(Yes, Brendan. You certainly *are* a stinker. Photo via Esther Lin/MMAFighting.com)
With their talent roster about 100 bodies over-budget, the UFC has had to make some hard decisions lately. Every fighter who doesn’t win impressively, or lose really impressively, is potentially on the chopping block. Which is why it surprised me today to see that Lavar Johnson will be keeping his spot in the UFC heavyweight division despite suffering his second consecutive loss against Brendan Schaub at UFC 157.
As we all know, Johnson loves to stand and bang. Unfortunately, he didn’t get much opportunity to do either against Schaub, who repeatedly took Johnson down and laid on top of him. The ease with which Schaub executed this “cerebral” game plan suggested that perhaps Johnson wasn’t aware that takedowns would even be allowed in the match. When the dust had settled, Schaub had won ugly, and Johnson had lost uglier.
So why is Lavar keeping his job, when so many others have been cut loose? There are countless factors involved in the UFC’s firing policy these days, so we tried to make some sense of it by putting it into flowchart form. Click the image below to enlarge. We hope this can be of service.
(BG)