Once again… it seems like a weekly segment can be written about fouls and their mishandling in the world of MMA these days.

On Sunday night, Stockholm time, a potentially very intriguing fight between Alexander Gustafsson and Glover Texeira took place. Both have been at the top of the light heavyweight division for  a long time, and this was one of the few fights between the very best in that division which had yet to be made. So, apart from the fact that they both already fought for the title and lost, it was a very interesting fight.

And the fight indeed started quite interestingly. Unfortunately, in the middle of the very first round Gustafsson apparently poked Texeira in the eye. Marc Goddard stopped the action, called in the doctor and told Texeira emphatically that he doesn’t have any time to recover and that he needs to decide immediately whether he can continue to fight or not.

Fighters are usually very reluctant to say they cannot fight. They prepare for months for these fights, their livelihood depends on these fights and it’s very important for fighters to have success in their careers to always feel like they can overcome any adversity. Plus, they usually get a lot of scrutiny from fans and promotions alike for quitting mid-fight. So while it may be the smart move for a fighter to quit for any reason that would compromise his fighting ability, most times fighters try to push through and keep fighting.

Oh My God! It happened again! Only a few short weeks after Mousasi kneed Weidman into a baffling and controversial TKO win by apparently legal knees, after the bout was stopped because the referee thought the knees were illegal (what?), and after Miragliotta took all the heat for his apparent mistake, and all the discussion surrounding the use of instant replays and referee polling, it happened again.  This time with the consensus one of the best referees in the business, Herb Dean. There was nothing different between the two incidents. Nothing. Except that this time it was worse. Much much worse.

Let’s take it from the top. First of all, we should remember that the new unified rules of MMA have not been adopted everywhere, which is a big part of the reason this confusion is taking place. In New York, where Weidman and Mousasi fought, the new rules had been adopted, which means that a fighter is only considered ‘downed opponent’ when both his hands (and feet) are on the ground.  In Texas, where Alvarez and Poirier have just fought, the new rules had not been adopted, which means that one hand on the ground is enough to consider a fighter “downed”, and therefore illegal for his head to kneed at.

Having just discussed the fiasco involving the result of the co-main event on Saturday’s card, there was actually another big story surrounding the main event.

As is well known, Daniel Cormier first weighed-in at 206.2 pounds, 1.2 pounds above the required limit for a championship fight. He then went back to the dressing room, came back less than 3 minutes later and weighed-in at 205 pounds on the nose, while holding the towel that was used to cover his privates and was held by two other guys on both sides.

Since obviously something was out of order here, allegations were immediately thrown Cormier’s way for cheating, claiming that by leaning on the towel, Cormier was able to lighten the weight he was putting on the scale by exactly those 1.2 pounds he needed to make the required weight. And in fact, when looking at Cormier weighing-in the second time it does look as if he is pushing down on the towel while looking at the scale as if he is trying to decide exactly how much he should be pushing down on the towel in order to get to the desired weight.

While it’s easy to blame Cormier for the incident, and he probably should be blamed, Cormier did what he did in plain sight. It wasn’t some smart trick he pulled behind the scenes. There couldn’t be a chain of events which would make it easier to understand that something was not right in the process, yet the people who were responsible for monitoring those proceedings, the New York State Athletic Commission, don’t get a whole lot of flak for the way they dealt with the situation. That’s not to say that they haven’t been criticized, but most references I could find about the incident direct the blame on Cormier, as if the Commission’s role in the situation is secondary.

At UFC 210, the Mousasi-Weidman fight ended rather controversially, when it was ruled as a TKO win for Mousasi after an apparent mistake by referee Dan Miragliotta when he stopped the fight due to an illegal knee, in order to let Weidman recuperate.

The most important thing to remember here is that New York State Athletic Omission doesn’t allow the use of instant replay in order to determine what really happened, which means that the immediate referee decision is final.  There is no reason to change it later due to use of replays.

Doctors were let in to the Octagon to check on Weidman, while Miragliotta was notified, in direct violation of that New-York rule, that after checking the replays it was discovered that he had made a mistake and the knees were legal.  He then decided, in light of this new, forbidden information, that the fight must continue immediately. The doctors who were checking Weidman found meanwhile that he has trouble recollecting what day or month it is, and therefore decided he cannot continue. Since the Miragliotta decided that fight should continue immediately and it the doctors decided that Weidman was not fit to continue, it was declared a TKO win for Mousasi.

Now let’s look at what should have happened.

Most promotions are just dying for name fighters and especially like it when they can make fights between two fighters with recognizable names, even if these fights are not warranted based on the fighters current rankings, or the fighters are not in the same weight division (like Rampage’s, King Mo’s and countless others fights at Heavyweight), or the fighters are long past their prime (like Ken Shamrock’s last few fights).

The UFC is obviously in no such need for name fighters and fights as other promotions, as its roster is full of name fighters. Still, it seems baffling sometimes how they go out of their way not to book name fighters against one another, opting instead to put the over-the-hill name fighter against some up-and-coming prospect, or sometimes not even that.

One glaring example is Anderson Silva who was put against Derek Brunson not long ago. Another is BJ Penn’s fight against Yair Rodriguez. And I think now we have seen an especially good example of that: Last week Rashad Evans made his middleweight debut against Daniel Kelly. Rashad Evans didn’t fight for 2 years and then didn’t look good in his fights since his return. If his transition to middleweight wasn’t a successful one, this would probably be the end for Evans’ career.

Once again a big fight fell through due to weight cutting issues. This time it was Khabib Nurmagomedov vs. Tony Ferguson, a fight that everybody have been looking forward to for a long time.

And once again the issue of weight-cutting comes up. There is enough criticism as it is against weight-cutting being very unhealthy for fighters, diminishing their fighting abilities come fight night and pitting different sized opponents against one another depending on how willing different fighters are to submit themselves to this dangerous process.  On top of that, from time to time there is the even worse outcome of fighters going to hospitals because of bad weight-cuts and big fights getting canceled at the last moment (not to mention a few deaths that resulted from weight-cutting related complications).

Clearly the method of making sure fighters fight at the same weight these days is not ideal, and there have been a lot of clamoring for its revision. To try and decide how to change it, two important things need to be considered: why are fighters cutting weight, and what is the theoretically ideal solution.

The main reason that fighters cut weight is to be as big as they can on fight night. Meaning, of course, that they want to fight at a weight that is as close as possible to the weight they usually walk around at, but they want to weigh-in at the lowest weight possible – much lower than the weight they walk around at – planning to gain all that weight back after the weight-in so that there would be the biggest margin possible between their fight weight and official weight.  This is of course the source of the danger – this discrepancy between the two weights.

Brock Lesnar tested positive for a banned substance by USADA right before his fight at UFC 200.

It appears obvious that Lesnar knew exactly what he was doing.  He did not test positive in any of the tests that the results of which came back long enough before the fight for the fight to get canceled, in which case he wouldn’t have gotten the money for the fight.  Instead, he took the banned substances for which he tested positive only when he knew that the results of the tests would come back after the fight, fought and got the money for the fight.

The question is, what should be done in order for that not to happen again in the future.

The situation now is that fighters who test positive for banned substances get suspended from fighting. This is, of course, a good solution for most fighters, for whom fighting is their main career.  By suspending them from fighting, they don’t get to pursue their goal of an MMA career (at least for a while); they don’t get the opportunity to continue being involved in competition and their livelihood is taken away from them for a period of time.

But for some fighters, an MMA career is not their goal anyway.  They are in for one big payday.  It happened before (James Toney), and it has never been more clear than this time with Brock Lesnar.

This weekend there was a bout between two heavyweight prospects: Francis Ngannou and Bojan Mihajlovic. Ngannou had two fights in the UFC prior to this one, while for Mihajlovic this was his Octagon debut. Both were coming off of impressive win streaks outside of the Octagon, but as we know the real test is when they come to the UFC.

So basically, the UFC paired two unknowns with impressive win streaks who are in their initial stages of their UFC careers against each other. This is not the first time UFC has done this; they actually tend to do that quite often.

I don’t understand why they do that.  Of course, these fights have the potential of being fun fights, but that’s true for many fights. There is a lot of reason why not to do that, in my opinion.  I am not addressing specifically the Ngannou – Mihajlovic fight, but the recurring match making of two UFC newcomers on winning streaks.

First of all, these kind of fights don’t really tell us a whole lot, at the end of the day. I mean, those are two fighters who were successful outside of the UFC against mediocre or weak competition. They come to the UFC, where they can fight better competition, fighters that are known to be good or decent, at least. Instead the UFC pits them against one another. Well, what do we learn when one fighter who beat nobodys beats another fighter who beat nobodys? Not much. We don’t really know what any of them is worth. They might be the two best guys in the world, so the fact that one of them lost to the other guy who will be champion one day, doesn’t mean he is not good. And vice versa, they might both be really weak compared to UFC caliber competition, so the fact that one of them beat the other doesn’t mean they deserve to stay in the UFC.

The main idea behind weight classes is, of course, setting a level playing field for the different fighters. Another result of the weight classes is for fans to know how much the fighters weigh, making the sport a little more understandable and relatable. If I know that a fighter weighs approximately the same as me, I can compare myself to him.

Boxing, where weigh-ins started, was never a very institutionalized sport. It was always a sport in which fights were made ad-hoc, and in which the different promoters had to go through a lot of negotiations to be able to make these fights. There was never a very orderly, rank driven kind of management for matchmaking. So the treatment the weigh-ins always got was similarly not very professional. Fighters could do pretty much whatever they wanted, as long as they stand on that scale and make weight once, usually the day before the fight.

MMA adopted this amateurish attitude, because for a long time, MMA was also a sport without some central organization which could organize it all in a more professional, safe fashion.  Now finally (and after ONE championship has declared its implementation of similar measures a few months ago) the UFC has announced new weigh-in rules, for the safety of the fighters.

I agree that the safety of the fighters is the most important thing. but there is another factor to consider, and that is the the effect on the fans.

Very Strange!

That’s all I can say.

Before the fight between Ronaldo Souza and Vitor Belfort I pretty much accepted that unless the Belfort’s performance against Chris Weidman was a gigantic fluke, Belfort has very little chance against grappling master Ronaldo Souza.

Chris Weidman took Belfort down easily with a simple double leg take down pretty early in the fight, quickly moved to half-guard and proceeded to hammer Belfort to oblivion. Belfort didn’t seriously try to escape the position, didn’t hip-escape or try to hold Weidman down. Didn’t really show any grappling skills, as if he didn’t even train for that – and that’s when he was fighting a wrestler. He even tried to punch Weidman from the bottom – the kind of tactic you’d see in the early days of MMA employed by absolute novices to grappling, who thought they had a chance of doing damage this way.