Houston Alexander vs. Sherman Pendergarst

One of the most explosive fighters in the UFC is set to make his return to MMA after almost a year out of the cage, but his return won’t be inside the UFC just yet. Houston Alexander made a huge splash in the MMA world since his 48 second demolition job of Keith Jardine during his UFC debut but things haven’t been so great since then. Despite winning another fight via a brutal knockout, Alexander would go on to lose his next three fights leaving fans stunned at how quickly the prospect had fallen from grace.

Those three loses prompted Alexander to work on his wrestling and ground game as he was dominated in said positions in all three of those fights. You have to imagine he has kept his word and worked on these parts of his game considering he has been out of the cage for almost a year now. Oddly enough Houston won’t be making his comeback with the UFC, instead he has been allowed to fight for another promotion (Adrenaline MMA) while seemingly still in contract with the UFC. This is something that hasn’t been seen for quite a while now since the UFC made all of their fighters exclusive to said promotion. Somehow Houston convinced the UFC to allow him to take a fight outside of the promotion before he makes his UFC debut. As odd as this seems, it makes perfect sense. No one really knows if Houston is prepared to even fight again let alone win, so by taking on an opponent at another promotion Houston is able to get a tune up fight to shake off the ring rust before he steps in front of the much larger audiences with the UFC.

There is another good reason as to why Houston would fight his opponent at the much smaller promotion, his opponents skill level. Sherman Pendergarst is no Lyoto Machida, in fact Pendergarst has only won three times out of his last twelve fights. Holding a record of 11-12, you’d think that Pendergarst is completely out of his league in fighting Houston but that simply isn’t the case. Of his 11 wins, Sherman has won over half of them via submission which fits perfectly well with Houston considering how weak he has been at avoiding submission attempts. But there is always to sides to the story, where Houston’s weakness is Sherman’s strength, the same could be said for Shermans weaknesses. Houston has extremely powerful hands and could literally any of his punches could knock any man unconscious if they landed and that plays into the fact that half of Sherman’s losses have come via KO.

As long as Houston can keep the fight standing there is no way he can lose. It truly is a case of, the longer the fight is kept standing, the closer Pendergarst comes to being knocked out. But this is MMA and anything can happen, so while the smart man might put his money on Houston to knock out his opponent, don’t count out Pendergarst.