Strenuous Manflurry posted:

Jonathan Snowden is a pathetic excuse for a human being.

CarlCX posted:

From Maggie Hendricks over at Yahoo's Cagewriter, UFC Allows Questionable Music Choices at UFN 25:


MMA Journalism: You probably didn't notice this but you should probably be outraged

willie_dee posted:

He claims Wanderlei was walking with a cane at the time so didn't cause trouble because it was a no win situation.

fatherdog posted:

Winning the title, defending it once and then leaving the organization definitely means you're a "dominant world champion"

colonel_korn posted:

that's pretty amazing.

I don't think it's possible to see anything of Evgeni Kogan without feeling the powerful urge to slap those stupid loving glasses right off his face, I seriously get douche chills every time I see him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EZ_lxgJRFA

Meat Recital posted:

I think you have your terrible MMA journalists confused. Jordan Breen is the one with the terrible hair. Josh Gross looks like a pedophile, but has otherwise unnoteworthy hair.

fatherdog posted:

Remember when it was announced that Snowden was no longer with bloodyelbow, and he insisted that he hadn't been fired but was "moving on to bigger and better things"?

http://bleacherreport.com/users/689391-jonathan-snowden

Chimney Sweeps Week posted:

and then admire his threadbare scalp in a mirror covered with photos of Fedor.

Socrates posted:

Layzie screwed up, he let his bias cloud his judgment. But he apologized quickly, directly and whole-heartedly when he got the facts straight. He added the context to his apology show that his mistake wasn't made maliciously. Layzie didn't say he wasn't his fault, just explaining things that contributed to his mistake.

I enjoy his videos and commentary, and the Diaz Bros., and MMA, probably gained a lot of fans over the last year through Layzie and MiddleEasy's publicity. I hope he doesn't take this too hard and stays active.

His situation illustrates the risks of being a both a media personality and a friend and de facto publicist for fighters.

fatherdog posted:

Every so often a Real Actual Journalist does an mma story and it makes you realize just how lovely we have it with the current crop of mma reporters.

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/8766486/reshat-mati-punch-baby

quote:

Now, at 5-foot-2 and 131 pounds, Reshat is a world-champion kickboxer, a national boxing champion, a North American grappling champion, and an all-around jiu-jitsu champion. As he rose through the ranks, winning national championships in all disciplines and at all levels, Reshat even picked up a cool nickname. They call him The Albanian Bear.

Steve Glutenberg posted:

Now that Miro Mijatovic isn't scared of getting kidnapped and shot to death he's saying some interesting things:

http://www.liverkick.com/index.php?...-1&catid=36:k-1
http://www.liverkick.com/index.php?...43%3Ainterviews

Steve Glutenberg posted:

he's a big pride never die weirdo and https://twitter.com/LiverKickdotcom/status/307654671223365632

Bloody Elbow guy posted:

Well, originally I had about 6 sock puppet accounts on Bloody Elbow, so whenever I put up a post, I would log in with my sock puppet accounts and comment on them, and I made my wife have a couple of sock puppet accounts, so we would have these little fake conversations between ourselves, trying to create the appearance of a community there. I mean, blogging's really frankly just not that crazy, it's dudes sitting at their computer typing.

One time in the early days, I was traveling and I was in some motel in Mississippi and I couldn't get the Pride PPV, so I had to quote-unquote 'live blog' it based off of Sherdog and MMA Junkie's live blogs. A total fail of journalistic ethics, but there you go!

...

Whoever the A-Hole is that keeps subscribing me to every newsletter on earth for being banned, is probably my least favorite member. He's got some sort of program that just goes through and signs me up, but thanks to Gmail that pretty much filters itself out, so it's not really the headache he thinks it is.

...

Michael Fagan was one of the best gambling analysts we've ever had, or anybody's ever had. He stopped doing it for us and he's moved on, and isn't missed in any other regard, but I do miss his gambling posts.

Jonathan Snowden, I think, is one of the most talented writers in the MMA media, definitely the leading historian in the field. I don't miss working with him one bit, but I do miss his content on the site. I think a lot of times he pisses people off, but honestly, I don't think he does it just to troll people or just to bait people. I think he just has a different view of the world than most people.

Triticum Guzzler posted:

brain damage is a terrible thing but the real MMA epidemic is that every single top flight fighter has had 800 major knee surgeries and that's just accepted as part of the game, it's terrifying

quote:

That is the sound of Zuffa getting castrated in their own backyard. And there were witnesses, all right.

To those sayin you can't compare the WWE digital network to the UFC's: Then why are there UFC employees in attendance for the announcement?

— Luca Fury (@FurysFightPicks) January 9, 2014

quote:

On Tuesday, I did a radio interview for Sirius XM with Ricky Bones, RJ Clifford, and Steve Cofield to talk about UFC Fight Pass and why the service so far has not impressed many fans. You can listen to the interview here. The consensus amongst us as to why UFC rushed Fight Pass out for public consumption was, partially, due in part to the upcoming launch of the WWE Network. In other words, UFC wanted to win the media news cycle by launching Fight Pass first even if it wasn’t a complete product and a product not 100% tested for bugs or failures.

quote:

UFC may laugh now but if their PPV buy rates keep dropping like WWE’s PPV buy rates have, look out.

quote:

1. Why did the UFC not launch Fight Pass as a joint venture with Fox Sports?

...

Fox Sports has all the technology & resources at its fingertips to make UFC Fight Pass a monstrous success for an online media property.

quote:

4. Is the concept of PPV itself dead?

quote:

5. How will Viacom (through Bellator) jump into the zero TV fray with the UFC & WWE sharks in the water?
It was suggested, perhaps facetiously, that if there was a Bellator Fight Pass featuring TNA PPVs & GLORY kickboxing events that it would draw better than UFC Fight Pass.
Even if you dismiss that and put that notion to the side, there is some truth to the argument that Bellator (with their Viacom resources) could further fan the flames with Zuffa over digital content presented online.

quote:

What makes Bellator an MMA company with possibilities is the Viacom ownership and they know media real well. With WWE and UFC now into the zero TV fray for good, it’s time for Viacom to step up to the plate and make a big splash. They very well could do so if motivated. If that happens, it will create a headache for the UFC. Especially if Viacom was able to persuade WWE to move RAW/Smackdown to Spike TV in 2014.

Bean Fried posted:

It was also kind of bullshit. The millions of casual fans from the PRIDE days are all gone, sure, but they still have plenty of hardcore nerds like us who are willing to buy tickets.

I actually think the UFC isn't giving Japan enough love these days and should seriously be going there more than once a year. As far as they've fallen they still have a very strong indy scene and are still producing plenty of talent. It'd be very easy to do one PPV card and two Fight Pass cards a year there.

quote:

And yet if you point out the obvious personal & past/current business/political connections between Rogich, Ratner, and Lorenzo you are labeled a conspiracy theorist by those who bother to speak up. Meanwhile, the majority of writers who could be discussing the obvious won’t. There’s no upside to doing so. Not only would it piss off allies in Zuffa and WSOF to start blathering about Rogich, it would also require an admission that I’m right. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned — from the testosterone issue to the PRIDE yakuza scandal to athletic commission scandals — it’s that many media writers would rather pass a kidney stone than admit that I’m on the right side of a touchy subject in the fight business.

Greg Jackson posted:

I bet Dana is regretting letting go of Bonnar now that Bellator is literally pro wrestling!!

DumbWhiteGuy posted:

There are just so many things wrong, I can't even motivate myself to write an indepth critique of their analysis so I'll just give some bullet points. If anyone doesn't understand one, I will elaborate.

• If they keep doing this, they are going to alienate some of their actual fighters in lieu of a few aging light heavyweights.
  

Lord Waffle Beard posted:

http://www.foxsports.com/watch/the-ultimate-fighter/story/texts-from-last-tuf-episode-1-091214

Yuriy posted:

we did it you guys, we have the best piece of mma journalism ever produced

http://fightland.vice.com/blog/jack-slack-street-fighting-roos

DumbWhiteGuy posted:

quote:

There’s a moment in Tito Ortiz’s latest video message for Stephan Bonnar in which the former UFC champion, sweaty and somewhat breathless from a fight week workout, pauses to lift his fists in classic ’90s movie school-bully fashion as he issues a dire warning to his opponent in Saturday night’s Bellator 131 main event.

“You better be able to stop these punches from hitting your face,” Ortiz says in his toughest tough-guy voice, “because I’m kicking your rear end.”

If you were writing the script for a self-made, pre-fight Ortiz video in the year 2014, you couldn’t do much better than this. It’s so perfect, so right, so Tito. He even promises to elbow Bonnar in the face for every one of Ortiz’s fans he’s disrespected, punch him for every family member, “and for everybody else,” Ortiz adds, just so all of humanity is represented by some violent act, “I’m throwing a knee in your face.”

...

In a lot of ways, it’s a fight about nothing. I mean, yes, they are mad at each other, or so they claim, so that’s something, even if it’s the most familiar and therefore tired something that there is in this business. On every other level though, it’s the fight we never asked for. It’s the fight we never even really thought about, and it’s happening at a time in their careers when it feels like the polite thing for us to do would be to look the other way.

...

There’s an element of dramatic irony at work. The fighter sees himself as he used to be, as we used to see him, and remains seemingly unaware that he has become a parody of this person in all the predictable ways. The feud angle that once worked so well with Ken Shamrock and Chuck Liddell now just feels bizarre. The attempted rebranding as a “people’s champion” feels like the kind of thing that will only play with some very specific types of people with very specific ideas about what the word “champion” means. The pre-fight hype feels like unintentional comedy.

...

It’s the kind of fight where you might say, “I gotta see this,” only you say it with a smirk.

Lord Waffle Beard posted:

The teeth kisser

Bluedeanie posted:

Chuck Mindenhall just posted a really interesting longform piece on finding the lost ark of MMA

http://www.mmafighting.com/2015/3/24/8259545/in-search-of-strange-brew

Mr. Nice! posted:

Basically.

I think it's an incredible article.

david carmichael posted:

I asked Mindenhall if he fact checked anything in that article and he ignored me, for some reason.

david carmichael posted:

No I feel bad for thacker, he was clearly taken advantage of by the ufc. My point of contention here is that this article, despite having an immediate emotional impact, isnt good journalism. Breathlessly repeating someone's story and presenting it as fact without verification, particularly when everything you know about the guy would suggest that perhaps there may be a tall tale being told. Good writing isn't necessarily good journalism. The funny part to me is that the culmination of 18 months of research and investigation was: talked to a guy, didn't verify anything he said. The Jason Thacker mental illness part isn't funny, the credulity of Mindenhall is.

And to be clear: compulsive lying usually isn't done for some kind of gain and almost always ends up being a massive detriment instead.

gunblade posted:

I actually meant to ask about this before, and now seems like a good time: In you guys' opinion, has there ever been legit suspicions of certain fights in the UFC being fixed?

Triticum Guzzler posted:

enjoying this one also http://www.mmaweekly.com/in-wake-of-paris-attacks-rich-franklin-detained-at-la-airport

Triticum Guzzler posted:

i didn't care about snowden before but i just found this tweet where he talks poo poo on hendo and misaki at the same time and now he is my ideological enemy https://twitter.com/JESnowden/status/663388893828521984