What Can We Expect in the Future from Strikeforce?

While we don’t yet know how many viewers caught Saturday’s “Strikeforce: Shamrock vs. Diaz” card on Showtime, the feedback has been mostly positive from those that did.  Even if the show didn’t exactly rearrange any weight class rankings, there were some entertaining performances and an early candidate for fight of the year, to boot.  The coming months, which should feature a number of big matchups, will help to determine whether Strikeforce will succeed where EliteXC failed.

The next Strikeforce show will feature the hard-hitting Robbie Lawler against grappler Jake Shields, who will be stepping up from his normal weight class to face Lawler at 185 pounds.  This bout is really a sign of things to come, as Strikeforce boasts most of its talent at middleweight, and there are a number of pretty good potential matchups to be had there.  Particularly, there are a lot of great strikers in the Strikeforce middleweight division, which will present a lot of crowd-pleasing matchups, if not rankings-altering ones.  Fighters such as Joe Riggs and Phil Baroni (who will face each other on the Lawler-Shields undercard) would put on memorable slugfests against other Strikeforce middleweights, such as Lawler, Scott Smith and Benji Radach.

Of course, a Lawler matchup with Cung Le, the current Strikeforce middleweight king, would also provide plenty of fireworks.  It remains to be seen whether Lawler will be the next fighter to get a shot at Le, however.  Nick Diaz, fresh off of his win over the aging Frank Shamrock, announced his willingness to face Le in the post-fight press conference.  He even got off to a running start on possible pre-fight hype, as he called Le an incomplete fighter who’s “never fought anybody”.

Then, there’s the potential Diaz-Lawler matchup, which should definitely happen at some point in the future.  While Lawler has downplayed any desire of his own to avenge his 2004 KO loss to Diaz, the fight would still be a highly-anticipated matchup that fans would want to see.  Of course, with Diaz, Lawler and Le being the only Strikeforce middleweights that currently factor into the middleweight rankings at all, Strikeforce would be well-served to be careful about when they use those matchups up.

A matchup between Strikeforce heavyweight champ Alistair Overeem and Brett Rogers is certainly on the way, as well.  Unfortunately, Rogers’ win over Ron Humphrey didn’t help establish that he poses a serious threat against Overeem.  Still, the fight is the best that the heavyweight division of Strikeforce has to offer, and would be an entertaining affair, at least.

One thing that Strikeforce can boast that no other organization in the world has is a big-money women’s fight on the horizon.  Gina Carano has indicated that she would like to face Cristiane “Cyborg” Santos in August, and Strikeforce promoter Scott Coker said that August is when the promotion would like to have the fight, as well.  It could even end up as the main event for an August card on Showtime, and the fight will be for the first-ever Strikeforce women’s title.  There’s no word on what weight the fight would take place at, but somewhere in the neighborhood of 145 pounds seems likely.  Perhaps this will lead to Strikeforce establishing multiple weight classes for women’s fighters, or at least a consistent weight class for Carano to fight in.

Finally, we’ll have another possible fight of the year candidate from Strikeforce when new interim lightweight champion Gil Melendez finally meets the injured lightweight champion Josh Thomson, who beat Melendez in their previous bout last June by decision.  No date is set for the rematch, but with Strikeforce establishing Melendez as an interim champion, it will definitely be Thomson’s next fight as soon as he is healthy.

Strikeforce isn’t going to cause Dana White to lose sleep anytime soon, but competing directly with the UFC right away shouldn’t be their goal, anyway.  Those who have attempted to do so too quickly have always burned out, and instead, Strikeforce should focus on slowly building their brand and eventually expanding their promotion.  It took the UFC years to go from running four shows a year to running 15 to 20 of them, some of which are shown live on basic cable.  Strikeforce should build their promotion according to that model, and with a number of good bouts yet to come, they could make a lot of progress before the year is up.

 by Jon Hartley for Fightmania.com

Tags: Alistair Overeem, Brett Rogers, Dana White, Frank Shamrock, Jake Shields, Nick Diaz, Robbie Lawler, Strikeforce, UFC