Fourteen fighters reportedly removed from UFC roster

Several times a year, the UFC goes through the process of purging their UFC roster as they remove inactive fighters, and cut fighters who are currently on losing streaks. The latest list of fighters is a rather lengthy one with several well-known fighters on the latest cut-list according to UFC Fighter’s Info:

Brandon Thatch
Li Jingliang
Yusuke Kasuya
Felipe Olivieri
Chris Avila
Jason Novelli
J.C. Cottrell
Nicolas Dalby
Dong-Yi Yang
Erick Montano
Viktor Pesta
Valerie Letourneau
Kelly Faszholz
Jocelyn Jones-Lybarger

Several names on the list which draw a bit of attention include: Brandon Thatch, Chris Avila, and Valerie Letourneau.

Thatch, a UFC veteran is currently on a 4-fight skid which has seem him drop four straight submission losses in a row over the course of the last 2 years. In 2015, Thatch had a 10-fight win streak snapped by Benson Henderson as he was submitted in the 4th round of a main event fight. Following that, Thatch dropped a submission loss to Gunnar Nelson, followed by a submission loss to Siyar Bahadurzada and most recently a submission loss to Niko Price.

Chris Avila had a rather brief stint in the UFC, going 0-2 as he dropped back to back unanimous decisions, losing to Conor McGregor’s teammate Artem Lobov at UFC 202, before dropping another unanimous decision to Enrique Barzola several months ago.

Valerie Letourneau is arguably the most well-known name on the list given her UFC 193 scrap with Joanna Jedrzejczyk. While Letourneau lost the fight, the fight was a rather impressive showing for ‘Trouble’ who was 3-0 in the UFC prior to the bout. Since the loss to Jedrzejczyk, Letourneau dropped two more fights, with the most recent one being a split decision loss to Viviane Pereira at UFC 206 back in December.

While the UFC has not confirmed the releases, the account which has released the information is a very dependable one, which uses an algorithm to scrub the UFCs active roster.

This article first appeared on BJPenn.com on 3/15/2017.