Silva vs. Sonnen: Power Ranking the Main Card Fights

UFC 148 stood as the most hyped event since UFC 100, and for the most part it held up its part of the bargain. Six main card fights took place, and excitement was in the air for the duration of the evening.

Let’s take a look at the most exciting fights of the night, obviously in reverse order to build the suspense.

Demian Maia vs. Dong Hyun Kim

What an odd one this was.

Maia gets the back from standing, drags Kim down, goes to mount, then gets up to celebrate victory without throwing a significant strike or even attempting a submission. Kim appeared to be injured on the clumsy takedown, but that didn’t make it any less strange.

Great to see one of the sport’s true good guys pick up a win in his welterweight debut, but the next time out for Maia will be a more truthful gauge of his skills at 170.

Chad Mendes vs. Cody McKenzie

Mendes KO’d McKenzie with a body shot/overhand right behind the ear in less time than it took you to read this sentence. It was definitely the least exciting fight, with McKenzie looking predictably outmatched against the No. 2 featherweight in the world.

Still, at least it was a finish, even if everyone in the world could see the winner coming and only got 40 seconds of action.

Ivan Menjivar vs. Mike Easton

Easton picked up the win with a surprisingly reserved, tactical performance. He patiently picked The Pride of El Salvador apart, rocking him a couple of times and generally looking like the better man all around.

Oddly enough the tilt drew boos upon its completion, but it was a decent scrap to watch even for people who don’t love decisions. A big win for an unheralded guy, one that will surely get a big name opponent next time out.

Anderson Silva vs. Chael Sonnen

Sometimes hype can only do so much. Eventually you’ve got to get in there and try to sell with your hands what you’ve sold for two years with your mouth, and the results are mixed.

That’s essentially Silva-Sonnen II.

It wasn’t a bad fight, and Sonnen did what he promised to for a round by putting the champ on the ground and beating him up. Then, in the second, he threw the stupidest elbow ever conceived and learned in a hurry that you don’t get two mistakes against Anderson Silva.

Silva smashed Sonnen against he cage with a knee and follow-up strikes, celebrating his 15^th straight UFC win not long after.

It was decent, but after two years of hype, trash talk and bad blood, it definitely wasn’t an end that did justice to the hottest rivalry in the history of the sport.

Cung Le vs. Patrick Cote

An underrated brawl between two good strikers, both guys came to fight and left it all in the cage for 15 minutes. Tough not to love that.

Le was a little more reserved with his kicks, picking his spots more than he had in his UFC debut and getting a little further with them as a result. Cote fearlessly ate them and marched forward to throw hands and force clinches, often roughing up the Vietnamese San Shou legend in the process.

If this fight didn’t happen on a night when Tito Ortiz retired and put on an alright show of his own, it wins fight of the night easily.

Tito Ortiz vs. Forrest Griffin

It might not have been a relevant fight in any conceivable sense of the term, but Ortiz and Griffin put on a great show in completing their trilogy at UFC 148. It’s not an easy sell that the right guy won, as sometimes stats don’t tell the whole story, but it almost didn’t matter anyway. Tito got the fight he wanted and gave Forrest a good run.

The two brawled all over the cage with Ortiz scoring the more powerful blows while Griffin went for volume. There was plenty of vintage Tito ground-and-pound, while Forrest did an excellent job playing his criminally underrated guard game to stay out of trouble.

For pure excitement, it wasn’t as good as Le/Cote. Considering it was a send-off for one of the first modern greats of the sport, it definitely had a special vibe to it.