This Friday night Josh Thomson will face off against Pablo Villaseca in the main event of Bellator 147. The bout will mark the second time Thomson has fought in the round cage of Bellator. It is also only the second time in his career that he has faced fighters with a highest quarterly ranking above 100 in back-to-back fights.

The former Strikeforce champion is a heavy favorite against Villaseca. Thomson’s Chilean opponent is 10-1 as a professional, but his highest quarterly ranking for Fight Matrix is 266. Thomson’s previous opponent in Bellator, Mike Bronzoulis, has a highest quarterly ranking of 103. Based on strength of schedule, this fight appears to be less about competition and more about setting up Thomson to face one of Bellator’s handful of high-caliber combatants with some semblance of a win streak to his credit.

Looking at Thomson’s overall MMA resume further highlights the gap between he and Villaseca but could prove useful in predicting how Thomson stacks up with the rest of the Bellator lightweight division. Prior to joining Bellator, he spent the majority of his career in Strikeforce and the UFC. While both promotions experienced success until the UFC purchased their competitor, there was always a significant difference in match making style. Is the difference a fundamental difference in philosophy or dictated by access to highly ranked fighters? The answer is most likely both.

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Nick Diaz uses marijuana.  He tells everyone that will listen to him that he uses marijuana.  He has a mild disability that marijuana helps him with.  Never mind that pills are probably better for him, and who knows which is best for getting hit in the head. California and Nevada have very liberal medical marijuana use laws. The UFC formerly used the expensive test that was ungodly accurate. Under the former test Diaz could have easily passed the test pre-fight, then flunked the test post-fight. Heavy marijuana users tend to store marijuana metabolites in their fat cells, and sweat them back out under stressful situations.  He claimed that he stopped using marijuana eight days before his fight.  His score was so low that detection should have made someone´s momma proud.  That is what got Diaz a one year suspension. After the UFC got wind of the facts, [from yours truly] they started using the cheaper, less accurate test.  For some reason Diaz was tested three times for a later fight. This created conflicting evidence. Big surprise.

Marijuana metabolites have a half-life. The amount of metabolites in the blood diminishes on an exponential scale. That means that it goes away really fast. Again, Diaz had low scores.  Diaz was his usual disrespectful self.  As is also usual, men in a position to make discretionary decisions look for a way to abuse that power.  So after collecting conflicting evidence, the Nevada Athletic Commission suspends Nick Diaz for five years.  Both times he opted to hire in-your-face lawyers to advocate for him.  Both lawyers caused long delays when they should have asked for justice tempered with mercy.  Hotly contested cases have to be prepared for, and later appealed.  His license to fight has been suspended since his last fight, Jan 31 2015.

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We are looking for someone to help us with direct marketing – in other words, selling advertisement space on FightMatrix.com to sports apparel & supplements manufacturers, or any other company that may be interested in reaching thousands of MMA fans who visit our site daily.  This is a commission-based position: help us make money, and you will make some for yourself.  No experience necessary – just internet access and ambition.  If you think you have what it takes, email advertise@fightmatrix.com for more details.

We’re also always looking for volunteer bloggers – if you have an opinion on anything pertaining to MMA, boxing, or any other combat sports or martial arts, you can make it heard here.  We’re in no position to pay for content, but this could be a great opportunity to get your name out there if you’re looking for a career in sports writing.  Dallas Winston, a highly respected contributor to sites like Bloody Elbow and Cage Potato, got his start as a guest blogger for Fight Matrix.  Do you want to be the next Dallas Winston?  If so, please email the address above or just drop us a note in our forum!

It’s always taken for granted that the heavier fighters are the more dangerous fighters.  Every champion is the best in his or her division, he or she may be the best pound for pound fighter in the world, but only one fighter is “The Baddest Fighter on the Planet”, and that’s the Heavyweight champion. He is the only fighter who would probably beat everybody else if there were no weight limits, and that stands to reason.   We implemented the weight system because we know size matters.

For some reason this does not apply to Ronda Rousey. She is considered a lot of times as the most dangerous woman fighter in the world, who supposedly can beat 50% of men fighters and beat Floyd Mayweather in an MMA fight. While all this time there is a whole division of women fighters who are heavier than her, which nobody says any of these things about.  We don’t really know how Rousey would fare against those women since she never fought any of them or at that weight – yet she is the one talked about as the most formidable woman fighter.

This situation is even more ridiculous considering that this heavier division has its own undefeated undisputed champion who smashes everyone she is facing and in fact has been doing so for a very long time, since before Rousey has even started MMA. Cristiane Justino has been considered the undisputed woman champion for a long time before Ronda Rousey got to be, and rightfully so. Ronda Rousey has taken her spot because she is American, more beautiful, more marketable and, most importantly, fights in the UFC.

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Apart from the huge deal surrounding the failed drug tests, there’s another, much smaller issue in UFC 183, the weight missing by two of the fighters, and quite big names at that, Kelvin Gastelum and John Lineker.

For a long time I’ve wondered why fighters are fighting at a lower weight than the one that they walk around with, and how did it come to be.

The answer to the first question, of course, is that everybody has better chances when fighting smaller guys, and so, everybody tries to pass as small as they can themselves. The reason they can do this is because they have 24 hours before the fight starts to rehydrate and recuperate from the weakened state they are in at the time of the weigh ins.

I don’t know why fighters are weighed in more than 24 hours before the fight, though. I guess that in the beginning (of Boxing) it had something to do with the option of finding a replacement for the fighter or for canceling the show before the crowd got there.  But nowadays neither of these is the case.  Fights are still made even if one or both fighters do miss weight.

So why is it still going on? Is it a health issue? These days, fighters lose so much weight for fights that their body is very weak at the time of the weigh ins.  If they would try to fight at this weakened state it would probably prove to be very dangerous for them.  Looking at it this way, it might make sense not to let them fight right after a weigh in, when they are particularly weak.

But I don’t believe that this is right way of looking at it.  Fighters lose all this weight and fight at weight classes smaller than their regular weight because they know they have those 24 hours to recuperate. The situation now is the dangerous one, since fighters are dehydrating themselves to extreme levels, sometimes to the point where their bodies just shut down.  We see it time and time again, and there is no reason to think we’ll ever stop seeing that.  Fighters will always try to fight in as small a weight class as possible and will always continue to hurt themselves in the process of trying to make that weight, counting on the 24 hour period after the weigh in for recuperation.

If, on the other hand, weigh ins would be held minutes (yes, minutes) before a fight, so fighters would have no time to recuperate from a weight loss, fighters would know that they can’t fight at a weight class lighter than their natural weight since if they do they will be weak during the fight, which is the most important time to be as strong as possible. fighters would, then, try to keep the weight pretty even, at the weight they would fight in, throughout the entire training camp because they wouldn’t want to need to lose almost any weight right before the fight which would make them weak.

This way fighters would fight at a weight much closer to their walk-around weight and there would, practically, be no health dangers surrounding the weight cut, and, of course much less weight misses.

I thought I’d take the latest drug test failures as an excuse for taking a foray into the subjective side of MMA mixed with some opinion and philosophy, something we don’t commonly do here.

When I think of PEDs in sports, the first thing that comes to mind (chronologically) is a group gathering I had with some friends circa-2001.  Realize, this was before “the cream” and “the clear”, before BALCO made the headlines and before Lance Armstrong taught us that cycling is a “dirty” sport.  At this point, we had just gotten past the discovery of those pills with the really long name that Mark McGwire had in his locker.  As we watched whatever sport we were watching, I turn to the room and say something to the effect of: “I bet most of these guys are juicing.”  After saying this, I almost got laughed out of the room.  OK, it wasn’t that bad, it was more like, “Yeah right, you just wish you were that big.”

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Sometimes fights are stopped too early and sometimes too late. In a perfect world, of course, all fights would have been stopped exactly on time.  But realistically judges usually have to decide (in a split second) between stopping the fight or letting it continue when the fighter seem to be really hurt but might still be able to continue.

The upside of stopping the fight at that point is that of the protecting the safety of the fighters, while the down side is that of stopping a potentially intriguing and important fight, robbing the fans of it’s entertainment value and maybe changing the rightful outcome of the fight, thus disrupting the whole true rankings and future fight schedule.

When should a judge, then, err on the side of caution and should he let the fight continue to a more definitive outcome?

The answer, in my opinion, primarily depends on the significance of the fight.

Yes, we all think that all fights should be judged exactly the same, like we think all fighters should be treated the same. But this is not the reality. Top fighters earn differently and get different treatment from promoters and athletic commissions, and main events get 5 rounds even when they are not title fights. The point is that top fights are much more important than all other fights. These are the fights that the fans care about the most by far, these are the fights that are most important for the sport and these are the fights that are most important for the fighters.

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