UFC 311: Hollywooding funny business

Endeavor's vision of turning fight shows into fight-flavored movies.

"Intuit Dome Façade" by Haruhi8 is licensed under CC BY 4.0..

Did TKO dodge a huge gambling scandal at UFC 311?

When we published our latest article for paid subscribers (UFC 311 leaves serious questions unanswered about injuries & fight odds), we suspected that whatever interest there might have been surrounding the way UFC handled the injury status of Bantamweight champion Merab Dvalishvili would eventually fade away because he defended his title in a rather dramatic match against Umar Nurmagomedov.

No harm, no foul. Right?

Then we started peeling back some layers of this proverbial onion and started asking real questions. Nate Wilcox’s instincts about Merab’s injury status and the betting lines for the two major UFC 311 fights raised suspicions. It didn’t pass the smell test.

As information slowly started getting disclosed last Saturday night, the fact pattern became alarming. Somebody knew something but we didn’t know exactly what that information was, nor did we have any sort of understanding about how valuable that inside information could be.

Merab Dvalishvili had a gnarly staph infection. His leg wound was slow to heal. He put on a miraculous fight performance despite this medical complication. Then he tried to talk about a serious back injury and got shut down by Joe Rogan. Then, Dana White played dumb about Merab’s medical condition in the UFC 311 post-fight presser.

That was the impetus behind our Sunday article on UFC 311 injuries & fight odds. We had questions. A lot of them.

It turns out that we have even more questions after an interview Merab did with Ariel Helwani on Monday.

If you bought tickets to go to the Intuit Dome to watch UFC 311, bought the PPV, or bet some cold hard cash on the fights, you should pay attention and start demanding answers about the way TKO management handled the events that transpired at last week’s big event.