The Ariel Helwani Show - GFL skepticism, disgruntled Bellator fighters, Colby vs. Buckley stakes | The Craic

Episode Date: December 13, 2024

Petesy Carroll is joined by Uncrowned colleagues Chuck Mindenhall and Ben Fowlkes to forecast potential issues GFL may face ahead of its proposed April launch date (00:30). Fowlkes shares details on his recent report regarding a growing number of disgruntled Bellator fighters (34:28) and Mindenhall provides key takeaways from his recent interview with Colby Covington (49:03).

Hello everybody, welcome back to The Crack. It is Friday evening. You know what that means. It's Pizzi Carol and his wonderful bunch of uncrowned colleagues and we're about to get you in the mood for tomorrow's fights of course joaquin buckley v colby covington but we also want to sink our teeth into the gfl and all the promises they've made and all the wonderful things they've promised to bring to the mma world like 50 revenue shares insurance for fighters retirement packages things that we are very excited about if they can happen but there is a fair amount of skepticism

I'd say amongst the MMA media and the MMA fan base on whether Darren Owen who first revealed the plan about GFL three years ago and now attempting to deliver the first event in April 2025 about whether this can go off

without a hitch of course we're going to get into bookley and covington at the back of the show and i'm very lucky to say i've been joined by two legends who actually spoke to two parts of the main event this weekend it is as usual the mayor of the nut men's the mayor of the nutmeg state chuck mendon all excuse me chuck sorry about that and another legend mr ben folks of uncrowned and the co-main event podcast, and obviously Montana rec hockey legend too. So let me bring the lads in.

Lads, how are you? We're getting ready for the silly season here. Chuck, your hat looks fantastic. This new office is beautiful, by the way. Absolutely fabulous. Hey, what do they call the Montana State? Like, what is the nickname for that? Treasure State, my man.

The Treasure State. Treasure State, my man. What is it? The Treasure State. Treasure State. Okay. Well, you're a true national treasure, so that makes sense to me. Good, good. This is the first I'm hearing about the nutmeg, personally. Yeah.

You didn't ever check out the other show, then. I don't know. Was it Ariel who gave me that? I think it was Ariel who, like, dubbed it the Nutmeg State. I'm not even sure that's actually Connecticut's nickname, but that's what he calls it. I just took his word for that. And I can't be a mayor of a state. I don't know. This whole thing is a little.

Well, I can't believe you've got so semantical about this. I was just happy to let that go forever. Hey, it's in my Twitter bio or whatever. So it must stay. It sticks, you know? Yeah. Come on. It's a good one.

We like working with that one. Ben, back again. And this time to explore some other themes. We said we'd have you back. We're delighted to have you back. And I think your contributions are going to be very important today because you have experience with a startup promotion like nobody else really in the MMA media, I'd say, on account of your experience with the IFL back in the day. We all consumed Darren Owen and his interview with Ariel on Wednesday about the GFL, the big roster reveal, a lot of legends of the fight game, some a bit long in the tooth here on the roster, as we have seen already. I want to get into all of this stuff with both of you but i got to go to you first ben tell me what was going through your head as darren owen read out this list of things that the gfl are trying to achieve some very very commendable things i will say but having been there on the ground floor of the ifl and for those of you who don't know ifl um a cult-like mma promotion from the past that had the team format, that had a lot of legend involved, that had a fantastic rap song, as Ben alluded to in a recent article.

But Ben, tell me how you were feeling when you heard all of this on Wednesday. You know, I don't hear often from some of my former IFL coworkers, but when I i do it's for stuff like this like as soon as the ghl stuff was being announced i got a message uh from one of my old bosses at the ifl where he was just like haven't we seen this before this this some of this stuff feels oddly familiar and it is it's kind of like it almost feels like we were cellmates together back in those times. And we've all kind of chosen to forget it a lot of times. But then every once in a while, something will bring it back up and we'll be like, yeah, no, we remember eating grilled cheese off the radiator. These people acting like they invented it.

And it's happened a few different times because people, obviously the IFL has been largely forgotten, except for me keeping that fire burn and reminding people every once in a while about it. But people forget they'll come along and say like, this fight promotion is offering fighters health insurance. First time to ever do it. And it's like, nope, the IFL did it. And they'd be like, this fight, this organization is offering fighters like training stipends and stuff so that they're getting paid outside of just fights.

And it's like, the IFL did that too. It just didn't work great. And maybe because so few people remember those lessons of the IFL, so many people seem eager to repeat the mistakes of the IFL. So, you know, that's my initial thought when I heard some of this was just like, I feel like I have lived this before. And somebody is coming along with it being like hey we have this crazy great new idea and it's like it's not that new honestly um we'll see if they can avoid repeating those same mistakes though i think what you're saying ben is that

you've been in this game too long that's what you're saying like if you've seen the cycles now like you're seeing the whole thing come around again. That's the craziest thing is I was more, when I got into MMA, like more full time was at 2007, 2008. So this would have been right in the, right in the time period of that. And I wasn't all together in the IFL until it was like kind of in its death throes of 2008. And you kind of knew it was going to be over. But I do remember the revenue sharing talks, all that stuff. I can remember all of that stuff kind of being in play and that kind of being the main competitive, I don't know what you'd say, like kind of like one of the main competitive points against the UFC and things like that. So this is one of those situations where you look at it

and you think, well, it's almost like they're taking a page from PFL who's, you wrote a piece today that ran today that basically, you know, there's a lot of doubt hovering over that organization as well. And the IFL. And they said, what if we take those two elements, kind of stick them together? Maybe we've got something. And let's brush off every 40-year-old fighter that has ever gone through the UFC and see if that works. That's a, it's a crazy formula. I'm not sure that it's like,

you can understand why there'd be some skepticism with this. Yeah. And, you know, I get it in a way that if you're trying to come up with an MMA promotion, you're trying to, if not compete directly with the UFC, at least appeal to the same fan base. But we've seen, you can't just do the same thing that the UFC is doing, but less so. That doesn't work. We've seen you can't just do the same thing that the ufc is doing but less so

that doesn't work we've seen people try to do that and it just doesn't work and so you see all these people trying to do something like that but different and find like their own unique selling proposition for how we are mma but not exactly like the ufc and people have tried a bunch of different ways you remember when bellator first started and it was all tournament based right yeah yeah and people they are trying to get creative about how to go about it and yet it also seems like you're you're trying to inject into mma a structure that doesn't work for a reason. You know, the team-based structure, the IFL's thinking, which in theory was not so bad,

which is just like, hey, people are used to team sports. They understand it. You can get people invested in fighters that they don't know or have any reason to care about if you say like, hey, you guys are from New York. This is the New York team. Don't you want to support the New York team as New Yorkersorkers but it turned out no not really like people did not and some of them weren't even from new york right like oh yeah no so that was another problem that that varied a lot from team to team because it was like henzo gracie had a new york team and they all

really trained at henzo's gym in manhattan henzo wasn't always there but they all trained there at the gym but then other teams it's like we had like a tokyo team and they're all from la except for one guy you know and they they barely even knew their coach didn't particularly like him uh you know carlos newton had a team that he did not seem particularly all that personally invested in pat militich was really training his guys city baby yeah but silverbacks it just silverback guy the they're trying to make a different sort of sports model work for fight sports which has always been just so individual star driven and i get that they're thinking like hey if you can't have the stars that people actually care about today i mean you can get some of yesterday's stars uh which i assume we'll get into but they they're thinking

like all right how do we manufacture a sort of interest in this and they think the team thing is the way to do it because it works for other sports but the problem is it's like yeah people follow the cleveland browns every season because they've been doing it their entire lives because the dad did it because they feel this deep-rooted connection to him and you're trying to just create that connection which is tough to do and especially in a sport that just doesn't really lend itself to more than individual pursuits it feels like pizzi like every every like five years to i don't know how long but some guys get together and they're watching like March Madness and they see the brackets and everything's ratcheting up through each round. They're like, oh man, Sweet 16, look at how, you know, this is crazy.

And they're like, you know, we got to do this in MMA, right? We got to put together a bracket and have these guys, you know, everything gets more exciting and more scrutinized and more the magnitude grows with every single win and it just hasn't really been the case in fact most people in tournament kind of formats i feel like everybody either loses interest or forgets it's even a tournament when the guys actually start to fight as they kind of advance and sometimes you arrive in the finals and you're like oh wait this was a tournament like that there's there's all kinds of that stuff i know that uh owen was mentioning you know basically getting rooting interest like the team rooting interest and you just mentioned it ben i'm like that's a very tough thing to do because first of all i don't know where these six cities i think it's six right that they're trying to put together

i'm not sure where those will be but you're're right. Like when you're watching football, man, you're watching your grandpa's team. You know, you're watching these teams and there's this inherited sort of passion that comes with it, misery or whatever it is. Like you inherit all of that and you take the baton and you take it. And that's why it's so, so big for you. If they actually win a championship, say if they never have, because you're like, well, we did it, you know, we did it. That's like one of those types of things.

I'm not sure you can even get anywhere near that with an MMA event. And it's a strange thing. And I think the last thing, man, I don't mean to like hog the mic, but it is a one-on-one sport. And if you talk to these guys, there's been PC, both you guys probably know, if you ask them, what do you love about it? Have you ever played ball sports?

And they're always like, no, man, I couldn't do do it i couldn't play the other sports because it had to be i had to be in control of what i was doing i had to be in control of it they didn't want to contribute to something else there was like a lone wolf mentality they had to they wanted to control and dictate everything that happened i've never been asking him very specifically was like you know he experimented with sports when he was a kid and some kid would ruin it for him he could not get over he still remembers him he can still recall the kids who blew games that he thought they should have won and he was like i'm never doing this again if it's can't if i'm not the one who's responsible for it i don't want to be a part of it and it's that mentality that collides with the team mentality and fighting absolutely and it's funny you mentioned

like marriage madness and stuff because when owen was speaking about it to ariel he asked him like how will this differ we just heard ben talking about his time with the ifl he's like well how does this differ obviously we had the team element with ifl we have the tournament element with pfl now and he said well you know gambling gambling is huge now and um you know we mentioned the thing as you said like supporting your team and i'm kind of like i don't i don't think that makes a difference in terms of gambling at all like my friends who are gambling on mma it won't make them want to gamble more if there's a team attached

to it and just at a tournament point we just had the 2024 finale of pfl and on the ariel awani show on the monday after that we all spoke about it uh new york rick gc mysterious frank even we're all speaking about like is this the best way to do this like you come away from that event with a great story and dakota dicheva over here you know it's another proof that this is another road, another thing that people can pursue. The only problem with that is you asked Dakota Ditchiver what her next step is. And she's like, I don't know. You know, beyond this, like, I don't really know where I'm going. She's like, I'm with the PFL right now, but I don't know. Yeah.

Yeah. It feels like that. So you're kind of like, am I crazy to think, Ben, that there is nothing new here, essentially. And I even see fans saying, like like you guys should be more optimistic you should be getting behind this because of the the 50 percent revenue share and advertising the the retirement scheme the insurance game but as you said like this is things that we have seen before and it's it's only good when it's put into action and we haven't even had an event yet so what what is there to celebrate essentially well yeah i understand and i'm willing to be convinced on this i'll i'll you know you get my attention when you come out with something like this and especially if these plans

are really as well-intentioned as they seem but the the thing is i wrote that uh column a while back about some of the things i learned from working for the IFL. And one of the things is that we've seen a lot of promoters come along and say, hey, one of the things that makes us different is that we are going to take care of the fighters. We're a fighter first organization. How many people have we heard that from over the years? We are the ones who actually care about these fighters. And we'll show it in this way by giving them insurance. We'll show it by giving them a revenue split, something like that.

And honestly, when you do that, you set the bar kind of high for yourself and you will inevitably fall short of that because fight sports by its nature is just sort of an exploitative business. And that's sort of how it's always been. And when you do fall short of it you will be judged a lot more harshly than somebody like the ufc who has just sort of conditioned us to a certain level of of falling short of the expectation that they do not have for themselves in terms of how to take care of the fighters and you see it now with what's going on with the pfl bellator stuff because the pfl has at times tried to put itself forward is that you know bellator tried to put itself forward is that, you know, Bellator tried to put itself forward is that initially when it was all tournaments, part of the, the sales pitch to us was, Hey, this is not one of those organizations where matchmakers

decide who gets to fight for the title. And some guys get put forward and better opportunities because we like them and other guys don't where the tournament decides everything. And, you know, it doesn't take long before you find yourself in one situation or another opportunities because we like them and other guys don't we're the tournament decides everything and you know it doesn't take long before you find yourself in one situation or another where you got to bend your own rules a little bit and i i'll be interested to see how that goes the problem with the whole revenue sharing thing is what's 50 of nothing like if you're not making revenue and how many fight promotions even fight promotions that are doing well like you know when i wrote about the bkfc not too long ago who's doing pretty

well uh i asked them you know are you guys profitable and they said with they said with an air of pride and optimism we expect to be profitable in the next six months and that was i mean if true that's still big and yet that's taken them how long to get to a point where they are hoping to be profitable soon. And so if you're telling me like, we're going to come out the gates and give you a revenue share, then it's kind of like of, of what though,

because it's tough to get to that point where you're in the black as a fight promotion, especially if you're signing all these guys and some recognizable names. And without a broadcast partner yet, you know, there's really no way to telegraph exactly how that's going to look. Where would you put the handicap on this? Number of events plus one and a half. Like, would you go over that?

Like, how many events actually happen plus one and a half? Where are you laying on this? That's a low line. I feel that's an incredibly low line though. Should I say two and a half? I don't know. Maybe the line moves sharp money comes on. I, I am, I think it will happen.

Like you can't possibly do, right. I think they'll call me foolish. I think this will get off the ground, but I just don't know how long it will stay in the air for. That's my fear. I don't know, Ben. Maybe I'm a foolish romantic when it comes to this silly sport we love so much. It depends how much money you have to play with at the beginning. Because if you have, you know, that was one of the things the IFL had going for was I had a lot of money to start with.

And it blew through a lot of money really quickly but if you have that to give you a little bit of a runway then even if it's not going great you can keep it on for a while the the thing is though you're like you you're starting really big with a whole big list of fighters and some of those guys i mean it is one of the things that got the most attention i saw from the initial announcement was people looking at the list and being like whoa we we actually know these people some of them you you know them enough to be like should you be fighting professionally still uh but you know those names at least a third of them been at least a third of them yeah well yeah like you saw you

know fabrizio verdum's name on that right and but you also saw fabrizio verdum's name uh filing those statements to the court uh during the usc antitrust case where one of the things he was saying was uh i feel like i'm dealing with the effects of brain trauma i I've got an inoperable cyst in my brain. I think I'm dealing with maybe some symptoms that could be CTE related. And then you pop up six months later in this new fight organization, people are quite reasonably going to be like, but is that a good idea though? Is that irresponsible to like, were you overselling it then in those statements to the court or are we doing something that seems like it ought to be obviously a bad idea to everybody and also the problem with coming out with this big list of names is a lot of those guys we know them because of what they did 10 15

years ago and how how long it let's say, you even do get a little excitement going because people are like, Vanderlei Silva's fighting again. Okay. What kind of fight can you expect out of him at this point? And how long can you expect him to do it? I mean, we saw Chuck Liddell versus Tito Ortiz. Which we had years ago. Yeah. Yeah, I know.

That's what I was horrific. Yeah. It was Vanderlei. Vanderlei was the name that stuck out to me the most, Ben. And I couldn't actually, I couldn't get past that in the announcement. You know, I couldn't even get to like, oh, revenue share, everything like that. Because I feel like that is such a silly move to have. And you've mentioned Fabrizio as well.

These guys who have said, like, their statements have been read out in court that say, you know, I think I have traumatic brain injury. I think I have issues that are consistent with CTE. I have mood swings. I am always depressed. I am very irritable. Now, I had someone reach out to me today

and not from this organization, but simply, you know, saying like maybe they're going to be in coaching roles, but you can't announce this and have a roster reveal and have these guys on there and expect us to be able to tell

whether who's a manager and who's a fighter. Like, I feel like if you're talking about fighter welfare, if you're talking about all these great things you can do, one of the main things you got to do is you got to be aware of who you are putting into a fight like this is an extremely dangerous sport van de ley his best years are well behind him he's 49 years of age he's a legend like one of like as i said the chuck in our roundtable piece this week

he's like my gateway drug to mma like when my brother was showing me videos of him and you know i'm only used to conventional boxing and my brother i was like 13 14 going like oh my god like what is this i've never seen like this guy seems like he's been cast from hell onto earth to just you know berserk his way through all of these uh pride fighters like i loved him i would i would watch these 15 minute highlights of him and it was like pure adrenaline being injected into me i can remember when he signed for the ufc how excited i was um and then to just think that literally like i think it was like last month that these statements came out and then you're now on a roster i think that is so such a bad look like i really can't get over it shook i i i don't i don't know anyone can to be honest well i mean if anybody needs insurance at this point it's going to be these older guys that

they're bringing in i mean it almost feels like back in the day dana always used to uh talk about how the ufc ran towards regulation this seems like it's running the other way you know from regulation because honestly that's a that's a real concern i don't know where they're going to host these events you know or how they'll look all that sort of thing but sanctioning some of these guys would feel like you know that feels like a stretch to me especially when you talk about the vanderleys right i mean there's guys like deep down the list like hen and morale wasn't one to fight in eight years you know i mean these guys are just they're they're not they've not been competitive they've not a lot of these guys have not been in fights um you know the danger

that exists in weight cutting anyway when you're at the with the peak but imagine certain guys trying to do this in their mid-40s and guys who are chinny or guys who have you know whatever issues that they're dealing with from long careers it's gonna be i don't really know how that'll look you know you can you can certainly anticipate a guy like Wanderlei Silva. That's pretty easy. And if you're a fan like you are, like you're talking about you're a fan of Wanderlei's, that's probably not something you want to see. I was pointing this out in the piece that we were kind of roundtabling this.

And I was like, imagine if the NBA, you know, said, hey, we're putting together a league that's going to kind of compete with the NBA. And we've got names like you know Earl Boykins and we've got uh you know you know what I mean guys from the past like Vince Carter's in it and all these guys you'd be like what why you know why would you do this and that's that's not nearly as crazy they'd just be slower and older and a lesser version of the selves that we remember in fighting it carries a lot more import you know when you get into a cage and you get and you go swing at each other's heads it's just uh it's tough when you

look at that roster and you and i'm sure you guys have done the same thing because we've seen so many leagues come and go that you're always like what would be the formula for a new promotion to come in and what would that entail and it's very difficult to figure out because if you try to build prospects nobody pays attention to them until they show you know something charismatic almost that transcends the fight game um which is rare and if you take all these older guys these relics from past generations and stuff this is the look you get so it's like it's a very tough thing to do and so therefore the optimism that people want from us is very difficult to find you know what i mean it's very difficult to it's just we've been in the you've been in the game too long you kind of see how it works so i just uh it's i i kind of have to brace if we do see events and it was kind of being half serious about how

many events do we actually get but i think that you have to kind of brace for something to be very ugly there well to your question about what can you create that will actually work i honestly think it's not going to be mma but in a slightly different format like this i mean i did like the the clip from the polish organization where if you miss weight you have to fight your opponent and your opponent's dad. You'd really love to fight that. You've been talking about that. I'm 100% into that. Just because there's going to be a range of dads.

I wouldn't want to miss weight against Tom Aspinall, man. Jesus. There's going to be some dads who don't make it, you know uh but i think honestly the answer to how do you create a thing that taps into this fan base but is not just a lesser version of the ufc it's probably something like bkfc that's probably the closest you get where you can get mma guys you can get other guys it's not mma it's not quite boxing it's something where they are doing a different sport basically but it has enough crossover elements uh whether it's the actual competition itself or the names involved that can rope in some of the same crowd like the venn diagram of fans captures at least some part of that uh and that you can do it the way they have done it

which is not hey we're a big huge thing to spend a bunch of money on signings right out the gate i think that that is often a recipe for a quick death but starting small and building up i think you know and you look at competing mma promotions the ones that came the closest to actually working it was like strike force uh you know wec it was stuff like that where they started as a regional promotion kind of mastered one market and then grew gradually from there and like that i think is a thing that you can do at least to a point uh coming out big out the gates makes a big splash and gets you some headlines right away but then it also creates a huge load you have to carry and they're not a whole lot of time to turn that into revenue you know it's a good point is it like another thing i felt i felt was a bit of a red flag was

when ariel seemed to be kind of looking into the finances like where is where is this um money coming from as chuck alluded to earlier no no tv deal and a silent money man behind it all um that again to me like and you've mentioned all these signings that cost money like regardless of where we think these guys are in our career simply to have their names on this release is going to cost a shit ton of money um does that worry you chuck like obviously we know that the majority of promotions outside of the ufc well the ufc too uh greatly funded by espn but outside the ufc you are relying so heavily on the broadcast deal and there's none in place here and there's a money man who doesn't seem to want to come out in public and say that he's the guy. Yeah.

I mean, the business aspect is obviously like, because, and it's funny because Dana will always say, you know, like with PFL, that's just happening. He'll be like, you guys know what's going on. They've ran out of money. And you're always like a little bit like, God, one time I'd like him to be wrong, you know, on these situations. But he has has there's a legitimacy to what he's saying like the way they've done business they've been able to stay in business they've been able to flourish and they've done it incrementally over the course of time whereas other promotions including the pfl i think are very ambitious and how quickly

they want to um escalate into becoming co-leaders you know and so whatever that you know whatever the language is that don davis uses but it's easier said than done and i always i feel like somehow whenever they're crunching the numbers and i honestly this one's mind-boggling because 300 fighters is a lot and especially guys who are in some of them are fairly fresh out of contracts with the ufc some of them are obviously legends of of contracts with the usc some of them are obviously legends of the game and um there's a there's a mix of type that type of people but that is not a cheap roster man um so i don't know honestly unless they've got something up their their sleeves a little bit with the tv gig um that or something like some kind of broadcast partner i'm

not sure i mean i guess that goes into the skepticism right it goes all into the skepticism because we've seen big talkers in this game before how long before these promotions tend to panic on the ground at the ifl is it a constant panic when you're a new promotion banners does it slowly just kind of unravel itself over the first few months like um how quickly are people getting worried behind the scenes in a promotion like this well when i got the job at the ifl i was unemployed so i was ecstatic to have any job and especially a job in mma but i also remember pretty quickly you know coming home from work and telling my girlfriend at the time i don't know if this is going to be the thing

that i do for for the next 20 years you can kind of see a little bit of the writing on the wall there uh but then what did you do there i don't even he doesn't know i i was a fight promoter i was the editorial manager which meant that i wrote all like the website copy i mean that's how it started was i was the editorial manager But it was also one of the things that surprised me working for the IFL when I first got in there was most of the people I worked with were not fight fans at all. Not even a little bit. And it was, you know, at the very top, Kurt Otto, who was one of the co-founders, he was a big fight fan and got into it kind of for those reasons. And a lot of the other people, they had hired, you know, sports executives from other organizations. We had a guy there who had been, who had worked with the tennis tour for a long time. We had a really good guy, Joe Favorito, who had been with the Knicks for a long time. And they knew the sports business and their areas of the sports business really well, but they weren't fight fans. And so there were a lot of sort of internal conversations where we're watching clips and everything.

And they're like, geez, can we kind of find some way to play down the violence of this stuff? And I was going, no, like, this is what people want. I understand that it's sort of jarring to you because you're not a fan of this, but, and this is also why it remains and will always remain to some extent, a niche sport, because not everybody is going to be in to that. And I understand understand that but there were not a whole lot of other people who even knew the appeal of the sport to fans and so i ended up doing a lot of other jobs you know we had a tv show that kind of had a disastrous start and then the next thing you know they were like okay look

you're going to stay in la for the next few weeks and help these tv people uh stuff like that would kind of keep coming up but yeah it was at times i was surprised how much people were not panicking just because they had a lot of money under them at first to start with and that can get you to a certain point but it also you know you're gonna run into some inevitable problems where you're gonna have fighters get mad at you you're gonna have when you do start to build stars, if you can pass the already difficult test of building your own stars, right? People don't know this guy through his work in your organization. They do know him. We had guys like that with Ben Rothwell and it didn't take long before, you know, affliction was starting up a new organization and they came hunting for talent.

And Ben Rothwell is one of the guys on their list and they're gonna they spent a lot of money up front too you know they they had three events planned pulled off two of them two and a half on that handicap and they didn't get over they didn't get the over you know and but that was a similar thing where they went out and they bought guys more in their primes you know uh at least closer to their primes but they spent a lot of money to do it and you know you had mega death plan oh my god i was at that event yeah me too yeah uh and you're you're blowing through a lot of money right up front it made for a couple memorable shows but it also flamed out pretty quickly before we move on just one question to both of you april 2025 is the second launch date we've been given for gfl

it was originally i think february 2023 that they thought it was going to get off didn't quite get off um yes or no answers lads chuck menthol does the gfl's first event happen april 2025 i'll say no ben what do you say well because chuck said no i'll say yes now Ben, what do you say? Well, because Chuck said no, I'll say yes. Oh, contrarian. This is ridiculous. Before we started taping, he's like, this will not happen. Nothing's happening with this. It's like Skip Bayless and Stephen A here.

Before you move on, there's a fantasy element. I pointed this out in the piece. Oh, you did. You did. I pointed this out in the piece. I was like, if you like if you created a fantasy element right like and you made this a thing would this matter you know like in pro football they've never been able to satisfactorily like come up with an mma fantasy

league you know what i mean but could they could that work for something like this where that becomes part of the industry you know that's a good question but i also think you're you're kind of working against one of the other arguments uh if you're the ghl saying like hey we'd go for a fantasy thing because hasn't gambling made it so that fantasy league feels a little bit lower stakes and because if that's what you want like if you want like hey my ability to sort of like invest in certain guys and predict the future, gambling will give that to you. Like that is part of the appeal. And I do believe in gambling's power to make things we wouldn't otherwise care about seem immediately interesting.

There's no horse racing, for instance, without gambling. You know, true. there's no horse racing for instance without gambling you know true the and i also believe to some extent in the power of a bracket to at least make us care a little bit more about something you know yeah college football this year is a good example where when it was just a bunch of disconnected bowl games i'm going to care about you know my team but other ones not so much this year you put them all on a bracket together where winners are moving on all right i'm a little bit you can you can get somewhere with that but again you still have to get us to have some level of like you said a awareness that it's happening that the fantasy thing doesn't work if we don't know when the fights are and we we or we don't know who the fighters are we're not

invested in them um but b you know you also you gotta have at least a little bit of time to build that interest i don't know if you're gonna storm out the gates and get people all the way bought in on this people will tune in because they'll be like is this going to be a train wreck let me see what this looks like you can get one one event under your belt that way but how do you build something sustainable on that? That part, I don't know. Building something sustainable is what Pachi Mix, Patricio Pitbull, do you like this?

And Corey Anderson. Ben, you wrote this piece. It's been a conversation that we've all been having about what's happening to uh these great fighters obviously we see patchy mix here the great new york rick has put up on our screen uh here's a tweet from him my manager told me to hold off but haven't heard anything from pfl don davis pfl if you are not gonna have me fight then just please release me from from contract sorry he didn't say my contract this is not what i want but i'm not important to the company being a

multi-time champ then let me go respectfully that was patchy mix we have patricio pitbull here as well the lack of transparency events and answers from pfl about its future and bellator is making boat promotions look bad what did you all think about what's going on what do you all think about what's going on christmas is coming up and i'd love to receive my release by then and we also have cory anderson i believe um maybe maybe not yeah cory anderson here he is aging like warm cheese over here waiting for pfl to give me a call but don't get it twisted we still ready to defend the strap against anybody young or old i actually saw cory anderson defend his title in beautiful belfast against carl moore one of john kavanaugh's uh fighters out of sbg

um not not recently i will say and hence his disappointment ben you you you talked to a few people around this situation and i mean these are the top tier fighters in this organization as well which makes it even stranger and in the piece it referenced these referenced these big contracts that were handed out by Coker and Co. just before PFL bought Bellator. Tell me, what's your read on all of this? And do. They don't have a year to sit around waiting for you to decide what you want to do with them. And you can see them getting frustrated. I thought that was very interesting. The wording too of that patchy mix tweet showed where he said, my manager told me to hold off, but, and basically being like, my manager said, don't send out this tweet, but I'm sending it essentially. Like that's kind of how that one reads. And this has been one of the things that was interesting to me as I started to

look into this story, because, you know, we hear this discontent from fighters. When I reached out to the PFL, a few different people to PFL and reached out in a few different ways. And there was just no response. There wasn't even a,

Hey, when's your deadline? We'll get back to, you know, the kind of responses you sometimes get or like, Hey, we don't want to comment. It wasn't anything to just act like I'm not talking to you.

And that's been their response publicly with this. Because you see Don Davis, he's on Twitter. They'll pay the advertising money to boost Don Davis's tweets, even if they're just sort of regular tweets. And you also see in the replies at this point to every single one of his tweets, there will be people in there being like are you doing with the bellator fighters give them fights or let them go this is terror you know so people the pressure is building on them and it's interesting who you're not hearing from like you're not hearing anything at all from the pfl and you're not hearing much from most of these managers which that was one of the things that you know duke rufus was one of the guys willing to talk about it because he's you know he's worked with sergio pettis uh and i know feels very paternally toward both the the pettis brothers there but the he he mentioned how he thought

the managers were the ones really uh falling asleep at the wheel on this issue because he's why aren't you out there advocating for your guys? You can see they're getting mad. You can see that they are feeling like, you know, they're, they're dying on the vine here waiting for fights and you don't hear from those guys. And I reached out to a bunch of managers and, you know, not many of them really wanted to talk about it. And the thing that I heard from a few people sort of off the record on this stuff was basically them just, you know, different people saying they didn't want their names on it, but they

felt like the PFL went and bought Bellator. You have some of these big Bellator contracts. So you mentioned some of the quotes in the story where they're saying a lot of these contracts got re-upped for big money before the sale, but PFL doesn't want to pay those people that amount of money. And if you don't have something in your contract that says they have to offer you this many fights within this timeframe, you know, something that really lays out what a breach of contract would look like in terms of like when you need to be offered fights, then they can kind of just keep you waiting. They don't have to give you that fight. They can wait you out to a certain extent. And after looking into it, that is kind of my sense of

what's happening here is that the PFL is just sort of waiting these guys out on these contracts. They don't want to pay the money to have these guys fight. They think maybe, Hey, if this guy has to wait a while, I don't, maybe the plan is see if he's willing to talk about a new contract for less money. Once he gets desperate enough, once he's burned through his savings enough, or just wait them out until the period of the contract is over. And then you finally let them move on, which if it's the second one that you're burned through his savings enough or just wait them out until the the period of the contract is over and then you finally let him move on which if it's the second one that you're doing let him go now you know let him go see if he can find uh another employer that will actually give him fights because these guys don't have that kind of time to waste and it's a really bad look for

the pfl because you can't that right now the as my cme co-host Chad Dundas put it, the strategy seems to be hide under a pile of coats and wait for it all to be over. So true, though. Just don't say anything about it. Don't talk about it. But it's not going to go away. You know, these guys are not going to get less mad at you the longer you keep them waiting. And that's the thing that a lot of the people, the fighters are saying is making them the maddest about it is they're not even hearing anything it's not they're not even being told oh you know we'll we'll give you a fight early 2025 or here's what the plan is like nobody's telling

them anything and that complete lack of transparency that uh patricia pitbull mentioned that the lack of any sort of communication or answers for it that's going to make them just increasingly frustrated and it's a it's a really bad look because if you're the pfl you you need there to be some fan support you're not the the gorilla in the room like the ufc where even when we get mad at the ufc we say hey it's still the ufc though we still got to see these fights you don't have that advantage so you need there to be some goodwill and you're kind of squandering it right now how wild is it there were only like thiswill and you're kind of squandering it right now. How wild is it? There were only like this transaction that you're mentioning, uh, PFL purchasing the

Bellator was only 13 months ago. Yeah. 13 months ago. And imagine being, what was it? Yates who said, I resent being tied to a dying animal when he was an old man. That's like, when you, when you look at that, they're already on a bad raft. They were already like with Bellator, we were talking about like, this is about to end. It's just a matter of what's going to happen with these guys so they were already being shuffled

around and then to end up in a situation a full year later where basically they're tweeting out the neglect and their anger and stuff like that this is just though i feel so bad for this group of fighters man that came from bellator um that are right in their primes a lot of them you know are very much in their viable uh time to make as much money as they can and yet they're in this situation i know that when we pizzi when we're doing the ringer mma show we were we mentioned we talked we talked all about this how it will look a year from now what's this going to be how long will bellator actually be a thing it It's pretty wild that I think the worst case scenarios, at least on, at least on surface and

at least the way that people are reacting and what we can kind of gather from this seems to be the case. It's just, it's a, it's a wild thing that's happened to those poor Bellator fighters, man. Look, that's the last thing you want, right? You're right. We talked about this as soon as PFL and Bellator

melded, I was like well you know you can look at this as a positive thing from pfl but you can also look at it as taking one viable option off the table for fighters um in terms of bellator not being there and i can't help but feel very worried um when i read your article ben in terms of the future the promotion especially when you hear about the money that's come in from the likes of saudi and stuff like that uh you know they had the money to throw around for the likes of francis and ghanu what i'd ask you is after these conversations and based on what chuck said there like the feelings we have based on what you've reported here how pessimistic are you with a view to the pfl's future or do you think

this is simply them trimming the fat to some extent like these guys are just simply too expensive um obviously saving the likes of in ghanu and stuff like these particular guys we don't feel it's viable to have them within the promotion and we're going to move on for or do you think it speaks to a larger issue with finances that could hinder them further down the line? You know, it could very well be that they're not, like Dana White phrased it as they're running out of money, making it seem like they're on the verge of collapse. And I don't know if that's necessarily the case. I think that it could be just you bought Bellator, you know, and who knows what your reasoning was for when, why you decided to buy Bellator when you did, but you bought it. You looked at what some of these fighters are going to cost to have you have them fight for Bellator, which haven't we seen this mistake over and over again, where one company buys another says we're going to continue operating it as a separate thing.

The rest of us kind of go, why though? And you do that for a little while and then you fold it. And it's, if you're going to do that, why not just fold it to begin with, you know? And this is one of the points though, that, that Duke Rufus brought up in the story where he was like, Hey, people criticize the UFC for fighter pay a lot, but they've gone through this situation. I think you guys remember when the UFC bought Strikeforce and they looked at some of the size of the contracts that Strikeforce was paying these guys and went, well, I don't know if we would have been paying Derek Brunson that.

You know, I don't know if that's a deal we would have done, but they honored those deals. So you didn't hear many people coming out there and being like, UFC bought my contract when it bought Strikeforce and now they're freezing me out. I mean, even when they didn't like it, like that Mark Hunt situation. Mark Hunt, that's the when it comes to mine yep they don't wait so that we've tried to pay mark hunt to make him go away and he said no give me my fights i mean now he's mad at them for different reasons but you did not hear people say the ufc is not honoring these contracts even if they didn't like now the uc also had uh it was pretty profitable by that point. So it did not have some of the same concerns maybe that PFL does, but it does seem like PFL does not intend to honor these Bellator contracts.

That's the sense I get anyway. I don't know if it means that PFL itself is running out of money or just that they look at it and they think Bellator is not going to continue to be a going concern for us. We don't want to continue operating bellator indefinitely so why do we spend all this money to put on another bellator fight you know and i don't know that's one of the conversations i had during this this week was me saying somebody like hey what's the end game to what end are we doing some of this stuff i know and and he kind of stopped me and said look you're thinking you're trying to reason your way to this by thinking there must be a good line of thinking on it and maybe there's not just just because somebody is doing something doesn't mean like you know what's the the thing in poker that never assume intelligence

like you might just be doing this stuff not because you have a grand plan in place but just like just because it's a bad idea doesn't mean you're not doing it you know i i don't know if it means that pfl itself is in danger but it does seem like pfl does not want to continue doing bellator the way it's been doing it i will say this is the worst way of going about trying to trim that roster is like yeah because it's just so you've got a chorus of voices and it's only going to get louder if honestly if this is what they're kind of doing is uh just saying like well let's just uh hold tight here and let everybody you know it's just a horrible way to go about it um and i gotta say like i think that part of this is don davis is a little refreshing or at least when he came in he was kind of refreshing because

you always get these guys are very optimistic about what they're going to do and they're kind of telling you why and they're kind of skewing numbers and you know whatever it is and but it always seemed a little like if you've been in the game like you were sitting here talking about 2006 and 7 you know if you've been in the game a long time you know what sounds tone deaf you know you know what sounds out of lockstep with what the reality is and i felt like we could circle that immediately when don davis was talking about everything and even before i guess right around the time you know as they purchased uh you know as they went through the purchase of bellatornal it just it seemed like a very ambitious thing and i think

there was a lot of skepticism surrounding that too but this is just if that's really the game plan is just to kind of put on the you know the air and kind of mute outside noise and just wait for it to kind of go away. And that's a horrible way to go about business, man. Yeah. They need to get the shit together with that. You know, honestly, you can't, because not speaking to Ben in this instance has now led to our minds wandering and you know, what is the future?

How bad is this? Should people who are signed to this organization be worried? But you can't help when they aren't giving you anything back when they aren't giving you a roadmap to how this will be resolved or giving you something you you immediately think the worst case scenario but why why wouldn't you speak about this everyone is speaking about this like you've just had your finale and yet this is one of the main talking points about your promotion right now it's it's it's redundant to not speak about it as far as i'm concerned so hopefully they get back to you soon ben but before we move on to our big preview it's not going to be very big based on how long we've talked about

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There's no risk with Nord's 30-day money-back guarantee. So make sure you check out NordVPN. And with that, let's bring our conversation over to the wonderful offering from the ufc the final offering from the ufc for 2024 and what a year it's been guys my god we could wax lyrical about what a wonderful year it's been for everyone not just the ufc but the pfl and of course the gfl as well who we talked about a lot today. Chuck, I wanted to ask you, your conversation with Colby Covington was a unique one. He seems to have become a member of the Trump family. I knew he was close, but I didn't realize he was this close.

And he's going to lots of really cool parties. And, you know, even over the holidays, he can get a meal over in Mar-a-Lago. I mean. You'll see him holding hands around the tree with the Trumps this year. It's an interesting one, right? Because he seems to, I don't know, when I read your piece and correct me if I'm wrong, right. It started off talking about like the, the lack

of the usual Colby-isms, um, you know, that would be all over our timelines usually when he fought, right? Like all this outlandish things he said are no longer outlandish it's pretty commonplace to hear that kind of rhetoric on the likes of x and what have you um and also he doesn't seem to be coveting much animosity from his opponent in in joaquin buckley otherwise other than that like it's just him telling you how wonderful his life seems to be and is due to his close proximity with the trumps what did you get from this conversation with colby has he changed or is he still the same guy no i think he's the same i think that people are just sort of like oh whatever

you know we accept him now or whatever you just ignore him or you think he's irrelevant or whatever your perception of him has changed right um i remember the first time i talked to him was in new york city i did a uh like a luncheon type thing where like they invited me to and i went there and he went to the bathroom and he left his maga hat you know like on the table and i took a picture of it and i'm like you know the enemy is blah blah blah making a joke because he was in new york city um that this guy was on the loose you know um and i remember the response you know at the time was just so he was such a polarizing figure you know and i think it's just it spoke to the moment in time i think it was 2019 it was

around that time when he was at his kind of height too where he was uh the most vocal and the most visible and talking to him five years later obviously his relevancy is not the same like he's lost three out of five he's had three title fights people feel like he's kind of been um expedited into these these shots even if he hasn't really earned them you know and he's still kind of hovering around because they're putting him against the guy if he beats buckley you'd be like well he's definitely going to enter into the picture again um hopefully not next but he would enter into that space again. But I just don't think that the things that he's been so vocal about mean as much. I don't know. Maybe you guys can tell me, but it's almost like he understands that to an extent.

And maybe he's, I don't know if he's toned it down because he was choking out that kid on the live stream just a few months ago. But I mean, I don't know how much he's toned it down but he's like he definitely is it's like a little bit like he's got uh something like he understands that his shtick is not no longer translating the exact same way and when you talk to him specifically in person sometimes like i was doing not in person on zoom like he can be such a weirdly down-to-earth guy as he's telling you some of the most outlandish shit you know what i mean like he can tell you like um you know he's going to be spending the holidays at mar-a-lago whatever you can be telling you this stuff but at the same time just like man i'm just

i just want to stick up for my country and then my principles and all that stuff and it's it's a bizarre thing i just but i i don't think that people see him i don't know you tell me you tell me because i wrote that piece and i'm like you're kind of unsure sometimes like what the public perception is it just feels like this event is so quiet and if you ever had a over the last five years colby covington if he's headlining event doesn't matter if it's a pay-per-view or something like this a fight night we'd be talking about him a lot more there'd be a much bigger feel to it it just doesn't feel like it's there yeah well also when you think about the difference between this fight and some of those recent ones for one thing the particular gimmick

that he's been trying to run doesn't work as well when you're not winning you know there are some guys where their gimmicks still work you know uh cowboy serrani uh conor mcgregor to some extent is like even when they were not winning fights the their appeal was that they were going to come out there and give you a show of a certain kind and so you didn't have to nate diaz you know you don't have to win them all and colby covington's gimmick i think in part because of like his fighting style that you know you're going to get a certain kind of fight out of him and it's not going to be the guns blaze and brawl kind of fight so if you're not winning those fights then what do you have you know uh that's part of it also that he's fought just once a year for you know the last several years so you just don't

see him that much anymore but yeah it also is some of it that you're he's been out there running this i'm the pro trump guy i'm the guy in the maga. I'm the guy in the MAGA hat. I'm the guy with the Trump suit. I'm over the top with that. And that seemed to distinguish him a little more a few years ago. But now the UFC itself is doing more of that than Colby Covington ever did. The UFC is doing the Donald Trump walkouts. So many fighters are over there, can't wait to shake hands take a picture with donald trump the commentators are cutting to the the trump cam in between every fight uh talking about

him as if he is actually affecting the outcomes of fights that you know there'll be there's a fight will be going on and they'll be like maybe this guy is nervous because he's fighting in front of donald trump you're like man what are you talking about there's so like so much over the top stuff from the usa itself that if that's your personal gimmick it doesn't really make you stand out he's competing with his own uh promotion now for that attention it's really funny because you could feel that i i would say that that actually came out you know and that's why he was like kind of pointing out like he's got a great relationship with them he's got an open invitation to you know hang out anytime he wants to and all that stuff

but i agree with you 100 that it's it's that the whole thing has changed you know like the ufc is basically um part of the campaign trail for trump and i you know once once that became the case i feel like his thing just became well it's just a small piece of something now rather than the guy doing that yeah i thought that like just from a guy, not from America, like I, at that point really stuck with me, the, like essentially I was seeing him as the voice of this silent, uh, majority. Right. Like that's what they were calling the Trump voters at one stage.

And we hadn't really heard anyone talking about it. And he's, he's lambasting the BLM and this kind of stuff, which seemed outrageous at the time. Right. Like we hadn't. anyone talking about it and he's he's lambasting the blm and this kind of stuff which seemed outrageous at the time right like we hadn't and now it's just that's that's all you see you just have this polarity in the world where everyone's just screaming at each other and no one's listening anymore so it just feels like old hat you know i don't know if that point's a good one because obviously i'm all the way in the emerald oil here but that's certainly how i felt well also you know you gotta win some of these fights if you want to keep staying relevant and this is one where you know he's never lost consecutive fights in his career and that was

one of the things that we would say is that even if you find colby covington obnoxious even if the lead-up to his fights is terrible he is a good fighter and that he'll still go in there and he's a tough guy to beat and now you're coming off that loss to Leon Edwards. He's lost all the title shots. He's had the interim belt for a little while, but couldn't get the title. If you lose this one, where you go in there against Joaquin Buckley, a guy who seems like he's on the way up, but he's not a star himself. He could really kind of cement himself as in the title conversation by beating you. You need to win just to cling to some

bit of relevancy because if if colby covington loses this one he's 36 if you lose this one to joaquin buckley then it's a long you're suddenly very very far off from the title and it starts to seem like well what we've seen of colby covington what we're going to see we have already seen you know he's probably going to be the mayor of the, uh, the treasure state at some point, man, he's going to get into politics.

You better hope he wins. Yeah. That's what he said to you, right? That was the parting remark. We can look forward to Colby in the political landscape, which is fantastic. Book Lee has told you,

Ben, that he thinks this event is made for him. Like this main event has kind of come together powerfully for him. And honestly, I tend to agree with him. What do you think? Yeah, I couldn't tell how much of that is, you know, how fighters can be sometimes where they have to be optimists. If something changes that was outside of your control, then you might as well tell yourself that this was a good change. You might as well tell us that this was a good change for you.

And that seemed to be what he was saying because i was i was curious what he thought about it not only in terms of what the fight what the stakes are changes if they go from ian gary to colby covington but also stylistically those are so different fights you know ian gary is going to try to do something completely different from what colby covington is going to try to do so when that change gets made that seems like a big shift. And he was saying like, yeah, it's a big shift, but he feels like it's one that will really work out for him, that he's not really worried about Colby Covington's wrestling or pace or anything.

He goes out there and in beating Colby Covington, you know, the thing he said was Colby Covington has had the interim belt, had a bunch of title shots, been at the top of the division, all this stuff that Ian Gary has not done. And so I have the ability to beat a guy like that and then turn around and say like, okay, look, who have you beat? I beat this guy who was interim champ, at least, you know, and maybe there's something to that. I also, I always wonder what, as a fighter, do you get more value out of being on the undercard of a pay-per-view, you know, especially,

uh, Shavcott and Gary were the co-main event of like a pretty good pay-per-view there. Or do you get more value out of being the main event of a fight night thing, which, you know, some people are going to skip it,

but to the extent that they care about these fights, they care about the main event and they don't have to pay $80 to watch it. So it's, it's a lot more accessible like i i go back and forth on which one of those has more value hmm is is is colby done joke like you talked to him right and that was the big sentiment and this has been talked about endlessly since his performance against leon he he got to the press conference and he was saying

my foot was broken in the first round guys like surely you have to give me some kind of credit here like you can't say this is what i am now um speaking to him did that reignite any feelings in you that this guy has a run and this guy has what it takes to put away a guy like buckley who seems to be hurtling towards toilet contention and who seems to be a guy who's very popular right like he has a spectacular style at times too like he can put guys away dramatically um do you think we are underselling colby covington's value in this main event no not really man i mean i feel like he's uh i feel like he knows that he's going into a situation that I mean this is very unusual for him over the last bunch of years right because he is very finicky into who he would fight he

doesn't really fight down you know what I mean he doesn't fight the guy who's kind of below him or trying to take his name um he understands all of that so there is a there is a piece of him that's trying to motivate I feel like his motivation is because he's the underdog and he is being forced to kind of, I guess you could say forced because he's got his whole story about how he, and it's probably somewhat true. I think he did want to step in or he was at least gauging stepping in to fight Shovkot since he was willing to fight. They're like, hey, we got to fight for you though if you want to, you know whole that whole situation i think he's just kind of in that position and he knows it he knows that he's in the position that like dustin poirier was in when he fought uh saint denis right or guys like that where you're like we're gonna if you're going to remain where you are you have to get through one of these younger hungry guys coming up um who want their shot and i guess we'd call that a gatekeeper role like in it to an extent but he's obviously not quite that either.

But there is certainly something, I think, that was in his attitude, not just when I was talking to him, just in general, that it's such a unique setup. He's kind of justifying where he's at and things like that. They're just ringing a little hollow. I think that you are at that point where it's a prove it or this is it. And the setup, i agree with buckley on this it's like it seems like a setup for him to kind of slam dunk and for him to get over and that's where i think that he understands that situation but i think that he understands that um you know that that sentiment is something he has to debunk essentially what do you think ben

like obviously buckley i feel can put himself right into contention here like regardless of how we feel about where colby is now i think we're all pretty much on the same page here in terms of seeing this as a massive opportunity for buckley um do you think he like do you think we could be entertaining the idea of a Buckley v Ian Gary fight again on the back of this like given that you know Gary has come up short but has taken a lot of plaudits for his performance if Buckley beats Colby you know they're there thereabouts in the same spot in those rankings do you think that's a fight we could see again in 2025 to establish a number one contender potentially yeah I do I think you know one of the things uh that buckley said that surprised me a little bit was he was like hey you know ian gary when he took that fight and he took

a loss and he his he fell a little bit in people's eyes as a result of the loss which i i don't really agree with i think that for ian gary doing as well as he did against a guy like shavkat even in defeat i think his esteem went up his esteem might have gone up more than if he had beat Joaquin Buckley in this fight, just because of how we perceived Ian Gary before versus how we perceived him after that fight. Whereas for Joaquin Buckley, I think he's in the situation we've seen some fighters in before where he's very, very good and on a winning streak and has looked really, really good. But then there's still a gap between being really good, winning fights, and getting people to think of you as really good in a way that they think matters in the division. Because a lot of these divisions, it's almost like they're split in two, where you got the

two or three guys at the top who are always talking about as potential title contenders, and then you got the two or three guys at the top who are always talking about as potential title contenders. And then you got everybody else. And even if you're the best of everybody else, you have to find a way to sort of connect with the fans and bridge that gap to get over to the point where we're talking about you. And we're saying, when is the champion going to fight this guy? Shavkat has done that before the Ian Gary fight. Shavkat had already gotten there where people were saying like, okay, whoever the champ is, we want to see him fight this guy. And beating Colby Covington here, especially if you're able to go out there and finish Colby Covington, there are still enough people out there who felt one way or another about Colby Covington's gimmick. Even if they might agree with his politics,

they didn't necessarily love the gimmick and the way he went about it. Because for years there, the gimmick was not just pro-Trump. It it was let me say the most awful stuff i can think of about everybody not even in a clever and funny way just in a mean way and people went oh come on man and he had to keep ratcheting that up because you gotta you gotta make the the gimmick seem like everyone he beat robbie lawler and he was like uh you and Matt Hughes got to stay off the tracks for the Kobe train. Remember? Yeah. Stuff like that, where it's just like the whole point of it is,

can you believe how awful I'm being? Not even in a Chael Sonnen way where it was just like, okay, you're being a jerk, but you're making me laugh. And so I appreciate it. He was just being awful. And I think if you go out there and you knock a guy like that out, there are going to be some people who love you for it. And, you know, you saw, you've even seen some of these comments from other fighters being like, I hope he breaks Colby Covington's jaw. You know, so this is a big opportunity for Joaquin Buckley. If he could look good and put Colby Covington away, then I think maybe he goes from just being another guy in the division who's really good to a guy who we really care about is it bigger for him to beat is it bigger for Buckley to beat Colt Covington

than it would have been for him to beat Gary yeah I think so I think I think beating Ian Gary I think in that situation for one thing it probably would not have been a super exciting fight just because of the way Ian Gary fights that even if you were able to beat him you know like shavkat's fight with him was not a super exciting fight uh even though he won it but i do think if you can go out there and beat somebody like colby covington when you have the stage all to yourself as a main event and especially putting them away that's gonna be a big piece of it if you could knock out colby covington then especially last ufc event of the year you're just we're we're gonna spend the next couple weeks in the media trying to think of stuff to talk about where there's only so many urine stuff we can do uh you're gonna get a lot of room to yourself uh in the aftermath of

something like that if this is colby's last fight lads what is his legacy but what like you know for a long time i think he was he was in that conversation like you know best guy to never win a title i i don't personally think of him in that regard right now maybe that's just a blind spot on my end um what do you think Chuck what would be this guy's legacy man these questions are always so uh hard because you know what happens is for people like us who cover the sport or people who just you could say like people who've really paid attention to the sport he'll always be a guy that you'll you'll look back at on and just be like you know like he was a very good competitor.

I think he has one of the craziest career trajectories ever. He was just kind of almost like a shy guy in the early stages of his career. He wasn't saying anything. And then it was way crazier than Chael Sonnen's turnaround, where all of a sudden he was coming out of the woodwork and being the dude you paid attention to. This was different. It always felt, I think, in our highest of like what we wanted to see in him we were thinking he might be like an andy

kaufman type character who was so in you know almost so in the kayfabe thing that you believed it and he was fooling you and all that i i think we'll always kind of look at him as a polarizing figure i don't know if you'll i don't think we're going to look back on his career unless he has some crazy resurgence, almost in the bisping vein where he wins a title late. You're not going to look back at him as like a great fighter. You're not going to go back and be like, that was one of the greats of the division.

There's just too many that have come and gone. And there's too many still right now that are, you know, processing and becoming that. Um, so I don't think it's going to be like some big lasting legacy, but he'll always be like a figure a character that you're going to think of uh in the years to come what do you think ben

i think you know definitely will remember the the gimmick thing that he started to run and especially like chuck said that the part of the chael Sonnen playbook he did take was nobody cares let me find a way personality wise to make them care and he did it just to some extent it also it came at a cost more so for him than for Chael Sonnen because I think Chael Sonnen is just more clever and fun about how he's doing it and that it was you know his natural personality just with the volume cranked up colby you remember him standing in line at the buffet when uh kamara usman and ali abdulaziz are running up on him and you you got the sense his reaction to that seemed like wait guys i'm not in character right now i'm off duty you know i'm not wearing the hat i'm just trying to be a regular guy trying to get some crab legs and they went no you need to

answer for some of these things you said because we think of them as belonging to colby covington the person not colby covington the character and there there seemed to be times like that where he wanted there to be more of a distinction between the two than there was i think as far as how we remember him and and how his legacy is viewed in mma it'll probably be as a rival to kamaru huzman it'll be as you know he'll be sort of the the frank trig to his matt hughes in a way where he's the guy who took the rivalry to a new level uh made some of those fights seem to be a bigger deal because of the animosity that he injected into them, but also didn't win any of them.

Oof. Just when you said that, do you know, do you know, I remembered as you were telling that story, but the, the buffet queue, do you remember when he like was live on Instagram and he walked into Dana White at the poker table?

Oh yeah. That's right. God. You saw a young woman who was sitting there and it just sort of faded out of the picture. Yeah. Yeah. You can hear him going, turn that off. That's right, my guy. He's like, oh, okay.

Oh, Jesus Christ. A whole body cringe happening here. Before we go, I believe we have some super chats from the great New York Rick is going to put up on our screen here. If you don't mind, lads, we'll have a quick look at them.

Welcome to Nose It Alls Welcome Oh sorry Really Like do you think I'm going to be able to You're going to have to lean in Roscos

Ron Keska Welcome to Nose It Alls Kenneth Sunby Welcome to Hellwanna Bees Timothy Farraghan Welcome to Hellwanna Bees Sorry Rick I mean the first name

What do you want me to do? Chuck Thoughts on Dustin St stolzfus title run really good man thank you to our pedigree for this great question it sparked the debate here in studio as you can see yeah um right who else we got muckaf watch party to end the show come on he's obviously fighting in brave this week against who i could not tell either of you um going on like right now as we speak it might be but yeah i have desperate trouble trying to watch brave i think you have to watch it on their own network and it's very difficult i have a sign on like i've registered eight times with them and I can't remember

one of my passwords every time I go. But, um, Listen, man, I was trying to talk to I was trying to talk to him and so I, I, you know,

I'm trying to get in touch with anybody at Brave. This is almost like with Don Davis and Ben Folks here. It's like, uh, I'm trying to get in touch with anybody.

I went different avenues, never heard from him. It's just, uh a typical, you know. You need to do more media, Mako. You have PFL. You need to do more media. We have the best two guys in the world here. I can set you up.

Just ring me. You have my number. You don't write back to me either. Anyway, lads, enjoy Tampa. The beautiful fights that we have this weekend. Chuck, I love you. Ben, I love you. New York, Rick, I love you.

Oscar, I love you. Crack Rick, I love you. Oscar Lausef, I love you. Crackheads, I love all of you too. We will be back next Friday. I nearly knocked over my light there. We'll be back next Friday. Thank you to NordVPN. Thank you to all of you for watching. Big kiss.

Enjoy the fights. Thank you.