Best of luck to Fedor Emelianenko and Alistair Overeem outside of the Zuffa umbrella. It’ll be interesting to see where they eventually end up.

Emelianenko has lost a step and did not fight upper eschelon fighters for a few years during his career, but it’s a bit callous to say he hasn’t fought top guys his entire career. “That guy hasn’t been fighting the best fighters in the world through his entire career”, said UFC president Dana White and that’s going too far. Fedor fought Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira, who fought for the UFC heavyweight interim belt his second fight in the organization and won it. Also, Mirko CroCop Filipovic, who was also defeated by Fedor, was set to fight for a UFC belt had he gotten through Gabriel Gonzaga. Granted a win over CroCop now is of much lesser value, but Fedor defeated CroCop when he was the most feared fighter in the sport and the sort of fighter that was able to finish off Wanderlei Silva and Josh Barnett in one night.

Dana makes a more rational argument in this interview with Ariel Helwani, speaking about not fighting top dogs in the world during the past few years:

The way Dan Henderson and Fedor Emelianenko fight it wasn’t too shocking that somebody was taken out in the first round, and the wild action that preceded the TKO victory for Hendo was highly entertaining. Fedor has never been in a boring fight in his career, and the highly violent and seemingly wild style of attack he displays in the cage makes it so much more of an accomplishment that he was undefeated for the entire last decade. Henderson once again has proven that he’s a great fighter and has the will and skill to compete with whoever he wants on the planet at any weight and be competitive. A return to the UFC would be a great thing to witness for Hendo as the 40 year old youngster continues to march on knockout opponents across the board. We’ll see if the conflicts he had with Zuffa/Dana White can be healed up now that his StrikeForce contract is up. He’s coming off maybe the greatest victory in his career, aside from his KO over Wanderlei Silva to win a Pride FC belt, but at the same time he left the UFC coming off a spectacular KO over Michael Bisping at the organization’s most viewed show off all time at that juncture–UFC 100. We’ll see how things go and hopefully Hendo can add a little pep and step to the middleweight class in the UFC.