The best and worst from UFC Fight Night 133

#3 Worst: The shoddy pacing

Despite most of last night's fights being entertaining, the glacial pacing of the show made it hard to watch

Of the 13 fights on last night’s show, only 8 of them went the distance with 4 being finished before the end of the second round. Add up the cumulative time of all of the fights and you come out with a figure somewhere around 165 minutes. So why exactly did the whole show – from the opening Fight Pass bout between Jessica Aguilar and Jodie Esquibel to the end of the JDS/Ivanov fight – last for around 6 and a half hours?

The answer is the absolutely glacial pacing that the UFC’s shows on Fox Sports 1 tend to run at. The main card, for instance, was already over an hour old by the time a triumphant Chad Mendes left the cage – after just the second of the six scheduled fights. I know commercials are where the TV stations make a lot of their money, but the amount of dead time between fights last night made what was a solid card a real slog to get through.

With the UFC’s new deal with ESPN beginning in 2019 – and pacing apparently one of the things that the broadcasting giant want to address – hopefully, it won’t be a problem for too much longer. But with another 9 Fight Nights scheduled for 2018, it’s something we’ll still have to sit through for the remainder of 2018, and it’s head-scratching.