After a four-fight stint in his second run with the UFC, Josh Thomson is once again thriving with Scott Coker promoting his fights, conceivably a win away from a Bellator title shot.

One could argue had it not been for the injury that forced him to pull out of Bellator 154, Thomson would already have gold around his waist. He eased into the promotion with two finishes and dropped from a fight with now champion Michael Chandler less than two weeks prior to their scheduled contest, Chandler won the belt the next month.

Fast forward nine months and we find Thomson ready to face the other challenger to the 155-pound Bellator crown left vacant by Will Brooks, Patricky “Pitbull” Freire. Just like that, Thomson is knocking on the door of getting that last fight re-booked, only this time with a bit more at stake.

Really Thomson is still breaking in the new kicks at Bellator. One of the first high-profile free agents to leave the UFC after the Reebok deal went into effect, the expectations were certainly for “The Punk” to step in and put on a show. He’s done just that, with a submission and a TKO win kicking off his new contract.

“I felt pretty much settled in by the second fight,” Thomson said in an interview with Cage Pages. “The first one I had to get the jitters out, a lot of hype was on me because I was one of the first people to leave the UFC and come over… but now my feet have been wet I’m ready for whatever they want to bring forward for me.”

While in the UFC, he never was in position to compete for a championship. He finds himself hovering around it much like he did in his 14 fight tenure with StrikeForce. The common denominator there? Scott Coker promoting his fights.

When Thomson returned to the UFC in 2013, Bellator wasn’t considered competition to the UFC. Hardly even an afterthought really. Strikeforce had just been shut down and there wasn’t a legitimate alternative to the UFC just yet. Well, a couple years to grow and the financial advantage they hold by allowing sponsorships inside of the cage have changed that landscape.

Plenty made the mistake of dismissing Strikeforce as inferior to the UFC back in the day and now several of those fighters have gone on to win UFC gold in the same divisions they were the king of while under Scott Coker. Thomson doesn’t forget that when analyzing his move from the Octagon.

“My outlook on the divisions is that they’re all tough man… Chandler’s obviously tough and Pitbull’s extremely tough. The misconception is that if you fight for companies like Bellator or Strikeforce, like we were all considered to not be as good as the rest but you take a step back and you look at the guys Scott Coker built in Strikeforce who are now in the UFC, they’ve all been champions. Robbie Lawler, Fabricio Werdum, Luke Rockhold, Daniel Cormier all came from Strikeforce, Cain Velasquez’s first fight was in Strikeforce. There’s never going to be a time when all the best fighters are in one promotion. As long as there are two big promotions… both of those promotions are going to have some of the best fighters, they won’t all be in the same promotion.”

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One of those fighters Thomson considers one of those studs outside of the UFC is the elder of the Pitbull brothers, Patricky. The Brazilian owns six knockout victories inside of the Bellator cage and has been a mainstay in this division for the better part of seven years. So he’s a dangerous enough task for Thomson before he looks for any title shot and the Californian is well aware of that.

“The one thing you can never count out is that power, man. If you stand in front of him for too long then there’s a good chance you can go to sleep. That’s the one thing, you can’t get drawn into that slugfest. Get in, get my combinations and get out… don’t get drawn into a dick-measuring contest… For me it comes down to using my speed, sticking and moving around my combinations and hopefully one of them catches him on the button and puts him to sleep.”

If he gets that done he will almost certainly be contending for a belt. A belt he considers to represent one of the best in the world at lightweight. If you ask him, Michael Chandler is already one of the top fighters at that weight with that belt around his waist, and that’s a statement that was legitimized with the defense of that belt over former UFC champ Benson Henderson.