Dominick Cruz knows Patchy Mix is confident based on who he’s facing in his UFC debut.
Mix (20-1 MMA, 0-0 UFC) meets streaking bantamweight Mario Bautista (15-2 MMA, 9-2 UFC) on Saturday’s UFC 316 (pay-per-view, ESPN, ESPN+) main card at Prudential Center in Newark, N.J.
The former Bellator champion is stepping in on three weeks’ notice to replace Marlon Vera against Bautista. Cruz says Bautista is no joke and is a legitimate and risky test for Mix.
“He’s going to find out the level he’s at because Bautista is real,” Cruz told MMA Junkie. “He just beat (Jose) Aldo, and Aldo is still one of the best ever. He’s just defensively really good. And what Bautista did was he used so much offense and so many different looks that it kind of kept Aldo on the backfoot and kept him from throwing. That’s the amount of offense this guy has and the amount of looks, and the amount of cardio because he also trains at elevation, if I remember, too. So that adds (to it). … (Mix) grapples a lot. He has a nasty guillotine. He’s choked a lot of people out with these guillotines.
“I don’t know if you can get away with guillotines as easy against Bautista as you can in these other shows. I just don’t know, but that’s why this is fun. Patchy Mix is a complete question mark. We don’t know how great he is and this fight will show because Bautista is one of the toughest guys in the division. But it says a lot about Patchy Mix and how good he knows he is because to take that fight – not a lot of people know about Bautista and not a lot of people would have taken that fight. I think Patchy is a beast. When I watch his fights, he’s a freaking beast. But like I said, you see guys like that then they get to the UFC and you’re like, I don’t know what it is. It might be the level of athletes they’re competing against, or it might be the whole shebang, the whole atmosphere.”
With that being said, former two-time UFC bantamweight champion Cruz thinks Mix will live up to the hype.
“Patchy is a champ so I’m going to go ahead and assume he handles it flawlessly, and we’re going to see a champion fighting Bautista, and he’s going to get the job done,” Cruz said. “If he can do his thing, he should be able to hold down Bautista, take his back, throw a body triangle, and maybe strangle him with a rear-naked choke, or just keep taking him down, rinse and repeat. … He’s an exciting prospect in the division, no question.”
