Rebney: 'Ridiculously one-dimensional' champ Askren will dominate if in UFC

So far, it hasn’t been the same kind of controversy that Bellator MMA experienced with Eddie Alvarez‘s free agency.

What will happen to the promotion’s welterweight champion, Ben Askren, remains to be seen. But Bellator CEO Bjorn Rebney believes the elite-level wrestler will continue having success if he stays or if he goes.

At this point, backhanded compliments might be just part of the game.

Askren (12-0 MMA, 9-0 BMMA) in July defended his title against Andrey Koreshkov with an utterly dominant performance that culminated with a fourth-round TKO victory. In January, he got a doctor’s stoppage TKO win over Karl Amoussou after three rounds.

Two straight stoppage wins for Askren has been the exception to the rule after six straight decision wins for the four-time NCAA All-American. But they were stoppages, nonetheless.

After the win over Koreshkov, though, Askren became a free agent, and Rebney let him test the market the same way he did with Alvarez, his former lightweight champion.

“What I said was I wouldn’t stand in his way of getting an offer – that I wouldn’t make him spend 90 or 100 days on the shelf negotiating with us,” Rebney on Friday told AXS TV’s “Inside MMA.” “Ben said he wanted to go out and see what the UFC would offer. I said, ‘You know what? Let’s cut this short. You go out and see what they’ll offer, and we’ll make a determination from there.’ So right now, we’re just waiting for Ben to come back, show us the offer from the UFC and we’ll make a determination from there.”

As of now, Askren hasn’t presented a UFC offer to Bellator – or at least if he has, Rebney hasn’t gone public with it.

When it came to Alvarez, there was a UFC offer, a Bellator counter-offer and then a nasty court battle until Bellator ultimately announced its inaugural pay-per-view event for Nov. 2 and found a way to get Alvarez on that card in a title rematch against champion Michael Chandler. In that situation, Alvarez said he gave a little and Bellator gave a little.

Rebney’s opinion on Askren includes an acknowledgment of Askren’s dominance so far in his MMA career – and an acknowledgement of what many fans seem to think of his wrestling-based approach to the sport.

“I’ve been a staunch supporter of Ben Askren,” Rebney said. “We can all agree: He’s ridiculously one-dimensional. But the issue with that one dimension is that he’s better at it than anyone on the face of the earth. He’s been dominant inside of our cage. He’s the best wrestler in MMA that we have in this sport. So look, if you don’t like wrestling and you don’t like what Ben does, then stop it. That’s why they call it a fight. Ben famously said up in Canada, ‘If you want to see two guys stand in the middle of the cage and hit each other in the face, there’s a sport called boxing.’ He’s executed beautifully.”

So does the CEO think he can re-sign his champion if the UFC makes an offer?

“We’ll see what happens with Ben,” he said. “I don’t know if Ben will be with us, I don’t know if Ben will be with the UFC. But wherever he goes, he will remain dominant and he will remain amazingly effective at the one thing he does better than anybody.”

For more on the Bellator and UFC schedules, stay tuned to the MMA Rumors section of the site.

(Pictured: Bjorn Rebney)