MMA Rewind: UFC 118

Sometimes when they say “anything can happen” in an MMA fight, what they mean to say is: “Actually, what happens here is going to be sadly predictable.”

Such was the case with the UFC’s self-described “freak show” fight between Randy Couture and James Toney on Saturday night. Though the company did its best to foster the ol’ “anything can happen” myth leading up to UFC 118, the only thing that occured once the two 40-somethings got in the cage was the inevitable.

Couture did approximately 10-seconds of circling before shooting for a low single leg, dropping Toney to his butt and almost immediately hopping into full mount. From there, things were academic. Couture worked over the former boxing champion with punches from the top before securing an arm triangle choke that elicited a verbal submission from Toney, who’d previously said he wouldn’t let Couture “lay on me and punch me like I’m a sissy,” after just over three minutes of fighting.

The most surprising thing about James Toney’s performance at UFC 118 is that he didn’t look to be in terrible shape. He looked a little paunchy, sure, but it appeared that not all of that hitting a tractor tire with a sledgehammer we’d seen in his training video had been for show. Toney did come out in more-or-less a traditional boxer’s stance, however, wearing a pair of ankle brace sleeves that only made it easier for Couture to trap his foot and take him down. Before that, Toney inched around the cage hanging his left arm at his waist as if begging – in this case probably literally begging – Couture to try to punch him.

Couture didn’t go for it, and now UFC president Dana White says Toney’s UFC career is over. If this were Strikeforce, we’d have some meaningless CompuStrike numbers to go over, but the only meaningful stat you need to know about Toney’s sole appearance in the Octagon is this: Zero punches. He threw zero punches while standing.

And thus ends one of the weirdest (read: dumbest) experiments of the Zuffa, LLC era. Even White – after he had some time to think about it – admitted to being a little bit mystified as to why he made this fight. Smart money says you won’t see Dana offer another 40-year-old MMA rookie a chance in his cage any time soon.

Slightly more unexpected than Couture’s squashing of Toney was how good Frankie Edgar looked in his title rematch against BJ Penn. Even after his first victory over Penn back in April, Edgar came into this fight a 3-1 underdog and with very few people expecting him to be able to recreate the near pitch perfect performance he turned in at Abu Dhabi.

Well, Edgar didn’t just repeat that performance, he improved it. Quite simply, the New Jersey product beat Penn up on the feet, took him down as many as four times and even escaped the Hawaiian phenom’s dreaded ground game en route to a unanimous decision win.

Suffice it to say, he won every round on two judges’ scorecards and left no doubt in the minds of his numerous detractors – Penn’s coaches and trainers, for example – who by turns claimed that Edgar had just “gotten lucky,” somehow fooled the judges or that Penn was suffering from a sinus infection in their first fight.

He now faces a future fight with Gray Maynard, the only man yet to be able to defeat Edgar during his mixed martial arts career. Though both guys have improved drastically since they first met in April of 2008, some people will no doubt once again pick against Edgar, citing Maynard’s size and strength advantage.

Personally, after UFC 118, I’m done picking against Frankie Edgar … and I’m done talking about James Toney, too.

Chad Dundas writes about MMA for CraveOnline, CagePotato.com and Versus.com. He lives in Missoula, MT.