Genuinely what is stopping some of you from stop watching the sport?

[CasualBot]

Thread title though...

 

[Takes Two To Tango]

Internet MMA talk has jaded many of you. The fights are now secondary to what you're going to discuss all week. Everyday is spent waiting for news, updates, and announcements. Fights are exciting but you're more intrested on what they talk and post about for weeks leading up to the event. Your MMA "fix" doesn't come from the events, it comes from the drama.

That happened to me for a long time with professional wrestling. Couldn't just watch the show, needed all the gossip and dirtsheets. You stop enjoying the moments and start disecting the wrestlers and the show. Instead of a big return being exciting, you've spent the entire morning waiting for airport photos.

If you find you're one of the serial complainers, you'll have a better time if you stop over-saturating yourself on content.

Interesting perspective, thanks.

 

[STAY GOLD]

I honestly just pay less attention to the UFC, and more attention to their alternatives.

I'm selective in what i watch and I don't watch every event. Even the events I watch, I don't watch all the fights. So I'm all good.

This is the way.

I’m more interested in alternatives than in the UFC. I’m not saying the alternatives are particularly better, but they’re more entertaining to watch.

I’m also selective in the fights I watch on UFC cards. There’s too many cards with too many fights with fighters I’m not really interested in watching so I just avoid watching the entire card and just watch the fighters I’m interested in watching.

 

[jeff7b9]

Biggest thing stopping me from stopping watching is that I enjoy watching fights

 

[AndrewGolota48]

I'm selective in what i watch and I don't watch every event. Even the events I watch, I don't watch all the fights. So I'm all good.

This is how I've become, still love the big fights and interesting matchups but the bar for what I will actively seek out has gotten much higher.

That's a scary thought though to think it could eventually become how I am with boxing, which was the first combat sport I got into way back. I used to love it, but now I won't watch a boxing match unless it's a truly top shelf HW fight like the Fury vs Wilder series.

I couldn't even get myself to watch Canelo vs GGG other than the first fight. I gave up on watching anything from the lighter weight classes.

I'm going to force myself to watch Canelo vs Crawford to see if I can maintain interest beyond a few rounds.

 

[Mujeriego]

Because its a fad.
Only sport where fans scream about how great it is and then within a year or two, have no interest at all.
Never see that with other sports.

 

[Streeter]

An watch what ?

 

[BigTruck]

I think a lot of people on this forum would benefit from stopping watching this sport altogether. Burnout happens, and this is not a great era of UFC. If you don’t feel like watching any of the cards, don’t know who’s who anymore, and just wait for the results to get posted, you’re burnt out. Take a break or stop watching because unfortunately the product is not getting any better.

This literally explained me to a tee, I think you might be right bc I literally don't even watch the free cards and just look at results.

 

[Only Here for Attachments]

Does only watching gifs of finishes count as "watching?"

 

[richardjohnson]

Did you say neck and neck with soccer. Basketball is about 50x more popular around the world and soccer i think is 100. Shit I think f1 is more popular then mma

Yeah I’m not sure how TS came to the conclusion that MMA is neck and neck with soccer.

 

[Spam On Rye]

I've watched every second of UFC since the early 2000s but in the past two years I only watch some of the main events and a prelim or two here and there. I'd love to go full bore with my investment but the quality just isn't there anymore. Almost feels like UFC is going out of their way to let you know they don't care at times as well.

 

[HatKick]

Been a casual for years. Probably a combo of the weak era, boring monotonous production and I'm not the type of person who can maintain a sports obsession for years. I'm still interested, just not THAT interested.

Khamzat and Topuria are THE must-watch fighters on the roster imo even if Khamzat's last fight was boring. Aspinall too but he lacks compelling opponents.

 

[whocares]

I still watch every event, although admittedly I'm prioritizing whatever I'm doing on a Saturday afternoon over catching all the prelims on a FN card now. I'm in it for the competition first but there's only so much of a deluge of no name matchups one can pump themselves up for.

I understand where people are coming from though because me and many others recently went through the same thing with basketball. Longtime diehard NBA/basketball fan but in the past 5-10 years Adam Silver's manipulation of "the product" + the analytics/3 point emphasis drastically altered the way the game is played and made it excessively sterile and uninspired. It was a concerted effort from Silver to cater to the young millennial/Gen Z audience and shorts/highlight friendly content by artificially boosting offensive numbers through neutered defenses, a poorly thought out mathematically inspired never ending barrage of sleep inducing 3 point spamming while allowing players to essentially spacewalk with the ball and get away wth all sorts of egergious rule bending that warped competition and skewed heavily to reward offense. This combined to make for an incredibly boring product where close, competitive games because the outlier to the norm. Silver essentially admitted in recent years that the 82 game regular season now sucks and introduced gimmicks like the in-season tournement and play in games for lower seeds to reach the playoffs which have boosted interest but the point is they could have just rebalanced the rules to foster a more competitive product. But Silver is the king of bandaid gimmicks instead of addressing root issues. So of course many of us long time diehard fans bitched and moaned and pouted about this devolution while continuing to watch for years. And we heard the same criticisms, "why are you still even watching?" Because that's what you do when you put 30 or 40 years of your fandom and attention into a product. You want it back. You want to see it get better. You don't just give up and walk away on something you have a bond and connection to.

But what happens as the product continues to degrade further is that one day you turn on a game and realize something like youtube or whatever else is commanding more of your attention than the game is. I never made a conscious decison to stop following a sport that I loved. I kept watching even though it was continually becoming less and less interesting to me. I just woke up one day and found out that it bored me completely, and that I would rather be watching or doing something else than dedicating 3 hours to something that couldn't be bothered to even keep my eyeballs on the screen. I see longtime mma fans grappling with the same kind of thing.

Their interests are no longer being catered to and they're not turning away from it, but being pushed away from it. It's not what they want and it's watered down version of what they've known, hence the bellyaching. While many have admitted they have alrady largely walked away from it. Not because they wanted to but because they can't be bothered by looking at a fight card and seeing a bunch of bullshit week in and week out for years now. So yeah I get it.

The difference between the NBA and UFC is that it was specifically the competitiveness of the sport the NBA neutered, whereas that aspect is still laregly intact in mma, it's just the level of excitement for nobody fighters that is replicating the lack of high stakes interest. The great equalizer about combat sports is there's no option to go through the motions with a dangerous opponent in front of you. Some of these other sports are on to some pure fuckboi entertainment type shit these days. Choreographed dances and handshakes and dumb shit that 12 year olds love. That's actually the thing the UFC is completely missing the boat on (thank god for that). Hard to glam up a fistfight or wrestling match when all of the excitement happens in the octogon.

And it's not lost on me that we're just old and this is how shit goes.

 

[Ramon Antonio]

I watch events the morning after during breakfast. I fast forward through all the boring shit and ads. It’s good enough entertainment for that most of the time.

 

[Why did you]

I think a lot of people on this forum would benefit from stopping watching this sport altogether. Burnout happens, and this is not a great era of UFC. If you don’t feel like watching any of the cards, don’t know who’s who anymore, and just wait for the results to get posted, you’re burnt out. Take a break or stop watching because unfortunately the product is not getting any better.

 

[JakePaulMMA]

Video Store?
What year is this?

This movin' picture box ain't showin' me the things I wanna see!!

 

[DragoonC]

I did stop watching a few years back when the UFC contempt for their own fighters became obvious.

Them absolutely trying to diminish the legacy of GSP and seeing the red goof with his smirk promoting Conor's teenage tantrums just felt bad.

 

[Poirierfan]

I honestly just pay less attention to the UFC, and more attention to their alternatives. I've also enjoyed the other niche fighting orgs that have popped up over the last few years, like BKFC. The Dirty Boxing card last night was lit as fuck. UFC has never really been the end all be all of fighting, for me, if it disappeared overnight I'd not really be that disappointed. Fights will still happen

College football will always be #1 for me, the feeling is sorta like Christmas on every Saturday. I don't get that with fighting, too often I leave disappointed. On average I'll watch maybe 3 fights on a card that I'm interested in.

 

[Preston broadus]

Ddp, islam, topuria, max, poatan, jiri, volk, weili, Pantera,

 

[Poirierfan]

Ddp, islam, topuria, max, poatan, jiri, volk, weili, Pantera.