UFC Vegas 95, The Morning After: New Low, Same Apex
Photo by Al Powers/Zuffa LLC
Actually, you didn’t miss anything at all
I cannot pretend anything of importance happened at UFC Vegas 95.
This card was never going to be great, but injuries ravaged the scheduled bouts in the lead up and during fight week itself. Then, the stakes dropped even further when three athletes missed weight on Friday morning.
Here’s a fun fact and excellent microcosm of the UFC in 2024: Chelsea Chandler is a ranked Bantamweight who has yet to win a fight at Bantamweight. Her weight-missing and not-winning ways continued at UFC Vegas 95. She missed weight by five pounds and then got her ass kicked by Yana Santos, who hasn’t otherwise won a fight since February 2021.
Not great.
Often, we hope this unimportant cards are at least fun, but that wasn’t really the case here. Three finishes in ten fights is not a great percentage, and there wasn’t a single knockout. In terms of pure fun, Toshiomi Kazama provided about 75% of the card’s joy by his lonesome, scoring his first UFC win by getting knocked mostly senseless and then throwing up a sweet triangle joke.
Perhaps the best overall fight on the card was Chepe Mariscal (missed weight) vs. Damon Jackson. Mariscal did some genuinely cool stuff, like scoring some Judo throws from the clinch and landing damaging punches from unique positions. There was too much clinch wrestling for it to be a “Fight of the Night” worthy, however, and no finish was produced. It was just a decent fight between good fighters — AKA the expected baseline for what UFC should be providing.
Finally, the main event was cool, even if not a main event. Serghei Spivac deserves his flowers for scoring revenge on Marcin Tybura via first-round armbar, but he also got easily walloped by Tom Aspinall and Ciryl Gane in the recent past. I like “The Polar Bear,” but we cannot pretend he’s currently an elite contender or that this win means anything for the title picture.
Let’s check back in on the Moldovan in 18 months.
Elsewhere on the card ... there was nothing else elsewhere on the card. No egregious judging or refereeing, no particularly noteworthy short-notice debut (Quang looks decent) or underdog performance. By and large, the favorites won without doing anything unexpected, and no sensational highlights were produced in the process.
Fans who skipped the fight card to watch some Olympic action or read a book or talk with their families won this night. Read a few highlight posts or watch a couple clips on Twitter, and you’re fully caught up, having successfully avoided what felt like five hours of Burger King jingles in the process.
Thankfully, there’s something of an end in sight to the current Apex era. Latest reports indicate that the UFC Apex will shut down in November for construction. It won’t open again until next summer, renovated and expanded.
Hopefully, nothing cards like this are left in 2024.
