Bellator MMA light heavyweight Chael Sonnen may be the smartest man in the MMA room. He recently uploaded a pointed message to the entire flyweight division, less one.
One thing at 125 pounds – and it does surprise me and it does disappoint me and it even infuriates me – listen, that division was almost cut. That division was almost gone,” said Sonnen, as transcribed by Jed Meshew for MMA Fighting. “And I’m not speaking out of school, that was very public and well-known. Henry saved the division. Henry Cejudo brought something new where they said ‘You know what? We’re going to keep it around. We’re gonna keep this guy here and we’re gonna see if he can drive it into the future.’ The rest of the 125 pounders were so thankful. The holidays were saved, their careers were saved. [But they] did not apparently learn a single god damn lesson from it almost being taken away from them.
Aside from Henry Cejudo, not one of the guys in the back who thought their contracts were going to go away because of lack of interest in the division have done a god damn thing to be interesting. Not one them and it is infuriating to me. As much as they all wanted to cry into their beer when they were going to get cut — and I would take no pleasure in somebody having their opportunity taken from them, none — but you would certainly think that would serve as a wake-up call. A major wakeup call – something has to be done different.
‘Oh my gosh, here’s Henry Cejudo. Oh my gish, this guy looks like a fool, a jester. This guy’s coming on stage with fake snakes and snapping them down. Oh my gosh, this guy just saved an entire division? He just saved the jobs of 56 strangers who happen to be in the same weight class with the same goals as him? Wow. Maybe I should learn something.’
Look, you don’t want a whole bunch of gimmicks in the division, you don’t. You don’t need a whole ton of them, particularly for the hardcores. The hardcores don’t need eight or nine characters all at once. But the casuals do. Now you may look at Henry and Colby [Covington] and go, ‘I don’t like the character. I don’t like the gimmick, they need to change.’ You may do that but you also need to understand that they are the two best gimmicks in the entire sport by default. They are the only two which makes them the two best. . . It just strikes me as a little bit of a surprise that [no one is] coming out with a branded marketing campaign to himself when one of them is about to fight for the world title and the other one has the title and saved an entire division. It would just seem to me that you would learn something from that.
