The NCAA tournament has taken over the sports world, as it tends to do every spring. It’s hard to open an internet browser or social media app without immediately getting hit by an image of a bracket.
You can’t fight it, so just embrace it. Historically, mixed martial arts rarely does brackets, although Bellator and PFL have both utilized the tournament format at times. But really, this is combat sports and there is hardly ever a direct line to a championship. There are usually a few zigs and zags composed of things like timing, marketing, injuries and style points.
But in the spirit of March, we decided to build a bracket of the top middleweights in the world and predict who would come out on top in a traditional tournament format. Why middleweights? Well, there have been four title changes over the last two years. It’s a division full of parity at the top. Since Israel Adesanya’s run of five title defenses from 2020 to 2022, no champ has been able to defend the UFC’s middleweight crown.
We used a combination of Brett Okamoto’s divisional rankings, which rank the Top 10 of each division, and then pulled six more of the best from every major promotion, including UFC, PFL and Bellator MMA. The ESPN MMA team filled out their individual brackets, and here are the collective results and how our expert team of Jeff Wagenheim, Ian Parker, Dre Waters and Eddie Maisonet believe the fights might look. Did any Cinderellas emerge, or did favorites prevail? Check out the results below.
It would take them 3 years to finish that shit
This would be great if done Pride GP style. The Bellator method of a separate event for each fight would indeed take 3 years.