The featherweight quarterfinals wrapped up on episode seven of The Ultimate Fighter: Team Grasso vs. Team Shevchenko with Grasso’s Mairon Santos edging out Shevchenko’s Edwin Cooper Jr.
Santos’s pre-fight prediction was a win by “pure demolition” yet this 145-pound bout ended up being the most competitive of the season thus far.
The opening round was spent mostly with Cooper controlling Santos on the ground and along the perimeter. Santos defended submission attempts and positional advances well as Cooper maintained dominant positioning along the cage and landed short strikes in close when there were openings.
UFC featherweight star Diego Lopes is a member of Alexa Grasso’s coaching staff and he could be seen helping prepare his fellow Brazilian during Team Grasso training sessions, working with him one-on-one. Round 2 was spent entirely on the feet and that meant Santos was in his comfort zone as the better striker.
During the preliminary rounds of the TUF 32 tournament, fights were scheduled for two, five-minute rounds with a third round only required if the fight was tied after 10 minutes.
Since Cooper, 31, clearly won the first and with Santos, 23, finding his groove in the second, they went to a third and final “sudden victory” round to determine the winner.
The majority of the final five minutes were also contested on the feet because Santos defended all but one of Cooper’s takedown attempts. The only time Cooper got his opponent down in the third was during the final minute, though he was not able to mount much offence and Santos quickly got back to his feet. The younger fighter had also been landing frequent body shots and uppercuts prior to being taken down briefly.
“That third round was really close and you really could give it to either one of these guys,” UFC president Dana White said of the fight.
Santos ended up winning a split decision on the judges’ scorecards to advance to the semifinals.
Valentina Shevchenko told Cooper afterwards she thought he did enough to win the third round.
NEXT UP
There was little mystery as to what the next fight would be. The final middleweight bout of the tournament is another striker vs. grappler matchup. It will see Team Grasso’s Paddy McCorry, a 4-1 brawler from West Belfast, face Team Shevchenko’s Mark Hulme, a fighter from Johannesburg with more than half his pro wins coming by submission.
PREVIOUSLY ON TUF 32
Episode 6: Ryan Loder of Team Shevchenko made quick work of Team Grasso’s Tom Theocharis with a first-round submission victory in middleweight quarterfinal action.
Episode 5: Team Shevchenko’s Zygimantas Ramaska of Lithuania and Tajikistan’s Bekhzod Usmonov of Team Grasso competed in one of the best TUF fights in recent memory with Ramaska advancing via a two-round decision despite getting dropped early.
Episode 4: Omran Chaaban of Team Grasso earned a comeback win when he submitted Team Shevchenko’s Shamidkhan Magomedov and moved on in the 185-pound bracket.
Episode 3: Australia’s Kaan Ofli of Team Grasso defeated England’s Nathan Fletcher of Team Shevchenko via a unanimous two-round decision to advance in the 145-pound tournament.
Episode 2: The middleweight tournament opened with Team Grasso’s Robert Valentin earning an 18-second knockout win over Team Shevchenko’s Giannis Bachar.
Episode 1: Roedie Roets of Team Shevchenko defeated Guillermo Torres of Team Grasso via a three-round decision in the first featherweight fight of the season.