At "numbered" UFC events, there's a period at the end of the prelims broadcast when Joe Rogan and Dana White take a minute or two to shill the upcoming pay-per-view.  This always happens to coincide with the video/music intro played at the venue to pump up the crowd for the main card, so they end up shouting over the beautiful strains of "Baba O'Riley" as they try to convey that the PPV is sure to be awesome and you should totally buy it.  In the bowels of the Fightlinker chatroom, this has lovingly come to known as "YELLING TIME!!!!!!", and it is truly a magical time indeed.  In particular, UFC 143 promised to be so awesomely awesome (liars!) that Joe simply could not contain his excitement.

The Fightlinker chatroom: come for the fight chat, stay for the thorough-yet-respectful discussion of Kim Winslow's lady-parts.

If Josh Koscheck looked a little flat in his fight against Mike Pierce, you might wanna cut him some slack. According to him, he's been training himself for the past few camps and officially severed ties with the American Kickboxing Academy during the post-event press conference. This came as a shock to many as Josh had been with the camp for 8 years and runs an AKA of his own out in Fresno. The reason? AKA founder Javier Mendez:

"(After the Alves fight) I had a lot of friends come up to me and calling me saying, 'have you read this interview with Javier Mendez?' and talking about me and my game plan," Koscheck said. "So I went online and I read this interview and I started to notice after all my teammates lost, it was the same thing; they didn't listen to the game plan, that he deferred it away from himself, and he threw us under the bus."

Lest you think this is just Koscheck being crazy, here's some of that aforementioned bus-throwing - with Cain Velasquez after the Junior Dos Santos fight and Josh Koscheck after the Georges St Pierre fight. Does that broken orbital bone hurt or is it THE TRUTH, Josh???

The world won't be turned upside down by Kos leaving. Half the AKA guys he was working with before will be headed over to Fresno to help Josh train when he's got fights coming up - he just swears he's never going to return to Javier Vasquez's gym. As for fighting other members of AKA...

“That ain’t ever going to happen,” said Koscheck. “I’ll move up a weight class or I’ll just quit. Dana White, he’s great about it, he was joking with me at the press conference and I joked with him back and I said ‘good luck with that one buddy’.

“If me and Fitch became the No. 1 contenders, if we were fighting edge to edge for the title for the No. 1 contender, then I could see why Dana would say ‘yeah you guys need to fight’ but I would probably just end up walking away from the sport. Because it doesn’t mean that much to me to fight a friend.”

After seeing what happened to former best buds 4evah Rashad Evans and Jon Jones, I'd say this is probably for the best. Guys like Josh and Jon have so few friends to begin with, why risk that kinda bromance for an organization that'll drop you if they get half the chance?

Let this be a lesson to all the fighters who think monkeying around in the cage will protect them from a swift kick to the face.

(via the Middle Easy)

Roy Nelson shows off what happens when you take half a dozen knees directly to the face. While his matchup with Fabricio Werdum won FOTN honors, Roy is now 1-3 over his last four fights. He may not be long for the UFC if matchmakers don't put him up against opposition a bit closer to the gate.

25 minutes of Dana White media scrum! (via the BE)

The new opening segment, via Iron Forges Iron. Now all we have to do is kill Stemm and we're all good!

Josh Koscheck says he's done being the 'nice guy.'

To the crowd out there and everybody who hates me, ***k yourselves. I'm sick of being nice you know, I'm sick of it. You know, I go out of my way to be nice to fans, I go out of my way to let them get to know me, but, you want to keep booing? I'll keep being a dick. You want to come at me, I'll come at you. Don't come up to me and get an autograph from me then. Stay away, don't come up to me. You know, I know I got fans out there, but all these pricks out there at the Mandalay Bay tonight, I'll walk down the street and they will all be like, "Oh Koscheck!" F*** you!

In related news, that was Josh Koscheck being a nice guy???

Nick Diaz's 'retirement' speech. I give it 4 months.

Heavy's UFC 143 Gallery is up!

And so is Esther Lin's UFC 143 Gallery as well. This is Dustin Poirier loosening up his opponent's arm ligaments en route to a Sub of the Night award.

Renan Barao reveals that his fight with Spot Jorgenson almost didn't happen:

"Actually, I got sick twice. At first I had a problem in the throat, with fever and I went to Rio de Janeiro train. Missing 15 days to fight again had the same problem in the throat, and Dede (Pederneiras) told me that if I did not train well next week, would be better to cancel the fight, and leave for later. But I wanted to fight anyway, and thankfully it worked."

Beating Jorgenson is impressive all on it's own, let alone after a training camp screwed up by sickness.

MMA Fighting has a collection of fighter reactions from the Condit / Diaz match. Based on media reaction you can put most of them into the 'idiots that don't understand the sport' pile because the majority thought Diaz won that fight.

The slap.

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You'd think someone coming back from a potentially career-ending injury would be more sympathetic towards an athlete in a similar situation, but this is Josh Koscheck we're talking about. What's the opposite of well-wishing? What Kos does here to Georges St Pierre:

Koscheck: Hopefully George is out for more than 10 months and they make that interim title holder fight twice.

Helwani: You're rooting against him?

Koscheck: Yeah absolutely. Hopefully he never comes back. Basically ACL surgeries take a lot out of you. I've had friends who've had the surgery and they say they're never the same. Hopefully it evens out the playing field and we can get another crack at Georges.

Helwani: There's still bad blood there?

Koscheck: No. Me and George have always been cool. He's a respectable guy outside of the cage when we're not fighting. He's a great person. I'm sure we would probably hang out. Well maybe not, he'd probably say no but I'd be willing to kick it with him.

"Oh yeah, we're totally cool. I'm just praying this injury cripples him for the rest of his career. No biggie." Nice to see a glimmer of the old Koscheck again. He's been a generally pleasant dude leading up to this fight with Mike Pierce and it's resulted in less attention than a bad Jacob Volkmann joke / assassination plot. Chael Sonnen has flooded the smacktalk market causing massive inflation, which means guys like Koscheck are gonna have to turn the volume up to 12 just so people can remember how much they hate the guy.

Maybe after his fight he can dish hate against Favored Superbowl Football Team and take his dickcrown back. But I've heard that a lot of guys never come back from the kind of whupping Kos received at the hands of Georges St Pierre. They're just never the same again.

Not much info has come out regarding the altercation Alistair Overeem was in over New Years weekend in Vegas, which sucks because I have so many questions about the alleged face shoving of some chick. Was it full on with palm enfolding face and 180 degrees of shove? Or was it half slap / half shove? Was it someone who (as Nick Diaz describes them) deserves a slap? We're still waiting for more answers but Dana White shares what he heard from people who were there:

"He had to use the restroom – this is my knowledge of what happened – (and) security was going to take him," White said. "He said, 'I don't need security,' and sure enough he goes over there, and his side of the story is some lady started yelling at him and swinging at him and everything else."

This is Vegas, a place where Keith Jardine's mom will attack you for talking smack about her boy. How many deranged Lesnar fans were on the strip over New Years Eve grieving /intoxicating over the loss of El Poopgut del Cocksword? Even without the crazy wrasslin fan demographic, there were probably a bunch. Add in the people who loved the fake stuff ... well, let's just say it's still real for them, dammit.

Boxing is pretty oldschool but every so often they get newfangled gadgets like those crazy slo-mo cameras that shoot at 500 to 1000 frames per second. You know, the ones that show you a shockwave of flesh rippling across a fighters' face with every blow? Now they may be getting even more futuristic on our asses with the addition of a glove sensor that will tell analysts everything about everything:

According to Ronnie Nathanielsz of Boxing Scene, HBO is seeking permission from the WBC to use a 1" x 1" sensor in the wrist of the boxing glove. Theoretically, this device would be able to measure the speed and force of the punches thrown in real time. The device has already been tested at 60 professional fights and countless amateur fights. I would assume that this would be the first time that this device has been used on a televised card. To borrow from the software vernacular, this would essentially be beta testing for the device before the designers choose to go gold.

The amount of data that would be available after this device becomes fully adopted will be staggering. We could figure out what a fighter's average punch speed is for each type of punch that he throws. We would be able to tell if a fighter is slowing down by looking as his average punch speed over his past couple of fights. If a boxer got knocked out by a punch, we could figure out the amount of force necessary to knock that boxer out, and which fighters in the division are capable of producing that kind of power. There would be no more arguments about who is the biggest puncher in a given division, because we would have the measurements. Same thing goes for the fastest hands in a given division. Also it would be easy to figure out if a boxer is carrying his power with him as he goes up or down in weight.

Some of those stats are the kind of things boxers probably don't want to get out, like what round they start slowing down and how powerful their punches are near the end of the fight. But boy oh boy would stats nerds and bookies love that sh*t. Watching the numbers flow out of those fancy glove sensors would be more exciting than watching the fights themselves. Now we just have to wonder how long it'll take for science to miniaturize these sensors til we can fit them in MMA's tiny gloves.

The world of kickboxing has been in turmoil since Japanese promotion K-1 fell apart a few years back. On their way down they stiffed tons of fighters for money, which is pretty much the sketchiest thing you can do as a fight promoter. If the world was just, they'd get a good Overeem-style face shoving right out of the scene. But since the world isn't, it looks like the same dirtbags are preparing to try and bring K-1 back yet again.

To understand what's up, you need a bit of background. There are two key characters on the K-1 side of things: founder Kazuyoshi Ishii and president Sadaharu Tanigawa. Ishii was in charge during the glory days of K-1 until he had to go to jail over tax evasion charges. Enter Tanigawa, who runs parent company FEG and the little MMA promotion that couldn't, DREAM. Most people blame him for everything that's gone wrong with K-1 and while I'm sure there were mitigating circumstances (like the Japanese fight scene going down the toilet), it's hard to look past all the sketchy lies and nonpayments done while he has been at the head.

The story is Ishii has teamed up with Dutch kickboxing camp Golden Glory and Total Sports Asia to bring kickboxing back. Meanwhile, Tanigawa has teamed up with rival Dutch promotion It's Showtime and a shadowy figure named Mr Kim to revive K-1. Last week, the Golden Glory guys started signing up former K-1 fighters by offering them full payment on what K-1 owed. Meanwhile, Ishii and Mr Kim transfered the K-1 brand to a business owned by Kim and sent out contracts of their own, offering 50% of owed moneys to fighters willing to sign on. Thus far, It's Showtime fighters are the main ones taking K-1 up on that offer.

So this basically boils down to a proxy battle between the guys who are trying to rip Alistair Overeem off and the guys who are being driven out of Amsterdam for having too many criminal connections. Stuck inbetween are the fans, who just wanna see some top-tier kickboxing from time to time involving some fighters that actually matter.

Everyone was pretty excited when Dana White announced that 2012 would bring us not only the end of the world, but the end of Gladiator Dude and the dulcet tones of Stemm's "Bring the Pain." Then UFC 142 happened, and it looked a lot like UFC 141, UFC 140, and every other event from the past 6 years. Not that I'm complaining too much. Thus far 'positive' production change has involved replacing prelim fights with sportsdesk ka-ka. Because people watching sports want less sports and more not-sports. At least this sounds positive:

The UFC will debut a new 60-second opening for its pay-per-view events at this weekend's "UFC 143: Diaz vs. Condit" show in Las Vegas. It'll replace the one that's been in use for nearly a decade.

The segment, which was produced by the digital-production company Digital Domain (and sister company Mothership), features highlights from 18 of the UFC's most iconic fights.

For years, the UFC has used an opening spot that features a gladiator suiting up for battle. The clip, though, has become infamously outdated and mocked.

According to a release, Digital Domain created the one-minute spot to encompass all eras of the UFC. Fights clips will combine archival footage with "entirely imagined backgrounds" that are meant to show the evolution of the sport. Additionally, the score was created by famed film producer and music producer Hans Zimmer through his company, 14th St. Music.

BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHM! Oh yeah, they got the guy from Inception, so we can expect 400 tubas playing a low C note to visuals of Anderson Silva front kicking people in outer space. Whatever it is, I hope it's good because based on the UFC's glacial pace of change, it might be what we're stuck with until the year 2020.