Urijah Faber: The Peyton Manning of MMA

Urijah Faber: The Peyton Manning of MMAUrijah Faber: The Peyton Manning of MMA

 

Contributor: Josh Hall

 

It is always a bit of a challenge to compare two athletes that play sports as different as MMA and football, and at a glance a 6’5 NFL quarterback and a 5’6 UFC bantamweight usually wouldn’t be the best people to match up.  But once you get past the physical differences Urijah Faber and Peyton Manning actually have some interesting things in common, and with both men having huge career moments upcoming this seems like as good a time as any to delve into their respective careers.

For anyone that has not kept up with the recent developments of both Manning and Faber, they both have some big things happening right now.  Faber is stepping in on short notice to replace the oft injured Dominic Cruz at UFC 169, and he will be taking on UFC bantamweight champion Renan Barao in his first defense as the legitimate champion (Cruz was stripped recently due to inactivity because of injuries).  Manning will be busy even sooner, as his Denver Broncos take on the San Diego Chargers Sunday night in the divisional round of the NFL playoffs.

If you take a look at the current odds of either man winning a title this February, you will see that both are in a very similar spot currently from a bookmaking standpoint.  Denver is currently paying out at 13-5 right now to win the Super Bowl, meaning they would pay out at +260 in MMA betting parlance.  When the lines came out recently for the Barao/Faber fight, Faber opened at +240.  Even though the Broncos have two more games two play before they would get to the championship according to the oddsmakers both Manning and Faber are virtually equally likely to become champions in the next month.  That is really nothing more than an interesting coincidence, but the careers of Manning and Faber have quite a few of those.

When you look at their respective careers in regards to championships, you see another one very quickly.  Both men, despite having careers that will leave them amongst the best in each of their individual sports, have only one championship to their name (Before you correct me, I am not counting non Zuffa titles for the purpose of this.  I know Faber was KOTC champ, but that is not a title relevant to this because it was against far from top competition).

Despite the incredible statistics Manning has put up in his storied career, the knock on him has always been too many losses in playoff games.  He is considered by many to be the best regular season QB of all time though, and his ability to take over Urijah Faber: The Peyton Manning of MMAand dominate those games is something to behold.  If you take Urijah Faber, and substitute title fights for playoff games and non-title fights for regular season games, you will see that same line of thinking applies almost perfectly to him as well.  Very few fighters ever have been as dominant as Faber in non-title fights, but he has the same reputation as Manning in regards to underperforming in the big moments.

In spite of their reputations, both men did have their moment to reach the top of the mountain and be called “Champion”.   Faber had nowhere near the fanfare when he won his WEC featherweight title, as the Zuffa purchase of the company was still almost a year away.  Still, it is the same title that eventually became the UFC FW title, and Faber defended it multiple times under the Zuffa banner.  His first title defense after the Zuffa purchase took place came in a submission victory over Joe Pierson on January 20, 2007.  Less than two weeks later, Manning was able to briefly shake off his reputation for playoff failures, and he was named MVP of Super Bowl XLI on February 4, 2007 in a 29-17 victory for his Indianapolis Colts over the Chicago Bears.  Both each attained his title in very different fashion, but at the end of the day they are in the same boat in regards to titles with one championship and a lot of close misses.

Some great athletes end up with a reputation on the field/in the cage that doesn’t adequately describe how impressive they really were.  I think that Manning and Faber are probably near, if not at the top of that list in their respective sports.  If you take the playoffs out of the equation, Manning is a machine of pure dominance that doesn’t seem to age.  According to his Wikipedia page he holds 43 NFL records currently.  No, that is not a typo.  While MMA doesn’t have the regular season of football, they do have a lot of non-title fights, and Faber is as dominant in those as anyone ever.  Since he entered the Zuffa domain, Faber has garnered the rep of a guy who blows it in title fights, but that is only because he beats everyone else so convincingly he never strays too far from the belt (but simply cannot beat the 135 or 145 champions).  Since Faber lost the WEC FW title to Jose Aldo in 2008, he has gone 9-0 in non-title fights between the featherweight division and bantamweight division and has fought an extremely high level of competition.  In seven of the nine wins Faber finished his opponent inside the distance, and the two decision wins were not close at all.  Peyton and Urijah don’t just win, they win convincingly.

If you look at the 2013 calendar year, you could make a strong case for Faber as fighter of the year (he was third on my personal list, going 4-0), and you would have to be insane to not give Peyton the NFL regular season MVP award.  Unfortunately for Faber, in MMA there is no distinction between FOTY and non-title FOTY as there is in football between the regular season and playoffs.  If there was, he was the clear winner, and he had a more impressive calendar year than a couple of the reigning champions in my opinion.  Two good athletes having exceptional calendar years isn’t that notable normally, but at the end of 2012 very few people were expecting these two athletes who many had suspected to be past their primes to succeed in the fashion that they both did.

Peyton Manning had a good 2012 season after the first serious injury of his career kept him out of the entire 2011 season, but nothing that would remotely indicate that the best season of his career was still to come.  He had the 8th first round playoff exit of his long career and starting the 2013 at 37 years old many expected age to finally take its toll and the decline to set in fast.  Instead Manning exploded for an NFL record 5477 passing yards and 55 touchdown passes (also an NFL record).  He is now poised to make a serious run at his second title.  2012 was the worst year of Urijah Faber’s professional career.  Normally a pretty active fighter, Faber’s only bout in 2012 was a loss to then UFC Interim BW champion Renan Barao.  Faber made it to the bell, but he was never competitive in the fight and suffered a broken rib in the first round.  It was the first year since Faber began fighting professionally that he did not have even one win in a calendar year.  Similar to Manning, at 34 Urijah Faber: The Peyton Manning of MMAyears old (and employing a fighting style with heavy use of athleticism and twitch muscle movements) people began to wonder if it was the beginning of the end for Faber.  A perfect 2013 and another Dominic Cruz injury later and somehow Faber is on the cusp of likely his last chance to win his elusive second title.

As the last year has shown so many similarities between the two, it is a fitting coincidence that if the Broncos can win their next two games Faber will fight for the 135lb championship exactly one day before Manning would challenge for his second Super Bowl ring.  For two guys that on the surface don’t have much in common, it is interesting to see how many places that their career arcs match up.

Even if you leave the NFL/UFC/WEC out of it, Faber and Manning still have quite a few similarities.  While there are many NFL players with college degrees, most superstars came out of college early.  Manning was the exception though, graduating in only three years with a B.A. in speech communication from the University of Tennessee while playing football.  College degrees are even more seldom in the MMA world, but Faber took care of that before he started his pro career.  Urijah wrestled and graduated from UC Davis, earning his bachelor’s degree in Human Development.  Both men are widely considered to be very high character guys, and both have been amongst the most popular and personable competitors in their respective disciplines for many years.  This has led to each man branching out beyond just being your traditional athlete and dabbling in a couple of other different entertainment mediums.

While nothing huge as of yet, Faber has appeared in multiple commercials for K-Swiss, and he has added a few small acting credits to his name as well.  Manning certainly has the bigger profile in the TV world, doing trainloads of commercials and proving funny enough to host a great episode of Saturday Night Live.  In addition to their on screen work, both Faber and Manning are published authors as well.  In 2000 Peyton co-wrote Manning: A Father, His Sons, and a Football Legacy along with his father Archie and in 2009 Peyton and Archie were joined by Eli as the three co-wrote a children’s book called Family Huddle. Faber joined the published author club in 2012 when his The Laws of the Ring was released by Harper Collins.  Manning and Faber both have a history of philanthropy in the sports world as well.  Peyton started his own charity, Peyback, not long after he entered the NFL to help disadvantaged children and has a children’s hospital named after him in Indianapolis.  Faber has hosted multiple charity golf events to raise money for children as well, and he also has worked with Amp energy drinks to raise money for youth wrestling programs.

There you have it.  An MMA fighter and an NFL quarterback that are dominant at their respective bests, oft accused of choking in their worst moments, and that happen to both have branched out into extra work as actors and authors while raising money for kids in need.  It would only be fitting (albeit unlikely) if they were both finally able to secure that elusive second championship only one day apart.  Whether they do or not, both men are still going down in the history books as all-time greats and true gentlemen of their sports.  That is a legacy anyone should be proud to leave behind.

 

-Josh can be reached at [email protected] or @jhall282.

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