(The time for talk is over…but we still bugged Chael for one last quote before he rematches Anderson)

Anderson Silva can deny it all he wants, but Chael P. Sonnen has gotten inside his head. After years of Sonnen antagonizing the middleweight champion, Silva has appeared to snap emotionally.

First, “The Spider” lashed out at the challenger with threats during a recent conference call promoting their UFC 148 rematch taking place Saturday night, and then on Friday he got in Sonnen’s face at the weigh ins in Las Vegas and hit him on the chin with a shoulder strike.

“Chael no respect nothing. Chael no respect [the] UFC, Chael no respect my country,” a fired up Silva told Joe Rogan moments after weighing in and striking Chael on stage. “Tomorrow, I go to fight.”

Sonnen appeared unmoved on stage after Silva’s surprise shoulder strike, leaving his hands up and standing stone-faced. We spoke with Sonnen a couple hours after the weigh in and asked him if he’d expected Silva to do something like that after all his trash talk, and if the shoulder bump had revved him up even more to fight his nemesis.

Sonnen had received an IV to help him rehydrate and begin recovering from his twenty pound water weight loss in just twenty four hours at that point and said he that he was done talking – But not without one last golden nugget of hype before going to war tomorrow…

(He owns at least one working bicep.  That’s a good sign, right?)

Let me be real, son.  Anderson Silva vs. Thales Leites is, on paper, the most one-sided UFC title fight since Georges St. Pierre vs. Matt Serra I.  And yes, we know how that one turned out, but there’s still no plausible reason to believe that the Thales Leites we’ve seen in the Octagon could beat even the uninterested Anderson Silva we saw against Patrick Cote…or is there?

In the interest of trying to make UFC 97’s main event seem a little more competitive than the oddsmakers think it is, here’s our best attempt at making the very difficult case for Thales Leites.

1. Aside From His UFC Debut, He’s Never Lost an MMA Bout
Losing your Octagon debut is almost a rite of passage for young fighters, like getting screwed by a sponsor or doing something so cool it makes Joe Silva leap out of his chair.  Leites lost his first UFC bout via decision to the very credible Martin Kampmann in 2006.  Since then, dude’s been hanging nothing but W’s.  Okay, his win over Nate Marquardt was highly suspect, but his quick submission over Drew McFedries wasn’t. (Sidenote: how did he go from a win over Marquardt to a bout with McFedries, anyway?  Not exactly a step up in competition there.)