I'm feel like I am playing on repeat when I say that overexposure has kind of made me fall out with MMA. The situation where there being IMO way too many fights and events has lead me to turn my back on MMA the same way that I don't really pay attention to NBA or MLB because there are too many games for me to really stay interested. I enjoy American football and even football football because outside of rare events, there is only one game a week.
Now MMA is a different kettle of worms because it's not like the same fighters fight every weekend, they would die if they tried to, but the reason why boxing is so lucrative and tends to be continually exciting is because there are only a couple of heavily advertised and promoted events a year. We have a reason to be excited. With MMA, and especially because of UFC, it's just too much and this past weekend was a golden example of this.
The big news(I guess) this weekend is that a UFC event took place in Mexico and as is the tradition with events in Mexico, UFC stacked the deck so that most of the winners would be Mexican. But Lone'er Kavanagh (who?) ended up getting a surprise upset victory over local favorite Brandon Moreno.
Normally this would be very big news because UFC really likes it when they can push someone from the UK, just look at Paddie Pimblett. I reckon Kavanagh gets streamlined to the top because of this win... go ahead and bank on it. His next couple of fights are going to be pushovers because he wasn't supposed to win this one. That's one of the things that really gets me upset about UFC, it seems as though they have a desired outcome and then will manipulate the fights in order to achieve those ends rather than having the best face the actual best.
In the rest of the fights a who's who of who cares went exactly the way you would expect with one exception. The Mexican fighters won 3/4 of the fights they were in. Imagine that! What an unbelievable coincidence that happens every single time there is an event in Mexico. Seriously, the next time they do an event there just log into whatever gambling site and bet on all the Mexicans. You don't need to know anything about MMA, you will win.
In other news a new promotion that I didn't even know existed called RAF (Real American Freestyle) seems to be going down the same tired path of UFC retirees looking for a paycheck that only a couple of thousand people are actually going to watch.
Urijah Faber (who I really liked in his heyday) and Henry Cejudo (also liked him as an MMA fighter) wrestled in the bustling city of Tempe, Arizona.
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All 18 people in the crowd gave a standing ovation
Other UFC has-beens participated in this event including Aljamain Sterling (sheesh I hate that guy), Benson Henderson (he's cool) and Clay Guida (that guy's still alive?).
The biggest buzz created by the RAF event happened with Arman Tsarukyan decided halfway through his wrestling match that he as going to throw punches. Remarkably, he wasn't disqualified for this and ended up winning his bout. The stands, which had about a high-school girls' basketball game amount of people in it, emptied out and a giant brawl broke out. Nice. That's something to break up the tedium of a wrestling event.
Right now the real news in the MMA world is that everyone is speculating about who is going to fight at the White House event in a few months and Jon Jones has thrown his hat in the ring for a potential fight against Alex Pereira and I said years ago that this fight was something that they were going to make happen somehow. Here we go!
My stance of standing back and just not watching any of this is the way it is probably going to be for a while. I think that UFC's greed has kind of ruined the sport and I am not really happy about Zuffa (UFC) entering the boxing world because they will likely do their best to ruin that as well.