Happy Thanksgiving!

The day that officially starts “the holiday season” in the United States is traditionally enjoyed with family, friends, and a laden table, where folk gather to celebrate what they are most thankful for. And we here at MMA Fighting have much to be thankful for!

Not only do we have the best readers and fans in the world, but we also get to spend our time covering the wild, wonderful, and sometimes woeful sport of MMA. Personally, we wouldn’t trade it for the world.

And so with 2024 winding down, Jed Meshew, Damon Martin, and Mike Heck gathered around the digital dining table to share the things we are most thankful for this year, and also admonish the biggest turkeys.

Biggest Turkeys of the Year

PFL/Bellator merger

Mergers and acquisitions as a whole in MMA might get fans excited, but it’s often a bad thing for fighters, because it gives them less options/negotiating power when it comes time to sign a new deal or potentially just finding somewhere to compete when for whatever reason the UFC might not be an option. But there was generally a lot of enthusiasm when PFL bought Bellator — and bought is a generous word considering PFL basically just took ownership of a promotion losing money off the books from Paramount — because it seemingly created a clear-cut No. 2 organization behind the UFC.

Almost exactly one year later, the whole thing seems like an absolute mess.

First off, Bellator was kept as a separate entity for some unknown and confusing reason, perhaps through a contractual obligation or maybe just because PFL was so dedicated to its season-long format that this was the only way to book fights that didn’t involve a tournament and a bizarre point system to determine rankings. That just made things confusing for the casual fan when PFL would make a grand announcement like “we just signed top prospect Paul Hughes” and then his first fight actually happened in Bellator.

But second and most important, just days away from PFL crowning a whole bunch of new champions and handing out $1 million checks to each of them, some of the most prominent fighters on the Bellator roster are lashing out about inactivity. Patricio Pitbull, Patchy Mix and Corey Anderson all complained recently about not being booked for several months with no sign when they might actually fight again. While it’s impossible to know for sure why these fighters are being iced, it’s difficult not to assume it has something to do with money because everybody’s contracts from Bellator were still in effect after the PFL purchase.

Something needs to be fixed and fast because PFL was in a rare spot to really make an impact in the sport with an impressive roster — that still doesn’t rival the UFC but it was a really good runner-up — and excitement to see what the organization could build for the future. Right now, it seems like there’s far more concern that PFL is going to be dismantled rather than blossom after buying Bellator. - Damon Martin

Netflix

I thought long and hard about putting Conor McGregor here given what a horrendous 2024 he’s had, but it’s the holiday season and frankly, I’ve written all I care to on the subject. And at this point it would be beyond beating a dead horse to bring Jon Jones back up, so instead let’s talk about Netflix and the disaster that was Mike Tyson vs. Jake Paul.

When Tyson vs. Paul was originally announced, most of us had the same reaction: that’s awful but streaming on Netflix is a pretty big deal. And it was. Tyson vs. Paul was by far the biggest combat sports event of the year and very likely the biggest combat sports event of the decade in terms of raw viewership numbers. Over 100 million people tuned in to watch this grand event and what they got was mostly awful.

The fight itself was the worst combination of sad and uninteresting, with Paul either being unwilling or unable to finish off a nearly 60-year-old man whose legs didn’t work (thank Thor he didn’t though because watching a senior citizen get killed was not on my to-do list). That would be bad enough but it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Not only was the fight bad, but it was so bad that a lot of people thought it was rigged. Those people are silly geese, but there were enough of them that Most Valuable Promotions felt the need to address the accusations of collusion, and if you’re having to justify your product to millions of viewers, well, that’s not exactly ideal.

And then, of course, there were the production issues. Netflix, the largest streaming platform on Earth, was simply unable to stand up to the strain of 100 million people tuning in, leading to the stream repeatedly crashing. As much as people talked about the terrible fight afterward, they were all roasting Netflix during the event. The idea that “all publicity is good publicity” is foolish and Netflix botching this big of an event undeniably hurt them in the future when they start trying to move in on the NFL or NBA.

And again, all of this was in service of a carnival sideshow event where a 58-year-old man is lucky to have not been seriously injured. Buncha turkeys, I say. - Jed Meshew

Merab Dvalishvili

Let me start off by saying that I really like Merab Dvalishvili. I was interviewing him well before he was a top-15 fighter, and he didn’t have to give me the time of day, and since then, he’s always been incredibly gracious and nice to me. I respect the man to no end, and it was a cool moment watching him jump over hurdle after hurdle get to the proverbial promised land of the UFC bantamweight division.

Having said that, Dvalishvili, perceptually, may have the worst two months of a title run in UFC history.

The MMA community wants to see if Umar Nurmagomedov is the dude at 135, and the vast majority want to see him fight Dvalishvili for the title. In fact, that’s a matchup fans have been calling on On To the Next One since he nuked Raoni Barcelos nearly two years ago. The UFC CLEARLY wants the fight, because after Dvalishvili beat Sean O’Malley, Nurmagomedov was sitting cageside and when asked about giving the fans the fight they want, Dvalishvili put over Dana White — who by the way, has been publicly blasting him for years. Although it looked bad, I somewhat understood the no-sell.

But since then, it’s been, “Umar doesn’t deserve this,” and, “Sean O’Malley deserves a rematch” (he doesn’t), and if “Deiveson Figueiredo beats Petr Yan, he should get the shot” (didn’t totally disagree with that, but still would’ve favored Umar), to the guy he absolutely ran over for 25 minutes 18 months ago, he should get the shot. Don’t get me wrong, Petr Yan is awesome, but he’s 2-3 in his past five fights, and his wins are against our No. 15 and No. 7 ranked fighters. Great wins, but not enough to get a rematch and a title shot.

There’s only one guy that makes sense. It’s not O’Malley and it’s not Yan. To quote the great Jed Meshew, Umar is coming, and Dvalishvili should embrace this challenge to no end. Also, going with the, “If the UFC wants me to fight Umar, I will” mentality is not what fans want to see or hear from a fighter who scratched and clawed to a title shot, a championship win in a fight that didn’t knock any socks off, and who has yet to defend the belt. I, in no way, am accusing Dvalisvili of being “scared” to fight Nurmagomedov, he’s just doing the complete opposite of prize fighting.

Let’s just take this latest example as exhibit Q.