Anthony Smith (-165) Vs. Ryan Spann (+135)

Once again I find myself picking a main event favorite.

That’s right: the pick is Lionheart Anthony Smith.

Compelling stuff! I know, but even though it’s a bit of a soft choice for a main event, I think it will be a fun one. I love Anthony Smith. I do not always pick him, but whenever I have he’s come through for me. Of course, he was always an underdog for those picks… the Gustafson fight in particular was thrilling.

The thing about Smith is that he keeps getting better.

I thought he might be done when Glover Texeira knocked all his teeth out; then he got leg-chopped and fence-mashed for an entire fight against Aleksander Rakić. But he bounced back from those losses with a triangle — a triangle for chrissake! — submission win against Devin Clark (who Spann has beaten as well, albeit with a far less elegant standing guillotine). And then in his recent bout with Jimmy Crute, Smith showed off an absolutely killer jab.

Go back and look at his fight with Andrew Sanchez in 2017: he uses the jab a lot, but it is slow and powerless and horribly telegraphed. Then look at the Crute fight again — look at his movement. It isn’t just that he turned that lazy jab into a crisp weapon; it’s like he also learned how to move. He looks way faster. Crute, for his part, had obviously watched the Rakic fight and figured he could just chop Smith down with leg kicks. And he did land a lot of them; but Smith checked a lot of them, too, and made others miss with his newfound movement. I don’t think anyone is going to succeed against Anthony Smith with naked leg kicks ever again.

(A word on that Smith/Crute fight and how it became essentially a battle of jab vs. leg kick: I think we are going to see more and more of that in MMA. Those techniques are ascendent, and in natural opposition to each other).

Now to Ryan Spann: I don’t think he is a very good fighter.

He is big and strong and well-rounded for sure — but he also makes terrible decisions, fades by the third round, and has repeatedly been knocked out cold or wobbled. Mediocre chin + poor gas tank are not attributes that pair well. And his poor decisions — well, some of them are technical, but others concern the way he chooses to spend that limited gas tank of his.

His size is the only issue I see for Smith — Smith has not done well against bigger opponents who can take him down and jam his head against the fence and hold him there. There is some chance of that occurring in this fight, I suppose, and if I were Spann’s coaches that would be the game plan. But I don’t think he’s good enough or big enough to do it. He is not Aleksander Rakić. And I don’t see Spann hurting Smith badly on the feet, either, despite his good power. Smith has taken plenty of hard shots from harder hitters than Spann, and his chin always holds up. Spann couldn’t even beat old Sam Alvey (he won by decision, but Alvey was robbed!) And that’s another thing about Spann; if you watch his last four fights, despite mostly winning you do not see him actually improving as a fighter. If anything he has regressed (apart from an early KO against chinny Misha Cirkunov). Spann is — in several ways — the very opposite of Smith.

So we have an older guy — a vet with over forty fights and championship round experience — who keeps improving despite setbacks, who shows new weapons and more importantly the intelligence to employ them, whose conditioning is very good and whose chin is low-key legendary; versus a younger guy with some skills and athleticism who repeatedly demonstrates tendencies to fade, to get hurt, to make silly choices.

And the fight is five rounds.

Who ya got?

Lionheart Smith is gonna tune him up. Want better odds? This fight will absolutely not go the five-round distance. Get your money out.