Fedor took some losses on the backside of his career when he was a shadow of his former self.
That doesn’t erase his almost decade of dominance.
Fedor has more finishes than Jones has fights. His peak run by itself was more dominant than Jones’ entire career.
And with the possible exception of DC, Fedor’s best opponents are beating Jones best opponents
And calling Hendo a middleweight is disingenuous in light of the fact that Fedor beat many bigger opponents in what was basically an open ended division – and Hendo had plenty of fights at 205, with 206 being the minimum for a HW fight.
Hendo also packs HW power and is hurting anyone if he connects clean.
The GOAT HW will IMO always be greater then the GOAT LHW.
Jones bided his time and stepped up to HW at exactly the right time to have the greatest chance of capping his career as the 2 division champ. He took the lowest risk move possible to pad his legacy – and he did it vs a mediocre opponent who didn’t even show up, and a 44 year old coming off a loss and a 2 year layoff.
Prior to that Jones failed to finish 8/10 fights going back a decade, and one of the 2 finishes was overturned because he cheated.
Nah can’t go along with that.
GOAT LHW fair enough but that’s it.
Fedor was a naturally smaller man fighting bigger guys in a division that had the best HW’s in the world. We will never see that much talent in the HW division ever again imo. He went 9 years with out losing while being undersized.
Jon the naturally bigger man decides to cut weight to a smaller division where he can rehydrate to 235-240 come fight night and have a massive size advantage.
Also Jon had four fights in a row against Shogun, Rampage, Rashad and Vitor whom were all declining physically or were out of their primes.
I don’t blame Jon for that. He fought everyone that was available at the time. Jon arguably lost to Gus and Santos as well. That tells me he wouldn’t have gone undefeated in Pride against those LHW’s with those rules etc.
Prime Rampage, Shogun, Arona, Hendo, Liddell, Wandy, Bustamante, Lil Nig is a lot tougher than most of the guys he beat in the UFC.
Jon and the UFC have obviously cherry picked his HW reign so far. He wanted nothing to do with Francis or Stipe when he was younger.