(Denial, anger, bargaining, plyometrics – Duffee has been through it all. PicProps: Sherdog)

It’s been almost a month and if you’re still having trouble wrapping your head around how Todd Duffee managed to get himself fired from the UFC after just one kind of fluky loss, you’re not alone. Duffee doesn’t seem to know exactly what to make of it, either. We’ve heard rumors of him faking injuries, turning down fights and having an all around piss-poor attitude, but the actual facts of the situation are still murky at best. One thing we know is true, however: At this point Duffee seems legitimately bummed about it. In a new article from Old Dad over on MMA Fighting, Duffee (and a few others) discuss the hard realities of getting fired from the only job they’ve ever really wanted. This MMA can be a pretty harsh mistress, fellas.  

"I’m back to where it’s kind of hard to admit that I’m a fighter,” says the Duffmeister. “When I finally made it into the UFC, all the people who thought I was stupid for pursuing this (career) sort of shut up about it. You could tell people, ‘I’m in the UFC.’ Now I’m back to where I don’t really want to tell people what I do."

Say what you will about him but damn, that sucks.

The latest piece of third-hand hearsay about Duffee’s release – and, again, there’s no way to really know fact from fiction here – indicates it was a confluence of events that turned the Octagon Overlords against the big guy. It goes a little something like this: Duffee allegedly turned down fights with James McSweeney  and Jon Madsen, told the UFC he needed time off to do a movie and then talked some junk about the company to the wife of someone important. There may have been a knee injury mixed in there somewhere, too.

Whatever happened, the UFC released Duffee pretty much out of the blue last month, some three months after he got knocked stiff by Mike Russow at UFC 114, in a fight Duffee had been dominating up to that moment. The timing of the firing was weird, even for a company known to have an itchy trigger finger when it comes to cutting loose its dead weight. As usual, it sounds like the fighter himself was the last to know. 

"I thought it was a joke at first.," Duffee says. "I mean, they’re not cutting me off one loss. They don’t do that. It didn’t make sense to me."

Doesn’t make much sense to us, either. Dana White has said Duffee just had a “horrible attitude,” but it’s hard to know how much stock to put in that assessment, since White’s idea of a good attitude for fighters typical equates with “do whatever I say, whenever I say it.” We’ll probably never know the whole truth, but here’s hoping Duffee finds a new home soon.