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Suggestion Box: New Jobs for Fired UFC Fighters, Fall 2012 Edition

(“…unless it’s on short notice, in which case I’ll have to decline because it would be the worst decision of my career.” Pic Props: No Holds Barred)

By Jason Moles

The Ultimate Fighting Championship recently held its own version of Dana White’s “blocking spree,” as the official roster has been narrowed quite noticeably, leaving many to seek employment elsewhere. Over the past few weeks, a handful of fighters received their pink slips for refusing to take a fight on short notice, losing a fight taken on short notice, missing weight, and flat-out sucking. Although it’s been quite a while since we last did this, we feel it only necessary at this point in time to offer a few suggestions to the latest Zuffa casualties.

Dennis Hallman: If there’s one thing we’ll remember about Hallman, it’s his appearance in the Octagon wearing nothing but a Speedo and the gloves on his hands. The aging veteran (he’ll turn 37 in December) still has a few years before he’s eligible to receive those social security checks and will need to find a new gig to line his wallet. The timing couldn’t be better, really; as it turns out, Speedo needs a new PR guy. And to think you thought I was just grabbing low-hanging fruit. Psssh! Having a former UFC fighter with over 65 fights pushing your product will definitely put Speedo back on the map. He’ll tell consumers about the extra attention and unique propositions you’ll undoubtedly receive because of the confidence you exude. If he plays his cards right, maybe someone will pay him to just go away.

(“…unless it’s on short notice, in which case I’ll have to decline because it would be the worst decision of my career.” Pic Props: No Holds Barred)

By Jason Moles

DaMarques Johnson: Google “glutton for punishment” and you’ll spot this BJJ blue belt. (Okay, not really. But you get the idea.) Enlist in the Army, which is essentially code for signing up to get screamed at while being forced to run or do pushups? Check. Willfully live in a house full of testosterone-and-booze-fueled dudes, away from your family, and without life’s many pleasures for an entire season of The Ultimate Fighter? Check. Take a short notice fight just two weeks after your medical suspension has ended? Double check. The next logical step for Johnson is for him to become a career human medical research subject. Hey, if it’s one thing “Darkness” enjoys is being paid in exchange for tremendous amounts of pain and suffering.

Rich Attonito: Former TUF 11 castmember Rich Attonito is best known for just that — being on a reality television series. If it weren’t for a broken hand sustained during his second fight in the house, he might have been remembered for so much more. With nothing to lose, “The Raging Bull” starts his own blog where he will later be recognized for his unique and colorful look at life in the MMA world. Hey, the man did a bang up job for us during his days as a reality TV star. It could happen. But until he starts earning CagePotato-money, Attonito will resume his duties as a fitness manager and personal trainer for New York Sports Clubs.

Charlie Brenneman: With a family to feed, “The Spaniard” will return to his roots as a high school Spanish teacher. Unfortunately, the worsening economy will all but put the final nail in the coffin at Hollidaysburg Area Senior High School. In an attempt to save all extra-curricular activities, especially wrestling, from impending doom, Brenneman will become the real-life version of Scott Voss from Here Comes the Boom by fighting his way back to the bright lights of the big stage in a desperate attempt to pay off the school’s debts — or at least earn some bonus cash. You know, whatever.

Michihiro Omigawa: Since he’s obviously not cut out to be an Octagon warrior, Omigawa will head to the land of the rising sun and do the whole Puroresu thing. It’s not the highest-paying line of employment in the world, but it’s the only place that still exists for him to try to earn a living in combat sports entertainment. Maybe Vince McMahon will try to strike gold in a new Japanese star, thus signing the journeyman mixed martial artist to a lucrative deal and starting an ongoing feud with Yoshi Tatsu.

Carlo Prater: After blasting UFC color commentator Joe Rogan for his ‘unethical’ criticism of referee Mario Yamasaki, Prater goes on to become a full-time public speaker focusing on Athlete-Journalist Relationships, Professional Personal Conduct, as well as the Golden Rules of Critiquing. Not only will he make appearances at the annual UFC Fighter Summit, the BJJ black belt will be requested by the NFL, NBA, and MLB in an attempt to steer the mainstream sports stars away from their normal ways of reckless abandon.

Shane Roller: Two Words: Fashion Designer .

And Now They’re Fired: DaMarques Johnson, Shane Roller Axed From UFC After Recent Losses

(Johnson secures a dominant position against Mike Swick at UFC on FOX 4, shortly before it all fell apart.)

After suffering his third-straight stoppage loss against newcomer Gunnar Nelson at UFC on FUEL 5: Struve vs. Miocic, UFC welterweight DaMarques Johnson has been released by the promotion. Johnson confirmed the news via Twitter late last night. “And the hits keep on coming,” Darkness wrote. “No longer a UFC fighter.”

The TUF 9 finalist complied an official record of 4-6 within the Octagon, with none of those fights going to decision — a stat that placed him in a first-place tie on the “Least Decision-Prone UFC Fighters of All Time” leaderboard. His most recent fight was somewhat controversial in that it came just 56 days after a brutal knockout loss to Mike Swick. Johnson faced Gunnar Nelson on short notice as an injury replacement, and while the UFC usually gives extra leeway to fighters who step up to save fights, the fact that Johnson didn’t even come close to making weight likely sealed his fate.

In other firing news…

(Johnson secures a dominant position against Mike Swick at UFC on FOX 4, shortly before it all fell apart.)

In other firing news…

UFC lightweight Shane Roller also confirmed his release — and apparent retirement — on Twitter, writing “Looks like I’m hanging up the gloves for good. It was fun, but time to move on. Sux that it ended like that. Now startn the next chapter!!”

Roller competed on the preliminary card of last weekend’s Browne vs. Bigfoot card, and lost to Jacob Volkmann via first-round neck crank. It was Roller’s fourth loss in his last five fights, and Volkmann’s first stoppage victory in nine UFC appearances; neither of those details would suggest future employment for Shane Roller. On the bright side, now there’s more space on the UFC lightweight roster for Gilbert Melendez. See? We always try to find the positive around here.

UFC Begins to Transplant Canceled UFC 151 Bouts. Spoiler Alert: None End Up On PPV.

Pictured: Their approximate reactions to finding out “garbage-ass” was a real phrase.

One week ago, Ben published an article voicing concerns over how weak UFC 151’s main card was. But it was cool, because Jon Jones vs. Dan Henderson was going to be such an awesome fight. Two days ago, Jones vs. Henderson was scrapped and UFC 151 was canceled. [Ed. note: Damn, two days? Feels like we’ve been covering this forever.] Even though most of us acknowledged that the cancellation of the event was at least partially due to the garbage-assness of pretty much the entire card, we were too busy talking about Jon Jones ducking Chael Sonnen/Sonnen attempting to troll his way into an immediate title shot (depending on which side of the fence you’re on) to really delve into the issue. But now that the UFC has started to transplant the canceled UFC 151 fights to other cards, it’s time to take a closer look at that issue for a moment.

The bouts from UFC 151 are quickly being rescheduled for different cards, with UFC on FX 5 taking a significant chunk of them. As we covered in yesterday’s link dump, UFC 151’s planned co-main event, Jake Ellenberger vs. Jay Hieron, will now be the co-main event of UFC On FX 5. This won’t be the only fight from UFC 151’s main card that will now be padding UFC on FX 5 – Dennis Hallman vs. Thiago Tavares, Danny Castillo vs. Michael Johnson and Shane Roller vs. Jacob Volkmann will be moved to this card as well. UFC on Fuel TV 6 will now be featuring fights between bantamweights Takeya Mizugaki and Jeff Hougland and flyweights John Lineker and Yasuhiro Urushitani, while Kyle Noke and Charlie Brenneman will do the man dance on the undercard of UFC 152.

In case you haven’t noticed, it’s worth mentioning that absolutely none of these fights – three of which were on the pay-per-view portion of UFC 151, mind you – have made it to the main card of an upcoming pay-per-view. Now I understand that financially, most fighters who were expecting a paycheck on September 1 simply can’t afford to wait until November’s UFC 154 to fight again. But that’s not the issue: The issue is that the UFC could afford to move pay-per-view quality fights *makes this hand gesture* to free television in the first place.

Pictured: Their approximate reactions to finding out “garbage-ass” was a real phrase.

One week ago, Ben published an article voicing concerns over how weak UFC 151′s main card was. But it was cool, because Jon Jones vs. Dan Henderson was going to be such an awesome fight. Two days ago, Jones vs. Henderson was scrapped and UFC 151 was canceled. [Ed. note: Damn, two days? Feels like we’ve been covering this forever.] Even though most of us acknowledged that the cancellation of the event was at least partially due to the garbage-assness of pretty much the entire card, we were too busy talking about Jon Jones ducking Chael Sonnen/Sonnen attempting to troll his way into an immediate title shot (depending on which side of the fence you’re on) to really delve into the issue. But now that the UFC has started to transplant the canceled UFC 151 fights to other cards, it’s time to take a closer look at that issue for a moment.

The bouts from UFC 151 are quickly being rescheduled for different cards, with UFC on FX 5 taking a significant chunk of them. As we covered in yesterday’s link dump, UFC 151′s planned co-main event, Jake Ellenberger vs. Jay Hieron, will now be the co-main event of UFC On FX 5. This won’t be the only fight from UFC 151′s main card that will now be padding UFC on FX 5 – Dennis Hallman vs. Thiago Tavares, Danny Castillo vs. Michael Johnson and Shane Roller vs. Jacob Volkmann will be moved to this card as well. UFC on Fuel TV 6 will now be featuring fights between bantamweights Takeya Mizugaki and Jeff Hougland and flyweights John Lineker and Yasuhiro Urushitani, while Kyle Noke and Charlie Brenneman will do the man dance on the undercard of UFC 152.

Dana White can point his fingers at Jon Jones and Greg Jackson and say “That’s the bad guy!” all he wants, but that certainly doesn’t make him the good guy in all of this. The fact that the UFC can give away bouts that they expected you to pay for without worrying about the revenue they’ll lose is essentially an admission that the bouts were never really worth your money in the first place. Essentially, it’s proof that, as we feared, over-saturation has reached its tipping point in the UFC and as a result, the main event of any given pay-per-view is the only fight worth paying for. Gone are the days when a fighter in the co-main event of a UFC pay-per-view was too big of a name for basic cable (Isn’t that right, Mike Russow?). It’s easy to make Jon Jones and Greg Jackson the scapegoats for the cancellation of UFC 151, but it’s nothing short of willful ignorance to continue to deny that over-saturation is a pandemic in the UFC.

With Jones vs. Belfort now headlining UFC 152 (151?), Dana White will more than likely use the “stacked” UFC 152 as “proof” that the UFC is still putting on stacked cards and that over-saturation is not an issue. On paper, he has a point; it’s hard to say that a card with two title fights isn’t a quality product. But let’s actually look at what we’re getting: A light-heavyweight title fight where the challenger earned the honor of fighting for a belt by simply being the first guy to say “Yeah, sure, I’ll do it,” a flyweight title fight that fans weren’t exactly excited for in the first place, and a middleweight scrap between two top-ten fighters who probably still won’t be getting a shot at Anderson Silva with a victory. Call me crazy, but I’m not seeing a stacked card here. I’m seeing a card that, up until Jon Jones was added on, was weaker than UFC 151.

I guess it would be pretty ironic of me to let the comments section fill up with complaints about how boxing died because champions were fighting unworthy challengers and the “one-fight cards” that ruined the sport. But to do that would be missing my own point, so instead I’ll propose a new rule: From now on, if you aren’t willing to complain with your wallet, you forfeit your right to complain with your keyboard. That should be enough to force the UFC to acknowledge over-saturation, and admission is the first step to recovery.

@SethFalvo

And Now He’s Fired (Yet Again): John Alessio

(Alessio prays for forgiveness (and another shot) after coming up short in a snoozer against Shane Roller at UFC 148.)

We don’t mean to disrespect a grizzled veteran of the sport like John Alessio, but simply put, if you are shocked to learn that “The Natural” was released from the UFC following an 0-2 stint in the octagon, you are either John Alessio or Lloyd Christmas. Having compiled an 0-5 lifetime record in the promotion, Alessio not only received one of the most undeserved title shots of all time under the Zuffa banner, but will live in CagePotato infamy for his placement amongst the “50 Worst Fighters in UFC History” and “The Ten Most Ironic Nicknames in MMA”. While he might be upset to learn of his placement on one of those lists, the other was more or less just a means of wasting time on our part.

Based purely on comparative success in other promotions, Alessio was/is basically the Canadian version of Jorge Santiago — a man capable of crushing 95% of the fighters he faces outside of the promotion, but one who simply couldn’t put it together under the bright lights — scoring impressive wins over fellow UFC veterans Chris Clements, War Machine, and Sean Pierson among others. Of his five losses, four came by way of unanimous decision, against superior strikers (Thiago Alves, Diego Sanchez), superior grapplers (Mark Bocek, Shane Roller) and superior superiors (Pat Militech). In an interview with MMAJunkie, Alessio discussed how his most recent loss to Roller was the hardest to swallow:

I’m super upset. I worked so long and so hard to get back, and the UFC always puts all this pressure on you about being exciting, so I tried to change my style up to be crowd-pleasing. But then I get an opponent in my last fight, where he just chose to hold me down to win the fight, and it’s just depressing that that gets rewarded when all they talk about is exciting fights.

I really thought that I’d be spending more than a couple of months of 2012 in the UFC. I thought I’d get one more shot. I don’t know where I should go or what my options are.

Though we are sure that Alessio will find success wherever he lands, his hope of getting a win in the UFC before he retires is a long shot at best at this point in his career. The 33 year-old Xtreme Couture products record currently stands at 34-16.

A tribute to Alessio’s finest UFC moments is after the jump.

(Alessio prays for forgiveness (and another shot) after coming up short in a snoozer against Shane Roller at UFC 148.)

I’m super upset. I worked so long and so hard to get back, and the UFC always puts all this pressure on you about being exciting, so I tried to change my style up to be crowd-pleasing. But then I get an opponent in my last fight, where he just chose to hold me down to win the fight, and it’s just depressing that that gets rewarded when all they talk about is exciting fights.

I really thought that I’d be spending more than a couple of months of 2012 in the UFC. I thought I’d get one more shot. I don’t know where I should go or what my options are.

We’ve whipped up a tribute to Alessio’s finest UFC moments and placed them below.

–J. Jones

Nate Marquardt: TRT or Not TRT That Is the Question

Apparently Testosterone Replacement Therapy (TRT) is not the wonder-PED we all believed it to be. At least, that seems to be the story we are being fed in certain corners of the MMA universe, in the aftermath of Nate Marquardt’s vintage performan…

Over at MMAFighting.com, Mike Chiappetta has suggested that TRT may not be all it’s cracked up to be:

“On Saturday night, Nate Marquardt fought off of TRT. He looked powerful, explosive and seemed to carry his cardio deep into his fourth-round knockout of Tyron Woodley. And Marquardt wasn’t the only person over the last week to do so. At UFC 148, Shane Roller put TRT in his rearview mirror and still beat John Alessio.”

At the risk of appearing combative, the above reasoning is almost comically incoherent. Sure, TRT may not be equivalent to a radioactive spider bite, or exposure to gamma rays, but one needn’t transform into Spiderman or The Hulk in order to gain a competitive edge.

Mike Chiappetta is setting up a false dichotomy, as though the efficacy of TRT can only be assessed by recourse to two extremes: human or superhuman. That is not how PEDs work, nor should anyone judge the impact of PED use based on a sample of one—or two if we include Shane Roller.

Ben Fowlkes, speaking on the Co-Main Event podcast, was similarly unimpressed with the argument against the efficacy of TRT:

“Just because you are doing something that is performance-enhancing and you don’t absolutely demolish the dude, that doesn’t mean that we should just let everyone do it.”

Fowlkes goes on to discuss Debbie Dunn, the US sprinter who was recently popped for high levels of testosterone. Dunn qualified for the US Olympic team by finishing fourth in the 400m at the Olympic trials.

However, does her failure to break the world record, or even place in a medal position, render her steady diet of testosterone irrelevant? Absolutely not. We do not judge the legitimacy of a performance based on whether or not the athlete in question acquires super powers.

On the flip side of this issue, when a fighter comes off of testosterone, cold turkey, and subsequently looks better than ever, it is worth asking whether they ever really needed it in the first place.

This is particularly true in the case of TRT, given that one is expected to be on it indefinitely once the therapy begins.

One gets the feeling that some journalists want to simply move past the issue of TRT, making the case that it is perhaps not as performance-enhancing as we once thought. For the sake of the sport’s legitimacy, we cannot allow it become acceptable just because it is so pervasive.

Every time a fighter admits to being on TRT, it should be like hearing nails on a chalkboard. Its ubiquity does not justify our indifference.

Read more MMA news on BleacherReport.com

UFC 148: What We Learned From John Alessio vs Shane Roller

It wasn’t the most entertaining fight, but Shane Roller is walking away from UFC 148 with his second UFC victory—a much needed win given that he was coming off three straight losses.John Alessio was a game opponent and dangerous on his feet, but …

It wasn’t the most entertaining fight, but Shane Roller is walking away from UFC 148 with his second UFC victory—a much needed win given that he was coming off three straight losses.

John Alessio was a game opponent and dangerous on his feet, but Roller was able to use his superior grappling to bring the fight to the ground and control the fight in the second and third rounds.

All three judges scored the bout 29-28 in favor of Roller.

What we’ll remember about this fight

Tough to say because it wasn’t too entertaining.

Possibly Alessio yelling out, “Do you wanna fight me or do you wanna ride me?” when Roller had his back in the third round. It’s not unusual for a fighter to be frustrated by being repeatedly taken down, but it’s rare that someone is so vocal about it.

Also, Alessio staggered Roller at the beginning of the third round. For a moment, it looked like he might steal a come-from-behind victory.

What we learned about Shane Roller

Nothing really. We knew he had decent striking and a solid wrestling base and that’s what he showed in this fight.

We did learn that Roller deserves to be a part of the UFC roster, which was questionable prior to this victory.

What we learned about John Alessio

He probably won’t survive in the UFC’s lightweight division. Alessio’s takedown defense is lacking and 155 lbs is filled with elite wrestlers.

His striking looked good, but not good enough to make up for what his grappling game is missing.

What’s next for Shane Roller

Sam Stout would make sense. Stout can test Roller’s striking, and given that Stout has been working hard on his wrestling Roller would be a good opponent to see how good Stout’s grappling has become.

What’s next for John Alessio

The UFC will likely keep Alessio around for another fight. He’s an entertaining guy and comes to fight.

Al Iaquinta seems a logical choice. Both men like to strike and are 0-1 in the UFC.

Andrew Barr is a Featured Columnist for Bleacher Report and a stand-up comedian.Check him out on Twitter @AndrewBarr8.

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