What mattered most at UFC Fight Night 214 at the UFC Apex in Las Vegas? Here are a few post-fight musings …
5. A nothing fight card delivers
UFC Fight Night 214 was not a strong card on paper. It lost two scheduled main events and several other fights along the way, leaving us with another ho-hum card on paper at the UFC Apex.
That’s fine. It is what it is. We’ve had multiple equally weak cards in recent years, and there will surely be more to come. All that’s to say, however, that this card over-delivered and actually made for a pretty enjoyable watch.
With nine finishes out of 11 bouts, the fighters squeezed out about as much entertainment value from a low-level card as they possibly could. It was a breeze to sit through for the most part, and that’s pretty much all you can ask for when the UFC is happy to produce this type of content to keep the train rolling.
4. Polyana Viana is a keeper
If you didn’t know anything about Polyana Viana’s career prior to seeing her flatten Jinh Yu Frey in a mere 47 seconds, you would think she’s among the most dangerous strawweights out there.
Viana (13-5 MMA, 4-4 UFC) is certainly up there when you’re talking about the first round of a fight, but if anyone is able to endure her initial hunt for the finish, it turns into trouble. Her .500 record through eight UFC appearances proves that, and if Viana wants to be anything more, she still has some improvements to make.
All that aside, though, I hope the UFC keeps Viana around for as long as she wants to be there. She brings a degree of unpredictability to her fights that is absent for a lot of others at 115 pounds, and the division very much needs her presence.
Will Viana be able to string together the right performances to make it to a title? Who knows. But at the very, very least, she has etched out her place as a much-needed action fighter for years to come.
3. Neil Magny enters a category of his own
You’re probably aware by now that Neil Magny passed Georges St-Pierre on the all-time UFC welterweight wins list after a third-round submission over Daniel Rodriguez in their co-main event matchup.
It was a big time accomplishment for Magny (27-10 MMA, 20-8 UFC), who has been a dedicated grinder from Day 1 of his UFC tenure. It’s not always thrilling to watch, but bit-by-bit Magny has won over fans through his active schedule, willingness to fight anyone no matter the risk and overall humble demeanor.
Magny was the first person to acknowledge that while he does have more wins in the UFC’s 170-pound division than UFC Hall of Famer St-Pierre, the value of those wins are dramatically different. The majority of St-Pierre’s run in the octagon consisted of title shots and title defenses, which Magny has exactly zero.
In fact, Magny is the only one of the 11 fighters in the UFC’s 20-win club to never fight for or hold a UFC championship. That’s not exactly a statistic he’ll gleefully hang his hat on, but it’s the reality, and one that might never change.
However unreachable you may find his goal of winning a UFC title, one thing about Magny that you know for certain is that he’ll keep trying until his final breath as an active competitor. And for that he deserves our admiration, because there aren’t many other fighters built like Magny.
2. Did Marina Rodriguez get screwed on the stoppage?
If you ask her, yes she most certainly did. If you ask me, I’m inclined to agree.
Look, we all know there’s a fine line between an early stoppage and a late stoppage. The debate about whether a referee failed to protect an athlete can literally come down to one strike and a split second, and I’m not here to argue otherwise.
In a perfect world you want referees to offer perfect consistency no matter the fighter or stakes involved with a bout, but this isn’t a perfect world, and certain things are circumstantial. In the case, Jason Herzog jumping in to wave off the action in Marina Rodriguez’s third-round TKO loss to Amanda Lemos in the main event, I felt she deserved a little bit more leeway.
The UFC presented this headliner as a likely title eliminator in the strawweight division. Rodriguez (17-2-2 MMA, 6-2-2 UFC) has spent the past several years chasing the UFC title shot that’s eluded her, and if she was going to fumble the opportunity and lose, I have no doubt she wanted it to be more definitive than that.
No one is out here denying that Lemos had Rodriguez in big trouble early in the third round when she landed a hard punch that staggered her fellow Brazilian. Rodriguez was in a bad spot taking damaging shots, but the moment Herzog stepped in, Rodriguez threw her hands in the air and protested it.
It’s got to be a very tough pill for Rodriguez to swallow. At 35, history would indicate the window for her prime is beginning to close, and it may shut entirely by the time she’s able to build herself back up to this position. The stakes for her were massive in this scenario, and even though it may sound like it’s not in the best interest of fighter safety, I would’ve liked to see her get more rope to either survive the storm or fall victim to it in that final sequence.
1. Amanda Lemos arrives
While it’s kind of a bummer to see Rodriguez’s immediate title hopes vanquished, the flip side of the coin is that the strawweight division got itself a new contender with Amanda Lemos emerging from the main event.
After losing her first UFC headliner to Jessica Andrade in April, Lemos (13-2-1 MMA, 7-2 UFC) made good on her second chance with the third-round TKO of Rodriguez, where her power and explosiveness were both on display. Lemos is unquestionably a power house, and in a division where finishes don’t always come in rapid fashion, she seems allergic to the judges.
Lemos now seems poised to challenge the winner of Saturday’s UFC 281 title fight between champion Carla Esparza and challenger Zhang Weili. That’s something we should all welcome, because it breaks up the round robin of similar names who have played hot potato with the belt.
In the past five-and-a-half years, only Esparza, Weili, Andrade, Rose Namajunas, and Joanna Jedrzejczyk have been involved in strawweight title fights, so Lemos represents new blood. Whether she has the skillset to defeat Esparza or Weili is a different discussion, but it’s exciting to potentially have a fresh face in there.
For more on the card, visit MMA Junkie’s event hub for UFC Fight Night 214.
