Hyden's Take
HYDEN BLOG: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly from Bellator 108 and UFC 167
Nov 20, 2013 - 11:30:21 AM HYDEN BLOG: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly from Bellator 108 and UFC 167

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By: Frank Hyden, MMATorch contributor

Bellator 108 and UFC 167 were this past weekend, let's get right to it.

Bellator 108

GOOD: Patricio Freire stops Justin Wilcox

Freire just dominated this fight before getting the stoppage in the first round. A great performance from Freire, who looked stoppable in this fight.

GOOD: Marcus Galvao stops Tom McKenna

Another dominating display. Galvao did land several punches to the back of the head, but the fight was pretty much already over by then.

GOOD: Vitaly Minakov stops Alexander Volkov

Minakov captured the Bellator Heavyweight Championship from Volkov with a relentless attack. You could argue that the stoppage was a tad premature, but I'd rather it be early than late. Minakov was just the better fighter tonight.

GOOD- Quinton "Rampage" Jackson stops Joey Beltran

The fight itself was fairly dull, up until the end of the first when they started swinging wildly. Rampage caught Beltran, dropped him, and got the stoppage. Bellator got what they wanted from this fight, a Rampage stoppage win. Four first round stoppages made for one of the better Bellator cards, at least for me. This was a pretty good show.


UFC 167

OK: Prelim decisions

I didn't want to go BAD, but these fights weren't very GOOD either. Erik Perez over Edwin Figueroa, Rick Story over Brian Ebersole, and Thales Leites over Ed Herman were OK fights, but nothing special.

GOOD: Donald Cerrone submits Evan Dunham

Part of me wanted to go GREAT here, but that would be going overboard. Still, this was a big win for Cerrone. He looked great and finished a guy who's pretty tough.

OK: Ali Bagautinov vs. Tim Elliot

Again, another decision (this one on the main card) that was nothing special. I couldn't go BAD, though, because the fight wasn't bad, just OK. Bagautinov got the decision.

GOOD: Tyron Woodley stops Josh Koscheck

Yeah, Koscheck has been done for a while, but Woodley look really good here. He got the finish in the first round with some brutal strikes.

GOOD: Robbie Lawler vs. Rory MacDonald

MacDonald showed again why he might not ever fight for a title. He looked really bad at times in this fight. He didn't show up at all in the first, then got caught by Lawler's power in the third. Just a bad no-show for him. As for Lawler, this puts him in contention, but he needs one more big win before he can fight for the title.

GOOD: Rashad Evans stops Chael Sonnen

Evans just took this fight from the start. He looked better than he has in a while. I'm not nearly ready to say he's going to make a title run, but this was a good step towards that. Now, we just need to see him do it again. If he looks good in his next fight, maybe we can start to believe a little. As for Sonnen, he just moves on to his next fight.

GOOD: Georges St. Pierre vs. Johny Hendricks

The fight itself was really close. A couple of judges gave GSP three rounds, the other gave three to Hendricks. It was so close that I think you could make a case for either man getting the victory. However, after the fight is where things took a turn for the worse. GSP babbled something about needing to step away. I don't know what his problem is, and I don't need to know. It sounds like it's very personal, though it could be something that seems to be much bigger to him than it really is. I don't say that out of disrespect or anything like that, I just know that we all view our own problems as being larger than maybe they really are. We all have things that happen to us that seem that they will swallow us up, but then things turn out to not be so bad. Hopefully that's the case here.

Now we move to Johny Hendricks. After the fight, he was upset and he felt he got robbed. I take issue with that in the sense that you can't get robbed if you think you won three rounds to two, but instead lost three rounds to two. He gets a pass, though, because he was caught up in the moment directly after the fight. What he doesn't get a pass for, though, is his comments later. He said he doesn't care if GSP retires because that's his belt. Well, he didn't get robbed, he didn't get screwed, he lost a close decision.

I'm not a fan of titles changing hands by decision. I didn't like it when Eddie Alvarez won the Bellator Lightweight Championship from Michael Chandler at Bellator 106. I think that in order to become the champion, you have to beat the champion, not get two or three guys at cageside to say you won. I realize, of course, that this isn't very feasible so I don't bring it up too often. I think you have to take the championship, and if you don't, then don't complain about losing a decision. I might feel differently if Hendricks had won four or five rounds, but he didn't. At best he won three rounds. That's not a case for a robbery.

The stuff Hendricks was saying pre-fight also factors into my dislike of his behavior. He was saying before the fight that GSP using VADA testing was a fraud, that he needed to use WADA. However, as MMATorch Editor-in-chief Jamie Penick pointed out, VADA uses WADA protocols. It's even worse when you consider that Hendricks didn't join GSP in the drug testing from VADA.

Hendricks said he'll never allow this to happen again. Good, I hope so. I do wish, though, that this was a case of Hendricks taking personal responsibility for what happened. After all, how many times have we heard "Don't leave it up to the judges"?


Comments and suggestions can be emailed to me at hydenfrank@gmail.com and you can follow me on Twitter at @hydenfrank