This is the first installment in what I hope is going to become some sort of a running feature. The goal is: I'm going to come up with a topic about MMA. This topic is going to be something that has little to no chance of actually happening, hypothetical discussions about things that simply have no relevance, or things that can only happen in some fantasy world. In other words, discussions that would be a waste of time. This is just something fun where we spark some discussion about random MMA topics that we otherwise wouldn't have had a real place to discuss.

Today's topic: The Hypothetical Grand Prix- Create a Grand Prix in MMA. Simple enough. The fact that the UFC is really not a fan of tournaments mean these discussions are moot, but they're fun to talk about. Like what you would buy if you won the lottery. Be creative, come up with something new. This isn't strictly UFC fighters, go ahead and create something for other divisions. Lightweight would be a good one, as would WMMA.

There's a few ways we can go with this:

• Come up with the best possible Grand Prix you can for a division
• Open Weight Grand Prix- keep it mildly reasonable as to have some sense of realism. Struve vs Mighty Mouse would just be weird.
• Maybe combine two weight classes and equalize weights to come up with a wider, more interesting talent pool.
• Incorporate history: bring in retired or out of prime fighters. I'd be interested in reading about an All-Prime LHW Tournament. There have been so many good one LHWs.
• Just do whatever you want, man.

My submission: Vanilla Middleweight Tournament

Middleweight has been really strange lately. It was one of the worst divisions for awhile, with Ando reigning supreme and destroying everyone while Okami, Marquardt, and Maia beat everyone and each other up repeatedly, and nobody stood a chance against the Champ. Now Middleweight has a number of fighters fighting for contention. My goal was to keep as many proposed match-ups together as possible, and only breaking them if I think my idea is much better.

via i.imgur.com

You can either create an image or just list the fights in order of how they'd appear ie:

Anderson Silva vs Georges St-Pierre

Chris Weidman vs Tim Boetsch

Michael Bisping vs Luke Rockhold

Rich Franklin vs Jake Shields

Vitor Belfort vs Jacare Souza

Yushin Okami vs Alan Belcher

Rousimar Palhares vs Hector Lombard

Mark Munoz vs Brian Stann

Here is a blank bracket.

This isn't formatted with seeding in the way a normal tournament is for one big reason: Anderson Silva's belt is still on the line every time he fights. So I structured it in a way that fighters like Chris Weidman and Michael Bisping- two of the top title contenders, aren't getting screwed out of a title shot by having to fight 3 times. Rockhold has favorable position because he's the current SF champ. Weidman deserves a shot soon. Hopefully GSP is Anderson's next opponent after Bonnar. On the right side of the bracket: Someone like Hector Lombard will have to beat Palhares, (Munoz vs Stann winner), then (Okami, Belcher, Belfort, Souza) before getting a shot, and they'd meet in the finals of the tournament.

Side note: If you have an idea for a future installment of Waste of Time, go ahead and propose it. I have a (short) list of ideas from which to choose and would love to get more options.