With UFC's final 2020 event finished, what have we learned? (2024)

And then, just like that, it was over. After a frantic sprint to the end of the year – 24 consecutive weeks with at least one event – the UFC finished up its last show of 2020 with a gritty five-round battle between Stephen Thompson and Geoff Neal, a bout which Thompson won via unanimous decision after splitting open his face on Neal’s head and sprouting a third kneecap before the final round.

Hope you enjoyed it, because it’s going to have to last you a while. There’s not another UFC event until mid-January, an almost unthinkable pause after the frenetic pace the UFC adopted following that initial COVID-19 shutdown in late March. After restarting on May 9 with UFC 249, the UFC didn’t go a single month with fewer than four events until December, when it stopped at three with Christmas rolling in the following weekend.

That’s a lot of fights, and it doesn’t even count the many, many bouts that were canceled by positive COVID-19 tests along the way. A hell of a year in the business of professional cage fighting. What, if anything, can we claim to have learned from it?

There’s the big-picture stuff, most of which we already knew or should have known. Like the fact the UFC events schedule stops for no one and no virus. Also the fact that, once the UFC proves it can be done, other MMA promotions like Bellator will happily follow the trail that’s already been blazed.

Then there’s the stuff we learned about fighters, like who seems to do well without a crowd to hype them up and who really doesn’t. We learned that having a makeshift gym in your garage (or actually owning one) sometimes really comes in handy. We learned that, for some, having too much time to sit around and think (or drink) is a recipe for disaster. For others, we saw how the opportunity to keep signing up for fights one right after another while the full roster is unavailable was actually all the break they needed.

For the more granular details, the final two UFC events of 2020 were actually pretty instructive. Take UFC 256, for example.

The final pay-per-view event of the year went through a dizzying carousel of potential headliners before eventually calling upon the new flyweight champion and his gamest possible challenger to step in and save the day on three weeks’ notice. It worked, too. While 125-pound champ Deiveson Figueiredo and challenger Brandon Moreno were two guys the UFC and its fan base had pretty much ignored prior to this year (the UFC actually cut Moreno as part of its unofficial flyweight purge a couple of years ago), they delivered an instant classic in the cage despite the incredibly short notice for a five-round title fight.

The card also got some help thanks to a hastily booked co-main event pitting former interim lightweight champ Tony Ferguson against Charles Oliveira, giving the latter the opportunity to show why his name should be added to the title talk in that division.

What does all that tell us? Well, for one thing, it proves that a lack of talent isn’t a problem for the UFC. It has some truly fantastic fighters. As a matter of fact, it has more of them than it knows what to do with most of the time. It has so many that they too easily get lost in the jumble. Somehow it still has enough that it can get all the way down to Plan E and still have faith that whoever does manage to show up will give us a fight worth seeing. One wonders if sometimes the UFC takes that ability for granted.

Then there’s the final Fight Night event, in which Thompson and Neal put on an excellent fight for the vaguest of stakes. Was that to determine who gets the next welterweight title shot? Definitely not. Was it a matchup the division had been crying out for? Not really. But when you’ve got so many good fighters in one division, you can almost pull two names out of a hat and get something decent from it. Again, the kind of thing that might be taken for granted.

But you look at the lineup for the first quarter of the next year and you see reason for optimism. This year has been an ongoing kick to the groin and finger to the eye for fight fans with all the promised bouts yanked out from under us at the last minute, but at least the plans for what’s to come look good.

And yeah, I know, fight card subject to change and all that. But if we’ve learned anything from the year we’ve just seen, it’s that the talent is there. It’s never been better, honestly. Even if getting everybody to the cage as planned only seems to keep getting tougher, hey, it can’t go on like that forever, right?

So we tell ourselves, anyway. So goes the mantra to keep us moving on to the next one. Another thing the past year has shown this sport to be especially good at.

(Top photo: Chris Unger / Zuffa LLC)