Preview: UFC Rio ‘Oliveira vs. Gamrot’

Heavyweights

Jhonata Diniz (9-1; 3-1 UFC) vs. Mario Pinto (10-0; 1-0 UFC)

Odds: Pinto (-125); Diniz (+110)

Brazilian thumper Diniz meets undefeated Portuguese prospect Pinto in a clash of young—especially by heavyweight standards—and upwardly mobile heavyweights.

There’s something about heavyweight, isn’t there? Thanks to the primal draw of seeing huge guys slug it out, and to the severe lack of top-shelf talent compared to the lighter weight classes, there is a certain amount of automatic interest anytime a fighter shows up in the UFC who is: 1) over 240 pounds; 2) not visibly fat; and 3) in possession of at least one or two solid skills. Sometimes those newcomers pan out into the next Stipe Miocic, other times into the next Robelis Despaigne, but we usually feel compelled to watch and find out which is the case—and here we have two of them.

Diniz is a massive heavyweight, but his size is deceptive in positive as well as negative ways. On the positive side, despite being huge and sometimes looking a bit lumbering in the cage, he is more athletic than you would think, a bit like mid-career Ben Rothwell in that sense. On the negative side, also like Rothwell, he is a solid hitter but not the crushing one-shot knockout artist that one might expect in a striker of his size. In practice, Diniz is actually somewhat nuanced and nifty on the feet, switching stances and throwing a variety of basic punch combinations that can add up to a lot of damage over the course of a round.

Diniz is used to coming forward at a deliberate pace, marching down his foes and pouring on the strikes until they go down. In his lone career loss to date, against Marcin Tybura, he finally ran into someone of comparable size and far greater experience who was able to exploit his deficiencies on the ground. Diniz knocked Tybura down early, but rather than swarming for the finish, found himself swept quickly and ended up losing the round, and when Tybura took him down later in the fight, he quickly beat him into a bloody pulp.

There will no doubt be chances to learn what lessons, if any, Diniz learned from that loss, but Saturday is not likely to provide them, as Pinto is even younger, greener and more committed to slugging it out on the feet than Diniz. The towering 27-year-old is one of the rawest prospects to enter the UFC in recent years, but the tools are there. He is huge, with a big wingspan and tons of natural power, but he has all the defensive flaws of a tall heavyweight who has yet to be truly tested: He keeps his head straight in the air and pulls straight back to avoid strikes, with or without pillaring behind his arms. Against low-level regional foes it never truly cost him, but even against mid-tier UFC heavyweights it’s going to get him knocked out.

Whether Diniz is the first to show Pinto the error of his ways is an open question. This is a close fight on the books, and rightly so, as there simply isn’t enough tape on either of these fighters against high-level opposition to make an easy call. The pick here is for Diniz, who is the more disciplined of the two and seems quite durable, to get the better of a wild first round, then start rolling downhill on the younger prospect en route to a Round 2 TKO.



Jump To »
Oliveira vs. Gamrot
Figueiredo vs. Jackson
Luque vs. Alvarez
Diniz vs. Pinto
Ramos vs. Ofli
Almeida vs. Aswell
The Prelims