The Co-Main Event MMA Podcast

Bellator staged the top MMA event of the weekend, with Sergio Pettis outdueling Patricio Pitbull in a compelling scrap for the men's bantamweight championship and light heavyweight titlist Vadim Nemkov reaffirming his greatness pitching a shutout against Yoel Romero. With both sides also confirming a Bellator-PFL merger is at least being explored, we'll take a look at what that might mean for comb...

Amanda Nunes pretty much whooped-up on Irene Aldana to retain her women's bantamweight title and then retired in the cage, which was a nice moment. Canadian fighters went undefeated in front of their home countrymen in Vancouver, which obviously was a feel-good story. But you know who really stamped their name on UFC 289 on Saturday? Charles Oliveira, that's who. Oliveira went out there and spoile...

Amanda Nunes returns Saturday to defend her women's bantamweight title against Irene Aldana at UFC 289. Should be a solid little scrap, though we're not sure there's any reason to suspect Nunes might lose ... except, well, she is 36 years old, recently left American Top Team to start her own gym and has been openly talking about retirement since her feud with Juliana Pena. So, can Aldana pull the...

Conor McGregor is "filling out the paperwork" to re-enroll in the USADA testing pool, according to Dana White, which means the biggest star in MMA is back! Almost? Maybe? Remains to seen. Despite the lingering uncertainty, it's clear at least one group of people is VERY glad to have McGregor in their lives again. Those people are the keepers of the MMA news cycle. McGregor hasn't totally done anyt...

Bloody Elbow's John Nash has a new report out on the UFC's finances and, friends, it is mind-blowing. Once again in 2022, the fight company made more than $1 billion in revenue and, largely because it didn't have to pay superstars like Conor McGregor last year, total fighter pay dropped by around $32.8 million (to roughly 13 percent of total revenue). UFC profits were up in every category, while e...

Joe Rogan said some fairly innocuous stuff this week about what would happen in a street fight (or a locked-room fight, as the case may be) between Jon Jones and Tyson Fury. Fury did not appreciate Rogan's opinion and aired his displeasure on social media, and THAT essentially kicked off a round robin of internet beef between Jones, Fury and Francis Ngannou. It was, honestly, pretty ridiculous. So...

This week, Friend of the Podcast and Real Life Hollywood TV Writer Kevin Seccia was kind enough to come in off the picket line to talk us through the particulars of the ongoing WGA writers strike. Kevin is a great dude as well as an active patron of the CME. He's also former standup comedian and currently a writer on the animated comedy "The Great North," which airs on Fox. The WGA strikes is some...

Rumor has it, there was some news this week. Just a lil bit. Just a lil bit of news happened over the last couple of days. As you may have heard, the biggest of homies, Francis Ngannou, announced on Tuesday that he is taking his talents to the PFL (and perhaps elsewhere) in a landmark deal that affords him what is almost certainly more money than if he'd stayed in the UFC as well as most of his ou...

What a tease this guy, Big Fran is. Here he is posting this video to his socials last week promising us that on Tuesday he's going to tells us (what we hope is) his final decision on free agency. We're not sure what he's going to say -- Will it be a boxing announcement? Will it be MMA? -- but that sure won't stop us from wildly and irresponsibly speculating. Plus, Jailton Almeida tapped the Bigi B...

Jailton Almeida isn't keeping his gameplan too close to the vest when it comes to this weekend's UFC on ABC main event against Jairzinho Rozenstruik. The fast-rising heavyweight prospect says he's strong where the Bigi Boy is weak, and plans to take him down and submit him. That's no surprise, considering six of Almeida's last 10 wins have come via sub. On the other hand, Rozenstruik has never bee...

The Economist published an interesting feature story about how UFC veterans Abu and Ottman Azaitar -- who you may remember from that UFC 257 fiasco involving an alleged "bagful of potatoes" -- have parlayed a friendship with the 58-year-old king of Morocco into pretty sweet lives for themselves. To hear the article tell it, King Mohammed VI (who was never that into ruling, anyway) has become compl...

It's pledge month at the Co-Main Event Podcast. As a totally independently produced podcast, we rely on the generosity of listeners like you to keep this thing rolling. Here's a free sample of our weekly Wednesday Live Chat, where we spend an hour (usually a little longer) taking questions from our beloved patrons. If you like what you hear, consider joining us at: https://www.patreon.com/comainev...

You know how some fight cards that look pretty "meh" on paper turn out to be unexpectedly great? Yeah, UFC 288 wasn't really one of those. Headlined by an important but perhaps not best-selling men's bantamweight title fight between Aljamain Sterling and Henry Cejudo, this one didn't really appear to live up to the high standards set by some of the UFC's other PPVs this year. There was nothing wro...

It's not every weekend that the eyes of the combat sports world fall squarely on BKFC, but with the UFC giving new meaning to the term Just Some Fights and no other MMA to speak of, that was the case on Saturday. A bevy of recognizable names -- Mike Perry, Luke Rockhold, Eddie Alvarez, heck, even Conor McGregor -- essentially made this BKFC's Super Bowl. Both for better and for worse. Plus, with U...

Welcome to the heavyweight elite, Sergei Pavlovich. Ya boy went out there and starched Curtis Blaydes in just over three minutes on Saturday at a UFC Fight Night event to become the consensus No. 1 contender in the heavyweight division. Could a lot go wrong between now and when Pavlovich might conceivably fight the winner of Jon Jones vs. Stipe Miocic? Sure. Did Blaydes engage in kind of a bizarre...

You think the UFC will stop sending its top men's featherweight prospects to Max Holloway? Because so far when they do, all they get back is a box of bones. Holloway continued his up-and-comer ass-whipping tour on Saturday, dispatching Arnold Allen via unanimous decision in the pair's UFC Fight Night main event. This fight was 95 percent Holloway stylin' on Allen with his speed, pressure game and...

Once it was over, you could kinda tell Israel Adesanya had been thinking about this one for a while. He had his bow-and-arrow celebration all planned out. He did every dance he knew how to do. He had his postfight interview scripted in his head. It's been a long time coming for Adesanya, but he finally got one back from Alex Pereira on Saturday at UFC 287. Adesanya is once again your UFC middlewei...

There we all were, just minding our own business, tying to enjoy our weekends when suddenly Endeavor just casually drops that, oh yeah, they're going to buy WWE and roll it into a single, publicly traded company with the UFC. Say what now? As you might imagine, this rather mind-blowing news quickly put to rest any notion of us talking about PFL, Bellator or GameBread Boxing 4 on Monday's episode o...

Cory Sandhagen and Holly Holm (or, Holly Holmes, if you prefer) both looked pretty good at the weekend's UFC Fight Night event. Both veterans dispatched challengers who were looking to break into title contention. Sandhagen took advantage of a slow start by Marlon "Chito" Vera in cruising to an impressive unanimous decision in the men's bantamweight main event. Holm mixed in some wrestling to go w...

Leon Edwards went into Saturday's welterweight title fight against Kamaru Usman at UFC 286 as both the champion and a bit more than a 2-to-1 underdog. As of Monday morning, he's now one thing, but not the other. Edwards pitched a masterpiece against Usman in their third fight against each other, ultimately retaining the gold via majority decision and proving that the oddsmakers had no clue what th...

Leon Edwards and Kamaru Usman are going to do it again, brother, for the third time on Saturday at UFC 286 in London. The champion is going off as a fairly significant underdog and conventional wisdom says this time around Usman just needs to NOT get kicked right in his head and he probably reclaims the title. Yet Usman has also reportedly been plagued by hand problems and he'll turn 36 years old...

Goddamn, he made that look easy. During the week leading up to UFC 285, Jon Jones said he expected people to be shocked by how effortlessly he'd beat Ciryl Gane for the heavyweight title. Jones said it would be a mismatch and we were all like, well, I don't know if I'd say it's going to be a mis--oh, holy shit. It took Jones all of two minutes, four seconds to choke out Gane and now JBJ is the UFC...

This episode takes a deep dive into a thing we once thought would never actually happen: Jon Jones' move to heavyweight. This Saturday at UFC 285, the greatest light heavyweight of all time finally takes that walk, gunning for the vacant heavyweight title against Ciryl Gane. You know ... maybe. It's Jon Jones fight week, after all, which means anything can happen. It's sort of impossible to foreca...

Erin Blanchfield jumps up to the No. 2 spot on the UFC's official women's flyweight rankings this week after her drubbing of a short-notice Jessica Andrade Saturday at a UFC Fight Night. Hard to say she doesn't deserve it. Blanchfield looked outstanding en route to a second round submission and now has duly earned her chance to compete with the division's elite. Plus, some gnarly shit happened at...

Islam Makhachev and Alexander Volkanovski had themselves perhaps one of the greatest fights on all time on Saturday at UFC 284. For all the hoopla about a superfight and the Nos. 1-2 pound for pound fighters on the planet squaring off, these dudes delivered. Makhachev was a better striker than we anticipated, Volkanovski a better wrestler. And while Islam won the fight, did Alex actually win our h...