Stand and Deliver: UFC Fight Night 212

Every fight matters, but some matter just a little more.

In some ways, a win is a win and a loss is a loss. But while it is true that every fight matters, some feel bigger than others, for whatever reason. In some cases, the elevated stakes are easy to define. Picture the fighter on a losing streak who knows he or she is likely fighting for their job; or conversely, any title fight in a top regional organization, where the combatants know they are almost certainly being scouted by the big boys. At other times, a fight feels especially important for reasons that are harder to quantify, but no less real. Whether it’s the symbolic weight of being a pioneer in MMA from one’s country, or the simple added spice of two fighters who genuinely hate each other’s guts, that fight means just a little more.

This Saturday, the Ultimate Fighting Championship returns from a week off with UFC Fight Night 212, a card that seems a bit cursed. Alexa Grasso vs. Viviane Araujo is a righteous offering for a Fight Night headliner, and may well decide the next challenger for Valentina Shevchenko’s flyweight crown. Mercifully, that bout remains intact as of the time of this writing, since two of the best matchups on the card, the Neil Magny-Daniel Rodriguez welterweight tilt and the Joanderson Brito-Melsik Baghdasaryan featherweight showdown, fell apart last week, with Magny-Rodriguez pushed a month down the road and Baghdasaryan withdrawing in favor of a spinning carousel of short-notice substitutes.

Nonetheless, the dozen fights that currently comprise “UFC Vegas 62” offer up plenty to look forward to. There is the usual heaping handful of Dana White's Contender Series graduates looking to make the jump to bigger cards and bigger-name opponents, a couple of scuffed and dented prospects trying to restore their shine, and two respected veterans who are very possibly fighting for their jobs on Saturday. With so much going on, it shouldn’t be difficult to point out a few fighters who are under a little extra pressure to stand and deliver at UFC Fight Night 212.

Viviane Araujo: [Insert Motivational Quote about Seizing the Day]

Make no mistake, “Vivi” will be under more pressure Saturday than her main event counterpart. At first glance, the stakes are similar, as Araujo and Grasso are both closer to a title shot than they have ever been and either woman, with an impressive win, will be well positioned to call for a fight with Shevchenko. The differences lie in the details, but they are numerous and significant. Araujo is a very respectable 5-2 in the Octagon, losing only to Top 5 opponents in Katlyn Chookagian and Jessica Eye while beating everyone else in generally one-sided fashion, but she is just one fight removed from the Chookagian loss. Even in a women’s flyweight division starving for fresh contenders, it takes more than alternating Ws and Ls to make any progress up the ladder. Meanwhile, Grasso is a perfect 3-0 since moving up from strawweight, which would make her an easier sell as a challenger if she can make it four straight. As a Mexican who has steadfastly kept training in her home country, Grasso is one of the most visible representatives of one of the UFC’s most coveted expansion markets. Lastly and most importantly, Araujo, who turns 36 in a few weeks, is nearly seven years older than her opponent. Those factors add up to one conclusion: Win or lose, Grasso will probably get more opportunities like this one over the next several years; for Araujo, there’s truly no time like the present.

If You Thought the First “L” Stung, Nick Maximov…

At the moment, Maximov is still one of the more promising prospects on UFC roster. He checks a lot of the boxes not only for a future contender, but an even rarer and more elusive label: potential star. A disciple of perennial fan favorite Nick Diaz, Maximov combines the expected grappling chops with top-shelf offensive wrestling of the kind that neither Diaz brother ever enjoyed. He has a bit of attitude, just enough to make him an interesting soundbite, and plenty of Stockton-approved “IDGAF” insouciance. We’re talking, after all, about a smallish middleweight who shrugged his shoulders, signed up to fight a 260-pound man on the Contender Series—and won. He’s just 24 years old and until this May, he was undefeated as a professional. That first loss, which came thanks to a fast Andre Petroski guillotine choke, surely stung, but may be remembered years from now as nothing more than an early-career hiccup, depending largely on what Maximov does against Jacob Malkoun this weekend. After all, Petroski is a solid prospect in his own right, a wrestler-turned-grappler much like Maximov himself, and in the cage he appeared to be about 15 pounds heavier. Unfortunately, most of the same things could be said about Malkoun. If Maximov wins, all will be well with the world. If he loses his second fight in a row, his blue-chip cred will be in serious danger, and the calls for him to drop to 170 pounds—which have been present even while he was winning all of his fights with ease—will ratchet up to new levels.

You Can Prove He Doesn’t Belong, Pete Rodriguez, But Can You Prove That You Do?

Here’s a little secret about this column: any fighter that is a -750 or greater favorite is pretty much guaranteed to be mentioned. That is because those kind of odds bring a special kind of pressure that is crushing, slightly unfair, and very rare in MMA, because it is one of the few times that simply winning is not enough. There is a sort of assumption—sometimes explicit, often unspoken—that those odds reflect not just the likelihood, but also the expected magnitude of victory. Is it reasonable to expect a 10-to-1 favorite to beat their opponent up five times worse than a 2-to-1 favorite would? Of course not, but we do anyway.

Rodriguez, who faces Mike Jackson on the “UFC Vegas 62” undercard, now gets to bear the weight of those lofty odds. Jackson, of course, is the Houston-based combat sports photographer and part-time kickboxer who joined the UFC as part of the Phil “CM Punk” Brooks experiment that also brought Mickey Gall to the Octagon. It is frankly kind of hilarious that Jackson is still on roster while those other two are gone, despite being the only one of the three without any actual MMA career aspirations. For Rodriguez, this fight is about the closest thing you will find to a no-win situation in the modern UFC. If he wins decisively, it is no more than expected. If he struggles with Jackson—or loses to him, as Dean Barry did in his first and only UFC fight—his stock crashes. Never mind that Rodriguez himself came to the UFC as an extremely unproven 4-0 prospect, scarcely more credentialed than Gall, and never mind that his debut ended in a quick and brutal loss to Jack Della Maddalena, he now gets to try and right the ship against a man playing with house money.