There's plenty of discussion going around about whether or not Brock Lesnar was given a title shot too early in his career. That is not what this thread is about. Lesnar currently has 5 mma fights. I would like to know what you think about his level of opposition in his first 5 fights when compared to the sport's current top fighters. Fedor is the #1 fighter in the sport, as well as being the sport's best heavyweight. Fedor had a 4 and bull**** 1 record after 5 bouts. Fedor's first 5 fights were against: Martin Lazarov then 0-0 / now 0-2 Levon Lagvilava then 0-1 / now 0-2 Hiroya Takada then 0-0 / now 1-3 Ricardo Arona then 2-0 / now 14-5 Tsuyoshi Kosaka (loss, but highly disputed) then 13-9-2 / now 26-18-2 Nogueira is still active, definitely current top 10, and arguably the 2nd best heavyweight ever. Nogueira was 5-0 David Dodd then 1-2 / now 4-7 Nate Shroeder then 2-4 / now 10-10 Valentjin Overeem then 7-3 / now 26-23 Yuriy Kochkine then 2-0-1 / now 6-4-1 Jeremy Horn then 37-5-5 / now 83-19-5 Shogun has recently taken over the seeming consensus of this forum's top spot at 205. Shogun was 4-1 Rafael Capoeira 0-0 / 3-6 Angel Antonio 0-0 / 0-2 Evangelista Santos 7-3 / 16-13 Eric Wanderlei 0-0 / 1-2 Renato Sobral(Loss) 22-6 / 35-9 Anderson Silva was 4-1 Luiz Azeredo(loss) 2-1 / 12-8 Jose Barreto 0-0 / 0-1 Claudinor Fontinelle 5-4-1 / 9-12-1 Tetsuji Kato 13-2 / 19-9 Israel Albuquerque 0-2 / 0-3 GSP was 5-0 Ivan Menjivar 4-0 / 20-7 Ju$tin Bruckmann 4-1 / 7-3 Travis Galbraith 5-1 / 17-6 Thomas Denny 10-9 / 27-18 Pete Spratt 12-6 / 20-16 BJ Penn was 4-1 Joey Gilbert 1-1 / 2-3 Din Thomas 12-1 / 24-8 Caol Uno 13-4-2 . 25-12-4 Jens Pulver(Loss) 11-2-1 / 22-12-1 Paul Creighton 2-0 / 2-1 Lesnar is arguably the sport's 2nd best heavyweight. Lesnar is 4-1 Min Soo Kim 2-5 / 3-6 Frank Mir(Loss) 10-3 / 12-4 Heath Herring 28-13 / 28-14 Randy Couture 16-8 / 16-10 Frank Mir 12-3 / 12-4
Lesnar had a very impressive start to his career, but you have to keep in mind that none of the other fighters had the option to fight big name fighters from the very start, even if they wanted to. Brock's popularity definitely opened up the possibility for him to plan his career as he saw fit. One other fighter I can think of that had a sick list of fighters for his first 5 is Pawel Nastula, he just wasn't succesful.
Nastula was a world class Judoka. He was just put in way to deep having debuted vs Big Nog loosing to Aleks E and Barnett. Nishijima was treated worse though. He was a former boxer in the old cruiserweight division who debuted against Mark Hunt!!! He then fought Yoshida (world class Judoka) Cyborg Baroni and then Manhoef. Shame he never stuck to boxing as he was fairly decent and was ranked in the top 10 by the Ring once.
If I remember correctly he even did fairly good in each fight and then gassed, I wish he would've gotten into it at a younger age. That said, I hope Ishii's gonna do good.
