Thanks EliteXC. Ass.

Just as I'm getting into your past shows and digging your real fighters, you go and collapse.  They really had the talent to compete with the UFC and had a much better avenue in CBS network television and Showtime for major mainstream exposure.  And they had a roster full of pretty good talent up and down:  Jake Sheilds, Wilson Reis, Robbie Lawler, KJ Noons, Nick Diaz, Bigfoot Silva, Ninja Rua, Benji Radich, Ken and Frank Shamrock, Brett Rogers, Scott Smith, and Joey Villasenor.  Even the chicks led by Gina Carano and Cyborg were for real.  They seemed to be on the verge of signing Tito Ortiz.  These were really good fighters and though EXC was nowhere near as deep as UFC, they had very compelling match-ups still to come.

Its good and bad for MMA.  Its good because the people who ran ProElite were stains who had no idea what they were doing and worse yet, pressured fighters to work a certain way to help out certain talent.  Basically, implicitly fixing fights.  Their collapse is good because it proves that this sport will not go the way of boxing and the true fans want integrity in the fights.  Its also good because we can finally say goodbye to Kimbo Slice.  The inherent lesson of EliteXC is that you can't cut corners to succeed.  To a point, you can, but backing Slice - an untrained professional fighter with no previous discipline to base his skill set off of - proved to be the fatal error.  In both the James Thompson fight and then the 14 second knockout to Seth Petruzelli, Slice showed he had no business in an MMA cage and no amount of paid training and hype could help.

The bad is that MMA has lost serious competition and exposure on network TV.  Despite the Kimbo nonsense, people who watched that show still got to see Andrei Arlovski and Jake Shields among others.  Having the UFC as the only game in town is not good.  More than likely they'll gobble up the better fighters - Shields, Lawler, Reis and possibly Rogers and Silva.  Affliction has Fedor Emelieneko, the consensus top heavyweight in the world, along with some other good fighters.  Affliction is MMA's last chance to have real competition and real competition means more free shows and better fights.  

Its a shame.  I was looking forward to the November 8 show with Lawler headlining.