UFC 330 card changes: four bouts gone in eleven days

Islam Makhachev vs Ian Machado Garry is still standing. Quite a lot of the card underneath it is not.

Since August 4, our card-change log has recorded seven separate alterations to UFC 330, which lands on Saturday at the Xfinity Mobile Arena in Philadelphia. Two of them arrived inside the same two-hour window on Sunday morning. One fight was added, removed, and restored to a different portion of the card inside 17 hours. All timestamps below are UTC, taken from the change timeline on our UFC 330 page.

Photo: Новости ННТ / CC BY 3.0

It began with the clock. On August 4 at 16:00, the listed start of the event moved from 01:00 on August 16 to 21:00 on August 15, pulling the whole broadcast four hours earlier. Early prelims now open at 21:00 UTC, prelims at 23:00, and the main card at 01:00 Sunday UTC, which is 9:00 p.m. Eastern on Saturday night.

The following afternoon the matchmaking started moving. At 18:00 on August 5, Geoff Neal (16-8) came off his welterweight prelim against Chidi Njokuani, and Njokuani was re-paired with Joel Álvarez (23-4). That one reads as a straight upgrade for the viewer. Álvarez won four in a row, including a decision over Vicente Luque last October, before Yaroslav Amosov submitted him in May. Neal has lost three of his last four, most recently a first-round knockout against Uros Medic in February, and the last man to beat him by decision was Garry, back at UFC 298.

Then things got strange. At 00:16 on August 6, a light heavyweight bout between Rafael Tobias and Lucas Fernando appeared on the prelims. At 02:00, one hour and 44 minutes later, it was gone. At 16:30 the same day it was back, this time on the early prelims, where it still sits.

The Sunday sequence was identical in shape. At 06:16 on August 9, a flyweight bout between Charles Johnson and Jose Ochoa appeared on the main card. At 08:00, again one hour and 44 minutes later, it was removed, and it is listed as cancelled today. It should be noted that a bout which surfaces and vanishes inside two hours can mean a genuine scratch or a listing that was never meant to be public; bout agreements are not something we can see from here. What we can say is that it was on the card, and now it is not.

None of that counts the biggest subtraction. Erin Blanchfield (14-2) against Jasmine Jasudavicius (15-4), a genuine women's flyweight title eliminator, is off, which we covered here. Its main-card slot went to Edson Barboza (24-14) against Esteban Ribovics (15-3), a fine trade in violence and a poor one in stakes. Barboza has lost three straight, the last of them a first-round knockout by Jalin Turner, who fights two bouts earlier on the same card. Ribovics is coming off a second-round submission loss to Mateusz Gamrot, who spent Saturday night being submitted himself.

For his part, Makhachev has been left alone. The welterweight title fight against Garry (17-1) has not moved a minute or a slot since it was announced, and the market has not blinked at any of the churn around it: the champion sits at a consensus -345, Garry at +275.

Here is what UFC 330 actually looks like as of Monday. Main card: Makhachev vs Machado Garry for the welterweight title, Mackenzie Dern vs Gillian Robertson for the women's strawweight title, Mansur Abdul-Malik vs Dustin Stoltzfus, and Barboza vs Ribovics. Prelims: Njokuani vs Álvarez, Turner vs Kaue Fernandes, Donte Johnson vs Eric McConico, and Luque vs Tresean Gore. Early prelims: Tobias vs Fernando, Neil Magny vs Ramiz Brahimaj, and Jeremiah Wells vs Myktybek Orolbai.

Five days to go. On this card's recent form, that is four more scrape cycles and at least one more surprise.