By any metric, 2013 was a weird year in mixed martial arts.
After years of setting our watches by the UFC’s welterweight and middleweight champions, both Anderson Silva and Georges St-Pierre disembarked for the great unknown. The world’s largest MMA provider continued to pack its schedule with more and more fight-related goodness, and its relationship with its biggest competitor (BellatorMMA) hit an all-time low.
New champions were crowned (Chis Weidman, Anthony Pettis), while some familiar faces (Robbie Lawler, Matt Brown, Vitor Belfort) reinserted themselves into the conversation. There were bad beats and drug cheats, as well as copious examples of bald men shouting at us from our TV screens, imploring us to open our wallets to purchase their wares.
Perhaps most importantly, women finally came to the UFC. Ronda Rousey was crowned bantamweight champion, and late in 2013 we got word that strawweights are on deck. They’ll be featured in an upcoming season of The Ultimate Fighter.
These are heady times, friends, and to quote the great poet Ferris Bueller: Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.
Before we plunge headlong into the nonstop sprint that will be 2014, Bleacher Report MMA lead writers Chad Dundas and Jonathan Snowden look back at the year that was. Together, they grapple with the calendar turn’s most gripping question: Who won 2013?