Out of people not mentioned I wouldn't want to fight Big Tim if I was a heavy.
Yushin Okami and Travis Lutter. Maybe they should fight each other!
Nate Diaz
Muhsin Corbbrey
AlexWysocki - "I get so fucking tired of hearing about how everyone is ducking tom erikson."
Well it is still a confirmed FACT, and not just some unsubstantiated rumor - i.e., a fact that was confirmed explicitly by both parties (Nog's own manager at the time, Mario Sperry, as well as Erikson) - that Nog did turn down a fight with Erikson, which Erikson had already accepted.
Where Sperry himself openly acknowledged that Erikson would have been a very dangerous matchup for Nog, and that Nog would thus need more time to prepare for someone like that - and where Erikson just didn't have the name value to justify the risk to Nog at that point.
And yes, Erikson is old and past his prime now (and in all that time, the game would have passed him by on its own anyway, if he never evolved with it).
But still, several years ago (like when he was offered to Nog), he really was the most-avoided fighter around at the time because he was considered too dangerous with his size and wrestling skills (where he would have always had a huge chance of at least LnP-ing anybody to a win) - but without having the big name himself for any of the other big names to gain much from beating him.
Besides, it doesn't necessarily take too long for a fighter to apparently drop out of his prime anyway. Actually, it can happen quite abruptly - where a decline can suddenly manifest even from just one year to the next (just see Chuck and Cro Cop from 2006 when they were both dominantly destructive - to 2007 where they both ended up being upset twice in a row, and looking deterioriated from just the year before).
And Erikson went 3 whole years without an MMA fight (and in the meantime, was left with having to go over to K-1 instead to do kickboxing for his paychecks).
AlexWysocki - "If he wanted to get fights so bad why didnt he lose some fucking weight and get into a normal weight class?"
What are you talking about?
HW in Japan had no silly 265 lbs. limit anyway. So he wouldn't have had to make any weight at all to still be able to fight Nog, who was the Champion of "a normal weight class" - the no-limit HW division.
Plus, Erikson stated that he told the UFC that he really wanted to fight for them and that if he had to, he could have made 265 - but the UFC just wasn't really interested.