Charles Oliveira built a career out of making people regret doubting him, so when he starts handing out picks, I listen. The former lightweight champion has publicly backed Carlos Prates to take Islam Makhachev’s title, a story The Mac Life pushed out on X on Oct. 16. Oliveira’s case came down to two things. Prates has the right kind of striking, and he has the timing to actually cash it in against Makhachev.
I think Oliveira is right. The most convincing evidence came from Prates himself, a day earlier, in a gym.
Why the pick holds up
Picking a striker to beat an elite champion is the easiest prediction in MMA to make and the hardest one to defend. Every dangerous kickboxer gets the same speech from the guy at the end of the bar. Sure, he’s scary on the feet, but what happens when the fight hits the mat? Taking the striker in that spot usually feels like betting on the Rocky montage over the guy with the Soviet lab.
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What makes Oliveira’s take worth more than bar talk is how specific he got. He singled out how Prates strikes and when he strikes, which is a sharper compliment than praising somebody’s power. Power is something a fighter carries into the cage. Timing is knowing the exact moment to spend it, and against a champion who won’t hand out many clean looks, that’s the entire ballgame. One counter landed at the right instant beats 40 punches thrown at the wrong ones.
That’s also the kind of read you only get from someone who has lived at the top of the sport. Fans see highlight reels. A former champ sees the half-second where the opening shows up, and Oliveira is telling us Prates lives in that half-second.
The wrestling clips
On Oct. 15, Gaston “Tonga” Reyno posted footage on X of Prates drilling wrestling with Henry Cejudo’s coach. The same day, DovySimuMMA shared a clip of Prates working on his wrestling. A couple of training videos don’t win anybody a belt, and I’m not going to pretend I can scout takedown defense off a phone clip.
The timing of it is loud, though. A striker getting talked up as a Makhachev problem is spending his gym hours on the exact part of the game everyone assumes will sink him. That’s a fighter who has heard the bar-stool speech and decided to answer it with homework instead of a tweet.
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That version of Prates is what makes Oliveira’s pick look smart. The striking is the weapon. The wrestling work is what buys him enough standing time to use it. If he can make the champion work twice as hard for every takedown, the fight starts drifting toward the range where Oliveira says Prates wins it.
Oliveira has an angle, too
In fairness to the skeptics, the messenger is campaigning. The day before the Prates news, Oliveira told @laertevianamma (as relayed by Championship Rounds and Spinnin Backfist on X) that a win over Diego Lopes would earn him a title shot. He conceded that he thinks Arman fights for the title, then made his pitch in the third person, which I will always respect: “Charles Oliveira sells a lot.”
He went further, laying out a scenario where “If Justin retires, Charles Oliveira definitely fights for the title against Tsarukyan, the number two.” He also made a pretty savvy point about the calendar, arguing that if he beats Lopes, “My fight will be fresher in people’s minds when they’re looking for someone to fight at the beginning of the year.”
That’s a guy doing politics, and good for him. A fighter lobbying for his own shot is exactly who I want doing it, because Oliveira at least has a plan (beat Lopes, stay fresh in the matchmakers’ heads, cash in early next year) instead of sitting on a ranking and waiting.
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That context makes his Prates pick more credible to me. His own title math, as he laid it out, runs through Lopes and Tsarukyan. Nothing in that plan depends on how Prates fares. So when Oliveira goes out of his way to back a fellow contender to dethrone Makhachev, there’s no favor or payday in it for him. That’s a straight technical read from someone who knows what championship pressure feels like.
I’ll take a former champ’s eye for timing over a hundred pundit hot takes about who wrestles better on paper. Prates already had the hands. Now he’s in the wrestling room with Cejudo’s coach, and if those clips turn into actual takedown defense on fight night, the guy at the end of the bar is going to need a new speech.
