Quote Originally Posted by Heavy D
I agree...his performace was, overall, extremely lackluster :P

In full disclosure, I've hated Rashad since day one. He was a mediocre fighter at best that always seemed to win on TUF when his opponents really should have beaten him. I felt Imes actually won their fight, except that he got knocked down a few times (knocked down, not out and not hurt, and last time I checked, knock downs don't count in the UFC per se[in the boxing sense]). However, I was very impressed in his fight with Lambert.

Now....he just plain old sucked in this fight. His striking was piss poor (all desperation shots). His defense was terrible. He was taken down at will, and had no defense on the ground. Definate kudos to him for standing back up, though, without taking too much damage.

I don't honestly believe either fighter was gassing too hard to make that much of a difference. Maybe I'm being a Monday morning quarterback, but Rashad's high kick was horribly telegraphed. It definately landed cleanly, but outside of the knee beforehand, his stand up was terrible. Salmon had none of his games, and was far more effective with his strikes. Rashad landed a knee and a high kick, nothing else worth mentioning.

So kudos to Rashad for the win, and his attempting to strike. But attempting to strike doesn't mean that you CAN strike. Any idiot will land a high kick every now and then. Until Rashad is able to effectively and efficiently land his strikes, I won't be hopping on his bandwagon. The guy still has TONS of potential, but this fight proved, to me at least, that he still has a lot of work to do.
Take apart the weaknesses and I could probably do the same thing to discredit any win in the UFC.

Can you do it without being biased?

He impressed me on that fight. He wasn't the Rashad Evans that I saw on TUF he was a lot better.