Another UFC pay-per-view is in the books, and all-told a great night of fights was delivered. While not a perfect card, featuring a strange co-main event and a few lull moments, overall the fights delivered. The preliminary bouts saw one of the most violent — and possibly reckless, from a referee / health standpoint — bouts in MMA history, between Matt Grice and Dennis Bermudez. Really, though, a lot rested on the results of the main event — the UFC debut of the women’s bantamweight division.

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If you’ve somehow managed to avoid the massive surge of media coverage for this event, then my hat is off to you. Tonight the UFC presents another pay-per-view, though this one does celebrate a historic occasion in the sport of mixed martial arts — the debut of a female division in the sport’s premier promotion. Following the closure of Strikeforce, the UFC picked up Ronda Rousey — and the rest of the female roster — and has made the first steps in establishing the mainstream legitimacy of women’s MMA.

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Make it two weeks in a row, thanks to some health problems and random nonsense (read: unprovoked dog attack), that my usual recapping was not done for Bellator’s latest fight card. That said, I was able to watch the event and it turned out to be one of the best TV fight cards I can remember watching.

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The UFC returned to England, with the seventh installment in the UFC on Fuel series of fight cards. After a six-year drought of title bouts, the interim bantamweight title would be contested, with support from a solid undercard. While lacking in big-name recognition, the entire fight card was packed with exciting prospects and compelling match-ups from top to bottom.

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Due to an unfortunate back injury, I did not do any sort of live recap, aside from some snarking on Twitter. The fight card was quite good, with Bellator’s next iteration of their middleweight tournament kicked off with a quick KO win for Doug Marshal (which have have been a bit of a premature stoppage), and a solidly entertaining scrap between Brian Rogers and Dan Cramer.

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This article has been in the works for a while, and was initially supposed to be published before the first pay-per-view event of the new year. In spite of delays, I offer up my breakdown of the previous year’s fights, as well as my predictions and an attempt to analyze my results.

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Presenting another installment in their ongoing series of MMA tournaments, Bellator 88 also featured a battle between two tournament winners in an effort to crown a new middleweight champion. (The belt having been left vacant when Hector Lombard left for the UFC.) The bulk of the card was made up of featherweights, both in the current tournament and potential prospects for future brackets.

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Right on schedule, we have the release of the second set in the Return to Ravnica block in the form of Gatecrash. Considering how busy I’ve been over the last eight months, this set actually snuck up on me; it had only sunk in that “hey, yeah I get to draft” during the middle of the week. So, despite only following the spoilers leading up to the release of Gatecrash, I was going to have to try and not donate free packs to my friends regardless.

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Music

• Econoline Crush, Affliction
• Econoline Crush, Brand New History
• Econoline Crush, Ignite
• Econoline Crush, The Devil You Know

Television / Streaming

• Bellator 87 (recap)
• The Ultimate Fighter – Season 17
• UFC 156 – Aldo -vs- Edgar (predictions | recap)
• The Universe – Season 4

Games

• Civilization V – Gods and Kings
• World of WarCraft

Another night of fights is in the books, and the UFC definitely started the year off in an interesting manner. Despite the fact that UFC 156 featured a lot of seemingly lopsided match-ups, some major upsets did in fact occur this evening. The upset train got moving early on the under card and wreaked havoc on a lot of gamblers’ plans throughout the night.

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