I respect your points, but if you mention he was tired against Volkov, imagine Malhadinho that took a guy 20+ Kilos heavier than you (and, yes, it was something like that because Lewis cut weight to make HW lol), take him down at will and control him 21+ minutes of a fight of 25 with the most dominant grappling positions AND, to add up, without losing too much gas. Blaydes wasn't able to do the same most of the times. I mean, talk negative about Malhadinho IN THIS SCENARIO is just stupidity (not talking about you specifically).
That was the first time Curtis had fought five rounds and the first time we had ever seen him gas. He had a well-deserved reputation as a cardio workhorse prior to that and after that blip to Volkov has largely maintained that reputation. That's really the
only time we have ever seen him gas out like that and it took him until the 4th round of a fight where he was maintaining an extremely high pace of takedowns for it to happen. Curtis has had multiple instances where he has either scored third-round finishes or gone the distance in dominant fashion against large opponents. He retired Justin Willis, who weighed in at 266 (i.e. also probably cut weight to make the limit), taking him down seven times, dropping him on the feet, controlling him for nearly twelve minutes, and 30-25'ing him on the cards. He finished Overeem in the third with GnP and largely replicated Almeida's performance against a younger & less shopworn version of Shamil.
I never said that Almeida was an unimpressive wrestler. Indeed, I think his ability to doggedly score takedowns against Lewis was impressive and he laid to rest a lot of fears regarding his cardio. Though it's worth noting that he was often scoring just one or two takedowns -- or a mat return -- per round, as compared to Blaydes who is often shooting a larger volume of individual takedowns per round. That's a credit to Almeida's skill as an offensive wrestler and positional grappler, but I never said Blaydes was superior in this regard. I don't think Blaydes would go out of his way to try and wrestle Almeida (he might a few sparing attempts here and there) and as such I have no reason to believe he would gas out in the same way he did against Volkov. The cardio involved in a sprawl-n-brawl affair is different versus actively trying to take down and hold down a 6'7" 250+ man who's attempting to strike/submit you the whole time.
Could Almeida potentially wear Blaydes down with the constant pace he puts on him in the grappling? Sure, it's absolutely possible -- but I haven't seen enough to be convinced of it personally.
And Cody East is indeed a random, come on. We could argue that "sambo master" was a random too? Ok, maybe that's also fair. But he is way better in wrestling than Cody, that's a fact IMO.
What are you basing this off of? I don't even have a problem with the claim, I'm just wondering if it has a basis in fact other than "He's from Dagestan and does Sambo, therefore he must be better".
My point is that you tried to use "Sambo master" as an appellation to pretty up the realities of the Nasrudinov fight while making the Cody East fight sound even worse than it really was, which is very dishonest. In the grand scheme of things they are both pretty damn irrelevant to elite-level wrestling at the Heavyweight scale (whatever that means).
Imagine Blaydes in 5 rounds, Blaydes tongue would be out of his mouth and Malhadinho would steamroll the guy in grappling department easily. Malhadinho is a specimen. If UFC decides to feed again Blaydes to Malhadinho instead of Gane, you mark my words.
Like I said above, I am not convinced and your arguments have done little to sway me. Curtis has gassed exactly once in his UFC career and it was in a situation which would not be particularly analogous to the stylistic challenge he would face against Almeida. He trains at elevation every day. He has ideal training partners at B Team to simulate Jailton's approach. He's the far more proven striker and has never been submitted despite having fought his way out of multiple submissions.
I think this is close to a 50/50 fight unlike OP and I'm actually an Almeida fan who has eagerly tracked his career since he appeared on DWCS, but on-paper I think Curtis has more upside in this theoretical match-up. I think Jailton has gotten a lot of fairly favorable match-ups thus far at Heavyweight and there are dudes who could pose him far more theoretical danger than the men he's faced so far.
