With Daniel Cormier vs. Anthony Johnson on Tap, Chaos Reigns Among UFC Champs

It occasionally seems like becoming UFC champion is the worst thing that could ever happen to a professional MMA fighter.

It may be the biggest prize in the sport, but there is mounting evidence that UFC gold is bad for your health. Take Saturday night’s UFC 187 for example, where Daniel Cormier and Anthony Johnson will vie to become light heavyweight champion only after the last light heavyweight champion’s life imploded.

If this were an isolated incident, you could just blame it on Jon Jones’ personal issues and move on. In truth, this weekend marks the third time since the beginning of 2014 that the UFC has had to crown a new champion under somewhat ugly circumstances.

It started with Georges St-Pierre’s public breakdown in the wake of his hard-fought UFC 167 victory over Johny Hendricks in November 2013. Seven years on top of the welterweight division had clearly taken its toll on the French Canadian phenom, and after he officially began an indefinite sabbatical from MMA in December of that year, it took three months to set Hendricks up with a bout against Robbie Lawler for the vacant title.

On Jan. 6, 2014, just 24 days after St-Pierre announced his departure, the UFC also had to strip bantamweight champ Dominick Cruz in order to promote Renan Barao to “undisputed” titlist. Barao had been carrying around the “interim” championship for a year-and-a-half, so the change wasn’t necessarily earth-shattering. But just four months after his official promotion, he dropped the strap to T.J. Dillashaw.

These days, the UFC is even having trouble getting Barao and Dillashaw together for a rematch. And Cruz? Let’s just say the narrative thread was lost a long time ago.

The most trying character of the bunch is Cain Velasquez. The heavyweight champion’s perennially injured status and the borderline cursed nature of the 265-pound title in general are both well-worn tropes for MMA fans. Velasquez’s on-again, off-again career trajectory finally became too much for UFC executives to bear last November, when they opted to put an interim title on Fabricio Werdum for defeating Mark Hunt at UFC 180.

Velasquez and Werdum are scheduled for a unification bout next month, and conventional wisdom says Velasquez could get stripped outright if he somehow doesn’t make the date.

And so, you see: All in all, there has been a lot of turmoil at the top.

The end of Jones’ reign as 205-pound kingpin was the most unceremonious of all, and the result may be a historically inauspicious start for either Cormier or Johnson.

We suspected all along that Jones would ultimately have to slip the knife between his own ribs—he’d been too dominant as champion for anyone else to do it. Cracks were long visible in his personal life, and they became chasms after a positive test for cocaine went public in the wake of his UFC 182 win over Cormier.

But Jones always seemed like too much of a control freak to lose the handle completely, so his April felony hit-and-run charges made for a surprising denouement. The UFC had little other choice than to put him on company-mandated timeout. Public scrutiny had simply grown too hot, too pointed.

Now, his absence puts Cormier and Johnson in an equally tough spot.

Cormier comes in as the favorite on paper (via Odds Shark) and in most people's hearts. The likable former Olympian is the kind of guy everybody wants to see succeed, but Jones just ran over him in January. That alone makes D.C.'s standing as a potential champion seem dicey.

Johnson, meanwhile, spent much of the lead-up to this fight mired in a domestic violence scandal of his own. UFC President Dana White has not exactly painted himself (link contains profanity) as the most enlightened fellow on the subject during his own media appearances this week, either. Now, we’re all just holding our breath, waiting to see how the notoriously irascible company would handle the public relations quandary of Johnson becoming champ.

No matter which of them gets the belt wrapped around his waist at the end of Saturday night, there are going to be significant complications. It will be difficult to accept either guy as the light heavyweight division’s new standard-bearer.

We’re accustomed to simpler, more linear storytelling in fight sports, so we’ll all just be waiting for Jones to return and reclaim the top spot—or legitimize the new champion with his blood.

It’s nobody’s fault. We’re just used to neat-and-tidy outcomes and resolutions free of ambiguity. It’s unfair to hang those expectations on Cormier, obviously, and Johnson’s considerable baggage is part of a more important but different discussion.

At this point, though, it’s hard to ignore the instability at the top of the UFC pecking order. The cases of Velasquez and Cruz remind us of the physical toll of being the best, while Jones and St-Pierre expose the psychological pitfalls that await, as well. It’s one thing to get to the top—by any means necessary, in this sport—but it’s another thing entirely to stay there.

Meanwhile, Cormier and Johnson stand as examples that, when a great champion leaves or is forced out, you can’t just pick up where he left off.

There’s a lot of history to inherit along with that title, and not all of it is pretty.

Win at your own risk.