The Weekend Bulletin

A quick snapshot at the weekend that was.

Biggest Upset: Ronny Rios +500 over Diego De La Hoya

Notable New Champions:

• WBA “Regular” World Middleweight Champion: Ryoto Murata
• Legacy Fighting Alliance Welterweight Champion: Jason Jackson
• WBC Silver Middleweight Champion: Liam Williams
• BBBofC British Heavyweight Champion: Daniel Dubois
• IBF International Junior Bantamweight Champion: Sunny Edwards
• NABF Junior Featherweight Champion: Ronny Rios
• WBA Continental Featherweight Champion: Joet Gonzalez

A Few Storylines Going Forward:

1. When a Title Fight Does the Work For You: At just 22 seconds, Arlene Blencowe knocked out Amanda Bell, earning her second stoppage win since losing to Julia Budd via a split-decision. The women’s featherweight division in general, but especially in Bellator, needs competitors, and Blencowe, who’s lost to Budd via majority-decision and split-decision, seems like a great story for a trilogy, again, in a division starved for stories, fighters, and action.
2. The California Man: I didn’t give Urijah Faber a hope in icy hell of winning even a round against a buzzsaw like Ricky Simon, but lo and behold, 40-year-old Faber ran through Simon like a hot knife through butter. He may very well be invigorated, and I wouldn’t want to throw him into a title fight, but he’s a HOFer and if he can keep it up, he’ll make a great fun attraction on the senior circuit or to be the super, super gatekeeper.
3. Herb Dean, Reputation over Results: Do you remember ten years ago, when the mainstream “consensus” was that Big John McCarthy was regarded as the best MMA ref in the world, even though he was clearly past his prime and downright dangerous to the sport, while the real best ref in the world was Herb Dean? Well, well, well. Here we are in 2019, and the narrative is that Herb Dean is the best MMA ref in the world. He’s not. Not even close. In fact, he’s one of the worst. Usually, he lets a fighter get nearly beheaded before he stops the fight, but in the case of Germaine De Randamie and Aspen Ladd, he stopped it after one knockdown when Ladd was scrambling to play defense. It was absurd, and just one more piece of evidence to show that the real best ref in MMA is, unquestionably, Marc Goddard. I can’t wait for 2029 when Goddard is proclaimed the best ref in MMA while he lets a fighter’s brain leak out their ears or determines that a fighter has had enough in the first clinch of the fight.