Bjorn Rebney fired from Bellator

[Guest The Beltster]

I'm surprised there are no threads on this yet. Yesterday Spike/Viacom who own controlling shares of Bellator fired Bellator founder and president Bjorn Rebney and gave the job to old Strikeforce President Scott Coker. They will be moving away from the tournament format and into a regular UFC style format. Sounds good to me, what does everybody think?

 

Dana White must be having a field day with this one, he hates Rebney :lol

[Guest John Hancock]

It's a weird one. Has anyone said why this happened yet? At least Scott Coker's back in a job though, I always felt bad for him getting booted out of Strikeforce, he didn't do a bad job.

[Guest The Beltster]

I think they just lost confidence in Rebney and the tourney format by the sounds of it and apparently they were interested in bringing in Coker for a while but he wasnt free from his no-compete.

[Guest John Hancock]

With the amount of name-guys the UFC are cutting, there's certainly potential for a strong number two company. Also, with the rise of Glory kickboxing, there's a bunch of guys who would probably like to try MMA out without signing exclusive contracts, dudes like Tyrone Spong, when his leg is working again. Plus, by being number two, the anti-steroid spotlight won't be shining on them so brightly, which is good news for any European kickboxing, what with their very clean, very natural training techniques.

 

I wonder how much WSOF doing relatively well recently put the willies up Bellator and forced these changes through? They can't realistically be aiming for the number one spot, but I wonder if they were worried about losing the number two spot.

[Guest The Beltster]

I think when WSOF publicly challenged Bellator to an inter-promotional PPV card (which Bellator completely ignored), Bellator surely started thinking they need to do something. If they thought they could whip the guys in WSOF they'd have agreed to that in a heart beat because there was money to be made, so they must not have been overly confident, then the injuries and cancellations happened. So yeah I reckon they are making one last ditch effort to really make a good run to see what they can do.