The Bottom Line: Enough With These Challenges

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If you’ve watched a UFC telecast recently -- and there have certainly been a few opportunities of late -- you’ve surely noticed the UFC’s current favorite thing in the world. Whether a fighter is on the cusp of a title shot or just improved to 2-4 in the UFC with a win on Fight Pass, that fighter following a win is almost assuredly going to be asked to challenge some other fighter to an upcoming bout. UFC loves these fighter callouts about as much as “Face the Pain” by Stemm, raising the question why exactly this has become so ubiquitous given how it accomplishes nothing of positive value.

Most fighters don’t want to pick future opponents. As a result, when most fighters are asked to pick a future opponent, they decline. Listening to fighters say over and over again they’ll fight whoever UFC wants them to fight doesn’t make for good television. You’d have better odds of producing memorable television asking them all if they have any secret talents.

Some media members and fight analysts, Chael Sonnen among the most prominent, have responded to this by ridiculing the fighters. Don’t they get that this is their opportunity to take their futures into their own hands? The irony of implying these fighters are stupid for not wanting to call out future foes is that the endeavor of educating them to do so is about as dumb as it gets.

One of the best things about UFC today is that the promotion has created a culture whether fighters are happy to take on the best possible opponents simply to prove that they are the best. This is one of the best things about the UFC and it is far from a guarantee in the combat sports. Boxing today is full of fighters who carefully select future opponents and try to build up those specific fights, rather than just preparing to take on the stiffest challenges possible. The result is a sport where the fights fans want to see rarely seem to get made; the UFC has a roster full of fighters happy to take on anyone, and they’re conditioning them to handpick opponents.

Adding to the silliness is that UFC has under contract some awfully good matchmakers. Joe Silva and Sean Shelby are very good at their jobs, they know how to match up fighters appropriately and have been doing it well for many years. It’s not like they avoid making the most marketable fights and need the athletes to point them in the right direction. The sport is better off with them booking the fights rather than the fighters themselves.

Even if Silva and Shelby weren’t very good at their jobs, fighters have proven to be very bad at booking fights. Half the fights that get thrown out are completely random and accomplish no positive goal. Sorry Louis Smolka, but the UFC is not creating an interim flyweight title for you and Wilson Reis to compete for. Spending air time on proposed fights that are not going to happen is counterproductive.

If half the fights that get thrown out in these challenges are completely random, the other half aren’t random at all but are calculated challenges directed at the same few fighters. Fighters know the risk and reward ratios that come with certain opponents, so if you encourage fighters to pick their next opponents, the smart ones will go after the ones they gain the most from beating but who aren’t as hard to beat. Fighters come to the same conclusions as to who these opponents are and the end result is a parade of challenges directed at the same few. It’s a big neon billboard advertising to fans who the fighters think aren’t that good among the biggest stars in the game.

It does the UFC no good to have every fighter from 145 to 170 pounds challenging Conor McGregor. It distracts from the fights he is actually going to take. It distracts from the fights those fighters are actually going to take. Most problematically, it makes it clear that a lot of fighters don’t think McGregor is as good as advertised. That’s a bad psychology for a money drawing superstar and it’s precisely why McGregor tries to sell the exact opposite, talking about all the fighters who pull out of fights with him. The promotion itself, meanwhile, is encouraging fighters to all throw their hats in the cage rather than just the select few most likely to end up in the fights they’ll end up promoting.

This isn’t to say that one fighter calling out another can’t make for a memorable moment that helps to create a big fight. There are a couple of examples that stand out and not coincidentally both from came before the era where there were five on every card. When Georges St. Pierre got on his knees to call for a title shot with Matt Hughes, it was a key moment in St. Pierre becoming one of the biggest stars in the sport. Likewise, Chael Sonnen calling out Anderson Silva built up arguably the most famous rivalry in the sport’s history.

If a fighter has a specific reason to want a specific fight, by all means, advertise the hell out of that. Almost always that means one of two things: a fighter wants a title shot or a fighter has a personal issue with an opponent. UFC knows when those circumstances exist. Ask the fighter with a grudge about his major rival and ask the fighter on the verge of a title shot about the champion. Don’t water those down by asking the second fighter on the card to challenge the guy who won the third fight on the last card as part of some sort of strange fight challenge fetish.