The Co-Main Event MMA Podcast

Friends, our apologies for leaving you hanging without an episode of the Proper yesterday. Circumstances beyond our control and all that. We hope that you will accept this free episode of the Patreon Live Chat as a peace offering. On this episode we entertain such questions as: Who is worse, Jon Jones or Conor McGregor? What’s left for Colby Covington after losing to Joaquin Buckley? And what MMA...

So, maybe Shavkat Rakhmonov fought Ian (Machado) Garry with an injury on Saturday at UFC 310. Maybe that’s why THAT BOY GOOD didn’t look quite as GOOD as we expected, even as he emerged with the unanimous decision win. Maybe it was merely the fault of our own expectations that left us feeling disappointed by the fight. And, yeah, now everybody’s gotta admit that Garry is very good. Maybe even elit...

Yeah, we know what you’re thinking. First of all: Men’s flyweight pay per view main event? Second of all: Who the hell is Kai Asakura? We get it. From 15,000 feet, maybe UFC 310 doesn’t look like the greatest PPV of the year … and it’s not. But you know what? It’s actually a pretty deep fight card. Not only do you get to see the former two-time Rizin (Risin’? Risen?) bantamweight champ Asakura dro...

It has been a long time since Conor McGregor was a relevant fighter in the UFC. Now, his worth as a human being seems to be rapidly diminishing, as well. This week, after being found guilty of rape in a civil trial in Ireland, some bad stuff finally started happening to McGregor. Now that he’s an adjudicated rapist, he’s been ordered to pay his victim around $250,000, has been ditched by the new o...

The fights themselves were not necessarily the story for either Jake Paul or Jon Jones, during what has to be considered one of the biggest combat sports weekends in recent memory. For Jake Paul, it wasn’t really that interesting that he went out there on Friday and beat the Ghost of Mike Tyson at Cowboy Stadium in front of a reported 65 million households on Netflix. The story was how many people...

Albeit for very different reasons, we’ve been looking forward to both Jon Jones vs. Stipe Miocic and Mike Tyson vs. Jake Paul for a while now. Both fights have experienced lengthy delays (one owing to Jones’ torn pectoral, the other owing to Tyson “vomiting blood and defecating tar” on an airplane) and now they are going to share a single weekend. The spectacle that will be Tyson vs. Paul airs Fri...

Belal Muhammad is out of his scheduled title defense against Shavkat THAT BOY GOOD Rakhmonov at UFC 310, owing to an infected bone in his toe. Say what? An infected BONE? We didn’t even know that was a thing that could happen. The hunt is now on for a replacement and you KNOW who the UFC is going to call first. Alex Pereira, that’s who. Honestly, though, hasn't Poatan done enough? Can’t we just le...

What a strange mix of emotions we felt watching UFC 308. On one hand, it was cool to see guys like Ilia Topuria and Khamzat Chimaev score big wins to solidify themselves among the next wave of MMA’s great fighters. But why, oh why, did it have to happen at the expense of our beloved Max Holloway and Robert Whittaker? In the end it was another stark reminder that fighting is not like other sports....

There are a lot of lean times in MMA. A lot of times where it feels like, for lack of a better term, ain’t shit goin’ on. This is not one of them. With Francis Ngannou making his return to MMA last Saturday with a first-round KO over Renan Ferreira in PFL and this Saturday offering us Ilia Topuria vs. Max Holloway at UFC 308, well, that’s about as good a couple of weekends as we’re gonna get in th...

This Saturday in Saudi Arabia, Francis Ngannou returns to the cage for the first time since January 2022. A lot has transpired since then, as we all know: Big Fran left the UFC amid a bitter contract dispute, he made a lot of money boxing, he suffered unthinkable personal tragedy … and now, he’s going to show up to fulfill his obligations to PFL by fighting Renan Ferreira on the fight company’s “B...

UFC 307 was not one for the record books. In fact, right up to the point that Alex Pereira and Khalil Rountree Jr. took the cage for the light heavyweight title fight main event, it was sort of a stinker. But then Pereira and Rountree went to war – and it was pretty glorious. Shoutout to Rountree for showing up and showing out better than we had any right to expect. Ultimately, though, it was Pere...

Alex Pereira sure fights a lot. Saturday’s light heavyweight title defense against Khalil Rountree Jr. at UFC 307 will be Poatan’s fourth fight in the last calendar year and also his 10th in the UFC since his promotional debut in Nov. 2021. Especially at the championship level, that’s a fairly absurd output. In fact, it’s the sort of thing that we’ve seen come back to bite people in the past. This...

The UFC’s long-awaited, much hyped debut at Sphere in Las Vegas finally went down Saturday and – you know what? – it was actually pretty cool. The visuals were stunning, the atmosphere was unique and it was refreshing to see the fight company break out of its cookie-cutter mold and take some chances. Now, was it the greatest night in the history of combat sports or whatever? Probably not. Did the...

Well, Main-iacs, the time is finally here. This is the week the UFC heads across town to (the) Sphere for UFC 306. Dana White has convinced himself that the dummies on the internet said he couldn’t do it, so a lot is riding on how things come out. The UFC is promising short films between fights and that the fights themselves will take place in “different worlds.” What’s that mean? We don’t know! O...

Since we missed the Proper yesterday, we thought we'd go ahead and put this episode of the Live Chat out on the regular free CME podcast feed. For you free listeners, think of it as a view behind the curtain at what's going on at our Patreon Page. Seriously, it's wild! It's weird! Is it sometimes wonderful? Only one way to find out. Join the team: https://www.patreon.com/comainevent For those of y...

Caio Borralho and Jared Cannonier actually had themselves an entertaining scrap on Saturday in the main event of the UFC's latest offering on ESPN. In the end, it was Borralho notching the unanimous decision win … after coming as close as humanly possible to knocking out Cannonier without them actually scoring it that way on the official record. It was clearly the biggest win of Borralho’s career...

How does Dricus du Plessis keep doing this shit, man? This is a guy who fights like he’s in PRIDE in like 2005. He rushes in, throwing them haymakers, seemingly just hoping for the best — and somehow it’s still working for him. This he proved Saturday at UFC 305, defeating Israel Adesanya via fourth round submission (!) to retain his middleweight title. It really and truly boggles the mind. Plus,...

We’re going to Perth for UFC 305 and Dricus Du Plessis vs. Israel Adesanya for the UFC middleweight title. It’s both a fight and a fight card that are flying under the radar just a little bit here. There’s a lot on this show that seems like it might be of, uh, local interest. Hold on, though, are we giving this card short shrift? Does this fight between DDP and Izzy actually have bigger implicatio...

The UFC this week made good on its promise to book a men’s featherweight title fight between Ilia Topuria and Max Holloway and we … are … stoked. For hardcore fans, this might be the best fight available right now (if we’re really going through with Jones vs. Stipe instead of Jones vs. Aspinall) and actually getting it is cause for celebration. It’s going down at UFC 308 in October. Only question...

Belal Muhammad went and did it. The man the UFC forced to go 10 fights without a loss between 2019-2024 before finally granting him a title shot. The man who came into Manchester a significant underdog to champion Leon Edwards. The one we all thought faced a terrible matchup of styles behind enemy lines. That guy. He walked out of UFC 304 the new welterweight champ on Saturday. So, shows what we a...

Oops! … He did it again. Jake Paul played with our hearts, got lost in the game on Saturday, as he dispatched Mike Perry via sixth round TKO. Things went a little off the rails after that, with Conor McGregor trying to “fire” Perry on social media and calling Paul a “pissbag.” Meanwhile, Paul called out Alex Pereira in a fight which seemed both interesting and also impossible. OK, so hear us out,...

Things Jon Jones has done on Twitter over the last few weeks include, but are not limited to: Announcing he gained 50/50 custody of a son we (maybe?) didn’t know he had. Posted a picture with his new cybertruck. Forgot his own birthday (maybe?). And also posted that he cut half his finger off at the Las Vegas airport. Maybe? Hard to know. After Jones did the old tweet-and-delete of his finger twee...

Well, you know what they say about sunshine and the proverbial dog’s ass. Hard to believe, but Nate Diaz and Jorge Masvidal went out there and had an (allegedly) entertaining boxing match over the weekend. We guess the law of averages says it was bound to happen eventually. Question is, though, now that we’re this far down the road into the overwhelmingly disappointing “old MMA guys try to box” pe...

Turned out, Alex Pereira didn’t need the dark arts to defeat Jiri Prochazka. He just needed Prochazka to continually rush at him with little to no defenses around his face until Pereira could start landing his bombs. Next thing you know, Jiri was standing there making his sad samurai face while Poatan was getting his hand raised. But now that Pereira is ensconced as UFC light heavyweight champion...

So, now we know. It was the toe. The pinkie toe, to be exact. The littlest pig. That’s what kept Conor McGregor out of the fight of the year, his grudge (?) match years in the making against Michael Chandler. And lo, what irony of all ironies it was the original SLG himself, Chael Sonnen, who trolled Conor into posting pics of the injured digit online which … yeah, that went about like you’d expec...