Some of the patterns from UFC Manila show that you can never quite tell where the entertainment value of a card is coming from.
UFC Manila, headlined by Urijah Faber and Frankie Edgar, was a show which inverted expectations. On paper, it had a solid main card, and a bad preliminary card. In the end, they ended up swapping places when it came to delivering on entertainment value, barring high spots like Mark Munoz's emotional retirement bout. Why?
The preliminaries had some genuine thrillers, including one of the most purely fun throwdowns of the year when Roldan Sangcha'an fought Jon Delos Reyes.