Next Saturday, UFC 146 in Las Vegas will be headlined by a heavyweight title fight between Junior dos Santos and challenger Frank Mir. That's fine. That's an okay fight. Best case scenario, dos Santos will wreck shop. Worst case scenario, Mir will get motivated and make it an exciting fight. The real disappointment here is that UFC viewers were robbed of a genuine superfight that they wanted to see and we were given this matchup as a consolation prize.
The massive Alistair Overeem was popped for failing a drug test, which everyone saw coming a mile away but we were all sort of hoping it would shake out after the dos Santos fight, rather than before (or at least, we were hoping he was being smarter about his regimen than he actually was, beyond the "eyeball test" -- which he failed instantly). Overeem's devastation of Brock Lesnar is still fresh in all our minds, liver-kicking the former champ's decimated colon straight into retirement. We all wanted to see Overeem try for the title. Sure, we were all hoping he'd come up short, but it was a fight everyone wanted to see.
No one has wanted to see Mir since a right hand from Lesnar sent him tumbling backwards, ass-over-teakettle. That's not a knock on Mir, who was once great. It's just that he's not a draw any longer. You can't fault UFC for not panicking and hot-shotting Cain Velasquez back into a rematch. That has to be a much slower build. This is one of the few options the promotion had and they almost certainly did the right thing here.
It's just not what we wanted.
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