« Asashoryu invited to appear at Inoki event in Tokyo | Home | Independent World MMA Rankings – February 12, 2010 »
The hullabaloo about Mark Coleman getting cut by UFC after main eventing the last PPV
By Zach Arnold | February 11, 2010
I think the end result is the right call, but the process is a credibility hit for UFC in regards to them promoting Coleman in the main event slot. It’s also a hit to Keith Kizer (Nevada State Athletic Commission) because the commission, on paper, is the one calling the shots in licensing fighters over a certain age. Coleman was always a tough call on that front. I don’t blame Mark Coleman one bit for fighting — you make as much money as you can before you retire in this business.
Other news and notes
The Indianapolis Star has a profile article on Chris Lytle and his training has been like for him leading up to his February 20th fight against Brian Foster. The article is more about the story of Lytle’s current life and how much money he can make before his career is over.
Marty Morgan, who trains Brock Lesnar, says Cole Konrad could become a champion within the next couple of years.
The UFC 111 March event could be shown in movie theaters across the States.
Frank Trigg wonders what is next in his fight career. Matt Serra, who beat Trigg and sent him out of the UFC, will remain in the Welterweight division.
Jake Rosholt will fight in March at the Spirit Bank Event Center in Bixby, Oklahoma.
Michael Bisping has not been talking much trash about Wanderlei Silva in the media, so a lot of the attention on Bisping has been on his training camp for the UFC 110 fight. Despite beating Denis Kang a while back, Bisping is still answering media questions about his loss to Dan Henderson. I swear, that fight out of all the big fights at UFC 100 is the second-most talked about performance outside of Lesnar’s win over Frank Mir. Amazing.
Dan Hardy always seems to pick interesting sponsors. (Remember this growth hormone sponsor in the past?) He’s now aligned with Xyience. Yes, the same Xyience that has a bankruptcy trustee legally questioning the business behavior of Zuffa in the way Xyience assets were handled. Zombie Xyience will never go away, it seems, as a sponsor in UFC.
Stick to fighting, Chael Sonnen. You will be more bruised in politics than in UFC (and you get bruised quite a bit). Ask Matt Lindland.
Topics: Media, MMA, UFC, Zach Arnold | 82 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
Well, Sonnen ain’t fighting Silva anyhow. Maia gets the fight. LOL. I wouldn’t bet on Maia until it hit +1000.
I was being sarcastic just in case u missed it 45.
Come to think of it, look at the odds on the next two title fights in the UFC:
-Dan Hardy is at +500
-Frankie Edgar is at +540
Maia will probably be over +500 also. That’s 3 craptacular title fights in a row. Gotta say that some of the luster is off of UFC 112. Oh well. I’ll buy UFC 111 instead probably.
Frank Edgar is going to beat BJ Penn. Upset of the year.
Hardy is going to get wrecked. He lacks to takedown defense to even make it a fair fight.
Maia is going to get wrecked but still has a tiny chance of pulling off a miracle submission.
Yeah, I’m not so excited about UFC 112 either now. UFC 111 & UFC 114 are the next two big shows I am excited about….
Frankie Edgar is awesome but he’s just too small and BJ is going to outbox him. It won’t be competitive. It sucks because he really should be @ 145…him vs Brown/Aldo/Faber would be awesome and would make that division more exciting so it doesn’t turn into a total rematch-fest. Of course, he’s not going to WEC cuz the money isn’t there.
The only example of non-UFC fighters losing fans when they join UFC is when they suck ass like Cro Cop did. If he performed like that in DREAM or Strikeforce or Sengoku or IFL he’d still lose fans.
And there is no way Edgar beats Penn. The whole “wrestling is BJ’s weakness” thing is only true when the wrestler is significantly larger than he is like GSP and Hughes were. GSP looked like he had 15-20 pounds on Penn. Edgar is a small Lightweight. Penn always being picked to lose by haters is becoming the new “FEDOR IS GOING TO GET EXPOSED THIS TIME YOU WATCH~!” He won’t lose at Lightweight unless he fights with the H1N1 virus or slips on a banana peel.
I think Edgar vs Penn will look a lot like Edgar vs Maynard. Except Penn will KO him eventually.
I’m sorry but Silva vs Maia just flat out sucks. Maia in no way deserves a shot. Give it a rest on the grappler vs striker crap we will here for the next couple months. Silva will get the KO when he wants it.
I’m reL disappointed in UFC’s booking of Silva. Since he beat Franklin for the MW title he has only been in two fights I was excited to see. Versus Menderson and Forrest. The rest were basically exhibition fights. You can argue Marquardt was a good match for him. I wasn’t excited at the time for it and it went just like I thought it would. Even the Forrest fight was basically a gimme fight, I just got excited to see what Silva would do knowing Forrest was going to stand.
I was real pumped for the Belfort fight. Aside fromthat there is nothing for him at 185. Time to throw him in the deep end of the 205 pool.
“You realize Nick’s last two fights in the UFC were wins right?”
Yeah not only that, Diaz left not because he was released, but because he chose NOT to resign with UFC.
You guys remember he lost 4 fights in a row before those wins, right? He fought two prelim fights on the way out.
Prelim fights are fights. He left because of a huge ass contract offered to him by World Fighter, later purchased and effectively turned into EXC.
The Zuffa nuts will always say, “well, Zuffa has more money than World Fighter had and they simply chose not to match that offer, therefore Diaz was deemed unworthy by Zuffa and therefore he sucks.” That’s how they explain that Arlovski is a “UFC reject.” It’s pretty pathetic.
Have you guys all gone nuts?
We talk about guys like GSP and Anderson Silva cleaning out their divisions. Nick Diaz got cleaned out of the UFC Welterweight division. Plain and simple. He lost to guys that aren’t even that good.
Listen, I used to be a huge Nick Diaz fan. I thought he got jobbed against Riggs and Sanchez. But at the same time he didn’t do enough to really gripe about not getting the decisions.
He is incredibly overrated right now. Where do you guys honestly think he’d be in the UFC WW division right now?
UFC let him go plain and simple.
They also let Arlovski go. They stuck him on an unaired prelim on the way out the door, Isaiah get real.
Diaz was already cut after the Sherk fight, he came in on short notice after fighting on a smaller show to fight Josh Neer and was given an extra fight as a thank you.
Duh. Arlovski was on an unaired prelim because his contract was up. Is that really confusing to you?
He is incredibly overrated right now. Where do you guys honestly think he’d be in the UFC WW division right now?
Looking at the rankings, I think he’s right there with Swick, Kampmann, Thiago, Hardy, Daley, Condit, and Ellenberger. Probably could beat any and all of them.
Duh. Arlovski was on an unaired prelim because his contract was up. Is that really confusing to you?
Yup. Koscheck was also booked onto the prelims for the same reason. He resigned a couple weeks later.
Re-sign (to sign a new or extended contract)
Resign (to QUIT)
Please make use the hyphen, it’s right next to your zero key on a standard US keyboard.
Anger has stolen all my “of”s.
Yup. Koscheck was also booked onto the prelims at the same show for the same reason. He re-signed a couple weeks later.
EVERYONE IS HAPPY NOW. Except for Mark Coleman. Is Wargodz still around?
UFC was done with Arlovski. They kept him on the shelf for awhile and then stuck him in a fight that. Would make TV if he lost. They didn’t want him anymore after he turned into a tentative, boring fighter. Is that confusing to you, Isaiah? It seems like maybe it is. Or you could just be someone who likes totwist things around after the fact.
Alan, I agree that’s about where Diaz is. Right in there with all those guys and Carlos Condit. I’m not sure Diaz would beat any of those guys. At best maybe he’d be .500.
UFC was done with Arlovski. They kept him on the shelf for awhile and then stuck him in a fight that. Would make TV if he lost. They didn’t want him anymore after he turned into a tentative, boring fighter. Is that confusing to you, Isaiah? It seems like maybe it is. Or you could just be someone who likes totwist things around after the fact.
I don’t think he’s twisting it at all. I think if Andrei was hearing contracts for 50/50 instead of 500K guaranteed, he’d have stayed in the UFC still where he was considered the top contender in the division circa 2008. Affliction paid him something like 4 million dollars that year to fight; he left over money. Period.
Koscheck was in a similar set of circumstances. He was looking for a big pay raise; Affliction showed they didn’t care about grabbing a welterweight, and EXC wasn’t looking to spend on him either out of fear he’d be a boring wrestler. He ended up taking a pretty solid but unspectacular deal well after UFC 82. Diego Sanchez also was bumped to prelims over the lack of a contract; he signed one the weekend of the event.
I think Diaz would be as good a title contender as any of the fresh fights for GSP would be right now. Would he win? Nah. But he’d at least make it entertaining and probably be more competitive than most thanks to his assortment of skills.
Hmm. Dana said the UFC wanted Arlovski and that he regretted being unable to make a deal with him, but an anonymous poster on an Internet message board says that the UFC had no interest in him. I’m so confused. I just don’t know who to believe.
The fact is Affliction, as a desperate promoter will do, just made an offer that was way out of the UFC’s payscale, and the UFC had little choice but to let him go. It happens. It wasn’t until Arlovski lost to Emelianenko that unscrupulous Zuffa fanboys started saying that the UFC was done with him.
“UFC was done with Arlovski. They kept him on the shelf for awhile and then stuck him in a fight that. Would make TV if he lost. They didn’t want him anymore after he turned into a tentative, boring fighter. Is that confusing to you, Isaiah? It seems like maybe it is. Or you could just be someone who likes totwist things around after the fact.”
– Detective Roadblock
“It’s funny you should ask me that. We were just talking about Arlovski. We want to sign him. It’s our intention to sign him. But I don’t know. We’re, well, I don’t know. We want to. Whether we will or not, I have no idea. We like Andrei and I know the fans like Andrei. I hope we can do something.”
– Dana White
http://sports.yahoo.com/mma/news?slug=ki-mmamailbag051308&prov=yhoo&type=lgns
The Heavyweight division was so bad at the time that they were open to keeping anybody who wanted to stay. If Arlovski was so worthless why did Dana basically hold him hostage for a year to keep him from Affliction? And despite popular disbelief, Dana didn’t let Tim Sylvia go because he hated him and finally got the chance to cut him. If Affliction didn’t offer that ridiculous contract he’d still be there. Hell, he’ll probably be back being fed to Kimbo next year. Or maybe Kimbo will main event against Arlovski for UFC 123: Glass Jaw Showdown.
If the idea was for Dana to fire everybody who sucked at Heavyweight in 2007, wouldn’t he have fired practically everybody?
As for Diaz, he’s talented as hell, but far too small to be at Welterweight in the UFC. Just like Aoki is incredibly talented but he’d be far too small to survive in UFC’s version of Lightweight even though they’re arguably less skilled than he is. The top dogs of that division look like giants next to him. If Nick could cut to 155 he’d do far better in the UFC. He’d never make weight, though.
Why are you guys talking about Arlovski from two years ago?
Tim and Andrei left because of huge guarantees from Affliction. That is also part of the reason Lawler has never come back(Big contract from EXC or whatever it was called before that).
Diaz is not too small for WW. He walks around at around the same weight GSP does. Its his lack of wrestling that would be his doom in the UFC. Nick is ok at 160-below but it takes too much out of him. He looked slow and lathargic against Noons, and wasn’t the fastest fighter in the world against Gomi.
The zuffa haters on this site are funny. You guys are arguing the semantics of Arlovski and Diaz not being in the UFC anymore. Diaz’s last two wins in the UFC were Neer and Tibau. The UFC probably would have kept him if he didn’t get a better contract offer. They knew he wasn’t worth that type of money.
Arlovski is the same. He went to affliction and got a huge contract. The UFC didnt offer him that extreme amount of money because… 1. His fight with Werdum was one of the most boring things you’ll ever watch… and 2. His Chin is too shotty to think he could be the face of your organization.
So pointing out that Dana wanted to keep Arlovski is irrational hating, but openly insulting a top fighter is, what, loving?
This thread has turned into a nightmare for Roadblock.
“The Zuffa nuts will always say, “well, Zuffa has more money than World Fighter had and they simply chose not to match that offer, therefore Diaz was deemed unworthy by Zuffa and therefore he sucks.” That’s how they explain that Arlovski is a “UFC reject.” It’s pretty pathetic.”
This is hating. Not on fighters, but on a certain fanbase that has is obviously dedicated enough to argue with guys like you about mma as a sport. Like it or not this fanbase is what has grown the sport to the level they are at today. There is plenty of reasons to not like zuffa ranging from fighter pay to shady business practices. But trying to discount their stable of fighters is an argument you are going to lose.
Arlovski has also said in the past that he wanted to stay with the UFC and him and Dana still had a great relationship. The fact is Zuffa didnt want to match what Arlovski could get else where. Same with Sylvia. Same with Diaz.
In case your wondering that means eventhough both parties wanted to continue working together the UFC decided to let them go.
Where is the insulting a top fighter?
Oh, OK. As long as you’re not accusing me of hating any fighters or the UFC…
I’m cool with being called a hater of ignorant cheerleaders for a promoter, though if you got to know me, you’d realize it’s more of a gentle contempt.
And I see that you and I are even on the same page with Arlovski. He was a top fighter and recognized as such by the UFC, but then Affliction came along and made him a ridiculous offer which he had to take and the UFC couldn’t reasonably match. I was disputing with someone who was implying that the parting somehow reflected badly on Arlovski as a fighter, even though he was universally regarded as a top-four HW at the time he left and moved up a spot after Nog’s horrible performance against Mir.
Yea your definately right about that stuff.
He was #2 in my book when he fought Fedor, and I think he was #2 on most sites as well.
“This is hating. Not on fighters, but on a certain fanbase that has is obviously dedicated enough to argue with guys like you about mma as a sport. Like it or not this fanbase is what has grown the sport to the level they are at today.”
What people do is try to open their eyes that there is a world beyond UFC. I realize lots of UFC fans are aware or even follow other orgs, but there’s so much ignorance from a lot of these people that of course you’ll get a little heated when they spew their ignorance. They also have huge chips on their shoulders in lots of cases which makes no sense because their beloved org is #1 by a landslide so shouldn’t they be comfortable in that knowledge?
“What people do is try to open their eyes that there is a world beyond UFC. I realize lots of UFC fans are aware or even follow other orgs, but there’s so much ignorance from a lot of these people that of course you’ll get a little heated when they spew their ignorance. They also have huge chips on their shoulders in lots of cases which makes no sense because their beloved org is #1 by a landslide so shouldn’t they be comfortable in that knowledge?”
Agreed but..
You also have the complete opposite from fans who have been around long enough to remember when Ken Shamrock fighting Tito was relevant. The chip on the shoulder you speak of seems like its a whole potato coming from guys who consistently try to knock the UFC for every little thing they disagree with. On top of that whenever an argument gets started some usually go straight to the “Oh since your supporting Zuffa I am going to immediately discredit your opinion and label you as a nut hugger”.
While there is a world in mma outside of Zuffa you have to realize that outside of Fedor the best fighters in the world compete for Zuffa. Sure there are a few exceptions in Nick Diaz, Shinya Aoki, Gegard Mousasi, Jake Shields, Gilbert Melendez, and Dan Henderson. Outside of SF and Dream you dont really have too many top ten fighters outside of Zuffa’s stable.
The funny thing about this argument about whether the UFC wanted to keep Arlovski or Diaz or not is that they look worse if they didn’t.
Think about it: if the UFC was happy to get rid of two guys who were on winning streaks within their own organization, that pretty clearly indicates that it’s not enough just to win in the “Super Bowl of MMA.” That runs a little counter to the popular myth about the UFC that it’s the organization where you earn your place, the best fight the best, and if you get cut it’s because you couldn’t hack it at the top.
If they let them go simply because those guys got lucrative counter-offers the UFC couldn’t reasonably match, well, that’s just the pragmatic response.