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Women’s Strawweights

Jodie Esquibel (6-2) vs. Karolina Kowalkiewicz (10-2)

ODDS: Kowalkiewicz (-470), Esquibel (+375)

ANALYSIS: Esquibel has caught some tough breaks in 2017. She was supposed to face current “Ultimate Fighter” Season 26 competitor DeAnna Bennett at Invicta Fighting Championships 22 in January, but the latter pulled out due to injury. Replacement Kali Robbins then dropped out due to complications with her weight cut. Esquibel eventually fought and took a split decision over Bennett at Invicta 22 in March, earning a shot at the promotion’s vacant strawweight title against former champ Livia Renata Souza in August.

Naturally, the 31-year-old Esquibel wound up injured and lost her chance to fight for Invicta gold, but she has an opportunity to make all the year’s bad luck a distant memory if she can pull off a win in her UFC debut. Unfortunately for the Jackson-Wink MMA product and fiancee of UFC veteran Keith Jardine, she faces one of the 10 best women in the sport and does so in Kowalkiewicz’s home country.

Kowalkiewicz, 32, has endured dreadful back-to-back fight experiences, but it has nothing to do with bad fight juju. Instead, she is an elite fighter in the best women’s weight class and happened to consecutively fight the best woman in the world, Joanna Jedrzejczyk, in a five-round title affair. She then met Claudia Gadelha, who is an especially tough style matchup for Kowalkiewicz, exploited an early scramble mistake and capitalized. When elite fighters face one another the way they do at 115 pounds, someone has to lose.

The primary reason “The Polish Princess” was whipped by Jedrzejczyk in November and tapped quickly to Gadelha in June is the reason she is an overwhelming favorite against Esquibel: She needs the clinch advantage to thrive. “Joanna Champion” is just too good there and from every range, frankly, and Gadelha’s size, strength and explosiveness early let her run roughshod over Kowalkiewicz. Esquibel will not have this luxury at all. Despite her squatty, compact frame, she is best from distance. She has had over a dozen pro boxing bouts, and in her win over Bennett, she showed that she has started to put her combination punching together in an MMA context. However, she will need to be flawless and pick off Kowalkiewicz’s rushes consistently to avoid getting ensnared.

Kowalkiewicz’s plan is always to attack with unorthodox striking salvos to close the distance and then use the clinch to launch steady streams of punches, elbows, knees and kicks. The application and success of her style is probably best witnessed in her fight with Rose Namajunas, where she ate repeated left-handed counters early from “Thug Rose,” finally moved into the clinch and began dismantling and thwarting her counterpart’s game, all while increasing her output. Less than 15 months ago, Esquibel faced Alexa Grasso in Invicta, and when faced with a similar game plan to the one Kowalkiewicz often employs, she was nearly unrecognizable, her face battered and swollen from a battery of punches, elbows and knees. Expect Kowalkiewicz to do much the same on the way to a clear, possibly bloody, unanimous decision.

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