Aljamain Sterling claims he is one of the most dominant fighters in the division

Aljamain Sterling is one of the most boring fighters to ever set foot in the modern-day octagon. He is booed at nearly every fight he is involved in and the crowds erupt into near chaotic applause whenever he gets defeated or even momentarily bested. He is a grappler and that is about it. It would be unfair to suggest that his grappling isn't effective, because it certainly is, but to go back to a reference in the film "Gladiator" .... the people simply are not entertained by this and because of this, people moan and groan whenever his name is on a fight card.

They know that more often than not they are going to be in for 15 minutes of hugging and playing defense, all the while never really generating any sort of offense.

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Getting your opponent to the ground is a very important part of UFC and MMA in a general sense. However, if you want people to actually enjoy your fights you need to actually do something with it once you are there. For exciting ground and pound fighters, they will take risks by posturing and moving their own bodies in order to attempt to get a better position where it is actually possible to inflict damage or force a submission. Sterling just locks up the body triangle and puts in just enough work so that the ref cannot justifiably stand them back up. It is extremely rare that he actually does any damage to an opponent but rather, just makes so that they are incapable of doing any damage to him while he wins because of ground control time on the scorecards.

I am not a fan of points being awarded for ground control time.

I would love to see an adjustment in the rules where ground control time is not a factor in who is determined the winner when the person who has the other on the ground fails to actually do anything while they are there. With many fighters, we are excited when they take their opponent to the ground but with Sterling, the crowd will normally have a collective groan as soon as Sterling, yet again, remains standing to kickbox for as little amount of time as possible and then once again locks up his opponent in a body triangle for the next 4 and a half minutes.

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He does this time and time again. To the inexperienced, the above picture probably looks like Petr Yan is in trouble because Sterling has his back and has him locked in with a body triangle as well as an arm around his neck. However, Yan is trained in defending against exactly this sort of thing and provided he doesn't expose his neck - which he didn't - Sterling can't really do anything in this position other than throw some weak forearms or hammer punches at him.

Sterling almost certainly knows this and recently he finally did an interview about his performance at UFC 300, where he did win but in a fight that had the crowd booing so loud that the UFC had to change how they were doing the audio feed for the home audience. Sterling was unapologetic about his performance, and well, I think he should be. The idea behind a prize fight isn't to just win, but to provide some amount of entertainment for the people that paid hundreds of dollars to be there.

Sterling said that he had perhaps "the most dominant match of the night" and that just makes me upset and very much looking forward to whoever KO's this guy in the future. He pointed out that he shut down Calvin Kattar's striking game and well, yes he did do that.... by spending more than 10 of the 15 minutes on the ground while not striking at all himself either. He points at the fact that Kattar only had 19 strikes the entire fight as some sort of good thing and I suppose that would be a good thing if this was a grappling tournament - it isn't. It is very difficult to land anything on a guy that is focusing not on causing any damage to you, but merely shutting down your ability to do it to him.

Sterling went on to say this about Kattar

"So for me to use my skill set against his and to reduce him from being someone who’s that dangerous to literally no threat whatsoever. I think it deserves a little bit of credit in that regard.”

Once again, this is MMA, not a contest to see who can prevent the other guy from punching the most and the fact that Aljamain did almost no damage to Kattar either and merely spent nearly the entire fight either running away or locked in a triangle on the ground, doesn't add any credibility to his case for claiming he deserves credit.

Sean O'Malley took the belt from Sterling in the bantamweight division and claimed that he "saved the division from obscurity by getting Sterling out of the picture." I definitely agree with this because if any division has a boring champion, nobody is going to be interested in their events. Dana White and the rest of the top brass are very aware of this and Sterling is very unlikely to be the focus of any PPV event unless it is a title match..... and all the people in attendance that are not related to Sterling will be rooting against him.

He is the most boring fighter in all MMA right now and his paychecks are reflected in that. This will not change unless he changes his tactics.