Fedor x Rogers was not a fight title
Accounts WMMA as an relevant title is laughable. I'm talking about elite events
In what way were the WAMMA fights not elite?
Fedor won the WAMMA title by beating the #5 fighter in the world (and former 2-time UFC HW champ, who was coming off a fight for the UFC Interim HW title); he then defended it against the #2 fighter in the world (who was also a former UFC HW champ and former UFC Interim HW champ with defenses of both belts), and then defended against Rogers who was ranked #9 (the Rogers fight was in fact a WAMMA title defense).
The lineage of the WAMMA HW belt is far better than the lineage of Overeem’s DREAM and Strikeforce belts, but no one bitches about those.
And on top of that, Fedor has multiple tournament belts in PRIDE and RINGS. Fedor is much more decorated than Stipe.
So JDS was old at 33 yr when he was KOed by Miocic but Miocic was at his prime when her lost by Nganou at 38? lol
Both JDS and Stipe were declined at those points in time. I’m just saying it’s weird to list a guy like JDS as being better than an opponent of Fedor’s when we saw Stipe vs JDS when they were both in or close to prime and Stipe didn’t win.
A lot of the people Stipe beat were past their best when he beat them: JDS, Hunt, Arlovski, Cormier. I’m a little forgiving of the Cormier losses because they were both old, but again, in their first fight when they were both closer to prime, Stipe lost.
Recover the title is a bigger feat than defense continuous, I can't understand you logic here
It loses quite a bit of luster when you’re just gifted the rematch. I mean, good on Stipe for avenging that loss, but let’s not act like he had some arduous climb to the top of the mountain again. He was literally just gifted a rematch.
Fedor on the other hand defended titles across multiple rulesets: in a ring with PRIDE rules (including against a version of Mark Hunt that weighed 290 because PRIDE had no weight limit), in a ring under Unified Rules, in a cage under modified Unified Rules (Strikeforce)…. Stipe has never had to do anything like that.
None of these organizations are harder to dominate than UFC of the modern ERA
That’s pretty subjective, but I would disagree. I think when you are fighting under a ruleset like PRIDE’s, with stomps, soccer kicks to the head, knees to the head, in a 10 minute first round, especially at HW where one strike can change the whole fight, and on top of that fighting a bunch of times a year, it’s much harder to dominate.
From the time Stipe got to the UFC, he only fought 1 or 2 times a year, with one exception, when he fought 3x in 2012 (and he lost one of those, against Struve).
Some may criticize PRIDE’s model of having the champ defend sporadically, but Fedor still fought good competition more often than Stipe. Fedor fought 3x in 2002 (his last fight in RINGS then 2 fights in PRIDE), he fought
5x in 2003, another
5x in 2004, another 3x in 2005.
Look at his 2004. He had 2 title fights which would be a typical schedule for a UFC champ (if we’re lucky enough to get 2)—but he fought for mer UFC HW champ and PRIDE GP champ Coleman who was ranked at the time, followed by Randleman who was a former UFC champ who moved to LHW and became ranked, then back to HW and was ranked there too, then had to fight Nogueira on the same night he fought Ogawa, and when that ended in an NC he ended out the year fighting Nog again.
Stip has nothing like that on his resume.
