Henry Cejudo believes UFC champion Dricus Du Plessis beats Alex Pereira and Khamzat Chimaev
Henry Cejudo backs UFC middleweight champion Dricus Du Plessis to take out two dominant fighters.
Du Plessis (23-2 MMA, 9-0 UFC) retained his middleweight title by defeating Sean Strickland (29-7 MMA, 16-7 UFC) a second time in Saturday's UFC 312 main event at Qudos Bank Arena in Sydney.
Du Plessis plans on fighting Khamzat Chimaev (14-0 MMA, 8-0 UFC) next, then move up to challenge UFC light heavyweight champion Alex Pereira (12-2 MMA, 9-1 UFC), who defends his title against Magomed Ankalaev in the UFC 313 headliner on March 8 at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas.
"Even though I do believe that Pereira is going to beat Magomed Ankalaev, I'll definitely put my money with DDP," Cejudo said on his "Pound 4 Pound" podcast with Kamaru Usman. "I think DDP, stylistically, is a problem, and I know DDP is going to go in there and f*cking wrestle.
"And I think with the grappling, I think that could be very problematic, but there's one thing that I will say is he will need to be careful because Alex Pereira does a really good job of countering, and there's a lot of little sloppy things that DDP does, but I think I put my strengths and his mixing of the fighting against a guy like Alex Pereira."
Cejudo broke down why he sees Du Plessis being the first to hand Chimaev a loss.
"I personally think he beats up Khamzat Chimaev," Cejudo said. "I don't think he's going to be easy to submit. I think DDP is scrambly, and I think his conditioning, bro, I mean, I want to put him up there. Particularly this last fight, you want to kind of maybe put him in the top three, maybe greatest right now cardios in the UFC. Obviously, Merab is one and then you can go two, three, but whatever it is, he looked freaking good.
"And he looked so good that fifth round where he was like 'Hey, I was able to go another five more rounds. I mean this guy's ready, and this guy's going to be a problem for anybody at 185 pounds, and I am excited to see this dude fight Khamzat. And if he beats a guy like Khamzat Chimaev, I would love for him to go up and then fight the winner of Alex Pereira and Ankalaev."
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For more on the card, visit MMA Junkie’s event hub for UFC 312.
This article originally appeared on MMA Junkie: Henry Cejudo believes UFC champion Dricus Du Plessis beats Alex Pereira and Khamzat Chimaev
