News and notes from around the MMA world …

- According to UFCMania.com, Tito Ortiz and Rashad Evans will fight again in a rematch which will be the next immediate fight for each.

- The website also stated that at the post fight press conference on Saturday, White stated that B.J. Penn was going to stay in the lightweight division. They also reported that Rich Franklin would get his rematch against Anderson Silva for the middleweight championship at UFC 77, and that it would be held in Franklin’s hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio.

- Gary Herman’s Notebook column on CBSSportsline.com has a quote from Dana White saying that Fedor Emelianenko will be fighting in the UFC in late 2007 or early 2008.

Talking Points

After an extremely heavy June, it looks like the MMA world will slow down. The next UFC show isn’t until UFC 74 on August 25, 2007 headlined by Randy Couture’s title defense against Gabriel Gonzaga. It will be interesting to see if the lack the national coverage will put the UFC on the back burner for a while.

What happened to all the ESPN coverage? They had a ton of coverage for the show headlined by Chuck Liddell vs. Quinton Jackson just two months ago. But after that, it’s been pretty light. On ESPN’s website, Wladimir Klitschko’s victory over Lamon Brewster in a heavyweight title fight was on the front page. I didn’t see if the UFC show made the front page or not, but if it did, it wasn’t up there for long. The boxing match wasn’t even a PPV event, instead being shown on HBO on Saturday afternoon. While the UFC didn’t have an easy to market fight on the card, they did have a lightweight and middleweight title fight in addition to a Tito Ortiz fight. From a notoriety standpoint, Ortiz is probably in the top 5 of recognizable faces in MMA and has headlined two of the biggest UFC PPV shows in history against Chuck Liddell and Ken Shamrock. It’s easy to see that a Tito Ortiz fight means more to MMA than a Wladimir Klitschko title fight does for boxing. But until the UFC is able turn the corner in the eyes of the sports media, a UFC event which is big business based on live gate and PPV buys will still not be seen as important as a boxing match that wasn’t even important enough to put on PPV.