What did he do??

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Man beat Gane the boogeyman that the ufc was propping up, stop falling for Dana's propaganda.

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They couldn’t come to terms on a new contract

I'd want a bag too if I knew Jon Jones was about to kick my shit in a couple times.

Go box and make bank, props to him.

Demanded to be paid his worth as the heavyweight champion

If by “kick his shit in” you mean “not get paid his worth while Jones gouged the fuck out of his eyes” then maybe?

JBJ hasn’t fought in almost three years and looked like dogshit when he did - and that was at 205 lbs. If Jones wanted that smoke, he had plenty of chances to do it. I’m sure Dana would have much rather done that fight than boring ass Ciryl Gane

The fight that should have been made was ngannou vs Jones the gane is just a warm up for him getting back to business.

I'm just shocked they couldn't come to some sort of agreement I really feel ngannou would have pulled an upset.

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Jones hasn't fought in awhile, has never been known for striking power and has lost many of his reach and leverage advantages by going up a weight class.

I hope Ngannou gets the money he wants and deserves. Too long have the UFC paid these fighters very little money to put it all on the line.

>I really couldn’t care less. I just read the article and regurgitated Dana White's spin

Did you just say a guy who obliterated his weight for like 8 years fought like shit? Your opinion obviously doesn't belong here.🤣🤣 Just the Reyes/Gustafson/Cormier fights put him above most guys in the UFC. Probably a Connor fan though, am I right....

He fought 205....he walked around at like 230 on the regular, clowns like you thinking this guy can't throw is absolutely hilarious. Jon throws some of the most brutal spinning elbows in the history of the UFC, also his ground game is unreal, he's one of the only fighters I've ever seen that throws those devestating knees to an opponents side while their grounded. His only loss, was a win, he's undefeated in the UFC for almost ten years, lets be real, and without his crazy personal shit, he's one of the GOATS of the UFC, especially if he starts thrashing these HW.

Man probably thinks White’s wife had it coming for hitting first and back talking.

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On striking power....Jons broke at least 3 dudes orbital bones with ground and pound elbows(ask Shogun Rua😂), so yeah, totally lacking there.🙄

I hope he can go box Tyson Fury and make a lot of money. It is a shame the UFC is being so stubborn.

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did he slap his wife?

99.9% chance he gets bodied tho

No. You get to be the boss if you do that

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He knows that, but he probably ends up making more money boxing.

And more importantly that seems to be where his heart is. He wants to box, and he’s a knockout artist.

UFC doesn’t need Ngannou, I guess we’ll see if he needs UFC.

Do you honestly think he can fight ngannou after 3 years of sitting on his ass? Are you insane? Chuck Liddell beat some dudes up years ago but I wouldn’t bet on him to beat Tyson fury. You’re bringing up old shit and somehow making the leap that he can do that do a guy who’s 50lb heavier than him? Ok… pray tell why hasn’t he had the title for the past 3 years if he’s so good?

To be fair, I saw this coming bit it still pisses me off. Pay the man ffs, let him lose his title legitimately, then can his ass. It sucks the Gane match might be the last time I see Ngannou in MMA

His elbows are definitely a lot scarier than his punches.

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I honestly was hoping to see ngannou get knocked out and eat one or two more punches as he lays there KO’d. Considering he likes to throw a couple of more shots after his opponent is knockout. I even kind of remembering one fight where he clearly knocks out his opponent. And even after the ref grabbed ngannou, ngannou was still gonna try to throw another punch.

Does anybody know here how much he made? Or what he was going for? No. What do we know? That he wanted to make more (than his fellow fighters) Pretty heavy for someone who ate out of a garbage can not that long ago. Either way a shame for the sport. He could have prolonged that title and give Gane and Jon Jones a whooping now that he was throwing ground game into the mix.

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Why does Stipe keep getting screwed on a title shot? Dude has the most hw title defenses in ufc history and should have been first in line, rematch or not

Dana White is a fucking piece of shit. There’s just no two ways about it.

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Cause he doesn't draw views. The ufc isn't a meritocracy anymore (if it ever was), it's a popularity competition now.

No probably about it. Unless he’s got the worst agent ever, he’d make more in one fight vs Tyson Fury than he made in his entire UFC career combined

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Dana is all about inclusivity. He’s an equal opportunity cheapskate who underpays his fighters regardless of ethnicity

Well done.

They offered him a deal to be the highest paid heavyweight fighter of all time.

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so says dana. have any #’s been made public?

I mean he’s not going to just claim that when Francis and Ngannous team could just refute it which they haven’t.

you doing alright? that’s easily half of the ufc you described.

Is it normal for sports to strip champions of titles due merely to them not participating in the league anymore?

Like if the Lakers wins an NBA title, then some contract negotiations resulted in the org exiting the league, can they just take back the title?

of course he is. he’s a promoter, he’ll say anything he can to make himself look better. brock made $2.5mil to fight mark hunt at ufc 200. i guarantee they didn’t offer francis that. highest base salary francis ever made was $600k for the gane fight and he was making $150-200k before that.

i’ll believe it was the biggest hw contract if/when the contract leaks, until then it’s just dana doing what dana does.

I get you gotta finish the fight. With that said Ngannou is pretty consistent with his follow up shots, and his opponents tend to be laid the fuck out. He even seems to want to continue to throw after the ref steps in. The follow up from ngannou comes off very malicious compared to the rest of the ufc roster.

With that said, I am getting down voted for wanting someone to give ngannou a follow up shot. Seems people don’t like the idea of the follow up.

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About tree fiddy

Historically there isn’t a lot of precedent, but the closest is probably the Tour de France/Armstrong stuff or the collegiate level stuff in Basketball and Football - those titles were all vacated (Armstrong may have also been stripped, not sure, but those Tour titles were vacated meaning nobody technically “won” in the record books).

I don’t know that there is a parallel though, at least in large organized sports, it’s pretty wild for a sitting champ to literally just bail out on the organization and I don’t even know what my feelings are.

You also have, in the NBA, one of the most player-friendly arrangements in all of sport…the NBPA pulls the strings in the league, there’s a real tangible power imbalance favoring players and I’m hugely in favor of that model - I think if this ever happened in the NBA you wouldn’t even catch a whiff of a title being stripped.

The UFC is a terrible organization. Someone needs to start an athlete owned MMA company where athletes aren't getting fucked over.

>Cause he doesn't draw views.

Gane draws even less. You’d have to think Jones vs. Miocic would bring in more views.

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Dana says the same shit every time there’s a situation like this and these mooks always lap it up

The UFC would be so much better without Dana

Yeah, Dana never lies

Stipe was approached to fight Jones for the vacant title before Gane, and they weren’t able to get Stipe to agree to it. So they went to Gane next.

In combat spprts you need to defend your belt. If you dont defend you are not the champ.

Makes sense, over 12.5 million bought PPVs to watch McGregor lose five out of nine fights. Two of those were in 2021 with no crowd but still had over 1.5 million PPV buys each.

UFC 260 and 270 with Ngannou as the main event maybe broke over 500K buys together.

Not sure the players would agree the NBA collective bargaining agreement is that player friendly. I strongly suspect the union doesn’t like individual player max and overall salary caps.

Basketball is somewhat unlike many other professional sports in that talent is relatively obvious at the time the player is signing their rookie deal. My suspicion is a baseball or fifa football style league structure (mostly without hard player or team salary caps) for the NBA would get NBA players in aggregate payed more, with high potential rookies and all stars in particular doing better enough a probable reduction in comp for the veteran role players wouldn’t swamp it.

The idea is to do it with mma gloves so Francis has a chance; that'd be interesting.

I think he quietly retired without announcing anything.

They didn’t strip it and act as if he was never champ. It’s not removed from the records. He’s still former HW champion and will be forever. Just not reigning champ.

haven’t you followed the updates about pfl? You’ll see him rather sooner than later. I dislike jake paul but it might be a good development for the fighters

This was a forgone conclusion. This was coming down the road for two years. Both sides were very vocal multiple times about potential contract discussions.

Shame because I think neither side is even considering each other's vantage point.

Don’t worry Dana is investigating that

NBA isn’t nearly at volume for those models to apply, and I think the current issue (if there is one from the player perspective, aside from the brutal schedule and wildly varying officiating quality they don’t have a ton of complaints) isn’t with the structure of contracts or the overall wealth distribution amongst them (we’re seeing $140 million contracts given to year 2, year 3 players already…and not high draft guys) it’s the distillation of league capital amongst markets.

There will never, ever, be a population that can support an Oklahoma City franchise the same way a population can support a New York franchise…and it’s bad. My team is worth $7.5 Billion - putting them in second behind the Dallas Cowboys in team valuation amongst all North American sports - and a team like the Pelicans are worth about $1.6 Billion; that essentially means the Pelicans are physically incapable of earning as much as the Warriors in a business capacity, which means ownership groups will never have the ability to spend on salary. The salary cap in the NBA is soft, it effectively does not exist when someone like Joe Lacob takes a several hundred million dollar hit in luxury taxes every year with a smile and a trophy in his hands. So right now it’s not the inability of players to get well paying contacts, it’s the lack of earning potential in individual markets and a massive disparity between the ones at the top and the rest of the league in terms of spending potential whilst still turning a profit. The owners have painted themselves into a corner.

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Wholeheartedly disagree. Jones vs Ngannou had the potential to be the biggest fight ever. UFC fumbled the bag over pride.

What did he do ? Hit his wife ? That too publicly ? Oh never mind wrong guy.

My thought experiment for “how player friendly is a league’s salary structure?” is basically trying to imagine what would happen if owners were banned from violating otherwise applicable labor laws (an example of such a violation would be dictating to employees who they have to work for through a draft). So I’m not sure I’d agree that the distribution of league capital is really separable from overall compensation, but I’m also not sure if you’re really arguing it’s a separate issue or not.

It seems to me that, as you observe, some owners have a willingness to spend money to win games that goes past the cap. It also seems somewhat obvious to me that, in addition to proving the salary cap is porous, such free spending owners prove that there is large unmet demand from owners for “winning.” Surely if Joe Lacob is willing to pay salary plus luxury tax, he would be willing to pay the same total amount in pure salary. Therefore I assume that (at least current period) NBA comp would rise without a cap.

The long term problem is related to the one you highlight in that, under my thought experiment, the league probably becomes even more top heavy than it is already especially with respect to major metro areas. It also become vulnerable to boom/bust overspend cycles. This may be bad for the league overall long term and bad for future players.

I’m also not 100% sure whether the luxury tax gets spent on salaries or not by teams below the cap. Like it doesn’t seem like it does necessarily but I couldn’t figure it out googling while watching wildcard games. Cheers!

He has a couple losses to usada and god though...

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Dude hasn't KO'd anyone in over 4 years, has 1 KO in coming on 10 years now + he's moving up a weight class.

The UFC currently holds onto 83% of revenue. Had the revenue been shared in line with other professional sports (50%), UFC fighters would have made $330,000,000 more in 2022 alone, 3 times what they actually made.

Fighters desperately need a union.

Francis is the ‘B’ side. Fury’s calling the shots if he wants the fight.

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"he didn't want it lol", more like Gane took less money than Stipe. Stipe knows his worth and is happy to family and firefight rather than lose more braincells.

i actually think you’re getting down voted because francis isn’t known for his cheap shots, so it sounds a little extreme. speaking for myself, it was the description of it more than anything that struck me. i don’t like the follow up shots but i understand that they’re engaging basically in a blood sport and adrenaline makes people do erratic things. also, i don’t begrudge you wanting to see certain fighters get a taste of their own medicine. i can relate to that.

i will also say it doesn’t really make your case when you say the ref pulled him off and he tried to throw another punch. that’s what the ref is there for, sounds like it worked as intended.

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But gane has shown he'll play the game. So dana would rather an obedient person who draws a bit less than someone like stipe who will call it like it is.

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Jairzinho Rozenstruik (multiple shots after the KO)

Luis Henrique, follow up was on the throat

Stipe (2nd fight, look at how slow and deliberate that one was. Much like Hendos on bisping)

Overeem (similar to stipe, i think alistar had a seizure from that one, i could be wrong)

Those were all after some pretty obvious KO’s, followed up by some of brutal punches. There are multiple post about Ngannou follow ups. If you’re ok, with that you should be ok with Ngannou eating a follow up as well. If you’re not ok with follow ups, then you’re probably not a fan of Ngannou which is cool.

With that said, we all should agree on one thing. If the ref gets inbetween a fighter and a KO opponent, and the fighter still is going to throw follow ups; we should all agree on that going way too far. Once the ref grabs you, the fight is over, there is no reason to keep going.

I don’t think that was the case. I think he was offered and either wasn’t ready or was injured or whatever. I think he will accept the financial offer to fight the winner at a time when he is ready to go.

Good for him. He can get paid what he deserves. Dana is a greedy asshole.

The article says he can negotiate with MMA and boxing with zero interference from UFC.

Maybe, but when someone is at the top in the top MMA promotion in the world, it's a step down. Whatever happens, I hope the man gets paid

Yup.

It's the fight everyone wanted too see.

But ufc is too l cheap to make it.

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The way it is worded almost makes it sound like they are defending the UFC. He is not affiliated with UFC so of course they can't interfere.

oh i see what you’re saying, not after the ref intervenes but after it seems like the fighter is done. fair points. and again, i’m not upset about the idea of ngannou eating follow up shots, what you’re talking about happens in probably 95% of fights where fighters go out and while i don’t love them, i realize that they’re always because the ref is in a bad position. if francis goes out and the ref isn’t there, he’ll eat some shots for sure.

totally agree on the last ref part.

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Funny enough Stipe posted an hour after my comment calling for the winner of Jones vs. Gane.

Do I wish I could see more Ngannou fights in the UFC? Sure. Am I going to stop watching UFC because he left? No. Best wishes to him and I'll watch if he fights somewhere else but, whatever.

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They called that boi ciryl gane instead

Fun fact: Hardest punch that's ever been recorded is from Francis Ngannou

Dude can punch harder than anyone in the world, think about that for a min

why a step down? he is reigning champion but most of the fighters (also francis) have been complaining about the pay they receive from this established brand. as I see it, the tide can swiftly change if enough athletes switch to pfl since they have enough capital behind them (given they take the right steps businesswise and establish good events)

Get that bag, Francis! Smartest thing any prize fighter can do.

This is how the UFC begins to lose its legitimacy as the place the best fighters operate within. If Francis starts fighting in another league, he can bring in sponsors and there’s a real shot to disrupt UFC here.

Everybody wants a union on their way up, but then they become a yes man to the system once they make it. Thereby killing any leverage.

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I don’t think it was pride. They want to avoid precedence.

The modern UFC was Dana White's idea.

You can't be serious. Please don't tell me you have been mislead to this degree.

Your hatred doesn't change the facts.

Well The Fertitas and Dana bought the UFC. It’s my opinion that the UFC would be better off without Dana, he treats people badly, has bad business practices. His monster ego gets in the way of everything.

>The Fertitas and Dana bought the UFC.

That's not true. The Fertitas bought the old UFC after Dana White pitched them the idea for the new UFC.

Apparently Francis was demanding better treatment for all fighters, not just himself, and that’s why they cut him. What a legend.

He’s be better of fighting one of the Paul’s then retire of the huge payday

Maybe. The Tyson Fury fight would be more interesting I think. Although he would lose I am amazed by how Fury can out box people. He can still make a lot from a fight with Fury.

Either way i hope he makes it out with a HUGE bag

I think fans should start supporting alternatives, UFC sometimes feels like the be all and end all

Fans definitely share a certain responsibility here as well. Unfortunately a significant portion of the fanbase subscribes to the "just bleed" mantra, as many of those who care about the fighters have stepped away from the sport due to the lack of protections for fighter well-being.

Yeah, that spoke volumes about his character. It says a lot that he is walking away from the UFC, while its president sticks around after beating his wife in public with no repercussions from Endeavor or Disney.

My hope is that Francis leads the charge for a union when he retires from fighting.