The Level Change Podcast · Combat Sports news variety show usually previewing or reviewing the latest UFC event while covering the latest news in combat sports.

Sean Strickland's latest video confessional + Sumo Stompin' with Tim Bissell

·1 hr·3 clips

Sean Strickland knows what his people want and gives it to them on the regular.

They open by trashing the card. The weekend slate gets treated like a bad joke, with only a few fights drawing mild interest and a pile of Contender Series debuts making the whole thing feel thinner than it should. That does not stop the show. Instead of forcing a preview, Steffi Haines and Victor Rodriguez use the weak card as a doorway into a looser chat that moves through some headlines. Bellator gets first crack. The big breaking item is Bellator's deal with Warner Brothers Discovery, which will put its events on Max, and the hosts take a quick detour through the branding mess of Max, HBO Max, and HBO itself. Then comes Strickland. Most of the middle stays on Sean Strickland's latest behavior and interviews, and on what it says about a fighter who got worse after winning the belt and keeps showing up as a public headache. Nobody is pretending. They talk through whether the promotion wants him in that public a position again, whether his audience will eventually tire of the same act, and whether that just pushes him to escalate again. The room gets blunt. The conversation keeps circling back to attention, pay-per-view buys, and the ugly practical truth that combat sports businesses often watch the aftermath before they decide how much chaos they can tolerate. The comparison game starts. They bring up Sneako, Machine Gun Kelly, and Conor McGregor as examples of how public provocation can slide from talk into contact, then ask how much of that line Strickland would actually cross if he stopped getting the reaction he wants. It stays messy. That messiness is part of the appeal, because the hosts are comfortable letting the argument breathe, correcting each other, and pushing hard on the bigger business and PR questions instead of sanding everything down. Then the tone shifts. Tim Bissell joins for sumo stomping, gives an update on the final stretch of the basho, talks through Takara Fuji and the purple mawashi, and points listeners toward his Sumo Stomp substack and fight-site coverage. The exit is warm. The episode closes on the usual sign-off and a small reminder to stay safe, which lands like a practical handoff after an hour of fight talk, media grumbling, and a very specific detour into sumo.

As heard by us

A rough fight card, Sean Strickland fallout, and a sumo detour keep episode 285 moving.

The episode leans hard into a rough fight card and the Sean Strickland fallout, with the hosts returning again and again to the same practical question: how much public chaos can a promotion take before it starts to drag the whole thing down.

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Why you'd press play

If you want a brutal card teardown, Sean Strickland chatter, and a sumo detour in one stop.

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