Preview: UFC Fight Night 239 ‘Tuivasa vs. Tybura’

Light Heavyweights

Kennedy Nzechukwu (12-4, 6-4 UFC) vs. Ovince St. Preux (26-17, 14-12 UFC)

ODDS: Nzechukwu (-575), St. Preux (+425)

It seems unlikely, but maybe St. Preux can turn back the clock one last time. “OSP” has put together a successful career over the last decade and a half, but the fall figured to be hard whenever St. Preux aged out of relevance. A former linebacker for the University of Tennessee, St. Preux was an obvious standout athlete with all the tools in the world but never put together a particularly coherent game. Instead, St. Preux got by with a grab bag of unorthodox tricks and techniques held together by his athleticism, including a sudden turn as a master of the Von Flue choke; and that was enough to keep him relevant for the better part of a decade, remaining both a fringe contender and a reliable UFC Fight Night main eventer. However, a December 2020 fight against Jamahal Hill seemed to be where the wheels started falling off for St. Preux. He had put forth some inconsistent performances leading into that fight, but the bout with Hill was the first time that St. Preux’s durability—formerly a foundation of his approach—started to betray him. With that, St. Preux has also gotten more tentative, and the result has been a fairly dreadful four-fight stretch, with his only win coming against a similarly diminished Mauricio Rua in a terrible fight. This time out, Nzechukwu does not seem like a particularly forgiving matchup, and in some sense, this does feel like a passing of the torch to a younger fighter whose game has yet to fully congeal.

Nzechukwu is a massive man for the light heavyweight division and came to the UFC in 2019 as a particularly raw fighter, and while he has taken his lumps along the way, he has found a general approach that usually works. He mostly just marches forward and tries to make something happen, relying on his durability to see him through some cold starts and find him a finish somewhere along the way. It has resulted in some surprising success, particularly since Nzechukwu has a tricky submission game of his own, but there are some times where it fails spectacularly in the form of a quick knockout loss, as was the case in his fight against Dustin Jacoby in August. Nzechukwu is quite a slow starter even by the standards of slow starters, so St. Preux will have the opportunity to make something happen early on, but this does look like a pairing where he will only delay the inevitable at best. The pick is Nzechukwu via second-round stoppage.

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Tuivasa vs. Tybura
Battle vs. Loosa
Nzechukwu vs. St. Preux
Dulgarian vs. Rodriguez
Chiasson vs. Kianzad
Meerschaert vs. Barberena
The Prelims