The MMA Daily

We have a scrap in the Featherweight division, as Hakeem Dawodu takes on Julian Erosa. A winner of six of the last seven fights, Dawodu is closing in on the division’s top fifteen. Coming off a win over Mike Trizano, in which Dawodu landed 141 significant strikes, Dawodu is blossoming into the hyped superstar that entered the UFC in 2018. Meanwhile, Erosa has been excellent in his third UFC stint. Winning four of the last five five fights, with big wins over Charles Jourdain, Nate Landwehr and Sean Woodson, Erosa has quietly been storming up the Featherweight totem.

Expecting this fight to be as good as advertised, I expect both men to have their moments in what I believe will be a contender for ‘Fight of the Night’. While both men are strikers, the key factor in this fight comes from Erosa. Landing five takedowns in the past two fights, Erosa has shown a wrestling game capable of stymieing foes. With good grappling and dangerous submission abilities, Erosa isn’t quite the one-trick pony he showed in previous UFC stints. However, other than Movsar Evloev landing nine takedowns, Dawodu has stifled his opponents for the most part during his UFC tenure. With excellent striking and the second best striking differential all-time in the Featherweight division behind Champion Alexander Volkanovski, I’m fairly confident that Dawodu holds an output and technical edge on the feet over Erosa. Also, Dawodu is very durable, whereas Erosa has been questionable in that department. As evident by the seven knockdowns in eleven UFC fights he has suffered. With that said, I predict that Dawodu will win via TKO.