MMAnomaly👊

The UFC isn’t a sports league, it’s an episodic reality tv series — If it were a sports league, your recent success rate, overall win/loss record, and meritocracy would determine everything. The rules aren’t laws, they’re broad suggestions — if they were laws, punishment would be uniform and consistent, repercussions would be anticipatory. The officiating is neither fair nor just, it’s sporadic and unpredictable (which costs fighters money) — if the referees were reliable arbiters, their fingerprints wouldn’t be on the final result so frequently. The rankings carry no meaning or actual weight, they’re promotional tools — if they were legitimate, being a #1 contender would be a guarantee at the next title opportunity (#1 not available? Hello #2, etc). Instead we skip to #8 to fit a narrative or appease a target audience. The belts have no relevance, they’re trinkets awarded on whim — if they were signifiers of the best in a given division, we wouldn’t be inundated with interim and vacant title bouts (X is only the champ because Y left to go to Z weight class, etc). They’re taken away and handed out at the company’s behest. As soon as the incentive of PPV points was gone and we started defending interim championships… the plot was lost. The UFC is no longer an MMA “promotion” built around a concept of “The Best vs The Best”, it’s a content provider with a massive quota to meet, and a marketing platform for ad space — a weekly conveyor belt of warm bodies, faces without names, where each new fighter on a 10k & 10k DWCS contract represents an accomplished combatant, on the other end of the spectrum, not being paid their worth. Real-time profit maximization at the expense of the athletes, the sport, and the viewer. All that matters, though, is that there’s a UFC card nearly every Saturday, chock full of cheap talent who are ready and willing to throw caution to the wind, so the mindless masses have something to pump cash into the sportsbooks over… and don’t forget that sweet, sweet 7-hour window of prime ad space to sell off to the highest bidder. We’re watching the closest thing to full contact pro wrestling that has ever been produced. And they think we don’t notice. #OneLastThing 📝