Anderson Silva has been the best mixed martial arts fighter on the planet for six years. He has defeated the best middleweights and a few light heavyweights during his UFC tenure, including an incredible knockout of Stephan Bonnar at UFC 153 on Saturday night.
Yet for all his bravado inside the cage, amazing athleticism and apparent inability to be stopped even in the most dire circumstances, one can’t help but feel like everything that we saw on Saturday night did nothing.
Granted, some of that was to be expected. Silva took this fight on short notice basically as a favor to UFC president Dana White, who was left scrambling to find a main event after Eric Koch had to withdraw from his featherweight title fight against Jose Aldo only to see Aldo forced off the card against replacement challenger Frankie Edgar due to an injury.
Bonnar hadn’t fought since last November and was, for all intents and purposes, as close to retired as a fighter can be without actually being retired: He was still around, but not taking any fights.
So, when you put the best fighter in the world against someone like Bonnar, what should you realistically expect to happen? Exactly what we got, which was a spectacular knockout that will be on highlight reels for years to come.
Silva was toying with Bonnar for basically the entire round before he decided to end it. It was a fun fight and provided a great “Holy Cow” moment for everyone watching, yet where do we go from here?
White told reporters after the fight that he is looking into putting Silva in the Octagon with Jon Jones next, though Silva continues to insist that he doesn’t want to do that fight:
I know my man says “no, no, no” to Jon Jones, but the amount of money that will be offered for that fight, he will say “yes, yes, yes.”
This is a gross overreaction to what we saw Silva do at UFC 153. Bonnar is not in the same league as Jones, so trying to take away anything that happened on Saturday night and applying it towards a super-fight is useless.
Silva does have a body type that can handle fighting Jones at 205 pounds, but he would be out of his element against an athlete who can match him, if not outdo him, in many aspects.
Jones’ limbs are so long that Silva would be lucky to touch him in that fight, though Silva’s speed can create opportunities that a normal fighter wouldn’t get.
None of this is to say that I don’t want to see the fight; anyone who has seen seven seconds of UFC would pay to see Jones fight Silva. But trying to put the two in the Octagon just because of Silva’s performance against Bonnar strikes me as incredibly shortsighted.
We didn’t see anything on Saturday night from Silva that we didn’t already know.
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