While I agree that PRIDE had the opportunity to showcase how different martial arts would fare against the other, I think the main difference between UFC now and PRIDE then is that UFC fighters are no longer specialists in only 1 thing, now I'm not saying there's no MMA guys in PRIDE, I simply believe they were not as good or facing as good of a competition as what we witnessed.
When I'm thinking about guys like GSP, Jones and a bunch of others, I just have a hard time seeing the equivalent in PRIDE. When I look at the PRIDE guys, I can't help but think that many of them weren't as elite as some pretend. They were elite at the time, because there wasn't many people, look at Fedor's shape when he fought, look at Wanderlei's performance in the UFC, I think it's easy to say that there's place for much improvement. The UFC HW division has PRIDE fighters in it, but it's because it's always been a weak division, not necessarily because of PRIDE's eliteness.
Yes, PRIDE is at HW, PRIDE answered many questions, PRIDE most likely provided a great show too, but I still don't feel like it's the cream of the cream, it's an era where there were too many experts of one thing, which is easy to take advantage of when you're able to mix it up (Fedor), but UFC is no longer at this stage, which is normal too.
And LOL@W"MMA" being exciting because it's new. The only thing exciting about W"MMA" is to see if one girl can finally defend an armbar or if she can throw a jab correctly. If you want this kind of excitement, I suggest training apprentice fighters.
