Author: Dave Meltzer

Robbie Lawler’s dominant performance, complete with a ref stoppage finish in the third round over Jake Ellenberger at UFC 173, has made him the frontrunner for the next welterweight title match.

While not outright declaring him the next top contender, UFC President Dana White endorsed Lawler (23-10, 1 no contest) on more than one occasion in talking to press after the fight.

“How could you deny him the fight,” said White. “The fight with Hendricks was awesome. With his performance before the Hendricks fight, no doubt he’s the No. 1 guy (contender) in the world.”

Lawler lost a straight 48-47 decision to Hendricks in their March 15 fight in Dallas to fill the welterweight title vacancy left when champion George St-Pierre took a leave from the sport.

In most people’s eyes, the first fight between the two, among the best fights so far this year,  was even going into the final round.

Hendricks suffered a torn biceps prior to the fight, and had surgery afterwards, and is targeting somewhere between September and November for a return.

“I did a good job, I got a stoppage and I put everyone on notice, and I know I’m in the conversation,” said Lawler.

White did indicate that he would likely wait until the Tyron Woodley vs. Rory MacDonald fight takes place, on June 14 in Vancouver, B.C., before outright announcing anything.

But he also gave the indication that both Woodley and MacDonald would have the pressure on them.

Woodley (13-2) is coming off stoppage wins over Josh Koscheck and Carlos Condit. MacDonald (16-2) has won six of seven, but his most recent loss was to Lawler.

White did praise Woodley, noting he has been aggressively finishing his fights of late, and compared his recent performances with those of Lawler. Woodley has past history with Hendricks, as Hendricks beat him for the Big-12 collegiate wrestling championship nine years ago, and has been wanting a shot at him since both became top MMA stars.

But it was clear that it will take nothing less than a spectacular win by Woodley for him to get the next shot.

Dana White has been pushing all week that Renan Barao is the best pound-for-pound fighter in the sport. While some may dismiss this as promoter hyperbole in building this week’s fight, his position is very reasonable to take. But, no matter where you rate Barao among the greats, he has yet to click at the box office.

Two days before UFC 173, Dana White was in a scrum with reporters and he was talking about this week’s favorite subject, the greatest pound-for-pound fighter in the world, Renan Barao.

Now, some of you may recall White saying that about Jon Jones ever since Anderson Silva lost for the first time last summer. Well, the good thing about being a reporter or a fan is you’re allowed to change your mind. When you’re the UFC President, you change your mind over time and it’s a contradiction, double-talk, or a promoter hyping this week’s fight.

But, after watching Urijah Faber go down to Barao for a second time on Feb. 1 in Newark, N.J., the suggestion of Barao as the best fighter in the sport can’t be dismissed as just promoter hyperbole during fight week..

Unlike Jose Aldo, Jones, Anthony Pettis, Ronda Rousey and Cain Velasquez, Barao is the one UFC champion who has never been in any kind of trouble in a fight. If he’s got a weakness, it’s a carefully guarded secret. You can argue about his competition, but after watching Faber the past few years against everyone but Barao, and then watching Faber against Barao, that argument falls on deaf ears.

Yet, it almost felt like White was arguing about the one thing that Barao is also the embodiment of.

Just because you are the best in the world in your weight or even the entire sport, doesn’t mean people are going to pay in droves to see you. Barao may be the greatest fighter in the sport, but he’s only the fourth biggest star on Saturday’s show, behind Dan Henderson, Daniel Cormier and Robbie Lawler.

With that conundrum, we’ve been left with a week of excuses as to why. He doesn’t speak English. He doesn’t hype his fights well. He’s too small. He’s not good looking enough. He hasn’t that the right opponent. He washes his clothes in the sink. Some of them, or all of them, well except for right opponent, because Faber is as marketable a challenger as you’re getting in a lighter weight class, and the clothes in a sink part, probably have some validity.

The reality is that two pay-per-views in a row where, going in, everyone knows the numbers aren’t going to be big. Barao vs. T.J. Dillashaw has a story. Dillashaw is part of the long quest to be the first Team Alpha Male fighter, after five unsuccessful title shots, to actually win a UFC title, battling the guy who beat his mentor twice. Or is Dillashaw the next victim of the sport’s greatest unbeaten streak, which is somewhere between 33 and 35 fights since Barao lost his debut fight nine years ago as an 18-year-old, depending on where you go to get your info? It’s unprecedented number, almost incomprehensible if you sit down and think about it, for someone at the top level in this sport. That in itself should be a hook–the greatest streak in the history of the sport is at stake.

It’s possible Saturday could have been the show that challenges the UFC’s pay-per-view baseline, that is, what is the lowest number a UFC show with a very legitimate title match can draw. But my gut says, this will not hit that level. The key reason is that even though the show is promoted around Barao vs. Dillashaw, the real main event is Henderson vs. Cormier. Plus, Lawler vs. Jake Ellenberger is a solid fight for its position on the show. Another is that people get together on holiday weekends and are looking for entertainment. By Saturday night, they aren’t caring nearly as much at what the cost of that entertainment will be. It’s not the strongest UFC show ever, but it is a UFC show with some names, and fights with significant implications. 

Unlike boxing promoters, UFC, ironically, the newer game, strongly sticks to more traditional based promotion. The title match, no matter who is in it, goes on last. If there are two title matches, with rare exceptions, the bigger guys are going on last. No matter what names are involved, it is the title match that the promotion is built around.

The positive in that mentality is the championship is positioned as more important than the personalities or an occasional grudge match. You can argue for the long-term health of the sport, it’s the right move. Championships mean nothing in boxing today. When UFC had five champions not that many years ago, they had great value. It’s not as much now with nine, and some would argue about choices of challengers at times, but they haven’t been prostituted out of all meaning either.

But on a show like this, you sacrifice short-term. Building the promotion of the show around Henderson vs. Cormier would have yielded more results on this night. Yet, that’s not how things are done.

As far as what is the UFC’s pay-per-view baseline in 2014, the show that may answer that question comes in three weeks.

UFC 174, on June 14 in Vancouver, B.C. is built around flyweight champion Demetrious Johnson and Russian contender Ali Bagautinov. The No. 2 fight, Rory MacDonald vs .Tyron Woodley is strong enough that the winner could very well get the next welterweight title shot  If the winner looks impressive, one would think it would be a lock. But three weeks between pay-per-views is a little early. Far worse for the next show, is that it’s three weeks before UFC 175, which is the biggest show of the year.

People who like to get together with their buddies once a month or so to watch fights, and see Saturday’s show, will have an easy time skipping 174. There will already be great awareness of the big one coming, with Chris Weidman and Ronda Rousey title matches and Wanderlei Silva vs. Chael Sonnen.

White, addressing the talk that these small guys aren’t drawing big numbers, brought up that it’s the lighter weights that have carried boxing. But there is a big difference. It’s the Hispanic fan base in the Southwest that has been a key in carrying boxing, and its nationalism as much as anything that leads to it. This country doesn’t have enough Brazilians to where the nationalism of a superstar from that country is going to yield the results of a similarly-successful Mexican.

Plus, great smaller fighters in the right match-up in boxing are visually impressive with their hand speed and footwork at a level that even a casual fan can see.

Smaller MMA fighters are no less skilled than boxers, but when it comes to fighting, an MMA champion is a jack of all trades as opposed to a master of one. With the exception of a quick transition into a submission, you aren’t going to get the knock your socks off mind blowing skill for an entire fight. You may get as good of a fight, or even better, if you get back-and-forth action. You may get every bit as memorable of a knockout finish. But there are reasons that certain things work differently in boxing than MMA.  

The big guy style MMA fight that relies on power is far easier for a casual fan to understand. But in boxing, once you’re used to the speed of a smaller fight in a singular skilled sport, the big guy style feels more like plodding. Boxing fans are past the point where their sport is about wanting to see the biggest and baddest guys, particularly since MMA’s existence almost makes that lure today irrelevant. It’s more about huge personalities, nationalistic pride and impressive skills.

MMA is still about who can beat who up in the closest representation to a real fight that is allowed. And thus, size matters more. But personalities and stories of the fight will trump size.

Even with enough time to build a legacy, and/or the right opponent, Barao is probably never going to touch Georges St-Pierre’s box office marks. But if he continues to dominate his division for years to come, there may be a day where his streak becomes something the average fan talks about.

Until then, he’s the example of the reality of combat sports. Being the best doesn’t make you the biggest star.

Now that Bellator’s first pay-per-view is over, there was some tangible success in that more people were talking about the promotion than ever before. But the big questions regarding whether Bellator can be financially successful in that arena remain.

Now that Bellator’s first pay-per-view show is in the books, the key questions are was it a success? And do we get another?

The answers are difficult. The part we know looks to have been successful. Saturday’s show in Southhaven, Miss., just outside of Memphis, was entertaining, for things both good and bad, and at times frustrating. But it got more people talking about the company than ever before.

But the part we don’t know is what drives the business. What did the public decide, based not on the quality of the show, but the interest? Did enough people buy the show to make future shows on pay-per-view a reasonable hope to have a shot at making money, or would doing another one be a bad financial decision?

If the show did reasonably well financially, even if it lost money, if that number isn’t too large, there are a number of reasons to try again. The first is the reaction. Bellator is still only in its first 17 months on Spike TV. Sure, it’s been around a few years before that, but not at anywhere near its current level of exposure and interest. They are still in the brand building game.  Shows like this build the brand more than a dozen Friday nights on Spike, even if television shows will have more viewers.

Case in point, on Sunday, the third most reached item on the Internet in the U.S. was Rampage Jackson, behind only Lorde, for her performance at the American Billboard Awards, and the Miami Heat. Bellator has never had anything poke into the mainstream even close to that level. It was an interest level on par with one of the weaker UFC pay-per-view shows.

But in brand building, the key is widening the audience of the brand is to heavily promote the brand. A key point is that for the most part, on the day after a UFC show, people are searching for UFC, unless it’s something like Anderson Silva breaking a leg or Ronda Rousey fighting. In this case, they were searching for Jackson, not Bellator. Some will praise that and say it shows Bellator builds the fighter, not the organization. And maybe, if they were searching for Michael Chandler or Will Brooks, I’d agree.

The reason for using high dollar stars like Jackson and Tito Ortiz is that their notoriety may get people watching. But the building phase for the company is not promoting Jackson and Ortiz as the focal point, because both of their times are limited. The idea should be that you then present a show, and showcase fighters fans don’t know, and hype them and hope they can become  future stars.

Jackson and Ortiz are not the long-term future of Bellator. The idea is that Jackson gets a larger audience to check out the promotion. But when the talk the day after is the star from the past and not the Bellator brand or a star of the future, it somewhat mitigates the success.

Still, there is a huge psychological difference with fans between what they watch for free and what they pay to see. People were talking about this show at a level that probably no Bellator show previously reached. For someone like Michael Page, a British fighter who debuted with a one-punch knockout, his win was far more valuable to his career than a few wins on free television, even if more people were watching. 

With the exception of a glitch during the Spike prelim show where announcer Jimmy Smith was interviewing “King” Mo Lawal, and couldn’t hear Lawal’s answers, the technical aspects of the show were good.  Spike was used well to promote the big fights coming up. In between fights, they hit you hard that Lawal and Jackson was the biggest grudge match in MMA history. Whether it was or wasn’t, when it comes to getting people to make the decision to buy or not at the last minute, nothing is more effective than convincing people that the two headliners hate each other. And few in MMA are better than Jackson at playing the role of the somewhat likeable but dangerous guy, who is going to come out with vengeance to lay to an opponent.

He’s got the million dollar scowl, and the no-nonsense rap when he’s mentally into fight building. The most successful non-championship fight in UFC history was Jackson vs. Rashad Evans. Far too often in watching the two go at it, it looked like an attempt to simply copy a formula that worked. Lawal, at times, even used the same phrases as Evans did to Jackson, mocking him for being slow in particular.

As for the live gate, Bjorn Rebney’s lack of answer when directly asked the question about it spoke volumes. From a visual standpoint, it looked like a professional show. Most Bellator events are in smaller venues, and with all the spotlights in the background, it had a different look and feel. There was a strong opening video, even if it felt too similar to how UFC opened the show.

If anything, from the look and how it was shot, it felt almost too much like UFC. They should try and give the show a very distinct look in some form, whether it’s more creative entrances or a different type of presentation. But in saying it looked or felt like a UFC with different announcers and fighters, that right there tells you it looked like a professional pay-per-view event and not like a cheap imitation.

The fights are still the main course. It wasn’t boring and they gave you something to talk about.

Just like the early UFC’s were there to show that size doesn’t matter, Tito Ortiz vs. Alexander Shlemenko was living proof of how much it does .

But more than anything else, it felt like most of the post-show talked revolved around the judging of the final two fights. It was a lesson that no point scoring system can overcome bad judging. The weaknesses of ten-point must can lead to the wrong winners even with the best of judges. But the system had nothing to do with the head-scratching wins by Jackson and Will Brooks.

There’s not even any consistency in the questionable calls.

My usual thought is that in a close fight, you have to accept that either fighter can win. Michael Chandler did not blow Brooks out of the water, nor did Lawal do the same with Jackson. Yet, when the show was over, my feeling is that I’d be more comfortable with these judges picking a winner on a rock, paper, scissors standard than ten-point must.

With Jackson vs. Lawal, I wasn’t shocked Jackson won. When it was over, I thought that Lawal was the clear winner of rounds one and three. But in a judged fight, it is never good to be on the bicycle looking like you are dancing away and avoiding contact in the last minute, the one the judges usually put more weight on. Plus, it’s doubly bad when you are in the other guy’s home market in front of his fans. More often than not, a star can get a slight edge in any judged sport. And Jackson was the star. Lawal’s loss was almost assuredly him giving away the fight because he figured he had it in the bag, and he should have.

Fans really hating a fighter can be good for business. Lawal was out there antagonizing the crowd. He appeared to have the pro wrestler mentality in building the fight. But everyone hating you for what is perceived as stalling against a guy they want to see knock your head off may feel like music to your ears, it can work against you in a judged fight.

That crowd reaction shouldn’t affect the outcome with professional judges, but it often does.

Still, my thought after the fight is that we had something equivalent to a football game tied in the fourth quarter. The visiting team kicked two field goals while the home team never scored.  The visiting team quarterback ran out the clock in the last minute by taking a knee, rather than tried to pass and risk losing a game seconds from being won. In this case, the judges all voted for the team that never scored, forgetting most of the quarter, and only remembering one team was stalling out the clock.

It’s not a disaster. Jackson is the bigger and more marketable star. Whether they do a rematch or not, he’s now won three in a row and lives to headline a few more shows.

With Chandler vs. Brooks, this is far harder to explain, particularly since I had the fight 47-47, as a draw. In theory that would mean that either fighter could win. To me, the only question in scoring is if you would give round three a 10-9 or 10-8 for Brooks, and I had the latter. While I had a draw, Chandler clearly won rounds one, two and five. There was, in my mind, no mathematical way this could go to Brooks. Yet it did by scores of 48-47, 47-48 and 48-46, when two judges gave Brooks round five.

All the reasons Jackson could have unjustly won didn’t apply here. In round five, Chandler was the one who finished strong, including a late knockdown, followed by serious ground and pound, and nearly finished Brooks with an arm triangle as the fight was coming to a close. Brooks had offense earlier in the round, including a German suplex and getting Chandler’s back, but his offense wasn’t nearly as effective as Chandler’s.

Plus, not that this should matter, Chandler was both the crowd favorite and bigger star.

It’s the second straight fight that Chandler lost that he probably shouldn’t have. This bad judging makes a huge difference in careers, and Chandler is the prime example. Instead of being 14-0, lightweight champion and would be argued as possibly the best lightweight in the world, Chandler is 12-2 and viewed very differently.

The wins also lead to a number of questions. Jackson’s win gives him the four-man light heavyweight tournament crown. That means he gets the next title shot at champion Emanuel Newton. But Jackson had made it clear that’s a fight he doesn’t want, since both train under Antonio McKee in the same gym. Even before the decision was read, Jackson was screaming that he wanted a rematch, which seemed to indicate he wasn’t very positive about his chances of getting the decision.

You could do a rematch, but the fight itself wasn’t all that exciting. If anything, as strange as this seems, Jackson vs. Ortiz is suddenly the most marketable light heavyweight fight in the company.

While Brooks garnered the interim championship, meaning the logical next step is a fight with real champion Eddie Alvarez to create a single champion, there are several mitigating factors in play.

The key, as Bellator CEO Bjorn Rebney stated after the fight, is the unique contract Alvarez signed called for one more fight with Chandler specifically. So the ball is in his court..

The unique circumstances make the logical fight also the stupid one for the promotion.

Alvarez is obligated for one more fight with Bellator before he becomes an unrestricted free agent, and can sign with UFC.

If he fights and beats Brooks, he’s the clear-cut champion, has beaten Bellator’s two best lightweights and his value to UFC is even stronger. Keep in mind he was guaranteed a title shot in his first UFC fight even though he was no longer Bellator champion, having lost to Chandler. There would be nothing worse for the company than Alvarez beating both Chandler and Brooks and leaving for UFC, as both two will be battling for a title that would mean far less.

If he were to fight Chandler, and beat him again, at least Bellator can crown Brooks as champion if Alvarez leaves, and Alvarez won’t have beaten him.

The Brooks win weakens a potential Chandler vs. Alvarez III fight somewhat, which would have likely been the main event of the second pay-per-view.  But should Bellator go with the trilogy fight, in the big picture, Brooks having beaten Chandler and being a title claimant is better for the organization in the long run.

Of course, if either Brooks or Chandler beats Alvarez, the situation is completely different.

Back in 2000, when the Fertitta Brothers started talking with Bob Meyrowitz about purchasing the UFC, the big question was, What exactly were they buying?

Meyrowitz had sold most of the company tangible assets in an attempt to keep the company alive. Lorenzo Fertitta years later noted, what they were buying, was three letters.

That $2 million check for a small percentage of the alphabet has paid dividends perhaps 1,000 times over for he and his brother.

As far as the value goes of the letters, in the 20-plus years that MMA has existed in the U.S. and Japan, something like 26 companies have tried pay-per-view. And in the end, 25 have ultimately failed in that arena.

There are all kinds of initials from CFFC, to MARS, to WFA, to EFC, WCC, KOTC, Ultimate Chaos, Yamma, Bodog and others far more forgettable. There were even companies that at one time were significant historically like Pride, Pancrase and Strikeforce. In common was unless you had the initials, ultimately, you never did big numbers, and ultimately didn’t survive on pay-per-view.  What was important is that company after company built their business around a plan that included rich eggs from a golden goose that wasn’t nearly as golden as it looked from afar.

On Saturday, Bellator tries to join the small side of that ledger with its second attempt at a first impression.

What’s notable is, unlike all the others, whose business plan was based on a big score pay-per-view, Bellator has a completely different business model.  It’s a television product owned by Viacom. Unlike most of the others, if Saturday’s show doesn’t do well, they’re still in business and running shows every Friday night in the fall.  Little changes, except perhaps some, or a lot, of money is lost, a lesson may be learned and some egos may be quietly bruised.

There are arguments why Bellator could succeed on pay-per-view, and others why it can’t.

Why it could is that Bellator has a weekly television vehicle that can reach anywhere from 500,000 viewers on a show where the headliners are names that may as well have come from the witness protection program based on how well known they are, to 900,000 viewers with names that were once stars in UFC or were named Eddie Alvarez or Michael Chandler. The main events frequently top 1 million viewers. In theory, if this show was on Spike, it would probably do well in excess of 1 million viewers. So the mentality is, if you can get only 20 percent of those people to buy, you’ve hit a home run, and even 10 percent is a good showing to build from.. 

That’s a takeoff on the mentality that led the dirty dozens into bankruptcy.

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We know there are a million people who are MMA fans that will buy pay-per-view, because Chuck Liddell vs. Tito Ortiz in 2006 showed us that. Whenever UFC has something really big, it can threaten or even beat that number. So if we can only get one out of ten of those fans to sample our show, we’ll be rich. That math sounds great, but real life is more complex than percentage of UFC’s big show numbers, or percentages of your television viewers. 

Bellator’s sister promotion, TNA wrestling, which has both of Saturday’s main eventers, King Mo Lawal and Quinton “Rampage” Jackson under contract, even though neither has appeared on its show in months, does anywhere between 1 million and 1.5 million viewers every Thursday for free. When they go to pay-per-view, they’re getting maybe one percent of those people, not 20 percent.

Another reason it may not work is that Bellator this week has to make viewers overcome a huge psychological hurdle.

When viewers see your product as something that you don’t pay for, they are going to believe it isn’t worth paying for. UFC is already having that problem. The more free product there is on television, the harder it is to convince their audience to pay for it, unless it’s something really big. And UFC has protected its top stars, in the sense going forward, I don’t think you’ll be seeing Cain Velasquez, Jon Jones, Chris Weidman or Ronda Rousey defend their championships on free television.

Bellator has been a free product. Every star and every championship match has been given to the public free of charge. Asking them to then believe the product is something that they should pay for is going to only result in a push back, because Bellator has already established a price and a worth for its biggest fights. I saw Eddie Alvarez and Michael Chandler fight twice, and it gets no better than that, and it cost me nothing.  Why should I pay to see Chandler face Will Brooks?

It’s the same mentality of why pay-per-view worked in the U.S. and Canada, but in other markets, like Japan and Mexico, it never really caught on. 

The three stars of pay-per-view are boxing, pro wrestling and MMA. In the U.S., for as long as anyone can remember, the big boxing matches, whether it was Ali, Sugar Ray Leonard,  Mike Tyson, Oscar De La Hoya or Floyd Mayweather Jr., were something you paid for. Before pay-per-view existed, you had to go to your local auditorium and watch it on a big screen. Pay-per-view was just a more convenient way to pay money than the old way. In pro wrestling, television promoted the big match, but before pay-per-view, you had to go to your local arena and pay to see it. After that, pay-per-view was a natural transition. UFC itself started on pay-per-view in 1993, and didn’t even get on regular television until 2005.

In Japan and Mexico, Ali fights were on network television live. The biggest pro wrestling matches were live and free in prime time on the networks. Pay-per-view did work to a degree, but as big as wrestling and combat sports were in Japanese society, it never worked like in the U.S. Mexico is the same situation. They always had their big boxing matches and big wrestling matches for free. Paying money for a big fight, even though boxing and wrestling are far bigger culturally than the U.S., never caught on to any significant level.

I can’t help but feel Saturday’s show is on pay-per-view only because, to fans and maybe far more importantly, business partners and cable distributors, you get one pass. Bellator got that pass last time, when it canceled its original first pay-per-view at the last minute when Tito Ortiz was injured, eliminating the heavily promoted main event with Rampage Jackson. The show was moved to television. The same thing happened here, with Alvarez’s injury, taking the main event off the show. But if they canceled twice in a row, Bellator becomes, to the pay-per-view providers, the boy who cried wolf.

It’s absolutely a strong show for Bellator.

Of the five fights scheduled, four of them could viably headline a Bellator Friday night show. Jackson vs. Mo could do 1 million viewers on its own if it was on Spike. Chandler vs. Brooks would do well above average numbers. Even Tito Ortiz vs. Alexander Shlemenko, as a television main event, would beat the average.  Blagoi Ivanov vs. Alexander Volkov in the heavyweight tournament final is a viable television main event, although not one that would do above average ratings.

So the last two weeks, Jackson and King Mo in a few 11 p.m. time slots have to convince you that they hate each other as much as Jackson and Rashad Evans did years ago, and get you to pay to see them fight while putting out of your minds how Jackson vs. Evans delivered. Somehow, after getting two Alvarez vs. Chandlers for free, and knowing a third is imminent unless Chandler is upset, we have to get excited about Chandler vs. Will Brooks.

And speaking of wolf, in a fight that really defies logic, big light heavyweight Ortiz brings us back to the size mismatch days of Pride, in facing much smaller, and much better Alexander Shlemenko. I’m not sure which fight it was where Ortiz proclaimed he was in the greatest shape of his life and was healthy for the first time since 2002, and then as soon as the fight was over explained that he couldn’t wrestle or spar or train at all because of all his injuries ,that he jumped the shark as a drawing card. It’s happened so many times that his saying how great he feels this week sounds like the beginning of a Jay Leno monologue.

The only thing that remotely makes sense here, is that they are hoping that either Ortiz, at 39, after more retirements than Leno, can somehow get resurrected and be worthy of his huge paycheck by winning against a guy much smaller, and people will buy it, and want to see him face Rampage or Mo. Or, more likely, that somehow Shlemenko, the company’s middleweight champion, will increase his value by the notoriety he’d get for beating Ortiz, as if that is an exclusive club.

This was a tough sell for Chandler vs. Alvarez as the main event, but at least there was a hook in the sense it was the deciding fight of the greatest in-cage trilogy ever in the U.S. With Alvarez out, the hook is buying Rampage vs. Mo, or if you’ve got nostalgia to see Ortiz. Given the success of the post-UFC resurrections of Ken Shamrock, I’m not holding my breath on that one.

Saturday night of upsets ended up as one of UFC’s more crowd friendly shows of the year, even though it didn’t have a lineup filled with top name fighters. Matt Brown, the biggest star who emerged out of the show, went from a fighter who was lucky to have not been cut three years ago, to someone who could be booked in a title fight tomorrow with little complaining.