5 Things You Might Not Know About Kyler Phillips

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Already established as an intriguing talent within the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s bantamweight ranks, Kyler Phillips now must prove he can take another step toward potential stardom.

The promising 27-year-old will toe the line against Marcelo Rojo in a featured UFC 271 attraction on Saturday at the Toyota Center in Houston. Phillips has rattled off four wins across his past five outings. However, he finds himself on the rebound following a contentious majority decision loss to Team Alpha Male’s Raulian Paiva at UFC on ESPN 27 in July.

As Phillips approaches his pivotal showdown with the Entram Gym-trained Rojo, here are five things you might not know about him:

1. A strong support system hastened his development.

Phillips operates out of the MMA Lab, where he trains under revered coach John Crouch and sharpens his skills alongside a number of world-class stablemates. They include former World Extreme Cagefighting and UFC light weight champion Benson Henderson, current UFC middleweight contender Jared Cannonier and polarizing UFC bantamweight prospect Sean O’Malley.

2. He followed a well-worn path to the Octagon.

“Matrix” competed on Season 27 of “The Ultimate Fighter” reality series, which featured former heavyweight champions Stipe Miocic and Daniel Cormier as coaches. Phillips was eliminated by Brad Katona—the man who later won the competition—when he wound up on the wrong side of a majority decision against the SBG Ireland rep.

3. He might still be unbeaten had a few breaks gone his way.

Phillips has never been decisively defeated. In addition to his aforementioned majority decision loss to Paiva, the only other blemish on his ledger resulted from split scorecards in an October 2018 encounter with onetime Deep champion Victor Henry under the California Xtreme Fighting banner.

4. Exotic weaponry supplements his repertoire.

The Torrance, California, native has but one submission victory to his credit, and it was something of a rarity. Phillips put away P.J. Ste-Marie with a calf slicer in the first round of their CFX 4 confrontation on Sept. 10, 2016. As a point of reference, Charles Oliveira and Brett Johns account for the only successfully executed calf slicers in UFC history.

5. Predictability has been a positive in some regards.

Phillips has completed multiple takedowns in all four of his UFC appearances to date. He delivered two of them in a three-round unanimous decision over Gabriel Silva at UFC Fight Night 169, two more in a second-round technical knockout of Cameron Else at UFC on ESPN 16, three of them in a unanimous decision over Yadong Song at UFC 259 and a career-best four of them in his loss to Paiva.