Heavyweights
#8 HW | Jairzinho Rozenstruik (12-3, 6-3 UFC) vs. #10 HW | Marcin Tybura (22-7, 9-6 UFC)His momentum has slowed greatly since the hot start to his UFC career, but Rozenstruik still lurks as a potential contender in the heavyweight division. Suriname’s “Bigi Boy” started his UFC career with three brutal knockouts, but his first main event turn against Alistair Overeem seemed to expose the sparseness of Rozenstruik’s game. He did not offer much resistance as a wrestler, and Overeem’s patient approach led Rozenstruik to retreat into a distressing level of inactivity. That is, of course, until the last 10 seconds of the fight. With heavyweight fights being such a crapshoot, it almost was not a surprise when Rozenstruik suddenly sprang into action and scored a knockout win with just four seconds left in a 25-minute bout. Rozenstruik has mostly tread water since, as the elite of the division have been able to outmaneuver him in one way or another. Francis Ngannou ran him over, Ciryl Gane patiently outstruck him and Curtis Blaydes outwrestled him. For as limited as Rozenstruik’s approach may be, knockouts of Junior dos Santos and Augusto Sakai have shown that a lot of his opponents simply do not have a clear path to victory that avoids the threat of a huge knockout. Does that apply to Tybura? We will soon find out.
Tybura has followed an interesting path towards heavyweight relevancy. The Pole is not an overwhelming physical force, which made his UFC a bit of a rude awakening. Faced with a massive opponent in Timothy Johnson, “Tybur” did not get much of anywhere in trying to push the much larger American around. That led Tybura to briefly pivot towards a striking-heavy approach in a knockout of Viktor Pesta, but it was not long until he was back to his old ways as someone who looks to outwrestle his opponents and finish them on the mat. After some rough patches, that spurred Tybura to a recent five-fight winning streak capped off with finishes of Greg Hardy and Walt Harris, which in turn ended in frustrating fashion against Alexander Volkov in October, as both men put in flat performances that resulted in a clear Volkov win. Tybura does certainly have the requisite level of wrestling and grappling to take over this fight against Rozenstruik, and as a more potent finisher on the ground than most heavyweights, there is certainly the chance that he can find a stoppage or a submission. However, Tybura also typically needs a while to get his game going, whether it is via his opponents imploding or his absorbing a lot of damage before turning things around. That is not really the type of gamble worth taking against Rozenstruik. As such, the likeliest scenario seems to be that Rozenstruik finds a fight-ending blow in short order. The pick is Rozenstruik via first-round knockout.
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