Jones reminds me, in many ways, of Shonie Carter in flash, and something more in substance.

With Jon Jones (11-1 MMA, 5-1 UFC, #8 IWMMAR) announcing that he was going to fight the winner of the UFC 119 co-main event fight between Antonio Rogerio Nogueira (19-3 MMA, 2-0 UFC, #7 IWMMAR) and Ryan Bader (11-0 MMA, 4-0 UFC) on Inside MMA, there’s a clear intent to put Jones into position to become a serious contender. That’s not to discount either Bader or Nogueira, but it’s fair to say that neither have gotten the attention that Jones has, and there’s a reason for that.

After Jones beat Stephen Bonnar (12-7 MMA), I got a text message from Curtis Clontz, my co-host on the now MMAOpinion defunct podcast, telling me that this kid from New York was the next great UFC lightheavyweight. It’s not just Curtis who felt that way, but I didn’t know enough about Jones and, despite my interest in prospects, he hadn’t be on my radar.

While Ryan Bader hasn’t made his way into the top ten yet, a win over Rogerio Nogueira would certainly put him there, and a fight between Bader and Jones would be a match that is hard to look at in a way that makes it look like it’s not a match between top contenders. While Jones qualified his statements by saying that he’d need one more fight before getting a title shot, likely against an establishment top five UFC lightheavyweight like Rashad Evans (15-1-1 MMA, 10-1-1 UFC, #3 IWMMAR) or Lyoto Machida (16-1 MMA, 8-1 UFC, #2 IWMMAR), depending on who is not staring down their own title shot at that point.

As far as the fight between Bader and Jones goes, it seems like the proverbial meeting between the immovable object and the unstoppable force, respectively. But beside from the nice literary tone is the potential both have themselves. Neither have shown serious signs of weakness in the UFC, and with Bones at 23 and Bader at 27, there is potential for these two guys to be around the UFC lightheavyweight division for a long time, and meet more than once, assuming that the matchup is good.

Now, if Rogerio beats Bader, it will affirm something we already know about him, that on the right day, he’s a world beater. He had a close fight with Jason Brilz (18-3-1 MMA, 3-2 UFC), one of the tougher matchups for anyone in the UFC at the moment, recently, and so its hard to see him being particularly close to a title shot, but the thought of Nogueira taking a title run makes for some really interesting thoughts. He has, perhaps, the best jiu-jitsu of the upper-tier UFC lightheavyweights, and his boxing is solid.

His matchup with Jones is marked by a contrasting style, for the same reason Bader’s is, only more dramatic. The style of Jones’ elusive standup often with flashy kicks and explosive clinch work and throws will be interesting against the very traditional, closed up, simple-yet-effective style of boxing that we see in Minotoro, who has probably the best striking of anyone Jones has ever fought, and certainly the least exposing. Similarly, his ability to fight off of his back, which will almost certainly come up in both the fight with Jones and Bader, is unmatched by anyone either has faced, with the exception of (for Bader) Vinicius Magalhães (4-5 MMA, 0-2 UFC), and even that’s debatable.

Both fights are stylistically tough for Jones, and I hope to get into them at length at some point soon, as well as the immediate matchup between Bader and Nogueira, which is a great stylistic fight. But both Bader and Jones are worth watching, as these are the guys who will likely be around, fighting for titles, when Lyoto (32) and Evans (30) start to age out. Shogun may be able to maintain his run for a long time (though, as I’ve said, I’m not so sure) and stay around as Bader and Jones are building their own careers, but the likelihood does seem to be that Bader and Jones will be fighting for the strap sooner, as well as later.

The issue that I did want to bring up is a line that appeared in the piece that corresponds to something I’ve been seeing a lot of on the message boards lately: “When you break down the numbers three of the five UFC champions; GSP, Lesnar and Edgar, all have some link to wrestling. This is a perfect illustration of how much success is being enjoyed by exponents of the discipline.”

I’ve actually commented on this issue before, but it’s worth restating my position at length to illustrate why trending in mixed martial arts is not relevant.

Since the institutions of UFC titles, we can track trending in divisions based largely on the title fights occurring in those divisions at any given time, and most divisions are dominated, consistently, by fighters with shared elements of background.

You can see my forum post to see what I’m talking about. The heavyweight division, with a short period of exception where there were no wrestlers competing, has been dominated by wrestlers; as has the welterweight division. The lightheavyweight division has actually become less saturated in wrestlers than it used to be, becoming more striker-centric. The middleweight division has never had an NCAA wrestler for a champion. And the lightweight division is incredibly hard to call because for a while it had only had three radically different champions who (until Frankie Edgar beat B.J. Penn) had never lost a belt in the cage.

There really isn’t enough data to talk about trending, but it does seem fair to point out that, while the UFC has three wrestlers for champions at this moment, there have been periods where they’ve had three BJJ blackbelts. All that means is that, at this moment, there’s a majority. And let’s not forget that the other two champions (Shogun and Anderson) are BJJ blackbelts, which means a single loss to a BJJ blackbelt would shift the balance the other way.

My point is this: I’ve learned that trends in UFC titles are more dependent on individual divisions than the sport, generally, and that if we’re going to comment on wrestling increasing as a trend, it should be acknowledged that the trend exists primarily in three divisions: heavyweight, welterweight and lightweight. Attempts to find a large number of emergent wrestlers in the middleweight division are doomed to fall short after Chael Sonnen, and while some can make the argument that Ryan Bader and others are a symbol of a growing level of wrestling talent at lightheavyweight, the historical lightheavyweight division has been far more wrestler heavy than the current division.

The best argument for the success of wrestlers actually has less to do with wrestling as a style and more to do with its institutionalization as a sport in the United States. The strong argument is that wrestling is physically exhausting and puts a heavy emphasis on building athleticism, so the wrestlers we see (like Jon Jones, or Bader, or Fitch, or Lesnar, or Koscheck; guys who have grown up wrestling) are simply better athletes than guys who don’t grow up in that culture. The other is that they’re more used to cutting weight, so their recovery after the cut is better than those who aren’t, and they’re able to cut more weight. I’m not convinced totally by either of these arguments, because it doesn’t see that wrestlers are as dominant as the argument seems to necessitate, implicitly, but these are definitely advantages of adoption wrestling, and it is apparent looking at the difference in core size between someone like Georges St. Pierre and Dan Hardy. But this is the strong argument, and not the notion that wrestlers are some how more dominant now than they used to be, which is questionable.

Photo by Tracy Lee.

More and more, the UFC’s lightweight division starts to look like the welterweight division, with an upper echelon comprised largely of wrestlers. While there’s obviously a difference stylistically between the way that Frankie Edgar (13-1 MMA, 8-1 UFC, #1 IWMMAR) fights and the way that George St. Pierre (20-2 MMA, 16-2 UFC, #1 IWMMAR) does. There are two questions, though, that jump immediately to mind with the change of lightweight landscape at UFC 118. The first is a macro-question about trending and, honestly, I don’t feel like I’m in a good position to answer questions about the trending in MMA towards wrestler-centric with only two (maybe three, if you make a precarious argument about the heavyweight division) divisions showing that trending.

The second, though, is about the UFC lightweight title picture, and that’s somewhere worth talking about.

A friend mentioned to me during the fight that if Gray Maynard (10-0-0-1 MMA, 8-0-0-1 UFC, #6 IWMMAR) doesn’t get a title shot after his win over Kenny Florian (14-5 MMA, 11-4 UFC, #3 IWMMAR), it will be a shafting the likes of which we haven’t seen in a while. Of course, that’s true. Maynard just beat the organization’s top gatekeeper (the top ranked lightweight not involved in the card’s title fight) and did it convincingly. Not to mention Maynard is the only fighter to beat the current champion, a fact which allows for some level of potential hype by promoters.

There’s actually an argument that you can rank Maynard #1 in the world, as it stands. Of course, that will never happen. Even experts, to some degree, rank fighters on the aesthetics of the fighting style, and while they’ll revert to ranking Edgar at #1 because he holds the belt, it’s hard to argue that Maynard is particularly fun to watch. Those who complain about St. Pierre’s recent title defenses would likely have issues with Maynard if he ever became UFC lightweight champion, and it does become difficult to sell pay-per-views when people don’t feel like they’re going to see a competitive or invigorating performance. Of course, it’s not going to shake the hardcore fans, and those of us who have enjoyed watching St. Pierre dominate Dan Hardy (23-7-0-1 MMA, 4-1 UFC, #5 IWMMAR) and Thiago Alves (17-7 MMA, 9-4 UFC, #4 IWMMAR), but we’re not really a demographic the UFC has to seriously worry about losing, so we don’t carry much weight in that regard.

The argument against giving Gray Maynard a shot is not based on merit, which he certainly has more than any other fighter in the division. It’s based on sales. It’s not relevant, but it is worthwhile to bring up the UFC’s potential concerns about Gray Maynard becoming UFC champion. The UFC lightweight division is wide open. Someone like George Sotiopoulos (13-2 MMA, 6-0 UFC, #8 IWMMAR) or Evan Dunham (11-0 MMA, 4-0 UFC, #9 IWMMAR) could easily step into the title picture and take the belt from either Maynard or Edgar, and any of those guys could hold the belt for three or four years. Sotiopoulos is the oldest out of that pool, at 33, and that hardly prohibits a multiple year run as champion.

At 28, Edgar could easily defend his title against all of those guys, though some part of me doubts it, given the volatile nature of the sport. I’m trying to decide whether I’m taking Edgar vs. Maynard in the upcoming fight. It usually takes me a few weeks to make up my mind on this kind of thing, but for the moment, I’m leaning towards Edgar. I just can’t work out whether that’s because I think he’s a more desirable UFC champion that Maynard, but we’ll come back to that. For now, what’s worth thinking about are the other potential contenders, the guys who are next.

Dunham will be taking on Sean Sherk (33-4-1 MMA, 7-4 UFC) at UFC 119, a fight that could set up talk of him becoming a title contender in the same way that Sotiropoulos’ win over Joe Stevenson (31-11 MMA, 8-5 UFC) at UFC 110 set up talk about bringing him into the title picture. After all, Edgar’s win over Sherk is what initially tossed Edgar into the title picture for many, even after his loss to Maynard. All of this will be discussed at length as we start to see the title picture unfold more clearly.

Randy Couture vs. James Toney

Demian Maia vs. Mario Miranda

Kenny Florian vs. Gray Maynard

Nate Diaz vs. Marcus Davis

Gabe Ruediger vs. Joe Lauzon

Dan Miller vs. John Salter

Photo credit to Tracy Lee. Published by Yahoo sports.

James Toney (0-1 MMA, 0-1 UFC) looked, last night, like he took a page out of the Gabe Ruediger (17-6 MMA, 0-2 UFC) Big Book of Diet Tips. He looked out-of-shape, but worse than that, he displayed some of the worst grappling since… well… since the last time a professional boxer stepped into the UFC.

For those who are missing my point, James Toney is the Art Jimmerson (0-1 MMA, 0-1 UFC) of this new school. Jimmerson appeared at UFC 1, taking on Royce Gracie in the first round of the tournament, was mounted and forced to tap with his lone, un-gloved hand. Toney, in the same form, did nothing to stop the takedown, to try and establish a guard or otherwise defend himself.

But Toney demonstrates a larger failing, not just on the part of his camp, but on the part of the sport that he was supposed to represent. And I’m not even talking about the failure of grappling. It’s a failure of attitude the existed both in Toney’s training (as made apparent by a performance more closely resembling Deep Water Horizon than a fight) and exists in boxing, generally.

When I listen to boxers talk about MMA, whether it was James Toney in the lead up to this fight, or Bernard Hopkins, or Jeff Lacy, or Floyd Mayweather Jr., there’s a sense of entitlement behind the words: because there’s punching involved, their knowledge becomes relevant. These guys are pugilists, they’re punchers. They’re not (as Toney so completely demonstrated) fighters. Their knowledge of fighting, writ general, is limited strictly to two weapons.

The boxers are, to embrace the old cliche, bring a knife to a gun-fight, and they think that because they brought a knife, because they’ve been training with it since they were kids, someone like Randy Couture, a world champion and athletic legend in his own right, is going to put away the arsenal he’s spent his entire adult life (and perhaps much of his adolescence) perfecting and fight you with a prison shank?

I was pretty good humored last night. I was happy to see Randy Couture (19-10 MMA, 16-7 UFC) absolutely demolish a fighter who had no place in the Octagon whatsoever. The fact that Toney threw a grand total of zero punches standing up was a wonderful if surprising statistic. But as I was going for a morning jog in the Fresno heat, today, I realized that perhaps my jubilation was not the appropriate response. Maybe it’s just the 100+ degree weather getting me hot under the collar, but as someone who studies this sport, as someone who considers it vocational, in a number of forms, I was insulted by James Toney, and by the audacity of the boxing community generally.

After all, this is a guy who made abundantly clear that he had put forth no effort whatsoever to learn the ground game. He had not in the least prepared himself to deal with the game that Randy was bringing in the cage. Either he is immensely stupid (and listening to people like Freddie Roach and Teddy Atlas commenting on MMA, he certainly wouldn’t be the only one) or he genuinely felt that the only thing he needed was a heavy right hand a big left hook.

Why is that insulting?

Because the guys who win big fights in MMA with one of those shocking punches (like Shogun Rua or Chuck Liddell) don’t do it because they spend their afternoons hitting the heavy bag. The “boxers” in MMA aren’t spending their days thinking about honing the skills that are going to win the fight. Anyone who knows anything about… well… anything knows that if you’re going to win with any sort of consistency, one of the important things to do is make sure that you’ve got your secondary skills to the point where a bad matchup doesn’t mean a definite ass-whupping.

I don’t expect Toney, or the boxing community generally, to learn much of anything from this event. I expect Bernard Hopkins to still make idiotic and homophobic comments about the grappling aspect of MMA, and the boxing community to continue to jeer the grappling game. But they’re welcome to send more boxers over, like a game of Red Rover, and we’ll be happy to introduce them to real fighters.

In the meantime, there are some great boxers who show respect for the sport, who know that they’re not cut out for learning grappling, that they don’t have the versatility of conditioning that MMA requires, or who feel that they do, and so they’ve humbled themselves and are trying to learn the skills. Those guys, Roy Jones Jr. and Ray Mercer, among others, are the guys the boxing community should look up to, not simply because they display a level of humility and an willingness to cop to limitations which has been absent in boxing for too damn long, but because they understand that boxing, MMA, and sports (generally) are about harnessing a skill set, building athleticism and stepping in to compete, regardless of who the guy at the other end of the cage or the ring is. Maybe, if the community, writ large, figures that problem out, or at least educates Floyd Mayweather Jr. enough that he decides he’d rather be an athlete than a professional heel, and lets those looking to cross over know that, if they don’t want to be at the center of a graveyard stand-up routine at Catch a Rising Star, they should spend more than five minutes a day on the mat.

For those who don't remember the decided tap in the Filho fight.

After he spent four rounds dominating the consensus pound-for-pound king, Chael Sonnen (24-11-1 MMA, 4-4 UFC, #2 IWMMAR) made a mistake. He let an arm slip out of the guard and got caught in a triangle. It happens to plenty of great fighters, and doesn’t diminish the dominance he had earlier in the fight, which certainly seems a substantial justification (on its own) for a rematch with Anderson Silva (27-4 MMA, 12-0 UFC, #1 IWMMAR). But the post fight fallout, which resulted from Sonnen’s attempt at a pseudo-tap, was thoroughly unnecessary.

I had some correspondence online with some folks who thought that Sonnen’s tap was going to be a big controversy, that Josh Rosenthal’s stoppage was suspect. Upon review, most of the community seems to agree that Sonnen’s tap resulted in a legitimate submission and a win for (statistically) the greatest champion in the history of the UFC. There’s an important conversation to be had about whether Silva is on the decline, as he does seem decidedly less impressive than he was at the start of his unbelievable run as UFC champion.

I like Chael Sonnen more than most. He’s incredibly charismatic, he’s funny, he’s friendly with fans and with writers, and even when he says stupid stuff, it does seem like he understands that it’s for the purpose of hyping the fight. But the one thing I don’t like is “the boy who cried ‘I didn’t tap.’”

When we get into the hype of the rematch, which seems inevitable at this point, we will hear about the controversy of the stoppage, just like we heard about Mazzagatti’s late stoppage in the first Lesnar vs. Mir fight. The thing is, this is the second time that Sonnen has pulled this stunt in a title fight. The first was against Paulo Filho, where Sonnen had an early lead and then gave a quick Brazilian tap followed by loud protest at the stoppage when Filho was about to rip his arm off. Now, in that fight, a rematch was warranted, because Sonnen had been putting on a great show against Filho up until he got caught, and the same is true of the Silva fight, but the reality is, in both situations, Sonnen attempted to escape the submission by slipping one by his opponent and the referee. He failed twice, but it’s still far from endearing.

Still, if he doesn’t get his rematch, it will be a travesty. He deserves it. He dominated the man that many consider the best fighter in the world for more than twenty minutes, and he deserves another shot at the belt. He proved that he’s a great matchup, stylistically, for Silva, and while Silva will likely not take the rematch soon because of an injury, Anderson definitely needs to show that he brings more to that matchup the second time he faces it. I didn’t believe Matt Lindland when he said that Chael was “the best athlete in the division, bar none.” Turns out, he was about right; we were just a little slow to catch up. Chael beat Paulo and went on to become #2 in the world.

There’s a lot of appeal to the rematch, regardless of your take on the tap. Sonnen is a dominant fighter and there aren’t many serious challengers left for Anderson to face. Vitor Belfort (19-8 MMA, 7-4 UFC, #5 IWMMAR) is still on a lot of minds, from what I can tell, and that might be a good top contender’s bout for Chael. Given that Vitor has been up for a shot with Anderson and forced to pull out twice, he’s certainly credible. There’s some history between Vitor and Team Quest (he’s 1-1, with a loss to Henderson back in Pride and that brutal knockout of Lindland at Affliction) which could make for some interesting backstory, though that’s pretty inconsequential given his training at Xtreme Couture. Still, the matchup is stylistically interesting, as it’s a continued test for both Sonnen’s submission defense and his striking (which will remain relevant in a second fight with Silva) and an interesting test for Belfort improvement, as his record against wrestlers is iffy. So long as Anderson is on the DL, that seems like a logical matchup to build hype for that next middleweight title bout.

And no one should expect Alves to be a force at middleweight. The division is radically different, there are fewer wrestlers to pin him down for fifteen minutes at a time, but a striker who’s 5’9 with a 70 inch reach is going to have a hard time being relevant when he’s giving up six inches of reach and three to five inches of height every time he steps in the cage, not to mention the difference in physical size between himself and the guys close to his own height, like Rousimar Palhares (11-2 MMA, 4-1 UFC).

All cynicism about Alves’ future aside, the thing that I find some combination of irritating and curious is the way in which Alves missing weight was handled by the UFC. Flying back from my vacation with my family, I got talking to a family member about a piece in the New Yorker on the Mayweather vs. Mosely fight. She was shocked that Floyd was fined six hundred thousand dollars for missing two pounds at the weigh in, totally 2% of his purse of the night. Not to trivialize a $600,000 penalty (much, much more than I make in a year) but it’s worth keeping in mind how small time that is to a guy who’s getting paid $30 million for the bout. After all, Alves was fined 20% of his purse for coming in half a pound over.

Its hard for me to tell what bothers me most about it. Is it that Alves is making about 0.5% of what Floyd made to fight Mosely? Probably. He got paid $60,000 to fight Georges St. Pierre at UFC 100. Is it that Mayweather got paid $30 million and missed weight? Joe Rogan used to get people to eat deer penis for a fraction of that. Or is it that the UFC contracts impose important stiff penalties to top tier fighters making a fraction of what the top tier boxers are making, while the boxers have no fear of retribution for missing weight? $600,000 could by Floyd a couple more awesome cars, or a lot of hookers, but he doesn’t need the money.

There is a style of penalty that I do like, which is the penalty Strikeforce implemented when Cristiane Santos (10-1 MMA, #1 IWMMAR) missed weight before the fight against Hitomi Akano (15-7 MMA, #4 IWMMAR). The 20% fine seems a little excessive, but giving half of that to Akano seemed about right, especially given the gratuitous amount of weight she was off by. Still, there ought to be some discussion in both the boxing and MMA community about how these fines ought to work. To have a standard 20% fine misses the gradation difference between missing a half pound, like Alves, and missing by five and a half, like Santos. The per-pound fine implemented by some boxing contracts is definitely worth looking into.

And on the other hand, boxing promoters ought to look into making the fines reasonable for the fighters, so that they actually discourage missing weight, instead of a ceremonial sort of fine like the inconsequential percentage offered to Mayweather. 20% of Mayweather’s purse, $6 million for those who don’t want to do the division, may have been excessive, but would probably have worked to discourage him. Even 10%, with some percentage of that going to Mosely, would have seemed more significant than what was initially on the table.

I worked with Brandt for a number of years, and I wish him the best with his new stuff. I’m also excited to work with the new owners, and I think that you guys will appreciate the direction this site is going.

Anderson Silva vs. Chael Sonnen (Part 1 and Part 2)

Jon Fitch vs. Thiago Alves

Matt Hughes vs. Ricardo Arona

Junior Dos Santos vs. Roy Nelson

Clay Guida vs. Rafael Dos Anjos

Tim Boetsch vs. Todd Brown

Phil Davis vs. Rodney Wallace

Stefan Struve vs. Christian Morecraft