Opinion: How Low Can the UFC Go?

Editor’s note: The views and opinions expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Sherdog.com, its affiliates and sponsors or its parent company, Evolve Media.

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With the never-ending barrage of Ultimate Fighting Championship events, it’s often useful to step back, look at the bigger picture and identify any interesting trends. Over two years ago, I wrote about how UFC cards have become weaker and weaker over time. Back when Zuffa first bought the company in 2001, there were between five and seven shows a year, all of them pay-per-views, and almost every single fight was either for a championship, pitted two Top 10 contenders against each other or featured elite young prospects who would go on to challenge for a title. It has steadily grown weaker in the years since, and the impetus for the article I referenced was the UFC on ESPN 10 card headlined by Jessica Eye-Cynthia Calvillo. It was an awful main event then and looks vastly worse now. Eye would never win a professional fight again, losing against Calvillo and her next three before announcing her retirement and plans to get into professional wrestling. Meanwhile, Calvillo has similarly been winless in three tries since, the last two ending in stoppage. She is woefully small and weak for the women’s flyweight division.

Incredibly though, the typical non-PPV UFC card has become much worse since I wrote that article. How is that even possible? With the exception of the main event, every other fight from UFC on ESPN 39 on Saturday would have been right at home on an undercard a few years ago. In fact, the 10 fights before the headliner would not even have cracked the main card at a stronger Bellator MMA event. Caio Borralho-Armen Petrosyan may take the cake for the weakest co-headliner we’ve ever seen not involving heavyweights. Both are graduates of the 2021 edition of Dana White’s Contender Series and had each won their UFC debuts, though a majority of people felt that Gregory Rodrigues deserved the decision over Petrosyan. Both Petrosyan and Borralho were talented but untested prospects—hardly something we used to see on main cards, let alone co-main events.

As for the headliner, it was a decent one by 2022 standards but probably would have been no more than an average co-feature a few years ago. Rafael dos Anjos is a legend of the sport, but at 37, the perception was that his days as a serious contender were behind him. Keep in mind that he had originally left the lightweight ranks back in 2016 after a first-round knockout loss to Eddie Alvarez and being thoroughly dominated by Tony Ferguson. After losing four of five against elite competition at welterweight, dos Anjos had won two fights upon re-entering the ranks at 155 pounds, but they were against a retired Paul Felder who heroically stepped on just five days’ notice and a Renato Carneiro who simply hasn’t looked that good since moving to lightweight. Thus, Fiziev—a very talented striker but one whose biggest win thus far had been against Brad Riddell—found himself a healthy -200 favorite. If you have any doubts about how weak the UFC on ESPN 39 card was, look at the card for UFC on ESPN 1. It was headlined by the return of Cain Velasquez, a man who at the time was widely considered the greatest heavyweight of all-time, against dynamite top contender Francis Ngannou. It also featured huge matchups like Aljamain Sterling-Jimmie Rivera, both Top 5 bantamweights then, on the undercard.

Why do UFC fight cards continue to decline in quality? Honestly, there’s no incentive for them to be better. Attendance doesn’t matter because many of them are now held at the UFC Apex. Ratings don’t matter much these days, either. It’s all about adding more hours of content to the streaming platform and nothing else, as the ESPN contract and corporate sponsors represent the bulk of the money the UFC gets. It’s irrelevant whether those hours feature moderately better fighters or not. It’s the same model we’ve seen from every other streaming platform, including Netflix. As long as you can occupy more hours of people’s time, the quality doesn’t matter past a certain baseline. With that in mind, the financial model is to hit that baseline while spending the fewest resources—in other words, paying fighters as little as possible. Thus, we understand why the UFC is suddenly signing so many more prospects from the Contender Series than it did in seasons past. They’re dirt-cheap, and UFC on ESPN 39 was dominated by them.

That leads me to the next question: Are UFC cards, outside of PPVs, going to get even worse? I thought they were close to their nadir back in 2020, but the promotion has done an excellent job proving me wrong recently. Now that I’m older and wiser, yes, I do indeed believe we can go even lower. Imagine a card where everything before the main event is as weak as UFC on ESPN 39 was, only with a far worse headliner—something on par with Eye-Calvillo, Aspen Ladd-Norma Dumont or Anthony Smith-Ryan Spann. It would be a UFC offering on par with the weakest Bellator cards, except that weakness wouldn’t matter since it would still generate many times more money than its rival simply courtesy of the logo being different. That event is coming and likely sooner than we think.