(Leben gets his cut checked out by forensics investigator Vince Masuka. Gif via IronForgesIron)

We knew something was up. After the first five minutes of his UFC 138 main event battle with Mark Munoz on Saturday, Chris Leben already looked like he was heading into the championship rounds — sucking deep breaths, his body drifting towards a Pudzianowski-esque shade of crimson. And according to a Fighters Only report, it wasn’t just trans-Atlantic jet lag or a post-Halloween candy hangover:

Chris Leben cut nearly 21 pounds in 24 hours to make weight for his fight with Mark Munoz, Fighters Only was told ahead of last night’s bout. The 31-year old middleweight had “a terrible weight cut” and was in such bad shape before the weigh ins that medical staff were keeping a very close eye on him.

(“Oh God, why did I chug that gallon of Pop Rocks and coke before the fight?” Photo courtesy of ESPN)

Heading into his highly anticipated face-off with Wanderlei Silva tomorrow night at UFC 132, Chris Leben was bound to hear the inevitable question about his last performance against Brian Stann: What went wrong? After all, Leben went into that match with the momentum of an impressive three-fight win streak, and wound up getting flattened within one round. Well, the explanation is simple, and it’s so perfectly Chris that all you can do is nod in sympathy. As he tells Ben Fowlkes:

“I ate a bunch of candy, dude. I’m not lying…I didn’t eat sugar for like two months. Then after I made weight I went and bought gummy bears and chocolate and ice cream, and I ate that. My body hadn’t had sugar, so I was backstage puking, sh—ing and puking when I was on-deck for that fight. That’s not a lie; that’s the truth. And Brian Stann fought an amazing fight, but hindsight’s 20/20. No gummy bears for me this fight.”

Hey, we’ve all been there before, right? I mean, certainly not in our adult lives, but as eight-year-olds on Halloween, yeah we could have totally related to that. Anyway, it’s a good thing that Leben is one of those guys who never, ever repeats his mistakes.

(We would have also accepted ‘extreme-constipation’. Photo courtesy of HeavyMMA.)

Breaking away from his usual “fat guy who can throw down” persona, Roy Nelson just looked like your garden-variety fat guy last weekend at UFC 130, wheezing through three rounds, too exhausted to do anything besides absorb blows from Frank Mir. Was it a sign that Roy should finally hook up with a nutritionist and get his BMI in order?

The obvious answer is yes, definitely. Just because you can drag around a barrel of adipose tissue around your midsection and still compete at the highest levels of MMA doesn’t make it a good idea. Nelson is literally weighing himself down in the Octagon, and putting himself at a profound competitive disadvantage; even most 205-pounders in the UFC outsize Nelson at this point. But according to a new report, there was another factor in play on Saturday that made a victory for Big Country even less likely:

There’s a very good chance that Tony Ferguson will be the next winner of The Ultimate Fighter. So it’s a shame that his primary legacy from the show — at least for the people who actually watched it — is the moment from this week’s episode when he attacked his own teammate Charlie Rader then needled Rader about having his son taken from him. It was particularly shocking because Ferguson hadn’t previously shown any signs of being a mean-spirited drunk. Now, he has to expect a small chorus of boos when he enters the Octagon at the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas next Saturday. In his guest blog for SBNation.com, Ferguson tried to explain the circumstances that transformed him from humble front-runner to TUF 13‘s biggest heel:

You first have to understand we started drinking not long after we had just got done fighting. We had also done the semi-final picks. I think part of me brought the fight home since my real fight with Ryan ended so fast. When you bring alcohol into the mix, it was just bad from there.

We all drank a lot. It started out with shots of Patron and moved to Jim Beam. Miller Lites were mixed in the entire time. We weren’t just drinking to relax. We were going hard core. Everyone was drinking, too, although maybe not as much as some of us.