Name: JRE MMA Show #9 with Jeff Novitzky
Uploaded: 2018-01-03T22:39:56.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'JRE MMA Show #9 with Jeff Novitzky' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-01-03. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'JRE MMA Show #9 with Jeff Novitzky' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-01-03. Transcript available.

JRE MMA Show #9 with Jeff Novitzky

four three two one ladies and gentlemen jeff novitski how are you buddy what's
up joe doing
good i have to ask you do you mind the nickname the golden snitch it's the
first thing i was
going to bring up with you this golden snitch bullshit i just want to say it's
not my nickname
it's brendan jobs he came up with it 100 on his own i was going to ask you it's
all good though
it's all good it's all good so a couple funny stories about that so i don't
when did he come
up with this about a year ago at least yeah so so people in the office started
coming up to me saying
hey golden snitch what the hell's that so do a little research i see something
about harry potter
some character name there i'm like what the hell does this have to do with me
so about a month ago
somebody lets me know hey check out wikipedia so for whatever reason there's a
jeff novitski wikipedia
page you go to that page now it says says actually my formal name jeffrey john
novitski aka the golden
snitch so last week donna marcolini you know donna long 15 year employee of the
ufc now works with me
and talk about her a little later she's a great asset to what we're doing she
sends me a text she says
check this out so she's got one of those amazon echoes um alexa i think so she
says alexa who is
jeff novitski and alexa's name says jeffrey john novitski aka the golden snitch
so thanks a lot shop oh shop what have you done that's hilarious i love donna
she's amazing she's
awesome so she's over there she's yeah i mean you know about kind of her
history she's one of the
five original employees of ufc was dana's assistant to start out with uh went
on to become vp of event
operations so basically you know she got everybody to the event set up hotel at
the event ran the crew
you know the blue shirts backstage that run the event um you know i think after
doing it for many
years she got a little burnt out on it so went to dana uh midsummer and says
look i i don't think i
want to do this anymore but i'd really love to do something else and i've seen
kind of what jeff's
doing in his program i really like to go over there and work with him and kind
of learn you know what
he's doing and so dana pulled me into the office and said hey what do you think
about this idea and it
took me literally a half second to say 100 on board this woman as you probably
know is about as attention
to detail and passionate about her work as anybody and really my positioning
unlike the the name the
golden snitch is an advocate to our athletes to make sure our athletes are
successful under the
program not that they fail under the program it's definitely the wrong nickname
it's just catchy it is
it's unfortunately again i'm all good with it better roll off my back but uh
the real golden snitch is
victor conti he's the golden snitch right yeah he's actually i can see that i
can see that because
he was a guy who was giving guys steroids you were a guy that was always
catching people correct so it's
the wrong moniker yeah correct giving them steroids and then talking about it
after right yeah yeah that's
a snitch that's the golden stench not you man but it's all good i was hoping
sha would be here call
him up i don't know what i'm up later in the show that i could do anything to
him but it'd be interesting
to look at him in the face he would say i'm sorry bro sorry it's all good yeah
well anyway back to
donna she's awesome i'm so i'm super psyched that she's with you so what
exactly does she do for you
guys again her you know when i sat her down the summer i said look your role
here is going to make sure
that the athletes are successful under the program and in a program like this
there are so many land
mines you know whether it be making sure your whereabouts filing is that time
is on time making
sure usada knows where you're at so they can come do a collection from you at
any time making sure you
make safe supplement choices making sure the medications you're taking are
correct so she you
know works hard for all those things i give you the prime example of what she
brings to this program so
every three months every quarter every single athlete on the roster is required
to file what's
called quarterly whereabouts can i pause right here just just so this can be a
standalone if people
don't know exactly what you do sure um jeff is in charge of making sure that
all the ufc athletes
are clean and free of performance enhancing substances and it was a huge issue
before you came along
a huge issue in the sport and and continues to be in other organizations
particularly overseas i mean
there's just rampant speculation about companies that literally encourage
people to take steroids
it was always the case with pride in japan that was one of the the big things
about pride ensign in
anyway who fought for them many times came on the podcast and literally was
saying in the contract
in like capital letters it says we will not test you for steroids like they
wanted everybody to take
steroids they i had friends who went to fight over there they told them to take
steroids and move
up a weight class so it was always an issue in the sport that this was a dirty
sport air quotes right
yeah um but since you've come along and since you guys started instituting this
incredibly strict
testing we've seen some pretty radical changes we've seen some amazing fights
and amazing performances
and i don't think the performance levels dropped in fact i think it escalated
and elevated rather which is
something that people were really concerned about but one thing that we did see
is some people that
you suspected of doing stuff their bodies radically changed it was really i
mean that became a meme
pre-usada and post-usada i mean and there's some comedy memes out there because
of it because
people's bodies change so radically yeah it's interesting you know the last
time i was on we talked about
kind of the smell test you know looking at somebody and you know it's difficult
to say definitively
whether or not you know changes in bodies are due to that or not but you know
you can't help but but
look at some of these pictures before and after you saw it and think that's the
case that's something i
always struggle with how do you judge the success of a program um you know do
you judge it on numbers of
positive tests i don't think that's necessarily the case you know maybe maybe
you're not catching
everybody maybe there's no one to catch um do you judge it on before and after
pictures i don't know
i mean that that could be you know one factor i like to judge it a lot anecdotally
you know a big
part of my job is getting out and building relationships with our fighters with
managers with coaches
and just you know chewing on their ear and and and figuring out what they're
seeing and what they're
hearing and almost universally the feedback i get from from them is this is
making a big difference
um you know one thing i brought with me today and really the coolest piece of
data i think i've seen
in any anti-doping program are some really objective measurable statistics and
the ufc anti-doping program
usada so usada is the united states anti-doping agency they're the official
anti-doping agency
of the united states by an act of congress they're in charge of all drug
testing for u.s olympic sports
back in 2015 we made the decision to outsource the administration of our
program to usada the
primary reason being the independence factor um you know when you look at all
these other professional
sports leagues some have you know better programs than others none really have
any independence in
the administration of that program and what that means is there's no way of
telling whether or not
um you know when an athlete is sanctioned it's done for business reasons or
done for favoritism
so in our program you know no one can say that that any of the administration
of our program is done
for that reason it's a truly independent authority so what usada did recently
is they went back and
they've been in existence since i think about 2001 on the u.s olympic level
they went back and took a
look at every single doper i think for steroids everyone was caught for
steroids in the existence of
the usada program and took a look at each of those athletes biological passports
and biological markers
and they looked at what was the most common factor for the doper versus you
know the non-doper and what
they determined was what stood out the most was large variance in testosterone
excretion in the urine
and when you think about it from a common sense point of view that kind of
makes sense and that
someone who's using steroids at that time presents a sample their testosterone
excretion is probably going
to be on the higher end and if they were to catch a doper on an off cycle what
happens when you get off
steroids is your body suppresses production of testosterone so in that case you're
going to
see a very low excretion of testosterone so they looked at that and plotted it
out and saw hey every
doper has a very large variance in testosterone excretion then what they did is
they took all the ufc
samples and they plotted them out by quarter and actually brought a graph along
with me and it's
some really drastic i think visual evidence of the success and the impact of
this program i don't know
if you can throw that up want to take a look at it pull that up um so what what
year exactly did uh
usada take over yeah so we can't usada came into play july of 2015 so usada has
been in existence for
two years so you see here um that first quarter quarter three of 2015 a pretty
decent variance there
um which means in any given test an athlete you know was up on an average a
little bit of 30 um a
little you know in the mid-20s and then look at as you plot out that graph uh
that variance becomes
smaller and smaller and smaller and more in the the medium range as it gets out
to you know quarter
three of 2017. that's very interesting you don't you don't this is you don't
usually see statistics this
is the first i've been involved in anti-doping world since 2002 and i can unequivocally
say that
this is the strongest visual objective measurable evidence of success of a
program that i've ever seen
well one of the things that's so fascinating about this and um this this goes
to this goes to credit to
the ufc 100 is that they decided to do something about this they didn't have to
this wasn't like
uh someone coming after them because uh you know so many people had been caught
and someone said hey
we're going to put a program on you guys to make sure you're not doping well
the ufc said we got
to clean this up and there's there's only one way the one way is to go with the
very best testing
possible and the most rigorous the most i mean check in everywhere you go we're
going to give you
random test six o'clock in the morning knock on your door like the whole the
whole full gamut of tests
and the results have been pretty amazing and that alone that speaks volumes
when you see the size of
the variance between the uh the test when you guys first started versus now
definitely hey it's a credit
to two people the renzo fertita and and dana white that you know made that
decision that's a hell of a
risky decision but done for all the right reasons you know anybody that contends
that you know dana
doesn't care about his athletes need look no further than this program this
program is of tremendous
risk to the company and to the bottom line when you're testing athletes 365
days a year unannounced
no predictability of when the test is coming there can be some very severe
consequences and there have
been there has been several main events there has been i mean ufc 200 yeah the
land arguably the landmark
event in the history of the ufc we lose our main event the wednesday before ufc
200 millions if not
tens of millions into the marketing of that um you know the success of the pay-per-view
probably hinges on
that great main event between john and daniel and we los