This Parisian-porter fight seems like a classic example of inflated contender series hype, wiki capping, and recency bias. Two first round finishes that really didn’t prove a whole lot. One by a spinning back fist - as someone who bet porter, I want Parisian to throw spinning shit as the chances that he gets countered are much higher than that of it actually being successful. Other one was his most recent bout vs Chad Johnson. Not only was Johnson outweighed by 50 (!) pounds, he’s not exactly an example of high caliber competition. Even so, he was able to tag Parisian heavy before laughably going for a takedown.
It is insane how bad the competition Parisian has defeated to get here, and he had to battle serious adversity virtually every fight. This has given him a reputation of a tough grinder who will get that late finish, but why the fuck is he getting rocked and slammed by 3-6 and 8-11 competition? Not only that, these are guys who are either in their 40s or dwarfed by 40-50 pounds, or both. It’s no coincidence these cans are having success too, Parisian has horrible striking technique and extremely basic grappling by any standard aside from heavyweight. Even so, he’s only able to get these guys down when they’re so exhausted they can’t even walk (obviously exasperated by weight edge). Also, the last time Parisian even got to a r3 was in 2017 where he won a majority decision over a 6-5 fighter, so his cardio edge isn’t as much of a certainty as most are making it out to be.
Crazy recency bias with porter. If one where to actually look at his fights, that would see that he has serviceable boxing, solid takedowns, and great tdd. He arguably holds the edge over josh in all those areas. Cutting from 290 on 6 days notice against a much more skilled fighter than Parisian isn’t a true representation of porter as a fighter. His durability was questioned, but the nascimento fight should silence that as porter took approximately 3x the punishment as nas did before finally falling. Josh has horrible technique which lends to very little power, the public is impressed by his finish-heavy record but these are all from gnp.
Porters last opponent before the ufc (1 year ago) looks far better than anybody Parisian has ever fought. That fight couldnt have been higher paced by heavyweight standards, and porter one punched him late into round 3. In fact porter likes to push that pace himself in basically all his fights. Given the full camp, it’s much more likely that version of porter comes out. No matter what, I will happily give away my 4u on Porter +190 as I have to cap him -125 here. Skill for skill, it should be more but Parisian does seem like a tough bastard and looked marginally improved in his most recent fight, and of course there is that chance porter comes out flat. This is low level heavyweight after all, but value is value.
