This is disgusting to watch, they're just letting him get hit in the head repeatedly. Dana can't pretend to care about the welfare of fighters when he allows a guy to tack on a ridiculous, unnecessary beating at the end of his career.
Blame the ref who had many opportunities to stop it, or Hunt's corner who kept letting him go out there to get slaughtered
Lots of things to blame Dana for, this isn't one. He wasn't even there, and I'm sure he was pissed watching it. Bet he rips that ref a new one
You know how you stop that shit is before it happens. You don't put a 41 year old, massively deteriorated Mark Hunt in there with a young lion that has cardio for days. It was just idiotic matchmaking. Worst of all it wasn't even on television, so anything the UFC would have "gotten" from Miocic pounding Hunt is negligible. No new star was made. That being said it does serve as a great reminder, and I'm gonna use this as a launch point to say something else I was thinking about earlier. I love MMA but there are some serious problems that are only going to get worse going forward, and I don't think the direction of the sport is anything less than very bad.
First and foremost the UFC is a promotional company and while that's hard to accept, that's what it is. Everything with them is about making money for themselves. Now, I don't think it takes a genius to figure this out, but their fight model is really screwed up and about to take a nosedive. The only guys they have on the roster who can get people in the building in places halfway around the world and even in the United States are guys like Mark Hunt. Guys whose best days are long past. This epidemic even persists in the other weight classes in which they have young champions. Or rather did until Jones was stripped. Fighters like Mark Hunt, Fabricio Werdum, Big Nog, Overeem, Barnett, Mir, Nelson, Cro Cop, Arlovski compose the majority of the weight class. I almost want to throw Junior in there as well because he has also deteriorated greatly. I can't possibly be the only one who sees the problem with this.
At middleweight we haven't seen the champion fight somebody in their athletic prime in 3-4 years. Other than Luke Rockhold, neither are any of his potential challengers.
At light heavyweight, this doesn't apply quite as much because Jones did fight young competition, but just look at the rankings and the positions in which the UFC has to put those guys on their card. Right now they are reliant on guys like Shogun, Hendo, Hashad, Rampage, Cormier (who is 36), and Glover (who is 35) to make money in that weight class. They have absolutely no young, quality 205 pounders in their ranks.
The other weight classes have a good mix, but they don't draw as much. The numbers show this. One of the massive problems with the UFC is a lack of young fighters who are going to take the spots of these guys when they're gone. Of course, this isn't only a UFC problem, it's one of many problems that plague MMA. The UFC likes to trumpet how much MMA has grown, but where's the growth?
One of the ways which MMA has grown is that the UFC has become bloated, showcasing lesser quality fighters with regularity. Zuffa's pockets have grown. The only real growth in terms of fighters is that the lighter weight classes have grown tremendously and WMMA has exploded. Although to what degree WMMA has exploded is in question as the only real growth is shown when Ronda Rousey fights as she's the only person who can main event or draw people to a show. As for the lighter weight classes, I love them. A lot of people do too. In the US, the biggest market for MMA there is, they don't draw. In Canada they don't draw.
Related to that is why MMA hasn't grown. Here's what I think. I think the UFC's destruction of companies not only permanently killed some markets out there, but that bringing all of those things under their thumb has homogenized the MMA product too much. I think this narrative that the UFC pushed about MMA going through a boom period worldwide was going to cause better athletes to choose MMA was fucking bullshit. Why would a better athlete choose to do this unless they didn't have any options? Fighter pay is shit. If you want to fight, you can be a boxer and make tons more. We've been over this many times though. Anyone breaking into MMA does so because they're either obsessed with the sport for some reason or don't have any other options in life. The actual cost of being trained and going around circuits to actually get in the UFC makes it so that nobody could maintain any quality of life. So, why would anyone choose to do this? I think the rankings and prospect quality in MMA right now make my point for me. I think the days of an athlete like GSP, Cain Velasquez, or Jon Jones entering the sport at those weight classes are over. The rampant steroid abuse is another issue that I don't really want to get into, but I have no doubt it keeps people away from the sport.
I think that anyone having a monopoly on something leads to stagnation. WWE is a great example. I know it's two different things, but I feel very strongly that the UFC is equal to WWE in so many respects. They're even matching each other in saying that fighters/wrestlers can't find a sponsor to put on their shorts/trunks. Bellator is getting stronger, they may get more strong due to the Reebok deal, and I think that would be great for the sport all things considered. Cross-promotional intrigue is one of the things that keeps combat sports going. If they don't, then...the sport is left in the hands of a group that doesn't build towards big fights, doesn't pay their rank and file fighters enough to quit their day jobs, and doesn't allow them to make enough money to quit their day jobs by putting ads on their shorts.
I also don't think the UFC is capable of creating stars. Part of that is cross-promotional intrigue that doesn't exist anymore, and related to that is that they scooped up their competition. The same thing happened to WWE when they scooped up the territories and all the guys from that territory era retired. There was nobody left to create stars for them. Another reason they aren't capable of creating stars is because they've forgotten that stars are created by keeping two guys separated for so long that people clamor to see a fight. Then the winner is a star, and the loser is a lesser star that you can build back up later. The UFC likes to blame piracy for their lack of PPV success, but I think that's absolutely untrue. How many PPV buys did Floyd-Manny do? Those guys were kept apart for so long, the match was supposedly past its sell-by date, and people were talking about them clearing 4 million buys. A gate of over 70 million. When you build a fight, it sells. When you don't, people will watch it on their computer. If not for stream sites those people wouldn't even be watching it on their computer, they shouldn't fool themselves that people would buy their shows. How many of the shows they put on in 2014 would you guys have bought?
As far as boxing goes, Canelo Alvarez is a great example of this. Did losing to Floyd Mayweather do anything to his drawing power? No, it didn't. He drew 30-35k to a baseball stadium tonight, and he's the future of boxing on PPV. If he fights GGG or Cotto on PPV later this year they'll probably clear a million buys. One of the things the UFC actually needs to learn from boxing is that boxing's greed has been the thing that kept it going for so long. Their greed was focused in different ways though, in the case of Zuffa it's to line their pockets as quickly as possible with no long-term vision. Boxing promoters are always looking towards the future. Their greed forces them to as that's the only way they can sign top prospects, cultivate them into stars, and make loads of money off them. The UFC really needs to learn from something like that, but I don't know how. Fighter pay is too low for starters, and you'd never see them sign somebody with an amateur background to a large deal with 0 fights under their belt because there's no structure. There is that structure in boxing. The best the UFC could do in that regard would be to immediately sign Olympians who want to become mixed martial artists and develop those fighters under their banner. Guys like Cormier and Cejudo should have been doing all of their fighting under the Zuffa banner. Some will bust and some won't, but they need to establish pipelines for the good of the sport.
Anyway, to sum up this late night rambling, the UFC doesn't really see it that way, and seeing as they've monopolized the sport, at this moment in time the UFC = MMA. I don't really think that the UFC has in mind the good of the sport, and when these older guys retire I have no idea what it's going to look like. I sort of expect Dana and the Ferttitas to cash out and let the whole thing be left to the vultures once that happens. They're destroying the sport just as much as they grew it. I feel like Zuffa has no long-term vision for the sport because they're not in it for the long term. By the way, the end of that Reebok deal is about when they won't have the ability to make money off the fighters under their thumb anymore, as an enormous amount of them will have retired with no prospects on the way. At the root of any successful sport, the people participating in that sport have to get something out of it and that's not really the case here.
