What, if anything, is to be done about the scourge of eye pokes in MMA? Is Ilia Topuria on the verge of the greatest three-fight run in MMA history, and is the UFC going to stand in the way? And of all the canceled fights, which one hurts the most?
All that and more in this week’s mailbag. To ask a question of your own, hit up @benfowlkesMMA or @benfowlkes.bsky.social.
@lexsimon.bsky.social: At this point why not just return to the NHB days and make eye pokes legal? Would the sport and fighting strategy change that much?
Fun fact: Eye gouging was one of the very few things not allowed at the first UFC. Yet still it continues to be a problem today. Ain’t that something?
What’s wild to me is that this has been a known problem for years now — decades even — and we have really tried almost nothing as a means of addressing it. Seriously, Randy Couture was out there getting eye-poked by Chuck Liddell in the mid-2000s and really nothing has changed since then to make that any less likely today.
It seems clear to me that the problem is the gloves. Take Saturday’s UFC main event between Song Yadong and Henry Cejudo, for example. Song wasn’t trying to poke Cejudo in the eye(s). He was clearly trying to intercept Cejudo’s right hand, which had already pasted him a few times in the fight. But this time the right hand was a feint by Cejudo, so Song reached out for something that wasn’t there just as Cejudo moved forward into those outstretched, reaching fingers. The result? Cejudo got Three Stooges’d in both eyes and the fight ended up being stopped.
We can say that Song should have lost a point (I do think all fouls — eye pokes, groin shots, fence grabs — should be confirmed via replay followed by an automatic point deduction), but then that fight ends as a majority draw. I doubt we’d feel any more satisfied with that outcome.
The crazy thing is, designs for gloves that might limit eye pokes are out there. They’ve been out there for years. And when the UFC announced that it had done tons of research and spent a bunch of money to design new gloves, many of us quite reasonably thought that limiting eye pokes would be the priority. Turns out, as the glove designers told us, it wasn’t really even much of a thought. Then the UFC ditched those new gloves a few months later anyway. Now we’re back to doing nothing except complaining about eye pokes after the fact.
What fight that was booked but cancelled do you wish happened the most?
I am enough of a dreamer to think that Rumble would of beaten Jones
Making myself sad looking at some of these
Cejudo vs Aldo – Leon vs Khamzat – RDA vs Conor – Tony vs Khabib
— Conor (@NeedXtoseePosts) February 25, 2025
@NeedXtoseePosts: What fight that was booked but cancelled do you wish happened the most?
I am enough of a dreamer to think that Rumble would of beaten Jones
Making myself sad looking at some of these
Cejudo vs Aldo – Leon vs Khamzat – RDA vs Conor – Tony vs Khabib
As someone who had just banked a really interesting interview with Dan Hooker about 12 hours before he announced he was out of the Justin Gaethje fight at UFC 313, that one feels pretty top of mind for me.
As for the ones you mentioned, Khabib Nurmagomedov vs. Tony Ferguson felt like the one that got away. At least, it felt like that for a time. But after witnessing Ferguson’s sharp decline, I’m not sure it would have been all that competitive in practice.
Looking outside the UFC, I’m still mad that we didn’t get Fedor Emelianenko vs. Josh Barnett in Affliction. Of course, we know why. Barnett got flagged by a drug test and Affliction called off the entire event right before throwing in the towel on what had essentially been a money pit of a fight promotion to begin with.
And though it was never actually booked, I can’t quite forgive Strikeforce for missing a chance to do Emelianenko vs. Alistair Overeem. Scott Coker and his crew tried to set it up for later in the heavyweight grand prix, forgetting that the MMA gods take great pleasure in wrecking the best-laid plans.
If you could DOGEify the combat world, who would be purged and why?
— MMAbandwagon (@MMAbandwagon) February 25, 2025
@MMAbandwagon: If you could DOGEify the combat world, who would be purged and why?
Can I say something without people getting mad? It’s the ring/Octagon women. They add nothing. They do nothing. It’s a holdover from an age of boxing when the crowds were all male and the fight cards didn’t include women who were actually athletes. It’s a tired, old tradition and we would lose nothing at all if it finally just went away.
And look, I’m a red-blooded hetero man. I like looking at pretty ladies. But we live in a society where the lack of opportunities to look at pretty ladies is really not a problem. Every person watching these UFC events has, in their pockets, a miniature computer that can conjure up an infinite number of pretty lady images within seconds. So why do we need the fake smiles and blown kisses from cageside? We don’t, is the answer. There I said it.
If Topuria fights Islam next and takes him out, would that be the most impressive 3 fight win streak in UFC history?
— Now Boarding Flight 209 (@jmprobus) February 25, 2025
@jmprobus: If Topuria fights Islam next and takes him out, would that be the most impressive 3 fight win streak in UFC history?
If it’s not, what is? Who else has not just beaten but absolutely demolished the two previous greats of his division (in one calendar year), then gone up a division to beat a dominant champ and pound-for-pound No. 1 in a higher weight class to complete the trilogy?
The fact that UFC CEO Dana White is even talking about doing anything other than Ilia Topuria vs. Islam Makhachev next is absurd. It is the biggest fight you could make for either of them. It’s one of the biggest fights you could make, period, in any weight class. To even suggest that you might forego it should be enough to get your promoter’s license revoked.
Topuria is doing exactly what we always say we want fighters to do. He finished two greats and now wants to challenge himself against a champ in a higher weight class. He even vacated his title to do it, so as not to hold up the featherweight division. That confidence and ambition, the willingness to take a huge risk in order to chase greatness — that’s rare. How could you not at least give him the chance?
Why is the UFC matching an unretired, resurgent Jose Aldo the way they are?
— Jay Pettry (@jaypettry) February 26, 2025
@jaypettry: Why is the UFC matching an unretired, resurgent Jose Aldo the way they are?
It doesn’t seem like the UFC quite knows what to do with him. He’s a former great in a tough division, but he’s still good enough that he could maybe spoil someone else’s contender hopes. The fight game loves to feed the old to the young, but it’s tricky when the old guys stay just competitive enough to be a problem. Right now it seems like the UFC’s strategy on Aldo is to treat him like he’s just another interchangeable mid-level guy, which is a bummer. He deserves better. And the fans deserve to see him in more interesting matchups.
