UFC 101 Results and Commentary

Main Card
BJ Penn def. Kenny Florian via Rear Naked Choke in R4
Anderson Silva def. Forrest Griffin via KO in R1
Aaron Riley def. Shane Nelson via decision
Johny Hendricks def. Amir Sadollah via KO in R1
Ricardo Almeida def. Kendall Grove via unanimous decision
Kurt Pellegrino defeats Josh Neer via Unanimous Decision

Undercard
John Howard defeats Tamdan McCrory via split decision
Alessio Sakara defeats Thales Leites via split decision
Matt Riddle defeats Dan Cramer via unanimous decision
George Sotiropoulos defeats George Roop via submission in R2
Jesse Lennox defeats Danillo Villefort via technical knockout in R3

The crowd in Philadelphia seemed to live up to the Philly sports hype. We heard some rallying cries for Kurt Pellegrino, fights in the crowd, and a packed house – a common occurrence during Flyers hockey games.

Pellegrino proved that he’s able to control the ground game, but he spent a lot of his time escaping a frustrated Josh Neer’s submission attempts from the bottom. Ricardo Almeida was able to stop Kendall Grove and oddly enough, seemed to be doing better standing while Grove did pretty well on the ground. Johny Hendricks got an early stoppage win over TUF winner Amir Sodallah – a lot of controversy over that stoppage, but if we go back to the idea of intelligent defense, there wasn’t much being offered by Sodallah while he was on all fours. Forrest Griffin ran out of the building just as fast as he ran in. He was humiliated by Anderson Silva’s standup game and ended up on his back a couple times before the fight was called in the first round. Finally, BJ Penn proved that he didn’t lounge around after his loss to Georges St. Pierre. Penn controlled his fight with Kenny Florian and secured a tight rear naked choke that Florian just couldn’t shake off.