Hi, everybody. How are you doing? It is one o eight a.m. East Coast time. It is now technically

Sunday. November 13th. How are you? This is the official morning combat UFC 281 post fight show instant reaction. Welcome. As I may or may not have indicated because I've been broadcasting now for about three hours. My name is Luke Thomas. I am one half of the hosting duel for morning combat. My co host Brian Campbell will be here in just a moment right now. You can catch him if you want on CBS sports HQ when he comes in. We'll get all of his takes. We'll start here with this. UFC 281 is in

the books. We're going to get to all the results and the analysis of the main card and maybe some other things along the way. So if you're watching now on YouTube, thumbs up. Please be so kind if you would do that. If you're new here, consider giving a subscription. We do the show live Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 11 a.m. in the east and then we do post fight stuff for big fights like this too. So with that in mind, if you don't want spoilers, now is your time to go. Five, four, three, two, one. Okay, let's get going. UFC 281 took place.

This is Madison Square Garden in New York, New York. We join you now from the swamps of Jersey City just across the river right here in your main event. How about this? Alex Pareda defeats Israel, a dissonia. They have it as a time of 201 of round number five. Man. Let's talk about this fight, shall we? And the story of it. The story of it that was that it was pretty competitive. Really throughout the course of the day.

But you thought that someone like Izzy was pulling away. That's what you thought, right? Because Izzy won the first round. It was close. But then he kind of rocked him with that jab, hold hand trap. Right hand that landed. He was able to go back to it with the course of the fight as a matter of fact. And so he took the first in the second round. Pareda had a great round. He had one take down which he controlled for just 21 seconds of control time. Not that long. But you thought he did the better work.

So round two goes to him. Round three. Different story. Champion gets a take down. Holds it for 347. Does pretty good ground a pound. The significant striking totals were 14 to Izzy. And then eight to Pareda. Right. So he did really well. Fourth round. It looked like it wasn't a super exciting round. Hardly dominant. But Izzy was just more active. He was coming off the strong third round. He was kind of pot shouting landing 20 to 15 overall. In terms of significant strikes. Not getting a take down.

And some control time. At least on the fence for a minute and eight seconds. And you thought, well, man, all I have to do is sort of survive five rounds. But what it looked like may have happened was so heading into the fifth. You probably had it three one Izzy. Probably. What had happened was it looked to me like maybe Pareda took the round round four off or something. But in general in this fight, what you found was that Izzy. I'm not sure I see I could see here on the on the feet who was visiting him. Oh, it's glimmer to show.

Yeah. Yeah. Izzy was courting danger along the warning track. And we had talked about it a lot. Pardon me. Namely that both of these guys used their feet to get away. They block a little bit. But they all do a lot of the leaning up against the kickboxing ropes where your torso is open. And the ropes are malleable to a degree. You can lean and get away. But up against the cage. It's completely different defense. And Izzy chose what he got.

Pareda up against the fence to get an inside angle on the shoulder, clasp his hands up here with a gable grip up top and kind of control him from there. Maybe lower his lock to the body lock to go for a takedown or some kind of trip removing. But what you notice, he didn't really do except on the clinch breaks. Was try to basically box him from there. He wanted to close off the space to reduce that volatility that could come from that. Pareda was not doing that. Pareda when he had Izzy backed up real close to the fence.

Was trying to do exactly what you saw in the final sequence there. His trademark left hook lands when Izzy had blocked or rolled or gotten out of the way of those for the last four rounds and whatever. All it took with a guy like that is one. I do think that the pre-fight. The pre-fight belief that Izzy had more skills and therefore more ways to win seemed like it was true. Based on the way this played out, they fought four and a half rounds. And Izzy was largely better.

The course of them, but that doesn't really matter, right? You can be better for long stretches. If the other guy has more danger, you let him hang around for up to five rounds or more, well, not more, but up to five rounds. All it takes is one of those. Boom. And you can't say it was accidental. You can't say it was luck. You can't say it was low percentage. Every time he had Izzy in those circumstances, the margin of error was thin. He got away with it because Izzy is typically pretty skilled in those positions.

But you got to be perfect. You got to be perfect for 25. Dude, you want to fight Alex Pereira on the feet. On the ground's a different story. We'll talk about that. But if you want to fight him on the feet, you got to be good. You got to be, your defense can't have a lapse. It can't have a lapse if you're going to fight him for five rounds. It's just not possible. And that makes it very, very difficult to fight him on the feet for that long. Izzy chose to fight this guy not exclusively. Not exclusively. There were some wrestling involved, but predominantly.

On the feet and the margin of error against him, even if you can beat him for long stretches, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. The second time they fought in kickboxing and the first time they fought in MMA, he fought him now three times in combat sports. He's got to win over him in all three. You just can't say it's accidental. I thought Izzy won their first fight overall, but he got the judges felt differently. Second fight, Izzy was winning the vast majority of that until he got his shit rocked and put down. And then this one.

It's very hard to catch Izzy now in open space. He has too much space to lean. He has too much space to roll. He has too much space to simply move his feet away at an angle, whatever. It's too much. But put him right along the fence. And you have constricted his options by a significant margin. It just makes landing on him a much more likely proposition.

Padeira pressured him there consistently throughout the fight had a hard time finding him consistently throughout the fight, but found one left hook that I'm not sure he saw coming.

And the show was over. Let's talk about the stoppage there for just a second. What do I think about it? I think it was fine. I think it was fine. You did see Izzy moving side to side.

You could make an argument. He was still trying to be in it. It's a title fight. It's the fifth round. You know, how much latitude do you want to grant? Okay.

You could maybe argue it was a little early if you wanted to or really don't think so. I think what really got her did in the end was save him from a vicious KO.

An all likelihood and all likelihood would would have happened there with Izzy that compromised is that he would have probably gotten knocked out because here is the interesting part about the takedowns.

Is he only got one of them? It was in the third round, which he did hold for a significant amount of time. It was a nice takedown. He got it was a sort of a body lock whip where he was sort of spinning him over in a circle, then taking him back to an empty plane.

And then he was able to hold it with good cross risk control through long stretches of it, but like he failed on the other three attempts and they weren't really all that close. Maybe one was kind of close.

And he was trying different things from the body lock, but the polish on on what he needs to make them work was pretty clearly missing.

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