(“I’ve been at the bottom. When I lost three in a row I thought I was cut for sure. I have no fear of that. I can look at it and say there’s worse things in life that could happen.” / Photo via Getty)

By Shawn Smith

A real-life Rocky if there ever was one, Matt Brown is not your typical MMA fighter. He didn’t wrestle in college and he doesn’t have the polished good looks that will land him on posters. He turned to mixed martial arts as a way out of a lifestyle that was killing him, and it has been anything but a smooth ride to the top of the UFC welterweight division. Three straight losses in 2010 had many, including him, questioning whether or not he was a UFC-caliber fighter.

Now with six straight wins in the UFC, Brown will get the most challenging opponent of his career. On December 14th at UFC on FOX 9, he’ll take on former title contender Carlos Condit in what is sure to be an explosive bout. We recently spoke to Matt to get his thoughts on the fight that could launch him into title contention, how MMA saved his life, his experience on TUF, what he thought about Georges St. Pierre‘s controversial win over Johny Hendricks, and so much more. Enjoy.

CAGEPOTATO.COM: What was it about mixed martial arts that drew you to the sport?

MATT BROWN: The first time I saw it was Tank Abbott way back in one of the first UFC events. That got me kind of interested. The first one that really got me was Sakuraba vs. Royce Gracie in Pride. I thought “man, this is freaking amazing.” It was something I wanted to be a part of in some way.

The draw is mainly the intensity and the authenticity of the sport. The UFC says it best: It’s as real as it gets. That’s a rare thing in life and in sport.

I find it funny you say Sakuraba and Gracie because they were so grappling-based and you’re more of a knockout guy.

At that time with the knowledge I had of MMA, Royce was unstoppable. He was the epitome of a UFC fighter. He was this mysterious guy who came in and did all these things that no one had seen before. It was amazing. The fact that [his fight against Sakuraba] lasted an hour and a half, it was like watching a movie. I don’t know what it was about that fight, but even to this day it’s a pretty amazing fight to me.

(UFC lightweight Pat Healy, daring us to make a HHNNNGGGG reference in two consecutive posts. Nice try, buddy. / Photo via Getty)

UFC on Fox 9 is shaping up to be a straight-up excellent card. The latest solid matchup was just announced as Pat Healy and Jamie Varner square up opposite one another in a lightweight contest. Both men are coming off losses but, on paper, this looks like yet another exciting and evenly-matched bout for the December 14th event in Sacramento.

Varner lost his last outing against Gleison Tibau via split decision. Before that, Varner bested Melvin Guillard and before that, he lost a thrilling bout to Joe Lauzon via submission, which won Fight of the Night honors at UFC on FOX 4. Healy recently returned after a marijuana-metabolite suspension that turned his incredible UFC-debut win over Jim Miller into a no-contest, and recently lost a decision to fellow Strikeforce vet Khabib Nurmagomedov at UFC 165. (Yes, I had to copy and paste Khabib’s name. No, I will never remember how to spell or pronounce it.)

Joining Healy and Varner on the December 14th UFC on Fox 9 card are new lightweight champion Anthony Pettis defending his strap against Josh Thomson, and Carlos Condit and Matt Brown trying to tear each other’s hearts out in a welterweight contender showdown. Also, Court McGee and Kelvin Gastelum do battle in one of those, TUF vs. TUF type contests. Your predictions, please.

- Elias Cepeda

(You can’t really get a good look at Carlos’s face in this picture, but we imagine it looks something like this. / Photo via Getty)

Yet another potential slugfest has been added to the UFC on FOX 9 lineup. FOX Sports breaks the news that former UFC interim welterweight champion Carlos Condit will face Gritty Son-of-a-Bitch™ Matt Brown at the December 14th event.

Condit’s most recent appearance ended in a savage fourth-round TKO of Martin Kampmann, which snapped a two-fight losing streak. Meanwhile, Brown is on a six-fight win streak in the 170-pound division, with five of those wins ending by stoppage within the first two rounds.

While some Natural Born Killer fans might consider this a step backwards for Condit — who is currently listed as the #2 welterweight contender on the UFC’s official media rankings, compared to Brown all the way down at #10 — keep in mind that Condit specifically asked for this fight. “[Brown has] been on a tear, and it’d be really exciting for the fans,” Condit explained to MMAJunkie earlier this month. And so, Condit gets the fan-friendly matchup he wants, and Brown gets what he’s long been pleading for — a chance to prove that he’s an elite-level welterweight. Will he rise to the challenge?

UFC on FOX 9 will also feature the Anthony Pettis vs. Josh Thompson lightweight title fight, as well as Urijah Faber vs. Michael McDonald, Chad Mendes vs. Nik Lentz, Joe Lauzon vs. Mac Danzig, and Scott Jorgensen vs. Ian McCall. Sacramento, you really don’t deserve this much awesomeness.

(Can Matt Brown keep rolling through the division’s elite? / Photo via Getty)

By Elias Cepeda

Since the beginning of 2012, UFC welterweight Matt Brown has won six consecutive fights, all but one by KO/TKO within the first two rounds. His most recent was a startlingly fast and violent knockout of the previously red-hot Mike Pyle in under thirty seconds this past Saturday at UFC Fight Night 26.

All of a sudden, Brown is more than a tough and exciting fighter — he’s the owner of the most impressive win streak in the division outside of Georges St. Pierre and Johny Hendricks, who meet one another with GSP’s title on the line in November.

Brown has been calling out the champion and, well, now it makes sense. CagePotato spoke with the contender Sunday while he celebrated with family far away from the lights that shone on him kindly in Boston during his latest victory.

“It’s weird, man,” Brown muses while sitting with kids playing and shouting around him. “Obviously, I’m real happy with the result but I do feel a little unfulfilled. It wasn’t the type of fight I prepared for at all. But you take what you can get, right?”

(Photo courtesy of Josh Hedges via Getty Images.)

By George Shunick

On paper, UFC Fight Night 26 – or UFC on Fox Sports 1 1, or UFC Fight Night: Sonnen vs. Shogun, or whatever else people were calling this card – looked to be one of the strongest of the year. Usually those cards tend to be solid, but still fall a little short of the hype. This wasn’t one of those cards. All but one or two fights delivered in some form, often with jarring, violent finishes. It was all the UFC could have hoped for to cap off its run on Fox Sports’ new network.

Let’s start at the top; Chael Sonnen managed to control Mauricio “Shogun” Rua for the majority of the first round before shocking everyone by finishing Shogun with a guillotine choke. For Sonnen, this was a big win; it legitimizes his jump to 205, and he managed to submit an opponent with very high level submission grappling ability. It also netted him an extra $50,000 for one of the UFC’s Submission of the Night bonuses. Now everyone from Lyoto Machida to Vitor Belfort is chomping at the bit to get a shot at him. He’ll probably move on to fight either one of them, or Wanderlei Silva in a gimme matchup. As for Shogun, he was eulogized elsewhere before the fight. The hard truth is he hasn’t been the fighter he was since his third knee surgery after the second Machida fight, and getting hammered by Jon Jones and Dan Henderson probably didn’t help matters. Getting finished by Sonnen in the first round is evidence of that. It’s not quite time to hang up the gloves, but that day is drawing ever nearer for the 31 year-old.

On a slightly more enjoyable note was the shocking ending to the Travis Browne-Alistair Overeem co-main event. Overeem held the edge in power and technique, and it showed from the beginning. Overeem hammered Browne with shots from all angles, but particularly knees to the midsection. Browne was dropped a number of times but was never out of it, always maintaining an intelligent, if not necessarily effective, defense. But Overeem, as he is wont to do, began to tire. As he plodded forward, Browne unleashed a front kick that, while lacking the snap found in Anderson Silva’s or Lyoto Machida’s, was still sufficient to drop Ubereem. Browne followed with hammerfists and Mario Yamasaki stepped in. It was slightly premature, though Overeem had no complaints.

(Personally, I’d stay away from any mortgage service that advertises on Chael Sonnen’s butt-cheeks, but hey, that’s just me. / Photo via MMAFighting.com)

The UFC is going all-in for their big debut on FOX Sports 1. Tonight’s UFC Fight Night 26 main card broadcast features a former UFC light-heavyweight champion (Mauricio “Shogun” Rua), a three-time UFC title challenger (Chael Sonnen), a former Strikeforce/DREAM/K-1 champion (Alistair Overeem), a former WEC champ (Urijah Faber), one of the two most bonus-decorated fighters in UFC history (Joe Lauzon), the man responsible for ending the Griggs Era (Travis Browne), an American hero who pre-emptively shattered a terrorist’s nose (John Howard), the owner of the greatest knockout in TUF history (Uriah Hall), and that gritty son of a bitch Matt Brown. If only all UFC card were this stacked and this free.

Handling the main card play-by-play for the UFC’s return to Boston is our man Oliver Chan (aka “O Chan”), who will be hand-delivering “UFC Fight Night: Shogun vs. Sonnen” live results after the jump beginning at 8 p.m. ET / 5 p.m. PT. Refresh the page every few minutes for all the latest, and keep the conversation poppin’ in the comments section. Thanks for being here.

Featuring a lot of dudes with incredibly similar names, the weigh-ins for tomorrow’s UFC Fight Night: Shogun vs. Sonnen are going down from the TD Garden like five minutes ago, but luckily, CagePotato tech specialist George Maharis has hijacked the weigh-in stream and will now be broadcasting it exclusively through us, so get in here to check out all the results.

Will Chael Sonnen enlighten us with some more of his avant-garde poetic stylings? Will Arianny once again fall under Alistair Overeem’s spell? All this plus fighting the frizzies at 4 p.m. EST.

(Poster via Nixsons.com)

With a UFC event scheduled for this weekend that’s actually worth watching, it’s time for another installment of Ben vs. Jared, in which CagePotato’s founding editor Ben Goldstein and long-suffering staff writer Jared Jones go cabeza-a-cabeza to discuss some of this card’s major themes. For example: Is Shogun vs. Sonnen the most pointless match on the UFC Fight Night 26 main card? Is it safe to board the Matt Brown hype train? Will Joe Lauzon make history again? And is it Yuri or Iuri? Prepare for serious business…

So, Shogun vs. Sonnen at light-heavyweight — what’s at stake here? Anything? Anything at all?

BG: I think Shogun’s career is at stake, for one thing. If he loses to a one-dimensional middleweight (no offense, Chael), it’ll drop his UFC win percentage below .500, and bump him out of the UFC light-heavyweight contender picture, maybe permanently. He’ll enter that twilight stage of his career where he’s just showing up for “fun fights,” still famous enough to headline smaller UFC events in Brazil, but no longer part of the overall conversation. Or, he can just retire and run a gas station like his brother. Neither scenario is ideal, but the one that doesn’t require him to sustain traumatic brain injuries seems a little healthier.

For Chael, this fight is more of a no-lose proposition, just like his previous light-heavyweight appearance against Jon Jones. A win against Shogun would be a career highlight, and a loss just means he goes back to middleweight where he belongs, for a battle against Wanderlei Silva that he’s already trying to hype up. Sonnen has already exited the title picture in two different weight-classes, but I don’t even think that matters to him much anymore. Whether he’s shouting behind a FOX Sports broadcast desk or cutting promos after a fight, the man’s just content to have a microphone.

JJ: Fuuuuuuck no. “Out of the light heavyweight picture?” Shogun has been out of the light-heavyweight picture since the current champion put him out of the light heavyweight picture at UFC 128, and I say that as a Shogun fan. The fact is, Shogun can’t stay healthy, he can’t put a win streak together, and his BADBOY tights are getting more constrictive by the day. Training with Freddie Roach may prolong Rua’s career a year or two longer than he would have lasted without it, but Shogun has got to be about the oldest 31-year-old in MMA. He was just used as a stepping stone for Alexander Gustafsson (unless you honestly thought the UFC was setting him up to be slaughtered by Jones again), so as far as I’m concerned, he IS in the “fun fights” part of his career. Again, Shogun fan talking here.

(On the bright side, my Thiago Alves Fathead is still in pristine condition.)

The run of awful luck for UFC welterweight Thiago Alves shows no sign of ending. After snatching defeat from the jaws of victory against Martin Kampmann in March 2013, Alves was forced out of his UFC 149 return fight due to an injury. The Brazilian striker was scheduled to come back from his long layoff at UFC on FOX Sports 1: Shogun vs. Sonnen (August 17th, Boston) against gritty* 170-pounder Matt Brown, but has now pulled out of that fight because of a tear in his left biceps tendon. FOXSports1′s twitter account broke the news yesterday, adding that Brown will instead face Mike Pyle.

From an competitive standpoint, I’d call that a fair trade. Matt Brown is on a five-fight win streak with all but one of those wins coming by KO/TKO, and Pyle has been victorious in his last four (with three of those wins via KO/TKO), and is coming off a split-decision win against Rick Story at UFC 160. Both fighters have griped about not getting enough respect from fans and media despite their recent success, so this is a perfect opportunity to see who really deserves it.

Also off the “Shogun vs. Sonnen” card is featherweight Akira Corassani, who we thought was already doing hard time for purse-snatching or something. [Ed. note: Different guy.] Corassani was supposed to face former WEC champ Mike Brown** on the card, but is now out with an undisclosed training injury, and will be replaced by TUF 14 vet Steven Siler.*** Unfortunately, Corassani has developed a bad reputation for pulling out of fights, after not being able to fulfill previous bookings at the TUF 14 Finale, UFC on FUEL TV 2, and UFC 156.

Alves looks to prove that he’s still one of the welterweight division’s best fighters by ending Matt Brown’s career resurgence.

When Dana White originally announced that the UFC was returning to Boston to help launch Fox Sports 1, he promised us a great card but didn’t announce any fights. The main event is still anyone’s guess, but according to MMAWeekly.com, a welterweight scrap between the resurgent Matt Brown and Thiago Alves is in the works for the card.

This is a very interesting fight to book. Not only because it features two of the welterweight division’s best strikers, but also because their careers appear to be heading in total opposite directions.

Matt Brown heads into this fight riding one of the most unexpected career comebacks in the sport. Just two years ago, Brown was a 12-11 “Why hasn’t he been fired yet?” gatekeeper who appeared to lack anything resembling submission defense. Five fights later, Brown is now 17-11, with four of those fights ending by knockout. During this stretch he has notably exposed Stephen Thompson’s takedown defense, ended Mike Swick’s bid for 2012′s Comeback of the Year, and most recently deflated the hype of Strikeforce standout Jordan Mein at UFC on Fox 7. While many fans still question Brown’s submission defense, let’s be honest, this fight likely won’t provide any answers as to how far that has progressed.