In this week’s Twitter Mailbag, does that darn ol’ “Cowboy” just fight too much? Is the return of “The Korean Zombie” something for hardcores to celebrate? And did the UFC just book one of its worst main events of all time?
All that and more in this week’s TMB. Got a question of your own? Tweet it to @BenFowlkesMMA.
I know that’s the explanation a lot of us reach for on those rare occasions when Donald Cerrone loses a fight, but I’m not sure if it’s the magic answer we want it to be.
It’s true that his loss to Jorge Masvidal on Saturday came just a little over a month after his last fight. It’s also true that it was his fifth fight in about 11 months, making this past year one of the busiest ones in an already busy career. But do you notice how that’s one of the things we like about “Cowboy” when it’s working out for him?
And plenty of times it does. He fought five times his first year in the UFC and won four of them, which instantly put him on the map. True, he lost the last of those fights when he took on Nate Diaz at UFC 141, and at the time his coaches seemed to think he was burned out, but it could have just as easily been the fact that Diaz was the toughest opponent he’d faced that year.
It’s the same with most of his other defeats. In his second year in the UFC, Cerrone fought only twice, winning both. Then he fought Anthony Pettis at the start of 2013, four months after his last fight, and he lost. Five months after that he beat K.J. Noons. Three months after that he lost to Rafael dos Anjos.
That schedule might be at the high end of normal, but if it happened to anyone else we’d say the problem was the opponents and not the pace. Same with his defeat in that UFC lightweight title fight with RDA. It was his fourth fight of the year, but his first after five months off. Still, do you need an excuse to lose to a guy like dos Anjos? He was champ at the time for a reason.
I’m not saying that his pace might not be a contributing factor. His reputation for being a slow starter could be partially to blame as well (two of his five losses came in the first round, and the Masvidal bout arguably should have ended there too). But that doesn’t necessarily tell us if the losses are because he fights so much that he breaks down his own body, or if they’re just the law of averages at work.
Cerrone has fought 24 times in six years with the UFC, and he’s only lost five times to four opponents. If we need an external explanation for a record that good, maybe we should look at our own standards for success.
In 2012, maybe, back when those Korean Zombie shirts were at all the UFC events and Chan Sung Jung was still vividly remembered for his WEC brawl with Leonard Garcia and his twister submission … also against Leonard Garcia. But now? It’s been a while. I get the sense that most fans, if they know him at all, know that they like him but without totally remembering why.
Hopefully his main event bout with Dennis Bermudez at UFC Fight Night 104 on Saturday will remind us. Hopefully he can jump right back in after more than three years away, much of which was doing compulsory military service, and his timing and overall game will prove to be unaffected. More likely, we’ll need to give him a few fights before we know for sure where he stands.
It would definitely reduce the stress on fighters and add some semblance of economic fairness to the sport. I know some people might worry that it would take away the incentive to perform and win, but only if those people haven’t thought it through for more than five seconds.
You don’t need a huge financial incentive to want to win a fight. All you need is an aversion to pain and embarrassment and a mild fondness for the way your facial features are presently arranged. There are so many external factors that can affect the outcome – bad judges, bad referees, bad luck – that making half a fighter’s paycheck contingent on a win seems like a raw deal.
It is a good trick for promoters, however. They know that every fighter looks at the show money and win bonus and pictures himself pocketing both when he’s calculating the value of his contract. They also know that every fight has a winner and a loser.
Here, in part, is what Conor McGregor had to say about the MMA Athletes Association during his pay-per-view interview with Ariel Helwani:
“There needs to be something, I just don’t know what it is. I’m focusing on me. I’m focusing on my family’s security, my family’s financial security. That’s all I can do. So I when I saw that, I just thought it was the biggest, fakest load of (expletive) I’ve ever seen in my life. So, I don’t know, I wish everyone well, but you need to focus on yourself. You need to stop putting your hand out. Everyone’s hands are out, everyone wants things for free. You’ve got to put in the work, you’ve got to grind, you’ve got to go through the struggle, and you’ve got to get it.”
And that, my friends, is exactly why fighters don’t already have a functioning association with collective bargaining power. Because the people at the bottom don’t have the power, and the people at the top are focusing on themselves. And even when they think there “needs to be something,” they could not be less interested in being that something.
There are two basic ways for a company to become more profitable: Make more money or spend less money. Ideally, you could even do both.
We’ve already seen WME-IMG’s early attempts to ensure that the UFC spends less. Extensive layoffs sent a lot of executives and other employees packing, which certainly trims the payroll. The new owners have also promised to trim the marketing budget and make up for it by “leveraging” their own extensive entertainment industry contacts.
But in order to make significantly more, the UFC either has to sell more pay-per-views or get a better price for its content. The first is hard to do when your biggest stars are on the sidelines for one reason or another. The second just requires a stronger negotiating position and a bidding war between motivated, well-financed suitors.
The UFC’s new owners think they will have exactly that environment when the current FOX deal expires in 2018, and there’s some reason to think they’re right. Still, they can’t just sit around and wait for the money to roll in. They need the UFC to be a strong product throughout 2017 if they want to get paid in 2018. That, too, is hard to do with your biggest stars on the sidelines.
The optimist in me says that this just gives the UFC more time to realize that Jon Anik is exactly the replacement it’s looking for. The pessimist says that it gives the UFC too much time, prompting the people in charge to overthink it and make a terrible choice.
I’d really, really like the optimist to be right on this one, because Anik and Brian Stann are about as good a broadcasting duo as we’re likely to get. If you disagree, that’s fine. You can just go ahead and be wrong.
It’s funny to think that a Michael Bisping vs. Anderson Silva rematch would happen because it’s such a pay-per-view blockbuster, since I definitely remember the first fight airing on Fight Pass in the middle of the afternoon. I know the landscape has changed some since then, but come on, that was slightly less than a year ago. Am I really supposed to believe that it’s a monster main event now, just because Bisping has the belt and Silva is … even older than he was then?
At the same time, I see your logic, in a way. If Silva goes out there and front kicks Derek Brunson in the face like it’s 2011, then calls out the champ with a reminder of how he kinda sorta knocked him out in their last fight, that’d be reason enough for Yoel Romero to worry.
But please, for the love of the MMA gods, can we not look for ways to screw this one up? The “money fight” fad is wearing thin. Fans are starting to push back against the trend. Bisping vs. Romero is a legitimately dope fight, and in just a few minutes of screen time together they already got a head start on the sales pitch. All the UFC has to do now is get out of the way and collect the paycheck it’s got coming, rather than scanning the floor for a lost lottery ticket.
I assume you mean worst in terms of name value and general fan interest in the fighters involved. Because I’ve seen some absolute garbage main events between famous fighters and ex-champions, just like I’ve seen great ones from dudes few people cared about.
That said, yeah, Jimi Manuwa vs. Corey Anderson does not feel like a headliner. According to the MMAjunkie/USA TODAY Sports MMA light heavyweight rankings, it’s a fight between a No. 8 and an unranked honorable mention. The UFC’s own rankings have it as a contest between No. 5 and No. 8. (Those rankings also recently bumped Patrick Cummins up one spot, to No. 13, despite the fact that he lost his last fight in May and is 1-2 in his last three, just so you know what’s going on there.)
Beyond the numbers, there just isn’t much excitement for this fight or these fighters. The most interesting thing about Anderson was his unusual nickname, which he recently changed. Manuwa has knockout power, but hasn’t been terribly consistent of late. It feels like one of those fights where, outside the two camps, not too many people even care who wins.
Does that make it the worst UFC main event ever? I wouldn’t go that far, at least until we see how it actually plays out in the cage. If you want to know why it’s headlining, though, ask the people who bought tickets to this event before they knew what they were getting.
Ben Fowlkes is MMAjunkie and USA TODAY’s MMA columnist. Follow him on Twitter at @BenFowlkesMMA. Twitter Mailbag appears every Thursday on MMAjunkie.
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