Jump to content
DVDVR Message Board

2017 Non-Event General MMA Talk Thread


Elsalvajeloco

Recommended Posts

Do any promotions hold womens fights at any weight above Featherweight? I've always found it ridiculous that the womens weight classes have the same names as the mens classes at the same weight. If there's just 4 classes, call them heavyweight, middleweight, welterweight and lightweight. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

10 minutes ago, Happ Hazzard said:

I've always found it ridiculous that the womens weight classes have the same names as the mens classes at the same weight. If there's just 4 classes, call them heavyweight, middleweight, welterweight and lightweight. 

I'm gonna need you to expand on that opinion. So you want Invicta to re-name their highest weight division, the Featherweight class, to Heavyweight, because.... it has the same name as the Featherweight men's division? Even though both genders have the same weight limits as the men, the women's divisions should re-name because reasons?

What happens if they sign fighters over the 145lb weight limit? This just doesn't make any sense.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Happ Hazzard said:

The weight classes are named based on the male classes. The heaviest womens weight class should be heavyweight. Cyborg is not a featherweight woman.

Good luck finding a bunch of female fighters that are 206-265lbs to fill that Women's Heavyweight division you keep mentioning. It'll basically be Gabi Garcia fighting her shadow, and a bunch of women that were fighting on Indian reservations the week before with hardly any training or skill.

Also, yes, I get that the female weight classes are named after their male counterparts. My point was - what's the problem? You can't go from Women's Featherweight to Women's Heavyweight with the same weight limits, that would be confusing and stupid. Plus what I mentioned before - the talent pool for female fighters within the actual weight perimeters of a Heavyweight class just isn't there.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

EliteXC tried the arbitrary weight/weight class name and didn't work because it was just manufactured so Gina Carano and Nick Diaz could fight at whatever weight they could make. The 140 lbs title Wilson Reis had served no purpose either. It was stupid all the way round.

The UFC has weight classes they've used for more than a decade and half and the recognized bantamweight and featherweight classes/lineages have been around for a decade once Zuffa bought WEC. Once they brought female fighters over, the easiest thing was to just roll in the recognized weight classes they were already using. They're the world leader in MMA so everyone pretty much followed. Even Pancrase years back changed their weight classes to the standard UFC (and most other promotions stateside) use instead of the goofy ones they had been using since 93/94.

Boxing doesn't even use the heavyweight = 140-147 for female boxer even though all the weight classes * >140 are thin when it comes to female boxing. They are the same all the way round. If a female boxer makes 112, she is a flyweight just like a male boxer is a flyweight when he makes 112 lbs.

So if the UFC doesn't want a female weight classes higher than featherweight, then they just choose not to use just like when they didn't have a weight class other than bantamweight. So if they ever decide to a sign a Kayla Harrison or if Claressa Shields ever chooses to do MMA, they can roll out a lightweight division instead the stupid thing Strikeforce did where the women's BW title was the welterweight title at one point and the eventual women's featherweight title was the lightweight and middleweight title. It's stupid as fuck and didn't work. Just have all the weight classes the same, and that's what everyone else is doing. All that stuff about women need to have their own weight classes, and men should have a cruiserweight division should have died in 2001.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 hours ago, Casey said:

Good luck finding a bunch of female fighters that are 206-265lbs to fill that Women's Heavyweight division you keep mentioning. It'll basically be Gabi Garcia fighting her shadow, and a bunch of women that were fighting on Indian reservations the week before with hardly any training or skill.

You're missing my point. There will never be a 265lb womens division, which is why the heaviest viable womens division should be renamed heavyweight. I'm not advocating changing the divisions, just the names. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Happ Hazzard said:

I'm not advocating changing the divisions, just the names. 

Except promotions did that already and it didn't work because it made absolutely no sense. Please stop with this suggestion.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

 

35 minutes ago, Elsalvajeloco said:

Because the promotions that tried figured out it made no sense at all, and you need to figure that out as well.

It makes no sense at all to have the heaviest womans weight division being called Featherweight.

35 minutes ago, Ace said:

Because 135 lbs. shouldn't be called heavyweight. There's literally no gain to it. Nobody cares anymore who the "heavyweight" champion is. 

 

People should care who the champions are. It's the job of promoters to make them care.

UFC will soon have 4 womens champions, at Strawweight, Flyweight, Bantamweight and Featherweight. It would be much easier for the casual fan to understand and easier to promote if they billed them as Featherweight, Lightweight,  Middleweight and Heavyweight. It's counterproductive to have Cris Cyborg, a big jacked up fearsome female fighter being  billed as the Featherweight champion.

If there's an argument against this (and not "nobody cares, it doesn't matter") I'd like to hear it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

32 minutes ago, Happ Hazzard said:

If there's an argument against this (and not "nobody cares, it doesn't matter") I'd like to hear it.

synergy. 

135 = bantamweight.  the less confusion you cause, the better. 

i understand your point, but for a corporate entity like this, they're going to want to keep things consistant.  When Rousey was WBW champ, a few "casual fan" friends were extremely interested in seeing her face the Men's BW champ, or at least compete in the MBW division. 

as far as division names making no sense, "MiddleWeight" is third from the top out of eight. More if you count women's divisions. Maybe they could rebrand that division as something else.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Dude. Multiple people here have presented that very argument you're looking for and you've stuck your fingers in your ears so hard that you refuse to listen to anything other than a viewpoint that matches your own. You've pushed this so much that anything less than, "You know what, you're right, they should just rename it a heavyweight division" isn't going to satisfy you.

The arbitrary renaming of divisions was tried and failed. Not only that, the naming of divisions has been something that has stuck around in the UFC for years, decades even. Just changing things up because a handful of casual fans that are dopes and can't reconcile a woman being in the top weight and not being a heavyweight is pointless and dumb.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This has to be Jeremy Lappen because only someone who has been a part of several failed MMA organizations would constantly harp on using ideas that already failed multiple times and have no effect on the success of the venture.

If Julia Budd was the Bellator Women's Heavyweight champion, does anyone care about that division more than they do now? I mean she is as "jacked" as Cyborg if not more because she has traps like Phil Davis. Nope, they still don't care? Well, please be quiet about this.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Nick Newell has signed with LFA and is no longer retired. He should be able to fight, but I don't know about the best MMA prospects available going against him after the Gaethje fight. But hey...that's his prerogative.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

If they rename Women's 145 to Heavyweight, and then a 170 lb or 185 lb World Class woman shows up and deserves a Championship to fight for, they're going to look really stupid. And it could happen. The future is not certain.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

39 minutes ago, AxB said:

If they rename Women's 145 to Heavyweight, and then a 170 lb or 185 lb World Class woman shows up and deserves a Championship to fight for, they're going to look really stupid. And it could happen. The future is not certain.

Claressa Shields is a world class athlete and more than likely, she will run through the best female boxers above 154 pounds before she turns 24 or 25. Yeah, lets turn her away because there is this weird obsession (that already failed in other places) about making the weight class proportional to the size of the athletes in relation to other females.

The UFC operates on the basis that they can pick and choose what weight classes that are active and the range of the weights, and everyone follows that lead. So anyone running arbitrary weight classes in comparison looks weird because everyone else follows the UFC. You have people running openweight and super heavyweights fights, but that's stuff designated for one off fights in Japan and lower level regional organizations very few people know about. The ABC has been trying to get the UFC to add these new weight classes for years. The unofficial reason why no one does them even though they can do it freely now? The UFC doesn't do it.

I mean it's good to have to new and fresh ideas in MMA, but the weight class changes (weight ranges + names) goes back a couple decades at least. I mean before the lightweight division came back (and years after even) in the UFC, people were saying "well, lightweights don't sell". In the last ten years, four of the five biggest UFC draws weren't heavyweights and the biggest two draws of that five fought a majority of their careers either at 155 pounds or BELOW. So that whole theory for years of heavier weights = more money was shot to pieces severely. The light heavyweight and heavyweight  divisions made the UFC money from 1993 to 2008. That is true. Then, both divisions stopped drawing a couple years after that because people stopped giving a shit about certain notions of size and the influx of the best talent reached an equilibrium. The biggest money years came AFTER what people might call the golden generation of those two weight classes.

The heavyweight division should sell. However, ideally, ALL the weight classes should sell based on the talent and charisma of your biggest stars and best prospects in addition to all the fights you can make from that. If you're just enamored by the names of the weight classes, you probably weren't a MMA fan to begin with.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

An article on  mmafighting mentioned Jon Jones as being one of the best fighters ever. After all these suspensions, can that really still be said? I don't doubt his natural ability and skill at all, but he is about to be stripped of a title for the third time in three years and only has three official wins since 2014. I think he could go down as the biggest wasted opportunity for sure, but even though he was dominating in UFC from 2009 to 2014 I don't think its enough to put him on that level, especially not knowing what drugs he was on (I don't believe he never did steroids in his life and suddenly did last summer). Not sure how he will be viewed in ten years, assuming either he is done now or when he does fight again he isn't at the elite level anymore if he gets a four year suspension.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
×
×
  • Create New...