Opinion: UFC Sacramento and the virtue of ‘next’

Jordan Breen looks back at Saturday’s UFC Sacramento card, and why an event that had some good moments felt so empty.

It’s hard to write a column with a stringent, strong narrative about Saturday night’s UFC Fight Night 155 card in Sacramento. It wasn’t without its high peaks and pops, especially for local stars. At the same time, it was woefully emblematic of a modern Ultimate Fighting Championship-throwaway card. In years prior, any given UFC card oriented us toward whatever was next, be it a pay-per-view or a cable television offering and we wouldn’t have got a lineup like this. Consequently, we wouldn’t have ended up with such a baffling, schizoid card that we received.

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It’s not even necessarily that UFC Fight Night 155 was bad per se. I mean, it was probably the promotion’s weakest event this calendar year so far, and may not be topped, but as I alluded to, there were some fun, feel good moments. Even if I could go several blissful lifetimes without hearing “California Love” ever again, watching Urijah Faber clock a quality fighter like Ricky Simon in 46 seconds in front of his hometown audience still makes your heart sing a bit. Likewise, an all-action fighter like Andre Fili, a Team Alpha Male representative himself, getting a first-round knockout against a wily striker like Sheymon Moraes was lovely too. And, that’s to say nothing of another Alpha Male member, Josh Emmett crumpling Mirsad Bektic as a +150 underdog.

Gazing through this particular lens, the card was a success. It put over 10,000 in the stands – comp ticket numbers weren’t released, but at least people were sitting in the Golden1 Center – and three of the four night’s bonuses went to Alpha Male fighters based in the city, from the recently retired bridesmaid to the tattooed wild-child to the consistent featherweight spoiler. If you train at Urijah Faber’s Ultimate Fitness or simply have civic pride in being from Sactown, maybe this card really spoke to you. In all honesty, I actually find it refreshing and commendable that in the WME-IMG era, the UFC lined up a card for a smaller market and actually got local talent on the card, which is an increasing rarity. On the other hand, in the broader stroke, this was a pretty awful card for the UFC.

Combat sports can be exciting in a vacuum; you can see an animated gif on Twitter of a thrilling knockout or submission and be enthralled. However, at the highest level – certainly when it comes to the biggest MMA promotion in the world – professional prizefighting is best when a thrilling outcomes orients you toward what’s next. This is ingrained in us, and hell, it’s why the UFC’s PR staff now force every fighter to have another athlete’s name on the tip of their tongue to call out the minute they win a fight. Unfortunately, this was a card that guided us toward nothing.

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Let’s consider the main event. I have no qualms with the matchmaking; Aspen Ladd is a great prospect. She’s just 24 years old and needed an opponent to affirm her status as a top contender at 135 pounds and make the jump to elite status. However, she ended up facing one of the best kickfighting women ever, who has openly and contemptuously refused to play the UFC rat race. She has a stable job with benefits as a police officer in the Netherlands and after becoming the inaugural UFC women’s featherweight champion, had no issue with vacating her title rather than fighting Cristiane “Cyborg” Justino. This was just her second fight in almost two and a half years. The mantra of matchmaking is creating win-win scenarios. If Ladd had won, sure, the UFC has a new contender for Amanda Nunes. Now, they have a prospect going back to building blocks and a main event winner who doesn’t give a damn about the promotion, its title scenario, or a showdown with Nunes. Way to go.

And, I don’t want to minimize Urijah Faber’s performance, because I thought it was fantastic. He came out of retirement at 40 years old – not looking a day over 14, mind you – and smashed a once-beaten prospect in Ricky Simon in a mere 46 seconds, landing a swooping overhand right and follow-up ground-and-pound that made it seem like the spirit of Dan Henderson crept into his body. It wasn’t a bunch of elbows followed up with an arm-in guillotine; it was something different and exciting from “The California Kid.” Yet, what does this lead to? Nevermind the fact that Simon can be forever dissed by being the guy who got clocked by aged butt chin, do you really want to watch a 40-year-old Urijah Faber fight Henry Cejudo? I’m not putting it past the UFC at this point, but imagine being Aljamain Sterling, sitting at home and brushing your hands through your hightop fade and wondering what you’ve done to your life.

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Perhaps most emblematic of the aimless nature of this card was grappling wiz Ryan Hall’s win over Team Alpha Male’s Darren Elkins. You know Ryan Hall, the dude whose submission game is based on 50-50 position, which should have no purchase in MMA? Well, he knocked Elkins down two times officially by FightMetric count, but as an independent observer, I wouldn’t argue if you gave him three knockdowns. Do you think for a second that Ryan Hall really cares about an MMA career? Just wait until ONE Championship gives him enough money to do a grappling match with Shinya Aoki and he’s gone. That’s the theme of this card; it had its moments, it was largely boring, but more poignantly, it’s just a road to nowhere, which is the curse and scourge for any MMA promotion. Going somewhere is what sweats people, entices them, gets them excited, makes them open their wallets even if your product is sprawled over over-the-top streaming services.

There’s nothing wrong with simply enjoying fights for entertainment’s sake, but in actual practice, it doesn’t happen that way for fans. If you’re a lover of any particular sport, you’re not simply taking in a single fight, game or match, appreciating it for its outcome and then moving on. You want to take pleasure in the outcome, but you’re driven by its result to wonder what comes next, what it leads to, thirsting for what comes next. When there’s no appreciable “next,” whatever you just witnessed feels hollow and empty. That feeling is even more profound when it concerns the biggest MMA promotion in the world. There’s a million things to criticize the WME/Endeavor iteration of the UFC for, but regardless of you feel about union-busting tactics and the diluted quality of major cards, there should always be that sense of “next,” that whatever you watch, whoever wins, however they do it, moves them as an athlete and us as a spectator, toward a new frontier to magnetize us further and help us try to solve the fundamental driving point of sports fandom: who is the best?

UFC Fight Night 155 may stand as the weakest UFC card this calendar year, but it’s not as though it was an extraordinarily awful viewing. Rather, it simply toyed with our fundamental interest in MMA, offering us bodies in a cage that for a moment, giving us visual action, but ultimately amounting to nothing. If fights for fights’ sake was all we craved, we’d all just watch videos on World Star Hip Hop instead. We watch MMA at its highest level because we are driven by the proposition of progression, and when the biggest promoters in the world lose sight of that, it doesn’t matter if we get some slick submissions or nasty knockouts over the course of a seven-hour marathon of fights. “Next” is a critical element of any fight, any card and without it, this is just bread and circuses.