Friday night after UFC on FX 3, Patrick Wyman and I started an mma discussion on Facebook chat. As these things go, we touched a broad range of subjects. The conversation initiated with me talking about the We Three Judges feature (which turned into an awful abortion), however it continued into a conversation about many of the important discussions concerning MMA right now. The entire conversation is too much for one FanPost, but the following addresses to big concerns for MMA fans that were brought up. First, the recent rash of high profile injuries. Second, the discontinuation of Wikipedia coverage of individual MMA and UFC events.

Chris - Do you think the recent rash of injuries indicate an oversaturation of the ma market?

Patrick - I think it's a combination of a lot of different factors, but I'm not sure how I'd weight them. First, that MMA's big draws are aging, with most of them either at the end or past their peaks; second, the insurance policy and the greater per-fight payouts make it more viable to pull out with injuries; and third, yeah, I'd agree that the oversaturation of the market makes it more likely that more fights would be called off simply because there's a larger sample. Another product of oversaturation is that there really aren't any more stars or name fighters than there were before, so they're spread pretty thin, meaning you have to pull scheduled fighters from other events to fill holes, rather than contacting a guy who isn't necessarily prepping for a fight.

Chris - Well said. I think you hit all the big points there. I don't really like the "fight insurance" causality most are spouting. It's far too simplistic and ignores the other factors. I also don't think the new insurance policy impacts nearly the percentage of fighters that people speculate.

First, low tier fighters need their fight purses regardless of the insurance. The exact opposite apply to main eventers who (should have) insurance plans in place already.

Patrick - Yeah exactly, I was typing something very similar. I think the middle tier guys (the Aaron Simpsons, Clay Guidas, Ed Hermans, and Vlad Matyushenkos of the world) are the ones who benefit the most from the policy, since they're probably secure enough that they don't have to take the fight but probably wouldn't have been able to afford insurance otherwise.

Also mid-tier veterans are likely to be older than prelim fighters, and probably more likely to get injured in the first place.

Chris - Exactly, it's such a multi layered problem and the "oh look at the insurance" explanation is so minimalizing it's damn near mind numbing. I would like someone to do the legwork on the stats for pre and post insurance injuries though.

Patrick - Yeah, we could learn a great deal from that kind of investigation. Difficult to assemble the data, though, especially because the individual wiki pages for a lot of the recent events have been consolidated and the information's no longer on there.

Chris - I'm so pissed about that. That was seriously an incredibly [dumb] decision.

Patrick - i just don't get it, it's more trouble to go through and consolidate the pages than it would be to just leave them be. they're not hurting anybody.

Chris - What I don't get is why Wiki itself wouldn't want to be the best source for any specific content. Yes, someone can take it upon themself to create an official MMAwiki, but why would they want to lose that traffic?

I was seriously surprised to see that dude's complaint actually succceed

Patrick - The whole thing was very strange. I feel like the wikipedia guy responsible had a beef or something like that; nobody just takes it on themselves to delete an entire category of pages just because. I have other reasons to dislike wikipedia - I went through and rewrote a page related to my area of specialization, and some jackass reverted it to the previous version on the grounds that my edits were "historically inaccurate".

Oh well, it's not worth trying to step into someone else's corner of the internet

Chris - You? Historically inaccurate??? That shit I cannot believe. I did notice with the little bit of looking around when the wikimma thing start that there seems to be an entire subculture of wikilawyering going on.

That seems even more depressing than being an MMA blog comment dweller/ moderator

Patrick - Hahaha it's definitely more depressing, and it's inherently weirder since there's a power component, in terms of controlling access to certain kinds of knowledge and information.

Chris - Agreed, and it's even more depressing because you have to have actually gone through the process of informing yourself on the intricacies of Wiki's specifically worded rules.

The conversation continued, but we strayed off topic after this and adding the rest here would have extended the post beyond reasonable means.

*Any editing to the conversation was not relevant to the conversation at hand.