News Dan Ige vs Movsar Evloev set for June 4th

[Jose Beehive]

Solid matchup, i'm not happy the Topuria fight isn't happening though.

 

[Busgosu]

lol, the two guys Topuria has been calling out for months, he must be pissed... well, that's what he gets for talking that much shit and then botching the weight cut the day before the fight...

 

[MixMartialFarts]

People are saying it's a big step up for Evolev, would Ige beat Hakeem? I'm not convinced he would.

 

[usernamee]

Well that sucks, really wanted to see Evloev sooner

c'mon UFC, do better

 

[Safton]

Dan is a good solid gatekeeper at 145 to test up-and-comers against, so I don't mind it. He's fairly well-rounded. That being said, I expect Evloev to cruise to a UD against him. TKZ managed to dominate him in the grappling exchanges and hold him down for much of the fight. Calvin landed the only TD he attempted against him and racked up over a minute of control time. Mirsad Bektic also had some success in the offensive wrestling department -- enough to take Ige to a Split Decision. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that Movsar Evloev is a vastly superior offensive grappler to any of these men. I mean you could maybe make an argument about how Dan didn't expect the wrestling so much from those guys or that he's improved since then. Admittedly for this fight he'll have a nice, long camp to train nothing but defensive grappling with a stud wrestler across the cage from him.

But the issue is that Movsar actually has developed a pretty solid technical striking game. It's centered around being rangy and managing distance while exploiting his long reach to land volume before ultimately crashing in to seek the clinch/TD. It's not flashy and he doesn't fuck people up with it generally, but it's efficient for his purposes. And statistically speaking, it works for him in terms of having a decent striking accuracy, solid striking defense, and excellent significant strikes landed-to-absorbed ratio. Better than Ige in all departments except the accuracy, in fact -- but that's probably because he's throwing more volume. Yes, Ige has shown more power and finishing capability, though he's generally not known as a "power-puncher" per-se; that Gavin Tucker fight was an anomaly within his UFC career.

 

[fortheo]

Between him, Arnold Allen, Sodiq Yusuff, and Bryce Mitchell, Movsar's fitting right in with his fellow young ranked FW prospects who never fight.

They learned from top Featherweights like Yair, ortega, and zabit.

Man, it's such a great division on paper, but they fight once every two years.

 

[Luckyme]

Not as interesting as the Topuria fight but it's a higher profile opponent for Movsar. Wonder who they'll line up for Topuria now?

 

[fortheo]

Dan is a good solid gatekeeper at 145 to test up-and-comers against, so I don't mind it. He's fairly well-rounded. That being said, I expect Evloev to cruise to a UD against him. TKZ managed to dominate him in the grappling exchanges and hold him down for much of the fight. Calvin landed the only TD he attempted against him and racked up over a minute of control time. Mirsad Bektic also had some success in the offensive wrestling department -- enough to take Ige to a Split Decision. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that Movsar Evloev is a vastly superior offensive grappler to any of these men. I mean you could maybe make an argument about how Dan didn't expect the wrestling so much from those guys or he's improved since then -- and for this fight he'll have a nice, long camp to train nothing but defensive grappling with a stud wrestler across the cage from him.

But the issue is that Movsar actually has developed a pretty solid technical striking game. It's centered around being rangy and managing distance while exploiting his long reach to land volume before ultimately crashing in to seek the TD. It's not flashy and he doesn't fuck people up with it generally, but it's efficient for his purposes. And statistically speaking, it works for him in terms of having a decent striking accuracy, solid striking defense, and excellent significant strikes landed-to-absorbed ratio. Better than Ige in all departments except the accuracy, in fact -- but that's probably because he's throwing more volume. Yes, Ige has shown more power and finishing capability, though he's generally not known as a "power-puncher" per-se; that Gavin Tucker fight was an anomaly within his UFC career.

Movsar is by far a better wrestler than any of those guys, but put all of them in a submission grappling contest and I think KZ would come out the winner.

 

[Safton]

Movsar is by far a better wrestler than any of those guys, but put all of them in a submission grappling contest and I think KZ would come out the winner.

I saw the sneaky edit

I mean, yeah, quite possibly. Jung is a legitimate Black Belt in Judo and BJJ and even did some Sambo. He had a fairly competitive (friendly) rolling session with Rener Gracie. He has more wins by submission than any other method (though a fair amount of those come after rocking the other guy on the feet to be fair), my personal favorite being when he caught a young, surging Poirier on a five-fight win streak with his own signature choke. I haven't seen enough of Movsar's skills in a pure BJJ context to know how he'd hold up in that context, leading me to favor TKZ instinctively. That being said it wouldn't overly surprise me if Movsar's wrestling and heavy top pressure allowed him to stall out on top and survive to a draw or even "win" (depending on the specific ruleset of the specific competition) like we've seen recently.

But I suppose it's sort of a moot point, as I was talking about overall offensive grappling skills in an MMA context. And to think I almost said "wrestler" there instead of "grappler" just to avoid this kind of confusion

 

[Sticko]

Pretty big test for Ige tbh