Michelle Montague (6-0, 17-2 Combined)
31 Years Old
Bantamweight
Fighting out of Coconut Creek, Florida, USA via Matamata, New Zealand
American Top Team
Originally hailing from small regional town Matamata in New Zealand, Michelle Montague is a highly credentialed grappler now training out of American Top Team in Florida. A former IMMAF Lightweight World Champion, two-time Kiwi Freestyle Wrestling Commonwealth Games Competitor and arguably most impressively a former Waikato Women’s Rugby Team Member; Montague has built on her grappling foundations as a main training partner of Bantamweight Champion Kayla Harrison.
Montague honed a majority of her craft at CORE MMA in Hamilton, as well as some time at City Kickboxing. She would move to ATT in early 2022 after spending a few months training there the year prior due to numerous difficulties with COVID border restrictions in New Zealand; restrictions that not only forced her to compete without her team at IMMAF, but also prevented her from returning back home too. These restrictions also led to her spending some time training at SBG Ireland due to her US Visa expiring and not having won her place in the MIQ Lottery to be let back into New Zealand.
Montague is a physically impressive athlete who has competed at both Lightweight and more recently Featherweight for her entire career. An IMMAF veteran with ten fights under their banner, Montague only ever lost to standout prospect Sabrinna de Sousa in two unanimous decisions. Her pro debut came on the PFL Challenger Series in 2022 which she won by RNC in just under four minutes, and although she didn’t win a contract it was clear she had a future at the top level of the sport. Her next fight came at iKON FC 5 where she also won by RNC, and her fight following that on the 2023 edition of the PFL Challenger Series she did the exact same thing. Following that Montague fought Abby Montes in a non-tournament PFL bout, Karolina Sobek in the Bellator Champion Series in Dublin and Marilla Morais in another non-tournament PFL bout, where she of course won all three by RNC.
From a skills perspective it’s pretty clear that Montague is a grappler, and a particularly strong one at that. Montague does a good job of methodically moving into mount without compromising loss of position, and she uses that positional dominance to display her slick Jiu-Jitsu to finish fights. Montague has beautiful timing on her TD entries that allows her to really commit to shooting blast double legs, as well as an incredibly powerful grip that effectively attaches herself to her opponent like a python with an unrelenting and immovable vice. Against the cage Montague likes to employ a variety of trips and sweeps to ground her opponent, as well as mixing in knees and elbows to create damage and shift attention away from the grappling exchange. Whilst sometimes these scrambles could ultimately lead to her finishing on bottom, Montague does a great job of quickly transitioning from the trip/sweep to her scrambles if required and this has allowed her to as some say “get away” with securing TDs that other fighters just simply wouldn’t be able to get. Montague has also shown an ability to work hard late in fights when called upon and finish really at any point in the course of the fight.
Montague has been developing her boxing skills and has a nice kicking game to back it up, however it’s usually done so in the hopes of setting up her eventual TD shot. Montague does a good job of getting strikes off on her opponents off-beat catching them when they’re unable to instantly respond, however from a defensive standpoint she can at times leave herself hittable when getting off combinations and leans her head away to avoid shots. Montague has shown a strong overhand right but often doesn’t set these up with strikes beforehand – I’d acknowledge that from the tape so far Montague’s striking game does need to continue to develop but not only does that make sense given her wrestling background, but she is also at an amazing place to continue to hone that aspect of her game under Mike Brown (and Kayla Harrison) at ATT. I also think it would be unfair to critique Montague’s striking without mentioning the improvements she has made to date and that you can see a rate of exponential improvement, but that said there is still undoubtedly work to be done in that department if she wants to become a top fighter in the UFC.
What I find most interesting is that Montague will be cutting to Bantamweight for the first time in her career at the UFC, having fought all her other career fights at either Featherweight or Lightweight. Will she have to drop some muscle to make the weight? Will the what has to be an intense weight cut sap her cardio or her chin? Will her strength advantage just be way too much for a vast majority of UFC Bantamweights? I’m really curious to see all these questions answered amongst many others when she steps onto the scales and into the octagon later this year, and I’m really looking forward to seeing how Montague does in the UFC because in a thin Bantamweight division she has massive upside potential as someone who could make a quick run up the rankings and take the crown once Kayla retires.