Why so many fighters want a piece of Michael Bisping, and why it often doesn't end well

Seems like for as long as there has been a Michael Bisping in the UFC, there have been people just begging for a chance to fight Michael Bisping in the UFC.

It’s practically a middleweight cliche at this point. Want to boost your visibility and maybe also your paycheck? Are you within spitting distance of 185 pounds? OK then, that British guy, he’s the one you want.

It’s gotten to the point where, if somehow you only heard people talk about Bisping and never actually got to see him in action, you’d have to assume that he must absolutely suck as a fighter.

He doesn’t, though. The numbers alone tell us that much. Bisping is 14-5 since debuting in the UFC at the conclusion of Season 3 of “The Ultimate Fighter,” and of those five losses, at least three were close decisions. His two stoppage losses – first to Dan Henderson in 2009, then Vitor Belfort in 2013 – came against opponents who were at or near the top of the division at the time.

Clearly, the bloke can fight a little bit. So why is everyone always picking on him?

There’s no one simple answer to this question. Instead it’s a combination of factors, most of which work in concert with one another, and all of which tell us something not just about Bisping himself, but about how things work in the wild world of the UFC.

1. He’s popular

Well, not popular in the sense that he is universally liked or respected, but that’s not really what that word means for the purposes of the fight game. What matters is that he is known. People care about him. He inspires strong opinions, which means people tune in to watch when he’s on the card, even if it’s mostly because they want to see him on the business end of a violent comeuppance.

The point is, if you’re a fighter trying to draw attention to your next bout, getting booked opposite Bisping does most of the work for you. It also serves a related purpose since he’s usually situated somewhere in the top 10 of the division.

So if you think you can beat him (and find me a UFC middleweight who doesn’t think he can beat Bisping), you stand to gain not only a popularity boost for throttling a well-known villain in front of millions of fans, but also, assuming you’re not already ranked above him, an improvement in your divisional standing. Don’t think that matters? Watch this video interview with Tim Kennedy, the latest fighter to win the Bisping Callout Sweepstakes, and listen to the first reason he gives for wanting to fight Bisping. (Hint: It’s not because “he’s a jerk.” That’s the fourth reason.)

2. He’s baitable

So OK, you’re a UFC middleweight who’s set his sights on ascending the ranks and hauling yourself into the public eye using Bisping’s face as your launchpad. But how do you land that fight? All competitors want to fight an opponent who’s ranked higher than them. Obviously, the math on that just doesn’t work out. Some people have to fight down the ranks for others to fight up them, and you don’t want to be one of those guys getting the bad end of the bargain.

If you want on Bisping’s dance card, you’ve got to find a way to convince the powers that be that your proposed pairing will be a fight worth making. The good news is, Bisping is a man who never learned to turn the other cheek. If you call him out offensively and aggressively enough, he almost can’t help but fire back. He can’t stop himself (just look at how fired up he is so far this week for Wednesday’s TUF Nations Finale headliner with Kennedy). Here is a man who can be baited into a blind rage, and that helps your cause in two ways.

Think back to Bisping’s bout with Jorge Rivera at UFC 127. Rivera spent weeks rolling out videos mocking the Brit – or so it seemed at the time. As Rivera explained after the bout:

“It was psychological warfare on him. You know the kind of person he is, you know how he’s going to behave. We knew how it would go. We filmed those videos all at once, did it all in one day, and it was done literally two months ago. We already had him lined up. This was all planned out.”

Rivera’s thinking was that an enraged Bisping would not be a tactically sound Bisping, and the more the fight degenerated into a bar brawl, the more it favored him. What he didn’t plan on was that it would also make Bisping so mad he’d throw the rulebook at the window and demonstrate why it always pays to cheat in an MMA fight.

Kennedy, who also needed a way to stand out in the chow line of potential Bisping opponents, took a similar path.

“Instead of just being like, ‘Ehh, I want to fight Michael Bisping,’ I just started attacking him,” Kennedy said. “He was like a freshman in high school in his response, which was ideal for him to get emotionally interactive with me, which made it that much easier to sell the fight to (UFC matchmaker) Joe (Silva) and (UFC President) Dana (White).”

How do you convince a guy higher up the ranks to take a fight with you? It helps if he’s the kind of guy who can be convinced to fight out of pure anger.

3. He’s not very scary

That’s not to say he’s not any good. He is. You don’t stick around in the UFC for eight years, seemingly always on the cusp of a title shot, if you’re a crappy fighter. But even when he beats up opponents, he doesn’t inspire that primal fear that knockout artists or joint-wrenching submission experts do.

Part of that is the fact that he’s genuinely not much of a finisher. Since 2010 he’s only had two victories via stoppage. One was over Rivera, whom he first softened up with perhaps the most blatantly illegal knee in MMA history. The over was against Jason “Mayhem” Miller, who ran out of gas early and was reduced to a frustrated punching bag by the time the ref called it off.

Bisping might outbox you, and he might even outwrestle you, but he probably won’t obliterate you the way an Anderson Silva or a Vitor Belfort might. (Although, as Alan Belcher would probably be quick to point out, he might .)

This is undoubtedly part of the reason fighters feel so comfortable calling him out, but it’s not just that he doesn’t knock people out. There’s also a perception problem at work. Whether because of his personality or his track record, there don’t seem to be many fighters willing to believe that he’s really so tough. Even if the evidence is there, they just don’t buy it.

Here’s retired fighter-turned-manager Charles McCarthy, explaining why he jumped at the chance to fight Bisping at UFC 83, despite being severely overweight and out of shape when he was offered the bout: “I thought it would be a relatively easy take-him-down-and-submit-him win for me. When it didn’t go at all how I planned – I got the takedown, went for a submission, he got out and then beat the crap out of me – I still thought he was a little overrated. I was just wrong about him. He was better than I gave him credit for. I let my dislike for his antics take away from my respect for his ability, and it ended up costing me in the fight.”

Even Sonnen admitted that he almost fell prey to that way of thinking when he agreed to switch opponents and face Bisping on short notice at UFC on FOX 2 in Chicago in 2012. As Sonnen later explained, he figured he’d outwrestle Bisping with ease, and it’s not like Bisping had the power to hurt him on the feet. Then his old buddy Hendo called him, Sonnen said, and told him not to believe the anti-hype about Bisping’s hands.

“[Henderson] said, ‘Every time he hit me, it hurt,’” Sonnen recalled.

The problem is, it’s not something most potential opponents seem willing to believe until they experience it for themselves. Maybe it’s because they can’t see past the exterior, in part because they’ve already made up their minds about him. They see a cocky Brit with pillow hands who has somehow stayed viable and relevant in the UFC for nearly a decade. They see a guy who they don’t personally like, and so they assume he must be a fraud. Maybe that’s why there’s such a rush to be next in line, because they’re afraid that others will expose him before they can make a name off him.

The problem is, once they get to the front of the line they often realize it’s a tougher night of work than they expected. And what happens if you lose to Bisping, the guy who no one, no matter how many times they see it proven in the cage, is willing to believe is all that good? If you can’t beat the pushover you asked for by name, where does that put you?

For more on the TUF Nations Finale, check out the UFC Rumors section of the site.