I’m surprised to hear you say that regarding Werdum. While I’d love to watch 2004 Fedor grapple with Werdum, I think Overeem showed (in their 2nd and 3rd fights) a cleat template to use to beat Werdum: punish Werdum standing, and just never ever follow him to the ground. Werdum in later years improved his striking a lot, but never to a point that I think it was better than Fedor’s.
Regarding competition, the fact that Fedor was undefeated against subpar guys is just a cherry on top of what Fedor accomplished. JDS for example has 8 ranked wins in his entire 16 year career. Fedor has 11 in his first decade. Now, later on when the UFC started doing (and manipulating) their own rankings, it’s possible someone like Stipe could have more—I’d honestly have to check and count it up. But Fedor put together an u defeated streak at HW that included 11 ranked wins, 7 title fight wins (I’m excluding tournament titles but including PRIDE and WAMMA both), and 5 total title defenses (3 PRIDE, 2 WAMMA). No other heavyweight in MMA history can say that.
Btw—beware of posters who allegedly list all the cans Fedor beat. There’s one dude who does it all the time, and I call him out because it’s really dishonest. What this dude does is list the fight records from the end of their career, and not at the time Fedor fought them. Secondly, he lists a bunch of fighters that Fedor fought right at the beginning of his career.
Example: he’ll list something like “Hiroya Takada, 1-3.” Well, Takada was either Fedor’s 1st or 3rd fight, depending on which source you believe. Fedor claims Takada was first, not Lazarov—meaning both he and Takada were 0-0 when they fought. If the Wikipedia order is right, Fedor would’ve been 2-0 and Takada 0-0. It’s a bit of dishonesty to list him as some subpar can Fedor fought.
