After a weekend that saw the biggest night in heavyweight kickboxing (and argurably the sport in general) and the biggest night in boxing for 2008, its hard to believe it may be topped without a single PPV card on the bill. But with 5 boxing cards and 3 MMA events scheduled for national television, it’s hardly a ridiculous notion. In our first of two parts, we detail the 3 MMA cards promised for the next 6 days.

UFC: Is there such a thing as too much?

There’s a fair argument to make that the two events that the UFC will present this week are the worst it has ever put on free TV, at least on paper. Whether or not that’s true is ultimately less important than the fact that they are least presenting free MMA, mediocre or not. And even with the mediocrity, there are some decent bouts.

In the case of Fight For The Troops, Cage Force Tournament winner Yoshiyuki Yoshida gets a shot at entering the top 5 against the always game and astoundingly athletic Josh Koscheck. Yoshida, if you remember, won the Cage Force lightweight tournament in less than astounding fashion, and if you’re a betting man, you look at the performance of many of the top Japanese fighters against western competition in the last 2-3 years. Koscheck possesses wrestling talent no one in Japan outside of potentially Ishida has, and Yoshiyuki doesn’t have that kind of an experience behind him. What may even up the fight is the beating Koscheck took just a few weeks ago against the now #2 welterweight in the world, Thiago Alves. Being forced to take an shortened camp and recovery time may very well affect the outcome.

The rest of the card is hardly as interesting. Mike Swick’s shine is long gone now and even if he beats the chinachinned Jonathan Goulet, its hard to picture him being a factor at a loaded welterweight division. Steve Cantwell, Corey Hill, Ben Saunders, and Nate Loughran offer some hope in the form of generally undeveloped prospects, but that’s not what you’d typically expect from the “Super Bowl of Mixed Martial Arts”. However, you can’t go forgetting that this is a fundraising event/PR exercise in addition to being a live fight card. It speaks volumes that the UFC has the talent base and the cash to pull off this sort of show when so many other promotions are scrounging to create shows.

The Ultimate Fighter 8 Finale, meanwhile, is quantifiably a “bad show” in terms of the quality of fighters and fights being presented. While Fight For The Troops features a fight that can legitimately get someone into the top ten, its impossible to see that a win for anyone, regardless of circumstances, will earn them a berth at the top of their division’s food chain (in Roganese). What is going for it rather is a strong history of TUF Finale shows in terms of entertaining bouts. Sure, no one on TUF 6 was really any good, but War Machine/Rollins and Huerta/Guida made for some of the more gutty UFC fights of that calendar year.

What makes this season interesting from the perspective of fight selection is that the UFC chose a heavy TUF cast card, in spite of this being one of the worst seasons for the program ratings wise and argurably talent wise. There is no Guida/Huerta here sadly, and its unlikely that Junie Browning will make up for it. The prospects that are in the finals all intruige far more than past TUF finalists over the long run (did anyone think Mac Danzig was anything but a finished and obviously inferior product? Didn’t you see Tim Credeur in Bodog? is that Jesse Forbes on my milk carton?) and perhaps one of them will, in due time (and it may be a long time) rise to lofty heights of Forrest and Rashad rather than petering out like Grove, Imes, Speer, and so many others.

ADRENALINE MMA: Not actually dead

There seems a strange rush to commit MMA promotions to the flames when they aren’t being run by Zuffa, regardless of the quality of fights. Frankly, I’ll never understand why there are those who consider themselves journalists who are dead set on pushing an agenda in which there should only be one world power in the sport, even when it shows all the rather nasty tendencies to act just as you would expect a dominant fight promoter to act. It is, after all, the kind of profession that generally asks you leave your soul at the door when you enter into it. 

In part of that rush to ignore whatever the WEC overnights are or crown club show promotions that pay you as the “new Strikeforce”, Adrenaline MMA was claimed dead. Oddly, for a company who lost significant investors, it somehow found more money and a serious headliner, and has returned to walk in the land of the living once more. Pat Miletich did a solid job of drawing in the Quad Cities last time he fought against Renzo Gracie in one of the IFL’s early “superfights”, and he comes back from a long retirement to fight club fighting legend Thomas “Wildman” Denny on HDNet this Thursday night. Miletich has probably guaranteed never being in the UFC Hall of Fame with his comments over the last few years (how can one forget his claim that the UFC was attempting to kill the IFL in its infancy?), but he’s still a pivotal figure in the history of the sport both as fighter and as trainer. Denny is a cult fighter in the same sense as names like Crazy Horse Bennett, Jay R. Palmer, offering stiff competition to midlevel fighters and often coming to bring entertaining bouts.

While the main event has certainly cost a couple pennies, the rest of the show probably didn’t. The second coming of the promotion sees the rest of the night shaped more like a Strikeforce MMA event, with bigger names such as Russow, McGivern, and Rothwell in very light against cheap opposition intended to bolster their records. One actively interesting fight features IFL light heavyweight star Mike Ciesnolevicz in against undefeated light heavyweight Derrick Mehmen. This was actually a fight intended to occur for a Mainstream MMA show several months back that was cancelled last minute due to weight issues for Ciesnolevicz. That a fairly weak bout such as that easily rides in as argurably the most relevant of the night establishes the overal quality of the fights offered, but should live ticket sales be decent, probably a stronger long term strategy than the first Adrenaline MMA card.

In our next installment, we review the 5 upcoming boxing cards for this week. A Ring champion will be crowned in one of the 4 world title bouts to hit TV along with a defense of the sole unified heavyweight championship.