UFC is on another level.
Hector Lombard fell to Tim Boetsch at UFC 149 by split decision on Saturday night. The Cuban fighter’s failure to make noise in his Ultimate Fighting Championship debut is proof that UFC is the superior MMA league.
According to John Morgan of MMAjunkie.com, UFC president Dana White talked about how disappointing Lombard’s match was. He said:
It’s the unfortunate thing about hype: When there’s a lot of hype behind you and you don’t live up to the hype, it goes away real quick. This is one of those things—the guy was on a 25-fight win streak, a lot of people were high on him, people have been talking about him forever. Guys that fight in other organizations end up in top-10 rankings, and it’s a whole other world over here.
In their MMA power rankings going into the week, ESPN ranked Lombard as the seventh-best Middleweight fighter in the world. Boetsch was unranked, by the way. Their analysis of Lombard’s ranking read: “All the talk of Lombard being overrated for annihilating the Bellator field can now stop: The Cuban is headed for the UFC.”
Well, isn’t that ironic?
When Lombard finally fought in the UFC, it only proved that he was overrated—not the other way around, like ESPN tried to play it.
A fighter that absolutely dominated Bellator and CFC couldn’t come up with a victory against Boetsch—a solid but far-from-elite competitor.
Lombard was supposed to be elite. He hadn’t lost a fight since 2006. Not only does his Saturday-night loss hurt his reputation, but it destroys Bellator’s and CFC’s as well.
There’s a lesson to be learned from the crash of the Cuban hype train: If they aren’t fighting the UFC’s best, don’t rank them among the UFC’s best.
David Daniels is a featured columnist at Bleacher Report and a syndicated writer.
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