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UFC: What the Light Heavyweight Title Picture Should Have Looked Like

Mauricio “Shogun” Rua and Brandon Vera have won a combined two fights since June of 2010, but thanks to a shocking announcement by Dana White, one of them will have a light heavyweight title shot after their fight at UFC on Fox 4.Both fighters were pul…

Both fighters were pulled from previously scheduled fights and put in the main event for Saturday’s fight at the Staples Center.

The co-main event will pit Ryan Bader with the former champion Lyoto Machida.

Matchmaker Joe Silva usually gets it right with his decisions, but he made several big mistakes, not only with the matches, but in making the Rua-Vera winner the No. 1 contender.

Rua may be a big name, but he’s 1-2 in his last three fights. Vera is 4-3 since moving to light heavyweight, his biggest win coming against Krzysztof Soszynski in August of 2009. Neither of those scream out No. 1 contender.

Here’s how this weekend, as well as the light heavyweight title picture should have looked:

1. Make the main event Shogun vs. Machida 3. Machida is a bigger name than Vera, and fans love trilogies.

2. Make the co-main event Bader vs. Vera. Both had high hopes and had flashes of brilliance before suffering setbacks, and both are once again trying to climb the ladder.

3. Pit the Shogun-Machida winner against Alexander Gustafsson. Lost in all of this is the 25-year-old Swede who’s 6-1 in the UFC, including five straight wins, including knockouts of Matt Hamill and Vladimir Matyushenko. He beat Thiago Silva, the same guy who beat Vera before failing a drug test, in April, and yet is somehow behind Vera in terms of getting a title shot? Does that make sense to anybody?

While this Saturday should be a fantastic night of fights, what follows it may not be so fantastic.

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6 MMA Fighters We Hope to Never See in the ESPN Body Issue

The ESPN The Magazine Body Issue has been a huge hit since it debuted back in 2009. The ESPN rival to the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue obtained 35% more ad sales than comparable issues its first year.What separates The Body Issue from th…

The ESPN The Magazine Body Issue has been a huge hit since it debuted back in 2009. The ESPN rival to the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue obtained 35% more ad sales than comparable issues its first year.

What separates The Body Issue from the Swimsuit Issue is that all of the athletes are shown fully nude, with strategic coverage of private parts. Also, the athletes are a mix of male and female, while the swimsuit issue is just female models and athletes.

In its first four years, the body issue has featured MMA fighters Gina Carano, Randy Couture, Ronda Rousey, and Jon “Bones” Jones. Those four fighters embody the “Bodies We Want” section in the issue, showcasing, you guessed it, the best bodies in the world of sports.

This list will focus on both sides of the spectrum: the bodies that we would never want, and the bodies that would be the hardest to achieve.

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UFC 148: Predicting the PPV Buyrate for Anderson Silva vs. Chael Sonnen II

One-million, six-hundred thousand.That is, in terms of pure numbers, the holy grail of UFC pay-per-view numbers. Three years ago, it was the buyrate of UFC 100, the highest selling UFC PPV ever.Not to be outdone, almost a year later to the day, UFC 116…

One-million, six-hundred thousand.

That is, in terms of pure numbers, the holy grail of UFC pay-per-view numbers. Three years ago, it was the buyrate of UFC 100, the highest selling UFC PPV ever.

Not to be outdone, almost a year later to the day, UFC 116 brought about 1,160,000 PPV buys, the most ever by a card with one championship match on it (UFC 100 featured two championship matches).

When Chael Sonnen and Anderson Silva met for the first time in August of 2010, their PPV drew 600,000 buys. This was before their rivalry REALLY took off like it has ever since the re-match was announced.

That was a fight card that featured Jon Fitch and Thiago Alves as the co-main event. This card features far more star-power with Tito Ortiz and Forrest Griffin as the co-main event.

There might not be a greater rivalry in UFC, if not all of MMA, history than Silva-Sonnen. Their hatred for one another has grown to rival that of Red Sox-Yankees, North Carolina-Duke basketball, etc. And history has shown that fans love a great rivalry.

After UFC 116, the next-most bought PPV of 2010 was UFC 114, headlined by Quinton “Rampage” Jackson and Rashad Evans, who had become bitter rivals stemming from the heels of their coaching gig on season 10 of The Ultimate Fighter.

That PPV also featured Michael Bisping and Dan Miller in the co-main event, far below the excitement of Griffin-Ortiz III.

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UFC 147: A Card Not Worthy of Being on Pay-Per-View

When UFC 99 was aired on PPV three years ago, it wound up being the second-least purchased UFC PPV of the year. That fight card featured a still somewhat-in-their-prime Wanderlei Silva and Rich Franklin in the main event, rising stars Cheick Kongo and future heavyweight champion Cain Velasquez in the co- main event, as well as Dan Hardy and Mirko Cro Cop on the broadcast. All of that drew 360,000 PPV buys.

On June 23rd, the PPV card of UFC 147 will feature the rematch of a now somewhat-past-their-prime Franklin and Silva, and a respectable at best co-main event between heavyweight contenders Fabricio Werdum and Mike Russow. That is where the PPV worthy matches end.

The next fight on the main card is a featherweight bout between Brazilians Yuri Alcantara and Hacran Dias. Alcantara is 2-0 in the UFC, with decision victories over Michihiro Omigawa and Felipe Arantes the last two times the octagon made its way to Brazil at UFC 142 and UFC 134. Dias is making his UFC debut after a 20-1-1 start to his MMA career, his last five wins coming in the Shooto organization.

The next two fights are the finals of “The Ultimate Fighter: Brazil” in the featherweight and middleweight divisions. The featherweight final will pit two (shocker) Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belts against one another as Godofredo Pepey will take on Rony “Jason” Mariano. Pepey comes into the fight 8-0, Mariano at 10-3.

The middleweight finals will pit 7-2 Daniel Sarafian against the winner of the semi-final fight between Thiago Bodao and Cezar Mutante. This is the first time in the 16 seasons of “The Ultimate Fighter” that the final will air on PPV.

This Brazilian fighter-heavy card is reminiscent of past events UFC 75, UFC 95, and UFC 105, all of which took place in England where the fight cards were filled up with English fighters to appeal to the majority of those in attendance. All three of those cards aired for free on Spike TV, and all of them had better main cards top-to-bottom than UFC 147.

The main card of UFC 147 has an appealing main event and co-main Event, at best. If the UFC thinks they will rake in big PPV numbers on June 23rd, they should think again.

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UFC: Why the Korean Zombie Has Nothing for Jose Aldo

Jose Aldo, in many ways, is Anderson Silva, Jr. He’s a Brazilian UFC Champion with a black belt in Brazilian jiu jitsu, though he rarely needs to show off his ground game because of his superior stand-up skills, something he has proven in his…

He has defeated submission specialists, knockout artists and top-flight wrestlers with ease, successfully defending the WEC/UFC Featherweight Championship five times since knocking out Mike Brown to win the title in November of 2009.

“The Korean Zombie” Chan Sung Jung will bring nothing to the table that Aldo has not already seen. Much like Anderson Silva, the person who defeats Jose Aldo will need a near perfect mix of wrestling skills, submission defense for when they do take Aldo down and enough stand-up power to keep Aldo guessing if only for a split-second so that he’s not defending take downs the whole fight.

Jung does not have the wrestling game that someone like Mike Brown, a high school state champion, or Urijah Faber, who wrestled at Division I University of California-Davis, possesses, and Aldo kept those fights on the feet, winning dominantly both times.

Jung for all his supposed success, has been a very unpredictable, somewhat inconsistent fighter. He let his first fight under the Zuffa banner go the distance with Leonard Garcia despite Garcia constantly gassing himself out after Jung abandoned any sort of game plan and proceeded to engage in a 15-minute display of offense with “Bad Boy,” with the concept of defense not really existing after the first round of the fight. He then was knocked out by George Roop, who entered the fight with one career win by KO/TKO. Hes looked better in his last three fights, including highlight-reel finishes of Garcia and Mark Hominick, but Garcia and Hominick are not Jose Aldo.

For that matter, nobody at 145 pounds in the world is Jose Aldo, which is why it seems as if Aldo will be champion for a long time.

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UFC: Is It Possible to Convince Fans That the Knockout Is Not Always King?

Fans of any combat sport in the world—whether it be boxing, mixed martial arts, karate or tae kwan do, among others—love a good knockout. A move coming out of nowhere to put a man on the ground, out cold, and get the fans out of their seats…

So, can the UFC convince its fans that the knockout is not all that it’s cracked up to be? How would it go about doing that?

Let’s see what we can do right now.

Look at the five nominees for fight of the year 2011: Jose Aldo vs. Mark Hominick at UFC 129, Dominick Cruz vs. Urijah Faber at UFC 132, Frankie Edgar vs. Gray Maynard at UFC 125, Nick Diaz vs. Paul Daley at “Strikeforce: Diaz vs. Daley,” and Diego Sanchez vs. Martin Kampmann at UFC Live 3.

The only one of these five fights not to go the distance was Diaz vs. Daley. That lasted less than one round. Imagine if that fight had gone on another 20 minutes. It may have won Fight of the Year, but it was never given enough time. Why? Because Diaz knocked out Daley with punches at the end of the first round.

What if Gray Maynard had knocked out Frankie Edgar in the first round of their fight at UFC 125? The comeback that Edgar put on over the next four rounds to earn a draw and retain his championship would never have been seen.

For the UFC to convince fans that the knockout is no longer king, they have to play the 15 to 25 minutes of action card as much as possible. Joe Rogan said of the Chris Leben vs. Wanderlei Silva fight at UFC 132 that it had “all the makings of fight of the year, and perhaps the fight of the decade!” The fight lasted 27 seconds. So much for that.

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