UFC 290 was genuinely spectacular, the sort of mixed martial arts (MMA) event that reminds you why you fell in love with this sport in the first place. Then, you look at what’s next on UFC’s schedule and realize you’re heading straight for five rounds of … Holly Holm vs. Mayra Bueno Silva.
It’s lost among his extensive and inimitable oeuvre, including the groundbreaking 17776 that so clearly shares its DNA, but Jon Bois’ There is No Future of Baseball lodged in my head from the moment I read it. It presents baseball as a finished product; there will always be tweaks here and there, such as this season’s suite of changes that threw the game into delightful chaos, but like horseshoe crabs and crocodiles, it found its ideal form long ago and will simply continue to exist until it doesn’t.
Baseball is a creation too odd to repurpose, and too fixed to be recalibrated. That is fine. It is fine for something to be wildly popular for quite a long time and then fade into something less popular, all the while unchanging, forever extant. It is where and what it is supposed to be.
MMA — or at least the Ultimate Fighting Championship that reached the Kleenex threshold and erased the distinction between consumer good and corporate brand — feels as though it’s reaching a similar endpoint. It’s off, though. If baseball is a bonsai — clipped and shaped into its best self with genuine care — UFC is a human body that’s abandoned exertion and begun reverting to its most basic and energy-efficient state.
Fighting in the Age of Loneliness articulated my feelings better than I ever could. Bloody Elbow covered similar ground last month. I just feel compelled to put my thoughts on paper after 13 years of following the sport religiously.
I’ve struggled to boil the feeling down into a digestible statement, but I guess “lack of effort” works as well as anything.
The trend is most obvious, I think, in its offshoots. Contender Series has consistently lowered its bar; where the first season averaged two contracts per episode, the most recent averaged more than four. Take out the infamous season opener that saw Joseph Pyfer emerge as the sole graduate and that average jumps to 4.67. Even Hailey Cowan — who took home an uninspiring split decision I felt she lost — got a shot in the Octagon.
Compare that to Brendan Loughnane demolishing Bill Algeo in Season Three, but missing out on a contract because he shot for a takedown in the last 10 seconds.
The whole thing just feels slapdash at this point, a monument to UFC’s disinterest in properly selecting and cultivating new talent. Look at George Hardwick — he’s a Cage Warriors champion with a 100 percent finish rate in the promotion and they’re making him fight for a $10,000/$10,000 contract. That’s when they’re not lowballing hot commodities like Cedric Doumbe and Roberto Soldic or straight-up ignoring obvious pickups like Eduard Vartanyan and Abdoul Abdouraguimov.
You see this flare up when UFC is hunting late replacements, like when they fed Westin Wilson to Joanderson Brito or tried to sacrifice Josiah Harrell to Jack Della Maddalena despite better-paid athletes such as Chris Curtis, Kevin Holland and Joaquin Buckley all expressing a willingness to step in on short notice:
You guys gotta lay off JDM. I threw my hat in the ring and the man accepted within an hour. Wasn’t him saying no guys. JDM is a gangster
— Chris Curtis The Action Man (@Actionman513) July 8, 2023
It was never more obvious, however, than in the current season of The Ultimate Fighter (TUF) 31.
To be clear, “Prospects vs. Veterans” is a great idea on paper. It just doesn’t work unless you have actual prospects, especially not when UFC has seemingly given up on trying to inject new life into the episode structure.
This “good enough is good enough” mindset extends into seemingly every aspect of the organization. We’re treated to week after week inside UFC’s Apex facility in Las Vegas, Nevada, where the novelty of hearing each individual strike and shouted strategy now just produces a longing for the electric atmosphere only a packed stadium can provide. For every moment of insightful commentary from Paul Felder or Laura Sanko, we’re treated to minutes of pointless rambling from commentators who either refuse to do research (Daniel Cormier) or are seemingly unaware of what’s going on in front of them (Joe Rogan).
So much feels arbitrary.
UFC matchmaker, Mick Maynard, insists bout order is a scientific affair, but potential stars languish on the “Prelims” undercard, while Walt Harris can lose three straight and still feature on the main card against Josh Parisian, who’s 2-3 in his last five. Talent retention, too; Saidyokub Kakhramonov is a Top 15-ranked Bantamweight who got cut after a 2-1 Octagon start, while Ashlee Evans-Smith is 1-4 in her last five and remains in good standing.
It feels as though we get a horrific eye poke every week, but despite more than a decade of insisting that they were working to fix it, UFC has yet to update its gloves. The grounded fighter rules were mercifully updated a few years back, but seemingly reverted without anyone commenting. Post-fight bonuses are divorced from merit — Sean “Mr. Apex” Strickland banked $50,000 for awkwardly swatting a dead-on-his-feet Abus Magomedov two cards back despite Rinat Fakhretdinov and Benoit Saint-Denis scoring far more impressive finishes and we’ve seen three separate one-sided thrashings (Mackenzie Dern vs. Angela Hill, Jared Cannonier vs. Marvin Vettori and Ilia Topuria vs. Josh Emmett) receive “Fight of the Night” in the span of two months seemingly by dint of being the main events.
Even the ads are underwhelming. I won’t pretend UFC ever had a great track record on that front, but every once in a while you’d get something genuinely creative and memorable. Now, their approach to advertising a card with two Mexican champions was producing a mediocre highlight reel set to “Gasolina.”
I promise you, I’m not trying to lionize the Spike TV days, when the only way you’d ever see a “Prelims” bout is if one of the main card bouts ended early. I promise you, I don’t hate MMA; if I hated it, I wouldn’t care this much about wanting it to thrive. I want it to be where the falling sideshow meets the rising sport. Modern UFC — where seemingly none of the skyrocketing profits are used to benefit the fighters or viewers — feels like it’s going through a heat death. No spectacular implosion, just a slow, lifeless roll into mediocrity.
It’s enough to make you nostalgic for Condom Depot.
There’s still magic here sometimes — throw enough youknowwhat at the wall and something will inevitably stick. It’s just hard to be passionate about something with no passion for itself.