What We Learned (Bellator 110) – King Mo’s Win, Rampage’s Knockout, Another Stab At PPV And More Thoughts

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Bellator didn’t quite have the amazing opening to its winter seasons as it did a year ago, which had Pat Curran defending his title in spectacular fashion with one of the underrated fights of 2013 against Pitbull Freire and Michael Chandler blowing Rick Hawn out of the water in short fashion. This one ended with a pull apart brawl that featured no brawling and was set up by King Mo and Rampage Jackson (and cleared with Mohegan Sun officials) beforehand.

This wasn’t Strikeforce: Nashville, one of MMA’s true wild brawls. This was a “work” designed to get idiots to be more into their fight. Don’t believe me? Click here for Sherdog’s Jack Incarnocion discussing it with a named Mohegan Sun regulator.

The moonlighting TNA wrestlers brought some pro wrestling antics to the cage in order to get the type of fan who doesn’t know that they’re good friends outside of the cage interested in the fight. It’ll probably be the co-main event of the just announced Chandler/Alvarez III PPV, which comes right in the middle of a pair of weekends of huge PPV cards already. But more on that in a minute as now it’s time to discuss what we learned from Friday’s Bellator debut.

— King Mo will never find that elite level ceiling we once thought he had

I remember Muhammad Lawal when he was an elite wrestler who could never quite get onto the Olympic team. I was excited when he got into MMA and I’ve loved the fact that he’s a genuine student of the game. He keeps improving and always wants to bring new things into the cage with him. He wants to be the best fighter possible and to have the biggest tool box possible. The problem is that he doesn’t quite have that explosive athleticism he did before the staph infection and multiple ACL surgeries.

The latter is something that doesn’t get discussed as much as it should. You don’t recover from two ACLs and be the same person athletically, much less one ACL surgery, and he’s had a staph infection that nearly cost him the same leg on top of it. He doesn’t have a couple of gears he used to have athletically and couple this with the fact that he’s on the wrong side of 30 and I think we’re seeing Lawal’s down slope. He had a ton of potential, and he’s still a really good fighter who’ll finish plenty of lesser ones, but that fringe Top 10 where guys like Emmanuel Newton roam is just out of reach for him it looks like.

— Rampage Jackson didn’t show much to look at … again

Christian M’Pumbu was never a guy you would think of as a serious Top 10 level talent for a lot of reasons. I always thought of him as closer to someone like a Stephan Bonnar type, a good fighter who never could be elite. He’s also a functional welterweight fighting up at light heavyweight and Rampage, a large light heavyweight, made him look tiny in comparison.

Rampage did what he should do guys like M’Pumbu, which is finish them in spectacular fashion, but it just shows you that Rampage is talented enough to thrash guys well below him when he’s not particularly motivated. That’s the thing with his show “Rampage for Real” and everything that’s been coming out of his camps since the Jon Jones fight. Rampage just doesn’t care all that much about fighting, which pays the bills, and I think he really wants to just be an actor and musician instead of fighting because he doesn’t enjoy MMA anymore.

That’s what his fight Friday looked like; Rampage playing the part of Rampage, not Quinton Jackson fired up looking to fight everyone and anyone.

— Chandler/Alvarez 3 will be the best PPV of May … and the least viewed

Eddie Alvarez vs. Michael Chandler is the only fight of 2014 I’m genuinely excited for. There are plenty of good fights projected for this year, of course, but after two FOTY candidates we’re looking at most likely a third. But the problem is that it is smack between Mayweather/Maidana and Machida/Weidman, which are likely to get prohibitively more coverage and dollars spent than either of those two. Not too many people are going to shed out money for all three cards. It’s a logical spot for it, as there is no UFC card scheduled for it (and don’t be shocked if the Cincinnati card scheduled a week prior somehow gets rescheduled for a week after), but it’s still a bad spot for it to cross any significantly meaningful PPV number.