Featured: The People's Main Event: Pereira vs Williams

 The People's Main Event: Pereira vs Williams

Every fight card, there is a fight that is not one of the marquee fights on that card but really speaks to the fans of the sports and, for lack of a better term, gets the people going. For the last card of the year from the UFC this weekend, that fight is Michel Pereira vs Khaos Williams at Welterweight. Buckle up, it is going to be a wild ride for this one.

We will start with the man fighting in the red corner. Words can not do justice for some of the things I am about to describe and breakdown of this man's fighting style, so I highly encourage anybody that has not seen a highlight reel or a fight from Michel Pereira (24-11 2NC, 2-2 UFC), to stop what you are doing now and go do that immediately. I will start with first acknowledging that Pereira is a super athlete. I know a lot of people like to throw that term around all too often but it is justified in this case. If he were not fighting MMA, I am sure that he could have been successful at numerous other sports, just based on his freaky athletic ability. The technique with which he threw that flying knee against Danny Roberts in his UFC debut was brilliant, and as someone that literally teaches people how to jump and the correct ways to jump effectively and efficiently, it could not have been cleaner. If I were to estimate Pereira’s vertical, based on footage that I have seen, I would put it somewhere between a 33 and 38 inch vertical, which is comparable to most NBA players. 

Using all of this athleticism also has its cons as well. These techniques can become stale quickly once the opponent sees it coming, which can leave you open to counters. The other big con is the amount of energy that is needed to pull off these techniques is large and can zap a fighter's gas tank in the blink of an eye. In Pereira’s second UFC fight against Tristan Connelly, this exact thing happened. In the first round all of the following things were done by Pereira in the first three and half minutes. He starts breakdancing during the introductions, he then does two backflips once the fight starts and throws four flying knees, two of which landed. He then starts breakdancing again, and tops it off with a backflip into his opponent's guard. By the end of that round, he was dead and got beat by unanimous decision because of his poor fight IQ. He then lost in his next fight against Diego Sanchez by DQ in the third-round because of an illegal knee but was dominant for most of that fight. His last fight was against Zelim Imadaev and it was the most complete performance of his career. He cut down on the breakdancing and backflips by about 75% and looked great. He outstruck his opponent the whole fight and even suplexed him down in the last twenty seconds of the fight, to then lock up a rear-naked choke right before the buzzer. His gas tank looked much better and he paced himself very nicely. It should be interesting to see which Pereira shows up on Saturday. The smart and calculated one that uses his flashiness to his advantage or the low fight IQ one that just wants to put on a show for the zero fans that are in attendance?

Khaos Williams (11-1, 2-0 UFC), on the other hand, is every bit as good of an athlete as his opponent is. Maybe not in the same faset as Pereira but in terms of overall ability. This man truly has scary one punch power. Once again, this term gets thrown around too often but this is the real deal folks. He has that Francis Ngannou, Anthony Johnson type power. His punches do not even have to hit you flush, a glancing blow will put you down too. He has not even clocked in over a minute of total UFC cage time yet. He knocked out Alex Morono with a flurry of punches, twenty-seven seconds into his UFC debut and knocked Adbul Razak Alhassan dead with one punch, thirty seconds into that contest. The kid is scary but I do have some concerns. One is that in the past, when a UFC fighter has just been knocking every single one of his opponents out in the first round on a consistent basis, they tend to look lost if the fight goes long into the later rounds. They almost always gas out too, which after watching some of his older pre-UFC fights, does happen to Khaos if the fight goes past the first round. He does, however, one hundred percent carry his power and can and will still knock someone out later into the fight. His technique just becomes sloppy and he can be countered fairly easy. His ground game is another big question mark. He has two wins by submission but the quality of his opponents were pretty low for those fights and Pereira has a black belt in BJJ, so I am pretty sure he will want to keep this one on the feet.

On MyBookie, they have this fight near dead even in terms of betting odds. Pereria is a -120 to win and Williams is a -110 to win and that seems about right to me. This is a great fight and the UFC matchmakers should pat themselves on the back for this one. Either guy can stop the other in his tracks. I will not be betting on this one for that simple fact alone. There are just too many outcomes that I feel would not go my way and just make me upset that I did not go the other way. One prop bet that I do like for this fight is the under 2.5 rounds for -200. It seems like the safest play for this fight to me. 

Finally, I can not stress this enough. If you have to go to the bathroom, wait. If you are hungry and desperately need something to eat, wait. I promise you, someone will be falling and you will not want to miss it on the last card of the year!