DJ Summers | UFC Betting Sites - The Best MMA Online Bookies

UFC Fight Night 36: Lessons We Learned from Brazil

For the second time in 2014, UFC Fight Night 36 favored the technical over the exciting. Ten of the 12 cards ended in decision, just like UFC 169. We have a few items to look at in the aftermath of a patience-testing fight night.

Could Tactical …

Could Tactical Fights Become the Norm?

It’s most likely a series of matchup flukes, but we should think about evolution of the sport, as well.

With 10 decisions out of 12 fights, last night gave us a reason to fear a chilling effect from the abolition of KO and Submission of the Night bonuses in favor of the grayer Performance of the Night bonus.

The UFC still gave the performance bonuses to Erick Silva and Charles Oliveira for their respective knockout and submission. Lyoto Machida and Gegard Mousasi won the Fight of the Night bonus, though, and that’s important because it illustrates the gulf between boring and skillful.

They fought a measured, precise and entertaining fight. Tactical and technical doesn‘t have to mean tentative and slow, and they showed us how and why.

If the evolution of boxing is any indication, the UFC could be moving toward fewer finishes. Boxing had far more KO’s and TKO’s in its early days. We might be getting a development of Octagon-craft at the cost of finishes.

Middleweight Ranks Tightening

The circle of the middleweight division just got a little more competitive. We now have several Brazilians looking hungry to get Chris Weidman‘s belt.

Machida looks more natural at middleweight than light heavyweight. What’s more, he doesn’t have the steroid issues, credibility challenges or broken shins of some other middleweights we could mention.

A new, clean, two-belt champion would restore some of the juice the UFC lost with Silva. Machida‘s nationality helps. Another Brazilian champion in a popular division helps the UFC’s continued entry into the Brazilian market.

Gegard Mousasi, for his part, looked outmatched but not overwhelmed. No. 3 ranked Brazilian Ronaldo “Jacare” Souza showed a great wrestling display against Francis Carmont. This puts Souza in title contention but not enough to jump the queue in front of Machida. This ought to pressure Machida and the organization to move hard against title holder Chris Weidman, set to fight Vitor Belfort later this year.

Refs Need to Be More Active

It’s too early in the year to have a list of refereeing flubs. After Herb Dean’s early stoppage of the Barao-Faber fight, UFC refs should lay the law down more consistently and proactively.

Featherweight Felipe Arantes recovered from a groin-shot heard ’round the world for a unanimous decision win against Maximo Blanco. Ref Mario Yamasaki deducted a point, though the kick was a clearly accidental inside leg kick gone awry.

Ivan Jorge got two pokes in the eye from Rodrigo Damm in their preliminary lightweight match. Damm also planted a heel kick to Jorge’s stomach a little too low. These accidents, troublesome as they were, didn’t get any points deducted from Damm, who won a unanimous decision to the crowd’s boos.

Gegard Mousasi landed an illegal up-kick to Lyoto Machida‘s face during the fourth round of their match. Mario Yamasaki stopped the fight but didn’t penalize Mousasi.

In both the Jorge-Damm and Machida-Mousasi fights, the referee seemed to respond rather than call the shots. Jorge and Machida looked to make the calls more than Yamasaki, halting their action before the call was made the same way Barao implored Herb Dean to give him a TKO stoppage against Faber.

Hopefully this won’t be a pattern, and the referees tighten their game.

Read more MMA news on BleacherReport.com

UFC Fight Night 36: 4 Fighters with the Most to Lose

Like most free cards, UFC Fight Night 36 isn’t stacked with marquee fighters and title shots. Plenty of the participants could suffer more damage than a cracked orbital socket, however.
In particular, two fighters need to perform well to preserve…

Like most free cards, UFC Fight Night 36 isn’t stacked with marquee fighters and title shots. Plenty of the participants could suffer more damage than a cracked orbital socket, however.

In particular, two fighters need to perform well to preserve their reputations and championship chases, while two others need to perform well to stay in the game at all.

Lyoto Machida has a chance to clean up a sticky career at UFC Fight Night 36. He dropped from light heavyweight to middleweight with an authoritative head-kick knockout of Mark Munoz at UFC Fight Night 30. This will be far from his last chance to re-energize his career, but losing now would destroy good momentum and an exploitable power vacuum.

Machida‘s career has a long string of almosts and not quites due in part to his sometimes-exciting, sometimes-boring counter-offensive style. UFC president Dana White denied the Brazilian a rematch against Quinton “Rampage” Jackson, who won a controversial split decision against “The Dragon” at UFC 123. White also skipped over Machida as a title contender after his impressive KO of Randy Couture at UFC 129.

He dropped out of a potential UFC 151 rematch against Jon Jones after Dan Henderson got injured, which resulted in one more title-shot denial. A matchup against Phil Davis at UFC 163 gave Machida another hotly contested decision loss.

Now a middleweight, he has busted out of a tough 205-pound division into one that is littered with opportunity. Machida has enough clout, history, style and personality to make a powerful champion; now he can make a title run without the history of awkward decisions and unexciting performances. We can see him as the precision knockout artist—the Bruce Lee-esque assassin we thought he was in 2009.

Or he can lose and fall into the same cycle of inconsistency and boredom—but in a lighter class.

After Georges St-Pierre’s departure, it’s doubtful UFC fans will flock to a cautious fighter. Francis Carmont, a Tristar Gym pupil, exemplifies that style in the middleweight division and faces a borderline lose-lose situation.

To beat Ronaldo “Jacare” Souza, a fearsome striker and Brazilian jiu-jitsu artist, Carmont needs to fight carefully. The Frenchman has yet to demonstrate the kind of power or resilience that would carry him through a UFC-level brawl.

If he fails, he will lose to a more exciting fighter in a stacked division, hurting his chances at succession as well as damaging his skillful reputation. If he wins, he’ll probably do it with another boring wrestling show or split decision, taking casual fans back to St-Pierre’s biannual insults.

Before losses to Jon Fitch and Dong Hyun Kim, Erick Silva gave us plenty to chat about in the welterweight division. Now he’s 3-3 in the UFC.

The UFC is bringing in King of Pancrase welterweight champion Takenori Sato to replace an injured, recently re-signed Nate Loughran. Housekeeping matches bode ill for at least one of the fighters involved—in this case Silva.

The UFC isn’t bringing in the Japanese welterweight to make a debut loss to a former prospect; he’s here to shake up the leaderless welterweight division. If Silva can beat Sato, he’ll prove he still belongs in the division. If not, he’ll end up with a losing record and probably a pink slip.

Similarly, Charles Oliveira‘s 4-4 UFC record puts him one loss away from being a bad investment. Like Silva, Oliveira is coming off two consecutive losses—a KO from Cub Swanson and a unanimous decision to Frankie Edgar.

He looked sharp against Edgar, but his losses to contenders Jim Miller and Donald Cerrone say a lot about UFC Fight Night 36. He’s fighting Andy Ogle for the right to stick around and ascend to the inner circle of the featherweight division. Only a decisive win will convince the promotion that he’s worth keeping around.

We might not get to see the next king being crowned on Saturday, but we might see some careers fizzle out. The flip side of the fight coin is important too.

Read more MMA news on BleacherReport.com

Dana White Should Stop Talking Smack on Georges St. Pierre

Dana White’s habit of berating people who displease him might do more harm than good when it comes to Georges St. Pierre. It could only end up painting White as even more fickle, spiteful and childish than usual—and at the expense of what sh…

Dana White‘s habit of berating people who displease him might do more harm than good when it comes to Georges St. Pierre. It could only end up painting White as even more fickle, spiteful and childish than usual—and at the expense of what should be better memory.

Since former UFC welterweight champion St. Pierre announced his unofficial retirement after UFC 167, the two men keep a steady back-and-forth.

GSP spoke in favor of better UFC drug testing and called the promotion a monopoly. He said his life was too high-pressure to continue as champion, which is reasonable considering the vitriol surrounding his UFC 167 fight against Johny Hendricks and the seven years of stardom preceding it.

White responded.

He railed against the Hendricks decision. He railed against GSP‘s decision to take a hiatus, saying that GSP “owed” the UFC. He called St. Pierre “kooky,” an insult he used again on Wednesday’s Fox Sports Live after Freddie Roach came out in support of the champion’s decisions.

This kind of venom deflates White’s already-shaky credibility among fight fans.

Certainly, White rules the UFC world, and his word is more or less law; the basis for the UFC’s success rests on internal control. The organization needs White’s rigid, bombastic temperament to keep fighters in line. When White insults a fighter who left him for no other reason than the leaving, it looks more like a spurned lover’s jealous anger than strong management.

St. Pierre has a well-earned reputation as the most gentlemanly fighter in MMA. He put a pleasant, accessible, marketable face on a sport where two caged men beat each other. He was dominant without a personality that scared off the casual fans whose dollars the UFC needs to grow. The whole time he stayed loyal to the UFC and showed a superhuman resolve to maintain his good-natured vibe even in the face of insulting opponents.

We could understand White’s hatred for Tito Ortiz. Talking badly of GSP feels wrong, like insulting Bob Cratchit.

Furthermore, White undoes his own PR campaign. It was White who rallied behind St. Pierre as the biggest draw in the UFC. White and the unstoppable UFC press engine pumped us full of stats and praises about how dominant he was. They told us he was the best, and we agreed.

Then fans started lambasting him over his careful title defenses. Fans criticized him for not moving weight classes to fight Anderson Silva. Finally, he quit, complaining of headaches and lack of life perspective, and justifiably so. White might as well slap a shell-shocked soldier.

The UFC is about controlling its ranks and its message, but more and more the fans are siding with the fighters.

Issues like pay and labor rights come down harder on White than anyone. Getting mad at St. Pierre exposes the dependence of the UFC on keeping the fighters leashed, only now the fighters have more traction individually than years ago. If there were ever a precedent for fighters to leave voluntarily and call attention to organizational issues, GSP fits the bill.

We like Uncle Dana when he’s curmudgeonly, but not when he’s outright vengeful to someone we’ve been conditioned, by him, to love. A smarter move for White would be a public and (outwardly) sincere reconciliation with St. Pierre.

The UFC prides itself on fostering a bond between fighter and fan. It seems like a bad move to taint one of the purer bonds we had and reveal the deeply fixed control issues at the heart of the promotion.

The high road might be more self-preservation than public relations for White. It’s unwise to turn your enemies into martyrs.

Read more MMA news on BleacherReport.com

Anthony Johnson: Pay MMA Fighters Like MLB Stars and They Won’t Use PEDs

Give Anthony Johnson credit for combining the two hottest subjects in MMA, even if they seem to have little to do with each other beyond stirring up opinions. We know now that Johnson A) likes and accepts PEDs and B) wants equivalent pay to M…

While speaking as a guest on Sirius XM’s TapouT radio (h/t MMA Mania’s Michael Stets), the recently re-signed UFC light heavyweight Johnson claimed not only that most fighters use performance-enhancing drugs, but that PED use is tied to their allegedly low pay.

“The one thing that he didn’t say is that you got guys like A-Rod and all them,”Johnson told host Ricky Bones. “They making millions per game. We making a couple thousand. They look at us and be like, ‘Man that’s pocket change for me.’ Hell, I’m probably about to say something stupid but I’m about to say, either pay us like them (MLB) and then we won’t have to use it, or let us use it so we can get to that level.”

Johnson claimed drug use is a necessary part of training and poses no problems as long as fighters use it responsibly. Fighters use it not to compete, but to simply keep up with their routine.

“With as much training as we do, you have to take something,” said Johnson. “I mean, it doesn’t have to be illegal, but you have to do something, because you just can’t say ‘I’m going to go home and go to sleep’ and just wake up in the morning and feel better. It doesn’t work like that.”

For amusement’s sake, let’s dissect this. Firstly, Anthony Johnson failed to illustrate exactly the connection between pay and PED use. It seems like he simply wants both steroids and more pay and connected them for convenience. Obviously, if baseball is any example, higher pay doesn’t exactly prevent steroid use.

Secondly, Johnson’s claims of “millions per game” are less than accurate. According to MLBPlayers.com, the average 2013 yearly salary for an MLB player was $3,386,212. At the required 162 games per season, the average per game pay is $20,902.

The fact that Johnson brought up Alex Rodriguez is also perplexing, as Rodriguez was suspended by MLB over a steroid scandal. Alex Rodriguez, coincidentally, has a $275 million contract, the largest in MLB history. So much for the “higher pay equals fewer PEDs” theory.

Lastly, if fighters need PEDs to make it through their day, we might need a conversation about over-training and proper physical rehab. TRT usage for a hormonal imbalance is one thing; total institutional reliance is something else entirely.

Read more MMA news on BleacherReport.com

5 Things We Learned from UFC 169

If UFC 169 did not exist, we would have to invent it as an example.
UFC 169 flopped from the first online prelim to the last title fight. Of 12 fights, 10 went to decision, the most in UFC history. The most important, a rematch between bantamweight cha…

If UFC 169 did not exist, we would have to invent it as an example.

UFC 169 flopped from the first online prelim to the last title fight. Of 12 fights, 10 went to decision, the most in UFC history. The most important, a rematch between bantamweight champion Renan Barao (33-1-0) and former champ Urijah Faber (30-6-0), ended with a premature stoppage by referee Herb Dean.

Barao clearly controlled the fight. He dropped Faber with an overhand right and pounded him on the ground. Faber stayed in belly-down side control, and the California Kid was only able to turtle up and cover his face against the barrage of punches Barao threw. Though Faber gave a thumbs up to signal he was surviving, Barao pled with Dean to end the fight.

UFC president Dana White called the whole night a travesty:

I think [Dean] is the best referee in the business. He rarely ever makes mistakes, but he made a mistake tonight. Barao gets screwed and Faber gets screwed. It’s the cherry on the 10-decision, record-breaking catastrophe this evening.

More than just a boring card, UFC 169 shed light on some issues the promotion will have to deal with moving forward.

Begin Slideshow