Jose Aldo

As soon as the main event of UFC 194 was over, with that one-punch KO that earned Conor McGregor the undisputed featherweight title, the debate over a rematch between the new champion and Jose Aldo took over the internet.

Mainly from Aldo’s Brazilian fans, the rematch argument is that a 13s-fight is not enough to put a definitive end to a 10-year undefeated streak and a 5-year reign as the champion.

Aldo’s first words after loss, still in the octagon, were to ask for it: “I want a rematch to regain what is mine.”

Nevertheless, the first signs from the UFC point to Aldo’s request not being the direction they want to go.

Joe Rogan said in the closing comments of last Saturday’s broadcast that he “does not see a clear reason for an immediate rematch”.

Dana White, in a interview with Fox Sports, said: “If McGregor wants to go up to 155, I’ll give him a title fight against the winner of Rafael Dos Anjos vs. Donald Cerrone.”

The UFC boss made the announcement after mentioning that McGregor’s head coach told him that the Irish fighter may never make it to 145lb again.

On the other hand, Conor himself said it’d be sweet to fight Frankie Edgar in his first title defense in front of 80,000 fans at Croke Park, in Ireland.

So, it seems the UFC and McGregor are ready to move on and let Aldo work his way up to a possible future title shot.

Those who advocate for the rematch say there are huge precedents to Aldo’s case.

Former light-heavyweight champion Jon Jones joined the chorus when he tweeted on Dec. 13: “If Rousey is granted an immediate rematch I would expect the same treatment for Aldo. It only seems right.”

Ronda Rousey’s immediate rematch against Holly Holm after being outclassed on Nov.15 is one example.

Cain Velasquez getting his second rematch is the other one. The former heavyweight champion regained his belt lost to Junior dos Santos after only one fight against Antonio Big Foot and now is getting ready to try to win it again in a rematch against Fabricio Werdum.

This Monday, Brazilian TV Combate released a video interview with Aldo, where he once again makes his case for a rematch: “off course I want a rematch! I think I have that right. My career talks for itself.”

So what do you think? Should Aldo get an immediate rematch?

The Japanese fighter, Kazushi Sakuraba has shone in a bout against Renzo Gracie on August 27, 2000, in front of his home crowd. The wrestling idol applied his favorite technique and dislocated the Brazilian’s arm almost ten minutes into the second round in the main event of the luxurious Pride FC number 10. The card for this event still featured Ryan Gracie, Mark Kerr, Ken Shamrock, Vitor Belfort and Wanderlei Silva.

Fourteen years later, Renzo will have twenty minutes to avenge the defeat. The Gracie and his tormentor will meet again for a duel without the gi and no points at Metamoris 5, on November 22^nd.

The world of MMA and Jiu-Jitsu does not speak of anything else, so GRACIEMAG heard the analysis of some experts about the rematch of the year. Who wins, Renzo or Saku?

Fabio Gurgel, Alliance world champion: “I always believe in Renzo’s Jiu-Jitsu, but the result of a fight like this is very difficult to predict. For me this is the best match ever on Metamoris. And, it is this element of unpredictability that makes this fight so good. ”

Marcio Feitosa, triple world champion by Gracie Barra: “Great match! This time Renzo will squeeze Sakuraba’s neck in a good old guillotine. ”

Mauro Ellovitch, MMA commentator GRACIEMAG: “The Metamoris is surpassing. The two fighters have stopped for a while, but I especially love these matches between MMA veterans. I prefer Renzo in No-Gi Jiu-Jitsu, but I’d bet in a draw since points do not count. ”

Koichi Kawasaki, former Pride matchmaker: “Renzo defeats Sakuraba this time, 100% sure. I do not know exactly how he is going to finish, but it doesn’t matter. ”

Metamoris 5

November 22, 2015

Long Beach Convention Center, Long Beach, CA

Renzo Gracie vs Kazushi Sakuraba

JT Torres Rory MacDonald x

Rafael Lovato Jr x Yuri Simões

Vinny Magalhaes x Kevin Casey

Zak Maxwell x Garry Tonon

Secret match

Georges St-Pierre is set to defend his UFC welterweight title on Nov. 16, but it was back at UFC 65 that he started his reign of terror over the 170-pound division. Check out this video of GSP taking out Matt Hughes to earn his title for the first time.

Anderson Silva front kicks Vitor Belfort at UFC 126. Photo by James Law.

UFC middleweight Vitor Belfort only wants title shots or fights with opponents near the top of his division. But if Anderson Silva beats Chris Weidman to regain the UFC 185-pound title at UFC 168, he may have to settle for the latter.

Silva recently told Combate that he doesn’t believe a fight with Belfort will happen and whatever business the two fighters had in the past is already taken care of. There is no need, according to the former title holder, for a rematch and he prefers not to face his fellow countryman.

“What was supposed to be done was done,” Silva said. “Of course, we are employees of the UFC, but I don’t like to fight against Brazilians.”

Silva and Belfort first faced each other in 2011 at UFC 126, a fight in which then-champion Silva front kicked the challenger on the way to a knockout win. Belfort has since won four consecutive fights at middleweight, with an additional failed attempt at the light heavyweight crown against Jon Jones.

UFC President Dana White and Zuffa Chariman Lorenzo Fertitta have offered a number of fights to Belfort, including a bout with former 205-pound champ Lyoto Machida, but the fighter has turned down every match-up the executives have proposed.

Belfort has recently written on Twitter that he now desires a fight with Chael Sonnen, a tweet that was prompted after the American fighter called out Wanderlei Silva during his recent post-fight interview at UFC Fight Night 26. White and UFC officials are yet to indicate whether or not they are interested in a Belfort-Sonnen bout for a future card.

While Belfort continues to lobby for fights that make sense to him, others aren’t so keen on the idea of fighting him. Time will tell who gets their way in the matchmaking chaos.

“I don’t think so,” Silva said when asked if he’ll fight Belfort again. “I don’t see that possibility.”

Bellator MMA and Eddie Alvarez have settled their legal dispute, and Alvarez will rematch Mike Chandler for the promotions 155-pound title on the Nov. 2 pay-per-view, promotion officials announced on Tuesday.

Chandler vs. Alvarez II will be the co-main event on the card, which takes place at the Long Beach Convention and Entertainment Center in Long Beach Calif.

“Without question, Chandler vs. Alvarez was the best MMA fight I’ve ever seen,” Bellator CEO Bjorn Rebney said in a statement. “I’m excited to be able to deliver this rematch to MMA fans.  It’s been a long time coming and we’ve had to jump over a lot of hurdles to get this done, but from the day we announced our PPV I promised fans that this card was going to be the deepest we’ve ever done, and we are well on our way. This is just the start.”

Alvarez and Bellator were in the midst of a legal battle when the fighter fulfilled his Bellator contract then was offered a free-agent deal from Zuffa, the company that owns the UFC, to compete in the Octagon. Bellator had matching rights and claimed they matched the offer given by Zuffa brass, which reportedly included a percentage of pay-per-view earnings.

The addition of Alvarez to the Nov. 2 Bellator card marks the end of a long battle, which has kept the fighter out of action since October 2012. Alvarez has since done numerous interviews in which he claimed financial struggles from not being able to fight.

With the Chandler rematch now being official, Avalrez will get his payday.

“I still lose sleep over my loss to Chandler, and I want it off my record,” Alvarez said. “This was a long process, but at the end of the day I’m back with Bellator and I’m happy to get back in the cage. I really believe everything happens for a reason, and at the end of the day my family and I are happy, and I’m ready to get my belt back on Nov. 2.”

The Bellator pay-per-view card is headlined by a light heavyweight match between veterans Quinton “Rampage” Jackson and Tito Ortiz.

Photo via Getty Images

Ladies and gentleman, we have a rematch.

UFC President Dana White confirmed yesterday, Saturday, on ESPN’s SportsCenter that UFC middleweight champion Chris Weidman and former title holder Anderson Silva will have a rematch of their UFC 162 fight.

“UFC 168: Silva vs. Weidman II” will take place on Dec. 28 at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, White said.

“I don’t know that there’s been more hype in UFC history after a fight,” he said. “Everybody’s been wondering if there’s going to be a rematch. I’ve been working on it since Thursday.

“Both guys signed their bout agreements. Anderson Silva is fired up, motivated and wants his belt back.”

Silva lost the title, as well as his first fight in the Octagon, in the July 6 bout against Weidman. Before and after the fight, Silva declared that he didn’t want a rematch, admitting that he was tired from the years of having the title and defending his winning streak.

Now, however, Silva appears motivated and ready to contend for the belt that he owned for almost seven years.

“I back. Trust me, I back,” Silva told ESPN.

With the addition of what is considered to be one of the biggest rematches in UFC history, UFC 168’s former main event, Ronda Rousey vs. Miesha Tate, will slide to the co-main event spot.

Rousey, the UFC women’s bantamweight champion, will face Tate for a second time. The first encounter between the two took place when the fighters were part of the Strikeforce promotion. In the fight, Rousey finished Tate with a first-round armbar – the only way Rousey has finished all of her fights.

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Anderson Silva doesn’t want a rematch with Chris Weidman. Photo via Getty Images.

Anderson Silva and UFC President Dana White are on opposite sides of the fence about an immediate rematch.

Despite White saying that Silva will have a shot at getting the middleweight title back, the now-ex-champ said before the fight that he’s not interested.

“Naw, man. I’m tired, bro,” Silva said in a pre-fight interview leading into Saturday night’s loss. “No rematch, no rematch.”

But the UFC boss said with certainty after the event that “The Spider” will want to get back in the Octagon for another run at the gold.

“Everybody knows … he’s going to want the rematch,” White explained.

Going into UFC 162, a number of fighters and experts in the media chose Weidman to be the one to dethrone Silva from the top of the middleweight division. Turns out they were right, as Weidman landed a left hook in the second round of the main event at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas. The punch dropped Silva, etching his first loss inside the Octagon since making his debut with the promotion in 2006.

Following the fights, White told reporters that he thinks there may be some truth to Silva experiencing relief from losing the fight, but added that there’s another side where the fighter doesn’t want to lose.

White also dismissed the notion that Silva intentionally lost the fight, calling the idea “stupid.”

“This one’s going to sink in (for Silva) a couple days after,” the UFC executive said. “The first thing I hear when I come in is somebody thinks it’s a fix. All this stupid sh*t that people are going to say will start to drive somebody crazy.

“He played around and ended up getting caught.”

White discussed the possibility of having the rematch take place on Super Bowl weekend in February of 2014. The venue, White said, would be the Prudential Center in Newark, N.J., which is located just miles away from Weidman’s home in Long Island, N.Y.

With the new champion having beaten Silva by technical knockout, the question now is if the rematch would go the same way. White doesn’t think it will.

If and when Weidman and Silva have another date in the Octagon, all things are expected go differently than they did last Saturday, according to White.

“I think it’ll be a totally different fight,” he said. “Silva-Weidman 2 is [expletive] massive. It’s huge. It’s not just huge here; it’s huge all over the world.”

Mirko “Cro Cop” Filipovic and Alexander Emelianenko will face each other in a rematch later this year, according to a reports on Monday morning.

The Cro Cop-Emelianenko bout will take place in Moscow in the “Legend” promotion, according to the report. While an exact date is unknown at this time, reports state October and November to be the target months for the affair.

“I think that providing a rematch to one of the legends of this sport and especially in his homeland … gives Cro Cop and our entire team that additional challenge and maximum motivation,” Filpovic’s manager, Orsat Zovko, told FightSite.hr.

Filipovic (28-10-2, 1 N.C.) announced his retirement from mixed martial arts competition in October 2011, following a TKO loss to Roy Nelson at UFC 137. However, the former Pride Grand Prix champion went on to fight one more time, beating Shinichi Suzukawa by armbar in December 2012. The famed striker also went on to win his first K-1 Grand Prix kickboxing title last March.

“After winning the K-1 WGP title, we had offers coming from all over the world, from Brazilians who were one of the most determined, to Japan, U.S. and Europe,” Zovko said.

Emelianenko (22-6), brother to former Pride heavyweight champion Fedor Emelianenko, last competed in a one-sided win over Bob Sapp last month. The Russian heavyweight is 5-1 over his last six matches.

The first bout between the two fighters ended with Cro Cop earning the win by knockout.

With a little over a week for the UFC in Fortaleza, Fabricio Werdum and Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira are already in the final stages of training for their main event on the 8th of June. However, these two beasts have met on the mat before.

The duel took place at the now-defunct Pride in July 2006 at the Saitama Super Arena in Japan. The event, which featured other famous names like Mirko Cro Cop, Wanderlei Silva, Mark Hunt, Vitor Belfort, Alistair Overeem and Rogerio Nogueira, was not divided into rounds of three or five minutes. Instead, an initial 10-minute followed by two five-minute rounds defined the winner. Heat the turbines for the next event of the UFC with the video above and check out the card that closes the “TUF Brazil 2.”

TUF Brazil Finale 2
Gym Paulo Sarasate, Fortaleza, Ceará
June 8, 2013

Rodrigo Minotauro vs Fabricio Werdum
End of “The Ultimate Fighter Brazil 2”
Thiago Silva vs. Rafael Feijao
Eddie Mendez vs. Daniel Sarafian
Erick Silva vs. Jason High
Rony Jason vs Mike Wilkinson

Preliminary card

Raphael Assuncao vs. Vaughan Lee
Ronny Markes vs. Derek Brunson
Godofredo Pepey vs. Felipe Arantes
Marajó Ildemar vs. Buscapé Leandro
Rodrigo Damm vs. Mizuto Hirota
Caio Magalhaes vs. Karlos Vemola
Antonio Braga Neto vs. Anthony Smith

Cain Velasquez and Antonio Silva will meet again. This time for the heavyweight title. Photo by Josh Hedges/Zuffa LLC/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images.

UFC heavyweight champion Cain Velasquez will defend his title in a rematch with Antonio “Bigfoot” Silva at UFC 160 in Las Vegas, according to a report on Tuesday evening.

The bout will headline the card at the MGM Grand Garden Arena on May 25.

Velasquez (11-1) regained the UFC heavyweight title in his last outing by defeating the man that took it from him, Junior dos Santos, at UFC 155 last December. The bout was mostly a one-side affair with Velasquez pounding away at dos Santos, giving the Brazilian heavyweight the first loss of his career.

Silva (18-4) shocked the MMA world by knocking out heavy favorite Alistair Overeem in his last bout at UFC 156 this past Feb. 2. Bigfoot opened up the third round by letting go a number of strikes that stunned Overeem and put an end to the Dutch striker’s hopes of facing Velasquez with the win.

Velasquez beat Silva in their first meeting at UFC 146 in a fight where the then-former champ brutalized his counterpart on the way to a technical knockout in the first round.

In addition to the Velasquez-Silva title fight, Overeem and dos Santos will face each other on the same card, according to a report. The two were supposed to face each other when dos Santos was champion, but a failed drug test prior to the match-up suspended Overeem for nine months and scratched any plans the UFC had at the time to put on the fight.

News of the UFC 160 match-ups was announced on Fuel TV’s UFC Tonight show.

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Dana White steps between champion Anderson Silva and challenger Chael Sonnen at the July 3 presser. Photo: Josh Hedges/UFC.

At a pre-UFC 148 open training session in Las Vegas, middleweight title challenger Chael Sonnen sweat like a lion. When interviewed by Ariel Helwani of MMA Fighting shortly thereafter, though, Chael was back to his calm self. Too calm, as the reporter himself noted.

“I got a call from Renzo Gracie, and when you get a call from a Gracie, it’s kind of like getting a call from Randy Couture: You don’t share your opinion, you listen, and you hang up. And that’s it. … He wasn’t overly happy with me, but let’s leave it at that,” says Sonnen in the interview.

The challenger also addressed the moment the two looked about to throw down for real at the pre-event press conference on Tuesday. “To me he was trying to get disqualified to not have to fight on Saturday. It was very hard to keep a straight face when he was doing that…” said Sonnen, who has to shed around ten kilos (22 lbs) by weigh-ins today.

In the interview, Sonnen is also charmed to hear he had been spoken kindly of by Mike Tyson, despite previously targetting the former boxing world champion in his frequent diatribes.

Check out the complete interview to see what else Saturday’s headliner has to say:

“No, I don’t want to face him because I felt I won. I want to fight Lyoto because it’s for the title, and that is my dream. What I want most is that belt and, therefore, I want to fight Lyoto again.”

On the delay in setting a date for the bout – which only just happened now -, Shogun has no complaints. His greater concern is keeping in shape.

“I’m never going to worry about that. I leave the details of my fight and opponent in the hands of my manager. My only concern is training. But of course I want to fight Lyoto as soon as possible,” he said in finishing.