The UFC needs a real personal conduct policy with clearly defined rules, processes and penalties, and that policy needs to exist somewhere outside of Dana White's brain.

via www.citizenvox.org

I've been beating this drum since Paul Daley whiffed on a half-assed sucker punch and got banned for life. Now, with the unfortunate (and wildly inconsistent) events surrounding Miguel Torres, Rashad Evans and Forrest Griffin, I'm ready to shout into the void a little bit more.

If the UFC is serious about becoming a more mainstream sport, its time to start developing clear, fair rules that aren't continuously invented and reinvented on the fly at the whim of its notoriously capricious CEO.

Paul Daley undoubtedly deserved some sort of disciplinary response for his actions, as did Nate Marquardt, Chael Sonnen, Forrest Griffin, Rashad Evans, Chris Leben, Miguel Torres and dozens of other guys who have stepped over some line or another in the course of their UFC careers. But all of those professionals also deserved to be judged and punished -- if necessary -- under a fair system, with clear, established rules.

I realize that Dana hands out lifetime bans like candy corn, and revokes them just as easily when it suits him, but it still isn't fair to the professional athletes who make their living in this incredibly dangerous sport that their jobs can disappear forever because one person gets a hair up his butt.

In no other sport on earth (mainstream or otherwise) would Miguel Torres get the effective death penalty for posting a tasteless tweet. It's just the latest in a long example of unjustified punishments. And the flip side of the unjustified punishments is almost as aggravating. Since Dana doesn't seem to know how to do anything other than fire people, or suspend them for an ever-shifting, arbitrary amount of time, he often just decides to look the other way when it doesn't suit him to punish a punishable offense (as in the case with Rashad).

How about setting up an internal committee of respected former fighters and industry insiders and asking them to interpret the rules and hand down punishments that are built into fighter contracts? That way fighters would be able to have at least a small amount of predictability and fairness in an unpredictable, unfair world.