and by Silva I of course meant Machida..ugh!

Are you really going to say that Wandy & Shogun A) were not way bigger when they were in Pride and B) had so much more aggression & endurance in those fights. Go back and look at their size and compare them to today. It is not a workout change. I have seen many people juicing and believe me you can tell just by looking at their body. Guys that left Pride have come out publicly and said they “were not tested” and that guys juiced up & took amphetamines prior to fights. All that Pride wanted was action, hence deducting purses for inactivity.

if PRIDE was obviously and notoriously the “wild, wild west” with no testing and everyone was juicing, Rampage had all the same “advantages” that everyone else did. Therefore the playing field was just as level as it is now and he got absolutely destroyed by both Silva and Rua.

As for “look at their sizes” – Silva and Shogun aren’t really discernably different physically then they were in PRIDE at all, in fact Silva look the same as always in the Jardine fight. The MAJOR difference is they were fighting without much weight cutting and against guys who weren’t cutting much either. In the UFC they are fighting guys that would have been HW’s in Japan (Griffin, Jardine, Liddell all walk around at 230-240), thus why they “appear” to be smaller.

I really don’t see there being a big difference, since they are again going to be on equal footing. Yes, the rules will likely be more favourable to Jackson, but Jackson isn’t the “slam master” anymore anyways and prefers a more classic boxing approach. If anything, Silva has a better “team” this time around in terms of all around training and preparation with Xtreme Couture and has now been acclimated to the UFC environment. Jackson on the otherhand is training with Wolfslair UK, coming off a clearly mentally draining loss as well as his personal issues.