I, for one, enjoy looking over the links provided on fightopinion.com because there are lots of stories and opinions that are either interesting or laughable. Hearing that the UFC is releasing guys like Sokoujou and Werdum and is replacing them with folks such as Ray Steinbeiss is really funny in how transparent the reasoning is. No offense to Steinbeiss, but he is not a world class fighter. Hasn’t beaten a world class fighter. Probably belongs on MFC undercards. Maybe headlining an ICE show in the midwest. He’s in the UFC because he is cheap and because people who watch the UFC do not really care who is fighting in the UFC outside of the main event.
Now wait, I know what you’re thinking: Stacked cards! Not like boxing! After all, Nate Quarry was really a top end fighter when he fought Maia, right? Well, he wasn’t really, and you didn’t need to be any sort of genius to realize that. The UFC 91 undercard was amongst the weakest ever done by the organization, however the number of “clean finishes” (read as KOs and submissions) allowed lots of fights on the air with the “action” hardcore fans crave. That few of the fights featured guys who were very good was brushed away easily. Its easy to pretend that Jorge Gurgel in a bad kickboxing match was meaningful, but much tougher to make the authentic argument that it really was.
UFC 91 has since been lauded by more than a few internet pundits to be perhaps the best show of the year. I naturally disagree and think it wasn’t even as good as UFC 81, but then again what has my opinion ever mattered? Instead, it is reiterated repeatedly as to the value of branding over stars (even when there’s a 550,000 buy difference in the course of 4 weeks) and undercard bouts that are the comparative equal of some undercard NJPW juniors match done 15 years ago between some roided up guys that are now dead. It should be no shock then that the burst of interest in MMA mimics that of pro wrestling circa 1997, with tons of poorly coded websites bursting with ridiculous rumors from unconfirmed sources, in large part because many of the writers (thanks chiefly to the puro and Meltzer connections) are people who lived through that very era. Read the rest of this entry »