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Luke Thomas with a rare W on how modern pandemic era UFC fans are used to watered down lower quality cards than those of us used to quality

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ExitLUPin

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This is obvious on Twitter especially. A lot of jabronis IMO 80% of MMA Twitter weren't watching MMA in the 2000s and most of em probably started watching during Khabib Conor if not the pandemic.

Whenever there's a valid complaint about the shite quality of the card it's easy to spot the lil bois and those who are used to quality over quantity since even though we didn't get weekly cards they put out consistent high quality cards even Fight Nights back then.
 
I'm not sure if I said this here before but we should be grateful that we were here pre Apex era.

People will look back at those times with envy in the future.

"Every event had big crowds??"

Now it feels like half of the events are at the Apex, and like Luke is mentioning here, the quality is seriously watered down.
 
I barely watch mma these days, not many fighters capture my imagination.

But if you’re a true fan you shouldn’t really care if they are names or not, the quality of fighters is good. More fights has gotta be a good thing right?

The only real thing I have issue with, is the price. 90 USD for non stars is ludicrous, I can watch nba every day for basically free, and the players are making hundreds of millions a year..

The pool of talent is becoming more impressive each year. I just preferred the old school mill of fighters Wanderlei vs Hunt, Arona vs Rampage, the combinations of awesome fighter personalities just went on forever.

Before a top ten heavyweight was Mark Hunt, now it’s Volkov.. what’s cooler?
 
EndlessCritic said:
This is what UFC PPVs used to look like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFC_55

Is this an objectively good card? No.

Does it feature multiple fighters coming off wins on DWCS and Road to UFC? Yes. And those fighters need to start somewhere.
Click to expand...

We're not talking about the time period when the UFC was the B League org to PRIDE and didn't even have the best talent for most of their divisions. If you want to use 2005 let's compare the A League PRIDE cards to today's UFC ones.
 
EndlessCritic said:
This is what UFC PPVs used to look like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFC_55

Is this an objectively good card? No.

Does it feature multiple fighters coming off wins on DWCS and Road to UFC? Yes. And those fighters need to start somewhere.
Click to expand...
That one was a stinker. So are numerous others from UFC 20-30 too. One advantage now is that fight cards are rarely that short.
 
To me it's not that the fighters are less skilled, or less recognizable, or less exciting. It's that cards feel, on average, more meaningless in terms of what it does for divisions.

It used to feel like the main card would have 2 or 3 fights with a ranked person on it and the main was usually 2 people fighting, the winner of which was set up to be in the title picture for it. Only rare fight nights or international cards lowered the level of quality so that the main didn't have some immediate impact on a division
 
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ZCrz said:
Does this guy ever stop complaining?
Click to expand...

I guess this guy's more your taste.

U2JGuXt.jpeg
 
EndlessCritic said:
This is what UFC PPVs used to look like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFC_55

Is this an objectively good card? No.

Does it feature multiple fighters coming off wins on DWCS and Road to UFC? Yes. And those fighters need to start somewhere.
Click to expand...
I can still recognize at least one name in each of the fights on that card though. It might have something to do with me watching MMA less but with the screenshot in question, I hardly recognize any of them. There’s a significant difference from my perspective.


wildchild88 said:
I barely watch mma these days, not many fighters capture my imagination.

But if you’re a true fan you shouldn’t really care if they are names or not, the quality of fighters is good. More fights has gotta be a good thing right?

The only real thing I have issue with, is the price. 90 USD for non stars is ludicrous, I can watch nba every day for basically free, and the players are making hundreds of millions a year..

The pool of talent is becoming more impressive each year. I just preferred the old school mill of fighters Wanderlei vs Hunt, Arona vs Rampage, the combinations of awesome fighter personalities just went on forever.

Before a top ten heavyweight was Mark Hunt, now it’s Volkov.. what’s cooler?
Click to expand...
Hunt for sure. Even though visually he looks like it, Hunt isn’t in the same tier as guys like Derrick Lewis or Tai Tuivasa. I would put him a few tiers higher purely off the strength of his pedigree in boxing and kickboxing. He’s without a doubt a legend at this point. And in my opinion, Volkov is exactly the kind of fighter that he would have put to sleep in his prime (like the Black Beast was able to).
 
Mohawk Banditó said:
To me it's not that the fighters are less skilled, or less recognizable, or less exciting. It's that cards feel, on average, more meaningless in terms of what or does for divisions. It felt like the main card would have 2 or 3 fights with a ranked person on it and the main was usually 2 people fighting, the winner of which was set up to be in the title picture for it. Only rare fight nights or international cards lowered the level of quality so that the main didn't have some immediate impact on a division
Click to expand...

Just did a little experiment.

I randomly went back 7 years to 2018, there was a fight night event on 3/17. Edwards was #15, fighting on the main card. He was on a 4 fight win streak, so I'm not sure why he was booked against a guy unranked, but that's still someone in the rankings working their way up. Co main was #11 Jan vs #4 Manuwa (who had just lost a title eliminator, so you know this fight had some meaning to it). This fight got Jan into the top 5. He wasn't in title range yet because of where they were both at beforehand, not exactly streaking guys and because Jan was already getting a huge leap with this fight anyway, but after this, he fought and beat Krylov, and then got a title eliminator against Santos from there. The main was #8 Volkov on a 5 fight win streak (3 in the UFC) beating #3 Werdum on a 2 fight win streak. This directly led to Volkov getting a title eliminator against Lewis.

That's what an event should look like. Main event winner got a title eliminator. Co main got put into 1 more fight before a title eliminator. That's meaningful.

The fight night card this weekend 3/15 is headlined by #8 Vettori off a loss vs #12 Dolidze in a rematch from just 2 years ago. They're the only ranked fighters on the whole event, and that's not even because of any pullouts from any intended fights to my knowledge.

The winner of this "main event" won't be in a title eliminator, nor even near the top 5, and no one else on the card is going anywhere any time soon. That main event isn't even good enough to be yesteryear's co-main.

If you were interested in who was going to soon challenge for the HW belt, or what prospective top fighters were going to emerge at LHW back in 2018, you watched that fight night. If you care about what's happening at MW right now, you can take a vacation on this event, it's not important and the results won't matter for nearly 2 years.
 
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