UFC 130: The Slippery Slope of Rematches

It was Samuel L. Jackson in Jurassic Park who coined the phrase “hold onto your butts” with such pitch-perfect dryness that it covered any underwhelming situation for the rest of time. Good movie, that.

Well, MMA fans: hold onto your butts.

Why?

Because UFC 130: Rampage vs. Hamill is official for May 28 thanks to injuries to both lightweight champion Frank Edgar and would-be challenger Gray Maynard, the initial headliners of the card. That fight is postponed at least six weeks, and in its place is a forgettable meeting that could cripple one man’s career or be a big win on an otherwise drab resume for another, depending on the outcome.

To pull a quote from another pop culture icon, Ned Flanders: “sounds spine-tingly-dingly!”

Except it doesn’t. At all. There likely hasn’t been a less appealing UFC pay-per-view main event in the past five years, in fact.

Don’t misunderstand the point though, this is nobody’s fault really. Injuries happen, and when they do cards are going to be reshuffled. The calls for Zuffa to make this event free are lunacy, as are the calls to make it available at a discounted PPV price.

If ever there was a situation that just is what it is and sucks for it, this is it.

The issue that this does shed light on though is that of immediate rematches, and what they do to divisional hierarchies.

With so many top guys fighting for position in MMA these days, it’s remarkable that even the slightest issue of contention can earn someone an immediate rematch.

Draw? You’ve got grounds for an immediate rematch.

Split decision? Grounds for an immediate rematch.

Close decision? Yup, grounds for an immediate rematch.

Outright loss? You guessed it, grounds for an immediate rematch.

Think about all of those possibilities. In reality, it’s amazing we see more than the same half-dozen fights just on constant rotation throughout the year if that’s the criteria being used to decide. And it basically is.

This whole Edgar/Maynard mess was caused by a draw at UFC 125, a draw that wasn’t a win for Maynard. That’s what a draw is.

So why does Edgar, the champion, owe him another immediate chance? He didn’t win the fight. Furthermore, the lightweight division is the deepest in the organization and the logjam of contenders is outrageous. There are anywhere from three to ten guys who could realistically claim to be a fight away from fighting Edgar, and the whole world is waiting on a guy who already didn’t beat him to get another shot? Immediately after not beating him a few months ago?

Oh yeah, that makes perfect sense.

Decision losses are a whole other ballgame. Look at Edgar again, who outboxed a sleepy BJ Penn in Abu Dhabi last year, making him look lethargic and lazy for five rounds.

His reward? A UFC title.

His first defense? An immediate rematch with Penn, whom he doubly thrashed in Boston, sending BJ back to 170. Great matchmaking.

Guys who just plain lose and get an immediate rematch are good ones too. Chael Sonnen batters Anderson Silva for four-and-a-half rounds, gets caught in a triangle, and gives up. The judges didn’t cheat him, the Fan Man didn’t fly into the cage and cause a no-contest, the octagon didn’t burst into flames right as he was about to finish Silva off. He quit.

What comes next? An immediate rematch. The only thing that stopped it was a failed drug test from Sonnen, otherwise he’d probably already have had his second chance. Hell, he might be champion right now.

The fact is that the immediate rematch is a slippery slope. Sure, sometimes guys deserve them. Mac Danzig probably did when he lost to Matt Wiman via submission even though he didn’t tap and didn’t go out, and the ref stopped it because Wiman said “he’s out!” What’s even better? He didn’t get one.

For the most part though, if you come out and say “[Guy X] did enough tonight to warrant another shot right away,” you’re setting a dangerous precedent. Because the next guy who does what Guy X did can lay claim to an immediate rematch too, even though the circumstances may be different.

Jon Fitch’s draw with Penn wasn’t the same as Maynard’s with Edgar, and yet an immediate rematch was setup because they needed to determine a winner. This in spite of the fact that anyone in world who saw the first fight and how it went once Fitch got on track can tell you how the rematch will go.

Furthermore, that’s a fight that some are suggesting could be a number one contender’s bout. So you’ve got Penn, one of your biggest draws, fighting a rematch for a chance to fight another rematch. With a guy who already beat him. Twice.

Consider the number of people you’d rather see Penn in there with, the number of fresh opponents out there for him, and then consider that potentially his next two fights could be rematches. His last two fights before Fitch were rematches. Is that really what you want to entangle a future Hall of Famer in, fighting the same few guys repeatedly just because the fights “make sense"?

This all comes back to the demise of the UFC 130 main event though, which illustrates what happens when you grant an immediate rematch and involve a title. Injuries to Edgar and Maynard if they weren’t fighting one another wouldn’t be the end of the world, injuries when they’re fighting each other—needlessly, and for a third time—set the whole division back.

And what happens if Edgar wins when they do meet again? They’ll both have a win each and a draw, so can Maynard lay claim to another immediate rematch to truly see who the better man is? You may think that’s facetious, but based on the way rematches are handled, he wouldn’t be out to lunch for claiming so.

It’s time for the immediate rematch to go the way of the dodo bird. If you can’t beat a guy the first (or second) time, you should have no claim in trying immediately to beat him again. Hopefully after what one could only assume will be a dreadful buyrate for UFC 130, and a lightweight division that’s clogged up worse than ever as a result of another immediate rematch now gone awry, Dana White and Joe Silva will see that as well.