The term “expected” is seldom thrown around much in MMA circles unless you ask someone that goes off of name recognition to make their picks, but when it is said that we as a sports community should have seen something coming, the first question relates to how we should have seen it coming.
Fedor losing two fights in a row, Randy Couture losing a fight against a top-five light heavyweight after defending the sport’s honor, Jose “Scarface” Aldo looking vulnerable, Urijah Faber being booked for a fight against a guy that he genuinely did not like—these are all the things we should have seen coming when they went down, but the fan in all of us prevented us from seeing the events of the past year coming.
Maybe we just wanted those dream fights to happen, but for whatever reason we chose and are sticking by, the fact is we chose to not see those upsets coming.
Maybe it’s me, but we may have to add the brand new UFC 131 headliner—the long-debated Junior dos Santos vs. Shane Carwin bout, still existent as a UFC heavyweight title eliminator until otherwise confirmed—to the list of MMA events in time that we should have expected.
From the moment it was announced that Lesnar and dos Santos were announced as coaches for The Ultimate Fighter 13 and UFC 131 headliners, there’s one question we all had before and during TUF 13 before we found out about Lesnar’s recurring diverticulitis:
Why is there not the same hype for this fight as the Velasquez bout got?
Was one of the men involved not named Brock Lesnar?
Maybe it was because the belt was on the line in the Velasquez fight, but Brock Lesnar is arguably the most polarizing name in the sport right now, so the belt should not have been preventing Dana White from hyping the bejeezus out of this sucker.
We also could have pointed to Junior dos Santos, who only had the hype of being unbeaten in the UFC and being one of the three arguable most technical strikers, pound-for-pound, in the UFC heavyweight division to his credit.
Aside from that and the fact that he’s learning English and able to conduct an interview without subtitles, there’s not much you can do with JDS because he’s so damn nice.
You’ve seen him on the show…you guys know what I’m talking about.
The dude couldn’t be a jerk if it meant saving his career.
Anyway, it seemed like we had all the answers, but then diverticulitis forced itself into a rematch with Lesnar as of yesterday, so Carwin had to step in for the man who took his “0”.
Then during a discussion someone sparked up earlier today, the thought came up about why a Brock Lesnar fight, of all fights, would not be as heavily promoted up to this point, and that’s when I started questioning it myself.
Should we have expected this dream-fight to become a reality from the minute we first heard that Lesnar and Dos Santos would first coach TUF, and then meet up in Vancouver?
I mean, Velasquez and Lesnar didn’t trade too much trash talk either.
The most offensive thing I can think of was Lesnar saying he’d eat a burrito and drink a Corona after beating Velasquez, but he didn’t say too many outlandish words to Velasquez either.
Maybe the fight was never meant to happen, or maybe Dana White just wanted us to have this fight since we’ve been talking about it for so long.
Whatever the reason was, whether we should’ve seen this coming or not, let’s answer one question honestly:
Whether we should’ve seen this one coming or not, can we really say the end result is disappointing?
Au contraire, I don’t think the end result could make me any happier than I am right now.
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