The model's best call was its quietest one
Our model picked Alberto Montes over Ricky Turcios on March 7, at a 63.3% win probability and a medium-confidence tag. Montes won, finishing Turcios by submission in the second round of a three-round featherweight bout. The system got the winner right while the broader card slipped below its usual line.
That split is the story of the night: a correct call on Montes wrapped inside one of the model's softer card grades of the year.
The night in brief
Montes submitted Turcios 40 seconds into the second round of a three-round featherweight bout. The model had named Montes as its pick, so the pick went in the win column.
Two fights ended almost before they began. Rodolfo Bellato scored a first-round knockout, and Gregory Rodrigues did the same, both finishes coming inside the opening five minutes. Two first-round knockouts on one card is the kind of result that leaves little for a prediction model to work with.
The model autopsy
This is where we grade ourselves in public, misses included.
Across the full card, the model went 7/12 for 58% accuracy. That is below our canonical live 2026 mark, and we are not going to dress it up. On a 12-fight slate, missing five is a soft night, and a couple of those first-round finishes are the kind of early, low-information outcomes that swing a card grade quickly.
The flagged picks tell a steadier story. On the LOCK and HIGH confidence tier, the model went 2/3. Those are the picks we stand behind most firmly, and hitting two of three keeps the high-confidence band roughly in line with where it should sit even on an off night for the card as a whole. The one miss in that group is the honest cost of the evening: a flagged pick that did not land, folded into the wider 7/12 result.
The Montes call is the bright spot, and it is worth being precise about why. The model picked Montes at 63.3% with medium confidence, a clear lean but below the flagged tier, and it came in. We log that as a correct call, but we also will not inflate a 63.3% read into something it was not. There was no called LOCK on this fight, and no upset flagged elsewhere on the card that we can claim credit for. The medium-confidence Montes call is the cleanest thing the model did all night.
No LOCK miss to own here, because there was no LOCK on the card. The accountability that matters is the card grade itself: 58% is below our standard, and the five misses are real.
One honest takeaway
A 58% night does not match the numbers we lead with, and it should not. Through this card, our 2026 record stood at 55-21, or 72.4%, across all picks. The March 7 card came in under that line, and the small flagged sample here, 2/3, is too thin to move the season number one way or the other.
The point of grading every card is that the soft ones count too. We do not average a weak night out of existence or quietly drop it from the ledger. The model read the Montes fight correctly and held its flagged picks at 2/3, while the rest of the card got away from it. Both of those things are true, and both go on the record at full weight.
The honest version of this recap is that the system earned its Montes call and lost the card. On a free, accountable model, that is exactly the kind of night we publish in full.