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With the recent news that Cristiane "Cyborg" Santos is now officially a free-agent after failing to come to terms with Strikeforce, and may be heading elsewhere, for now, Womens' MMA is finding itself in serious peril of not surviving an eventual Strikeforce/UFC merger. What good is having a women's division in the UFC if you don't have the best in the world after all?

Yet strangely, with recent signings, Strikeforce now has eight of the top ten women at 135 listed in the June Unified Women's Rankings under contract, or at least seven (Hitomi Akano's contract status is unclear). They aren't far away from having an unprecedented monopoly on a single women's division. So it seems like at least matchmaker Sean Shelby cares quite a bit about women's MMA. But it still is going to be a very hard uphill battle to legitimize their top division without the woman undisputedly seen as the best in the world. One thing about that though:

That doesn't mean she actually is.

Most of Cyborg's wins since coming to the United States have been over women who don't even normally fight at 145. Yoko Takahashi and Gina Carano are the only opponents she's had since then that are in fact in her natural weight class. The Girlfight Monster Hitomi Akano certainly is a tough, elite grappler but she's not even a natural 135 lbs. fighter, she's a Flyweight. And her last opponent, Jan Finney, was not only a weight class below Cyborg, she wasn't even very good within that weight class. She has a chin and guts and little else. Why the athletic commissioners sanctioned a bout between Cyborg and an 8-7 Bantamweight is beyond me, and the incredibly brutal mauling that followed was all too predictable. Cyborg may be incredibly dangerous, but if you took Cain Velasquez, Brock Lesnar, JDS, Shane Carwin, or Overeem and had them fight a journeyman off the indies with a hard head and not much else, and added a referee who would not stop the fight until one fighter had multiple broken bones in their face, I suspect the results would be quite similar, and no one thinks any of those guys are outright invincible.

At any rate, it would take quite a bit of effort to give someone enough credibility that they could be considered on the same level as Cyborg, especially at what is by far the thinnest of the 12 significant divisions, Women's 145. After looking at who was available though, I realized it wasn't impossible. Zuffa has traditionally shied away from doing tournaments because in an eight-person tournament, seven of them leave it on a loss. However, there is no surer way to create a credible champion in a division where none exists.

Fantasy match-making is the sort of thing that can be groan inducing to some people since it leads to disagreements about whether a particular match-up is moronic or not. However in Women's 145, the bigger challenge is simply to find enough women to field a tournament who aren't tomato cans. So I came up with a list of 14 women for a hypothetical Eight-Woman Grand Prix with four alternate slots (two of which are play-ins), and it was actually much easier than I thought it would be. Most of them are not under contract to Strikeforce, but none of them should be implausible acquisitions. All of them have good resumes. All of them have fought at 140 or higher. Some of them would be better off at 135--and if they lose early on those people could simply change divisions and keep their credibility--but too my knowledge none of them are natural 125 lbs. fighters like Hitomi Akano or Roxanne Modafferi. And with two play-in fights, all but one of them would be entering on a win (hint: if you can guess which fighter would be entering the main tournament on a loss, then you were probably aware of at least one female MMA fighter before reading this article). After the jump,there's a bio of every hypothetical participant, along with who isn't in the tournament.

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Cross-posted from a post at Gal's Guide to MMA.

With the recent news that Cristiane "Cyborg" Santos is now officially a free-agent after failing to come to terms with Strikeforce, and may be heading elsewhere, for now, Womens' MMA is finding itself in serious peril of not surviving an eventual Strikeforce/UFC merger. What good is having a women's division in the UFC if you don't have the best in the world after all?

Yet strangely, with recent signings, Strikeforce now has eight of the top ten women at 135 listed in the June Unified Women's Rankings under contract, or at least seven (Hitomi Akano's contract status is unclear). They aren't far away from having an unprecedented monopoly on a single women's division. So it seems like at least matchmaker Sean Shelby cares quite a bit about women's MMA. But it still is going to be a very hard uphill battle to legitimize their top division without the woman undisputedly seen as the best in the world. One thing about that though:

That doesn't mean she actually is.

Most of Cyborg's wins since coming to the United States have been over women who don't even normally fight at 145. Yoko Takahashi and Gina Carano are the only opponents she's had since then that are in fact in her natural weight class. The Girlfight Monster Hitomi Akano certainly is a tough, elite grappler but she's not even a natural 135 lbs. fighter, she's a Flyweight. And her last opponent, Jan Finney, was not only a weight class below Cyborg, she wasn't even very good within that weight class. She has a chin and guts and little else. Why the athletic commissioners sanctioned a bout between Cyborg and an 8-7 Bantamweight is beyond me, and the incredibly brutal mauling that followed was all too predictable. Cyborg may be incredibly dangerous, but if you took Cain Velasquez, Brock Lesnar, JDS, Shane Carwin, or Overeem and had them fight a journeyman off the indies with a hard head and not much else, and added a referee who would not stop the fight until one fighter had multiple broken bones in their face, I suspect the results would be quite similar, and no one thinks any of those guys are outright invincible.

At any rate, it would take quite a bit of effort to give someone enough credibility that they could be considered on the same level as Cyborg, especially at what is by far the thinnest of the 12 significant divisions, Women's 145. After looking at who was available though, I realized it wasn't impossible. Zuffa has traditionally shied away from doing tournaments because in an eight-person tournament, seven of them leave it on a loss. However, there is no surer way to create a credible champion in a division where none exists.

Fantasy match-making is the sort of thing that can be groan inducing to some people since it leads to disagreements about whether a particular match-up is moronic or not. However in Women's 145, the bigger challenge is simply to find enough women to field a tournament who aren't tomato cans. So I came up with a list of 14 women for a hypothetical Eight-Woman Grand Prix with four alternate slots (two of which are play-ins), and it was actually much easier than I thought it would be. Most of them are not under contract to Strikeforce, but none of them should be implausible acquisitions. All of them have good resumes. All of them have fought at 140 or higher. Some of them would be better off at 135--and if they lose early on those people could simply change divisions and keep their credibility--but too my knowledge none of them are natural 125 lbs. fighters like Hitomi Akano or Roxanne Modafferi. And with two play-in fights, all but one of them would be entering on a win (hint: if you can guess which fighter would be entering the main tournament on a loss, then you were probably aware of at least one female MMA fighter before reading this article). After the jump,there's a bio of every hypothetical participant, along with who isn't in the tournament.

Continue reading this post »

As Kendall Grove just became the third Ultimate Fighter winner to be cut from the UFC roster, it's become increasingly clear that winning the Ultimate Fighter is no longer a free pass for people to underperform as long as they're otherwise professional. Having started his UFC career winning three straight and seeming like he could be a future contender, Grove then went 4-6 since and bobbled up and down until he finally got completely manhandled by Tim Boetsch a couple weeks ago, leading to his pink slip. He's a fairly interesting guy to watch so hopefully he can find enough success on the indies to get another shot, either in the UFC or Strikeforce, and I definitely wish him luck.

Kendall Grove may be the third TUF winner to get cut, but he's the first one to not do anything more than lose matches. Travis Lutter, having won a golden ticket to leapfrog past a whole slew of individuals to get a shot at Anderson Silva, ended up missing weight for a championship fight, which more than erased any special protection or goodwill he might have gotten from being a TUF winner. Dana White's expression at the weigh-ins was quite similar to a man watching a million dollars being burned in a bonfire, and Lutter was nearly booed out of the arena when he entered for his match. Silva predictably stopped him in the second round in what was now a non-title fight. One fight later in what was merely the second hardest match-up the UFC could have possibly given Lutter, Rich Frankin TKO'd him right out of the company. Two-and-a-half years later, Efrain Escudero managed to also miss weight for a fight, and lost his second fight in three outings to the much less heralded Charles Oliveira, proving you don't have to fuck up a PPV main-event, you just have to generally fuck up on top of losing to get fired.

Kendall Grove though didn't do anything particularly shameful. He just lost two fights in a row and three of his last four. This is pretty much a standard reason for the UFC to fire any well-known-but-struggling fighter.

Kendall Grove may have some company soon though, as Joe Stevenson looks to be fighting for his job this Sunday, when he drops down to Featherweight to take on Javier Vazquez at UFC on Versus Live 4. So I thought I'd put together this poll.

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Earlier today, news broke that StrikeForce head Scott Coker doesn't want to have an immediate rematch between Fabricio Werdum and Fedor Emelianenko, but would rather Emelianenko fight either Champion Alistair Overeem, a top contender in Antonio "Big Foot" Silva, or PrideFC veteran Sergei Kharitonov.

Okay it's been established that in potentially having their Heavyweight Championship be fought between Overeem and a man coming off of a loss for the second straight time, StrikeForce is treating their title belt like feces. It's been reiterated in countless articles, fanposts, comments and message board threads.

Even I was saying this at first, but the situation is a lot different than if they were a promotion with a much deeper roster. Part of the problem is just the difficulties in dealing with M-1 Global. While Coker made what was arguably a major mistake in acquiescing to their original demands in the first place, including agreeing to omit a very standard championship clause from Fedor's contract, I don't think he's making a mistake this time with his most recent proclamation, and this is coming from a huge UFC fan. Given the situation, it seems as though Scott Coker is actually being very smart here, and is just hedging his bets depending on three different possible outcomes in negotiations with Fedor's M-1 Global handlers.

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Image from www.cdn.sherdog.com

Who are the world’s top flyweights? If you look at the few MMA sites that rank the division, almost all of them will have Jussier "Formiga" da Silva (4-0) ranked #1, and the former Shooto champion whom sa Silva defeated Shinichi Kojima (10-4-5) as #2. This is logical, since the Shooto Flyweight belt is the most prestigious one, and they run more Flyweight matches than anyone else and have always done so, and have easily the most established Flyweight division in MMA.

The problem with this is, the real answer is that nobody actually knows who the world’s top Flyweights are.

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Image from www.cdn.sherdog.com

No, this is not an official Bloody Elbow meta-ranking, since I don't work for them, but I did manage to find 5 sites that had Flyweight rankings that didn't mix genders (like MMA ELO), and decided to combine their rankings using BE's formula modified for a mere Top 10, giving anyone ranked #1 ten points, #2 nine points, and so forth. Sherdog, Fight Matrix, MMARocks, FiveKnuckles.com, and MMARising.com all have relatively recent Flyweight rankings, and were the sources for this. The consensus #1 Flyweight was Jussier "Formiga" da Silva, who has been inactive since beating longtime #1 Shinichi "B.J." Kojima last July. Kojima was the consensus #2. See the rest of the rankings after the jump.

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The short answer is, it's probably in the top three, at least for now. Sorry if this analysis is really long.

The WEC's lack of exposure being on a lesser cable network is a very common complain among MMA fans, especially among those who live in the U.S. but still don't get the channel in their line-up. I was wondering what the best potential options might be if the WEC hadn't re-upped their contract with Versus recently, so I consulted a website that lists weekly cable network viewer totals, both in primetime and overall daily averages. I decided to check out the most recent week for which data was available as of the writing of this article, and list the top 50 American cable networks and see both where Versus and Spike stood, and which ones were a bad fit demographically. Out of the top 50 cable networks, Spike was 19th in primetime that week, which I believe is lower than average, and Versus was 30th, which is about average for them as of late. The fact is, Versus has been growing hugely very recently with the acquisition of NHL games and IndyCar races. They just aren't a fourth-tier network anymore. 30th on cable is still pretty far from the top though, and WEC events still do quite a bit above their typical primetime viewership average, so I still wondered if there wasn't a superior alternative. The results were a bit surprising. More after the jump.

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