Jared Rosholt is making a name for himself.
A rising fighter in the UFC's talent-starved heavyweight division, Rosholt is 14-2 as a pro in MMA, including 6-1 since joining the UFC in 2013.
There's just one issue. Rosholt is boring. Watching him fight is like squeezing a ketchup packet, only the ketchup never comes out because you didn't tear the packet enough. There are plenty of grinders out there, but Rosholt stands out for how emphatic and strident he is about it. He is aggressively unaggressive, liberally conservative.
So it's not a huge shock that Rosholt has a few detractors out there. "Haters," to employ the modern parlance. Heading into his co-main event Saturday with Roy Nelson at UFC Fight Night 82, Rosholt is just as unapologetic outside the cage as he is inside it. The haters, to continue with the slang jag, can suck it.
“I block people [on Twitter] who bother me. I reply to the people who are nice,” Rosholt told Matt Erickson and John Morgan of MMAjunkie Thursday. “For every dig I get from somebody, I get 50 compliments. So get a life. I’ve got better stuff to do than sit around and listen to this. … C’mon. Get real.”
Telling fans, any fans, to "get a life" is probably not a piece of advice you find in any media training session or public relations guidebook. In doing so, Rosholt is indicating he doesn't care about such things.
Is this what a heel turn looks like?
In fairness, Rosholt comes across as a fairly reasonable person in public. In the MMAjunkie article, the 29-year-old freely acknowledged that he is "still developing" and needs "to work on my striking."
And given that Rosholt was a three-time All-American wrestler at Oklahoma State, his grinding style is in no way unexpected. It's just that he is very, shall we say, committed to the style.
The most action-packed part of Rosholt's game might be his head, which he presses into his opponent's head as a way of slowly eroding their will to live as they clinch together along the fence. Rosholt has powerful hands (six of his seven stoppage wins came from striking), but generally speaking, they are only a tool that allows him to close distance so that striking need not occur any longer than it must. Once a dominant position is achieved on the mat or the clinch, Rosholt is content to remain in the position for as long as his opponent, time constraints and his considerable skills allow.
On one level, it's fine. It's all legal, it's not easy to do and, hey, if someone doesn't like it they're free to try to stop him from doing it. Rosholt has asked for a top-10 opponent if he defeats Nelson. That is a valid request.
On another level, it's boring. It's just boring.
On still another level, it displays a kind of risk aversion that is unpalatable beyond a simple lack of visual appeal. He fights as if to avoid a fight breaking out.
The analog is not one of a great defensive football team, which displays its own aggression and makes its own progress. It would be like a team choosing to take a knee on every offensive possession until it was time to punt, pinning opponents deep in their own territory time and time again and stopping their forward movement to the point that it eventually got into field-goal range by attrition.
It takes discipline and will, on top of talent. Rosholt has those things. He also clearly has the psychological makeup it takes to impose such a game plan, which requires an inability or unwillingness to consider the feelings of the paying public.
So more power to him. But if his unappealing style continues alongside an insistence that all critics are losers living in their parents' basements, he could quickly become a notably unpopular figure.
As history has shown, that in itself can become a source of marketability and media attention. He certainly appeared to have plenty during the fight-week activities leading up to Saturday's event, as MMA Fighting's Chuck Mindenhall shared on Twitter:
Sometimes you just have to admire a juggernaut star like Jared Rosholt from the outskirts... http://pic.twitter.com/4cLGty21Gs
— Chuck Mindenhall (@ChuckMindenhall) February 4, 2016
Will it continue? This route is a tricky one, because a loss dries it up quickly. There's no safety net. We'll see how long Rosholt can continue the tightrope walk, and who, if anyone, is waiting on the other side.
Scott Harris covers MMA for Bleacher Report. For more, follow Scott on Twitter.
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