Preview: UFC Houston Prelims

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The Ultimate Fighting Championship’s upcoming trip to Space City is a solid example of what a fight night card should be in the Paramount+ era. UFC Fight Night 267, which goes down Saturday at Toyota Center in Houston, features a headliner with immediate implications for the middleweight title picture, and the rest of the 14-fight lineup is stocked with reliable action heroes, interesting prospects and quite a few fighters with Texas ties.

The eight-fight undercard slated for Saturday isn’t long on name value for the casual fan, but it’s well stocked with delights for diehards. Among the people of interest competing on the prelims are Yadier Del Valle and Alden Coria, two of the top candidates to be the next Joshua Van-type phenom to burst out of Houston onto the world stage.

Here is the preview for the preliminary card of UFC Fight Night 267, also known as UFC Houston:

Welterweights

Chidi Njokuani vs. Carlos Leal

BETTING ODDS: Leal (-130); Njokuani (+110)

Njokuani (25-11, 1 NC; 5-4 UFC) looks to regain the momentum lost in his quick and ugly loss to Jake Matthews last summer. Prior to that fight, he had won three straight since dropping from middleweight, an achievement marred slightly by his having missed weight twice in those three wins. At 37 and with nearly 40 professional MMA fights under his belt—and probably twice that many muay thai and kickboxing bouts—“Chidi Bang Bang” is certainly in the final act of his career, but he remains more or less the fighter he has always been: a rangy, fundamentally sound striker with underrated offensive ground game, but the expected deficiencies in defensive wrestling and grappling.

At his best, Njokuani makes excellent use of his long frame, using his jab, front kick and lateral movement to keep shorter, quicker fighters out of his face, as well as any foe who might wish to bring the fight to the mat. Range management is his best takedown defense, as his sprawl has never been much to write home about. While he was overwhelmed quickly on the ground by Matthews, he normally shows good defense on bottom as well as an urgency to get back up.

Leal (22-7, 1-2 UFC) came to the UFC a year and a half ago with a certain amount of buzz, thanks to the bevy of nasty knockouts he piled up in Professional Fighters League, but his Octagon run thus far has been a bit of a mixed bag. Both of his cage appearances of 2025 ended in first-round knockouts—one for and one against him—and don’t give a whole lot of clues as to his current competitive condition.

“The Lion” certainly presents as a striker, but where Njokuani is patient and technical, Leal is twitchy and unpredictable. He can throw a variety of offensive techniques, but when push comes to shove, he tends to neglect most of them in favor of hunting for a big right hook or overhand. It’s effective, as he is one of the hardest punchers in the entire division, but he is both hittable and prone to not throwing enough volume, which leaves him at risk of losing close rounds if the big knockout blow never comes. Consider his UFC debut loss to Rinat Fakhretdinov, which was a robbery, but at the same time Leal was at least partly the author of his own misery; the rounds simply didn’t need to be that close.

Considering that neither man is likely to shoot a takedown except in dire straits, this fight should be a fun kickboxing affair, and the advantage is likely to reside with whoever dictates the pace and range. If Leal is able to enter the pocket freely, chances are that he finds Njokuani’s chin sooner or later. If he cannot, Njokuani is likely to win rounds almost by default, as he is perfectly at home sticking and moving against fighters who don’t cut off the cage well. Leal is the slight favorite here but give me the upset: Njokuani by decision in a tense fight that seems primed to blow up at any moment, but never quite does.



Jump To »
Njokuani vs. Leal
Osbourne vs. Idiris
Coria vs. Gurule
Cornolle vs. Edwards
Brahimaj vs. Soriano
Rowe vs. Lebosnoyani
Leavitt vs. Del Valle
Miller vs. Judice