Daniel Cormier and Roy Nelson will meet at heavyweight on Saturday, but UFC 166 could preview a light heavyweight move for both men.
While Cormier has said he’ll be dropping to 205 pounds regardless of the outcome over the weekend, Nelson recently post…
Daniel Cormier and Roy Nelson will meet at heavyweight on Saturday, but UFC 166 could preview a light heavyweight move for both men.
While Cormier has said he’ll be dropping to 205 pounds regardless of the outcome over the weekend, Nelson recently posted a picture to his Facebook page of him looking much trimmer than usual. Due to the magnitude of their matchup at UFC 166, the winner could be an immediate title contender in the light heavyweight division.
Of all the heavyweights on the UFC roster, only Mark Hunt is shorter than both Cormier and Nelson. At 5’11” Pat Barry stands at an equal height with Cormier. With Cormier and Nelson both having a little extra girth around the midsection, it’s unsurprising that they’d be considering a move to a lower weight class.
Which heavyweight will set up a potential light heavyweight title run on Saturday?
Here is a closer look at how Cormier and Nelson match up against one another in all areas.
Coming up this Saturday, Daniel Cormier may get his toughest test in the octagon yet. He faces off against Roy “Big Country” Nelson at UFC 166.
The Ultimate Show got a chance to sit down with the former Olympian at his gym, AKA in San Jose,…
Coming up this Saturday, Daniel Cormier may get his toughest test in the octagon yet. He faces off against Roy “Big Country” Nelson at UFC 166.
The Ultimate Show got a chance to sit down with the former Olympian at his gym, AKA in San Jose, to ask him a few questions. Hear how this fight with Big Country came to be, what it’s like training with the Heavy Weight Champ Cain Velasquez and more.
Be sure to sound off and let us know what you think in the comment section below!
Back in July, Daniel Cormier discussed how he planned to call for a light heavyweight title fight against Jon Jones after he was done roughing up Roy Nelson at UFC 166. Nelson, though, is looking to steal his thunder in more ways than one.
Speaking wit…
Back in July, Daniel Cormierdiscussed how he planned to call for a light heavyweight title fight against Jon Jones after he was done roughing up Roy Nelson at UFC 166. Nelson, though, is looking to steal his thunder in more ways than one.
My goal is just to beat Daniel. My goal is to fight the champ. Right now, Daniel is in front of me, so I’m trying to beat him…in everything he does. I’m hearing that if he beats me, he’s supposed to get a title shot at 205; he gets to jump to the front of the line. I’m all about jumping to the front of the line. My mode of thinking is that he’s number 2, and if I beat him, my next step after that would be to fight for the belt, in either division.
Nelson, twice now, has gotten very close to title contention in the heavyweight division. He dropped a top contender bout to eventual champion Junior dos Santos at UFC 117, and most recently, he had an impressive three-fight streak of knockouts ended by an ugly decision loss to StipeMiocic. Nelson, though, hasn’t taken his eye off the prize.
“Big Country” recently posted a photo of himself looking shockingly lean and in-shape. He has long been chastised by UFC president Dana White for his weight and disheveled appearance.
Commentator Joe Rogan has long rambled that Nelson would be best served by fighting at light heavyweight. However, that has seemed to be a pipe dream, given Nelson’s age (he is currently 37 and didn’t join the UFC until he was 33 years old) and the fact that he has spent his entire MMA and Brazilian jiu-jitsu career at heavyweight.
That said, Nelson’s recent weight loss, depending on the actual number on the scale at the weigh-in, makes that seem like a legitimate possibility.
Even with the weight loss, Nelson is a big underdog against Daniel Cormier. Cormier has had remarkable success against some serious UFC competition and has beaten three top-10 heavyweights in his 12-fight career. He is a world-class wrestler who, on paper, seems more than capable of outclinching and outgrappling Nelson without difficulty.
Still, Nelson has shown himself to be capable of knocking out anybody in the business.
They will meet at UFC 166 on October 19. Make sure to keep an eye out for more updates about the fight card as they become available.
In advance of their UFC 166 world heavyweight title main event on October 19th, champion Cain Velasquez and challenger Junior Dos Santos are being featured in another UFC Primetime documentary series. Episode 1 premiered Wednesday night and already began to reveal a number of interesting tidbits about the fighters and their training camps heading into the rubber match of their trilogy.
1. Junior Dos Santos may be challenging Georges St. Pierre for having the most scientific training camp in the world.
Dos Santos demonstrated incredible will and conditioning throughout the five-round beating he took from Velasquez in their second fight so it was amazing to hear that he wasn’t at his best for the fight, physically. In fact, the then-champion had over-trained for the fight, resulting in a nasty condition called rhabdomyolysis, where muscle fibers were breaking off and let loose into his blood stream.
To make sure that doesn’t happen again to him this training camp, we learned in last night’s episode that Dos Santos has employed a group of scientists who constantly test his blood. He gets his blood drawn at home, he gets it drawn at the gym right before sparring and the white coats spend the rest of the day testing and analyzing his samples and preparing reports for Junior and his team. Dos Santos’ sophisticated strength and conditioning program is informed by that blood work.
By the looks of it, this is some of the most scientific preparation we’ve seen outside of Georges St. Pierre doing gymnastics and benefiting from the French-Canadian supplement-wrestling complex.
In advance of their UFC 166 world heavyweight title main event on October 19th, champion Cain Velasquez and challenger Junior Dos Santos are being featured in another UFC Primetime documentary series. Episode 1 premiered Wednesday night and already began to reveal a number of interesting tidbits about the fighters and their training camps heading into the rubber match of their trilogy.
1. Junior Dos Santos may be challenging Georges St. Pierre for having the most scientific training camp in the world.
Dos Santos demonstrated incredible will and conditioning throughout the five-round beating he took from Velasquez in their second fight so it was amazing to hear that he wasn’t at his best for the fight, physically. In fact, the then-champion had over-trained for the fight, resulting in a nasty condition called rhabdomyolysis, where muscle fibers were breaking off and let loose into his blood stream.
To make sure that doesn’t happen again to him this training camp, we learned in last night’s episode that Dos Santos has employed a group of scientists who constantly test his blood. He gets his blood drawn at home, he gets it drawn at the gym right before sparring and the white coats spend the rest of the day testing and analyzing his samples and preparing reports for Junior and his team. Dos Santos’ sophisticated strength and conditioning program is informed by that blood work.
By the looks of it, this is some of the most scientific preparation we’ve seen outside of Georges St. Pierre doing gymnastics and benefiting from the French-Canadian supplement-wrestling complex.
It would seem that showering after rolling around with an unkempt guy like “BigCountry” would be a good idea — you know, to get the hair balls out and to ward off tetanus — but Velasquez’s coach/teammate Daniel Cormier says he won’t have time to shower after facing Nelson in their UFC 166 co-main event. In addition to being a sparring partner of Cain’s at American Kickboxing Academy (more on that below) and being the #3 UFC-ranked heavyweight in the world, Cormier is the champ’s wrestling coach and Velasquez does not feel comfortable fighting without the Olympian in his corner.
Because of this, Cormier will have to rush from the Octagon after fighting Nelson and get right to Cain’s corner. No time for showering, you see.
3. Daniel Cormier and Cain Velasquez beat the crap out of one another three times a week.
Cormier and Velasquez are teammates in the same weight division (for now) so, of course, they are sparring partners. In episode 1 of UFC Primetime: Velasquez vs. Dos Santos, however, we get to watch one of their thrice-weekly sparring sessions and they go pretty darn hard. This ain’t no timing sparring going on here, these two get after it. No wonder they each have confidence heading into their fights.
4. Junior Dos Santos may be the most bitter, happy guy in the world.
We all know Junior as a smiling, KO machine with nary a bad word to say about anyone not named Alistair Overeem, but his last loss to Velasquez and the commentary during and after it have clearly rubbed the #1 contender the wrong way. Primetime takes us into the home of Dos Santos as he watches tape of his loss to Cain and listens to the television commentators marvel at Velasquez’s whooping of him and say that “this is the real Cain Velasquez.” You know, as opposed to the impostor that Junior beat with ease when he himself had a torn meniscus in 2011.
His anger at the way his fight was called bubbles up throughout the episode for Dos Santos. There’s also lots of footage of him fighting and playing around with friends, but make no mistake — the ex-champ is going into this rubber-match with a major chip on his shoulder.
5. JDS has a secret Russian wrestling weapon and his name is Khetag Pliev.
In addition to getting punched and kicked around the Octagon for five rounds by Velasquez, Dos Santos was handily out-wrestled and out-hustled by Cain. To help improve his wrestling, Dos Santos flew in 2012 wrestling Olympian Khetag Pliev. The Russian says that Dos Santos is getting harder to take down for him and in the episode we see Junior using lots of takedowns in his own sparring. Will it make a difference? Shoot us your predictions for Cain vs. JDS III in the comments section…
Yep, that’s TUF 10 winner, TUF 16 coach and UFC heavyweight Roy “Big Country” Nelson, looking trimmer than Tom Hanks at the end of Cast Away(which, with the Saddam Hussein circa 2003 beard and all, might be exactly the look he is going for).
Nelson’s weight has been a topic of much discussion over the years — usually in the aftermath of a particularly stinging loss — to the point that he once promised to cut to light heavyweight if enough people “liked” his Facebook page. Although his challenge was unsuccessful, it looks like Nelson is finally starting to take this weight-cutting thing seriously.
And it couldn’t come a day sooner. With Nelson set to face former Olympic wrestler and Strikeforce heavyweight champion Daniel Cormier at UFC 166, he’ll need to be in tip-top shape if he is to avoid dropping his second straight contest for the first time since 2011. It also appears as if Nelson has heeded the requests of Cormier’s camp and undergone a Dumb and Dumber-style makeover in regards to his facial hair. Stipulations of his new contract, maybe?
Yep, that’s TUF 10 winner, TUF 16 coach and UFC heavyweight Roy “Big Country” Nelson, looking trimmer than Tom Hanks at the end of Cast Away(which, with the Saddam Hussein circa 2003 beard and all, might be exactly the look he is going for).
Nelson’s weight has been a topic of much discussion over the years — usually in the aftermath of a particularly stinging loss — to the point that he once promised to cut to light heavyweight if enough people “liked” his Facebook page. Although his challenge was unsuccessful, it looks like Nelson is finally starting to take this weight-cutting thing seriously.
And it couldn’t come a day sooner. With Nelson set to face former Olympic wrestler and Strikeforce heavyweight champion Daniel Cormier at UFC 166, he’ll need to be in tip-top shape if he is to avoid dropping his second straight contest for the first time since 2011. It also appears as if Nelson has heeded the requests of Cormier’s camp and undergone a Dumb and Dumber-style makeover in regards to his facial hair. Stipulations of his new contract, maybe?
Less than a week has gone by since the epic battle between Jon Jones and Alexander Gustafsson went down at UFC 165.
The pound-for-pound phenom escaped the Air Canada Centre in Toronto with his light heavyweight strap in tow, but certainly did not do so…
Less than a week has gone by since the epic battle between Jon Jones and Alexander Gustafsson went down at UFC 165.
The pound-for-pound phenom escaped the Air Canada Centre in Toronto with his light heavyweight strap in tow, but certainly did not do so unscathed.
Jon Jones and Alexander Gustafsson took turns emptying out their respective arsenals over the course of the five-round affair. While “The Mauler” took Jones into deeper waters than he’d ever been before, it still wasn’t enough to sink the young champion.
Immediately after the main event tilt, the MMA community demanded a rematch. Debates raged on Twitter for the next two days regarding the judges’ decision, but the one idea most media members and fans seemed to agree on was that a rematch made the most sense.
Those sentiments were put on ice Thursday morning when the UFC announced the next fighter to get a shot at the light heavyweight title would be Glover Teixeira. The Brazilian powerhouse had been deemed next in line by UFC President Dana White prior to the “Fight of the Year”-worthy bout between Jones and Gustafsson, and despite the outcry for an immediate rematch the promotion decided to book Jones vs. Teixeira instead.
While the decision to book Teixeira as the next opponent for Jones may not have been the popular choice to make, it was made nevertheless, and the 205-pound division is now facing an interesting road ahead. With Jones and Teixeira set to square off on Super Bowl weekend in New Jersey, the title race in the upper tier of the division will now become wide open.
Prior to the main event at UFC 165, the options remaining for Jones in the division he’s dominated for three years looked sparse. But now after being taken to the brink by Gustafsson, and moving on to his next challenge with Teixeira, what appeared as a “cleaned out” weight class one week ago is now looking a bit different.
Gustafsson‘s Stock is High but the Next Step is Going to be Tricky
Despite being a sizable underdog going into his bout with Jon Jones, upon the fight’s conclusion Alexander Gustafsson emerged a new man in the eyes of the fighting faithful.
While his quest to “shock the world” wasn’t fulfilled in the sense he initially intended, the rangy Swedish fighter absolutely accomplished this task by making a fighter who had yet to look human appear very much so. Few people were giving the 26-year-old even a remote chance to dethrone the light heavyweight king going into the fight, but afterwards Gustafsson‘s skills and heart were the hot topics floating around the MMA universe.
Although he had come up short in Toronto, “The Mauler” wasted no time in lobbying for a rematch. He took to the interview circuit to make his case and received massive support from the UFC fan base in his mission to secure another bout with Jones.
Nevertheless, the UFC tapped Glover Teixeira to face the champion next, and now Gustafsson will face an interesting dilemma on the road ahead. While a former title challenger having to get at least another win under his belt before jumping back up into contention is a common scenario in combat sports, this presents a problem where Gustafsson is concerned.
Outside of friend and teammate Phil Davis, there are no other elite 205-pound fighters without bouts scheduled on the docket. Davis and Gustafsson have already fought once before with “Mr. Wonderful” handing Gustafsson the first loss of his professional career. Following their fight at UFC 112 in 2010, Gustafsson moved his training camp to join Davis at Alliance MMA in San Diego.
During the taping of Countdown to UFC 165, Gustafsson addressed the issue of them having to step into the Octagon again in the future. He alluded to it being something they would have no problem doing with a title on the line. Davis has also addressed the issue in the past and expressed the same sentiment.
Obviously, if they were to lock up later this year or early next there would be no championship gold at stake, and this would make a rematch between the two teammates a difficult situation to navigate.
That being said, there aren’t many other options for Gustafsson with the current landscape of the division. Former title challenger ChaelSonnen and former champion Rashad Evans are set to dance at UFC 168 in late December, but the winner of that tilt most likely wouldn’t compete again until March or April of 2014.
Dan Henderson and VitorBelfort are slated to trade leather on Nov. 9 at Fight Night 32, but that contest won’t do much in providing an answer in the 205-pound ranks. “Hendo” will be coming into the bout on a two-fight skid, and while Belfort is currently on a tear those wins have been in the middleweight division. Even if he does get past Henderson, there is no guarantee “The Phenom” will remain in the light heavyweight fold in the aftermath.
This leaves Gustafsson sitting with red-hot stock and nowhere to go, and that is a problem.
More Than a Few Obstacles Blocking Daniel Cormier‘s Light Heavyweight Title Shot
For the past year the excitement has been building for Daniel Cormier to get into the Octagon with Jon Jones. The two men have taken turns trading barbs in the MMA media, and the anticipation for “D.C.” to get into the mix at 205-pounds has been high.
With the dominance Jones has displayed in the weight class, it is rare to see a potential opponent mentioned that draws his ire, but Cormier has accomplished this task. In every interview or press conference where the champion is asked about a potential bout with the former Olympian it becomes clear just how much the AKA fighter has gotten under Jones’ skin.
Nevertheless, Cormier is currently competing in the heavyweight division and there are some major obstacles blocking his projected path towards Jones. The first is a brick-handed knockout artist in Roy Nelson, who Cormier will face next month at UFC 166. Before making the move down to 205-pounds, Cormier wanted to settle his beef with “Big Country” and that grudge match will get resolved on Oct. 19 in Houston, Texas.
While there is no guarantee he will defeat the former TUF winner in their tilt, the road to Jones took another big twist this past weekend in Toronto. With Gustafsson coming just shy of unseating Jones from the light heavyweight throne, he became the fighter fans want to see inside the cage with the champion. Even with Gustafsson getting passed over for the immediate rematch, he will certainly be the next in line for the title shot after Jones and Teixeira settle their business on Super Bowl weekend.
This will create a bit of a predicament for Cormier as his hopes were to defeat Nelson at UFC 166, then drop down for a title shot at 205-pounds. The Strikeforce Heavyweight Grand Prix winner is 34 years old, and despite his late start in MMA, has been on a serious run to become a champion. That being said, with his friend and teammate Cain Velasquez holding the heavyweight strap, Cormier has decided to put his focus on the light heavyweight title.
While achieving that goal is still a possibility, the odds of him getting a title shot in his first fight in a new weight class have become highly unlikely. Then again, there are several other factors at play which could alter those plans dramatically in the near future.
A loss at the heavy hands of Nelson would cool any momentum Cormier has built considerably, making his move to light heavyweight an unheralded one. Another scenario that needs to be taken into consideration would be the current heavyweight champion being defeated by Junior dos Santos in their trilogy bout at UFC 166.
If dos Santos and Cormier are both successful in Houston, a title shot in the heavyweight division would become a realistic option for the former Oklahoma State University wrestling standout. Then again, there are too many variables and hypothetical outcomes to weigh in that scenario to get a clear picture of what the next step would be.
The only thing that appears to be clear-cut at this time is the light heavyweight title shot Cormier was looking for has moved a bit further down the line. Whether that means it has moved beyond his reach remains to be seen, but it will certainly be an uphill climb from here on out.
Duane Finley is a featured columnist for Bleacher Report.
Less than a week has gone by since the epic battle between 
