(Penn and St. Pierre during their first fight at UFC 58 in 2006, which GSP won by split decision. Photo courtesy of Brawl Sports.)

Though Dana White has previously stated that the UFC 94 superfight between BJ Penn and Georges St. Pierre would be a non-title bout, Dave Meltzer is reporting that the UFC has changed their mind, and GSP’s welterweight title will be on the line. This would give Penn the opportunity to be the first UFC fighter to hold championships in two different weight divisions at the same time. Of course, he’ll have to win a five-round fight against St. Pierre to do so, which ain’t gonna be easy. UFC 94 is slated to go down in Las Vegas on January 31st, and will also feature the much-anticipated light-heavyweight scrap between Lyoto Machida and Thiago Silva. In other UFC news…

— If Anderson Silva makes it out of Saturday’s fight against Patrick Cote unscathed, he could possibly fight again at UFC 92 on December 27th, a card that’s already stacked with heavyweight and light-heavyweight title fights, as well as the match between Quinton Jackson and Wanderlei Silva. Josh Koscheck may have a quick turnaround as well.

— Brock Lesnar will be profiled in a segment on ESPN’s E:60 tonight at 7 p.m. ET., in which he discusses, among other things, his disappointment in not making it in the NFL and his minor addiction to booze and pills.

(Oh. No. She. Didn’t.)

- Matt Lindland’s MMA career now fodder for political smear campaign. (MMA Payout)

- Dana White says Anderson Silva could fight GSP, but never B.J. Penn. (The Sun)

- Little Nog is headed to Japan again, this time for Sengoku. (Fight Ticker)

- Chris Horodecki considering a fight in Japan while he waits for Affliction II. (MMA Weekly)

- Tim Sylvia headed to Dream or Sengoku? Really? (Nightmare of Battle)

- Fedor could fight Arlovski next, or Barnett. Who knows!? (MMA Fanhouse)

- Chuck Liddell turned away from big shot nightclub, and he’s not pleased. (TMZ)

- Robert Drysdale talks MMA debut. (Tatame)

- A movie trailer that is better than most actual movies. (Holy Taco)

- Life after Lehman Brothers. (Wall Street Fighter)

- Seven most underrated hot chicks on TV. (Screen Junkies)

- Brtual broken bottle beatdown. (Nothing Toxic)

Since it’s Labor Day and I’ve already spent too much time going through your submissions for our latest caption contest — fine work, by the way — we’re just going to do this old-school style, where I pick two winners and then you bitch about them mightily in the comments section. But first, the honorable mentions:

mayhem420: Wait…didn’t Kendall Grove say that guns were for white people?

ruckus: Sean Sherk, you’re dead.

adam: Following months of hardcore training in Brazil, BJ Penn thinks he has found a weakness in Machida’s defense.

The Truth: Quick, what’s Hawaiian for “one-legged French Canadian”?

Aptninja: Um, okay, so…where is the carb?

jakey: The Penn is mightier than the sword

Cankly Carano: “Upon seeing this photo, Jim Lampley exclaimed, ‘See, I told you these barbarian ultimate fighters take knives and guns into their cages. Pathetic. No skill compared to the sweet science! …now where’s that bitch wife of mine? She needs a good smack across the face.’”

Horror Fighter: BJ Penn prepares a response for all CagePotato readers who consistently complain about “caption contest” winners.

And now the winners…

After arranging a visit by BJ Penn to his Army unit at Fort Lewis, MMA writer Kelly Crigger was inspired to dig deeper into the subculture of mixed martial arts, and find out what would compel a person to sacrifice all worldly comforts for the opportunity to beat up a stranger in a cage. Over the next year, he visited leading MMA camps including Team Quest, American Top Team, and Sityodtong, and interviewed fighters at every level of the game. The result is Title Shot: Into the Shark Tank of Mixed Martial Arts, which, no bullshit, is probably the most insightful and essential exploration of the MMA lifestyle that you’ll ever read. We highly suggest that you buy it, but you also have a chance to win a signed copy right here.

Check out the photo above — one of thousands that Crigger took during the preparation of his book — which shows The Prodigy at the Fort Lewis shooting range. (As Crigger explains: “We took him out to bust some caps, but he couldn’t learn to hold the weapon for shit.”) The two readers who provide the best captions in the comments section below will win a signed copy of Title Shot. Contest ends Sunday night at midnight ET; feel free to enter multiple times. Good luck…

(“I see you can ‘andle my riddum.”)

In an interview with Kevin Iole of Yahoo! Sports, Dana White confirmed that BJ Penn and George St. Pierre would have their rematch at the UFC’s Super Bowl weekend event on January 31st, 2009, in Las Vegas. GSP’s welterweight belt will be on the line.

White also confirmed that UFC 91 will be held November 15th in Portland, Oregon, and will indeed feature a lightweight bout between Kenny Florian and Joe Stevenson. (We can safely infer now that BJ Penn won’t be fighting again at the end of the year.) When asked about Wanderlei Silva’s next Octagon appearance, White would only say that the Axe Murderer probably wouldn’t be part of their December 27th event in Las Vegas — which could mean they’re still pushing for him to headline the Portland card against Quinton Jackson, or that they’re extending his hiatus until early ’09.

“We have nothing but big fights left for the rest of the year, but this is so crazy because there are so many of them,” White said. “We’re going to have a retreat on Monday to figure this all out.” Here’s what’s on the dry-erase board at this point…

UFC 88 (September 6th, Atlanta): Liddell/Evans, Franklin/Hamill, Parisyan/Yoshida, Henderson/Palhares

UFC Fight Night 15 (September 17th, Omaha): Diaz/Neer, Danzig/Guida, Alexander/Schafer, Lauzon/Bradley

UFC 89 (October 18th; Birmingham, England): Bisping/Leben, Machida/T. Silva, Jardine/Vera, Sokoudjou/Cane, Carwin/Wain

UFC 90 (October 25th, Chicago): A. Silva/Cote, Sanchez/Alves, Sherk/Griffin, Franca/Tibau

UFC 91 (November 15th, Portland): Florian/Stevenson

The Ultimate Fighter 8 Finale (December 13th, Las Vegas): no fights announced yet

UFC 92 (December 27th, Las Vegas): Nogueira/Mir

UFC 93 (January 31st, Las Vegas): Penn/St. Pierre

(Hey, remember this? Brutal.)

MMA Weekly is reporting that Kenny Florian and Joe Stevenson have agreed to face each other at a November 15th UFC event in Portland, Oregon. Florian’s unanimous decision over Roger Huerta on August 9th made it five straight wins for the Bostonian, while Stevenson last fought at UFC 86 in July, disposing of Gleison Tibau via guillotine choke.

I gotta be honest — I’m not feelin’ this matchup. Both guys have little to gain and a lot to lose from the outcome. If Florian wins, his position at the top of the lightweight ladder is unchanged, and he’s still next in line to face BJ Penn. If he loses, the UFC would be without a clear #1 contender, because it seems very unlikely that the UFC would want to set up Penn vs. Stevenson II anytime soon, considering how one-sided their first meeting was in January. I like Joe Daddy, and I wanted to see him built back up to the top incrementally; the Tibau fight was a great start. Most likely he’ll get torn up by Florian, and his stock will drop even further.

In other UFC news: Though Dana White announced that Mike Swick would be fighting on the UFC 90 card in October, Swick doesn’t think he’ll be ready to fight until December, as he’s still recovering from recent surgery on his elbow.

Just as Kenny Florian won’t be sitting on the bench until BJ Penn decides to give him a title shot, Penn also wants to get another fight in by the year’s end, even though Georges St. Pierre has said he doesn’t plan on returning to the Octagon until 2009. According to a report by MMA News, BJ’s brother JD has confirmed that the UFC’s lightweight champ is back in the gym and training for a fight in December, and his fight against GSP will likely be pushed back until February 2009 when the UFC holds it’s Superbowl Weekend card.

So maybe a Penn/Florian title fight at the end of the year is still a possibility? Then again, JD’s claim that BJ will fight in both late December (against TBA) and early February (against GSP) is so unlikely it’s barely worth discussing.

The good news is, the UFC’s year-end card could wind up being so stacked that it doesn’t even need a high-profile BJ Penn fight in the lineup. Besides the heavyweight title match between Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira and Frank Mir, NBCSports has suggested that a superfight between Anderson Silva and Chuck Liddell as well as a light-heavyweight title match between Forrest Griffin and Wanderlei Silva are both outside possibilities. (It’s also been reported that the UFC is trying to set up a fight between Quinton Jackson and Wanderlei Silva for a November event, despite Silva’s preference to fight on the December card.)

Potentially related: If Tyson Griffin beats Sean Sherk, he wants Kenny Florian next.

10. Randy Couture vs. Gabriel Gonzaga
(UFC 74, 8/25/07)

At 44 years of age, Randy Couture was the one who was supposed to look busted up after his heavyweight championship match with 29-year-old Brazilian wrecking ball Gabriel Gonzaga. But in one of the greatest triumphs of his career, Couture broke down the bigger, younger fighter with his wrestling and dirty boxing. About three minutes into the first round, blood began to pour out of Gonzaga’s shattered nose, giving Randy’s back a nice, red coat. The steady flow interrupts the challenger’s breathing and vision, leading to a brutal ground-and-pound finish in the third.

9. Robbie Lawler vs. Scott Smith
(EliteXC: Unfinished Business, 7/26/08)

In the second round of their EliteXC middleweight championship do-over, Scott Smith nailed Robbie Lawler with a series of standing elbows that opened up an ugly gash on the top of Lawler’s head. With blood pouring out of the wound, Lawler turned up the intensity, doing his best to finish Smith before a doctor could stop the fight. About 90 seconds later, he succeeded — but not before a spray of “plasma” fell into commentator Mauro Ranallo’s lap. The video doesn’t really do it justice; you should also check out this photo from the fight, and this photo of the aftermath.

8. Chase Beebe vs. Eddie Wineland
(WEC 26, 3/24/07)

It may have been the most grisly demolition of a cauliflower ear in MMA history. Midway through a five-round bantamweight title match, challenger Chase Beebe dropped an elbow from the top that burst Eddie Wineland’s overripe right ear, causing it to spray blood several feet across the mat. Wineland, who had already suffered multiple cuts near his eyes from Beebe’s precision striking, soldiered on to the fifth-round bell with what appeared to be a gaping hole in the side of his head. Beebe took home the belt and Wineland hasn’t fought in the WEC since.

After the jump: Things really start to get disgusting.

Stephanie Lum of Honolulu’s NBC affiliate KHNL 8 got a lot more than she bargained for when she made a visit to BJ Penn’s gym in Hilo for a segment called “Job Swap.” Penn greeted Lum by slamming her into the cage then taking her to the mat. Later, she was arm-barred into submission by a young boy who just wanted to “see what she was like.” (Or was that “feel what she was like”? Either way, awesome.) As local news fluff pieces go, it’s a success. Though technically, if they were really swapping jobs, wouldn’t BJ be trading puns back in the studio with Howard Dashefsky?

(Props: Bloody Elbow)

As we told you earlier this week, Matt Hughes was not at all impressed with Georges St. Pierre at UFC 87. His blog post about how boring he found the GSP-Fitch fight seemed laced with no small amount of jealousy. That’s somewhat understandable. A guy beats your ass twice, you may have some ill feelings towards him. But now Hughes is trying to claim that after GSP’s fight with Fitch (which Hughes walked out of halfway through) he does not deserve to be mentioned in the pound-for-pound debate. Has anyone told Hughes yet that GSP actually won that fight?

The hilarious thing is that Hughes also says B.J. Penn deserves to be considered among the best pound-for-pound. As in, the same B.J. Penn who Hughes (and GSP) beat. But GSP, who beat Hughes twice, convincingly, gets knocked out of the running for beating a guy who is ranked above Hughes in just about every welterweight top ten list in existence. You following this?

If only Hughes could bring himself to admit that, while he is a legend of the sport who was great in his time, that time is now over and St. Pierre is on top. Is that so hard? Probably, yeah. Especially for a guy like Hughes, whose stubborn unwillingness to believe that anyone could possibly be better than him has served him well in the past. Still, he’s got to let it go. Watching a former champ snipe at the guy who supplanted him is just sad. If Hughes really thought that GSP wasn’t any good, you know what he’d probably do? Beat him. I guess when that’s out of the question you settle for insults.

(Props: Yahoo’s Steve Cofield)

This video of BJ Penn’s experience at UFC 87 (courtesy of BJPenn.com, via Yahoo!) confirms a few things that I’ve long suspected: 1) BJ Penn has more fun than I do, 2) Jesse Ventura (seen sitting stone-faced next to Penn at one point) does not, and 3) everyone in the world — including “Rampage” Jackson — thinks they do a good Hulk Hogan impression, but most of them are wrong.

Where things really start to get interesting here is when Penn enters the Octagon to confront Georges St. Pierre about their superfight. You can hear Dana White asking Penn to let GSP “have his moment here real quick,” and you can also hear the boos from the crowd when Penn steps up to the mic. No matter, Nick Swardson thinks he’s the best fighter in the world, and that’s enough for me.

Below, check out BJ hitting the town with Bruce Buffer, who declares Jon Fitch to be “a tough son of a bitch.” You gotta love the Buff.

Find more videos like this on BJPENN.COM

(St. Pierre wants to “do it” — just not right away. Video props to Bloody Elbow.)

In an article written for RDS.ca titled “Jon Fitch est un Terminator” (and translated here by Fightline.com), Georges St. Pierre says he may not return to action until next year:

Many state that my next opponent should be BJ Penn. Nothing has obviously been signed yet, but he is my number one challenger. I believe he deserves a chance to challenge me for my title, but we’ll see what happens on that matter in the next few weeks…

On my end, however, I don’t know if I’ll be stepping back into the Octagon before 2009. I’ve fought four times in the last 12 months. I therefore need some rest. I like the life I lead, but I sometimes need to relax. It’s not the fight as such that’s exhausting; it’s all the preparation that comes with it. I’ve made so many sacrifices to prepare myself. During training camps, I practically do not live anymore. It’s therefore on a psychological level that I need to recharge.

So unless Dana White can bribe/threaten him into changing his mind, the UFC’s New Year’s show may be down one superfight. But no matter when the inevitable meeting goes down, it’s obvious that Penn wants it a hell of a lot more than St. Pierre does. If you watched the end of UFC 87 (video above), you probably picked up on the different vibes displayed by Penn (with his shrill cries of “LET’S DO IT GEORGES, YOU WANNA DO IT!?”) and GSP (who seemingly wants to fight Penn as much as anyone else who “deserve a shot”).

(Props to MMA Mania for the poster image.)

— Kenny Florian doesn’t plan on sitting out until BJ Penn decides to defend his lightweight belt; he’ll be fighting one more time this year, no matter what. “(Penn) made the decision that he wants to fight GSP and I tell you what as a fan I want to see that fight,” Florian said during an appearance on MMA Weekly Radio. “It’s a risky move and some people have criticized me for it, but I still want to get another fight in…before the year’s end and I want to fight someone tough.”

— All signs are pointing to Cheick Kongo as Brock Lesnar’s next opponent. And why not UFC Hall-of-Famer Mark Coleman, who was originally supposed to take on Lesnar at “Seek and Destroy”? According to Dave Meltzer: “The basic story is this…Coleman really doesn’t want the fight.”

— UFC 90 (October 25th, Chicago) will see the Octagon debut of Matt Horwich, the Team Quest product and one-time IFL middleweight champion. He’ll be given a very tough test against BJJ ace Ricardo Almeida, who’s coming off a split decision loss to Patrick Cote at UFC 86. The UFC has also announced a UFC 90 middleweight matchup between Goran Reljic and Thales Leites.

— Even Jason MacDonald doesn’t know why he decided to fight Demian Maia on the ground: “It was a stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid fight on my behalf. And I take the full blame 100 percent for it. I’ll take it right on the forehead like I took those hundred elbows from Maia.”

(‘I don’t want to sound like a jerk, but one of us needs to lay off the tanning salon.’)

We all suspected it, but now it’s real. Dana White said he will give B.J. Penn the fight he wants against Georges St. Pierre some time in the coming months, although where it will go down is another question. When asked if the superfight would take place in Montreal, White answered “probably not”. He also said Penn wouldn’t vacate the lightweight title to fight St. Pierre.

So what does that mean for company man Kenny Florian, who was hoping for a once-promised shot at that title after his victory over Roger Huerta? Looks like he might have some vacation time coming, because St. Pierre and Penn get their wishes granted first. From MMA Weekly:

“They both really want that fight, they both want to fight each other,” said White. “I’m going to let that fight happen and then I’ll figure out what we’re going to do at 155.”

The Penn-St. Pierre rematch will most likely happen on December 27, or at least that’s the most prevalent rumor. That means Florian’s reward for toppling troublemaker Roger Huerta is that he maybe gets a shot at the lightweight strap six months from now. Maybe. Of course, odds are that if Penn beats GSP he’ll never darken the 155-pound doorway again, so we may be looking at a vacant title situation or, worse, another interim title while White waits for Penn to come to his senses and return to the weight class that loves him far more than he loves it.

So is this title freeze a screw job for every 155-pounder in the UFC whose name doesn’t rhyme with T.A. Kenn? Probably. But as long as it means we get to see Penn-St. Pierre II, nobody else seems to mind. Including GSP:

“I want to be a real champion, I want to be the best in the world,” St. Pierre stated. “And to be the best in the world you need to fight the best in the world and I want to give a shot to everybody that deserves it. B.J. Penn deserves it, he’s an incredible fighter.”

Translation: Game on, suckers.

(“Considering our fight is pretty much meaningless now, we’re just gonna bro out for a while, if that’s cool.”)

Partly because of BJ Penn’s restlessness and partly because of Roger Huerta’s stalled contract negotiations the UFC is no longer promising that the winner of Saturday’s match between El Matador and Kenny Florian will get an immediate title shot. During an appearance on TAGG Radio, Dana White edited previous statements about the fight’s #1 contender status:

“There’s no guarantees that Florian and Huerta are going to get a title shot after this fight,” White said of Saturday’s lightweight bout. “It definitely puts them in the mix … but definitely, if St. Pierre beats Fitch, it’s looking like it’ll be GSP (vs.) B.J. Penn.”

The thing is, that’s not exactly how Penn sees it. The Prodigy recently told MMA Weekly that he’s 170-bound no matter what happens in tomorrow night’s main event:

“I’d feel okay facing anyone for the welterweight title…It would be great to put on a big fight with me and St-Pierre, but then again, it’s about me fighting the best fighter and if Fitch goes down and proves he’s the best fighter, then he’s the man.”

(Next big thing, or MMA’s Ryan Leaf?)

With a blockbuster UFC 87 lineup as our fodder, it’s time again for Cage Potato’s editors to argue like an old married couple that only got hitched because of an unexpected pregnancy. We don’t love each other and yet we don’t know enough to expect better from our lives, so here we are. In this edition we debate topics such as what’s to become of Brock Lesnar on Saturday night and beyond, who will be the number one lightweight contender when the dust finally settles, will Rampage Jackson be back in the UFC any time soon, and more. Let’s grimly get it on.

Will Brock Lesnar revive his MMA career with this fight, or will he officially be a bust once UFC 87 is in the books?

Fowlkes: Clearly the UFC isn’t interested in giving Brock Lesnar a lay-up to help jumpstart his MMA career, and you have to respect that. Heath Herring is tough and experienced and, had a couple things gone differently for him, he could easily be the top heavyweight contender right now instead of Frank Mir, who won all of two straight fights to achieve that distinction.

Lesnar is a physical specimen who is athletically gifted, this we know. But what else do we know about him? He hates airplanes and gays, prizes staying home, and is vulnerable to submissions. Basically, we don’t know what he’s really capable of as an MMA fighter. Strength won’t be enough against Herring (who will have spent the last couple months drilling his wrestling if he has any sense at all) and strength is about all we can count on from Lesnar at this point.

Herring is too crafty a veteran to get overwhelmed by pure power. He’s going to pick Lesnar apart on the feet and submit him late in the second or early in the third, and when he does you should turn up your TV so you can actually hear the air going out of Lesnar’s hype balloon. The UFC will give him a young up-and-comer next, just to see what he has left, but this is the point where he goes from a top prospect to another guy fighting for contract survival.

Goldstein: Yeah, Herring’s probably been drilling his wrestling. You know who else has been drilling his wrestling? Brock Lesnar. I wouldn’t be surprised if either fighter pulled a win out of this match, but there’s one thing that’s guaranteed: At some point, Herring will be taken down and put on his back. Seriously.

(Whose house? KenFlo’s house.)

As MMA fighters go, Kenny Florian is as intelligent and articulate a guy as you can hope to find. He’s also a workaholic and an ever-evolving bad-ass in the cage, and his next test against the formidable Roger Huerta should answer any lingering questions as to who deserves to be the UFC’s top lightweight contender. Whether B.J. Penn will stick around to defend his 155-pound title, well, that’s another issue altogether.

In this exclusive interview with KenFlo we discuss training strategies, Roger Huerta’s apparent dissatisfaction with the UFC, being an ESPN MMA analyst, and more.

CagePotato.com: Hey Kenny, thanks for talking with me. How has your training for this fight been going?

Everything’s been going really well. My training camp was awesome. I really didn’t take too much time off. After the Lauzon fight I think I was back in the gym the following week and I wasn’t completely pleased, technically speaking, with my performance, so I wanted to get right back in the gym and improve on those things. With all the commitments I had before this fight, the traveling and all that, I’m glad I got a jump on it early.

What were you displeased with about your performance against Lauzon?

Joe Lauzon just shouldn’t have taken me down like he did. That was the main thing, was the wrestling angle of it. I just wanted to get back and get my hands on a quality wrestling coach so I could really improve in that area. It’s one thing to be able to do it in training, but it needs to be second nature in order for you to use it when you need it in a fight. So I found a great wrestling coach who’s just been a phenomenal addition to my team.

I’ve just been working on a lot of the fundamentals of wrestling, both defensively and offensively, and working on making sure I’m doing things right technically. With wrestling in particular you get a lot of people who will tell you ‘Oh, you should do it this way or that way,’ but having a world class guy to show you this is the way it should be done and here’s why, it gets it into your muscle memory and makes you a stronger fighter.

What do you think Roger Huerta’s greatest strength is as a fighter?

Dana White has told The Canadian Press that the UFC hopes to return to Montreal in November or December:

“I literally just left a meeting where we were talking about that,” UFC president Dana White told The Canadian Press on Tuesday. “We’re looking to come back to Montreal.”

The UFC’s Canadian debut — “Serra vs. St. Pierre 2″ in April — was a record-breaking event, drawing 21,390 fans to Montreal’s Bell Centre for a gate of $5 million. With a superfight between hometown boy Georges St. Pierre and BJ Penn being discussed for the end of the year, it may be wise to begin making arrangements; if GSP beats Jon Fitch on Saturday, we wouldn’t be surprised if White makes an announcement about the UFC’s next Montreal card shortly after. Said White: “Obviously B.J. is pulling for GSP because he wants to fight him.”

In the same article, White discussed the condition of beleaguered former light-heavyweight champ Quinton Jackson, telling The Canadian Press that Rampage is A-OK:

“It wasn’t psychiatric at all, it was physical,” said White. “He had a physical condition — exhaustion, dehydration that caused delirium.”

White said Jackson, a California native, had remained in Las Vegas for a week after the fight and was fasting — living on energy drinks alone.

“Bad combination,” said White. “Physically and mentally he’s OK. Now he’s got some legal problems, obviously.”

Well sure, exhaustion and dehydration can cause delirium, but what could compel a person to fast and go on a Brawndo bender until they’re exhausted and dehydrated? Could it have maybe, possibly have been a psychiatric issue? See, you didn’t think about that, did you?

(Props: TKO Extreme)

Jon Fitch has a new blog entry up on UFC.com in which he discusses his training at AKA in preparation for the bout with Georges St. Pierre at UFC 87 next Saturday. Sounds like he’s none too pleased about all this GSP-B.J. Penn talk, as if it’s just a given that St. Pierre will walk though him en route to another meeting with “The Prodigy”:

Working like we do, when people are talking about how good certain fighters are, one of our first questions is, ‘who does he train with?’ That’s always a big question because I don’t care how good you are; if you don’t train with anybody at your level, you’re very limited in how good you can be and how good you actually are.

Outside of training, I’ve heard some talk over the last few weeks about BJ Penn moving up to 170 to fight GSP at the end of the year. Of course, they’ve forgotten that GSP has a fight with me first. But that just shows you where some people really are still in this sport and how they still have no idea what’s going on. There are a lot of so-called experts out there, but they know nothing about the sport. They’re spectators on the outside watching the sport through a telescope, and they think they’re on the inside and know everything, but they don’t. You can’t let that stuff bother you though. I think it’s funny and it’s just that little extra pleasure at the end of the day when you win and all those people are exposed.

Are we supposed to take this to mean that Fitch thinks GSP is generally overrated? We certainly hope not. Fitch’s win streak and overall skills make him deserving of the respect he’s getting, but so is GSP. Of all the strategic errors you could make when facing the welterweight champ, underestimating him really shouldn’t be one of them. Even if you are right behind him in the all-important Cage Potato Power Rankings.

(Patrick Cote: Dead man.)

The UFC has informed the Chicago Sun-Times that UFC 90 (October 25th @ Chicago’s Allstate Arena) will be headlined by a middleweight title bout between Anderson Silva and Patrick Cote. Get a load of how retarded Cote is:

“This guy will need 10 punches to my face to knock me out, and I’ll just need one,” Cote said. ‘”I have a good chance. He won’t exchange with me, and I’m not scared of him.”

Absolutely nothing in the above statement is accurate. And if that 10/1 ratio thing that “The Predator” mentioned sounds familiar, it’s because James Irvin said something idiotically similar before getting his lights turned out — with one punch! ha! — in his fight against Silva. But don’t worry, because Cote knows that the secret to defeating Anderson Silva is head movement:

“If you want to know how not to fight Silva, just watch tape of [the Silva/Irvin] fight,” Cote said. “He was flat on his feet with no head movement. He threw a lazy kick against a world-class Muay Thai fighter, and that’s what happens. I’m not like James Irvin. I’m a better striker, and I’m faster.”

Translation: Cote isn’t making it past the first round. In other UFC news, Five Ounces of Pain is reporting that if Georges St. Pierre successfully defends his welterweight title against Jon Fitch next month, he’ll face BJ Penn on December 27th, at a yet-unnumbered UFC event that is also slated to feature the heavyweight title clash between Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira and Frank Mir. One theory making the rounds is that the Penn/GSP match will be a non-title affair that will be marketed as a “battle of the weight divisions.” As cheesy as that sounds, there’s a certain logic to it — assuming the fight is contested at welterweight, it would seem a little unfair for GSP’s belt to be on the line but not Penn’s. We just hope that the UFC has special “superfight rules” in place that would make Penn vs. St. Pierre five rounds instead of three. More to come…

From BJPenn.com via 5oz.: BJ Penn wakes up Heath Herring at home before flying to Santa Barbara with Sean Sherk for the taping of a reality show on NBC Sports. Who knows what it all means, but it looks like Penn and Sherk have buried the hatchet — assuming their beef was legitimate in the first place.

Here’s the second episode of “Chris Leben: Evolution of an Icon,” which features the Crippler working with his suspiciously attractive students and attempting to install a heavy bag at the top of a mountain.

After the jump, Joanne of the MMA Girls spends a lovely day with Jon Fitch that includes shopping at the Ecko store and lunch at what appears to be Panda Express.

The MMA world was all a-flutter with the news that Georges St. Pierre had been nominated for an ESPY in the “Fighter of the Year” category. There were even brief efforts to get us all to band together and vote him in.

But in this recent interview with MMA Rated, “Rush” says he has no plans to attend the awards. Why? Because GSP ain’t in this to win awards, dammit.

He also talks about preparing for Jon Fitch, a possible fight with B.J. Penn, and what’s going on (or not) between him and Mandy Moore.

(Get ready for war, kind of.)

With Elite XC’s next CBS show planned for July 26, the UFC is once again putting on its counter-programming hat (which one assumes looks a lot like a viking helmet) to try and screw with their ratings. So what is it this time? Anderson Silva fighting a pack of wolves live on Spike TV? The debut of the long-awaited Chuck Liddell-Girl Scout Troop 104 sex tape?

Not quite. Try a rebroadcast of UFC 84: Ill Will, featuring B.J. Penn and Sean Sherk. Spike TV will be running it all night, beginning at 9 pm EST, to be preceded at 4 pm by a rebroadcast of the Silva vs. Irvin Fight Night from a week before, just in time to match main events with the Showtime portion of the Elite XC card, which begins at 8 pm.

Oh, the indignity.

Realistically, the UFC couldn’t be expected to do much more than this just one week after their frantically thrown together anti-Affliction show, but it’s still got to sting a bit to know the UFC thinks reruns are all it takes to draw attention away from your live event on network TV.

Five Ounces of Pain is reporting that Dana White has his own network deal close to finalized. While we’ve all heard this siren’s song before, this time there’s a time frame involved:

“We’re real close to a network,” said Dana White, “I’m going to say in three months.”

As for which network, the smart money’s on Fox, though we’ll believe it when we see it. We’ve been burned too many times before and we just don’t know if we can go through that hurt again.

Dana White has confirmed what BJ Penn has been talking about since last week — a rematch between Penn and Georges St. Pierre could happen by the end of the year:

“If St. Pierre buzzsaws through (Jon) Fitch then yes, we’ll do Penn vs. GSP,” said White.

Though by no means guaranteed, GSP buzzsawing through Fitch is a likely scenario, and Penn would be granted an opportunity to avenge his UFC 58 split decision loss against St. Pierre. Which means, theoretically, Penn could become the UFC’s first two-division champion well before Anderson Silva, who will be attempting the same feat. A lot of “if”s there, I know, but the possibility is compelling. Who ya got on GSP/BJ 2?

In other UFC news…

— Early speculation points to UFC 90 being held on October 25th in Chicago. This would depend on a SpikeTV deal being locked down for UFC 89: Bisping vs. Lebven, which would be held just a week earlier.

— Medical suspensions for UFC 86 have been released, and Quinton Jackson, Marcus Aurelio, Justin McCully, and Jorge Gurgel could potentially be out of commission until January.

— The UFC wants you to know that you can watch all of Anderson Silva’s UFC and PRIDE fights on UFC.com for $9.99. I guess this is for people who don’t have Google?

Yahoo! Sports has an article claiming that Josh Koscheck “wouldn’t mind” dropping to lightweight to take on B.J. Penn at some point in the future. This, apparently, because there is a perceived lack of credible challengers in the UFC’s lightweight division, which is already a questionable thesis to begin with.

But assuming you go along with it, then you’re expected to make the leap to believing that Josh Koscheck is the savior the division needs. Koscheck himself sounds only lukewarm about the idea:

“You never know,” he said, beaming, when confronted about his ability to make the lightweight limit of 155 pounds. “If people would want to see me fight B.J. Penn at 155 for the title, because there is really nobody there for him to fight, I’d do it.”

[...]

“I know B.J. very well, but business is business,” Koscheck said. “We’re friends, but at the end of the day, it’s about making money together. If the fans would want to see it, I’d suck it up and I’d live that life to where I’d do whatever I have to do to make 155.”

These statements make Koscheck seem far from eager to go down in weight and face Penn, but what’s interesting is the assertion that there is “really nobody there for him to fight.”

On the surface this seems kind of true, but only because Penn is so dominant right now that we assume whoever claims the number one contender spot will inevitably be destroyed by him. The reality is that the 155-pound division is one of the deepest weight classes in the UFC and the sport as a whole. Maybe Penn will beat every credible challenger in the division, but shouldn’t he do that before we just assume that he will?

In this clip from Fighters Club TV, BJ Penn announces his intention to move back to 170 to fight the winner of Georges St. Pierre vs. Jon Fitch, possibly around New Year’s Eve. The Prodigy says he’d love to reclaim the welterweight title, will take future matches at lightweight “if it makes sense,” and moving to middleweight is a future aspiration. Hopefully, a title defense against Roger Huerta or Kenny Florian still makes sense to Penn, but the lure of eating more cheeseburgers building a legacy can be strong sometimes. (Props to Steve Cofield for the find.)

Another notable bit of UFC news emerging this morning is that UFC 89 (October 18th; Birmingham, England) will be televised for free on Spike TV, and another pay-per-view event will likely be held one week later. UFC 89 will be headlined by Michael Bisping vs. Chris Leben, and will reportedly feature a bout between Thiago Alves and Diego Sanchez.

You may think that typing out a sentence about what a no-talent mama’s boy some fighter is has no real effect on anything, but Joe Stevenson begs to differ. In a recent interview with MMA Rated he admitted to scouring the internet in the past to read what people were saying about him:

In (the) rankings, you know, I don’t really check the Internet too much, I stay off of it because when I first started, I remember the headache that I would get from watching people say, ‘oh yeah, this that and the other’ and, I mean, emotionally it does hurt you. You’re like, ‘wait a minute! You jerk!’ You know, it doesn’t really matter if it’s a 13-year-old kid with acne or if it’s a 27-year-old guy that thinks he can do it or someone that’s really legit and has an opinion. It still hurts, words hurt.

As our Cage Potato comments pie chart revealed, the internet is a place for all the negative/racist/sexist/nonsense things people can’t say in polite company, so it’s probably best for Stevenson not to take it to heart. Of course, by writing that I’ve probably opened the door for some thirteen-year-old kid with acne to call me a Stevenson nuthugger while perhaps also questioning my sexual preference.

Also in the interview, Stevenson looks back on his loss to B.J. Penn, especially the now infamous moment where Penn licked his blood off his own gloves.

($225,000: Enough to buy a new pickup truck and a healthy white baby.)

Official salary and bonus numbers for UFC 84′s fighters have been released by the Nevada State Athletic Commission. Here’s how the guys stacked up:

B.J. Penn: $250,000 ($125,000 to show, $125,000 to win)
Wanderlei Silva: $225,000 ($150,000 to show*, $75,000 for Knockout of the Night)
Tito Ortiz: $210,000
Lyoto Machida: $100,000 ($50,000 to show, $50,000 to win)
Wilson Gouveia: $93,000 ($18,000 to show, $75,000 for Fight of the Night)
Rousimar Palhares: $85,000 ($5,000 to show, $5,000 to win, $75,000 for Submission of the Night)
Goran Reljic: $81,000 ($3,000 to show, $3,000 to win, $75,000 for Fight of the Night)
Rameau Thierry Sokoudjou: $80,000 ($40,000 to show, $40,000 to win)
Thiago Silva: $50,000 ($25,000 to show, $25,000 to win)
Rich Clementi: $40,000 ($20,000 to show, $20,000 to win)
Dong Hyun Kim: $40,000 ($20,000 to show, $20,000 to win)
Sean Sherk: $35,000
Kazuhiro Nakamura: $20,000
Ivan Salaverry: $20,000
Shane Carwin: $12,000 ($6,000 to show, $6,000 to win)
Yoshiyuki Yoshida: $12,000 ($6,000 to show, $6,000 to win)
Terry Etim: $10,000
Keith Jardine: $10,000
Christian Wellisch: $10,000
Jon Koppenhaver: $8,000
Antonio Mendes: $4,000
Jason Tan: $3,000
* Wanderlei Silva’s guaranteed $150,000 salary doesn’t depend on a win bonus.

Overpaid: Wilson Gouveia. Looking back on UFC 84 a year from now, is the two-round almost-war between Gouveia and Goran Reljic going to be remembered by anyone? Yes, Reljic’s relentless left head-kicks were pretty, but Gouveia should have eventually figured out that they were coming. (For us, the presence of Mirko Cro Cop in Reljic’s corner was the early tip-off.)

Underpaid: A lot of people — particularly Shane Carwin, whose Knockout of the Night bonus was robbed from him by Wanderlei Silva. The way I saw it, Carwin’s single-punch, mouthpiece-ejecting KO of Christian Wellisch was more deserving then Wandy’s slightly more prolonged ground-and-pound TKO of Jardine, and Carwin could probably use the money more. Other than that, what the fuck is up with the UFC’s newcomers making three, four, and six thousand dollars to show? Goddamned slave wages. The UFC made $3.7 million off of “Ill Will”‘s gate; they could certainly afford to establish a minimum base salary of $10,000 for their fighters if they wanted to.

(After a long, hard day in the courtroom, a wide-mouthed Mickey’s really takes the edge off.)

As if being the undisputed ruler of the UFC’s lightweight division wasn’t enough, BJ Penn can now add another title to his impressive resume: Beer poster-boy. According to a new press release:

Two greatly respected Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) powers are combining forces to bring added excitement to the popular sport. The partnership between BJ “The Prodigy” Penn – his league’s current lightweight title holder – and Mickey’s Fine Malt Liquor promises action inside and outside the octagon.

“BJ Penn is a favorite among MMA fans, and Mickey’s is BJ’s beer of choice, so a partnership makes a lot of sense for both of us,” said Patrick Minogue, Mickey’s marketing manager. “From the website to packaging to personal appearances, we plan to bring this alliance to life and give Mickey’s drinkers more access to this top MMA fighter.”

Wait a minute — Mickey’s is a “greatly respected MMA power”? Mickey’s is BJ Penn’s beer of choice? Mickey’s is anybody’s beer of choice? Please, guys, one bombshell at a time.

Penn’s new sponsorship deal follows Tito Ortiz, who inked a deal with Mickey’s last month. At the time it seemed like a perfect fit, as Mickey’s had just been bounced out of the Octagon in favor of Bud Light, and Tito looked to be heading for the exits as well. Now that the Prodigy is taking their money, it appears that Mickey’s replacement by a more prominent brand doesn’t mean that they’ve been banned by the UFC altogether. Could other beers follow the fighter sponsorship model in the future? It would be great to see Marcus Davis proudly representing Guinness, Heath Herring named PBR’s official Drunk Texan Brawler, and Georges St. Pierre pretending to drink from unopened cans of Molson, Xenergy-style.

(Wandy’s triumph; courtesy of UFC.com)

(Penn outboxes Sherk; courtesy of Sherdog)

(Tito Ortiz comes within a ball-hair of submitting Lyoto Machida; courtesy of Las Vegas Sun)

(Michael Jackson takes in the fights; courtesy of TMZ)