Monopolies Kill, Competition Builds

American MMA ain’t done yet. A group of rebels, rejects, and fighters seeking retribution got together to chart new territory in the stale sport. Let’s go through everything that happened this weekend and what that means for the future of fighting.

Now let’s get into it.

10 years, 2 months, and 2 weeks ago Nate Diaz shook up the world. The scrappy underdog from Stockton strangled the then face of the sport into submission. He grabbed the mic from Joe Rogan to say, “I’m not surprised motherfuckers.”

A few months later he would be.

The UFC sold for $4 billion in August 2016. This was the most expensive transaction for an organization in sports history and it came at the perfect time.

Forget McGregor’s loss. Forget Ronda Rousey’s loss that came at the end of the previous year. The organization was soaring to higher and higher revenues off of those fighters’ explosive careers. UFC parent company owners, Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta, sold at the top like any smart executives would. Matchmaker Joe Silva left the company with them. President and promoter Dana White had his role reduced.

The passionate people driving the biggest promotion in fighting walked away to open more avenues for monetization.

Today the UFC is using bad AI videos to promote fights, much of the programming they used to film for fight promotion is gone, and elite talent is skipping signing with the UFC because they aren’t paying as much as other organizations are willing to. Now organic interest from casual fans is drying up.

Another executive that left the UFC several years after their sale saw where the company was headed. UFC’s former Chief Financial Officer, Nikita Bidarian, teamed up with influencer turned MMA bully Jake Paul to promote fights under the Most Valuable Promotions (MVP), banner.

Regardless of how you feel about MVP you can’t deny their impact. They persuaded Netflix to put on their first ever boxing card!

MVP went to Netflix again this weekend to travel back in time and gather the attention that started leaving leaving the sport after the UFC sold. They recruited Diaz, Rousey, Francis Ngannou and more to create a trojan horse of an event that would introduce casual fans to compelling talent outside of the UFC. Namely, French sensation Salahdine Parnasse.

If you’re a hardcore fan you already knew this guy’s name. KSW’s action star made headlines for nearly becoming a triple champ in the organization after failing to negotiate with the UFC.

Like all good carnival shows, Netflix MMA’s first card had a huge dose of controversy. Adriano Moraes, the man that stopped Mighty Mouse in ONE Championship, fought undefeated prospect Phumi Nkuta.

Moraes rallied in the second. He used his grappling to sneak in a crafty back take in the second.

Then Moraes’s grappling yielded one of the most controversial moments of the year.

Moraes got the win because Nkuta was ruled unconscious before the bell.

I saw Moraes holding the choke after the bell went off. The rules should have told the ref to send the fight to the judges. But I’m not Nkuta so I have to see this finish as a good thing.

I’d never heard of this guy a week ago. Now I want to see how he rights the wrongs of bad judging. A fighting career in the 21st century is all about attention to put asses in seats eyeballs on screens and this controversy underneath the rest of the fight card took all of those eyeballs this weekend.

The UFC was back in the Apex for another edition of UFC Fights^TM while Netflix took their first swing at MMA. The guy that I was most excited to see put a beating on his undefeated late replacement.

This win is Gantt’s 15th finish across 16 professional and amateur MMA fights. He’s also 33. It’s time to run the wrestler up the rankings.

Before Gantt’s finish we got one of the silliest submissions you’ll ever see.

Nothing hurts more than an unforced error.

The most competitive contest from the whole weekend came from the UFC’s headliners.

Costa tried to turn it around in the first. He was able to sneak around Allen to get on his back.

Allen shook him off after this momentary scare. Then he pushed his lead in the second round.

This was the basic dynamic of the fight. Allen would circle to put Costa on the fence. Every time Costa tried to kick Allen off of him he would simply slide slide away or check the kicks. Then Allen would step into hard left hands.

Costa came out swinging in the final round. Then he got overzealous and found himself on his back.

Normally Costa has pretty good throws from the clinch.

Okay so what’s the difference between these two sequences? No kuzushi, no throw.

Kuzushi means off balancing. The cliché reminds us that you need to disrupt someone’s base if you want to remove them from their feet.

Erosa’s balance was compromised from his own knee. All Costa had to do was step across him and pull to throw Erosa to the floor.

If there is no kuzushi you’ll often end up on the worse end of the takedown attempts.

Allen dismantled Costa on Saturday. He scored 1 knockdown, 7 takedowns, and landed 70% of everything he threw with 156 of 222 total strikes. The only problem is no one is talking about it.

It’s next to impossible to compare viewership between MMA organizations. The UFC has no reason to release so they hold the numbers to maintain leverage over the industry. We can look at Google Trends to see what fans are searching for.

Regardless of how you search for the events, Arnold Allen’s fight with Melquizael Costa hardly registers relative to the inaugural Netflix MMA card. The people that are searching for Allen vs Costa are still searching for various fighters on from the Netflix MMA card. The same thing doesn’t hold true for Rousey vs Carano.

You can also look at Tapology’s Twitter to see how active the sport was this weekend.

The largest independent database in MMA reported more traffic than any time in their history.

You might be thinking that Allen vs Costa wasn’t a big UFC event and was never going to compare to Rousey vs Carano. No arguments here.

You might also think that the UFC will put on a massive card during the next Netflix MMA event to steal those eyeballs back. I sincerely hope so. I want more opportunities to watch more good fights.

I’m not dumb enough to think that this promotion threatens the UFC. I don’t even necessarily want that to happen! All I care about is more more money for more fighters across more events.

The UFC was at California’s Intuit Dome in January 2015. That’s the same venue that hosted Netflix’s MMA card. California law requires promoters to release purse information so we can actually compare the two events’ payroll.

Now here is what the UFC

Yes you are reading this correctly. Nate Diaz reportedly got more money than Islam Makhachev and Renato Moicano, combined.

Sure, this doesn’t cover unreported bonuses for either card. Doesn’t matter.

We now have a new organization creating more avenues for more athletes to make more money in MMA. And I can’t figure out why anyone other than TKO’s rent-seeking shareholders think that’s a bad thing.