Midnight Mania! Ronda Rousey fallout, Cody Garbrandt callout … of Conor McGregor?

Bringing you the weird and wild from the world of MMA each and every night …

Welcome to Midnight Mania! And welcome to 2017! We officially live in a post-2016 world. Let me break the fourth wall for a second and say I actually had a good year in 2016, personally, though not without challenges. It ended well for me, in part because I started writing here at MMAmania.com. Thank you for all the positive feedback, reading and commenting on Midnight Mania in 2016. In 2017, the goal is to keep this up … except better.

Obviously, the big story from the weekend was Amanda Nunes pasting Ronda Rousey at UFC 207 (watch highlights here), this time in even more devastating fashion than when Holly Holm did it one year ago.

No small part of the blame for this goes to her awful, terrible, no-good coach, Edmond Tarverdyan.

I can’t stress enough how awful he is.

Derrick Lewis took his own shots at his upcoming opponent, the also-unpopular Travis Browne:

Also from Lewis’ Twitter …

ANYWAY …

I found this hilarious from Invicta FC champion Tonya Evinger:

This knockout is absolutely insane. I’ve never seen one quite like this before.

Dillon Danis, Conor McGregor’s Brazilian jiu-jitsu coach, posted this caricature of himself and “Notorious:”

Brazilian ring girls, y’all.

I don’t think we will see this one, but it’s pretty amazing how both Tyron Woodley and Michael Bisping seem to be going out of their way to pick fights that are not with the most deserving fighters in their divisions:

One of the breakout fighters of 2016, Lando Vannata, is one to keep an eye on in 2017.

World Series of Fighting (WSOF) put on an entertaining night of fight’s on New Year’s Eve (complete results here). Justin Gaethje has an uncanny ability to put himself into highlight reels.

This was a bizarre injury stoppage, but entertaining exchanges leading up the injury.

Jon Fitch defeated Jake Shields in what may have been his final fight at this event. He’s had quite the career — all the best to him moving forward. It’s always good when a fighter can retire off a win.

Max Holloway with the Diaz brothers? It makes sense.

If you missed it, Tim Means hit Alex “Cowboy” Oliveira with two knees that he insists he did not know were illegal.

Rogan and even Marc Ratner, who should know, contributed to the confusion on the rules. The bout was ruled a “No Contest.”

You don’t see ring girls get punched in the jaw every day:

Whoopsies!

In case you missed it, Carla Esparza and Claudia Gadelha got into it over the weekend on Twitter.

This was how we thought the Cruz-Garbrandt fight was going to go:

How it actually went:

Garbrandt took Cruz to school and made him bleed:

The win was inspiring not in small part because Garbrandt was able to fulfill his promise to his young friend and inspiration, Maddux Maple:

Afterward, they celebrated Team Alpha Male style:

Cruz, meanwhile, handled the defeat as well as anyone I’ve ever seen. He won two rounds on my scorecard (the second and fifth) so this fight wasn’t a steamrolling, and showed a toughness and a refusal to give up that we didn’t know existed beneath the slick movement and cerebral … until now.

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#ICYMI: Weekend Breakdowns

• Jack Slack’s breakdown of Cody Garbrandt’s sensational win over Dominick Cruz is incisive and also filled with Graphic Interchange Format goodness.
• Phil Mackenzie’s “So Meta” discussion of why grappling as a primary skill set seems to be going away in modern MMA. It’s illuminating, to say the least.
• And Chuck Mindenhall on why it has been so difficult to root for Ronda Rousey in this most recent fight, and why perhaps some of that schadenfreude is justified.

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Podcasts and Audio-Visual Thingamajigs

What’s next for Ronda Rousey?

The “Severe MMA” podcast: Irish accents, fighting knowledge, occasionally funny.

The “Co-Main Event Podcast:” No accents from the fictional nation of Ireland, literary knowledge, consistently amusing and also occasionally funny.

Luke Thomas’s “Monday Morning Analyst,” in which he find an old interview that highlights why Edmond Tarverdyan is unfit to be a high-level MMA coach.

Tommy Toehold’s UFC 207 Postmortem:

“The MMA Hour,” in which Garbrandt opens up about how much fun he had fighting Cruz and calls out Aldo and McGregor:

Conor and Cody have already gotten into it in the past:

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Random Land

Extremely awkward and incredibly close …

Dogs and toddlers are hilarious mixes.

Wendy’s don’t play!

Stay woke, Maniacs.