Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Ufc 317 this weekend and highly encourage you all watch it. @Tanista comment on lat weeks thread about Jon Jones, one of the better mma fighters, behind only the likes of GSP, Fedor etc retired after holding up the worst division, heavyweight, for two years has made people who watch the sport happy.
Ilia Topuria, Payton Talbott and Joshua Van are three entertaining young fighters who are blockbuster entertainment whilst also being extremely talented.
Topuria was the featherweight champ and knocked the last two greats out in succession, something that is unprecedented and this was likely the greatest title run in the UFC impact wise for the division. Topuria is a pressure fighter, defensively sound, sleeps people with one punch and wants to be in the pocket. He fights a now past his prime Charles Oliveira who himself was the pressure fighting guy at lightweight, the division Topuria is fighting in now.
Talbott is a very online young guy and the first fighter to tweet about Sam Hyde incessantly making him someone I root for now. He fights at 135, a division above Van who's at 125. Mma is very stale, boring and not worth watching now. The UFC wants no big superstars to emerge as they want a total monopoly on the business so that they pay fighters as little as possible. The thinking of this kind has made the peak we saw in 2016-17 look like a different world.
The other fight in this card features 125ers who can sleep people. Lower weight classes are a treat to watch. As a long time fan, I hope you folks tune in, buy, pirate, watch it at a bar, whatever. Ufc 317 is on this Saturday, you can watch the embedded vlogs ufc produces to get some more context about the fights if you wish to.
then
Getting some mixed messages man.
Anyhow, I will be watching it at a bar with a bunch of guy friends, as much an excuse to be social as anything.
Have to agree with the general assessment of UFC logic. At best, I'm ambivalent on Dana White, he's clearly done a lot to get the sport mainstreamed but so many of his basic tactical decisions with regard to the business are hare-brained from my perspective. The commentary on the fights tends to be ass, the officiating has been questionable (a bit better of late?), they won't adopt new gloves to prevent eye pokes, and it is really unclear if they want to market as a brand of semi-family-friendly entertainment (they're on ESPN now, after all) or keep things 'gritty' and amp the bro-ish, violent and unapologetically masculine nature of it. They still have Octagon girls in skimpy outfits, the fighters curse regularly in ring interviews, most of their sponsors are likewise still aimed at the Titties 'n' Beer crowd.
Like, you ask me, the entire point of UFC is to set up the most interesting fights/matchups possible and encourage the top contenders to fight as hard as possible for a win, and generally avoid safe, riskless approaches. Big purses and other monetary incentives are a good method. Bring in the best talent from across the globe and get them to give their best performance.
Yet they sideline or outright oust their most effective, driven fighters half the time. Thinking specifically of Mighty Mouse and Ngannou.
Maybe there is some logic to mitigating the chances of a fighter reaching superstar status, once they're popular and wealthy enough they tend to dictate their own terms on when/if they fight. Like McGregor. If the UFC can keep them on a tighter leash then in theory that means they can arrange and actually deliver good matchups consistently, if the talent is there.
But also the actual fighting is getting to a point where the 'optimal' style is somewhat predetermined. Unless you're a talented kickbox-wrestle-jitsu practitioner, you're going to get stomped by someone who is more well rounded than you, no matter how good you are at your particular niche. Maybe that's how it should be, but its just a fact now that "MMA" is not literally "mixed martial arts" but really it is a style unto itself, it isn't really about pitting different styles against each other anymore.
I wonder if they should start introducing different obstacles to the octagon, or adding in strange conditions. "In round 1 they're covered in cooking grease. In round 2 they'll have an eyepatch over one eye. In round 3, their legs will be tied together with a two foot rope to limit movement and kicks. Round 4, they fight while each gripping a Bandana as hard as they can.
Or just go full Super Smash Bros. and let them opt to have Tasers, baseball bats, and small incendiary devices dropped into the octagon if a fight goes past 3 rounds. Or is that WWE's shtick?
I kid, but if you want to break out of the current local maxima for the current dominant fighting styles, you will have to adjust the parameters somewhere to force new optimizations.
This was the line when the UFC was growing and needed to compare itself positively to boxing. It's quite clear that, after the sale and the ESPN deal, the UFC simply doesn't care as much about this. It's nothing new: the strict USADA testing was implemented to clean up its image for a sale (GSP begged for it and was ignored until it was to the UFC's benefit) and then they eventually did away with it because why risk stars popping constantly? It's actually perversely rational: the UFC looks worse than sports that don't test so why bother?
And you can understand why. This isn't the WWE where you can script and the public often doesn't reward you at all for good fights. Mighty Mouse did incredible things in the ring but nobody ever cared. People would rather watch Sean O'Malley or whoever fight.
Making competitive fights is how a champ like GSP who brought along Montreal/Canada (one of the few countries that'll pay for PPVs) get knocked out by Matt Serra. Or 1m+ PPV seller Ronda Rousey ended up getting beaten to within an inch of her life by a Brazilian lesbian with a thick accent. She's probably not going to charm the audience on Colbert or get put in many films. The division - which was attracting normies who wanted a role model for young girls - never got as big again.
Now that they have no credible competition they've settled for squeezing money from their existing base and resting on their laurels.
I don't think this is the case. People have been saying for years that MMA is destined to be dominated by "true" mixed martial artists like Rory MacDonald who've trained in blended styles from the start. But Rory never became champion and there's still a ton of people with a specific specialty they build on when they get to MMA
It may be that this should have happened but the very problem we're discussing prevents it: if you're a very athletic youth and you have options why would you want to focus specifically on MMA to make 10/10? There's a reason a lot of the top people are former wrestlers who've hit their ceiling and HW is so bad a division athletically (an athletic HW is probably going to gain more in other sports)
There are zero crossover champions right now in any promotion that had a serious pre MMA background. Adesanya and Pereira fight 185 and up which are shallow.
He left the UFC due to low money and won the championship in bellator, the ufc guy at the time Tyron Woodley was someone he had beaten comprehensively and was for a point the world's best 170-pounder.
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Yeah, it isn't lost on me that this is exactly what happens to virtually ANY product that obtains market dominance, and stops having to care about the original, 'hardcore' fans and thus can try to lower the quality of the product to increase profit margins.
There seem to be a confluence of factors going in:
So you're constantly adjusting the equilibrium of each division to make them look competitive but get someone who can stand out on top, and give your guys reasons to be entertaining and go over the top but still maintain the integrity of the skill involved.
If I'm accurate, you can see how they'd be taking pages from the Professional Wrestling playbook, except they can't outright script storylines and hand-pick a fighter's career, and instead you have to try and wrangle things with a series of incentives and nudges and creative publicity and hopes and prayers.
Long story short, UFC is modern day Gladiatorial combat, without the lions and without the executions. Entertain the proles and plebians enough to get their money. Put on a show. But to maintain the reputation as a legitimate fighting league (and to be clear, I'm not saying they're illegitimate) the sport has to be governed by stringent rules and have reliable rankings and keep things to a certain standard, so they can't go all in on spectacle and entertainment.
So Dana has them partnered with WWE, and buys into stuff like Powerslap or more recently UFC BJJ so the casual viewer can get entertained without having to know the ins and outs of a fairly complex sport.
And maybe the goal now is to just have the UFC as the 'flagship' product but use it mainly to attract in the wider viewership who can then be siphoned to a more controlled, profitable product that they can just mindlessly watch without the investment of a hardcore fan.
Holy cow, I just now realized how Powerslap is directly optimized to be fed to viewers in short-form videos so they can be part of your average normies' slop-scrolling experience.
Powerslap is the worst because no one good will ever compete in a sport with that low IQ. Plus, having zero defence means that everyone will get knocked the fuck out before becoming a star. You cannot have a dominant champion getting dethroned storyline ever. Dana is struggling to break through, as the UFC will need to allow fighter unions and two more divisions with fewer apex cards to let the sport make money.
UFC BJJ for instance, will always lose out to CJI because the people doing it are not phoning it in the way UFC is.
No, I'm agreeing with you.
I'm just realizing that They're trying to create content that can compete in the Tiktok environment.
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Fighters are great, the management and the people running the business are short sighted.
Agree on all points. The speculative exit economy that ruined software follwoed mma. Dana is a scum who should have his assetes liquidated for lobbying and stealing money from fighters whilst never having done anything more than cardio kickboxing. UFC did not save MMA, it would have risen from Japan, they just made it worse via monopoly. They just wanted to sell it and the things like standard uniforms and stuff was just a way to convince investors
That is a cover for thier real incentive which is to sell tv rights to ESPN as PPVs keep sinking in the gutter. The Ali act that saves boxing cannot exist in MMA as fighters cannot unionize, this makes the fights worse as Dana and co dont want you to get too popular like mcgregor or want any independence like Fedor. They just want people who will take lifec hanging brain damage for 10k show and 10k win. Not a surprise they are business partners with another entity that loses relevance everyday, WWE.
Its not set in stone. Beyond BJJ being made totally irrelevant (bjj not submission grappling, bjj is about guard play, something that will get you killed in an amateur fight), the "meta" keeps changing regularly. In the early days you had a mixed bag with wrestle-boxers dominating, then we shifted towards more kickboxing, it keeps swinging back and forth. The outputs per fighter is way higher now, prodigies who are good are defensively better. Every weight division has bigger fighters which means that you have more knockouts but also a higher willingness to step in the pocket and punch in combination. The bjj aproach of take pass guard has been replaced with dragging the guy to the corner of the cage, once your hips are not stationary, you cannot play guard. The sport is still fun, its that the UFC much like the WWE wants to kill the outliers who will demand what they are worth like they do in boxing.
Yeah but you do see a ton of flair. Caucasian wrestlers, kickboxers, american wrestlers, freestyle wrestlers, submission grapplers all are very different. The first true MMA only background guy was Rory Mcdonald funnily enough.
Or they can introduce powerslap inside the octagon and lose them even more money lol. But jokes aside, they should add two more weightclasses between 155 and 185, pay scouts money like actual sports and remove weight cuts. Beyond that, allow kicks to the face on the ground, stand people up if they clinch too long on the fence and sign fighters late. Signing fighters via the contender series leads to people like Bo Nickal who cannot get good and end up as midlding fighters with no style. Luke rockhold had a style, you could see that he built it to kill wrestlers, could not have looked like had he been admitted earlier.
Lol, pro wrestling is worse now because people know of mma so the scare factor goes out, beyond that the peak of it in the last 40 years, the attitude era was defined by adult themed storylines and outliers like Steve Austin, The Rock, which the WWE does not want more of. So they up the ante in the usage of fake weapons and falls but its not compelling because the two things i listed are simply not there anymore. You tell someone that you like pro wrestling now, you will be seen as a wierdo as the product is for kids. I do not watch it but Jim Cornettes podcast gives a fun rundown of why its bad now.
The current style is good. Every belt holder currently is someone who strikes and gets finishes. Less than a tenth of the roster is made up of wrestlers and wrestling defence gets better each year as anti wrestling is easier than trying to take people down. The UFC just needs to hire scouts, let fighters unionise, make more money. Boxing is very fun now. We have had superfights on the regular whilst Dana does not want Jon Jones to leave despite having a worse string of opponents in the past two years than Sam Alvey. His contender series is a terrible idea too.
I don't think the UFC can compete with things like wrestling for lower weight classes or NFL on the high end. It'll never be as prestigious or profitable. And it simply doesn't have the number of fights to absorb all of the combat sports.
The best part of its model is that it leeches off other, more entrenched sports' scouting and training practices. What it should do is try to attract more athletes who want to cross over (like UFC fighters do with boxing) but the UFC is now in the WWE position and has no reason to innovate.
I would never want that, people crossing over is ok in limited amounts, if everyone who did dutch kickboxing came over then dutch kickboxing would die out. Though MMA can be far bigger if the ali act was enforced here.
It did this for a while but the scouting thing is not the same. MMA does not have scouts, people just count on fighters sending their records and videos over to gyms and promotions. Actual scouting and ali act would fix the sport totally if you can remove weight cutting.
The UFC is like the WWE and both lose relevance daily despite better fighters in the UFCs case, all because of greedy businessmen who deserve decades behind bars for the damage they willingly caused. The UFC has class action lawsuits and I want it to lose all of them. They are both anti innovation because they dont want outliers. Their goal is to swindle networks into getting a deal.
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The variation could at least be semi-realistic, to be in keeping with the original idea. Longer/no rounds, ground that really sucks to be on, 2v2, etc.
That'd be interesting. Recently watched a video that shows that Jiu Jitsu loses utility when you're not on soft/forgiving ground.
If it was 2 v. 2 I'd prefer some kind of tag-team format, since actual two v. twos inevitably turn into 1 v. 2s, which always end badly for the one.
They seem to be in a decent spot right now balancing overall safety for competitors while still allowing some bloodsport, and obviously it is in nobody's interest for competitors to get devastatingly hurt on the regular. It runs counter to their strategy of getting mainstream appeal, but I'd say they could afford to do fewer large events per year and focus more on really stacking the big ones up.
I wonder how much you could condition yourself against abrasion. I know people can run on gravel at least.
I did mean to see the dynamics defending multiple directions. Just make it so the team loses with the first knockout/tap.
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There was a grappling tournament on a 5v5 format called quintet which made grappling really exicitng. I'm a purist in mma but we do need freakshow fights. Half of pride was the best vs the best and the other half being freakshows.
Yeah. Need to be exhibition rounds in UFC events that are just there to be a spectacle, not everything has to be completely serious.
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