Whenever a member of the Sacramento-based Team Alpha Male steps into the Octagon for a UFC championship fight, the ominous stat that follows the group inevitably comes up.
Since January 2011 when the featherweight and bantamweight divisions migrated from the WEC to the UFC, the trio of Urijah Faber, Chad Mendes and Joseph Benavidez sport a perfect 20-0 combined record in non-title matchups and an 0-6 mark when championship gold is on the line. Faber has come up short three times at bantamweight, Benavidez twice in the flyweight division, and Mendes in his lone shot at featherweight gold to date.
Now T.J. Dillashaw gets his first opportunity, stepping up to face Barao in the main event of this Saturday’s UFC 173.
PROGRAMMING NOTE: Watch UFC 173 preliminary fights May 24 on Sportsnet 360 starting at 8 p.m. EST
While the standard take is to hold Team Alpha Male’s lack of success in championship bouts against them as an indication that the elite team of lighter-weight talents somehow don’t measure up, there is another side to that coin that rarely gets discussed.
First and foremost, you have to give some credit to the collection of champions that have turned back Faber, Mendes and Benavidez over the years. Barao, Jose Aldo and Demetrious Johnson all sit in the Top 5 of the media-voted pound-for-pound UFC Rankings, while Dominick Cruz, the first man to defeat Faber in a UFC title fight, never lost the bantamweight title and will be right back in the championship hunt once he returns to action.
As much as the series of setbacks has undoubtedly been frustrating for the team, they’ve only lost to the very best in their respective divisions — three of the best fighters walking the earth today. While the cumulative record is ugly, the triumvirate of Aldo, Barao and Johnson are a combined 18-0-1 with 14 consecutive championship victories in the divisions they currently represent, so it’s not like the Team Alpha Male athletes are the only ones coming up short against this collective.
Secondly, how many other fight camps can boast four fighters that have — by the time Mendes rematches Aldo at UFC 176 on August 2 in Los Angeles — all earned title fights in the same calendar year?
Answer: none.
While the Jackson-Winkeljohn team and American Kickboxing Academy (AKA) have more champions and Top 5 talent competing in the UFC at this time, none of the nine contenders from those two camps (five for Jackson’s, four for AKA) have fought for a title in the last year. In fact, only two regular members of that group — John Dodson and Carlos Condit — have fought for gold at all.
Meanwhile, Team Alpha Male will have produced four different title challengers in three divisions in the span of nine months, starting with Benavidez’s bout with Johnson last December and ending with Mendes’ second encounter with Aldo later this summer.
To put things into perspective, The Skrap Pack/Cesar Gracie Fight Team has had four fighters challenge for UFC titles over the last three-plus years — Jake Shields, Nick and Nate Diaz, and Gilbert Melendez.
Team Alpha Male has accomplished that same feat in nine months.
Say what you will about the depth of the divisions or the UFC giving Faber multiple opportunities, but the reality is this: they’ve earned their opportunities by turning back every opponent that has been placed before them in non-title fights since making their way from the WEC.
And it’s not like this is a three-man show either.
Dillashaw has gone 5-1 since losing to John Dodson in the bantamweight finale on Season 14 of The Ultimate Fighter, and you could easily make the case that he should be 6-0 in that stretch, as his loss to Raphael Assuncao was an ultra-close split decision contested in Brazil.
Then there is the unsung member of the team, lightweight veteran Danny Castillo. “Last Call” has gone 7-3 in his 10 UFC appearances to date, most recently earning a nasty second-round knockout win over Charlie Brenneman at UFC 172.
Along with Dillashaw, the next wave of potential Team Alpha Male standouts include featherweight Andre Fili (13-2, 1-1 UFC), bantamweight Chris Holdsworth (5-0, 1-0 UFC), who won TUF 18, and Lance Palmer (7-1), the former NCAA Division 1 wrestling standout who currently competes under the World Series of Fighting banner.
As a group, they’ve won 74 percent of their appearances in the Octagon, and have gone 34-6 in non-title fights. That’s a winning percentage of 85 percent across 40 fights, which is a pretty big sample size.
For all the praise that gets heaped on some of the other top gyms in the sport, Team Alpha Male doesn’t get nearly enough credit for what they’ve been able to accomplish, as critics and fans prefer to focus almost exclusively on their lack of success in championship fights.
Yes, they’ve come up short thus far, but they’ve made it there time and again, which is something numerous fighters never get a chance to experience once, yet alone multiple times. That’s a phenomenal accomplishment that deserves to be acknowledged.
All too often we fixate on the negative, finding the one or two weaknesses or shortcomings in a fighter or team as we fail to give them the recognition they rightfully deserve.
And Dillashaw shouldn’t be judged on what his teammates have done before him either. This is a new fight, a new opportunity and none of those championship losses are on his shoulders, so discounting his chances based on what Faber, Mendes and Benavidez haven’t been able to do is unfair to the talented 28-year-old title challenger.
Team Alpha Male isn’t cursed — they’ve simply run into elite champions. If Dillashaw should come up short on Saturday, it will be because Barao is the better man, not because of a jinx that plagues the team.
Regardless of the result, what the ultra-impressive collection of lighter-weight fighters have been able to accomplish inside the Octagon to date is outstanding, and that needs to be acknowledged more frequently than it is in these situations.