dana is making a big mistake

Dana’s being stupid saying that he won’t strip the title, but at this point, really can you blame him? That fight was in fucking JULY! By the time they get to the next continued appeal date, it will have been four months since the fight. The suspension started back then. Do you really think he’s going to bother vacating the title for eight months? It’s not worth the effort, he can’t even line up the fights to establish a new champion in the time it will take for Sherk to be back in the cage.

There was no reason to give them until Halloween, and the idea that they needed MORE time is just stupid.

Really when you take a step back and look at it, this isn’t such a bombastic move by Dana White. So what if Sherk keeps the belt – that was White’s call to make anyway, and he isn’t keeping the belt on Sherk because of or in spite of the CSAC, he’s keeping the belt on Sherk because he believes his buddy is innocent, simply on account of being his buddy. So *IF* the statement of the week remains Dana White’s stance, the outcome, in the end, will be no different from what it would have been if he had said nothing. Again, because Sherk is absolutely not, realistically, on a 12-month suspension, and even though Dana White is all mad about the CSAC, ******he is not actually doing- or threatening to do anything that goes against their ruling******

Yes it is a HUGE issue that Dana White will take a fighter’s word over a drug test result, but that is also old news by now. Nothing new here.

Nonetheless, if the CSAC does find Sherk used steroids, White would be a fool not to strip him. It’s not like Sherk sells a lot of tickets/buys — certainly not more than the likely new champ, Penn, or even Tuffer Stevenson — and White would get the PR benefit of looking tough on performance enhancers. The argument that Sherk’s roid use was proven only when he was defending the title (rather than when he won it) is a technicality that White should dispense with. Use of roids should result in loss of the belt.

FF

I think that Dana should have said nothing until this was decided.

Garcia did indeed fuck up by not handing out of the defense briefing like he was supposed to. That is the cause of the current delay and makes them look amateur.

If all of the paperwork is found, I don’t see how Sherk will get off/ If some of the paper trail continues to remain unfound, Sherk may indeed get off. Some of it turned up on Wed, but not all of it. If they can’t account for the sample every step of the way, it does make it easier to assume it might have been tainted.

What’s the difference whether Sherk has the “official” belt or not? Even if Sherk got stripped, everyone knows damn well he would have gotten first crack at the winner of Penn/Stevenson anyway.”

I’m inclined to agree with Grape – the second he comes off his suspension, he would be “fighting to get his title back” had he been stripped.

I find it humourous that they’re so ardently standing behind Sherk, but they want nothing to do with Barnett who was in an identical situation….

Oh I don’t doubt that in the least – I was just saying, it’s pretty ballsy b/c this could either be the stand that needs to be taken against a clearly inept commission or it will blow up in his face (regardless of the nobility of his reasons).

Sherk got caught cheating red-handed thats something I’m certain of. His ratios were completely off the charts, like 12:1 rather than the normal 2:1 (I’ve tried and eff’d up the math enough times that I will say that he was far higher than one should be – even factoring for genetics and intense training). So even if he did have “tainted supplements”, I’m sorry but I find it impossible to have ingested supps that were “tainted” so much that they gave him the results he pissed out.