fights are contested, but he’s also quite proficient at every other element of the game and blends it all together, making him a danger in all facets. This isn’t something that the rest of the group of prospects can claim. Rodriguez’s wrestling isn’t a threat in any meaningful way. Choi is still green and full of question marks. Ortega is way too content fighting off his back. Oliveira has no power.

I will acknowledge that Holloway has the least amount of holes of the group; he is currently closest to a finished product. Still, Bektic has the highest ceiling. He’s aggressive but not reckless; powerful but not sloppy. Right now, his biggest problem is his health, but he recently told MMA Junkie Radio he expects to be back around November.

I’m open to an argument I’m wrong. Chad, tell me why Holloway is a better championship threat.

Chad: I guess I’m a sucker for seeing a fighter prove it at the top level. Perhaps that invalidates the whole idea of being a “prospect,” but to me it’s impossible to overlook Holloway’s nine-fight win streak built over the course of two-and-a-half years and over an increasingly talented gauntlet of competition.

Saying Holloway looks like a handful for anybody in the division right now is just easier for me than trying to peer into my crystal ball and project where Rodriguez, Choi or Ortega will be in a few years. Does that mean I’m cheating the parameters of this discussion? Maybe. I can be a jerk like that.

Holloway is big and rangy for this division—5’11″—and has proved himself with recent wins over known commodities like Cub Swanson, Jeremy Stephens and former title challenger Ricardo Lamas. His striking is fearsome, and he’s athletic enough to compete with the top of the division.

You know what else I like about him? He seems to have a championship mentality. Back-to-back losses in 2013—the second one to current champ McGregor—seemed only to push him to work even harder. That’s the kind of mental approach you have to have to compete in a sport as wild and unforgiving as this.

But I digress. How about the rest of this crop, Mike? Which one of these also rans ultimately soars the highest? 

Mike: I feel like you took the easy way out here, partner. But sometimes, the easy way is the best way. It’s true, Holloway is a stud, and given his youth, is likely to get even better than he is now. Still, I just can’t shake the feeling that there is some missing piece that may derail him. Perhaps I’m overly influenced by his early losses ahead of his current wins. 

Either way, he remains infinitely fun to watch, and in some ways, that is the hallmark of this crop of featherweight talent. Oliveira is like a jiu-jitsu thrill-seeker, Ortega loves to skirt the line between success and disaster, Choi and Rodriguez are action junkies, and Bektic is a mauler. And we haven’t even mentioned 25-year-old Teruto Ishihara, who packs brashness, firepower and over-the-top (and occasionally over-the-line) charisma into his appearances. 

Which man will go the furthest remains up for debate, but even if Chad and I disagree on the leader of the youth vanguard, if there’s one thing we can agree upon, it’s that the featherweight division is in great and exciting hands.

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Stepping into the cage for UFC 201 in Atlanta, Tyron Woodley must have felt at least a little bit out of his element. It had been 547 days between fights. In the interim, eight of the 10 UFC title belts had changed hands, USADA began to randomly drug test the promotion’s athletes and the company had been sold.

There hadn’t just been a few changes; the MMA landscape had been profoundly transformed. Ironically, the stability atop Woodley’s division had one of the few constants; alongside Demetrious Johnson, welterweight king Robbie Lawler had been one of the two champs to hold on to gold.

While Lawler made war a personal habit to the degree that it became the expectation, his chin couldn’t hold up forever. It was finally compromised on Saturday night, with a sledgehammer right ending his exciting reign and installing a new champion. 

Let the chaos continue.

That’s the kind of year it’s been in the Octagon—one where the only predictable outcome is unpredictability and champions are vulnerable by nature of their very existence. 

Woodley did the deed with a stutter-step right hand that began with a feinted overhand and then ended with the real thing. It landed flush, leading to a sight about as rare as the Leonid meteor storms: Lawler on his back, helpless.

He was already out, the fight was by any meaningful measure decided, but referee Dan Miragliotta offered Lawler the champion’s grace period, meaning he got to eat five more gloved hammers before being rescued. The fight took all of two minutes, 12 seconds. 

It marked the first time Lawler had been knocked out since April 2004, when Nick Diaz pulled the trick at UFC 47.

“I wanted to use all my angles, go back-and-forth and side-to-side,” Woodley (16-3) said in the Fox Sports 1 post-fight show. “No one’s had great success standing right in front of him. I was prepared.”

To add to the mayhem that 2016 has brought, Woodley brushed off the idea of a fight with current No. 1 contender Stephen “Wonderboy” Thompson, instead suggesting the possibility of facing off with the aforementioned Diaz or with former champion Georges St-Pierre.

“If I’m an athlete in this sport, in this division, and I want to say I’m the best in the world, I feel I should compete against those guys,” Woodley said in the post-fight press conference. “I don’t feel any obligation to go by the rankings. I want to go out there and fight the money fights.”

Prior to UFC 201, the storyline between Woodley and Lawler was their shared lineage at American Top Team, where they were ostensibly “teammates.” But the two only rarely trained together and spent little time together. 

In fact, when Woodley joined the team, he was just an amateur, and competing at that level, Lawler actually refereed two of his fights. 

“I was getting my butt kicked,” he said. “I was just a bag of bones.”

While Lawler (27-11, 1 no-contest) calls the gym’s Coconut Creek, Florida, world headquarters home, Woodley opened a satellite ATT school in his native Missouri in 2011, making that his home base.

Still, Woodley felt that brief time together meant something on Saturday, conditioning Lawler to overreact to his subtle takedown fakes. The first two minutes were slow going on action, but Woodley did fake the level change several times, and used it again in his final feint before landing the championship right.

“I think he realized the level of wrestling I brought to the table,” he said of their time together. “He was fearful of that. I used the level fakes, and I saw the reaction. I knew as long as I did that, it would set up my hands.”

While the knockout was only the sixth of Woodley’s career, he has been something of a late bloomer in developing his power, making it a significant complementary threat to rival his wrestling pedigree in a well-rounded game. But a knockout coming against Lawler still has to be characterized as a surprise.

According to FightMetric, Lawler came into the fight with a 16-1 career knockdown ratio and hadn’t been dropped since the loss to Diaz over a decade ago. 

So of course it would be in a crazy year like this when this would happen.

We’ve seen Jon Jones and Brock Lesnar test positive for banned substances, media darling Conor McGregor briefly fall out of favor with UFC management, Ronda Rousey disappear without a trace and Michael Bisping knock out Luke Rockhold on a two week’s notice. 

And now we’ve seen the iron-chinned Lawler go down, too.

If this were a book, we’d criticize it for having too many plot twists.

Instead, it’s exactly the draw of the sport. At its best, MMA brings an electric unease to the air, and whether you have 10 days to prepare or 547, you can create a magical moment.

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For the people that knew them, it should have been obvious that Caros Fodor and Ben “Phoenix Jones” Fodor would one day step into a cage to do what they’d always done privately. There were too many signs it was inevitable.

There was the time Caros terrified Ben by “shooting” him with a Carbine 15—which was thankfully loaded with a blank. There was the time Ben decided to launch Caros out a second-story window, and Ben grabbed his brother’s wrist at the last-second, forcing both into the horrific crash. There was the time when Ben choked Caros out cold with a triangle—during Christmas. There were the times they took turns throwing each other into piles of farm animal dung. There was knives, baseball bats and broomsticks. There was blood, stitches and broken bones.

Almost as long as both Fodors have been around, they’ve been fighting each other. The simmering tension between them has occasionally exploded. But still, a cage fight with sanctioned rules and a paycheck? Both acknowledge it’s an extreme yet inescapable step, that their personalities virtually guaranteed they would end up standing across from each other in competition waiting to punch, kick and elbow their past history to bits.

“We don’t talk,” Caros told Bleacher Report. “We don’t talk and we let things build up, and here we are.”

“I agree this is extreme, but I’m the king of things getting out of hand,” added Ben, who professionally goes as Phoenix Jones after making national headlines for fighting crime as a “superhero.” “Someone broke into my car so I bought a $10,000 suit to track down and beat up 250 criminals. I’m an escalator. I’m the king of driving things out of control. You should know that if you’re my brother.”

There isn’t one single incident that led to this, the two say. Instead, it’s simply a lifetime of confrontation and conflict coming to a boil, leading to World Series of Fighting 32 in their home state of Washington on Saturday night. The fight airs on NBC Sports Network.

And even though Ben is the self-proclaimed “king of things getting out of hand,” it was actually Caros that took the initiative to set up the fight. 

Despite past declarations that they’d be willing to fight one another dating back several years, the two committed to an uneasy truce up until about a year ago, when Caros traveled to Connecticut to corner Ben in his bout with Emmanuel Walo. Shortly after that, Caros said things started to spiral downward, and while both sides declined to discuss specifics, citing “private family stuff,” the two let their anger for each other stew.

Finally, when Caros heard WSOF was coming to the Fodors‘ home state of Washington, he reached out to WSOF president Ray Sefo.

Sefo had already picked out opponents for both, but upon hearing Caros’ request to fight his brother, he immediately flashed back to a similar moment in his long and decorated career in combat sports. There was a time when his own brother Rony won a kickboxing title that placed him in a tournament along with Ray. If they both won a couple of rounds, they would be forced to face each other. The possibility alone made him sick, so much so that he basically resolved that if it happened, he would walk into the ring and put his hands down and allow his brother to win. Luckily for them, the bout never materialized. In a way, he hoped the same would happen now, too.

“I told them, ‘I’ll give you guys a couple weeks to think and see if this is really what you want to do,’” he told Bleacher Report. “ But even after that time, it was the same answer.”

Ben said that he had no choice in the matter, that Caros’ was essentially throwing down the gauntlet and refusing would have been accepting a slap in the face, something he would never do.

“He did it for one paycheck, and I mean one, because he’s not getting a win bonus,” he said. “If that’s what you’re willing to trade me for, f–k you.”

The fight between them—Ben (6-1-1) is a natural welterweight and Caros (10-5) is a natural lightweight—will take place at a 162-pound catchweight.

The seeds of this all are far from an MMA cage. Both Ben and Caros were adopted into a large family, and though both say they were lucky to find themselves taken into a loving home, the scars of being surrendered by your birth parents always remain. 

Even as kids, their wildly diverging personalities led to constant tension. While Ben is outgoing and at times over the top, Caros is introverted and averse to attention. Still, as the brothers grew up, there seemed to be the potential for harmony.

At age 12, Caros made up his mind that he wanted to be a Marine, and he made good on the promise after graduating high school, joining the Corps. The distance between them helped Ben realize his affection for his brother. When Caros returned from his service—including a tour in Iraq—he needed an adrenaline replacement, and that ultimately led him to mixed martial arts. Ben soon followed, though to put the Fodor conflict stamp on it, he joined a different gym.

“Pretty much the best part of our relationship was after we got into MMA,” Caros said. “It was like the first thing we ever had in common that we could share conversations about. Nothing was more exciting to me than to go to his fights.”

But their relationship has always worked in waves; the crash was coming.

The particulars remain private, but the tension swelled. There was a time when the two were working at the same foster home, one that Caros estimates at 600 square feet. After getting into an argument, they went weeks there without saying a word to each other. They more recently showed up at their mom’s house at the same time; the standoff lasted just a few minutes before Caros left.

Those instances pale in comparison to the bouts of violence the two have engaged him, but in some ways are harder on the psyche. A momentary physical fight just requires one burst of emotion; a sustained emotional battle is a test of wills. 

Even this contracted fight has had its share of bumps in the road. 

For one, the family has been dragged into it, but most have opted out of paying any attention at all, doing their best to ignore the public escalation of a family feud.

For another, shortly after the fight was signed, Ben, who in the recent past had been training alongside Caros at AMC Pankration & Kickboxing with renowned coach Matt Hume, said he sent Hume a text about training and received a reply that he would have to find a new gym for this camp. Ben says that Hume left the door open to return afterward, but the scramble was on.

While Ben claims that Caros put Hume up to it, Caros denies that charge.  

“Matt made the decision,” Ben said. “Anyway, Caros doesn’t really come in to train. He comes in to get in shape.”

It was then that Sefo stepped in, made some calls and found a nearby gym—Catalyst MMA—run by Eddie Grant, who happens to be a past coach of Ben’s.

“It was at a point where I wasn’t sure it was going to happen,” Sefo said. “From Ben’s perspective, it’s just a fight. But from Caros’ perspective, it’s a little more personal. So it got a little bit complicated.”

Regardless of the result on Saturday, things between the two may stay that way.

Both brothers are remarkably candid regarding their skill sets and shortcomings. Caros, three inches smaller at 5’9″, believes he’s the better all-around fighter but that Ben wields greater power and the ability to rise to the occasion. Ben admits Caros is technically superior but thinks the natural introvert will shrink under the pressure.

“I’m a different kind of dude,” Ben said. “He’ll win most of the fight but I know for a fact there will be a moment where he’ll make a mistake, and I’m a better car. He’s a Mazda and I’m a Ferrari. When he makes a mistake, I’ll pull away.”

“Skill-wise I should literally walk through him,” Caros countered. “The problem is he’s really good on game day. Some guys dig a little deeper, and that’s him. Athletically, he’s a monster. But skill-wise, I should beat him everywhere.”

At least in the practice room, both brothers admit that’s how it’s gone. Caros has sharper technique and more experience. But Ben says it’s not a meaningful simulation because he has never really been able to open up with his power in such instances. 

That will change Saturday. Everything else might change, too. But how? How will it all end? What would be the perfect conclusion to this brotherly feud? 

For the record, Caros still holds out hope it somehow ends well. He says he’d be able to get over a loss, but that Ben couldn’t handle losing to his arch-rival. 

“I’m really pissed at him but I love him,” Caros said. “I really don’t know how he f—–g feels. I have questions in my mind like, ‘Does he even care, ever?’ He can be a pretty selfish person. So I’m planning in my mind the possibility for us …  I’m not planning for us to make amends. If anything, this is probably going to push us further over the edge of never talking.”

Ben doesn’t dispute that, and says Caros’ feelings may be his downfall. He says that Caros may have conflict roiling below, and that if it manifests itself in hesitation, he’ll be waiting to take advantage of the situation by whatever means necessary.

And yes, if he loses, he thinks he will have a hell of a time moving past that. 

“I’m still in the middle of my emotional anger,” he said, “so if I lose, I can’t say how I’ll feel about myself or about anything, but I know it’ll be his fault for putting me here, so I will hate him until I die.”

Yikes.

For now, neither admits to any regrets. Neither says the process has been therapeutic. There are simply too many untangled layers of pain to look for a peaceful future resolution.

Perhaps the best-case scenario is one offered by Sefo, who said this would be one of the rare times in his role as a promoter when he would gladly accept a draw. Of course, such a result would immediately trigger thoughts of a possibility that might occur anyway with the Fodors, whether in or out of the cage: a rematch.

“S–t,” sighed a dejected Sefo. “I sure hope not.”

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