You mentioned his quality of his opposition and "5 former LHW champions" earlier. Just one of my reasons is that a number of those guys were well past their prime and the odds of them beating Jones were never very high. Is it good that he beat them? Sure. But I mean, FFS, it was up in the air how long Shogun was going to keep the belt, even w/o Jones fighting him, if for no other reason than he was like 3 and 5 after Pride and had just went 1-1 with Machida. Most of the guys in the mix at the time were somewhat long in the tooth. I mean, I've loved Rampage since Pride, but c'mon.
Of course you can make the same kind of argument against pretty much everyone, but it is what it is.
Another thing is how his fights seemed to change. He went from finishing fights to 5 round decisions. The quality of opposition probably played a part in that.
2 more points: I generally hate GOAT debates because they really don't mean much and it doesn't account for a whole slew of things. Is Fedor not GOAT because they had a hard time finding top shelf opposition during his prime, while the UFC had tons of names to throw at Jones, topshelf or otherwise? Is he not GOAT because Japan likes freak fights? What about his refusal to cut weight and fight at LHW and instead fighting a lot of guys who weighed 40+ lbs more than him on fight night, like Bigfoot? Or him not retiring and thinking he could still pull out fights well after his career had peaked? Same with Spider. But one thing I'll say now....is that unless Jones retires, he's going to go through the same shit and his GOAT status will be tarnished like everyone else. Saying he's GOAT now isn't going to really mean anything once he loses a step, and everyone does eventually. Then we'll have the same retarded situation like we had with Spider, where tons of people used to call him GOAT, but then his career went south and now you don't hear it near as much. I'm happy to toss him in the top 5, where he'll probably be 10+ years from now, unless he gets his head straight and starts smashing people again.
And of course, I'd be lying if I said that his shenanigans didn't play a part. But I look at it as "greatest of all time" and not "potentially the greatest of all time". It would be a completely different argument if he hadn't been stripped and had kept wrecking people, but then again that's not really my problem.
