Chad mendez is the urijah Faber of 145

[King in the North]

Faber was a 145 champ in WEC and defended multiple times. Most of his prime was spent outside of the UFC.

 

[FleximusPrime]

 

[hedidhisownstunts]

People forget his belt and five FW defenses. they act like WEC wasn't owned by zuffa; they act like like the FW belt faber had and defended isn't the same lineal belt that max holds today.

As much petty manlet angst comes out of Uriah, he's one of the greatest and a hard working man. I respect the hell out of him.

 

[eseseses681]

People forget his belt and five FW defenses. they act like WEC wasn't owned by zuffa; they act like like the FW belt faber had and defended isn't the same lineal belt that max holds today.

To be fair, those five defenses weren't against the best guys the featherweight division had to offer. The top guys in Shooto and the featherweights who moved up in weight to fight in HERO's or Pride (Kid Yamamoto, Pequeno Nogueira, Hiroyuki Takaya, Jens Pulver, Gilbert Melendez) would have posed serious challenges to Faber, some of them probably beating him at their peaks.
Before he fought Curran, Faber's top victories were over Joe Pearson (who was kind of like a Josh Emmett kind of guy in the low top-10 with one victory justifying that ranking, to use a current analogy, but it was the best Faber could get), Naoya Uematsu (a longtime featherweight ranker and a very good, explosive grappler, who was on a two-fight losing streak with the previous loss being in his bantamweight debut), Cole Escovedo (a good fighter with unfortunate luck, but like low-top-20 at his highest ranking at the time), and a DQ over Ivan Menjivar. He was a great featherweight, but his actual featherweight run is really underwhelming compared to his bantamweight run.
The interesting thing is that his striking devolved after he lost his featherweight title and dropped down to bantamweight. I think that had something to do with building the Team Alpha Male brand so much...