(Fans outside the Engenhão await their national hero.)

The UFC has confirmed the date and venue for UFC 147: Silva vs. Sonnen 2, slating it for June 23rd at Estádio Olímpico João Havelange in Rio de Janeiro. Known to the locals as “Engenhão,” the multi-use stadium seats nearly 47,000 people, and is the home field for the Botafogo soccer team. Engenhão will host the athletics competitions at the 2016 Summer Olympics.

With the main-event building steam, Chael Sonnen has gotten a head-start on his trash talk, responding to Anderson Silva‘s recent claim that Chael should quit talking and start training. His latest promo clip is vintage Sonnen. Here’s a taste:

“I’m not fighting you in Brazil, I’m not fighting you in Chicago, I’m not fighting you in Florida. I’m fighting you in the Octagon. And when you get in there and I get in there, I’m gonna stomp you this time the same as I did last time. You can complain about your rib. I’m sure your rib *did* hurt. Your rib is inside of a coward. That’s the problem your rib’s got. It’s got the same problem your hands and feet have — they’re attached to *you*, dummy! I’m gonna be attached to you too, for 25 minutes or until you give up.”

Check out the video after the jump..

(Thankfully, Silva’s wife was too busy making steak sandwiches for a certain someone, and could not be in attendance.) 

HOW CAN CHAEL SONNEN HATE THIS COUNTRY?!

If I knew that this was how fighters undergoing injury rehabilitation were treated in Brazil, I would have thrown myself in front of that horse truck that ran over Antonio Rodrigo Nogueria years ago. We have no clue what the name of this show is (Melhor do Brasil maybe?), but we feel that depriving you of that piece of information won’t really irk you when you take a look at the drop dead gorgeous women that the current UFC middleweight champion Anderson Silva got to judge as part of a body painting contest.

Join us after the jump for the video. You’ll be glad you did.

(*mind explodes*)

A fight MMA fans have been clamoring for the past few years is a super fight between two of the sport’s most dominant champions: Anderson Silva and Georges St-Pierre.

The stumbling block, besides the queue of challengers lining up to face both men is the fact that they compete in different weight classes — St-Pierre at 170 and Silva at 185. It would almost make more sense to have “The Spider” face 205-pound champ Jon Jones since they walk around at a closer weight and Silva has fought and won at light heavyweight, but “Bones” has stated that he has no interest in the fight.

One of the biggest proponents of a GSP-Silva pairing (which St-Pierre says he’s all for in the next 12 months) is UFC president Dana White, who stated this week that he would love to do the fight in St-Pierre’s home country,which would guarantee a sellout even if it was the only bout on the card.

“I want to put on big fights. I want to put on fights the fans want to see. I know how big that fight is. Imagine if we did Anderson Silva versus Georges St-Pierre anywhere in Canada, how big that fight would be. Believe me, I’d love to do it. We’ll see what happens,” he told MMAWeekly. “Obviously it’s a fight that people have been talking about for a long time. So like Georges said, first of all, he has to get healthy. Then he’s got to fight [Carlos] Condit. Anderson is fighting Chael [Sonnen], and then we’ll see where we go from there. I know that Anderson couldn’t make 170 [pounds], so it would depend on Georges moving up or those guys meet at a catchweight or something like that.”

(That moment you realize you are a fraction of the man Dan Henderson is.) 

Few, if any, will ever be able to forget Dan Henderson and Mauricio “Shogun” Rua’s epic battle at UFC 139. It was like that time you watched your dad and your friend’s dad argue over a garden hose at your local pub when you were 12, an argument that quickly devolved into chair throwing, bottle smashing, and frequent use of the “n-word” despite the fact that both participants were white. You and your friend would never be the same again, but to be fair, his dad did say he would return the hose over a week ago, so fuck him.

Now swap your friend’s dad/Shogun with Dana White, and your dad with Dan Henderson, and you’ve pretty much got the gist of these two’s ongoing series of misunderstandings. They’ve butted heads over money before, but now it seems they’ve moved into the territory of straight up verbal warfare. At yesterday’s Calgary press conference, White informed Mauro Ranallo that he had attempted to secure a rematch between Henderson and Rua, but was met with firm opposition by the inventor of the H-bomb:

Yeah, I was trying to put together Dan Henderson vs. Shogun II and Henderson doesn’t want to do the fight. Henderson wants to wait for the winner of either Jonny “Bones” Jones or Anderson Silva. He wants Anderson Silva, if Silva wins, he will make that cut. Otherwise, he wants to fight the winner of Rashad and Jones.

After hearing the above snippet, Henderson took to his Twitter account to respond, where he promptly slayed DW in less than ten words.

Join us after the jump for those ten words.

(Full press conference video, via YouTube.com/UFC. Man, Nick Ring is like a *god* in that town.)

Today’s UFC press conference in Calgary resulted in a tidal wave of major announcements, highlighted by two title-fight bookings and confirmations of three Canadian events in 2012. Here’s what we’re looking at…

- The middleweight championship rematch between Anderson Silva and Chael Sonnen will take place at an 80,000-seat soccer stadium in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, not Sao Paulo as originally reported. [Ed. note: R.I.P., Chael.] The exact venue hasn’t been confirmed yet, and the event is expected to take place at UFC 147 on either June 16th or June 23rd. It will be the third time in 10 months that Rio will host a UFC event. We’ll be keeping our eyes out for this guy.

- For the third year in a row, the UFC will hold three events in Canada this year: UFC 149 in Calgary (7/21), UFC 152 in Toronto (9/22), and UFC 154 in Montreal (11/17). No matchups have been scheduled for the Toronto and Montreal shows, although welterweight champ Georges St. Pierre said he’d like to compete at UFC 154 if his knee-surgery recovery allows it.

(Tom couldn’t handle constantly being asked if the guy he was with was the dude that f*cked Kimbo)

As fans and pundits of the sport, sometimes we forget that the fighters we love and hate to watch in the ring and cage are normal human beings like we are. They have bills to pay, mouths to feed and wives and girlfriends that *most* of them go home to every night.

We’ve been introduced to many of the W.A.Gs of fighters by UFC countdown shows, porno movies, arrest reports and through their own contributions to the sport as managers and fighters in their own right. Regardless of what they do, they support their men through the good and the bad and keep the home front running smoothly while their husbands and boyfriends are away for training camps or competing.

They don’t get a lot of mention by us media types, so we figured we would pay them tribute by posting a gallery of some of the lesser-known ladies behind the well-known fighters in the sport.

CagePotato Roundtable is a new recurring column in which the CagePotato writing staff (and some of our friends) share their opinions on an MMA-related topic, and hopefully inspire some discussion among our readers as well. For the inaugural installment, we took inspiration from Joe Rogan’s enthusiastic crowning of last weekend’s Tim Boetch vs. Yushin Okami fight as “the greatest comeback in the history of the UFC.” That’s debatable, to say the least — but isn’t everything? So what *was* the greatest comeback fight in MMA history?

Seth Falvo
When Joe Rogan first called The Barbarian’s victory the greatest comeback in UFC history, my first thought was “Come on, Joe, are you seriously the only MMA fan who hasn’t seen Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira vs. Bob Sapp?” That comeback exposed Sapp for the overhyped freak that he was while establishing the legend of Big Nog and his ability to come from behind to win fights. Hell, we at Cagepotato consider it to be the best freak show fight to ever come out of Japan. But in fairness to Joe Rogan, that fight didn’t take place in the UFC. So my second thought was “Come on, Joe, are you seriously the only UFC fan who hasn’t seen Mike Russow vs. Todd Duffee?”

What makes this comeback so great was the fact that Todd Duffee and Mike Russow were essentially photo negatives of each other. Before this fight, Duffee was destined to be the next big thing in the UFC’s heavyweight division, having just tied the record for the fastest knockout in UFC history in his promotional debut against Tim Hague. Duffee was on the cover of Muscle & Fitness, the poster boy for Muscletech and seemingly in every men’s magazine on the planet — no matter how loosely the content was related to sports. Meanwhile, Russow was quietly coming off of a unanimous decision victory over Justin McCully in his UFC debut and had more fat in his left bicep than Todd Duffee had in his entire body. Everything about this fight seemed like it was a squash match.

(“Train? I didn’t have time to train with all of the commercial shoots the last six months.”)

King of all Brazilian Media Anderson Silva makes a brief appearance Nike’s new “Brasil vs. Brasil” commercial. Nike is one of the marquee companies on Silva’s bluechip sponsor roster alongside Burger King, Ford and the Corinthians soccer team.

The message of the ad, which also features members of the Brasilian national soccer team, former Brasil player Ronaldo and singer Thiaguinho, is “Triumph Over Your Shadow.” In one-minute spot, Brasil players  Neymar, Ganso, Pato, Thiago Silva, and Mascherano play against themselves in their away jerseys.

Check out the video after the jump.

(Video courtesy of YouTube/NicktheFace2)

If you’ve never heard of NicktheFace, first of all, what’s wrong with you, and second of all, do yourself a favor right now and check out some of his body of work and then ask yourself how you enjoyed MMA without him.

Okay, that’s a bit of a stretch, but why the hell isn’t this dude working for the UFC.

The impassioned fan/highlight video master craftsman is at it again and this time the results might just be the best Anderson Silva-Chael Sonnen promo video we’ll see before they square off at UFC 147 this summer and that’s including the inevitable “fan-made” clip of Chael inserted into a clip of “American Gangster.” We’re on to you and you’re grassroots guerilla campaigns, UFC marketing department.

Anyway, there’s not a hell of a lot more we can say about this masterpiece, other than we dare you to watch it and say you aren’t looking forward to this fight. We double-dog dare you, even.

After the jump:

NTF’s Shogun vs. Hendo highlight and his Diaz-GSP promo.

(“I would not fight anyone here. These are my friends.”)

Anderson Silva made a stop on the Max & Marcellus show on ESPN 710 radio this morning and made some interesting comments about some of his potential future fights.

Although he mentioned his upcoming rematch with Chael Sonnen, who he says ” no respect nothing,” “The Spider” named injured welterweight champ Georges St-Pierre as his most apt opponent out of anyone in the UFC right now.

Strikforce’s paper-thin light-heavyweight division just lost another one.

As GRACIEMAG first reported yesterday, Strikeforce light-heavyweight Roger Gracie has been called up to the UFC. While a date and an opponent have yet to be named for his UFC debut, Roger Gracie has hinted that he may enlist Anderson Silva to help him train for the bout. Roger Gracie is currently 4-1 in his career, with his last fight being a first round knockout loss to King Mo at Strikeforce: Barnett vs. Kharitonov.

On paper, it’s pretty strange to call up a guy with five professional fights who just lost to the big leagues. But it makes a little more sense when you actually look over Strikeforce’s light-heavyweight division. With King Mo on the shelves for a while, there really isn’t much to offer Gracie in Strikeforce. As the age old saying goes: If Gracie fights Ovince St. Preux or Gegard Mousasi in Strikeforce and no one watches, does the fight even matter? At least I think that’s how that one went.

You read that correctly. Russia…has water parks. Not only do they get to have Sambo, awesome sweaters, and The Dude’s favorite beverage, but now they have waterparks as well. YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO BE THE LAND OF SNOW AND SORROW GOD DAMN IT.

We have no clue where this video came from, or what the true purpose of it is, but we’d be lying if we said that Piterland doesn’t look like the bees knees, and apparently former PRIDE Heavyweight champion Fedor Emelianenko and his daughter Masha agree. We are still waiting to hear who “The Last Emperor’s” next opponent will be, but rumors have ranged everywhere from Bobby Lashley in a MMA match to Brock Lesnar in a pro wrestling bout, so who the hell knows? What we do know is that the next man to fight Fedor might want to reconsider if he values his health whatsoever. Poor Ishii.

What’s that you say? You want to see a MMA fighter humiliate and dance around his opponent ala Silva/Leites/Maia/anyone before brutally kicking them in the face? Well we’ve got just the video awaiting your viewership after the jump.

(These things have been passed around more than Arlovski’s ex-girlfriend.)

Although the UFC only had five weight classes at the time, four years ago today it had seven champions and only two still hold a strap.

BJ Penn (155), Matt Serra (170), Anderson Silva (185), Quinton Jackson (205) and Randy Couture (265) held titles in their respective weight divisions, while Georges St-Pierre (170) and Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira (265) were the anointed interim champions.

Fun Fact: Anderson Silva is the only champ who still holds the same belt he did then.

(“And then he had the nerve to say that we all probably dance around an effigy in grass skirts praying to our pygmy gods. Talk about clueless.”)

Anderson Silva appeared in the latest episode of the Brazilian “Sports Spectacular” series over the weekend as part of a promotional appearance for one of his sponsor’s brands, Amazoo Açaí.

During the segment, Silva fought by the Amazon tribe’s “huka-huka” rules, losing when his back was taken by his opponent, but when the tables were turned and he was allowed to employ his Brazilian jiu-jitsu techniques, the UFC middleweight fighter put on a submission clinic for the Kamayura people.

(If anyone can explain what is going on in this photo, we’ll give you Carmen Valentina’s digits.) 

After Edson Barboza’s spinning heel kick KO over Terry Etim gave birth to the phrase “falling tree” knockout here on CP, we got to thinking, what other classifications of devastation existed in the MMA highlight-o-sphere? Debates got heated, egos got crushed, and limbs got mangled, but we were eventually able to agree that the next category of KO’s in need of appreciation was that of the “lawn chair.”

What is a “lawn chair” knockout, you ask? Well, it’s that special kind of knockout, perhaps the complete opposite of a “falling tree,” in which the victim’s legs give out from underneath them almost instantaneously after the lethal blow is delivered, often forcing their body to collapse into itself like that of a common lawn chair. And to add insult to injury, the poor son of a bitch often receives an unnecessary strike courtesy of his own knee on the way down. Here are nine of the finest examples, in no particular order.

Chuck Liddell v. Guy Mezger

Ricardo Lamas v. Bendy Casimir

Check out seven more beautiful examples of this phenomena after the jump.

(Pillow-fists > Toilet-brush-hair.) 

Here you have it, folks, incontrovertible proof that The Great UFC Title Curse of 2011 has satiated its thirst for champions and is now moving on to any viable contender within sight. Dana White (via his Twitter) broke the news just a few minutes ago that Mark Munoz has suffered an unknown injury which has forced him to withdraw from his number one contender bout with Chael Sonnen, which was set to go down at the second UFC on FOX event in just 11 days. Taking his place will be none other than TUF 14 coach Michael Bisping.

Bisping, who most recently dominated opposing TUF 14 coach Jason “Mayhem” Miller back at the TUF 14 Finale in December, was originally scheduled to face Demian Maia at the same event, but has now catapulted himself into a marquee match-up against Sonnen for a crack at middleweight champ Anderson Silva. Maia has been left without an opponent as a result. Since dropping a unanimous decision to Wanderlei Silva at UFC 110, Bisping has collected four straight victories, including the aforementioned win over Jason Miller, a second round TKO of Jorge Rivera, and a pair of unanimous decisions over Dan Miller and Yoshihiro Akiyama.

Who you guys got for this one? Hint: Sonnen.

-Danga 

(An artist’s depiction of what was going through Joe Rogan’s mind the moment he found out Eric Silva had been DQ’ed. And yes, Joe Rogan appears in his own fantasies.) 

Much has been made of Joe Rogan‘s impromptu interview with referee Mario Yamasaki following his decision to disqualify Erick Silva at UFC 142 this past weekend. Some are saying it was a totally unprofessional move by Rogan, while others believe it would have been unprofessional of him not to question the seemingly botched ruling by the longtime UFC official. Whether or not you agree with Rogan’s decision (or Yamasaki’s, for that matter), we can all agree that the Silva/Prater fight proved the necessity for a stricter policy in regards to an instant replay in areas other than Nevada. Rogan, however, has already taken to the internet, specifically the UG, to explain why he chose to put Yamasaki on the spot:

He’s a great guy, and I’m always happy to see him. When I step into the octagon however, I represent the people watching at home that might have obvious questions, and when something is controversial I’m forced to confront it honestly because that’s what I would want to hear from a person in my position if I was a fan watching it at home.

I think Mario Yamasaki is one of the best in the world at refereeing MMA. No doubt about it. He’s got great insight to the sport, he’s a life long martial artist, and he’s a really smart guy. What I was acting from, is that I saw an incredible young talent get denied a KO victory for a questionable call. When I entered into the Octagon and was told of the official ruling that Silva was going to be disqualified for illegal blows to the back of the head everyone that I was around who heard the news opened their mouths in shock. Everyone said, “what?”

The people in the truck couldn’t believe it. I had to read it back to them because I thought it was a mistake, and when I leaned over to explain it to Goldie he couldn’t believe it either. I had to ask Mario about it. I didn’t know how he was going to respond, but I had to ask him.

Erick Silva is a very promising fighter and I felt like I had a responsibility to address the issue. No disrespect intended.

Join us after the jump for more interesting tidbits from around the MMA world, some of which may or may not be completely made up.

(Unfortunately, rehab for”The Spider” consisted mainly of wearing a Power Balance bracelet and eating Whoppers.)

It looks like Anderson Silva is not nearly as bionic as we thought.

TATAME is reporting that the UFC middleweight champ has sustained *another* injury and his return to training and competition will likely be pushed back as a result, meaning the winner of the UFC on Fox 2 bout on January 28 between Chael Sonnen and Mark Munoz may have to wait a while before getting a title shot.

(Video courtesy of Flo Wrestling)

Chael Sonnen did a seminar back in November for some youth at the Northeast Duals’ “MMA Fest,” held at Hudson Valley Community College in New York where he gave an inspiring speech about how to match intensity with an opponent.

“One thing on intensity, and I hope that we’re all old enough that I can tell this without people taking it for something that it’s not, but when we’re being intense and we’re out there and we’re competing — wrestling, fighting, MMA, whatever it is — I need to match my partner’s intensity. I can’t let him come in and bully me,” Sonnen explained. “I can’t let him pick on me. For some of you younger guys, eventually you’ll be getting into high school as freshman and these older guys are gonna push you around a little bit. Then you’ll go back and do it to the next group. It’s just the way that it works. You get to college and it’s intimidating because the intensity’s a little different. You gotta match ‘em.”

Sounds like good advice so far. Maybe Chael does have a career in politics if he can ever get his criminal record expunged by an outgoing president. Let’s listen to what other sage advice the Gangster from America has for the youth of the nation .

(Anderson’s naughty language begins at 3:54.)

Props to MiddleEasy for turning us on to the SAMURAIFIGHTSPIRITS channel on YouTube, which specializes in post-fight footage from the PRIDE era. Seriuously, this is already my favorite time-suck of the week. Here’s Chuck Liddell predicting that this Alistair Overeem kid is gonna be good. Here’s Kevin Randleman screaming “I SUCK!” after getting caught in a guillotine by Mirko Cro Cop. Here’s Rulon Gardner chillin’ with Dan Henderson. So much awesome.

Maybe the most fascinating bits of footage are the clips of Anderson Silva reacting to his pair of submission losses to Daiju Takase and Ryo Chonan, which ended the Spider’s PRIDE stint on an unsatisfying note. Above, the Takase loss makes Silva fire off a string of Portugeuse expletives that would make a marinheiro blush. After the jump, an obviously-in-pain Silva can barely keep his emotions together after his freak upset loss to Chonan via flying-scissor-leg-takedown/heel-hook. So remember: Before Anderson was an unbeatable UFC champion, he was a crier, just like you.

(Video courtesy of YouTube/TUF)

Sure Anderson Silva has a date with Chael Sonnen the winner of Chael Sonnen and Mark Munoz this summer, but when you think about it, there really aren’t many fights left for the dominant UFC middleweight champion at 185, so why not have him move up?

Anderson has a plethora of reasons why he likely won’t fight at 205 and most of them concern loyalty to friends like Lil’ Nog and Jon Jones, but from a fan’s perspective, a move up in weight is the only one that makes sense for “The Spider.”

Look at how he toyed with Ryan Bader in the TUF sparring session, basically letting him punch him in the chin as hard as he wanted to. Granted, Bader has improved from his technique of charging forward with arm punches, but I really don’t see a match-up between the two going any differently now. Silva made one former UFC light heavyweight champ look stupid and he would likely do the same to most of the division’s top contenders, so why not have him step up?

We’ll tell you why.

(#FacesofDeath) 

You know, it’s rare that we come across a filmed street fight with a video quality above that of The Blair Witch Project, and even more rare that we see one with any sort of technique involved whatsoever. Sure, Eddie Bravo will straight choke you to death if you cross him on camera, but it’s fair to say that most of the fights we catch on the Youtubes often involve two drunken nightclub patrons attempting to knock the glitter covered dragons off each other’s Ed Hardy v-necks using a fighting style that can only be described as “Tasmanian Devil-esque.”

We’ve tried to persuade you from this kind of thing, while understanding that it is bound to happen nonetheless. So what we’re saying is, if you plan on following the path of Lionheart in the near to distant future, you should do two things:

1. Take a couple lessons away from the following video.

2. Pray to your God that Jorge Masvidal isn’t the one you find yourself against.

(“Today FUEL TV, tomorrow the world…muahahaha!”)

If you’re like us and you can’t get enough of The Chael Sonnen Show,  you’ll be happy to know that “The Gangster from America” has been added to the line-up of Fuel TV’s new weekly UFC Tonight serial.

Sonnen will have his own segment on the show called Chael’s Corner and if the clip below is any indication, it will consist mainly of “The Real UFC Middleweight Champion” taking potshots at Brazilian fighters.

(Can someone say SUPERFIGHT?!!!) 

It’s a new year, Potato Nation, and aside from an endless number of Mayan-themed jokes that will undoubtedly punctuate most of our content, we’ve decided to kick off 2012 with you, our esteemed followers, in mind. And while we had more than our fill of exciting brawls in 2011, things like injury curses, excessive title shots, and sudden desires for film careers left us with hunger pains that could only be satiated by the announcement of another marquee match-up. That, or one of your wife’s famous steak sandwiches.

Call us greedy, call us insensitive, but we’re the type of fans that simply must have our every fantasy fulfilled, and it is with that in mind that we ask you, our fellow fanatics, to join us in a discussion of the five fights we NEED to witness this year, if only to end a few of the never ending arguments that constitute the CP comments sections. Here are our picks…

#5 – Anderson Silva vs. Chael Sonnen

Why?: Because if we have to hear how lucky Silva got one more time, we are going to round up all of our writers and perform a full reenactment of Death of a (Real Estate) Salesman. Goldstein will play Willy Loman, the elderly and dillusional salesman (Obvs.). CrushCo will play Biff, the former football star who yearns for a life as a farmhand, and Seth will play Happy, the slacking womanizer, leaving none other than myself to play Linda. What can I say, it sucks being the new guy.

(Within 24 hours of touching that thing at a UFC Expo, Overeem will punch you in the face.)

Typically, UFC champions fight at least two to three times per year. This year, each strap was defended an average of 1.86 times because of a rash of injuries we chalk up to the UFC title curse.

13 title defenses for seven belts is a problem for any organization, especially one as big as the UFC. It’s tough to garner interest for your promotion’s champions when only a few are defending their titles more than once or twice a year.

(Days after Arianny presented Ali with theOctagon Girl
Championship belt, she was let go by the UFC. Coincidence?)

The question is, should there be a limit to the amount of time a champion can go without defending his or her leather and gold before an interim champ is declared?

Check out the breakdown of the 2011 UFC champion injury plague in order of lightest to heaviest weight class after the jump and judge for yourself if title fights are less interesting as a result of how infrequently they occur.

(“Take that, logic!”)

With a pair of decisive losses in his last two Octagon appearances, Jake Shields‘s career is at a crossroads. He could try to scrape his way back up the welterweight ladder — starting with his fight against Yoshihiro Akiyama at UFC 144 — or he could try to re-invent himself completely. Since his homey Nick Diaz is now competing for interim titles in the same weight class, it’s clear which way he’s leaning:

“I would have no problem fighting there,” Shields told MMAWeekly.com in regards to returning to 185 pounds. “It’s something I’ve thought about before and I was thinking about it (before) this fight, but they offered me this fight (and) I took it. Especially with my teammate, Nick Diaz, challenging for the welterweight title, it’s definitely in the back of my mind going up to 185 (pounds)…I’d fight sparring partners, but (Nick and I) are different. We trained together for, like, 11 years; so it’s a little different.”

So who does Shields have his eye on, hypothetically, at 185? Hint: It’s the same guy he’s always wanted — Anderson Silva. Oh Jake, you crazy dreamer. Here’s what he told MMAFightCorner:

(The question is, whose wife cooked him the steak?)

If you were busy getting hammered off of rum and egg nog and exchanging token gifts with annoying relatives you thankfully only have to see once a year, you may have missed Chael Sonnen’s second appearance on TSN’s “Off the Record” show Friday night.

Don’t worry though, we’ve got you covered after the jump, homies.

(Anderson Silva: Like Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, and America’s Best Dance Crew, all rolled into one. / Photo courtesy of CombatLifestyle.com. Check out the full gallery after the jump.)

As we enter the last week of 2011, join us in celebrating the year’s most memorable images — from tense face-offs to action shots, ring girl pin-ups to gnarly post-fight injuries, and other assorted insanity. If we’ve left out any of your favorite MMA photos from the past year, drop us a link in the comments section. Enjoy…

(“Look kid, I’m gonna find the man who did this to you. And when I do, so help me God, I’m gonna dock him one point for shorts-grabbing.” / Photo of Stout vs. Edwards aftermath via ESPN)

With a little help from the Potato Nation, we spent the last couple days gathering videos of the nastiest, ugliest, most-painful looking knockouts and submissions from this year. Finding 25 of them was the easy part. (Damn, MMA fighters. You seemed especially angry this year. Problems at home?) Putting them in order was a little more challenging.

Obviously, Frank Mir snapping Nogueira’s arm at UFC 140 was the people’s choice for #1. But how do you rank a head-kick knockout against a spinning-backfist knockout, when they both leave their victims zombie’d on the mat with their eyes open and their arms in the air?

So here’s what we’ll do. Instead of arranging these brutal stoppages in some arbitrary order, we’ll arrange them in groups. Use the links below to navigate through the sections, and take a moment to appreciate the human devastation that our great sport has caused in the last 12 months. And all this without a single death! Enjoy…

(Ben Goldstein)

- Page 1: The Perfect One-Shot (Or Two-Shot) Knockouts
- Page 2: The Savage Striking Onslaughts
- Page 3: The Gruesome Submissions
- Page 4: Fancy Kicks and Other Insanity

(I see trouble a brewin’ on the horizon.) 

Given their frequency within the sport, we oft discuss the rematch here at CagePotato: we’ve mentioned a few that we’d like to see, we’ve mocked the possible occurence of others, and we’ve even gone as far as to predict how future ones would go down. And with 2011 featuring over 10 in the UFC alone, we decided to take a look back at at a year that both showcased and disgraced the awesomeness that is the rematch. Join us on this trip down memory lane, won’t you?

The Ones We Needed to See 

#5 – Anderson Silva vs. Yushin Okami at UFC 134

(Silva v. Okami, though this image could be from just about any of Silva’s fights.) 

Why it had to happen: Because the first fight marked the last time Silva had lost…at anything, and even if it was by way of illegal upkick DQ, it was enough to convince some people that Okami had his number. Plus, Okami had earned his shot by this point, and we were getting pretty damned tired of debating this old issue.

How it happened: Absolute. Domination. In typical fashion, Silva toyed with Okami like he was wrestling with his 4 year old nephew, letting the audience know that the fight would end when he decided it would. A head kick that rocked Okami at the end of the first round reinforced this belief, and Silva mercifully finished him off in the second. Cut. Print. TKO.

What it proved: That, outside of Chael Sonnen, there are no threats left in the UFC’s middleweight division for Anderson Silva. As with Strikeforce women’s featherweight champion Christiane “Cyborg” Santos, Silva must journey to another weight class if he desires a true challenge. Even DW is coming around to the idea, sort of.