Kevin Iole has decided that Matt Hughes is done.

June 9, 2008 – 9:41 am by fightlinker

Sometimes I forget why I hate Kevin Iole. Back in our salad days of blogging, we used to rip him a new asshole on a nearly weekly basis. But since then we got a little bored of him … we got used to him parroting anything the UFC told him, we got used to him not fact checking half his shit, and we got used to him talking out his ass. But every so often he still writes something that makes my blood boil. Like this article on why Matt Hughes needs to retire.

There’s nary a paragraph in this entire article that won’t piss you off. Kevin twists statistics, ignores facts, and throws around a bunch of retarded hyperbole to try and justify his idiotic stance that Matt Hughes needs to retire … BEFORE HE GETS HURT. Should Hughes fight Serra so they can wrap up TUF? Not according to Kevin:

He clearly wants a fight with his bitter rival, Matt Serra, a fight UFC president Dana White said he’d make if Hughes wants it.

And while there was a time when most mixed martial arts experts thought Hughes would steamroll Serra, that time is long past. Hughes has now lost three of his last four and has been dominated in each of the losses.

Though the bad blood between the two, and Serra’s ability to chatter, would help sell the fight, it would be another of the WWE-type promotions that the sport is better off without. The UFC appeared to leave that behind when it was done with the Ken Shamrock-Tito Ortiz trilogy, and it has no need to go back to such events. The athletes are too good and the sport has evolved too much for it to rely on “feuds” to sell tickets.

And given that there has to be considered at least a decent possibility that Serra could win the fight, White needs to consider the fact that he wouldn’t be doing Hughes any favors by letting him get into the cage and get beaten up again. Certainly, he doesn’t need to be in with young, strong and athletic men like St. Pierre and Alves any more.

Hughes losing three of his past four is a lot less definitive when you realize two of those three losses came at the hands of Georges St Pierre. I still don’t know what planet you need to be on for a loss to Thiago Alves to be considered proof that you’re over the hill. The reason Hughes is 3-1 is because he keeps accepting hard as fuck fights so the UFC isn’t stuck with a shitty main event. That’s what happened with UFC 79, and again with UFC 85.

Are Hughes’ best days behind him? Yeah, I do think so. He’s not getting any better, but everyone else is. But considering how good he is, that still puts him in the top five of the UFC’s welterweight division. So to have people calling for his retirement is fucking lame.