The Ultimate Fighter / UFC thread

[MikeyPatriot]

dankhank,

UFC fans and booing is one of my biggest gripes when I watch a show.

re: Anderson's wrestling

If you mean Anderson is poor at takedowns, I might be willing to concede that, but why would he ever want to? Also, his sprawl/takedown defense is absolutely disgusting. Maybe some of us are overrating him, but he just took the clear #2 MW in the UFC and made him look like a child...AGAIN.

re: UFC 78

This Bisping/Evans isn't a great main event, but I think this is a very intelligent fight from the UFC. Both guys are at the same level and coming off controversial fights. Evans should be able to take this if he follows Hamill's gameplan + effective GNP. The undercard is very solid with Chonan/Parisyan, Alexander/Silva, and Fisher/Edgar all very very good matchups. Should be a good card to lead into the huge Dec. 29th show.

[traz]

ugh, I finally got caught up and watched the last TUF episode. Why are there so many terrible fighters? A show like this should be all premium guys

[mephisto]

I'm officially on the A. Silva train, tooooooootooootttt. That guy is so sick, send someone of his talents to the MW division like henderson or whoever because it will be a killing spree and barely worth paying for otherwise.

So where does Rich go from here? Should he retire? Clearly the guy will never beat A. Silva, never in a million years. It's all downhill for him, I feel bad, he's a hardworker and has a good heart.

[Bigdaddydvo]

[ QUOTE ]
I'm officially on the A. Silva train, tooooooootooootttt. That guy is so sick, send someone of his talents to the MW division like henderson or whoever because it will be a killing spree and barely worth paying for otherwise.

So where does Rich go from here? Should he retire? Clearly the guy will never beat A. Silva, never in a million years. It's all downhill for him, I feel bad, he's a hardworker and has a good heart.

[/ QUOTE ]

I think Rich will take a Tito Ortiz style "gatekeeper" role where folks who want to fight for the MW title need to beat him first. Right now among UFC regulars, he's a clear #2...unfortunately the gap between him and #1 is pretty big right now.

[traz]

I never really thought Franklin was all that good. His career was catapulted by a weak ass match against Ken Shamrock.

[ThaSaltCracka]

Jesus, Andersons performance was the most dominating UFC performance I have ever seen.

[El Diablo]

All,

Pretty decent card.

Belcher-Starnes. Fight was surprisingly good. Even after getting caught a few times, it looked like Starnes was connecting with some really nice shots and had crisper punches overall. But Belcher didn't even seem to be fazed in the slightest. That Starnes definitely wanted to fight, no question about that. He didn't seem very hurt, unfortunate that cut was so major.

Schafer-Bonnar. Wow, didn't like that guys strategy of basically getting underneath Bonnar in guard. He did have one good shot at submitting him, but didn't look like Bonnar ever was in huge trouble, and talk about teeing off in ground and pound, wow. Bad game plan.

Sylva-Vera. OK, I think I'm going to be a Sylvia fan now. I feel bad for the guy. Also, Vera sounded like a punk in the post-fight interview. Vera really didn't look like he could do anythign against Sylvia, whether it was in the clinch, on the ground, or standup. Sure, Sylvia was not very exciting for much of the fight, but he leaned on Vera and wore him down and then found good spots to let his fists fly. Thought Sylvia's standup looked pretty good.

Silva-Franklin. Wow, talk about a beatdown. How confident and relaxed was Silva coming to the ring? Wow. And he just never seemed to have any concern at all in the fight. Seemed like he was almost toying w/ Franklin when he lowered his hands and just bobbed to avoid for a bit. Franklin with about 1:30 left in the first round looked like he wanted nothing to do with that fight. And Silva would have needed about 5 more seconds to completely finish the fight after that knockdown at the end where Rich just crumpled. I liked the corner "You were winning Rich, he just caught you at the end!" hahahhahaha. After the second knee (the last one that hit him square from the inside), I thought it was pretty classy that Silva held up instead of pouncing on him on the way down. He easily could have nailed him with a couple of clean punches, which I expect most all fighters to do simply out of instinct and training. But Silva held up and let Big John step in, that was a nice move.

[Fnord]

No mention of Vera breaking his hand in round 1? How much of an impact do you think that had? That said, Vera just seemed to not have any answers for dealing with a solid fighter as big as Sylva, but I'm not astute enough to say if not getting hurt early would have changed much.

[MikeyPatriot]

[ QUOTE ]
No mention of Vera breaking his hand in round 1? How much of an impact do you think that had? That said, Vera just seemed to not have any answers for dealing with a solid fighter as big as Sylva, but I'm not astute enough to say if not getting hurt early would have changed much.

[/ QUOTE ]

It's interesting that he broke it in round 1 and came out and, IMO, pretty convincingly took round 2. I didn't like his gameplan of coming out and clinching with Tim. Tim is just so big, and Vera is already an undersized HW.

[LyinKing]

I've trained a bit with Franklin, as aforementioned. That there exists a fighter who makes him look so inept is really, really frightening.