Georges St. Pierre file photo | Dave Mandel/Sherdog.com
UFC President Dana White conceded that welterweight champion Georges St. Pierre has cleaned out his division. After the 29-year-old French Canadian overwhelmed another worthy contender, Josh Koscheck, in the UFC 124 main event on Saturday at the Bell Centre in Montreal, who could argue?
St. Pierre’s Cloudy Future at 170
With another dominant win, St. Pierre has done something interesting, and it’s certainly a problem champions like Cain Velasquez will not have anytime soon. He looked so good that there is not a single challenger on the horizon that will be less than a 4-to-1 underdog against him.
That’s ironic, because it makes it that much harder for GSP to be a headliner carrying the main weight of the card. My guess is that while his match with ex-Strikeforce champion Jake Shields proceeds, it does not go off at anything less than 4-to-1 on the books, which is hardly a selling point for a pay-per-view if it not accompanied by one hell of a co-main event and solid undercard. Mike Tyson could get away with this because he destroyed people in very palpable terms, notching scalps and such. What GSP has been doing lately is, essentially, finding out what the other guy cannot deal with and doing it over and over.
What’s left for GSP after Shields? The winner of Jon Fitch-B.J. Penn? Hard to envision building that one up, because if Fitch beats Penn, it’s almost surely in classic Fitch fashion, which is an effective style that will produce little for a highlight reel promo to push him as a viable GSP challenger, especially after their one-sided initial match. If Penn wins, he will have to put together his A game against Fitch, but he has already lost to GSP twice, including a one-sided wipeout in their rematch.
Thiago Alves might be compelling, if he can string together a couple big knockout wins -- a punch neither Fitch nor Penn seem likely to beat him to -- but outside of that, who’s left? The middleweights, that’s who.
At the end of the day, fans want to see champions challenged. My guess is that by early 2012, GSP either moves up to middleweight or starts taking on back-to-back challengers on the same night, because that’s the only way the UFC will elicit fan interest in plunking down $54.95 to see him. UFC 124 was a bit of a glorified sparring session, so he cannot even fall back on the knockout to seal the night’s business.
That’s not a knock against him, as a well-crafted decision masterpiece speaks of his greatness in merely another language. Still, a lot more people speak of Tyson than ever did of Pernell Whitaker, and the same holds true for MMA. Until then, GSP as a middleweight is the only way he’s going to be remotely challenged.
Lightweight Judges Judging the Lightweights
Because the little guys lack the relative, one-punch knockout power of the bigger fighters, evenly-matched bouts at 155 pounds and below tend to go to a decision more often than their counterparts at heavyweight and light heavyweight. In fact, if you look at the last 20 or so contender showdown-type lightweight matches in the UFC, I would venture that more of them went to close decisions than the bigger boys.
Now consider the impending talent glut at 155 with the WEC merger and the inevitability of more closely contested lightweight bouts. Contemplate what it will take to secure a title shot, as well. Now look back at controversial judging at matches 155 and below in recent months: Sean Sherk over Evan Dunham, Leonard Garcia besting Nam Phan and Nik Lentz beating Tyson Griffin.
The list goes on and on. Note: these are included because fans, media and the like saw them as controversial. I did not think Phan was robbed, but many of you disagreed, which is what proves my point.
My theory on why this happens with lightweights is twofold. First, heavyweights rarely go to close decisions because they plainly lack the multi-dimensional skill sets required to compete at lighter weights. Coupled that with one-shot, fight-changing blows being rarer and it makes for fights that require much for subtle appreciation of what really constitutes effective fighting.
Instead of waiting for a 260-pound guy to land the first haymaker, judges are instead relegated to obtuse concepts as weighing the merits of complex sequences of events with no concrete criteria established to make overall comparisons as to which fighter was more “effective.” Let’s say Fighter A eats a hard kick to the body, then is stuffed on a takedown, while Fighter B sprawls against the fence successfully. Fighter A then switches off to another takedown, gets it, only to have B pop up, land a couple effective knees to the body, then get a takedown of his own, land a couple fair shots from ground-and-pound, then get swept and fail to submit A after a lengthy triangle attempt.
How would you score it? It may seem a tad ornate, but this is exactly what judges should be scoring fights on, at least in a rough sense, and with so many tough, pick-’em style matches on tap in the coming months and years, these controversial decisions will become more prevalent unless we get qualified MMA people in there, along with more clear definitions of what wins rounds and fights.
This is not going away, folks, and it was bad enough in the last couple years. Given the high stakes of guys jockeying for extremely limited slots among the elite of the 155-pound division, the fury will only build if these types of things keep happening. I’m also skeptical of going overboard and literally scoring every act, a good-in-theory concept with dubious implementation. A right hand to the head from one guy is not the equal of another’s, and I would not trust judges to score the “closeness” of a submission attempt, when half the time they do not even seem to know what the hell constitutes a legit attempt.
The discussion needs to take place. It’s not going to initiate itself given the athletic commissions and various vested constituencies -- many are holdovers from the boxing era and most are politically and/or otherwise connected to the current positions they hold -- because they are the yahoos benefiting from it.
Struve: A Different Kind of Heavyweight
Disclaimers should always come first, so here goes: I picked Sean McCorkle to beat Stefan Struve, and Struve proved me and all his other doubters wrong in a solid performance. While I wished the stoppage had been a little more clean-cut, that is not Struve’s fault, and he finds himself in an interesting position among the big boys.
First, despite being 253 pounds, at 6-foot-11, he’s still not as physically strong as the typical heavyweight. He’s just too long and lanky. That said, at 22, he has a lot of room to fill out. With all this, he has developed into an interesting fighter to watch. When was the last time you saw a heavyweight execute a kimura sweep from the bottom to effectively change the entire tone of the fight? That’s what Struve did after the bigger McCorkle got into what everyone believed would be his sweet spot moments into the bout. The clear-headed Struve hit a textbook sweep and punched away from mount for the finish.
As such a young guy, Struve has a lot of experience, with 25 fights. And he has rebounded from one of the tougher UFC debuts a guy can have, losing via first-round knockout to the powerful Junior dos Santos. One has to wonder how the UFC will match Struve, given his long-term potential.
Do you give him a big “step-up” fight against the likes of a comebacking Brock Lesnar, or pit him against a fellow rising young gun like Brendan Schaub? In Struve’s case, I hope it’s something resembling the latter, because it’s nice to see heavyweights that wins on technique because they have to, which is exactly why he wins.