The UFC did what it could to push DeMarco Murray past former Heisman winner Mark Ingram, but the efforts to get the Las Vegan the cover of EA Sports NCAA Football ’12 fell short.

After 140,000 votes were cast, Ingram beat out Murray along with future NFL draft picks Nick Fairley and Jake Locker for the cover.

Why did the UFC care if Murray landed the prestigious spot?

The former Oklahoma running back has ties to the UFC’s owner Lorenzo Fertitta and president Dana White. Murray attended Bishop Gorman, the same Las Vegas high school, as the UFC powers.

During a video campaign on UFC.com and mentions on the promotion’s Facebook page, White pointed out that Murray is a longtime MMA fan, who supported the sport in its infancy during live events in Sin City.

Murray’s also a fan of MMA training.

"It’s definitely a lot different than what I do on the football field, but some things you can translate into your game. I spent three, four weeks in Las Vegas training with [striking coach James Gifford] at Lorenzo’s gym, and that definitely helped me out a lot with my hand coordination and speed, along with working muscles that I’ve never worked on in football," Murray told UFC.com.

According to MMAjunkie, Murray plans on wearing something with the UFC logo during next week’s draft.

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With the UFC holding the rights to over 85 percent of top 125 fighters in the world, training partners would eventually be faced with stepping into the cage with each other. Just about everyone in the fight world has an opinion on the teammates versus teammate story.

Rashad Evans agreed to do it against newly crowned UFC light heavyweight champ Jon Jones. That Evans-Jones matchup irks Strikeforce 205-pounder Muhammed "King Mo" Lawal. Lawal is buddies with Evans and feels like the longer tenured member of Greg Jackson’s team was boxed into a corner. The problem started with Jones stepping in front of Evans to take the UFC 128 title fight against Mauricio Rua and then softening his stance on not fighting Evans.

""I think it broadsided (Evans), because they both made an agreement (not to fight) and all of a sudden someone reneges," Lawal told Five Knuckles. "I would never fight Daniel (Cormier) definitely, and he would never fight me. Then all of a sudden if he went behind my back and said, ‘I’ll fight Mo on TV’ … that’s a ho move and a ho move deserves an ass whipping."

Lawal, like many other fighters, adheres to the philosophy that training partners should never fight.

"I know none of my training partners that are my brothers would ever pull a ho move like that. If I say I ain’t going to fight my brother, I ain’t going to fight my brother," said Lawal.

MMA isn’t that important to his wallet, so he’d find another option if forced to fight a teammate.

"I got brothers who I train with (and) I won’t fight my training brothers," Lawal said. "They can fire me and I will go to the WWE, I don’t care. Rashad is a brother to me, why fight him if there are other options?"

There’s no such brotherhood with King Mo and Quinton Jackson. Lawal would love to fight Jackson and thinks he could handle him easily.

Tip via Cage Potato

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When we first looked at Hitpost back in January, it was still just a concept ? people taking pictures of sporting events and talking about them as they watch them on TV. Shortly thereafter, the iPhone and Android apps hit and it was off to the races. Today it’s time for the 2.0 launch which brings a couple new big features: tweets and news. The “meat and potatoes” as Hitpost founder Aaron Krane puts it. When you load up Hitpost 2.0, you’ll now see scores, news, and athlete tweets to go along with the main event: photos. The UI of the app has also been completely reworked. Notably, there is now a “My Teams” view to get an overview of all the aforementioned information about the teams you follow. And full Facebook sharing integration has been added.

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