With the Strikeforce Heavyweight World Grand Prix kicking on Saturday night with the first two quarter-finals, Will Cooling and Chris Roberts have a look at whether the brackets actually make sense.
Chris’ Take: The media, always on the lookout for the negative spin, has spent a lot of time wringing their hands over the seeding and bracketing of the tournament which could be described as wonky at best. In fact, right now out there in cyberspace there are probably as many (conspiracy) theories as there are actual living Strikeforce fans. A lot of them focus on Josh Barnett and the fact that he has a little trouble passing drug tests and, well, caused a fight promotion to go under because of it. Others talk about how one side of the bracket has, in my opinion at least, the top 4 guys in it.
Some are of the mind that Scott Coker is simply trying to shoehorn in Fedor Emelianenko vs. Alistair Overeem because the grand plan is to place the semi-finals and finals on pay-per-view. That makes some sense to me as I too believe this is his big play for the promise land but I would take it a step further and say that really any semi-final matchup that comes out of the Emelianenko/Silva and Overeem/Werdum bracket is probably good enough for 250,000 buys or so. If Coker really wanted to ensure his blockbuster fight why not just put Emelianenko against Brett Rogers (yes, we have seen it before and some would scream…OK maybe a lot would scream) and Overeem against Andrei Arlovski?
Will’s Take: The more I’ve thought about it the more I’ve liked the way Strikeforce has laid out the brackets for its Heavyweight Grand Prix. The key thing to do is to not see this so much as a tournament but more as a diagram to explain Strikeforce’s matchmaking in the heavyweight division over the next year. Once you do that it all becomes very clear. Alistair Overeem enters as champion and by virtue of his win against Fedor Emelianenko, Fabricio Werdum is the number one contender. Therefore those two meet in what is effectively the year’s first championship match. Saturday’s main event between Emelianenko and Antonio Silva is between the two men generally considered to be the third and fourth best heavyweights in the organisation. Therefore their match creates a fresh challenger to face whoever emerges from Overeem vs. Werdum as the de facto champion. Whoever wins in New Jersey tomorrow that victory should give them enough momentum to be a credible and marketable challenger, although I think Chris’ prediction for that fight’s performance on PPV is a tad optismitic.
So the first side of the tournament brackets effectively books the first two ‘title’ matches this year. To build a challenger for a third title match you need more than one victory. Despite all the hype about how deep the division is in reality there is a huge gap between Silva and the rest of the heavyweight contenders. Andre Arlovski and Brett Rogers are both coming off multiple defeats and have in recent memory been absolutely annihilated. Arlovski seemingly lacks the chin to properly engage standing while Rogers is just a severly limited fighter. Josh Barnett and Sergei Kharitonov have impressive resumes but have been far too inactive to treat as serious forces in the heavyweight division with Kharitonov having not fought more than once in a year since 2007 while Barnett has looked extremly unimpressive against medicore opposition recently. None of them would worry the major fighters in the UFC’s heavyweight division. If these has-beens and never-weres are going to face one of the big names in the tournament then they need building up so it means something. So putting them all in the weaker side of the bracket will hopefully allow one of them to run through and prove themselves a worthy champion by winning their quarter-final and semi-final convincingly. You can argue that perhaps involving one or two rising stars would have been a wiser investment in the future than dealing with the headaches some of these wayward veterans bring but the general principle is sound as it gives the bottom half of the seeds the time they need to impress the fans.
