Friday night in Visalia, Calif., Bellator MMA will renew its search for that most elusive of prizes in the world of mixed martial arts: a quality heavyweight contender.

In the process, it will also revive those familiar comparisons between its roster and the UFC’s – comparisons made even more inevitable by the field of heavyweight hopefuls it’s working with.

You look at the four-man bracket and you see three fighters who have competed in the UFC to varying extents, and with varying levels of success. Two of those three (Lavar Johnson and Vinicius Queiroz) exited after being popped for performance-enhancing substances in losing efforts. The other is Cheick Kongo.

Interesting note about Kongo: when I asked what made him decide to sign with Bellator after the UFC’s re-up offer proved not quite “interesting” enough for him, Kongo replied that it was the chance to be a champion that lured him over.

“That’s the reason I’m here now,” Kongo said back in August.

There a couple different ways you could read that. One is to interpret it as an endorsement of Bellator’s tournament structure. With no pesky matchmakers in the way, Kongo now controls his own destiny, so on and so forth.

The other interpretation is a little less generous.

Had Kongo stayed in the UFC, where he went 11-6-1 in a little less than seven years with the organization, there’s little reason to think he would have ever fought for the heavyweight title, much less held it for any length of time. At 38 years old, he’d already lost to most of the high-profile heavyweights he’d faced in his career, so at best he seemed like a guy who could hang around and collect a few more paychecks.

It’s a different story in Bellator, which might be part of the reason it seemed so appealing to him. While the UFC’s heavyweight division has never been more robust, Bellator is struggling to find big men who aren’t, to most fans, unknown and interchangeable Russians. Adding guys like Kongo and Johnson to the mix brings a little name recognition to the heavyweight tournament, but it also presents a potential problem.

Say Kongo goes on a run here and emerges the winner in the four-man field. Say he even becomes the champ. What would that tell us about how Bellator’s heavyweight class stacks up against the UFC’s? And if he loses in the first round to the ambitiously nicknamed Mark “The Hand of” Godbeer, what then? That name recognition won’t do the tournament much good then. And while beating Kongo might give Godbeer a welcome career boost, it’s not exactly an exclusive club he’ll be joining.

Then again, you could say the same about whoever emerges victorious from the Johnson-Queiroz tilt, hopefully with a clean urine sample.

At the same time, I’m not sure how much we can blame Bellator for its choice of heavyweight hopefuls. There just aren’t that many capable big men to choose from in MMA, probably for the same reason there are tons of good lightweights. If you’re a big, athletically talented young man with an eye toward a career in professional sports, you’ve got options. If you’re somewhere south of six feet and well under 200 pounds, you’re probably better off looking for a sport that will pit you against guys your own size.

It’s not like Bellator can invent new heavyweights, and it wouldn’t get very far trying to import new Russian prospects to fight the Russians it already has. It’s next heavyweight title bout is already set to be an all-Russian affair between challenger Vitaly Minakov and champion Alexander Volkov. The only other heavyweight champ Bellator has ever known was Cole Konrad, and he quit to go get a real job. Unlike Matt Riddle, Konrad actually stuck to that plan.

Bellator has to make the most of what’s out there, which is what the UFC was doing for years as it cycled through just about every heavyweight who could string a few wins together in search of a viable, interesting division.

Now the UFC has the heavyweight class it’s always wanted. Bellator? It’ll settle for the leftovers. We’ll have to wait and see if it can’t somehow make a meal out of them.

For more on Bellator 102, stay tuned to the MMA Rumors section of the site.

(Pictured: Cheick Kongo and Mark Godbeer)