The Real Winners and Losers from UFC on ESPN 28

Lyle FitzsimmonsJul 31, 2021

Call it the basic cable calm before the pay-per-view storm.

A week ahead of a trip to Houston for UFC 265, the mixed martial arts conglomerate was in the lower-profile Fight Night business with a 10-bout show from its Apex facility in Las Vegas.

But that doesn't mean the fighters were any less combative.

Ranked middleweights Uriah Hall (No. 8) and Sean Strickland (No. 11) were on the marquee for the main event, getting together in a scheduled five-rounder with a chance to crash the upper echelon at 185 pounds.

Hall arrived on a four-fight win streak that included defeats of former champions Anderson Silva and Chris Weidman, while Strickland had four straight wins of his own dating back to his last loss in May 2018.

ESPN handled the broadcasting particulars with the team of Brendan Fitzgerald, Michael Bisping and Paul Felder at the announce table and the ever-present Megan Olivi working the room with news and features.

Joe Martinez was in the center of the Octagon in place of Bruce Buffer, but the B/R combat sports team was in its routine Saturday night spot to compile the preeminent list of winners and losers for the show.

Click through to take a look at our thoughts and give us a few of your own in the comments.

Winner: Proving Your Worth

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It was Hall who was having the birthday.

But it was Strickland who was doing the celebrating.

The 30-year-old Californian claimed all along that he’d prove he was worthy of a top-10 ranking at 185 pounds and he did so in his first UFC main-event appearance, dominating his now-37-year-old foe in nearly every round on the way to a wide unanimous decision victory.

Strickland earned scores of 50-44, 50-45 and 49-46 on the three scorecards, sweeping all five rounds in the eyes of two judges and winning four of five rounds with the third.

B/R also scored it 49-46, giving Hall the second round, but it was completely overshadowed by the other four in which Strickland used a thudding left jab and powerful follow-up shots that kept Hall at a manageable distance and never fully able to get in the rhythm of the fight.

He ended the 25 minutes with a badly swollen left eye and looked both exhausted and mentally spent, while the unmarked Strickland looked and sounded like a guy who’d barely broken a sweat.

“From start to finish,” Fitzgerald said, “Sean Strickland put on a performance that proves that he belongs with the elite in this weight class.”

Strickland landed 133 significant strikes to Hall’s 81 and scored the fight’s only four takedowns in five attempts while running up better than four minutes of control time. He was particularly effective in the third and fourth rounds, landing a hard right hand that dropped Hall in the third and a clean, hard left jab in the fourth that had him wobbly and at least briefly in danger of a stoppage by referee Herb Dean.

“Five-rounders are fun. The last round, you’re so tired you don’t care about getting hit,” Strickland said. “(Hall is) a guy I always respected. He kind of scared me. I grew up watching his highlights.”

The two trained together several years ago while Strickland was campaigning as a welterweight, but he made the decision to move to middleweight following a near-fatal motorcycle crash in 2018 and has now won four straight at 185—including three at the scheduled three- or five-round distance.

Still, he wasn’t interested in callouts or prolonged post-fight rants, instead taking a thankful—if not exactly G-rated—tone.

“I just want to fight. I just want to make money,” he said. “As long as I have that UFC logo under my feet, I’m happy. If it wasn’t for the UFC I’d probably be cooking meth in a trailer or in prison.”

Loser: Following the Plan

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Cheyanne Buys claimed she had another plan.

The 26-year-old strawweight was beaten by decision in her UFC debut four months ago, thanks to being taken down four times and controlled on the ground for nearly 10 minutes.

So she wanted to redeem herself with her mat game.

"I was going to come in and wrestle because I got outwrestled in my last fight," she said.

"I can die tomorrow. I did not want to be known as the girl who got head-locked in her last fight. I am the warrior princess. Tonight, I showed that."

Showed it, and then some.

The Texan relocated to Las Vegas for a full training camp with her Xtreme Couture team and made the investment completely worthwhile with a brutal first-round stoppage of Brazilian export Gloria de Paula.

The end came suddenly, after Buys took down her foe and stood back and de Paula began to rise to her feet. The moment she did, though, Buys ripped a left kick to the side of her head that left her semi-conscious on her back. Several unfettered left-hand strikes followed before referee Mark Smith intervened.

It was the fourth-fastest finish in strawweight history.

"I didn't expect that. She's a beast," Buys said. "She has great striking."

Winner: Claiming Your Bonus

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Jason Witt asked the question, in the form of a statement.

“If that doesn’t deserve the 50 Gs as Fight of the Night,” he said, “I don’t know what does.”

The correct answer: Nothing.

“The Vanilla Gorilla” and “Bam Bam,” also known as Bryan Barberena, got together for as tumultuous a 15 minutes as you’ll ever see in combat sports, repeatedly knocking each other senseless in a memorable scrap at welterweight.

“That’s a fight right there,” Felder said. “That’s how you lay it on the line.”

Indeed, the fighters combined for 170 strikes, eight takedowns, a submission attempt and better than six minutes of control time in their three frenetic rounds, which ultimately yielded a majority decision that Witt captured with a pair of 29-28 scores alongside a dead-even 28-28 count.

“This was the performance he was looking for,” Bisping said. “Jason Witt showed a lot of heart because he was definitely rocked. He was hurt.”

Indeed, Witt used every trick in his resilience book to endure the last round, taking a hard right hand to the head in the second minute and several more shots as the session passed the three-minute mark.

Witt scrambled to lock Barberena up on the mat as he cleared his head, then survived another violent exchange to the final horn and was ultimately able to boost his record to 19-7 overall and 2-2 in the UFC.

“That third round was absolutely wild,” Bisping said. “I absolutely loved it.”

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Loser: Obnoxious Self-Belief

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Some guys brashly claim their bonuses. Others are a bit more subtle about it.

You can safely count Melsik Baghdasaryan among the latter.

The native Armenian and newly-minted U.S. citizen made his UFC debut in cash-grabbing style, turning fellow newbie Collin Anglin's lights out with a highlight-reel KO that impressed nearly everyone.

Nearly everyone, that is, but the guy who delivered the blow.

"I have so many guns. So I don’t care," he said. "If I touch him, he’s going to go to sleep for sure."

Already a winner of four fights inside of 60 seconds and another by decision on Dana White's Contender Series, Baghdasaryan kept his promise thanks to a lightning-quick left kick that landed on the right side of Anglin's head—with the brunt of the blow coming just behind the hapless victim's ear, sending him dizzily to the mat.

Baghdasaryan immediately pounced, landing a vicious left-hand strike and winding up for another as referee Smith jumped in to stop things at 1:50 of Round 2.

Still, the winner was low key.

"Maybe for you it’s a good fight. Maybe for my coach it’s a good fight. For me, it’s normal," he said. "I didn’t feel that was me. I was just fighting. I didn’t watch any of my opponent's fights. You come in the cage, you have to fight. That’s it."

Baghdasaryan became a citizen two months ago and subsequently welcomed his parents to the U.S. He followed with the arrival to the UFC and the victory, and will complete the hectic stretch with a wedding on Sept. 24, which he slyly mentioned along with a happy birthday wish to UFC czar Dana White.

White turned 52 on Wednesday.

"Maybe that's worth some extra money," he said.

Winner: Rafa Garcia's Street Cred

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This just in: Rafa Garcia is a tough, tough man.

The Mexican-born lightweight was on the receiving end of 176 strikes—including 100 of the significant variety—across a violent 15 minutes in the cage with opponent Chris Gruetzemacher.

But the numbers don’t quite tell the story.

The 26-year-old was beaten to the body, cut on the face and sustained what certainly appeared to be a broken nose on the way to dropping a reed-thin unanimous decision in the preliminary finale.

Still, he never stopped coming.

Garcia dropped his foe with a left hook in the first round, scored a takedown in a hellacious second round and rebounded from what looked like an imminent stoppage loss to get Gruetzemacher on the mat twice more in the third before finishing with a flurry in the final 10 seconds.

Garcia finished with 90 landed strikes of his own and scored all of the fight’s five takedowns on 12 attempts, which explains why he reacted with visible frustration when the scorecards were read.

All were 29-28 in Gruetzemacher's favor.

The loss was the second of his career—both in the UFC—after 12 straight wins in multiple lower-profile promotions.

“That was fireworks and bananas,” Felder said. “If we were in an arena, we’d have 20,000 people on their feet after that one.”

Loser: Following a Schedule

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They’re as much a Fight Night tradition as punches, kicks and blood.

Cancellations. Reschedules. Purse penalties. Oh my.

No fewer than seven would-be bouts for Saturday’s card were impacted in one way or another—including three that flat-out cancelations, one reschedule in its existing form, two more resets with opponent changes and a final issue that saw one principal sacrifice 20 percent of a paycheck.

COVID protocols nixed a bantamweight bout between Kyung Ho Kang and Rani Yahya and prompted the move of a planned duel between heavyweights Shamil Abdurakhimov and Chris Daukaus to the UFC 266 show in Las Vegas on Sept. 25.

Other health reasons erased a bantamweight fight matching Ronnie Lawrence and Trevin Jones, and Nicco Montano’s failure to make the bantamweight limit forced the elimination of his bout with Wu Yanan.

Visa issues with Russian middleweight Roman Kopylov led to his removal from a would-be bout with Sam Alvey, and Alvey was subsequently rescheduled to meet Wellington Turman on a Fight Night show on Aug. 28.

Also felled by visa issues was Tunisian welterweight Mounir Lazzez, who found himself removed from the show while his scheduled opponent, Niklas Stolze, went ahead and fought last-minute substitute Jared Gooden.

Gooden went on to drop and stop Stolze in just 68 seconds in the middle bout of the five-bout main card.

And last but not least, welterweight Phil Rowe weighed-in at 173.5 pounds—missing the agreed-to limit by 2.5—and thereby forfeited 20 percent of his $20,000 purse to opponent Orion Cosce.

It didn’t help Cosce in the end, though, he was stopped on strikes in Round 2.