What to expect between Evans and Ortiz at UFC: 133

Well its almost here, were only a few days away from witnessing a long awaited rematch between, Rashad Evans and Tito Ortiz. To be honest I'm not a huge Evans fan and I don't like Ortiz at all. I wasn't at all shocked when I heard he was booked as the replacement to fight Evans, the fight interests me because they have history which I feel can sometimes make fights just that bit more intense.


Evans and Ortiz fought to a unanimous draw (28–28, 28–28, 28–28) on a packed card at UFC 73. Ortiz was deducted a point in the second round for repeatedly grabbing the fence, costing him the W.


Ortiz hadn't won a fight in 5 years since he got "knock out of the night" over Ken Shamrock in the first round of their final endeavour. That was of course until Ryan Bader got a bit to close to Tito's fist, got dropped and then submitted in a guillotine (which wasn't even that great, Baders defence was to pull away from the submission which ended in him tapping out). Now just a little over a month later he's opposing against the number 1 contender in the LHW division.


Is Ortiz in the top 10 of the LHW? I wanna say no, but I think he may be there, right at number 10. His win over Bader was impressive, I truly expected Bader's wrestling and superior stand-up to dominate Ortiz at the weakest point of his MMA career. For him to comeback as he did was impressive, I expected and wanted him out of the UFC.

Expect more of this in the opening round

So how do I think the fight will go down? To be honest I think they are gonna go in there and fight hard in the stand up in the first round. Evans will no doubt use his wrestling and control Tito for the majority of the second round and in the third round I see a little more stand up with a lot of takedown attempts on both parts, I don't think Ortiz will be able to take down Evans, certainly not as late as the third round. I give this to Evans by unanimous decision,

How Evans will control the fight for rounds 2 and 3

Tito has everything to gain from this and an impressive win over Evans will catapult him into top title contention, but then what? If he ever gets to fight Jon Jones then he would get destroyed by him sending him back to Dana's office begging for yet another pity fight or sending him straight to retirement. What if Rashad wins? Well its pretty obvious, he goes on to face the winner of Jones vs Rampage, which I assume will Bones (if he plays smart and controls Rampage on the ground).


So that's my view, Evans will win by UD, leaving Ortiz a broken shell of a fighter once again.