Ricardo Almeida coming off his unanimous decision win over Matt Horwich, has openly mentioned his options on his post fight interview on the UFC website.

To the untrained eye in the world of MMA, there is a lot that can go unnoticed. To a casual fan, these types things are rarely spotted, and even if they were, they are hardly the type of thing that induces anything beyond a passing consideration.

Let's include the UFC into our discussion early, because a great deal of this topic will focus on their top tier fighters.

Finding prospects is one of the most enjoyable parts of being an MMA fan, and we have all watched a fighter and said—either to ourselves or out loud—that “this guy is going to be great” and from that point on supported them. It is very easy to be a fan of a champion and it’s not hard to go around telling people how great Georges St.Pierre, Anderson Silva, or Fedor Emelianenko are. But backing a young fighter is tough, especially after taking their first big loss, having a bad showing, or when they are out a long time with an injury. It’s even harder to stand by them when they don’t have a long track record and everyone is calling them a bust, sometimes even frustrating. But by dealing with this frustration,

In our continuing series on the evolution of Jiu-Jitsu in Mixed Martial Arts we fast-forward a couple years from our last segment.  When we checked in last time, Royce Gracie's reign of dominance over the MMA world was beginning to falter, and Royce decided to walk away from the sport.

In the two years between Gracie's departure, and the emergence of the next great Jiu-Jitsu players in the world of MMA, the sport went through a lot of flux.  Without any elite Jiu-Jitsu fighters to keep them in check, wrestlers became the dominant fighters.  Fighters like Mark Coleman, Mark Kerr and Randy Couture rose to the top of the sport.