UFC 135 Fight Card: Is Matt Hughes Still An Elite Welterweight?

Matt Hughes is taking life easy these days.  Well, you know. For an avowed country boy and active MMA fighter who, this September at UFC 135, will face a top-10 welterweight in Diego Sanchez.

The impression Hughes offers through his personal website and much-relaxed fighting schedule is that he is just as likely to be found wrestling with his kids and kicking back as he is to be wrestling any training partners or kicking pads.

He travels the country making appearances. He hunts. He trains other people. And, of course, he trains himself, though that seems to comprise a smaller slice of the activity pie than perhaps it once did.

The UFC’s longtime welterweight champ is one of the elite cage fighters of all time. But the question these days is: Is he still at that level at 170 lbs.?

I’ll spoil the surprise right now and tell you the answer is no. Those rebalanced priorities are partial evidence of that, but it goes much deeper.

A quick look at Hughes’ fight record shows a clear line of demarcation.  After entering the Octagon in 2001, Hughes fought 22 times, or just over twice per year on average.  But ever since he lost his bid for the interim welterweight title against Georges St-Pierre in 2007, Hughes’ pace has slowed considerably.

In the intervening three-and-a-half years, he has fought only five times, or 1.4 times per year. His match with Sanchez will be his first action in 10 months.  Though no one will accuse him of ducking fights, he has been routed (by himself, by others or a combination of the two) toward matchups that are fan-friendly but carry no immediate implications for the welterweight title picture.

A fight with Renzo Gracie last April in Abu Dhabi is a perfect case in point, as is a grudge match with Matt Serra and a rubber match with fellow legend B.J. Penn.  It’s not that these are easy fights. But not every single contest is a title eliminator, either.

There are several MMA polls out there, and as of today Hughes ranks at or around No. 14 on each one. Sanchez hovers around No. 10. So win or lose at UFC 135, Hughes is unlikely to hold a single-digit ranking during 2011 (rankings have no bearing on actual fightmaking, of course, but they do provide a good barometer).

Furthermore, Hughes is 4-4 in his last eight fights. The four losses came against the cream of the divisional crop—GSP, Penn and Thiago Alves—while the wins came against the gatekeeping and novelty set—Gracie, Chris Lytle and the now-retired Ricardo Almeida.

What does that tell you? He can still win fights, just not elite fights.

During the losses, he has seemed more susceptible to the big shot; he either can’t get out of the way or he doesn’t see it coming.  Three of the four aforementioned losses came by KO or TKO; before that run, he had only one TKO loss and zero KO losses in his entire career.

His verbal submission to a St-Pierre armbar was his first tapout in almost four years, and ironically came on the same move he used to submit St-Pierre in their first fight (and which he later razzed GSP for being unable to defend).

Simply put, Hughes no longer has the raw athleticism to power out of his mistakes like he once did (see Frank Trigg). Chuck Liddell had a problem like that. Ditto Wanderlei Silva. One is now retired, while the other is teetering even more precariously than Hughes.

Hughes himself said he was “one big step closer to retirement” after the most recent B.J. Penn fight, which he lost in about 30 seconds.

With his name recognition and scrapper’s mentality, Hughes still can and does take part in good fights. Even great fights.  But those will remain confined to the novelty circuit and gatekeeper sections of the fight card.

I’d say the Sanchez fight has a foot in both those camps. What’s more, Sanchez himself straddles the line between contender and also-ran. An argument could, therefore, be made that this fight will separate wheat from chaff.  If Hughes pulls the victory, maybe he can make another run.

Count me out on that logic. I think Hughes’ contending days are over. And I think he knows it. His fight schedule says as much. If he defeats Diego, do you really see him lining up for Jake Shields or Carlos Condit?  I sure don’t.

The guess here is Hughes never fights for the title again; in fact, he probably never comes close.  But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have good fights left in him.  Either way, he’s earned the right to pursue life as he chooses, and that includes going out on his own terms, whatever those might be and whenever that might come.