As we sit here in the afterglow of a week when the UFC flat out bludgeoned its fans into veritable submission with nearly an entire day’s worth of fistfights spread across three consecutive nights, there’s a weird cross section of emotions at play.
Excitement over new champions.
Enthusiasm over the return of former champions.
Exhaustion over the sheer volume of combat since Thursday evening.
UFC 200 was to be the crown jewel of all this, headlined by superstars on top of stars on top of action fighters, but it sort of fell flat. It wasn’t bad, but when an event touts such a number of champions, former champions and performance-bonus winners in its advertisements, hopes are pretty high. It’s not an unreasonable stance to suggest those hopes went largely unfulfilled on Saturday night.
The early prelims delivered quick, violent finishes to prime the pump. The Fox Sports 1 portion of the night was full of competitive action and provided some interesting tilts but certainly held less savagery. The main card devolved a little further, a strange hodgepodge of misplaced fights and oddities that made it hard to feel any momentum building.
It could be surmised this had a lot more to do with the pacing of the event than it did the fights themselves.
The five fights that made up the main card were all appealing for one reason or another—star power, high stakes and what have you—and there were worthwhile performances in each. Cain Velasquez looked to be back in form stopping Travis Browne, Jose Aldo looked like he did 10 years ago in dispatching Frankie Edgar, Daniel Cormier and Anderson Silva were playing with house money by even fighting at all, Brock Lesnar returning was Brock Lesnar returning (enough said) and Amanda Nunes shocked the sport by trucking Miesha Tate in a few minutes.
Unfortunately, the roller coaster ride of the event’s production made it so exhausting it was hard to care about any of these as they happened. You just kind of wanted to see them get on with it all.
Having a five-round fight followed by two three-round fights before the main event was the viewing equivalent of a fighter’s adrenaline dump in the cage after years of being conditioned to see such a bout as the end of your night. The predictably wrestling-heavy game plans of Cormier and Lesnar back-to-back also helped draw things to a grinding halt right in the middle of the evening.
Having Tate and Nunes go on after Lesnar was a death knell for whatever interest they’d generated, as it seemed the whole world was there to see what the pro wrestling star would look like after five years away from MMA, and they weren’t sticking around to engage with a women’s bantamweight title fight immediately afterward.
The repeated insistence of showing an arena full of fans watching videos on some sort of octagonal curtain dragged things on far more than was required as well. It was all tedious to the point a Nate Diaz interview—one of the great things MMA itself has to offer—felt more like an agonizing time-filler than the celebratory experience it usually is.
It’s strange a company that does so many things right would struggle so mightily with piecing together the parts for its biggest-ever event.
Someone in the Zuffa offices should have undertaken a study into the best way to construct the card because sprinkling random fights with random stakes throughout the night was clearly problematic. Based on the eternity that most Fox Sports 1 cards become between fights, studio analysis and commercials, it’s perhaps unsurprising no one did.
So as you sit in the wreckage of the biggest fight week on the calendar, trying to understand why you weren’t fulfilled by the biggest event in UFC history, consider it might be out of your hands. The fights weren’t terrible, and the pomp and circumstance was done correctly. But the pacing was clearly off.
Oh well.
There’s always UFC 300.
Follow me on Twitter: @matthewjryder.
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