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UFC 107 (12/12 Memphis at FedEx Forum)
By Zach Arnold | December 12, 2009
Dark matches
- Welterweights (170 pounds): Kevin Burns vs. TJ Grant
- Welterweights (170 pounds): DaMarques Johnson vs. Edgar Garcia
- Middleweights (185 pounds): Rousimar Palhares vs. Lucio Linhares
- Welterweights (170 pounds): Johny Hendricks vs. Ricardo Funch
- Lightweights (155 pounds): Matt Wiman vs. Shane Nelson
- Middleweights (185 pounds): Alan Belcher vs. Wilson Gouveia
Main card
- Heavyweights (up to 265 pounds): Paul Buentello vs. Stefan Struve
- Lightweights (155 pounds): Kenny Florian vs. Clay Guida
- Welterweights (170 pounds): Jon Fitch vs. Mike Pierce
- Heavyweights (up to 265 pounds): Frank Mir vs. Cheick Kongo
- UFC Lightweight Title match: BJ Penn (champion) vs. Diego Sanchez (challenger)
Jon Fitch continues to not finish opponents off in UFC bouts
Which leads to Jordan Breen pointing out the obvious:
Fitch’s situation is unfortunate. UFC don’t want a GSP rematch, don’t want him to be contenders, so opponents are tough guys with no Q value
Love the stream of @’s I got. Don’t you all remember when you flooded Joe Silva’s inbox to see Fitch on the main card? Tsk tsk bandwagoners.
Unlike Yushin Okami (who got finished by Chael Sonnen), it’s hard to see anyone finishing Fitch off outside of St. Pierre. Glass ceiling…
Topics: Media, MMA, UFC, Zach Arnold | 76 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
Interesting card. Don’t know that I want to pay $55 for it, but there are some fights I want to see. Florian/Guida should be interesting, as should Fitch/Pierce. Don’t know how excited I can get about Frank Mir vs. anyone. BJ Penn/Sanchez…unknown. On paper, BJ wins by stoppage of some kind.
It’s one of those cards with possibilities of some good fights but isn’t going to excite the casuals into buying it and should continue UFC’s 400K or less holding pattern.
Penn/Sanchez is going to be good even if Penn outclasses Diego, Mir/Kongo will be the drizzling shits like every Kongo fight is, Fitch/Pierce is very underwhelming, Florian/Guida is good on paper but will consist of Florian holding Clay down for 3 rounds in reality, Buentello/Struve is going to be a generic heavyweight fight. The show stealer could be Gouveia/Belcher on Spike.
I think Penn/Sanchez is going to be fantastic….
Really looking forward to this card…. Can’t say the same thing about UFC 108…
Florian holding down Guida for 3 rounds?
BJ is a megastar. I think this will do a good buyrate even though Rampage fucked the fans out of the main event. Let’s say 550k buys.
Any PPV estimates out for the last UFC card?
I think the main event in this one is outstanding.
Wonder how much of the undercard there going to show? Lot’s of quality match’s.
Gotta love the Heavyweight fights. Sturve/Buentello is gonna be lot’s of fun. I’m buying this card. First UFC card in a while that’s worth it.
Mark I don’t think Spike is doing the prelim’s again? kinda of sad actually.
Penn’s big draws involve another star fighter like GSP or Hughes, or a really strong semi main like 101 had under him. I’d be shocked if anybody actually cares about Mir/Kongo. UFC 84 where he fought Sherk with a much stronger co-main (Ortiz/Machida) only did 475K and Tito probably made the difference there.
Plus nobody really believes Sanchez has much of a chance to win. Penn is far ahead of him in skills, so all Diego has going for him is better cardio into rounds 4 + 5 but he’ll probably get finished before then. And with fan education much better than it was when crappy fights could draw, people are only interested in fights with uncertain outcomes.
Also, I’m going to make a prediction that Mir/Kongo is going to be nearly as awful as Couture/Vera.
So you think…
1) Florian is going to take down Guida for 3 rounds.
2) The general public doesn’t think Penn vs. Sanchez is a close fight.
3) Penn is not a draw, despite being the headline of two major shows this year.
4) Mir vs. Kongo is going to be extremely boring.
Anything good to say about this card Mark?
“The show stealer could be Gouveia/Belcher on Spike.”
I wish it was going to be on Spike. There will be no prelims airing on SpikeTV this time around. Some awards show is already scheduled for the 8pm timeslot that night on Spike. Video Game Awards I think.
There’s just no pleasing some people. There’s 4 top 5 fighters on the card, plus Diego who is #6 but is probably a betting favorite against anyone not named Penn at 155. I’d have to check, but I’m fairly certain it has higher ranked fighters than any card since UFC 100.
“And with fan education much better than it was when crappy fights could draw, people are only interested in fights with uncertain outcomes.”
Not true. Fedor got 5 million viewers against Rogers, and he was a bigger favorite than any fight on this card.
Well he’s certainly not going to stand and trade, duh.
It isn’t. People are educated now, and Clay Guida is no BJ Penn.
I said he was a draw in big fights. GSP was a big fight. People bought UFC 101 for Silva/Griffin. If you really think the public cares about Kenny Florian something is wrong with you.
Yep.
…Says the man who shits on everything. I said I looked forward to seeing Penn/Sanchez so like all UFC shows I’ll buy it. It’s not my fault they decided to put two stiffs on the main card because they’re heavyweights over a really exciting Middleweight fight that could go either way. It’s getting my money, that’s pretty positive, right?
Yes, there are top 10 fighters on the card….against non-top 10 fighters (Kongo isn’t ranked, Mike Pierce isn’t ranked, Clay Guida isn’t ranked.) When Strikeforce or DREAM or boxing does this you bitch about it.
Because it was on free television. This is $45. Big difference.
Mir/Kongo won’t be extremely boring. Its ending one way or the other inside the distance. I don’t think Mir’s gonna be getting his hand raised either; his best shot is pulling guard, I’ll say that now.
Penn/Sanchez is probably the best fight that realistically can be made in the lightweight division. Only potential contender is Kawajiri/Aoki, really. I don’t care about Fitch/some guy and really no one else does either, even if he loses. I like Florian/Guida; Guida is a test for anyone, and he’s live to expose flaws in Kenny. Belcher/Gouveia is like a loser leaves town fight. The rest I don’t care about in any way.
I think Diego is being underrated. I would pick him against Florian, he already beat Guida and Stevenson, and I think he would beat Aoki. I would like to see Alvarez and Kawajiri and Hansen and those guys over in the UFC.
Diego is a very good wrestler (though he won’t be able to take BJ down), he is super aggressive, has an excellent chin, hits fairly hard, and doesn’t get tired. BJ should win, but I see this going to decision because I think Diego will be tough to finish. Mir-Kongo is compelling too. Struve-Buentello will be a fun fight as well. I would rather watch paint dry than watch Jon Fitch fight.
Diego’s pace just won’t benefit him in the 4th and 5th rounds… It will benefit him throughout the fight.
Will BJ accuse Diego of “greasing”
His pace and aggression is more likely to get him countered and KTFO than anything else.
Diego definitely has a shot to win a decision. All he has to do is steal one of the first three rounds, then hope he wore out BJ a bit and take the last two. Then again, recent decisions have showed us that strategy doesn’t mean shit.
I just saw on espn.com that Mayweather has agreed to terms for the Pacman fight. It will either be March 13 or May 1. Is UFC running ppv either day?
Im saying 3 million buys as a minimum for this show.
Shogun vs Lyoto 2 is May 1st…BLAF is praying right now that they go for the 13th.
I can’t handle another “HE GOT SCREWED~!” bitchfest so I pray BJ taps him or even Diego knocks him out. Either way would be better than Sunday morning judging again.
But the thing is, what can he do better than Penn? Is he a better striker? Not really. Is he a better grappler? Not even close, he’s never looked good against a top level grappler and Penn is far better than guys like Koscheck and Fitch. So while he does have better cardio unquestionably, what can he do for 25 minutes to win rounds? He’s too ballsy to hit n’ run. He’d get overconfident and BJ would catch him or take him down. I agree he’d beat everybody else in the division, but Penn is on another level.
If this is true I am absolutely stunned Mayweather agreed so fast. I was expecting a long negotiation. But I guess its easier to give out huge money when you know the thing is going to break records.
The PPV industry won’t let both shows run on the same day. And Dana isn’t stupid enough to put a Machida fight of all things against a fight like this. Lesnar maybe, but he knows he’d get slaughtered head to head.
Rumor is that it is either March or September… Either way, UFC should nit go against it. Just like boxing should not go against Lesnar….
I don’t think they have a choice even if they wanted to. The PPV industry is pretty good about preventing event overlaps (otherwise WWE and WCW would have always run events on the same day for example.) They know UFC is guaranteed to do well and this is a blockbuster so since they get a 40% cut they’ll make sure it does as well as possible. Plus Manny is the one boxer MMA fans will pay to see even if they might not consider themselves full fledged boxing fans, so even countering it with the return of Brock Lesnar would be too risky for UFC to want to attempt.
Kenny needs to just give in and rock the Chester A Arthur for realz.
Nice. Mark may not care about Kenny Florian, but there’s a whole region of the country that does.
Damn, they practically needed to roll Kongo’s limp corpse off Mir. Crazy punch.
Good show, IMO. Mir keeps on trucking, much to my surprise, Penn is his usual excellent self, Florian looked outstanding against Guida, there were a couple rock em’ sock em’ fights that meant nothing and probably got Dana a hardon, and oh yeah, Fitch. The fight did nothing for him; He didn’t look good at the end of it, he didn’t add a great or even a really good name to his resume, and we will await him perhaps getting someone more notable sometime in the future. But, at the same time, to fight guys like Pierce outside the UFC, he’d likely make less than he does fighting them in it. No reason to rush on out.
Maybe Fitch should leave American Kickboxing Academy. He’s not gaining a killer instinct there
Oh Mark and your predictions…
Mir seriously impressed. His wins over Lesnar, Nogueira and Kong were awesome, notwithstanding the brutal loss to Lesnar.
Tonight he looked stronger, faster and bigger than ever.
I would like to see Mir vs Carwin for #1 contender, and I believe Mir would win by submission.
Hmmmm, a surprisingly decent card after all. Maybe UFC hasn’t completely lost their knack yet.
These cards dont look like a lot on paper, yet still manage to reasonably entertain. Or maybe I’m just that big of a junkie. 🙂
And how about this crazy MMA game. The fight that I thought would be the biggest joke Mir/Kongo, ended up being one of the highlights of the night.
Hopefully we’re turning a corner for the better in the new year.
@ Alan, the fight probably did nothing for Fitch except make him look a bit more beatable. But for the roster, I think we just discovered Pierce.
I thought Mike Pierce won. He successfully stepped in and showed some precise punching. Fitch is a mediocre striker, I’m not sure how this continues to go overlooked.
I wonder if Jose Aldo could be the one to finally give Penn a challenge at 155?
He seems to also have that natural, almost effortless greatness like Penn does.
The fight I want to see is Penn vs Koschek at 170.
No surprise in the main event: Diego had nothing for BJ. Thank God it got finished because I could not handle another “JUDGES SUX!” bitchfest online. Penn has to be getting bored and will be attempting 170 again very soon I predict. Do you really think he’s going to wait on Maynard or another KenFlo fight? I don’t. Sanchez was the last name at 155 who he could draw any kind of money against unless another WW drops down (which I doubt.) Other than that he’s got guys who have exciting fights but aren’t names and never will be names so much like Anderson Silva he won’t tolerate that. But even if he doesn’t fight GSP again he has a bunch of marquee fights at 170: A Hughes rubber match, Koscheck, Fitch, Alves, Johnson, Renzo, ect. Moving to 185 for Silva wouldn’t be out of the question I don’t think either. I doubt he’d win, but he’d attempt it and it would be a big seller to make both disgruntled-in-their-division fighters happy.
Fire Kongo, please. He’s useless. Too crappy on the ground for anybody, but too dangerous to feed to Kimbo either. As for Mir, people really want to see him fight Lesnar again? Really? He got saved in the first fight and got destroyed in the 2nd. Is the draw Lesnar may be too unhealthy to win then? There are a half-dozen other fights I’d like to see Lesnar have before Mir III.
I’d have to have respect for Clay Guida before I could be impressed that Kenny beat him, sorry. Guida will have a UFC job for life because he has the exciting stand n’ trade fights that Dana loves like Lytle and Wanderlei, but he’s never going to beat anybody that matters. This was a gimme fight for Florian, period. Congratulations on finishing him, but he’s a third-tier fighter at best.
And Fitch looked like absolute crap in round 3. Did he train with Tito?
Hey, what happened to Ivan?
The problem with Lesnar vs Mir 3 is that it is effectively Lesnar vs Mir 3/3.
Mir and Lesnar really won’t get another shot at it at that point. Four fight series are extremely unusual in this game for a reason, people feel like that third fight is the conclusive rubber match if the first two were split. You don’t get even that if you lost the first two unless Tito Ortiz is going to be involved in the fight (apparently).
Lesnar vs Mir 3 is too big a draw to waste on anything less than New Years Eve 2010/2011. But how do you ensure that both guys are healthy, in the minds of the public, and that there’s still a belt on the line though?
@ Alan, the fight probably did nothing for Fitch except make him look a bit more beatable. But for the roster, I think we just discovered Pierce.
I don’t. Because he had 30 good seconds at the end of the third? Fitch fought a standup battle with Pierce because he assumed zero risk with the guy. It turned out differently at the very end of the fight, but in general Pierce was getting handled. You can only credit a guy so much for losing.
I wonder if Jose Aldo could be the one to finally give Penn a challenge at 155?
Maybe he should clear out his weight class before we start talking about him taking on one of the top P4P fighters in the sport and being competitive? I’m not ready to talk about that fight for awhile.
I would like to see Mir vs Carwin for #1 contender, and I believe Mir would win by submission.
I completely agree. Carwin has done nothing particularly amazing to merit the shot and even I, the most ardent of Frank Mir skeptics out there, have to say that him bodying up Kongo the way he did is an achievement. Its a good fight for a great number of reasons, and a solid co-main for some show somewhere.
I guess no one wants to point out to Zach that “glass ceiling” Fitch was supposed to rematch Alves, who is hardly a boring or no-name fighter; that there weren’t exactly a bunch of name fighters ready to step in when Alves pulled out; and Fitch had not fought since July and probably wanted to fight no matter what. Damned facts, always getting in the way of conspiracy theories.
Alves himself was a fill-in too, let’s not forget. I hope Fitch gets some decent fights in the UFC and if not, well, he’s getting paid well to fight scrubs and no-names.
I don’t have a problem with them doing the fight, but since Lesnar clearly dominated both fights (and Mir was about 5 seconds away from being KOed in the first fight before the Mazzagatti miracle) I’d rather see fights with questions going into them first. I don’t know how he matches up with Carwin, or Nogueira, or Dos Santos, or Velasquez, or Nelson. And just because he destroyed a guy whose biggest win is over Cro Cop during the “Cro Crap Years” but who couldn’t beat Heath Herring doesn’t excite me into thinking he has something new to stop Lesnar’s ground n pound. And “we have to do it now or never” is not a good excuse for it. “We have to do it now or never” has brought us disasters like Couture being put in the LHW mix at 47 and Liddel-Ortiz IV. You can’t force things.
For all the people who gripe and scream about Overeem’s size gains being chemically aided, I have to wonder why we haven’t heard much about Mir’s miraculous increase in muscle mass in the last 4-6 months.
That guy looks like he’s been on a strict diet of horsemeat sandwiches.
Mir will sell fights and is a legit draw HW (and I should hope so after getting a solid 6 years of hard pushing) but I’m not sure how much more I’m sold on him after beating a painfully 1-dimensional, borderline top 15-20 hw.
I honestly don’t know what they’re going to do at 155 if BJ plans to stay and cement his legacy as the most dominant divisional champion of all time.
There’s just nobody that’s in the division that is a good “test” for whether you’re good enough to fight BJ. There is just such a step-up between the upper tier of that division and BJ…he truly stands alone at 155 and I don’t know if there’s anyone that has a dream of even touching him right now or in the near future.
But I think it’s safe to say that if it wasn’t transparent before, they clearly hot-shotted Sanchez into a title shot and valiantly sold him as a dangerous challenger when in reality they put him up against Joe Daddy and Clay Guida…and he won pretty unimpressively.
I honestly don’t know what they’re going to do at 155 if BJ plans to stay and cement his legacy as the most dominant divisional champion of all time.
C’mon man; He’s a great fighter; they should pinch themselves that they have such a dominant future legend with them right now. They’re better off with someone like BJ (who they can build title challengers to over long periods like Florian) than to have world title hot potato.
BJ should take a fight at WW to give a LW contender the chance to separate himself from the pack. I think Edgar should take on the winner of Maynard-Diaz. Meantime Florian should try to avenge all his losses by taking on Sherk then Sanchez, assuming they both win their next fights.
Who should Penn fight at WW? I think the obvious choice is Koscheck, while Fitch rematches Alves.
#44-Gaijin-no one(HARDLY) makes that comparison probably because mir has always been a NATURAL HW. and a big one at that. he weighed 255 when he destroyed nog and has always weighed 250-255, EXCEPT for his last fight with lesnar when he came in at 245, obviously trying to be the quicker fighter. so he gained 19 lbs of muscle (not 25, like some on the net have eluded to) and weighed 264. big whoop! while alistair was a tall lanky LIGHT-HEAVYWEIGHT who got demolished by the top of the line fighters at 205 to all of a sudden become this monstorous HW, all while fighting in japan, never coming back to the us to defend his strikeforce “hw title” with no drug testing, gaing 60+ lbs and a head the size of a giant pumpkin. wether overeem is a roider or not, comparing frank’s gains to overeem’s is fucking RETARDED!