I'm aware. And I think sometimes this is actually done. Cointelpro is a legit example.
Stripping Aldo of the title
- Thread starter Wild
- Start date
$millions$ spent in promoting this fight all to possibly see it wasted. The only champion earning his/her paycheck is Ronda. I absolutely believe in time frames for when a fighter needs to return or lose the title.
The disclosure of this injury is very questionable. I read someone in Aldo's camp went to the media with this information? I'm not a fighter but it would seem like injuries occured during training are kept private, if for nothing else but strategic reasons. Pac fought Mayweather with a shoulder injury and nobody outside his camp knew until after the fight. That seems like standard procedure. I believe the fight is not going to happen. If Aldo was going to fight through it nobody in his camp would have said shit.
The disclosure of this injury is very questionable. I read someone in Aldo's camp went to the media with this information? I'm not a fighter but it would seem like injuries occured during training are kept private, if for nothing else but strategic reasons. Pac fought Mayweather with a shoulder injury and nobody outside his camp knew until after the fight. That seems like standard procedure. I believe the fight is not going to happen. If Aldo was going to fight through it nobody in his camp would have said shit.
Do you really believe that someone like Mighty mouse dosen't earn his paycheck? What more does he have to do? lol
He doesn't move the needle.
talent aside
That dosen't mean that he dosen't earn his paycheck. A quick look at his record since he won the belt shows pretty conclusively that he does 'earn' what he is paid plus a whole lot more.
EDIT: Sorry Zeph I didn't mean to copy your post word for word almost! Great minds think alike I think!
I think that would be great. concrete criteria where if you take longer than that the belt leaves.
Yea you're right. I used the wrong words. I'm just frustrated by the same fighters consistently getting hurt....Pettis, Aldo, Cain, Cruz.....
Should be Edgar, I agree.
They absolutely need something like this. But then, they also need a ranking system that actually means something (like determining title-shot paths, championship fights and important matchups) and we all know they will never, ever do that. Zuffa wants maximum flexibility when comes to this stuff so they will never handcuff themselves by laying down hard rules, unless they absolutely have to (like with PED's, for instance).
you know that's not how the UFC wants to operate. they want the rope to treat it on a case-by-case basis so that they can protect Dana's boys and throw whoever else under the bus when it suits them.
Yeah we've agreed on this in the past. My interest in mma is waning because of this. When i watch a fight I want there to be a purpose to it rankings wise that's quantitative. If im going to watch the undercard and first 3 fights of a main event that is full of no names it would be more exciting if I knew where the win puts them now. For example we would know the no name on the undercard that just won needs 5 more wins for a title shot. There should be standings so we know where everyone stands.
At the moment its way too subjective. the novelty of fighting is gone for me. I dont want to see rematches over and over. Ive lost interest in most of the fights nowadays. Combined with the nu-metal poor prestantation and the lack of creativity compared to other orgs. I mean heck last Saturday night boxing Adrien Broner vs Shawn Porter had an awesome stage setup in las vegas.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiLVe5NWvUo
this is exactly what needs to happen. thats how all real sports work.there needs to be a system in place to work your way up the ladder no matter how the bosses feel about you or how marketable you are
yeah it would be great for both fans and fighters. Its too random right now. Whats the point of watching some no names fight when nothing will come of it. It then just becomes filler.
I've felt this way for a long time, but part of it, and this sucks to admit, but part of it comes with aging. I'm just speaking for myself here. There are maybe a couple of decades of life when everything is vibrant, and then after that comes this slow slide into grey, stupid muck.
I still get pumped for great fights and all, but I'm much cooler these days about missing a show. It's just MMA---and frankly, it's a very weird sport. I'm not overjoyed to finally realize this. But what is this sport? Some desperate goofballs get together to punch each other in the face in a cage. Why the fuck are they doing this again? I can't always remember. It seemed like I knew, at one time. I could swear I really knew. Now? Sometimes I watch these fights and I don't understand a single second of it, or myself.
Anyway. We're very far removed now from those early days when every show was amazing, even when it actually wasn't. It was new, and we were new along with it. This is what time does. Little by little it brings a worse version of the past into the present, and little by little, you realize how much better the past was, and how much better---even if slightly---the past before that was. It's the same for everything. The first girlfriend/steady lay you had, it'll never be like that again. It's over. It's OVER now. Now you're just a struggling insect on the sidewalk with some unnecessary powers of self-awareness, and a long jumble of memories---thousands of MMA fights---trailing out the back of your head. Spaghetti circuits, your own death yawning out the back of your pitiful head. What are you going to do? Become Richard Branson and rage against the dying of the light? Jump out of airplanes at age 70 to keep time from murdering you with little jokes about the past?
Forget all that. Suppose you're trapped in an elevator with Dana. It's 120 degrees, with no power but some very dim emergency lights. The small talk is over and the conversation has turned to MMA. He knows you're a fan, and wants your honest opinion. You tell him what's up, and he just shrugs, lifts his eyebrows like, hm, okay. "But there's so much you don't know." He tells you what goes on behind the scenes, and you start sympathizing for a minute. He's making some sense. He tells one little story, then another. After about an hour, you feel like he made a point.
But then he keeps talking, and he goes on and on. He's starting to ramble. He's becoming angry, his voice is starting to carry. He's really fucking loud. The elevator is small, and you're not deaf. You want to tell him to chill out but he won't stop. You just sit there, hostage in this elevator, listening to Dana go on and on. A rant about how greedy and misguided all the fighters are, what pains in the ass they are, except for maybe one or two of them. About what a bunch of motherfuckers everybody's managers are. How nasty and brutal this business is, and how nobody understands that you have to fuck the fighters or they'll fuck you. His face red, sweat gushing down, globules of sweat dripping from his chin. "All these motherfuckers, I'll tell you what, it's a shark tank out here. Hold on, I'm getting a text from my mom. What the fuck does SHE want? Jesus Christ, it ain't easy bein' me."
I feel like we've been in that elevator for over ten years now. Waiting for, fuck, I don't know. Possibly---this is the worst thing it could be, but possibly---1993. I think that's what we're waiting for, but this elevator can't go there. Nothing can, but the fucking screaming spaghetti trailing behind your skull. Where all the good times are.
I'd bang my head against a wall but I'm too tired.
Two things I want to say:
1) The belt is a complete irrelevance if someone didn't win it from the champion or succeed them in an appropriate fashion. I've never understood the fascination with belts. It doesn't make you a champ. This is how promotions sucker you into believing they're more important than they are and why boxing evolved to have sanctioning bodies separate from promoters (though thanks to little regulation, those belts degenerated into alphabet soup). Making an interim title is always completely idiotic because if you had Conor fight Mendes, no one would call that person the champ. Dominick Cruz is an exception because he was out for over 2 years, but rather than giving him a tune up fight when he returned, he should've gotten Dillashaw right away. Wasting Cruz on Mizugaki in a tune up just leaves us with unanswered questions. There's the chance Cruz could've won, but even if he did, who cares? We'd still get to see great fights. They just wouldn't be for a belt. Having a belt on the line does not make for a better fight. All it does is lock fighters into an inescapable contract forever. Every single interim title fight in history has more or less been meaningless until the champ lost or retired. If it's not lineal, there's no use bothering with a belt. Risking Conor on Mendes would be a disaster, particularly if Conor lost, which is likely.
2) Awesome post from
@WoodenPupa on the effect of nostalgia on the MMA fan's mind and on totally nailing it with that Dana metaphor. I would push back on only two points: Technically speaking, MMA is better than it ever was. There are few fights in Pride or the old UFC that you can point to that are technically better than even a Fight Pass prelim from a modern UFC or Bellator. If you showed the fights to a total noob with no backstory or attachment to the fighters and the sound off, they'd likely agree. The boxing is crisper. The kicks are better set up. The wrestling is way better. The jiu jitsu is much more even. And the work rate in an average fight is much higher. There are a few gems from the old days, but most of them were slobberknockers. The modern game is just so much more technical. That said, it definitely has less character and since we're all older and know the limits of the sport, it has less pizzazz. The reason WMMA is blowing up now is because it feels like the old MMA used to. Women are still finding their way technically at the highest levels because the highest levels didn't exist until a few years ago so there's some curiosity left. And as far as Dana goes, I think MMA fans obsess over the guy too much. He wields less power behind the scenes than it appears in public. I don't think of what he says or take it seriously much at all. I met the guy once and he seemed soft spoken, almost shy. His bombastic personality is just old school carny techniques to promote Zuffa's agenda, as he's paid to do. The collective Zuffa orientation is to project irreverence and he does it well. Fighters fit the script well because a combination of lack of education and narcissism make them easy to collectively exploit. But they are very much the center of what makes the sport magical.
McGregor/Aldo was Zuffa's shot at reclaiming the magic and if there's fallout from it not happening, it will be proof that the fighters should be at the center of the sport rather than promoters and their trinket belts or latest marketing push.
1) The belt is a complete irrelevance if someone didn't win it from the champion or succeed them in an appropriate fashion. I've never understood the fascination with belts. It doesn't make you a champ. This is how promotions sucker you into believing they're more important than they are and why boxing evolved to have sanctioning bodies separate from promoters (though thanks to little regulation, those belts degenerated into alphabet soup). Making an interim title is always completely idiotic because if you had Conor fight Mendes, no one would call that person the champ. Dominick Cruz is an exception because he was out for over 2 years, but rather than giving him a tune up fight when he returned, he should've gotten Dillashaw right away. Wasting Cruz on Mizugaki in a tune up just leaves us with unanswered questions. There's the chance Cruz could've won, but even if he did, who cares? We'd still get to see great fights. They just wouldn't be for a belt. Having a belt on the line does not make for a better fight. All it does is lock fighters into an inescapable contract forever. Every single interim title fight in history has more or less been meaningless until the champ lost or retired. If it's not lineal, there's no use bothering with a belt. Risking Conor on Mendes would be a disaster, particularly if Conor lost, which is likely.
2) Awesome post from
@WoodenPupa on the effect of nostalgia on the MMA fan's mind and on totally nailing it with that Dana metaphor. I would push back on only two points: Technically speaking, MMA is better than it ever was. There are few fights in Pride or the old UFC that you can point to that are technically better than even a Fight Pass prelim from a modern UFC or Bellator. If you showed the fights to a total noob with no backstory or attachment to the fighters and the sound off, they'd likely agree. The boxing is crisper. The kicks are better set up. The wrestling is way better. The jiu jitsu is much more even. And the work rate in an average fight is much higher. There are a few gems from the old days, but most of them were slobberknockers. The modern game is just so much more technical. That said, it definitely has less character and since we're all older and know the limits of the sport, it has less pizzazz. The reason WMMA is blowing up now is because it feels like the old MMA used to. Women are still finding their way technically at the highest levels because the highest levels didn't exist until a few years ago so there's some curiosity left. And as far as Dana goes, I think MMA fans obsess over the guy too much. He wields less power behind the scenes than it appears in public. I don't think of what he says or take it seriously much at all. I met the guy once and he seemed soft spoken, almost shy. His bombastic personality is just old school carny techniques to promote Zuffa's agenda, as he's paid to do. The collective Zuffa orientation is to project irreverence and he does it well. Fighters fit the script well because a combination of lack of education and narcissism make them easy to collectively exploit. But they are very much the center of what makes the sport magical.McGregor/Aldo was Zuffa's shot at reclaiming the magic and if there's fallout from it not happening, it will be proof that the fighters should be at the center of the sport rather than promoters and their trinket belts or latest marketing push.