ESPN Mixed Martial Arts

Training camps have become their own game of roulette, and Dominick Cruz -- who trains fiendishly year round -- is the latest casualty.

Cruz tore his anterior cruciate ligament Thursday while prepping for his July 7 title fight with Urijah Faber, and now 2012 will pass by without the UFC bantamweight champion ever stepping into the octagon.

Bummer.

When 10 top contenders can’t beat you, ACL’s are around to remind us that there is such a thing as destructibility. Look at Georges St. Pierre, who suffered the exact same fate. It’s all eggshells before fight night, because injuries remain stubbornly indiscriminate (and prefight drug screenings have a way of coming back hot).

The big difference between Cruz and St. Pierre? St. Pierre’s injury took Carlos Condit with him.

In Faber’s case, he’ll still be dealt a fresh new face, likely in the form of Brazilian Renan Barao or the 21-year old Michael McDonald. Neither one of them provide a gussied-up, trilogy-fight storyline, but both stand a fantastic chance of dialing Faber’s mystique back for good -- which is to say, both have the power to derail Faber’s trilogy fight with Cruz forever.

In a game centered on hype, situations change at far greater speeds than belts. Very likely, whoever wins the rejiggered UFC 148 bout will have the placeholder belt and will wait out Cruz’s timetable for recovery to unify things.

And this is where things fall into a familiar sludge.

How many titlists and top contenders can be on the shelf at once? How many actual and theoretical belts can we introduce without it becoming charades? Whatever the case, matchmakers Joe Silva and Sean Shelby are becoming fluent in the laws of attrition. Taking a look at the tops of the UFC’s weight classes right now -- with all the conditions, exceptions, suspensions and voluntary sabbaticals -- most are a total mess.

St. Pierre will fight only once this year (hopefully), and Anderson Silva possibly the same (but hopefully not). Junior dos Santos is fighting in his first title defense in a few weeks (knock on wood), yet the top contender he was supposed to face -- Alistair Overeem -- is suspended. Likewise, Nick Diaz is suspended at welterweight.

Circumstantially, the latest contenders are putting themselves on hiatus, too. Nate Diaz says he’ll wait out Frankie Edgar/Benson Henderson, a fight that’ll likely take place in September. That means the earliest we see No. 1 contender Diaz again is in December. It’s even rockier for Johny Hendricks at welterweight. If he waits out the tentative November showdown between Condit and St. Pierre, he won’t surface again this year.

Title fights in 2012 are becoming scarce. Out of eight weight classes, we’ve had three in five months, and are on pace for maybe 14. Even the flyweight coronation was postponed due to a bumbled math job in Australia. Big fights are being made, and big fights are falling through. It’s the nature of the fight game to roll with the punches, but what a collision course of rotten luck.

What can you do? To use the most common refrain in MMA right now, it is what it is. The UFC can’t issue a memorandum that says, “tread light before the fight.” With Cruz out for the next nine months, it means opportunity for either Barao or McDonald. And the UFC has always been very good at branding optimism and opportunism above all else.

As for this year they have to, because that's what's for sale.

NEW YORK -- For as stacked as the UFC 146 card appears for Memorial Day weekend, it’s really two title fights (Urijah Faber/Dominick Cruz and Chael Sonnen/Anderson Silva) and a pack of glitzy non-consequential match-ups (Cung Le/Rich Franklin and Forrest Griffin/Tito Ortiz).

Not so for New Jersey and this weekend’s free UFC on FOX 3 card. No belts will change hands, but situations are in play. Complicated situations. Theoretical ones. Titles dangling in the balance, right there for some and just out of reach for others. And there is, of course, much obfuscation.

For example: If Nate Diaz capitalizes on his broadcast television main event and downs Jim Miller, he is essentially guaranteed a title shot at 155 pounds. However, with Benson Henderson and Frankie Edgar fighting for the title in August, that shot might come in a wintry month like December. That’s a long time to wait for a guy who A.) fights for money, B.) likes fighting and C.) has a nice head of momentum. When asked if he’d wait in that situation at Thursday’s news conference, Diaz said simply, “I have a fight on Saturday.”

This drew a New York cheer. Diaz, for all his volume in punching, is a man of few words.

If Jim Miller beats Diaz, on the other hand, he isn’t guaranteed anything. Rather, he is guaranteed to be cheering for Frankie Edgar at UFC 150 when Edgar fights Henderson, because in that case Miller would potentially get to fight Edgar (his erstwhile training partner/friend).

Got it?

Here’s what Miller had to say when asked if he’s confused by Diaz getting a title shot with a win (even though he’s 3-3 in his last six lightweight bouts) while he (10-2 as a lightweight in the UFC) won’t necessarily:

“You know, honestly, it doesn’t matter to me right now. I’ve got a fight in two days, and that’s where my focus is. From doing that [10-2 record] and having that seven-win stretch and dealing with the rematches in this division, it really cemented that things change -- and things happen. So I’m not going to sit here and try and predict what’ll happen with a win or with a loss. I’m just focused on the fight itself, and after that, then it’s time to speculate about the next fight.”

If he won’t speculate, we sure will, and we’ll add a name to the mix: Anthony Pettis.

Pettis, who is a quasi-No. 1 contender, will be coming back to full health some time in the summer. Logic would say that the winner of Diaz/Miller will end up fighting Pettis to establish a true No. 1 contender, while Henderson/Edgar II plays out.

Meanwhile, the co-main event has its own wild set of conditions. Should Johny Hendricks beat Josh Koscheck, he is the No. 1 contender for a title fight. Problem is, once again, that Georges St. Pierre and Carlos Condit are likely fighting in November to settle up the permanent and interim belts. There’s no way that Hendricks will want to wait for that to play out for a spring 2013 title fight.

Yet if Koscheck wins, he will have to pull for Condit to beat St. Pierre to have a word in the title conversation.

Confused? You should be. If we learned anything from the final prefight news conference, it’s this -- the UFC doesn’t want repetition. Koscheck/St. Pierre and Henderson/Miller happened too soon ago to happen again. The UFC craves new blood.

It’s the most complicated contender-type card that ever was, and it’s going down Saturday night in New Jersey.

First UFC "super fight" in January?

In the post news conference scrum, a media member asked Dana White about a potential fight card at Cowboys Stadium in Dallas, a venue which can hold 100,000 people.

White said all that flirtation about holding an event there was not only real, but is a serious possibility. He also alluded to a big January card that could potentially be so massive.

“We’re always looking for a potential big fight,” White said. “We’ve always wanted to do a fight, and we’ve been talking to [Jerry] Jones and his crew about doing a fight down in Dallas Cowboys Stadium, but we need a fight big enough to do it. The last fight that I was going to try and make there was Brock [Lesnar] and Fedor [Emelianenko].”

There is potentially a fight out there that’s big enough.

Running through the timelines of “super fight” candidates for a place like Dallas Cowboys Stadium, or a second event at the Rogers Centre in Toronto (or at the old, reliable stand-by in Las Vegas), one could envision a Jon Jones/Anderson Silva match-up at least being discussed.

Think about it. If Jones beats Dan Henderson in September, that would be four months ahead of January -- perfect for the turn around. Anderson Silva fights in July. Should be beat Chael Sonnen for his record 10th title defense, there would be only one way to raise the ante -- and it wouldn’t be to take on Mark Munoz or Hector Lombard.

It would be to fight Jones, who’d have tidied his own division up just in time. Is that what the UFC has in mind?

“I don’t know,” White said. “We’ll see what happens. We’ll see what we end up putting together.”

New York state of mind

By now, everyone knows about the MMA ban in New York, even as we make our way through open-minded 2012. This is why the UFC dangles its product just across the Hudson River -- to reinforce that all notions of “human cockfighting” are antiquated and hyperbolic. Whether the sport hasn’t been sanctioned in the Empire State is about “gangsters” in the Culinary Union (as Dana White says) or something less ominous, it depends on whom you talk to.

But when MMA does finally get legalized in New York, the UFC plans on doing it big.

“When we finally do break through and do a big event here, I think the event at Madison Square Garden that we do will be huge, and it’s be a great time to pull off a Fan Expo here in New York,” White said. “I think it would be huge.”

In the meantime, those in New York who want to catch MMA in a live setting must go underground. Or, underwater. For MMA, there’s light at the end of the Lincoln Tunnel, across the way in East Rutherford, N.J., where the UFC will once again mock New York with the one thing it doesn’t have.

The UFC’s flyweight division was exactly one fight old when things went haywire at the top.

That’s so 2012 in the UFC. When title belts are in play, all paths look more like construction zones with detours.

This time, Ian McCall appeared as if he’d won a back-and-forth fight to advance in the shudder-speed flyweight tournament. Then the scorecards were read and it was actually Demetrious Johnson who won a majority decision, turning "Uncle Creepy’s" maestro swagger off as fast as it came on.

His depression didn’t last long.

To the chagrin of flyweight matchmaker Sean Shelby, who was in Columbus for Strikeforce some 10,000 miles away, the Australian athletic commission miscalculated the scorecards on McCall/Johnson. The result should have been a majority draw, and somewhere in the bowels of Allphones Arena in Sydney they informed Dana White, whose only response could be the obligatory tirade of profanity. They weren’t. And the disheartening thing for the UFC was that this was an eventuality it had prepared for by introducing a sudden victory round -- à la "The Ultimate Fighter" format -- to resolve any draws at the end.

But there’s no accounting for human error, and nothing much can be done in that situation except adopt the common shoulder-shrugger’s refrain: it is what it is.

Now Joseph Benavidez -- who TKO’d Yasuhiro Urushitani -- will wait for a rematch that most will be stoked to see and yet shouldn’t have to see. Flies in the Vaseline, they are. Sadly, the UFC’s newest division adds to the already algebraic complications going on with the UFC’s title pictures.

Go back a week and start there. Benson Henderson defeated Frankie Edgar at UFC 144 in a close fight to take home the lightweight strap. Seeing that it was a close fight, one that could be interpreted either way, Edgar asked for an immediate rematch. Problem is that Anthony Pettis, who knocked out Joe Lauzon the same night, wants his shot at the belt, too. He was the last man to defeat Henderson, and was at one point the solid No. 1 contender (a position he fancies himself in again). Jim Miller and Nate Diaz are operating with the understanding (delusion?) that their May 5 fight in New Jersey is a title eliminator.

It’s complicated.

Of everyone, Edgar is the unignorable here. The UFC wants him to challenge Jose Aldo for the featherweight belt, but Edgar doesn’t want to. He rematched B.J. Penn and Gray Maynard without quibbling, and he wants some return love. It’s hard to argue. Before his fight with Henderson, the UFC romanticized Edgar as a Rocky-esque figure in the hype process. Yet not even Rocky was Rocky coming off of wins. He was Rocky because of how he responded to losses. First with Apollo Creed, then with Clubber Lang. And later, after losing the vainglorious Creed to a killing machine from Russia, against Ivan Drago.

How can the UFC draw upon a man’s heart and not give him the chance to show its full dimensions? Having lost to the bigger, stronger Henderson sets the table for a truer representation of his nonfictional Rocky story.

As an extension of the uncertainty at 155 pounds and Edgar, the featherweight division is in limbo. What next for Aldo? Then you glance at the welterweight title picture, and that's way out of focus. Georges St. Pierre is recovering from ACL surgery, and is either way ahead of schedule or possibly right on schedule or something else. He is tentatively looking at a November return. Interim titleholder Carlos Condit is waiting to see something definitive in that timetable before deciding what to do next. Jake Ellenberger is waiting to see what Condit does, and now so is Martin Kampmann (the last man to defeat Condit). It’s possible we don’t see an “actual” title defense at 170 pounds this year.

By slotting Dominick Cruz against Urijah Faber as the coaches on "The Ultimate Fighter" Season 15, that means Cruz won’t defend his bantamweight belt until the summer. And that means any challengers beyond Faber -- guys like super-sensation Renan Barao -- are out of luck until winter.

As for middleweights, Anderson Silva is finally going to fight again in June after recovering from bursitis in his shoulder. There’s a chance we see just one middleweight title fight in 2012.

With eight weight divisions, and a conservative average of two fights per year, there should be in the neighborhood of 16 title fights. That won’t be the case in 2012. There might be 10, if we're lucky.

Can you imagine if Jon Jones had made good on his request to take a few months off? Light heavyweight is the closest the UFC has to a normally functioning division right now. And it looks like Junior dos Santos is ready to go, if Alistair Overeem can avoid injuries and conflicts beforehand.

Otherwise, title fights are scarce to come by this year. Which means we’ll be watching a lot more PFC (Penultimate Fighting Championship) than UFC (the Ultimate variety).

Is it wrong to kind of like a George St. Pierre-less welterweight division?

Not that we don’t want him back in November, but these last few months have been kind of fun, yeah? For starters, the St. Pierre injury story is great in itself. No fighter has been able to legitimately challenge him in years. Can a knee injury do it?

Because to be honest, the novelty of St. Pierre ho-hummingly dominating opponents one five-round fight after another had started to wear off. It was still an impressive run, absolutely, but -- come on. In sports, we’re supposed to get drama. We like two-minute drills. We like half-court prayers. We like a man on third, two outs in the bottom of the ninth, down by one.

What’s been kind of nice about St. Pierre being out to start 2012 is that it’s allowed us to envision a welterweight division without such a dominant champ. And what that vision looks like are razor-thin title fights and a serious group of contenders who would trade the belt back and forth between themselves for years.

From a business standpoint, you don’t mind the St. Pierre model. A dominant champ entices casual fans to watch and see what the fuss is about. Hardcore fans will tune in as well, if for no other reason to make absolutely sure they are watching when he loses.

But from a sports fan perspective, I think most would admit they’re ready to see what “St. Pierre in trouble” looks like again. The eye injury he suffered during the Jake Shields win was certainly adversity he had to overcome, but it’s not like the outcome of that fight was ever in question.

So, here’s the question: Can any of these welterweights we’re getting excited about during St. Pierre’s absence actually beat him when he comes back? As I did in October with the lightweights, let’s sort out which of these guys has the best shot at being the one to end St. Pierre’s reign.

The “if stars align and everything imaginable goes your way then maybe ... but still probably not” Group: Dan Hardy, Diego Sanchez, John Hathaway, Rick Story, Dong Hyun Kim.

Go on, laugh at Hardy even being included on this list. Hey, he’s about as long as a long shot can be. But if the organization is willing to hang on to him after four fairly miserable outings, then what’s to say they wouldn’t reward him with a title shot quickly if he were to get hot again?

Sanchez is interesting because if I’m a UFC welterweight I say to myself, “Man, I should call out Diego. I’m pretty sure I can beat him and he’s a big name to add to my résumé.” The only problem is I do that, then I get to the third round of the fight and Sanchez is still coming forward, spewing blood from the nose I’m pretty sure I broke with my knee in the first round and, suddenly, I’m scared. Not sure of what exactly, but definitely scared. This will happen in the next two years: A rising prospect calls out Sanchez and loses.

The “Any way we could combine these two?”: Thiago Alves, Martin Kampmann.

I think last weekend’s fight summed up both fighters pretty well. Kampmann is a gamer with tremendous will but he lacks elite-type athleticism. Alves is the opposite -- he might be the best athlete in the division but he’s vulnerable to mental lapses.

It’s not a terrible idea to go for a takedown in the final minute of a fight you’re winning to remove the flash KO threat, but in these circumstances (Kampmann has five submission wins in the UFC against one TKO) it was bad judgment. And the worst part is, fair or not, we’ve sort of come to expect this from Alves. For the record, though, of these two, I still give Alves a better shot overall at ever holding the belt.

The potential feel-good story of the century: Jake Shields.

If this were Hollywood, wouldn’t you lay everything you’ve got on Shields having a monster year in 2012 and claiming the belt in 2013? In the movie world, St. Pierre would be made out as a way more sinister foe in their first fight and maybe, after the loss to Ellenberger, movie Shields would go on some month-long drinking/partying binge that threatens to end his fighting career. But by the time the credits rolled, he’d be pointing up to the sky with a title belt around his waist.

It could happen. We know the guy is talented. He’s 33 and hasn’t taken a ton of damage despite a lengthy career. And I still think, for whatever reason, we caught Shields on an off night at UFC 129.

The blazing hot prospect and the simmering hot prospect: Rory MacDonald, Erick Silva.

Some of you will no doubt have MacDonald higher on your list, but I can’t quite pull the trigger on a 22-year-old whose biggest win is arguably over string bean Nate Diaz. Don’t get me wrong, I love MacDonald as a future titleholder, just not sure if you can rank him higher than these other guys right now.

Silva, same thing. He certainly looks the part, but so far both opponents he’s fought in the UFC took the fight on short notice and both came within friendly confines of his home country.

The old faithfuls: Josh Koscheck, Jon Fitch.

These guys have been here for years and they’ll continue to be here through at least 2013. Fitch’s loss to Johny Hendricks could mean nothing. It was 12 seconds. He was facing some serious ring rust. If you think it’s the last we’ve seen of him, it’s probably because you just don’t like him and it’s clouding your judgment.

Koscheck gets the opportunity to avenge his friend’s loss against Hendricks in May. It’s a surprising fight to me because you’re risking a possible No. 1 contender to a guy who, as long as St. Pierre has the belt, can’t really be a No. 1 contender. Koscheck is high on this list because of his skills but frankly, a lot of things outside his control need to happen if he’s ever going to win the welterweight title.

The "highly" unlikely: Nick Diaz.

He’s probably getting a one-year suspension. If that’s the case, he can’t fight until February 2013. What kind of fight does he pull when he gets back? There will still be a lot of interest in a St. Pierre fight, even if St. Pierre isn’t even holding the belt, but do you really like his chances in that fight after such a long layoff? I don’t. So, would he get a “tune-up” fight first? Even if he did, it would be against a legitimate guy with a real chance at beating him. If that happens, he probably needs to win two more fights to get a title shot. Sorry, but there are just enough unknowns right now that I no longer love Diaz’s chances. He still claims a high spot on this list though because when he comes back, a matchup against St. Pierre is so marketable the UFC will so its best to put it together.

The favorites: Carlos Condit, Jake Ellenberger, Johny Hendricks.

In that order. Condit sits at the top thanks mainly to the intangibles on his side. He’s getting the next opportunity to do it -- at least that’s what it looks like. St. Pierre will be dealing with a very long layoff and he’ll be competing for the first time on his reconstructed knee. Stylistically, he faces an uphill battle in my opinion but not an insurmountable one. If he can stay on his feet, he’ll hit St. Pierre. He’ll get taken down but he’s terrific at escapes and he’s very tough mentally. He won’t be intimidated and he’ll keep working even if things don’t go well early.

Ellenberger is actually my favorite to get it done from a stylistic standpoint. I think he’s the most athletically gifted of the three and I like his standup a little over Hendricks’, although they both clearly hit hard. It would be good if he was a little bigger, but St. Pierre isn’t a huge welterweight either. He’d be very dangerous in a fight against the champ, especially early in the fight.

Hendricks is right there as well. He has the game changer in the left hand and, although St. Pierre would frustrate him a bit in the speed aspect, he’s not an easy opponent to control.

When it’s all said and done though, I guess this is all for naught because it’s very difficult to see anyone unseating St. Pierre. My guess is he makes this whole knee-injury, layoff ordeal look easy. That is, after all, the St. Pierre we’ve come to know.

Science fiction writers could probably spend entire careers offering alternate histories for Martin Kampmann.

Example: What if Kampmann hadn’t come out on the losing end of a razor thin decision against Jake Shields at UFC 121?

What if the judges had sided with the vocal majority who thought he should’ve gotten the nod over Diego Sanchez in March 2011 in their bloody, hard-fought cable TV main event?

What if Kampmann’s unanimous decision win over Rick Story three months back -- originally announced as a split verdict, like maybe the judges had considered taking that one from him, too -- had been the cherry on top of a five-fight win-streak instead of a two-bout slump buster?

No long meditation on the butterfly effect is needed to know that if any of the above had come to pass, well, Kampmann probably wouldn’t be taking on Thiago Alves on Friday in a fight that feels like a stretch as a main event, even for one of the UFC’s new live shows on FX. On a Friday night, no less.

If Stephen King can crank out 800-plus pages speculating about a couple of guys going back in time to try to stop the Kennedy assassination, we can take a couple of sentences to acknowledge what Kampmann has learned the hard way during the last year and a half: That the line between contender status and just being middle-of-the-pack in the UFC welterweight division is slim, and the margin for error essentially nonexistent.

If Kampmann had defeated Shields and/or Sanchez (some people believe he rightfully did both) maybe he would have been fighting Georges St. Pierre in late spring or early summer of last year. Or maybe he would have met up with Jake Ellenberger in a No. 1 contender bout in late 2011 or early 2012. Heck, given Kampmann’s 2009 win over Carlos Condit, maybe it would have been him in the cage against Nick Diaz fighting for the interim 170-pound title at UFC 143, instead of “The Natural Born Killer.”

Or maybe not. This is all speculative, of course. It's possible things could have gone off the rails for Kampmann in a thousand other ways. Perhaps his UFC 103 loss to Paul Daley -- arguably his only real misstep of the last few years -- would still have been enough to hold him back.

Whatever the case, instead of finding himself considering the intricacies of the welterweight title picture right now, Kampmann’s current reality is Friday's bout with Alves, where the stakes are, at best, uncertain.

Alves is just 2-3 during his last five appearances and his only two wins since October 2008 came as the middle leg of John Howard’s three-fight losing streak and over a debuting unknown in Papy Abedi. He’s already been to the mountain top, fighting St. Pierre at UFC 100, and came out on the wrong end of a terribly lopsided decision loss. A return trip is starting to feel more and more unlikely.

At this point, the book is out on Alves, who starts like a house of fire and then fades late when his opponents can impose their game plans on him. The only real juice in this fight is the stylistic matchup -- both guys like to bang and Kampmann doesn’t fit the blueprint of the wrestle-first fighters like Story, GSP and Jon Fitch who’ve given Alves all sorts of trouble.

What does it all mean when a 1-2 fighter takes on a 2-3 fighter on cable TV on a night the public isn’t used to seeing fights and just 24 hours before a far more hyped-up women’s bantamweight title bout hits the airwaves? Nobody knows. It’s just one both guys know they don’t want to lose, that’s all.

Losses, we all know, are bad. Even losses that maybe should have been wins. Just ask Martin Kampmann.

Because he’s a professional fighter, Kampmann would likely blame himself for his recent rough turns of fate. He’d probably tell you it was his fault for “leaving it in the hands of the judges.”

Really, though, he’s not to blame, and that makes it hard not to wonder "what if."

While we’re engaging in fantasy, perhaps we could also indulge one where the fighters in our sport in 2012 don’t have to fear “leaving it” in the purview of the judges. Maybe there’s an alternate universe out there somewhere where the rules are better and the judges can be counted on to do a decent job.

Jake Ellenberger is convinced Carlos Condit does not want to risk his UFC welterweight title shot by fighting him during Georges St. Pierre's absence. More »

For all the marvels, one thing that UFC President Dana White has never been particularly good at is speaking for Dan Henderson. This was the case before Henderson bolted for Strikeforce, and it’s still the case right now.

And for as telegraphic as Henderson has been in his latest title quest -- in any division he can physically make from middleweight on up -- he apparently turns into a sphinx when it comes to everything besides. White says Hendo’s waiting for Jon Jones/Rashad Evans; Henderson says that isn't true, that he wants to stay busy. White says Hendo turned down a fight with Lyoto Machida; Henderson says that’s the buffet talking -- that fight was never on the table.

One of these guys needs to get a landline, because the phone calls keep breaking up.

So what’s the truth? Probably that neither party has any good ideas on what to do. Henderson is hovering as contender No. 1B in two divisions, with willingness to explore a third (heavyweight). Yet out of all those divisions, the UFC can’t find him an opponent. It’s problematic for a 41-year-old to hit these kind of wait-and-see impasses.

The sticking point is that Henderson wants a guy of similar projection, somebody with a couple of wins in a row and title momentum. Those are scarce right now in the divisions Henderson dabbles in. If Henderson could make welterweight, he’d find the kind of guys he’s talking about. People like Carlos Condit, who has an interim belt he doesn’t know what to do with. Or Jake Ellenberger, who fits that bill, too. To fight those types, Henderson would have to fast like a yogi for as long as it would take to wait out Jones/Evans in April. In other words, fat chance.

At light heavyweight (his obvious preference), there’s Machida, who’s lost three of his last four bouts. But Machida’s in his own purgatory -- and even then he’s become a pretty attractive “why not” proposition for people in better positions to consider. Henderson apparently is. And there’s also the winner of Ryan Bader/Quinton Jackson, which happens on Feb. 26 in Japan at UFC 144. If the UFC could book a quick turnaround fight with the winner there and jibe up the schedules to the Jones/Evans bout, Henderson would do it.

Again, though, that’s all a dice throw.

Yet aside from a Mauricio Rua rematch, that’s about all there is -- and a Rua rematch would feel too much like déjà vu. How haunting would it be to sign on for that fight just in time for Evans to go down with an injury, just like last time? Never mind the memorable fight they put on, had Henderson waited a week before signing on for Rua at UFC 139, he’d already have fought Jon Jones at UFC 140 in Toronto. That stays in Henderson’s mind as much as the experience with Rua.

So who else is there? Henderson has made it clear he doesn’t want to go back down to middleweight unless it’s for a rematch with Anderson Silva -- which leaves heavyweight, a division that Henderson would never balk at fighting in so long as it could be perceived as fan friendly. Unfortunately, not a lot of fights make sense there, either (read: virtually none).

Pat Barry has Lavar Johnson in his sights, and Cheick Kongo is fighting Mark Hunt in Japan. Stefan Struve? Doesn’t seem a big enough name for Henderson. All the elite names (Junior dos Santos, Alistair Overeem, Frank Mir, Cain Velasquez) have fights already. And besides, as Henderson said, “none of those guys wants to fight me, anyway.” Daniel Cormier stares at his phone most days saying, “why won’t you ring, why won’t you ring?” Shane Carwin is still a mile down the calendar from coming back. The only name that could be intriguing at all would be Fabricio Werdum, a smaller heavyweight who shares a distinction with Henderson of having defeated Fedor Emelianenko.

It would be a cameo, but in a world of very few alternatives, it might be enough to pique Henderson’s interest.

Otherwise, the options for a marquee fight are very limited for Henderson right now, and matchmaker Joe Silva and Dana White are throwing up their hands with what to do. So is Henderson. Will he wait? Will he fight? Seems like a good time to meet up, put some headshots on the wall, and throw some darts.

Or, at very least, for the UFC and Dan Henderson to have a talk.

For Carlos Condit and the UFC, the reasons to wait for Georges St. Pierre are obvious.

St. Pierre is the champ, after all, and fighting him is still the holy grail for any welterweight who harbors ambitions of being recognized as the best in the world. The road to any legitimate 170-pound title has run through St. Pierre since 2006 and it will continue to do so until someone can knock him off his pedestal in a way that doesn’t feel fleeting or fluky.

For Condit, that’s a chance you absolutely cannot pass up. The “Natural Born Killer’s” rise from WEC titlist to middle-of-the-pack UFC contributor to now interim UFC champion is a feel-good story of the highest order. Perhaps more than anyone, his career path was disrupted when Nick Diaz took a rubber mallet to the organization’s welterweight plans. Condit must have felt a little like the last kid picked for playground basketball as he got shuffled through a series of prospective opponents and possible dates while the UFC tried (unsuccessfully) to manage Diaz’s various peculiarities.

Now that Condit has triumphed over all of that and secured a fight with St. Pierre, it’s perfectly understandable that he wouldn’t want to risk losing it. Who would?

For matchmakers and number-crunchers, Condit versus GSP is certainly the most lucrative welterweight matchup the UFC could promote this year, or at least the next best thing, now that any immediate hopes for St. Pierre-Diaz have been dashed. Any time you can get a sniff of some actual competition for the most dominant 170-pound fighter in history -- who, we are continually reminded, is also your best pay-per-view draw -- I suppose you do everything you can to make that bout happen.

Feels like kind of a bummer though, doesn’t it?

Here we have the most intriguing weight class in the UFC building an unprecedented sense of momentum, a talent pool that rivals that of the vaunted lightweight division, and now we have to push the pause button on the title picture for the next 10 months.

Any way you slice it, the decision to keep Condit out pending St. Pierre’s recovery is logical, but it’s not exactly ideal.

Why even crown an interim champion if he’s just going to cool his heels for almost an entire year? Isn’t the point of having an interim champ that he’s available to defend the belt while the real champ is out? And if he can't put the title on the line against anyone other than St. Pierre, doesn’t that make Condit more No. 1 contender than champion, interim or otherwise?

Condit made just one Octagon appearance during 2011 and if he waits on GSP until November, it will mean he’s fought just twice in the last 16 months. That’s an awful lot of down time and very few paydays for a guy who will turn 28 in April and who might now sit idly while the most potentially lucrative year of his fighting career passes into history.

It would be one thing if there wasn’t anybody else for Condit to fight, but that’s certainly not the case in the welterweight division right now. Watching Jake Ellenberger rough up Diego Sanchez on Wednesday night, it was hard not to imagine what a five-rounder between "The Juggernaut" and a technical wizard like Condit might look like. Or, for that matter, to wonder if Ellenberger’s mix of physical strength, wrestling prowess and punching power might actually make him the most intriguing matchup for St. Pierre.

Now, we may never know. As it stands, the UFC is holding the line that Condit will likely wait for GSP, that Ellenberger could face the winner of Johny Hendricks’ May meeting with Josh Koscheck and that -- for all intents and purposes -- the welterweight title may as well not exist until this winter.

And yeah, that might be the right thing to do, but that doesn’t mean we have to like it.

UFC president Dana White all but confirmed that Jake Ellenberger had not done enough to earn an interim welterweight title shot with Carlos Condit at UFC on Fuel on Wednesday night. More »

By his own admission, Diego Sanchez was displaced, unfocused and very nearly down and out just a couple of years ago.

Now, the newly rebranded “Dream” can add another adjective to that list: Overlooked.

Few people are giving Sanchez much chance of pulling the upset on Wednesday when he meets Jake Ellenberger in the welterweight main event of UFC on Fuel 1. Oddsmakers see him as more than a 2-to-1 underdog to the streaking Ellenberger, who’ll be fighting in his hometown of Omaha, Neb., and is currently riding high on a wave of publicity after a first-round knockout of former Strikeforce champion Jake Shields in September.

People are already putting Ellenberger in the front row of potential challengers for interim champion Carlos Condit -- depending, of course, on whether or not Georges St. Pierre’s injured knee heals at a pace deemed acceptable by company brass. All Ellenberger needs is one more win, over a fighter who has been inconsistent and slowed by his own difficulties (both physical and mental) recently.

For Sanchez, the stakes are somewhat less concrete. Unlike Ellenberger, he may not be a single win away from a title shot, but -- at 30 years old and 27 fights deep in his MMA career -- he needs this fight to prove he can still hang with the elite at 170 pounds.

The “Ultimate Fighter” Season 1 winner has been back training with Greg Jackson’s vaunted MMA team since 2010, but is still very much mired in the process of proving he’s returned to full strength after a couple of lost years elsewhere.

He split with Jackson in 2007 after the Albuquerque-based trainer began working with St. Pierre, who, at the time, was the dominant titlist in the weight class where Sanchez had championship aspirations. What followed were difficult times, where he says he bounced around gyms in southern California and New Mexico and succumbed to the allures of drugs and alcohol. He also vacillated between two weight classes, suffered three of his four career losses (including a career-defining beating at the hands of B.J. Penn at UFC 107) and has made veiled references to losing $150,000 to a bad investment deal, running afoul of the IRS in the process.

Sanchez is 2-0 since reuniting with Jackson, but perhaps because one of those wins was a razor-thin decision many believed rightly should have gone to Martin Kampmann, people aren’t quite buying into the renaissance just yet.

A victory, or at least a good showing, against Ellenberger could go a long way to changing their minds.

Even if Sanchez can’t grab the upset over the hard-hitting “Juggernaut” (who arguably does most of the same things Sanchez does, only better) it’s imperative that he doesn’t get run over in this fight the way Shields did five months ago. If not an outright victory, he at least needs a repeat of the too-close-to-call battle he had with Kampmann to prove his brightest days are still ahead of him.

If Sanchez were to somehow force his way back into the title picture, it could present something of a logistical nightmare -- no pun intended -- for the Jackson camp, as Sanchez, Condit and St. Pierre are all teammates there. Jackson has already said he’ll recuse himself and let his assistant coaches handle prefight preparations for Condit versus GSP. At least St. Pierre can do most of his prep at TriStar Gym in Montreal. No telling how Jackson’s crew might handle having Condit and Sanchez in the same room together.

At this point though, that seems like a good problem to aim for if you're Sanchez.

And he’s a guy who already knows a thing or two about problems.

Josh Koscheck invites you to hate him. Why? Because he was one of the earliest subscribers to the “as long as you care” camp. If you can’t stand him, that’s like saying you won’t miss the chance to see him get his head smashed in. That’s like saying you love him.

But something about Koscheck’s heel mode has never seemed right. When he was calling Chris Leben a “fatherless bastard” on the first season of the “Ultimate Fighter,” he just came off like your ordinary punk. By the time he was coaching opposite Georges St. Pierre on the show 11 seasons later, his demeanor had only been tweaked by success -- it was cockiness with actual backing. This version, the entrepreneurial one, had a Ferrari in his garage in Fresno; the first version had just a few trophies from his collegiate wrestling days at Edinboro University.

Does any of this make for a heel? Definitely annoying, maybe shallow. If we’re talking heels heels, Koscheck is certainly well heeled and open about it. Koscheck has always been hard to know aside from his materialistic desires. Even his close friends, the ones who know the “real” Koscheck, are generally business people where real is often interdistinguishable from the alternative.

But think about that, anyway -- if only specific VIPs know the other side of Koscheck, and it’s a circle that’s so tight and protected from commoners as to become elitist, doesn’t that amount to the same thing?

It’s a strange place to have to go in search of a genuine center. But that’s Koscheck -- or as much of him as we can glean.

Yet heel or not, he’s once again making his way back up the welterweight rungs as a sort of man without a country. He lost his title bid to Georges St. Pierre in December 2010, effectively turning him into the Rich Franklin of the welterweight division. As he recovered from broken orbital bones suffered in the St. Pierre bout, his options were limited to this: migrate or guard the gate. By the time Koscheck resurfaced to fight Matt Hughes nine months later, he was talking about exclusive “big fights” or a possible run in the middleweight division. This was Franklin all over again (only, you know, he was threatening to sue Stephan Bonnar).

Then things changed.

With St. Pierre’s knee injury, the introduction of an interim belt, and a victory over Mike Pierce at UFC 143, Koscheck appears to be neither gatekeeper nor division-hopper. Instead he appears again as a contender. And just like that he will fight Johny Hendricks in May in a bout with significant ties to another title shot.

In this way, Dan Hardy might have touched on more than he knew when he said that Koscheck was an “unflushable.” Think the idea of Koscheck/St. Pierre III isn’t exciting? Kos couldn't care less of what you think. He even went so far as to say he hoped St. Pierre would never fully recover from knee surgery. If you can’t beat them, hope for divine intervention.

But here’s where things get different -- this time, as Koscheck makes his way back, he’ll do it as a lone wolf. He revealed after the Pierce fight that he was no longer training at his long-time hub in San Jose, Calif., the American Kickboxing Academy -- that he was now a full-time member of himself in Fresno. Though this feels like the way it should be, AKA has always been the sweet side of Koscheck’s loyalties. This was what kept him from looking like a bounty hunter with peroxide curls -- training partners Jon Fitch and Mike Swick were his brothers. They were part of his “inner-circle,” part of the Zinkin bond.

Now they are separate. And even though they're no longer gymmates, Koscheck still contends that he’d sooner retire than fight Fitch. A little mystery toward the deeper chords of brotherhood? Maybe. But if you listen to what Koscheck has been saying for the last couple of years -- all this braggadocio stuff about being a “gold-digger, baby” -- you’d have to wonder if loyalties would tend toward Fitch or Benjamin Franklin if presented.

Perhaps then we’ll know if he’s a true heel or a man of very strict guns and principles. Because right now he’s a prolific fighter who we love to hate, yet who’s smart enough to know exactly how reversible that phrase is.

And the strange thing is, at 34 years old and entering his 20th UFC fight since 2005, Koscheck might finally be coming into Koscheck. Here’s a guy who left AKA to go the course alone, who is inviting New Jersey to make like Montreal and give him full-throttle hate, and who, despite it all, is a win away from perhaps forcing a fight on the public that virtually nobody other than he himself wants. Well, you know who he caters to, and it isn’t the public.

Only it sort of is. By daring you to hate him, he’s ensuring that you at least care. And that’s a pretty calculated heel if there’s ever been one.

It’s been a whirlwind week in the UFC’s alt-title scene -- and it begins and ends with Nick Diaz.

For all his warts, Diaz had achieved a sort of cult status before his fight with Carlos Condit at UFC 143, and the terms of endearment were his alone. Innocent people who vaguely associate cannabis with the Donner party of the 1840s were starting to find warmth in his mean mugging. New York Giants quarterback Eli Manning was picking him to beat Condit, saying to the extent of his knowledge, “he’s a tough guy.”

This happens to be the universal perception that we tinker with. By the time Diaz’s second-grade teacher was cameoing on UFC Primetime, we were seeing Diaz in a different light. Or, younger in the same light. Either way, always a tough guy.

The thing everybody was growing to appreciate was this: Here was a truly unyielding person. The subtext was even better: Here was a human being.

None of that has changes in the aftermath of Diaz testing positive for marijuana metabolites after UFC 143. It’s the second time he’s tested positive in the state of Nevada, with the first occurring after he gogoplata’d Takanori Gomi at Pride 33 in 2007. That time, his THC levels were three-and-a-half times over the legal limit. If you are a fan of Nick Diaz, you are a fan of everything that goes into Nick Diaz, whether it’s heart, drive, contradiction or exotic subtances.

And if you were a fan of his a week ago and you aren’t today, you’re verging on hypocrisy.

That’s because this latest positive test isn’t so much news as it is consistency. Our perceptions may be fickle, but Diaz is still Diaz. His image doesn’t get hurt too badly for getting popped for marijuana again, even if his career spirals as a result. It’s not considered a performance-enhancing drug (though this can be contested); it’s a lifestyle choice that Diaz has never hid from. It’s illegal, and that’s what matters to governing bodies. What might not matter is the anticipated year-long suspension that the NSAC may impose. When asked, younger brother Nate Diaz texted ESPN.com that Nick intends to stay retired.

As crazy as it sounds, maybe Diaz really, truly is “through with this s---.” It would be par for the course for a guy who can’t be corralled into such nuisances as protocol and rules.

And with Diaz out of the picture, the welterweight division just as suddenly opens back up. Now it’s Condit’s decision to wait on Georges St. Pierre to fully recover from a torn ACL -- and GSP says that could be by November -- or defend the strap. Since Condit fought only once in 2011, it’s hard to imagine him catering to St. Pierre’s timetable, particularly when you look at how quickly he jumped at the Diaz rematch that was not to be.

Who benefits the most?

It could be Johny Hendricks, who has two things on his side -- timing and merit. It doesn’t hurt that he knocks people out with his big left hand, like he did to Jon Fitch at UFC 141. But Hendricks, who is riding a three-fight win streak, is ready to roll. So is Condit.

The monkey wrench could be Jake Ellenberger, who fights Diego Sanchez on Wednesday in Omaha. Should Ellenberger win, he too would have a case for a title shot. Remember that Condit and Ellenberger fought in 2009, a split decision so close that it would best Diaz-Condit in controversy if only the stakes had been as high. A rematch would do better business than no fight at all.

If Hendricks-Condit is made, there’s a chance that the UFC looks at Josh Koscheck-Ellenberger. Before Ellenberger signed on to fight Jake Shields, he was publically calling out Koscheck. This could be tabbed a No. 1 contender bout, even as St. Pierre rolls back into the fold.

The bottom line is, the division opens up to contenders that a couple of days ago it looked closed off to. And whomever it is that gets that shot can thank Diaz, who is the game’s greatest paradox.

For a guy who refuses to yield, at this point that’s all he can do.

If you've followed Nick Diaz's career at all, maybe even just caught a glimpse of the recent UFC Primetime, you know this if you know anything about the man: He does what he wants.

That is, until he can't anymore.

That's where to begin and end with Diaz. And while the results of what he does (or doesn't do) can be sometimes frustrating and infuriating for fans and friends around him, how can anyone really hate on the guy?

Hear me out.



Diaz is a walking "who cares" to the world. Don't we need people like that to keep us sane?

In 2007, after Diaz tested positive for "off the charts" levels of THC following his bout against Takanori Gomi, I slammed him. Last year, when he failed to live up to his duties as a professional fighter and appeared to cost himself, the fans, his teammates and his promoter a giant fight against Georges St. Pierre, I let him have it.

But for what? To pretend like Diaz would read my columns and the lightbulb would turn on? No, I wrote those pieces because I saw a talented guy throwing everything away. I hate that. It's horrible in its unvarnished reality to take in.

Remembering Diaz for what he did in the ring against Gomi would be so much better than remembering him for what happened next. But that’s not how it went down.

Well, he didn't beat Carlos Condit on Saturday, so the scenario is different. But the price is much higher. And, not that this is anyone’s concern but mine, I can't wade into this again. Not this time. Or the time after that.

Nope.

Truth be told, in some strange way I have more respect for Diaz in the wake of his second positive test for marijuana in Nevada -- not because I condone his actions (the merits of marijuana as a performance enhancer can be debated another day), or because suddenly I’m fine with his lack of professionalism. Of course, I’m not. But the point remains, I have more respect for Diaz today because he's his own guy, consequences be damned.

And they be damned.

Probably to the tune of a year’s suspension and a 40 percent fine of his purse. That's a lot of money for a guy who long complained about how little money he was making. If the inability to fight, if the steep toll of what could be an $80,000 penalty, if the lessons of the past ... if none of these things matter to Diaz, then so what? Let it be.

He'll eventually fade into the sunset, soon to be remembered as one of the crazy ones; not, unfortunately, one of the great ones. It could have been different, maybe. But if Diaz is comfortable throwing away his best years, forgoing his money-making potential in a trade he was born to ply, what's it worth spending our time getting all righteous about it?

So you and I may miss out on entertaining fights. There will be others to fill the void. Fighters here today and emerging tomorrow have talent and the ability to suppress the urge to toss out insults and expletives to the world. And in the end, those are the ones worth our valuable time.

Please don't feel bad for Nick Diaz. I'm guessing he doesn't want anyone's pity. He's living his life. And that's all that matters. To him.

The marching orders for Nick Diaz’s second tour of duty in the Octagon were clear from the start. Before the start, actually.

“The problem with Nick Diaz is, Nick won’t play the game,” explained Dana White last January, five full months prior to Diaz returning from self-imposed exile in Strikeforce and inking a new deal with the UFC. “When Nick Diaz wants to play the game just a little bit, we’d love to have him back.”

There it was, simply put. Play the game. Toe the line. Make even the slightest effort to show us you want to be here, that you’re ready for this, and we’ll hand you the keys to the castle.

After running off an 11-1-1 record during the near-half decade he spent away, few people questioned Diaz’s credentials when he vacated his Strikeforce welterweight title in June and leapfrogged straight to the front of the line of the UFC’s 170-pound contenders. His abilities were not at issue; at least, not to those who’d paid attention to his evolution from mediocre mid-card performer to bonafide main event talent. If anyone had proven he belonged among the best fighters in the world, it was Diaz.

The million dollar question was: Could he deal? At 28 years old, was he finally equipped to handle the rigors of life as an MMA superstar?

Sadly, we got our answer on Thursday, as news trickled out that the Cesar Gracie Jiu-Jitsu fighter tested positive for marijuana in the wake of his unanimous decision loss to Carlos Condit on Saturday at UFC 143. As a result, Diaz will face disciplinary action from the Nevada State Athletic Commission, effectively scuttling the UFC’s frenzied plans to get him an immediate rematch with Condit for its interim welterweight title and give him yet another opportunity to find his way into a lucrative fight with Georges St. Pierre later this year.

The answer, emphatically, was no.

Now, perhaps we have final, definitive, comprehensive proof. To absolutely no one’s surprise, Diaz is not willing to play the game. Not even a little bit. Not even with the world’s largest MMA promoter bending over backward trying to make him one of this sport’s biggest attractions.

For those of us on the outside, the most tragic part is that we were all rooting for him.

I would wager that deep down, even Diaz’s strongest critics wanted to see him get it right this time. We wanted him to succeed not only because of his immense gifts and because it’s a joy to watch him fight, but because we empathize with his obvious personal pain. In a weird way, we relate to this guy who desperately wants to be understood, but can seemingly never find the words to say so.

Much has been written these past few months about why we can't seem to take our eyes off Diaz. The truth is, it's not because he's "crazy" or a "bad boy" or whatever unfortunate words we typically use to describe him. It's because many of us -- even if we don't want to admit it -- see parts of ourselves in him, and that makes it easy to want Diaz to rise above all the pressures and pain, and become the best in the world at what he does.

At least for now, however, that’s not going to happen. For now it’s easy to imagine that the "demons" (if that's what you want to call them) are getting the better of him. For now, it seems that awkward "retirement" he announced in the cage following his loss to Condit might actually stick; at least a little bit longer than we had hoped.

Diaz has been back in the UFC for all of eight months now and already he’s committed two offenses that probably would’ve gotten a less talented, less popular fighter released outright. He'd already dodged a bullet when the organization granted him a second chance after he no-showed a pair of prefight news conferences for a scheduled bout with St. Pierre at UFC 137. Now, he’s tested positive for this particular "drug of abuse" for the second time in his career, for the second time in the state of Nevada.

The first came in 2007 and turned his amazing second-round gogoplata victory over Takanori Gomi at Pride 33 -- at the time the biggest win of Diaz’s career – into a no contest. That was a little more than a year after he brawled Joe Riggs at the hospital in the wake of dropping a unanimous decision to the journeyman fighter at UFC 57. It was seven months before he began a four-year romp through the competition in smaller organizations, only to re-sign with the UFC in 2011 and notch a record of two major screw-ups in two actual appearances in the Octagon.

At this point you have to wonder how many strikes the UFC will give him. How many missed flights? How many hospital brawls? How many unsuccessful drug tests?

Though we all desperately want the opposite to be true, at this point we must admit that Nick Diaz is not in the lesson-learning business.

And if he isn’t ready to play the game by now, will he ever be?

Well, that didn’t take long.

Moments after he beat Nick Diaz on the scorecards at UFC 143, Condit said he wanted to take some time to contemplate his next step. Would he take another fight before Georges St. Pierre returns and defend the interim belt, or simply, you know…wait it out? He needed to think about that.

Turns out Carlos Condit’s contemplative mode lasts about 48 hours.

On Monday Condit’s manager Malki Kawa was telling people they had no interest in a rematch. By Tuesday, Condit had interest in a rematch. By Tuesday night, the rematch was common knowledge for the nearly two million people who follow Dana White’s Twitter feed. What happened in the interstices is company business and, though the deal isn’t signed yet, somehow Condit must have found incentive to dangle his barely broken-in placeholder belt over Diaz’s head. The bruises haven’t even had time to heal yet.

And Condit’s 180-degree turn is nothing next to Diaz’s, who fought, thought he won, lost, then retired. Now he’s in the same spot he was in before that disappointing sequence. This is what happens when you put live microphones on mood swings. Yet for the record, a few days does not constitute a comeback. This isn’t Randy Couture. This was a powersulk that paid off, by a guy who will never be swayed by something as misguided as public opinion. You think he lost? Diaz has expletives for what you think.

Meanwhile St. Pierre, who loomed over Las Vegas last weekend like a French-Canadian Zeus, might get what he’s been hoping for: A rematch between the two guys chasing him. (If only Diaz can avoid the banana peel this time through!). And Josh Koscheck, who was the first guy that Dana White stuck in the door as Diaz made his way for the exits, could be headed back to the “wait and see” game.

Like sands through the hourglass…so are the days of welterweight contention.

But all the “Dana wants to give the fans what they want” aside, think about the ripple effect that this could cause. For instance, a rematch essentially hijacks the welterweight division for 2012, much the same as Frankie Edgar/Gray Maynard closed down the lightweight division to all contenders in 2011. If a sequel happens in summer, and the winner gets St. Pierre around November to marry up the belts, that means Johny Hendricks, Koscheck and Jake Ellenberger will likely be a year away from a title shot. And, as time waits on no man (and bills don’t pay themselves), they’ll be turned on each other.

If St. Pierre (and Diaz) get their way in this thing, that means a lot of other guys didn’t.

Yet in the theatrical sense of drama, Condit/Diaz II is the fight to make. Depending on your couch criteria, you either saw Diaz coming forward and swinging switches (as he does) or you saw Condit making himself evasive, counterprogramming Diaz’s hit show with the old stick-and-move. It was close enough to divide fans down the middle, which makes for something left unresolved.

So what happens if the fight is made? Will Greg Jackson’s methodical brilliance win out, or will Cesar Gracie’s sic-em-boy star pupil tweak that attack? (Indeed, is that even a possibility?). What happens if Diaz chooses to react, rather than stalk forward? Does the fifth round, when Diaz took Condit to the ground, become the blueprint for the newly added five rounds?

For whatever it’s worth, Condit likes his chances enough to say “why not” to a rematch he stands nothing much to gain from. That says something about Condit and his love of fighting. And for all the accusations and hurt feelings over the weekend, two things could be made clear in a rematch.

Condit isn’t running. And Diaz isn’t walking.