MMA Scribbles-Best of 2022 Letter

It’s safe to say MMA has officially crossed over in 2022

3 min readJan 5

By the time some of you read this, we’ll already be in 2023.

*We’ll know who won the Bellator vs RIZIN event in Japan, you’ll start looking ahead at your 2023 schedule, (or combat sports schedule like I do), and have some personal goals in mind for what you want to do to improve yourself.

I think we’ll see a lot of improvement in combat sports, especially now that it seems everyone wants a piece of that pie and the United States seems to be the leader in the sport overall. I’m only saying that because RIZIN President Nobuyuki Sakakibara said that in the build of the New Year’s Eve event.

I’m sure it will produce a lot of fireworks, but 2022 had an ease-up on restrictions from the pandemic and we had a lot of fireworks happen that will likely go unmentioned by bigger MMA media that focuses primarily on the UFC. Almost every outlet does a “best of” and gives out imaginary awards for what they all think was the best thing they saw this year.

So, Matt Hawkins and I decided to go a different route and just look back at what we thought was most memorable on our final podcast of 2022. We even brought on my friend and colleague in the fight business, MMA Junkie’s Nolan King. Here’s a short list of what we liked from 2022:

Knock Outs

They’re both the most dangerous and eye-catching thing in any combat sport that involves striking. For some reason, my mind couldn’t bring up the one that mattered most to me personally because I know the fighter that did the one I should have said. I wound up mentioning Alex Pereira’s win over Israel Adesanya (like some damn casual) when I should have gone with the one Matt said because it checks two boxes for both KO of the year and submission of the year. Although I still stand behind my submission of the year pick because of how unique it was.