Now that Jon Jones has captured the light heavyweight title (as correctly predicted by your friends at this blog), he has, in the eyes of fans and the media, ascended to the status of godhood -- that rarefied air occupied only by other figures of worship such as Anderson Silva and GSP.
Well, this blog ain't buyin' it! Jon Jones is very good, but he's not invincible. Like the aforementioned MMA gods Silva and GSP, Jones benefits from being in a division where few other fighters possess the strengths to exploit Jones' weaknesses. Silva, for instance, has been able to hold his title for so long because of a dearth of excellent wrestlers in his division. The one time he had to face a great wrestler, that wrestler, Chael Sonnen, pounded Silva's face into the Octagon for 23 minutes before succumbing to one of his two major weaknesses -- a submission -- the other being an inability to stay out of trouble with the government. (Sonnen would be in real trouble if he ever had to fight a bureaucrat who knew submissions!) Other than Sonnen, Silva has benefited from facing a parade of inferior strikers and grapplers lacking sufficient wrestling ability to exploit Silva's glaring weakness in this area. Meanwhile, the sickening goody-two-shoes Canadian GSP benefits from occupying a division lacking a powerful, fast striker with good wrestling. (The Shertards will have a heart attack when I say this, but a bulked-up Frankie Edgar could take out GSP.)
As for Jones, he, too, benefits from having possibly the strongest wrestling in his division, possessing the GSP-like ability to take down wrestlers with more credentials. However, when and if Jones faces a wrestler who can stuff his takedowns and capitalize on Jones' penchant for silly spinning kicks and elbows, he will lose.
Alas, I do not believe Rashad Evans will be this wrestler, though I can see how he could win if he trained right and employed the proper game plan. (This is highly unlikely given Evans' limited intelligence in these matters.) The wrestlers Jones previously defeated were unprepared for Jones' superior ability because they made the mistake of thinking, "I have X number of wrestling credentials, so there's no way this junior-college wrestler is going to take me down." Evans, at least, won't make that mistake. If Evans trains right (again, highly unlikely), then he is fast enough to take down Jones during one of Jones' flashy ballerina attacks and is a good enough wrestler to hold him down. Also, Evans is fast enough to get in and out with his powerful punches in order to negate Jones' reach. (Why not train as Roy Nelson did for Struve -- with training partners standing on chairs and wielding long pipes? I'm only half kidding here!) The problem, however, is that Evans, though displaying a strong chin in his earlier fights, has, upon being punched, performed the turkey-leg dance in his past three fights. Such a suspect chin does not bode well for Evans in this fight and will probably cause his demise.
A short review of the dreaded Sherdog forums -- abandon hope, all ye who enter -- illustrates the consensus reaction to Jones' win --a combination of shock that Jones decimated Pride-nerd hero Shogun, a premature desire to coronate Jones the new undisputed king of MMA, and a disillusioned acceptance that there's no longer any use in watching MMA since Jon Jones will, after gutting the light-heavyweight division, buzz saw through the heavyweight division and then presumably trounce even Goku of Dragon Ball Z and perhaps, finally, Chuck Norris himself.
Though clearly a great fighter, Jones is not the invincible beast he is being worshiped/feared/hated as. One strong piece of evidence in favor of this assertion is that idiotic Sherdog Radio host TJ Desantis spent nearly the entire Beatdown After the Bell disgustingly burning incense at the altar of Jones. Desantis, like Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, is an excellent negative indicator. Everything he says turns out wrong, but Desantis over the years has perfected his authoritative radio voice so that his inane predictions have the ring of truth -- much the way Bernanke masks the absurdity of his catastrophically wrongheaded economic prognostications in the veil of incomprehensible econometric babble. Ergo, we can safely assume that since TJ has anointed him, Jones will inevitably disappoint.
An early sign of that disappointment revealed itself in the title fight -- the fact that despite taking no significant damage and in fact dominating his opponent, Jones was badly gassed by the end of the first round and won only because Shogun was even more gassed as a result of Jones' offense. Jones' trainer blames the gassing on all of the media attention Jones has received of late and, laughably, his alleged superhero act in subduing a New Jersey crackhead. (I have me doubts about whether that incident was not heavily overblown for UFC propaganda purposes.)
Me thinks Jones did not train very hard for this fight, and he didn't have to since his superior wrestling would have enabled him to squash the wrestling-deficient Shogun even if he hadn't trained at all. But Jones has gassed in his previous UFC bouts that went the distance. This gassing will catch up with him sooner or later, and all the alleged experts will, in shock and amazement, ponder what happened to their latest figure of worship.
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