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#4 Andrea Lee vs. Montana De La Rosa
Women’s Flyweight is still very much a division in flux; sure, there’s a dominant champion now in Valentina Shevchenko, but the spots right underneath her are very much there for the taking, and given these women have a combined record of 5-0 in the UFC and 20-6 overall, the winner of this one could easily find themselves vaulted into contention.
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Of the two, Lee has garnered the most hype; ‘KGB’ was brought into the UFC last year as a vaunted prospect, having won the LFA Flyweight title on two occasions with her only losses coming to longtime veterans Roxanne Modafferi and Sarah D’Alelio.
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An accomplished kickboxer with numerous Muay Thai titles to her name, Lee actually used her strong ground game to beat Veronica Macedo in her UFC debut before largely outstriking Ashlee Evans-Smith to pick up her second win.
De La Rosa meanwhile came from the largely-overlooked TUF 26 season and fell short in her goal of becoming the first UFC Flyweight champ, losing to eventual winner Nicco Montano in the Quarter-Finals of the title tournament. Since then though, she’s gone 3-0 in the Octagon and has looked excellent, using her dangerous ground game to submit all three of her opponents with relative ease.
The wife of fellow UFC fighter Mark De La Rosa, it’s pretty clear that Montana will want this fight on the ground when you consider she’s got eight submission wins in 10 fights. The issue for her in my opinion though is that Lee is probably the best fighter she’s faced in this UFC run and while her record looks strong, she was snacking on extremely low-level opposition prior to making it to the UFC.
Most notably – and it is hard to quantify how much each belt colour means due to differences in instructors and so forth – Lee is a brown belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu under renowed instructor Relson Gracie, while De La Rosa has a purple belt, one step below a brown. That suggests to me that De La Rosa cannot expect to simply run through Lee on the ground as she’s done to previous opponents.
If De La Rosa can’t dominate Lee on the ground, then I can’t see her winning this fight. Lee is simply a far superior striker and should have enough to hold her own if not come out on top on the ground, too. I wouldn’t be surprised in fact if this is a surprisingly one-sided fight in favour of ‘KGB’.
The Pick: Lee via unanimous decision
