(You may have been listening to us, Brandon. But you certainly weren’t *hearing* us.)

I swear you guys, sometimes it almost seems like these fighters are not constantly checking our site for updates and then living according to what we say like it’s the freaking gospel. Just a little over two weeks ago we enacted one of our irrevocable Cage Potato Bans on the practice of promising to bring back your old self. We’d had more than we could stand of guys vowing that this next fight, this was when we’d once again see that bright-eyed young ass-kicker we’d once known. It struck us as a cloying and empty gesture, and so we banished it from the land forever.

But wouldn’t you know it? Here comes Brandon Vera, wantonly flouting our edict like it meant absolutely nothing to him. As he told MMA Weekly:

“I stopped believing in the hype, I stopped worrying about what people think. I’m going back in there just trying to hurt people again like I used to,” Vera said. “When I first came out, I would just bang on people and roll with people just to see them break. I got away from that somehow. I don’t know what happened. I got sucked into the MMA world of trying not to disappoint people. I’m over it, I want to go back in there and start doing things like I used to.”

Really? That’s your plan for beating Jon Jones? Because it sounds eerily similar to what you’ve been saying for the past year, and yet the results haven’t exactly been outstanding. How about this, instead of going into a fight against a talented young up-and-comer with the stated goal of being someone you already were in the past, how about trying to become someone better? 

Face it, Jones has seen that old Brandon Vera on tape already.  We all have.  Even if you manage to be a carbon copy of the guy who bashed Frank Mir‘s head in, how much do you really think that will surprise him? 

Come on, Brandon.  You’re better than these tired clichés.  At least, we’d really like to believe you are.