UFC 187 Bold Predictions: Who Picks Up the Pieces After Jon Jones' Suspension?

Like a desert mirage, these big-time UFC pay-per-views have a way of looking different from up close.

Take UFC 187 for example. We once thought Jon Jones would be there, defending his light heavyweight championship for the ninth time. For a while, we even thought Khabib Nurmagomedov was coming to Las Vegas to claim the No. 1 contender spot at lightweight.

When the event actually happens on Saturday, however, the landscape will be much different.

Jones is suspended indefinitely, having been ordered to get his life together after he was allegedly involved in a hit-and-run accident in New Mexico. Nurmagomedov is injured again.

Instead, we're getting Daniel Cormier and John Makdessi, respectively, and what once looked like a potentially historic card now merely looks really good. But really good is still really good, right?

As always, bold predictions are required. Here, MMA lead writers Chad Dundas (that's me) and Jonathan Snowden take their best shots at predicting the unpredictable. 

Prediction: Daniel Cormier Becomes the UFC's First Pretend Champion

John Locher/Associated Press

Jonathan: A lot has been written about whether it was right for the UFC to strip the light heavyweight title from champion Jon Jones. Much of it by me.

No matter whether you agree with the decision, it's done. We all have to live with it, even if we don't care for it. While Jones will remain my champion, he won't be the champion. That's a subtle but distinct difference.

That means by the end of Saturday night, the UFC will crown its first new champion at 205 pounds since 2011. It will either be a convicted domestic abuser (Anthony Johnson) or a former Olympian (Daniel Cormier), albeit one who just got his clock cleaned by the former champion.

I'll take the Olympian over the abuser every time.

Cormier is a nice guy who has made a career of being an also-ran. Runner-up in college. Fourth-best in the Olympics. Second-best among heavyweights at his own gym.

It's nice that circumstance will finally put him in a position to win the big one. I love the dimples that pop up when he smiles, and he truly seems like a good person.

But it's not the true championship. Ric Flair taught us that "to be the man, you have to beat the man." And, brother—Jon Jones is still the man until someone beats him in the cage.

Chad: A fighter as smart and self-aware as Cormier will know exactly what the new 205-pound belt means when Dana White straps it around his waist Saturday night. He’ll surely understand as acutely as anyone that people aren’t just going to forget about Jones. I suspect—even more than finally earning that elusive championship—Cormier will look at beating Johnson merely as the shortest path back to a rematch with Bones.

Still, it seems a wee bit harsh to call the winner of this bout a “pretend” champion—and it certainly won’t be the first time a fighter has ascended to the throne without “beating the man” who came before him. Neither Johny Hendricks nor Robbie Lawler ever beat Georges St-Pierre, for example. Neither Renan Barao nor T.J. Dillashaw ever beat Dominick Cruz. The circumstances will be different, but the next light heavyweight champ will have no better or worse claim to championship status than those (and any number of other) guys.

So, while I agree with you in principle that Jones remains first in our hearts, I’m also willing to cut the Cormier-Johnson winner a bit of slack. “Undisputed” may not be exactly the right word for the next light heavyweight champion, but neither is “pretend.”

Prediction: Chris Weidman Turns Back the Clock on Vitor Belfort

David Becker/Associated Press

Chad: As I wrote on Tuesday, the most intriguing thing about Saturday night’s co-main event will be seeing which Vitor Belfort shows up to battle for the middleweight crown. Nobody in MMA specializes in remaking himself—both physically and spiritually—quite the way Belfort does.

Truthfully? If the muscled-up head-kick specialist who terrorized the 185-pound division during 2013 turns up at UFC 187, it’s possible that Chris Weidman could be in some trouble. But the Belfort we’ve seen of late—after having 15 months to put a failed drug test behind him and transition away from testosterone replacement therapy—doesn’t look anything like that monster. He looks a lot more like the guy who spent more than a decade as one of our sport’s most notorious self-saboteurs.

The blueprint of how beat that version of Belfort is well-established, and Weidman seems uniquely suited to follow it to the letter. He'll wrestle this one right out of Belfort's clutches. In other words, Weidman will turn back the clock to the guy The Phenom was from about 1997 to 2009. He’ll break his will and walk away with a lopsided unanimous-decision victory—and the championship.

Jonathan: The suggestion that Vitor's career can be divided into "TRT Belfort" and "No TRT Belfort" is fairly reductive. First, it ignores the whispers that have followed Vitor from his early days training with Curtis Leffler (look at this picture of Leffler—just look!) to the ultimate confirmation of our collective suspicions when he tested positive for steroids in 2006.

In those nine years, we saw all different kinds of Vitors. Big Vitors. Small Vitors. Good Vitors. Bad Vitors. I don't think the difference can be attributed to the presence of certain pharmaceuticals.

Whatever drives Vitor, it's deeper than that.

For years, we all wanted to see "the old Vitor." On Saturday, I'm afraid we'll see "old Vitor" instead. His 38 years of age, more than the amount of testosterone he's consumed, will be the key here.

The truth is, whether enhanced or not, Belfort has mostly fallen short against elite competition. He feasts on the ordinary and the good. The great eat him alive. Chris Weidman is great. That's not good news for an old lion.

Prediction: Travis Browne Reminds Andrei Arlovski's Chin That It's Really Old

David Becker/Associated Press

Jonathan: Chad, I'm fairly notorious for picking with my heart instead of my head. And, like most aging sports writers, my heart not so secretly belongs to the fighters I came of age with, fighters from dark days when this entire enterprise was hanging on by the thinnest of threads.

That means I tried to convince myself that Ken Shamrock could beat Tito Ortiz. That Kazushi Sakuraba still had it. That B.J. Penn had one more fight left in that Spam-filled body.

Wrong (times three). Wrong. And, you guessed it—wrong.

This time, I'm determined to let my head win a battle for a change. Yes, Andrei Arlovski predates the Zuffa administration. Yes, he once asked Tim Sylvia "how taste my pee pee?" Yes, he once knocked poor Paul Buentello out in just 15 seconds.

But no. Sorry. No. At 36, Arlovski doesn't have what it takes to beat man/planetoid Travis Browne.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me 137 times, shame on me. I won't be shamed again.

Chad: I, too, considered doing a bunch of soul searching and stark introspection about who would win this bout, but then I just decided to look at the odds—where Browne is going off as a huge favorite at Odds Shark. So that was pretty much good enough for me.

Browne, after all, is 32 years old and in the thick of the heavyweight title hunt. He's 17-2-1, and his only two career losses have come to the current interim champion and in a fight against Antonio Silva where Browne ripped his hamstring throwing the first kick of the fight. He's a giant of a man and powerful enough to turn seemingly innocuous positions—downward side elbows on a shooting opponent, anyone?—into out-of-the-blue fighter-enders.

By contrast, Arlovski is just trying to squeeze the last few drops from a once great career. He's righted the ship since a disastrous four-fight losing streak from 2009 to 2011, but we have no reason to believe he can still hang with the heavyweight elite.

Browne wins this and wins this easy, and then we'll all have to do some soul searching about Arlovski's fighting future. 

Prediction: Donald Cerrone Finally Becomes No. 1 Contender

Gregory Payan/Associated Press

Chad: This obviously isn’t the matchup we wanted for Donald Cerrone. For about the last eight months—an eternity in Cowboy Time—we’ve been waiting for matchmakers to get him together with Khabib Nurmagomedov. But after a February fight announcement that once again got our hopes up, that bout was scratched for a second time owing to another injury to Nurmagomedov. So we’re getting Cerrone vs. Jon Makdessi instead.

Stylistically, it’s a dream—these dudes are fixing to throw down, Snowden—but in all other ways, it's kind of a bummer. Hopefully, we still get to see Cerrone across the cage from the captain of the Dagestani debate club at some point.

The good news, I guess, is that Cerrone is going to win this fight, and even though a victory over Makdessi won’t exactly cap his current seven-bout win streak the way beating Nurmy might have, we won’t be able to deny him No. 1 contender status any longer.

This will be fight No. 18 in the Octagon for Cerrone. He’ll be 15-3 in the UFC after this win, which is better than we ever could have forecast for him when he came over with the rest of the spoils from the WEC in 2011. A victory over Makdessi won’t add much to that resume, but it’ll underscore the pointlessness of denying him a title shot any longer.

If all parties somehow manage to stay healthy, look for Cerrone to rematch Rafael dos Anjos for the lightweight championship sometime in early fall.

Jonathan: Makdessi, in case you were curious, sits 62nd in Fight Matrix's computerized rankings. While far from ideal, that system does a pretty good job of telling us all we need to know about a fighter's level of competition. For Makdessi, it's not good.

Of course, you didn't need a computer to tell you that. Instead, just try to picture Makdessi in your mind. What does he look like? What does he do? Who has he beaten in the Octagon? If you claim to be able to name several of his victims, you're either a liar or a Wikipedia MMA editor. Likely both.

This match perfectly encapsulates the UFC's current haphazard approach to event promotion and fighter development.

That is not a compliment.

Ideally, you build a fighter through a series of increasingly high-profile bouts, eventually culminating with a title shot. Athletically and promotionally, it just makes sense. The fighter, if handled correctly, will reach the peak of his powers and popularity at roughly the same time.

That's not happening here. In the worst-case scenario, Cerrone has an off-night and loses to a fighter no one knows or cares about. Alternately, you can try to push him into a title bout off this fight against a non-entity. That's a meh scenario.

There is no best-case scenario here. That's a disservice, both to Cerrone and the champion who needs all the help he can get trying to sell his next title fight.