Preview: UFC Fight Night 176 ‘Overeem vs. Sakai’

Light Heavyweights

Alonzo Menifield (9-1) vs. Ovince St. Preux (24-14)

ODDS: Menifield (-130), St. Preux (+110)

After a positive COVID-19 test pushed this fight back two weeks, St. Preux makes his return to the comfortable confines of the light heavyweight division. A former linebacker at the University of Tennessee, St. Preux has been an obvious high-level athlete throughout his career, but that may have been more of a curse than a blessing, as it has allowed him to get away with an often-incoherent fighting style. St. Preux never seems to go into a fight with a set game plan, but his combination of unorthodox strikes and submissions has usually been enough for him to find a finish over the course of 15 minutes. Now that “OSP” is in his late 30s and his athleticism is waning, things have started to fall apart a bit, with St. Preux looking much more inconsistent from fight to fight. He managed to outlast Michal Oleksiejczuk in September, but that was sandwiched between flat performances against Nikita Krylov and Ben Rothwell, the latter in a one-off move to heavyweight. St. Preux returns to 205 pounds against Menifield, who is coming off of a disappointing loss to Devin Clark in June. Menifield is an interesting prospect, but he was never really tested until the Clark fight. While he flashed some supplemental skills as needed, most of Menifield’s fights saw him knock out his opponents early without much resistance. Against Clark, Menifield got off to his usual hot start, but once things moved into deeper waters, it quickly became an ugly fight that saw him tire and run out of ideas. Menifield certainly has the knockout power to take this early, but even as St. Preux has become easier to hurt, he is still quite difficult to put away; and if he can survive that early barrage, he should be able to take over this fight one way or another. The pick is St. Preux via third-round submission.

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