Noche UFC 3: Silva vs. Lopes picks and predictions
See who we think will win in San Antonio this weekend.
NOTE FROM NATE: Apologies for not announcing that we were scaling back our picks schedule in advance. Going forward we’ll only be doing picks for UFC pay-per-view events, or the biggest Fight Night of the month when there is not a PPV.
The UFC celebrates Mexican Independence this weekend with two Brazilians fighting in Texas. This card was initially planned for Guadalajara, Mexico. The show was brought north to San Antonio after issues with the venue south of the border.
The main event is pretty tasty here with Diego Lopes coming off a unsuccessful title bid opposite Alexander Volkanovski. In San Antonio he meets Jean Silva, who seems to be trying to make MMA fun again all by himself. Silva is now fighting with the pressure to put the Fighting Nerds back on top after Caio Borralho and Mauricio Ruffy were outshone at UFC Paris.
The rest of the card is a little underwhelming. There are some OK names and interesting prospects, though. The co-main has one each of those archetypes with Rob Font taking on the young KO machine David Martinez. Other interesting prospects on the card include Santiago Luna and Alice Pereira.
For some reason Tatiana Suarez vs. Amanda Lemos is buried on the prelims. Other good match-ups include Kelvin Gastelum vs. Dustin Stoltzfus and Alexander Hernandez vs. Carlos Diego Ferreira.
We’ve looked over the latest Noche UFC card and done our best to pick the winners. And we have a pretty good track record of doing that.
After a poor UFC 319, some of us stormed back at UFC Shanghai (despite all of us picking Zhang Mingyang). I did the best, going 14-3, but Zhang was my lock pick! That miss from me allowed Kristen to get past me and into first place. She went 12-5 on the card and picked Taiylake Nueraji as her lock pick.
You can see who we are picking for our locks below.
If you’re using this info for betting purposes, please do so responsibly.
Leader board
Diego Lopes (+195) vs. Jean Silva (-238)
Miguel: This is a pretty straightforward pick for me. Silva has shown a dramatically wider striking skillset predicated on a knack for finding devastating counters very early in a fight. Lopes, on the other hand, has proven to be a quite limited brawler who needs his…