Eddie Alvarez Concussed, Bellator 120 PPV Still Happening

by Dr. Octagon, J.D.

The injury bug continues to bite Bellator in the ass and this time it’s not Tito-related.

Eddie Alvarez is out of Bellator 120 with a concussion and Bjorn Rebney is still acting like they have a product that is worth spending your hard-earned money on. Michael Chandler will now be fighting Will Brooks.

We pretty much buy Pay per Views without blinking an eye. If there’s a fight on TV, I’m buying it, but this card is so bad that there are two guys on the main card without Wikipedia pages (the number one indicator of a bush-league fighter). I think that this is the worst Pay Per View card I’ve seen since Bad Chad Dawson fought Bernard Hopkins.

I really want Bellator to succeed, as it would help pressure the UFC to pay all of its fighters more reasonably, but I’m not really sure what their plan is. Are they just going to keep on signing UFC washouts and trying to put on terrible Pay Per Views? This card is on par with some of the UFC’s worse free cards. What does it have to offer?[[MORE]]

Eddie Alvarez versus Michael Chandler, which was the one fight that I would consider paying for is no longer happening.

The fight prior to that is Alexander Shlemenko, Bellator’s middleweight champion, fighting at light heavyweight against Tito Ortiz, who had one win since 2006 in the UFC and hasn’t fought for two years due to injury. Shlemenko’s a pretty solid fighter and has a lot of wins on his record, but many of the guys he’s beaten have not been very good and a win against Tito isn’t really going to be any more impressive.

Slightly more intriguing than the Ortiz-Schlemenko fight is Rampage Jackson versus King Mo Lawal. Like Tito, Rampage left the UFC on a loss streak, but has since won two squash matches in Bellator against Joey Beltran and Christian M'Pumbu.

If Bellator wants to be successful, they need to start spending money and signing away top talent from the UFC. Right now, they’re just putting out a product that is at least a rung or two below the UFC. They might have been able to get away with that when the UFC wasn’t putting on so many fights, but now it’s actually difficult to even keep up with covering UFC, given the frequency of events.

The only differentiating factor Bellator has is the tournament format. But no one really likes a tournament format enough to put up with subpar fights.

With a few notable exceptions, I’ve typically regretted watching the Bellator fights that’s I’ve seen recently. They need to start spending that Viacom money and stealing prime fighters from the UFC. If that doesn’t happen, people will continue to question whether even their best fighters are truly elite. I don’t think they currently have a product that can sustain a Pay Per View card, but I’ll guess we’ll have to wait until May 17th to see whether fight fans agree.