Preview: UFC Fight Night 137 ‘Santos vs. Anders’

Marina Rodriguez defeated Vanessa Guimaraes w/ a Triangle R2 at Aspera FC 41 (2016) #UFCSaoPaulo pic.twitter.com/s7ySXgCJIs

— LORD HONKY HUMUNGUS (@Mr_Honky) September 17, 2018

Women’s Strawweights

Randa Markos (8-6) vs. Marina Rodriguez (10-0)

ODDS: Markos (-110), Rodriguez (-110)

Canada’s Markos has alternated wins and losses throughout her nine-fight UFC career, which feels about right; since an unexpectedly deep run on 2014’s all-strawweight season of “The Ultimate Fighter,” Markos has been one of the most maddeningly inconsistent fighters in the division. Markos has a solid wrestling game and has supplemented that with a pressure striking game that, while not pretty or technical, flows into her grappling enough to be effective, but how well she utilizes that seems to be a crapshoot from fight to fight. Sometimes, like her 2017 bout against Carla Esparza, Markos’s wrestling is on point and she can cause just enough trouble to get a decision win against a tough opponent, while she just as often seems to have a complete inability to control her opponent, losing rounds as the fight goes on. Markos is coming off a loss to Nina Ansaroff, so that might be bad news for Brazilian newcomer Rodriguez.

Rodriguez is one of a few fighters on this card that joins the UFC via Dana White’s Tuesday Night Contender Series in Brazil, where she had a quick stoppage win over Maria Oliveira. In that fight and throughout her career, Rodriguez has shown a sharp muay Thai game that’s allowed her to defeat, all things considered, a fairly strong run of opponents given the standards of the Brazilian women’s scene. One of the big questions will be how Rodriguez deals with wrestling against UFC-level opponents, so this fight against Markos will go a long way towards proving whether or not Rodriguez can be an impact newcomer.

This is a hard fight to call, if only because a lot of it depends on how Rodriguez reacts if she’s put on her back, which is an open question. Rodriguez has mostly been able to handle opponents with her striking, and what brief footage there is out there of her grappling is mostly her on offense, which looks perfectly functional, if not anything exceptional. If Markos was a lockdown wrestler, I’d give her the easy advantage, but her control comes and goes, so there’s a decent chance that Rodriguez is enough of an athlete to get out of trouble and keep this fight on the feet, where the Brazilian should land the harder blows. Still, I’ll have to take the more proven fighter to get her game going, even if I have little confidence in it; the pick is Markos via decision.

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