UFC 306: The Good, the Bad and the Delightfully Bizarre of Noche UFC at Sphere

UFC 306 promised us an MMA event where the venue itself was the star. The technological marvel of the Las Vegas Sphere helped make that possible. But so did the main fighters themselves, who did enough to win without ever doing so much that they threatened to steal the show.

In the main event, Merab Dvalishvili defeated Sean O’Malley by wrestling and decision to become the new UFC men’s bantamweight champion. And in the co-main, Valentina Shevchenko regained the women’s flyweight title she had held for nearly five consecutive years, finally earning revenge by winning a unanimous decision against Alexa Grasso.

Neither fight will go down in history as one of the best ever. They were not even among the best UFC fights of the last six months. Normally that would be an unfair or at least unkind yardstick, but when you promise the biggest combat sports event that someone ever seen, well, you get the bar you set for yourself.

First, the good things about the UFC’s debut (and farewell, or so we’re told) at Sphere:

• When someone finally flipped the switch just before the pay-per-view portion of the card, the visual effects were pretty impressive. From Aztec ruins flickering in torchlight to marigolds falling from the sky during a Day of the Dead vignette, the immersive quality of the sphere between fights was put to good use.

• The UFC production team also managed to walk the fine line between fascinating presentation and annoying distraction. The “chapters” between fights set the stage, then a static image took over as the background for each fight without ever becoming an intrusive nuisance.

• The frontrunners put on a great performance, throwing some wild punches in hard-fought battles. Esteban Ribovics’ victory over Daniel Zellhuber and Ronaldo Rodriguez’s comeback win over Ode Osbourne were both highlights of the evening.

Now for the bad:

• For the first few hours of the event, the Sphere was basically a giant screensaver. Even in that state, it was special and kind of interesting. But after spending a lot of time last year hearing UFC President Dana White’s enthusiasm for the venue, you would have thought they would use it at full capacity throughout the night, rather than just for part of it.

• The UFC seemed to think there was a narrative line between these video vignettes between fights, but that ended up being pretty unclear. It was supposed to be about the history of Mexican combat sports, but then we saw a CGI scene with an indistinct figure flying to the top of a futuristic cityscape, and it was hard to tell what that had to do with… anything. Visually, the presentation was mostly great. As a cohesive story, it felt like someone was using ChatGPT to summarize the history of Mexico.

• No matter how stunning the setting, people still buy tickets to a UFC fight to see what happens in the cage. And when the climax of a seven-hour (!!) show is 10 pretty boring rounds spread over the last two fights? Well, that doesn’t exactly send people flying into the Las Vegas night with eyes wide open.

The latter is just part of this business. Even if you book the best possible matchups between the biggest stars available, you can never guarantee great fights. All you can do is put the pieces in place, lock the cage door, and hope for the best. Sometimes there are fireworks. Sometimes they are duds.

UFC 306 ended with two fights that were more of the latter than the former. That’s the way it is. If we hadn’t been promised by far the greatest live combat sports show of all time (White’s actual words), we might be more forgiving. But once you set those expectations, you have to live with them.

I’m not saying that this was all a mistake by the UFC. Trying something new and pushing the creative boundaries of their live production was a good decision. Hopefully the UFC will do more of this elsewhere, even if they don’t have the magic of the sphere to do it.

If this event has shown us anything, it’s that there are different ways to present the sport. The UFC has done it a certain way for so long and so successfully that it’s in danger of forgetting that. An occasional reminder is a good thing, even if the results may not quite live up to the hype.