Any discussion of the show begins with the headline act, Brock Lesnar. He did exactly what I anticipated. Having learned from the first loss to Mir, he’s improved his submission defense greatly and simply overwhelmed the former proper UFC Heavyweight champ and then interim belt holder. Ignoring the post fight antics for a moment, Brock looked sound in there. He took some pretty solid hits from Mir in the second and ended up wrestling him to the ground and smashing him. Mir looked lost for much of the fight, totally unable to deal with the overwhelming strength of his opponent, and his attempts at offense were more characteristic of a bravado/desperation mix than they seemed to be calculated moves as part of an extended game plan, like the leg lock attempt in the early going of the first.

However, what Lesnar encountered last night is not what he’ll see if he fights Shane Carwin or Cain Velasquez, and you can bet your ass that the UFC is cognizantly aware of that. Its why Noguiera/Couture is happening as a #1 contenders fight. They’re going to give Lesnar plenty of face time with his belt before dispatching him into the truly deep waters against the kind of guys that will pose a problem for him. In the meantime, he’s convinced his fanbase that he’s an unstoppable monster through beating a career journeyman, a 45 year old man who hadn’t fought on over a year, and an argurably (as Brock himself put it) fraudulent belt holder. If Fedor struggles at all with Barnett (and he probably will), its only going to further inspire endless chatter about how Lesnar would dominate him from the fans of faux fighting.

In the meantime, sit back and wait for the end of the year show, where we will likely (in my opinion) see Lesnar mix it up with Antonio Rodrigo Noguiera in what is an infinitely well matched for Lesnar. Nog beating Couture would come as a surprise to many fans in spite of Couture’s advanced age and lack of a win in 2 years, but I see it as extremely likely given the remaining strengths of both. And while he’s a live dog against Lesnar with his elite submission skills, as the Bob Sapp fight proved years ago, Noguiera’s core strength is deficent against the bigger heavyweights. Brock is infinitely more talented than Sapp was and will obliterate Noguiera with a similar showing to Sapp’s early ground and pound flurry at Dynamite/Shockwave, should they match up.

George St. Pierre, meanwhile, also did exactly what was expected of him. Having now dispatched of another #1 contender, St. Pierre’s record in MMA now stands as, almost inargurably, the greatest in the history of the sport by any competitor. Having now recorded wins over Karo Parisyan, Matt Serra, Matt Hughes, Thiago Alves, Jon Fitch, Frank Trigg, Mayhem Miller, Josh Koscheck, and Sean Sherk, he has defeated virtually every major welterweight contender of the last decade. Only missing from his ledger from the entire history of the 167/170lb weight class Mach Sakurai, Pat Miletich, and Carlos Newton, and with two of them being greatly diminished and no longer even competing at the weight, its safe to assume he won’t need them for his ledger either.

There’s a call for him to rise to 185, and I hate it. Why can’t we have a dominant welterweight in this sport? The winner of Swick/Kampmann is no less a challenger than either of these guys, and GSP is simply not big enough to contend with guys who are cutting significant weight to make the middleweight limit (like Okami and Anderson Silva). Let him be. Maybe the UFC will sign Jake Shields? That would provide a decent challenger also somewhere down the line. But for god’s sake, let someone be dominant. Its okay.

I don’t like to speak for other people, but Jon Snowden and I both scored the Akiyama/Belcher fight for Belcher. He had a horrible second round where he did everything wrong, but otherwise he was doing significantly more damage to Akiyama with his strikes and dictated the pace and location of the fight for much of it in the first and almost entirely in the third. 30-27 for Akiyama may be the worst scorecard I can remember in some time. It was a good night for dudes of Korean heritage too, with Dong Kim scoring a big ol’ win against the generally underrated TJ Grant. Time to move him back to the televised card, guys.

I had a brief article saying that losing TV was terrible for the UFC in the UK. Well, maybe not so much. The fans there weren’t shown Michael Bisping’s near death experience and that may actually help protect the guy’s image from being too shattered. He fought in completely the wrong fashion for Henderson. For all the talk of his technical striking, he made repeated and obvious massive flaws.

Mark Coleman. What the hell can I say about this guy? He gave the dude who’s fighting for the 205lb belt a huge challenge and beat Stephan Bonner. I have no idea how he did either. He looked like ass for much of the Shogun fight, but fought with great courage and had moments late in the bout. I haven’t watched the fight yet, but hey, good for Mark. I know he needs the money. Still, I worry about his long term health as he’ll undoubtedly be put in there with another top light heavyweight. Perhaps Jon Jones next? That might be uncomfortably brutal.

TUF 7 had a possible saving grace: CB Dolloway. With some growth in his submission defense and roadwork, a guy with his striking and wrestling seemed to be on the fast track to stardom. That’s all over. No hate to long time DVDVR poster Tom Lawlor, but he’s not likely to be a top 185lb fighter ever. Dolloway losing to him by guillotine was embarassing and perhaps career destroying. The UFC may actively consider cutting him, or at the very least paying him the minimum while he returns to fighting complete bums. He’s nowhere near ready for this level though.

One last thing that I gotta mention: Look, UFC 100 was a fun show for MMA fans. I like it. Got my $54.95 out of it. I still came away thinking that it came across as a spectacle. Seriously, if I met someone and they told me they watched UFC 100 and were a big Lesnar fan, I would think less of them as a person. I’ve seen some of the positive pieces about his postfight jabber as being compared to Stone Cold Steve Austin, a guy who was a hero to literally the lowest denominator of human being on the planet. To the UFC’s credit, he will make them tons of money. People will love to hate Lesnar and many will probably become huge fans. His credibility as a dangerous fighter is well deserved at this point. However, he is not the man to excite the general public into accepting mixed martial arts as a legitimate sporting venture. He embodies the bloodsport ethos that most normal human beings feel about the UFC. He may very well have enforced his credit among testosterone filled teenagers and alcoholic rednecks, but he is not going to be the sport’s Jack Dempsey and push it into widespread acceptance.

As badly as I feel about that though, Dan Henderson was actually worse. Throwing and gloating about the second punch to Bisping should have repulsed anyone with a shred of humanity. Like James Thompson’s exploding ear last year on CBS, its the sort of thing I would never, ever dare show someone who’s a new or mildly interested person to the sport of mixed martial arts. I am entirely serious in that someone could have raped a woman in center ring and probably gotten cheers after that display of what any sane human would consider barbaric, and what would result in massive fines in any other sport in the world. Those two events more than overshadowed, to me at least, the enviroment of GSP’s terrific gutty and technical display, further defining MMA as what its detractors often refer to it as: a gladatorial bloodsport not far removed from throwing Christians in with the lions. I have never been so sure that the sport cannot overcome that perception in the long run, because I don’t think anyone, promoters and participants included, want it to be anything but.