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MMA Top 10 Middleweights: Mark Munoz Rises

Filed under: UFC, Strikeforce, Rankings, MiddleweightsCould Mark Munoz be a future contender to Anderson Silva’s middleweight title? That’s a question few people would have asked before UFC 131. But after Munoz beat Demian Maia, it’s a serious question…

Filed under: UFC, Strikeforce, Rankings, Middleweights

Could Mark Munoz be a future contender to Anderson Silva‘s middleweight title? That’s a question few people would have asked before UFC 131. But after Munoz beat Demian Maia, it’s a serious question.

After defeating Maia, Munoz is 6-1 since moving down to middleweight, with the only loss coming by split decision to Yushin Okami, the UFC‘s current No. 1 middleweight contender. Munoz is probably only one more win away from being the UFC’s best option to fight Silva, assuming Silva beats Okami.

Munoz would be a huge underdog to Silva, of course, but every middleweight is a huge underdog to Silva. And Munoz, a former NCAA champion wrestler, at least has the tools to threaten Silva where he’s weakest. Munoz and Silva are friends and training partners, and they might not wish to fight each other. But if both of them win their next fights, we could be heading toward a situation where fighting each other is what the UFC asks them to do.

See where I have Munoz ranked among the middleweights in MMA below.

(Editor’s note: The individual fighter’s ranking the last time we did middleweights are in parentheses.)

1. Anderson Silva (1): The last time Silva lost, it was by disqualification when he illegally kicked Okami in the head on the ground. Since then Silva is 14-0, with half of those wins coming by first round knockout or technical knockout.

2. Chael Sonnen (2): Sonnen still deserves to be ranked No. 2 because of his impressive win over Okami and his tough fight with Silva, but soon he’s going to start dropping because of inactivity. There doesn’t seem to be any end in sight for Sonnen’s problems getting an athletic commission to license him.

3. Vitor Belfort (3): Belfort’s 19-9 record really doesn’t do his career justice, as the nine losses are to a who’s who of great fighters: He’s lost to Randy Couture twice, Alistair Overeem twice and Kazushi Sakuraba, Chuck Liddell, Tito Ortiz, Dan Henderson and Anderson Silva. Up next for Belfort is Yoshihiro Akiyama.

4. Yushin Okami (4): Although Okami does technically have a victory over Silva on his record, Silva was getting the better of Okami before he was disqualified for the illegal kick. If Okami can beat Silva in their August rematch in Rio, it would probably be the biggest upset of the year in MMA.

5. Mark Munoz (NR): Getting knocked cold by Matt Hamill might have been the best thing to ever happen to Munoz. That fight made him decide to move down from 205 pounds to 185, and he’s much more impressive at the lighter weight.

6. Demian Maia (5): The Maia-Munoz fight could have gone either way, and even in defeat Maia showed that his striking is continuing to improve. However, the fight also showed that Maia can’t just submit anyone he gets to the ground. In his first five UFC fights Maia submitted all five opponents, but in his last six fights he hasn’t submitted anyone.

7. Brian Stann (6): A matchup between Stann and Munoz would make a lot of sense as a next step for the UFC, and the winner would have a strong case for being the next No. 1 contender in the middleweight division.

8. Ronaldo Souza (7): Jacare, the Strikeforce middleweight champion, will defend his title against Luke Rockhold in September. Rockhold is 7-1, and all seven wins are by first-round stoppage, but he’s not on the same level as Jacare, who should be able to make Rockhold tap.

9. Wanderlei Silva (8): The soon-to-be 35-year-old Silva isn’t the fighter he once was, but his UFC 132 fight with Chris Leben promises to be an all-out war. And if he wins in spectacular fashion, it’s possible that the Axe Murderer could get the next shot at the middleweight belt.

10. Michael Bisping (10): With no UFC events in England this year, Bisping will not have any fights in his homeland for the first year since 2006, when he was an Ultimate Fighter contestant. Instead Bisping will coach on The Ultimate Fighter and take on Jason “Mayhem” Miller in December.

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MMA Top 10 Middleweights: Brian Stann Moving Up

Filed under: UFC, Strikeforce, Rankings, MiddleweightsBrian Stann has always been a great story. What he’s showing now — in the year since he moved down to middleweight — is that he’s a great fighter.

Stann, a Naval Academy graduate who earned a Sil…

Filed under: UFC, Strikeforce, Rankings, Middleweights

Brian Stann has always been a great story. What he’s showing now — in the year since he moved down to middleweight — is that he’s a great fighter.

Stann, a Naval Academy graduate who earned a Silver Star for service in Iraq, was a decent fighter at light heavyweight. But we heard about him more for what he had done outside the cage than in it. But Stann has looked reborn at middleweight, going 3-0 at 185 pounds with three finishes, most recently knocking out Jorge Santiago at UFC 130.

Find out just how high Stann has moved up in the middleweight rankings below.

(Editor’s note: The individual fighter’s ranking the last time we did middleweights are in parentheses.)

1. Anderson Silva (1): The champion defends his belt against the last man to beat him, Yushin Okami, in August. Okami’s previous victory over Silva was by disqualification, and Silva is a heavy favorite to avenge his loss and improve his all-time best UFC record to 14-0.

2. Chael Sonnen (2): If Sonnen doesn’t get his licensing issues straightened out soon, he’ll start to drop down the rankings as a result of inactivity. But he’s still the man who gave Silva by far his toughest test in the Octagon, and the man who put a thorough beating on Okami. If he can return to the Octagon as the same fighter he was in 2010, Sonnen deserves to be considered the No. 2 middleweight in the world.

3. Yushin Okami (3): It’s not completely inconceivable that Okami could pull the upset against Silva, but anyone who saw their first bout knows that Silva was completely outclassing Okami in the stand-up department before getting disqualified for an illegal kick to the head on the ground. Okami will need to stick to Sonnen’s game plan and secure repeated takedowns in order to have any chance of beating Silva.

4. Vitor Belfort (4): Belfort is a tough middleweight to assess because he has fought so infrequently at 185 pounds, but I expect him to show against Yoshihiro Akiyama at UFC 133 that he’s still one of the hardest hitters in the sport.

5. Demian Maia (5): Maia’s upcoming UFC 131 fight with Mark Munoz should be a great opportunity for him to showcase his impressive Brazilian jiu jitsu skills. The middleweight division’s best grappler has looked a little tentative since his fight with Silva, winning a couple of easy decisions rather than going for the finish. That should change against Munoz.

6. Brian Stann (9): How high can Stann go at middleweight? It’s almost impossible to imagine him beating Silva, but then again it’s almost impossible to imagine anyone beating Silva at 185 pounds. Assuming Silva beats Okami, Stann will be the UFC’s highest-ranked middleweight who hasn’t already had a crack at the champion. Stann could be one more win away from a title shot.

7. Ronaldo Souza (7): Jacare, the Strikeforce middleweight champion, has expressed frustration at the slow pace of Strikeforce matchmaking. It would make a lot of sense to have Jacare follow the lead of Nick Diaz and enter the Octagon sooner rather than later.

8. Wanderlei Silva (8): His upcoming fight with Chris Leben at UFC 132 is a good chance for the Axe Murderer to get on his first winning streak since he beat Ricardo Arona and Kazuyuki Fujita back-to-back five years ago.

9. Jorge Santiago (6): In his return to the UFC, Santiago ran into a buzz saw in Stann, who took the fight to Santiago and never relented. I’m still optimistic that Santiago can be competitive in the UFC, but maybe not against truly elite middleweight competition.

10. Michael Bisping (10): Bisping will get a promotional push when he coaches against Jason “Mayhem” Miller on The Ultimate Fighter and then fights him in the Finale in December. Bisping has won three fights in a row, and if he makes it four, the UFC might be tempted to put him in a title fight against Anderson Silva in England in 2012.

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Tim Kennedy Offers to Fight Michael Bisping for the Good of Mankind

(Guess if they’re gonna let *somebody* fight Bisping, it might as well be somebody we like.)

When last we heard from Tim Kennedy, he’d just completed the MMA equivalent of sinking a two-foot putt by choking out Melvin Manhoef in Strikeforce, then went public with his lament that he hadn’t been the one to administer an in-home eye exam to Osama bin Laden. Y’all know we’ve always liked Kennedy. Seems like a super cool dude and admittedly there’s something fascinating about a guy whose typical day might just as easily include either choking out a Dutch-Surinamese kickboxer or smoking the world’s top terrorist. Give or take.

It’s exactly that admiration that led us to be a bit disappointed this week when we heard about Kennedy offering to fight Michael Bisping over at MMA Weekly. Calling out Bisping is one of the more played-out moves a well-known middleweight can make, after all. When we saw Kennedy saying it, we assumed it was just another case of a guy trying to make his bones off Bisping’s inflated reputation and general overratedness. Truthfully, there probably is some of that at work here. But then we started digging into Kennedy’s quotes and realized that A) He’s offering to fight “The Count” basically for free (PR bump notwithstanding) and B) He seems driven to do it out of moral obligation, more than anything else. As far as we’re concerned that – as long as he’s not just bullshitting us – is pretty cool.

(Guess if they’re gonna let *somebody* fight Bisping, it might as well be somebody we like.)

Kennedy, it turns out, is still kind of pissed about Bisping’s tainted win over friend and Ranger-Up stablemate Jorge Rivera back at UFC 127. He and the Brit have already had words about it on Twitter – yawn – and now that Chael Sonnen has been remanded to purgatory for his all-around untrustworthiness, Kennedy is offering to take his place in any sort of athletic endeavor against Bisping. Preferably one that involves punching him in the face.

“I haven’t lost sight of where I am and who I’m looking at realistically in Strikeforce,” Kenneday says. “I knew that Chael (Sonnen) was going to be in a bad position, and if Chael and Bisping are kind of the No. 1 and 2 guys, and Chael is out, I’ll fight the No. 2 guy in a heartbeat. I know they don’t have anybody lined up for him, so I’ll step up to the plate.”

Now, all that seems like standard boilerplate call-out material, but then Kennedy launches into a stirring indictment of the illegal knee Bisping landed en route to his victory over Rivera and essentially makes the case that he’ll fight the former “TUF” winner to strike a blow for the powers of good and decency against cheaters, liars, swindlers, hustlers, backbiters and evil-doers everywhere.

“I don’t like trash talking, but I hate people that don’t fight fair,” he says. “I hate cheaters. I hate people that use steroids. I hate people that hide their urine samples. I hate people that grease their bodies. I hate people that manipulate judges. I hate it all. Just go out there and fight. It disrespects everything this sport is about …

“He walks away with a win, a TKO, from blasting the dude in the face, illegally. Just drives me insane, like it’s the worse (sic) thing that can happen in the sport. As a fellow athlete, I think somebody has to hold him responsible for that … If the promotion won’t do it, let’s let the other athletes do it.”

In our minds eye, we imagine Kennedy delivering these words from the back of a truck on a makeshift airfield, surrounded by a ragtag band of misfits, as smoke swirls around him and some emotive music plays in the background. You know, like Bill Pullman in Independence Day. Unfortunately, it probably didn’t go down that way, but that doesn’t stop Kennedy from saying if he got to fight Bisping, he’d donate his entire purse to charity.

“Without a moment’s hesitation,” he says. “I love fighting, I love this sport, I love the competition of fighting, and I’m still a military guy through and through. I don’t fight for the money. So my fight purse I would give to a military-based non-profit. I have some in mind. I’m waiting for this fight to happen before I said who it was, but they already know who it would be.”

So, in summation, does calling out Michael Bisping make you look like a guy who’s looking for a winnable fight that will further your career? Yeah, it does. But if you’re absolutely 100 percent committed to calling out Michael Bisping, we guess, this is the way to do it.

MMA Top 10 Middleweights: Intrigue Grows at 185 Pounds

Filed under: UFC, Strikeforce, Rankings, MiddleweightsWe haven’t updated our rankings of the Top 10 middleweights in mixed martial arts in quite some time because, frankly, Anderson Silva has made it a boring division.

That’s not to say Silva is borin…

Filed under: UFC, Strikeforce, Rankings, Middleweights

We haven’t updated our rankings of the Top 10 middleweights in mixed martial arts in quite some time because, frankly, Anderson Silva has made it a boring division.

That’s not to say Silva is boring: When he’s on his game, he’s as exciting as any athlete this sport has ever seen. And it’s not to say the other fighters in the division are boring: There have been plenty of good middleweight scraps over the last few months.

But ranking the middleweight division can get boring because not much changes: It’s always Silva on top, and a familiar cast of characters competing for the right to be Silva’s next victim.

But there are some indications that the middleweight division in mixed martial arts might be getting a little more interesting. Yushin Okami is finally scheduled to get the title shot that was promised to him months ago, Chael Sonnen is finally getting close to being cleared for a return, and the addition of Strikeforce middleweights (starting in July with Jason Mayhem Miller and likely including Strikeforce champ Jacare Souza soon) may inject some new blood into the middleweight class.

So now is a good time to update our list of the Top 10 middleweights in mixed martial arts, keeping an eye on what’s ahead for Silva and the other top fighters.

Jason “Mayhem” Miller and the Top 15 Middleweights in the UFC

For the past few years, the UFC’s middleweight division has been its most predictable. Anderson Silva has dominated the division since he won the belt back in 2006, leaving everyone else shuffling for second place. Add Jason Miller to the l…

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Jason “Mayhem” Miller and the Top 15 Middleweights in the UFC

UFC 128 Results: Ranking Nate Marquardt and the UFC’s Top 10 Middleweights

Spoiler alert! The UFC middleweight division is still Anderson Silva’s world. Everyone else is just paying rent until Georges St. Pierre starts gaining muscle mass. That doesn’t mean, however, that there isn’t plenty of action elsewhere in the divisional rankings. So if my giving away the obvious ending hasn’t soured you, please read on. Begin […]

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UFC 128 Results: Ranking Nate Marquardt and the UFC’s Top 10 Middleweights