Justin Gaethje went to war with Paddy Pimblett this past Saturday night to claim the interim lightweight title in the UFC 324 main event while both fighters collected $100,000 each for taking part in the Fight of the Night.<\/p>\n
The slugfest is already being hailed as a potential Fight of the Year contender but veteran UFC welterweight Matt Brown voiced his opinion that watching Gaethje and Pimblett beat the hell out of each other for 25 minutes didn\u2019t exactly blow him away. He backed former UFC heavyweight champion Josh Barnett when he called it \u201cone of the worst UFC main events in a while\u201d<\/a> and Brown says it all comes down to the skills he expects to see in a fight of that magnitude.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I go to watch a UFC fight and particularly when I\u2019m watching a title fight \u2014 it\u2019s not necessarily surprising what we saw \u2014 but when I go to watch UFC, I\u2019m looking at the Super Bowl of MMA,\u201d Brown explained on the latest episode of The Fighter vs. The Writer. \u201cI want to see the highest level martial arts that the world can produce and that\u2019s what the UFC does. They go get the best guys in the world, and they beat the hell out of each other until one gets a title shot. When you\u2019re looking at a title shot, even an interim title, you\u2019re looking at two of the best martial artists on this planet.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat we seen on Saturday was two of the toughest guys on the planet swinging for the fences with no skill hardly at all. Both of them are more skilled than that. I\u2019m not taking anything away from them, but what they showed on Saturday night was not indicative of their skill, but they did not fight like I would expect a world champion to be fighting.\u201d<\/p>\n While almost universally praised as an entertaining affair, Brown was hoping to see either Gaethje or Pimblett stand out as a real threat to reigning UFC lightweight champion Ilia Topuria, who was unavailable to compete on Saturday due to some ongoing personal issues.<\/p>\n Instead, Brown felt like he saw two guys looking to put on a show but failing to actually display the kinds of abilities possessed by a pair of the top fighters in the world in one of the deepest and nastiest weight classes in the sport.<\/p>\n \u201cI wouldn\u2019t say it left a bad taste in my mouth or anything. I was just saying what I felt,\u201d Brown said. \u201cI think those guys would admit themselves it was a sloppy, undisciplined fight. They had no responsible hands, responsible posture, no discipline. I think they\u2019d probably agree with that. Justin Gaethje, all respect to him, the guy doesn\u2019t care about that stuff either. It seemed like he was kind of moving towards that but Saturday, he didn\u2019t care about that stuff at all.<\/p>\n \u201cThe fact that anyone would disagree with the fact that this was a sloppy, slugfest just blows my mind. It wasn\u2019t a high skilled, high level fight. It was just two guys swinging for the fences and Justin\u2019s just better at that game. He\u2019s probably the best in the world at that game.\u201d<\/p>\n During his own career, Brown was drawn into more than a few of those back-and-forth brawls so he understands why that\u2019s such an appealing style, especially when it comes to fan reactions.<\/p>\n But as time passes and he continues to grow and evolve on his own martial arts journey, Brown just doesn\u2019t see the attraction to seeing a pair of top ranked UFC fighters just throw caution to the win for the sake of entertainment. That\u2019s ultimately what Brown witnessed at UFC 324 as Gaethje and Pimblett were seemingly more concerned with putting on a show than actually showing which one of them was the better mixed martial artist.<\/p>\n \u201cTo be honest, these slugfests, they don\u2019t excite me like they used to,\u201d Brown said. \u201cI\u2019ve seen so many of them. Hell I\u2019ve been involved in enough of them myself. I\u2019m not out here putting myself on a pedestal that I\u2019m some special guy that hasn\u2019t been involved in these types of things myself. It\u2019s fun. I get it. I get where Justin wants that. Because it\u2019s a f*cking blast, no doubt about it. But look, maybe I\u2019m just becoming an old grumpy man, I don\u2019t know but that just doesn\u2019t excite me like it used to.<\/p>\n \u201cWe all like watching the slugfests. We all like watching the knock-down, drag out wars. But I want to see the skill. You see it all the time in other sports, and I just expect that out of a UFC title fight, and it\u2019s not what we got. We got what literally looked like a regional show fight.\u201d<\/p>\n Perhaps more discouraging than anything else with that fight was Brown being totally convinced that Gaethje stands little chance to dethrone Topuria if they meet later this year.<\/p>\n Now Brown has constantly touted Arman Tsarukyan as the real No. 1 contender in the division even if he\u2019s not getting the next title shot, but he was hoping that Gaethje would show something different to convince him otherwise.<\/p>\n \u201cNeither one of those guys showed any signs that they are the best in the world,\u201d Brown said. \u201cI\u2019m not hating on these guys. It\u2019s all going to get twisted up \u2018he\u2019s a f*cking hater!\u2019 They did not exhibit anything showing that they are the best in the world. They showed that maybe they\u2019re the toughest in the world.<\/p>\n \u201cThe way that Paddy and Justin fought, I\u2019ve literally seen fights like that on local shows here in Columbus.\u201d<\/p>\n Listen to new episodes of The Fighter vs. The Writer every Tuesday with audio only versions of the podcast available on Apple Podcasts<\/a>, Google Podcasts<\/a>, Spotify<\/a>, and iHeartRadio<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Justin Gaethje went to war with Paddy Pimblett this past Saturday night to claim the interim lightweight title…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":436654,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[444],"tags":[49,48,641,701,638,37036,329,82,640,702],"class_list":["post-436653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mma","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-fighting","tag-latest-news","tag-mma","tag-mmaf-podcast-network","tag-podcasts","tag-sports","tag-ufc","tag-ufc-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/436653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=436653"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/436653\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/436654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=436653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=436653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=436653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}