Monday, June 22, 2009

What We've Learned From Bellator FC Season 1

The first season of the Bellator Fighting Championships is one for the books and champs in four weight classes have been crowned. So what have we learned over the course of a dozen shows? (More bullet points! Yay!)
  • Toby Imada may not be the best fighter at 155, but the dude is dangerous if you let your guard down.
  • Nothing says "viral buzz" like a YouTube clip. Bravo to the Bellator exec who greenlighted putting highlights on the Internet.
  • Jared Hess sure can bleed.
  • Hector Lombard is a monster. But we knew that, just like we knew Eddie Alvarez and Lyman Good were monsters.
  • Joe Soto is one tough featherweight bastard, and he's shown just how beatable Wilson Reis is. Reis barely squeaked by Roberto Vargas, who took a page from Soto's book by out-scrambling the master scrambler.
  • If there's a bantamweight tournament in the cards, it has to include Nick Pace.
  • There aren't a lot of A-level or even upper B-level Latino fighters. There are, however, a lot of up-and-comers. Give them time and Omar De La Cruz, Hector Urbina, Estavan Payan and Yahir Reyes will be killers.
  • Smooth production, professional packaging and decent fights means season two will definitely be worth watching.

2 comments:

garth2 said...

that all sounds awesome...but sadly, I could only watch online, with a delay. I tried to get the ESPND channel JUST for this, in Spanish (which I don't speak worth a damn), and the hurdles were simply too high. I can understand making a Latino-market-aimed show, that's just smart marketing...but make it available to the other folks who want to watch. I'm betting the advertisers would appreciate some extra eyeballs, even purportedly from anglos.
I've tried writing about this but ESPN does not respond. hopefully the reception will be such that they'll air bellator on an english language channel.

Jim Genia said...

The word is they're going to be on one of ESPN's English channels next time around.