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Cub Swanson vs. Chad Mendes

Mendes, the latest Team Alpha Male super-prospect, gets his chance to prove that he can fill the featherweight void left by teammate Urijah Faber’s drop to bantamweight. Swanson meanwhile just wants to prove that he’s more than the gatekeeper his WEC record makes him out to be.

Beating Mendes begins and ends with stuffing his takedowns, but Swanson just doesn’t have that level of takedown defense. What he can bring is a far more proven and diverse offense as well as the sort of hard-nosed style that can make life hard on a prospect accustomed to dominance.

Unloading that offense on Mendes, however, is more dependent on how Mendes, not Swanson, approaches this fight. Mendes almost never deviates from his takedown game and has the positional skills to shut down any offense Swanson can generate from the guard.

This leaves Swanson with no option but to bank on creating scrambles. That is an awfully dicey game to play considering Mendes’ nasty front headlock series. High-level offense has been slow to develop for Mendes, but being able to maintain tight top control essentially cancels out that flaw -- at least against mid-level opposition like Swanson.

As with any raw prospect, there is always the chance Mendes comes out thinking he can get away with showing off his striking or testing out risky grappling gambits. Of course, there is always the chance a fighter does something silly and gets laid out. That chance is significantly lessened by Mendes’ disciplined style and Swanson’s own lack of knockout power.

Good as Swanson may be on the mat, he isn’t a particularly technical grappler. Even if he was, he only has 15 minutes to snatch a submission on a stultifying wrestler. Given the leaps and bounds in skill that modern prospects make on a fight-to-fight basis, the potential is there for Mendes to turn this fight into his coming-out party. Failing that, he can still notch a competitive decision win.