Covington backs up his smack talk at UFC Vegas 11.. kinda

People have tried to paint this as a racism thing but this simply has everything to do with Covington being a strident Trump supporter and because of the fact that Tyron Woodley is black. What the media seems to not be terribly interested in telling people is that these two guys used to be team-mates at American Top Team and have a very long history of butting heads. Race has nothing to do with it but you know, that is popular these days.

One of the things that I like about Covington is that he talks a lot of trash, but then he backs it up in the ring. While I do believe his constant posturing for Trump is at least in part a publicity stunt, it is fun to see him do it and as far as getting people interested in the sport that otherwise might not be, I would imagine it is an effective tactic. It probably doesn't hurt that Dana White is also a very outspoken Trump supporter and it's almost never a bad thing if you and your boss' ideals align.

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If your only exposure to this fight were to read about it, you might have the impression that it was a pretty exciting fight as they talk about this head kick and this body kick and the exchange of combinations but unfortunately, this fight was actually pretty damn boring. One write up I read had this quote

Woodley started quickly in round two, but Covington used his height advantage to great affect, launching a couple of flying knees and again taking the fight into the clinch on the fence.

"flying knees!" Wow! That must have been exciting! Well it was, for about 8 seconds, then the other 4 minutes and 58 seconds almost nothing happened because Covington was going for the clinch on the fence basically all the time.

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All fighters that use this path to victory are generally pretty boring to watch. The same is true for people that constantly shoot for takedowns and then appear to not even try to do anything with their opponent once they get there. This is because of two factors in the scoring process that I basically disagree with that are called "octagon control" and of course simply "takedowns." The problem I have with takedowns having so much impact on overall scoring is because it doesn't take into account whether or not the person performing the takedown actually does anything once they get them there. This was a big problem I had with Johny Hendricks and if Covington continues on this path I will probably have the same issue with him.

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Covington "controlled" most of the fight and it was clear that he was headed to a unanimous decision victory when in the middle of the 5th round Woodley was unable to continue because of a rib injury. There hasn't been any word on how severe the injury was, but the fight was declared a TKO victory due to Woodley's inability to continue. I think there is at least a chance that Woodley realized that he was going to lose on points anyway and he wasn't going to be able to finish Colby before the time ran out.

When you look on paper and see that Covington had landed 242 strikes to Woodley's 52, it is pretty clear who was going to win. Look a bit further and notice that Covington controlled the octagon for 12 minutes while Woodley did so for a mere 14 seconds, and you can see where I am going here. The problem I have with those stats is that if you actually saw the fight, you would notice that about 220 of those 242 strikes had very little behind them, he wasn't exactly swinging for the fences and while this is a good strategy for victory, it is pretty boring to actually watch.

There were no bonuses given to either fighter after the match.

In a post fight interview Covington did what we knew he would do, which was to give a shout out to Trump and also do some more smack talk, this time calling out Usman and Masvidal who he hilariously referred to as Marty Fake Newsman and Street Judas.