Best thing you can say about UFC 209's main event? It's over, and we finally got a winner – sort of

It seemed like such a good idea at first. It seemed necessary, even.

UFC welterweight champion Tyron Woodley and challenger Stephen Thompson had just fought to a spirited draw, and the matter demanded closure. How could they not do it again? How were we supposed to move on without a clear winner?

That wish was granted with Saturday’s UFC 209 main event, which gave us a winner without exactly giving us closure, all while ensuring that no one would ask for a third helping. It’s kind of impressive, when you think about it that way. If you think about it any other way, it was mostly just disappointing.

For two men who’d already spent five rounds in the cage with one another, Woodley (17-3-1 MMA, 7-2-1 UFC) and Thompson (13-2-1 MMA, 8-2-1 UFC) sure spent a lot of time trying to figure each other out in the pay-per-view’s headliner at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. This resulted in a slow, circular waltz around the cage. Prolonged periods of staring. Feints and counter-feints. Occasionally someone got hit in the face. Once, at the very end, Thompson even came tantalizingly close to getting knocked out.

Then the judges rendered their majority decision for Woodley, meaning that the same guy who showed up with the belt would take it back home again, to which the combat sports world responded with a resounding: Fine, whatever.

There might be some room to argue about the scores, but honestly, do we really need to? Wouldn’t we rather just move on? The best thing you can say about this rematch is that it’s over. The second-best thing is that we got a winner this time, which means we can start thinking about what should come next.

In an alternate universe, this is an easy question. With Georges St-Pierre (25-2 MMA, 19-2 UFC) announcing his return to action, it only makes sense to throw the former UFC welterweight champ in there against the current titleholder to find out whether the division’s past is better than its present.

But ours is not the universe where that happens. On the same week that UFC President Dana White declared himself officially sick of “money fight” requests, his company went ahead and booked a new one when it decided to put St-Pierre against UFC middleweight champ Michael Bisping (30-7 MMA, 20-7 UFC).

And if you’re coming at it from an accountant’s perspective, you can see the reasoning at work. Bisping is human sandpaper, guaranteed to agitate even the steadiest of nerves over the course of a multi-week buildup to a fight.

GSP has a reputation for remaining calmly unflappable, but if you’re the UFC, you’re betting that, not unlike Nick Diaz before him, Bisping will be the speck of dirt that gets into the oyster shell of St-Pierre’s mind, and you’ll be the pearl farmer there to extract the treasure at the end.

So where’s that leave Woodley, other than with the welterweight title still around his waist?

It leaves him deeply unpopular, though maybe not unpopular enough to count as one of the sport’s reliable villains. It leaves him as the narrow winner of perhaps the most forgettable title fight in the division’s modern history. It leaves him in need of a challenger who will bring some modicum of interest to his next fight, because at this rate he’s not going to do it by himself.

For complete coverage of UFC 209, check out the UFC Events section of the site.