UFC 102 Press Conference Notes – Randy Couture Signs A New Contract
– 16,088 for a gate of 1.92 million dollars
– KO of the Night to Nate Marquardt
– Submission of the Night to Jake Rosholt
– Fight Of the Night to Couture and Nogeuira
– All bonuses were $60,000
– Dana said they’d probably go to Seattle first and then possibly back to Portland.
– Dana says that he won’t do 5 round non-title fights.
– He says both Marquardt and Henderson are both in the mix for a shot against Anderson Silva.
– He says that Brock was cheering for Randy hoping to fight him again.
– Randy and Dana just said that they signed a new contract and he doesn’t only have one more left. He says it’s for 28 months and for 6 more fights.
– Dana says that Chuck Liddell was texting him all night, wanting to fight again.
– Big Nog says that it was the most important fight of his career even though it wasn’t for the title because he was fighting one of his heroes.
Six more fights for Randy?
Even though that guy is a living legend, six fights for Couture could be pretty rough.
Couture vs. Jardine.
“- Dana says that he won’t do 5 round non-title fights.”
I dont think he said that. I watched it back and it looked like he said that he doesn’t want Hendo/Nate to be 5 rounds, but he also said he wishes Nog/Randy was 5.
I think he will do one eventually when its special enough.
In an interview with Sherdog he says he won’t do 5-round non-title fights because it would make title fights less special.
It’s exactly what he said. Watch it again. He said having 5 round non-title fights would water down 5 round title fights and he said there’d be no difference between title fights and non-title fights.
Which I kind of think is a bad reason. The difference between title fights and non-title fights is the TITLE. Not the number of rounds.
A wouldn’t mind, at all, if the main events became 5-round fights. Two more rounds last night would have been great.
I think the issue is that what decides it? You’d think that maybe it’s the magnitude of the fight. But what would happen is that they’d only use it when they didn’t have a title fight in the main event, and that fight may not necessarily be of the proper magnitude. You still want to make them special.
I don’t think he’ll be all that stubborn on this. It’s probably just what he’s feeling at the moment.
I’m not to fond on the idea of doing 5 round non title fights.
In ways I wish that boxing world title matches were still 15 rounds just to differentiate them. I’m glad it was changed for safety purposes, but now all title bouts of any type are 12 rounds. And now pretty much every fight is for some kind of regional title or paper title, and it has become completely transparent.
In the same way, I feel if UFC started to do a bunch of non title fights over three rounds will hurt the prestige of the championship fights. I think it’s best to keep the 5 round fight special. In my opinion there is way more to lose than to gain.
That was pretty much Dana’s argument.