UFC Fight Night 156: Shevchenko vs. Carmouche II - Predictions and Picks

#5 Rodolfo Vieira vs. Oskar Piechota

The UFC debut of grappling legend Rodolfo Vieira promises to be intriguing

Most UFC debutants don’t garner a lot of hype these days – with the roster being so huge now.

Hot prospects are coming in much earlier than they once did meaning they don’t build as much momentum, and it seems like crossovers from Bellator are few and far between now as well. That’s why it’s refreshing to see a genuinely exciting debutant in the form of Vieira here.

‘The Black Belt Hunter’ is one of the best grapplers on the planet right now; a multi-time Abu Dhabi champion since 2009, he’s basically won every meaningful grappling tournament in the world on numerous occasions, and where we’ve seen other classical grapplers struggle in the Octagon due to their lack of explosive athleticism, that shouldn’t be the case here.

Like Ronaldo ‘Jacare’ Souza, Vieira is an A+ athlete. A huge man for 185lbs, he’s unbelievably fast and powerful, with a remarkably good takedown for someone who doesn’t come from an amateur wrestling background. And as you can imagine, his top game is practically death for any of his opponents.

The issue for him? Like Jacare when he first started MMA, he’s not quite used to striking and in the footage I’ve seen of his five MMA wins thus far, he doesn’t look too natural on his feet even if it hasn’t given him many problems thus far due to his stellar grappling. Therefore the big question here is whether he can run over Piechota as he’s done his previous opponents.

Piechota – who hails from Poland – came into the UFC with a pretty strong reputation in his own right.

A Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt under Robert Drysdale, he’s not in Vieira’s league on the ground but he still brought an excellent grappling reputation into his Octagon debut, and he showed skills both on the ground and the feet in beating Jonathan Wilson.

A second victory – a quick KO of Tim Williams – made him 11-0 and kept the hype train rolling, but a submission loss to Gerald Meerschaert then derailed any hope he had of developing into a contender.

And so here we are, with a once-hot prospect now feeling like he’s been hand-picked to lose to another one.

That Meerschaert loss is the fight that largely worries me for Piechota here and is making me lean towards Vieira.

The Polish fighter trucked Meerschaert in the first round of that fight, beating him upstanding and coming close with submissions on the ground, but once Meerschaert turned the tables on him in the second and got some dominant positions on the ground, it looked like Piechota simply couldn’t cope.

There’s the chance that Piechota takes out Vieira in the first round with strikes; he’s far better standing than the Brazilian and the fact that Vieira appears to shell up when someone swings for him is worrying.

But I’m just not convinced that the Polish fighter can stop the takedown and if he thought Meerschaert was nasty on the ground, he hasn’t seen anything yet.

The Pick: Vieira via first-round submission