• Moderators, please send me a PM if you are unable to access mod permissions. Thanks, Habsy.

OT: WWE/MMA/Boxing Thread

GGpX said:
After UFC 293, Dana said during the press conference that the rematch was the most logical step. A few days later, during the Contender Series press conference, he didn't quite walk it back, but left the door open to other avenues.

One of Dana's major blindspots, beyond how he treats the fighters financially, is his insistence for immediate rematches or near immediate rematches. Remember a decade ago when he wanted to do Lesnar-Mir 3 and there was a major public outcry? So much so that he openly said, yeah that wasn't something they'd be going forward with because of how hte fans reacted.
Click to expand...

I’ll give him some credit for doing what boxing often failed to do, which is giving fans the fights they want to see…..and like your example here, he’ll bend to fan pressure so long as it’s easy on his pocketbook.

GGpX said:
I'm open to immediate rematches under 4 conditions:

1- A long reigning champion loses his belt to a new challenger. The champion should have the opportunity to avenge that loss immediately.
2- A fight that is stopped prematurely, such as an early eye poke rendering one of the fighters incapable of continuing. (See Austin Lane - Junior Tafa)
3- A massive robbery with the judges or a complete referee fuck-up.
4- A fucking badass fight and the result was close. I could watch Gaethje / Poirier / Chandler / Prime Ferguson fight each other over & over and I don't think I'd ever get tired of it.
Click to expand...

pretty much agree to the letter. I’m sure if we tried we could find some outliers to these 4, where it still made sense to make the rematch…..but overall I think that’s a pretty ideal framework to go off.

GGpX said:
But the reality is, according to court documents, the UFC doesn't see the belts as something that determines who the best in the world is, they see belts as a "prize" to give out at the end of the night. Israel signed a contract that made him the highest paid fighter in the UFC, there's no chance they're going to have him fight in three round fights before the main event. They want him to headline because they're paying him as one of their main headliners.
Click to expand...

I’ve completely dipped on MMA news etc in recent years, and just watch the bigger fights when streams can be found…..so hadn’t heard about this revelation in court documents.

It’s both unsurprising on some level (mimics WWE verbiage) but is also so brazenly gross that it kinda makes my stomach churn.

as Mindz has mentioned before, it’s already hard enough to watch this sport or NFL, knowing the long term ramifications for these guys, how they’re being financially exploited etc……but to also remove on top of that the idea it’s a real competition & sport to discover who is #1…..really lays bare that it’s just gladiators in the colosseum fighting to the ‘death’ for our frivolous entertainment.


…but at its best, I still fucking love it. 😡
 
Montana said:
I’ll give him some credit for doing what boxing often failed to do, which is giving fans the fights they want to see…..and like your example here, he’ll bend to fan pressure so long as it’s easy on his pocketbook.



pretty much agree to the letter. I’m sure if we tried we could find some outliers to these 4, where it still made sense to make the rematch…..but overall I think that’s a pretty ideal framework to go off.



I’ve completely dipped on MMA news etc in recent years, and just watch the bigger fights when streams can be found…..so hadn’t heard about this revelation in court documents.

It’s both unsurprising on some level (mimics WWE verbiage) but is also so brazenly gross that it kinda makes my stomach churn.

as Mindz has mentioned before, it’s already hard enough to watch this sport or NFL, knowing the long term ramifications for these guys, how they’re being financially exploited etc……but to also remove on top of that the idea it’s a real competition & sport to discover who is #1…..really lays bare that it’s just gladiators in the colosseum fighting to the ‘death’ for our frivolous entertainment.


…but at its best, I still fucking love it. 😡
Click to expand...
Amazing to think that Shane McMahon tried (and failed) to convince his dad to purchase the UFC a couple decades ago (when it was possible by the WWE). One of those 'what if's'. Guess Vince McMahon preferred to dump that money into his XFL venture back then.
 
Sports, for the very large part, are different forms of gross exploitation. There are a lot of terrible people at every corner, whether it's the rich owners, the scumbags in management, the people recruiting literal children for academies, grooming in gyms, etc.

I mean, shit, this is a hockey forum and we're discussing the sport on a nearly year round. I love the sport, I grew up with it, but hockey is fucking gross. There are so many appalling things about the sport and the people in it. The glorification of violence and the ignorance of the effects that they have are particularly nauseating to me. And I'm not even talking about fighting, honestly. I have more of an issue with players that swing their sticks around or use their sticks to crosscheck people in their lower backs.

To me, there's something inherently fucked up that the main selling point of a sport is a "dream" when everyone knows that 99.999% of the participants will never, ever come close to making it. My dream is to be a Stanley Cup champion, to be world champion, or to [insert very improbable goal here]. You're putting it in the heads of kids as something they should center their lives around... as your business model.

Football is a different type of icky feeling. You attract players, who are for the very most part under-privileged families in the worst parts of America, to come to your college with the allure of "free education", while feeding them the dream of making it to the NFL to make money.

And that's not including the Saudis & sportswashing.

ramble ramble ramble
 
Montana said:
Is it true Izzy is getting another immediate rematch?…..saw it mentioned on Twitter but find that hard to believe, even for Dana.

if you’re undefeated previously, sure…..if it’s your first title loss in that division after years dominating, by all means…..but to be your third career UFC loss, all three of which are pretty damn conclusive losses, and your second in division within a calendar year??? What are we doing.
Click to expand...

Dana walked it back already on the Tuesday night right after. Likely a #1 contender match in Dhabi coming up instead.
 
Agreed with all the above…but at least those sports have been forced to equally share their revenue with the athletes generating it.

NHL, MLB, NBA, and EPL I can enjoy pretty guilt free….they make their sacrifices, but I think their risks are fairly minimal relative to the upside of being pretty set financially in the end, which I’d imagine a pretty dece amount are, relative to the three below.

MMA, NFL, and College Football are just another level of gross though.

all of which are pretty self explanatory, but I’ll add in the NFL’s case, it’s an instance of a Players Association, being a pretty huge failure, relative to other leagues.
 
So it looks like the PFL is on the verge of buying Bellator, which would give them a firm hold on the second spot behind the UFC in the world.

The problem with the PFL, like with every other organization besides the UFC, is that they aren't making money.

They're making big moves, but I can't help but wonder how this is going to end.
 
Have they considered paying their fighters in food stamps? That appears to work as a business model (.....pending litigation)
 
Definitely. John Nash & Paul Gift have done a lot of work about the financial side of the UFC.

I don't know where the links are, but it's probably in BloodyElbow's archive, or what remains of it.
 
If you can, read up on the fighter lawsuit.

One of the reasons Nate Diaz and Francis Ngannou were able to get out of their UFC contracts was directly because of that lawsuit.

When that lawsuit was started, the UFC changed the wording in their contract to include a "sunset clause". That clause would allow fighters to exit their contract, even if they hadn't fought out all of the fights in there.

The problem with Nate Diaz & Francis Ngannou were, they both had one fight left on their contracts. The UFC contracts are written in a way that, if you are officially offered a fight and you turn it down, they can extend your contract by 6 months (not sure about the length of time, but I think it's 6 months). The UFC is notorious for giving favorable match-ups to fighters in return for a contract extension. For lower level fighters, or even fighters they didn't particularly care about keeping all that much, they would feed them to the new, young buzzsaw or give them just a stylistically terrible fight (striker vs aggressive wrestler, for example) so that they would be leaving the UFC on a loss, directly hurting their bargaining power with other organizations and lifting up someone the UFC hopes they can promote in the future.

With Diaz/Ngannou, the UFC didn't offer them any fights because they wanted them to re-sign. Diaz had been begging for a fight, any fight, for the longest time, and when the UFC saw that there was no way he was going to re-sign with them, right before his contract expired, they offered him Khamzat, which is one of the all time bad matchups you can make, hoping Diaz would tell 'em to fuck off. But since Diaz wanted out, he accepted the fight. As fate had it, Chimaev missed weight by nearly 10 pounds and Diaz fought a washed Tony Ferguson to be able to leave.

Ngannou, on the other hand, just waited it out because he blew his knee out just before the Cyril Gane fight. Ngannou still took that fight because he didn't want his UFC contract to be extended, which makes it one of the most impressive victories in recent memory.
 
This upcoming Bellator card is pretty damn good.

1696733758687.png

With the exception of Sidney Outlaw, these guys would all be ranked if they were in the UFC.
 
Big, big UFC news today.

Paulo Costa's out of his fight against Khamzat Chimaev in two weeks, he's getting replaced by Kamaru Usman. 3 rounds at 185 pounds. A more interesting fight, imo.

But the biggest news of the day? UFC's kicking USADA to the curve at the end of the year.

Luke Thomas has been ranting about USADA for years and he was right.

 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top