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Sorting out the Women’s Bantamweight Division Past Ronda Rousey vs. Cat Zingano

One of the best stories of 2014 has been the return to action of women’s bantamweight contender Cat Zingano. After missing out on a coaching spot and title fight opposite Ronda Rousey due to injury late last year, Zingano has gone through difficu…

She’s back now, and her third-round TKO over Amanda Nunes at UFC 178 last month set up a fight that many have been waiting for: Ronda Rousey vs. the rightful No. 1 contender, “Alpha” Cat Zingano. Looking at the current landscape, there are a few different outcomes we might be looking at past Rousey vs. Zingano.

As of this writing, 10 of the Top 15 fighters in the UFC women’s bantamweight division don’t have fights booked. Aside from Leslie Smith vs. Jessica Eye at UFC 180 and Holly Holm vs. Raquel Pennington at UFC 181, the fights involving the key players aren’t scheduled yet, so we don’t know the next moves for a lot of the women in the division.

Zingano is the most legitimate threat to Rousey in the division, and like Rousey, she has yet to taste defeat in mixed martial arts. Despite all this, Rousey will be a heavy favorite to defeat her.

If Rousey is able to hand Zingano her first loss at UFC 182, then what? Who might be next for Rousey and the rest of the top of the UFC women’s bantamweight division?

The Top Five

Aside from Cat Zingano, the women in the Top Five have all lost to the champion, with Sarah Kaufman being the only one who lost to Rousey outside of the UFC. Believe it or not, these women might be the farthest away from the title, despite their high rankings.

2014 has seen Miesha Tate bounce back from two straight losses and take home unanimous-decision victories over Liz Carmouche and Rin Nakai. She’s going to need a lengthy winning streak with strong performances to get back into the title conversation.

There are plenty of fights for Tate to take, and a bout with Sara McMann or Alexis Davis might make sense. Tate might also best be served as a stiff test for new entrants to the division.

McMann had a surprisingly tough fight against former Invicta FC bantamweight champion Lauren Murphy back in August but left with a split-decision victory. The UFC needs to be a bit careful what it does with McMann, because she could be a bona fide hype-killer. Her wrestling credentials could make her a veritable nonstarter for young prospects who are just starting out in the UFC.

Her only loss is to the champion, so a few impressive finishes might align McMann for a rematch with Rousey toward the end of 2015 or early 2016.

On The Rise

The archrival and nemesis of the “Four Horsewomen” is the undefeated Brazilian, Bethe Correia. After a decision victory over Rousey team member Jessamyn Duke at UFC 172, she threw up four fingers and lowered one of them, firing the first shot at Rousey and her crew.

That earned her a fight with another member of the Horsewomen, Shayna Baszler. Correia finished Baszler at UFC 177 and has made it onto the champ’s radar. With the UFC looking for Rousey to make a quick turnaround after her next fight, the 31-year-old out of Pitbull Brothers will likely fight for the title in 2015.

The UFC announced this week that undefeated prospect Holly Holm will make her Octagon debut at UFC 181 on December 6 against Raquel Pennington. Holm, who trains out of the famed Team Jackson-Wink in Albuquerque, New Mexico, is a former world champion boxer and posted a 33-2-3 record in professional boxing record and went 2-1 in kickboxing before going 7-0 in MMA.

She’ll get a game opponent on the feet in Pennington, who’s willing to brawl in a fight that will likely be fought in Holm‘s stand-up comfort zone.

Cyborg and Carano

UFC President Dana White has gone back and forth about the status of Gina Carano entering the Octagon. White went from saying that he was going to get a deal done one week to telling FoxSports.com that Carano was “the hardest human being we’ve ever dealt with and I didn’t see it coming.”

With the door most likely close to shut on a fight between Carano and Ronda Rousey, the only remaining matchup of intrigue for Rousey outside the UFC is against Cristiane “Cyborg” Justino.

Cyborg is scheduled to make her 135-pound debut on December 5 at Invicta FC 10 on UFC Fight Pass. No opponent has been signed as of yet, but with a win, Cyborg would likely get shipped over to the UFC for a superfight with Rousey or a top-contender fight against someone else in the upper end of the women’s bantamweight division.

A lot of fighters in the Top 15 of the women’s bantamweight division simply don’t have fights booked for the end of 2014 or beginning of 2015. We know Rousey and Zingano will finally face off, likely at UFC 182 on January 3, but beyond that is speculation.

The UFC is doing a good job of signing female prospects from around the world and from Invicta, and the talent pool in the bantamweight division might start to catch up with its dominant champion.

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4 Fighters Who Could Challenge Demetrious Johnson

Demetrious “Mighty Mouse” Johnson has been extremely dominant as the UFC’s first and only flyweight champion.
Since his 2012 rematch with Ian McCall, he has reigned supreme over every 125-pound fighter the UFC has put in front of him….

Demetrious “Mighty Mouse” Johnson has been extremely dominant as the UFC’s first and only flyweight champion.

Since his 2012 rematch with Ian McCall, he has reigned supreme over every 125-pound fighter the UFC has put in front of him. Despite many people thinking that Johnson has essentially cleaned out the top of the flyweight division, a few worthy adversaries remain.

Johnson was one of the top fighters at 135 pounds when the UFC first introduced that weight class prior to flyweight. He defeated Norifumi “Kid” Yamamoto and Miguel Torres to earn a shot at then-bantamweight champ Dominick Cruz but came up short, losing by unanimous decision to Cruz in October 2011.

If Johnson ever truly clears out the 125-pound ranks and needs some competition, he can do what former UFC middleweight champion Anderson Silva did from time to time—move up in weight for occasional showcase fights against intriguing opponents.

There are more than a few intriguing bouts for Mighty Mouse at his old stomping ground of 135 pounds, including a “superfight” with the champ T.J. Dillashaw.

Johnson really doesn’t need to look beyond his current weight class for formidable opposition. Not yet, anyway. An upcoming matchup between sixth-ranked flyweight Jon Lineker and third-ranked Ian McCall on November 8 could likely determine the next challenger for Johnson’s title.

Here are four fighters who could challenge UFC flyweight champion Demetrious Johnson.

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Sorting out the Contenders, Pretenders in the UFC Middleweight Division

Atop the middleweight mountain stands Chris Weidman. He’s young, big, strong and capable of competing with and defeating everybody who stands in front of him.
Champion-like qualities aside, his controversial victories over Anderson Silva left muc…

Atop the middleweight mountain stands Chris Weidman. He’s young, big, strong and capable of competing with and defeating everybody who stands in front of him.

Champion-like qualities aside, his controversial victories over Anderson Silva left much to be desired. Understandably so, a fluke knockout and a broken shin created questions that we needed to be answered.

Then he stepped into the cage with Lyoto Machida and silenced most of his critics. He’s the real deal.

After Weidman lies a crop of fighters who are all vying to compete for UFC gold. Some are the real deal; some even have the skills to dethrone the ultra-confident Ray Longo-trained fighter. But many aren’t and don’t.

Scroll along as we brand each of the UFC’s top 10 middleweights as a contender or a pretender. For the purposes of this article, contenders are those who stand a chance (slim or otherwise) of defeating the champion. Pretenders, on the other hand, do not.

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The Ultimate Fighter Brazil Launches Casting Call

São Paulo – The UFC® will be hosting a casting call for the fourth season of its Brazilian reality TV show, The Ultimate Fightersup>®, airing on Globo, on Monday, October 27 at the Windsor Barra hotel in Rio de Janeiro. Tryouts will be open to bantamweights (61 kg) and lightweights (70 kg). This season’s coaches have not yet been announced.
All candidates for The Ultimate Fighter® Brazil should be between 18 and 35 years of age and have a minimum of three professional Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fights – holding a winning record (with verifiable records). For … Read the Full Article Here

Jon Jones Has Been a Little Too Quiet of Late, Perhaps That’s a Good Thing?

Jon Jones has become a lightning rod within the world of mixed martial arts.
The man that once saved a woman from an attempted mugging hours before becoming the UFC light heavyweight champion has placed himself in a position to be hated. Every move he …

Jon Jones has become a lightning rod within the world of mixed martial arts.

The man that once saved a woman from an attempted mugging hours before becoming the UFC light heavyweight champion has placed himself in a position to be hated. Every move he makes in the public eye causes the situation to worsen. Everything from deleted Instagram posts and tweets to mentioning his championship reign as destiny has given off a bad impression to the fight community.

As the world awaits his eighth title defense against Daniel Cormier at UFC 182, it seems as if the champion has not had much to say, which is a very good thing at this point in time.

It is a fact that Jon Jones is an athletic force within the Ultimate Fighting Championship. He has dominated the 205-pound weight class in a way that has never been done before. At just 27 years of age, he has shown flashes of the potential to go down in history as the greatest fighter of all time. Still, those points have not saved him from the ridicule that has become customary in recent years.

Unfortunately, Jones brings much of this situation on himself. The initial controversy started with his 2012 DUI arrest in New York, per MMA Fighting. From that point on it seemed as if the relationship between Jones and the fans began to sour.

“It seems oxy-moronic to say this, but the most well-sponsored man in the sport is one of the most disliked,” Dane Curley of Fan Rag wrote in 2013. “Jon Jones has been rubbing people the wrong way ever since he took home a DUI for crashing his Bentley with two female passengers inside.”

Compound this situation with the cancellation of UFC 151 and the issue involving contract negotiations to sign Alexander Gustafsson, and it seemed as if Jones further fell into the role of the bad guy. As fate would place him against Daniel Cormier for UFC 178, a fight that would be nixed due to Jones suffering a knee injury, his public persona would continue to suffer via his words and actions.

No one will forget the run-in that occurred during the lead-up to UFC 178. Many expected the media brawl with Cormier to have a negative backlash on the sport of MMA, according to MMA Fighting.

“I think it’s ridiculous,” UFC personality, Joe Rogan said during his podcast (via David St. Martin of MMA Fighting). “This can’t happen. You can’t do that. This is real bad for the sport. It’s real bad. It’s real bad for public perception. It’s a weapon to be used against MMA. It’s unfortunate.”

While Jones would go on to apologize for the situation, via MMA Weekly, footage of Cormier and Jones arguing after an ESPN segment would just make the situation worse. It seems true that these two men are not fond of each other in any way, but their actions in the public eye have not been positive at all.

Since then it seems as if Jon Jones has been relatively quiet. While he is still active with his social media profiles, he has not resorted to responding to fans in controversial fashion like he has in the past.

Perhaps this change is for the best to let the air settle after the way the UFC 178 promotion nearly got out of hand. Jones can benefit from this newfound silence to emerge as a “focused champion” before what may be his toughest title defense to date.

Whatever the reason may be for his growing public hatred, Jon Jones may be the best fighter in the sport today—and ever when his career is over. For all his skills in the cage, he hasn’t shown the ability to present himself in the same way to the public. This newfound silence may be a smart move for the time being, but that wouldn’t be nearly as much fun.

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MMA’s ‘Fighter of the Year’ a 2-Man Race Between Cerrone and Lawler

As 2014 winds down, and we look to what the future might hold in 2015 for mixed martial arts, the pack starts to thin in the race for “Fighter of the Year,” and so far it’s down to two men: Robbie Lawler and Donald “Cowboy” Cerrone.
U…

UFC champions have not been particularly active this year. Cain Velasquez will only have one fight in 2014, the same goes for Jon Jones, Chris Weidman and Anthony Pettis. Johny Hendricks, Jose Aldo and Demetrious Johnson will have each fought twice by the time the year is over, and bantamweight champion T.J. Dillashaw has fought three times.

You could make a case for Ronda Rousey as Fighter of the Year due to the dominance in her two victories in 2014, which took a total of 1:22. There have been a lot of fighters who have been more active than the current group of UFC champions over the past year, and two in particular have stood out from the rest.

Robbie Lawler’s first fight of 2014 was against Johny Hendricks for the vacant UFC welterweight title at UFC 171 in March. He rallied back from being down two rounds, and won the third and the fourth round on all three judges scorecards. It was tied going into the fifth and final round.

The round itself was a microcosm of the larger fight as a whole, as it was super close with Hendricks just barely pulling away with a takedown at the end of the round that he was able to use to keep Lawler down just long enough to win the decision.

After the close fight with Hendricks, Lawler rebounded with a third-round TKO win over Jake Ellenberger in May, where he outstruck Ellenberger for the first two rounds, and late in the third a devastating knee to the body of Ellenberger and a left hook from Lawler put him away.

He followed that up with his five-round battle with the hard-nosed Matt Brown in the main event of UFC on Fox 12. Two impressive victories and a close loss in a title fight might be enough to declare “Ruthless” the Fighter of the Year, but the fact that he has earned a second title fight that will also be taking place before the year is up is even more impressive.

If Lawler takes the title from Hendricks on December 6, a new UFC welterweight champion would be hard to argue as the Fighter of the Year.

We don’t know exactly what the end of 2014 will look like for Donald “Cowboy” Cerrone just yet. He has been insisting since January that he wants to fight six times this year. He could wait and potentially fight for the lightweight title or in a top-contender fight with Khabib Nurmagomedov when he returns in early 2015. But Cerrone has said that he wants to stay active and fight again ASAP.

His 2014 offensive on the UFC 155-pound weight-class has been remarkable thus far. He kicked the year off with a first-round head-kick knockout of Adriano Martins at UFC on Fox in January.

Three months later he returned to action, where he engaged in a two-minute Muay Thai battle with Edson Barboza before jumping on his back and choking him out.

He finished Jim Miller twice in July. In the main event of UFC Fight Night Atlantic City, Cerrone caught Miller with a shot to the body that had Miller looking to the ref to save him. Mistaking it for a low blow, referee Dan Miragliotta briefly haulted the action and the resumed it. Cerrone then officially put Miller away with a head kick and some punches.

Two months after that, Cerrone had the daunting task of welcoming Eddie Alvarez to the UFC. Alvarez was thought to be one of the very best lightweights in the world, and would finally have a chance to prove it in the UFC. Cerrone defeated Alvarez by unanimous decision.

Four wins, three finishes, and the intention of fighting again within the next two months. Cerrone has set the bar pretty high for the fighter of 2014.

If Robbie Lawler starts off 2015 holding the UFC welterweight title, then he will be the year’s fightingest fighter, but if not, Donald “Cowboy” Cerrone will reign supreme.

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