Diego Sanchez: Has a headache...Following a convincing and one-sided loss at the hands of UFC Lightweight Champion B.J. Penn, lightweight contender Diego Sanchez seems to have elected to test his mettle at Welterweight yet again.

2007 was a rough year for Diego. In April, Diego seemingly found in opponent Josh Koscheck the first competitor capable of deflecting his aggression and tactically diverting his onrush. Diego would lose for the first time professionally by way of unanimous decision, and obviously not deterred by his loss, would go on to fight again just four months later.

At UFC 76, Diego stepped into the octagon against Jon Fitch, a wily veteran whose kill-chart includes recognized competitors such as Luigi Fioravanti, Roan Carneiro, Shonie Carter and Brock Larson. Again, the fight between Diego and Fitch would result in a loss for Sanchez, this time by way of split decision. This, the second loss of his career, would be the first time the accomplished Ultimate Fighter reality series winner had tasted consecutive defeats.

"I feel that he beat me fair and square,” Diego told Yahoo Sports following his split-decision loss. “I was close, but close isn't close enough.”

“All fighters go through losses,” he humbly recollected. “I'm just going to have to come back stronger. I'm contemplating in my mind if I'm going to drop to (1)55 or not, because I'm a smaller welterweight. I could do more power lifting and put some more weight on or I could lose some weight."

Interestingly enough, his fight against Fitch marked the first time in his entire career that Diego was not training with guru Greg Jackson prior to his bout.

“Diego has moved to California to reconnect with his son out there,” Jackson told MMA Weekly in an interview, back in August of 2007. “He’s always a part of the team, but he’s going to train out there for a while. We love him to death, he still loves us; it’s just kind of a thing where he wants to get out there and get to know his boy and live a good life.”

Diego would take two more cracks at the Welterweight division following his loss to Fitch, taking down both David Bielkheden and Luigi Fioravanti in 2008, and both by way of raining vicious strikes down upon his grounded adversaries. Following two successful parting fights, Diego debuted as a lightweight to begin 2009, exactly eight months to the day following his win over Fioravanti.

At lightweight, Diego seemed poised to wreck shop. His debut over Joe Stevenson was a winning effort by way of unanimous decision. His second fight, this time a split decision win in his favor, served to exorcise whatever demons Diego had taken with him as he dropped in weight to retain his competitive edge. With this, the match-up of his life was set: Diego would fight BJ Penn, arguably the greatest competitive lightweight mixed martial artist in the world, at UFC 107. Penn would have just under six months to prepare, which was almost as long as he spent cutting from welterweight to lightweight.

Here, Penn devastated Diego on every front, negating his advancements and stalking the perimeter to land crisp, clean strikes. For four rounds, Diego was given every reason to question his viability at the upper echelon of UFC’s lightweight ranks. Shades of his ended Welterweight run, and the demons he’d worked so diligently to exorcise within a years’ time, revisited him this night. In the fifth round, after a night’s worth of Penn cracking away on him for five minutes at a time before going back to his corner and not even sitting on his stool, Diego’s night was ended via a hard right high kick that opened an axe-wound in his already beaten and bloodied cranium. This was December 12th of 2009.

Sunday, January 17th, Diego left a message on the wall of his Facebook account that obscurely stated he would be “going back up to 170.”

Contacted by press later that day and on Monday, it was confirmed that this is indeed the case. As well, Diego followed up on his Facebook message by way of a Twitter message Monday afternoon stating "Yes I'm going back to welterweight. I'm loving my new diet. I want Kos or Fitch but any top guy will do. Just want to give you fans the best fight."

Be it because he’s had recent difficulty at the faster weight, or because he’s had trouble making the weight as a larger-than-typical lightweight fighter, it appears that Sanchez has made up his mind about where his next fight will take place.

Hojak’s Editorial Take

Diego Sanchez was one of the greatest hometown fighter stories of our modern era. Growing up in Southern California, the hotbed of MMA as it came back into sanctioning and grew as a sport, King of the Cage was a fairly common name. Tapout was known state-wide before it was known world-wide, thanks not to official UFC sponsorship or clever commercials, but rather to three young men selling t-shirts out of the back of a truck.

Hearing that he was going to be on the Ultimate Fighter with what was then an 11-0 record was exciting, because I knew he’d be amongst the best competitors that respective season had to offer, without even taking a look at the other competition. Lo and behold, he won the show.

Fast-forward five years (yes, it’s already been that long), and Diego’s been tested. Dating back to April of 2007, seven contests have yielded three defeats and two shifts between weight classes.

It’s likely that Diego is advantageously utilizing the time he has left in this sport (he turned 28 on 12-31-09), and shifting his interests to the weight classes he sees himself competing most successfully in. Then again, it’s possible that Diego is now looking beyond lightweight towards getting back on track with where he’s capable of doing the most damage. Seemingly framed naturally as a welterweight, it’s hard to imagine Diego envisioning himself doing more damage to opponents weighing fifteen pounds less than he did as he surged to 17-0 before tasting defeat.

Diego’s style is not surprising, his methods of advancement are not mysterious, and his tactic for grounding and outworking his opponents is a staple of his reputation. However, all obviousness aside, Diego’s proven time and time again that despite the given knowledge his opponents may possess regarding his styling, he will persist beyond this awareness and go to every end to fell that which stands before him. This tenacity and grit alone keeps him viable within any respective weight class he shows up to fight at.

That said, there’s not much different waiting for him at 170 lbs. than there was when he left.

As MMA Weekly puts it, Diego Sanchez still has Georges St. Pierre, Jon Fitch, Thiago Alves, Josh Koscheck and Paul Daley to contend with, with each fighter representing one of the UFC’s top five spots at this weight. Two of them have already successfully bested Diego. Since dropping to lightweight, an anticipated reemergence at lightweight hasn’t done much to show fans that he’s advanced by way of technique, or by way of skill set.

My fear in this move is that Diego will find himself hopelessly climbing the welterweight ranks as Dana White urges him on, only to find the same astoundingly one-sided handling he found when he fought the champion a weight class beneath him.

The optimist in me wants to believe that we’re watching the progression of a flourishing martial artist, walking his own road and notching an impressive win list while taking the knocks and learning from past mistakes. However, the realist in me is quick to take over on that note, reminding myself that MMA is usually a cut-and-dry affair that caters to pessimists and masochists alike.

Diego will need more than just luck and skill as a returning welterweight. Most certainly, his approach verges on similarity to that of Tito Ortiz, granted that he’s assumed his opponents to be incapable of handling his wrestling rush, and finds himself stunted severely when any given adversary exhibits defensive formidability. Following a 17-0 run, Diego’s current 21-3 record represents his losing effort in three of his last seven fights. Two of these losses came in the UFC’s welterweight division, the class to which he is returning, and home to some of the greatest MMA fighters in the world.

Like Tito, his style “is what it is”, and this leaves Diego very little room to advance as a tactician. Rather, it seems that Diego’s next level of competitive viability will come by way of an improvement of his current game plan: more effective ways to aggressively pursue, pin down and dominate an opponent.

I suppose the question then becomes “How long until Diego meets his Iceman?”

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