Turnover at the top of mixed martial arts makes for a dynamic main event scene. Most fighters’ time at the peak of the sport is so short that fresh and interesting matchups are always being produced.
The price we pay for that, as fans, is a lack of truly memorable rivalries. While there have been some famous trilogies in the sport’s 20-year history, only two—Frankie Edgar versus Gray Maynard and Josh Thomson versus Gilbert Melendez—can honestly be referred to as “great.”
Junior dos Santos and Cain Velasquez were supposed to change that. Instead, Velasquez beat him up for five rounds before the bout was mercifully stopped. As it turns out, when Cain isn’t injured going into the fight, it’s really not much of a contest.
No matter what the heavyweights did, however, it would have been impossible to match the exciting undercard fight between Diego Sanchez and Gilbert Melendez. The two lightweights let it all hang out as the fight came to a dramatic conclusion. And, though Melendez won a unanimous decision, there were no real losers. The crowd’s huge ovation for Sanchez, if nothing else, made that abundantly clear.
While Joe Rogan called it the best fight he had ever seen, it wasn’t the only great bout of the night. Let’s take a look at each bout and who the true winners and losers were at UFC 166.
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