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THE BELLATOR CONUNDRUM

When people take the chance to go onto the Bellator Fighting Championships website, they would find out that Zoila Frausto is the current BFC Women’s Champion. However, after successfully defeating Karina Hallinan at Bellator 35, not much has been said or heard about the champion. Most people can assume that the lack of appearances from the champion has to do from her recent marriage to Strikeforce fighter Jorge Gurgel, but something else is amiss as well.

Much like the issues Strikeforce has had with women’s middleweight champion Cristiane Santos, there may not be any fighters willing to mix it up with the Bellator ladies champ. If you take a look at the woman who faced Zoila Frausto at Bellator 35, Karina Hallinan, people will notice that she has a less than stellar 3-5-0 record as a professional MMA fighter. Worse than that is the fact that Karina Hallinan had lost two straight fights heading into her encounter with the champion.

Outside of Strikeforce, no other promotion has promoted women’s MMA like Bellator and now they are falling in the same trap as their larger counterpart. Strikeforce, in the last six months has been having trouble finding believable opponents for their champion. This problem has not only derailed one of the promotions top attractions, but has possibly devalued the championship as well.

This is now a potential issue that Bellator has to deal with because they risk the same type of problem that Strikeforce is dealing with. As of this writing (5/17), there are no plans for a women’s tournament in the upcoming fifth season of Bellator. Another interesting fact is that there was only a single women’s fight in all of season four, which was the aforementioned Zoila Frausto/Karina Hallinan encounter.

The immediate solution to the problem would be to quickly find eight female competitors and hold a top contenders tournament in a few months. That potential solution would be like putting a band-aid on a bullet wound, the real solution involves a little more tinkering. What I would do is hold off the tournament until season six and feature at least one fight on each card of season five, whether it is on the televised or preliminary card.

Also, I would make sure current champion Zoila Frausto competes at least twice in season five to put her back at the forefront. Season six would then feature an eight woman tournament for the right to face Zoila Frausto for the gold in the following season. These steps, if followed correctly, would put the women’s division back in the forefront and build up plenty of new challengers for the champion to face.

Right now, Bellator is sitting on a fine line when it comes to the female fighting division, but how they position themselves in the coming months will have a lot to say about that division’s future.

You can contact David Tees at bigteesps3@yahoo.com

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