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#4 James Vick vs. Dan Hooker

Has Dan Hooker recovered from his beating at the hands of Edson Barboza?

This Lightweight clash could turn out to be the fight of the night, if both men’s previous fights are anything to go by. The last time we saw James Vick, he was losing a close fight to Paul Felder on the first ESPN show, while we haven’t seen Dan Hooker since he took a truly criminal beating from Edson Barboza last December.

The biggest reason this fight is so interesting to me is that while the 6’3” Vick usually has a huge height and reach advantage over his opponents at 155lbs, Hooker is equally lanky, standing at 6’0” and having a 75” reach to Vick’s 76”.

He’s also highly adept at using his range to his advantage, as he loves to throw the step-in knee ala Donald Cerrone and makes use of long, sweeping punches.

The New Zealand native is also no slouch on the ground; while his wrestling hasn’t looked great at times during his UFC career, his long arms make him dangerous with chokes, and we saw an example of that when he submitted Marc Diakiese back at UFC 219 in 2017.

Like Hooker, Vick has a dangerous ground game but he’s become more well-known for his striking, as he put together a run of 4 straight wins between 2017 and 2018, picking up two excellent knockouts in the process.

Worryingly though, like other tall fighters like Stefan Struve and Kendall Grove, I’m not really sure that Vick has learned exactly how to make the most of his range.

Sure, he’s got a stiff jab, but in that fight in February Felder found it all too easy to get past it to land shots, and Vick still has a dodgy tendency to lean back to avoid strikes rather than moving his head. And he’s also shown a susceptibility to leg kicks, something that Hooker – an adept kicker – must surely have noticed.

Throw in the fact that Vick’s chin has always been questionable – he was knocked silly by Beneil Dariush and Justin Gaethje for instance – and I’d have to say that this match appears to favor ‘The Hangman’.

The problem is that I’m still questioning how much Hooker can have recovered from the Barboza beating, and how much that fight took out of his career overall.

Simply put there are very few fighters who sustain the amount of punishment that Hooker took in that single fight across their whole careers. He did display a ludicrously tough chin, admittedly, but has that chin now been cracked? Vick might test that theory on Saturday and if he lands cleanly then we just don’t know how Hooker will react.

In the end, though, Hooker didn’t go down from shots to the chin – he was folded by a body shot – and that makes me think that his chin might still have some strength left in it. If that’s the case and this ends up being a striking battle, then I’m favoring him; his chin is far superior to Vick’s and ‘The Texecutioner’ still has a major tendency to get hit – and that was against smaller fighters than Hooker.

If Vick has really learned to use his range this is a winnable fight, but given he hasn’t managed it yet and he’s been around since 2012, I doubt he’s going to change any time soon. I think he walks into something nasty from Hooker midway through the fight and that’ll be that.

The Pick: Hooker via second round KO