Joe Rogan Hails Jon Jones as ‘The Smartest’ for Never Taking a Short-Notice UFC Fight

In his 17-year UFC career, Jon Jones has never taken a fight on short notice. While that may concern his critics, according to UFC commentator Joe Rogan, it’s the smartest thing the UFC heavyweight champion has ever done.

At a time where fighters like Alex Pereira have built a career on short-notice fights, Jones has out and out refused to entertain any aspect of it. Back in 2012, Jones was supposed to fight Dan Henderson at UFC 151, but the contender got injured. The promotion wanted to offer former middleweight contender Chael Sonnen to Jones at 205 lbs, but the Rochester native didn’t want to take any chances.

This led the promotion to cancel the entire event at the Mandalay Bay Center. Interestingly, the consensus at the time had Jones picking up an easy win against Sonnen despite the lack of time to prepare.

In an episode of the JRE podcast with Ron White, Rogan reflected on the event and said, “To this day, everybody says he’s the GOAT. Well, why is he the GOAT? Coz he did everything the right way“.

Rogan was talking about how fighters were pushing themselves to their limits every day during camp to reach their peak. The sport has become so calculated that coaches would pull fighters out of matches if they feel that their mentee is peaking too early.

It’s this kind of methodical approach that was making the sport get better, he contended.

Certain trainers will even back off from training if they feel their fighter is peaking too early before a fight.

Rogan drew parallels between this to what Jones did 12-13 years ago and said,  “Jon Jones is the smartest, Jon Jones never did that. They changed opponents? ‘F*ck you , fight’s off'”.

But it wasn’t always by the book.  Jones always had problems with partying and substance abuse, something that makes his achievements mean all the more to the UFC commentator.

Jones’ habits had Rogan in awe

Rogan believes that although what he did was wrong, knowing that he was partying and drinking a week before a title fight just made things more impressive.

Rogan spoke about a moment from the Daniel Cormier fight presser from 2017, saying, “One of the craziest things he ever said, Daniel Cormier, when they were having a rematch… and DC said something to Jon, Jon goes, ‘I beat you when I was on coke. Is the craziest statement'”.

“He did everything the wrong way too, I mean he did a lot of partying and still beat the f*ck out of everybody because he was that good, because he was that talented”, explained Rogan.