(Don’t be scurred, Bellator. You can’t fight the power of the plaid vest)

I was going to say the Paulo Filho saga has officially jumped the shark with the embattled Brazilian fighter’s latest whacked out accusations, but then I realized that to do that there would have had to be some semblance of believability that he was not crazy.

In an interview with TATAME today, Filho blamed  Bellator for his inability to obtain the American work visa necessary for him to face Hector Lombard on Thursday night’s card as originally planned and said it was likely because they were scared that the old "Ely" was back to form.

“Honestly, I don’t know. I think maybe people knew I was in a good shape, strong, so they got scared… In fact, I’ve been informed it was a mistake of the event, which didn’t gave me the letter so I could take it to the council. Things were left to be solved at the last minute, unfortunately I won’t fight.”

Besides blaming Bellator for his not being able to fight at the show, Filho also had harsh words for Sherdog for perpetuating the rumor that he pulled out of Bitteti Combat’s February 25 show because of a drug relapse. According to the 31-year-old, the reason for his removal from the card was a disagreement with the organization’s  promoters and had nothing to due with his previous battles with depression or prescription drug addiction.

“My biggest concern is that people start to think that my absences are because of other things better than from what it actually is… I didn’t fight on Bitetti Combat for reasons between me and the organization and it came out on Sherdog that I was doing drugs and medicines once again. I fear that people actually believes that… I was training hard, working on my boxing with Distak, conditioning, running on the beach, doing Jiu-Jitsu… It was everything going pretty good, but there’s always something to get in the way.”

Funny how other fighters seem to be able to avoid having things get in the way of scheduled bouts.