The Ultimate Fighting Championship isn't exactly putting its best foot forward on Saturday night with its UFC 146 fight card.
That's not a knock on the fights that UFC matchmaker Joe Silva has put together for Saturday night's event at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas. From the main event that pits Frank Mir against Junior dos Santos for the Brazilian's newly-won UFC Heavyweight Championship and the de facto No. 1 contender's bout between former champ Cain Velazquez and recent addition Antonio "Bigfoot" Silva to the bout between up-and-coming talents Lavar Johnson and Stefan "Skyscraper" Struve, the UFC has featured its heavyweight division about as well as it possibly could, given the constraints created by injuries (Gabriel Gonzaga, Mark Hunt) and failed drug tests (Alexander Overeem).
The problem, though, is that the best action in the UFC generally isn't found in the heavyweight division, and to be honest, it never really has been.
When the UFC began its rapid ascent into the national sports consciousness in the middle of the last decade, the biggest stars - Chuck Liddell, Randy Couture and Tito Ortiz - were in the light heavyweight division. That's continued through the years, as fighters like Quinton "Rampage" Jackson, Forrest Griffin, Rashad Evans, Lyoto Machida and Mauricio "Shogun" Rua have held the promotion's 205-pound title, eventually giving way to the UFC's next superstar, current titleholder Jon "Bones" Jones.
Meanwhile, Anderson "The Spider" Silva continues to reign over the middleweight division, fending off an impressive list of challengers that's included Dan Henderson, Vitor Belfort, Yushin Okami, Demian Maia, Chael Sonnen and Rich Franklin. Georges St-Pierre, the only fighter who has rivaled Silva for the title of best pound-for-pound fighter in the world, rules over a similarly deep middleweight division, while the lightweight division is the best it's ever been, with nine of the top 10 fighters in the world at 155 pounds competing in the UFC.
Why, then, is Saturday night's main event called "The Heavyweights?" Why isn't it an all-middleweight card or an all-lightweight card?
Because the heavyweights are the heavyweights.
Even though the best pound-for-pound fighters in the world - Silva, St-Pierre and Jones, in that order (for now) - fight in lower weight classes, there's a certain ring to the phrase "World Heavyweight Champion." It resonates in a way that "Middleweight Champion" and "Welterweight Champion" don't, even though the men who hold those titles carry star power equal to that of dos Santos, if not greater. By the same token, there's a certain attraction in the idea of taking 10 of the biggest and baddest men on the planet and putting them all on the same card.
And what better time than now? Boxing's second biggest problem - after the never-ending saga that is the effort to book a fight between Manny Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather, Jr. - is the stranglehold that the Klitschko brothers have on the heavyweight division. In fact, the lack of compelling fights in the weight class is probably an even greater contributor to the sport's decline than the Mayweather-Pacquiao saga. By putting together an all-heavyweight affair on the main card (the undercard features seven fights ranging from featherweight to light heavyweight), the UFC is showing that it can deliver the kind of compelling heavyweight action that has disappeared from boxing, headlined by the Heavyweight Championship of the World.
So really...why not the heavyweights?
