It’s no wonder Derek Brunson has been talking a lot about performance-enhancing drugs these days.
Since coming to the UFC as part of the Strikeforce acquisition in 2012, Brunson has steadily—but somewhat quietly—set about climbing the ladder in the star-studded but occasionally drug-addled middleweight division.
The 32-year-old North Carolina native’s success in the Octagon has been impressive. All told, he is 6-1 in the UFC and looks to extend his current win-streak to five fights when he takes on Uriah Hall Saturday night in Fight Night 94’s co-main event.
Considering his position at No. 10 on the UFC’s official 185-pound rankings, this bout against Hall (who is No. 9) may be something of an entrance exam for Brunson to enter the middleweight elite.
In his attempt to establish himself as a bona fide contender, Brunson seems keenly aware that at least a few of the people still ranked above him have recently flunked PED tests—and he hopes that works to his advantage.
“If I come in here and steamroll this guy, I think I make a really good case [for a future title shot],” he said this week on MMAjunkie Radio, per Junkie’s Steven Marrocco. “A lot of the guys ahead of me have popped for PEDs. You can’t keep rewarding these guys who are getting suspended and doing things they shouldn’t be doing, so I think it’s about my time.”
Leading up to this particular bout, Brunson also took to his Twitter account to lob some thinly veiled PED-related shade at Hall, too:
@UriahHallMMA @usantidoping tired of getting texts from people talking about your habits. I'm putting you away in the 1st
— Derek Brunson (@DerekBrunson) July 29, 2016
While there is no actual evidence that Hall may be cheating, you can’t blame Brunson for being suspicious of almost everyone. Several middleweight mainstays—guys like Anderson Silva (No. 6), Vitor Belfort (No. 5) and Yoel Romero (No. 4)—have all run afoul of the UFC's beefed-up testing program recently.
That knowledge must hit close to home for Brunson, who experienced his only setback in the Octagon so far at the hands of Romero.
That bout, in January 2014, almost turned out to be a surprise coming-out party for Brunson, as he proved himself every bit the burly Romero’s physical equal, and the more complete MMA fighter, too.
For two rounds Brunson all but wore Romero around the cage like a hat. He stunned him with strikes twice in the first round and managed to take the Olympic wrestling silver medalist down and control much of the second from half-guard and mount.
But Brunson began to slow down as the fight wore on, and Romero’s power proved to be the difference. The heavy-handed Cuban fighter stung Brunson with a hard right hook early in the third and then poured on a barrage of strikes until the referee stepped in to award Romero the TKO victory with just over two minutes left in the fight.
The two men shared Fight of the Night honors, but the win helped springboard Romero into a string of increasingly more important and high-profile fights. At least in the eyes of the public, he duly left Brunson in his dust, until—at the precipice of a title shot earlier this year—Romero failed an out-of-competition drug test.
Romero blamed the failure on a tainted supplement and independent tests backed up his story. After arbitration, he settled with the UFC and the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency on a shortened six-month suspension instead of a two-year ban.
However, none of those mitigating factors likely brought Brunson any comfort.
Compared to the attention Romero received in the time since their fight, Brunson has been toiling in relative anonymity. Over the same stretch he’s arguably been just as good, going 4-0 with three first-round TKOs—albeit over slightly lesser competition.
Earlier this year, vision issues forced him to withdraw from a potentially important fight against Gegard Mousasi at UFC 200. Now against Hall, he’ll finally get a great chance to prove he belongs among the upper echelon in the division.
And he’s not missing the chance to paint Hall with the same broad brush as some of the other guys he might soon compete against.
In a conversation with Bloody Elbow’s Tim Bissell this week, Brunson made it sound like the PED accusations he’s hurled at Hall were meant to be some variety of psychological warfare.
"I heard [Hall does PEDs] from a legit source, so I decided to let him know,” Brunson said. “If you put it out there that you think somebody is gonna be doing it for that fight, they’re probably gonna be less likely to do it, because they know that the eyes are on them.”
Sound strange? Baseless? Potentially unfair?
Maybe. What it may actually be is nothing more than an extension of a feud that stretches all the way back to both men’s involvement in The Ultimate Fighter Season 17.
According to his MMAjunkie Radio appearance, Brunson was involved in the casting process for that installment of the UFC’s ubiquitous reality TV show, though he didn’t make the final cut.
Nonetheless, he and Hall reportedly got on each other’s nerves in those early stages of the season's development. To hear Brunson tell it, Hall may not have taken kindly to some of Brunson’s attempts at humor, and some manner of bad feelings persist to this day.
Hall came out of the TUF 17 experience endowed with, in retrospect, clearly way too much hype. In that regard, chalk him up as perhaps yet another middleweight who has received more publicity than Brunson while arguably performing at a comparable level.
Brunson cruises into this fight as the slight favorite, according to Odds Shark, and, at least on paper, appears to have the stylistic edge.
While Hall’s offense includes powerful, flashy striking techniques, Brunson figures to be the better-rounded athlete. If he can smother Hall’s explosive attacks with pressure and keep him off balance with the threat of a takedown, he'll likely win this fight.
As Bleacher Report’s Nathan McCarter puts it:
Brunson has a decisive edge in the grappling department. Hall has struggled against other grapplers in the UFC. It would seem to be a clear path to victory for the budding middleweight contender.
Brunson also sports 100 percent takedown defense, per FightMetric. That's especially impressive considering he has fought the likes of Yoel Romero inside the Octagon.
Offensively, defensively, Brunson is simply better in this category.
A victory would leave few matchmaking options other than to start pitting Brunson against the true titans of the division.
Brunson appears ready to make the leap, and he’s clearly not afraid to say exactly what he thinks every step of the way.
