Jon Jones has faced extreme criticism in the wake of his retirement that he was ducking a fight against Tom Aspinall, but fellow UFC legend Matt Brown just doesn’t buy it.
In fact, Brown knows from past experience that a fighter’s missteps are almost always forgotten with time, which is exactly what he expects to happen with Jones’ legacy now that he’s calling it a career. As much as everyone wanted to see him fight Aspinall right now, Jones’ body of work is so extensive that him ultimately deciding to retire won’t come back to bite him in the long run.
“Jon’s a smart guy,” Brown said on the latest episode of The Fighter vs. The Writer. “He knows in a year, two years, no one’s going to remember what this narrative was. It’s going to all be forgotten. The division’s going to move on, the UFC’s going to move on and we’re going to forget there was this seven-month stagnant period, and Jon Jones is still going to be the greatest ever.
“On his end, he’s like ‘f*ck you guys, say whatever you want, it’s all going to be forgotten, I’m the greatest, I can do whatever the hell I want,’ and if I was in his shoes, I’d probably say the same damn thing.”
If anything, Brown feels like Jones waiting seven months after his win over Stipe Miocic to decide to retire really just screws Aspinall more than anybody else.
While he’s now been promoted to undisputed heavyweight champion, Aspinall doesn’t have a whole lot of options as far as compelling opponents. He went from a chance to face arguably the greatest fighter in the history of the sport to a series of potential matchups where Aspinall is going to be very heavily favored to win.
Following Jones retirement, odds makers already placed Aspinall as a 3-to-1 favorite over Ciryl Gane, who appears to be his most likely next opponent. Brown astutely points out that Jones laid waste to Gane in his heavyweight debut and there’s no way that doesn’t get brought up again if that becomes Aspinall’s first official title defense as undisputed champion.
“It’s almost like Jon has something against Tom Aspinall,” Brown said. “Like he just wanted to completely ruin his life in every way possible, and he’s doing a great job of it. It puts Tom in a tough spot. He’s definitely the biggest loser in this whole thing. It makes it difficult for him.
“Like where does he go from here? He fights Ciryl Gane, the guy Jon beat in two minutes? Or Jailton Almeida? Almeida lost to [Curtis Blaydes]. The heavyweight division isn’t what it was.”
Brown argues that Jones’ run at light heavyweight ended in rather unimpressive fashion with a series of fights that just didn’t seem all that interesting to him. But the benefit Jones had was when he first got to the UFC, there was a long line of top contenders in the division and he eventually beat all of them.
Jones moving to heavyweight was just the cherry on top of his already stellar career.
Sadly, Aspinall just doesn’t have that option because cupboard at heavyweight has been picked bare in recent years and there isn’t much of a youth movement to help matters much either.
“Jon ruined the freaking light heavyweight division,” Brown said. “He knocked out all the legendary guys that we thought would give him [a fight] like ‘Shogun’ [Mauricio Rua] and ‘Rampage’ [Quinton Jackson] and Rashad Evans and then Daniel Cormier and then the tail end of his light heavyweight run it’s [Thiago] Santos, who he arguably lost to, [Dominick] Reyes, who he arguably lost to. It just went kind of uninteresting later on. But Tom is kind of starting right there with being uninteresting. The heavyweight division is supposed to be the division all the fans want to go watch. I don’t know how interested we’d be in watching Tom fight these guys.
“It’s basically like these women’s divisions. You’ve got one or two that make the worthy contenders and then it drops to like does this person have a chance? It’s a tough division right now. I’m not sure what the UFC’s going to need to do to step that up. Are they going to call Brock Lesnar back maybe?”
All jokes aside, Aspinall can still rack up title defenses and that could set him apart from the rest of the heavyweight division but level of competition still has to be considered.
That’s one of the reasons why Demetrious Johnson rarely gets put at the top of these mythical all-time greats lists because despite having 11 consecutive title defenses, the flyweight division just wasn’t as deep as what Jones had at light heavyweight or somebody like Georges St-Pierre faced at welterweight.
Jones may take some jabs right now that he avoided a fight with Aspinall but all he really did was refuse to give possibly his toughest challenger the chance to really solidify his own legacy given the state of the heavyweight division right now.
“I just think Jon doesn’t give a shit,” Brown said. “He’s out partying. He’s living his best life. I don’t think it has anything to do with him thinking that he’s going to have a hard time with Tom Aspinall, which I do think he would as a matter of fact, but I don’t think it has anything to do with that.
“I think he’s a party animal and he’s got millions of dollars in the bank and he’s set for life. He’s like f*ck yeah I’m going to go party, why should I go fight?”
