Will the quality of these fights be worth spending $65 at a time millions of people are on unemployment?
This is not a flippant question. On your ordinary fight card, sure, you’ve got your fair share of short-notice fights, fighters who go into the cage after horrible weight cuts, and all sorts of circumstances under which fighters compete under less-than-ideal situations.
But there’s never been a disruption anything like COVID-19. Gyms all over the country had to shut down to slow the spread of the virus. Undoubtedly many of the fighters had hush-hush arrangements to continue quietly training with their usual partners that we’ll never hear about.
But the show’s also been a shotgun arrangement, as the UFC had to pick up the pieces after a month and a half of events were wiped off the schedule. Some fighters are going on short notice, some have been in start-and-stop patterns for months.
The bottom line is, there’s an even wider range of preparedness or lack thereof than you’ll find on a typical event. It could make for a night of subpar, sloppy fights, or, conversely, a night of wildly entertaining scraps. But it’s a fair bet this won’t be an ordinary evening of action, one way or another.
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