Last night you got Dan Gable versus a tough, problematic journeyman at under 3/1. Gable, and Jones, being ~ 99/1 fave to win every time they take to the mat. Will go down in history as epic fail of oddsmakers.

Nice pic. I'm actually wearing the shirt that Jon Jones wore to the weigh in and it's even more telling than the one Gus wore.




Under the UFC logo there are 4 letters: HRSD which stand for Honor Respect Strength and Discipline. Interesting that Jones is wearing this shirt because he has no honor, he shows no respect, he has little discipline and his strength comes from illegal banned substances.

Best UFC matchup from a hype perspective would def be Jon Jones vs BROCK. Let them both roid up.

I think there are potentially some fights for Jones at LHW down the road. Anthony Smith and Thiago Santos have looked good their last few fights albeit against lower level of competion. Maybe Dominick Reyes can work himself into contention or even Rockhold might look better moving up to LHW.

Ideally he moves up to fight DC next, then Stipe if he wins and after that a contender at LHW might have moved to the front of the pack.

I would obviously watch Jones vs DC at LHW but them fighting at HW is what I really want to see.

There are fights for him at LHW but does anyone expect any of those matches to be competitive? Reyes is the one potentially interesting matchup since he's pretty young in the sport and his progression is still unknown. However, Jones is better than the other 3 in every aspect of the game (other than KO power).

At HW there are tons of interesting challenges for Jones even outside of the top guys.

The picogram of tbol Jones has tested positive for offers zero athletic benefit..

Frankie wasn't supposed to be competitive against BJ. TJ wasn't supposed to be competitive against Barao.

Things emerge. Sometimes anyway.

Sure, that's what makes Reyes so interesting. He's only 4 years into his fight career. Like Reyes, Frankie and TJ were both up and coming fighters. Barao had 25 fights in his career before TJ had his first. BJ Penn had 12 fights before Frankie had his first and they were mostly against top level competition at the time: Lyoto Machida, Matt Hughes, Takanori Gomi, Matt Serra, Din Thomas, Caol Uno, Duane Ludwig.

Do you know how many fights Jon Jones had before Anthony Smith had his first fight? Zero. How many fights did he have before Luke Rockhold had his first fight? Zero. Those two have been in this game for as long as Jones. They are not young up and comers.

I like Anthony Smith. He's fun to watch but it's humorous to even think about him getting in the octagon vs Jon Jones. He just lost to Thiago Santos this year. He lost both rounds 1 and 2 vs Oezdemir and was fortunate to come out of there with a win. Rashad Evans and Shogun are 2 fights tailor made for him to win although Shogun is still a top 15 guy so props for that.

Cormier says there are levels to this game and at LHW those levels are very apparent.

New Year’s Eve RIZN card starts in an hour. Some good mma fights on it and the mayweather exhibition v that star Japanese kickboxer. I guess you can buy payperview sans mayweather fight in USA but hopefully there will just be a decent stream I’m not paying for this

Dude isn't allowed to kick. What kind of bull**** is this? Nothing more than a glorified sparring session.

Yeah I don’t really care about that much but it’s supposed to be a relatively stacked mma portion

I take it you never saw Muhammad Ali fight Antonio Inoki. There's virtually no chance this will be worse than that.

I did. It won't be but that's a low bar to step over.

I suppose Tenshin could try to throw punches from his back.

That chick that just won is the most ripped female I have ever seen short of a body builder what the ****

Gabi garcia

She used to be less ripped, but still physically imposing. Just ask Wanderlei.

Fun fact: She once missed weight by 28 pounds

Never subscribed to fight pass but ESPN + just added a bunch of old ufc fights today (including the “top 25 of all time”) to go along win it’s classic boxing archives. Pretty cool if you’re a fight fan. Kind of must own now for me with some exclusive ufc and boxing cards I hope they don’t jack up the price soon

Fight Pass is/was good. I probably never took full advantage of all the content they have on there and mostly used it to watch early prelims and the cards that were exclusively on fight pass. My subscription was up in October and I didnt renew as I wanted to see how things would work out with with the new ESPN+ deal.

Alot of the exclusive Fight Pass cards were mediocre cards on the other side of the world that were on at random times, definately didnt have any title fights. I wonder if other ESPN+ cards will have fights at a similar level to Cejudo vs Dillashaw or is it a once off for the 1st ESPN card of the new deal.

ESPN will be airing 30 UFC Fight Nights a year, 20 of which will be broadcast exclusively on ESPN+. ESPN+ will also be airing Dana's Tuesday Night Contender Series. Plus ESPN will be airing all the PPV prelims which they can air on ESPN networks or on ESPN+. $5/mo is a bargain for ESPN+ IMO, and that's without considering you get access to a lot of other sports programming.

My initial thought was that it would be pointless to subscribe to UFC Fight Pass but perhaps not. Apparently Fight Pass is doubling the amount of live content they are broadcasting with over 250 live events a year (1000+ hours of live fights). This would be more for the hardcore fight fan as most of the programming will not be UFC programming. UFC has made new deals to broadcast Roy Jones Jr Boxing, a lot more Muay Thai, plus Lethwei (burmese bareknuckle fighting). Now that Dana White has this feud with Oscar "de la dummy", Dana seems hell bent on competing with Dazn so don't be surprised if UFC continues to add more programming.

Supposedly you'll be able to add a Fight Pass Subscription from the ESPN+ app. A lot of people, myself included would like to see a $5/mo charge for adding that although to my knowledge UFC Fight pass still costs $7.99/mo to $9.99/mo.

Airing on UFC Fight Pass in 2019

MMA
UFC (Early prelims for PPVs)
UFC Contenders Series (my guess is that the international versions of this show will be aired on Fight pass, potentially on delay)
Invicta FC
Cage Warriors
Cage Fury Fighting Championships
Pancrase
Island Fights
Titan FC
CES MMA (moving from AXS TV)
TKO MMA
Alaska Fighting Championship
M-1 Global USA (couldn't find much on this but apparently will be on fight pass)

Kickboxing
Glory

Submission Grappling/Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu
Eddie Bravo Invitational
Polaris Professional Jiu-Jitsu Invitational
Combat Jiu-Jitsu
Quintet

Boxing
Roy Jones Jr. Boxing

Muay Thai
Friday Night Fights
Bangkok Fights
Muay Thai Grand Prix

Lethwei
World Lethwei Championship
Lethwei Fighting Championship

Karate
Karate Combat

Regarding ESPN+ I wouldn't expect any pricing increases anytime soon. Right now Disney is just trying to get market penetration with their streaming services. Most streaming services have not really increased their prices much if at all, aside from Netflix which feels it is sort of invincible right now and I suppose Amazon Prime going from $99/year to $119/yr, although Prime Video is generally not the primary reason people subscribe to Amazon Prime.

UFC 235 looking like it might be pretty stacked. Already had Askren vs Lawler and Zabit vs Jeremy Stephens which were fights that I was looking forward to and Ariel Helwani is now reporting that Woodley vs Usman is signed for that card with Jones vs Anthony Smith planned but just waiting for Jones to get his Vegas license before confirming.

Im suprised Usman jumped the line ahead of Colby to fight Woodley. Once again interim titles prove to be useless.

vs a 53 year old woman who hadn't fought since 2000.

This card is super stacked from top to bottom, even the prelims. I was wondering how this was possible. One reason is because UFC 233 was cancelled altogether. Another reason is because UFC 234 is in Australia. That event has a strong main and co-main but the rest of the card is typical for cards in the eastern hemisphere.

For me the biggest thing is that Jon Jones is back. Not only is he back, but he is fighting just 2 months after his last fight. I heard he wants to fight more often, probably to catch up for lost time. This is a really big deal because he only fought once in each of the last 5 years (2014-2018). Now we could potentially see him fight 3 or 4 times in a year.

Also, Cain Velasquez is headlining a Fight Night in February. Having him back is huge too if he can stay healthy because he has only fought twice in the last 5 years.

I keep thinking that this Covington vs Woodley matchup will be huge. It's like Trump vs BLM, two diametrically opposed views of the world at a time when the masses are so divided and angry. Who am I kidding though? Colby Covington is no Conor McGregor. He can't sell a fight by himself, and Woodley is not great at selling a fight. If those 2 went really hard in the media I think it could become something but as it stands it's no more than a co-main event that the masses know and care little about. For that reason, Colby is completely replaceable by a guy that Dana criticized for most of his career, Kamaru Usman, but suddenly loves after one dominant performance.

From a competitive standpoint I'm fine with the change but it is unfortunate that there has been so little enthusiasm for the WW division by the casual fans since GSP and Matt Hughes left.