(Video courtesy TheMMAFix)
It looks like Dana White wasn’t thrilled with Jon Fitch‘s less than enthralling performance in his win over Thiago Alves at UFC 118 last month, since the UFC president has now rescinded an earlier assertion that the winner of the bout would be next in line for a title shot at the winner of December’s Georges St-Pierre-Josh Koscheck showdown.
During an appearance on Comcast Sportsnet Washington’s The MMA Fix, White said the welterweight title picture is a bit murkier than it seemed a few weeks ago, which may be partially a result of Fitch’s conservative stall and brawl tactics he employed to decision Alves.
"I want to wait for Koscheck and St-Perre to happen and we’ll figure out who gets the next shot," White explained noncommittally. "By then Jake Shields will have fought…Kampmann…you know…we’ll see what happens. A lot of it is timing too."
Martin Kampmann knows all about the kind of timing White is referring to.
He was slated to face Mike Swick at UFC 103 to decide which of them would get the next shot at St-Pierre, but when Paul Daley stepped in to replace and injured Swick, the title shot was pulled off the table. After losing to Daley, "Hitman," who won his first two bouts at 170 prior to his questionable TKO stoppage loss to "Semtex," has had to work his way back up the UFC’s welterweight ladder and has done in impressive fashion with decisive wins over Jacob Volkmann and Paulo Thiago.
Many argue that one win by Shields in the UFC as a welterweight, regardless of whom it’s over, shouldn’t lead to a title shot for the former Strikeforce middleweight champion, who hasn’t fought at 170 for nearly two years.
Somehow I think we’ll hear who’s next in line after Kampmann and Shields fight at UFC 121 on October 23, rather than after St-Pierre and Koscheck do on December 11 at UFC 124 and I doubt Jon Fitch will like the answer.
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Dana gets a certain amount of leeway to make matches that people want to see, but at some point he needs to put that shit aside and give the title matches to the people who have unquestionably earned them, boring or not. If Dana wants to act like this is a legitimate sport, he is going to have to start making legitimate matches, at least when titles are concerned. You don’t see NFL teams in the Super Bowl just because “People want to see this team more. That other team, the one that won all season, is boring. They just used their superior running game.”