You're listening to the Co-Main Event Podcast, and now your hosts, Ben Folks and Chad Dundas.

That's right. You're listening to another episode of the co-main event mixed martial arts podcast.

I'm Chad Dundas. That's Ben Fulks. We're both senior writers in MMA for the Athletic,

and we meet here every single week to chop up all the prominent, newsworthy, and hilarious happenings in the world of mixed martial arts.

Ben, we got a lot of ground to cover this week, probably more than we can reasonably be

assured in getting to in the next hour.

UFC 249 went down on Saturday night, plus you got two additional UFC cards coming this week on ESPN,

all from the Vistar Veterans Memorial Arena down there in Jacksonville, plus considerable fallout,

I would say, before and after this event on Saturday night.

So we're just going to get started with this.

We are going to forego our normal three-round format. We're just going to have sort of an open

discussion here for the next hour and change about UFC 249 and then anything that we can squeeze

in about these other events as well. It's going to be guided by some listener mail that we got this

week, as always, around these big events that people turned out and sent guided by some listener mail that we got this week, as always, around

these big events, the people turned out and sent us some great listener mail. So we're going to

answer as many of those as possible as we try to move through, you know, a number of these

signposts newsworthy moments this past week at UFC 249. I guess I would open up just with a

question for you before we actually get started.

How did it feel to you to have fights back?

I know one of the questions heading into this event was whether or not we were going to be able to

suspend our concept of what was going on in the outside world and focus on these

these MMA fights, man.

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