Preview: UFC Fight Night 183 Main Card

straight wins, straight finishes! @ChitoVeraUFC gets it done in round 3! #UFCTampa pic.twitter.com/Z597ntwp0r

— UFC (@ufc) October 12, 2019

Bantamweights

#7 BW | Jose Aldo (28-7, 10-6 UFC) vs. #15 BW | Marlon Vera (16-6-1, 10-5 UFC)

ODDS: Aldo (-145), Vera (+125)

It has certainly been a strange run for Aldo at bantamweight. Of course, Aldo moving down to 135 pounds was strange all along. After a loss to Alexander Volkanovski essentially closed the window for Aldo to return to the featherweight title picture, it was not a surprise that the all-time 145-pound great would want to change weight classes. However, it was a shocker when Aldo announced that, after years of teasing a move up to the lightweight ranks, he would be cutting down to 135 pounds. The UFC immediately matched him with top contender Marlon Moraes, and there was a consensus of concern given how cosmetically terrible Aldo looked in the weeks leading up to his weight cut. While Aldo still looks drawn inside of the cage, he has held up fine physically. Even so, there has still been a lot of strangeness. For one, Aldo has mostly abandoned the style that put him among the all-time greats; his featherweight title run was built around defense and power, disincentivizing his opponent’s weapons in order to slow down the fight and leave his opposition helpless on offense. All of that nuance has been stripped from Aldo’s approach at bantamweight, as he has adopted a much more straightforward and bullying approach built around power in exchanges. That did well enough against Moraes, as Aldo’s consistent pressure turned it into a close decision that “Magic Marlon” earned on the scorecards. Despite the loss, Aldo still found himself in the bantamweight title picture thanks to a confluence of events. Then-champion Henry Cejudo wanted a legacy-defining opponent to face for what he had apparently pegged as his retirement fight, and the UFC needed to sell tickets in Brazil, so the promotion just moved on full speed ahead with a Cejudo-Aldo title fight. That fell apart thanks to the pandemic, but Aldo was grandfathered into a fight for the vacant title against Petr Yan. There, Aldo showed well but still succumbed to a late-round finish. While Aldo did an impressive job of going shot-for-shot with a Russian buzzsaw, the current champion’s pace and power was simply too much for him to absorb over the course of four-plus rounds. Even so, Aldo is somehow now ensconced as a top bantamweight despite never actually winning a fight in his new weight class, which makes for an odd path going forward. For now, he looks for his first win at 135 pounds against the surging Vera.

Vera has been an impressive overachiever like most of his Season 1 castmates from “The Ultimate Fighter Latin America,” and he might be the most pleasant surprise of the bunch. As Ecuador’s entrant on the season, Vera was more notable for his personality and his story than his performances, as he was fighting to afford surgery for his daughter’s nerve disease. “Chito” actually lost his fight to Marco Beltran coming off of the season, but the UFC kept Vera around until he suddenly clicked into a well-rounded prospect. It has been a pleasure to watch Vera evolve over the years, as he has gone from a dangerous submission specialist to a slow-starting action fighter to now someone who is just plain good. He has spent 2020 proving he can hold his own with the latest generation of blue-chip prospects. While he came out on the losing end, he went blow-for-blow with Yadong Song, and he is coming off of a first-round finish of the much more hyped Sean O'Malley. Six years ago, it was unthinkable that Vera could rise from the fringes of the UFC roster to a fight with an all-time great like Aldo, but that moment is here and he actually has a shot to win.

This should be a straight-ahead war, and it is still difficult not to favor Aldo, even if his complete stylistic shift down at 135 pounds does muddle the dynamic. For all his improvements as a fighter, Vera remains relatively dependent on working towards a finish, and Aldo’s durability should still hold up. While that has slipped a little bit for the Brazilian, it did still take Yan multiple rounds of a relentless pace to eventually finish the job; and even over the course of that fight, Aldo showed enough in matching Yan strike for strike that should Vera take that same route, which he likely will, the Ecuadorian is going to eat a ton of damage himself in return. Vera is ridiculously durable himself, so this should be 15 minutes of pure violence, but “Chito” is just one fight removed from a decision loss to a much harder hitter, and this figures to carry a similar dynamic. These two should match each other every step of the way, but Aldo still looks like the one who will deliver the more impactful blows. The pick is Aldo via decision.

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