The UFC has a huge fan base, no doubt. It’s filled with everyone from the die hard fan who saw the older UFC’s live in the front row while sitting next to Mask Lewis, to the relative new comer. Any fight club knows that getting more fans and followers is key. It’s what pays the bills after all. So it makes sense that the UFC would want to give free programming on Spike TV every now and then to let people get a taste of the sport. However, as we all know there is one drawback to having free content and that is … it’s not free. Without the PPV buys the program has to be paid for SOMEHOW right? Of course it does, so enter in advertisement, we get to watch a free night of good fights all for the low cost of having to watch some target commercials for a little bit. Pretty sweet deal right?

Well if you were watching UFN 20 last night, you weren’t just subjected to the standard commercials, you were also subjected to countless amounts of references to “Blue Mountain State”, the new TV show on Spike TV about college kids on a football team partying every day. Now I will admit. It worked on me, I watched BMS and it was actually quite entertaining. But this is not the point. The point is, this commercialization stick was not only brought out but they freakin beat us over the head with it until our brains were hemorrhaging BMS sneak peak clips. I swear to God. Mike Goldberg would be in the middle  of commentating a fight and would literally stop mid-sentence to promote BMS. “Looks like Nate Diaz is going for the straight left and don’t forget to watch the premiere of Blue Mountain State coming up right after this match.” Ok I get it Spike, you want us to watch your show, you can leave me alone now.

Now look, I get it. I am totally fine with commercials and advertisements. If that is what it takes to allow us free fights then I say bring it on. The point I’m making is that the way BMS was promoted really brings to light what we have to deal with to get free programing. It wouldn’t have been as bad if it was JUST commercials of the show when there was down time in the fights, but it wasn’t just that. They would play extended clips of either BMS or Legion during the fighter walkouts which many fans at home like to see. They also took like a good ten minuets of the show in between fights to interview the cast of BMS, I mean seriously. My message to UFC? Pull back a little bit on the plugging. I’m not saying I want you guys to lose money, I am just saying if UFN 20 was the first MMA match that I had ever seen, I most likely would not have come back because of all the plugging. If your goal is to get more fans then this might be something you want to think about you know .. food for thought.

HERE

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If there is one part of MMA that is never going to go away, it’s the trash talking. In fact, that’s half the fun. It helps build the tension between the two fighters, which makes a great fight even more enjoyable. However, there are a couple of fighters that sometimes just don’t know when to pull it back a bit. The general rule of thumb is that when the match is over, that’s usually the end of the drama because differences are settled in the ring. Brock Lesnar and Shinya Aoki sort of took this rule and threw it out the window in their most recent fights. So the question is which fighter had the worst post fight antic? Brock or Aoki? Let’s break it down.

First, Brock. The match was 100% clean. Since there was nothing dirty done we don’t have to mark any points off him yet. His immediate celebration may have been a bit much but nothing to yell at him for. He did go straight to Mir while Mir was recovering to rub the win in this face. This was a classless move. Your opponent just took a brutal loss and is trying to pick himself back up, you don’t need to tear him back apart. Or at least not right away. The flicking off of the crowd was of course unacceptable. These are the people that are writing your paycheck, so it’s not smart to piss them off. Throw in the fact that Brock then slammed the main sponsor and gave us WAY too much information on what he wanted to do to his wife and you had a pretty bad post fight antic. However he did apologize the next day and although that didn’t take away what he did, it at least felt genuine.

Next we have Aoki. I am not going to count the breaking of Hirota’s arm against Aoki. Hirota did not tap, plain and simple. if you don’t want to tap and go all Renzo Gracie, fine, but then you accept what that will mean for your limbs. The flicking off in Hirota’s face is absolutely horrible. I thought that getting in Mir’s face after he lost was bad, but at least Mir was WALKING. Hirota was on the mat motionless with his freaking arm broken. It’s like the ultimate insult to injury. Followed up with a little flicking off of the crowd and Aoki is definitely on the same plane if not worse than Brock at this point. Aoki saves himself a little bit by not continuing to dig himself deeper in a hole like Brock did. His apology though was a bit half-a**ed. He said that he did something rude that he should apologize for, but that it was just because of his excitement over the win. I mean, sure excitement is one thing, but middle fingering a guy you just broke, literally, I would say is a bit malicious.

Final vote? I am going to go with Aoki. Though Brock’s antic was longer, Aoki’s was more malicious. When you have broken someone’s arm I think it’s far to say that your opponent has gotten the point. Especially if what Hirota was bashing you on was your ground game. At that point there is no need to keep going. Couple that with the fact that Brock made better amends and you have Aoki with the worse post-fight antic.

Wow. Just wow. I don’t even know where to start on this awards show. Everything from the set, to the host, to the writing, to the research was absolutely terrible. Now granted I’m sure that MMA in general doesn’t give a crap about award shows so the bar was most likely set pretty low. That being said even going in with my expectations not that high, the show still management to blow my mind at how awful it was. So if you missed it, don’t be sad because you didn’t miss much, but go ahead and read on if you are curious as to how bad this awards show actually was.

First, the host. Ok I’m sure that John Heffron is very funny when he does stand-up. However he is NOT funny when he hosts. All of his jokes fell 100% flat. Sure there were some chuckles now and then from the audience but overall you could hear crickets. One question to UFC, did you guys forget about the comedian that you ALREADY have on your payroll? Not to mention Joe Rogan has hosted a television show before, which leads me to believe that he would be able to pull this off better than Heffron. Also who the hell was in charge of writing? Seriously, I want to know who in their right mind thought that the material put out there was even remotely close to witty or funny. It wasn’t. I’m willing to give the fighters slack because well, they were never meant to be presenters, but everything was just so forced and delivered so badly that it just amplified the crappiness.

Oh and who the heck is working the research department? Some of the categories they put up were just plain stupid. No offense but I don’t REALLY care about what the best GLOVE of the year is. How about UFC Ring Girl of the year? I mean WTF? THERE’S ONLY ONE LEFT! How can any other girl BESIDES Arianny win? Plus they may as well just have called this the UFC awards show because that’s the only program that won any award (unless you count Hendo winning KO of the year in which NOW he’s SF but I digress). It is no surprise that with all of this I turned it off about 60% of the way through.

There are some good points that are worth mentioning though. We got to see that Heath Herring was still alive although he had no clue how to talk into a microphone, Greg Jackson and his gym won some much deserved awards for coach and gym of the year, and Chris Cyborg got female fighter of the year. However, the best part was when we got to see a drunk Diego Sanchez accept his award for fight of the year against Clay Guida. For a good minute, you couldn’t understand a word that Diego was saying. It was hilarious. He sounded like a stuck tape deck repeating the same thing over and over. It gets even better when in the background you can see Hendo trying so hard not to crack up. I would say that little moment saved the award show. Don’t get me wrong though, it was still pretty bad.

You know what I love most about MMA? Dana White. Why? Because thanks to him it’s impossible to run out of writing material. Sooner or later he says something that I say to myself “man I need to respond to this”. I was willing to let him slide on the comments he made on the vlog since anyone would be annoyed that an event that is being put on isn’t being promoted, but now he’s starting to go a little off the deep end. He recently made the following comments:

“What happened with the last card is people were (complaining) because the Rashad Evans-Rampage fight wasn’t happening. Look at what happened. This is my philosophy on this, if you’re a (expletive) fight fan, we’re going to put on good fights for you. It’s been pretty crazy. In the history of being in this game, I’ve never seen anything like this. We’ve never had injuries like this. It’s part of the business. We’re in the fight business. Our job is to make fights that people want to see and when guys fall off we’ve got to fix it. You get 10 (expletive) hardcores on the Internet going, ‘Oh, this card (stinks), there’s no this, there’s no that.’ Then guess what: Don’t (expletive) buy the card!. It’s usually the ones that they’re bitching about that end up being some of the best.“

First of all Dana, your taking you’re frustration out on the wrong people. I may only be in my second semester of business school, but I know enough that you don’t piss off your customers. We’re the ones that give you money. If people are complaining about the card then telling them not to buy it is not exactly going to do anything for you. Especially since IF your hardcore fans are complaining about the card then most likely they have ALREADY considered not purchasing the event. Maybe we wouldn’t be as upset if you didn’t try to create lofty promises that were hard to keep. You didn’t HAVE to have Rampage v.s Rashad. You could have just given Rampage the next title shot. So don’t come yelling at us when your fighters go off the range, ruin Plan A, and then Plans B through X get ruined for reasons beyond anyone’s control.

So instead of getting mad, how about you take a couple minutes, take a few deep breathes, and ask yourself “why are my customers reacting this way?” Have you ever considered that maybe fans are not so much concerned with quantity of fights but quality? One of the reasons why MMA did so well in the past two years was because there appeared to be a nice balance. There were just enough fighters to get us the amount of events that we wanted but at the same time they were fighters that we always wanted to see. Slowly but surely this “golden” state is becoming a bit crowded. Granted we do like to see up and coming fighters, but only on the free fight nights and TUF. Fans don’t want to shell out $50 for the B-list.

Dana White has always marched to the beat of his own drum and certainly doesn’t care about anyone’s opinion but his own. That being said my critique is more than likely falling on depth ears. However, in the slight chance that it’s not I just want to say this, your customers have opinions for a reason. You can accept them or ignore them, it’s your choice. Just remember, rule #1 of business. If you don’t take care of the customer, someone else will.

Cool yes? Of course it is. I mean just look at the beauty of that kick landing on Horodecki’s face. Now some would argue that while this knockout is sweet, it doesn’t deserve KO of the year, reason being because the significance of the match it no where near as big as other knockouts that have happened in 09. I am willing to concede that yes this match was not as important as others and therefore doesn’t make the KO as flashy. However, this gets my vote for KO for the year for one simple reason. It emphasized that one thing that I love about MMA and that is there is no running away from a fight. When you step in the ring, it’s on. This isn’t boxing, you can’t do things like clinch to escape a beating. You either go hard or you go home. Horodecki thought that by turning his back he would get some sympathy from Njokunai. He was wrong and he learned the hard way. This KO has had people debate as to whether or not it’s ethical to hit a fleeing opponent. Well I say screw that. Don’t turn your back, you’ve come to fight, not run around like Kalib Starnes.