UFC 117 was so exciting that I needed an extra couple of days to recover from it. Full of twists and turns, the card was full of surprises. Chael Sonnen may not have won the UFC middleweight title, but the man deserves a lot of credit. He spoke up and backed up his words. From the moment the first round bell rang he went to the center of the octagon and never backed down from Anderson Silva. Let's take a look at what's in store for the main card fighters.

Roy Nelson

The man with the big belly and ever growing mullet was unable to solve the Junior Dos Santos puzzle, but he showed a tremendous amount of heart, not to mention a steel chin. With a never say die attitude Nelson took a lot of punishment and kept on ticking. He even managed to land a few dangerous shots of his own. Shane Carwin may be on the horizon for "Big Country" and I think that Nelson can handle his own against the powerful Carwin, but will more than likely walk away with another loss. If not Carwin, Nelson could face the loser of the Matt Mitrione-Joey Beltran bout that will take place at UFC 119 in September.

Junior dos Santos

You'd be hard pressed to find anyone else who has defeated the caliber of opponents that "Cigano" has in his first six bouts inside the octagon. Fabricio Werdum, the man who defeated Fedor, no problem there, it took Dos Santos all of 80 seconds. Gilbert Yvel and Gabriel Gonzaga lasted a total of six minutes before being knocked out. Cro-Cop made it into the third round before he realized he had enough and called it a night. Nelson is the only one of Dos Santos' UFC opponents to make it to the judges scorecards, that is pretty impressive when you compare him to the five other victims.

Dos Santos provides a very real problem for the winner of the Brock Lesnar-Cain Velasquez heavyweight title bout that will take place in October. While we still aren't sure what Dos Santos can do off of his back he has proven that you are going to take some serious punishment the moment you get too close to him. Both Lesnar and Velasquez have shown to have incredible chins and may be able to absorb the punishment that is necessary to get the fight to the floor, but until we see Dos Santos working off of his back we will be left to wonder how he will fare.

Matt Hughes

I walked away very impressed with Hughes' performance on Saturday night. He laid Almeida out and used his brute strength to choke the Gracie trained BJJ black belt out cold. At this point in his career Hughes is only looking for interesting match-ups. He has said he won't fight again this year and for me that works out perfectly. I still want to see him fight Matt Serra again. With Serra fighting in September that works out perfectly, unless he loses to Chris Lytle. If that doesn't pan out, I'd love to see Hughes take on the winner of the Diego Sanchez-Paulo Thiago bout scheduled for UFC 121. Both match-ups could prove to be very interesting.

Ricardo Almeida

I was wondering if Almeida had a problem with the weight cut because he looked flat footed...