Mario Piazzon returned to Dana White’s Contender Series on Tuesday and fought Guilherme Uriel for a UFC contract in Las Vegas. The heavyweight matchup came after a Monday face-off that turned sharp enough for Piazzon to say the fight had already started before the opening bell.
That is why Piazzon is the name drawing searches now. He and Uriel touched foreheads after the official weigh-ins, and Piazzon said the hostility was part of what he wanted going into the bout. “It’s going to start at the faceoff,” he said, adding that if Uriel looked at him the wrong way, “things are going to get ugly.”
Piazzon also said Uriel blocked him and everyone around him on Instagram, while he kept his own account unchanged. “I’ve never said anything about him,” Piazzon said. “From my side, there’s nothing.” The message was plain enough: he welcomed the pressure, but he was not the one pushing the feud online.
This was not Piazzon’s first time on the Contender Series stage. He won his first appearance in September 2023 after Alexander Soldatkin was disqualified for an illegal knee in the third round, then said he liked the same kind of hostile atmosphere that surrounded that fight. He later went to Sao Paulo and was stopped in under three minutes by Alex Junius, a loss he called “the biggest learning experience of my life.”
That setback changed how he sees each matchup. Piazzon said there was no reason to underestimate another fighter after the Junius loss, and he said he would not enter a bout thinking it would be easy again. He also said he believes he can fight among the top 15 in the UFC, which is why this second run on DWCS carried more than just the weight of one night.
What remains unresolved is whether Tuesday delivered the contract he came for. Piazzon had already said he would be throwing down from the face-off onward, and he returned to DWCS with the kind of edge that usually means there is no slow build left in the story.
