3 lessons from 3 days of UFC action

Paige VanZant

If you’re reading this, that means you survived. Three straight days of UFC action, beginning this past Thursday afternoon and ending early Sunday morning, depending on your time zone.

If you watched it all (I know I did), you saw 34 total fights in that three-day span. And if you watched it live (I did that too), you invested roughly 17 hours to feed your apparently bottomless appetite for unarmed combat.

Now that it’s over, seems like it’s worth asking ourselves what we learned from this orgy of violence. And there are a few worthwhile lessons, if we’re willing to look for them.

1. Building up to a grand finale does have a way of creating a big fight feel

Conor McGregor and Jose Aldo

Chances are that UFC 194 would have felt like a major event even all by itself. You put together a lineup with two title fights and a bunch of compelling, divisionally relevant scraps, we’re going to give you our attention.

But positioning this card at the end of the three-day binge, during which the UFC 194 weigh-ins act as a lead-in for The Ultimate Fighter 22 Finale, made the entire thing feel like one long main event. It was definitely an improvement on the set-up in place the last time Conor McGregor fought a major UFC pay-per-view, when UFC 189 went off on a Saturday night with the TUF 21 Finale following on Sunday.

This time the action built to a crescendo, and then closed with a bang after a 13-second main event. It’s almost as if McGregor knew we’d been at this for a while, and wanted us to catch up on some sleep.

2. ‘Ultimate Fighter’ finales continue to be the slowest slogs in all of televised sports

Gabriel Gonzaga

One downside of having back-to-back-to-back events is that it’s almost impossible to avoid comparing one format to the others. This time we got three different experiences – one event entirely on UFC Fight Pass, another entirely on FOX Sports 1, and a pay-per-view with prelims spread out between the other two formats.

By far, the TUF 22 Finale on FOX Sports 1 made for the worst viewer experience. With 10 fights, it was actually the shortest fight card of the three, but it didn’t feel that way.

Some of that is an inevitable consequence of the cable-TV format. We already know that UFC events on FOX Sports 1 come with lots of commercials, and usually the same commercials over and over (all I have to do is mention FarmersOnly.com, and you’ll get that song stuck in your head). It doesn’t help that TUF Finale cards tend to have the least going for them in terms of overall star power and fighter name recognition.

On the East Coast, you would have had to stay up until 1 o’clock in the morning to see Frankie Edgar drop Chad Mendes. You would have also had to maintain consciousness during the “featured prelim” bout between Gabriel Gonzaga and Konstantin Erokhin, which gets my vote as the worst UFC fight of 2015. If DVR didn’t already exist, TUF Finale cards on FOX Sports 1 would be reason enough to invent it.

3. Even some stuff that was fun when it happened sure seems like a distant blur now

Demian Maia and Gunnar Nelson

Remember how, before this three-day campaign started, some of us wondered whether it would hard to keep all the action straight by the time it was over? I can’t speak for you, but for me that definitely happened.

For instance, did you even remember that Demian Maia fought this weekend, and looked pretty great as he systematically dismantled Gunnar Nelson? How about Michael Chiesa submitting Jim Miller or Tim Means knocking John Howard stiff? Both those fights seem like distant memories now, and they only happened four days ago.

For the fighters the UFC made an effort to push, standing out in the crowd wasn’t so tough. (Who could forget Sage Northcutt’s post-fight speech, or Paige VanZant’s gritty performance despite her thorough demolition at the hands of Rose Namajunas?) But for the rank-and-file, slugging it out in the same white-and-black (or black-and-white) Reebok shorts as everyone else, it must have been hard not to feel like they were just one more stop on an assembly line.

For complete coverage of UFC Fight Night 80, The Ultimate Fighter 22 Finale and UFC 194, check out the UFC Events section of the site.