Losene Keita took the Aaron Pico fight on short notice, and he isn’t spending any of that compressed camp reading the comments. Asked about the persistent online chatter that Pico can’t take a shot, Keita brushed it aside in remarks shared by MMA Fighting this week. “I see a lot of chin allegations on social media. … I don’t really care how it’s going to end. I know I’m going to beat him because I’m a better martial artist,” he said.
The two featherweights open the main card at UFC 333 on Saturday, Oct. 24, in Abu Dhabi, with the broadcast starting at 2 p.m. ET on Paramount+. The UFC billed Keita as the man who “answered the call” for a short-notice appearance, and the promotion has been pushing Pico hard all week as the fighter tasked with starting the main card off loud.
Pico, now 30, sounded like someone who has spent time with his own tape. He told MMA Fighting the humbling he needed had nothing to do with how he carried himself outside the cage. It was about what happened inside it. “I was fighting too out of control. The mindset was to get this thing over,” Pico said. “Now I want to enjoy and cook the fight.”
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He also said he’d have no problem stepping in against featherweight champion Alexander Volkanovski on three days’ notice if something happened to the main event, where Volkanovski defends against the unbeaten Movsar Evloev. “I know with what I’ve been doing and my mindset, I’m prepared to win,” Pico said. The co-main is the Petr Yan and Merab Dvalishvili bantamweight trilogy, so the bout sits on a stacked card.
Where they stand
Pico is chasing his second UFC win, according to the promotion. MMA Fighting’s Mike Heck laid out the rest of the ledger in the outlet’s UFC 333 roundtable. He described Pico’s PFL run as one with real highs and some hard lows, and his UFC debut as a moment destined to live in pre-main card highlight packages for years. That was followed by a bounce-back win over an opponent Heck called serviceable, with a strong résumé but clearly on the back nine. In Heck’s view, Pico has to win this one, and a case can be made that Keita is the second- or third-toughest opponent Pico has ever faced.
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Keita has his own stakes. Heck noted that a loss would drop him to 1-2 in the UFC. He’s playing with mostly house money on short notice, then, though he isn’t playing with nothing.
The Spinnin Backfist account spent Tuesday reposting one of Pico’s old knockouts with the caption “This Aaron Pico KO never gets old,” which tells you how much of his reputation still rests on highlight reels.
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My take: the most interesting sentence of fight week belongs to Pico, and it’s the one about being out of control. Fighters who can name their own flaw out loud are usually the ones who’ve started fixing it. But Keita stepping in late against a guy with everything to lose is a dangerous setup for the favorite. If Pico really does slow down and cook, he wins this. If the old urgency shows up in the first exchange, Keita has already told us he doesn’t care how it ends.
