Mexico’s Yair Rodriguez went into The Ultimate Fighter: Latin America Featherweight Tournament with a 4-1 record, and won. His next win was the Fight of the Night. Then he won again. Then he won three fights in a row, winning a performance bonus in all three, capped by the dismantling of BJ Penn. With his hyper exciting style, ‘El Pantera’ appeared like he could be the next big thing.

He lost via TKO to Frankie Edgar. However, there were still extraordinarily exciting fights for him, including his Russian clone Zabit Magomedsharipov. However, Rodriguez turned down fights vs. Magomedsharipov and Ricardo Lamas, and was released.

On a recent episode of his Beyond the Fight, Chael Sonnen explained why.

I did read a post on something that kids call the ‘UnderGround forum’, and they were saying how that was wrong of Dana White to release him for not wanting to fight, said Sonnen, as transcribed byMilan Ordoñez for BloodyElbow.com. Well, you’re devastatingly wrong about that point. Dana has to do that. He has to make sure [he ’s] maintaining the integrity of his company, [that] the guys are fighting the right guys.

This is a UFC policy, and this is explained to all of the guys on the roster from the beginning. You will be called an offer to fight. You can say no to the first fight, but you cannot say no to the second fight. So you play that however you want. You can say no once, you can’t say no twice.

In Yair’s case, when he turned two guys down, well, of course, you release him. There’s nothing else you can do. It’s not the boxing model where guys get protected or guys get to pick their own fights, or guys can only take fights that they think they can win. It doesn’t work like that.

The contenders and the ranked guys have to fight the other contenders and the other ranked guys, whoever they are, as long as they’re in the same weight class. That’s it. So when he said no, he became eligible for [release].

Sonnen is currently in the semi-finals of the 2018 Bellator Heavyweight Grand Prix:
Chael Sonnen vs. Fedor Emelianenko
Matt Mitrione vs. Ryan Bader

And in time, don’t be shocked if Chael Sonnen ends up running the UFC, if they are smart enough to hire him.