Roger Huerta is now officially a free agent. Following the final fight on his UFC deal Roger has entered into the period where he is able to negotiate with any promotion while the UFC retains the right to match any offer made. Sherdog.com was able to catch up with Roger Huerta and Jeff Clark of his management team and get a few statements out of them:
When asked if he and the fighter had started negotiations with the UFC, Strikeforce, and other promotions, Clark answered that, “we’ve had a lot of interest from different parties.” Clark would not elaborate further.
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“I recently saw, actually, that fight with Fedor (Emelianenko) vs. (Brett) Rogers and the show looked amazing,” said Huerta, who is 6-2 in the UFC. “The fights looked great. There’s a lot of great fights in that show.”
Huerta, who was the first mixed martial artist to grace the cover of Sports Illustrated in 2007, believes he’d fare well in Strikeforce’s 155-pound ranks.
“It would be up to them,” said Huerta, “but I’d definitely like to fight a top-caliber fighter like (Shinya) Aoki, (interim champion Gilbert) Melendez, or (champion Josh) Thomson. Obviously, I’d have to earn my stripes in that organization, if I went there, but any of those fights would be amazing.”
Strikeforce and Bellator both have to be very interested in signing the lightweight star. The real question is: how much defense is the UFC going to play in matching any offers that come in to Huerta?
A lot of people assumed that making the fight with Maynard was a similar move to the Andrei Arlovski / Jake O’Brien fight where a “star” on his way out was given a fight which even if he won would end up looking ugly. Instead we got some of the usual Huerta drama and he left the promotion with a split decision loss. No matter how clear it was that Roger lost that fight, one judge scoring it for him really improves his marketability. Rather than being bounced from the UFC in embarrassing fashion, he now “lost a hotly contested split decision.”
This is going to be a very interesting situation to watch develop.