ESPN Mixed Martial Arts

Over the last year or so, the UFC welterweight division has unexpectedly become a young man’s game.

If we’d had to guess back in the halcyon days of, say, UFC 124, it might have seemed a good bet that Georges St. Pierre would’ve cleaned out his weight class by now; that we might be talking about him moving up a division and about a potential superfight against Anderson Silva being in the immediate offing.

As it turned out, nothing could be further from the truth.

Due to St. Pierre’s lengthy injury layoff and the rapid rise of a new breed of 170-pound challengers, the welterweight ranks have undergone a significant revival since December 2010. That is, since the last time GSP whooped up on Josh Koscheck.

Suddenly, the ESPN.com welterweight top five is stocked with fresh opponents for St. Pierre (whenever he returns), all of them still comfortably in the athletic prime of their mid-to-late 20s: Carlos Condit, Nick Diaz, Jake Ellenberger, Johny Hendricks -- this is their show now.

Thirty-somethings like Koscheck, Jon Fitch and Jake Shields have been relegated to the bottom half of the top 10 rankings. Worse than that, there’s a growing and palpable feeling that their time has passed.

Unless.

Unless.

Unless the division’s original malcontent has anything to say about it.

When Koscheck fights Hendricks on Saturday during the UFC’s third live show on Fox, it’ll likely constitute the 34-year-old veteran’s last real chance to launch himself back into the thick of the 170-pound title hunt. It’s also pretty easy to frame this matchup as exactly what it is: A meeting between the welterweight class’ sturdy old guard and its new wave of exciting young upstarts.

As a guy who has traditionally reveled in the role of villain, perhaps this could be Koscheck’s final opportunity to really stick it to fans, as well.

Even without taking sides, it’s clear that the more interesting way forward for the division at large would be a victory for Hendricks here. After all, whereas we think we’ve already seen the best Koscheck has to offer (it was good, but not quite good enough), Hendricks is the more unproven commodity, and therefore the more interesting one.

We have no idea how Hendricks might fare against St. Pierre and that’s exactly why we like him. Ditto for guys like Condit, Diaz and Ellenberger. On the other hand, we’ve witnessed the French Canadian champion put Koscheck through the wringer twice before, and we have no reason to believe another meeting would be any different.

To a slightly lesser degree, the same goes for Fitch, Shields, Thiago Alves, B.J. Penn and the rest of yesteryear’s top welterweight contenders.

A victory for Hendricks means the division gets to continue the renewal we’ve seen over the last year. It means it can go on being one of the most vibrant and interesting weight classes in the sport. A win for Koscheck obviously wouldn’t undo that entirely, but it would send the 170-pound youth movement staggering a bit.

We should likely stop short of saying a Koscheck victory would be a victory for the old dogs of the welterweight division -- as the man himself would probably remind us, a win for Koscheck is a just a win for Koscheck -- but it certainly would be a significant defeat for one of the guys fight fans are hoping will carry us into the future.

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.

Near the end of the ESPN.com live chat of UFC 143 on Saturday, one of our users called Carlos Condit a coward.

Actually, that’s not entirely accurate. To be more precise, the guy called Condit a COWARD, in all caps.

This, of course, happened immediately after the scores were read in Condit’s slim but unanimous decision win over Nick Diaz, awarding him the UFC’s interim welterweight championship and -- if all goes according to plan -- the opportunity to face Georges St. Pierre in a title unification bout later this year.

To say that emotions were running hot would obviously qualify as a tremendous understatement.

I mention this anonymous user’s comment -- which we can only assume was written in a fleeting moment of blind frustration and complete cerebral shutdown -- not to give it any special consideration, but only to underscore how highly charged the Condit-Diaz decision was for nearly everyone involved.

And everyone not involved.

It’s hard to remember another judges’ verdict in a high-profile bout that spurred as many contradictory opinions and such, uh, furor in the days following.

Clearly, it wasn’t the fight many of us expected. We thought we’d get a pier six brawl; instead, we were treated to a tour de force of game planning and strategy. Condit’s gambit revealed itself subtly and though he played Diaz like a fiddle during the final three rounds, their bout was excruciatingly close and extremely difficult to score. When Diaz took his back during the final 81 seconds, it felt like things might still be up for grabs.

They weren’t. Not according to at least two ringside judges, who gave Condit the nod in all but a single round.

Even to the impartial observer, that seemed a little too lopsided. The problem is, you’d have to look pretty far and wide to find anyone who felt impartial about this fight. Like Diaz himself -- so distraught at the outcome he said he’s “done with this MMA” -- many people probably allowed themselves to get too emotionally close to the situation to judge it accurately.

Such is nearly always the case with Diaz who, if he truly does walk away for good, will be remembered as a fighter who inspired strong feelings on both sides of the aisle.

And indeed, maybe the way you scored Condit-Diaz has a lot to do with how you view both fighters and how you see MMA in general. If you prefer a more old school approach -- or possibly a more primal one -- and think of MMA first and foremost as a simple “fight” that pits one man’s spirit and physical toughness against another’s, then you probably believe Diaz’s aggressive, unyielding style won the day.

If you believe MMA aspires to be something more than a schoolyard scuffle, if you see it as a nuanced professional sport in which tactics and brainpower can and should be just as important as pure brawn, then Condit was probably your guy.

Personally, I scored it 48-47 for Condit, awarding him each of the final three rounds as he built more and more momentum, became more effective at stifling Diaz’s offense and exhibited a kind of “Octagon control” that proved more artful and effective than just senselessly pushing forward. Diaz made it tight with his late takedown and submission attempts, but in my book he didn’t come close enough to finishing them to turn the tide in the last moments.

In the live chat, of course, we update our scorecards following every round. After I scored the first two rounds for the former Strikeforce champion, users accused me of unfairly favoring Diaz. After I scored the final three for the former WEC titlist, users accused me of unfairly favoring Condit.

Neither side said it quite so nicely. That was fine. Then somebody accused Condit of being a coward. That was different. That was ugly.

Ultimately, the vehement and varying reactions to the Condit-Diaz decision speak to something both great and terrible about our sport: Everyone is so passionate about MMA that no one believes anyone else could possibly understand it in the same, personal way they do.

I love the enthusiasm. But I could probably do without the name-calling.

What a strange time it is to be a UFC executive.

During these last couple of weeks your product aired on network television in front of a peak audience of 6 million viewers, you were besieged by Internet hackers and, this Saturday at UFC 143, the best case scenario for your immediate future involves Nick Diaz becoming interim welterweight champion.

Wild, but true. Somewhere between nearly firing him in September and setting up this weekend’s bout against Carlos Condit, the UFC has clearly decided to double-down on Diaz’s personal brand of unusualness, using some of the lead-up to UFC 143 to lay the groundwork for a possible big money meeting between Diaz and Georges St. Pierre later this year.

Somehow, some way, company brass has come to grips with the fact that, as unpredictable as the former Strikeforce titlist can be, he’s also their best chance to get the welterweight division back on track.

Long the picture of rock-solid consistency, the 170-pound class has been downright uncooperative during the last six months. The fight company’s best laid plans for the welterweight title have been foiled at every turn as of late; first by Diaz’s own obstinacy, then by the bum luck of back-to-back knee injuries to St. Pierre, who had typically been one of its most dependable pay-per-view draws.

The plan to get the ball rolling again begins at UFC 143, so long as both main event fighters can actually make it to the cage without injury or without quietly escaping out the back door of Cesar Gracie’s house. If they do make it that far -- and engage in a fight that results in one man being crowned interim champion -- Diaz will have the chance to do the unthinkable. Not just win the fight, mind you, but transform himself from the division’s biggest outcast into its champion and biggest promotional chip in one fell swoop.

Remember, it was Diaz’s utter lack of dependability that threw the weight class into chaos in the first place. His failure to show up at a pair of prefight news conferences in the fall got him yanked from his original title shot at UFC 137 and forced matchmakers into a juggling act they haven’t quite worked their way out of yet.

As strange as it must feel for the UFC brain trust to throw their promotional muscle behind a guy who so badly failed them just a few months ago, it’s clear that Diaz versus St. Pierre is the fight the paying public wants to see next. If Diaz wins and matchmakers can book it for later in the year, it will not only guarantee the company the kind of substantial payday it sorely needs right now, but it will also give the welterweight division a feeling of momentum it hasn’t had for months.

A Condit victory would be fine -- at least the company would have someone to prop up as champion until St. Pierre returned -- but it wouldn’t spark nearly the same kind of excitement as the lead-up to Diaz-GSP.

Perhaps the oddest part is that Diaz appears to have transformed himself into arguably the 170-pound division's second-biggest draw without even really trying. Unlike middleweight counterpart Chael Sonnen, whose sudden ascension to the upper echelon of his own weight class was obviously carefully scripted, Diaz appears to have forced the UFC's hand simply by being himself. There's just something so compelling about him that, love him or hate him, fans have to watch him. In the fight game, there is perhaps no more valuable commodity than that.

With apologies to Condit, the money, the sizzle and the clear way forward for the welterweight division are all with Diaz here, and right now that makes him the UFC’s best hope.

How weird is that?

As of this writing, it’s been roughly 24 hours since Dana White revealed via social media that UFC welterweight champion Georges St. Pierre will miss most -- perhaps all -- of 2012 with a torn ACL. And, so far, the fallout has ranged from the merely typical to the nearly mandatory.

Keeping with one of its great strengths as a company, the UFC moved swiftly on Wednesday to set Nick Diaz up with an interim title bout against Carlos Condit. Just as quickly, Diaz’s camp went on record as angry and aggrieved, which is pretty much Diaz’s default setting.

Steady-eddy Condit was far more understated, even though he’s the guy who could probably best justify it if he was near the end of his rope after having his opponent switched a handful of times during the last few months. Josh Koscheck swore up a blue streak. Frank Shamrock said some stuff that pertained mostly to Frank Shamrock.

Oh yeah, and a bunch of people wondered aloud if we’d seen the last of GSP as a dominant force in the 170-pound division. Nobody has quite said the R-word yet, but that’s the way we’re trending.

In other words, there have been few (if any) surprises. Everybody seems to be playing their part to a tee.

The champion himself has also been characteristically timely and carefully managed in his response to all this. St. Pierre has always been one of the most on-message figures in MMA and he did not disappoint in his darkest hour.

"Some people will say bad stuff about me, that 'he's finished,' and stuff like that," he said during a conference call yesterday. "What I'm going to tell you is, it's very easy to hit a guy when he's down ... People will laugh because I'm in a downfall, I'm hurt, I'm not a threat to them; but I'll be back on top."

Make no mistake, the ACL tear is historically a devastating injury. It’s one so common that most sports fans have at least some familiarity with the anterior cruciate ligament, even if the sum total of the rest of their anatomical knowledge is of the “knee bone’s connected to the leg bone” variety. It’s an ailment those in the know say can take a year to fully crawl out from under and for a fighter whose approach is based primarily on innate athleticism, speed and mobility, it’s a scary deal.

At this point in sports medicine, it’s also far from insurmountable.

So while it seems just as typical as Diaz’s anger or Condit rolling with the punches that we must now speculate wildly about GSP’s future in the sport, I wonder if we shouldn’t just hold off a minute. Or a few months.

St. Pierre hasn’t even had surgery yet, and here we are already guessing at the time he’ll be out, calculating how old he’ll be when he returns, and forecasting what the welterweight landscape might look like when he does. We’re wondering about his recuperative abilities, mental toughness and whether this type of injury hurts his specific skill set most of all.

We do this because it’s our nature as fans and media analysts to ask the unanswerable and pretend to know the unknowable. Because in 2011, the sporting culture on the whole has become weirdly future obsessed, always asking "what’s next, what’s next?" These days, guesswork and hearsay are what we do best.

In light of that, here is some more conjecture, ultimately just as empty but as equally possible as the rest: I think GSP is going to be fine.

To date, during St. Pierre’s near 10-year MMA career, he’s overcome every physical obstacle put in his way. He’s beaten every challenger and avenged every loss. And by every, I mean two. With no amateur wrestling background to speak of, he’s transformed himself into arguably the sport’s best wrestler. He’s been so dominant that the only thing for his critics to do is sweat the details, to harp on him for not being exciting enough and bash him for continually falling back on his grappling which, again, may be the best in the game.

I’d venture a guess that the most likely outcome here is that St. Pierre rehabs his knee injury to the letter of the law, comes back in late 2012 looking like very much the same fighter and continues to dominate the 170-pound division for several years to come.

In response, haters will hate. Others will smile and tweet redemptive thoughts about his miraculous recovery. Maybe those will be the most typical things of all.

It ain’t easy being Georges St. Pierre right now.

Turns out, when you’re one of the most dominant fighters in the world, possessing of ridiculous athleticism, borderline movie star good looks and nine straight UFC victories in increasingly flawless but conservative fashion, some people aren’t going to miss the opportunity to kick you when you’re down.

All told, it’s enough to make you wonder if things are pretty lonely in the welterweight champion's world right now. You know, aside from the supermodels and high-dollar corporate sponsors and the guy who comes over once a week to clean the pool.

Nick Diaz called out St. Pierre for what seemed like the thousandth time on Saturday night, insinuating in his subtle way that GSP was so scared of the homie that he faked an injury last month to avoid fighting -- uh -- Carlos Condit. Now, Condit’s camp is mad at St. Pierre for taking the bait, saying they didn’t exactly willingly “step aside” after the champ reportedly begged Dana White to let him fight Diaz after all.

“If I were him, I’d want to fight the Strikeforce champion ... but apparently, he didn't think it was too important,” Diaz said, before learning that St. Pierre had vowed to give him the worst beating in UFC history. “Apparently, he’d rather fight Carlos Conduit (sic).”

“Last I checked, Carlos was the tougher fight,” Tweeted Condit manager Malki Kawa after White announced the GSP-Diaz redux. “So I guess now [St. Pierre] will fight Nick.”

See? Sort of a no-win situation for our man Georges.

This is to say nothing of the seemingly growing number of fans who’ve decided that St. Pierre’s otherworldly dominance has gotten “boring” over the last few years.

Or the handful of people who bought tickets to UFC 137 before GSP was injured and then showed up to the fights last weekend wearing T-shirts that said things like: “GSP and Dana White owe me $4,000.”

Or the guy who stood up in front of God and everybody during Frank Mir’s Friday afternoon Q&A session at Mandalay Bay and asked Mir what he thought after St. Pierre “b----ed out” of a fight due to a sprained knee.

What, if anything, did St. Pierre do to deserve all this hate? Is he just too good? Too nice? Is his personal brand too impeccably crafted to appeal to the more self-consciously edgy element of the MMA set? And if so, is St. Pierre on the verge of his own minor popularity crisis?

Yeah, probably not. It should be noted that the guy who publicly used the b-word to describe St. Pierre in Las Vegas last week got booed out of the arena. And for every guy strutting around in an anti-GSP T-shirt, there was at least one who attended UFC 137 wearing one of St. Pierre’s signature Karate Kid headbands. The man himself remains one of the UFC’s biggest draws and, despite this recent injury, one of its most dependable performers.

But assuming that St. Pierre’s image needs a little boost to get fans excited about him again; then, perhaps, this rivalry with Diaz comes along at just the right time. Maybe an honest-to-goodness blood feud is just what St. Pierre's nice guy image is missing.

With apologies to Condit and his people, the UFC was absolutely right to jump on the Diaz-St. Pierre fight while it’s white hot. Diaz may well be MMA’s most must-see star right now and he’s already plied some very un-GSP-like behavior out of the mild-mannered champion. That can only be a good thing when it comes to promoting this matchup, as fans will likely be happy to see St. Pierre show a little emotion, for once.

With the added promotional power of network television set to give the UFC’s Super Bowl weekend show an unprecedented build-up, you couldn’t ask for a better matchup in terms of a good guy versus bad boy storyline. In Diaz, St. Pierre will have a foil worthy of his unfiltered disdain and, if he's smart, he'll play it up leading into their scheduled bout in early February.

In the end, if Condit wins at the same event, his title shot will still be there.

So too will the fans who’ve at least momentarily bailed off the GSP bandwagon. If he beats Diaz in a bonafide grudge match, my guess is most of them come flocking back to him.

Then we can all get past our various gripes about St. Pierre, and go back to wishing we had his problems, instead of our own.