The Michael Bisping era in the UFC middleweight division hasn’t exactly been a model of consistency.
By the time Yoel Romero and Robert Whittaker fight for an interim championship at UFC 213 Saturday in Las Vegas, it will have been nine months since the 185-pound title saw the light of day. Even longer since anybody who might rightly be considered a top middleweight contender got a sniff at the gold.
To find the last time a 185-pound title fight featured arguably the Octagon’s top two middleweights, you have to go all the way back to October 2015, when Luke Rockhold beat Chris Weidman at UFC 162.
Six months later at UFC 199, Rockhold‘s reign ended with a shocking first-round KO by Bisping.
That win not only made Bisping one of the most unlikely titlists in UFC history, it also created that rarest of situations in the Octagon: One where the champion isn’t necessarily regarded as the best fighter in his own weight class.
With any semblance of 185-pound order smashed, Bisping set about marking his own course. He ignored a gaggle of contenders clamoring for his gold in favor of picking and choosing his own matchups. He rematched the legendary Dan Henderson at UFC 204 and then began chasing an on-again, off-again booking against returning former welterweight titlist Georges St-Pierre.
In the process, normal business at middleweight has essentially ground to a halt.
Honestly? It hasn’t been all bad. If nothing else, it has been interesting.
It was initially considered a feelgood story that Bisping became champion. After a career spent as an important and influential draw for the UFC, it was like watching a well-liked coworker rip the wrapping paper off the gold Rolex at his retirement party.
It’s been nice to see “The Count” get a little time to bask in the limelight before calling it a career. On the other hand, his reign has ushered in a noticeable competitive drought in what should be one of the UFC’s most competitive and interesting weight classes.
To make matters worse, after negotiations for the St-Pierre fight bogged down, Bisping revealed he’s still recovering from knee surgery and may not fight again until the end of the year.
The whole situation has caused no small amount of unrest among fans, as well as the 185-pound rank and file. In May, Rockhold essentially advised his fellow middleweights to go on strike until matchmakers could install a workable plan for the weight class.
This week, the former champion made an even more dire pronouncement.
“The division is f–ked,” Rockhold told MMA Fighting’s Ariel Helwani. “No interesting fights.”
With all due respect to Rockhold, however, it’s possible Romero vs. Whittaker has the potential to un—uhh—screw the 185-pound division in one fell swoop.
For starters, this bout finally gives two elite fighters a crack at winning a version of the title. Even with the interim tag looming, that’s a very good thing.
Second, it’ll be our best chance in a long time to anoint someone the consensus No. 1 middleweight on the planet.
An originally crowded herd of contenders that included Weidman, Rockhold, Romero, Gegard Mousasi and Jacare Souza has thinned a little bit at the moment. That leaves the door open for the winner of this fight to seize the throne atop the world rankings.
Third—and perhaps best of all—this fight shapes up as a scintillating matchup of styles between two of the division’s most compelling figures.
The 26-year-old Whittaker is as aggressive inside the cage as he is affable outside it. Currently riding an impressive seven-fight win streak, he made his bones as a legitimate title threat with a second-round TKO over perennial contender Souza three months ago.
But if Whittaker is a relative newcomer to the championship picture, it doesn’t make him any less dangerous. His five stoppages in nine UFC wins attest to that.
“I’m going to control this fight,” Whittaker said this week, via MMA Junkie’s Fernanda Prates and Ken Hathaway. “I think it’s going to be a smart fight … [but] I just see me putting too much hurt on him.”
Meanwhile, Romero has already been waiting for this opportunity for a long time.
The 40-year-old former Olympic wrestler has been ticketed as a potential title contender from nearly the moment he arrived in the UFC in 2013. With his outstanding amateur credentials and comic book physique, he certainly looks the part of a fearsome MMA destroyer.
After jetting to an 8-0 record in the Octagon, Romero has made good on that obvious potential. After looking a bit green during early UFC appearances, his most recent bouts have shown what the finished product might look like for him—and results have been scary good.
After edging Souza via split decision at UFC 194, he authored a 2016 knockout-of-the-year candidate with a flying knee on Weidman at UFC 205. By stacking those wins back-to-back, it’s hard to make a case anyone deserves a shot at the title more than Romero.
But that doesn’t mean he’s overlooking the up-and-coming Whittaker, either.
“All opponents are dangerous,” Romero said this week, via MMA Junkie’s Mike Bohn and Hathaway. “He’s a young fighter, he’s hungry. These things always make your opponent dangerous.”
There has been some controversy to Romero’s UFC run, however. In between the Souza and Weidman wins, he was suspended six months for a positive drug test later determined to be the result of a contaminated dietary supplement. Though Romero’s claim that he’d done nothing wrong appeared to hold up, some people weren’t going to let him off the hook so easily.
One of those people is Bisping, obviously. The current champ has mocked Romero as a steroid user and waffled on whether he would deign to give the consensus No. 1 contender a title shot.
This week, however, the champion sent the clearest signal he may be open to fighting the Whittaker-Romero winner—even if his intent was merely to put more pressure on GSP.
“Georges, you’ve got until Saturday,” Bisping told Ariel Helwani on The MMA Hour (via Fansided’s Mike Heck). “Because on Saturday, I’m going to be on the FS1 post fight show and one of those two, tune in, Whittaker or Romero will be joining me at the desk, so you know that will have fireworks. If I can’t say I’m fighting GSP by then, then I have to say that I’m fighting Whittaker or Romero.”
UFC President Dana White also told MMAJunkie in an exclusive interview that Bisping‘s next fight will be against the winner of Romero-Whittaker, making it feel as though we’re tantalizingly close to getting the middleweight division back on track.
The first step toward that goal happens this weekend, when either Romero or Whittaker will leave T-Mobile Arena with a UFC belt around his waist.
The guy who holds that interim title may well hold the key to getting the weight class moving again.
With all due respect to the standing champion, they’ll also be regarded as the best 185-pounder in the world until Bisping gets his chance to prove that ranking wrong.
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