Must-win fights loom for several fighters on UFC 125 undercard

If you want to know just how much can change in MMA over the course of half a decade, all you have to do is take a look at the UFC 125 undercard. Or, if you don't want to spend the time on a Google search, cut out the middle-man and just ask Brandon Vera. He can tell you all about it.

Four or five years ago, Vera was the UFC's next big thing. He ran through his first four opponents, among them former heavyweight champ Frank Mir, and it seemed to be only a matter of time before he was a champion himself.

But when he showed up to the UFC 125 pre-fight press conference on Wednesday, the questions, as they have for much of the last couple of years, trended in one direction: What happened?

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The answer from Vera, over and over again, has been "arrogance." To hear Vera tell it, he started believing his own hype, and his career has been up and down ever since, culminating in a second straight loss and a fractured orbital bone courtesy of light heavyweight up-and-comer Jon Jones last March.

"I guess my arrogance caught up with me," Vera told reporters in Las Vegas on Wednesday. "My head got real big and somebody needed to pop it. Too bad he had to pop my face for it to pop, but it's popped."

Then again, this isn't the first time we've heard this rap from Vera. Before his fight with Jones, for instance, he claimed he had "stopped believing in the hype" and vowed to "go back in there and start doing things like I used to."

In all fairness, he was facing an uncommon talent in Jones, but that approach still landed him in the hospital at the end of the night.

Vera's not the only one guilty of putting too much stock in this fallacy of the former self. For a fighter at a certain stage in his career, it starts to seem as though the key to success lies in going back in time. That's why you hear so many of them talk about returning to "the old me," the guy who kicked way more tail for way less money.

If only they can somehow find that person again and go back to being him, they seem to think, everything will be just fine.

The truth is, it doesn't work like that. It never has. Time only knows one direction, and it's forward. Even if you could go back, you might find that it isn't exactly how you remember it.

Take Phil Baroni, another UFC 125 undercard fighter, for example. It's easy to get nostalgic for the age when being a heavy-handed brawler like Baroni was enough to rack up wins in the cage. He was brash, exciting, and relatively successful back then. He punched people, they fell down, he declared himself "the best eva," and on and on it went. That is, until it stopped working.

These days Baroni is on a two-fight skid and is just one defeat away from dropping to a miserable 13-13 for his career. He keeps trying to rediscover that old "New York Bad-Ass," and what he keeps finding are opponents who can run circles around him.

Then again, it's not just who you used to be, but who you used to fight. Face it, the competition in MMA gets stiffer each year, and has grown by leaps and bounds over the last decade. It's highly possible that some of the fighters who romanticize their early days in the sport aren't taking into account the changing landscape beneath their feet.

Not only is it not helpful to try and regress to a former version of yourself, it's difficult to keep winning even if you remain the same from one fight to the next. The fighter who isn't constantly improving is a fighter who's falling behind.

From Vera and Baroni to guys like Takanori Gomi and Marcus Davis, the UFC 125 undercard is littered with fighters who are at risk of being left in MMA's past unless they can prove that they belong in its future.

It's a cruel game, and one that nobody wins for very long, but that's how it goes. With the UFC ranks swelling and a new, brutal year beginning, there's no time to look anywhere but straight ahead.