UFC 332 Early Prelims: Dos Anjos, Walker, Vettori, McGee, Counted

UFC 332 starts on Saturday, October 3, at the Delta Center in Salt Lake City, and the first bell rings at 4pm Eastern, 1pm Pacific, 2pm in the building and 9pm in the UK. That first block of five fights, the early prelims, goes out before the prelims and a long time before the main card.

Four of the ten men in that block are Rafael Dos Anjos, Johnny Walker, Marvin Vettori and Court McGee. A former lightweight champion, a light heavyweight who has headlined four UFC events, a former middleweight title challenger, and the winner of the eleventh season of The Ultimate Fighter, who has been in the UFC since 2010.

I already counted what is missing at the top of this card in a separate piece. This is the other end of the poster. I counted who the UFC put first, and what the record says about why.

The count

UFC fights only, Contender Series bouts left out, no contests included. A main event is the top fight on a UFC card. Market lines are the current sportsbook consensus; model numbers are our model's win probability for the veteran as of Friday.

That is 94 UFC fights and 23 main events between four men. The ten fighters on the UFC 332 main card have 109 UFC fights between them, and nine main events, seven of them Deiveson Figueiredo's. Add the other six men on the early prelims and the opening block carries 129 UFC fights. The eight fighters on the prelims, the block that runs straight into the main card, have 20.

The two oldest men on the card, both 41, are on the early prelims. So is the only fighter on the early prelims who is ranked anywhere.

And the combined record of the four veterans over their last five fights is 4-15 with one no contest. Their opponents are a combined 11-6 over their last five in the UFC.

The champion in slot 11

Dos Anjos made his UFC debut at UFC 91 in November 2008. He won the lightweight title from Anthony Pettis at UFC 185 in March 2015 and held it until Eddie Alvarez stopped him in July 2016. He has fought for a UFC belt four times and headlined 12 UFC events, the last of them against Vicente Luque in August 2023.

From November 2012 to August 2023 he fought 24 times in the UFC, and all 24 were on a main card. Then Luque beat him. His next fight, against Mateusz Gamrot at UFC 299, was on the prelims. So was the one after, a first-round knockout loss to Geoff Neal at UFC 308. That is three losses in a row. He dropped off the lightweight rankings after the November 12, 2024 update, where he was 15th.

Saturday is his first fight in 707 days. He is bout 11 of 14, against Alexander Hernandez, who is 4-1 in his last five and was on a Fight Night main card in April. The market has drifted away from Dos Anjos all week, and I went through that move in the card-wide odds piece. He turns 42 on October 26.

Ranked, and on the early prelims

Photo: Sexto Round / CC BY 3.0

Walker is 13th at light heavyweight on the September 29 rankings, which makes him the only ranked fighter on the early prelims. He was as high as fifth in the summer of 2023. Every one of his 16 UFC fights was at light heavyweight, and 12 in a row, from March 2020 to his split-decision loss to Dominick Reyes at UFC 327 in April, were on a main card. Four of those were main events, the most recent a second-round knockout of Zhang Mingyang in August 2025.

His move to heavyweight was supposed to happen on August 1, on the main card of a Fight Night, against Ante Delija. That bout was cancelled. The debut now happens against Mick Parkin, and it happens on the early prelims.

Parkin is 4-1 in the UFC. He was 15th at heavyweight until the July 28 update and has not been on the board since. His last fight was a decision loss to Marcin Tybura, and Saturday will be 560 days after it. Walker is the only one of the four veterans the market has as the favorite, at -126. Our model disagrees and has Parkin winning 59.4 percent of the time. Walker's last five: one win, three losses, one no contest.

This is the booking that says the most about how the order gets drawn. A currently ranked fighter with four main events is placed below eight men who have 20 UFC fights between them, because his next weight class has no number next to his name yet.

The title challenger

Photo: La Gazzetta dello Sport / CC BY 3.0

Vettori fought Israel Adesanya for the middleweight title at UFC 263 in June 2021. Between October 2021 and August 2022 he was ranked as high as second in the division. He has headlined six UFC events, the last of them a decision loss to Roman Dolidze in March 2025.

That loss is the second of four straight: Jared Cannonier, Dolidze, Brendan Allen at UFC 318 and Brunno Ferreira at UFC 323. The Allen and Ferreira fights were on the prelims. After the Ferreira loss he fell out of the middleweight rankings, where he had been 14th.

Here is the detail I did not expect. Vettori against Ismail Naurdiev was first booked for June 27, as the third fight on the main card of a Fight Night. It fell off that card. When the same pairing came back, it came back on the early prelims of a numbered event. Same two men, same division, two sections lower.

This is the one bout of the four where the model and the market agree. Vettori is +115, and our model gives him 41.7 percent.

The TUF winner opens the show

Photo: Sgt. Sarah E. Enos / Public domain

McGee won the TUF 11 final in June 2010, submitting Kris McCray in the second round. That fight topped the card, and it is still the only UFC event he has headlined. He has had 23 more UFC fights since, at middleweight and then welterweight. His last main-card fight was a decision loss to Ben Saunders in January 2017. The 12 fights since then were all on the prelims, and Saturday makes it 13 in a row.

He is 1-4 in his last five, the one win a first-round submission of Tim Means at UFC 307. His last fight was a decision loss to Michael Chiesa in June 2025, 475 days before this one.

His opponent, Eric Nolan, is 29 and 0-2 in the UFC. The market has McGee at +187, which works out to about 33 percent once the bookmaker margin is stripped out. Our model gives him 41.2 percent, still the underdog but about eight points closer than the market. It is information about how differently the two read a 41-year-old, not advice.

McGee against Nolan is bout 14 of 14. It opens UFC 332.

Sorted by the future

To be sure, the order is not an insult the UFC invented. The market has three of these four men as underdogs. Our model has all four. The record is 4-15 with a no contest over their last five, and a promotion that put that record on the main card would hear about it.

But the card order is not a ranking of who is most likely to win. It is a statement about who the company wants people to see, and the UFC's answer on this card is plain. The block before the main card belongs to eight fighters with 20 UFC fights between them. The history goes out at 1pm Pacific, before the prelims, on a numbered card whose top half I already showed is thin.

Three of the four have been sliding down cards for a while: Dos Anjos for three fights, Vettori since his last main event in March 2025, McGee for nine years. Walker's drop came in one step, from the main card of UFC 327 in April to the opener block of UFC 332 six months later, with a weight class in between.

Start times for every section are in our viewing guide, and the picks are open on the UFC 332 pick'em until the first bell.

When McGee won TUF in June 2010, his fight topped the card and Eric Nolan was 12 years old. On Saturday, the same man opens one.

Correction, October 2: an earlier version of this article quoted model probabilities affected by a data issue that has since been fixed. The model figures above are the corrected ones, and the betting lines have been updated to October 2.