I said this before, but I think his ceiling was higher at 205. Could easily envision a championship trajectory for him there, or at the very least Top 5. He didn't make it to elite competition to prove himself at LHW, but the way he was pretty easily dispatching dudes with solid grappling pedigrees by beating them at their own game was really something to behold. He was enormous for the weight class, very physically strong, and was able to bring that advantage of physicality into pretty much every contest at 205.
At Heavyweight, he's giving up that size and strength advantage to avoid cutting weight, to gain a slight speed advantage, and for the sake of the
presumption that fewer Heavyweights know how to grapple. I get it, there's a couple of positive knock-on effects that come with not cutting weight. But I don't know if it'll be worth it solely from a career trajectory standpoint, especially since I don't know if that last point regarding divisional makeup and lack of grappling acumen is entirely true. 205 is loaded up with a lot of kickboxers and primary strikers right now, some of which have suspect defensive grappling. And frankly just as a division in general the depth of talent isn't
orders of magnitude better than Heavyweight outside of, like... the Top 6 guys.
And I kinda feel like I've seen enough to reinforce this belief. It started with the Parker Porter fight. Jailton shot a picture-perfect, well-timed entry on Porter's hips against the fence. He straight-up beats Parker to his own hips and has him dead-to-rights before Porter even thinks about defending the takedown. Against all of his previous opponents at 205, he would have elevated and dumped them on their head. Yet against Parker, you can see Almeida have a brief moment where he
struggles to lift the bigger man's weight. It wasn't for long -- maybe a second or two -- but it was apparent and striking, especially in comparison to his previous bouts against much better technical wrestlers. Eventually he managed to sort of "re-dig" and dump Parker onto the canvas before destroying him.
Then came the Shamil fight, where a 41-year-old Abdurakhimov who is beyond shot cracked Jailton with a right hand in the opening frame and managed to keep exploding back to his feet every time Jailton took him down. To Almeida's credit, he maintained some semblance of control over Shamil and kept hitting mat returns to tire the bigger guy out, but he still evidently had issues consolidating a dominant position early and ended up taking Shamil to the second round before finishing him.
Against Rozenstruik, Jailton got pressured quickly and was forced to shoot a reactive TD to survive Jairzinho's glancing flurry... a TD which got stuffed. Again, he got the fight to the ground and in his wheelhouse soon thereafter, but even then it felt more like Jairzinho's mistakes rather than Almeida's typical brutal GnP set up that sub (though I don't want to take too much credit away from Jailton for a solid win over a dangerous guy). For a moment I honestly thought Jairzinho was going to stay conservative on his back, mind his P's and Q's, and just go for broke in Round 2 again.
Here's the issue: the fights only get harder from here for Jailton. He's looked great thus far. But look at the rankings:
Not updated yet, I'd expect Jailton to slide in at #9 where Jairzinho is currently sitting on this graph. The only guy ahead of him after that whom I would confidently favor Almeida over are Gane and Tuivasa... who he called out, incidentally (smart man).
A switched-on Volkov, I think, is a deceptively solid test for him and in a five-round Main Event I think that's closer to a 50/50 fight than many people might think at a glance. Spivak, a healthy Aspinall, and Blaydes are all on-paper pretty atrocious stylistic match-ups for him if you ask me. Curtis didn't test Sergei's defensive grappling as thoroughly as I would have liked in their fight, but I'm starting to come around to the idea that Pavlovich probably isn't the same guy who got pounded out by Reem in his debut all those years ago and frankly that was a pretty unique set of circumstances... so I'd probably favor Pavlovich over Jailton, too.
Stipe and Jones probably aren't worth mentioning as there's a good chance we'll be seeing a double retirement situation coming up soon, but if either man is at even a fraction of their old self I don't think Almeida's skill set is the kind to defeat them. Stipe's obviously the easier fight on-paper, though.
***
So... final stance is that I voted "Not sure, need to see more". That's the closest to how I feel. I don't think it's out of the question that Jailton ends up holding the strap, but I think it would require some pretty favorable matchmaking on the part of his team and the UFC. For instance, imagine he gets a returning Tuivasa. He almost certainly takes him down and either subs him or pounds him out inside of three rounds. Then, meanwhile, Jones beats Stipe and both men retire from the sport. Gane gets the Pavlovich fight he wants for the vacant championship. Sergei tries to box with him, not relying on his wrestling base and ends up getting outstruck at range for his trouble. Gane wins, faces Jailton, gets out-grappled and submitted. Voila. This is just one example I hastily threw together in my mind of how I could feasibly see Jailton getting to the belt. But if he has to legitimately go through the murderer's row of any or all of the men I mentioned above? I think he's taking L's at some point or another... unless I'm either underestimating him or overestimating the Heavyweight contenders -- both of which are very possible.
