UFC Rankings Review: Khamzat Chimaev is Back?
April 30, 2021
Editorial Commentary by Peter Parsons
In this week’s UFC rankings, many fighters were taken out of the rankings due to inactivity, change in weight division or in the case of Tyron Woodley, not re-signing at the end of his contract. We see a lot of fresh faces in the rankings this week and a familiar face at welterweight.
Khamzat Chimaev re-enters the welterweight rankings at No. 15
For regular readers of this column, you may be getting tired of reading about why Khamzat Chimaev should not be ranked. I did not think we would see Chimaev ranked again until he won another fight at welterweight. While he is inactive because of his recovery from COVID complications, there are other welterweights earning impressive victories, like Randy Brown at UFC 261 this past Saturday.
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If you weren’t in front of a TV on Saturday night, you may have missed the greatest sports spectacle of the year. It’s not February, so it wasn’t the Super Bowl. It wasn’t the NBA or NHL playoffs, as they’re still working toward their regular-season conclusion. If you weren’t on your living room couch or at a local sports bar on Saturday evening, you let UFC 261 pass you by, and wow did you miss out.
Saturday night’s UFC pay-per-view was a fight card loaded with talent and championship-caliber fighters that provided its viewers, both live and at home, with entertainment that will keep them talking for weeks. UFC 261 marked the first indoor, full capacity event in the United States since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and those in attendance were in for a treat.
Randy Brown knew he would finish Alex Oliveira, but did expect the fight to play out differently.
Brown and Oliveira were the prelim headliner and early on in the scrap, the two exchanged punches and Brown knocked him down. After that, “Rude Boy” got ahold of his back and submitted the Brazilian with a one-arm rear naked choke.
“Yeah, I saw several ways to beat him and the ground game was one way to beat him. I did expect the fight to be more of a striking battle but I was prepared for everything and it showed,” Brown said to BJPENN.com. “I have been able to get that one-arm choke in practice, but I couldn’t see his face so I didn’t know how tight it was so I kept on squeezing, and eventually, he tapped before I could’ve gotten the other arm on it. It was also the biggest win of my career.”
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When it’s all said and done, UFC 261 will likely go down as one of the biggest cards of the year for the promotion.
On top of reportedly doing 700,000-plus buys on pay-per-view, the UFC 261 prelims also delivered as the No. 1-rated program across all of cable this past Saturday night.
According to the Nielsen Ratings System, the UFC 261 prelims, which aired on ESPN starting at 8 p.m. ET ended up with 951,000 viewers on average with a .36 rating in the coveted 18-49 year old demographic, which was tops for all programming on Saturday.
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