I suppose we should have seen this coming. Paramount my actually flood the market with even more events than UFC did before the $7.7 billion broadcast rights shift to Paramount. I pay so little attention to it that I didn't even realize this until I was looking up the stats for UFC 324 and found out that there is yet another major event just a single week after the first one. This has never happened before and the card looks a bit disappointing and I shouldn't be surprised about this because this one is basically a "Fight Night" and it also is taking place in Australia and I mean no offense with this but UFC doesn't put their best events in Australia since their major target audience is the United States and Canada for TV viewership.
Volkannovski vs. Lopez part 2 is exciting kinda I guess but these guys just fought one another last April and it was the last fight that Volk had. I don't understand the rush to oo it again. Aren't there other people in the Featherweight division that they could have put in there instead?
There are a lot of other people I would prefer to see in this place. Anyone other than Aljamain Sterline, who remains one of the most hated professional MMA fighters of all time, would be fine with me.
The rest of the card is something that is disappointing but is so typical of any event they have in New Zealand or Australia and that is that they have their "local talent" on the card and normally they are fighting against people that they are expected to defeat. Tai Tuivasa lost a lot of steam after losing 5 straight fights and he embodies a lot of what I think is wrong with UFC. He got a lot of eyes on him because he has a good mouth on him and because he got famous for drinking a beer out of a random fan's shoe after he wins.
There are a lot of reasons why you shouldn't drink anything out of a shoe, even if it is your own shoe but this is what UFC has become. Even if you suck at fighting if you do something really crazy after a fight you get more fights and this merely encourages other people to follow suit.
The Heavyweight division friggin sucks in UFC right now though so I guess they are going to put whatever they can in there. At least Vegas is being honest though as they tend to be and even though Tai is facing a lower ranked opponent he is a pretty major underdog at +275. I think Tuivasa is washed up and was never all that good to begin with so I'm going to bet against him. I also think this is his swan song and if he loses that UFC is going to release him from his contract. Drinking beer out of a dirty shoe can only get you so far even in a corrupt fighting promotion like UFC.
Almost every fight on the card features some Australian fighter you have probably never heard of, and if it isn't them it is some Japanese or Chinese fighter you have never heard of, presumably because of the good time zone for watching. I don't know if they even have Paramount+ over there though so how are they going to watch it?
While I was perusing the who's who of who cares I did come across this guy though.
His name is Aaron Tau and he is a -110 favorite over some Mongolian guy that we will likely never see a fight from ever again unless they do an event in Korea or Japan. Tau on the other hand has permanently defaced himself with a tattoo that makes Mike Tysons silly face tattoo seem like a good idea in comparison. Seriously guys? What have we done with tattoos? I recall when I was in my 20's that very few people had tattoos and even the people that went all out with them wouldn't put them on their friggin face.
He's from Auckland, New Zealand and has a record of 11-1 yet UFC's own website doesn't feature who these wins were against. Seeing as how facetatt is the very first fight on the early prelims, I am going to take a guess here and imagine that they probably were not world-class competitors. I do think that just generally speaking that I would probably not want to be involved in a punch up with someone mentally unstable enough to tattoo their face though and for his sake I hope this entire MMA thing works out for him because nobody else is going to employ him.
I hope that Paramount's idea to make money isn't going to be to have a major event every single week. The fights that I look forward to are already few and far between but if they flood the market anymore than they already have in the past 5 years, there are no amount of stupid tattoos that are going to hold my interest.