Spivac vs Petrino: the takedown race that decides the co-main

The UFC is in Sacramento tonight, at the Golden 1 Center, and the co-main event is the fight I have been arguing with myself about all week. Prelims start at 2 p.m. PT (5 p.m. ET), the main card follows at 5 p.m. PT (8 p.m. ET), and Paramount+ carries the whole thing in the United States. Anthony Hernandez vs Gregory Rodrigues headlines. Nobody is talking about the fight underneath it, and that seems like a mistake.

Here is the shape of it. Serghei Spivac (18-6) is the No. 6 heavyweight on the official UFC board, where he has sat since late February, when a decision over Ante Delija moved him up from No. 7. Vitor Petrino (14-2) is not on that board at all. And Petrino is the betting favorite, at a consensus of -145 across the 25 books we track, with Spivac coming back at +133.

Our model has it tighter than the market does: Petrino 54.8 percent, Spivac 45.2 percent. What is interesting is where that edge comes from. It is not the resume. The model separates them on age (Spivac 31, and flagged as past his peak; Petrino 28, and not) and on recent form (Petrino on a three-fight run, Spivac at 60 percent across fifteen UFC appearances). On everything that measures what the two men have actually done in a cage, it calls them level.

Three wins, and none of them against anybody

Petrino moved to heavyweight in the summer of 2025 because his light heavyweight run had stalled out. He beat Tyson Pedro in March 2024, then got submitted in the first round by Anthony Smith and stopped in the third by Dustin Jacoby. One and two, and a slide off the rankings, which he had briefly touched at No. 15.

Since going up he is 3-0: a first-round submission of Austen Lane, a third-round knockout of Thomas Petersen, a decision over Steven Asplund. Not one of those three men has ever appeared on the UFC heavyweight rankings, on any snapshot we have stored, going back to 2013.

That run did get him back onto the board, at No. 15, in late February. Then he beat Asplund on March 14, held the spot for ten more days, and fell off it anyway on March 31. Five months of inactivity and a churn of new names above him did what two losses used to do. He goes into tonight ranked nowhere, in a fight against the No. 6, and favored.

So the matchmaking here is not a reward. It is a question, and the question is whether the last three wins meant anything.

Spivac's fights are decided by one thing

I want to be careful about how I say this, because "grappler needs the takedown" is the laziest sentence in MMA writing. But in Spivac's case the numbers are not subtle, and they are ours to check.

Across fifteen UFC fights he has landed 32 takedowns from 54 attempts and logged 41 minutes and 12 seconds of control time. Split that by result:

In four of the six losses he recorded two seconds of control or less. Against Tom Aspinall, against Marcin Tybura the first time, against Walt Harris: zero. Against Ciryl Gane: two seconds, then a second-round stoppage. When Spivac cannot get a man down or hold him against the fence, he does not have a plan B that has ever worked at this level.

The other number that matters: in fifteen UFC fights, Spivac has scored zero knockdowns. He has three wins by strikes, over Jared Vanderaa, Greg Hardy and Augusto Sakai, and not one of them is preceded by a recorded knockdown, which tells you exactly where the damage was coming from. His career rate is 3.57 significant strikes landed per minute against 4.23 absorbed. He is not a heavyweight who wins standing up. He is a heavyweight who survives standing up long enough to change levels.

The problem with that plan

Petrino has been taken down five times in his UFC career. All five came in one fight, his promotional debut against Anton Turkalj in March 2023, when he was 25 years old and had seven professional fights behind him.

Since that night, across eight fights, opponents are 0 for 11 on takedown attempts against him. Thomas Petersen alone went 0 for 8 before getting knocked out in the third. Petrino's career takedown defense sits at 79 percent, and that figure is dragged down by a debut he fought three and a half years ago.

Put the two profiles next to each other and the fight writes itself. Spivac attempts 3.82 takedowns per fifteen minutes and connects on 59 percent of them. Petrino has stopped every single attempt anyone has made on him since he learned how. One of those numbers is going to break tonight.

And Petrino's stoppage work has a shape Spivac's does not: both of his knockout wins started with a knockdown, one against Modestas Bukauskas, two against Petersen. He absorbs 2.71 significant strikes a minute. Spivac absorbs 4.23. In a fight that stays vertical, that gap is the whole story.

Where I keep changing my mind

Twice this week I have written the Spivac pick and deleted it, so let me make the case honestly.

Turkalj took Petrino down five times. Turkalj is not Serghei Spivac. Whatever hole existed in that debut, nobody with real chain wrestling has tested it since, because Lane, Petersen and Asplund are not that, and neither were the light heavyweights. An 0-for-11 streak built against men who cannot wrestle is not proof of takedown defense. It is proof that nobody good has tried.

Spivac's six losses also break down cleanly by opponent class: Aspinall, Gane, Jailton Almeida, Waldo Cortes Acosta, Tybura, Harris. Three of those men have held or challenged for a title. Petrino is not in that group yet, and the fight he is walking into is the exact fight, a heavyweight who wants the mat, that he has never been asked about since his first week on the roster.

The counter to my counter is the calendar. Spivac is 31 and has been in fifteen UFC fights. His last five fights read 2-3, and the most recent of those two wins, the Delija decision in February, took him three full rounds and one takedown from four attempts. That is not a man whose grappling is getting easier to impose. Twelve months ago I would have picked him without thinking about it.

So: the first level change decides this. If Spivac hits it clean in round one, he wins going away, because Petrino has never had to survive from underneath a heavyweight who lives there. If Petrino stuffs the first two, Spivac has nowhere to go, and he has spent fifteen fights proving he does not have a striking gear that beats a younger man with better defense and heavier hands.

I think Petrino stuffs them.

Prediction: Vitor Petrino by TKO, round two.

Join us for the live card and results at /events/ufc-2026-08-22.