When Marius Zaromskis stepped up to fight Nick Diaz for the vacant Strikeforce Welterweight title, I figured he'd catch Diaz somewhere over the course of five rounds, knock him out and get the title. 

After a brief scare, Diaz stopped him. But when he faced off against K.J Noons, I was sure it was going to be a repeat of the first fight. Diaz's wide hooks and square stance were going to be picked apart by a professional boxer. Instead Diaz broke his jaw and took a close, but still clear decision.

When he fought against Paul Daley, I knew that his pitter-patter style wasn't going to stop Paul Daley fast enough, and sooner rather than later the then-best welterweight striker in the world was going to blast through his defences and knock him out.

Didn't happen. By now I'd learned to cheer for Nick Diaz, and really wanted him to beat B.J Penn. Trouble was, I didn't think he would. B.J Penn, with slick BJJ and some of the tightest boxing, would frustrate Diaz and take a one-sided decision.

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It seems everybody and their mother has been writing about how Dominick Cruz just isn’t that marketable, singling him out as a force holding back the 135lb division.

Alright, I’ll buy that. Except Dominick Cruz isn’t alone.

The trouble, if you want to even call it that (note that all this bashing of Cruz has happened before we even see ratings numbers, and the news that UFC on Versus drew a record gate) is that MMA seems to have two different lines of promotion.

The first is the “As Real As it Gets” moniker- the televised, regulated equivalent of a street fight, with a heavy dose of Pro Wrasslin thrown in. Feuds, larger than life characters who want to beat each other up and finish the other.

The second is  the “These are the finest athletes in the world” bit which Dana so often says, in a push for more traditional coverage and acceptance. As MMA gets bigger and bigger, the talent pool grows, and in order to stay at the top you have to be a better and better athlete, spend more time in the camp, be more of a freak of nature like Jon Jones, and yes, fight smarter and less riskily.

There’s no doubt which made MMA popular in the U.S in the first place.  The characters who kept the UFC alive and grew the sport were the larger than life characters. Batshit crazy Ken Shamrock fighting arguably-more-disconnected-from-reality Tito Ortiz.  Ortiz fighting Chuck Liddell, who would out drinking the week of his fight. Griffin. Lesnar. Penn. Hughes. Jackson. Etc.

Many of those guys trained sporadically, adding to their charm. Now they’ve all faded, partly due to age, but also partly because they’ve been supplanted by people willing to train harder and sacrifice more than them. The days of Matt Hughes sauntering into the gym two weeks before his championship fight are over. Ditto B.J Penn training when he feels like it and remaining the greatest lightweight in the world. MMA no longer has a small talent pool, and no longer has the luxury of having champs who spend as much time building their image as they do in the gym.

Cruz is far from alone. How exciting,character-wise, exactly is Frankie Edgar? The only thing you could say about him is he’s more interesting than the man he’s about to fight for the third time, Gray Maynard. Quick- Name something interesting about Cain Velazquez!

GSP was interesting when he broke in, partly because he was handsome, partly because he was Canadian, but partly because he was also a new kind of athlete. Now he’s one of many, fights cagey, and is increasingly maligned by fans.

 The truth? The story of the incredibly dedicated, diligent athlete who attains an unheard-of physical and technical perfection is really fucking boring after a while, even when the fights aren't People would rather see the California Kid go out there and do something stupid like throw a spinning back elbow to match his personality. Except well, you know. There’s a reason Cruz is champ and Faber isn’t.

 The UFC knows this, which is why they keep giving their strongest personalities title shots they arguably don’t deserve. Jackson, Penn, Sonnen (before he pissed red) and Faber have all been given second chances where the Fitchs of the world wouldn’t.

 Anyway, this is to say the issue is much bigger than Cruz or Edgar. We can complain all we want about Cruz being champ and no one caring, but the fact is if the UFC got so big partly off the back of WWE fans coming over, it’s hard to complain when they start when the product changes to something they don’t like. And we should probably get used to seeing it more and more.

In February 2010 Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira fought in a UFC Heavyweight Title eliminator fight against Cain Velasquez to see who would get to fight Brock Lesnar. Even in his 30s, it looked like Nogueira was as good as ever. The betting lines were even, and 6 out of 8 BE staffers picked him to win the fight against Velasquez, some of whom would have no doubt picked him against Lesnar.

Fast forward to before UFC 134, and, despite a relatively close betting line, everybody it seemed, had left Nog for dead against a TUF 10 runner-up, one last sad knockout loss before retirement. In other words, in 200 seconds Cain Velasquez had changed Nogueira from potential heir to the title to carrion.

Of course last night Nogueira changed that. It wasn't a lucky break, nor was it just five brilliant seconds in an otherwise lackluster performance, as some have deemed it. At some point last night in Round 1, perhaps because of his legendary chin, perhaps because of his even more impressive experience, Nogueira realised nothing Brendan Schaub was doing was truly going to hurt him, planted his feet and was decided he was willing to take a few shots before uncorking a massive right hand. It wasn't any more fluke than what Dan Henderson did at UFC 100 in round two, at a time when many people were doubting Hendo as well.

But it wasn't just Nogueira who shirked predictions of the end last night. Shogun Rua, despite being one fight removed from being the top LHW in the world, improbably faced predictions of the doom of his career. Yes, he has bad knees. The same bad knees he knocked out Chuck Liddell and the previously unbeaten Lyoto Machida in under a round with. The same he used on Forrest Griffin.

So why exactly do we turn on our favourite fighters so quickly? Wanderlei Silva, one fight removed from beating up a top ten middleweight, is being called on to retire. Incredibly enough, some people think it's best for Forrest "I just beat two former champions" Griffin to do so as well.

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In the old (and new) martials arts movies, there was always a character, often the lead, who defeated his opponents through the use of some hidden knowledge, or even a supernatural mystique that would propel him to victory. So we came to believe that it was perfectly plausible that a 130-pound Bruce Lee could kill 200-pound Chuck Norris with his bare hands when pushed far enough, or that 70-year-old Mr. Miyagi could karate chop opponents a third of his age. They were movies, but the belief endured- it didn’t matter how big or strong your opponent was- it was possible to beat him using your hidden knowledge.

The birth of modern MMA in some ways shattered and in other ways gave new life to that belief. The vaunted disciplines of kung fu, karate and taekwondo fared poorly in the beginning, taking them off their Hollywood pedestal and changing the way martial arts were looked at. But at the same time submission grappling came up and filled that void, with smaller men like Royce Gracie, Frank Shamrock or Kazuchi Sakuraba tying their bigger opponents in knots.

Much of the excitement that comes out of MMA has been a result of the clashes between the seemingly more physically gifted athlete and the more experienced one we hope can pull out the win. Wrestlers have never enjoyed the same popularity as other styles because despite the skill involved, as wrestling so often looks to most eyes like a bigger guy pushing around a smaller guy. The hatred that Brock Lesnar received I always felt was less about his mouth than about the fact that he shattered everything we loved to believed about MMA. Here was this big strong MMA neophyte that could crush more experienced people because he was a physical beast. Ditto Tim Sylvia. Hard to cheer for. Many of us believed, and probably most of us hoped, that Shogun Rua would somehow be able to out-experience and out-smart a much bigger, faster, stronger athlete in Jon Jones to victory. He didn’t even come close, and now Jones is probably the least favourite fighter round these parts these days.

On the other side of the coin, some of our favourite athletes are the ones who help us preserve our belief that the wiser, zen-like master can defeat his more agile opponent despite his physical limitations and vulnerabilities. Randy Couture, who beat the crap out of the much younger Tim Sylvia. Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira, maybe the collective “favourite fighter of all-time” who so often took a vicious beating and prevailed to win, confirming our beliefs.

But arguably no one has embodied this ideal better than Fedor. He’s always had the action hero background. Born in the USSR, trained in a Russian military art, lives in a middle-of-nowhere village humbly with the same two trainers for the past God knows how many years, eschewing money and fame. At a somewhat doughy 230 pounds (even at 223, he doesn’t look particularly svelte), he spent most of his life destroying more physically gifted or at least larger athletes.

And he did it with the mixture of utter brutality and vulnerability that’s been so enthralling. His highlight reel is arguably the best in MMA, but that’s only half the story. Look at almost any one of his opponents, and you could almost always see a way his opponent could theoretically beat him. His history seemed to confirm that- Fujita had him on rubber legs before Fedor pulled off a brutal RNC. Randleman dropped him on his head. Hunt had him in a keylock. Rogers was GnP-ing him with very hard shots.

But every time he came through, like the action movie star. Every time he stepped into the cage his fans could wonder if this time was finally going to be it, if maybe we weren’t deluding ourselves that a smallish heavyweight from an unknown camp could destroy virtually everybody he faced, from squash opponents to the best in the world. But as time went on, his mystique simply hardened into something that wasn’t even to be debated. It was there, maybe best exemplified by Andrei Arlovski laying glassy-eyed face down on the canvas, having paid the price for doubting it.

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To hardcore fans of MMA, there was one thing which could be counted on: the WEC always delivered. Most fans could quickly rattle off a list of MMA events that disappointed for other promotions like the UFC or Strikeforce, but not so much for the WEC. Even the WEC's swan song looked to end up fizzling, until  in the last fight, the last round, the inexplicable magic came back and Anthony Pettis delivered the craziest kick in MMA history to seal the win, and the belt.

But the kick didn't land from nowhere. Give another look to the fight, and you'll realise two things. Benson Henderson, unquestionably the then-top dog in the WEC lightweight division, has two huge holes in his game. The first is that he's absolutely awful at defending against the back mount. The second is that he has a terrible sense of distance. Watch him punch throughout the fight- he routinely misses by 12-18 inches. The first defect made the fight be tied in the first place, with Pettis winning an entire round on Henderson's back. The second saw Henderson utterly unaware that Pettis's kick could reach him, with his hands down by his waist, defenseless when he kicked him. In other words, it was the holes in Benson Henderson's game that created that moment of glory.

That might well be taken as true of the WEC as a whole. The cast of characters that made up what many felt was the world's most entertaning promotion was a series of up and comers and UFC washouts, most of whom faded away from the scene very quickly. And yet they created events and fights that somehow always were exciting.

But why?

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Every one it seems, can agree on one thing: the 10-point must system isn’t perfect. Some people completely bash it as a system for judging fights, and even its supporters say something like Winston Churchill did about democracy: “it’s the worst system ever, except for every other one we’ve tried.”

Now with last night’s fight, it’s completely legitimate to see why Quinton “Rampage” Jackson could take a 29-28 decision over Lyoto Machida. The reasons have rehashed enough. The problem last night, for all everyone’s bitching, really wasn’t the judging.

But if the UFC is supposed to be about recreating a “real” fight, saying Jackson “won” is about as sensible as saying that last weekend’s Patriots-Steelers game, which was actually a 39-26 victory for New England, should have been a draw because each team won two quarters, or that when Baltimore lost 26-21 to the Atlanta Falcons on Remembrance Day they actually won, because they won the third and fourth quarters and tied the first. But if you were to suggest that scoring system to an NFL fan, they’d rightly call you an idiot.

So why exactly do MMA fans accept and defend a system that is so obviously inadequate for judging three round fights with the incredibly diverse tactics that MMA offers? Well, the number one defence of 10-point must is that is provides, as opposed to Pride scoring, a system of checks and balances that is absent from Pride scoring, and thus is less open to corruption.

After the break I’m going to point out why such a defence is absurd.

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The MMA Encyclopedia Contest: UFC 71 and the knockout of Chuck Liddell

At UFC 71 fans witnessed Chuck Liddell enter the arena at the absolute apex of his popularity and mseemingly, his fighting talents. It took just two minutes for challenger Quinton “Rampage” Jackson to leave Liddell crushed, feebly protesting about a completely justified stoppage to the referee.

The build-up

By the time the bell sounded on May 26, 2007, the Iceman had turned himself into the biggest stars in the MMA world, and had gone a long way towards dragging the UFC up with him. When he fought his last non-title bout (against Vernon White) in August 2004 on a card headlined by Randy Couture, the event had pulled in 80,000 buys. His next fight, when he took the title from Couture, drew 280,000. His last fight before his knockout by Jackson drew over a million.

If it was the trio of Couture, Liddell and Tito Ortiz that helped the UFC pull out of the dark ages, Liddell was the biggest of the bunch. He was marketable, with a very easygoing, one-of-the-boys persona, and also had a hugely exciting fighting style. In his five title fights from UFC 52 to UFC 66, not a single one of his opponents reached the final bell. There isn’t any title holder in the UFC who can claim anything like that since.

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It was just about 14 months ago that at UFC 101, Anderson Silva demolished Forrest Griffin in the co-main event after having stepped up because there seemed to be no challenges in the middleweight division. Next fight, B.J Penn took on a very legitimate title challenger in Kenny Florian, and made him look not so legitimate. As Brent Brookhouse wrote:

I didn't have Penn losing a second of that fight

The previous event, UFC 100, had seen GSP completely dominate another very legitimate challenger, Thiago Alves, and Brock Lesnar had crushed the interim champ Frank Mir. At UFC 98 Lyoto Machida had fulfilled the expectations of fans who believed he’d been held back too long due to his suddenly-not-so-boring-looking style, destroying champ Rashad Evans.

After that the question began to crop up: was the UFC’s title picture going to get stale because there were too many dominant champions? As Michael David Smith wrote:

There's never been a time when the UFC has better champions than right now. Penn and Silva, along with welterweight champion Georges St Pierre, light heavyweight champion Lyoto Machida and heavyweight champion Brock Lesnar, appear to be just about unstoppable in the Octagon.

  But when you look at these UFC champions, you just see five guys who are just about pefect at what they do. Penn, St. Pierre, Silva and Machida have nearly flawless styles. Lesnar is a physical freak of nature. When will one of these guys be beaten?

MDS wasn’t alone- there was a lot of similar concern, and a lot of debate over one issue: was it better for business to have dominant champions with big name recognition, or to have a competitive title picture with lots of new champions?

Fast forward to now.  The first upset of the year came to B.J Penn in April. Next was Shogun finally knocking out Machida at UFC 113 in May. July saw no title changes, but Silva coming within two minutes of losing an embarassing loss to Sonnen. Penn failed to recapture his title in August , and now.Lesnar’s been embarrassed by Cain Velasquez in October.

All told? Three of those "invincible" champions have been beaten, once twice in two five-round decisions, and two of them falling in the first round. Silva has been made to look mortal after all.

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At UFC 98, Lyoto Machida came in and absolutely destroyed Rashad Evans. It wasn't just that he beat him, it's that he took the number one fighter in the division, and made it seem like Evans wasn't even fit to be sharing the same cage with him, and sure enough, finished him in the second round.

After that, the short-lived "Machida Era" began. HIs next challenger, Shogun Rua, was seem as essentially a stepping stone to another victory. Instead he fought one very close fight, then lost by first round KO in his next outing.

Similar situation with Dan Henderson. He came into UFC 100 at around the same odds as Machida did over Evans,but from the get-go, it was clear Bisping had nothing for Henderson. Hendo laughed off Bisping's takedown, brutally roughed him up and then handed him one of the most brutal KOs in MMA history. From that, he went from being a fighter who was seen as somewhat over-the-hill to being one who was seen as having (by me, too) a very good chance at the UFC belt, and beating Jake Shields was largely seen as a formality. Instead he lost.

Then there's Little Nog, who put on a stunning display against Luiz Cane, and like Machida and Henderson, destroyed his opponent. From there fans began openly speculating on a title shot, he opened at around -250 against Forrest Griffin (I believe) before he was  injured,  and a staggering -800 against Brilz. And we all know what happened there.

There's other examples- Dunham, Hathaway, Sonnen, and probably  Gomi right now.

So what does this have to do with Jake Shields? After the jump!

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Barry vs Filipovic has been billed as a kickboxing match, and probably for good reason, given the backgrounds of both of these guys. Dana's put a bit of pressure on Barry and Mirko to keep it that way, saying in the promo "neither guy likes to take this to the ground" and predicting we'll get the KO of the night from this fight.

But oddly, I think there's a reasonable chance Mirko will do just that- take this fight to the ground. I don't really think his experience helps him much in the stand-up against a guy like Pat Barry. Stylistically, I think it's a pretty bad match-up for Cro Cop. Even in his old Pride glory days, CC enjoyed using a lot of counters, and could slip a punch incredibly well. You can watch him fight Aleksandr Emelianenko and Ibragim Magomedov for pretty good examples of this. But in Pride he also could throw devastating offensive combinations, which often culminated in a vicious body or head kick. Trouble is, since he came to the UFC, somehow he's lost much of his ability to throw these combos, instead (even against Perosh) throwing off single straight rights and left kicks. He's still good enough at it that he can finish Perosh and even catch JDS with a few very good shots, but against a high level striker I don't think it'll fly.

And against Barry a patient counter-punching style would be suicide when he can chop your legs out from under you. Mirko's best way to win the stand-up would be to do what people learned to do to him- be aggressive, pressure him, force him to circle away from being able to throw his own power kick and box him. Trouble is I don't think Mirko has it in him to use this style.

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It's funny looking at a lot of the blogs leading up to UFC 114, and the big matter that everybody is discussing is Rampage's conditioning. We know, or we are constantly told, that Rampage hates training and does not train properly for fights, creating a big question mark over what kind of shape he'll come into to the fight. But I think looking at his past six fights in the UFC, this point is being wildly overstated.

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I was at UFC 113, and saw every fight but the first, ankle snapping Macdonald-Salter fight (which presumably wasn't fight of the night, though I haven't seen it), and had a couple of thoughts.

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Most of the talk surrounding UFC 104 was over the effectiveness of Shogun's leg kicks against Machida's overhand counters, with people divided on both sides of the question. Machida seemed to be hunting for the counter, and was at least partly stymied by Shogun's range, keeping him at bay.

What's more interesting though is the advice given to Machida between rounds 4 and 5. "Don't kick too much, don't kick too much" his corner told him, which seemed very strange advice to me when I watched it, and still seems strange now. During Round 4 Lyoto landed what was arguably the best strike of the fight at 3:08, a head kick to Shogun. Despite this, his corner told him not to throw more, instead they continued to hope he'd "find Shoguns's timing." But it wasn't the only kick he landed during the fight. GIFS below.

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So undoubtedly one of the coolest things about the MMA blogs such as BE, Sherdog and others is the live-blogging of events, which I find interesting both as a way of following fights but also as a historical source. But I had a question about their legality, which I find interesting.

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