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Bellator, PFL, RIZIN, Glory, and LFA Thread (The Battle of Britain...in Connecticut Edition)


Elsalvajeloco

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54 minutes ago, Jiji said:

That's what I'm interested to see now that he's taken steps but clearly has some leftover issues. What are his immediate and long-term paths? Now that he's looked solid against the lower tier guys, does he start to move up and face some of the fighters from the featherweights that were in the grand prix? Moving his way up through the losers of the first and second rounds wouldn't be the worst way to mark his progress if he and his team think he's ready for that. Then, how long does he stick around in Bellator until he feels like a move to the UFC is in his best interest? I can't imagine him being a Bellator lifer. They probably won't survive that long first and foremost. 

The one route (at least if you're Bellator) you definitely want to avoid is the MVP route. Michael Page is in his mid 30s I think and been in Bellator since they first joined Spike in 2013...I still don't know how good he is. He might be top 15 or not even top 30. That's INSANE that we still don't know how good he is. They completely botched him. Now it looks like he may be past it considering what I heard (or lack thereof) about his last fight.

The one downside of being with Bellator is you don't get the sheer variety you would see in UFC due to the roster size. With Bellator, you're either not that good, past your prime, slightly above average, or really, really good. That slightly above average tier is ok, but the gap between those last two tiers is crazy. How many fight of the year candidates is Bellator cranking out? Like 3 a year max maybe? When was the last time Bellator had ONE fight on par with the five or six best UFC fights in a year? When your divisions are so top heavy, it makes how you treat your prospects much, much more delicate. You either throw him up against a no hoper or someone who can really expose them. There is no perfect strategy to build them up. You can say tournaments are perfect work arounds, but most tournaments aren't properly seeded. Most are designed to get one maybe two desired matchups at the very end. 

The best Bellator can do really just judge him fight-to-fight and not make any irrational matchups for him. They don't have the resources or talent to really develop him efficiently. Hopefully, Pico himself can find different ways to maturate in and out of the cage to overcome that. That's the best he can hope for. Otherwise, it wouldn't make sense to talk about him in the UFC. He has to master this level first.

Edited by Elsalvajeloco
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Lineker looked excellent against Belingon, stopping him in the second. Bibiano vs. Lineker is gonna be a helluva fight, though I'm thinking with Lineker's solid takedown defense and Fernandes not having very good takedowns... I wonder if Bibiano tries to play runaway until Lineker starts to fade. 

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I don't even understand. It looks like he's not even throwing everything into that (look how sharply he stops his follow through). Yet so much night night.

Slashing hook like out of an anime.

He debuting on the UFC roster before the end of the year? 

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3 minutes ago, Jiji said:

I don't even understand. It looks like he's not even throwing everything into that (look how sharply he stops his follow through). Yet so much night night.

Slashing hook like out of an anime.

He debuting on the UFC roster before the end of the year? 

Early next year probably.

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2 minutes ago, Jiji said:

How crazy would an MMA rematch be between Pereira and Adesanya?

I feel like they (the UFC) put so much on Joe Duffy beating Conor that he was never able to shake that. He had a decent start in the UFC against less than stellar competition, had that war against Poirier where he took a lot of punishment, and never recovered. He clearly lost all his passion for fighting. I don't want to revisit that again.

If Pereira gets to the UFC, I feel that should be downplayed until if and when he starts beating real competition.

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13 minutes ago, Elsalvajeloco said:

I feel like they (the UFC) put so much on Joe Duffy beating Conor that he was never able to shake that. He had a decent start in the UFC against less than stellar competition, had that war against Poirier where he took a lot of punishment, and never recovered. He clearly lost all his passion for fighting. I don't want to revisit that again.

If Pereira gets to the UFC, I feel that should be downplayed until if and when he starts beating real competition.

Oh 100% absolutely. But it's going to be the first thing everybody thinks of when they see him. 

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2 hours ago, twiztor said:

first Invicta, now Titan?

PFL's gonna lose their breakout star.

It's quite the opposite. They're doing this since they don't want to lose her. She didn't want to go a whole year or more without fighting. If this Titan FC fight happens, they would have found her two stay busy fights when the rest of their roster save for like Werdum and maybe one other exception had zero in 2020. 

I think Lance Palmer is the other fighter who made a big stink about the cancelation of the 2020 PFL season. I dunno if he was released, the situation was resolved under the table, or if they're about to get into some litigation. This thing with Harrison at least shows PFL is pliable.

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Things are going well in ONE

But I did laugh at this:

Quote

Compounding the issue is the fact that the company is headquartered in Singapore, where some of our sources have expressed concern that legal proceedings can become very expensive to the point where the party with the least amount of resources often ends up losing the most.

Completely unheard of in western democracies.

Jesus, Alain Ngalani... 

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To me, ONE is basically every money mark MMA org post PRIDE or the height of K-1. The only thing is it's in Asia. It's hard to put any credibility into stuff when everyone talks in anonymity, but I am very familiar with the pattern of everyone saying they're doing very well. Then, eventually, they go out of business. It's just about how willing are the people behind it are to lose money and for how long. It's going to be hard to quantify their success even if you have their financial statements because anyone can spin stuff a certain way. In addition, they're largely in markets that never had major MMA promotions of any significance save for Japan. So you can basically say anything because there is no measuring stick. With that said, I don't put much stock into anything negative or positive about the promotion anymore.

I mean this BE article even starts about talking about their FA signings and having like Miesha Tate work for them. Ok...what does that mean for the company? Can you quantify that outside of you signed some good fighters? Like what is Miesha Tate really doing in her role that makes one difference toward their bottom line? How is this any different than UFC having Minotauro be a talent scout for UFC in the Brazilian market? It's a figurehead position pretty much. Everything else from the no badmouthing toward the company, the free tickets, no PED testing, and miscellaneous sketchy dealings....that's literally every money mark organization over the last 15 years damn near. Hell, you can throw in Bellator into that mix because they certainly don't give a damn about testing and for years local fighters would have bundles of tickets to give away for their shows. The media stuff...even though it's not fighters per se, UFC in the Fertitta era wanted to basically run how they were covered by various websites. Only until UFC 199 with the Ariel thing and whenever Ariel got fired by Fox did some of that stuff come to a head. Now, a good majority of the folks that UFC had nasty interactions with back then don't have much to do with MMA anymore, and the known MMA folks including Helwani work with their media partner ESPN. Even the ones that don't work for ESPN still work at more UFC friendly websites. In the end, UFC won out. So all this stuff mentioned in the article is not atypical to MMA. It's not even atypical to poorly run MMA organizations here and abroad. It's just that we won't know if it was really bad or not until ONE completely gets blown to smithereens or they do finally make a tangible mark on MMA in Asia. Otherwise, everything is speculation.

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21 hours ago, Elsalvajeloco said:

we won't know if it was really bad or not until ONE completely gets blown to smithereens or they do finally make a tangible mark on MMA in Asia. Otherwise, everything is speculation.

i agree with everything you posted.

but it's easy to see that ONE is talking big but presenting no facts to back that up. They're not the first, they won't be the last. Maybe someday they'll blow up huge and accomplish all the things they're saying they've already done. Maybe someday they'll go out of business. Who knows? But right now, they're just blowing smoke.

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