UFC 133 Fight Card: Is Rory MacDonald the Future of UFC Welterweight Division?

Win some, lose once—that's basically Rory MacDonald's UFC run in a nutshell.

His only loss was his UFC 115 loss to Carlos Condit, but he bounced back and made it look easy when he defeated Nate Diaz in his UFC 129 bout with the TUF 5 lightweight winner.

Now he gets "The Prospect Killer" known as Mike "Quicksand" Pyle at UFC 133 in a bout that Pyle is once again not supposed to win on paper.

Can you blame anyone in this scenario, though?

MacDonald is a prospect and needs to beat guys like Pyle in order to find himself in the cage opposite the Thiago Alveses and the Dan Hardys of the world, and Pyle needs to beat the Rory MacDonalds and the John Hathaways of the world in order to prove that he's a true contender in the welterweight division.

Besides, the question of whether MacDonald is the future of the welterweight division, win or lose, should not even be asked.

However, since I just did ask the question, now would be a good time to say that, yes, MacDonald could be the future of the division, along with Hathaway, Rick Story, Charlie Brenneman and perhaps even Johny Hendricks.

He's not your average fighter in every aspect of the game, and although it'll take a convincing win over Pyle to put him in line for his crack at the upper echelon and eventually the champion, he's shown that with every passing fight, he's always getting better in just about every aspect of the sport.

Again, you could point to his win over Nate Diaz, and Diaz is very skilled on the ground for a guy who is a Brown belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

MacDonald made mincemeat out of Diaz and threw him around like a duffel bag of cinder blocks, and Condit's win over MacDonald was a Hail Mary TKO with only seven seconds to go at the end of the fight.

If he can do that to the first lightweight winner of TUF and if he could come close to being the youngest man to beat Condit, imagine what kind of message MacDonald could send to the rest of the welterweight division if he beats Pyle.