UFC doesn't exactly save their best fights for events that are going to take place in New Jersey, so I suppose this isn't a huge surprise that it was the least exciting venue I have seen in a while. The fights as usual took something crazy like 6 hours to get through them all and just like is usual this is largely done on purpose and each 15 minute fight is followed by at least 15 minutes of advertisements and promos that in themselves are also advertisements.
The fights themselves didn't look like they would be very exciting to begin with, but the fact that both of the co-main-events were lopsided and turned out exactly like the pundits and most fans predicted they would, just made it that much worse.
Honestly, you have to go pretty far down the undercard to find a single fight that didn't go exactly like it was predicted it would go.
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By the time we got to the top fight of the night with Sean O'Mally attempting to regain "his" title against Merab Dvalishvili I was already pretty angry about how boring everything had been and thought that maybe there was a chance that this was going to be the standout fight of the night. I was wrong and my hopes were misguided.
This fight went exactly how I and many other predicted it would go with O'Malley being incapable of dealing with the ground game of the Georgian champion and just looking like a fish out of water once he was down there.
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Merab was always going to take the fight to the ground, that is where he is best. The thing that was diappointing is that O'Malley, who is an excellent striker even though his strikes are a bit weak, didn't do much in the way of making us believe that he was the better of the two as far as standing up is concerned either. He looked completely out of his element and perhaps this will be the final nail in the coffin that take the wind out of his sails as far as being a focus of this division is concerned. I said long ago that I thought that O'Malley was hand chosen to be in this role because of his personality and looks and not necessarily because he was the best at the job. UFC does this on a regular basis as they will engineer fights for up and comers, stream-lining them to the top of a division and then once they get there, they can sometimes win the belt but never keep it for very long.
Also, once someone has seen what the top is like they seem to change their tactics to one of being extremely defensive in their tactic and trying very hard to "go the distance" rather than seek out an early finish. With O'Malley he was never much of a finisher anyway because even though he would often go the distance he wouldn't do enough damage with his punches (primarily) to actually finish off his opponents. People that have fought him have stated that his punches dont hurt, he just hits you with a lot of them.
In this fight, O'Malley seemed to be extremely preoccupied with throwing as few punches as possible and in the round that he was finished in with a choke, he had at one point only had 3 strikes total in that round. Not significant strikes, 3 STRIKES. The guy wasn't even throwing. All too often the guys that get near the top aren't trying to win, they are trying to not lose. This is a tactic that simply isn't going to work anymore because almost everyone at the top these days is a submission specialist and will just get you down on the ground and work towards a position and make you tap.
This is precisely what Dvalishvili did in the early stages of round 3 when Sean tapped.
At no point in time did it appear as though O'Malley had even and inkling of a chance at winning this thing.
The co main event was already heavily stacked in the favor or challenger Kayla Harrison. Not a single pundit picked Julianna Pena for the win and it was evident why that was the case very early on as Pena didn't really look like she deserved to have that belt even as a visitor in her house.
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I kind of suspect that Pena was paid to put on a convincing show, but to not win. With the news of Amanda Nunes coming back out of retirement (sigh...another one) the sportsing world has zero interest in seeing Pena get beaten about by Nunes again so Harrison is who they want in this spotlight as UFC pushes for her to become the new Holly Holmes. I'm not trying to take away from Harrison, but she hasn't really been tested very well. She has defeated what was then an already washed-up Holly Holmes, then defeated a non name in Viera, then was given a title shot, which she won. Congratulations, 3 fights in the UFC and you are champion. TO be as fair as I can to UFC, there aren't really a ton of competitors in the women's Bantamweight division to choose from so let's give them the benefit of the doubt and say that they gave her the best opponents that they could.
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I'm not trying to take away from her victory or championship though, she definitely deserved it but the main problem I had with it was she, the challenger, was the heavy favorite before the bell even rang and her opponent, the presumed by the fact that she was wearing a belt to the ring champion of the world, didn't look like a top fighter at all. The ending was guaranteed before the fight began it seems.
In all, the main card of UFC 316 had huge splits on the odds for the fighters, many of them 2 to 1 favorites and with one exception far down the undercards, every fight went exactly as was predicted.
I think at this point a good way to make money on UFC events would be to simply bet some amount on every single fight and take the favorite because I am starting to feel as though the UFC actually makes these fights with somewhat engineered outcomes.
I didn't go to a bar to watch the fights this time and instead got a dodgy connection to one of those websites that probably immediately throws viruses on your computer once you visit them. I kept it on the background and only looked at it every now and then. I just don't feel as though UFC really has the excitement factor that they used to. I honestly didn't need to watch this event at all. Everything just felt so pre-planned.