The best and worst from UFC Fight Night 154: Moicano vs. Korean Zombie

#1 Worst: The watering-down of the UFC’s fighters

Fights like Randy Brown vs. Bryan Barbarena are perfectly acceptable, but all merge into one in 2019

Despite some very exciting fights on some really fun shows this year, recently it’s felt like the UFC’s ESPN+ Fight Night cards have become weaker and weaker to the point where they almost merge into one big, forgettable mixture of fights; some good, some bad, but none really worth talking about the next day.

This is obviously an issue for the UFC, but is it one that they can fix? In all honesty it’s hard to say. Most of the televised fights on a UFC card these days are at least perfectly acceptable, but the issue has become more that the fighters have become so homogenised that nobody stands out.

It was notable last night for instance that the only fighters to really receive a big reaction from the crowd pre-fight were the two in the main event and Andrea Lee – who has a clearly recognisable personality thanks to her Donald Cerrone-esque style – while the rest of the athletes on show only gained reactions once they’d shown their in-cage skills.

Sure, the UFC are partly to blame for this thanks to the number of fighters they now showcase and other issues like the Reebok deal, but the fighters themselves could also do much more – way too many of them last night simply called out “whoever the UFC decides” post-fight, which isn’t a good way to push their personalities at all.

The UFC might’ve come up trumps with the current ESPN+ pay-per-view deal, which essentially means every PPV is worth 500,000 buys, but if they want to succeed further down the line they have to find a way to stop the homogenisation of their fighters and create stars again.