NEWARK, N.J. – If Shane Carwin keeps this up, he’s going to give mixed martial arts a bad name. This is the sport that takes a lifetime to master. It requires hours upon hours of daily training. It humbles even the greatest of athletes and the strongest of men. You don’t do MMA as a side job and win championships against the best in the world. At least, that was the conventional wisdom before Carwin came along and blew that school of thought to bits. Carwin still holds down a full-time job as an engineer and is a married father of a newborn daughter. That’s plenty to make the average man weary at ...

The issue of weight-cutting as a ‘quick fix' to a fighter's divisional troubles came to me as an interesting subject for discussion following B.J. Penn's destruction of Diego Sanchez at UFC 107. Not to take anything away from Penn's phenomenal performance, but it's hard for me to sit back and honestly say that Diego Sanchez's transition to 155 has been a wise move for his career. Sanchez's drop was inspired by two back-to-back defeats and the allure of physical advantages (strength and conditioning) he would supposedly hold over his fellow competitors at lightweight. But where have those advantages been displayed? Certainly not in his last three fights, which I will get to, but first, let's take a stroll down memory ...