(Dear God, can you imagine how funny this is going to look when Silva puts his creative spin on it?)
Before we begin, I’d like to take a quick poll: What is getting more annoying, the fact that Rampage Jackson continues to air out his dirty laundry with the UFC ad nauseam, or that everyone involved in deciding Anderson Silva’s next opponent continue to talk circles around us?
First it was Luke Rockhold. Then it was Michael Bisping. Then it was a film career. It was never Chris Weidman, until recently when it was Chris Weidman. And then, likely because Ed Soares is secretly suffering from Symphorophilia, it was Cung Le. And now, according to a recent interview with Dana White, it’s Rashad Evans, because he’s a thing:
A lot of people think Chris Weidman is the #1 contender right now. If Rashad made a move from 205 down to 185, it’d be safe to say he’s now #1. If Rashad won on Saturday night and wanted to go to 185, we would consider that.
As much as I’d like to use this opportunity to get on my soapbox about the UFC’s recent insistence on matching up their champions with challengers from entirely different weight classes based solely on name value, I’d rather like to applaud Dana for actually considering Evans here. For starters, he would at least be theoretically coming off a win in this scenario, and that in and of itself is more than the UFC has been capable of delivering in recent times.
On the other hand, can you imagine how humiliating this must be to the fighters of the middleweight division? These poor bastards just don’t seem to have it in them to string together enough wins/talk enough trash to get their own champion on board for a title fight, to the point that the president of the promotion has been forced to find guys who would damn near kill themselves making weight just to fill in the void.
And if you don’t find this whole situation hilarious enough as it is, just wait until you hear what Rashad Evans has to say about all this (via MMAJunkie, emphasis mine):
I’m not a good matchup for him. I’m sure he’s not chomping at the bit to fight me. He doesn’t really have anything to gain from fighting me, so I don’t know if he would even want to fight me. I don’t know why he would go out of his way to fight somebody like me.
Besides that, I love Anderson. He’s a great guy outside of the cage, and he’s one of my favorite fighters to watch inside the cage. To me, to fight him would be a little bittersweet because I know I would beat him. I know I would beat him.
You just have to appreciate that kind of confidence when it’s delivered by a guy who did little more than serve as a punching bag to Jon Jones in his last title fight.
Of course, Evans’ performance against Antonio Rogerio Nogueria will say more about the direction in which he’s headed than anything else. And based on the current betting lines, we’re going to guess that he’ll come out of that one just fine. While there’s no doubt that he could pose some problems for Anderson — he’s basically a more experienced Chris Weidman with better hands — are any of you Taters enticed by this potential matchup?