Stevenson dropped to featherweight
Option #5: Dropping Down (a.k.a. The Current Trend)
Changing weight classes is the hot trend in MMA right now. It’s the baseball jackets and all-black watches of career choices for mixed martial artists.
Dropping down a division has become a means of injecting new life into a career that has stalled for one reason or another.
Urijah Faber fled the featherweight division after Jose Aldo jacked up his leg and removed almost all probability of another title run from the table. The decision was an easy one of “The California Kid,” as he’d always been a little small for 145-pounds but able to get by on his athleticism and talent. When that was no longer enough to compete at the pinnacle of the division, he chose to shed an additional ten pounds and earned himself a shot at the bantamweight crown in just two fights.
While Faber switched to the bantamweight division in hopes of tracking down a title again, others make the cut to try and jumpstart a stalled career.
Joe Stevenson is the perfect example.
Though he’s only 28-years-old, Stevenson’s time as a contender in the lightweight division has come and gone. He’s lost three in a row to fighters at descending levels of the ladder, so trying his hands at featherweight looks like the only option left. This move will tell us if the talent at lightweight just became that much better or if Stevenson has nothing left after competing as a professional since age sixteen.
Somewhere in the middle you have a guy like Tyson Griffin.
2010 was a horrible year for the Xtreme Couture product; a pair of losses to Evan Dunham and Takanori Gomi were finished off by a controversial split decision defeat to Nik Lentz at UFC 123. Prior to last year’s bad patch, Griffin was at the highest point of his career, coming off a finish of Hermes Franca at UFC 103 and sitting on the brink of becoming a contender. Now he’s cutting ten more pounds to compete alongside Stevenson in the featherweight division, debuting in June against Manny Gamburyan.
Why put Griffin in a different group than Stevenson, despite similar results and “Joe Daddy” having greater success? Honestly, Stevenson looked unable to fire against Danny Castillo while Griffin simply got a raw deal against Lentz. Time could prove me wrong, but I think Griffin has much more left in the tank than Stevenson.
Option #6: Be a Late Replacement (a.k.a. Training Camp? What Training Camp?)
The UFC has an unwritten rule, or at least I think they do.
Whenever someone accepts a replacement role in a bout on short notice, they get themselves another fight, almost regardless of how the previous outing went down. Todd Brown stepped up to face Tim Boetsch at UFC 117 without much advance warning, and suffered just the second loss of his career for his troubles. Despite the uneventful showing, there was Brown, seven months later, standing opposite Igor Pokrajac on the second Versus show.
That one didn’t go very well either, as the Croatian pounded out a victory as the bell sounded to end the opening round, but Brown still proved the theory. Countless others have as well; Waylon Lowe, Steve Lopez, John Salter, just to name a few. While none of them are world beaters or even managed a victory in the opening appearance in the Octagon, they all had a second chance.
It applies to fighters already in the UFC as well.
Dan Miller has stepped up on a couple different occasions to fill middleweight vacancies, and it has put him in the good graces of the UFC for all eternity. It would take a serious slide for the older half of New Jersey’s Fighting Miller Brothers to find his way to the unemployment line.
Option #7: Achieve Legendary Status (a.k.a. The Randy Couture Rule)
If Couture wanted to fight until he was 73-years-old, the UFC would have to let him. After all, he’s Randy Couture.
When you make a career out of proving people wrong and becoming a legend in the sport, you’re allowed to go out on your own terms. It would take a serious string of bad performances for Dana White to give Couture the “I think the time has come” speech he undoubtedly delivered to Chuck Liddell before and after UFC 115.
The reason this one comes last in the list is that there is only one Randy Couture; as great as some of today’s athletes are and as impressive as the fighters of the future are going to be, no one can compare to Couture.