Holy moly, punch pals! This weekend is jam-packed with fights and there’s a ton of title fights. It’s kind of boggling since so much is on Saturday night, but whatever, let’s figure out what’s going on and when!
SATURDAY
This is the last Bellator card of the year, so they are going out big! The prelims kick off at 7:00 PM ET on Bellator.com and Spike.com as usual, and as usual, the prelims are random local yokels and jamokes that I’ve never heard of. The main card is super-stacked, though. Things kick off at 9:00 PM on Spike TV with King Mo Lawal taking on Joe Vedepo. There’s also Nam Phan taking on Mike “The Marine” Richman in what should be featherweight fun. Kickboxers Melvin Manhoef and Joe Schilling are going to inflict violence upon each other at middleweight. The co-main event is probably the best fight, as Will Brooks and Mike Chandler square off again for the lightweight title. The main event is sadly, Stephan Bonnar verus Tito Ortiz.
WSoF returns with a whole bunch of title fights on one night. That’s a potential 75 minutes of fighting just for the top three bouts. The prelims will start at 7:00 PM ET on the NBC Sports site. I somehow know even less about these guys than the Bellator prelim dudes, which is pretty impressive. The main card will start at 9:00 PM ET on NBC Sports. The three title fights should be really good, with world #1 strawweight Jessica “JAG” Aguilar taking on Kalindra Faria. Next up is one of my favorite non-UFC fighters, Justin Gaethje taking on Melvin Guillard in the co-main event. The main event is a middleweight title fight between David Branch and Yushin Okami. Again, the co-main looks like the most entertaining fight.
Now we’re at the big times! UFC 180 will start on UFC Fight Pass at 7:00 PM ET with two fights between four dudes nobody has ever heard of. The regular prelims start at 8:00 PM ET on Fox Sports One, and hey, it’s fighters with Wikipedia pages! Well, okay, it’s just Jessica Eye and Leslie Smith that meet that criteria, but it’s better than nothing. These prelims also feature the bantamweight and featherweight finals of TUF Latin America, which I did not watch, so I can’t even have a rooting interest.
The main card starts at 10:00 PM ET on PPV, so please don’t talk about illegal methods of watching this. Anyway, the glut of unknowns continues for the first two fights on the main card, but luckily Dennis Bermudez and Ricardo Lamas are here to save us in a featherweight tilt. The co-main even will be between Uproxx Sports favorite Kelvin Gastelum and Jake Ellenberger, which should be a lot of fun.
The main event is a heavyweight title fight (Well, interim title fight) between Fabricio “Go Horse” Werdum and Mark “HUNTO” Hunt. I’m not going to lie, my entire world is kind of hinging on the outcome of this fight.
There’s a lot of fights going on at the same time, so I’ll probably end up watching WSoF’s replay around 11:00 PM on Saturday to keep the fun going.
