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Saturday headlines: Does Fedor vs. Yoshida appeal to you?
By Zach Arnold | November 24, 2007
Brent Brookhouse goes shopping for MMA DVDs.
For those of you who use Blogspot and Blogger for your MMA blog, you know that Blogspot uses the ATOM format instead of the RSS format for content syndication. Follow these instructions and convert your ATOM feed to RSS. Why? Because if you make the proper conversion, I might add your blog feed to the new site that I’m going to unveil sometime next week.
MMA California notes that the California State Athletic Commission recently shut down a ‘smoker’ event.
Looks like the chances of Fedor vs. Yoshida happening on 12/31 are increasing.
Joe Silva’s matchmaking in UFC receives more scrutiny.
An interview with Kenny Florian.
How Matt Serra’s back injury screws up GSP’s career.
Yahoo Sports released their Top 10 MMA rankings for November. I prefer the user-generated MMA HQ rankings.
Dong-A Ilbo in South Korea has an article about the fall of PRIDE and the bad karma those PRIDE stars have had since the promotion shut down.
Shonie Carter is taking a beating.
There is an upcoming show in New Mexico on 12/1 at the Tays Special Events Center in Alamogordo.
A profile article on Patrick Cote.
Ricardo Mayorga, not Kevin Iole’s favorite fighter, defeated Fernando Vargas on Friday night at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. More details here and here.
Topics: Boxing, Canada, Japan, Media, MMA, PRIDE, UFC, Zach Arnold | 20 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
Please give me Choi vs. Fedor.
Choi>Yoshida
Pride=Dead
ergo
K1>Pride
Choi or Yoshida are jokes to fight Fedor. The guy hasn’t fought a legit challenger since August 2005. Which means 1 legit threat in 3 full calendar years. Nothing like holding on to your past success.
How anybody can still rank this guy #1 is beyond me.
I can live with it. It’s kind of fun as a match up, be evenbetter if they were going to grapple only. ot gong to do a damn thing for his rankings.
p.s. Mark Hunt was and is a legit contender.
“The guy hasn’t fought a legit challenger since August 2005. Which means 1 legit threat in 3 full calendar years. Nothing like holding on to your past success.”
Fedor was set up to fight the winner of the OWGP for a title shot on 12/31/06. Unfortunately the winner of that GP “took the money and ran”, rather than take his title shot.
Offers were made to both Josh Barnett and Big Nog – both of whom decline to take the fight. Other than MarK Hunt (who was considered a top 10 HW at the time) who would you have had him fight seeing as the “top 3” contenders refused to fight him?
While his recent selection of opponents has been suspect, I can hardly see where you blame him when he fought the best fighter available at NYE ’06. So imo, he’s fought a legit threat within the last year but beyond that we’ll see where his management takes him.
Fedor’s last 4 fights have been against middleweight Matt Lindland, Mark Hunt, 62 year old Mark Coleman and fucking Zulu. I’m as big a Fedor fan as the next guy, but when you haven’t fought a top 10 Heavyweight in 2 years you don’t deserve to be ranked #1 anymore, even if you are the best fighter in the world.
id much rather fedor beat someone who can beat james thompson. someone really really good like butterbean or neil grove.
no seriously, ill watch fedor fight anyone just because hes fedor, but the one that really makes sense is against barnett.
As weird as this may sound, I’d rather see Fedor vs Choi even though it’s a total freak show.
Obviously, Yoshida has a greater MMA profile and pedigree but overall he has had limited success at both LHW and HW. We know one thing for sure: there ain’t no way he’s beating Fedor.
Choi, on the other hand, is f*cking huge. While he is new to MMA, he has decent striking skills and most likely some amount of grappling from his ssireum experience. So, Giant Silva, he is not. And he’s f*cking huge. 7’2″ and 350 lbs huge. That’s 1’2″ and 125 lbs more than Fedor. That’s nothing to laugh at, skill difference notwithstanding.
Sure, on paper, Fedor should beat him, but Choi’s size and strength advantage gives him something that Yoshida does not have: a chance, no matter how small.
In a perfect world, we’d see Fedor/Barnett or Fedor/Couture, but unfortunately the crazy Russians got in the way.
hahahaha, Yoshida? No way. I like the korean freakshow vs Fedor Emelianko mutch better than I guy who fought James Thompson and losed. I want to know who Shinya Aoki and Gilbert Melendez is going to fight. The 2 best fighter’s in the world with Anderson Silva afcourse.
Fedor – Yoshida:
1. Sounds like fun to me. I’d watch it, even though Yoshida has a snowball’s chance in hell of even hurting Fedor. Which is also why:
2. It also makes sense if M-1 wants Fedor to be fit for late February.
As long as he doesn’t fight another non-challenge in his next fight I don’t have a problem with him doing so for the NYE spectacle.
Iole was correct in calling out Mayorga and Vargas though. Both of those guys put the “ass” in “class”. Their pre-fight presser was beyond loser-filled.
Hey, I’m on the Internets!
Fedor vs. anyone I don’t approve of = FREAKSHOW!!!!!!!!1
Now that we have that out of the way, it doesn’t matter what the hardcores rank Fedor. He is undefeated, and is considered by pretty much anyone that matters to be the best in the world.
Randy Couture, Josh Barnett and other fighters recently called him #1, so I’ll take their opinion over ‘Huddle 45’. I’m just wacky that way. 😉
Thanks for the tip re RSS feed. I have updated my blog with it!
Ask them again in a year and see what they think.
GSP will fight Matt Hughes for interim title on Dec 29! From Matt’s blog:
http://www.matt-hughes.com/blog/2007/11/24/breaking-news/
Another interim title? Just have the fight be an official #1 contender match. Interim titles are meaningless and just dilute the real value of the real title.
All the Fedor talk is so tired too. If you’re going to drop him from the #1 spot, you should drop him from the rankings altogether due to inactivity. No one is happy about Fedor being inactive or not fighting top talent. But thinking he should just sign to UFC under terms he didn’t agree to is ridiculous.
The UFC purchase of Pride has locked out many great fighters this year. Barnett, Kawajiri, Hunt, Hansen, Melendez, Fedor, Gomi, Sakurai, Lil Nog, Arona. 2007 was a shithouse year for MMA with barely any top dudes fighting each other. All the matchups seem to be to set up fights that never came.
Hopefully 2008 is better.
If Serra ends up out for a significant period of time with the herniated disc (and its a serious possibility) that means they can pull the title off Serra and give it to GSP on a fulltime basis. Since the UFC isn’t charging sanctioning fees I wouldn’t worry about a Wonjongkam/Arce situation here where you have two parties defending belts at the same time with no interest in fighting one another.
Thanks for the tip on the RSS. The feed for FightMetric is:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Fightmetric
I bascially second Grape Knee High’s post for Fedor vs Big Korean Dude instead of Yoshida.
Interesting article on Shonie Carter.
My question is…was that bout even sanctioned? We’ve seen many fights in the past few years not sanctioned or pulled because the comissions have deemed the fighters records a mis-match. Yet here we have Carter, with over 100 pro-fights behind him taking on a kid in his 3rd pro fight.
I guess its a moot point as Carter got clocked, but on paper, that fight should never have happened.
As for Yoshida vs Fedor, I say thats the best option in terms of a draw in Japan right now.
People need to understand Yoshida and Hong Man are big names in Japan and this fight is for the Japanese fans it will not be shown in America.