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In 2013, the year of the "superfight" and new-fashioned division jumping in the UFC, anything is possible. How possible? A simple, timely text can shake up an entire division for the better part of a year. Ask Ricardo Lamas, who should have been t...

Anthony Pettis is a man of action. He could have voluntarily waited for his chance at the 155-pound belt. Or he could do what he did, which was text UFC president Dana White to embark on an expedition. Pettis asked for a chance to fight Jose Aldo,...

Title shots are nice, but they're hard to come by in the UFC's lightweight division. Anthony Pettis knows. Since coming over as the reigning WEC champion a little more than two years ago, he has lived in a world of obstructions. There was the Fran...

It's always a good problem to have two (or three) contenders with strong cases to fight for a belt. That's the perpetual state of the UFC's always-bountiful lightweight division. Ever since Frankie Edgar clogged the top with his battery of rematches ...

It's fight week, and it's flight week. No more Strikeforce after Saturday night. No more wondering if and when we'll be sold on Josh Thomson-Gilbert Melendez IV. No more decagon, and no more second-class citizenry. At long last, the long road ends...

It took 15 months and some monumental forks in the road to arrive at the end point of the Strikeforce heavyweight grand prix. No, it didn't go the way people thought it would, nor the way many hoped. There isn't going to be Fedor Emelianenko versus J...

For what it's worth, Gilbert Melendez/Josh Thomson III isn't a bad fight. It's just not the fight people wanted. It just feels obvious and limited and, you know, uninspired. There was a time not that long ago when Dana White assured everybody that...

Alright, so Gilbert Melendez will fight on May 19 in San Jose, only five months and two days after beating Jorge Masvidal to retain his title. Though this isn't major news in itself, it's a turnaround that beats nine months of involuntary limbo. ...

Dana White alluded to the new Strikeforce/Showtime deal in the past couple of weeks with a sense of giddiness. He talked about it like it would knock our socks off just as soon as he was finally able to reveal the nature of the thing. This sort of te...

Just looking over the inventory of possible lightweights to contend for Frankie Edgar's belt, it came down to three names -- Gilbert Melendez, Clay Guida and Ben Henderson. That much was obvious on Saturday after Melvin Guillard fell through a hatch....

Two weeks ago, Melvin Guillard opened up a can of worms by suggesting to ESPN.com that the only way to sort through the lightweight division's growing list of contenders was to hold a 155-pound grand prix. This idea was, of course, ludicrous. The...

If it looked like the rejuvenated Matt Wiman could have went 10 rounds against Cole Miller in January's UFC "Fight for the Troops," well, then the picture clearly expressed a thousand words. Before his camp heading into that fight, Wiman relocate...

With the fresh transfusion of WEC 155-ers, the UFC's lightweight division is deep enough that guys like Melvin Guillard can win seven of eight fights and barely register as a blip on the radar. The problem starts with the bottleneck situation at the ...

NEWARK -- Count UFC light heavyweight champion Mauricio Rua among those who are jazzed about the influx of new faces soon to make their way into the Octagon. While having lunch at a Brazilian restaurant in Newark on Monday, just five days before ...

It's always a fun occasion when possibility crosses over into probability -- especially when possibility has forever felt more like fool's hope. With the epic news of UFC's parent company Zuffa purchasing its primary competition Strikeforce, the do...