OSP is back with the weirdness. After getting dropped and nearly choked out standing for a second time, Ovince Saint Preux comes back and cranks a nasty armbar on Tyson Pedro for the tap! #UFCSingapore pic.twitter.com/fI97qj9be8
— Kyle Johnson (@Maldobabo) June 23, 2018
Light Heavyweights
Ovince St. Preux (23-11) vs. Dominick Reyes (9-0)Advertisement
This is a weird fight in a weird division, as two former collegiate football players square off in a veteran-versus-prospect battle. Once a top prospect in his own right, former University of Tennessee linebacker Ovince St. Preux instead became a cautionary tale about the dangers of staying in a small camp. St. Preux stayed loyal to his alma mater, choosing to remain in Knoxville and train with the camp that brought him to the dance. As a result, his skills never coalesced into any sort of coherent whole. Instead, St. Preux’s fighting style is just a mish-mash of tricks, combining unorthodox strikes with low-percentage submissions, all the while managing to make it work thanks to his elite athleticism. It’s telling -- both in terms of St. Preux’s strange effectiveness and the oddly shallow state of the light heavyweight division -- that St. Preux somehow has three wins in the UFC via the rarely-seen Von Flue choke. For a few years, St. Preux kept getting shots to get over the hump and become a title contender, mostly due to a lack of other available options, but there’s now thankfully enough up and comers at 205 that St. Preux is now settling into a gatekeeper role. To that end, California’s Reyes is the latest fighter to step up and try to knock off St. Preux.
Reyes went across the country to star in football at Stony Brook University, but since returning home to California, he’s shot up the light heavyweight prospect ranks. After scoring a viral head kick knockout of Jordan Powell on the regional scene, it was only a matter of time before the UFC picked Reyes up and indeed, within three and a half weeks, Reyes was making his late notice debut. That was a quick knockout of Joachim Christensen, which has been representative of Reyes’s MMA career to date; only one of his fights has made it past the first round, and even Reyes’s longest UFC fight lasted only a shade over three and a half minutes. Given that his career is basically all quick finishes, there’s still more questions than answers about Reyes, but what he’s shown is impressive enough that he’s definitely a prospect to be excited about, particularly in a weight class like light heavyweight.
No one knows how this will play out. Reyes is still completely unproven, which raises enough questions, and it’s not like St. Preux’s game is going to bring any sort of structure to the affair. It’s the right test for Reyes, though. His fellow former football player is going to be the first test to see how Reyes handles high-level athleticism, and we should get that answer quickly given how dangerous both men can be. Both fighters are just going to throw their tricks at each other, and while I’m higher on Reyes than I am most light heavyweight prospects, I think St. Preux’s speed and power is just a little bit too much of a move up the curve for Reyes to handle just yet. It’s a coin flip, but the pick is St. Preux by first-round knockout.
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