Fightmania Mailbag: Dead Promotions, Upsets, and Penn-Florian

It’s been awhile since we’ve done a Fightmania mailbag, and it is long overdue.  With everything that has happened in July, there are plenty of e-mails to choose from and you guys have definitely made your voices heard.  Let’s see what the Fightmania readers have had to say about some of the biggest news of the summer as well as what is still to come.

Scott out of Tempe, AZ is back with his opinion about the UFC outlasting yet another competitor…

You know what?  I’m actually glad that Affliction is no more.  I would rather see one big company that signs all the best fighters, so that we fans get to see the best against the best.  If the best fighters are all spread out like they were in the Pride days, we miss out on a lot of great fights.

I can see where you are coming from, Scott.  I think it’s too bad for the fighters involved, because let’s face it, most of them won’t end up in the UFC and almost all of them will be negatively affected financially by the demise of the company’s MMA promotion.

However, Scott is right in pointing out that there are certain advantages to having one top of the line organization that signs most of the world’s best fighters.  For fans, it is not hard to decide where to spend their pay-per-view dollars, since the UFC is really the only show in town when it comes to PPV.  Meanwhile, since so many great fighters are under contract with the UFC, we see a lot of fights that we never would have seen when Pride was around.

Of course, there will always be fights that we miss out on.  Even now, a handful of really good fighters in each division are not in the UFC, and for reasons that seem to be political, many of them probably will never be (ie Fedor Emelianenko, Josh Barnett, Matt Lindland, etc.).  The good news is that with the possible reconciliation between the UFC and Tito Ortiz, Dana White has shown that he can set aside personal issues for the better of the company and the sport.  And, of course, there’s not much the UFC can do if the Cung Le’s of the world do not want to come test themselves against the best, right?

Jonah didn’t give his location, but his e-mail demanded inclusion:

People don’t seem to understand that just because someone beats someone else, that doesn’t mean that they are definitely better than them.  A good example is Matt Serra beating GSP, or more recently, Brett Rogers beating Andrei Arlovski.  We don’t assume that the Oakland Raiders are better than the New England Patriots if they get lucky and win one game against them, we just acknowledge that they were better on that particular instance.  Why can’t fans do the same thing with MMA?

I hate to say it, but Jonah has a point.  There are few matchups to be made between top-level MMA fighters where one fighter would never have a chance of beating the other.  This is especially true when given the types of fluky finishes we have seen over the years (Matt Lindland knocking himself out on the mat during a slam, or Vitor Belfort’s glove slicing Randy Couture’s eyelid, anyone?).  I would think that in a hypothetical world where GSP and Serra could fight again and again, “Groundhog Day” style, GSP would win most of the bouts.  That isn’t to take anything away from Serra, though I guess I’m doing just that.  The reality is that GSP is not really that great of a matchup for Serra, and Serra’s combination of skill and the circumstances surrounding how the fight happened and GSP’s own actions all came together to give Serra his historic victory.

It’s also similar with Arlovski, I believe.  As a polished striker with pretty good ground skills, he should have been able to take advantage of a favorable matchup against a sloppier (albeit powerful) striker in Brett Rogers.  Unfortunately, Arlovski’s chin is not the best, and with Rogers’ power, any mistake can be a fight-ending one, as we saw.  Does that mean that Arlovski would not win the rematch, or the majority of a dozen rematches, if they could somehow occur?  Of course not.

I don’t think that this takes too much away from the fighters.  If anything, one of the best things about MMA is that we can endlessly debate which fighter is better, even if one has gotten the better of the other in the past.

Carl from Waterloo, Iowa wants to get a preview of the preview, I guess?

Hey man, I know you’re gonna do a preview of UFC 101, but can I get some early thoughts on Florian-Penn?  I think that Florian has a real good chance of beating BJ!

Hmmmm…well, there’s no reason I can’t break the release date on my pre-fight analysis and give you guys a taste of my thoughts.  In short, I think BJ is the favorite for good reason.  My one worry regarding him was how hard he would train, and the various weigh-in/pool jumping videos Penn has released have shown that he is in great shape and ready to go.  I think that Penn is better pretty much everywhere than Florian, and that people are short-changing him because the last time they saw him, he was getting knotted up badly by GSP.

Well, there’s no shame to losing to St. Pierre…though complaining about it for months afterward, that’s debatable.  Anyway, I will probably be rooting for Florian because he’s a hard worker who has come a long way, loves the sport, and he would be a much better champion in terms of defending the title regularly than BJ.  But I just think that Penn will win.

Sam from Minnesota has a quick question regarding the post fight antics of Brock Lesnar, which now have become the dead horse that all other beaten dead horses in MMA will be judged by (with apologies to “Greasegate”):

Am I the only one who thought Lesnar’s interview was hilarious?

Nope.  I did too.

by Jon Hartley for Fightmania.com

Tags: Andrei Arlovski, Brett Rogers, Brock Lesnar, Dana White, Fedor Emelianenko, Josh Barnett, Matt Serra, Randy Couture, Tito Ortiz, UFC, Vitor Belfort