MMA Update!

[Brush with Greatness 0]

I thought Wes Sims fared well against Mir in their fight and would like to see a rematch there. What they gave us I thought was great and unfortunately Sims made a mistake and got carried away.

[Guest neodragonsan]

Which do you all think overall has the toughest fighters, UFC, Pride, or KotC?

[Lei Tong 0]

It's tough to say overall.

 

PRIDE is widely considered to have the best HW's in the world, and also has a LHW crop equal to anywhere else. They even have had an unofficial 185 division for a while now. However, they often bring in extremely suspect talent for the pure sake of spectacle. Also, unlike most other big name companies, they have no divisions for WW, LW, & FW's, although Bushido looks to try and be a secondary show for them that features these fighters. However, this lack of weight classes does have an advantage, as I'll get to in a minute.

 

UFC has good talent at each division, but none of these divisions seem to be far and away the best in the world. This is do to many factors, chief amongst them how UFC handles money and their fighters. Simply put, they can't afford to pay most of their MW-HW's as much as PRIDE does should PRIDE show interest, yet still pay most of their LW's & WW's (and some higher weight fighters) so little that it's not that huge of a difference if they fight as a top dog in a smaller org. and get paid roughly the same. THis is in addition to UFC's cut happy ways, releasing certain fighters after a few bad performances, or keeping others around long after they should (often due to huge contracts). Then of course you have their bad luck with champions: Barnett & Syliva test posititive for roids, Bustamante & Pulver walk out of contract negotiations as champions, the Tito/Chuck debacle, etc. Also, another thing that's tough for them is the sheer amount of talent they try to showcase. When you have 5 weight classes and only run 6 shows a year, there's simply no way you're going to be able to make fans care about many of your fighters. This why PRIDE can build up the fighters they have, since they only have 2/3 divisions of fighters to promote, while smaller companies run monthly shows and can showcase twice as much talent.

 

An example of these smaller companies is SHOOTO. They run monthly shows, and have produced some of the best FW's, LW's & WW's in the world. THey also have a very proffesional ranking system compared to just about every other MMA company out there, and thus the level of competition is high. Their problems are that the best LHW's & HW's are elswhere in the world; they often lose some of their lighter talent to the deeper pockets of UFC (& sometimes PRIDE); and in the end, smaller fighter simply don't attract as much attention as the bigger guys, and thus Shooto is more or less seen as a second tier organization despite their positives, and thus are not very big in financial terms.