When watching fights is a weekly habit, it can be strange when a weekend arrives and there are no fights to watch. It’s like when you try to quit cigarettes and all those pockets of time spent on smoke breaks suddenly become awkwardly and impatiently idle. If the absence of fights takes you by surprise, it can be hard to kill your newfound time, even though you should be cherishing it and seizing the day. The Ultimate Fighting Championship, which usually occupies its time by showcasing fighters on its roster, kept busy this weekend by removing fighters from it instead.
This usually isn’t newsworthy. Fighters come and go all the time, mostly for reasons that are immediately understandable and reasonable. Wilson Reis, for example, has definitively lost four of his last five fights, three of them by stoppage. Marcelo Golm is on a three-fight losing streak, and Eric Shelton has gone 2-3 across the entirety of his UFC stint thus far. There’s a good chance average fans have no idea who any of them are, unless they tuned in to watch Reis get dismantled in his title fight against Demetrious Johnson two years ago.
Yet Elias Theodorou’s release was somewhat unexpected…