UFC 118 Post-Fight Thoughts: Edgar, Maynard on championship collision course

Some thoughts following a good night of fights at UFC 118 in Boston...

How can you not help but be impressed by Frankie Edgar? For the second straight fight, he showed no fear whatsoever of BJ Penn, the man who laid an epic beating on his last opponent prior to Edgar. Although many pundits had differing views on the first fight between the two, there was no arguing about this one.

50-45 for your win and STILL UFC lightweight champion: Frankie Edgar.

I picked Edgar to win this fight by decision because I thought the fight he fought last time against Penn would hold up again in a close fight. I don't think anybody saw Edgar coming in and completely dominating Penn the way he did. He took Penn down more and landed clean shot after clean shot in the later rounds and really put the stamp on Penn in the fifth and final round.

Many pointed to things like the Fight Metric report of the first fight between these two. Well, the Compustrike numbers for this fight really tell the story.

Edgar landed 155-of-283 strikes (55 percent) while Penn connected on only 53-of-154 (34 percent). That's right, Edgar landed more strikes than Penn attempted. Edgar helped his total percentage by connecting on 91 percent of his ground strikes (60-of-66) and 78 percent of his leg strikes (29-of-37).

Penn showed no urgency in this fight, and that's very alarming. The desire of Edgar is what really took him over the top. It's clear being a UFC champion is of the utmost importance to Edgar. Edgar has the heart of a champion. After Saturday's performance (and many others), it's clear now more than ever Penn doesn't.

Someone that is going to have that hunger will likely be Edgar's next opponent: Gray Maynard.

With his unanimous decision win against Kenny Florian, Maynard has likely earned his shot at Edgar's championship.

I think it's time for people to start giving Maynard credit where credit is due. Maynard dominated a two-time title contender in Florian like few others have. In fact, this is Florian's first loss in a non-title fight since his UFC debut at "The Ultimate Fighter 1 Finale" back in April 2005 — and that was at 185 pounds. It says something about Maynard that he was able to do to Florian what fighters like Roger Huerta, Joe Stevenson and Takanori Gomi weren't and that's beat him.

Going back to the Compustrike numbers, Florian simply couldn't find Maynard enough to hit him on the feet, connecting on only 15 percent (7-of-47) of his arm strikes. Maynard landed 18 power strikes to Florian one and hit 5-of-6 takedown attempts. Maynard landed 71 percent of his strikes (60-of-85).

With this fight and another dominating performance in a fight many predicted him to lose, Maynard should earn people's respect.

This was a simply dominating performance by Maynard and one that firmly cements him as the lightweight division's number one contender. And I have to say I'm much more interested in seeing an Edgar-Maynard rematch coming out of UFC 118 than I was going in. Both fighters were extremely impressive and their title fight should make for one heck of a technical battle.

Compustrike also tells us that Maynard has hit on 26-of-29 takedowns in his last seven fights. He's going to need that to continue against Edgar.

So much for James Toney training and being in shape.

Toney was felled by a laugh-inducing low-level single-leg takedown in the first 15 seconds. From there, UFC Hall of Famer Randy Couture worked over the IBA heavyweight champion before securing a fight-ending arm-triangle choke at 3:19 of the opening frame. The only thing that prevented Couture from finishing the fight earlier was their positioning against the cage, which didn't allow Couture the necessary space to turn the corner on the choke.

All-in-all, this fight proved nothing. It went pretty much how many people expected it to and had almost zero drama considering the true lack of effort Couture had to use to take Toney, who resembled a falling tree, to the mat.

Despite Toney's poor performance, I'm still interested in seeing boxers come to MMA. We saw what happened when the sides were reversed in the Tim Sylvia-Ray Mercer fight of 2008 — an out of shape Sylvia got sent for an unexpected nap in that one — but the interest and the curiosity will be off the charts should a high-level boxer and a high-level mixed martial artist ever meet. Unfortunately, I don't foresee that happening anytime soon because high-level boxers still are still making much more money than their high-level MMA counterparts, so unless there was some type of big co-promotion involved where the boxing promoter would be putting up their usual share of the money, it's tough to imagine that happening. And it certainly would not happen in the UFC.

SBN coverage of UFC 118: Edgar vs. Penn 2