Dave Mandel/Sherdog.com
More than any other division, the 135-pound class is in a permanent state of flux. The next player in this ongoing fistic soap opera appears to be the man who usurped Beebe’s crown, Miguel Torres.
Many fans predicted Beebe’s slide and with good reason. He was greener than a Prius when he won the title, and the WEC was starting to sign up serious bantamweight talent. Torres was the cornerstone of that influx, and watching him tap out Beebe for the title at WEC 32 bordered on anticlimactic.
Three successful Torres title defenses later, and it appeared as though the WEC would no longer roam the desert in search of a bankable bantamweight commodity. Then he got starched in a single round by Brian Bowles and tapped out in two by Joseph Benavidez.
Speaking of Bowles, his title reign was over before it even started. He lost the bantamweight strap to converted featherweight Dominick Cruz on March 6 in a fight that turned out to be about as evenly matched as Ernest Hemingway against an open bar. For anyone wondering if Cruz will turn out to be the fistic messiah, let’s just say that it would be an upset if Cruz still had his waist bling this time next year.
While virtually every other division has gone through multiple periods without a truly dominant champion, the hierarchy of talent has remained relatively consistent. This is where the bantamweight class is anomalous. The division’s top 10 today is completely different from what it was six months ago, and there is already a new crop of prospects like Joseph Benavidez and Scott Jorgensen ready to turn the division on its head anew.
The reason why this cycle started is simply because this is the first time the vast majority of the world’s bantamweight talent has been grouped together. Old assumptions about how the division would play out are being replaced by the ongoing reality that no one has a clue about what this division will look like by the end of the year.
The same scenario played out in the featherweight division, albeit in a more truncated fashion, when Urijah Faber lost his stranglehold and Jose Aldo came out of nowhere to clean house. Although Aldo has yet to defend his title, there is a key difference between his career path and the path of every elite bantamweight in the WEC.
Aldo was allowed to develop because the WEC had a steady supply of contenders to feed Faber thanks to the focus the promotion had placed on building the division around Faber. Having the benefit of proper development outside a major organization and five fights against quality opponents inside the WEC before challenging for a title is a perk that not a single bantamweight enjoys.
Torres has 40 professional fights to his name, but nearly all of them were bouts against overmatched competition on the North American circuit -- it was the only competition he could find. When Bowles split Torres’ wig, that was just Bowles’ eighth professional bout.
Put the puzzle pieces together and it becomes clear that the division is in flux. Any hierarchy being formed is built on a foundation of sand. When no one gets a real chance to mature as a professional fighter, the end game is a massive collection of talent lacking the experience to actually grow into sustainable champions.
The concrete consequences don’t just hold back the fighters either: WEC 47 posted the kind of ratings you’d expect from a Corey Feldman karaoke tribute to Michael Jackson. The event joined WEC 45, a card headlined by a non-title lightweight bout, as the only WEC cards with a reported viewership of less than 400,000 homes since WEC 34. While the loss of DirecTV viewers carries some blame, the WEC 46 card headlined by a lightweight title bout easily cleared 600,000 viewers.
It’s not like fans don’t care about bantamweights either, as WEC cards headlined by Torres routinely drew in solid ratings. The simple truth is that casual and hardcore fans alike want matchmaking to serve not only the purpose of putting together the best fights but creating compelling storylines as well.
Fans bought into Torres being an unstoppable champion. When the title that once seemed to be his birthright changes hands twice in consecutive bouts, there is suddenly no storyline to draw fans in. While the unpredictable nature of MMA is certainly a selling point for many, unorganized chaos and ongoing parity inevitably grows tiresome.
Unfortunately the only solution is to develop prospects and let the cream rise to the top -- a time-intensive and fiscally risky move for a promotion that has nowhere near the financial security of the UFC. The current situation isn’t going to work any better, though, and considering the bantamweight division makes up a third of the WEC’s bouts, there isn’t much of a choice to be made.
This is going to be a tough stretch for the WEC. The financial return on the bantamweight division in the short term won’t be what it was with Torres running the show, but holding on to prospects instead of promoting them to title contention is the only way the division will find its footing. Case in point is Joseph Benavidez, who is clearly still developing as a fighter but has been a serious title contender for nearly a year. The same goes for Scott Jorgensen, who is on the same fast track to title contention despite the fact that both fighters need some more time to fully capitalize on their talents. Jorgensen and Benavidez, as well as any other top-shelf bantamweight prospects, are incredibly valuable. The trick is to know when to cash in on that value.
The safe play is always to give a prospect more time than he needs and know exactly what you have before throwing him into the deep end of the shark tank. This is the only way the WEC will get the bantamweight division moving in the right direction, and if that means a few less than stellar title bouts, it’s a small price to pay in the long run.
Trying to make money off the bantamweight division in any combat sport has always been fraught with migraines. It simply doesn’t have the built-in cache of the heavyweight or middleweight divisions. The only way the WEC is going to make the bantamweight class into a financially viable part of its business is to take a hit on it for the time being.
Having Urijah Faber around to stabilize the featherweight division was a luxury that the WEC played beautifully, but the bantamweight division is a different beast altogether. There is no built-in superstar around to make life easy on the matchmaking department, and the only way they’ll ever find that superstar is by waiting.
Waiting for a division that has never had such a wide array of elite talent brought together and is still sorting itself out is a tough sell, but it’s one worth buying into. With a pay-per-view debut around the corner and the increasingly inevitable addition of a flyweight division, the bantamweight class needs to be resolved before any more long-term projects come into the picture.
And if that means getting to watch fighters like Jorgensen and Benavidez grow into their own, I really don’t see what the problem is in the first place.