UFC 184 Bold Predictions: How Long Can Cat Zingano Hang with Ronda Rousey?

UFC 184 may be limping and exhausted, but at least the finish line is in sight.

At this point, Ronda Rousey’s women’s bantamweight title defense against Cat Zingano will do nicely as Saturday night’s main event. The much-ballyhooed debut of Holly Holm in the co-main won’t be anything to sneeze at, either.

It’ll all be fine, it’ll all be fun, even if it’s not exactly what we expected.

This event was once slated to be a middleweight showcase—featuring the long-awaited title clash between Chris Weidman and Vitor Belfort as well as a potential No. 1 contender bout between Ronaldo Souza and Yoel Romero—before injury and unforeseen circumstance had their way.

Frank Mir vs. Antonio “Bigfoot” Silva was supposed to be on this card. Neil Magny was briefly rumored to appear. Replacement opponents had to be found for both Mark Munoz and Tony Ferguson.

Now, with Rousey and Holm each going off as prohibitive favorites, we’re not sure what our expectations should even be.

Luckily, Bleacher Report Lead Writers Chad Dundas and Jonathan Snowden are here to lead the way. Here, they drop some bold predictions for UFC 184 and hash out exactly how this revised fight card is going to play out.

Prediction: Cat Zingano Goes the Distance with Ronda Rousey

John Locher/Associated Press

Chad

If you’re reading this right now, then you already know the UFC women’s bantamweight champion has been an unstoppable finishing machine since beginning her MMA career in the spring of 2011.

Ten wins, 10 stoppages, nine of them in the first round. So far, the longest any 135-pounder has lasted in the cage with Ronda Rousey is 10 minutes, 58 seconds—a feat pulled off by Miesha Tate at UFC 168.

Cat Zingano changes that on Saturday.

Zingano certainly won’t beat Rousey, but she’ll survive. While putting up her own 9-0 professional MMA record during the last seven years, she’s proved that she is one of the sport’s most durable and determined fighters. Add to that the fact that Rousey will enter this fight eager to show off her developing stand-up skills (just as we saw against Alexis Davis at UFC 175), and this won’t be the same sort of short-and-sweet performance we’ve come to expect from her.

Instead, Zingano will last the 25 full minutes with the champ. She’ll get thrown, she’ll get pummeled, she’ll almost get submitted, but she will gut it out. Call it 50-45 (maybe 50-44) for Rousey, but Zingano will live to see the finish line.

She’ll give Rousey the best fight of her career so far, even if it is another one-sided affair. In the process, Zingano will see her own UFC stock rise.

Jonathan

In the permanence of a picture, Zingano certainly looks formidable. She's a physical specimen out of a dime store pulp fantasy, muscles bulging like a modern incarnation of Red Sonja. Looking at her, the spitting image of feminine strength, it's easy to imagine Zingano competing successfully against anyone.

Even against the great Ronda Rousey.

But I've seen her fight in real time, watched her lose two rounds to Tate before pulling off a miracle victory. Watched her lose the first round to Amanda Nunes before rallying for the finish.

This isn't a woman who is surviving the Rousey show. This is ending, as all her fights do, early. There will be no moral wins Saturday night. There will only be pain.

Prediction: The UFC Tries Hard to Make This Holly Holm Thing Happen

Jonathan

Have you ever noticed that UFC, as the product it is pitching gets less and less appealing, has a tendency to turn up the volume on its hyperbole?

Well, for debuting 33-year-old prospect Holly Holm, the amp is on 11, and the UFC has just taken a magic marker, crossed it out and handwritten the number 12. If you go to UFC Fight Pass to see what Holm is all about, Chad, you'll be greeted with a graphic telling you the brand-new UFC star is the best boxer in the world. Not in the division. Not of people in her gender.

In. The. World.

Keep in mind that only three of Holm's 38 boxing fights have taken place outside of New Mexico, where her management has carefully matched her with opponents well-suited to crumple upon impact. Her MMA career, to this point, has also been contested primarily against competition it's generous to call nondescript.

None of this, of course, will stop the UFC from praising her to the point it feels a little gross. After all, Ronda Rousey is a beast that needs feeding.

Chad

I admit, I haven’t been privy to much of the UFC’s Holly Holm hype. The past year or so, I’ve made a conscious effort to try to turn a deaf ear on the bombastic, largely empty rhetoric that streams out of Zuffa, LLC headquarters on a near-endless loop now that the fight company does almost 50 shows per year.

I’ve found it remarkably easy to do, and also kind of invigorating. Frankly, I recommend it, because, brass tacks? I don’t need the UFC to tell me Holm is good. I know she is.

I’ve watched her fights on the independent circuit—enough of them to know that, for me, she passes the eye test as a high-level athlete. We can nitpick her previous level of competition or look down our noses at her boxing experience, but she’s going to be a formidable presence in the UFC women’s bantamweight division.

Will she beat Ronda Rousey? Nah, but neither will anybody else, so I’m not sure that’s a particularly illuminating metric. I’ll tell you one thing that's for sure: Short of maybe Cyborg Justino, I can’t think of anybody I’d rather see try.

Which brings me to this...

Prediction: Cris Cyborg in the House, Everybody!

Jeff Chiu/Associated Press

Chad

The icy, longstanding cold war between the UFC and Cris “Cyborg” Justino began to warm ever so slightly during recent months. In January, UFC CEO Lorenzo Fertitta revealed the on-again, off-again negotiations between the two parties were back on. Some time after that, a Cyborg fight retrospective showed up on the UFC’s digital subscription service.

At this point, we have every reason to believe it's only a matter of time before Justino shows up in the Octagon. As luck (or proper planning) should have it, she’ll also be in LA this weekend, defending her women’s featherweight crown against Charmaine Tweet at Invicta 11 on Friday night.

If she wins (and she will), I get the funny feeling she'll make a UFC appearance the very next night.

There she’ll be, in the front row at Staples Center, waiting for Ronda Rousey to beat Cat Zingano, so the two can finally have their long-awaited, highly charged, perfectly framed-in-high-definition face-to-face confrontation. It’ll be magic.

And yeah, there’s still a lot we don’t know about a potential Cyborg-Rousey matchup. Like what weight it will happen at, for instance. Like whether or not Justino could survive the enhanced drug testing that will theoretically begin for all UFC fighters come July 1, for another.

But you know what? It’s 2015, and the UFC needs to make big fights. Rousey-Cyborg is the biggest fight in women’s MMA right now. Book it, and sort out the details later.

Besides, inviting Justino into the Octagon just a couple of weeks after announcing a new, no-nonsense, get-serious stance on performance-enhancing drugs is the sort of delicious irony to which the UFC has always been completely oblivious. They’ll totally do it.

Jonathan

I think Cyborg is a fighter you can turn into a compelling opponent for Rousey. I think that's a different thing entirely than Cyborg being a necessary opponent for Rousey.

If you present Cyborg the right way, she certainly seems to be a high-level challenger. She is self evidently an impressive physical specimen. She has a certain cache among hardcore fans. If the narrative is driven carefully, this has the makings of a box-office hit.

But this isn't a fight Rousey or the UFC needs.

Cyborg's crowning achievement, a win over B-movie actress Gina Carano, came more than five years ago. To the bulk of the UFC's audience, she's a complete nonentity, a fighter who failed a drug test in 2011 and then essentially fell off the face of the earth. In fact, she didn't step into the cage at all in 2014.

If Cyborg manages to drop 10 pounds and earn her spot at bantamweight, well, this becomes a fight worth making. Until then, there is no groundswell of demand for this bout. And, considering UFC's new anti-doping priorities, I'm just not sure it makes any sense to muddy the waters and bend over backward to reward a drug cheat who hasn't earned it in the cage.

Prediction: UFC Gets Derrick Lewis Back on Track

Reinhold Matay/Associated Press

Jonathan

Last year, Derrick Lewis sure looked like he might just be somebody. I sat with our boy Jeremy Botter in Las Vegas and watched him put the stamp on the immortal Guto Inocente in the very first round. Coupled with a first-round knockout of Jack May earlier in 2014, plus some impressive work on the regional scene with Legacy FC, and he had a nice little streak going on. Momentum even.

Then he went and got a little too big for his britches. Lewis called out Matt "Meathead" Mitrione, and my how the tables were turned. In Ledyard, Connecticut (population of 15,051), Mitrione needed less than a minute to finish Lewis off, giving him lots of time to figure out what one does in Ledyard.

Lesson learned, UFC has returned its tilling machine to the undercard. He'll meet somebody named Ruan "Fangzz" Potts in a three-round tilt. No, that extra "Z" is not a mistake. He's 37 and seems to smile a lot. He's from South Africa.

None of that seems good.

I kind of get the feeling Ruan Potts is being shipped over to Los Angeles for nefarious purposes. He may think this is an opportunity. And it is—to be victim No. 1 on streak No. 2. That's right, Chad. "The Black Beast" is back.

Chad

Hard to believe, but those days of promise you describe for Lewis also once existed for Potts—and not that long ago, either.

As recently as late 2013, he also had a fair amount of momentum behind him, when the UFC signed the streaking Cape Town native on the basis of an 8-1 professional record that included five first-round stoppages and the EFC Africa heavyweight title.

To date, however, Potts’ UFC run has been a bit of a nightmare. He lost back-to-back fights to Soa Palelei and Anthony Hamilton during 2014 and, at present, is looking a little long in the tooth, not to mention a wee bit knockout prone. While that doesn’t necessarily differentiate Potts from most guys in the heavyweight division, it likely makes him fodder for a Lewis victory on Saturday.

Lewis is certainly a fun guy to have around. He’s a great story and knows his way around a post-fight callout. But the man still comes off pretty one-dimensional to me. He might win a Performance of the Night bonus this weekend, but I’m not sure I can go all-in on any narrative about him being “back” or “on track.” It’s unlikely he ultimately proves to be among the 265-pound elite.