UFC on ESPN: Overeem vs. Harris - Predictions and Picks

The third of the UFC’s trio of quickfire shows in Jacksonville, Florida during the current Covid-19 pandemic, UFC on ESPN: Overeem vs. Harris largely features a bunch of fights that were planned for a canceled event on April 11th in Portland, Oregon.

Overall this doesn’t look like a bad card by any means; it doesn’t have the depth of UFC 249, which is hardly a surprise, but as a free TV show it looks solid enough and there should be plenty of exciting matches on tap.

We're just getting started! 👏📺 Two more cards this week on E+ and @ESPN. pic.twitter.com/fRZAlGd11S

— UFC (@ufc) May 11, 2020

Here are the predicted outcomes for UFC on ESPN: Overeem vs. Harris.

#1 Heavyweight: Alistair Overeem vs. Walt Harris

Alistair Overeem is one of the UFC's longest-serving veterans

This Heavyweight clash was actually planned for the UFC on ESPN show last December, but the tragic kidnapping and murder of Harris’s stepdaughter unsurprisingly forced him out of the bout. Overeem instead faced Jairzinho Rozenstruik, and suffered a nasty 5th round TKO. So can the Dutch veteran get back on the winning path here? Or will he come out on the wrong end of things again?

For me, the result of this one should stem on whether or not Overeem can avoid a heavy shot from Harris early in the fight. The Dutchman’s chin has a poor reputation – of his 18 losses, 14 have come by knockout – but the truth is that he’s tougher than his record suggests.

He doesn’t have a completely glass chin per say, and he can weather a certain amount of punishment. His issues have come more from his tendency to cover up under fire – stemming from his days in K-1 when the larger gloves worn by the fighters there offered more protection – and well, the fact that he’s facing the heaviest hitters in the sport.

Harris is definitely one of those heavy hitters, but despite being unbeaten since 2017, he’s not all that proven at the very top level. He did defeat Aleksei Oleinik in his last outing, which was highly impressive, but how much can you really take from a 12-second knockout win?

Essentially, the win over Oleinik showed exactly why ‘The Big Ticket’ is dangerous; he hits very hard and for a huge guy, he’s deceptively fast. The problem for him against Overeem, however, is that the Dutchman isn’t a plodding fighter like Oleinik was.

‘The Reem’ does have a somewhat methodical style, but he’s still an A+ athlete despite turning 40 the day after this event, and I doubt that Harris will be able to bum-rush him as he did to Oleinik and take him out that quickly.

Were this fight taking place in say, 2013 – when Overeem hadn’t quite found a style to suit him in his post-‘Ubereem’ days – then Harris would definitely be a decent bet. At that stage the Dutchman was still using his stalking, methodical style and simply looking to cover up when his opponent fired back – leaving him susceptible to the kind of knockouts he suffered at the hands of Ben Rothwell and Travis Browne.

Since then though, he’s become a much more economic fighter, with a tendency to catch his foe and then get on his bike to avoid any return offense. This style worked fantastically against the likes of Junior Dos Santos, Andrei Arlovski and Fabricio Werdum – but it’s his more cerebral side that I feel makes him a bad match for Harris.

‘The Reem’ is underrated when it comes to being a well-rounded fighter; he can strike from distance, but he’s equally adept at abusing a foe from inside the clinch. And more relevantly for this fight, he’s an excellent wrestler and grappler, capable of grounding an opponent and working them over with strikes or hunting for submissions.

The guillotine choke has traditionally been his go-to submission, but he’s also used various arm-based holds to tap opponents out in the past. And while he hasn’t submitted an opponent since 2009’s tapout of James Thompson in DREAM (!), he’s been using his ground game more and more recently.

His wins over Oleinik and Sergei Pavlovich both stemmed from his ground work, and he was also well on his way to defeating Rozenstruik using his wrestling before he succumbed to that last-gasp knockout. And it’s very notable that Harris’ ground game has always been a bit of an Achilles heel.

Granted, anyone could be tapped out by Fabricio Werdum – who submitted Harris in 2017 – but ‘The Big Ticket’ looked absolutely lost on the ground with the Brazilian and it’s rare to see a submission in just one minute.

With that in mind – and Overeem’s switch to being a more economical, smart fighter – unless Harris can catch him in a rush and put him away in the opening minutes of this fight, I just don’t see how he’ll be successful. Overeem is a more technical striker, but more than that he’s a far more polished fighter in all areas too.

I’d give ‘The Big Ticket’ a puncher’s chance here, but I suspect that ‘The Reem’ will take him down and either finish him with ground-and-pound or look for a submission and get it.

The Pick: Overeem via first round submission

#2 Strawweight: Claudia Gadelha vs. Angela Hill

Claudia Gadelha was once considered the #2 Strawweight in the world

It’s been an interesting couple of years for Gadelha, once considered the #2 fighter in the Strawweight division. ‘Claudinha’ came up short in her title challenge against Joanna Jedrzejczyk, but her wins over Cortney Casey and Karolina Kowalkiewicz meant that she retained a high rank. Since then though, she’s slipped somewhat.

A loss to Jessica Andrade was hardly shameful; Gadelha took the fight to her fellow Brazilian and showed better striking than she’d done before, but was outgunned in terms of power. Her win over Carla Esparza though was less convincing, and her loss to Nina Ansaroff was disappointing before a win over Randa Markos seemed to get her back on track.

However, that win wasn’t so much a show of improvement as it was a show that for ‘Claudinha’, things remain the same. Essentially, she’s a phenomenal grappler from the top position and has more than adequate technical striking, meaning she’s likely to beat the majority of her division.

However, using her striking can cause her to gas out – as she did against Esparza and Ansaroff – and if she then can’t get an opponent down, she tends to struggle, particularly down the stretch.

Essentially then, the roadmap to beating the Brazilian is to stop her takedown and attempt to push the pace early on, hoping that she’ll run out of steam and be open to being picked apart on the feet. So can Angela Hill do that?

Personally, I doubt it. ‘Overkill’ is on the best run of her UFC career – a 3-fight win streak – and so she definitely deserves this step up, but it must be said that ever since she emerged into the promotion in 2014, she hasn’t really evolved all that much.

She’s still an excellent striker, both from range and from close quarters, but on the ground, while she’s become better from a defensive standpoint, she still has a tendency to struggle. More to the point, her takedown defense still isn’t great – she’s simply too willing to let an opponent close her down due to her own skill in the clinch.

With all that in mind, I think this is probably Gadelha’s fight to lose. She’s tough enough to withstand punishment from Hill – who doesn’t hit as hard as someone like Andrade – and if she can get inside and get ‘Overkill’ down, the former Invicta champion is almost definitely in a world of trouble.

Gadelha will need to be careful not to empty her gas tank too early if it turns out that she can’t get Hill down, but I don’t think that’ll be the case and if she can put ‘Overkill’ on her back then I think she’s likely to finish her off as she did Kowalkiewicz a couple of years ago.

The Pick: Gadelha via first round submission

#3 Featherweight: Dan Ige vs. Edson Barboza

How Edson Barboza will make 145lbs is anyone's guess!

To me, this is an outright baffling fight, largely because I can’t really understand what Barboza is thinking with this drop to 145lbs. He was absolutely shredded at 155lbs with barely any bodyfat, and at 5’11” it’s not like he was a stocky fighter ala Alexander Volkanovski or Chad Mendes, for instance. Quite how he’ll make it down to 145lbs is anyone’s guess.

The truth is that this feels like a desperate attempt from ‘Junior’ to regain some traction in his career. He’s gone 1-4 in his last 5 fights and while he looked excellent in that win – over Dan Hooker – and could well have beaten Paul Felder with different judges, the truth is that he doesn’t weather punishment well these days and is massively susceptible to fighters with a powerful ground game.

However, outside of Khabib Nurmagomedov and Kevin Lee, powerful ground fighters aren’t all that common in the UFC’s Lightweight division. Of the current top ten at 155lbs, I’d give Barboza a fair chance against at least half of them – which is why this move is so strange.

Thankfully for the Brazilian, he’s not faced with one of the true killers at Featherweight – someone like Zabit Magomedsharipov or Yair Rodriguez – and instead, he’s up against a guy just breaking into the top half of the division in Ige.

‘Dynamite’ is on a 5-fight win streak and has looked impressive throughout, and in his last fight, he defeated the highly touted Mirsad Bektic – although it was a very close decision that could’ve gone either way. Overall, Ige is a well-rounded fighter capable of hurting an opponent on the feet, but also outworking them on the ground.

Does he possess the kind of thudding ground-and-pound of Nurmagomedov or Lee, though? Not really. Add in the fact that Barboza’s takedown defense – against lesser grapplers – is pretty excellent and on paper at least this looks like a good fight for the Brazilian.

For me it all depends on how well ‘Junior’ responds to what sounds like a horrendous weight cut. If he manages to make weight with no problem and doesn’t drain himself completely, this could well be a Jose Aldo situation where we see Barboza take well to his new division and shred Ige with relative ease.

If he struggles though, the likelihood is that unless he can take ‘Dynamite’ out early, he might find himself dragged into a war of attrition that he simply doesn’t have the gas tank to win. If that turns out to be the case I could easily see Ige grinding him down in the later rounds and taking a decision.

I’m going with a bit of a risk and picking Barboza here; if you ignore the weight issue then it should be his easiest fight for some time. I’d be more comfortable choosing a winner after checking out the weigh-ins, but obviously that’s not possible, so I’m going with the more proven fighter.

The Pick: Barboza via second round TKO

#4 Middleweight: Eryk Anders vs. Krzysztof Jotko

Eryk Anders has extremely heavy hands

Both of these men are on two-fight win streaks, but that’s about the only thing they have in common. Jotko is a largely technical, cerebral fighter who can often be dull to watch, while Anders is almost all athleticism and power, and the lack of refinement in his technique has been the thing to hold him back thus far.

It’s hard to really hold that against ‘Ya Boi’, though. He only debuted in MMA in 2015, and by 2017 he was in the UFC, beating Rafael Natal and Markus Perez with his thudding strikes. A tight – and controversial – loss to Lyoto Machida followed, before he righted the ship with a head kick KO of the unheralded Tim Williams.

That fight exposed Anders somewhat though; his power punching style left him wide open to the more technical striking of Williams, even if it was ‘Ya Boi’ who won out in the end. 3 straight losses followed – an ill-advised move to 205lbs saw him suffer against bigger, harder hitters – before he moved back down in 2019 and defeated the tricky Gerald Meerschaert.

Despite now having 4 years of UFC experience to his name, the problem for Anders is that he still almost purely relies on his athleticism and power to get him through. In reality, he probably needed at least two more years snacking on lower-level opponents outside the UFC – but his explosive nature was always going to get him noticed. Such is the curse of the top-level athlete transitioning into MMA.

So can he use that explosive nature to take out Jotko in what would arguably be his biggest win to date? It’s definitely possible. A lanky 185lber, Jotko tends to look to clinch with his opponents and beat them up from close range. Recently he’s been relying more and more on his ground game, but whether he can get Anders down is another question entirely.

It’s not that Jotko isn’t dangerous, more that for the most part – especially after two TKO losses in a row – he’s become very much a safety-first fighter. The worrying thing for me with regards to this fight is that it sounds very much like Jotko’s dull fight with Marc-Andre Barriault – a fight that saw way too much clinching and Jotko edge a decision over a more athletic, heavier hitter.

Can he do that again here? Possibly, but I’m actually favouring Anders. He’s far more explosive than Barriault and he can generate scary power even from close quarters, meaning that the likelihood of Jotko simply pinning him into the fence seems rather low.

Add in the fact that the Polish fighter is eminently hittable, and doesn’t have the strongest chin, and it does sound like a recipe for ‘Ya Boi’ to pick up a knockout. He may need more nuance than simply swinging for the fences wildly, but despite his lack of technical ability he has shown patience in his previous fights, and has always carried his power into the later rounds of the fight.

The Pick: Anders via second round TKO

#5 Bantamweight: Song Yadong vs. Marlon Vera

Marlon Vera is one of the UFC's most exciting fighters

This Bantamweight clash is to me the best fight on the card outside of the main event. Both men are on solid unbeaten streaks, and more to the point, they’re both massively exciting to watch as well. And given this is a battle between the #13 ranked and #14 ranked fighters in the division, the winner could well be considered a genuine contender.

Vera emerged from the first season of TUF: Latin America and like the majority of his castmates, quickly established himself as a high-end action fighter in the UFC proper. Unlike most of his castmates though, ‘Chito’ has been able to display genuine flashes of elite-level potential.

The native of Ecuador was always a venomous grappler, but over his years in the Octagon he’s also developed a very nasty striking game. We’ve seen him take out opponents with head kicks, body shots, standing and on the ground, and while his defense isn’t hugely strong, he survived 3 rounds with both John Lineker and Douglas Silva de Andrade – hardly the easiest thing to do.

Basically, Vera is the kind of fighter who doesn’t really know how to take a backward step in the Octagon – which is why he’s one of my favourites to watch on the current roster.

Yadong doesn’t have as much UFC experience as his opponent here, but he’s definitely a very dangerous man. A tremendous natural athlete, ‘The Kung Fu Monkey’ has shown himself to be an explosive and hard-hitting striker, brutally finishing off Felipe Arantes and Vera’s fellow TUF castmate Alejandro Perez.

His most recent fight was a draw with the highly rated Cody Stamann; it was a fight Song would’ve won had he not received a point deduction for an illegal knee in the first round, but worryingly, it also saw him largely dominated on the ground in the third round after tiring somewhat.

It was the first time we’d seen the Chinese fighter gas out, though – perhaps due to the fact that Stamann was the first opponent to really draw him into extended grappling sequences.

That’s what has me leaning slightly towards Vera in this one. ‘Chito’ doesn’t have as much pure striking power as Song, but he’s far more rangy and holds a 3” reach advantage over ‘The Kung Fu Monkey’. And judging by the Stamann fight, while he doesn’t have the wrestling of Stamann, he may well hold a grappling advantage overall on the Chinese fighter.

Despite the finishing skills of both men I can see this one going the distance purely because of their toughness, but I think Vera’s got just enough due to his range and excellent groundwork to outpoint Song, assuming he doesn’t get badly hurt early on by one of the Chinese fighter’s bombs.

The Pick: Vera via unanimous decision

#6 The Prelims: ESPN+ card

Fan favourite Matt Brown headlines this weekend's prelim card

It appears that Saturday’s prelims will be shown on the ESPN+ streaming service for US viewers; they’re not heavy on name value but there will definitely be a handful of stars in action that most fans should recognise.

One such star is Welterweight Matt Brown, who returned from retirement in December to knock out Ben Saunders. He faces undefeated Miguel Baeza, who picked up a UFC debut win in October. Baeza looked good in that fight, but despite Brown’s age – 39 now – this is still a massive step up for ‘Caramel Thunder’.

I suspect this will be an ultra-violent fight – and you can’t count Baeza out as Brown doesn’t weather punishment all that well – but in the end I’m going with ‘The Immortal’ by TKO.

At Middleweight, Kevin Holland faces off with Anthony Hernandez. Holland most recently saw a 3-fight win streak snapped in a bit of an upset against Brendan Allen, while ‘Fluffy’ Hernandez picked up his first UFC win in August over Jun Yong Park. This is a tricky fight to pick as Hernandez isn’t all that proven at the UFC level, while Holland has been inconsistent at best. I’m leaning towards Holland by decision, but this one could go either way.

At Featherweight, Georgia’s Giga Chikadze takes on Mike Davis. Davis looked good in his previous fight, but then he was facing a man in Thomas Gifford who has simply terrible striking defense. Chikadze meanwhile is very wild, particularly on the feet, but is a great athlete and can push a nasty pace. I’m taking the Georgian by decision here as I feel like he can outwork Davis down the stretch.

Veteran Cortney Casey returns at Flyweight to take on Italy’s Mara Romero Borella in what should be an intriguing fight. Casey hasn’t fought in well over a year since her loss to Cynthia Calvillo, but despite her weak record (8-7) she’s a very hard-nosed fighter who’s only ever lost to genuine contenders.

However, she’s never fought up at 125lbs before, and worryingly, her takedown defense was extremely porous in the majority of her fights. That could play into the hands of Borella, a grappler by trade who’s lost her last two fights. If Casey can keep this one vertical it’s a winnable fight for her, but against a bigger opponent I worry that she won’t be able to stop the takedown, and so I’m taking Borella via decision.

At Featherweight, longtime fan favourite Darren Elkins is back, taking on Nate Landwehr. Elkins is on a 3-fight losing streak, but is still as tough as nails and even at the age of 35, his hard-nosed style will be tricky to stop. I simply can’t see Landwehr – who was knocked out in his UFC debut earlier in 2020 – being capable of stopping Elkins, and so it’s more likely that ‘The Damage’ will grind out another win – likely by late TKO.

Finally, two Heavyweights clash as Don’Tale Mayes faces debutant Rodrigo Nascimento. Nascimento isn’t the biggest Heavyweight – in fact, he looks like he could make 205lbs – but he does appear to be a highly skilled grappler, with 5 submissions on his 7-0 ledger. Mayes appears to be the better athlete, but he was submitted by a striker in Ciryl Gane in his UFC debut which doesn’t bode well. I’m going with Nascimento via tapout in this one.