It’s hard to look at the history of the Ultimate Fighting Championship middleweight title and not think, on some level: Wow, what a mess.
The incomparable Anderson Silva so thoroughly embodied the 185-pound division during his seven-year-plus reign that it’s easy to forget how flimsy and unstable it had been before his arrival. In fact, like its fellow unloved stepchild, the lightweight division, the UFC middleweight division had a long period during which there was no champ at all, in this case the two-and-a-half year gap between October 2002, when Murilo Bustamante defected to Pride Fighting Championships, until Evan Tanner’s unforgettable comeback win over David Terrell to claim the vacant throne in February 2005.