The Natural’s Bad Picks

December 30, 2007 – 10:47 am by fightlinker

Randy Couture used to be the man when it came to picking the winners on any given UFC card. Up to UFC 76 he was sporting an impressive 15-4 prediction rate, and most of his wrong picks were huge upsets like Kongo / CroCop. That, however, was before he turned into an asshole who can’t seem to get anything in his life right.

Around the same time Randy picked retirement over a fight with Big Nog, he also started picking some pretty weird fighters to win some pretty obvious fights. For UFC77 he went 3-3 including a bet on Jason MacDonald to beat Yushin Okami. While I’m a Big Mac fan myself, I wouldn’t have put a smelly quarter I stole from a sleeping beggar’s hat down on him.

He skipped UFC 78 … guess he was too busy doing press conferences and being generally surly to make his picks. But he was back in action for last night’s UFC and here were his picks:

UFC Interim Welterweight Championship Georges St. Pierre vs. Matt Hughes – ST. PIERRE
Chuck Liddell vs. Wanderlei Silva – SILVA
Rameau Thierry Sokoudjou vs. Lyoto Machida – SOKOUDJOU
Eddie Sanchez vs. Soa Palalei – PALALEI
Melvin Guillard vs. Rich Clementi – GUILLARD

If you’re still too gummy and hung over to count that up for yourself, let me make it easy for you: he went 1-4. The only fight he managed to pick correctly was GSP vs Hughes, which was about the most obvious fight of the bunch (unless you’re one of the 52% who text messaged into the UFC poll last night – haha, you guys are retards).

All jokes of Randy having a voodoo life curse aside, I think the main problem is that he’s in too political of a position now to make the picks that he really wants to make. When you’re training half the fucking MMA fighters in Vegas, you can’t really make a prediction on The Fight Network that one of them is going to lose. While I don’t think anyone other than Silva had the official ‘Team Couture’ title, it wouldn’t surprise me if Guillard and Palalei dropped into the gym a few times during their camp.

**CORRECTION** I had initially listed Couture as picking CroCop over Gonzaga, which is incorrect – everyone made a big deal of the fact that Randy was right about Gonzaga. What I meant to say was Couture picked CroCop over Kongo. I dunno what’s wrong with my brain today, but here’s hoping it clears up before my reputation as a moron is cemented.