The redemption crowd has this one right. UFC 332 looked like a throwaway on paper and turned into one of the most finish-heavy nights the promotion has put on: eleven knockouts, nine of them inside the opening round. The undercard rescued the show and made the people who booked it look silly.
Start with the numbers. By the time Natália Silva dropped Wang Cong with a second-round head kick, that knockdown was the sixteenth of the entire card, a modern-era record for a single event. The nine first-round knockouts set a promotional mark too. Fighters kept hitting the canvas so fast the cageside crew could barely reset between fights.
And then the main event landed on top of all that like a wet towel. Silva beat Wang by unanimous decision to claim the vacant women's flyweight title, a belt Valentina Shevchenko gave up in September with an undisclosed injury. Silva survived a late scare and finished the job over five rounds against a live opponent, and she deserves credit for it. Crowning a champion is a real story. But a title fight that even friendly outlets described as lackluster, sitting at the top of a card that produced this much carnage underneath it, is a placeholder with a belt stapled to it.
The folks calling the whole night a stinker have it backwards. The thin post-fight chatter and the shrugging reactions online say more about who was booked on top than about whether the fights were good. People cared plenty while Payton Talbott steamrolled Deiveson Figueiredo in just over two minutes, while Roman Kopylov wrecked hyped prospect Ateba Gautier, while Imanol Rodriguez folded Alden Coria with a body kick to stay unbeaten and bank a hundred grand of the four hundred thousand in bonuses handed out. The apathy targeted the marquee, which undercuts a company that sells the marquee as the reason to pay.
The blame belongs to whoever decided a vacant 125-pound title between two fighters casual buyers can't name was the right thing to headline a pay event, while a murderers' row of finishers waited on the prelims. Silva and Wang didn't do anything wrong. You build a card around the guys who make highlight reels, and UFC had a stack of them, then buried most of them before the main broadcast ever got going.
The loudest drama of the night happened below the main event, too. Esteban Ribovics missed weight for the first time in his UFC run, nearly came to blows with Bobby Green at a hotel beforehand, then dropped Green three times and finished him in the first round to snap a four-fight win streak. The stoppage turned into the usual Herb Dean argument, with Green insisting he was fine and Dana White offering the least convincing defense imaginable: "Herb's having a rough f*cking year... Bobby was laying there going, you know, but he got dropped like three times in a row. So, I've seen worse stoppages." That's a promoter admitting his best material happened before the main event even started.
UFC got bailed out by its kids. The next time the matchmakers want a night like this, they should try booking it on purpose instead of hoping the prelims cover for them again.
