Women's MMA: That's How Strikeforce Can Compete With The UFC

What better way to get a leg up on your competition than to offer something that the competition doesn't?  That's what Strikeforce will be doing as they build their women's division of MMA.  Sherdog is reporting that Strikeforce will be conducting two women's tournaments of 135 and 145 pound fighters over a span of months in 2010.  Of course Strikeforce already has it's 145 pound champion in Christine "Cyborg" Santos, who'll be defending her title against Marloes Coenen on January 30th at the Strikeforce: "Miami" event.  The 135 lb championship bout has been confirmed by MMAWeekly to be Sarah Kaufman vs. Takayo Hashi.  It's thought that the winner of the 2 tournaments will face the champions of the two respective divisions later in the year.

I think women's mma is the way for Strikeforce to go if they really want to compete against the UFC.  They have a couple of legitimate highly ranked male fighters, however, the overwhelming majority of the best fighters in the world reside in the UFC.  It's really not even close.  However, the UFC has basically handed women's MMA over to Strikeforce simply because Dana White doesn't think there's enough talented women to form divisions.  This would be a way for Strikeforce to differentiate itself from the UFC and lay legitimate claim to the home of the best women fighters in the world.  They already have the most popular women's fighter in the world under contract in Gina Carano.  She's a proven draw, and the atmosphere that Carano/Cyborg created proved that there is a place for women's MMA when using appropriate vehicles to promote the fights.

It's just a way to be different than the UFC.  It's sort of like that Bojangles commercial where the guy asked why does Bojangles serve breakfast all day when most other places stopped at 10:30am.  The guy replied, "well if our breakfast tasted like everybody elses, we'd stop serving our breakfast at 10:30 too.".