what percentage of those fighters debuted after 2012 like he stated? raufeon stots is a great example of a recent collegiate wrestler who turned into a solid MMA fighter, he looks promising and i forgot him. hasn't beaten anyone great yet but he doesn't have any embarrassing losses either. of course, you fuck yourself out of being taken seriously when you name a bunch of older guys that i already acknowledged were promising prospects back when being a high-level collegiate wrestler was impressive.
also, i'm not going on bellator rankings or UFC rankings. I'm talking world rankings, based on media consensus. the rest of the guys you named outside of older MMA fighters or raufeon stots are nobodies.
At this point you're just exposing your ignorance on Bellator. And if you don't like Bellator that's fine, it's tehMoose and GueseGuy's job to judge you for that, not mine. But to pretend that "Raufeon Stots hasn't fought anyone great yet", when he beat the guy who beat Petr Yan, and others on that list haven't either is ridiculous. Also I find it hilarious that again you fixate on individual names. Very cute.
There's no such thing as "world consensus" or "media consensus", we are either talking Bellator or we are talking the UFC. UFC fighters do not fight Bellator fighters and vise versa. No matter how great a Bellator fighter can be, they can never be UFC champion. So when the person you were talking to was naming fighters like Trice and Crutchmer, they cannot win the UFC title as Bellator fighters so it is and would be pointless to discuss them unless you took into account Bellator's rankings. A few different MMA magazines have MMA rankings. First of all, no one cares about those. I think one of them even showed AJ McKee, who is on my above list, as the top FW in the world. Who cares? What is that based on? He has no common opponents with the top fighters in the UFC, has not fought and is not scheduled to fight any top fighters in the UFC. Who knows or cares what John Johnson from MMA online thinks? And secondly, all the rankings are vastly different. Some magazines will place top bellator fighters in the top 10. Other journalists won't list any Bellator fighter in the top 30. And that's fine, no one cares about these rankings. Even organization internal rankings have their flaws, but at the very least they're based on common opponents and are used to reference future fights scheduled. Random blogger's opinions, who in the world would care. I don't think even the bloggers themselves who write the magazines care.
See, previously you were using the metric "date entered rankings". No one keeps that, so you were kinda secure. But now that you accept debut date as a proxy...now I can actually give you data. 16/21 of the listed fighters made their professional debut in 2013 or later. Which is 76%. Which is what I'm talking about both with your complete ignorance of Bellator, if you knew Bellator fighters or cared to know you'd see the list and realize they were mostly pretty young fighters. And I can list those again below. Raufeon Stots. AJ McKee. Aaron Pico. Justin Gonzales. Logan Storley. Joey Davis. Austin Vanderford. Johnny Eblen. Romero Cotton. Dalton Rosta. Corey Anderson. Julius Anglickas. Alex Polizzi. Tyrell Fortune. Davion Franklin. Jake Hager.
Also, now that you introduced debut date as an acceptable reference statistic, here's a counterargument to show why your argument is flawed. Israel Adesanya made his MMA debut in 2012. The same year Kamaru Usman made his debut, in fact Adesanya debuted 8 months before Usman. No top MMA fighter from Glory/K1 has debuted since either. So by some twisted logic like you have, we could say "well kickboxing USED TO be a viable base in the days of Cro Cop, Mark Hunt, Overeem, but no one has been able to come from kickboxing since Adesanya so kickboxing clearly isn't a viable base anymore.
Now this argument is facially ridiculous. Why? Well firstly is the ridiculous standard that you apply. If a fighter has a single loss they can be written off. Really, what you said was "embarrassing loss" so it's entirely subjective, it's a feeling more than logic. But if you were to have a consistent standard, or pretend to, and not just a subjective feeling, you'd be able to write any fighter off for a single loss. And that's facially ridiculous. What about Giga Chikadze? He has lost 2 fights. They were not good losses. Is he not a prospect? To the contrary, many people actually feel that he could be a prospect and could win some big fights in the UFC. Alex Pereira is making his UFC debut in November, he lost his MMA debut fight to a nobody. Can we write him off already?
Now legitimately, big name kickboxers have not done well in MMA recently, recently being since 2012. Joe Schilling (Glory Tournament champ) was recently 3-3 in Bellator. Gabriel Varga (Glory Champ) lost his 2nd MMA fight and quit MMA. Alex Pereira (Glory Champ) lost his MMA debut. Gokhan Saki was brutally knocked out by Khalil Rountree and quit MMA after that. Ben Edwards (K1 Champ) lost his PFL fight in 2019. Hisaki Kato (K1 Contender) was released from Bellator with an 8-3 record after losing to Chidi Njokuani. Robin Van Roosmalen missed weight in his final fight and then got into a car accident so he probably will never fight again as well. Even Giga Chikadze had 2 losses at the outset of his career. And other examples like Makhmud Muradov was a highly touted kickboxer, he was choked out by Gerald Meershaert in his last fight as a -600 favorite. Qiu JianLiang, Glory of Heroes Kickboxing champ, lost his MMA debut and quit in the GOH MMA scene. Melsik Baghdasaryan (K1 title contender), is in the UFC now but was choked out in his MMA debut. Yuta Kubo, former K1 Champ, was beaten by a Japanese freestyle wrestler nonetheless, in his MMA debut. etc. So could we make the argument that "well all of these famous kicboxers already faced setbacks and many straight up quit MMA. Kickboxing must not be a good base for MMA anymore?"
Obviously it's false, but why? Because all the names I listed above, about a dozen. That's an incredibly small sample size, almost anecdotal. Kickboxing is a great base for MMA striking, but the best MMA strikers are not necessarily the best kickboxers. Hundreds of fighters with a kickboxing base transition to MMA every year. Maybe one or two kickboxing champions or elite professionals transitions to MMA every year. I wrote this in the Gable Steveson thread "I am supportive of Gable and Bo, and I believe in them, but if I had to pick between Gable and the field, or Bo and the field, for the UFC MW/HW champion in X years from a wrestling background, I always pick the field." Between picking "champions" with high pedigree, and picking the field, always pick the field.
With a tiny sample size basically anything can happen. A fighter can have injuries, lose interest, be poorly coached, have bad matchups, etc. Over the large sample size, dozens if not hundreds, of fighters that transition from any given background in a given year, there will be a few who have good health, sustained interest, solid coaching, good matchups, etc. Max Holloway, for example, never had a significant pro kickboxing background. Undisputably one of the best strikers in MMA.
So the argument that "well this small handful of highly touted fighters didn't make it so no one is making it" is a very bad argument. AJ McKee, former D2 and community college wrestler. He doesn't have the most touted wrestling background. But he's arguably Bellator's top P4P fighter right now, for whatever that is worth. Raufeon Stots was a D2 champ, but came into MMA with significantly less fanfare, now he is next in line for the title shot at BW. Austin Vanderford wrestled D2 as well, he is the next fighter who will contend for the belt against Gegard Mousasi, after being then top 5 fighter Fabian Edwards. The list goes on. Sometimes a belt winner is a highly touted guy, but more often than not the field wins.
I don't know who the next big name is, who the next AJ McKee will be. It could be Tom Pagliarulo. It could be Ryan Kuse. It could be Daniel Argueta. It could be Christian Natividad. It could be Nick Maximov. Or it could be some more credentialed wrestler like Bo or Gable. I'm happy with any of the above outcomes. I both don't know and don't care to know who it will be, until the time comes. But it will be somebody. As to Russian wrestling prospects, you talk about them but I guarantee you that I know both more Russian wrestling prospects and more about them. I don't see us as being in competition. I'm glad if a wrestler holds the belt no matter what nationality he is from.
Moreover, I follow Russian wrestlers on the Russian regional MMA scene very closely as well. Now in the world of freestyle wrestling, Russia is clearly the #1 country, and the US is #2. So it stands to reason that the proportion of Russian wrestling champions should be larger than that of Americans. But the reality is that they're all transitioning from wrestling. MMA wrestling is different from freestyle or folkstyle. Some Americans transition well, some Russians transition well, but I've seen my fair share of both go poorly as well. A classic example is actually just this past contender series. A russian wrestler, Nasrudin Nasrudinov was favored against a brazilian Jailton Almeida, basically only because he was Russian. And Jailton won against him by outwrestling him. Before that fight, me and Hellowhosthat both sounded the alarm about Nasrudinov's wrestling, because he has good open mat freestyle mechanics but really seemed to struggle to incorporate the cage into his wrestling. And he is still a good case, because he went 9-0 in the Russian scene in the first place, which is how he got on contender series. So there are and will be good CIS area wrestlers, and there should be. But they're fundamentally no different from American wrestlers, they have to make the same transition, and some succeed and many more fall through the cracks in the regional scene. Many sambo world champions or former russian freestyle wrestlers haven't even made it out of the Russian regional scene, much less to the big stage. Which is fine, it is expected. But one isn't viable and the other not viable, both are amazing backgrounds to have.
