It was a wild week for UFC fans, but nothing the UFC machine couldn’t handle.

The week of UFC 223 started with a freak injury. Tony Ferguson, who was scheduled (for the fourth time) to face Khabib Nurmagomedov, tripped over a studio cable on Sunday and tore a ligament in his knee. A long-awaited title fight, destroyed in one moment of cruel serendipity—again. This was unfortunate, but for those fight fans familiar with the particulars of curse magic, not a total shock. As an aside, I suspect the UFC’s new Performance Institute was built on an Indian burial ground; this is the price you pay for the chance to measure Francis Ngannou’s bite strength in Ford Fiestas.

Still, it was in the aftermath of Ferguson’s accident that the started to unfold.

Seemingly as soon as the news broke, Max Holloway threw his hat in the ring, the reigning featherweight champion eager for the chance to claim the lightweight belt. Holloway has stones the size of O’ahu; that should not be lost in all of this—however, he was shortly ruled unfit to compete, and the fight for the lightweight title was once again up in the air. Still, a potentially dangerous weight cut was averted, so we shouldn’t complain too much about that part of the story.

The next part, on the other hand... well.

If you are reading this, you already know the major beats of this bit, so I’ll simply summarize them here. On Thursday, Conor McGregor crashed a media day event, attacking a transport bus filled with fighters scheduled to compete that weekend. Claiming an altercation between Nurmagomedov and his teammate Artem Lobov as his excuse, McGregor launched a hand truck through the window of said bus, injuring two fighters with shards of glass, and called for more violence as he was momentarily apprehended. McGregor has since been arrested, and posted bail.

The attack threw a few more wrenches into the works of UFC 223, to say the least. The aforementioned injuries forced two undercard fights to be canceled. In an ironic but unsurprising twist, Lobov was also removed from his scheduled bout for his (immediately regretted) part in the mayhem. What had started as a 13-fight card was now down to ten, with the main event hanging in the balance.

As always, public relations were the primary focus of the UFC following the incident. Company president Dana White quickly disavowed McGregor’s actions, expelling all of the practiced, professional disdain he could muster. “What happened today was criminal, disgusting, despicable, makes me sick,” said White, ticking off boxes with impressive alacrity.

Tellingly, White went on to frame his attitude in purely PR terms. When asked whether he was still interested in the McGregor business, White responded: “Right now? No. Absolutely not. Do you want to be in business with Conor McGregor right now? Do you want to chase this guy around for interviews and buy his fights? Do you? I don’t think anybody is gonna want to right now. I think everybody is gonna be pretty disgusted with Conor McGregor right now.”

Surely, no amount of shrewd calculation could alter this stoic stance.

Back in the tangible world, the UFC found themselves with an event in tatters. To the promotion’s good fortune, however, they had stocked 223’s undercard with several bouts at lightweight. This being the same class as the main event, Khabib’s coming-out party, at least, was salvageable.

Their first choice as replacement was Anthony Pettis, a former champion who weighed in just four ounces above the championship limit on his first try. Pettis’ planned opponent, Michael Chiesa, was one of those injured by McGregor’s zany antics (was that my stance softening?), so he was an obvious choice. According to reports, however, Pettis was too demanding for the UFC, asking for a bigger payday to account for the dramatic change in opponent and number of rounds. One wonders what sort of sum Pettis could have suggested that the UFC could not afford, but evidently it was egregious. So, as soon as he was in, Pettis was out.

Next, Paul Felder was briefly considered, but was apparently also deemed unfit by the New York Athletic Commission. The commission claims that Felder was never brought up as an option.

It was around this time that the UFC’s perspective on the McGregor incident seems to have shifted. On Friday, thousands of people around the world tuned in to watch McGregor’s court hearing. His public image had taken a hit, yes, but evidently people still cared a great deal about him. As if testing the waters, the UFC released their footage of the incident that same day. UFC Embedded was careful not to paint McGregor’s actions in a positive light, highlighting his crazed eyes and the fretful reactions of his victims, yet the final episode of fight week ended with Khabib Nurmagomedov, the target of McGregor’s ire, calling his would-be opponent out. Two men’s assault and battery is another man’s kayfabe.

With this lucrative grudge match on the horizon, the UFC went from trying to give Nurmagomedov a competitive fight, to lining him up for an easy win.

Anthony Pettis would not have made for a bad replacement, per se, but a well-known weakness to aggressive southpaw wrestlers would almost certainly have spelled his doom. Paul Felder would likely have lost in similar fashion, but Felder is on an impressive three-fight winning streak. Perhaps that momentum never entered into consideration, but it is hard to imagine what made Felder so unqualified when his originally scheduled opponent, #11 ranked Al Iaquinta, made the final cut. Over the last few years, while Felder was notching notable wins, Iaquinta beat one shopworn journeyman, and otherwise occupied himself by selling houses, and publicly calling out the UFC.

Was Iaquinta seen as an easy matchup for Nurmagomedov? I don’t truly know. Plenty of fans seemed excited enough about the announcement on Friday, though certain, remarkably humble sportswriters were skeptical of his chances from the jump. From my own vantage, Iaquinta was never going to beat Khabib (he didn’t, ICYMI). And, if ensuring a future matchup between Khabib and Conor was the plan, even the fact that Nurmagomedov was “unimpressive” in victory is unlikely to hamper the promotion’s angling. If anything, performances like that can be catnip for potential opponents.

Either way, the result of a messy fight week was nothing if not a series of wins for the UFC. This is not a promotion which lives and dies by future matchups. The UFC is and always has been a machine which specializes in generating instant profit. Make as much money as possible, as quickly as possible; such is the unspoken motto. And the UFC made some serious dosh this week.

First there was Pettis. With Pretty Tony as their main-event fill-in, the UFC would have garnered a similar result to the one we got, with the added weight of the former champion’s name. However, the promotion saw the chance to save a few bucks, and they did. Pettis’ name wasn’t worth as much as he’d hoped.

Then there were the injured fighters. Ray Borg and Michael Chiesa were removed from the card through no fault of their own, denying both themselves and their opponents the opportunity to earn a winning payday. Each was wounded by McGregor, and Borg’s injury, a laceration of the cornea, could very well have long-term affects.

Most fighters in the UFC are paid on a show/win basis. For the majority, this means earning half of the potential purse by showing up, and the other half with a win. So, if you made $60,000 winning your last fight, you could make just $30,000 for losing the next. Did the UFC reward these unfortunate souls for their wasted labor?

Chiesa and Borg didn’t lose their scheduled bouts, only the chances to compete in them. Still, the promotion saw no need to pay them in full. “All the guys that ended up not getting fights are gonna get paid,” said Dana White. But “just their show. We don’t have that much money.” Of course, Artem Lobov was removed from the card without being paid at all, but presumably some $70,000 of savings can’t help the likes of Chiesa, Borg, Moreno, and Caceres. By way of consolation, White added, “We’ll turn them around and get them fights again real quick.” In the fight business, success has to be earned—if you’re a fighter.

But let’s revisit White’s unabashedly unironic phrasing. “We don’t have that much money.” UFC 223 was an outright success at the box office. Despite offering ticket refunds after the main event shakeup, the UFC had no trouble selling out Brooklyn’s Barclays Center on Saturday. 17,026 fight fans paid the UFC’s famously reasonable ticket prices, netting the promotion a gate of over $3 million, according to Dana White. Per BE’s Iain Kidd, that $3 mil is “almost certainly . . . less than the total fighter salary payout for tonight. And remember, that’s before counting the $30+ the UFC get from every PPV sale.”

Of course, this is all cream for Dana White. Yes, the man making these decisions, or at the very least proclaiming and defending them to the public, gets nine percent of all future UFC profits for his service. Every dollar saved on fight night equals nine cents in Uncle Dana’s wallet. Presumably, the promotion had already budgeted to pay a winning fighter in each of the 13 fights on the original card, but once their biggest star had removed said fights from the schedule, White and company were happy to pocket the unearned bonuses. When money is tight, hard decisions have to be made.

One word comes to mind considering the actions of the UFC and their representatives over the past week: greed. Whether planning future fights in bad faith, or nickel-and-diming the talent on whose backs their business is built, the UFC shows no hesitation in making money wherever it can be found. Apparently, you don’t spend $4 billion on a fight promotion because you care about the fighters.

From condemning McGregor to using his antics as advertising. From considering a former champ to accepting a cheaper option. From budgeting for a 13-fight card to skimming cream off the top of a niner. The week of UFC 223 was a wild one, but in many ways, it was all business as usual. For men like Dana White, regular profit is taken as granted. But for the fighters, hard-earners who frequently live paycheck-to-paycheck, their wage is left up to the whims of McGregor and the market to decide.

This week, fans lost a slew of great fights. Fighters lost their much-needed paychecks. Conor McGregor may have lost a little leverage.

The UFC just made money, manicured hand over taped fist. Welcome to the hurt business.