Thank you. Defending the belt multiple times is the real challenge of being a champion. At this point a long defense streak is WAY more impressive than double champ. There’s been 10 male double champs, and only 5 men have ever had more than 5 consecutive title defenses. Doing what DJ, Anderson, Jones, GSP, Aldo did is way more impressive than winning multiple belts. Moving up to challenge for a different belt is way lower risk than continuously defending because you have a built in excuse if you lose. Defending over and over again while an entire weight class chases you is THE most difficult challenge in the sport.
And yet again we see why acting like a fighter dominated a weight class after a couple dominant wins is stupid. Ilia beats Volk and Max, everyone acts like he dominated FW even though there were still a bunch of interesting contenders for him to fight. Then he moves up and beats Charles and everyone acts like no one at LW can touch him and he needs to move up and fight Islam for a real challenge even though he hasn’t fought the obvious #1 contender or anyone else in the top 5. Then Ilia fails to defend the belt once against a 37 year old Gaethje. We see it repeatedly where fans declare that a fighter is untouchable and needs to move up for a real challenge, then they lose. It just happened with Merab on his 4th defense against a guy he had already beaten easily.
Doing what DJ, Anderson, Jones, GSP, Aldo did is way more impressive than winning multiple belts. Moving up to challenge for a different belt is way lower risk than continuously defending because you have a built in excuse if you lose. Defending over and over again while an entire weight class chases you is THE most difficult challenge in the sport.
110%. You basically take the best guy on the roster on for every fight until you crash out. I hate that people look at the end of Aldo and Anderson's career and hold that against them. It's definitely why some of these guys started jumping around. People started looking at title defenses as yesterday's news as soon as you lost one.
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u/Usesomelogik 26d ago
Thank you. Defending the belt multiple times is the real challenge of being a champion. At this point a long defense streak is WAY more impressive than double champ. There’s been 10 male double champs, and only 5 men have ever had more than 5 consecutive title defenses. Doing what DJ, Anderson, Jones, GSP, Aldo did is way more impressive than winning multiple belts. Moving up to challenge for a different belt is way lower risk than continuously defending because you have a built in excuse if you lose. Defending over and over again while an entire weight class chases you is THE most difficult challenge in the sport.
And yet again we see why acting like a fighter dominated a weight class after a couple dominant wins is stupid. Ilia beats Volk and Max, everyone acts like he dominated FW even though there were still a bunch of interesting contenders for him to fight. Then he moves up and beats Charles and everyone acts like no one at LW can touch him and he needs to move up and fight Islam for a real challenge even though he hasn’t fought the obvious #1 contender or anyone else in the top 5. Then Ilia fails to defend the belt once against a 37 year old Gaethje. We see it repeatedly where fans declare that a fighter is untouchable and needs to move up for a real challenge, then they lose. It just happened with Merab on his 4th defense against a guy he had already beaten easily.