Last week, I had mentioned that Wanderlei Silva was making the move to the middleweight division. I was expecting a warm up fight, building up from there until he earned a title shot against Anderson Silva. What I wasn’t expecting was his next opponent to be Rich Franklin.
And even less explicable, it’s set to be a “catch-weight” fight, even though Franklin had recently moved up to the light heavyweight division, where Silva is…at least for now. When they fight at UFC 99, it looks like it will be at 195 pounds…
With both fighters coming off of losses – Franklin to Dan Henderson and Silva to Quinton Jackson, each in the 205-pound division – a catch weight fight doesn’t really damage either’s hopes for a title shot, as each would likely have to win a couple of fights before being considered a contender again.
A catch weight fight is a logical step for Silva to make his transition to the middleweight division a little easier. Walking around at about 208 pounds, he’s never really had to deal much with weight cutting in the past, but will obviously have to in order to compete at middleweight.
There has been a lot of talk ever since Wanderlei Silva cutting down to 185, pretty much ever since he signed with the UFC. Silva’s always been a smaller light-heavyweight (he “walks around” at 208), so the weight cut seemed to make a lot of sense to everyone except for Wanderlei.
Last night gave us too major developments in the light-heavyweight division. The first is obviously Rashad Evans capturing the light-heavyweight title, cementing him as MMA fighter of the year as far as I’m concerned. Yeah, he only fought twice this year – but one of those fights was last night, and the other was a KO of Chuck Liddell. Plus, there’s that whole undefeated thing too.
I went one for four in the Ultimate Fighter Finale…though the Vega$ oddsmakers only went 2-5, so it ain’t like I was the only one. Let’s see if I can improve on that…
