Strikeforce Grand Prix Heavyweight Tournament Fails Before Opening Bell

Strikeforce recently announced that its February shows would represent the beginning of a Grand Prix tournament in the Heavyweight division. An author on my site, GuysNation.com, put together his thoughts on why the tournament is doomed to fall short of expectations even before the opening bell.

Here's the article:

It was an exciting moment when I heard that Strikeforce was setting up a heavyweight tournament involving some of the biggest names in the business. Fedor Emelianenko was there. The man who ended Fedor’s unbeaten streak, Fabricio Werdum, is in the brackets. Strikeforce Heavyweight Champion Alistair Overeem is also scheduled to compete.

What’s not to be excited about with a tournament like that?

First and foremost, the left half of the bracket is stacked.

Fedor fights a guy nicknamed “Big Foot”, and the other quarterfinal on his half of the bracket features the Strikeforce Heavyweight Champion, Alistair Overeem taking on Werdum. 

Fedor will likely win his quarterfinal fight, meaning this plays out like the matches would’ve happened without Strikeforce creating brackets and calling it a “tournament". He’ll either get the opportunity to avenge his loss to Werdum, or he’ll be the second top challenger Overeem will face.

The other half of the bracket could be seen as a “future challenger” section, helping to determine who deserves a title match down the road, and the finals would play out true to non-tournament bookings with one of those guys riding a two-fight win streak en route to a fight with the champion.

Herein lies the huge problem with this tournament: Overeem isn’t defending his championship. Not in the quarterfinals. Not in the semi-finals. Not in the finals. Nor would any of the guys, were they to beat Overeem.

The logic behind the title not being on the line is that championship fights, by rule of some international MMA organization, have to be five rounds of five minutes each.  Strikeforce officials have deemed it unfair that the champion would have to potentially fight his way through two additional rounds each fight, giving his opponents an unfair advantage.

So what?

If you take away the brackets, Werdum vs. Overeem SHOULD be a Championship fight. Werdum probably got lucky against Fedor, but he DID, in fact, beat Fedor Emelianenko.

Fedor should get a fight under his belt so he doesn’t just sit back and wait for a Werdum/Overeem winner, so why not put him up against Silva? That’s as good of an opponent as any.

The guy is getting some decent hype (for a non-UFC guy), so make it happen. Let Fedor get back on track. Then it makes all the sense in the world that Fedor should fight for the title. 

It shouldn’t be of concern that the winner of Werdum vs. Overeem had to potentially go five rounds and Fedor didn’t. If you take away the brackets, that’s how it works either way. Then, once the Fedor/Silva winner fights the Werdum/Overeem winner, another name needs to step up, and that’s where the other half of the bracket could come in.

Who cares how many rounds they were forced to go through to get there? 

In the best possible scenario, the winner is only going to have needed one round to win each of his two fights to get to the championship fight anyway, and the championship matches are likely going to take at least three rounds each.

The championship should be on the line throughout the tournament.

If they didn’t want to do that, I’m okay with Strikeforce having a tournament, but then if you look at the way the matchups were aligned, it makes no sense at all.

Essentially what they did was to take their top three seeds and put them all together.  Your final four will contain two of the lowest seeds and two of the highest seeds, and your finals will have one of each. The best scenario they can hope for in the finals is a top seed taking on the fifth seed. 

If this were the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament, you’d have the top eight seeds from each region set up to square off prior to the finals. The Elite Eight, in the best case scenario, would have four No. 1 seeds on one side and four number nine seeds on the other.

This tournament was a good idea, but the ideas that went into determining the details doomed it to fail.

It’s a shame, because this was Strikeforce’s opportunity to set their heavyweight division apart as the best in the business. At the very least they could establish that they had talent as good (or better) than what UFC currently has in the weight class.

To view the remainder of the article and vote in the half-dozen polls which were set up to allow you to voice your opinion on the matter, and to leave comments for the author to see, check it out on GuysNation.com, where there's plenty of other sports and entertainment news and discussion!

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