The Miscellaneous Thread

@Duck Yan vs Rainbowpubes was a pretty bad score. Not nearly atrocious as the cards for Gordon vs Paddy the ***** though.

It's virtually incomprehensible to me how anyone could have scored that fight for Pimblett. The system is corrupt. Too many instances of fighters with the market momentum/ drawing power getting gifted inexplicable, dubious decisions--to say nothing of the matchmaking via which the deck is stacked to pushed money-maker fighters. It's just not something that would occur in a legitimate competition based on truly neutral, impartial adjudication and competition. I don't know how it happens exactly--or if it's a formal or informal conspiracy, or how it works. But if it looks like a duck and sounds like a duck, it's very probably not a fish.

It was always probably ridiculous to believe that there could ever have been integrity in a gambling-infested bloodsport like MMA.

I'll still watch flagship events, but I simply don't have the appetite for it that I once did.

@Chris I could believe that if it wasn't the case that decisions going the way of the promotions and gambling agencies weren't so common, but it just isn't like that. It's also the sort of thing that's fairly easy to get away with. Ultimately, the rules-as-written are fertile soil for corruption. The primary criterion is impact and ultimately a panel of judges who are appointed by bureaucracies state-to-state and who subjectively determine what that is without oversight, and a UFC event (especially a large one) brings in quite a lot of revenue for the state in which it is held--tourism dollars are real. Athletic commissions make money by taking a cut of the gate and PPV sales of Boxing and MMA events, and UFC's business model largely based on PPV and gate sales. Merchandise to a lesser extent. Licensing fees.

Obviously, both have a vested interest in all of these things being as profitable as possible. And if what drives high PPV numbers is fan attendance, both virtual and literal, and what drives that is popularity in specific fighters....well, it's not hard to see how the eye might wink at the hand, which is why Nate Diaz was consistently given fights he hadn't earned on merit. I'm reasonably confident there's some kind of relationship between UFC and commissions, and the judges are involved in it. This doesn't necessarily have to mean brown paper bags under the table. It's more likely to me that commission employees and judges are kind of 'made to understand', if that makes sense. More of an informal conspiracy. Not necessarily outright bribery. It's probably the case that if they don't judge in a form that is beneficial to promotions and the commissions, they kind of just don't get the big gigs. This process would be accumulative and would get to a point where they sort of 'selectively breed' judges that produce outcomes conducive to business interests.

Everything is a conspiracy theory until it isn't. Have you been following the twitter files? I'd probably write a large rant about how I was right about intelligence agencies and the left side of the spectrum paying/colluding with Twitter to act as a defacto propaganda wing and suppression tool just to ***** slap Greg with the fact I was right all along if I actually thought he had the humility to concede he was wrong.

* Edited at 12.27.2022, 5:08 PM ET *