Munoz, Machida and the search for meaning in UFC's murky middleweight waters

Let’s start with a quote from Mark Munoz, who, as you can imagine, showed up in Manchester, England, this week to a deluge of questions about what this UFC Fight Night 30 headliner with Lyoto Machida means, exactly.

After all, he’s no longer fighting Michael Bisping, who had the whole local appeal thing going for him back home in England, not to mention his constant “in the mix” status at middleweight. Instead Munoz is fighting a guy he was training with just days before the fight was made, a guy who is only now wandering into the division after his path to a belt as a light heavyweight hit a dead end.

So, what are we doing this for again, Mark?

“I truly believe we both have a shot at a title after this fight,” Munoz said earlier this week.

First of all, when you use the words “truly” and “believe” right next to each other like that, what people hear is “hope.” You hope it will work out that way. As in, “I truly believe this is the winning lottery ticket,” or “I truly believe Scarlett Johansson would like me if she got to know me.”

If you actually believe something, and if you regard it as a perfectly reasonable thing to believe, you don’t need the truly. You can just say, “I believe,” or better yet, “I think.”

Second, there are some pretty good reasons why Munoz might phrase it like that, not the least of which is the very strong possibility that he realizes what a longshot it is.

Consider the state of the middleweight division right now. You’ve got UFC champion Chris Weidman, who stomped Munoz en route to the title, and you’ve got Anderson Silva, who is best buds with both Machida (19-4 MMA, 11-4 UFC) and Munoz (13-3 MMA, 8-3 UFC). You’ve also got Vitor Belfort, who keeps kicking contenders in the head down in Brazil, which only seems to earn him the chance the kick other contenders in the head down in Brazil.

Somewhere in that picture you’ve also got Ronaldo Souza and Bisping, who might as well see if they can’t get healthy at roughly the same time for a fight that could headline any of those innumerable UFC events in Brazil. (Sorry, United Kingdom. Better luck next year.)

Considering all that, is it really any wonder that the promos for Saturday’s headliner on FOX Sports 2 at Phones 4u Arena are touting Munoz-Machida as a bout “for a chance at a middleweight title shot“? It’s tough to imagine main event stakes that mean less, or are as vaguely dishonest.

Ask yourself, what would it mean to win a chance at a middleweight title shot in the UFC, where, as we’ve seen, you could win an outright, signed and sealed title shot and still never get it? Winning a chance at one is like winning a chance at a chance, the dream of a wish. It’s parents telling a child “we’ll see” when asked about going for ice cream later. It’s a high school kid giving his girlfriend the promise of a promise ring. It’s not something you should clear your calendar over.

In fairness to the UFC, we are dealing with plan B here. Nobody set out to headline a cable TV card from England with Munoz and Machida. It’s an interesting style matchup, in its own way, which is to say that it could be surprisingly fun or it could be absolutely terrible. The one thing it almost certainly won’t be is a fight that determines who gets the next shot at the middleweight strap. It is, at best, an eliminator. It can cross names off the list, but probably won’t do much to change the order that the others are already in.

I guess the question we should be asking is, is that enough? Would we prefer that the UFC ditch the “chance at a middleweight title shot” crap and just level with us?

True, it doesn’t make for much of a sales pitch to tell people that they should watch this fight because it’s free and on TV and because, who knows, it might be cool, but at least it wouldn’t feel like such a desperate grasp for meaning. At least we could all be honest about what we’re there for.

But maybe the fighters wouldn’t want that as much as we would. When Munoz says he “truly believe[s]” that a win over Machida could launch him into a title shot, maybe he’s saying it more for his benefit than ours.

Then again, maybe Machida had the right idea all along when he admitted that he didn’t know what the future would bring, or whether there was a title shot at stake on Saturday.

“Everyone’s asking about that, but I’d prefer not mentioning it,” Machida said.

Sounds pretty reasonable to me. But good luck trying to put that one in a commercial.

For more on UFC Fight Night 30, stay tuned to the UFC Rumors section of the site.

(Pictured: Lyoto Machida)