Red Corner MMA <\/a>about Tsarukyan. \u201cSince Islam\u2019s gone, he\u2019s really good. He\u2019s big, strong, physical. The champion Ilia Topuria is tremendous. I think Ilia and Arman are the two best guys in the world. I think they need to fight at some point.<\/p>\n\u201cPaddy Pimblett is awesome. Justin Gaethje\u2019s awesome. Arman and Ilia seem to have something and not only something in terms of skill but between the two we can build a great fight around. I think Arman\u2019s fantastic. He\u2019s good. He looked great against Dan Hooker, too.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tsarukyan is currently riding a five-fight win streak including victories over Dan Hooker, Charles Oliveira and Beneil Dariush. By any metric available, he should get the next title shot but Tsarukyan remains in Dana White\u2019s dog house after he was scheduled to face Islam Makhachev for the lightweight belt this past January but an injury suffered during fight week knocked him off the card.<\/p>\n
In the aftermath of that disastrous situation that forced the UFC to pivot to an entirely new main event on just a few days\u2019 notice, White said that Tsarukyan blew his opportunity and he\u2019d have to work his way back to title contention again.<\/p>\n
Tsarukyan finally returned to action in November when he dispatched Hooker inside two rounds but once again the UFC CEO said he still had more work to do before he\u2019d be considered for another title fight.<\/p>\n
That doesn\u2019t make a whole lot of sense to Cormier, but he also knows that Tsarukyan hasn\u2019t been noticeably vocal taking shots at the UFC for that decision so he believes there\u2019s more to this story than anybody truly knows.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know why Arman\u2019s not fighting for a title. I really don\u2019t,\u201d Cormier said. \u201cI\u2019ve heard the reason because of what happened in Los Angeles. I thought that by weighing in as the backup fighter when Ilia fought Charles [Oliveira] and by going and fighting Dan Hooker, it would be OK. I don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know what the conversations that they\u2019re having behind closed doors are. Because they\u2019re telling him something that\u2019s making him OK with it, right? Because if he wasn\u2019t OK with it, he would be more loud about him not getting his opportunity. I kind of defer to they know more than we do and so we\u2019ve got to kind of accept it for what it is because it seems like Arman is doing that, too.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Arman Tsarukyan is the odd man out in the UFC lightweight title picture with Justin Gaethje and Paddy…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":393657,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[444],"tags":[49,48,641,701,638,82,640,702],"class_list":{"0":"post-393656","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mma","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-fighting","11":"tag-latest-news","12":"tag-mma","13":"tag-sports","14":"tag-ufc","15":"tag-ufc-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=393656"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393656\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/393657"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=393656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=393656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=393656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}