UFC President Dana White looks back at UFC 143 and talks about what’s next for the fighters.

Jared from Missouri writes:

I’m interested to get your side on the whole fighter pay controversy. I saw the thing on ESPN and heard Dana White’s rant and I think I fall on the side of the fighters here. It’s not like the UFC can’t afford to pay more, right?

Now, this is a big issue to tackle, so let me first point out a few things that struck me about the whole fighter pay non-troversy. Yes, non-troversy. During my viewing of the ESPN piece, my reading of the accompanying article on their website, and my viewing of the videos that Dana White released, these things stood out to me:

–One of the big flaws of the ESPN piece is that they didn’t mention any arguments to the contrary of their thesis. Of course, the thesis was that “fighters make a small amount of money compared to what the UFC makes/is worth, and they aren’t happy but are scared to speak out.” However, there was no mention of anything that could be considered a counter-point, such as the fact that the exposure that the UFC provides to both big-name and no-name fighters leads to a huge increase in sponsorship money. Even before the UFC could afford to pay someone like Chuck Liddell a huge salary, he was making some serious bank on sponsorships. You can’t look at just a fighter’s UFC salary when determining their income from the sport as a whole.

–Along those lines, why was there no mention of the exposure that the UFC gives these fighters? Isn’t that worth something? You get to coach on The Ultimate Fighter and suddenly, hundreds of thousands of people (or more) who didn’t previously know who you were are familiar with you. This, in turn, leads to more of those coveted sponsorship opportunities, as well as chances to make money on appearances, doing seminars, or even opening your own gym one day (the UFC-released video touched upon this nicely).

–I thought that Lorenzo Fertitta’s counter-point that ESPN sometimes pays boxers less than $300 to fight on an ESPN-televised card was a great point. However, it may be a bit misleading to point that out after pointing out that ESPN makes billions of dollars per year. Sure, they make billions of dollars per year, but how much do they make off of that particular boxing card? That’s what’s relevant. Bodog was a huge casino company, but Bodog Fights was not a profitable promotion. Did they owe fighters a share of their casino revenue, even though the MMA events they put on weren’t profitable? If Fertitta was arguing that ESPN should pay a decent salary even if that means they will lose money on their boxing events, that’s an interesting point, and the UFC has done that in the past, so it wouldn’t exactly be a hypocritical one.

–It’s not even close to fair to manipulate viewers who know very little about the sport of MMA by comparing the pay of preliminary card fighters in the UFC to league minimum salaries in the NBA, NFL or MLB. That’s not even comparing apples to oranges, that’s more like apples to Snickers. We’re talking completely different business models here, and you’re also talking about sports leagues that have existed and flourished for decades or, in the case of Major League Baseball, for over a century.

–One other problem I had with the ESPN piece was regarding the anonymity of the fighters being surveyed and their fear of being black-balled for complaining about their pay. Now, I’m not going to say that a young fighter who has fought once on the prelims of a UFC on FX card can just go in the media and bitch about his pay and not have to worry about his job security. However, isn’t that true in all occupations? If your first act on the job is to start loudly complaining about how little you’re getting paid, would you last long in that position, no matter what type of work it is that you do? Would people not, at the bare minimum, say, “Hey new guy, you knew how much you’d be making, shut up and get to work”?

What we’ve seen in the past is that fighters can and do complain about their pay and continue to get fights in the UFC. It’s usually moderate to big names, but again, doesn’t that make sense? Is there any job in the world where you can complain about your pay before you’ve even accomplished anything on the job and expect to remain gainfully employed? If one of those boxers on an ESPN card started ranting and raving in the press about his $275 payday, would he be asked to fight again on the next card?

The argument that if a fighter was to complain, he would be disciplined is also a disingenuous one. I could say that if I did any number of things, something terrible would happen to me, and you wouldn’t be able to convince me otherwise. Until I actually did the thing we’re talking about, there would be no proof one way or another that I was either right or wrong. If I said, “If I call Dana White a blowhard on Twitter, he’ll light a bag of poop on fire and put it on my porch,” how can I be proven wrong unless I actually call him a blowhard on Twitter? Since these fighters believe that they will be black-balled for speaking out, they won’t speak out, and therefore we can never know whether or not they’re right about being black-balled.

I will say this: if the UFC is concerned enough about their image that they will do an interview with ESPN in order to defend what they pay their fighters, do you really think they would black-ball a guy who gave an interview to ESPN about that same topic? If they’re going to do something that’s going to make them look that bad, then why would they do the interview in the first place and try to make themselves look good? What sense does that make?

Now, if you piss off the UFC by having boring fights, making rape van jokes on Twitter, refusing to fight certain opponents, failing drug tests, complaining in the media or doing any other number of annoying things, you will certainly face consequences. “Black-balled” may be pushing it, though. I think it’s more rational to think that you may not get the benefit of the doubt if you have a two or three-fight losing streak, or you may not get called to do The Ultimate Fighter, or you may have a harder time getting extra bonuses. However, that’s once again no different from how things work in all of our lives. Piss off the people that pay you, and they won’t give you preferential treatment. No surprise there.

Now, to speak directly to your point, should the UFC pay its fighters more? I don’t know that they should. Do the fighters complain about their pay sometimes? Of course they do. Here’s something to do: go ask your friends and family members, or even strangers, whether they would like to make more at their jobs. Take it a step further and ask them whether they deserve to get paid more at their jobs. How many will really say no? So am I supposed to go, “ooooh” when ESPN finds a couple dozen fighters who say they’re underpaid? Don’t even get me started about interviewing agents who represent fighters. These guys make their living off getting a cut of the pay of their fighters. You expect them to say that fighters shouldn’t be paid more?

I would love to see fighters get paid more. And in recent years, we have. One thing people don’t acknowledge, however, is that Zuffa does more than they have to do. Would any aspiring MMA fighter really turn down an offer of $2,000 to fight on a UFC card? Would they pass up that opportunity because they wouldn’t make any real money in their first fight? No way. Before Zuffa took over Strikeforce, some fighters on the Strikeforce prelims were making about that much or a little more to fight. It’s not as if more people watch the Strikeforce preliminary bouts now than they did then, but look at the increase in pay they’ve gotten since Zuffa took over.

Look at the issue of expanded health insurance. Is it the most that Zuffa could do? No. But is it far, far more than the least they could do? Absolutely. What competitors in the industry are forcing them to raise fighter pay or expand medical coverage? None. It’s not as if fighters will go fight for Dream or Bellator if the UFC cuts pay by one-third or if they hadn’t expanded their medical insurance. The UFC, like it or not, is where you go to succeed at the highest level in MMA, and fighters would make sacrifices to fight there if they had to. Yet, Zuffa has continually improved pay and other benefits over the last several years without a union or a serious competitor to force their hand. That says a lot to me.

A.C. asks:

I think that weight cutting needs to go. If you ask me, that’s the biggest danger to the UFC. If a fighter dies, it’s more likely to be from cutting weight than from an actual fight. If everyone is 10-20 pounds heavier at the time of the fight anyway, why bother having them lose weight for the weigh ins?

That’s a good point, and one that I will echo here. I’m not sure that we’ll see a fighter death anytime soon due to weight cutting, although it’s still a somewhat fair point because college wrestlers have died cutting weight for wrestling meets. Still, my thinking is kind of like yours: what’s the point? If Anthony Johnson and Vitor Belfort are both between 205 and 210 on the day of the fight, why not just have them fight at light heavyweight?

First, let’s discuss Johnson’s epic weight cutting failure. Here’s a guy who had missed weight by several pounds before when fighting at a lighter weight class. You’d think the extra fifteen pounds would be enough to prevent further problems, but clearly that wasn’t the case. Apparently, he was at 187.5 when the on-site doctor refused to let him go any longer without fluids and made him re-hydrate.

The scary thing is that at the weigh-ins, Johnson looked ridiculously cut at 197 pounds. The idea that this guy used to cut to 170 is crazy when looking at his frame with 27 more pounds on it. Now, the possible health complications and risks related to weight cutting are well-documented. I’m not going to rant and rave over how unsafe the process is, because we’ve all heard that before.

I think besides the safety issues, you can look at two major problems with the current weigh-in procedure. One is that it can lead to sub-par performances by those who attempt to drop too much weight. The other is that the UFC itself is burdened when fighters aren’t able to make their weight. Title fights are nixed and the whole process is brought under scrutiny. The thing is that the UFC is quite happy, for whatever reason, with the current procedure and doesn’t want to change it. For that reason, they aren’t pleased when someone like Johnson attracts attention to what a farce the weight cutting process is, since they’re comfortable with keeping it as-is.

Here you’ve got divisions full of guys that naturally weigh in the weight range of the division above them, but fight at the division below with the understanding (wink wink, nudge nudge) that none of them are really ever at that weight, save for a couple of hours around the time of weigh-ins. Frankie Edgar, for instance, may be the only real lightweight in the lightweight class. Johnson isn’t the only light heavyweight fighting at middleweight; he’s just the only one that weighed in as one, too. His opponent, Vitor Belfort, was well over 200 pounds come fight time, as well. Why not have those guys fighting at light heavyweight?

Many (including myself) find that a really fascinating piece of information is missing from the otherwise-useless “tale of the tape” that the UFC provides: the fighter’s weight just before the fight. Why can’t we have that information? Because the UFC doesn’t want everyone to recognize what a farce the weigh-ins are. The real question is, what difference does it make to the UFC?

Is there any real reason why fighters couldn’t simply weigh in right before a fight, or a couple of hours before? Vitor Belfort and Anthony Johnson would still have been able to fight one another; it just would have been a light heavyweight fight, instead. Make the heavyweight limit 230 pounds and add a super heavyweight class with no limit and voila! No more worries.

Will people still miss weight? Sure. But they already do now, right? Weigh them a few days before the fight, too, and make sure they’re within say, five pounds of their fight weight then, too. Will fighters still cut weight? Some will, but will perform so colossally poorly when dehydrated that soon before a fight that they won’t make that mistake twice.

Of course, none of this needs to happen. Since just about everyone cuts weight, no one is really put at a disadvantage by it, after all. But that understanding does prove that the whole thing is a charade. Really though, if the UFC isn’t going to change anything, they should stop with the righteous indignation whenever someone like Johnson doesn’t do their part to maintain appearances. Isn’t the weight that you fight at more important in determining the fairness of a bout than the weight the night before the fight?

E-Mail Jon Hartley
Follow Jon Hartley on Twitter

ESPN “Outside the Lines” interviews Zuffa CEO Lorenzo Fertitta on the subject that UFC fighters say they deserve more money from the UFC revenue generated from their fights.

UFC President Dana White responds below with his thoughts on ESPN and also shows us unseen footage from the interview on fighter compensation.

I won’t put these in any particular order, but all were stories during 2011 that not only had big ramifications at the time, but will likely continue to in the future. I wanted to answer the question, “If someone was in a coma/shot out into space/stuck in a cave eating seaweed and bat meat for sustenance during the entire year, what would be the most important things to tell them, other than the outcomes of the fights themselves?” Here’s my list.

Zuffa Buys Strikeforce

Though many might favor the UFC/Fox story, I still think this is the biggest MMA story of the year. We all expected the UFC to move to greener pastures than Spike TV at some point, so the TV deal didn’t come out of left field like the Strikeforce purchase did.

Strikeforce was in the midst of an exciting heavyweight tournament and appeared to be picking up some steam, even if they still weren’t exactly threatening the UFC in any real way. All of a sudden, Zuffa made the purchase and now most of Strikeforce’s champions are fighting in the UFC, Strikeforce shows are being advertised on UFC programming, and only Bellator Fighting Championships remains as decent competition.

Bellator Has a Strong Year

Though the UFC continues to get the lion’s share of coverage and fan interest, Bellator continued to impress savvy MMA fans with great fights, suitable production values and an ever-improving roster of fighters who are fun to watch.

Bellator maintains a few top ten fighters in various weight classes, had one of the best fights of the year when Eddie Alvarez clashed with Michael Chandler in November, and will be moving to Spike TV to fill the massive void that the UFC left. It seems like whenever the UFC purchases its leading competitor, a new one steps up to take its place, and Bellator is clearly the best promotion outside of the Zuffa umbrella right now.

Zuffa Expands Fighter Insurance

Zuffa not only made headlines for purchasing Strikeforce, but also turned heads earlier in the year by offering improved, expanded health insurance for its fighters. Fighters were extremely pleased with the changes, which covered injuries sustained in training as well as injuries sustained in actual competition, which were already covered previously.

With many fighters unable to pay high insurance premiums as “independent contractors”, this kind of insurance has made a big difference in their lives. Of course, it also may be a contributing factor to the ridiculous rate of injuries that caused fighters to withdraw from bouts in 2011, but that’s a necessary evil, I suppose.

Injuries Plague the UFC

Whether because fighters knew their training injuries would now be covered, plain old bad luck, or as I suggested, because the stakes are just too high nowadays to risk fighting when you’re injured, this was inarguably the worst year for injuries that the UFC has had yet.

How bad was it? Well, just 15 of the 27 UFC events in 2011 occurred without injury-forced changes to any big fights. For the purposes of this stat, I defined a “big fight” as either a title fight, main event or co-main event. This makes sense to me because most likely, these couple of fights are the main reasons why people are likely to order a UFC card. They are the fights that are promoted heavily. If you want to look at entire cards, I don’t think any UFC card escaped without an injury replacement in 2011.

There is reason for hope, though. Nine of the first 14 UFC events this year had replacements in big fights due to injuries, whereas only three of the final thirteen events did. So maybe bad luck accounted for more of the injury substitutions than we all thought.

Dream Survives, Sengoku Doesn’t

We ended 2010 wondering whether Japanese MMA as we know it was just about done for. Dream had no events planned for the first few months of 2011, Sengoku had given away some of its best fighters, such as Jorge Santiago, to competing promotions in the United States, and things just didn’t look good.

Although Dream’s late start was a cause for concern, it may not have been as big of a deal as we all thought at the time. Though the promotion didn’t ring in 2011 until late May, Dream has historically never held an event until March or later in any calendar year. Also, with four events in the last seven months of the year (including Saturday’s New Year’s Eve show), Dream seems to be in it for the long haul.

Sengoku didn’t fare so well, with Japanese discount store Don Quijote ceasing funding to the organization’s promoter in March. Sengoku is now finished, and didn’t even run a show in 2011. Meanwhile, even K-1, once ultra-popular in Japan, didn’t run its annual World Grand Prix tournament for the first time ever in 2011. K-1 and most of its related trademarks were sold by FEG to Barbizon Co., Ltd. in July, and the future of the storied kickboxing promotion is still unclear.

Strikeforce Will Stick Around, But For How Long?

It appeared as if the writing was on the wall when Strikeforce’s top fighters began leaving for the UFC, despite protests from the UFC brass that it was “business as usual”. However, it was announced recently that Strikeforce has extended its contract with Showtime, after all. So, we will be getting some sort semblance of Strikeforce for the forseeable future.

Will it even be recognizable, though? The UFC has already cherry-picked most of the better fighters in the promotion, and now it has been announced that the heavyweight division will no longer exist in the near future, though the heavyweight tournament will conclude as planned. Perhaps Strikeforce can stick around with a few marketable fighters like Gilbert Melendez and the distinction of having the best female fighters of any promotion in the United States. However, we can’t forget that when the WEC started losing weight classes, it all ended with the promotion simply folding into the UFC for good.

Long-Needed Changes Made to Sport

Lost amidst all of the big stories this year were some important changes that finally occurred within the sport itself. For instance, we at long last received five round non-title bouts, although at this time they are only used when a UFC main event is not a title fight.

One change that has not received as much publicity is the addition of monitors at judges’ stations, which ensure that such lame (yet valid, I suppose) excuses such as “we don’t see what you guys see on TV” won’t be heard after awful decisions anymore. Has it improved judging? That’s questionable, but at least we’re taking steps to help judges come to the right conclusions after fights.

UFC Continues Inconsistent Disciplinary Actions

This could be a whole column in and of itself, but let’s get to the highlights:

–Chael Sonnen returns from having a revoked license for unapproved testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) nearly in time to be rewarded with a coaching spot on The Ultimate Fighter. Meanwhile, Nate Marquardt is unable to fight at UFC on Versus 4 because of an elevated testosterone level due to TRT and is immediately cut from the promotion altogether.

–Within a week of both Rashad Evans (who said he would “put hands on [Phil Davis] worse than [Penn State coach Jerry Sandusky] did to those other kids at Penn State”) and Forrest Griffin (“Rape is the new missionary,” he tweeted) making unfortunate rape-related comments, Miguel Torres is fired altogether for making a joke about how if “rape vans were called surprise vans, more women would get into them”, saying that “everyone likes surprises”. The line wasn’t even his; it came from the Comedy Central show Workaholics. It should be noted that Torres was “re-hired” by the UFC within the month.

–Nick Diaz lost his title shot against Georges St. Pierre for missing consecutive press appearances to promote the fight. Of course, it didn’t matter because GSP would ultimately injure his knee, withdraw from the event, and then tear ligaments in his other knee when training for the apparently-doomed Diaz fight when it was rescheduled for early 2012.

The UFC Debuts on Fox

It was hardly a surprise, but represented a huge milestone for both the UFC and the sport itself nonetheless. The UFC signed with Fox Media Group in 2011, paving the way for UFC events and programming to appear not only FX and Fuel, but also Fox, itself. The UFC held its first network televised fight on Fox in November, featuring a historic(-ally short) one-minute clash between former champ Cain Velasquez and the new king, Junior dos Santos.

The sport’s representation on network television means one thing above all others: that MMA forums the world over will continue to be well-stocked with new fans that will inform us all that anyone not in the top ten of his weight class is a “can” and that Fedor Emelianenko was always overrated. Thanks, Fox!

E-Mail Jon Hartley

Here’s the UFC 140 post-fight press conference where Dana White announced the addition of the 125-pound flyweight class to the UFC.

Following fighters were also awarded $75,000 bonuses:

Fight of the Night: Jon Jones vs. Lyoto Machida
Knockout of the Night: Chan Sung Jung
Submission of the Night: Frank Mir

UFC president Dana White discusses why UFC cut Miguel Torres for posting the joke tweet “if a rape van was called a surprise van, more people wouldn’t mind going for rides in them. Everyone likes surprises.”

Do you think it was the right thing for Dana White to release Miguel Torres from the UFC based on that tweet? Let us know below.

The fact that both Rashad Evans and Forrest Griffin have made jokes or comments about sexual assault has not been lost upon those who have already written on this topic, so I’ll spare you the lengthy diatribe about how Torres is getting hosed in this situation.

Suffice to say that Rashad’s joke that he would “put those hands on [Phil Davis, who went to Penn State University] worse than that dude did them other kids at Penn State” was every bit as potentially offensive as Torres’ joke tweet that “if a rape van was called a surprise van, more people wouldn’t mind going for rides in them. Everyone likes surprises.”

I mean, while Torres was using the words “rape van” as a synonym for “windowless van” (which is clear given his decision to edit the tweet later on by swapping the terms), the reports that Torres’ joke was a “rape joke” are not really accurate. Isn’t it more of a windowless van joke? To me, the subject of the joke is the van itself, just as when you point out that a guy with a bad mustache looks a bit like a child molester, the joke is about the mustache, not child molesting.

Meanwhile, Evans’ comment was making light of a real-life situation with specific victims. I’m not offended by either comment, in part because I don’t get offended all that easily by off-color jokes, but which one is really more insensitive?

No matter. I said I wouldn’t spend the whole column comparing the two offenses, and I won’t. Like most of the people discussing the issue, my focus was initially on how unfortunate it is that the UFC treats fighters with so much inconsistency. You can see it in how quickly fighters are cut for bad performances (some fighters are cut after one or two losses, others remain after four or five) or how, as in this case, they are disciplined. Ask Nate Marquardt, for example, how he feels about being left off the UFC roster while Chael Sonnen, whose testosterone replacement therapy landed him a suspension as well, is being promoted by the organization to this day.

However, I’ve come to realize that I initially missed the point, as did most of us. If we expect the UFC to ever be consistent with the way that they address poor performances or even inappropriate conduct, we’re going to continue to be let down. That’s because the UFC has never attempted to address such issues with consistency, and they never will.

For all the talk of how the UFC wants to compete with the NFL, NBA or MLB, there are certain areas in which the UFC has no intention of replicating its competition. Sure, mixed martial arts is a sport, and the UFC is basically a sports league. However, things like who will challenge for a title are decided in a highly-subjective manner and are always subject to change (can you see the NFL telling a team they won’t be playing in the Super Bowl because a bunch of the players skipped Media Day?). As illustrated earlier, personnel decisions are also made with often little to no rationale given to the fans who follow the organization and spend their money watching the fights. Top twenty fighters are routinely dropped because they lose to elite competition, while mediocre fighters can keep their jobs by alternating wins and losses on the prelims.

And so it goes. My point is that we can argue all day that Torres should not have been cut for his joke, but there’s no way that Torres was cut for his joke. Can’t you think of about 30 other fighters who could have said the same thing on their Twitter accounts and kept their jobs? I can.

Torres could have been fired for many reasons: he hasn’t put on terribly exciting performances in his three-fight UFC tenure, he’s put up just a similarly uninspiring 2-1 record in that time, he’s in a division that’s absolutely stacked and thus is more “expendable” than he would be if he was a heavyweight with his kind of talent, and so forth.

Did the joke play into his firing? Sure, it did. I would imagine that he was actually fired not just for his joke, but also for Evans’ joke and Forrest Griffin’s joke (which claimed that “rape is the new missionary”, apparently because sexual assaults are becoming more common). Perhaps Dana White felt pressure to address the presence of three off-color jokes referencing sexual assault that happened in very quick succession. Who was going to get penalized? Evans? Griffin? Come on, now. None of us are that naive.

My point is that while it’s true that Miguel Torres was fired for being Miguel Torres, he was also fired for not being Rashad Evans or Forrest Griffin.

E-Mail Jon Hartley

UFC President Dana White looks back at the TUF 14 Finale and says the Mayhem-Bisping fight was “one of the most one-sided fights in UFC history”, do you agree?

UFC president Dana White looks back at UFC 139 and claims that the main event was probably one of the best fight ever in MMA history.

Jerrick from Pennsylvania writes:

An hour of air-time and a minute of fighting? I’m not sure how that’s going to attract new fans.

Adam says:

There are only three things shorter than that fight was:

-Kim Kardashian’s marriage.
-Dana White’s hair.
-This e-mail.

Nicely put, guys. Although, let’s add “Nick Diaz’s temper” to the list. And “the list of Joe Son’s fans.” Oh, and “the applause after Michael Bisping is announced (anywhere but in England)”.

So, what do we take away from the UFC’s debut on Fox? It had an experimental, work-in-progress feel to it. It also felt disjointed, honestly. Here you had the classic elements of a Fox Sports broadcast- the music (which I think is best left for NFL football and nothing else, but whatever), the lengthy “analysis” beforehand (another football-inspired element that is best left out of MMA- at least if the “analysis” is going to come from Dana White and Brock Lesnar), Curt Menefee. Then, the presentation abruptly gives way to the usual UFC broadcast that we know and love, which was business as usual, then back to more Fox crap.

Some kind of synergy would be nice, but if it means watering down the UFC production to match Fox’s sterile, inoffensive motif, perhaps we’re better off with this approach. For now, let’s just be happy that the Fox Robot didn’t rear his ugly head, doing the cabbage patch or the running man in the corner of our TV screens while wearing UFC gloves and Tapout shorts.

The real problem here, whether you’re a longtime fan or a newbie, has got to be the god-awful pacing. Hey, I understand that there was only an hour to work with, but do we need the meandering, mind-numbing approach that we got Saturday night? About 40 minutes of talk/hype and 15 minutes of commercials to get to 4 minutes of introductions and a one-minute fight? How is that going to attract new fans? Hey, you know how you get new fans to appreciate MMA? By showing MMA fights.

It’s good that new fans get to see a somewhat underwhelming, one-minute fight right off the bat. They need to know that that’s how MMA goes sometimes. Two top-five talents can face off, and one of them can win in a minute or less, despite being fairly evenly-matched. This isn’t boxing. These guys weren’t going to stalk each other for 10 rounds and hide behind their respective jabs, and they didn’t have over-sized gloves to protect themselves with, either. In boxing, the mentality that only a couple of guys in each weight class are worth a shit has existed for too long, and it’s better if fans understand from the get-go that in MMA, there are more than a handful of guys in each division who can theoretically be title-holders.

Me? I’d like to see some stability in the heavyweight division, and it might not look so great to have the guy the UFC branded “the baddest man on the planet” fail to make it through a single round of his first title defense. But hey, Fox is locked into this thing for awhile and hopefully, the next UFC on Fox event will be more UFC, less Fox.

Snarky writes:

What’s sadder: Aleksander Emelianenko’s KO loss last weekend, or Fedor’s prospects outside of the Zuffa banner?

Great question, Snarky. Let me go with the latter. Let’s face it: Aleks hasn’t ever been a truly elite fighter, and though he fights in a vaguely similar manner to his brother, he lacks Fedor’s work ethic and the intangibles that have made Fedor so special. So having him lose in devastating fashion in under a half-minute isn’t such a surprise, even if it was to a guy who walked into the ring with four career fights.

The loss is less embarrassing once you watch it than it is on paper, anyway. Aleks laid out a lazy jab and paid for it against a fighter who actually wanted to win, which Aleks rarely ever seems to want to do at this point.

Meanwhile, Fedor comes off of a devastating four-fight stretch in Strikeforce with no real chance of facing a legitimate top ten heavyweight outside of either Strikeforce or the UFC. He’s in the twilight of an admittedly awesome career and can either fight middle-of-the-pack type guys or retire with a considerable portion of the fanbase thinking he was always overrated (which is incorrect, I might add). That’s much sadder. Fedor actually cares about his career, which makes his situation sadder by default, actually.

In a way, Jeff Monson represents very well the kind of fighter Fedor will be facing for the balance of his career: he’s not at the level where fans will give Fedor any real credit for beating him, but he’s just good enough that he can pose a serious threat if Fedor has an off night or makes a big mistake. Not an enviable position for Fedor, who is now by default the best heavyweight not fighting for Zuffa, to be in.

JR from the UK asks:

Whaddya think, is Gilbert Melendez gonna be fighting for the last time in Strikeforce next month?

I think so. No matter how much Dana White claimed that it was going to be “business as usual” after Zuffa acquired Strikeforce months ago, we’ve seen since then that that’s just not true. I mean, if “business as usual” means “three of Strikeforce’s champs ditch their titles and head to the UFC”, then sure.

Melendez has no one else to really challenge him; I don’t even think that the tough Jorge Masvidal is anywhere near his level. There’s just no one left for Melendez to fight in Strikeforce, and the options in the UFC are just too numerous and tempting to ignore.

If I was a conspiracy theorist, I might offer that the UFC is draining all of Strikeforce’s talent to gimp the brand and make Showtime less than enthused about keeping the promotion around. Considering the history of the UFC buying, then dismantling the competition, does it seem more rational that the UFC would keep Strikeforce around in the long-term or simply absorb what it wants and then move on, like the Galactus of MMA?

Melendez will be in the UFC in 2012. And he’ll be far from the last Strikeforce fighter to make the trip, too.

E-Mail Jon Hartley