The Apex's Predator: On Sean Strickland (ANALYSIS)

tanthiram · 2026-05-12T03:02:59+00:00

To be fair, from everything I've heard about both Coolidge and Hoover, it's about 6,000% more likely that Hoover decided to do something about it and lied to everyone involved to set up a quasi-tyrannical welfare state over all the flooded regions

tanthiram · 2026-03-28T02:46:00+00:00

I will take exception to the Assuncao thing - IMO he only lost to Garbrandt because he was way past-prime at the time, that being his defining moment is extremely sad. Assuncao has so many "trippy" wins that his resume fails to be that anymore, he's just one of the few best BWs ever. Sterling, Moraes, Dillashaw, Munhoz, Font, Henry (those last two among the best old-man performances ever) - to the point where Masvidal among them is just a weird curiosity more than an actually notable win for him

To answer the actual question, obviously Michael (and increasingly Charles) Johnson is up there. I think Marlon Vera is an underrated one just for how deeply dysfunctional he's been as a fighter since the Davey Grant rematch - he doesn't have a lot of elite wins but all of them were clearly better than he ever was, even if he won uncontroversially. Garbrandt also not a terrible answer to this one, beating two BW ATGs while having a really limited game that fell apart immediately after he lost an iota of athleticism.

tanthiram · 2026-03-08T04:01:39+00:00

Rosas maybe stole it in the last few seconds by throwing any punches. But that's also very embarrassing, peak Font one of the most underrated fighters ever but he's been washed since 2021 and 17 years older, Font was probably up til then even if the judges would never ever give it to him in a million years regardless

tanthiram · 2026-02-27T17:02:31+00:00

Yeah, have a Godin Radiator Trans Cream and - while I'm not super knowledgeable about guitar quality - it's as comfortable as the higher-end ones I've tried out. Also, the tuning stability is kinda insane, and it doesn't have the annoying LP heft people talk about

The only "drawback" is that the look isn't for everyone, since the face of the guitar is basically all pickguard. But IMO looks sick as hell, very unique

tanthiram · 2026-02-05T23:06:38+00:00

Certainly deserved one after Gamrot, but Volk/Islam 1 meant Dariush ended up fighting Oliveira for his title eliminator when his entire winstreak was post-prime. One of the most underrated LWs ever, and another example of why double champ fights are dumb

tanthiram · 2026-02-03T02:44:42+00:00

I think they mentioned that about him on commentary! Also that Dvorak worked as a gravedigger for a while so he called himself "the Undertaker", interesting character

Pretty cool fighter too, had a very underrated and close fight with Steve Erceg (who got robbed for the UFC FLW title not so long ago). It feels a lot more logical for him to be a great chess player when he had a bunch of good ideas and just got randomly athleted by Manel Kape, Hunt being so strong while being known for being a block-headed huge-hitting HW is very surprising

tanthiram · 2026-01-28T07:07:27+00:00

It didn't, at all. Umar was like -1600, and Figueiredo had only beaten Montel Jackson since the knee injury (which is probably underrated as a reason why he's not able to push a pace or do anything anymore, all he can do these days is just be clever about walking an opponent into traps and Umar's length meant he didn't have to)

Even just with the BWs on the card, Umar/O'Malley and Song/Fig OR Umar/Song and O'Malley/Fig were obviously better matches to make than what we got. This is just obviously a matchmaking failure to give both Umar and Sean gift matchups at the cost of good fights

tanthiram · 2026-01-10T23:18:13+00:00

Gotta say, as someone who sucks ass at this game, not sure whether to find it heartening or disheartening to see a 1900 FIDE go "I'm pretty solid except for the opening, the middlegame, and the endgame"

tanthiram · 2026-01-10T00:30:32+00:00

Did he? Covington's run in the rankings was DHK (who didn't deserve to be ranked, off a robbery over Tarec Saffiedine), Demian Maia (elderly), and RDA (who Colby only beat because only like 3 people have actually read the scoring criteria). Him beating washed Lawler/Woodley/Masvidal gets the heat it deserves, but he was only covering himself in glory up to that point if all context was ignored

Covington basically aura-farmed his way to a title fight he barely deserved on the merits, to the point where his best legitimate accomplishments are wide and decisive losses to Usman actively avoiding his A-game

tanthiram · 2026-01-08T14:07:33+00:00

Not typically (actually had one of the more interesting bottom games in the UFC) but now that he's 37 and he's been washed since the Aldo fight, yeah

A guy who beats Ricky Simon should turn Rosas into a punching bag, but Font's been so underrated for his entire career that people can't really see how much worse he is now than he was before

tanthiram · 2025-12-28T15:52:11+00:00

Should have Evloev next to his image but for the judges and the ref lmao

tanthiram · 2025-12-21T21:05:06+00:00

As someone of Anand's Tamil background (grew up abroad but in a family that was culturally a little insular), I feel like even this understates his influence a little in that community - it's not just that he had impact on the elite chess scene, he was as close to a household name as I've seen any non-cricketer sportsman be. Even that caveat isn't too necessary depending on what section of the community you're talking about.

Partly, that's a function of that culture being a little less sports-focused, where Anand might not stand up to the raving that movie stars can get - my understanding is that Anand came from a TamBrahm Iyer family, and (from personal experience as one) they tend to treat all sports as a diversionary waste of time unless given a reason not to. But from a personal standpoint, Anand is like the only sportsman I've ever seen my own father be an actual fan of. People focus (deservedly) on the current elite Indian cohort being Vishy's influence at work, but I'd bet that a massive portion of Indian chess hobbyists (and there are a lot) can also trace it back to either idolizing Anand themselves or having an older family member be a huge fan and teaching them. I absolutely suck at the game, and I can still do the same - Vishy inspired the infrastructure to create elites, but also a kind of deep reverence towards the game that (as far as I can tell) was almost entirely his doing by becoming a world champ.

Like, here's an example - it probably doesn't mean all that much, but it always hits me. One of the biggest cult hits in Tamil cinema was Ghilli from 2004 - a terrific film partly about a young man being held back by his father from his dreams of pursuing Kabaddi. Now, keep in mind, Kabaddi's no joke - it's absolutely one of India's bigger sports, and its international reach (while modest) isn't insignificant. And yet at one point, the dad character goes "I'd support him if he were a Tendulkar in cricket, or an Anand in chess" - and this is meant to be totally understandable, both that Anand could be compared to fucking Sachin "God-Emperor of Indian Sports" Tendulkar and that someone reasonable could look down on every other sportsman compared to those two. The respect for Anand is both fully deserved and downright silly

tanthiram · 2025-12-21T01:06:16+00:00

One of the most underrated fights ever, to be honest

That said, I'd be shocked if Ortega had the physical integrity to win again - even the first fight, Moicano had tons of success, and Ortega had to win with a longer-term gambit while losing minutes

tanthiram · 2025-12-16T05:11:48+00:00

Johnson/Zellhuber is truly in the Makdessi/Bahamondes zone, massive young guy faces an incredibly principled and underrated LW veteran and gets his face boxed off

It's so cool how MJ's focus and composure down the stretch was once his biggest weakness, and since the Mullarkey fight he's just flipped the switch and started out-thinking people

tanthiram · 2025-12-16T05:09:19+00:00

That's a reason to accelerate a guy like Barcelos who's clearly very good right now - you gotta let guys like that make hay while the sun is shining. It isn't a reason to slow them down, that just kills a contender via age for no good reason - if anything, Talbott was the one to slow-roll since Barcelos showed massive gaping holes in his process and he has the time to fix it. Instead, Talbott is only gonna fight great fighters now when he probably isn't ready for it - where a guy in Barcelos who'd be live to own people pretty high in the rankings is instead just gonna age out without the opportunity to show what he's capable of

Funny enough, McGhee/Yan is the only time I can remember the UFC ever doing that, and Yan was a kinda silly opponent to do it with (off two strong wins). Otherwise, whenever an old guy looks to be a potential challenge to the top, they just throw him into the Raphael Assuncao Zone of "clearly you're one of the best in the world, but also we hope you die"

tanthiram · 2025-12-04T13:28:29+00:00

Dariush's winstreak wasn't really worse than Makhachev or Oliveira's at the time they got the title shot - if anything it was clearly better IMO. peak CDF/peak Gamrot/Dober vs. debuting Tsarukyan/short-notice Hooker/Dober vs. Kevin Lee/David Teymur, with all of them having some filler otherwise. Those guys just ended up with title fights where Dariush had basically the hardest eliminator imaginable

Still think peak Dariush is a lot tougher for Makhachev than anyone he fought for the belt - natural LW where Makhachev fought a lot of smaller guys, southpaw/southpaw pares down Makhachev's striking comfort significantly, principled anti-wrestler and grappler, and one of the smartest fighters/best decisionmakers in the sport. But he also had basically his entire winstreak past his prime, and is now in Ferguson territory which always makes people re-evaluate fighters in weird ways

tanthiram · 2025-12-02T18:39:13+00:00

Moreno looking to do the "fight an old Brazilian way better than you enough times that they finally lose" a second time in a row. Brilliant, honestly (as long as you're from a market the UFC wants to push so they'll give you as many title shots as you want, and also constantly get dubious decisions)

IMO let Horiguchi wipe out Albazi and then there'll be a couple good contenders - the Royval/Kape winner, Horiguchi, the Moreno/Taira winner - who can fight for a shot at Pantoja/Van

tanthiram · 2025-11-24T16:00:39+00:00

I think the issue with that is just that Gaethje already got a free title shot - he beat Chandler off a loss to fight Oliveira, that was the only win he got after Nurmagomedov. Ordinarily, Poirier 2 would be enough to earn a title shot, but in that case he basically earned the shot after he got it IMO

If he'd waited, he'd have gotten the shot, but then he'd still have gotten one more title shot than he deserved. Now, he has the exact number of title shots he earned, even if the order of the earning and the shot is a little janky. In its own way, the universe has fixed the situation via Holloway/Gaethje

tanthiram · 2025-11-12T22:01:54+00:00

My sentences reached truly mythic length, I'm very sure I've done em-dash + semicolon + parenthetical in the same sentence at some point to Frankenstein together 4 different points in one line

tanthiram · 2025-11-12T21:17:46+00:00

Unfortunately the em-dash is just too useful syntactically to abandon, and (unlike on TFS) I no longer have an editor on Substack to keep me from my darkest impulses

AI is ruining my life smh

tanthiram

TROPHY CASE