Deiveson Figueiredo vs Payton Talbott Preview & Prediction — UFC 332

Deiveson Figueiredo built his case in this fight on the mat, not the feet. Payton Talbott has to prove he can survive there long enough to use his length and pace. The desk is logging this one as a read, not a bet, but the pick is Talbott, and the reasoning runs through exactly how he handled an elite wrestler the one time it mattered.

Deiveson Figueiredo

Figueiredo's path to winning this fight is clear on tape. Against Rob Font's teammate Barcelos, he landed 8 of 15 takedowns and racked up 583 seconds of control, mounting Talbott's style of opponent and hunting the back until Barcelos gave it up. Against Garbrandt he ran a similar blueprint, 223 seconds of control en route to a rear-naked choke. An inside trip or a scramble into top position is his surest route to finishing this fight, and it has worked before against comparable output-heavy strikers.

The problem is what happens when he can't get there. His recent losses share one shape: longer, technical strikers who simply outwork him at range. Yan outlanded him 121 to 53. Sandhagen was ahead 54 to 6 before an injury ended things. Umar beat him 34 to 8 on significant strikes while also controlling him for 290 seconds. Song finished him outright with a guillotine off a low, predictable shot. In all four, Figueiredo's single-shot counter game never caught up to the volume thrown at him, and his answer was to shoot himself into trouble.

Payton Talbott

Talbott is built as exactly the kind of problem that has given Figueiredo trouble lately. He is roughly a decade younger, carries a 2.5-inch reach advantage, switches stance, and throws considerably more volume, with finishing ability to back it up. That is the Yan-Sandhagen-Umar template on paper: length, output, and angles that make a single counter shot hard to time.

His one loss came against a high-control wrestler, which is the honest counterpoint here and the reason this fight isn't a lock. But his response to that kind of pressure is instructive. Against Henry Cejudo, as complete a wrestler as he is likely to see, Talbott gave up just 1 of 7 takedown attempts and only 159 seconds of control for the entire fight. He answered with 211 seconds of control of his own and won 30-27 on all three cards. That result says the grappling deficit is something he can manage and offset, not something that automatically swallows him.

How the fight plays out

Figueiredo's best chance is the one his tape keeps pointing to: get an inside trip or catch a scramble early, get on top, and start hunting the kind of finish he got on Barcelos and Garbrandt. If he gets Talbott down and holds him there, this fight tilts hard in his favor.

But Talbott has already shown he can take that specific kind of pressure test and pass it. Against a wrestler far more decorated than Figueiredo, he conceded one takedown attempt out of seven and under three minutes of total control, while still winning every round. That is the blueprint for tonight: use length and output to keep Figueiredo on the end of punches, avoid feeding him the single committed shot that Song and others have punished him for chasing, and let the fight play out at range where Figueiredo has lost every recent decision. The desk's read lands on Talbott doing here what he did against Cejudo, managing the grappling instead of eliminating it, and winning the rest of the fight comfortably.

The verdict

The pick is Talbott. His combination of reach, switch-stance volume, and finishing ability mirrors the exact style that has beaten Figueiredo in his most recent losses, and his performance against an elite wrestler in Cejudo shows he can absorb Figueiredo's control game without it deciding the fight.