Jon Jones and Stipe Miocic will face off in a heavyweight title fight at UFC 309 on November 16th.
Both have wrestling backgrounds, a path taken by most of the dominant fighters.
However, a former All-Pro linebacker says it won’t be long before someone with a football background takes over atop the heap.
“Look, I’ve trained a bunch of NFL guys who, if they spent time really focusing on the discipline, they would be monsters,” said Los Angeles Chargers legend Shawne Merriman, who led the NFL in sacks in 2006. “They would be a world champ one day. It’s coming. A former NFL player will become a world champ.”
Merriman, whose MMA promotion Lights Out Xtreme Fighting has its next card on December 7 in Long Beach, points to linebackers and safeties as the type of players with the build to be dominant in MMA.
“Give me a Kam Chancellor, give me a Patrick Willis,” Merriman said. “Patrick Willis is actually pretty good. He’s trained with my trainer before and he can go. You give me somebody with one of those builds and then trim them down to a 205 or a 185. Someone like Kam Chancellor can actually get down to 185, and he would destroy people down there.”
Headlining our next fight coming from the booth to the cage we have Blake Troop going against Kelvin Fitial in a heavyweight clash that’s the only way to end the night.
📍 Long Beach, California
📆 Saturday December 7th
📺 Lights Out Sports TV
🎟️ https://t.co/f2inE0EuY5 pic.twitter.com/KBb2owjzvk
— Shawne Merriman (@shawnemerriman) November 2, 2024
Merriman himself would have given MMA a try after retiring from football in 2013, but said the money and prestige wasn’t there.
He said it’s a much more enticing setup now, especially for NFL guys who never cashed in with lavish contracts.
“Now that the money and opportunity is there, you will see more NFL guys,” Merriman said. “A guy that played a couple years, got cut or got injured, just didn’t make it. It might have been a bad situation, and now he wants to go kick some ass.
“They have all the intangibles, right? They’re walking in with the coordination and the explosiveness. Most of them can learn how to punch. Now they just need to learn their groundwork and takedown defense, because you’re going against guys that have been doing it a lot longer than you.”
Merriman knows this from experience after sparring with big-name MMA fighters over the years.
“I remember when I started training MMA my rookie year in 2006,” Merriman said. “(On the field) I’m going against a lot bigger guys. I’m going against Orlando Pace, Willie Roaf, Walter Jones, Jonathan Ogden. These guys have 50-plus pounds on me.
“And now I’m getting in there against someone my size. I’m like, ‘OK, this is a piece of cake.’ But when you get in there, you realize you are so behind the 8-ball, because these guys have been doing groundwork. They are former wrestlers, or even a brown-belt jiu jitsu will cause you problems. They have that background. But I was in there and I sparred against some of the best in the world. I held my own.”
Greg Hardy is the biggest-name former NFL star to try MMA. He finished with a record of 7-5.
Merriman believes Giants edge rusher Brian Burns is the ideal MMA prospect among current players “because of his athleticism and what he’s capable of doing.”
Merriman said a recently-retired future Hall of Famer leads his list of dream converts to MMA.
“I would love for Aaron Donald to pick it up because he would be a monster,” Merriman said. “He’s retired and he’s got time on his hands. The only thing is, his bank account is too big. I can’t afford him. You look at Aaron Donald and he’s probably walking around at 280 right now. He could fight at 260, maybe 255, and just destroy people.”
