The UFC’s landscape is changing. With the promotion’s $4 billion sale to WME-IMG and Zuffa’s exit from the landscape of MMA, the new owners will soon be looking for a new TV deal and, more important, new stars to market on pay-per-view.
The strawweight division should be at the heart of this ongoing transformation.
While the UFC has only featured 115-pounders since December 2014, when Carla Esparza and Rose Namajunas met to contest the inaugural championship, the division has already shown its depth, the quality of action it consistently provides and its potential for producing charismatic new stars.
Joanna Jedrzejczyk has the makings of a dominant champion atop the division. She brutalized Esparza to win the title in March 2015, and since then has put a vicious beating on Jessica Penne, taken a wide decision from Valerie Letourneau and won an increasingly one-sided decision from nemesis Claudia Gadelha.
Jedrzejczyk‘s skills are a perfect match for a young division in need of someone to carry the flag for her fellow strawweights. She’s one of the cleanest and most technically sound strikers in the sport, regardless of gender—a protege of the legendary Dutch kickboxer Ernesto Hoost. She overwhelms her opponents with a rapid-fire stream of smooth and aesthetically pleasing combinations. And she only gets better as the fight goes on.
What could be better for a division trying to find its legs than a champion who puts on entertaining and skillful fights?
The Polish fighter’s personality is just as compelling as her skills in the cage. She has a remarkable swagger that plays out in her fights, but it also translates to real charisma on the microphone and in interviews.
Jedrzejczyk is just one fighter, but her erstwhile opponent and consensus number two in the division, Gadelha, is hardly a wallflower herself. The two fighters’ back-and-forth exchanges during their time coaching The Ultimate Fighter is the stuff real rivalries, and therefore long-term fan interest, is made of. (Warning: NSFW language)
The strawweight division’s talent goes deeper than its accomplished top two, though.
The aforementioned Namajunas faces Poland’s Karolina Kowalkiewicz in the co-main event of Saturday’s UFC 201 card in a barnburner of a fight that will likely determine the next challenger to Jedrzejczyk‘s throne.
The former title challenger was a raw and unprepared 22-year-old when she fought Esparza for the vacant belt back in 2014. In the year and a half since then, Namajunas has evolved into a much more controlled version of herself.
Her electric talent is still obvious, but a tempered and modulated aggression now characterizes her work in the cage. Jabs and straight rights have replaced spinning kicks and flying armbars, and she’s a better fighter for it.
Namajunas isn’t alone: Youthful talent packs the top 15 of the strawweight division. The champion herself is only 28, Gadelha is 27, Namajunas turned 24 in June and even seasoned veteran Carla Esparza is only 28. Recent addition Jessica Andrade is 24, Tecia Torres is 26 and Paige VanZant is already a veteran of Dancing with the Stars and a headlining bout at just 22.
Only four fighters in the UFC’s top 15—former title challengers Penne and Letourneau, Juliana Lima and the well-traveled Jessica Aguilar—are over the age of 30, and of them only Letourneau is ranked in the top 10. Kowalkiewicz, Michelle Waterson and Randa Markos have reached that mark as well, but all three are still in the best years of their careers.
In fact, there isn’t a single fighter ranked in the top 15, with the possible exception of Penne, who’s even at the point in her career where we might expect to see a decline. The elite is packed with young and improving fighters who haven’t even hit their prime years yet.
No other division in MMA is so packed with rising talent.
And that’s just the top 15. The UFC currently has 34 strawweights under contract, per Bloody Elbow’s comprehensive list, which is more than both the flyweight and women’s bantamweight divisions. Moreover, the promotion has yet to scrape the bottom of the talent barrel.
The recently completed season of The Ultimate Fighter added world-class freestyle wrestler Tatiana Suarez to the division, with potentially more fighters to follow. There are talented strawweights hanging around a plethora of regional promotions from Europe to Brazil. Asia ONE Championship’s 20-year-old atomweight champion Angela Lee will eventually grow into the 115-pound division.
Despite losing 11 fighters who left to form the bedrock of the UFC’s strawweight division in 2014, Invicta FC has rebuilt the 115-pounders into a deep and compelling weight class once again. It has 20 fighters under contract, including champion Angela Hill. Hill, a great personality in addition to her obvious talent, was just a bit too raw for UFC-level competition coming off TUF 20. But she has blossomed since arriving in Invicta.
Former champion Livia Renata Souza is a 25-year-old talent who dropped her belt to Hill in May, but she’s far from a finished product, while 21-year-old Japanese import Mizuki Inoue has yet to reach her full potential. Invicta recently signed top muay thai and kickboxing competitor Tiffany Van Soest to fight at 115 pounds as well, per Marc Raimondi of MMAFighting.com, adding yet another serious talent to its repertoire.
Alexa Grasso, who headlines July 29’s Invicta 18 card, could surpass them all. The 22-year-old native of Guadalajara, Mexico, returns from a 17-month layoff against Jodie Esquibel. But before Grasso missed time, she was a rising star who drew praise from UFC president Dana White himself.
If she beats Esquibel, all of that will come rushing back. With the UFC continuing to expand into Mexico, Grasso has a chance at real stardom.
The UFC’s strawweight division is in great shape with a roster of rising young fighters who have yet to reach their peaks. Moreover, there’s enough talent outside the organization to sustain it as a marquee weight class in Invicta as well. In that sense, it’s the women’s equivalent of lightweight or welterweight in men’s MMA.
The contrast with the wild and woolly women’s bantamweight division couldn’t be stronger. Ronda Rousey ran roughshod over the division for two years, but since her loss to Holly Holm last November, the true thinness of the 135-pound division has become crystal clear.
Rousey lost to Holm, and then Holm lost to Miesha Tate, who has lost to Rousey twice. Tate lost to Amanda Nunes, who barely scraped by Valentina Shevchenko. Shevchenko beat Holm convincingly and cemented herself as a rising talent in the division, but that loss to Nunes was only four months ago.
What in the world is the UFC supposed to do here?
Rousey, Tate and Holm are the draws, but Nunes and Shevchenko seem to have established themselves as the best fighters, at least for the moment. More worrisome is the fact that the only real up-and-coming prospect in the division is Julianna Pena, who hasn’t exactly looked like a destroyer of worlds since winning The Ultimate Fighter 18.
Even if Rousey returns, the strawweight division is the better long-term bet. By any measure, there’s more talent, and that talent is younger and more promising. The 28 women’s bantamweights on the UFC roster are barely enough to sustain a functioning division, and there are few reinforcements on the horizon in Invicta or elsewhere.
Look to strawweight. Jedrzejczyk and her compatriots are the future of women’s MMA in the UFC.
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