What does Gegard Mousasi's departure tell us about the UFC's priorities?

There goes Gegard Mousasi. He’s taking his five-fight winning streak and his charmingly pessimistic world view and he’s bolting for Bellator.

Another way of putting it is, the UFC is letting him walk, having opted not to match his Bellator offer now that his UFC contract is up. Nevermind the fact that the UFC’s own rankings had him as the no. 4 middleweight. Nevermind the fact that he’s coming off a win over a pretty recent UFC middleweight champion. He still wasn’t worth keeping in the eyes of the UFC, which is an interesting and perhaps troubling development.

We’ve seen fighters flee for UFC competitors before, so that part’s not so unusual. What’s different this time is not just who is, but where he is in his career.

At 31, Mousasi (42-6-2 MMA, 9-3 UFC) looks to be a fighter still on the upswing. He’s got a healthy winning streak going. He hasn’t lost since a somewhat fluke-ish (and subsequently avenged) TKO defeat to Uriah Hall in 2015. He’s finally found a way to connect with fans by channeling his inner Diaz brother while offering glumly realistic assessments of the way the UFC operates. If you put him in a title fight opposite current UFC middleweight champion Michael Bisping, chances are he opens as the favorite.

And yet the UFC decided that it didn’t want him anymore, or at least that it didn’t want him enough. Mousasi had remarked before that he wasn’t happy with the offer on the table, and the UFC apparently didn’t sweeten it enough to beat out Bellator. It seems the world’s biggest MMA promoter would rather lose a top middleweight than crack the wallet open any further.

That works out nicely for Bellator. It needs fighters like Mousasi. He has a name and a future. He can and will fight in multiple weight classes. He adds validity and legitimacy to a promotion that desperately needs fighters people care about. Slowly, Bellator is amassing enough of these fighters to build some truly interesting fight cards.

But what about the UFC? It’s not going to crash and burn without Mousasi, which may well have been a large part of the thought process behind letting him walk, but doesn’t it seem strange that the organization where “the best fight the best” wasn’t more interested in holding onto someone who looks so much like a potential champ?

It’s not like Mousasi is a boring fighter, either. He’s been the main or co-main event in all of his UFC fights with one exception – the uncommonly stacked UFC 200. Clearly, the UFC thinks we care about this guy and want to see him fight, both of which are true. So why isn’t it worth shelling out to keep him?

The easy answer is because he’s not Conor McGregor, therefore he’s not absolutely vital. It’s not a great look, but you can lose a few Mousasi-type fighters – the guys who help you hit singles and doubles but never any home runs with pay-per-views and cable TV cards – and the bottom line won’t suffer too much.

What suffers instead are the intangibles. For instance, it gets harder to keep claiming that you’re the home to the best when you pay more for pro wrestlers with zero experience or ability than you do for top talent. It also sends a message to every other fighter on the roster: No matter how many fights you win or how many event posters you get your name on, you’re not that important.

But if you tell fighters they aren’t important, you’re also accidentally telling fans. And if these people aren’t important, why should we pay you to watch them? And if someone else tells them that they are important, why shouldn’t the fighters go work for them instead?

That’s what Mousasi’s doing. If his departure is indicative of a shift in how the UFC views its talent, he won’t be the last one to go. Pretty soon, this trickle of defections could turn into a flood. And what happens when the fighters who used to anchor your TV cards end up working for the other guys? Then the best are still fighting the best, but they’re just doing it somewhere else.

For more on Bellator’s upcoming events, check out the MMA Rumors section of the site.