Dana White on UFC 149's Hector Lombard - "When you don't live up to the hype, it goes away real quick"

By: Jamie Penick, MMATorch Editor-in-Chief

Three fighters entered Saturday's UFC 149 event in Calgary with lengthy winning or unbeaten streaks, but only two walked out with them intact. With both Ryan Jimmo and Renan Barao keeping their streaks alive, it was Hector Lombard sitting as the odd man out, losing a split decision to Tim Boetsch in the night's co-main event.

That brought an end to Lombard's 25-fight unbeaten streak, which began in February 2007, three months after dropping a decision to Gegard Mousasi at Pride Bushido 13. There was some controversy over the decision, though there was little enough action from both fighters that it ultimately didn't bring about an outcry.

However, looking at the stats from the fight, Boetsch actually had a case for all three rounds. According to the FightMetric stats from the bout, he out-landed Lombard in significant strikes 54-26 for the fight, with a 19-9, 16-10, and 19-7 advantage in the three respective rounds.

Regardless, it was a tedious, tentative, poorly executed performance from Lombard in what was a mostly anticipated debut into the UFC's middleweight division. He was even in the conversation for a title fight depending on how the fight went, but that talk has been entirely derailed.

"It's the unfortunate thing about hype," UFC President Dana White opined at the event's post-fight press conference. "When there's a lot of hype behind you and you don't live up to the hype, it goes away real quick."

"This is one of those things; the guy was on a 25-fight win streak, a lot of people were high on him, people have been talking about him forever. Guys that fight in other organizations end up in top ten rankings, and it's a whole other world over here."

White save most of his vitriol for the main card fight between Cheick Kongo and Shawn Jordan, but he couldn't hide his disappointment in Lombard-Boetsch being something entirely different than what was advertised.

"It wasn't the fight I was expecting," he said. "It just wasn't what I thought it was going to be. Whether it was Boetsch or Lombard winning, I was expecting a real war. I thought this thing was going to be a war."

Penick's Analysis: White also suggested that Lombard should move to the welterweight division, though this fight didn't really make any statement either way that it's a necessary move. Lombard simply fought a tentative fight and never fired a finishing attack. His lack of offense hurt him as much or more than anything Boetsch did in the fight, but his inability to do anything himself led to the worst possible debut for him. The UFC gave him a lot of backing in this fight and were hyping him up further into this debut, and when this was the performance they got from him it's not a given they'll look to feature him that way again. He'll now need to start from scratch in the middleweight division, as he'll no longer be propped up by the unbeaten streak or the KO-artist label, both of which were used heavily to promote this fight. He fell, and he fell hard on Saturday night. It's going to be a much tougher road for him in the UFC going forward.

[Hector Lombard photo (c) Henry Dziekan III]

Source: http://www.mmatorch.com/artman2/publish/UFC_2/article_13913.shtml

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