UFC 116 served us sloppy Joes and we ate it up like it was filet mignon

Okay, folks, time to curb your enthusiasm a little bit. The UFC needed the media to sell Saturday’s UFC 116 headliner as the biggest heavyweight battle of all time and the media obliged. And now it needs the media to sell Brock Lesnar’s victory as some sort of act of divine providence, a baptism by fire leading to him emerging bigger and stronger and more powerful than ever. And the media is following along like the good little puppies they are and selling this Lesnar-as-Shiva-the-god-of-death shtick without really looking at what really happened in the cage against Shane Carwin.

Lesnar is not the “baddest man on the planet,” as many, including “Showdown” Joe Ferraro, have crowned him (Joe, you should know better). And Saturday’s UFC 116 was hardly the best night of fights. Far from it. But that’s what everybody’s saying after drinking the UFC Kool-aid.

Yes, UFC 116 was entertaining, which many of you will probably say is all that matters. But it was a sloppy brawl-filled spectacle as fighters stood and winged haymakers and ate punches and wobbled and bled. Stephan Bonnar summoned his inner American Psycho to deliver a blood-crazed beatdown of Krzysztof Soszynski in an all-out dogfight that truly was remarkable in terms of demonstrating the depth of human resiliency. Chris Leben survived a war of heavy-fisted attrition that involved more toe-to-toe trading than your average day on the stock exchange to pull off a comeback submission of Yoshihiro Akiyama. Chris Lytle banged away at Matt Brown until he gave up an armbar. George Sotiropolous out-struck and out-grappled Kurt Pellegrino en route to a decision in what was easily the most-technical bout of the night.

Are you not entertained? Sure. Damn straight. Especially after eagerly swallowing the last half-dozen Ambiens masquerading as UFC events. But it was hardly good MMA, even as it might have been good for MMA. I’ll explain shortly.

Time also to slam the brakes on the Brock Lesnar express. Everyone’s pointing to Lesnar’s remarkable, miracle-level survival of Shane Carwin’s first-frame ground-and-pound and his equally shocking submission win early in the second round to unify the heavyweight title. The performance is being touted as evidence of the evolution of Lesnar as a mixed martial artist, his ascension to some quasi-Cthulhu godlike status. Bullshit. Total bullshit.

I saw no such growth, no such display of skill, just a bit of grit, some good fortune and a nifty arm triangle. No disrespect to Joe Ferraro, but Lesnar is not “the baddest man on the planet,” and I doubt Ferraro would even consider making that statement if Fedor Emelianenko hadn’t suffered his first loss in a decade just last week.

Here’s what I saw in the so-called biggest heavyweight bout in MMA history: a fighter who hates to get hit, I mean who really hates to get hit, who got tagged by a not-particularly-powerful Carwin uppercut. He flinched like a girl in a slap fight and then turned and cowered in the corner, hiding his head and sucking his thumb.

He claimed afterward that it was all part of his strategy to lay back and wait out the storm. A nifty rewriting of history, but that’s how it works – the winner decides how the story gets told. It must also have been a part of Lesnar’s strategy to count on referee Josh Rosenthal to allow the pounding to continue when in any other fight – any other fight not involving UFC breadwinner Brock Lesnar, that is – he would have stepped in to wave it off. Except for what happened in round two, he should have stopped the fight, but there’s no way Rosenthal could’ve predicted the outcome. Lesnar was taking a beating, he was not intelligently defending himself, it should’ve been stopped. No question. Doesn’t matter that Lesnar rebounded. Plenty of fighters have been knocked out and come around seconds later ready to continue the fight. And if the fight had been called last night nobody would’ve thought it was wrong, nobody would’ve questioned it, nobody except for maybe Lesnar.

Instead, Rosenthal lets Carwin drop bombs on Lesnar’s head, shoulders and arms until he’s run out of ammunition and there’s nothing left in the gas tank. Carwin has never had a fight last longer than 3:48, with 1:08 being the average, so after three solid minutes of hitting Lesnar, who was curled up in a ball against the cage the whole time, remember, Carwin got a little tired. Then he got a lot tired. So there was nothing left in the tank for the second round. Nothing. Hence the weak-ass takedown Lesnar scored, the ease of going to mount, locking in the arm-triangle and finishing the fight.

The whole thing was pretty sloppy, actually, save for that final submission. But then, sloppy was the order of the night.

And sure, lots of crazy back-and-forth fights are good for the sport, at least in the sense that they appeal to our inner bloodlust, get us riled up and attract even casual and non-fans the way car crashes do. We want to see the wreckage even if we don’t, ya know? And Lesnar as champ is good for the sport. He brings an entirely new fanbase with him from professional wrestling while polarizing people into two camps – those who hate him and everybody else.

But since when should an MMA fan care whether an athlete is good for the sport? I don’t care that Tiger Woods was good for golf or Michael Jordan for basketball or Sidney Crosby for hockey. I just care whether they are good athletes, good competitors. And I don’t care whether Brock Lesnar’s popularity can help grow the sport. That’s for Dana White and the folks at Zuffa to worry about. I only care about how he behaves in the octagon, and at UFC 116 I wasn’t particularly impressed.