Promoted to the Front Page by Anton Tabuena

When Urijah Faber enters the cage this Saturday night to challenge Dominick Cruz for the inaugural UFC bantamweight championship, he will also be looking to avoid a dubious distinction:  becoming the only man to lose four consecutive title fights in major-league MMA competition.

In the history of "major-league" MMA (which I'm defining as UFC, PRIDE, WEC, Strikeforce, EliteXC, Affliction), many of the biggest names have lost two consecutive title fights, including Randy Couture, Kenny Florian, Tim Sylvia, Frank Mir, Tito Ortiz, Rich Franklin, Matt Hughes, and B.J. Penn.  But losing three consecutive title fights is a burden borne only by two men - Dan Henderson, who lost three consecutive title bouts in two weight classes and in two organizations, and Urijah Faber, who came up short in each of his last three title fights at featherweight.  "Hendo" has shaken off the curse with the capturing of the Strikeforce light heavyweight strap, which would leave Faber on a very lonely island with a loss this weekend.

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Continuing an ongoing "series" I began prior to my hiatus.

The "after word" for UFC Versus 4 - the theme, if it had to be boiled down to one word - was OPPORTUNITY.

Merriam-Webster defines opportunity as:

• A favorable juncture of circumstances
• A good chance for advancement or progress

If there was a theme to the main card of UFC Versus 4, it reduces itself to opportunity:  in one case, a former title challenger apparently throwing away the opportunity career advancements of various kinds; in another, a fighter showing admirable restraint when faced with the opportunity to heap gratuitous violence on an adversary; in a third, a fighter snatching the opportunity to face and defeat a rising prospect on a big stage, and in a fourth, a fighter making a most improbable comeback, making the most of a second and even third opportunity provided by excellent officiating and netting himself a win bonus with a highlight-reel KO.

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The entire MMA world is abuzz with speculation about the cause and meaning of the release of Nate Marquardt from the UFC, an unexpected announcement distributed online by Dana White.  I have no special insight into the reasons for this action by the UFC, but assuming that health issues are not outright endangering Marquardt's fighting career itself, then his story (whatever it is, which we will apparently learn this afternoon and/or evening in various pre-fight statements released by Dana White,  Marquardt, and others) serves as a cautionary tale to other fighters currently on Zuffa's roster:  Following Zuffa's purchase of Strikeforce, the stakes have been raised and the consequences of being on the outs with the UFC are financially more painful than ever.

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One year ago today - June 26, 2010 - Strikeforce (co-branded with M-1 Global) held their Fedor vs. Werdum fight card in San Jose.  The main event featured "The Last Emperor", Fedor Emelianenko, vs. Brazilian jiu-jitsu ace Fabricio Werdum.

There have been in the history of MMA several iconic moments, snapshots of time captured in the memory of fans, that have marked defining moments in the evolution of the sport, critical matchups, or jaw-dropping moves.  Among this filmstrip of frozen images, few if any have served as dramatically to announce to fans that the world had changed, as occurred at this event when the great Fedor tapped out.

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This date in MMA history four years ago - 6/23/2007 - UFC held its TUF 5 Finale.

The card featured the traditional mix of Ultimate Fighter competitors, the show's finale, and various stylistically TV-friendly bouts.  But the highlight of the card for most MMA fans had nothing to do with TUF itself (except that the two combatants had coached season 5) - the main event was "The Prodigy", BJ Penn, in a rematch against former (and inaugural) UFC lightweight champion "Lil Evil" Jens Pulver.

The two men had fought before - five and a half years before, at UFC 35.  Pulver had won the UFC's first-ever lightweight championship at UFC 30, defended it once, and faced undefeated (3-0 with 3 stoppages) hot prospect BJ Penn for his second title defense.  The course of events that night would remain a part of the narrative surrounding BJ Penn for years to come - that he was insanely talented and athletically gifted, but lazy, unfocused and undisciplined.  Withstanding a strong start from Penn, the underdog Pulver survived to claim a close 5-round decision and retain the title, handing BJ his first loss.

Years later, Penn was still very bitter about this.  The bad blood became mutual as Pulver reacted to his perception that Penn was questioning, if not the validity of Pulver's win, then his viability and legitimacy as a champion.  Both men agreed to coach season 5 of The Ultimate Fighter, with the two coaches contracted to square off in the live season finale on Spike TV.

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"I feel life passing on by us, passing on by us, passing on by us", sings Robert Pollard in his hard-rocking commentary on the changes imposed by time, Psychic Pilot Clocks Out.

This weekend, when looking at Strikeforce's on-screen brackets for the Heavyweight Grand Prix, similar sentiments ran through my head.  Fedor Emelianenko didn't advance on his side of the bracket?  How can this be?  There's a pairing on the left side - a fight involving Fedor - and the guy who advanced wasn't Fedor.

Obviously, I don't live under a rock and I knew Fedor had lost his opening round fight to Antonio Silva months before this weekend.  I was also all too aware that even that hadn't been Fedor's first legitimate loss, that he had lost to Fabricio Werdum months earlier.  I'm a very avid MMA fan who watches everything and reads everything; I knew all this stuff.  It wasn't news to me.  But that didn't change the odd feeling that remained in looking at that bracket.  Like when you lost a tooth as a kid and were overly aware of the gap, the absence.  That comes close to describing the sensation.

All at once the realization hit home that, as Pollard might have belted out if he were an MMA fan, our heroes of PRIDE are passing on by.

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This date in MMA history three years ago - 6/21/2008 - UFC held its TUF 7 Finale.

A fairly unspectacular card, it will likely be best remembered as the final fight of Evan Tanner  before his untimely death on September 8th, 2008.

Tanner is one of the most beloved, colorful, and enigmatic fighters in UFC history. He had made his UFC debut more than 9 years prior, at UFC 18. He fought a total of 17 times in the UFC, including stopping David Terrell at UFC 51 to win the middleweight title. Evan lost the title in his first defense against Rich Franklin, and following a stoppage loss to David Loiseau and a first-round submission of Justin Levens (now also sadly deceased), Tanner took an extended hiatus from competitive MMA for nearly two years.

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The history of sports - indeed, entertainment, period - is replete with instances of greats exchanging monumental performances and raising the bar on one another.  Bird and Magic battling for rings in the 80s.  Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa's thrilling 2-man home run derby in the late 90s.  In music, the Beatles released Rubber Soul, inspiring Brian Wilson to respond with Pet Sounds, which in turn prompted the Beatles to step up their game with Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.  The list could go on.

All of these "step ladder" progressions - in sports, in movies, in music - have one thing in common: the fans win. As the saying goes, iron sharpens iron. So, likewise, does escalating competition - friendly or otherwise - produce escalating excitement for those lucky enough to watch it all go down.

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The first in a planned regular feature series.

The "after word" for UFC 118 - the theme, if it had to be boiled down to one word - was ADAPTATION.

Merriam-Webster defines adaptation as:

Adjustment to environmental conditions...modification of an organism or its parts that makes it more fit for existence under the conditions of its environment.

If there was a theme to the main card of UFC 118, it was the adaptation to the demands of the battle on the part of one party, or absence on the part of the opposition.

In Kenny Florian vs. Gray Maynard, it was Florian's failure to successfully prepare for the prospect of finding himself on his back over and over again which cost him the fight. This appears to have been partially a failure of proper assessment; Kenny seemed to feel prior to the fight that his time training with Georges St-Pierre had prepared him to match Maynard's wrestling skill. He seemed to not put the priority on, as Joe Rogan espoused during the fight, drilling submissions and escapes over and over from his back - and it showed in the fight. Usually a very well-rounded fighter, Florian's single most glaring weakness - his guard game - happened to be the one area where he had to know he was going to be most tested by Maynard for stylistic reasons.  Regardless, when the time came, he had no answers.  Dana White now-infamously summarized it as Kenny "choking" in the big fights, but in the best Sun Tzu tradition, I believe the battle is won before it's fought.  In the case of MMA, this means your preparation.

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In MMA as in other sports, history sometimes repeats itself or at least recalls itself.  Watching UFC 118's main event last night of Frankie Edgar vs. BJ Penn, I was struck by how unconcerned Edgar was to wade right into BJ's guard time and again in order to impose damage from there.  The conventional wisdom in the UFC has been that as good as BJ is on the feet, you don't want any part of his ground game.  But Frankie waded in unafraid at every opportunity, following takedowns and knockdowns, content to hang out in BJ's guard and win the fight in every arena.  In doing so, he brought to my mind another great fighter who shares the "Fe" initials on Edgar's trunks: Fedor Emelianenko. I began to divine a broader similarity.

Heresy, some would say.  Fedor is in most fans' minds the greatest fighter in the history of the sport.  Comparing another guy - ANY other guy - to Fedor is as blasphemous as comparing Kobe or LeBron to Michael.  But while the analogy is never perfect, and history never perfectly repeats, I see in Frankie something I didn't expect to see - didn't even consider - until last night.  I see echoes of Fedor.

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Promoted from the FanPosts by Kid Nate.

One of my favorite nonfiction writers, Ray Kurzweil, named a chapter in his most recent book The Singularity is Near "The Promise and the Peril".  His book is about the future - the future of technology and biology.  The chapter was the "payoff" to his arguments developed throughout the book and presented the possible upside and downside of the future he articulately described.

The future in MMA is clearly Jon "Bones" Jones.  His dismantling last night of tough-nosed veteran Vladimir Matyushenko silenced any doubts, voiced or unvoiced, about whether the hype around Jones was justified.  Now that those questions are definitively answered (for those who were still dubious after the dismantling of Brandon Vera on UFC Versus 1), the question on everyone's mind is, "what next?"

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One year ago today - August 2nd 2009 - undefeated Brazilian Marlon Sandro faced Japanese Michihiro Omigawa in World Victory Road's Sengoku 9 event as the final round of the Sengoku Featherweight Grand Prix.  The four finalists were Sandro, Omigawa, current world #7 featherweight Hatsu Hioki, and current world #10 featherweight Masanori Kanehara.  The two winners would meet later that night to determine the Sengoku Featherweight Champion.

The onetime journeyman Omigawa - who had lost four of his first five fights and seven of his first eleven - was a Cinderella story going into the finals.  He had decisioned the tough current world #11 featherweight LC Davis in the Grand Prix opening round, then TKO'd Nam Phan in the second round to book passage to the GP Finals at Sengoku 9.  He had built momentum with these unlikely results and was something of a "rebel favorite" (famously yelling to the crowd after a previous fight, "everyone who didn't believe in me...f*ck you").

Sandro on the other hand brought a different history into the fight.  He was 14-0 with roughly equal numbers of stoppages by (T)KO and submissions, to go with a roughly 50% decision rate.  He was picked by most pundits going into the Grand Prix as the second most likely to win (Hatsu Hioki being the prohibitive favorite).

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One year ago today - August 1, 2009 - Affliction Entertainment was scheduled to put on its third PPV event, the appropriately named Affliction: Trilogy.

Affliction Entertainment - an independent subsidiary branch of Affliction Clothing - entered the MMA promotion landscape with its first PPV event roughly a year prior, July 19th 2008. The card was the stuff of hardcore fans' dreams: a main event of Fedor Emelianenko (then world #1 heavyweight) vs. ex-UFC world champion Tim Sylvia was the main event capping a card also featuring Andrei Arlovski, Ben Rothwell, Josh Barnett, Renato Sobral, Matt Lindland, Vitor Belfort, Antonio Rogerio Nogueria, and others.  The show featured an equally ostentatious payroll - compare its $2,866,000 base pay to the recent UFC 116's $923,000: three times the payroll for only a fraction of the PPV sales.

Affliction's second event was originally scheduled for October 11, 2008, in Las Vegas, but a month before the scheduled event, Affliction rescheduled the event for January 24, 2009 in Anaheim. Fedor and Arlovski were again on the card - this time facing one another - and most of the big names from the first event were also on this card.  The reported payroll for this event was even higher - $3.3 million - for an estimated 100k-200k PPV buys.

With the company undeterred by its meager (which is to say negative) return on investment, they scheduled the third event, Affliction: Trilogy, for August 1st, 2009.  The event was to return to the Honda Center in Anaheim, California - site of the first two events - and was to feature a long-awaited heavyweight tilt between Fedor Emelienenko and Josh Barnett, the longtime top-10-ranked heavyweight.

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The new USA Today/SB Nation rankings were posted on Thursday. 

The traditional rankings layout provides a certain view into the data; Kid Nate's and Luke Thomas' timely analysis per weight class provides additional insight; the FightLines series of posts provide another look; and I wanted to contribute yet another view-at-a-glance.

This approach utilizes the "cross table" method of charting the top 25 in each weight class and their performances against each other.  The graph is meant to be read "down then across" - for example, if you refer to the heavyweight table, look at  Brock Lesnar on the left side...we can see at a glance that he is 1-0 vs. Shane Carwin, 1-1 vs. Frank Mir, 1-0 vs. Randy Couture, and hasn't fought anyone else currently ranked in the top 25.

The color/number scheme is fairly self explanatory but:  green means the fighter has a winning record against his opponent; red is a losing record; yellow is an even record which can be something like 1-1, or only 1 fight which they drew, or only 1 fight which was a no contest.

While the images below are quite readable, they are easier to read when clicked to reveal fullsize.

The data was compiled manually so please let me know if you see any errors and I will correct.

If there is interest in these, my plan is to compile them every month shortly after BE's rankings are released.

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The long, dry spell with little big-league MMA action is soon coming to a close, and fans' thirst will be slaked with ten - count them, TEN - major MMA events in August (two UFC PPVs, UFC on Versus, a WEC, three Bellators, a Sengoku, a Strikeforce, a Strikeforce Challengers...and a partridge in a pear tree).  As we've come to be spoiled to expect, these events feature several great matchups - but what intrigues me is that in the span of just over 2 weeks (15 days), there will be SIX major-org title fights, of which fully half - in a span of ten days - are going to be rematches.  While we recently had a period which featured seven title fights in 14 days (UFC 112, Strikeforce Nashville, Aldo vs Faber), I cannot remember a time when there were so many rematches for titles in such a short period.  This affords us a rare opportunity to sit back and enjoy watching the adjustments all six men (winners and losers) may have made since their last encounter.

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This Fan Shot was promoted to the front page by Nick Thomas.

Kid Nate fired the first shot in the ongoing BE discussion about the decline (or lack thereof) of submissions in MMA, its causes and implications. Nate:

I've been concerned that MMA is becoming too unbalanced and the disturbing trend that [Josh] Gross points out does nothing to reassure me...I'm not saying there's anything wrong with a good stand-up war, but I do worry that MMA is degenerating into bad kickboxing.

Mike Fagan played good cop in a response, arguing that while there was a clear downward trend, the death of grappling was greatly exaggerated and due to the numbers involved could be largely smoothed out with the addition of just a few "extra" submissions.

With additional time having passed, I thought it would be interesting to revisit this topic.  The result is (I hope) a couple more insights into the numbers.

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I am, by any definition of the label, a hardcore MMA fan. So I've sometimes wondered why watching events put on by Strikeforce - unarguably the #2 domestic MMA organization - sometimes leaves me a little unfulfilled, as though something is missing.  I've experienced this sensation following more Strikeforce events than not; it's a feeling I very rarely get after watching a live UFC event.  Since both organizations are high-level MMA, with world-class athletes, varied stylistic representation, and on a theatrical level feature solid production values, my natural curiosity is piqued as to the reason for this difference.

Without a great deal of introspection I arrive at the answer. I believe the reason is the same as the biggest part of why Strikeforce's ratings are also suffering.  While the most recent Fedor vs. Werdum event struck gold, a couple of other recent events were ratings flops.  That reason: matchmaking.

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Promoted from the FanPosts by Kid Nate. Happy Birthday Saku! MMA History piece on him in the works.

Forty-one years ago today - July 14, 1969 - Kazushi Sakuraba, one of the greatest (and most creative) MMA fighters of all time, the man later known as "The Gracie Hunter", was born in Katagami, Akita, Japan.

Our own Jonathan Snowden, in his great book Total MMA - Inside Ultimate Fighting, which I highly recommend, said "in Japan, more than anywhere else on the planet, mixed martial arts and professional wrestling are inexorably linked."  Sakuraba, like such other major-promotion MMA fighters as Brock Lesnar, Ken Shamrock, Don Frye, Dan Severn, etc, got his start in professional wrestling.  Sakuraba ("Saku" affectionately among fans), as is also the case with a number of other great MMA fighters, began in amateur wrestling.  In high school and college in Japan, Saku was a legitimately talented national-caliber wrestler who trained alongside and competed with Olympic wrestlers.

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Eight years ago today - July 13, 2002 - the UFC journeyed to the UK for the first time, hosting UFC 38:  Brawl at the Hall in London.  These days the United Kingdom features very prominently in the UFC's international expansion. They have held more than half a dozen events there, featured several British fighters on their flagship Ultimate Fighter reality show, and dedicated one season of that show to promote a USA vs. UK rivalry.  But all of that was still 5+ years in the future when the UFC first descended upon England in July 2002.

The event was notable for at least four wildly different reasons.  First, for being the UFC's first venture into Britain. Second, for being the culmination of Zuffa's first ever television deal, just over a year after purchasing the organization.  Third, for being not only Matt Hughes' second title defense, but a decisive victory over Carlos Newton, whom Matt had controversially defeated to win the belt in the first place; and finally and most notoriously, for being the scene of an infamous post-event streetfight involving among others Tito Ortiz, Pat Miletich, Lee Murray and Chuck Liddell.

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Fourteen years ago today - July 12, 1996 - the sport of MMA, very much in its infancy, changed forever with the arrival of Mark Coleman into the Ultimate Fighting Championship at UFC 10 in Birmingham, Alabama.  Coleman was unambiguous about his strategy in the aired pre-fight interview piece, saying:

My name is Mark Coleman; my basic strategy is to use my freestyle wrestling skills to get my opponent to the mat as quickly as possible; finish him off with some knees and elbows, or look for the choke.

Known as the "Godfather of ground and pound", and the man often credited for coining that phrase, "the Hammer" entered the UFC at the age of 31, having won an NCAA title in wrestling and competed in the Olympics. 

Coleman participated in the eight-man tournament - which marked the return by the UFC to the tournament format after it employed the modern-day "single fight" structure for its 9th numbered event - joining Brian Johnston, Mark Hall, Scott Fiedler, Moti Horenstein, Gary Goodridge, John Campetella, and tournament favorite Don Frye.

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On July 5, 2008, Forrest Griffin and Quinton "Rampage" Jackson fought for the UFC light heavyweight title in the main event of the titular UFC 86 - Jackson vs. Griffin.

Rampage was the defending champion, having won the belt from Chuck Liddell at UFC 71 and defended it against Dan Henderson at UFC 75.  Rampage and Forrest were opposing coaches on season 7 of The Ultimate Fighter, with a scheduled title fight at the show's conclusion.

Going into the fight Jackson was a -260 favorite to win, with Forrest at +200.  Six of the 9 luminaries in  Sherdog's customary "The Pros Pick" pre-fight piece picked Rampage to win.

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Dana White's recent acknowledgment at the UFC 116 pre-fight presser that the UFC's heavyweight division has "sucked" in recent years led me to consider the vibrancy of each of the UFC's weight classes in general.  My assessment is that the "state of the UFC union" is strong at all but welterweight; but I see that division heading into a very enticing rebirth phase.

Lightweight is as dynamic as ever.  From the belt recently changing hands and an upcoming rematch between former champion BJ Penn and current champion Frankie Edgar, to the addition of PRIDE standout Takanori Gomi, to Joe Stevenson's "rebirth" from the ashes under the auspices of Greg Jackson, to Kenny Florian's demonstrated ability to finish just about anyone not named BJ Penn, to the host of high-paced multifaceted fighters such as Sean Sherk, Clay Guida, Tyson Griffin and others, the division has plenty of exciting fights and storylines ahead of it.

Middleweight "suffers", if you want to subscribe to such language, from a dominant champion in Anderson Silva; but that can be good as well as bad, with each of his victories increasing the intensity of interest - in both fighters and fans - in seeing how long the streak will continue. There's lots of room for the picture at 185 to resolve itself. Kid Nate has discussed how the UFC's  Liddell/Couture/Ortiz/Belfort round robin defined a clear pecking order in the 2004-2006 era of the 205-pound division.  I hope for the same in the current 185-pound picture. BloodyElbow's rankings have Chael Sonnen > Nate Marquardt > Vitor Belfort > Demian Maia > Yushin Okami.  However, with Sonnen having lost to Maia while beating Marquardt and Okami; Marquardt, who lost to Sonnen, beat Maia; Okami having faced only Chael Sonnen (among these "top 5 contenders"); Maia having beaten the #1 contender while losing to the #2 contender; and Belfort having never fought at MW in the UFC, the picture is very muddied, which inherently means there is lots of room for movement and change.  Don't sleep on Michael Bisping and even Chris Leben (I said it) to at least threaten to enter the frame.

More after the jump.

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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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