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By: Jamie Penick, MMATorch Editor-in-Chief
The UFC has not found an adequate replacement to face Ryan Bader at UFC Fight Night 68, so they've pulled him from the card. The middleweight bout between Dan Henderson and Tim Boetsch will now serve as the night's main event.
Bader was pulled after his scheduled opponent, Daniel Cormier, was shifted into the UFC 187 main event. That came after the UFC stripped Jon Jones of the UFC Light Heavyweight Championship and suspended him indefinitely for running from the scene of an accident he is believed to have caused. The UFC says they're exploring options for Bader on a future card.
The 44-year-old Henderson returns to a main event fight for the first time since knocking out Mauricio "Shogun" Rua in their rematch last March. Since then he's suffered a brutal submission loss to Cormier, and a TKO at the hands of Gegard Mousasi. He still believes the fight was stopped too quickly in the Mousasi bout, but it serves as his third stoppage loss in his last four fights.
As for Boetsch, he's lost two of his last three fights by submission, getting choked out by Thales Leites in January and getting his arm wrenched in a nasty kimura from Luke Rockhold last year. He scored a TKO win over Brad Tavares in the middle of those two bouts.
UFC Fight Night 68 hits New Orleans on June 6, and will air live on Fox Sports 1.
Penick's Analysis: They really didn't have a lot of feasible options for Bader on that card, and still don't have a ton of realistic options for him on another card at the moment. With that said, I don't know how thrilled the fans in New Orleans are going to be by this news. It was a passable fight on a Fox Sports 1 card, but shifting it to the five round main event given their respective recent history doesn't exactly make it an intriguing draw. That said, it's a fight both of them can win at this stage in their respective careers, and both have been stopped recently, so it could wind up being entertaining.
[Dan Henderson art by Grant Gould (c) MMATorch.com]
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Jamie Penick, editor-in-chief
(mmatorcheditor@gmail.com)
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