Preview: UFC Rio ‘Oliveira vs. Gamrot’

Featherweights

Ricardo Ramos (17-7; 9-6 UFC) vs. Kaan Ofli (11-4-1; 0-2 UFC)

Odds: Ramos (-200); Ofli (+170)

Veteran featherweight mainstay Ramos will seek to keep his place in the divisional pecking order and delight the partisan crowd while denying Australia’s Ofli his first UFC win.

Ramos has been in the UFC for long enough that it’s mildly surprising that he just turned 30 this summer. From Brazil, but a longtime exponent of California’s Team Alpha Male, “Carcacinha” bucks most of the stereotypes of Urijah Faber’s fabled gym. Where the classic TAM representative is a stocky wrestle-boxer with busy hooks and a mean front headlock series, Ramos is a rangy featherweight with a penchant for low-percentage, high-reward strikes and much more of a classic jiu-jitsu game. It has been generally effective, as evidenced by Ramos’ solid win rate in the Octagon, but the numbers belie how inconsistent he can look from fight to fight.

Ofli is not getting any kind of break here. The 32-year-old Aussie is more promising than his 0-2 start in the UFC might imply, and he was competitive in losses to Mairon Santos and Muhammadjon Naimov, but at this point he desperately needs a win and the UFC has given him a matchup that is arguably a step up, not down, from Santos and Naimov. Ofli, ironically, is much closer to the wrestle-boxer archetype than Ramos. On the feet, he is orthodox, throwing a sharp one-two and two-three that he usually punctuates with low kicks, though he tends to get countered cleanly in the pocket. He is an effective offensive wrestler and, at least when he is on top, a dangerous grappler.

Ofli has the feel of a prospect that just hasn’t quite dialed it in yet; in his loss to Naimov, he took over the fight as soon as he turned up his aggression and workrate in Round 3, leaving us (and presumably him) to wonder whether he would have won the fight if he had simply done so a round earlier. That, and Ramos’ tendency to look like a world-beater one night and hapless the next, makes this fight feel like a pick ‘em rather than the 2-to-1 line it is.

On the preview podcast, I leaned towards Ramos by decision while my co-host Keith called for the upset, both of us admitting that it’s a tough one to call. The pick is that we get the good version of Ramos and he ekes out a win in a competitive fight, but if you’re the investment-minded type, all the value is with the underdog here.



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