A "noob" question.

[sb24]

Re: A "noob" question.

This happened in the WEC when the MW cham Paulo Filho failed to make weight, and so his defense was lowered to just a regular fight; which he lost. I find that bull**** - he should have been come down on hard for missing weight in a defense. Sonnen beat him, and should have been given the belt.

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Man you should lose the belt just for not making wieght. He should have to go back and win it again if he cant make weight. That actually makes me mad.

[ManiacMatt1782]

Re: A "noob" question.

Man you should lose the belt just for not making wieght. He should have to go back and win it again if he cant make weight. That actually makes me mad.

Doesn't really matter. Zuffa scrapped the middleweight division in wec. Sonnen recieved an invite to the ufc mw division while filho is still looking for work. Sonnen still came out the winner.

[Da_Czar]

Re: A "noob" question.

1. A fighter works his way up in the rankings (much like boxing) and then the promoters/schedulers will offer the fight to both the contender and the champion. Once they agree, then the championship fight is scheduled.

2. The guys on The Ultimate Fighter US vs. UK (and all the TUF seasons) will be signed to a contract by the UFC if they win the show. Also, in past seasons, many of the fighters on TUF who didn't win the show still got fights at Ultimate Fight Night, etc. and worked their way into contracts and are still fighting in the UFC. But yeah, these guys are generally lower-level pros or amateurs trying to get into the big show of the UFC. The Ultimate Fighter has basically turned into a public proving grounds for fighters looking to get into the UFC.

3. PRIDE was an MMA organization that is not defunct after being bought by the UFC. The replacement in Japan is DREAM, which is ran by the same company who puts on the K-1 kickboxing shows. PRIDE was the UFC's main competition for years and they'd often fight over fighters -- when Wanderlei Silva and others came over the the UFC it was because PRIDE was bought out, but previous to that, guys like Dan Henderson would bounce back and forth between organizations.

Aside from PRIDE (now DREAM), there is also World Extreme Cagefighting (owned by the UFC), Strikeforce/Affliction (main non-Japanese competitor for the UFC, they have lots of quality fighters), and Bellator (Mexican MMA org). There are others too, but those are the main national ones that put on televised events and PPVs.

4. They had in an interim heavyweight champion in the UFC due to Frank Mir's motorcycle injury. Previously the title was held by Randy Couture, who had a falling out with the UFC and left the title behind when he left the UFC. Anyway, Lesnar got the title after beating Couture when he came back, and so he was the official UFC Heavyweight champion. However, Mir beat Noguiera for the Interim Title, so now Mir and Lesnar have to fight to "unify" the belt and get it back to just the official HW Title. That fight will be on July 11th at UFC 100.

Yeah, that's confusing...

Great post stumble I was trying to get a handle on that myself.