The Co-Main Event MMA Podcast

Renato Moicano got stood up from the body triangle on Saturday, friends. The body triangle! One of the most dominant positions a competitor can attain in an MMA fight! Moicano had successfully controlled Tom Nolan with said body triangle for much of their main event bout at last weekend’s UFC Fight Night before referee Dan Miragliotta called for a standup. A few minutes later? It was curtains for Moicano, TKOed by Nolan at the beginning of the third round. Now, granted … Money Moicano hadn’t done a ton with the body triangle … but still … You start standing dudes up from do...

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Well, that was awesome. The Big Homies (and obviously we mean that only figuratively) Alexander Volkanovski and Petr Yan both put on virtuoso performances in their own ways at UFC 333. Volk summarily answered the questions about whether the dog was getting too old to be fighting these young cats with a triumphant, “Fuck no,” as he pretty much styled on Movsar Evloev...

Alexander Volkanovski turned 38 last month. That’s like 150 in men’s featherweight years. This weekend, he’s gonna go out there and defend his 145-pound title against Movsar Evloev, who is undefeated, 32 and has one of those beards that tells you everything you need to know about him. At this moment, the fight’s being deemed a straight pick ’em (both guys going off at -110). If Volk shows up once again looking ageless and dangerous as ever, he’s probably got a good chance to win. If he’s lost a step? That’s gonna be a tough night at the off...

It’s amazing how often this happens: A UFC fighter who was once just happy to be there gets some age and experience under their belt, gains a little notoriety, maybe wins a championship and then suddenly realizes, “Hey, wait a minute, I’m getting screwed here.” Middleweight champion Sean Strickland reached this part of the UFC lifecycle last week, when he started comparing his own paychecks to the big money deals given to dudes like Conor McGregor and Conor Benn. Now Strickland — always one of the UFC’s strangest and most frustrating minds — wants out of his contract, figuring maybe...

Bunch of people got separated from consciousness on Saturday at UFC 332 — just as the good Lord intended. Eleven T/KO finishes in 13 fights. Nine first round stoppages. Not too shabby, if you’re into brain trauma (and if you’re reading this right now, you know who you are). Immediately afterward, the UFC broadcast team, and some of their sycophants online, went pretty hard trying to convince us that this rash of knockouts alone made UFC 332 one of the greatest shows of all time. Could that be true, though, considering how much flak the UFC (rightfully) took for this event...

As many of you know, the big boxing match between Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua is finally official, with the two set to meet on Dec. 11 at Principality Stadium (granddaddy of them all) in Cardiff, Wales. The card will air live on Netflix. Somehow, this news only intensified the war of words between Eddie Hearn and Dana White, with the British boxing promoter quipping that White got “royally mugged off, pants down, bent over, butt cheeks spanked.” GASP!

So, this week, we must ask: Is Dana White really getting royally mugged off in his desperate effort to inse...

Things … did not … go … great … for ya boi Gable Dan Steveson at UFC 331. You could feel the vibes start to shift early in the week, when Sean Sharaf called him a rapist to his face and Steveson’s only response was to smile awkwardly as if to say, “Yeah, I (allegedly) did that shit.” Then, during the actual fight, Steveson caught a hot left hook right on the off switch from Sharaf and got knocked the FUCK out in 12 seconds flat. THEN, as if this wasn’t bad enough, he left the cage before Sharaf even got his hand raised. So, sudd...

The heavyweight title reign of Big Tommy Gas Hands Aspinall came to an end this week, with Aspinall vacating the title because he still can’t get a doctor to sign off on him participating in a cage fight. So, that sucks pretty bad. The most ironic part of it is that Aspinall giving up the belt makes Ciryl Gane the new “undisputed” UFC heavyweight champion — and you’ll recall, Ciryl Gane and his damn pokey fingers are the reason Aspinall can’t fight to begin with! There’s just no justice in MMA, we tell ya.

Anyway, what i...

It feels like the sport of MMA needs a Salahdine Parnasse right now. You know, a charismatic young fighter with an exciting style and the goods to back it up? In these current days of the UFC just rolling out a factory assembly line of anonymous Contender Series fighters, people like this don’t come along every day anymore. Enter: Salahdine Parnasse, former two-division champ from KSW, who the UFC essentially nabbed out from under MVP (the promotion) after he showed out on the Rousey vs. Carano card in May.

The UFC saw fit to give Parnasse a...

It was a weird weekend in combat sports, especially for the big betting favorites. Umar Nurmagomedov cemented his place as the Ziggy Sobotka of his family, getting his plug pulled by Song Ya Dong in their UFC Fight Night main event in Shanghai. The “next Mike Tyson” also lost — as Moses Itauma threatened to rename the Coleman Index after himself, getting more tired than he’d ever been in his life against Filip Hrgovic before his corner threw in the towel. And then there was poor Mike Perry, who dislocated his shoulder early in his fight against replacement opponent Brandon...

Score a couple for the cybernetic organisms, because the biggest winners of the weekend were Gregory “Robocop” Rodrigues and Cris “Cyborg” Justino. Rodrigues went out there in a UFC Fight Night main event and beat up Anthony “Fluffy” Hernandez (who didn’t get on the automated humanoid train with his nickname, which seems like a mistake in retrospect). Cyborg successfully defended her PFL women’s featherweight title against Ketlen Vieira, in a fight that was supposed to be Cyborg’s retirement party — but it turned out Vieira was the one that retired.

Also at the UFC event, there were seven fir...

Is that a Tina Turner reference in the title of this week’s episode? Shut up, don’t worry about it. Anyway, Ian Machado Garry couldn’t quite get it done against Islam Makhachev over the weekend at UFC 330. Garry did a decent job getting up from the takedowns and, as the fight wore on, it actually seemed like Makhachev was the one who got ti-red. But Makhachev had the fight’s biggest moment — kicking Garry in his damn face during the second round — and otherwise was able to salt away the victory with his stifling (if not particularly dangerous) g...

Is there any chance at all that we’re all sitting here next Monday saying, “Well, yeah, it’s obvious in retrospect that Islam Makhachev might struggle with Ian Garry. This was only Makhachev’s second fight at welterweight, after all. Garry is so long and rangy. If he was able to stop the takedowns, it was always gonna be a problem. They have weight classes for a reason, I guess. Also, ain’t that just the way, when it comes to these so-called unbeatable champions?”

Any chance at all? Nah, probably not. But you can’t blame a couple...

“We’re in a whole other fucking stratosphere now. I mean, I’m competing with all the majors. Those guys aren’t my competition. So good luck to them all. I wish them all the best.”

That’s ya boi Dana White talking to the media about last week’s news of Jake Paul and Nikisa Bidarian’s Most Valuable Promotions absorbing the PFL to create the world’s second-largest MMA promotion. No big deal, he says.

And maybe Dana White is telling the truth. The UFC is in another fucking stratosphere now from anybody we’ve previously s...

Just a few months ago, it seemed like we had a lot to look forward to in MMA. You had Ronda Rousey and Gina Carano set to do the damn thing in MVP’s inaugural event. You had the UFC getting ready to go big at the White House. You even had the much-anticipated, loooooooong-awaited return of Conor McGregor. Today? Well, you’ve got Islam Makhachev vs. Ian (whispers: Machado) Garry and Mackenzie Dern vs. Gillian Robertson coming up in mid-August but, other than that, there’s just not a lot on the schedule.

Last weekend, Magomed Ankala...

Well, turns out Conor McGregor blew out both his ACL and meniscus when he tried to do that flying kick against Max Holloway at UFC 329. Pretty much broke his whole shit, which means he’s probably out until at least next summer. As Dana White is quick to point out to everybody who has asked, Conor’s knee is so “fucked up” (his words) that it’s not even really worthwhile discussing what might be next for him until he’s healed up and ready to go again. Oh, and in case you’re wondering, Conor has decided it was actually G...

Things did not go well for ya boi Conor McGregor in his big return fight against Max Holloway at UFC 329 on Saturday. “Fight,” in fact, is probably too strong a word for what happened, after McGregor led off by sprinting across the cage, trying to throw a leaping kick at Holloway’s head and ended up blowing out his own knee on re-entry. Cue the sad trombone for the Notorious One. It goes without saying that this, at 37 years old, after already coming off a serious leg injury and five years of very ugly personal behavior away from the cage...

For being one of MMA’s all-time most talked-about fighters, it sure feels like Conor McGregor is a big, fat unknown headed into his return fight Saturday at UFC 329 against Max Holloway. Don’t know if you’ve noticed but up until about a week ago, the storylines surrounding McGregor have been almost exclusively TERRIBLE … and also NOT about fighting. So, as he prepares to come back to the Octagon for the first time in more than 1,000 days, let’s just say there are questions.

Holloway seems like a bad stylistic matchup for McGregor under the best of circums...

Old guys seem to be having a renaissance in the UFC right now and, as gentlemen of a certain age, we frankly couldn’t be happier. Shout out to Mike “Bad To The” Bohn for pointing out this week that the older fighter has won the main event of every numbered UFC PLE so far this year (Volk and Gaethje, both 37; Chuckie Olives, 36; and Uhlberg and Strickland, both 35). That’s right, 2026 so far is the UFC’s Year of the Unc. But what's really goin' on here? Fighters aging better? The move away from USADA 👀? No decent young athletes want to get i...

Breaking news, Mainiacs! Right before we started recording this episode, the UFC announced that its new artificial intelligence fighter rankings — developed in conjunction with Zuck and the smart kids at Meta — are out! Finally, the pesky whims of humanity will no longer hamper the UFC’s ability to rank fighters in each weight class from 1-15. Now, a computer will use “statistical modeling and machine learning with the deep domain expertise of the UFC” to tell us who’s hot and who’s not. It will evaluate “a comprehensive set of objective metrics, including outcome probability, win type, fighter trajectory, and...

I guess we gotta give a small amount of credit to the UFC for showing some uncharacteristic restraint during Donald Trump’s Big Birthday Bash at the White House. They actually kept the overt MAGA Mania to a minimum. They didn’t show D-Tiddy himself too much (though when they did, he sure seemed to be having a terrible time). They didn’t have anybody pop out of a cake to sing “Happy B-Day, Mr. President,” or bring the special little guy into the cage to give him a championship belt. Then again, if “it could have been worse” is our metric...

D-Tiddy’s Big Boy Birthday Bash faced an unexpected late-breaking hurdle early this week after a lawsuit was filed to try to keep the UFC’s White House spectacular from happening at all. Now, we don’t think that suit is going to go anywhere, but if it did, wouldn’t that just be some MMA shit? Think of the unbelievable disaster!

Plus, unlike the UFC, we also get around to (sorta) talking about the actual fights.

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The UFC is coming off a fairly anonymous Fight Night in Macau last weekend and is headed into a fairly anonymous Fight Night back at the Apex this weekend. And yet, we’re just two weeks away from the big White House spectacular, and the UFC also has Conor McGregor’s alleged return scheduled for later in the summer.

Look, it’s no secret there has been some fairly vocal discontent among a significant portion of UFC fans lately. Does summer 2026 shape up as a make-or-break season for the UFC? And if so, will the guys who own th...

Dana White’s everywhere right now. Time Magazine. Rolling Stone. NPR. The New Yorker. Wait, what? The New Yorker? Believe it.

Leading up to the UFC’s Big Boy Birthday Bash at the White House, Dana’s on a media tour with the actual, legitimate mainstream media. Not surprisingly, he's spent a LOT of that time talking about himself and his very special relationship with ya boi D-Tiddy, and not much time at all talking about the actual fights or the fighters. No surprise there.

But, wait, did Dana seriously just find out THIS WEEK during...

Most Valuable Promotions put on its inaugural MMA event on Netflix last weekend. If we’re being honest, it was a lot. The mismatch-filled main card played out exactly according to chalk. Mike Perry beat Nate Diaz into a living death before their fight was stopped due to cuts. Big Fran KOed a puffed-up light heavyweight in Philipe Lins after a few minutes of toying with his food. And that much-ballyhooed main event between Ronda Rousey and Gina Carano? Hoo boy. We kinda knew it was going to be bad, but we didn’t know it was gonna be THAT...

He did it again, brother. This crazy MFer Sean Strickland once again went out there in a championship fight he had no business winning and walked away with the belt. This time, he took the UFC middleweight strap off the previously undefeated Khamzat Chimaev. Strickland needed a little help from Chimaev himself to pull it off, as the now former champ fought one of the weirdest title fights we’ve seen in a long time, following up an absolutely dominant first round with a disastrous second round before bouncing back to spend the rest of the fight failing to ut...

We’re not totally sure how, but Sean Strickland plans to bring a gun to New Jersey for UFC 328. I mean, is he driving? Does he know a guy he can call when he lands in Newark who will meet him on a darkened street corner and hand him a suspiciously heavy-looking brown paper bag? Anyway, if he does manage to keep that thang on him in Brick City, he says he'll use it to shoot UFC middleweight champion Khamzat Chimaev if Chimaev should try any shady shit outside the cage. For Strickland, it’s probably either that (commit cold...

A little less than a year ago, Jack Della Maddalena was riding high, fresh off scoring the UFC welterweight title from Belal Muhammad at UFC 315. Unfortunately, like they used to say in VH1’s Behind the Music: it was all about to come crashing down. After getting summarily handled by Islam Makhachev in his first title defense at UFC 322, Della Maddalena heads home to the Land of Oz this weekend for a Fight Night main event in what promises to be a good-ass scrap with Carlos Prates. If you’re Jackie Flat Nose here, this seems like one you want...

They put on WrestleMania 42 in Las Vegas over the weekend, and the reaction from at least some wrestling fans has been: “Fuck TKO.” As in, we mean they were actually, literally chanting “Fuck TKO” in the arena during the post-show. Yeah, it seems like the parent company of WWE and the UFC isn’t super popular with either fan base. And maybe they deserve that. Maybe they’re sucking all the life out of both these products on some soulless cash-grab shit, without any thought for the future, and where the only barometer for how things are going is how much mon...

Somehow, Carlos Ulberg won the UFC light heavyweight title on one goddamn leg. Not sure we’ve ever seen anything quite like that. It was an all-time great championship finish. Now, however, at least some of the public discourse has pivoted to whether Jiri Prochazka basically let him off the hook, taking it easier than he should have right up until he very generously walked face-first into a left hook. That doesn’t totally feel fair to Ulberg (winning the belt on one bum wheel should probably earn you more credit) but also, yeah, he’s clearly hurt and even a...

Six different dudes have held the UFC light heavyweight title since Jon Jones vacated it for the last time (well, the last time so far) back in August 2020. Friendly-ass Jan Blachowicz, old-ass Glover Teixeira, weird-ass Jiri Prochazka, off-putting-ass Jamahal Hill, boring-ass Magomed Ankalaev, and legendary-ass Alex Pereira. Yes, that’s a lot of ass, which is mostly what 205 has been since Jones’ recidivist-ass messed around and left the sport.

And now, this weekend, Jiri P. and Carlos Ulberg are gonna go out there at UFC 327 and see if we can’t reinvent this division one more time. Are ei...

The UFC went to Seattle and put on an event many are calling the best of the year so far, where Joe Oliver Pyfer defeated Israel Adesanya in a main event bout that might make ya boi BODYBAGZZZZZZZZZZ somebody in the middleweight division. In other action, Michael Chiesa got his soft-filter retirement celebration (while Niko Price most certainly did not), and Alexa Grasso did some absolutely horrific stuff to Maycee Barber — which, of course, was awesome.

Plus, Dana White came to the postfight press conference and answered several pertinent questions about the UFC product by telling us, “Who...

Most Valuable Promotions announced eight more bouts on Tuesday to fully flesh out its undercard for Ronda Rousey vs. Gina Carano on May 16 and … well, hello there, Junior dos Santos. Long time no see. Yeah, a couple of these newly revealed fights actually are of some interest, including JDS vs. Robelis Despaigne and Muhammad Mokaev re-entering the chat against Adriano Moraes.

Plus, no sooner does Movsar Evloev defeat Lerone Murphy (“Did he thoooough?”) in a “title eliminator” bout than the UFC seems poised to give the next shot at Alexander Volkanovski to Jean Silva. And the Octagon is off to...

Those little rascals at Most Valuable Promotions added another spectacle fight to their big, loud MMA show coming up on Netflix on May 16. Nate Diaz and Mike Perry are set to do the damn thing at the Intuit Dome in Los Angeles, rounding out a lineup of three featured fights that also includes Ronda Rousey vs. Gina Carano and Francis Ngannou vs. Philipe Lins. And that, kids, puts us in an unexpected position.

Who would’ve thought that by the middle of March, with the UFC fresh off announcing the fight card for its gala event at th...

Months and months. The UFC spent months hyping the release of its White House event fight card. Back in July of last year, Dana White said it would be the “Sphere on steroids.” In December, the President of the United States promised “eight or nine championship fights.” Basically every UFC fighter begged to be involved.

Imagine our surprise, then, when the promotion finally released the full list of fights last Saturday and it looked like … just another event? Not BAD by any stretch, but also not the super-mega-MAGA jerkfest we were promised. Now fans are upset, and Jon Jones...

Alex Pereira announced last week that he is vacating the UFC light heavyweight title. Why? Well, nobody has said for sure but … we’ve got some ideas. Ya boi Poatan isn’t just going to give up the strap for no reason. He must be chasing something and, honestly, the only thing for Pereira to chase outside of 205 is a heavyweight title fight (probably at the White House) against one of three men: Jon Jones, Cyril Gane or Tom Aspinall. We know Aspinall is still out trying to get his eyes put back in his head, so that leaves Jones...

As is so typical in this sport, they’re going to give us the superfight. They’re just going to give it to us about 10 years too late. Such is the case with Ronda Rousey vs. Gina Carano, which will go down May 16 (yes, May 16, 2026) at the Intuit Dome in Inglewood, Calif. Perhaps the biggest surprise of all is that the people giving it to us aren’t the UFC, but Most Valuable Promotions — and the fight will air on Netflix.

Let’s be clear: This seems inadvisable. It likely won’t be competitive. But it’s probably going...

On the heels of last week’s stinker between Tallison Teixeira and Tai Tuivasa at UFC 325, this weekend brought us Rizvan Kuniev vs. Jailton Almeida and, wow, holy shit did it absolutely suck. Not to beat a dead horse here but: Heavyweight. Still shitty after all these years, huh? In fact, we have to ask the question: Is the heavyweight division shittier now than it has ever been? That’s a scary thought, but one that deserves some of our attention.

Plus, the weekend’s Fight Night might have been dogshit, but Mario Bautista looked great in the ma...

They did it again, brother, but when it was over it sort of seemed like they probably didn’t need to go to the trouble. Once again, Alexander Volkanovski defeated Diego Lopes by hard-fought but clear-cut unanimous decision, retaining his men's featherweight title at UFC 325. Somehow, the 37-year-old Volk is aging as gracefully as an MMA fighter can, looking damn near unbeatable with a remarkably versatile attack — the striking, the grappling, the feints, the stance switches, etc. , etc. It all gives you a lot to think about out there, and it was too much for Lopes, who came into this...

Apologies for missing the Proper yesterday, friends. We’re back today with an episode of the Co-Main Event Podcast Patreon Live Chat, which we’re releasing for free to everybody. Seemed like a bad week to miss an episode, what with it being on the heels of the first PLE of the Paramount+ Era and the week before UFC 325. So, here ya go!

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