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One of Dana White’s old adages – although I don’t know the exact quote – is that fans should never judge a UFC card before it’s happened. His argument, I guess, is that you don’t necessarily need big-name fighters to create a great, action-packed show, and that shows stacked with big stars don’t always turn out to be the best shows in execution.
That’s true to an extent, but of course, on the flipside of the argument, the UFC markets itself as the promotion where the best fight the best – and thus if they’re producing a show that doesn’t feature at least one or two of the best fighters in the world, then something’s very wrong.
That becomes even truer when the shows in question are on pay-per-view – meaning fans in the US have to pay a substantial amount of money to watch them.
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While the following 5 pay-per-view shows saw mixed results in terms of the action that went down in the Octagon, they’re probably the worst cards that the UFC have ever put together – on paper, at least.
#1 UFC 55: Fury – 10/07/2005
The UFC was on a pretty hot streak in 2005 following the promotion’s explosion in popularity thanks to the inaugural season of The Ultimate Fighter that aired in the early part of the year. But at the time, the promotion’s roster wasn’t anywhere near as packed as it is today, and so after blockbuster shows in the first half of the year, we were always due for a stinker at some point.
That stinker turned out to be UFC 55, which took place in October from Uncasville, Connecticut. The main event – a UFC Heavyweight title match between Andrei Arlovski and Paul Buentello – sounded fun, but the rest of the card was simply a hot mess.
A hastily-put together Fight Night card just days before the show meant that the pay-per-view lost its co-main event – Evan Tanner vs. David Loiseau – and a Heavyweight fight between Brandon Vera and Fabiano Scherner was also moved onto that card.
In the end, a weird fight between TUF champion Forrest Griffin and Aussie veteran Elvis Sinosic was placed as the co-headliner, and the rest of the pay-per-view featured Renato Sobral vs. a pre-fame Chael Sonnen, Joe Riggs vs. Chris Lytle, and debutant Branden Lee Hinkle against cop-turned-streetfighter Sean Gannon - hardly a night of fights to get fans’ pulses racing.
In the end, UFC 55 wasn’t outright terrible – most of the fights delivered some solid action – but the card stands as a testament to the UFC’s relatively thin roster at the time – a roster that would quickly expand a year later.
#2 UFC 72: Victory – 06/16/2007
April 2007 saw the UFC return to the UK for the first time in 5 years, and the show they put on – UFC 70 – was a barnburner that saw the likes of Mirko Cro Cop, Gabriel Gonzaga, Andrei Arlovski and Lyoto Machida in action. A couple of months later the promotion returned – this time to Northern Ireland – but to say the card they put together was underwhelming would be an understatement.
The UFC’s first show in Belfast was initially main-evented by a Middleweight fight between former champion Rich Franklin and Martin Kampmann, who was then replaced by Yushin Okami due to an injury. While Franklin was a recognised headliner, Okami had only appeared in one televised UFC fight prior to this event.
The co-main event didn’t sound much better – Forrest Griffin, returning from his knockout at the hands of Keith Jardine, was booked against Hector Ramirez, a largely unknown fighter who’d been knocked out by James Irvin in a preliminary bout in his Octagon debut.
The card was rounded out with fights between Jason MacDonald and Rory Singer, Clay Guida and Tyson Griffin, and Ed Herman and Scott Smith. Both Guida and Griffin were considered fast-rising stars, but none of the 6 was considered to be in title contention, and more worryingly, only Herman was not coming off a loss in his last Octagon appearance.
In execution, the show was almost as bad as fans feared it would be going in. Griffin and Guida put on a tremendous fight but the rest was pretty dull, and when 2007 ended it was only the presence of that Lightweight classic that kept the show from being considered the worst of the year.
#3 UFC 122: Marquardt vs. Okami – 11/13/2010
By 2010, one of the main criticisms aimed at the UFC was that they were booking way too many shows for their roster strength to handle. For the most part that was true – it wasn’t until 2011 that the lighter weight classes were added to the promotion following the closing of WEC – and perhaps the greatest example of that was the super-weak UFC 122 card from November.
The show – the UFC’s second effort in Germany after their debut there in June 2009 – featured an incredibly weak card, headlined by a UFC Middleweight title eliminator between Yushin Okami and Nate Marquardt, who stepped in to replace Vitor Belfort. Okami ended up winning a dull fight – and had to wait until August 2011 for his title shot.
Dennis Siver – 5-4 in the UFC at the time – took on Andre Winner in the co-main event with the Brit coming off a loss. How the two men found themselves in the co-main event of a UFC show was anyone’s guess given they’d featured in 3 televised fights between them prior to this show.
The other three main card fights saw dull decision wins for Amir Sadollah, Krzysztof Soszynski and Duane Ludwig over Peter Sobotta, Goran Reljic and Nick Osipczak respectively – and Ludwig’s win was one of the worst judges’ decisions of the year to add insult to injury. Naturally, none of the fighters were anywhere near the top ten of their division at the time of the show.
Overall UFC 122 was a hugely disappointing show, both on paper and in execution – and when the WEC merger was announced a few weeks later, it was immediately suggested by some fans that the idea behind it was to prevent more shows like this one from happening.
#4 UFC 161: Evans vs. Henderson – 06/15/2013
Most of today’s weaker UFC cards are caused when injuries remove most of the top fights from a show, and UFC 161 was perhaps the greatest example of that as the show lost both its main event and its co-main event, leaving the fans with a three-round headliner between Rashad Evans and Dan Henderson – two great fighters, no doubt, but hardly the most intriguing fight by 2013 with both men coming off losses.
Probably the best fight on paper was the quickly thrown-together co-main event between Stipe Miocic and Roy Nelson, but of course, this was years prior to Miocic’s rise as a main event star, and in fact he was actually coming off his loss to Stefan Struve prior to this booking. The fight did end up being the lone standout of the night, but that was faint praise.
The rest of the main card also sounded weak; nobody really wanted to see Ryan Jimmo vs. Igor Pokrajac – a match between two fighters with reputations for putting on dull fights; nobody had even heard of Rosi Sexton and Alexis Davis, both of whom were making their Octagon debuts, and the idea of Heavyweights Shawn Jordan and Pat Barry ever making it into title contention had long passed, even if people figured their fight could be exciting.
Essentially, wedged in between two far more stacked events in UFC 160 and UFC 162, UFC 161 looked like a massively skippable show, something inexcusable given the strength of the UFC roster at the time following the StrikeForce merger at the beginning of 2013. The poor buyrate – 140,000 – showed this, and in execution the show was disappointing too.
#5 UFC 177: Dillashaw vs. Soto - 08/30/2014
2014 was a weak year overall for the UFC, but UFC 177 - labelled as a ‘haunted card’ by Joe Rogan due to the sheer amount of late changes – was definitely the worst offender of them all. A total of 6 fights had to be changed or scrapped due to various reasons, including the originally planned co-main event of Demetrious Johnson vs. Chris Cariaso, which was moved to provide UFC 178 with a headliner.
The main event of TJ Dillashaw vs. Renan Barao ended up being changed when Barao collapsed on the day of the weigh-in, and so we ended up with a headliner between Dillashaw and promotional debutant Joe Soto, and the co-main event featured Tony Ferguson – prior to his rise to fame – against Danny Castillo; it was Castillo’s first main card appearance and only Ferguson’s third.
Of the other three pay-per-view bouts, Bethe Correia was making her first main card appearance while Shayna Baszler was making her UFC debut, and while Ramsey Nijem and Yancy Medeiros were relatively known fighters, Diego Ferreira – who faced Nijem – had never been televised before while Medeiros’ foe Damon Jackson was another UFC debutant.
Overall, despite the fact that the show over-delivered in terms of action – only Ferguson/Castillo went the distance and it was a fantastic fight – to expect fans to pay $44.99 for a show this low on name value was simply criminal. UFC 177 stands as a sour reminder of what can happen when injuries and other issues simply wreck a UFC card.
