Former The Ultimate Fighter (TUF) season four welterweight finalist Chris Lytle (22-13-5) has confirmed that he will fight former 170-pound champ Matt Hughes (40-5) at UFC 68 on March 2 in Columbus, Ohio.
Here's a snip from a recent MySpace bulletin:
For those of you who haven't heard the news already, I have taken a fight against Matt Hughes at UFC 68 in Ohio on March 3rd. Just when I thought I had faced the most important fight of my career with Matt Serra, the UFC presents this opportunity to me. I am very excited to fight Matt, who is coming off of a loss and losing his long held welterweight title and is easily considered the most dominant 170 lb fighter in the UFC and quite possibly the world. My skills are always improving and I train with Integrated Fighting in our new facility shared with the Carmel Kickboxing Academy. Any of my fans that are in the midwest have a great opportunity to come see me at a live UFC event. Tickets go on sale to the general public Tuesday, Jan 9th at 10 a.m. The decision loss to Matt Serra was difficult for me to accept, considering most of the viewers of that fight thought I should have won or had a 4th round to decide the victor. I appreciate all my fans and all their support and look forward to this exciting new challenge ahead of me.
Phew ... it appears we can finally put all the speculation and rumors to rest.
Rest assured, in the months, weeks and days leading up to this match up, we're going to hear a lot of "styles make fights" commentaries.
Hughes is a demon on the ground with his wrestling skills, while Lytle is a former professional boxer who prefers to keep fights standing.
In his split-decision loss to Matt Serra (7-4) at the TUF 4 Finale, Lytle could not avoid the clinch or takedowns of the jiu-jitsu ace.
This alone presents huge problems for Lytle, in my opinion.
Hughes is one of the best at taking his opponents down once he gets close. And if Lytle thinks he can survive with his back up against the cage like he did against Serra, I think he'll be in for a short night.
However, Hughes recently has let his ego affect his fight game. Even though he's made a successful career taking guys down and submitting them, Hughes has recently tried to stand and trade with his opponents.
BJ Penn (10-4-1) lumped him up in their fight at UFC 63, and Georges St. Pierre (13-1) nearly kicked his head into the third row at UFC 65 when Hughes opted to stand rather than stick with his bread and butter.
It'll certainly be interesting to see which Hughes shows up on March 3.
If it's version 1.0, I don't think Lytle stands a chance.