At various times in his UFC career, Matt Hamill‘s wrestling has been described by UFC personalities as elite, Olympic-level, and world-class. Among his wrestling achievements are a gold medal, and two national wrestling championships. After watching Quinton Jackson easily stuff all of Hamill’s takedown attempts, it’s safe to say his abilities as a wrestler were overrated.
But if you’ve been paying any attention, you’ll know that they always were overrated.
Matt Hamill was a Division III wrestling champion. It’s not like he was ever the best wrestler in his weight class, or even the third best.
There are two whole bigger and better divisions above Division III.
Matt Hamill may not even be a national-level wrestler, let alone a world-class one.
Hamill never wrestled at the Olympics.
He wrestled and won his medals at the Deaflympics. That’s a far smaller pool of talent in America, let alone the rest of the world where resources spent on handicapped athletes are far more limited.
Not to take away from what Hamill has achieved as a wrestler and MMA fighter, but his credentials simply don’t stack up as elite or world class, and to say so is simply lying.
In that respect, UFC promoters and personalities like Joe Rogan should take some of the blame for hyping up Matt Hamill as this elite wrestler who could possibly beat Rampage Jackson.
But as promoters and hype generators, this is their job.
It’s not their job to point out that even if Hamill’s wrestling was on that elite level, Jackson has already held his own against elite wrestlers in the past, like Kevin Randleman, Dan Henderson, and Matt Lindland.
In this case, the UFC threw us a bone and told us as much anyway.
It takes about 5 seconds to run a Google search and find Matt Hamill’s Wikipedia entry.
Any MMA fans who were shocked or disappointed in Hamill’s efforts have only themselves to blame for being lazy and getting themselves overhyped over a match where the final outcome of victory and defeat was about as predictable as they come.
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