Mixed Martial Arts

[Tonton]

Shin-Gi-Tai...

Shin: in MMA, killer instinct, the will to suffer more than your opponent.

Gi: skills. You can learn them.

Tai: the physical part, that can mitigate a small disadvantage with regards to skills, that can make you outlast the opponent (i.e. your strength bar in the video game doesn't go to red as fast as your opponent), endurance while you are explosive, that's why you dope.

There's no substitute for mental toughness and skills. Or at least no quick substitute, hence the say that you can't turn a donkey into a Kentucky Derby winner. Shrinks, training can improve a fighter. But the low hanging fruit is Tai: after round one and your opponent is at 80%, you're at 90%. after round two your opponent is at 70% and you're at 85%. Or just over-power. It can be natural, and you're a great athlete, or it can be...and you're a fraud.

That's Jones, Spider, Brock, and plenty more.

I would venture to say that MMA is more dirty than any sport. That's why GSP left, The come-back was risky, you don't show up with a knife at a gunfight with all the doping going on. Maybe that's why he chose Bisping.

GSP: stop or you will meet a Lance, who may not get busted and your legacy is tainted. Just a Connor smack and go. Big money.

[jmdirt]

Shin-Gi-Tai...

Shin: in MMA, killer instinct, the will to suffer more than your opponent.

Gi: skills. You can learn them.

Tai: the physical part, that can mitigate a small disadvantage with regards to skills, that can make you outlast the opponent (i.e. your strength bar in the video game doesn't go to red as fast as your opponent), endurance while you are explosive, that's why you dope.

There's no substitute for mental toughness and skills. Or at least no quick substitute, hence the say that you can't turn a donkey into a Kentucky Derby winner. Shrinks, training can improve a fighter. But the low hanging fruit is Tai: after round one and your opponent is at 80%, you're at 90%. after round two your opponent is at 70% and you're at 85%. Or just over-power. It can be natural, and you're a great athlete, or it can be...and you're a fraud.

That's Jones, Spider, Brock, and plenty more.

I would venture to say that MMA is more dirty than any sport. That's why GSP left, The come-back was risky, you don't show up with a knife at a gunfight with all the doping going on. Maybe that's why he chose Bisping.

GSP: stop or you will meet a Lance, who may not get busted and your legacy is tainted. Just a Connor smack and go. Big money.

NOT. We probably should engage in that discussion here though.

[StyrbjornSterki]

A former UFC fighter just got 10 months in the dock for accepting a bribe to take a dive at Fight Night 79 (2015) in Seoul.

A sudden swing in the betting tipped off UFC officials that the fight might have been fixed so they went to Bang Tae-hyun and gave him a very pointed warning before the fight. His sentence was reduced because he both won the fight and gave back the money but the online story offers no detail as to how the police might have known he repaid the bribe, or what the proof was that he had accepted it in the first place. The fight took place two years ago today and Bang (is that not the perfect name for a fighter?) apparently is still both alive and ambulatory, so it seems to me he has been treated much more harshly by the Korean legal system than the Korean mafia (but maybe we should reserve judgement on that account until we've seen how he fares after 10 months in the nick).

AFAIK this is the first public acknowledgement of fight fixing in the UFC, but it does give one to wonder, is this the only time it's happened or merely the first time anyone's been caught?

[StyrbjornSterki]

GSP now is on the UFC's sick list due to colitis. He is famous for the anxiety bouts he experiences before a fight, which can't help in that regard. I think this probably comes closer to the truth of why he skipped out on four years fighting than tales of "unfairness" due to the UFC's slipshod policing of PEDs. If he's looking for an honourable "out" from fighting for a living, this looks bespoke. But considering the result of the Bisping fight, and considering how few of his final pre-layoff fights he managed to score a finish on, I can't help but wonder whether he isn't a more formidable fighter with the extra one stone. I don't think he ever in his career scored such an blatant "walk-off" KO as he did against Bisping.

Speaking of GSP, in short order we've had two knockouts in the octagon -- Bisping's (via GSP) and 'Reem's (via Ngannou) -- that were about as violent a "snap-the-head-straight-back" KTFOs as I've ever seen. Overeem lying stiff on the canvas like he was clutching a high voltage wire was just frightening. Ngannou appears to have punching prowess to make Mike Tyson jealous.

[StyrbjornSterki]

Right on queue, GSP has relinquished the middleweight title for 'health reasons."

Anderson Silva's coach claims the Spider tested positive owing to contaminated supplements (how original!). Also claims they will be testing those supplements (future tense) to confirm they were the cause. Which probably means they're shopping at this moment for contaminated supplements to be the scapegoat. In Brazil, this should not be too challenging.

Roy "Big Country" Nelson gets Matt Mitrione on 16 February at Bellator 194 in the heavyweight grand prix. Should be quite a watchable bang-fest, even if you're not a fan of Bellator. They've fought once before, in 2012, and Nelson won by TKO in the first. But it was only Mitrone's seventh MMA bout and Nelson's 25th. Coming off a dramatic "Rocky-esque" win over The Last Emperor, Mitrione starts the tourney as the odd-on favourite. I like watching both these guys fight because guys there's no show-boating, no finesse. Just two very large men, each promising to push your face in.

The UFC cleared Mark Hunt to resume fighting after a battery of tests at the Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas. Dana White pulled Hunt from all fight cards after Hunt wrote a letter to PlayersVoice.com.au complaining he wasn't sleeping well, he was forgetting things and slurring his words. Next Hunt sued the UFC claiming his words were being taken out of context. To which DW replied in a letter to the Daily Telegraph asking how is it possible to take the words Hunt himself wrote out of context. The letter ends with a bit of self-serving promotion, DW claiming the fighter's health always comes first (except, of course, for when the promotions' concerns come first.

[StyrbjornSterki]

MMA Fighting is reporting that Jon 'Bones' Jones was administered and "passed" a polygraph test in which he stated he had taken NO PEDS in the run-up to UFC 214.

I have no idea if a poly holds water with USADA (or WADA).

[StyrbjornSterki]

When Uriah Hall sent no notice and didn't show up for the weigh-in for last weekend's UFC Fight Night in St Louis, he got the rough edge of a lot of people's tongues, most of all his scheduled opponent, Vitor Belfort. Now he's claiming he had a mini-seizure and slight heart attack. Which sounds credible to me, on two counts. First, this guy loves to bang, and I'm hard pressed to believe he would try to dodge a fight with Godzilla, much less Vitor "Mister TRT" Belfort. Second, Dhafir Harris, AKA Dada 5000, who collapsed in the ring at the end of an otherwise completely forgettable fight against Kimbo Slice (at Bellator 149, 19 February 2016), same venue as the equally forgettable Ken Shamrock vs Royce Gracie bout) and was later diagnosed with cardiac arrest and renal failure due to dehydration. He had cut ~40 pounds (18 kg) to make Bellator's heavyweight limit of 265 and was suffering from severe electrolyte imbalance.

Hall also mentioned his kidneys were involved, and his doctor told him he probably would have died had he managed to make weight. The words "electrolyte imbalance" aren't mentioned in the linked article but that's my completely half-arsed diagnosis.

I'd be preaching to the choir/ beating the dead horse [pick one] if I bothered of mention the stupidity of allowing weight-cutting to continue that puts so much physical stress on the fighters, so I won't.

[jmdirt]

When Uriah Hall sent no notice and didn't show up for the weigh-in for last weekend's UFC Fight Night in St Louis, he got the rough edge of a lot of people's tongues, most of all his scheduled opponent, Vitor Belfort. Now he's claiming he had a mini-seizure and slight heart attack. Which sounds credible to me, on two counts. First, this guy loves to bang, and I'm hard pressed to believe he would try to dodge a fight with Godzilla, much less Vitor "Mister TRT" Belfort. Second, Dhafir Harris, AKA Dada 5000, who collapsed in the ring at the end of an otherwise completely forgettable fight against Kimbo Slice (at Bellator 149, 19 February 2016), same venue as the equally forgettable Ken Shamrock vs Royce Gracie bout) and was later diagnosed with cardiac arrest and renal failure due to dehydration. He had cut ~40 pounds (18 kg) to make Bellator's heavyweight limit of 265 and was suffering from severe electrolyte imbalance.

Hall also mentioned his kidneys were involved, and his doctor told him he probably would have died had he managed to make weight. The words "electrolyte imbalance" aren't mentioned in the linked article but that's my completely half-arsed diagnosis.

I'd be preaching to the choir/ beating the dead horse [pick one] if I bothered of mention the stupidity of allowing weight-cutting to continue that puts so much physical stress on the fighters, so I won't.

I'll keep singing it...walking weight rule. They have to weigh in once a month and can not cut more than 5% from their 12 month average. ie: 180 lb average could fight as low as 170, no more 180 fighting 155. Not only would this be healthy (ier) for the fighters, I think that it would make for better fights for many reasons.

Should be a good heavyweight fight tonight!

[Ferminal]

Not quite... Ngannou was pretty embarrassing, even for a heavyweight. I mean I get the lack of cardio when you're carrying that much muscle but there's no way he should have been in a title fight as those four rounds showed.

I'm not a fan but Macdonald was most impressive for me tonight, proper tough.

[jmdirt]

Not quite... Ngannou was pretty embarrassing, even for a heavyweight. I mean I get the lack of cardio when you're carrying that much muscle but there's no way he should have been in a title fight as those four rounds showed.

I'm not a fan but Macdonald was most impressive for me tonight, proper tough.

I didn't see the fight, but in the highlights Ng just looks slow from round one. He's a big man and that can win some fights, but Miocic is a good fighter so you need more than just size and power to get him.

[jhonnyllb]

The ladies division is wild! I like that any one of them could win on any given night! So does AN get RR or HH now? AN looked WAY bigger than MT.

Last I heard him remark to it, Dana said R3 will get whomever wears the belt on her return. I haven't looked into Nunes's "street weight" but the Brazilians across the board are notorious for their weight-cutting.


The Ferttitas bought the UFC about UFC 40, but even with all their financial backing (read: dad's money), it stayed underwater until UFC 100 (hindered, no doubt, by widespread misunderstanding of the sport, which Zuffa have made great headway in correcting). If MMA Payout's estimate of 1-1.2m is accurate (actual numbers won't be available for weeks yet), UFC 200 will be no threat to eclipse UFC 100 as the high water mark for PPV sales (@1.6m). Which will leave speculation what might have been if Jones-Cormier II had come off, but Jones-Cormier I only sold 800,000 PPVs.


Both Rashad Evans and Chael Sonnen are saying Jon Jones tested positive for two estrogen-blockers. This is a possible indicator he was on post-cycle therapy, coming off a "cycle" of anabolic steroids. Natural Test production is depressed when on cycle, so symptoms of excessive estrogen, like gynecomastia (AKA bitch's tits), can appear immediately post-cycle, when the exogenous Test is withdrawn but before the testes have regained normal output.

On PCT, an anti-estrogen (SERM) typically is accompanied by HCG (Human Chorionic Gonadotropin), which mimics the natural luteinizing hormone to trigger the testes into resuming natural production all the sooner (a function of the HPG axis). When Jones said he was accused of taking something he couldn't even pronounce, hCG was the first banned substance I thought of. Now they are available in the form of drops, which are still banned in USA.

AASs also would explain why his T/E ratio was as low as 0.19:1 during testing prior to Jones-Cormier I (UFC 182). The OOC might have been administered early enough into his PCT that endogenous Test production was still depressed but long enough into his course of diuretics that no exogenous Test remained. NSAC did a CIR test on account of the abnormal T/E, but it came back cleans.

In a recent Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Chael Sonnen tells the tale (which he alleges he heard from eye-witnesses) that USADA showed up unexpectedly at Jones's gym in the run-up to Jones-Johnson at UFC 187 (23 May, 2015), which never came off, on account of Jones's hit-and-run incident. The story alleges that Jones panicked at the approach of the USADA men and hid under the cage, thinking they'd leave once convinced he was not there. This was prior to the UFC signing with USADA, before fighters were obliged to keep the organisation apprised of their location, so there would have been no penalty for Jones being unlocatable. But instead of leaving, the USADA men took a seat and waited until the gym closed for the day and everyone (except Jones, hiding under the ring) went home for the night.

All of which only got Jones off the hook temporarily, because USADA got wind of how they had been duped, and moved Jones's name to the top of their hit list. Sonnen says they were so vexed, in fact, they figured Jones must have had to go to answer the call of nature at some point while he was in hiding, so they even tried (unsuccessfully?) to get a warrant to test the floor under the cage for Jones's urine.

Sonnen also speculates that this one positive was so far in advance of the match, and the OOCs were coming with such regularity, that there likely are other (possible) positives that USADA just haven't finished testing yet.

Did brock lesnar ever had drugs? I heard most MMA fighters take Drugs before matches.. Only few of them caught under dope test. Is that true?

[jmdirt]

Cormier and Miocic are going to get it on for the heavyweight title at UFC 226!

[jmdirt]

Some good leather swapping on Fox FREE TV tonight.

10 point system is silly...have you ever seen a 10-5 round?

I would like to see more of points system like wrestling (ie: a take down is worth 2), plus punch total is worth points, kick total is worth points.... etc. It will take (some of) the judges 'opinion' out of it, plus IMO make for better fights. In some ways its better if the fighters don't let it go to the judges, but by the same token a great brawl that goes the distance is great.

[StyrbjornSterki]

The lowest they can go is 10-8, only recently changed from 10-9. All forms of professional fighting are heavily influenced by the gaming industry, and I think the odds-makers want to keep fights close even though one fighter is clearly superior because it benefits the gambling business.

This is my obviously too-long-winded explanation of how the UFC got to a 10-point scoring system to begin with.

First they got in Dutch with "the authorities" from the start because the UFC billed itself as "no rules" fighting. Which wasn't entirely true (though not far from it), but thanks in no small part to American Senator John McCain's use of his bully pulpit, 36 of the American states passed laws banning "ho-holds-barred" fighting.

The first few UFCs didn't have weight classes or rounds or judges. Or a prescribed dress. Shoes or barefooted, gloves or no, gi or no, all up to the individual fighter. The fight didn't end until one fighter tapped or was knocked unconscious. The rules didn't even allow a TKO, but they did allow head-butting, hair pulling, groin strikes, fish-hooking, small joint locks and elbows to the top of the head.

To get their legality (and their livelihood) restored, the UFC had no choice but cozy up to the athletic commissions in all of those 36 states. Which led not just to a considerable softening of the rules of the contest but also to adoption of the 10-point scoring system. In part that was because some of the states wouldn't allow a contest in their jurisdiction without their own judges were used (you might have noticed that the state of New York conspicuously requires the referee at UFC events to wear a NY athletic commission shirt), and those judges would have been schooled in the 10-point system.

Any system for scoring a fight necessarily is going to involve an element of subjectivity. Even scoring a single blow requires multiple layers of subjectivity because there are only two types of blow that can be scored completely objectively: a wiff that altogether misses and has absolutely zero effect, or a strike that renders the opponent immediately unconscious, a KTFO. In every instance, the former is a zero and the latter is a maximum score. However, everything else would have to be scored on the basis of where did it land, how hard did it land, and what effect did it produce. Only one of those three considerations can be weighed completely objectively but even that one would require some subjectivity in assigning the score value per blow because somebody somewhere would have to address the question of how many points a kick to the calf is worth versus an elbow to the jaw or a punch to the abdomen.

Too complicated, I think. Best to only require each judge to distill his assessment of each fighter's performance in each round to a single number.

On the subject of the impact of the states' athletic commissions on the competition, you might have noticed that Big John McCarthy was absent from the UFC for a while, and then only showed up occasionally. Big John's stature in the UFC cannot be overestimated because he was the only referee for all the fights in the first UFCs. And it was only at his insistence that they implemented the first change to the fight rules. He insisted on being able to stop the fight whenever one fighter lost the ability to intelligently defend himself. In effect, a TKO. And he set the standard for decorum and performance for all the other referees. He's as much a bedrock feature of the UFC as the steel fence is. Anyway, in 2007 Big John left his gig at the UFC to become a commentator on a start-up MMA telly station. When that station failed, the UFC graciously gave him his old job back.

However, in the interim, his license to referee combat sports in the state of Nevada lapsed. When he returned to the UFC, which stages a majority of its events in Las Vegas, Nevada refused to reissue a license to him. They said, in essence, we don't need you, we have enough referees. So for a while after he returned, he only could referee UFC events that weren't in Nevada. Which explains why he was absent for a spell, and then uncommonly scarce for a while longer.

After all that he had been to the sport, can you imagine the hubris of denying Big John a license to referee because you already had plenty? Along with Herb Dean and Jacob "Stitch" Duran, he's as much as a rock star. I am quite sure he could make a comfortable living entirely off his celebrity, were he a mind to. And probably without having to resort to accidentally leaking a pr0n video of himself having sex with someone named Kardashian.

I didn't get turned on to the UFC until the number of their events was up into the 60s, and as my interest grew I decided I needed to go back and watch those early events for myself. So I got ripped digital copies of the first 40. I tried to binge watch when I could because I found that compressing time that way gave me a heightened sense of just how the the sport was evolving in response to a frequently-changing rules structure. Besides, digital video let me skip all the dead parts, and the majority of the events only had 30-45 minutes of action anyway, so I could watch half a dozen UFCs in roughly the same timespan as two films.

I started out thinking that one of the founding principles of the UFC was that the fighting should be as near real-world as possible, a "run what you brung" fight, regardless whether what you brung was karate or boxing or drunken monkey kung fu. And there's no "rounds" in a real fight, so why should the fighters get breaks in the UFC?

Then I got to UFC 5. The championship match was Ken Shamrock vs Royce Gracie. At UFC 5 there still were no rounds and no time limits but they stopped the fight after 36 minutes and called it a draw because the only people in the audience who hadn't already walked out were the ones who had fallen asleep. Gracie and Shamrock both were submission artists, and equally skilled at submission defence, and after more than half an hour neither one had enough petrol left in the tank to out-submit the other.**

That wasn't the only time in those early UFCs that the fight lost most (or all) of its entertainment value because both fighters were gassed, but it certainly was the one that drove a stake through the heart of not having rounds and not having a scoring system to decide the victor if neither could finish the other. But I count both those changes good ones, in large part on account of that fight.

So the UFC kissed the pope's ring and adopted the 10-point scoring system. To quote Winston Churchill, "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." That's how I view the 10-point system. It sucks, but it sucks less than all the others. Certainly less, IMHO, than not scoring the fight at all but insisting that one finish the other.


**Gracie and Shamrock faced off again in 2016 at Bellator 149. It was the only win by striking in Gracie's long and distinguished career, but that fight was the poster child for mandatory redundancy for aging mixed martial artists. It was painful to watch. On top of that, Shamrock tested positive after for steroids and methadone.

[jmdirt]

The lowest they can go is 10-8, only recently changed from 10-9. All forms of professional fighting are heavily influenced by the gaming industry, and I think the odds-makers want to keep fights close even though one fighter is clearly superior because it benefits the gambling business.

This is my obviously too-long-winded explanation of how the UFC got to a 10-point scoring system to begin with.

First they got in Dutch with "the authorities" from the start because the UFC billed itself as "no rules" fighting. Which wasn't entirely true (though not far from it), but thanks in no small part to American Senator John McCain's use of his bully pulpit, 36 of the American states passed laws banning "ho-holds-barred" fighting.

The first few UFCs didn't have weight classes or rounds or judges. Or a prescribed dress. Shoes or barefooted, gloves or no, gi or no, all up to the individual fighter. The fight didn't end until one fighter tapped or was knocked unconscious. The rules didn't even allow a TKO, but they did allow head-butting, hair pulling, groin strikes, fish-hooking, small joint locks and elbows to the top of the head.

To get their legality (and their livelihood) restored, the UFC had no choice but cozy up to the athletic commissions in all of those 36 states. Which led not just to a considerable softening of the rules of the contest but also to adoption of the 10-point scoring system. In part that was because some of the states wouldn't allow a contest in their jurisdiction without their own judges were used (you might have noticed that the state of New York conspicuously requires the referee at UFC events to wear a NY athletic commission shirt), and those judges would have been schooled in the 10-point system.

Any system for scoring a fight necessarily is going to involve an element of subjectivity. Even scoring a single blow requires multiple layers of subjectivity because there are only two types of blow that can be scored completely objectively: a wiff that altogether misses and has absolutely zero effect, or a strike that renders the opponent immediately unconscious, a KTFO. In every instance, the former is a zero and the latter is a maximum score. However, everything else would have to be scored on the basis of where did it land, how hard did it land, and what effect did it produce. Only one of those three considerations can be weighed completely objectively but even that one would require some subjectivity in assigning the score value per blow because somebody somewhere would have to address the question of how many points a kick to the calf is worth versus an elbow to the jaw or a punch to the abdomen.

Too complicated, I think. Best to only require each judge to distill his assessment of each fighter's performance in each round to a single number.

On the subject of the impact of the states' athletic commissions on the competition, you might have noticed that Big John McCarthy was absent from the UFC for a while, and then only showed up occasionally. Big John's stature in the UFC cannot be overestimated because he was the only referee for all the fights in the first UFCs. And it was only at his insistence that they implemented the first change to the fight rules. He insisted on being able to stop the fight whenever one fighter lost the ability to intelligently defend himself. In effect, a TKO. And he set the standard for decorum and performance for all the other referees. He's as much a bedrock feature of the UFC as the steel fence is. Anyway, in 2007 Big John left his gig at the UFC to become a commentator on a start-up MMA telly station. When that station failed, the UFC graciously gave him his old job back.

However, in the interim, his license to referee combat sports in the state of Nevada lapsed. When he returned to the UFC, which stages a majority of its events in Las Vegas, Nevada refused to reissue a license to him. They said, in essence, we don't need you, we have enough referees. So for a while after he returned, he only could referee UFC events that weren't in Nevada. Which explains why he was absent for a spell, and then uncommonly scarce for a while longer.

After all that he had been to the sport, can you imagine the hubris of denying Big John a license to referee because you already had plenty? Along with Herb Dean and Jacob "Stitch" Duran, he's as much as a rock star. I am quite sure he could make a comfortable living entirely off his celebrity, were he a mind to. And probably without having to resort to accidentally leaking a pr0n video of himself having sex with someone named Kardashian.

I didn't get turned on to the UFC until the number of their events was up into the 60s, and as my interest grew I decided I needed to go back and watch those early events for myself. So I got ripped digital copies of the first 40. I tried to binge watch when I could because I found that compressing time that way gave me a heightened sense of just how the the sport was evolving in response to a frequently-changing rules structure. Besides, digital video let me skip all the dead parts, and the majority of the events only had 30-45 minutes of action anyway, so I could watch half a dozen UFCs in roughly the same timespan as two films.

I started out thinking that one of the founding principles of the UFC was that the fighting should be as near real-world as possible, a "run what you brung" fight, regardless whether what you brung was karate or boxing or drunken monkey kung fu. And there's no "rounds" in a real fight, so why should the fighters get breaks in the UFC?

Then I got to UFC 5. The championship match was Ken Shamrock vs Royce Gracie. At UFC 5 there still were no rounds and no time limits but they stopped the fight after 36 minutes and called it a draw because the only people in the audience who hadn't already walked out were the ones who had fallen asleep. Gracie and Shamrock both were submission artists, and equally skilled at submission defence, and after more than half an hour neither one had enough petrol left in the tank to out-submit the other.**

That wasn't the only time in those early UFCs that the fight lost most (or all) of its entertainment value because both fighters were gassed, but it certainly was the one that drove a stake through the heart of not having rounds and not having a scoring system to decide the victor if neither could finish the other. But I count both those changes good ones, in large part on account of that fight.

So the UFC kissed the pope's ring and adopted the 10-point scoring system. To quote Winston Churchill, "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." That's how I view the 10-point system. It sucks, but it sucks less than all the others. Certainly less, IMHO, than not scoring the fight at all but insisting that one finish the other.


**Gracie and Shamrock faced off again in 2016 at Bellator 149. It was the only win by striking in Gracie's long and distinguished career, but that fight was the poster child for mandatory redundancy for aging mixed martial artists. It was painful to watch. On top of that, Shamrock tested positive after for steroids and methadone.

That's my point with that statement, it could be a three point system. My point with the next part is that I would like to see it scored more precisely than just winning/losing the round.

[StyrbjornSterki]

Anderson Silva, busted AGAIN. This time methyltestosterone and an as yet unnamed diuretic. Ironically, USADA will treat the Spider as a first-time offender because his previous offence (in 2015) was under NSAC's jurisdiction and before UFC signed on with USADA. Since they've already named the substance (with specificity), I presume that means the "B" sample also tested positive (probably tripped by a skewed T/E ratio) and was confirmed by a CIR test.

Yet another Brazilian fighter caught out by USADA (Brazil, IMHO, is to MMA what Spain is to pro cycling).

Cormier and Miocic are going to get it on for the heavyweight title at UFC 226!

Which poses an interesting dilemma for the UFC. Cormier and Velazquez are BFFs and both are adamant they will not fight the other. Cormier as much as has said he will relinquish the belt -- if the should win it -- before he'll fight Cain. The odds are against him defeating Miocic, but far stranger things have happened in MMA. Velazquez at the moment is the #4 ranked heavyweight contender, so Ngannou, 'Reem and Werdum should have precendence.

Cormier and Velazquez refuse to fight because they're like brothers. OTOH, Roy Nelson says his bout with Matt Mitrione at Bellator 194 (16 Feb), will be like fighting his sister. Not exactly the sort of words you would forward to eating.

[StyrbjornSterki]

Anybody else see this past weekend's UFC Fight Night 125? Particularly the Shevchenko - Cachoeira fight? And I use the term "fight" loosely because before Shevchenko ended it by submission in the final minute of the second round, she was ahead in the official punchstat by 230-3.

Dana White is ripping Mario Yamasaki a new one for letting the fight go on for so long -- in fact it sounds as if he'll be dismissed from the UFC -- but I think it would be setting a dangerous precedent to let the referee end the contest simply because he felt pity for one fighter. Cachoeira wasn't exhibiting impaired judgement or diminished motor skills, and she wasn't suffering injuries that were likely to cause permanent maiming or disability, so who has the right to tell her that she can't continue if that's what she wants? Yamasaki as much as said he was obeying her wishes to go out on her shield, and I've got to side with him. He's far from my favourite ref, and if he disappeared from the octagon forever I would not shed a tear, but if there's any blaming to be done, I think it should be laid at the feet of the UFC's matchmakers (Mick Maynard/Sean Shelby) rather than the referee's.

Or might this be a case of veiled sexism? Because the Diaz brothers in particular earn their livings collecting scar tissue. Their only strategy is to beat their opponent fists (and feet) with their face until the opponent wearies of the effort. Then they go for the submission. Which doesn't meet any definition of "intelligent" I am familiar with, yet this is the path they have chosen. So shouldn't sauce for the goose also be sauce for the gander? Or should a professional fighter's sex be weighed in the decision when to end a fight?

But I don't see any sense in blaming the referee for not doing what would have amounted to creating a new rule on the spot when your promotion already has staged more than 300 events without anyone previously having seen the need for any such rule.

[jmdirt]

Romero very unprofessional for not making weight!
Rockhold was looking like the man in this class but changed his winning game plan for some reason and paid for it.

[StyrbjornSterki]

I think Rockhold needs either to move up in weight or find another line of work. I think he's fighting too dehydrated (for his age) and the durability of his chin is suffering from it.

[StyrbjornSterki]

Could it be that Rockhold reads the CN forums? Because he's moving to LHW.