The UFC returns to Fox Sports 1 this Saturday, November 5 with a stacked offering featuring a barnburner of a main event between former lightweight champion Rafael Dos Anjos and Tony Ferguson, a firecracker of a contender on an eight-fight winning streak.
Jon Anik, the play-by-play commentator for Fox Sports 1 and the UFC, caught up with Bleacher Report to break down the excellent card.
Bleacher Report: You’re calling a fantastic card this weekend on Fox Sports 1, one of the best on the network this year. Which fights in particular are you looking forward to?
Jon Anik: Well, it’s nice to hear you give it this praise. Whenever I’m doing a card, I look at the ranked fighters, but also to see which UFC newcomers might be there. I don’t know that there’s been a more highly touted prospect at strawweight than Alexa Grasso, so certainly I have my eye on her to kick off the main card.
Rashid Magomedov vs. Beneil Dariush is just a great lightweight fight. Not a lot of people on the street know who Magomedov is, but I can tell you that down here in South Florida they do. He’s undefeated in the UFC, and I’m curious to see what he can do in the biggest spot of his career.
There’s a lot of meat on the bone here. Charles Oliveira and Ricardo Lamas is a huge fight and a nice addition for us. The main event speaks for itself.
B/R: We’ve been hearing about Alexa Grasso for a while now as potentially the next big thing at strawweight. What are your thoughts on her now that you’re calling one of her fights?
Anik: She’s exciting and she’s as advertised, but I also think there’s a sort of composure that belies her years. She’s a skilled striker, and you can see why UFC President Dana White had her on his radar.
It’s also just a perfect spot for her against a veteran like Heather Jo Clark. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a UFC newcomer in that -475 [betting odds] range. I think it’s a good test for her because we know Clark is durable; I’m not sure she’s the best opponent of Grasso’s career, since she comes in fairly battle-tested.
It’s interesting when a young fighter has experienced adversity the way that Grasso has with the injuries. She missed about a year-and-a-half recently, and she’s still just getting back. I’m not sure we’ll see Alexa Grasso, strawweight contender, this night, but she’s going to raise a lot of eyebrows, and the tape tells you she’s got a lot of skills. Fans are going to get behind her.
I think there are going to be some emotions in that building, too, that she’ll have to bottle. A lot of fighters try to enjoy the home crowd but not let it overtake them, and that’s a big challenge for a 23-year-old.
B/R: It’s interesting that you mention her composure, because that’s something that has always stood out watching Grasso. No matter how quick the pace of the fight is or what kind of pressure she’s being put under, it barely looks like her heart rate goes up.
Anik: I touched on the experience, and she certainly has it. She has eight pro fights, and she’s won all of them, and she even fought twice in one night at one point.
I feel like one of the louder pops of the night is going to be reserved for her, so intangibly, that’s something that I’m looking at, kicking off the main card as her UFC debut. She obviously seems so invested in wanting to represent her country and her gym. It’s just a huge moment, and hopefully she shines under the brightest spotlight of her career.
B/R: Shifting gears a little bit, this is the UFC’s third event in Mexico City, and at each of the first two, the altitude presented problems for fighters, most notably Cain Velasquez in his title-losing effort against Fabricio Werdum.
Leading up to this card, is that something fighters have been talking about, are worried about or are finding ways to deal with?
Anik: Yeah, I think the smart ones are, but you’re still going to have a few stragglers on a fight card with 26 guys all with varying degrees of means and the ability to go somewhere to train. Alexa Grasso went from Guadalajara to Mexico City, which is a slight difference in terms of the altitude.
But there are a lot of different things that go into it. In Mexico City, there’s smog, the air quality isn’t great, there’s less oxygen, so it’s a very real thing. Even me, as a non-athlete who runs four or five miles a day, when I go to these places it’s harder for me to run my four miles. It’s a real thing we could see Saturday night.
B/R: Moving to the main event, it’s a fantastic matchup between Tony Ferguson and Rafael Dos Anjos, one of the best fights that can be made in a division full of fantastic potential fights.
How do you see this playing out? What do you think Dos Anjos’ mindset will be after losing his belt? Tony Ferguson, now riding an eight-fight winning streak, where’s his head at in terms of finally being on the cusp of a title shot that he’s wanted? In general, what are the big things we should be keeping an eye on?
Anik: Well, as far as Dos Anjos and what happened in July, it’s not like he’s a fighter who hasn’t dealt with adversity before when it comes to injuries and the broken jaw and the foot that took him out of the McGregor fight.
But I wonder emotionally about the camp change. He’s not training at Kings MMA under Rafael Cordeiro anymore, who is going to be there cornering Beneil Dariush, so their paths will inevitably cross. We’re hearing some rumors about what might have happened, and as fight week progresses we’ll hear more about that, but that’s a dynamic that bears watching.
As far as the action inside the cage, these are two offensive fighters. There’s certainly an edge in championship and high-level experience to Dos Anjos, and he’s undoubtedly the best opponent Ferguson will have faced. If there’s any knock on Tony, it’s that he doesn’t have that signature win. Josh Thomson is nice and so is Edson Barboza, but to potentially finish a guy like Dos Anjos would do big things for Ferguson.
For my money, Ferguson is as watchable as any fighter in the world. He’s not going to wow you defensively but is just so able to adjust and in transition and as a scrambler can excel on the fly like few people in MMA. We’ll see how he deals with Dos Anjos’ pressure, but reciprocally, Dos Anjos is going to have to deal with Ferguson coming a hundred miles an hour.
The fact that we have 25 minutes to decide this thing is encouraging. Ferguson has been scheduled for UFC main events before against [Michael] Chiesa and [Khabib] Nurmagomedov that haven’t materialized, so Rounds 4 and 5 could potentially swing to Dos Anjos.
I’m excited to see this thing play out in a few days.
B/R: What a fight, top to bottom, every way you could look at it.
I’m really interested to see what effect the Cordeiro thing has on Dos Anjos, because Dos Anjos has always had tools. He’s always been able to kick really hard, he’s always had a good takedown game, he’s always been a great grappler, but it was really Cordeiro who put all of those tools together into a coherent package and made that machine hum.
What happens when that particular aspect is no longer there? Are the tools still as effective, and is the whole worth more than the sum of its parts?
Anik: Yeah, and I think it varies from fighter to fighter. Look at a fighter like Eddie Alvarez, who didn’t realize success working under Henri Hooft, but when he moved to Mark Henry, there’s just been a different confidence in what he’s doing in there. Every time he’s quoted, there are really insightful comments as to what Henry has brought to him mentally.
There are a lot of different layers to it for Dos Anjos. I think he’s probably confident that he has absorbed most of Cordeiro’s best over the last several years, but fight night is a different animal if you don’t have the repetitions and you have a different guy on the pads and a different guy in your ear. That’s a very real variable.
But Dos Anjos is a pretty tough and mentally tough guy, and I feel like he wouldn’t have made this move in advance of a huge fight if he weren’t confident that he’d be able to surround himself with people who can help him get it done.
B/R: Absolutely. There are always going to be fighters who need a coach to ride herd on them, to make sure they’re where they need to be, doing the things they need to be doing, and Dos Anjos doesn’t strike me as one of those guys. That was always the knock on Shogun Rua after he left Cordeiro years and years ago, that he just kind of went off and did his own thing without putting in the effort that he needed to.
It’s hard to see that being a problem for Dos Anjos the same way.
Anik: Right, and I hope we don’t forget just how elite Dos Anjos is. He’s favored to beat a guy on an eight-fight winning streak for a reason. But sometimes in MMA, one high-profile loss can make you forget how good a guy really is: People had a short memory on Jose Aldo after the Conor McGregor fight.
Because of the ferocity of Alvarez’s knockout of Dos Anjos, people might be sleeping on him a little bit. When he’s on, I still think he’s a top one or two lightweight in the world. You can be sure he’s going to try to take that out on Tony.
B/R: Dos Anjos does have a certain meanness to his game that could be bad news for anyone standing in his way at this point.
The whole card features great action fights, but this main event has the potential to be a fight of the year. Check it out on Fox Sports 1 on Saturday night.
Patrick Wyman is the Senior MMA Analyst for Bleacher Report and the co-host of the Heavy Hands Podcast, your source for the finer points of face-punching. For the history enthusiasts out there, he also hosts The Fall of Rome Podcast on the end of the Roman Empire. He can be found on Twitter and on Facebook.
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