Sean Brady took Joaquin Buckley down four times at UFC 328 and held him there for more than 12 minutes. It was about as one-sided as a welterweight fight between serious contenders gets. So when Brady turns around and picks Buckley to beat Mike Malott in Saturday’s UFC Fight Night 291 main event at Rogers Place in Edmonton, the lazy read is that he’s being a gracious winner. I think it’s the sharpest breakdown of this matchup anyone has offered, and it comes from the one guy who prepared for Buckley for a full camp and then spent most of a fight on top of him.
Brady made the pick on his BradyBagz Show, and he flagged his own bias right away: “I’m going to be biased. I am picking Buckley.” Fine. Then he did something most people making predictions skip. He gave the other guy the early rounds.
Brady hands Malott the blueprint
“So I think it’s going to be Mike Malott early,” Brady said. He expects Malott (14-2-1 MMA, 7-1 UFC) to study the Brady fight and the Kamaru Usman fight, and he thinks Malott can get Buckley down. I agree with that part completely. Buckley (21-8 MMA, 11-6 UFC) has now been shown the mat by two elite wrestlers in a row, and Malott is, in Brady’s words, a good grappler with power. A takedown game that front-loads control should bank Rounds 1 and 2 for him.
The catch is what you can do with Buckley once he’s down there. “Buckley is hard to submit. Buckley is very strong,” Brady said, and he’d know. Brady is one of the better top players at 170 pounds, and he described a man who keeps working the whole time. That matters more than people think. Holding a strong opponent who refuses to settle is expensive. Every scramble, every wall-walk, every time he gets a knee under himself, the guy on top pays for it in his shoulders and his lungs. The fans who yell lay and pray at that kind of exchange are missing the actual fight, which is the bottom man taxing the top man’s gas tank one rep at a time.
The tank and the timer
Which brings us to Brady’s real argument, and the reason I’m with him. He pointed to Malott’s loss to Neil Magny, where Malott was ahead and faded. “Neil Magny has one moment, turns it on, wins the fight,” Brady said. That’s the scariest data point on Malott’s résumé heading into a five-round main event, because the first three rounds against Magny are the only sample we need to know the pace can catch up with him.
Now line that up against what Brady says about Buckley late. He cited the Usman fight, where by his account Buckley nearly had Usman out in the fifth round. He cited Stephen Thompson, a fight Brady says Buckley was losing the whole way before knocking Thompson out at the end. And he cited Colby Covington in the fourth round. Brady’s point was that Buckley doesn’t tire and his power stays with him deep into fights.
Then he boiled the whole pick down: at three rounds, Brady said, he’d take Malott, and it’s the two extra rounds that move him to Buckley. That’s an honest, specific prediction, with no wiggle room built in. Brady is telling you exactly where he thinks the fight flips and why. I wish more judges watched fights with that kind of attention to when the momentum actually changes, instead of scoring Round 1 on a takedown and Round 3 on vibes.
Why I’m landing on Buckley
The records argue for Malott. He’s 7-1 in the UFC, and Buckley is on a two-fight skid. Brady thinks the skid helps Buckley. He said he saw Buckley at RAF and that Buckley understands the stakes, specifically that he can’t afford a third straight loss. I’m usually skeptical of the desperation theory, since fighters don’t hit harder because they’re scared of getting cut. What I do buy is that a fighter coming off back-to-back grappling losses has spent an entire camp drilling the exact thing Malott wants to do, which is getting up.
Brady came back to that point more than once: Buckley doesn’t fade, and he never stops fighting to get back to his feet. Put those two traits together against a grappler whose cardio has already cracked once on tape, and the math tilts toward the later rounds. Malott has a real chance to win this on the cards if he can keep the takedowns coming through Round 5. I don’t think he can. I think the wall work in the second and third rounds drains him, the shots get slower and easier to stuff, and Buckley finally gets to stand in front of a tired man.
My pick matches Brady’s. Malott takes the first two rounds, Buckley starts stuffing shots in the third, and Buckley knocks him out in Round 4. UFC Fight Night 291 streams on Paramount+ on Saturday, Oct. 17, and if Malott is still shooting with the same snap in the fourth round, I’ll happily eat this one.
