Would a win for Ian Machado Garry over Islam Makhachev at UFC 330 make this the year of the upset in MMA? And how does this event compare to the UFC's other memorable trip to Philadelphia? Plus, what does the Garry fan base actually look like? To ask a question of your own, hit up @BenFowlkesMMA on X or @Ben_Fowlkes on Threads.
@bodkins_nick: If Ian wins 2026 the year of the upsets? And whose upset would be the biggest Strickland, Gathjie, or Garry?
Justin Gaethje's upset of Ilia Topuria at the White House is going to be hard to top. At one point he was a bigger underdog against Topuria than Gina Carano was against Ronda Rousey. That's nuts! But if Garry beats Makhachev, I do think we'll have to start asking ourselves if there's anything to be learned from this string of upsets. Even if that thing is just that oddsmakers and fans and media maybe don't know this sport as well as they like to think they do.
@zainbando99: Ben, compare UFC 101 (the last numbered event in Philly) to this one. Which one is objectively better and why?
UFC 101 had a lightweight title fight between champion B.J. Penn and challenger Kenny Florian. It also had one of the most famously and artistically one-sided wins ever, with Anderson Silva demolishing Forrest Griffin as if he were fighting from five seconds into the future. UFC 330 has another MMA great in Makhachev and another upstart challenger in Garry, but it doesn't look to have any Silva-Griffin equivalent.
Also, you look at the undercard and you see almost nothing but known names. That can sometimes be misleading, because it's easy to say we know those fighters now, after they had a whole career to make their mark. But the truth is we also knew most of them then. The UFC did a better job of highlighting the up-and-comers and helping us trace their paths up from stuff like TUF and UFC Fight Nights to numbered events. There were also just fewer events and fewer total fighters, so it was easier to keep track of them all. That said, you never know. We sometimes get great fights and memorable performances out of people we don't know yet. Every known name in this sport had to start somewhere.
@ewillcock: I find Ian Garry pretty darn relatable with his silly little guy energy. Why do I feel like I'm the only one?
Maybe because the angriest people tend to be the loudest. Reactions to Garry's whole deal may vary, but I think there are a few basic camps. There are those who think he's cringey but unremarkable. There are those who see in him some of themselves, or maybe just who'd they'd like to think they are. There are those made irrationally angry just because he's a pro fighter existing outside the typical pro fighter mold. Then there are those who, despite the ongoing arguments of all these factions, still don't really care one way or another. How could you not root for this guy? Jeff Bottari via Getty Images
The thing I am forced to admire about Garry is that he genuinely does not seem to care all that much how he is perceived. I'm reminded of a kid I went to elementary school with. Not a popular kid. Had all the markings of a classic nerd except he wasn't especially smart or good in school. For the sixth grade talent show this kid performed a tap dance number. It was gruesome to watch. Even if you're good at tap, which he wasn't, your male peers in sixth grade are not going to respect it. I remember watching and thinking, my dude you already get made fun of a lot. Why would you choose to do this? Only later did I realize it was because he didn't really care. He just liked to tap dance, so he got out there and tap danced. To hell with all of us who didn't get it. Garry is a little like that. I don't always know what he's doing or why, but I have come to believe that he knows. If you're secure enough in your sense of self, that's usually enough.
@leonsuh: Excluding a few exceptions (judo, sambo, karate), most MMA fighters train in the same disciplines - wrestling, BJJ, boxing/kickboxing. Do you think there's some martial arts or skill that fighters could adopt that could give them an edge? Krav Maga? Slap fighting?
I think there are always little things that fighters can and do take from other martial arts. (Except slap fighting. When the whole sport is built around your opponent standing perfectly still with his hands behind his back, it's not terribly applicable to other sports that are not as dumb as that.) But at this point I think MMA is basically its own martial art. The foundations of stuff like wrestling and kickboxing and jiu-jitsu are essential, but all of those have aspects that don't work for the MMA rule set. (If you just wrestled like a wrestler, you'd give up your neck and back too easily. If you boxed like a boxer, you'd be forever getting kicked in your head as you dipped low off to one side.) One of the things that makes MMA so interesting is how it's gotten people to take what works (for MMA) from so many different martial arts and discard the rest. In the process, it's created something entirely new.
@ggooglyboogly: I spent a lot of the ESPN era not watching a lot of UFC events because I hated ESPN+, because of this I currently don't know as many undercard fighters. What are one or two fun under the radar matchups at UFC330?
I've been saying for years that this is a drawback of the UFC treating its own product like it doesn't expect you to watch it all. You break some links in the chain and you lose that name recognition for fighters as they rise through the ranks. But to answer your question, I think Jalin Turner vs. Kaue Fernandes could turn out to be fun. I also think fighters like Esteban Ribovics and Mansur Abdul-Malik are, let's say, being put in a position to be successful. (Read: huge favorites matched against fading opponents in the hopes of creating a highlight that will flesh out their résumés.) I'm also always interested in seeing the enemy of spellcheck, Myktybek Orolbai, any time he fights. (Talk about a prohibitive favorite; he's -1100 in the UFC 330 curtain-jerker against Jeremiah Wells.) But honestly, this is a very top-heavy card. You might call it boxing-esque, in that sense. Outside of the main and co-main events, zero ranked fighters. That tells you something, doesn't it?
@Jietzsche: Using live in-cage interpreters for translating post fight interviews sucks. We gotta sit there and wait while the dude rambles in his foreign language, before it gets translated. Why doesn't the UFC just use some auto-translate software to add realtime subtitles?
I only thought about it for about 10 seconds and I already envisioned several ways for this to go very, very wrong. The only thing I use any form of AI for is transcribing interviews. That technology has gotten a lot better at reliably turning audio into written transcripts, but it's still not perfect. You add in the tricky task of translation, which requires making choices about which word in one language captures not only the meaning but the intended connotation of the word being said in the other language, and you have a recipe for disaster. AI is not up to that, and it absolutely would botch it horribly and possibly hilariously.
@ChrisKirk_ASP: Is Disclosure Day the film making equivalent of all time great fighter thinking they can still do it in their 40s but they really, really can't do it anymore?
I saw "Disclosure Day" and I did not hate it. It's definitely not Steven Spielberg's best, but it had some moments. Maybe the best fighter comparison is Anderson Silva. We've seen him out there boxing and he's clearly not the Jedi he once was, but he's still solid enough that I'll check in if there's nothing else on that weekend.
@EmppU94: considering power slap is a bigger sport than football, baseball, nba.... the biggest sport in the world (LOL), do you literally no ANYONE who follows it/ watches it/ can name even two "athletes" who compete in it? All I see is people who hate it when it comes on feeds.
I'm sure there are people out there who identify as Power Slap fans. I'd like to think I do not run in those circles or know those people. It is the dumbest sport I think I've ever encountered, in part because it's one of the only sports where the rules specifically outlaw any form of defense. It is made for simple-minded cretins with zero attention span, and if it's successful on social media that's more an indictment of social media than it is a proof of concept for Power Slap. The other thing that's weird to me about it is how, whenever I hear it spoken of (and it's almost always Dana White doing the speaking) or see a story about it, the focus is entirely on how successful it is. It's always a business story and never a sports story. That's bizarre. Also? If it was really doing so great I don't think you'd have to keep telling us. I think we'd already know.