With one short sentence, middleweight champion Anderson Silva essentially rendered meaningless a fight mixed martial arts fans have drooled over for years. Silva also provided UFC president Dana White with his biggest headache since White was tasked with finding a way out of a $44 million hole in 2005.

How could anyone care whether Silva fights welterweight champion Georges St-Pierre when Silva is so obviously running from light heavyweight champion Jon Jones?

Before Jones burst into prominence last year by going on the most dominant 18-month run in the company's history, MMA fans were salivating about a potential Silva-St-Pierre superfight.

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Buying the fight would have required a leap of faith, though, because St-Pierre is a far smaller man who has yet to show the ability to compete with opponents Silva's size. Silva is naturally about 30 pounds heavier than St-Pierre and fights at middleweight, where the limit is 185 pounds, 15 pounds higher than the welterweight limit of 170.

Such, though, is not the case with a potential Jones-Silva match. Jones holds the UFC's 205-pound belt, and Silva proved yet again at UFC 153 on Saturday at HSBC Arena in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, that he has no issues making light heavyweights look as ridiculous as he does middleweights.

In the cage after knocking Stephan Bonnar out with a knee to the solar plexus, Silva doused ice water on the building momentum for a fight with Jones.

"No," he said, "I am not going to fight at 205 again."

And with those 10 simple words, he presented White with an extraordinarily large problem.

[Dan Wetzel: Silva dismantles Bonnar, stokes fire for superfight with Jones]

It won't be much longer before White begins to hear the two words that should frighten the bejabbers out of any fight promoter who wants to put on the matches the public most wants to see: Mayweather-Pacquiao.

Anyone who has followed the completely ridiculous three-year saga involving boxers Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao is, unquestionably, sick of it now. They still haven't fought and, from all indications, they're no closer to a match now than they've ever been.

Worse, the idiocy of the negotiations has extended to the fans of both sides, who have taken to debating what percentage of the revenues each fighter should be paid.

It's beyond moronic to argue that point. If someone is a fight fan and wants to see the Nos. 1 and 2 fighters in the world meet to determine which of them is truly the best, who cares what they are paid? Boxing fans should simply want to see them fight, whether the split is 50-50, 99-1 or, as Pacquiao recently offered, 55-45 in favor of Mayweather.

The likelihood exists, though, that the Jones-Silva saga could devolve into MMA's version of Mayweather-Pacquiao very quickly.

[UFC 153 rewind: ’Big Nog’, Glover Teixeira score big wins]

Silva has never said directly why he won't fight Jones, though it's apparently some bizarre ethos about not wanting to get in the way of a shot for one of his teammates.

He's teammates with Rafael "Feijao" Cavalcante, who A) is signed with Strikeforce and thus isn't eligible to fight Jones; B) is on a suspension for having tested positive for steroids and is out until at least May 2013; and C) has done nothing to earn a shot at Jones even if he were to sign a UFC contract and the suspension were lifted today.

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