The UFC’s welterweight division has had its ups and downs over the course of the last few years. At one point, many fans, including myself, had a very pessimistic outlook on the division’s future as current champion Georges St. Pierre had taken out Jon Fitch, Thiago Alves, and B.J. Penn in title defenses. He’ll fight in his fourth straight defense on March 27th against Dan Hardy in a battle that many fans see as another destructive win for the champion.
Unfortunately for fans, there aren’t too many options left for Georges St. Pierre. Jon Fitch will likely be the next title contender if he can defeat Thiago Alves at UFC 111, but a case could be made for Josh Koscheck if he manages to defeat power-punching British striker Paul Daley at UFC 113. And of course, the challenger for the contender spot in Mike Swick will also be in the mix with a couple of victories. Are we sensing a trend?
Recently on MMAWeekly.com radio, Mike Swick talked about the possibility of teammate vs. teammate match-ups happening in the UFC’s welterweight division, and as expected — he wasn’t optimistic of it happening:
Swick believes right now the cons far outweigh the pros in a situation pitting one AKA fighter against another. He says the gym would face choosing sides, which is never a good place for a team.
“Right now it’s a lose-lose. They’ve been asking us for over a year, maybe a year, year and a half, and we’ve never had to fight each other,” Swick commented.
“Say we say we want to fight each other or something, now all of a sudden we have this tension between us and we’re a direct result of each other. We’re the fighters we are because of each other. So we don’t want that tension in the gym of Koscheck calling me out, or saying he’s going to beat me up, or Fitch saying he’s going to beat Kos up or something like that.”
To be perfectly honest, I’m a bit tired of the logic here. While I understand that camps within the structure of the sport work as a family, this is still a business. The only reason we haven’t seen AKA teammates battle each other is because the division has such a dominant champion in Georges St. Pierre. Take him out of the equation, and we may have potentially had the Josh Koscheck vs. Jon Fitch showdown a couple of years ago.
In any case, Swick pushes the same statement. They won’t be fighting each other anytime soon. Unfortunately for AKA, it’s going to happen eventually. After Fitch’s recent performance against Mike Pierce and Swick’s loss to Hardy, I’m much higher on Josh Koscheck being the eventual contender and top dog out of AKA than anyone else.