The UFC is the indisputable pinnacle of MMA and with the merger with the WEC, they now have seven weight classes: heavyweight, light heavyweight, middleweight, welterweight, lightweight, featherweight and bantamweight.
According to the Unified Rules of Mixed Martial Arts, that’s seven down and just super heavyweight and flyweight to go.
Dana White has already stated that he wants to create a flyweight (125 lbs.) division. My suggestion is pretty simple: Don’t create a flyweight division from scratch. Buy one that already exists.
Tachi Palace Fights is an MMA promotion that most people haven’t heard of. This is no surprise of course. They only have one really big thing going for them—they just happen to have four of the top 10 flyweights in the world fighting under their banner.
Mamoru Yamaguchi, Ian “Uncle Creepy” McCall, Jussier “Formiga” da Silva and Darrell “The Mongoose” Montague are all top-10 fighters and all fight for Tachi Palace Fights. And they have a decent stable of other fighters, too.
So my recommendation to Zuffa is simple: Buy Taichi Palace Fights and upgrade their 125 lbs. champion to UFC champion.
The rest of the best flyweights in the world are scattered among MMA organizations all over the globe. Most of them will come to the bigger stage and better payday in the UFC.
Now what do you do about the super heavyweight division?
Once upon a time, the UFC saw giants fighting in the Octagon. Seeing the 800-pound jelly roll monster named Emmanuael Yarborough in the Octagon was a sight to behold. And watching Scott Ferozzo beat Tank Abbott at his own street-fighting game was highly entertaining.
Guys like Paul Varlens, Dan Bobbish and Andre Roberts all saw a good degree of success in the UFC. And none of them could fight in the UFC today because all of them were well over 300 lbs. Cutting weight to 265 lbs. just wouldn’t have been realistic for any of them.
Fast forward to today and we see guys like Hong Man-Choi, Semmy Schilt, Bob Sapp and Eric Pele. All of them are too big to effectively compete in a 265 lbs. division. And who knows how many giant men out there simply don’t bother pursuing MMA because they’re just too big.
The problem with the super heavyweight division today is quite simple. There are very few super heavyweight fighters because really big men have nowhere to compete. They have nowhere to compete because there are very few active super heavyweights.
All major MMA organizations do not have a super heavyweight division currently. Ranking systems completely ignore their weight class.
In my opinion, the people behind the Unified Rules of MMA should just dissolve the super heavyweight division and make heavyweight unlimited. But I think we all know how likely that is. Try convincing them that 12-to-6 elbows should be legal.
You can throw them numbers and prove beyond all doubt that 350-pound fighters do not have a significant advantage over 250-pound fighters. You can point out that MMA history proves that the 250 lbs. guy is significantly more likely to win than the 350 lbs. guy.
But at the end of the day, they’re just seeing some 7’ tall behemoth facing off against someone a foot shorter and 100 lbs. lighter. You’re never going to convince them that this is a fair fight.
Since you can’t change the rules, what do you do? What Zuffa needs is a test laboratory.
Create a super heavyweight division in Strikeforce and wait and see if it grows into anything. Have Bob Sapp fight Hong Man-Choi for the inaugural title or something like that. Give it a few years and if it grows, move it into the UFC. If it doesn’t, dump it.
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