First off, I'm glad the UFC has finally put official in-fight statistics on their duly improved score-graphic. It's got a boxing-esque feel to it and presumably they're using FightMetric for their numbers and not CompuStrike, which probably had Matt Riddle landing 459 strikes.
Unfortunately, this very helpful new feature of the UFC's revamped broadcast production has now become Mike Goldberg's only source of play-by-play. I lost count of the number of times he would blatantly ignore the action right in front of him to spout off completely uninteresting stats from a fight. So now this is the rough shortlist of things Goldie will mention in every commentary:
- Statistics passed along to him during a fight of any sort (e.g Werdum has landed 80% of his significant strikes).
- Anyone associated with a Karate background or even a Karate stance is automatically another version of Lyoto Machida. Stephen Thompson is an American Machida, don't you know?
- If you just as much land multiple knees in the Muay Thai clinch, it's reminiscent of Anderson Silva.
- If you're small and throw a lot of kicks, you're Jose Aldo. Renan Barao is like a 135 Jose Aldo....until you realize Barao hasn't recorded a KO in forever and has slick offensive submission skills.
- Personal stories of fighters that he's determined to finish reading as Joe Rogan screams all over the actual action going in the cage.
- Any spectacular knockout will be met with "OH MY GOODNESS! HOW GOOD WAS THAT?!"
- Teep!
- Turk!
- Boom!
- It is all over!
- Mediocre fighters like Matt Brown or Matt Riddle are never in a boring fight.
- Every terrible striker like Dean Lister, Jake Shields, Karlos Vemola, or Matt Riddle is described as "ever-improving".
- In pre-fight talk, every loss is simply described as a "hard fought battle".
- Nut shots: "So you wanna be an Ultimate Fighter?" to serve as a reminder that if you want to be an "Ultimate Fighter", you will get kicked in the balls occasionally.
Have I missed anything? Try turning my list into a drinking game. You'd be dead within seconds.


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