I don't agree with this at all. Yeah Bisping is the champ, but he got the title fight as a last minute replacement and KO'd the champ. The hendo fight didn't make sense, but it was Dan's last fight, he was coming of a win against Hector Lombard, and they had some history. This shit doesn't happen all of the time.
Bisping is being discussed as an opponent for GSP's return. It might happen again. Bisping won the title in a legitimate way, everything since then has been the UFC trying to milk a dollar.
And that shit doesn't happen all the time? Look at LW right now. Look at how FW has played out. That's just now. If I go through each of the divisions over the last 4 years, $$$ has beat out legitimacy more than a few times. It's worse than ever, currently.
90% of the time the UFC put on the best possible title fights. Look at Fedor when he was with Affliction, Pride, and Strikeforce. He was fighting guys like Matt Lindland and Pro Wrestlers with 0-1 records.
Sure, but your Fedor example is horrible. You're now comparing the present UFC to the past 13 years of MMA, which is in no way a fair comparison.
While Fedor was in PRIDE, PRIDE had the best HWs. The UFC's HW roster then was laughably shallow. In no way would Fedor have been better off in the UFC during that period of time.
Not sure why you mention Affliction or SF. Which fights in either of those orgs were bad? He fought ranked HWs in each one of his fights in those orgs, minus his Hendo fight. So, 1 out of 6 fights, and even then it's against Hendo, someone who had a fairly impressive (albeit short) list of fights at HW going into it.
He didn't fight Lindland in any of the orgs you mentioned in your example. So, why link Lindland to any of those orgs? Maybe you're not intentionally trying to be dishonest, but you are with this comment. At this time of MMA as well, it's debatable whether the UFC would have been a better spot for Fedor anyways. Look at who Nog was fighting, for an idea. People that Fedor already either beat the piss out of, or was about to beat the piss out of (Sylvia). So I call bullshit here as well.
The UFC will have the occasional Conor Diaz 2 or Hendo Bisping 2, but the champions are always fighting opponents in the top 10.
Sure, most of the time. The point is to show that as the UFC's competition has gone away, they've made less of a point sticking to this. Matchmaking is at its worst right now in terms of legitimacy.
Do you follow boxing? Because if the talent splits that's what mma is going to turn into. I still like boxing, but if they could take a page out of the UFC's bussiness model it would be a better sport.
I follow boxing. Not as religiously as some. Boxing for the most part made big fights happen for a very long time. Lately, they suffer from a lack of talent as much as any combat sport. I mean, look at the HW boxers right now.
I don't even like the boxing example. It's different than multiple organizations competing with each other. It's individuals and their management coming to terms to orchestrate an event.
As mentioned, cross division fights has only ever been an issue for the UFC. And that's because they got salty after Rampage literally made Chuck squeal in PRIDE, after claiming the UFC had the best fighters.
So I don't agree at all. MMA had better cards between 2006-2011, largely because you had multiple orgs with talent all looking to put on good cards.
Since that competition went away, the UFC has put on weaker and weaker cards. This has devolved into the mess they have now, where the "best fighters" don't even need to prove they are the best. I want to see McGregor fight Khabib or Ferguson. The UFC couldn't make that happen, so they made yet another crappy interim title. Who knows when Conor will fight either one of those two. We're still months away from knowing who the best LW in the world is and thus far, the UFC has given two shits to answer that question.
