Chael Sonnen is nothing if not prolific. The American Gangster hailing from the mean streets of West Lin Oregon has an intriguing new conspiracy theory – and unlike Brendan Schaub – he’s unlikely to get ridiculed for it.
Sonnen claims Khamzat Chimaev was tapped to be the replacement for the headliner between Israel Adesanya and Alex Pereira. This would be a huge thing, if it were revealed to be true. Mainly due to the fact that neither Adesanya or Pereira have any sort of wrestling background and their grappling is mediocre at best.
In an episode of his podcast, Sonnen speculated:
“We also have this backup fighter situation. I like the backup fighter. Some people don’t. Right. We can have those conversations. I like the interim championships. Some people don’t. But we acknowledge that they exist. And we also acknowledge that we don’t fully know the criteria for when we’re going to execute that. ”
“So we don’t fully know when there’s going to be backup fighters as soon as we had our first ever backup fighter, I would have guessed for you guys and I would have been wrong that we’re going to have a backup fighter for every single title fight that we do moving forward that hasn’t been the case.”
“So now, we would essentially be bringing in a backup fighter that is gonna have an air of redundancy should they get in there with Adesanya, unless the backup fighter is Chimaev. Now, that’s the rumor. That’s the speculation. That’s the conspiracy.”
” But what do you think? And I’ve got some evidence to lean towards that. It’s circumstantial evidence at best, I admit.”
“He was called out very vocally and very aggressively by Belal Muhammad, five days ago, to which he never responded. Why? The answer does not have to be that he’s a backup fighter at Madison Square Garden. ”
“But I do believe that the answer would lie somewhere within because he already knows what he’s going to do next. The reason he’s not signing off on the Colby fight or responding to the whole fight is because he does have a plan and he does know what he’s going to do next and therefore doesn’t feel he needs to respond.”
Self proclaimed Lord Chael was suspicious of the fact that Chimaev is staying out of the media as of late.
Chimaev was very active on social media during his long stay in Chechenya in the after math of his clash with Kevin Holland.
While a Brazilian outlet reported Chimaev is set to miss his flight to Brazil due to passport issues, Chimaev’s management debunked the claim and he quickly surfaced first in Grozny, then Abu Dhabi and he now appears to be safely back in Sweden.
His future in MMA still hangs in the balance because with his considerable stature he would be hard pressed to make 170lbs again without some sort of an extensive preparation.
While White had discussed UFC targeting a match between Chimaev and Covington it’s not hard to see Chimaev in middleweight division – especially the obvious deficit there when it comes to wrestling. The middle of the pack talent is incapable of matching either Adesanya or Rob WHittaker in terms of MMA IQ.