- Joined
- May 8, 2002
- Posts
- 427,425
- Reaction score
- 44
They do not sit around with compasses or abacuses, and you won’t find a pocket protector within a 10-block radius of their hub in Sao Paolo, Brazil, but the Fighting Nerds love the idea of a calculated risk. Sitting around an Airbnb in early April in Miami, nearly a full week before his fight with Bryce Mitchell, Jean Silva is still days away from fully morphing into the “Lord” figure that showed up on fight night at UFC 314, but there is a ready-made depravity in his eyes when I ask about the demons Mitchell accused him of carrying around.
Those eyes roll back to the whites before he returns the pupils to me.
“He’s looking at you like you’re Bryce Mitchell,” says his coach and Fighting Nerds mastermind, Pablo Sucupira. At this moment it’s as though Sucupira has smuggled in the Tasmanian Devil himself to South Florida, and he’s not too sure he can predict its behavior. Silva grabs my digital recorder and growls — a little too like Regan MacNeil, if we’re being honest. Then he says into the mic end, as if delivering a happy punch line: “F*** Bryce Mitchell!”
It sounds like Brights Meeshell in his non-English speaking Portuguese, but he’s smiling as he says it. That smile relieves all tension. The next thing I know he has a piece of candy he wants me to try. It’s called Paçoquita, a crumbly peanut and honey candy from Brazil, which he very much likes and travels with. His eyes are wide open with anticipation as I open the wrapper. I try a bite, and he is pleased that I like it. This is a good candy, and the thing is even if it wasn’t, I am not going to tell a Fighting Nerd that his candy sucks. They are the sweetest assassins ever assembled. They are a collection of misfits, too. Strays. A four-eyed foursome and a silvery coach with very different pasts, come together to … what? Kick a historical amount of ass? Slay everyone from 145 to 185 pounds? Become the rulers of MMA, not just in the dictatorial sense but also in the mathematical?
Carlos Prates, Caio Borralho, Mauricio Ruffy and Silva — the Fighting Nerds collective, as we know them — are a combined 24-0 in the UFC, including appearances on Dana White’s Contender Series (DWCS). All of them broke into the UFC through DWCS. Of the 24 wins, 16 have come via knockout or submission.
And after each vanquishing, the Nerds sport these ridiculous plastic glasses with tape on the bridge of the nose and on the hinge, holding them together. The very symbol of poindexter-level nerdom. It brightens all moods in the MMA space, because it runs so contrary. Those glasses aren’t just to showcase high fighter IQs, but that a movement like this is possible. Not an individual, but a team. And an idea.
What should be weakness is a declaration of strength.
After Mitchell wondered aloud on his own podcast whether Adolph Hitler might make for a fun fishing buddy, the UFC loosed Silva on him. He became a sort of punishment. He knew just what to do, too. He handed Mitchell a small globe, so as to demonstrate that the world isn’t flat (as Mitchell suspects). He baited him the entire way up to UFC 314, leaving it up to the cosmos to decide what’s unholy. And after he choked Mitchell unconscious, lying cross-eyed on the canvas, Silva leaned over his uncomprehending body and barked like a dog.
Jean Silva reacts after choking Bryce Mitchell unconscious.
Jeff Bottari via Getty Images
It almost felt too vicious.
“People talk about the high finish rate of the Nerds, and there are two reasons for that,” Sucupira tells me six days before the scene of the crime at UFC 314. “We understand it’s not just that finish rate, but how we’re going to do media day, how we handle ourselves. All of it. It’s all part of entertainment. We understand that the UFC needs that, and wants that. That’s one point.”
The other?
“The other point is that the fighting style I developed is not from other fighters,” he says. “It’s from animals. I like to watch an animal hunt another animal. When an animal hunts another animal, he cannot win by decision. He needs to kill the other animal. Animals hunting other animals is what inspired me. So that is the mindset we have at the Fighting Nerds.”
What Coach seems to be saying is, don’t be duped by the glasses.
(Photo: Getty Images, Zuffa LLC. Design: Henry Russell, Yahoo Sports.)
In a way, the Fighting Nerds vision is a paradox, as it all started with Caio Borralho’s poor eyesight. He is nearsighted. He can see targets in close, but nothing out yon. He says he feels naked without his glasses, which means he’s more naked than anyone else when he takes off his shoes and shirt to fight. More vulnerable. And, in calculating his deficiencies in trying to deduce a strength, more dangerous.
It’s in Borralho’s image that the Fighting Nerds became a thing in 2014. He met Sucupira — who’d fought professionally as a Muay Thai fighter and as a boxer — back when the gym was generically known as Combat Club. That was the name of the operation since 2009, yet nobody cared for it, so they started playing around with others. For a hot minute it was the MMA Big Riders, which was soon discovered to be too close to a common term used for those who try to curry special favor. Then it became the Nerds da Porrada, which is Portuguese for “brawler nerds.” Then it was Nerds da Luta, which — “because the UFC is American” — was eventually translated to the Fighting Nerds.
“I thought of all these different names,” Sucupira says. “Then I thought, man, we’re kind of nerds. Caio was my big athlete back then. I started to ask people about the name, the Fighting Nerds, and people said that’s a crappy name. Then I talked to Caio, and Caio loved the name. Because he was a nerd. He was a chemistry teacher, a true nerd. I thought, that’s a good name. That’s how it started.”
Borralho’s myopia didn’t prevent him from seeing the big picture, and his vision spread to others. Soon there were nerds showing up out of the woodwork. Women and men. UFC's Mayra Buena Silva dons the glasses now, and so does Thiago Moises. Today the gym in Sao Paulo is 60 strong, with honorary nerds popping up every day. After Michal Oleksiejczuk flattened Sedrigues Dumas at UFC 314, he put on a pair of the now-famous frames, with Borralho standing proudly in his corner.
Michal Oleksiejczuk dons the now-famous glasses after his UFC 314 win.
Jeff Bottari via Getty Images
The thing is, you don’t have to be a scholar to be a Fighting Nerd. If you have a love of fighting? All good. A hunter’s mentality? Aim your arrows. A solidarity against bullying? That’s a common theme on the team, because Borralho himself — who was built like a runt until he hit a growth spurt at age 16 — was bullied throughout his school years. The glasses are a triumph, a revelation of deeper identity. They’ve come to stand for untold perseverances, and as a general warning to be careful judging a book by its cover.
In that way, the glasses are meant to magnify the contents of the fighter.
And some of what gets magnified would never be described as bookish.
Some of those who wear the glasses smoke half-a-pack of cigarettes a day and like to stay out until late into the night, warming his hands to whatever chaos is out there to find.
“Carlos?” Sucupira says, shaking his head. “Carlos is crazy, bro.”
Carlos Prates, the welterweight who is the UFC’s version of Ricardo Mayorga. The rogue figure of the group. He was supposed to be in Miami with the whole team, but was pulled from the card when his opponent Geoff Neal was forced to withdraw. (“That made him very grumpy,” Sucupira says, “you wouldn’t want to talk to him when he’s in a bad mood anyway.”) Fortunately, Prates was redirected into a main event slot against Ian Garry, which takes place this Saturday at UFC Kansas City. Whenever Carlos’ name comes up, which is often, it’s like genuine awe at the defiant brother who everyone has deep affection for, if only because he can’t be held to ordinary standards of conduct.
“He likes to party, bro,” Sucupira says. “The thing is, Carlos, just like Jean, he’s kind of crazy. The way they discovered to keep their crazy in check was to fight. If those guys go a long time without fighting, it’s going to be a problem for them. Jean, he fought like 12 times in three years. Carlos fought the same, maybe even a little bit more. What they do to stay sane is they fight a lot. This keeps their crazy down.”
Prates fought four times in the UFC in 2024 alone, winning every fight by knockout. There was a scale of execution which should be noted. He didn’t just beat Li Jingliang in Perth, he methodically turned his face into target practice for his left hand. Nor did he pounce when he hurt Jingliang with it towards the end of the second round. He let him recover just enough to hit Jingliang with it again. And again. The last one, the satisfier of the whole wicked sequence, dropped Jingliang along the fence, and it was as though he’d be shot. He rolled onto his back, with his limbs flopping dead to his side.
Neil Magny? Poor Neil probably never should’ve signed on the dotted line. Prates delivered a left-hand walk-off that left Magny face-planted in the canvas. He strolled away with the attitude of a guy flicking a cigarette butt into the gutter at the end of his lunch break. Fast and easy, which — as we learned this past week — is just the way his mommy likes it.
Where would a loose cannon like him be if not for the Fighting Nerds?
“I like to say I become a fighter because I didn't like to work, and now the thing I do most in my life is work,” he says. “Because every day I have to do some videos on the YouTube channel or Instagram, and then I need to sign something. Now we have some cards for UFC to sign, a lot of cards, and then I go back to the training. It doesn’t stop.”
Ask any Fighting Nerd, and they will tell you that Prates — who is perhaps at his tamest when the glasses come out in victory — is barely suppressing the wildman locked inside.
“They think that’s me?” he says, putting on his most innocent face before smiling an ornery smile. “I think the same. Usually I like to say, ‘You have just one life.’ But I'm trying to get better and better take care about my health and things like that. Be more athlete than fighter.”
That’s a tough equation for a dude who has Muay Thai tattooed across his chest and a pack of cigarettes in the locker.
(Photo: Getty Images, Zuffa LLC. Design: Henry Russell, Yahoo Sports.)
To look at Caio Borralho is to look the Fighting Nerds Brahma right in the face. His eyes look through the lens to see. His teeth are extraordinarily white, and through those he takes special care to enunciate his words. His English? The best on the team. There’s that popular meme where Zach Galifianakis is staring off almost inwardly while mathematical symbols drift through his vision. That’s like Borralho, except that his ears are these extraordinary cautionary tales that look like wads of chewed-up gum. Those ears signal danger.
Borralho is the archetype. The grand poobah of the Nerds. He knows his way around an algebra equation and reads more than the rest. He likes books on cryptocurrency, stocks, self-improvement. He is a self-confessed “numbers guy,” who before finding joy in punching people’s faces was a teacher in both math and chemistry back in the northeast of Brazil, just like his grandfather.
“I was giving classes to young kids in the neighborhood and all that,” he says. “I came to Sao Paulo to work with Demian Maia, and I met Pablo through a student of his, Bruno Murata. Pablo’s a small guy, but he knows how to punch, he knows how to move, dodge. At the time I was just starting my career. He beat the s*** out of me and I was like, 'I think this guy is the guy I need to follow.'”
Caio Borralho reacts after his knockout victory against Paul Craig at UFC 301.
Alexandre Loureiro via Getty Images
Borralho, who at age 32 is also the elder statesman of the Fighting Nerds, came to Miami to be here for Silva. And to help Oleksiejczuk turn things around, see if some of that Fighting Nerd magic might rub off. Caio is the polar opposite of Carlos in how grounded he is, and he thinks that range of personalities is really what makes his club unique.
“If you see all the groups that [have] a lot of success, you see a lot of musical groups like Backstreet Boys and all these guys,” he says, “you see like the Fantastic Four or the Avengers and all that — they bring together different kinds of people. People who are way different, but they come together for the same concept. So that’s the power of it. You have everybody that is different but is bringing something to the one power.”
It’s not common in MMA to have a true team, the kind of collective that associates fates, one and all. Back in the day, the Miletich Fighting Systems in Bettendorf, Iowa, had a range of champions in Jens Pulver, Matt Hughes, Robby Lawler, Miletich himself and Tim Sylvia. It was more of a factory for Midwest wrestlers than anything else, a group of similar minded individuals. Team Quest had Dan Henderson, Randy Couture and Matt Lindland, but same thing — individuals in a business venture, who trained under the same roof. There wasn’t a running team tally. To mention Henderson didn’t have much to do with Lindland, as they weren’t really tied at the hip. The old IFL, which had literal teams? Wasn’t real. Nobody bled Quad City Silverback black and gold.
The GFL? LOL. More like DOA.
“The thing is, nobody understood the power that an MMA team could have,” Sucupira says. “If you look at the NBA, you see LA, Boston, they are really powerful teams. They are bigger than the players. When you think about MMA, there are no teams, just the players. So there is a spot there that nobody saw. Because we are not just a team. We’re a concept. We’re a brand. We’re a tribe. Nobody understood yet the power that an MMA team could have.”
Maurico Ruffy, Jean Silva and Caio Borralho pose backstage in Miami, Florida.
Mike Roach via Getty Images
Borralho was the concept, the big brain by which all else orbits. The glasses connect everyone to his vision. There are others involved. Analysts. Coaches. Fighters who like to pore over tape and break down opponents for the Fighting Nerds, to identify every weakness and every opening that can be exploited. Opponents are story problems to be solved: X leaves his hands down when circling to the right, and Y found success putting him on his back foot, therefore…
“That’s exactly how I see it all,” Borralho says. “More analytical, that's really the thing. I take all the emotions out. I like to watch fights with no sound so I can’t be emotional with the fight. It's better that way.”
He literally adjusts his glasses as he talks about this.
“I’ve always done that since the beginning of my career,” he says. “All I've done besides training is watching. That’s pretty much what I was doing at home. I’d train, then I’d go home and I’d watch four or five hours of tape, studying a lot of guys. Then after that, I go back training, go back to the home, eat, rest, and then the next day start all over again.”
The others look up to Caio, the big brother of the team. When I asked Prates who of the core foursome of Fighting Nerds will be the first champion among them, he doesn’t hesitate.
“Caio [is] going to be first,” he says.
Yet Caio thinks bigger.
“I can see four or five belts in our gym,” he says. “I think for sure it's the hardest sport in the world, the top level, the highest level in the world. But I think we're showing that we can do it. I think we're showing everyone — the fans and the UFC — that we can house and hold a lot of belts at the same time.”
The time is coming where we’ll find out if his calculations are correct.
(Photo: Getty Images, Zuffa LLC. Design: Henry Russell, Yahoo Sports.)
It’s Sucupira’s wife, Mariana, who makes the glasses. Pablo buys the plastic frames by the thousands and she tapes each one by hand, to be distributed wherever the Fighting Nerds tour lands next. People all over the MMA landscape can be spotted wearing them. Daniel Cormier. Jon Jones. Joe Rogan. Mark Zuckerberg. Whoever the Fighting Nerds come into contact with, it’s an easy souvenir to pass along.
And an easy thing to embrace.
The soft-spoken Mauricio Ruffy might be the coolest of the bunch to wear them. It’s pronounced closer to “hoofy,” with a faint "r" sometimes detectable after the huffing "h" — and I’m not sure he even responds to Mauricio at all. When I mention that name to Ivan Jatobá, the manager of the Fighting Nerds, it takes him a minute to know who I’m talking about.
“Oh, Hrrooffy?” he says.
Ruffy is forever ready to fight. He was ready in Miami during UFC 314 fight week, when he laid out for me a delirious plan to crash the party at the Kaseya Center. He was so apologetic about the ass kicking he dreamed of handing out, that it bordered on comedy.
“This is me not wishing anything bad on Paddy Pimblett or Michael Chandler,” he told me during a mini squall on South Beach through his friend and business partner Yann Oliveira. “Because I don’t wish anything bad on those guys — they’re hard workers, and they’re great guys. But with all due respect, with my last fight, you all saw what happened with Bobby [King] Green — I really don’t feel like I fought. So I’m ready to go if something should happen.”
Mauricio Ruffy scored a brutal, highlight-reel knockout of King Green at UFC 313.
Jeff Bottari via Getty Images
Ruffy is a man of God. He goes to church regularly. He doesn’t drink or go out to the clubs. He doesn’t even curse. If Carlos is the devil on one shoulder, Ruffy is the angel on the other. And he thanks the heavens for the miracles in his life that some might take for granted, such as having children. His wife was told she couldn’t have babies, and — as he will tell you, especially when talking about what’s in store for him — “anything can happen; just look, I have two healthy, beautiful kids.”
And he believes it when he says, “anything can happen.”
One of the things that Ruffy makes happen is he evaporates whoever steps in to fight him. Green was supposed to be a kind of litmus test to see where Ruffy stood next to his fellow Nerds. He lasted exactly two minutes. Ruffy landed a spinning wheel kick that dropped the jaws of everyone in Las Vegas. Now he is angling for a bigger fight, yet in the meantime he is looking to be the first Nerd to truly branch out.
He is on the verge of opening a Fighting Nerds gym in Brentwood, New Hampshire, with his business partner Yann Oliveira. A satellite to the Sao Paulo headquarters. A place for Nerds to gather in the Northern Hemisphere.
“I see us as a brotherhood,” he says. “I’m very happy for all of us, and what we’re doing. Ultimately everybody is following their own path, following their own dream. I’m very happy to have the relationship we do, that brotherhood feeling. At the end of the day, I’m very happy for the team as a collection. You look at a guy like Jean, or Carlos Prates, Caio Borralho, they all have their own thing going. We’re all very different people.”
Ruffy is a calming influence on the more volatile Nerds. And of all of them, he might be the scariest once he steps in the cage.
“I try to guide them the right way when I’m around them, but I have a lot of respect for my brothers,” he says. “I’m my own person, though. I don’t necessarily get involved in the Carlos Prates type of thing. He goes out and stuff, but I am so happy being me.”
Like the others, Ruffy was bullied as a kid, too. The glasses allow him to look back as much as they do forward.
(Photo: Getty Images, Zuffa LLC. Design: Henry Russell, Yahoo Sports.)
That’s the common thread. The Nerds were bullied, and they’ve endured. Carlos was bullied. Same thing for Ruffy, who has seen some stuff too. At just eight years old he helped save his father’s life after a motorcycle accident. Silva, who was on a road to delinquency until fighting steered him right, was a “chubby kid” weighing north of 200 pounds when he was young. At one point he was in a coma after an accident, and says he spent nearly a year in a wheelchair.
He got bullied, too.
And Caio, who fits the bill of a quintessential nerd both in looks and in scholastic interests? He was bullied too often to forget. He hasn’t. None of them have. Ask them and they’ll tell you, that’s why the Fighting Nerds are going strong in 2025. They are part anti-bully movement, part hope collective for anyone who knows about being bullied.
The glasses, which are suddenly associated to winning, are an inspiration gimmick. And the players themselves are happily entwined in the messaging. Sucupira, a marketing man in a previous life, the architect. Caio, who might just have a pocket protector somewhere in his wardrobe back in Sao Paulo, the prototype. Ruffy, Jean, Carlos — they are the bespectacled brigade who might be the most violent group of avengers ever assembled. And definitely one the best stories in MMA.
They are the Fighting Nerds.
And right now they’re the ones getting the last word.
Continue reading...
Those eyes roll back to the whites before he returns the pupils to me.
“He’s looking at you like you’re Bryce Mitchell,” says his coach and Fighting Nerds mastermind, Pablo Sucupira. At this moment it’s as though Sucupira has smuggled in the Tasmanian Devil himself to South Florida, and he’s not too sure he can predict its behavior. Silva grabs my digital recorder and growls — a little too like Regan MacNeil, if we’re being honest. Then he says into the mic end, as if delivering a happy punch line: “F*** Bryce Mitchell!”
It sounds like Brights Meeshell in his non-English speaking Portuguese, but he’s smiling as he says it. That smile relieves all tension. The next thing I know he has a piece of candy he wants me to try. It’s called Paçoquita, a crumbly peanut and honey candy from Brazil, which he very much likes and travels with. His eyes are wide open with anticipation as I open the wrapper. I try a bite, and he is pleased that I like it. This is a good candy, and the thing is even if it wasn’t, I am not going to tell a Fighting Nerd that his candy sucks. They are the sweetest assassins ever assembled. They are a collection of misfits, too. Strays. A four-eyed foursome and a silvery coach with very different pasts, come together to … what? Kick a historical amount of ass? Slay everyone from 145 to 185 pounds? Become the rulers of MMA, not just in the dictatorial sense but also in the mathematical?
Carlos Prates, Caio Borralho, Mauricio Ruffy and Silva — the Fighting Nerds collective, as we know them — are a combined 24-0 in the UFC, including appearances on Dana White’s Contender Series (DWCS). All of them broke into the UFC through DWCS. Of the 24 wins, 16 have come via knockout or submission.
And after each vanquishing, the Nerds sport these ridiculous plastic glasses with tape on the bridge of the nose and on the hinge, holding them together. The very symbol of poindexter-level nerdom. It brightens all moods in the MMA space, because it runs so contrary. Those glasses aren’t just to showcase high fighter IQs, but that a movement like this is possible. Not an individual, but a team. And an idea.
What should be weakness is a declaration of strength.
After Mitchell wondered aloud on his own podcast whether Adolph Hitler might make for a fun fishing buddy, the UFC loosed Silva on him. He became a sort of punishment. He knew just what to do, too. He handed Mitchell a small globe, so as to demonstrate that the world isn’t flat (as Mitchell suspects). He baited him the entire way up to UFC 314, leaving it up to the cosmos to decide what’s unholy. And after he choked Mitchell unconscious, lying cross-eyed on the canvas, Silva leaned over his uncomprehending body and barked like a dog.
You must be registered for see images attach
Jean Silva reacts after choking Bryce Mitchell unconscious.
Jeff Bottari via Getty Images
It almost felt too vicious.
“People talk about the high finish rate of the Nerds, and there are two reasons for that,” Sucupira tells me six days before the scene of the crime at UFC 314. “We understand it’s not just that finish rate, but how we’re going to do media day, how we handle ourselves. All of it. It’s all part of entertainment. We understand that the UFC needs that, and wants that. That’s one point.”
The other?
“The other point is that the fighting style I developed is not from other fighters,” he says. “It’s from animals. I like to watch an animal hunt another animal. When an animal hunts another animal, he cannot win by decision. He needs to kill the other animal. Animals hunting other animals is what inspired me. So that is the mindset we have at the Fighting Nerds.”
What Coach seems to be saying is, don’t be duped by the glasses.
You must be registered for see images
(Photo: Getty Images, Zuffa LLC. Design: Henry Russell, Yahoo Sports.)
In a way, the Fighting Nerds vision is a paradox, as it all started with Caio Borralho’s poor eyesight. He is nearsighted. He can see targets in close, but nothing out yon. He says he feels naked without his glasses, which means he’s more naked than anyone else when he takes off his shoes and shirt to fight. More vulnerable. And, in calculating his deficiencies in trying to deduce a strength, more dangerous.
It’s in Borralho’s image that the Fighting Nerds became a thing in 2014. He met Sucupira — who’d fought professionally as a Muay Thai fighter and as a boxer — back when the gym was generically known as Combat Club. That was the name of the operation since 2009, yet nobody cared for it, so they started playing around with others. For a hot minute it was the MMA Big Riders, which was soon discovered to be too close to a common term used for those who try to curry special favor. Then it became the Nerds da Porrada, which is Portuguese for “brawler nerds.” Then it was Nerds da Luta, which — “because the UFC is American” — was eventually translated to the Fighting Nerds.
“I thought of all these different names,” Sucupira says. “Then I thought, man, we’re kind of nerds. Caio was my big athlete back then. I started to ask people about the name, the Fighting Nerds, and people said that’s a crappy name. Then I talked to Caio, and Caio loved the name. Because he was a nerd. He was a chemistry teacher, a true nerd. I thought, that’s a good name. That’s how it started.”
Borralho’s myopia didn’t prevent him from seeing the big picture, and his vision spread to others. Soon there were nerds showing up out of the woodwork. Women and men. UFC's Mayra Buena Silva dons the glasses now, and so does Thiago Moises. Today the gym in Sao Paulo is 60 strong, with honorary nerds popping up every day. After Michal Oleksiejczuk flattened Sedrigues Dumas at UFC 314, he put on a pair of the now-famous frames, with Borralho standing proudly in his corner.
You must be registered for see images
Michal Oleksiejczuk dons the now-famous glasses after his UFC 314 win.
Jeff Bottari via Getty Images
The thing is, you don’t have to be a scholar to be a Fighting Nerd. If you have a love of fighting? All good. A hunter’s mentality? Aim your arrows. A solidarity against bullying? That’s a common theme on the team, because Borralho himself — who was built like a runt until he hit a growth spurt at age 16 — was bullied throughout his school years. The glasses are a triumph, a revelation of deeper identity. They’ve come to stand for untold perseverances, and as a general warning to be careful judging a book by its cover.
In that way, the glasses are meant to magnify the contents of the fighter.
And some of what gets magnified would never be described as bookish.
Some of those who wear the glasses smoke half-a-pack of cigarettes a day and like to stay out until late into the night, warming his hands to whatever chaos is out there to find.
“Carlos?” Sucupira says, shaking his head. “Carlos is crazy, bro.”
Carlos Prates, the welterweight who is the UFC’s version of Ricardo Mayorga. The rogue figure of the group. He was supposed to be in Miami with the whole team, but was pulled from the card when his opponent Geoff Neal was forced to withdraw. (“That made him very grumpy,” Sucupira says, “you wouldn’t want to talk to him when he’s in a bad mood anyway.”) Fortunately, Prates was redirected into a main event slot against Ian Garry, which takes place this Saturday at UFC Kansas City. Whenever Carlos’ name comes up, which is often, it’s like genuine awe at the defiant brother who everyone has deep affection for, if only because he can’t be held to ordinary standards of conduct.
“He likes to party, bro,” Sucupira says. “The thing is, Carlos, just like Jean, he’s kind of crazy. The way they discovered to keep their crazy in check was to fight. If those guys go a long time without fighting, it’s going to be a problem for them. Jean, he fought like 12 times in three years. Carlos fought the same, maybe even a little bit more. What they do to stay sane is they fight a lot. This keeps their crazy down.”
Prates fought four times in the UFC in 2024 alone, winning every fight by knockout. There was a scale of execution which should be noted. He didn’t just beat Li Jingliang in Perth, he methodically turned his face into target practice for his left hand. Nor did he pounce when he hurt Jingliang with it towards the end of the second round. He let him recover just enough to hit Jingliang with it again. And again. The last one, the satisfier of the whole wicked sequence, dropped Jingliang along the fence, and it was as though he’d be shot. He rolled onto his back, with his limbs flopping dead to his side.
Neil Magny? Poor Neil probably never should’ve signed on the dotted line. Prates delivered a left-hand walk-off that left Magny face-planted in the canvas. He strolled away with the attitude of a guy flicking a cigarette butt into the gutter at the end of his lunch break. Fast and easy, which — as we learned this past week — is just the way his mommy likes it.
Where would a loose cannon like him be if not for the Fighting Nerds?
“I like to say I become a fighter because I didn't like to work, and now the thing I do most in my life is work,” he says. “Because every day I have to do some videos on the YouTube channel or Instagram, and then I need to sign something. Now we have some cards for UFC to sign, a lot of cards, and then I go back to the training. It doesn’t stop.”
Ask any Fighting Nerd, and they will tell you that Prates — who is perhaps at his tamest when the glasses come out in victory — is barely suppressing the wildman locked inside.
“They think that’s me?” he says, putting on his most innocent face before smiling an ornery smile. “I think the same. Usually I like to say, ‘You have just one life.’ But I'm trying to get better and better take care about my health and things like that. Be more athlete than fighter.”
That’s a tough equation for a dude who has Muay Thai tattooed across his chest and a pack of cigarettes in the locker.
You must be registered for see images
(Photo: Getty Images, Zuffa LLC. Design: Henry Russell, Yahoo Sports.)
To look at Caio Borralho is to look the Fighting Nerds Brahma right in the face. His eyes look through the lens to see. His teeth are extraordinarily white, and through those he takes special care to enunciate his words. His English? The best on the team. There’s that popular meme where Zach Galifianakis is staring off almost inwardly while mathematical symbols drift through his vision. That’s like Borralho, except that his ears are these extraordinary cautionary tales that look like wads of chewed-up gum. Those ears signal danger.
Borralho is the archetype. The grand poobah of the Nerds. He knows his way around an algebra equation and reads more than the rest. He likes books on cryptocurrency, stocks, self-improvement. He is a self-confessed “numbers guy,” who before finding joy in punching people’s faces was a teacher in both math and chemistry back in the northeast of Brazil, just like his grandfather.
“I was giving classes to young kids in the neighborhood and all that,” he says. “I came to Sao Paulo to work with Demian Maia, and I met Pablo through a student of his, Bruno Murata. Pablo’s a small guy, but he knows how to punch, he knows how to move, dodge. At the time I was just starting my career. He beat the s*** out of me and I was like, 'I think this guy is the guy I need to follow.'”
You must be registered for see images attach
Caio Borralho reacts after his knockout victory against Paul Craig at UFC 301.
Alexandre Loureiro via Getty Images
Borralho, who at age 32 is also the elder statesman of the Fighting Nerds, came to Miami to be here for Silva. And to help Oleksiejczuk turn things around, see if some of that Fighting Nerd magic might rub off. Caio is the polar opposite of Carlos in how grounded he is, and he thinks that range of personalities is really what makes his club unique.
“If you see all the groups that [have] a lot of success, you see a lot of musical groups like Backstreet Boys and all these guys,” he says, “you see like the Fantastic Four or the Avengers and all that — they bring together different kinds of people. People who are way different, but they come together for the same concept. So that’s the power of it. You have everybody that is different but is bringing something to the one power.”
It’s not common in MMA to have a true team, the kind of collective that associates fates, one and all. Back in the day, the Miletich Fighting Systems in Bettendorf, Iowa, had a range of champions in Jens Pulver, Matt Hughes, Robby Lawler, Miletich himself and Tim Sylvia. It was more of a factory for Midwest wrestlers than anything else, a group of similar minded individuals. Team Quest had Dan Henderson, Randy Couture and Matt Lindland, but same thing — individuals in a business venture, who trained under the same roof. There wasn’t a running team tally. To mention Henderson didn’t have much to do with Lindland, as they weren’t really tied at the hip. The old IFL, which had literal teams? Wasn’t real. Nobody bled Quad City Silverback black and gold.
The GFL? LOL. More like DOA.
“The thing is, nobody understood the power that an MMA team could have,” Sucupira says. “If you look at the NBA, you see LA, Boston, they are really powerful teams. They are bigger than the players. When you think about MMA, there are no teams, just the players. So there is a spot there that nobody saw. Because we are not just a team. We’re a concept. We’re a brand. We’re a tribe. Nobody understood yet the power that an MMA team could have.”
You must be registered for see images
Maurico Ruffy, Jean Silva and Caio Borralho pose backstage in Miami, Florida.
Mike Roach via Getty Images
Borralho was the concept, the big brain by which all else orbits. The glasses connect everyone to his vision. There are others involved. Analysts. Coaches. Fighters who like to pore over tape and break down opponents for the Fighting Nerds, to identify every weakness and every opening that can be exploited. Opponents are story problems to be solved: X leaves his hands down when circling to the right, and Y found success putting him on his back foot, therefore…
“That’s exactly how I see it all,” Borralho says. “More analytical, that's really the thing. I take all the emotions out. I like to watch fights with no sound so I can’t be emotional with the fight. It's better that way.”
He literally adjusts his glasses as he talks about this.
“I’ve always done that since the beginning of my career,” he says. “All I've done besides training is watching. That’s pretty much what I was doing at home. I’d train, then I’d go home and I’d watch four or five hours of tape, studying a lot of guys. Then after that, I go back training, go back to the home, eat, rest, and then the next day start all over again.”
The others look up to Caio, the big brother of the team. When I asked Prates who of the core foursome of Fighting Nerds will be the first champion among them, he doesn’t hesitate.
“Caio [is] going to be first,” he says.
Yet Caio thinks bigger.
“I can see four or five belts in our gym,” he says. “I think for sure it's the hardest sport in the world, the top level, the highest level in the world. But I think we're showing that we can do it. I think we're showing everyone — the fans and the UFC — that we can house and hold a lot of belts at the same time.”
The time is coming where we’ll find out if his calculations are correct.
You must be registered for see images
(Photo: Getty Images, Zuffa LLC. Design: Henry Russell, Yahoo Sports.)
It’s Sucupira’s wife, Mariana, who makes the glasses. Pablo buys the plastic frames by the thousands and she tapes each one by hand, to be distributed wherever the Fighting Nerds tour lands next. People all over the MMA landscape can be spotted wearing them. Daniel Cormier. Jon Jones. Joe Rogan. Mark Zuckerberg. Whoever the Fighting Nerds come into contact with, it’s an easy souvenir to pass along.
And an easy thing to embrace.
The soft-spoken Mauricio Ruffy might be the coolest of the bunch to wear them. It’s pronounced closer to “hoofy,” with a faint "r" sometimes detectable after the huffing "h" — and I’m not sure he even responds to Mauricio at all. When I mention that name to Ivan Jatobá, the manager of the Fighting Nerds, it takes him a minute to know who I’m talking about.
“Oh, Hrrooffy?” he says.
Ruffy is forever ready to fight. He was ready in Miami during UFC 314 fight week, when he laid out for me a delirious plan to crash the party at the Kaseya Center. He was so apologetic about the ass kicking he dreamed of handing out, that it bordered on comedy.
“This is me not wishing anything bad on Paddy Pimblett or Michael Chandler,” he told me during a mini squall on South Beach through his friend and business partner Yann Oliveira. “Because I don’t wish anything bad on those guys — they’re hard workers, and they’re great guys. But with all due respect, with my last fight, you all saw what happened with Bobby [King] Green — I really don’t feel like I fought. So I’m ready to go if something should happen.”
You must be registered for see images
Mauricio Ruffy scored a brutal, highlight-reel knockout of King Green at UFC 313.
Jeff Bottari via Getty Images
Ruffy is a man of God. He goes to church regularly. He doesn’t drink or go out to the clubs. He doesn’t even curse. If Carlos is the devil on one shoulder, Ruffy is the angel on the other. And he thanks the heavens for the miracles in his life that some might take for granted, such as having children. His wife was told she couldn’t have babies, and — as he will tell you, especially when talking about what’s in store for him — “anything can happen; just look, I have two healthy, beautiful kids.”
And he believes it when he says, “anything can happen.”
One of the things that Ruffy makes happen is he evaporates whoever steps in to fight him. Green was supposed to be a kind of litmus test to see where Ruffy stood next to his fellow Nerds. He lasted exactly two minutes. Ruffy landed a spinning wheel kick that dropped the jaws of everyone in Las Vegas. Now he is angling for a bigger fight, yet in the meantime he is looking to be the first Nerd to truly branch out.
He is on the verge of opening a Fighting Nerds gym in Brentwood, New Hampshire, with his business partner Yann Oliveira. A satellite to the Sao Paulo headquarters. A place for Nerds to gather in the Northern Hemisphere.
“I see us as a brotherhood,” he says. “I’m very happy for all of us, and what we’re doing. Ultimately everybody is following their own path, following their own dream. I’m very happy to have the relationship we do, that brotherhood feeling. At the end of the day, I’m very happy for the team as a collection. You look at a guy like Jean, or Carlos Prates, Caio Borralho, they all have their own thing going. We’re all very different people.”
Ruffy is a calming influence on the more volatile Nerds. And of all of them, he might be the scariest once he steps in the cage.
“I try to guide them the right way when I’m around them, but I have a lot of respect for my brothers,” he says. “I’m my own person, though. I don’t necessarily get involved in the Carlos Prates type of thing. He goes out and stuff, but I am so happy being me.”
Like the others, Ruffy was bullied as a kid, too. The glasses allow him to look back as much as they do forward.
You must be registered for see images
(Photo: Getty Images, Zuffa LLC. Design: Henry Russell, Yahoo Sports.)
That’s the common thread. The Nerds were bullied, and they’ve endured. Carlos was bullied. Same thing for Ruffy, who has seen some stuff too. At just eight years old he helped save his father’s life after a motorcycle accident. Silva, who was on a road to delinquency until fighting steered him right, was a “chubby kid” weighing north of 200 pounds when he was young. At one point he was in a coma after an accident, and says he spent nearly a year in a wheelchair.
He got bullied, too.
And Caio, who fits the bill of a quintessential nerd both in looks and in scholastic interests? He was bullied too often to forget. He hasn’t. None of them have. Ask them and they’ll tell you, that’s why the Fighting Nerds are going strong in 2025. They are part anti-bully movement, part hope collective for anyone who knows about being bullied.
The glasses, which are suddenly associated to winning, are an inspiration gimmick. And the players themselves are happily entwined in the messaging. Sucupira, a marketing man in a previous life, the architect. Caio, who might just have a pocket protector somewhere in his wardrobe back in Sao Paulo, the prototype. Ruffy, Jean, Carlos — they are the bespectacled brigade who might be the most violent group of avengers ever assembled. And definitely one the best stories in MMA.
They are the Fighting Nerds.
And right now they’re the ones getting the last word.
Continue reading...
