Newscientist.com published a story  I found interesting for obvious reasons:

Imagine you are an experienced martial arts referee. You are asked to score a number of taekwondo bouts, shown to you on video. In each bout, one combatant is wearing red, the other blue. Would clothing colour make any difference to your impartial, expert judgement? Of course it wouldn't.

Yet research shows it almost certainly would. Last year, sports psychologists at the University of Münster, Germany, showed video clips of bouts to 42 experienced referees. They then played the same clips again, digitally manipulated so that the clothing colours were swapped round. The result? In close matches, the scoring swapped round too, with red competitors awarded an average of 13 per cent more points than when they were dressed in blue (Psychological Science, vol 19, p 769).

And, further down the story, referring to Olympic combat sports:

When they analysed the results they found that shirt colour appeared to influence the result, with nearly 55 per cent of bouts being won by the competitor in red. In closely fought bouts it was 62 per cent (Nature, vol 435, p 293). "It should have been roughly 50 per cent red, 50 per cent blue, and this was a statistically significant deviation," Barton says. "Skill and strength may be the main factors - if you're rubbish, a red shirt won't stop you from losing, but when fights were relatively symmetrical, colour tipped the balance."

The author goes on to offer a proposed explanation for the phenomenon:

In nature, red is often used to signal dominance and aggression, and in humans this is reinforced by cultural symbols such as warning signs and stop signals.

"Closely fought bouts....relatively symmetrical fights...."  Hmmm, sounds to me like split decisions in MMA.

More after the jump...

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In the world of MMA, not much inspires the excitement and anticipation of fans like a rematch whose time has come.  Wanderlei Silva vs. Rampage Jackson II, Matt Hughes vs. Frank Trigg II, and more recently Brock Lesnar vs. Frank Mir II and BJ Penn vs. Georges St. Pierre II are all fights that generated a tremendous amount of chatter and speculation among fans.

As we look forward to the fight cards that will finish 2009 then, and look ahead to 2010, here (in no particular order) are nine rematches that need to happen sometime in the next year.

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The first of a planned recurring review from yours truly.

In Dana White's pre-UFC 91 Vlog, he shared with us that he is "the Grim Reaper, mother****ers" - the undertaker that brings a swift and certain end to all competitors.

This mindset can be more broadly expanded to Zuffa's growing dominance in many areas of MMA - stable of fighter talent, PPV buys, international presence, mainstream media, you name it.  The UFC (/Zuffa) is making rapid inroads toward establishing themselves as the unassailable #1 player in the MMA market.  This feature is a weekly roundup of news item relevant to that crusade.

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With the last of the week's Great Post-Affliction Press Conferences now done, we get a chance to catch our breath and analyze what the changed talent-distribution landscape means for the UFC.

While the big one got away from the UFC yet again, as after the PRIDE purchase, they did pick up a handful of talent from the disbanded Affliction.

One of the week's biggest acquisitions  for the UFC - which was not directly related to the Affliction meltdown - was the fighter that left the organization 17 months ago amidst turmoil and bad blood (put mildly) - Tito Ortiz.

More after the jump.

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There are a few huge UFC fights coming our way in the next 5 weeks, including three title fights - in the heavyweight, welterweight and lightweight divisions.

But it's interesting to consider that while Florian-Penn is more than a month away, and Bisping-Henderson is an undercard fight on UFC 100, both of those fights - not to mention Lesnar-Mir - have been the subject of more "chatter" in the MMA blogosphere and forums recently than another fight which is a week away and as big or bigger than any of them: Georges St. Pierre vs. Thiago Alves.

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This date in MMA history three years ago - 6/28/2006 - UFC held its fifth Ultimate Fight Night, in Las Vegas.

The main card was fairly unspectacular, with three of the four fights going to decision.  However, the one decisively violent main-card fight and its winner would soon attain legendary status.

The fight was Anderson Silva vs. Chris Leben.

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Although there's still a week left in June, there are no more major-league MMA (UFC, Affliction, DREAM, Strikeforce etc) events until July.  That being the case, it seemed a good time to review the candidates for this year's traditional "best of MMA" voting.

At year end various websites present users and staff with a smorgasbord of categories to pick from in defining The Year That Was in our sport.  I'll leave most of the categories - like most improved, fighter of the year, best camp, biggest story, etc - till year end and instead focus only on the blue-chip categories: submission of the year, KO of the year, and fight of the year.

Some candidates I think should be in voters' minds when the tree is up and decorated and the kids are building snowmen - after the jump:

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This date in MMA history seven years ago - 6/23/2002 - PRIDE Fighting Championships held PRIDE 21 in Saitama, Japan.

The main event would live on forever in MMA lore. It was a heavyweight tilt between Don Frye and Yoshihiro Takayama.

The staredown alone was incredible, and the fight took it from there to the next level. The beginning of the fight is commonly considered among the most exciting 30 seconds in the history of the sport, as both combatants engaged in 1000-MPH dirty boxing, clenching the opponent's neck with almost no distance between them and throwing literally dozens of right hooks to the head, face and body. That pace could not continue forever, but the remainder was still great, with Frye getting the mount and ending an exhausted Takayama with ground and pound 6:10 into the first round.

The drama and excitement of that fight was immediately evident, but the co-main event revealed itself only in retrospect to be even bigger in the course of MMA history. It was the first appearance in PRIDE of a 25-year old Russian fighter named Fedor Emelianenko.

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Kevin Iole has a  piece on Yahoo! Sports speculating about the future of The Ultimate Fighter show.

Ratings ... have stagnated and while both Spike and UFC officials insist they’re pleased, they don’t mirror the UFC’s pay-per-view growth. Pay-per-view sales have skyrocketed since 2005, but the reality series hasn’t come close to matching the 1.67 household rating from Season 1 or the 1.77 from Season 3.

The show is, in essence, an infomercial for the pay-per-view fight between the coaches that will take place following the finale.

Beginning in Season 6, the ratings have gone 1.29, 1.20, 1.25 and 1.19. While that’s a solid figure and almost unheard of for a cable reality series in its ninth season, the numbers would suggest that some have had their fill of it.

...

[T]he UFC and Spike have to find a way to reinvigorate the series to prevent it from becoming stale, if it already hasn’t.

...

The show is, in essence, an infomercial for the pay-per-view fight between the coaches that will take place following the finale.

TUF has clearly been one of the pillars that has provided structural support to the UFC during its ascent in the past 4 years of the Zuffa era.

I think Iole is short-sighted when he says "The show is, in essence, an infomercial for the pay-per-view fight between the coaches that will take place following the finale."  Certainly TUF is that, but it's much more.  It provides constant weekly marketing for the UFC, a means to develop stars practically overnight, a vehicle for giving fans someone to root for or against (e.g. Junie Browning, Chris Leben, Diego Sanchez, Josh Koscheck), a sort of "minor-league" feeder system for fighters to break into the UFC, and a more accessible entrance path for all kinds of fighters to get onto Zuffa's radar - which is actually going to be increasingly, not less, important as MMA grows, the number of bright young prospects explodes, and international expansion means that fighters in Germany, the Phillipines, Korea, France, the UK, Australia, and elsewhere will want to get into the big leagues.

I do agree that the formula is somewhat stale, but there's an argument to be made for not making drastic changes.  As the article somewhat begrudgingly admits, TUF is still doing great ratings for a show with its longevity and its genre.  The formula is one that is proven to work and which I don't see suddenly failing - precisely because it's largely powered by the personalities of those that compete and by the UFC's/Spike's demonstrably solid ability to tell their stories and create an interest in their fate.

If I changed anything at all, I would leave the format almost as it is but have the fights be more Bellator style - either live or next-day on tape delay.  This will impart a more "fighting" feel and a less "TV" feel. 

Also, you could, as popularity continues to expand, conduct a few different TUF "seasons" in parallel and simultaneously, bringing them all together each week on the live fight night, where each fight on the card would be a showdown from one of the parallel "seasons".  Possibly each "season" could then produce its own winner and the TUF Finale would be even bigger than currently, with the different parallel seasons' champs fighting it out for the big prize.

Incidentally this would also be a way for the UFC to give a bit more to the fans while expanding their own fighter base slightly and allowing fighters to remain a bit more active than currently.

The foremost topic on the minds of most MMA fans this morning is, What is going on with Anderson Silva?

BE member "AlwaysRelaxing" has written what I think is a solid FanPost  here, which I think very well captures the curious - and unexpected - situation Dana White finds himself in.

Dana himself apparently feels similarly.  He pulled no punches in his candid assessment of his star's performance as cited in a Yahoo! Sports article:

I can honestly tell you that I’ve never put on an event that I was embarrassed to be at until tonight. I want to publicly apologize to all the fans…. I apologize. I personally apologize for what happened tonight. You guys know, this isn’t what the UFC was built on and this isn’t the way the fights usually go. Listen, any night you can have an off-night. When a guy is that talented and can literally end a fight whenever he wants to, wow.

Over at MMAMania they are asking fans to weigh in on whether Silva-Leites surpasses Sylvia-Arlovski III as the worst main event in recent memory.  An Anderson Silva fight being compared unfavorably with Tim Sylvia is officially the sign of the apocalypse.

How the heck did we get to this point?  What is going on with Anderson Silva?

There's plenty of speculation on all corners of the MMA universe including Bloody Elbow.  For my take, I think that this situation Dana is in should not be unexpected - at least in hindsight.  Anderson himself foreshadowed this with a single short but telling quote, from a Sherdog interview in October 2008 when he said, "Everything has its time, and I believe my time is already over."

That may have been as close as we'll come - for a while - to knowing what has occurred.  Putting all the pieces together, I believe that Silva is simply burned out and is no longer interested in fighting MMA.

Everyone has these ups and downs in their life when they are more or less passionate about things, including their career. Anderson is a human being.  He's given us some incredible fights but I think he may have been disarmingly honest with us when he said his time had already passed. We have yet to see more than a shadow of the "old" Silva since that interview.

I hope - as an MMA fan I pray - I'm wrong and that Anderson will again grace us with his inimitable "ballet of violence" - but for now, this is my attempt to fill the yawning void of questions with at least a piece of an answer.