MMA Fighting - The MMA Hour with Luke Thomas - Episode 441

Episode Date: July 9, 2018

The Mixed Martial Arts Hour returns with a recap of the big week with UFC 226 and TUF 27 Finale, and so much more. Below is the rundown of Monday's show: 0:00 -- Show open with a look back at the huge week with TUF 27 Finale, UFC 226 and more. 38:20 -- Alexander Gustafsson joins us to discuss his upcoming bout at UFC 227, plus his thoughts on Daniel Cormier's win and comments. 57:20 -- The Monday Morning Analyst with Dominick Cruz recapping UFC 226 and looking ahead to UFC 227's bantamweight title fight. 1:22:49 -- The Sound Off featuring your calls, tweets and more on the latest in MMA. 2:00:50 -- The new champ champ Daniel Cormier stops by to discuss his historic achievement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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How's this? Oh, yeah. Way better. Save on insurance by switching to Bel Air Direct and use the money to fix your car. Bel Air Direct, insurance, simplified. Conditions apply. It's the mixed martial arts hour. It is Monday, July 9, 2018, and Caesar is home. Welcome, everyone.

My name is Luke Thomas, and this is the MMA Hour here on. MMAfighting.com. Thank you so much for joining me. I greatly appreciate it. Well, we have quite the show for you, ladies and gents. Yes, we do. This will not only be our first UFC champion on the show, at least under my iteration, Champchamp on the show. Daniel Cormier will be here. We're actually going to go a little bit long today to make room for him, but if you've got to make room for somebody, it's the champ champ. Dan, Cornier, 2 p.m. East Coast time. Working backwards, we'll have at 1 o'clock our Monday morning analyst segment, and to help us do that will be the man who helped call the fights on Saturday,

former Bantamweight champion himself, Daniel, excuse me, not Daniel, Dominic, Cruz will be here. And then at 1240, he's got a big fight coming up in August. Plus, I want to see what he has to say about Daniel Cormier, because he may fight him down the road. It could be, we'll see. Light heavyweight contender Alexander Gustafson

will be here. Plus, you will be my guest during the soundoff. We'll do that at 1.30, as we always do. We're actually going to have a little bit longer of a sound off today, because I'm actually really enjoying those and we keep making them short. You notice I only had three guests today. And we have three great guests.

Don't misunderstand me. There's nothing wrong with having a lot of guests. Ariel obviously had tremendous amount of success doing that. He still does. But we only have two hours. We've got to pare it down. And I like having guests, but I've been having too many. I mean, don't get me wrong.

I've enjoyed all the guests we've had on the show. But just to make sure that the show breathes the right way, we got to give space to the sound off. So we're going to do that today. We're going to have around 1.30, maybe even like 1, 20. So that should be a lot of fun. I'm told we have a lot of good calls. By the way, number to call, as always,

to leave your voicemail, your question, your bitch, your gripe, your smart-ass remark, 844-8-6-6-8. You can see that number there at the bottom of the screen. And, of course, your tweets as well. Hashtag the MMA hour. We always appreciate that, too. All right, so there we are.

It's a Monday. I have not even been home yet. I did not fly from Vegas to Washington, D.C. I flew from Vegas to New York City. I stayed in a hotel last night because I knew I had to be here on time. And I'm excited to do the show today. I'm excited for my job after this one. And I'm excited to go home.

I have not seen my dogs or my wife in quite some time. So that should be a little bit fun later. Real quickly, if I can, go to my man in the back, the frihole to my arroz. The one and only Danny Segura. QO. What's up, buddy? Come on, I'm going to say everything's fine. But most things are fine.

I haven't slept. No one cares about this. I understand. I'm just going to say it. I have not slept well since I went to Vegas. I just can't. Can you sleep in hotels? I cannot sleep in hotels.

I can sleep basically anywhere. Really? Yeah. How old are you again? 25. That's why. Give it 14 years of hard drinking and see what happens to your body.

It just won't react to the same. We'll talk then. Now, we got a bunch of great calls for the sound off, right? Yeah. Any of my favorite? Of course. And you'll go plenty of that.

Don't worry. Oh, the mouth breathers. Yeah. All right. We got a really good submission. In fact, it was so good I could barely sleep last night. Really? Yeah.

Creve me out. That should be good. We got good tweets as well, right? Yeah, pretty good. Now, we've talked about this before the show. We can't do it today, but I'm thinking about separating the tweets, having that at the beginning of the show when we get to these big media topics. And then maybe just leaving the sound office calls.

We'll talk about that more. Maybe we'll try it out next week because I'm loving the calls and the segment is so good. We're having to, like, cramp everything in. Maybe just make it all some calls. Yeah, I agree. More space for the mouth breathers is really what I'm saying. Hey, one note before we get to the big topics today, I got to say thanks to everybody who came out in Las Vegas, dude.

My God, can I tell you when I got out there talking to the fans, all of them were saying, we're loving the new MMA hour. They all said that they hated your guts, but that they liked me. And I was okay with that. You know, I was totally fine. I'm teasing. No, no, I wanted to tell you that everybody, you know, when you took over the show, you took over for somebody as big as Ariel,

and then this is an institution, it's horrible. It's hard. It's hard. And you don't know what kind of backlash there's going to be because people are loyal in which you totally would understand. And man, they were so supportive in Las Vegas. They had so many nice things to say. So we can't take our foot off the gas. We have to keep going. But I want to tell you that I was overwhelmed by the amount of nice things. People took time. See, it's easy to say something negative to somebody. But when someone takes time out of their day to say something nice, that's rarer in my judgment. And they did it. Yeah, and even on Twitter, like our first show, we got so many replies from so many people, just saying how much they liked it, the new format, and just, you know, saying that they're going to be tuning into the show. So it was pretty good feedback. All right. Well, like I said, 1240, Alexander Gustafson, 1 o'clock Monday morning analyst with Dominic Cruz. We've got, oh, we got 120 for the sound off here.

Even better. Yeah, we'll make it a nice, long one. Perfect. And then 2 o'clock, Daniel Cormier. It's a great show. Great lineup. All right. So I will talk to you in just a bit, but let's kick off the show.

How about that? No more wasting time. Let's get to our big topic to start the day, my opening statement if I can. And look, there's a lot to say about Daniel Cormier's win. We're going to say it. I'm going to take your calls about it, I'm sure, and your tweets as well. But before we get to Daniel Cormier and before we get to Brock Lesnar and the various debates that I saw pop up on social media yesterday, I want to send one note to somebody out there that I think deserves to hear it. And it's Max Holloway. I know that we're all celebrating Daniel. Kormier's big win, and I'm going to do that on today's show. We're going to have them on the show later, and that's all great. And I have, of course, nice things to say about Steve A. Miochich and handling defeat like that. I mean, it was a total model of how to do it, and he'll be back, of course.

But I just want to make sure that when we start this show on Monday, we don't forget about what actually happened last week, where we had one of our rising stars in the sport, a decorated champion, still new in his championship reign, but nevertheless, beating the best featherweight ever, not once but twice, back to back. Going on live TV with either what was initially told to the public to be concussion-like symptoms, now there's some theories about other things it could be. But it just got me to thinking. It's like, first of all, let's just say it out loud.

Obviously, on behalf of everyone at MMA fighting and the show and the production staff, and really even Vox Media, the most important thing is Max Holloway. getting the rest and the recovery that he needs. And I certainly am expecting him to fight again, and I hope he fights again. I'm sure he will fight again. But what's not important as if he does, it is just his health. So I want to make that a known thing up front. But there's a bigger consideration here that I wanted to make, and I wanted to kick off the show with this. And I swear we're going to get to these goat debates and everything else, but please just give me the time and space to see it, and excuse me, to say it rather, I think we ask fighters to do too much.

That's sort of my big takeaway from all of this, to be quite honest with you. Now, I don't know exactly what the solutions are. To some extent, I don't know that there are, to be perfectly honest. There are some things, of course, I think we can mitigate, right? And we're well on our way, for example, to making big improvements in weight cutting. You could even argue that some of Max Holloway's woes have been a function of extreme weight cutting. Right? He has not fought in 2018, in part, because at 23, he couldn't even get out there.

and whether you want to say the commission is heavy-handed or not, they pulled the plug on it. Maybe that was the right call in the end, you know? So we are making progress on the weight-cutting side of things, but I don't know if that's enough to be perfectly honest with you, much, much more to go. And I frankly feel like we ask fighters to do too much media. Like, it's not that I feel bad asking people to come on the show

because I think it's a great platform for any guests that we have, and I have a lot of things that I want to ask people. But at the same time, like, you see during the course of a fight week, particularly these champions, how much media they have to do. Do you remember when Connor McGregor did not want to fly out to Vegas for the UFC initially the 200 presser? Because he was like, dude, you know how it's just backbreaking the amount that they have to do and how it interrupts their schedule and their flow and their ability to concentrate and

focus on their things and their home life and their family life. It sounds like it's nothing, but man, it adds up. It's death by a thousand cuts. And I'm part of the guilty party on this one. To be perfectly honest with you, like, absolutely part of the problem. Do I believe that in the totality of my work, I should pare down interviewing? Yeah, probably a little bit, probably a little bit. Like, we're going to have Cormier on today, but after that, he should go celebrate with his family and we'll hear from him down the road a little bit.

He needs time off and has earned it, obviously. So I do believe that there's a case to be made, that the openness with which the fighters treat us is both a blessing, but it's a curse on them, too, man. It's just too much. It's just too much. Then also, look, I'm sorry, folks. You could say what you one about how much of an outlier my position is, I believe I am changing the Overton window on on this, not single-handedly. I'm part of a larger movement, of course. And the Overton window is sort of this idea of like, what's the acceptable opinion you can air in public? And it used to be the idea that if you said anything bad about anti-doping, you were some sort of ostracized social pariah. Look, I do not know what the answer is with anti-doping. But I know that telling these guys to train the

way they do and find these innovative recovery methods in the way that they do and the volume of work that we ask them to do, then you add on top of that the weight cutting and you add on top of that various media responsibilities, you add on top of that the travel, the notion that you should take a cold shower and have asparagus and that should be fine for a sport with a 100% injury rate seems to me ludicrous. It seems to me totally insane to think that that's a good idea. Because the reality is this, if you're just training boxing, any of these combat sports, over time, they will grind on you, they will wear you down, they will beat you to a pulp, right? So you can't escape the grind no matter what. But if you're boxing, you don't really

have to worry about wrestling. You don't have to worry about submissions. You get to focus on a contained universe. If you're wrestling, it's hard nose. Again, you do it long enough, you'll need a hip replacement. But while you're doing it, you don't need to worry about necessarily submissions, unless you have a dirty opponent. You don't have to worry about getting punched in the face, kicked in the stomach. If you're doing jujitsu, that can grind you to a pulp too,

but in the interim, you don't have to worry about being slammed, for the most part. You don't have to worry about being punched. You don't have to worry about all manner of other things that other athletes have to worry about in MMA. In MMA, we had this totally unconstrained universe that puts insane demands on these guys.

How is it that guys and ladies this tough, this driven, this committed, are ritually unable to make it to the finish line, whether it's some kind of concussion-like symptom, and we'll see what ultimately the end, what really is wrong with Max, or has historically been wrong? Whether it's weight cutting, whether it's injury, whether it's something, how is it possible that there's this kind of turnover? Dude, something is broken. Something is clearly broken. Yes, you have injuries in other sports. It's not like this, man, unless it's football and you have this next man up league mentality. Of course, to our international viewers, I'm speaking about American football, there's this idea that if, you know, you're the right tackle and you get injured and you're the starting right tackle, that the next guy comes up and maybe he's not quite as good as you, but you just fill him in and you see what you can do from there. And that's fine if you have a larger team where you've got more than 10 guys or something on the field to help carry the load.

but if you're just one guy, what is the alternative? And you could say, well, the UFC should build better cards. Dude, they built a better card. They lost Max Holloway. It was still a great card in the end, the new co-main event notwithstanding. You didn't miss Max on Saturday night? All of you did. All of you.

How could you not? You can build a better card. You're still going to have something less than what you ordinarily started with. And that's forgivable on a team sport if your team can still eke out a win. But as a fight fan, there's just, there's no real replacement to Holloway Ortega. I don't know what any other iteration, all due respect to Jeremy Stevens and Frankie Yeager, these are great guys, but that's not the same as Max Holloway taking on Brian Ortecic. I'm sorry, it's not, not at this stage anyway.

So to me, it's like you've got to ask some real hard questions about this sport, man. You can get better about weight cutting and maybe if there's a fighter's union, they'll change the anti-doping protocol to be slightly more lenient. I know that might sound crazy to some people, but sorry, I just would have believed that this war on drugs prohibition is so clearly not working. And even if it was, there's a question about whether it actually is counterproductive in the end. And then the end of the day, this is a product, man.

You're going to arrange all these cards. You're going to arrange all these fights. They've got to deliver, and it's becoming, it has been for some time now, increasingly difficult. The rigors of the sport are too much, whether it's guys like, me asking people to come talk, weight cutting, anti-doping protocol, the training itself, the volume of the training, it's too much, man, it's too much. And I don't know what all the answers are. More progress is being made on a lot of these fronts, but I think we need to reconcile with the fact that

this is way too much to place on the shoulders of even very capable people. And when you're in that kind of predicament, dialing things back a little bit, I think is important. All right. So I just want to get that out of the way because I felt like it was a good. important to say. I wanted to make sure we didn't just charge into the week, glorifying all the great things that happened without some acknowledgement of the realities of what Max's the situation and the situation of many other fighters tells us. All right. It's good coffee. I broke my cardinal rule about swallowing on air. You never should do it, but I don't have an ability to mute my microphone here at the desk. On my radio show, I can just hit a button. I don't have that here.

So apologies if you had to hear that. Whenever I hear that, I want to close line somebody. But, okay, I have my own issues. Now, let's get to this debate that we had coming out of Saturday. Let me go back to Danny real quick on this one to help set it up if I can. Danny, of course, is in the back here. My trusty steed here on the MMA hour. All right, Danny, so you saw the fights.

By the way, where did you watch the fights on Saturday? Just from home. Okay. Give me your top three greatest of all time fighters in lieu or I should say as a consequence of and taking a due account the results from Saturday. I have two different lists. One with failed drug test, one with without.

Which one do you want first? Well, you should know before you give me this that that demarcation is not justifiable. But go ahead. So no drug test failures. I'm going to go with GSP up top, Daniel Cormier number two, and Demetra's Johnson number three.

Okay, now with drug, opening the field to everyone. who's on that list? Yeah, I'll go still GSP up top. Okay. Daniel Cormier second and John Jones third. Okay, now why the switch? It's just the type of opponents.

John Joan has like versed, you know, DJ, DJ has versed like really good competition. There's no doubt about that. But John Jones faced literally everyone who built the light heavyweight division and destroyed them. And just the way he did, it was incredible. And he looked like he could easily go up a weight class and challenge for the heavyweight title.

I mean, I really do. think he's one of the greatest. Okay. All right. Fair enough. So let me open up with appreciate your perspective. We'll get back to here in just a little bit. I want to see where you stood as sort of a baseline way of constructing this argument. First of all, I don't buy the argument that you can separate those things out. Now, maybe in the future you can. But right now you can't. And the reason why you can't is very, very easy to grasp. Let's say the UFC has been around 25 years. I've been promoting it. MMA, you can argue has been around in some form or another a little bit longer, but let's just use that 25 as our

evaluation period. For at least 22 of those, you had either poorly restrained or no restraint at all put on drug use. To the point where in certain parts of the world, it was even outright encouraged and not regulated at all. Okay?

Then you have this USADA era, which has caught, I think, people who are not good at hiding it, but ultimately the ones who are will continue to use and not get caught. To say that you are disqualified from being the Hall of Fame if you get caught. I can understand it because you can say even if there's use allowed, or if there's a use going on, tolerated, I should say. If you fail the drug test,

it's just automatically disqualifying. That's fine if you really want to go down that and you eliminate the low-hanging fruit to an extent. But the reality is what you're saying there is, yes, it's fine if you used as long as you didn't get caught. And by the way, we're going to take into account achievements of people who competed in a place where there was no prohibition put on that at all. To say that you can just, now we can divide them up between the test. failures and the non-test failures. What about the test failures who, for example, there are some questions about the most recent one about Josh Barnett or about JDS. JDS, I recognize is not in the conversation about grace of all time, but what if he was? What would that do? How would that affect

things? You're going to have somebody who, by the way, that's going to be a consideration. Yol Romero, in my judgment, the best middleweight to never hold a title, I think he was totally exonerated other than strict liability issues by Yusada. How does that factor in? So to say you can have this sport that has been drowning in PED use for the overwhelming majority of its history, more than 90% of it. And now because you don't pass a test and whether or not that test is actually a fair indication of use, I just don't buy it as a fair demarcation line. There's other ways to count it. Maybe you don't count the wins that came off those fights. Maybe you just say we can't have that portion of the conversation until enough time has passed.

I don't know, but I just don't bother you can disqualify people like that. That's sort of my overview of the issue. Now, shouts to the boys and the folks that run Fight Matrix, I believe. Saw this graphic floating on Twitter. Can we put this graphic up? Now, this is their top 13 fighters of all time. Let me just read you this list. Now, I'm not necessarily endorsing the placement,

but I think that there's something really instructive about this list. And the numbers you see on the right are their point totals based on the way that they arrange and prioritize the various things that account for high achievement. And I encourage you to go to their site and look at their methodology. Again, I'm not going to get too in the weeds on this, but I just wanted to show you something. So they have St. Pierre's number one.

St. Pierre's also my number one, no matter what kind of list you're putting together for greatest of all time, whether you include or do not include folks who have failed various drug tests. Then you have Anderson Silva, Josay Aldo, at three. Four is Fader O'Millianenko, five, John Jones, six, Matt Hughes, seven, Dan, Henderson, eight, BJ Penn, nine, Randy Gator, 10, Nogera, 11 is Demetrius Johnson, 12 is Daniel Cormier, and then 13, you have Frankie Edgar. Okay, so what can we say about this list? Now, again,

I'm not showing this list to say that I fully agree or that I hereby endorse their methodology, but I do think it brings to light some interesting considerations. Right? Here's the first one. And I've had this debate a number of times, but it's relevant again. Now, these are a little bit old. They've got into Cormier at 21 and 1, right? So I guess it would be 21 and 1 and 0 and then won no contest. I'm not sure how that would be. Maybe 21 and 1, whatever. So this is this list might need some updating. But the point being is it raises an interesting question about to what extent is standing a post. at a weight class, versus jumping around a little bit, the more difficult task in mixed martial arts. Because you have Jose Aldo, the best featherweight ever, criminally underrated, and they've got them higher on the list because I think what they value is this consistency,

this longevity, and this ability to stand to post and take on all comers. Because that would involve some degree, and I know he had his issues, but it would involve some degree over the course of his career of consistency. And he had late injury woes. I understand it. But he also has more than 30 fights to his name that doesn't happen by accident. That's more than Daniel Cormier, for example. It involves obviously high achievement.

It involves title defenses. It involves a number of things that just time over time, over time, over time. Like the only way to get that is by virtue of time. You can't manufacture it quickly at all. I believe that to be very compelling. I remember I had a really interesting conversation with Matt Brown one time. This was in Atlanta prior to his Wonder Boy Thompson fight. And I know there can be some questions about how strenuous the tests were in kickboxing

that Wonderboy had faced prior to joining the UFC relative to the highest, highest level, let's say over in Asia. But Matt Brown's point was a salient one, which is this guy's got what, more than 50, 60, 50s, and he's undefeated. Now think about that for a second. What does that tell you? That tells you that over the course of his competition career, you think every time he showed up injury-free?

You think every time he showed up without troubles in his home life? You think every time he showed up feeling great? You think every time he showed up having a good camp? You think every time he showed up everything had just aligned to make his career move forward? No, of course not. But he still found a way to win every single time. That's impressive.

And that moment when he told me that has always really stuck with me, I don't think we put enough emphasis on sitting in a weight class and having longevity of a rain over it. Right? I do think it matters. I really, really do. I don't know that Aldo necessarily belongs at three. You can have them anywhere you want,

but I do feel like making that point is an important one. It's the same reason why St. Pierre, why is he stood at one for me? Well, he does have that winner from Michael Bispin gained the two titles in two different weight classes, obviously, not simultaneously, but doing it after four years. I mean, it's just this incredible achievement, right? But also, the dude beat welterweight after welterweight after welterweight. And yes, he had a couple of hiccups along the way. The two mats got him, right?

But he had an insane run at a deep weight class time over time. And we talked about it before all the stress being put on fighters. When you're competing as actively and as regularly as St. Pierre was, right? You're out there cutting weight. traveling, doing media, onto one camp, onto the next. You need a couple of injuries mixed in there. But by the time he bowed out after the Hendricks fight, he was completely burnt out.

He was getting chippy in interviews with people, which you could totally understand by that point. Like, it just beats you down. It is hard to stay out there. And even if you're beating other good contenders, we've seen this sport. This is a rebound sport. It's a sport where upsets happen just utterly routinely.

So to stand a post in the way he did in a super deep weight class is so hard. It's why there's been turnover at lightweight. It's why there's been turnover in most weight classes. And St. Pierre's ability to keep that lack of, or rather, I should say, to render turnover, essentially null and void while he was on top, is just so utterly remarkable. Same for Anderson Silva. You guys can say what you want about all the drug test failures. I'm telling you right now, there's people sitting in various halls of fame.

Well, I guess there's only one with U.S.U.S.U. Hall of Fame. You think everyone in there never used? I mean, let's just be serious about this. That's just not realistic. It's not realistic, in part because they're not bad people. Because they came from an era where that kind of thing may have been commonplace, and no one was really asking any difficult questions about it from the regulatory side of things. So you guys want to get mad at Ernst and Silver, you better start passing that blame around. And then Fedor, you could say about the very streaks he had. Let's weigh in on the DC portion of it. And I appreciate this list. You can take it off the screen.

I just wanted to illuminate what it can mean to get titles in two different weight classes, what it can mean to have longevity. I do think we underrate the guys like Aldo who had these nice long runs. But of course he got iced by Connor McGregor, right? And then Connor McGregor beats Eddie Alvarez, one of the great lightweights ever. So what does it mean to jump around?

I don't know that we have a great argument for it. Here's my argument about the placement of Daniel Cormier. I'm going to say he's certainly top five for me. you could make a case. Number one seems a little bit hard for me. But if you want to put him in your top three orbit, I could entertain that. I've seen some folks who had them outside their top 10. I have a very difficult time buying into that.

I could see a case for putting him outside the top five if you really were being strict about different kinds of methodology. But for me, he's top five greatest of all time, probably top three. Somewhere in that space. I think getting the title in the way he did against Steepay, where he had this long hiatus and comes back and it's one of DC's easier fights

when he stops them inside the first round, K.O. This is the thing you have to realize about Daniel Korme that makes his run so impressive. You know, Aldo had weight cut issues at featherweight. The famous one against Mark Harmonic in Canada for the big show that they had, St. Pierre taking on Jake Shields where Leota Machita retired Rainy Couture.

You know, the weight, cut story there is sort of legendary, right? I mean, he was shivering and shaking like a T.I. Lyric trying to force himself to get down there and he barely did it and he had a terrible fifth round against Homonick. He didn't look himself. He's had issues too. And Cormier has been incredibly successful at light heavyweight, no matter what, but what Saturday reminded me, man, was like, however good you thought DC was at light heavyweight, he's another level. He's another level above that at heavyweight. In other words, this guy earned a title in a weight class. He was only in to accommodate a teammate and you got a lesser version of him in the process. Remember, he had to

lean on the towel to make weight up in, what was it, Albany or whatever the hell they were fighting in, right? It drained him. He has acknowledged that his power, it just kind of fades a little bit, more than a little bit noticeably fades at that weight class, and he still went out there and captured a title. And then he goes back up to heavyweight, and it's a whole new ballgame. To me, to capture a title in a weight class by beating the greatest ever,

or at least the most accomplished in that division, puts you in a pretty elite company. To then say you have another title from another weight class, and I realize that the complications there about how he got it are real, but nevertheless, to have earned one in another, weight class where you're a significantly less dangerous version of yourself and you're still good enough to get a title in that weight class? Ladies and gentlemen, what do you want me to say about that? That's just so insane. That's so completely, ridiculously insane. You can get a title when you've drained

yourself to the point where your knockout power almost basically disappears. What? How is that possible? And we're talking about a division that was historically anyway, not so much anymore, but historically, the glamour division. And the only one you lost to is maybe the best fighter we've ever seen under extenuating circumstances. It's just, it's absurd. It's totally, totally absurd. And what it told me was, D.C. Jones 3, folks are like, well, how do you have a third

fight with a guy that beat you twice? In fact, the first time, pretty conclusively, second time, no doubt about it. And then, of course, it turned into no contest. but at least the action about what happened inside the cage, there can be no doubt. How do you have a third fight? Ladies and gentlemen, I, we will be shortchanged if there is no third fight.

But here's the catch. The third fight between Daniel Cormier and John Jones does not and should not happen for the light heavyweight title. It should happen, title or no, we'll see what happens at heavyweight. I want the full Daniel Cormier. And interestingly, I'd be curious to see what a weight class jump up does for John Jones. How does he change as a consequence? How does he become a different fighter as a consequence? Because it looks to me like Daniel Cormier is a different guy.

Maybe John Jones is too. Maybe in the end, John Jones keeps some kind of lead on him. I don't know. I don't know. I'm not here to make any major predictions about it because to me, it would be foolish to do so. But what I do know is having Cormier compete at a deficit, what is the point of that anymore? He's done in March. Let's get the real, full-on Daniel Cormier. Let's get the guy who can go out there and knock out the best and most accomplished UFC Heavyweight of all time in a round. It would be such a complete and total waste to have us not do that.

We're going to have Alexander Gustafsson on probably in about 10 minutes, man. I almost want to see him fight D.C. at Heavyweight just to see what it would look like and how it would be different, how different Alex might look at Heavyweight. wait. That's the reality here. It is a brand new fight to me up a weight class. You now have Dendikorme having two belts. So there's plenty on the line in terms of an attraction for John Jones to want to go up and do it. And if he can get out of this USADA situation and we can make that happen before March, oh my God. Oh my God. We have to do it. We have to do it. It's just, it's so important for, I think, frankly, mixed martial arts history

to get that, I don't know, is it a trilogy fight, whatever it is, whatever the proper nomenclature is, that's the one that needs to happen. So on the goat debate, I could entertain three. I think anything less than top five, I have a hard time buying. But I want to make it known. We cannot forget about the guys, like a Demetrius Johnson,

who have stayed in their weight class, but they've just stayed consistent over a long period of time. And the same for the Jose Aldos of the world that I think deserve some recognition as well. One final note, if I may. How about that Brock Lesnar stuff? Let me pitch it one more time to Danny. I'd be curious to see what he thought of it.

Everyone knows my views on pro wrestling, but you may not know how I feel about Brock Lesnar. So let's see what Danny has to say about old Brock Lesnar, having watched from the comfort of his home. Now, Danny, the fight ends. They bring in Brock Lesner. Your reaction was what when you saw that in? Not now, not 48 hours later or whatever.

How are many hours? it's been. But in that moment, what were you thinking? Well, first, they were sort of panning the camera and he was walking around with Dana White and I'm like, wait, is this happening? I couldn't believe it. I was like, I was still on the fence about it. And once Daniel Kormier called him out and Brock Lester hopped

on the cage, I got pretty excited. This is, this was like, pardon my hipster reference, but this is a shot of ginger to MMA. I mean, MMA needed excitement. This is exciting. This is a huge fight. So I was super stoked about that. As far as like the push and all that,

It was very pro wrestling, like. I'm not a huge pro wrestling fan. So, you know, that I didn't like that much. But given everything else, I kind of, you know, let that buy. But it was really good. I enjoyed it. In general, positive things to say. Very positive, yeah.

And it got a little pro wrestling, but it wasn't too much to like, you know. Okay. We'll come back to that. I'm sure we'll have some more questions about that during the soundoff. And we'll get to that a little bit later. But my general view on it to discuss it here, if I may, is I don't really have a problem with it, to be honest with you.

Now, you guys know my view. Look, I don't like... Okay. You see this? Look at this mug. Right? Get to the chop a mug. All right?

I like stupid things. I really have no problem admitting that. Here's the reality of everyone watching this. You also like stupid things. Everybody likes stupid things. I don't need you to like my stupid things. I don't care if you don't like Arnold Schwarzenegger. I love Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Politics notwithstanding. I consider him one the most important figures of the 20th century. For me, I mean, I think he's a hero to me, to be perfectly honest, right? I revere the guy. So any kind of Arnold Schwarzenegger coffee mugs, we have dolls of him here on the set, right? It's a stupid thing, but it's my stupid. I think pro wrestling is stupid. I do.

Everyone knows this. I'm not trying to win a debate with you. I'm not trying to argue about it. I'm not trying to do any of those things. everyone's got their own dumbass thing that they like in their life. Me, I have a totally unjustifiable weird man crush on Arnold Schwarzenegger. And I make no apologies for it. I make no apologies for it at all.

So I'm not asking anybody to like what I like. I'm not telling you what you need to like. Here is what I know. Do I need to see Brock Lesnar in that cage out there, hamming it up and try to sell a pay-per-view down the road? Do I need to see that? no, of course I do not need to see that. It does nothing for me.

And yeah, I get the deuce chills whenever we get to these sort of pro wrestling atmospherics in MMA, but it doesn't matter. Here's what I know coming out of Saturday. However big D.C. versus Lesnar was before that, it's even bigger now. It's even bigger now. And Daniel Kormier, I don't think, can make a strong claim to be upset about it. Number one, he knows what he's doing. and number two, he engineered it.

He engineered it. You know, my colleague Jeff Wackenheim was writing that, well, you know, the Brock thing ruined DC's moment. How? He asked for it. He brought him into the cage. How do you, I mean, maybe you could say it didn't go the way he thought it would. He didn't look upset to me at the post-fight presser.

I could tell you that. I was texting with him back and forth yesterday. I did not detect that he felt like he had a moment taken from him. I think he felt like he had a moment amplified. Dude, the reality is that Brock Lesnar might be in the course of all the years, which I've covered someone. Is he more famous than Connor McGregor? No. Is he more of a trendsetter than Ronda Rousey and a pioneer in a new and interesting way? No. No. But he has been one of the most captivating figures, if not the most captivating, that I've covered in my time. I have made this point. If you are new to this show under my hosting duties, and you've not heard the this before? I don't think I'd have a job in MMA, were it not for Brock Lesnar, to be perfectly honest with you. I remember one day after he fought Frank Mirr the first time, I went back and I was

running, I think a bloody elbow at the time, and I looked at our traffic and normally there was a spike like that, and then, you know, for the post-fight traffic, and then for the Lesnar, it was like this. I just, I didn't even know the numbers could get that high, and it just continued on. And at that point, things just ballooned from there. I absolutely credit my ability to have a job to Brock Lesnar coming in and just tasering MMA, right, the way that he did. And he had a short run and it was a weird run and the diverticulitis, of course, is all terrible. But when Brock Lesnar takes the microphone in Joe Rogan's hands and he's out there shoving the cameraman, breaking the lens, he's calling everyone a POS.

Yes. Yes. Please. Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? Why would I not want to see that? I want to see everything about that. How do you not?

Well, he doesn't deserve a title shot. All right. I mean, what do you want to do? Certainly, I can, if you're Curtis Blaze today, Derek Lewis has already said he doesn't deserve a title shot. If you Curtis Blaze today, I get it. I really do. Maybe there's a way they could do it or not for a title.

I don't know. I don't know. But what I am trying to tell you is, the UFC needs a big pay-per-view. In my judgment, they're due for a big pay-per-view. way more people would want to see that. And unlike the CM Punk thing, Brock Lesnar can fight. He can fight very well.

I underestimated him when he first came in. I was like, well, the fight of Raminu Kim was good, but we'll see how he does against Meir. He did much better. And then I was like, well, Heath Herring's pretty big too. And then he ran over Heath Herring. The guy's a natural. He's been sidelined by a late start and a belly disease.

But he's amazing to watch. He's absolutely must-see TV. And when he came back at UFC 200, I had no problems with it. None. I'm happy to see him back now. I really don't care about the idea that he should be sitting out for this infraction or that one. Nope, bring him back. All in favor of the Brock Train, this guy. And I don't know anything about his pro wrestling run. I couldn't tell anything about it. I don't watch. I don't care to watch. It doesn't do anything for me. But I know that when he's in MMA, he's unlike anybody else. His matchup with Cormier will be absolutely huge. There's a way to look at this after the Michael Bisping run at championship. say this guy deserves a late payday in the last chapter of his career. I have very little to say about it bad. I do feel for Curtis Blades, of course, but you're not going to see me saying a whole lot bad of Brock Lesnar.

You're just not. It's not going to happen. All right. Enough of that. Let us get to our first guest if we can. This gentleman was discussed heavily on Saturday night. He has a lot going on in his life. Of course, they'll be competing very, very soon here against, I should say, UFC 227.

He's one of the top fighters in the world in the UFC's light heavyweight division. The one and only Alexander Gustafson joins us here on the hotline. Mr. Gustafson, how are you? I'm good, thank you. Just wrapping up the training workout here, so he's all good. How are you? I'm doing quite well. I'm happy to be joined by you.

I think this is the first time I've ever interviewed you, so it's a bit of a new thing for me. So let me just start here. You watch the fights on Saturday, I'm sure. You've seen them at some point. And I know you know what Daniel Kormier had to say. Let's start with his performance. What did you make of it? It's great.

I'm impressed, man. I'm impressed by the way he finished Dipey, how he won the fight. Yeah, I'm very impressed about the guy. He's doing great. Did you expect Stipe to win? I don't know. I did really have a prediction for that fight because I know it was a very tough fight to predict. But I had a feeling that D.C. is a tough guy, man.

He's such a good athlete. And he's, I even believe that he's better at heavyweight and light heavyweight. I think he's stronger. You know, he can eat. He can, like, he doesn't have to stress about the weight. So, you know, I think he do even better in heavyweight. So I had a feeling that he would win the fight. the way he finished it, he made it look

I don't know, he made it look kind of, I don't know. He sees, maybe a wrong thing to say, but he did great. How was his punching power when you faced him at light heavyweight? No, he wasn't that bad. I don't remember him punching me that hard. I've been fighting guys to punch him way harder, but you know, he's very, he's very, he's very, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he whole worker. He just keeps

pressuring him. He just keep throwing his punches and just working with his wrestling. He doesn't stop working in the fight. I think he wanted to hit one of his biggest strength. All right. So then you saw his post-fight comments, I'm sure, afterward where he said he wouldn't necessarily

not fight you, but you had to do something in his words special. What did you make of that? I don't know. I think it's I think it doesn't sound right when he says it like that. I know, you know, I understand. I respect. It looks for the big fight and the money fights. But the way he says it,

but I have to do something spectacular. I think it's a bad way. I think it's a bad thing of him to say because I'm ranked number one. And I've been fighting everybody in the division. I've been winning. And I'm the number one guy. So, you know, I don't know. It's not up to him to say something like that, you know.

Like, what would that even... Go ahead. Sorry? Go ahead. Go ahead. I didn't mean to cut you off. No, no, no. I just feel like, you know, it's...

It's... I don't know what it mean by that. You know, like, I've been fighting everybody. So I'm just waiting for an opportunity like everyone else, fighting for the belt. And he's up there now. He has the heavyweight belt. He has, like, heavyweight belt.

He keeps in the light heavyweight belt. belt from himself. He doesn't want to let it go. I don't know what's going on. You know, he has to make up his mind and decide whatever he's going to do. He wants to come down. I'm just going to be Volkan, and I'm not up and up there, and I'm ready for him. You know, or either he should let that belt go

and just, you know, give it to us, so we have something to fight for and then stay in the headway. Here's what's interesting. You have this fight with Volcan Oostomier, UFC 227, a very tough guy, very tough opponent. We'll talk about that in just a second. But beyond beating him, you know, what is the spectacular or special thing

that you could even do? You know what I mean? Sorry, can you repeat? He said you had to do something special or spectacular to get a fight. And beating Volkan Usdemier is not an automatic thing. It's hard to do. But I'm saying, other than winning that,

what else could you do to get him to want to fight you? Exactly, that's what I'm saying. That's why it's not up to him. He can't sit there on his chair and stuff like that because I am the rank number one guy. I've been working hard for it. I've been injured for six months. I'm coming back and the division looks like it does. So there's why I haven't fought for a long time.

But still, I beat everybody and I'm up there. I'm ranked number one. I'm there. You know, it's so, so, you know, I don't know. I don't know. And we all know that it's not going to go down to 205 anyway. So you can just let that belt go, give it to us. So we can fight about it.

to fight for it now, and the show will just go on. You know, he's too heavy to go down. I think it's going to, you know, he's a good heavy weight. It's going to stay in heavyweight. That's what I believe. And by the way, just for clarification's sake, there's no way you would fight him at heavyweight, right? You would only fight him at light heavy?

Well, I just feel like I have so much of course standing in the light heavyweight division. So, you know, let's see what happens. I don't think he has that many fighting him anymore, you know? And I have plenty of fights in me So I'm not finished with the division Maybe I go up one day I don't know but my focus is still on that That belt in my division

And by the way Do you think they should create an interim title If he decides that by Well I guess by March they would just have He would be retired But do you think there's a case if you beat Volkan To have an interim title fight after that with somebody else Besides Daniel?

I don't know man They should do this fight for an interim title. They should do this fight for an international. And I know, you know, whatever this team makes up his mind. And if he wants to come down, let's fight for the real title. But they should make this fight as an interim title for me and all can. That's the number one guy and number two guy, fighting for chess. By the way, who are your top three fighters of all time, Alexander?

Well, the top three, tough, I don't know. I like all the champions, but, you know, I have one of the first of me is a veteran. I watched a fight when I was young. I like those legends. I like Crow Crop. I like those guys. But, you know, you have those great champions like GSP and Anderson Silva and those guys

too. I look up too. So I got a couple of guys. All right, fair enough. So let's talk about your fight coming up here against Volkan Usdemir. Before we talk about Volkan specifically, you know, this is your first fight here in 2018. Has it been frustrating sitting on the shelf all this time? Yeah, super frustrating.

because I was injured for six months. In August last year, I injured myself, and I've been injured. I've actually been training hard for since January, February, and just stay in business. So we've just been looking for a fight and an opportunity here. And finally, we have something that makes sense. And here we are. So I'm super excited.

I'm really motivated to come, go in there in a month and show that. You know, I am the best guy out there in my division. Has the time off been good in the sense that while you weren't actively competing and maybe that was something that you wanted to do, you have been able to get all the extra rounds of training, all the extra rounds of drilling, all the time to work on your craft. So by the time August comes around, you can show that not merely that you have been good, but that you've got maybe new tools? Yeah, absolutely. I've been working. I've been working myself. and I just feel more prepared than ever. I'm much, much, a lot of skills, new skills I'm working on.

I'm feeling overall as a better fighter. And, you know, I look at my condition, my strength is there. I just want to go in there and show the world that I'm, that I'm the best, you know. And there is, there is no, no free time or holiday here. We've just been working, working every day. It sounds like you feel like the world has forgotten. Do you think the world's forgotten? No, I don't think so.

I don't think so. I felt like, you know, I did a great performance against Lover. Even if it's quite a while ago, I still feel that. I've been still in there. You know, but the end of the day, I don't care. You know, I don't care. I just do my thing every day and I'm looking for the next fight. And here I am fighting Volkan.

So I'm super excited. Has the UFC said anything to you about this fight and what it means for the division? No, nothing. It looks like they're they see it as a regular, normal fight, a three-round fight, nothing more, nothing less.

Well, nevertheless, it's still, as you mentioned, the top guys in the division. Let's talk about the fight itself for just a second. His biggest threat is what? Early, he's got great hand speed. Yeah, and he's, you know, he's got some power, you know.

People have been doubting him before, committing hard and he shocks people with his power. So, you know, he's a good fighter. I respect him and he's all about winning, you know. Not like D.C. says, I'm going to do spectacular, whatever he says. I'm here to win. Nothing less, nothing more. I'm just going to keep my game plan and work him out. I will win the fight.

I'll decision if I finish him, submission, submission, knockout. That's what happens. But I will win the fight. Yeah, this is sort of the interesting position that you're in. the rest of the world wants to see something spectacular, but rationally speaking, the best thing you can do for yourself is get the win, and that may come spectacularly,

but it may come after a hard-fought three-round decision. There's really not much you can do in terms of that, right? No, exactly, and I don't think the world wants to see something spectacular. It's just the scene and he said. It doesn't want to fight me. He doesn't want to fight me at all. That's why he said stuff like that, you know? It may be fighting it because if I do something spectacular,

it doesn't find me. The end of the day, he doesn't want to fight me. The end of the day, he doesn't want to fight, and I don't think it's going to come down to light heavy. Anyway, I just feel like, you know, like you said, I just want to just want to fight. It doesn't matter if it's a hard decision, but if he's an easy knockout with a submission.

Now, Volcker is a tough guy, and I'm unprepared for the worst. The best work is the best work and there is, and I'm prepared for the worst in the fight, so I'll be ready. What do you make of his troubles, and these are all alleged issues? He's not been convicted of anything, but all of these issues outside of the cage that Orchon has been faced.

I don't care about that. I don't care about that. I don't even know what's going on. I don't even know what I is. I have no idea. And I'm about updated there. I'm just looking at an opponent right now and what his weaknesses and his strength,

you know. That's what I'm focused on. Do you watch tape? Yeah, yeah. I do. How much tape? Exactly what can I am. A lot.

I watch a lot and I don't try to focus too much on it. But I want to know how I'm fighting. and I want to know what is good at, what his weaknesses are, but, you know, and still he maybe has some new skills. He knows who I am, so he's probably going to think he's an answer for me. So it's all about coming down to, you know, have a good strategy and have the conditioning for it. How often do you want to compete in 2018? You've got this fight in August that leaves you a few months at the end of the year.

A little more than that, actually. Are you going to get another fight in? Yeah, of course. I want to fight too. I want to, you know, if this goes very well, I just want to have another fight. You know, I just want to stay busy. It's been, you know, it's been too long this now. I've been sitting and waiting for a fight. I have to be more active.

And that's my mission right now. And just win my fights and stay active and show guys like D.C. that they can't avoid me. They have to fight me. By the way, what happened with the proposed Rockhold and even Romero fights? Why did they fall through? I think they had some injuries. I think they had some injuries.

I don't know. I don't know what's going on there. I think that's some injuries. Yeah. That's all I know. The interesting thing is, you know, you've been out there really active on social media for a time, understandably, right? Looking for a fight, trying to get a fight, trying to get back in there.

In the end, do you think that stuff works with UFC management? You know, I don't know. I can't do more than I do, you know. And I think, you know, you have to be some, you have to, even if you don't fight, you still have to be on the social media. You need to do some type of statement from time to time.

But, you know, at the end, they are still, the, they still do you feel that you're fighting or not? So, you know, but you have some statements from time to time. That's something that I've been working on now. trying to get something good, you know, and I got what I wanted, and I'm very happy about that. I'm very happy about that. Yeah, I'm about to say, are you glad you're coming back to a three-round fight as opposed to a five,

given the layoff? No, no, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. I got my conditioning. I don't doubt my conditioning for a second. I can do a title fight. I always train for a title fight. It doesn't matter if it's a three-round or five-round.

I always train for a five-round fight. I see. So the big consideration for you is that. he's ranked so highly. He's ranked, yeah. You know, Vulcan, it's not a, it's not a, it's not, it's not one you can just look past. You have to seem serious. They have to treat him as, you have to treat him as, you have to treat him as his, you have to

see the guys like they're the best. And that's how I'll see Volkan. He's super dangerous. And, you know, I see some clear weaknesses as you have, but, you know, he has still power to knock people out and that's making very dangerous. And then for folks who may say, well, this fight, you're taking it on short notice. Your point, as you made earlier, you've been training hardcore since January. So you're actually overprepared, perhaps, for this opportunity here at the beginning of next

month. Yeah, I'll make sure I have some balance in my body. It's always, you know, you have to, it's always about like getting like, you know, just your butt a little bit and then keep that balance in your body. You don't get over-trained either and then, you know, is you keep your motivation and stuff like that. So, you know, I'm going to peek at the right time.

It doesn't matter if it's a, you know, I'm ready. The time is not a factor in this case. By the way, how do you tolerate traveling from Sweden all the way over to the other side of America, L.A.? That's a long trip, man. I know, I know. This is not a problem. I'm just going to be there in time.

to make it, to get used to the time, the time change and, and all that. But, you know, you know, I'll be ready. It doesn't matter if I, if I fly in, like, the day off, the day before the fight, I'll just be able to train a little bit and, and feel the weather a little bit, and enjoy getting ready for the fight. Very quickly, a couple more questions for you. I really appreciate your time. By the way, oh, I'll get to in just a second.

The fight, if it goes your way in August, We talked about being active on social media. Do you plan to continue that to get the D.C. fight? Are you going to let it come to you? Are you going to focus on, like, what's the plan after that, if things go well for your August 4th, to get an opportunity to fight for a title? No, you know, like I said, it's all up to him, man. You know, he can't sit there on his throne and decide who he's going to fight or not going.

He's not going to want to fight, being the lightweight division. You better let that belt go then. If he doesn't want to come down, because I want that belt, that's all I'm focusing on. after the Volkan fight. So he has to make a decision. Either he fights me or he let the belt go.

That's the only thing I say. He can't sit on his throne and decide who's fighting or not, you know. He's a great fighter. He's a double champ and, you know, all credit you see, man. That guy is an inspiration for real. But, you know,

he can't sit there and set stuff like that. You know, I'll beat, I'll beat Balkan. When I beat Balkan, I'll be ranked him a good one guy, and the next five is for the belt. That's it. Fair enough. Before we let you go, Alex, I'm told you have a Instagram page for your dogs. Is that right? Yeah. So your dog's names are Ghostface and Sativa?

Yes. So let me see if I got this right. You named your dogs for a rapper and marijuana? And I'll be honest with you. I picked them both up in Amsterdam. So I don't know what that says, I think I know exactly what that says. These are great names.

Why are you into Pit Bulls in particular? No, I love them, man. The best family dogs, I love them. It's, it's, it's, they're there, they're in the family, and they just go so well with my, with my daughter and family and friends. They're a big part of the family. They around us all the time, and they're just so, so calm and so trustworthy, you know.

That's hilarious. All right. Well, I'll tell you what, Alexander. It's been a real thrill to get you on the show. Good luck with the rest of the training. Have fun with your fight in Los Angeles, safe travels. And thank you so much for spending some time with us here on the show today. We really appreciate it.

I appreciate that, man. Thank you. All right. There he goes. That's hilarious. I'm looking at these pictures now from his Instagram page. It's, if you want to get on it, it's a ghostface bully XXL. And it's welcome to Ghostface and Sativa's official Instagram.

That is, that is just too good. I thought I was cool, me, name of my dog after beards, but, you know, hard to go anything better than Supreme Clientel. All right, we're a little bit early for the segment, but there's no time like the present. Let's get to it now. It is time, ladies and gentlemen, for the Monday morning analyst. All right, joining us now on the hotline is the gentleman who is the former UFC Banthaway champion of the world and who called the fights on Saturday night in Las Vegas, the one and only Dominic Cruz joins us here on the hotline. Dominic, how are you? I'm good. How are you, Luke? I'm doing well. Thank you for making time for us today. I really appreciate it. Let's get down to brass tacks here a little bit. Were you surprised that DC won as frankly as easily as he did? You know, I think that when you look at the way that fight went,

nobody really saw a knockout going in the first round, so that was surprising. But the fact that he won, not really surprising, just to get a knockout in the first round. That was pretty cool for him. All right, so you talked a lot, and you always talk a lot about the underhooks. In the final sequence, he was driving a left underhook,

and that's when, like, right after that, he threw the right hand. What's the issue there? Is that the underhooking, was it a distraction to him? Does it provide an anchor for punching? Is that merely coincidence between the two? What's the role there of that underhook? Well, what I encourage you to do, Luke, is go back to the very beginning of the fight to the very, very first sequence.

And you see, Cormier is already looking for this setup. And this is one of his things that he's used throughout his entire time. career. But I think that he assumed that it was going to work extra well against Stepe. And you could see he has a natural gift to where he can feel things and then just flow instead of overthinking it. And right off the bat, Tepe came across the fence and started to punch in combinations. And what you do is you grab, you grab the top of the head and you grab overhook on the other side or underhook on the other side. And what that does is it gives, it gives Steepa the underhook, but it also allows him to grab the uppercut and fire on the opposite side. So it's kind of a weird feeling for

Stepe. Most people don't give underhooks like that. Most of the time, it's like there's a fight there. So he pretty much gave Stepe his back, but then ran to the fence. And all that does is that keeps him from getting punched, and it allows him to be in the grappling transitions where he can start making feels on the opening for Stepe as the fight will move on in that clinch. Because Cormier wants to do everything he does from the over-under clinch or from the pocket. He stays at distance and at range with Stipe, it's bad news. So what's really intelligent about it is by giving the underhook, you're basically telling Stipe, here's the position, take it.

And so Stipe won't steer away and go back to space. He'll stay connected to D.C. where D.C. wants him instead of punching him from the outside with his size and range and length. So it was really intelligent because it was a trap. The whole thing was a big trap. D.C. just wanted to grapple with Stepe to get the feel of the Greco. Now, in that last sequence, it's not that D.C. was driving the underhook. He gave the underhook.

So if you watch, you'll see that he's right back to that very first sequence that the fight started out with, where he pretty much puts that left hand almost on the back of Stepe's neck. And by doing that, he can switch to an uppercut on the right with the right hand if you want to. but what Steppe did is what most people would do. He went and he went and tried to jack the underhook up because that's how you gain control on a shorter man. D.C. limp arms, limped arm Stepe when he tried to jack them up. And a limp arm is like when you you just like sagged the arm back through

and you come around the waist of Stepe. By doing that, Stepe has to move away from the tight waist that D.C. grabbed Because if D.C. grabs that tight waist, he now has a sequence to throw Stepe. So as he walks away from the tight waist of Daniel Cormier, he walks into the right hand of Daniel Cormier, which actually makes it more powerful and harder to defend. It's just dirty boxing 101 with Greco-Roman wrestling, and it was just in fluidity, and it was beautiful. It truly was. What a great explanation, Dominic. But here's my question. And this is going to be a dumb question, but just humor me for a second. If D.C. even talked to the Fox Sports crew ahead of the fight saying the guy keeps his hands down exiting the Clinton. Lynch. Now, it's one thing to notice it. It's another one to act on it. But if it's, if DC had

noticed that, how come no other opponent had ever been able to take advantage of it or even really try? Like, why is everyone else trying to strike with him on the outside? All right. What, excuse me, what's the one style that there's two, not one, but two, uh, multiple weight class champions? And that one martial art would be Greco-Roman wrestling. You got Randy Couture and Daniel Cormier. Both are two division champions, and they both have the dominant style, first art of Greco-Roman wrestling at an Olympic level. So that's the missing link with everybody else in Stepe.

The Greco-Roman wrestling stops Stepe from being able to throw combinations. And nobody else wanted Stepe to grab a hold of him because he can wrestle so well. D.C. wants Steepe to grab a hold of him so he doesn't punch him. him. So it was actually a completely different style matchup because of that. The Greco-Roman wrestling puts comfort against Depe where nobody else is comfortable. And that was the opening for the win. Okay, that makes a lot of sense. So what is your estimation about best wrestling styles for MMA? I mean, maybe the answer is whatever somebody can make work. But it sounds like you believe that Greco-Roman has been, what, undervalued as a weapon inside the sport?

Yes and no. You got to remember that that has to do with weight classes. well. So you can't just say Greco-Roman wrestling across the board is the best. You know, you got to, all martial arts are awesome, but you got to look at which martial arts dominate which set of weight classes. And in Greco-Roman wrestling, it's a huge tool for anybody in 205 and up, in my opinion. If you're 205 pounds and higher, you should be a specialist at Greco-Roman wrestling because how much time do you do those guys spend in the over-under clinch or up against a fence or just grabbing a hold of each other in general.

It's probably at least a third of the fight. So if you get super good in that clinch position as a 205 or as a heavyweight and you're highly specialized at it, I mean, you already have a third of the fight in the bag. Now you just got to fill in the rest of the gaps around it. That's what D.C. has as a heavyweight at 14 and 0 now.

Interesting. Yeah, because we had like Joe Warren, world champion. He had a lot of success in MMA, but maybe not quite at the level of a cornea. or a couture, right? Right, which was still really good. I mean, you could see how effective that Greco-Roman wrestling was, but in the lighter weight classes,

we move our bodies so much more dynamically because we're so much smaller that the legs become more of a factor. Take down, like, watch Demetrius Johnson at 125, and then watch Daniel Cormié at one, or at heavyweight, and you see the way the grappling transitions are different. At 125, it's a lot of leg attacks. There's very little Greco-Roman wrestling. If you're in the over-under clinch, it's knees in the clinch, so it turns into moit Thai.

But at the heavyweight division, the clinch doesn't really turn into as much moit Thai. You're not getting in as many knees. You might get a knee here and there, but realistically, those guys are so strong, so heavy, that they're pretty much staying in that over-under and just pummeling. So that allows more effectiveness of the Greco. Whereas at flyweight, you know, you got duck unders, you got elbows, you got shuck pies, you got knees, you got a fake a knee to a shuck by you got, there's just so many different transitions

when you get into the lighter weight classes that it changes the style. But yeah, Greco is effective for all styles, period. That was something I used to fight Demetrius Johnson. Right, because you were able to dominate him when you guys got in close range, get the takedown, maintain it, but you were able to sort of hold him

to a degree that no one else has been able to do. Yeah, that has to do. Well, first you got to, first you got to be able to get a hold of the dude. I mean, the dude's lightning. So, I mean, first you got to grab them, but that's part of the equation, you know, and then there's more to it. But realistically, Greco is a huge tool against that man. So let's talk about this theory that we're, I'm positing anyway, which is that watching the power of Daniel Cormier come to life at heavyweight, I knew it was there, but, you know, I'd forgotten about it too, right? I mean, I needed a refresher. And sure enough,

it's out there, do you think that DC versus John Jones is a meaningfully different fight at heavyweight versus light heavyweight? Not saying the outcome is necessarily different, but that the fight could be a lot different. Yeah, I mean, why not? But you got to remember John Jones can be a heavyweight too, so

who knows how he's going to look at heavyweight. Yeah, I mean, that's easy to say. It's like, it's almost so broad, Luke, that it's like, yeah, of course it'll be different, you know? It's those guys fought against at 2,05. I think the fight will be a little bit different. And just that now Daniel's got some serious confidence under his belt.

But you've got to really look stylistically more than anything, Luke. You really do because John Jones stylistically, just the fact that he can switch to Southpaw and throw kicks, that one thing alone is a huge, huge, huge difference from Steve Miltich. Just that. Just that. And then you add the fact that he throws the front. deep knee, the front cheap kick to the knee. That stops any Greco-Roman pressure, any over

on their clinch, anything that Cormier needs in order to be competitive, and to create those dirty boxing scenarios, which are his gift. John Jones uses that strike, and that completely kept the range exactly where Jones needed it. So there's just certain tools that Jones uses that nobody else does in the heavyweight division, and there's certain dynamics that he has that aren't rebuilt anywhere in the heavyweight division, like switching stance or basically throwing kicks even there for the most part. So those two factors alone just completely changed the fight for anybody on earth. That's a great point. So the idea is that if he's standing in a South Paul position with a right-hand lead and he's using kicks as well, that either eliminates or

reduces the ability for Cormier to set up a collar tie, which he does from that left side? Well, no. It's more about the way that Daniel Cormier defense strikes. He leans. He's a leaner. So he leans right. He leans left. And he does that because of boxing.

That's many, many boxing rounds. The problem is the lean is what got him kicked in the head. And that lean is even more of a lethal defensive movement against the South Paul John Jones because of his left high kick. he leans right into that left high kick. Are you understanding where I'm going with this? Yep, yep. Now I'm putting it together in my head.

That makes sense, yes, absolutely. Yeah, so it's not necessarily, it's not really that Jones switches the top on throws kicks, and so Cormier can't clinch with them. It's the fact that he can't clinch with them because Jones can wrestle and did Greco, first of all. Then there's the fact that he can't get close to Jones. Why can't he get close to Jones?

He uses the front tip kick to that, knee. Anytime Cormeet takes a step forward, he chops that knee. And then if he gets past the chopping the knee, now he's got to get through the hands of Jones, which sets up the left high kick before Jones, because if Jones starts throwing his hands, what's Corrmey going to do? He's going to start leaning. When he starts leaning, the kick follows and it lands. And that will always be a symptom of Cormié's style. I mean, you saw he, that's got him knocked out against Jones fundamentally. And he still did it against Stepe, but Stepe only boxes. So if you're only boxing, that's the perfect defense that D.C. does. Unfortunately, it's the worst defense for a kickboxer. Got it. Okay, that is very

clarifying. Adama, there's another fight on this card I wanted to ask you about. It was the Anthony Petis, Michael Kiesa fight. There's this argument being made and floated around, and even Petis himself acknowledges it's pretty clearly true, which is that he's got all these submissions. He has seven off of his back, which is the most ever in UFC Strike Force Pride and WEC, a pretty remarkable stat. And he even acknowledges a lot of that comes from his hands. He gets guys hurt, and all of a sudden it's a new world. I acknowledge that, but I also feel like it's fair to say he does have a very quick,

dynamic guard that gives people problems, yes, when they're hurt, but even not when they're hurt. Yeah, so are you asking me to agree with you, or are you asking me a question? Well, if you disagree, by all means say so, but that's sort of my position. Yeah, no, he does have a dynamic guard 100%. And he's right in understanding his strengths. But what really impressed me about Pettus when I talked to him was his understanding of where he needed to change in order to be successful again. I mean, it just showed he put a lot of time and thought into this.

It wasn't just, it's hard to come up with the adjustments that Pettis made to win that, and then to actually go out and believe in it and do it. It's one thing to talk about it, but he actually believed in it and did it. And that is, I need to get back to submissions and kickboxing. That's what got me to win. It's just that when you face that one matchup that out grapples you and holds you down and you can't get the submission that you've been getting, you soon realize, well, well, shit. If I could have wrestled, then I could have stayed on my feet, and then he wouldn't have stuffed me in the corner and stopped all my submissions,

and then I would have had a chance to knock him out. But then he could just go forever, like, oh, but I could have submitted him if I would have focused more on my jiu-jitsu instead of focusing on defending the takedown and standing up. So it's like you can go in circles. So the key is, and this is what impressed me about Pettis, is making the adjustment of just picking one, believing in it, wholeheartedly, sticking to it, and then follow through.

And he did that. It was, believe in my submission game, believe in my striking game, believe that my striking game is my wrestling defense, and believe that my jiu-jitsu game is my wrestling defense. And those two things become his wrestling defense instead of focusing on wrestling defense, because wrestling defense is never part of his arsenal. So it changed his style altogether. together. It made his offensive striking different, and it made his offensive submission game

different, focusing on the wrestling defense. So he let go of that part and said, I'm going to use my offense as defense. And that was a nice, smart move by Pettis to make that adjustment. And just finally understand it. It took how many losses for him to really admit that and say that and kind of dumbed down fighting is what he said. He said, I just got a dumb down fighting. It's not as complicated as I made it. I started winning. I got on the Wheaties box, and I hired a nutritionist, and I got this specialist and that specialist, he's like, it's just a fight. And, you know, I feel like as you get older in this sport, more of a veteran as he is and more just understanding in time, you realize that. That it's just a fight, man.

Like, if this guy shows up outside my lawn right now, I'm not going to have somebody check my body fat before I knock him out. I'm just going to walk out in my front yard, hit him in his face until he goes to sleep or submit him or whatever I got to do. And sometimes as fighters, because we've got 12 weeks to think about this specific. make matchup, we overdo it. And Pettis made a nice understanding that he just needed to dumb it down and get back to W.E.C. Pettis, and he did it. I'm happy for him. How long did it take you, because it sounds like what the issue is, as an identity as a fighter, like, okay, what kind of fighter am I? What kind of fighter do I want to be? What is my style? How long did it take you and, of course, your professional career to figure out this is who I am and this is the path

I'm going to take? Yeah, well, fortunate for me is I understood that right off the bat. The thing that I do is I'm good at giving credit where credit is due and then making adjustments around the credit that I give to somebody else or trying to take those things from them and use them as well because you can't really adjust until you know what they're good at and actually truly give them the credit they deserve for it. So for me, I knew the things that I need. I know the things that I got to do in my style. I know my gifts. I know my strength and I got to stick to them. From there, it just comes down to really making sure that I just stick to the game plan that we set because they have to adjust to me. Fair enough.

One more fighter I wanted to ask you about very quickly, if I could. Israel Adasanya over the weekend. Again, you probably know this a lot better than I do, but it was just remarkable to me. Years ago, Dom, you saw a lot of really good strikers. They could stop the initial takedown attempt, but they'd be just glued to the fence. for minute after minute after minute, his ability to extract himself from the situations. It resets all the action and allows him to do what he does. I'm wondering what your biggest takeaway was from the Adasanya win over Tavares.

Well, really, I mean, you just know that he knows that these guys got to grapple him. So if you know that somebody has to do one specific thing to beat you, it really makes fighting a lot easier. And the truth is people have to gain the rest. respect on the feet from Adasania before they're ever going to be able to outgrap them from now on. And that's just the way it's going to be. Because if you're going in there thinking I'm just going to outgraple this one-dimensional fighter, it's much easier to stop a takedown time and time again if you use the right offensive striking and the right offensive pressure, then it is to attempt take down after a takedown and not succeed.

Because the more takedowns you are not successful at, your power bar goes down. and you're going to take a lot of damage because it takes more energy to be offensive on a takedown than it does to defend the takedown, generally speaking. So what happens is, Adasania can get you to shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot after those three shots. Now he's got all this energy and he's going to piece you up really bad because you wasted it all trying to grapple him. And now you don't have energy to strike with him now. So it's playing a fine line with Adasania. You got to strike with him and gain his respect, meaning hit him as hard as he hits you.

Don't take too many steps back. Make sure you're sharp. Make sure you're hitting him. Make sure you're hurting him. Make sure you're doing things on the feet. Only then will you're grappling be successful because he has to worry about your striking first. And what's the word with you, Dom? I know you had an injury.

I'd be curious to just get an update if we could, how things are going, how you're progressing, and what the situation is today. I'm progressing. It's this arm. What happened is I broke my arm and the bone didn't shift. So since it didn't shift, I didn't get surgery right away. They said, ah, the bone will fill in the gap on its own. It will heal and everything will be okay.

Three and a half months later, that did not take place. So the bone did not fill in. And since I did not get surgery, the bone is not strong. So three months into my arm break when it initially took place, I now have to go see the doctor and they say, well, on second thought, you do need surgery. So that four-month injury turns into now is seven, eight-month injury. Does that make sense?

Yeah. Man, that's terrible. Right. So that's what happened. And it's nobody's fault but mine because it was my decision to not get surgery. The truth is I've had so many surgeries when the doctor says, yeah, I'm sure it will be fine. You know, I could have gotten more opinions, and I didn't, I trusted that. And I think deep down, I didn't want to go into surgery again, and I had hoped for the best.

So I took my vitamins, and I used my bone stimulator, and I stayed off of it for three months. And basically all I did was stay off of it for three months for nothing to happen. And so I had to go back in, get the surgery. Now that I've had the surgery, I'm finally healing and I'm finally training again and doing my thing, but I still have time before I'm cleared by the doctor from that surgery. So it seems like forever because the first three months I was waiting to heal and it didn't heal. So it turns from a four-month surgery into a eighth-month surgery. Man.

Well, we obviously wish you a very speedy recovery. Before you go, one last question, Dom, if I may. The Bantamptonway title's up for grabs. T.J. Dilleshaw taken on Cody Garbrand in early August. They fought lasted UFC 217. What is your estimation of this contest relative to the first one? Will they look the same, or are you expecting a much different fight? No, I think it'll go a little bit longer this one.

But I also think that I think Cody gets at this time. They're going to end up having to have a rubber match or something somewhere down the line. But I don't care either way. I mean, I'm going to end up fighting both these guys. So it doesn't really matter how their fight goes. knows, you know, for me personally, for the world, you know, I guess, I think Cody gets it done this time probably. I think it's hard to get that title and then, you know, to keep it is a whole other thing,

Luke. It's just, you know, the good thing for these guys is they've had long breaks in between their defenses, so that'll really help because they're probably much more healthy since they had the breaks. You know what I mean? That's like a real key is, I mean, Derek Lewis and Inganu, I know Derek Lewis's back was hurt. He had to walk into that fight hurt because I know he walked into that fight hurt. You could tell.

And had no excuses, but that's the type of stuff that happens when you fight three times in a year in your title fight. And their title fights because that's like taking an 80-hour work week and then using that for it, doing an 80-hour work. work week for an entire year without a break instead of half that which is a 40 hour work week and that's that's more doable it's still a hard year but at least it's more natural you fight three fights in a year it's very difficult to do that for a title because the amount of rounds that you're putting in in training and then the amount of rounds that you're putting in in the fight um so i think that these guys are doing i think they're on track for maybe one defense maybe two a year so that's right on track to stay healthy.

So I think we'll see the best of those two on that night. I think Cody's back was hurt a little bit, their first meeting when he got knocked out. And I think with the time they've had off, his back might be a little bit better now. But that's it. I mean, they're all just guesses, man. You can't really know. But these guys haven't been super busy. You know, I've been hurt this whole time, and they fought one time since I haven't hurt.

Right, right. Well, you know what? Dom, there's no one in the game quite like you. scholar of this. I really appreciate your time today and your insight. It's always a joy to get to pick your brain. Wish you a speedy recovery. And thank you so much for spending some time with us here on the show today. Yeah, thanks, Luke. Good luck to do everything. All right. Appreciate that. Thank you. All right. There he is. I mean, you're not going to get analysis much better than that. I don't know what to tell you, folks. So appreciate Dom Cruz, sharing his perspective. All right. We are a bit overdue. I believe, right? The show clock calls for it.

Yes, it does. It is time. ladies and gentlemen for the sound off. All right. Now, before we get to this, you know, look, you got to live your life on air. We don't get any commercial breaks. My right nostril doesn't work. In fact, you can't zoom in, but if you watch this, I'll breathe in. This nostril will collapse.

This one won't. Ready? Let's see if I can get it right. A little bit. I'm not sure. But I can't breathe that in my right nostril now. I had it checked out. It's broken.

So rather than taking nasal spray and then just shooting at this, I actually put it in like an eyedropper. so I can breathe. There we are. And now it'll be open for like an hour. And I can finally leave. But I was sitting here breathing on the mic like our folks breathe when they give us calls at 844-866-24-68.

All right. Let's get to it now. Time for the soundoff. This is where you leave your calls. I gave the number out before. 844-866-24-68. We'll get to your tweets as well using the hashtag the MMA hour. But to help us do this,

We have to go to our man in the back. The Adequipe to my pan. One and only Danny Segura. All right. What did you think about Dom's analysis? Pretty good, right? Amazing. Yeah, he's the...

I mean, there's just not quite many in the world like him. Not, not really. He just sees things completely different. I know. It's like how... We watch the same sport, but I don't see the same thing he sees. Like, we're not looking at the same... It's crazy.

There's levels to his game. It's like every time I feel like I know something. I talk to him, I'm like, oh, yeah. Oh, no, I don't know anything. Right, right. Okay. All right, we'll figure it out. All right.

So we have calls, do we not? We do. Or messages, I should say. We're not taking live calls. Right. How good were they this week? They're really good. I'll just say that your breathing on the mic fell completely short compared to what we have on the calls.

All right. Well, without further ado, set these up for me. Who do we have first? Cool. So let's keep the UFC 226 train rolling. So we're going to do a few questions about that, mostly about that and then deviate on a few other topics. Okay. So let's get started.

Hey, Luke, this is J.B. from Sarnia, Ontario, Canada. And I just wanted to hear your thoughts on D.C. currently holding the light heavyweight and heavyweight belts. He made it fairly clear that he has little interest in fighting anyone not named John Jones or Brock Lesnar. With both of their immediate features unknown, this is ultimately a bad thing for the UFC. Not having a title fight in literally their two biggest divisions for the next six months, sounds like a step backwards. And props through Monday on the Shui. You're up next, Luke. Oh, am I? Am I up next?

By the way, I've done a shoe. You ever done a shoeie before? No, no. We don't call it that. I got it from a buddy of mine on a rugby team. They call it shooting a boot. Okay. That's what they do.

I've done that before. I did it from someone's shoe they were using like a cleat before. That's rough. So not a regular shoe, like an actual athletic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's rough. And people spat in it, and I drank it anyway. I might be able to do the shoey, but I can't do this spit.

We'll get to Marker Mondays and just, why not? You're pouring alcohol on top of it. Like, what are you worried about? That's just, it's so gross. Well, if you saw, I got germs the size of turtles on my toenails. So you worried about the spit. That's the least of your concerns. If I was wearing a shoe, you had to drink out of it.

But point being is, this is one of those things like, there's a lot of different arguments to make. I raise these concerns whenever they have these two division fights. And ultimately, I can live with the one that they had with Kormier versus Steep A because it would remember what was originally proposed It was going to be on the same card. It was going to be Steppe, D.C., Nunez, Cyborg, and then T.J. DJ, and I was like, tying up six divisions at once is a terrible idea, and to do it all at the same time is an even

worse one. So, no, I'm super against this. I still don't like the idea of combining divisions for the very reason that, like, these guys fight two, three times a day. You just, or a year, you just heard Dominic Cruset say, fighting three times in a calendar year, so difficult. By the way, gives you some respect for Israel Adasania, who's fought three times in six months. And wisely decided to take time off.

Here's my point. Everyone was all excited for this fight. Me too, in the sense of the fight itself, how could you be against D.C. versus Stipe as a fight? As a fight, it's got everything you could possibly want. But now the bill is due. So we'll see what Daniel says. I mean, maybe this was all posturing,

and he will fight Daniel, or excuse me, he'll fight Alexander Gustafson next, and all these concerns will be allayed. In the end, he says he's out in March, so we have eight months between now and then or so. Pardon me. So no matter what, he's not going to be holding it for a year before he's stripped. So I guess we're avoiding the worst case scenario.

I think it was a calculated risk by the UFC. I don't think we're going to get to a worst case scenario. But yeah, the bill is due now. And now we've got to pay it. Do you think Daniel Cormier will defend his light heavyweight title before he fights Brock listener for the heavyweight? I think it's entirely dependent on Brock. And to be honest with you.

Because Brock can only return past January. Right. He can't even fight this year. So if I'm Daniel Cormier, the thing about it is, do you want to fight Gustafson? Let's say Gustafsson comes out, looks like a beast against Oostomere. Do you want to fight Gustafsson potentially risk losing? Now, you still have your heavyweight belt,

but now you've lost. What does that do to the luster of the Lesnar fight? You ruin that a little bit, rather than going into the Lesnar fight as the champ champ. So to me, I don't think we're going to see a fight until up and until the Lesnar fight. And I got to tell you, man, like, you know, I don't know what's going to happen with him in the reentry into the Usada pool. Maybe it'll be all fine. Part of me feels like we're going to be headed towards some kind of delay or complication, which case could throw off the timing.

But if they make that in January, I think he probably fights a slight heavyweight after that. But in 2018, no, no chance, right? Yeah. No, I don't think so. And I think it's problematic, but the benefits of O'Brock Lester versus Daniel Kormier fight are. huge so great that you it kind of overrides the problems i think the last time cornea defended his light heavyweight title was in january of this year so it would be you know he would fight rufford and he would obviously need time to recover and get ready for a fight so it'd be over a

year uh for that light heavyweight belt to get defended which is and by the way very problem small issue that no one's talking about he the the ufc is going to want to come out screaming yeah on the espn deal if you can put a show together now i don't think they would put lesnar versus DC on P. Excuse me, on ESPN. They would put it on pay-per-view. But what they would do is they put the prelims. They would put those on ESPN. And ESPN would probably go all in on that card to do whatever they could for coverage before, after the fight week, the whole nine, they would go all in on it for something like that. So I think the UFC would be like, look, we want to make this fight anyway, but we've also got this new television deal. Let's just put this right in line to make our new partners very happy.

And historically, the UFC has always started Like every single year with a bang They always put in a really good card So yeah, I can totally see them stacking up All right, what's next? Cool So again, let's keep talking about DC This is mouth-breathing Mike from Connecticut

And I just wanted to ask Do you think that DC's big win over Steve They finally got him out of the shadow of John Jones Because in my opinion, I don't think There's going to be a way to get completely out of that shadow unless he beats John in a third match, even though this headway championship win definitely helped a lot. That's it, yeah. First of all, great call.

I love the enthusiasm there for the mouth breathing schick. The answer is probably no, in my judgment, probably no. But I will say this. I had Brandon Gibson on, I did a radio show before UFC 226. I was in Las Vegas. And Brandon Gibson stopped by. By the way, shout out to Brandon Gibson, just one of the real good guys in the sport. and he made a point to me, which was he was like, because here's a thing, man, and I know he's a coach,

he's not a fighter, but I've had a million coaches, excuse me, I've talked to a million fighters. Believe it or not, I'll do it because I know it's important to do the full breadth of an interview, but the MMA analyst notwithstanding, I try to limit the amount of questions I have about another fighter when I'm interviewing a fighter. You can't not ask them if you're talking to X about Y or about Z. You have to do it. But I try to limit it a little bit. And so after the interview was over, you can imagine all the questions to Randy Gibson were about John Jones and what's his future and what's next. And afterwards, he just sort of made a point. He's like, you know, look, it's, it's okay. My career is inextricably tied to John, right, for perpetuity. And I think that you're going to get

the same thing with Daniel Cormier, not to the same extent. I do believe that this steep A win in becoming the champ champ, champ, it puts him in a space where you cannot talk about the career of Daniel Cormier without talking about John Jones, but you can talk about some of his biggest accomplishments without him. And that gives him a little bit of breathing room. That gives him space now where he is occupying a certain grandiosity all his own. If you want to be really cynical about it, you could say, well, he only got those opportunities because John wasn't competing. Maybe that's true, maybe that's not. But here's what I know. He wasn't competing. And here's what I also know. Daniel Cormier has done something that is next to impossible in many people's estimations.

and certainly worthy of a strong degree of praise. So the answer is totally divorced from John Jones? No. But breathing room between them, I don't see how you can disagree. Yeah. I think for him to completely be divorced from that, he will have to beat John Jones no matter what. If he doesn't have a way of...

But even then, Jose, I'll let you finish. I didn't mean to cut you off. I'm just saying, even then you'll have three fights with the same guy. How can you tell each other stories without the other? It's impossible. Oh, no, for sure. They're going to be always tied to tight to you. together. But what I'm saying is that whole, you know, argument that John Jones is better, that

D.C. is only there because John Jones isn't. I think that'll go away if D.C. beats John Jones. Other than that, like, he can get the heavyweight title. He can defend the heavyweight title or the light heavyweight title. And that will definitely help the case, but it will never create that separation. Okay. I can live with that. Yeah. Cool. Let's go on to next question now involving John Jones. Hey, Luke, what's up, man? It's Tim from Jersey. I was just wondering with all the current talks about the goat with, you know, D.C. and D.J. and G.S.P. and Jones and all. What's your stance on Jones? Do you think he, you know, fits into that, those talks or do you think the steroid stuff just, you know, ends it all for him? All right, man, I'll look forward to the show tomorrow. There we go. First of all, great call. Appreciate that. I always like it, name and where you're from.

It doesn't, I can't say it means nothing to me, but this is the point about grace of all time. I have a real hard time with this demarcation we talked about, well, whether you popped or whether you didn't. It's like, so we're only going to keep out the guys who popped. We don't know of all the ones who did actually are guilty. Some of them probably are. Many of them probably are. But even then, there's a ton of people we all celebrate that were juice to the tits. Like, and we're not going to say anything about that.

To me, that makes no sense. So here's what I'll say to you. I don't know about the official rankings and what the criteria would be, but are you asking me, is John Jones the best naturally talented fighter I've ever seen? Yeah, I think he is. I'm sure some people would debate that. I'm sure some people would disagree. That's fine.

That's what this show is all about. Maybe you do, if you do, tell me. But, you know, look, his issue is only career management. It's not talent. It's never been his problem. It's just everything else around that. If he can figure that out going forward and we'll see what happens, sky's the limit for him.

Still, at age 30, he's still got play. Cormier started at 30, excuse me. He started at this. So, yeah, to me, he's probably the best five I've ever seen. That's a different question than who has achieved the most, right? That's a separate issue. But that's probably my number one in terms of just ability. You?

Yeah, I would have to agree. Maybe Demetri's Johnson can give him a run for his money. He's so technical as well. But my definition of the goal kind of changed recently with the World Cup. I think achievement is greatly tied to the, you know, who's the goat. I think you can obviously look at a fight and see how... What do you mean? What do you mean?

Like, you can look at a fighter and he could be extremely technical and you could appreciate that and you could be like, okay, this guy might be the best fighter in the world, but it also matters what you achieve. Like, let's say Daniel Cormier just stayed fighting at light heavyweight. We know how good he is. But going up to heavyweight and getting the title also means something, you know. GSP, we knew how good he was. He didn't have to go up to middleweight.

But going up to middleweight and capturing him. that title, you know, adds to it. So same thing, like, you know, back to what I was saying with the World Cup, like, Cristiano Ronaldo and Messi, like, these two, we know they're very skilled. But if one of them won the World Cup, like, that definitely puts a lot of weight in their argument. Yeah, but it's a team sport. Like, people, like, I saw Mike Wilbon make this argument. I was like, Mike Wilbon's a dumbest man in America.

Mike Wilbon was like, well, for Ovechkin to really be one of the best hockey players ever, he needs to win at least another cup. And it's like, do you hear yourself talking? Why would you even say something like that? On a 60-minute game, right? On a 60-minute game, you're sharing that with, you know, four other players. I mean, it could be power play or something like that, right? But there's five on the ice, right?

You're on there for maybe 20 minutes a game. Maybe 20 minutes a game. Meaning for the majority of the game, you're not even playing. and even when you're on the ice, how much are you able to contribute? The idea that like these people do this all the time. Oh, well, how many rings does a certain quarterback have? Well, look, Tom Brady also shows these qualities

that are beyond these simple calculations. Like, you could say independent of those wins, he does things that make you think he's the best ever. But in these team sports, like, oh, Ronaldo, you know, Messi didn't win a World Cup. Yeah, have you seen, I mean, have you seen how dysfunctional that team is and how unprepared the coach is. So like it's a to me if you want to make that about like these next level achievements, Danny, I totally understand. I get it. I completely get it.

You do get something extra. When St. Pierre goes up to another division, 100% agreed. But with the team sport things, be like, well, Ronaldo didn't win a title. He got the euros with Portugal, but he didn't win a World Cup this year. He's got five ball and doors, man. Like, I mean, measure that against all the other things. When, when, you, you know, When, you know, when his biggest help is charisma, what do you want me to say? But for example, look at Maradona. Why is he regarded one of the greatest of all the time? He literally carried...

Because of dumbass South American mythology around him, that's why. But he literally, he also carried a team on his back. He's also a renowned cheater. What do you want me to say about? I don't have nice things to say about Diego Maradona. He's a talented player. And like you, my wife thinks he walks on water. But it's a bunch of bullshit mythology, man.

I don't buy it at all. I think achievement is great. I mean, at the end of day, skills are there so you can achieve things, right? You can't achieve certain things without skills. I mean, there could be luck involved and whatnot, but... Yeah, but for the team sport thing, there are so many other variables that go into achievement, that trying to define a player's career as a function of that is very perilous. Versus fight sports, which, yes, you have a team around you, but the competition itself is just you.

I think a much more analogous thing might be tennis, right, where you have a coach, you have players, you know, you have partners, you have trainers, you have nutritionists. But once you get on the court, man, it's just you, it's just you. So that might be a little bit more helpful. And, you know, guys like that winning grand slams, winning grand slams on clay, winning grand slams on grass, winning grand slams, like the U.S. Open just on total, whatever is, cement, whatever the normal playing surfaces. Right. That tells you. okay, these are, you know, Nadal, the best guy on clay. Outside of that, real debatable, right?

That kind of thing. St. Pierre, best guy at 170. I don't know how good he is among all middleweights ever, but he was good enough on that night in New York City up the street, so I can tell you that. That's how I kind of look at it. All right, what else? Now, let's talk about Brock.

Hey, man, this is Cody from Atlanta. The only question I have at your UFC 226, is there any way Brock Lesnar can actually beat Cormier? It's hard to find his path to victory. I don't think you can out wrestle them, and there's no way you can stand on the fee with Corbier. That's my question. Enjoy me. Right.

Yeah, Corby is going to beat the brakes off of them, right? But here's the thing, Danny. Right? This is what the fight game's all about to an extent. For me, like, my favorite thing is a Jones DC fight where you're like, man, what's going to happen? Two of the best, right? I'm like, oh, I can't wait to see this. I'm so enamored, you know, and this is so interesting.

But a portion of the fight game is just confusing, cap. Casuals. Like, who thought McGregor had a shot in hell of beating Mayweather? Donkeys. You know how many of them there are? About 4.6 million buys worth. That's how many. Like, the most predictable outcome got the highest amount of buys. That's what you have here. You have donks, and I love them, but you have donks. They're going to look at this and say, well, Lesnar's huge. Lesnar. I don't know why I'm talking like a 19th century. plantation owner, but Lesnar's huge. Lesna, Falkhorn, leghorn style. He's big and blonde and he's got lots of muscles. He wrestled too, by the way, Danny Segura. He wrestled. He wrestled Tom Bien. And you're like, well, okay, but not at nearly the same level. And, you know, this was the amazing part about Kormier. Who was it? Was it Lucas Bordaughn on Twitter? Did you see what he called him? No, I didn't. Not the baddest man on the planet, the daddest man on the

planet. It's what he is. He doesn't look like anything. So why is it great? Because if you know F all about fight sports, you know Kormier is going to go in there and borderline behead that guy. The dude for Mortal Kombat should call the fight and about 90 seconds in, you're going to hear finish him. It's going to happen. Fatality. The whole bit. Cormier is going to rock his shit. It is going to be fairly academic. However, the UFC needs a big pay-per-view and Lester's a big attraction. I do think Lester will make it more competitive than some folks might think. in the end, in the end, there's no doubt about who the winner is going to be. There's no doubt about it being a finish.

Whatever Velasquez did, I imagine Cormier could do something pretty similar. But they're selling it to casuals who don't know the difference, and it's going to make Buku De Niro, right? Yeah, I think this might actually be the worst match for Brock Lester. I mean, we saw what King Velasquez did to Brock Lester and Daniel Cormier can do just about the same thing. Yeah, I think that's right. Speed. He can match him technically, although it was,

kind of funny. Did you see the FS1 clip? They had Cormier come to the stage after his win, and then they watched, so they had Cormier, like, see how I'm watching you? Yeah. They had Cormier watch himself get pushed by Lesnar. He was like, ooh, he's strong. And he kind of smiled about it. Lesnar's strong as hell. He's strong. He's strong. He's a good wrestler. Like I said, I think in the end, Cormier's going to beat him, but, uh, and probably pretty quickly. But do I think that Lesnar's a good fighter at heavyweight? I mean, he came back after a huge layoff and he beat Mark Hunt without much issue. So yeah, I do, actually. And still, we can't deny that Brock Lester's a really good wrestler, plus the strength.

So that will definitely add like an interesting component. But I don't see Cormier losing this fight. No, neither do I. Yeah. Cool. Now, this one's a bit interesting. All right. Hey, this is Rush from Chicago, Illinois. If you were doomed to watch only one fight for the rest of your life, which one would it be? Engano versus Lewis versus Pung versus Mike Jackson. Wow. Think about that. Thank you. That's an easy call.

It's an easy call. CM Punk Mike Jackson. Yeah. Okay. Here's why. Very easy call. Things happen in that fight. Right? Some of it, quite frankly, for comedic relief, if I'm being honest with you. Also, there are some talent, talent, I don't know what I'd do. Drenched is the right word, but there are some moments of skill from Mike Jackson anyway.

So you could admire that. but things happen over the course of 15 minutes. Nothing happened with Inganu and Lewis. It was terrible. It was terrible historically bad. I do feel bad for Derek Lewis. How much of a pass do you give him? Because I actually, here's what I'll say about Derek Lewis.

He acknowledged that it was an injury, which people were blaming excuses. But then when you watch his post-fight press comments, he doesn't shy away from the responsibility even a little bit. He takes total blame, says, yes, I won. I do not deserve a title shot.

I don't deserve to call anybody out. He took ownership over the failure. I kind of, not kind of. I actually really respect that. Yeah, he was somewhat embarrassed, too. You could tell, yeah, yeah, yeah. He was not happy at all. And I do, I would agree that Derek Lewis did a little more than Francis and Ghana.

At least he was trying to push the action, swing more. And Ghana did absolutely nothing. He just stood in front of him. And regarding the question, I'd rather watch terrible MMA than no MMA at all. Yeah. Well, what did you make of that Ngunner thing? It was weird. I don't know.

I don't know. Here's the other thing I didn't understand. The Dana White comment about him being ego, what ego in what way? Yeah. Like, what is that? Okay, you're saying it's an ego problem, but like manifested how. To me, it was like, I couldn't tell what it was. The boys at the Heavy Hands podcast, and I think I want to, I'm told as well that Laura

Sanko and Megan Anderson do a podcast. and I'm told that they also predicted this that when you have two counterstrikers a la, let's say, you ever seen Pedro Hizzo take on Rico Rodriguez? I remember, yeah. It looked about the same. Terrible.

Two guys who were very skilled when they fought at the time anyway. That fight happened in the UFC. Very skilled. It was just a disaster fight because you get two counterstrikers. I don't know if it's that or if the beating that Stepe put on him

changed him. I remember distinctly David Loaza, who was a great martial artist and had some great moments inside the Octagon, but it's hard to argue that after the Rich Franklin fight he was the same guy. Is it that? I don't know.

I guess we're going to have to see, but that, wow, I did not see that coming. Yeah, I did it at all. For a second, I was always hanging on to some hope. I thought in Ganu acknowledged that he got gassed, you know, against Miochik, so I thought maybe he was going to take it easy the first two and kind of coast

and then really turn it up in the third. But obviously that wasn't the case. It was one of the worst fights I've seen. All right, let's keep the strain running. This is Mike from Columbus, Ohio. Long time, first time. My question is, who gets the title shot first? Is your Al-A-Sanya, Kasta, or a sunset?

Why did he say Arasanya like that? Yeah, I don't know. Like he was somebody mocking a racist Chinese accent or something. Yeah, I don't know. Arasanya. Okay. I have to say it like that. Play it one more time because I wasn't listening.

I was so thrown off by the... By the accent, sure. I was like, why are you saying it like that? This is Mike from Columbus, Ohio. All right. Long time, first time. My question is... Who gets the title shot first?

Is your Alessania, cost us, or a sunset. Ooh. That's, you know what? You would say by achievement, a Sunsale would be right there. A Sunsah should have gone on a title shot two years. I know. You just, you would think that would be the guy, but I guess he's not the guy. I don't really know.

I would say out of Sanya. I would say Adasanya, I think, man, he is on a rocket ship, dude. How do you watch his fight and his progression, by the way, from the Vittori to the Tavares fight? How much better he looked already? How do you watch that progression? Then, in the

post-fight scrum he did with the media, it's not just that he's smart. He's very smart, right? And he gets the fight game and he gets being a personality, and he gets talking to the media. He gets the He understands the value in talking to the media. Did you notice how perceptive he was?

Like the creative duo, Esther and Casey, brought this up to my attention. He spotlighted, you know, look at that guy's beard. Look at that guy's what he said. He even was able to call out a headline from one of the, again, I'm not being disparaging, but one of the smaller MMA outlets about Paul O'Costa, not even knowing who he was.

I don't know that MMA fighting or junkie reported that. I think it came from another outlet. He saw it and he remembered it. So like, dude, how do you not look at this guy? Three wins, six months, understands self-promotion, understands talking to the media, understands how to make money in this business, and say to yourself, someone's going to beat him in the queue

to get a title shot? As Sunsow's further ahead, but in some ways, he's actually not. Yeah, I mean, we know in this day and age, like, talking gets your fights, but Israel has both the skills and he can back it up, so that can get him pretty far. I don't see a Sunsail getting a title shot anytime soon. I think Morais will likely get a title shot before him,

which is kind of ridiculous thinking, you know, knowing that Osun Sa has a win over him. Right. But I'm actually going to disagree with you. I'm going to go Apollo Costa because he does have the skills as well. And he talks as well. And, you know, there's a difference between Israel Adasanya. Don't get me wrong.

He's a really smart fighter, but he's calling out the winner between Hall and Costa. You know, he called out Tavares. Costa's aiming for the big dogs. He called out Chris Wydenman for UFC 230 here in New York City. And I think he's aiming a bit higher. And I think the UFC is willing to give him that. So I think if he gets past some top-level opponents, he's right there. Plus, I think he's ranked higher, too, right?

Yeah, he might be. Dude, can I tell you how absurdly handsome that man is? He's very handsome, man. Okay, he reminds me, like, you see him standing there. He just, you know what he looks like? You ever watch Westworld? No, never. I hear it's a great show.

I gave up one of the season because they tell stories too slowly. But it's essentially, without giving the plot away, it involves a series of these highly functional androids, right? Oh, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Designed for human pleasure. And so you can imagine they get, like, good-looking characters, male or female to play the role. He reminds me of one of these, like, hosts from Westworld. I had a fraternity brother who was, like, absurdly handsome, right?

And we went to a bar one time. I'll never forget us. We went to a bar. So it was me and then three other of us. And he was off to the left, like a 10 out of 10, right? Every time we went somewhere, like the women were on them. and I remember I was leaning this way. We had not been in that bar.

I'm telling you, Danny Sigura, not more than two minutes. And I looked to my left and he was already making out with some woman. She just came up to him and they started doing that. And my fraternity brother looks at me, the other ones. And they go, dude, what is that like? What is that like to just walk into a bar and two minutes later, they're all over you?

I don't know, but I bet that's what happens to Baha Sinha when he goes out. Oh, yeah, for sure. I don't know if you remember he told. the crazy story about him going to Costco thinking it was Walmart, and he didn't have a Costco membership because he have to pay with, like, a card. And there was a lady at working the cash register, and he just, like, I guess, charmed his way through. And she's like, oh, I got you.

I'll use the card. And he got to pay his whole thing. They're probably like, you know what, just take the large screen TVs for free. Fuck it. Yeah, probably. Yeah, well, look, membership has its privileges, I guess. Yeah. I wouldn't know.

All right, keep going. All right. This is, I picked this one specifically because I saw you, doing a little bit of trolling in Vegas. Yes, I certainly was. Yeah. Hey, Luke, this is Richard Powell from Las Vegas, Nevada, fight capital of the world.

I just want to ask, what do you think the Golden Knight chances are of making it to the Stanley Cup finals next year are? I just want to say congratulations too, man. Thanks. Before you answer that, how many FUs did you get while you're in Vegas? People got bitter.

They got bitter. Like, straight up bitter. Some people had a good laugh about it. Other people were like, really, dude, really? And I was like, yes, yes, really. I didn't get a chance. A bunch of buddies and media friends all got to fly out for the games. And there was only two, no, excuse me, there were three, right?

Because they played game one, game two, and then game five. Yes, that's right. All in Vegas. I never got a chance to go. And so I really wanted to do it. Yeah, there were some people who were like, plus I did this event again ahead of time at the like this official party, excuse me, the official bar for the Vegas Golden Knights outside the Team Mobile flashed it.

And we came back from every commercial break. And I was like, all right, Stanley Cup champions are who now? And people were booing me. Some people threw some drinks. But you know what? It was all worth it. What do I think their chances are? Terrible.

Not good. I've not paid attention too much to their offseason, but I know they've already lost some key components. And they have a good coach. I really respect their coach and whatnot, but they don't really have any star players. Their first line is usually every other team's second line. They just had some good chemistry.

And I don't think they're going to be able to repeat. But I didn't think they were going to become this far anyway. It didn't matter because the Washington Capitals beating with an inch of their life. So there you go. Yeah, I don't know anything about hockey. You should do. It's soccer on ice with violence. Yeah, I actually like the fights and I've seen highlights and I really enjoy it. I'll tell you, my wife's like you came here. She was like, I don't like American sports. She goes to hockey games with me. Well, I've actually like been to a hockey game.

Okay, who'd you see and where'd you see it? Panthers. And I think that was years ago when I first down in Florida? Yeah, yeah. Dude, you got to go to MSG. You got to see the Rangers play. First of all, you're going to hear the craziest trash talk from the Long Island donks, you know, who are a rangers fans. I know they have their team, but, you know, Haya, you bum! You're going to hear that constantly, but it's still worth going. Correct me if I'm wrong. The Panthers are pretty decent now, right? Because I remember going like 2006 or something.

The real good team is the one the Caps play, the Tampa Bay Lightning. That's a legit, very, very good team. All right. This one was actually from last week, but it was so good and we couldn't get. to it that it carried over. Okay. It's a familiar face. Hey, Luke, it's Applesauce McGee here from the first week, calling out of DFW.

I'm learning to say my name. The first show is great. I loved it. But anyway, my question. So in my opinion, Michael Chandler is one of the best lightweights to ever step inside the cage. So with that being said, if he never signs with the UFC, will he ever get the respect that he deserves as being called one of, if not the best lightweights to ever step in the cage? Again, Luke, thank you so much for doing a great job with the MMM.

hour makes my day go by a lot faster. Thank you. All right. Well, I really appreciate that from Apples. So that was the guy who called the last time, but didn't give his name, and I called him Applesauce McGee. That's great. I'm glad that people are embracing. You should start at Twitter. I really should. Applesauce McGee on the sound off. We could do like the Apple Sauce McGee, you know, segment here on the show. Yeah. It's a good question. Here's what I'll say. I think to people in the know, it won't make a difference for the most part. I think to people not in the know it to make a huge difference. So when you ask, how will he be remembered? The question is not how will he be remembered. the question is how will he be remembered by the various parties involved?

So to people who understand what he's been doing and how good he is, I think they'll have pretty high praise for him. You could make an argument that even those folks in the know will have to downgrade what he's done because there were so many good fighters of his generation that he never faced. I can understand our argument too. But the reality is getting to the UFC is such a point of visibility. And again, look at the lightweight crop that's over there.

I mean, the lightweight division has literally never been better. Right? This is, we're living in peak lightweight times. Even with BJ Penn and his title reign, this is better than that in terms of the overall stackedness for lack of a better description of the division. So how much will affect them? Yeah, I think substantially by a lot of people, whether that's fair or not. That's life, I guess. But wouldn't you say, for example, we knew Eddie Alvers was a great lightweight, right, at Bellator. No doubt about that. Oh, he was amazing. But wouldn't you say like, him going to the UFC and actually seeing him go up against, you know, fighters that we know are very good in the UFC. Wouldn't you say that helped this case to, you know, cement himself as one of the greatest lightweight? To you and me. But even now, does Alvarez get the respect from UFC fans that he deserves?

Look at Alvarez's resume. Was a UFC champ, has beaten UFC champs, WEC champs, strike force champs, is beating Dream champs, one FC champs. You can go on down the line. I mean, you want to talk about a belt collector, Mike. God, yes, he did not have a good showing against McGregor. Okay, fine. But just about everywhere else, he has looked phenomenal. He's a super phenomenal talent. But how many people know that? Again, it's not a question of what did they actually do. It's a question of what is the public

visibility about that accomplishment and how much does that matter? People might think Connor is one of the greatest fighters ever, and certainly he is one of the best lightweight fighters ever. And what he's done, again, icing the best featherweight and lightweight of all time, or one of the Dust Lightwoods of all time. It is amazing. But does he have the same body of work that other fighters do? No, he's been inactive. He can't. Yeah, I would agree with that. But I do think if he wants to be seen and, because like you can be seen as a really great lightweight in Bellator, but I really don't think you can be seen as the best until you go to the UFC. The reason why we, there's that argument that, you know, Rory McDonald or Gaggard-Musasi might be the best at their

weight class is because we've seen them in the UFC. We know what. they can do so there's that and then so we got one more question and it oh by the way i'm getting a correction apparently it was us that cost yeah no yeah it was it was an interview i didn't realize that we i don't think it was a headline but we cut we cut clips from it and that was one of the even then it's a small thing that he found yeah yeah it's a social media clip he's paying attention i got the fact checkers all up on me cool now this is our weekly uh mouth breathing all right Which was pretty intense. I got a, I got to.

Did he treat his lower body like an amusement park? Again, no comment, but you'll be the judge. You tell me. This is like me with sleep apnea. It gets worse. Wow. Oh, yeah. Well, that's just pornographic.

That's, dude, that's literally me every night struggling to breathe. I feel bad for your wife, man. Yeah. She pushes me, like, you ever seen those, like, beached whale? they're trying to like push back into the water. She's out there shoving me, bro. That's how I sound. I have to sleep with,

because the nose is blocked. And if I sleep on that side, then everything gets collapsed. Yeah. That's a nightmare, bro. Man, that's rough. All right, let's get to these tweets. Yep, let's do it.

After the mouth breathing performance art. Yeah. That was his story, huh? Certainly was. Any day now, Danny. Ready? There we go. Oh, I know this dude.

Vic Nobu. Good guy. Trolls me a little bit, but that's okay. I know Stepe is a great fighter, but were we getting our head of ourselves, anointing him the greatest heavyweight ever, or is DC just that good, maybe both? So here's my thing about this.

We have this debate all the time, Danny. It happens constantly. St. Pierre comes back, well, maybe he's the best ever. And then Demetrius Johnson comes back. You're like, well, that comes back, but, you know, it gets back into rotation. You're like, well, no, I mean, look at what he's out there doing. And then another guy comes along.

You're like, well, look at what he's doing. And I realize that this is just about heavy weight, not about anything else. Look, here's what I would say. he is historically the most accomplished heavyweight champion for the UFC. No more, no less. And that's a great, great thing to be. Best ever, you got to wait a little bit.

You got to wait a little bit to see that. What else do we have? Let's keep these rolling, shall we? Do you think Lewis versus Francis should have been a draw to not reward one or the other with a win? Why or why not? Well, no, it should not have been a draw to not reward one of the other. It would only be a draw if you felt like it was a draw to justifiably score that way, which perhaps you did, but not to send a message.

That's not what judging is about. Judging is merely evaluating the action for action's sake, not about social engineering. So no, I would not say that. Keep going, please. What else we got here? Okay, what, in your opinion, is the appropriate trajectory of Kiwi stars, Adasania and Hooker in their divisions?

Should they be fast-tracked into top five contender fights? or given a couple more manageable fights to build their skill sets and fan bases. Well, Adasania certainly top five. I can say that with a strong degree of confidence. Hooker, a little bit different. Hooker, I would say, maybe top 10, top 15. In fact, let me pull up the rankings here because I don't even know where things are at right now with that division, although he has, I mean, the way he beat Burns was just so utterly tremendous.

So let's see, we've got Hooker, yeah, I mean, you got Vic at 11, Pettus 12, Hernandez at 13, Felder 14, Trinado at 15. Some of that's going to be shuffled around because we don't have the rest of that settled yet. But so I'll say top 15 for Hooker, top 5 for Adasania. Definitely. I've been blown away by how good he has looked. All right. Moss. Thank you. Their second fight felt closer just before the head kick. But does John Jones have a harder time with DC at heavyweight? You know what? I will hold off on that call because we have to get, or that tweet because we have to get right to our, all right, well, let's make him count then. Here we go. Joining us now in the hotline is the second ever champ champ in the UFC. One of the best fighters to ever do it. He joins us now on the hotline. The one and only Daniel Kormier is here. Daniel, how are you, sir? What's up, Luke Thomas? How you doing, man? Daniel, I am so sorry for ruining your Sunday with my endless stream of texts, but I really appreciate you being here on the show. It means a lot. Okay. Okay.

Persistency, it pays off. You remember those little polsters that were always in the cafeteria when you were a kid? Had the cat, like holding on to the top of the thing trying to pull himself up. You've got to be persistent, Luke. That's how you get it done. And congratulations on your new game, man. Thank you, D.C. I really appreciate it, man. So let's get right to it.

It's been now a couple of days, or at least a day and a half. Has the enormity of your achievement sunk in yet? I think it's starting to. You know, I think it's starting to. I think for me, I'm just kind of sitting around like it's normal. You know, I just laid around the room all to be yesterday, but when I go outside and I try to go somewhere, that's where you feel the difference

because it seems like everybody either knows you or they kind of go, for some reason this guy stands out to me. And they might know not exactly what you did or who you are. people are kind of turning and crating their necks a little bit more than they used to. And that's a little bit of a day. Yeah, I mean, give it time, right? Because I'm imagining the UFC is going to keep you busy in public. By the way, no one asked you this at the Post-Fi Presser I should have.

Does it feel good to break the Conan curse? That is, that's a, yeah, it did. You know, I thought about that. Luke, it threw all that when I was done, I was like, well, I guess he didn't get me. I guess colder didn't get me. So, yeah, it felt good, man. You just got to have confidence in yourself and hope it works out. All right.

Let's talk about that right hand that closed the show. I went back and I watched the fight. You had landed it in a very similar way a couple of times earlier in the fight. When you landed, how soon did you realize that was it? Like, you had basically closed the show at that point. Man, the way he fell, right? He fell with his legs like up. And I was like, man, this dude was not trying to put his...

feet on my hips or anything, you know. You see a lot of times Luke when you get dropped. We usually kick our legs up to try to keep the guy away from him. He didn't do any of that. I kind of just passed his knees. I passed his knees behind my hips and it was over.

I was able to just stand above him and ran shot after shot at the shot. He was kind of going by time he hit the ground. But I didn't realize until I heard the crowd erupt and him start falling backwards. But I feel like when we were trading, I was landing some pretty good shots already that was starting

to take effect on it. You know, I was having this debate with people prior to the fight. Certainly, Steepa, as you mentioned, hit hard, but nothing you were used to. I'm wondering, relative to Anthony Johnson, was it as powerful or less or more? Like, where would he stack up relative to Rumble? Honestly, Rumble, I think, might have hit harder. And the reason Rumble hits harder is because Rumble is a lot faster. He's a lot faster.

And he pays a fast guy for a heavyweight. But he's so fast and he's accurate and he's so explosive. I've never really felt anybody that hits as hard as Anthony Johnson. I've been mulling over this question and I'm going to ask it respectfully because I do mean it in a respectful way. But hear me out on this. You accomplished a lot in the world of wrestling. But your achievements in MMA now, this is. This is different, Daniel.

This is like truly historic stuff. So I know you define yourself and your identity as very much tied to the wrestling community as a wrestler. But are you a better fighter than you are a wrestler? Man, I think, I think a hard question, right? Because wrestling's been around for so long. So people have had more time to get better at that one discipline. Whereas mixed martial arts is still a younger sport, the UFC is only celebrating 25 years.

Wrestling was in the very first Olympics. So to get to one of the top guys in the world in that single discipline is so, so difficult that I don't know if I could ever be that good a fighter. Okay. And again, in terms of your identity, you lead with the wrestling that's like you do you conceive of yourself like is fighting your job and wrestling is who you are is that a fair characterization

I didn't I didn't understand that question in terms of self-identification you are a wrestler but like fighting is what you do yeah I'm a wrestler yeah I'm a wrestler and I'm a fighter I mean look if you're not a fighter at heart you can't do this job and you can't do this job at this level. You have to be a true fighter.

You have to be a dog. You know, a guy that's willing to go in there and just mix it up and fight. You know, so I'm a fighter. But I do feel like at the end of the day, you know, Luke, I'm the guy that runs out with his shirt tucked into his pants. I like to tuck my socks in my pants into my socks. It's because the lessons I learn are things I learn from wrestling. And also, wrestling has been the catalyst for everything that I've done in my life and career.

So, yeah, I'm a wrestler. Beyond just the power that you picked back up at heavyweight, did anything else feel not merely different, but better about competing in that weight class? Faster. I felt like I was faster, you know, because I feel like. I think my speed is not as, it doesn't jump out as to as much because all the guys that I fight are pretty fast and still. So I think I felt faster. I think I felt faster.

I had weight. And then just not having to do that weight cut. It's a big deal, man. That weight cut can really, really, you can really utilize you. I was about to say the fight didn't go very long, but your energy levels, you must have felt over the moon in terms of how supercharged you were before the fight itself, right? Yeah, I was so excited, man. I was in the back trying to contain myself, you know, like, how do I stay the course and not put myself in the fight too early? You know, because that's that, without having to worry about the weight management, now I have all this time to think about the fight.

You know, and I do a lot of visualization and stuff. So it's like, when I visualize, I'm like, wow, I could go and just fight right now. I don't have to cut any weight. How do I monitor myself and manage my energy in regards to the fight? I can't get to exciting. So I was really trying to peel myself back a lot. I was trying to peel myself back a lot when it came to thinking about the fight.

You know, you're at your peak earning potential. But if your career was over today, you're totally satisfied with it, right? Like, in other words, getting this, I mean, this is about as good as it gets, right? You know what's crazy? Luke is just that it's the mountain top, right?

It's like, man, I won the heavyweight championship for the world. I'm the USC life heavyweight champion. How do you top that, you know? And if I got to be honest, I feel like I could fight until I'm 42, 43 years old. But my family and I, we made a decision a long time ago on when I was going to be done,

and I'm going to stick to that. So I'm not leaving because I can't compete, obviously. I'm leaving because it's something that we've tried to do a while ago. How different would a fight with you and John Jones be at heavyweight? I don't know. You know, when I look at matchups, right, like everything that he does, right, and all the mistakes that Jones makes, still a very difficult matchup point.

He always will be because he's tall. And there are a lot of different things coming up. at you. There's not just punches, but you know, that's why I was so confident that I was winning against people. You know, just because they're new, but at most part, it's just punches. Punches and wrestling, you know.

With Jones, there's just a lot coming at you. Fair enough. I want to, I know the Jones questions must be exhausting at this point, so I don't really want to ask a whole lot of them. But I am kind of interested in this Brock Lesnar thing. Some folks have said that that ruined your great night.

And I don't really know that I understand that argument. You don't seem to feel that way, right? No, not at all. Didn't ruin my night. It made it even better. If not for anything, if I was a guy that just wanted that type of moment, you know, like that would have been okay, but how did it ruin my moment? You know,

when I won the belt the first time, the first thing I did was yell at John Jones about getting stuff together, set up my next fight. This fight would drop Lesnar. I told him to get me the opposite on, set up my next life, how do you have ruined my moment? You know, it doesn't change the fact that I got to win the U.S. He had a way time.

They've got this great image of me sitting on top of the cage floating around right now. I don't understand how that would have ruined my moment. And by the way, I saw you talking about him shoving you on, I think it was on Fox Sports One. You laughed at how strong he is. How strong is he? He's very strong.

He pushed me. He pushed me, and I went falling back. And then when he got closed, I, like, pushed him back, but I barely moved him. I'm like, gosh, I'll push him so much harder. I'm like, why did I push him so soft? Am I, like, am I, like, kind of scared of Brock Lesnar? He was like, why didn't I push him a lot harder than I did? But he's going to get his.

He's going to get his. Did your coach break his hands trying to shove Brock Lesnar, Mr. Sanchez? Did you see that? What in the world was Rosendo doing? Dude, you got a death wish? I think, do you have a death wish? I was like, because right now, you're going to push Brock Lesnar? And Brock just kind of didn't even, it's almost like Brock didn't even,

it's like Brock didn't even steal him, push him. He just kept going about his business, you know? It's crazy, man. It was crazy. It's funny, though. It just shows that Rosendo's kind of a ride-and-eye guy, you know? The titles. You play devil's advocate if I may, Daniel.

It's certainly a great thing that you're setting up a big fight with Brock Lesnar down the line. It'll do wonders for you financially and for all the various parties involved. But we had Gustafson on the show earlier. He's saying he believes his fight with Usdamer should be for an interim title. Basically that, look, you can have the title, but there's a responsibility in terms of the schedule to defend it. Your response to that would be what? I just fought in the division in January. Like what?

Like, I don't understand. Like, it's not like I've been gone for a year or two years. years of. I haven't been gone for a long time. I fought in the division in January. Would you fight at light heavyweight before fighting at heavyweight? Yeah, of course.

You know, it just depends. Like, you know, what's going to happen what's going to happen after what's going to happen in the next couple months? You know, I have to figure it out, you know? Brock has to go through the East side of thing. I'm not going to fight Brock.

he's not 100% clean, you know? So I have to, if I have to fight a 205, I'll go back down to fight at 205. And then if Brock's ready, I'll just fight Brock later beginning the next year. You know, maybe February or March, I'll fight in November against somebody else. And I really don't sleep.

You know what I'm going to be a guppistice and to be honest. But you can't just worry yourself into a title shot, man. You can't not fight for a year or a year in something and think that you're going to just be given an interim title part. Also, I know you went to the doctor this morning. How is the hand? I do have a break in my knuckle. So no surgery, but it's got to take some time.

I'm in a splint. A lot of swelling right now. Hopefully that goes down soon. And I can get back to training in a little bit. But nothing that would prevent you from keeping the kind of schedule that you were sort of eyeballing before all this took place, right? No, no, no, I'm going to need about two months for the thing to get back to where I can start using it again in combat. But no, it won't slow me on too much.

Does this win, by the way, and then of course Habib's win as well? Does this feel good to stick it to the AKA critics who said you guys train too hard? You know, we have the best gym in the world. I mean, without my gym and my team and my coaches, that would be nowhere. Without King of Alaska, being at the gym every day. day to help me. I'd be nowhere. All my training partners, Tony Johnson, Jackson, Gaggleville. Everybody, like, these guys

give so much of themselves for me to become who I am and for our team to be what it is. There's no better team in the American Kid Box Academy. You can watch the Ultimate Fighter. And I believe, the Ultimate Fighter finale, and I believe two guys really stood out. Brad Cotonin,

and he's got a great team at SDG, and Luis Paine. And those guys are at big gyms that are really people that are preparing them in the way to fight at the highest level of mixed martial arts. And I believe that we do it better than anybody else. I know you got to go. So last question for you. But I'm wondering, is there any kind of way to help someone understand through all of your wrestling journey and all of your MMA journey for the ups and downs, even until last July all the way to hear? Is there any kind of way to encapsulate what this, not merely the feeling is, rather, but the achievement? What does this

achievement mean to your athletic career? It means everything, it means that for a guy that was almost like, like right on the cusp but never was able to push through and you just keep trying, man, just keep working, keep getting better,

keep pursuing goal after goal after goal, like, you know, when you fail at something, put something else out of heading you and hope that you can go and put that, you know, like just keep trying. and keep giving yourself opportunity to do something special. And I did that and did that and did that. And eventually I got it done.

It's an amazing feeling. Daniel, I know you got to go. So I'll let you go. Let me just say it one more time. It's a true honor to have you on the show. It was an honor to watch you win that second title. Thank you so much. And I wish you all happy vacation time and whatever else you're going to be doing with your family.

Luke, thank you so much for having it. And I appreciate it. And once again, hey, congratulations. Good job, man. Thank you, buddy. You too. All right. There he is. Okay. Folks, we are done here. We went a little bit long, but we had to make some room for the champ champ. I really appreciate it. Remember, keep putting in your phone calls. 844-866-24-68. Send us your tweets using the hashtag the MMA hour. We'll be back next week. And until next time, stay frosty.