UFC Discipline Will Never Be Consistent

The UFC’s dismissal of Miguel Torres over an ill-advised joke was a lot of things, one of which is a reminder that the UFC’s disciplinary actions continue to be inconsistent, unpredictable and downright puzzling.

The fact that both Rashad Evans and Forrest Griffin have made jokes or comments about sexual assault has not been lost upon those who have already written on this topic, so I’ll spare you the lengthy diatribe about how Torres is getting hosed in this situation.

Suffice to say that Rashad’s joke that he would “put those hands on [Phil Davis, who went to Penn State University] worse than that dude did them other kids at Penn State” was every bit as potentially offensive as Torres’ joke tweet that “if a rape van was called a surprise van, more people wouldn’t mind going for rides in them. Everyone likes surprises.”

I mean, while Torres was using the words “rape van” as a synonym for “windowless van” (which is clear given his decision to edit the tweet later on by swapping the terms), the reports that Torres’ joke was a “rape joke” are not really accurate. Isn’t it more of a windowless van joke? To me, the subject of the joke is the van itself, just as when you point out that a guy with a bad mustache looks a bit like a child molester, the joke is about the mustache, not child molesting.

Meanwhile, Evans’ comment was making light of a real-life situation with specific victims. I’m not offended by either comment, in part because I don’t get offended all that easily by off-color jokes, but which one is really more insensitive?

No matter. I said I wouldn’t spend the whole column comparing the two offenses, and I won’t. Like most of the people discussing the issue, my focus was initially on how unfortunate it is that the UFC treats fighters with so much inconsistency. You can see it in how quickly fighters are cut for bad performances (some fighters are cut after one or two losses, others remain after four or five) or how, as in this case, they are disciplined. Ask Nate Marquardt, for example, how he feels about being left off the UFC roster while Chael Sonnen, whose testosterone replacement therapy landed him a suspension as well, is being promoted by the organization to this day.

However, I’ve come to realize that I initially missed the point, as did most of us. If we expect the UFC to ever be consistent with the way that they address poor performances or even inappropriate conduct, we’re going to continue to be let down. That’s because the UFC has never attempted to address such issues with consistency, and they never will.

For all the talk of how the UFC wants to compete with the NFL, NBA or MLB, there are certain areas in which the UFC has no intention of replicating its competition. Sure, mixed martial arts is a sport, and the UFC is basically a sports league. However, things like who will challenge for a title are decided in a highly-subjective manner and are always subject to change (can you see the NFL telling a team they won’t be playing in the Super Bowl because a bunch of the players skipped Media Day?). As illustrated earlier, personnel decisions are also made with often little to no rationale given to the fans who follow the organization and spend their money watching the fights. Top twenty fighters are routinely dropped because they lose to elite competition, while mediocre fighters can keep their jobs by alternating wins and losses on the prelims.

And so it goes. My point is that we can argue all day that Torres should not have been cut for his joke, but there’s no way that Torres was cut for his joke. Can’t you think of about 30 other fighters who could have said the same thing on their Twitter accounts and kept their jobs? I can.

Torres could have been fired for many reasons: he hasn’t put on terribly exciting performances in his three-fight UFC tenure, he’s put up just a similarly uninspiring 2-1 record in that time, he’s in a division that’s absolutely stacked and thus is more “expendable” than he would be if he was a heavyweight with his kind of talent, and so forth.

Did the joke play into his firing? Sure, it did. I would imagine that he was actually fired not just for his joke, but also for Evans’ joke and Forrest Griffin’s joke (which claimed that “rape is the new missionary”, apparently because sexual assaults are becoming more common). Perhaps Dana White felt pressure to address the presence of three off-color jokes referencing sexual assault that happened in very quick succession. Who was going to get penalized? Evans? Griffin? Come on, now. None of us are that naive.

My point is that while it’s true that Miguel Torres was fired for being Miguel Torres, he was also fired for not being Rashad Evans or Forrest Griffin.

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Tags: Dana White, Forrest Griffin, Miguel Torres, Rashad Evans, UFC