UFC's Alistair Overeem Experiment Is Over Before It Started

By Jay Anderson
Alistair Overeem
Joe Camporeale – USA TODAY Sports

At UFC Fight Night: Mousasi vs. Souza Friday night, Alistair Overeem — a former Strikeforce and Dream heavyweight champion — once again proved one thing, he simply doesn’t have what it takes to be an elite heavyweight in the UFC.

Having joined the Jackson-Winklejon fight camp to train alongside the likes of Jon Jones and Andrei Arlovski, Overeem was expected to win his bout against Ben Rothwell Friday night. It was a fight you would expect a mutli-promotion champion to win. It was a fight you would expect the man who retired Brock Lesnar to win, even if that win was tainted by an eventual positive drug test that came within a six month window of the Lesnar fight, a window during which Overeem was to be tested for performance enhancing drugs under his conditional fight license in Nevada. The NSAC opted to let Overeem keep the win despite suspending him, but it would be his last for a while in the UFC, as he went down to title challenger Antonio “Bigfoot” Silva upon his return from suspension. Subsequent to that, he would lose to Travis Brown, who would go on to fight in a title eliminator, before at long last grabbing his second UFC win in February 2014 by dominating a well past his prime Frank Mir for three rounds in a fight that most felt he should have been able to finish.

Rothwell? Well, coming off the Mir win, regardless as to whether it was believed that Overeem should have finished it, Rothwell was expected to be someone “The Reem” could beat. Lets make no mistake, Overeem was brought into the UFC to be champion some day. He was a huge name, the biggest name outside the UFC at the time he signed with the promotion, other than Fedor Emelianenko — and Fedor went off into retirement.

How certain of Overeem’s eventual stardom was the UFC and its parent company, Zuffa? Well, Overeem is currently making upwards of $200,000 just to show for a fight. With his win bonus (should he win), he pockets well over $400,000 — at UFC 169, he made considerably more than featherweight champion Jose Aldo, who headlined the card. More than twice as much, in fact.

So, that brings us back to Rothwell. In their co-headlining bout at UFC Fight Night 50 Friday night, in the very first round, Overeem once again found himself caught, tagged by a powerful counter-punch after he launched a sloppy shot towards Big Ben. Rothwell connected with Overeem’s head (Overeem’s own punch was just a glancing blow), and the big man went down. Again. Rothwell followed it up with some shots as Overeem tried to cover up, but the ref was right on top of things to end the fight in a TKO for Rothwell.

Forget all the talk of steroids (Overeem went from an okay light heavyweight in Pride, who lost as much as he won to a dominant heavyweight in Dream and Strikeforce, and many believe that was due to drug use that saw his body balloon to cartoon superhero proportions). Forget all the hype and the fact that he retired Lesnar (a Lesnar who had been through major surgery due to two bouts with diverticulitis). The real problem with Overeem in the UFC is that, prior to the UFC, he never fought — or at least rarely, and more rarely did he win — against top competition. Really, the best names on Overeem’s record in the heavyweight division are Mark Hunt and Fabricio Werdum; many of the rest were fighters at the end of their careers, or who never really went to the top levels. In the UFC, Overeem just isn’t able to hang with the best.

He was over-hyped from the start, and with the loss to Rothwell, the Overeem Experiment in the UFC is done. In fact, it never really got started.

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