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By: Shawn Ennis, MMATorch Senior Columnist
Saturday night has come and gone, and with it another light heavyweight contender. Well, we'll use the word "contender" loosely. "Challenger" would be a more apt term in this instance. UFC 159, like any big event, showcased some good and some bad, but this particular card featured more of the ugly than that to which we've become accustomed. And so let's once again discuss, dissect, and decide how we feel about the show by using that most elementary of appendages: our thumbs.
Thumbs Up (and big toes sideways): to Jon Jones, who seems destined to dethrone Anderson Silva at the top of the consensus pound for pound rankings. According to Twitter, he's already done that for several pundits. Jones is at the top of his game, and he hasn't entered what is considered to be the prime age range for athletes. That is a scary thought. Before flattening the UFC's ninth-ranked middleweight (a fact that the UFC shamelessly continued to show next to Sonnen's name graphic), Jones had obliterated five straight former UFC champions. Those champions, by the way, defended the title a combined total of two times. Jones has matched the record five defenses set by Tito Ortiz eleven years ago, when Ortiz was two years older than Jones is now. And while anything can change, and change quickly, in the world of MMA, right now we have no idea where the champ's ceiling is.
Thumbs Down: to the UFC for booking Chael Sonnen in a title fight. It's been discussed ad nauseum already, but it wouldn't be right to let another opportunity go by without pointing out the folly that was this matchup. Instead of using their biggest asset in a way that was productive and forward-moving, the UFC chose to waste everyone's time with a season of The Ultimate Fighter that was successful in basically every way other than the supposed feud between the coaches, and a laughable pre-fight buildup that called for suspension of disbelief that the challenger had any shot whatsoever of even being competitive. And for all of their trouble, they were 30 seconds away from having the most ridiculous paper champion in combat sports when Jon Jones destroyed his toe en route to finishing the overmatched middleweight. If I had more thumbs, they would all be pointed southward.
Thumbs Up: to Joe Rogan for continuing to call for change in how eye pokes are handled.
Thumbs Down: to everything else that involved eye pokes on Saturday night, including Rogan's suggestion for a solution. Modified gloves are not the answer. A padded finger making its way into one's eyeball is perhaps only marginally less agonizing than an unpadded finger – and that's only conjecture on my part, as my eyeballs have made it through life relatively unscathed thus far. The problem is the habit that many fighters have of pawing an open hand at an opponent's face. If the behavior doesn't change, the results won't either. The solution would take time to affect change, but it's really pretty simple: deduct a point for each eye poke, intentional or not, and confirm the poke via instant replay. Should a fight end via eye poke, it's a disqualification. It's not a no contest, and we don't go to the scorecards if it happens in the third round. The fighter who ends the fight via eye poke loses. That's it. This rule would have changed the outcome of two fights on Saturday, and it would have been for the better.
Thumbs Down: to the voice of Satan that scorched our ears between rounds of the Bisping-Belcher fight. It says a lot about the general weirdness of UFC 159 that the demonic voice that somehow permeated the feed seemed completely fitting for that night. One can only imagine the number of people watching who were relieved to find out they weren't the only ones to hear that.
Thumbs Up: to the decisiveness of officials. Hey – if you're going to call the fight, call the fight. Kevin Mulhall did it in the Villante-St. Preux fight when he called the action to a halt after Villante was poked in the eye, and Keith Peterson did it when it became obvious that Chael Sonnen had no choice other than to put his arms up and deflect only a portion of the punishment that Jon Jones saw fit to inflict.
Thumbs Down: to bad stoppages and the confusion that causes them. I'm not talking about Jones-Sonnen. That was a good stoppage. I'm looking more at the Villante-St. Preux stoppage. As I said before, the decisiveness was good. There was no waffling or back-and-forth. The problem is the guidelines that surround this kind of instance. Why is it permissible to give five minutes for a groin shot while there are no guidelines for handling eye pokes? Sure, referees can massage the moment without asking the fighter if he can see, but why should they have to think about ways to not ask if a fighter can continue? Dana White called for some changes to the way eye pokes are handled, and those changes can't come soon enough. Hopefully the changes involve mandatory point deductions and disqualifications as well as guidance about stopping a fight.
Thumbs Down: to Dana White's cell phone. Anderson Silva called you after the fight? No he didn't. I almost believed that Anthony Pettis texted you, but I'm not buying Silva for a second. What was he calling about? To remind you that he already booked a fight with Chris Weidman?
Thumbs Up: to Roy Nelson's continued streak. I'm not saying that this version of Nelson would turn the tables on Werdum during that historic beatdown, but you have to wonder if the results of the Mir fight at least would be different in 2013. Who would have thought that trimming down a little bit and (if appearance isn't too deceiving) taking training a bit more seriously would have such a positive effect on a career?
Thumbs Up: to the UFC heavyweight division. How much fun is that division right now? If Mark Hunt can get past Junior dos Santos (and are you going to count him out of a possible slugfest?) we could be looking at a Roy Nelson-Mark Hunt title eliminator. Just let that sink in for a second. And if that happens, we could be looking at a Velasquez-Werdum title fight, which is all kinds of intriguing. Add to that the mix of Overeem, dos Santos, Cormier, et al, and you've got an exciting division full of fresh matchups. (This despite the fact that the upcoming title fight is a rematch of a one-sided affair that, judging by the victor's appearance, looked like it ended in homicide.)
Thumbs Down: to missing out on seeing what else Rustam Khabilov is capable of doing. The guy is obviously as strong as an ox – you don't get to suplex someone who doesn't want to be suplexed without some significant strength – but due to a goofy landing by Yancy Medeiros, we were deprived of seeing whether he would be challenged this time out. Luckily Khabilov came through unscathed, and he fights at lightweight, which means there are enough potential opponents who aren't booked that we could see a quick turnaround.
Thumbs Up: to Pat Healy. Going into the event, the consensus was that Jim Miller was a better version of Healy. The first round did nothing to dissuade that notion, as Miller probably could have coaxed a TKO stoppage had he been afforded half a minute more. But Healy was undeterred and showed that his run in Strikeforce was not necessarily due to lesser competition. In doing so he carved out a place for himself in the UFC lightweight division – and in the current lightweight climate, that is no small feat.
Thumbs Down: to the event as a whole. This isn't to disparage the fighters in any way. Steven Siler, Sara McCann, and Bryan Caraway are three others that I haven't mentioned yet who put in excellent performances but were overshadowed by the overall strangeness of the show and the newsworthy weirdness and lack of quality in the main event. It's one thing when there's a challenger who has improbably worked his way up to the top of a division and still no one gives him a chance against the dominant champion. It's a very different thing when an undeserving challenger with no memorable or recent fights in a division is gifted a title shot for reasons comprehensible only to those in charge of making the fight, and that challenger is seen as having no chance. The fight never should have happened, and the MMA gods punished the decision makers for booking it. Unfortunately, the fans also felt that same wrath.
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Jamie Penick, editor-in-chief
(mmatorcheditor@gmail.com)
STAFF COLUMNISTS: Shawn Ennis - Jason Amadi
Frank Hyden - Rich Hansen
Chris Park - Matt Pelkey
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