Tag: Rankings/List

UFC Fight Night 83 and its fighters faced plenty of misfortune in the run-up to the event, held Sunday night in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. No fewer than seven competitors disappeared from the event for one reason or another.

That includes some crowd-pleasing strikers in Brandon Thatch and Sam Alvey. Another knockout artist, John Lineker, pulled out after he contracted a case of dengue fever. Dengue fever!

Most notably, Tim Means was flagged for a potential doping violation and had to withdraw from his main event with Donald Cerrone. That’s the same Donald Cerrone who made a big name for himself at lightweight and debuted Sunday as a welterweight. 

Cerrone instead faced a relatively unheralded (if fairly exciting) competitor in Alex Oliveira, who also goes by the nickname Cowboy. I know, what are the odds? 

Even with the amazing nickname convergence, that fight and this card as a whole had a notably lower Q score, thanks to injuries and bad luck. Hey, it happens.

But that doesn’t mean there weren’t good fights. You just have to know where and how to look. That’s where we come in, and as always, the final stat lines only reveal so much. These are the real winners and losers from UFC Fight Night 83. 

For the literal-minded among us, full card results appear on the final slide.

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There’s probably a nicer way to put it than “freak show,” but not a whole lot nicer.

There are probably also nicer ways to make a buck, particularly for older guys who poured the foundation of modern MMA. 

And yet, here we are. Whether motivated by financial security, a final quaff of notoriety, a strategy for seat butts and TV eyeballs, a last grasp at score-settling or something else or all of it or none of it, freak-show fights—which, in case it’s not self-explanatory, tend to feature wild contrasts in style or size, over-the-hill legends and/or unpolished, if somehow charismatic, competitors—seem to be in MMA’s DNA. 

Just look at UFC 1. No weight classes. Virtually no rules. Sumo vs. kung-fu. That thing was all freak show.

A strain of that—sometimes entertaining, sometimes sad, sometimes gross, sometimes compelling, sometimes all of it—has persisted throughout the years and the evolution of the sport.

And now, it gives me nothing but the purest pleasure to observe that we appear ensconced in a new freak-show golden age. That’s thanks to Bellator, the promotion that under Scott Coker has crafted several freak-show matchups as one way of matching swords with the monolithic UFC.

On Friday, it happens again with Bellator 149, which is headlined by a trilogy matchup between UFC 1-and-then-some champion Royce Gracie (49) and inaugural UFC Superfight champion Ken Shamrock (52). Combined age? One hundred and one. The last time they fought each other? 1995.

Oh, but that’s not all. Knockout artist Kimbo Slice takes on fellow backyard fighting legend Dada 5000 in the evening’s co-main event. Double your fun.

To honor the occasion, let us now look at the top 10 freak-show fights in MMA history. They are ranked based on the prominence of the competitors and the degree to which the fight was a freak show. Were the combatants really old? Did they weigh a lot? That’s going to “weigh” in their favor on the freak-show scale.

Got it? Great. Step right up.

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Joined once more by Zane Simon from Bloody Elbow, we bring you 10 of the best brawls that have ever blessed the cage (or ring). 

I’m more of a grappling fan than a striking fan, but even I won’t deny that little else can replicate the anticipation and excitement generated by all-out brawls in MMA. They have you on the edge of your seat the whole time.

The best brawls come from fairly matched opponents; while lopsided matchmaking may deliver highlight-reel knockouts, they’re not satisfying. Watching two evenly matched elite strikers try to outwit each other with their fists and footwork is to witness the combat sports equivalent of a masterpiece. As MMA has evolved and refined itself over the years, we’ve seen the cream of the crop of brawls get honed to a new level as well.

What constitutes “best” is subjective; our main criteria were relevance and degree of technicality or sheer insanity. The other criterion was that the fight wasn’t Don Frye vs. Yoshihiro Takayama. This is a list of the best brawls…aside from that one.

Really, there were so many possibilities, we can’t include them all, even with an honorable mentions slide. Tell us in the comments what’s missing!

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While January provided neither the quantity nor the quality of December’s delectable smorgasbord of MMA action, it was still a month filled with meaningful action.

Robbie Lawler and Carlos Condit put on an all-timer of a welterweight title fight to open up proceedings, while Dominick Cruz regained the belt he never lost in the cage against T.J. Dillashaw two weeks later. Anthony Johnson put a brutal beating on Ryan Bader to cap off the month. Ben Rothwell staked his claim for a title fight at heavyweight for what seems like the umpteenth time.

Bleacher Report’s panel of voters took it all into account, so let’s take a look at how these fights affected the rankings.

As usual, each panelist’s rankings are available on Twitter.

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One of the great things about MMA is its athletic purity. Not to get all purple on you, but nothing else strips physical competition down to bare wood like fighting.

The same goes for the mind and spirit. If you’re not properly prepared or girded, a fight will expose that posthaste.

All of these tenets were on full display Saturday in the main event of UFC on Fox 18, which went down from the Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey.

Said main event featured a stylistic matchup as old as organized combat itself. Anthony “Rumble” Johnson, the favorite, is a knockout artist, with 14 of his 20 professional wins arriving at the ends of his heavy fists and feet. He has also been dogged by a tendency throughout his career to tire and flag in later rounds.

As it happens, Ryan Bader, the underdog, was an All-American wrestler in college, more of a grinder who, the assumptions went, would try to control and outlast the dangerous striker on the mat. But a game plan is only as good as the person executing it, and Bader has historically struggled to perform in big fights, like this one.

The main event was only one of the 13 bouts on Saturday’s docket. In the co-main event, bruising heavyweights Josh Barnett and Ben Rothwell met, and the meeting had implications for the top end of that division.

Oh, and there was that Sage Northcutt guy, too.

As always, the final stat lines only reveal so much. Here are the real winners and losers from UFC on Fox 18.

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Super Bowl weekend became decidedly less super for MMA fans Monday when heavyweight champion Fabricio Werdum withdrew from the main event of UFC 196.

The news, delivered by Guilherme Cruz of MMA Fighting, comes precisely one day after former champ Cain Velasquez pulled out of the fight with Werdum because of a back injury. It was to be a rematch between the two greats and the first bout for both since Werdum defeated Velasquez for the title last June.

Because of the history and stakes involved, this was a hotly anticipated fight and the clear anchor of the UFC’s always-important Super Bowl weekend pay-per-view event.

The whole thing got us to thinking: Although there’s a pretty good chance this one gets rescheduled at some point in time, as it stands, where does Werdum-Velasquez 2 rank among the biggest UFC fights that never were? We shall now rank the top five based on how good the fight could have been and how important it was.

Two notes: First, these are fights that were on the official books at one time but didn’t happen. This is no hypothetical matchmaking. Second, we’re talking about fights that were cancelled entirely, as opposed to those where one fighter changed or something like that.

Got it? That’s great. Let’s get it on.

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