Conventional wisdom says we’re supposed to feel bad for Jose Aldo and Frankie Edgar.
Neither guy got exactly what he wanted here.
The UFC’s biggest quarry slipped through their fingers last month when Conor McGregor’s rematch with Nate Diaz was confirmed as the likely main event for UFC 200. It was an assignment they both wanted badly, as their recent words in the press clearly underlined.
“If he’s got balls, he’ll pick me,” Edgar told ESPN.com’s Brett Okamoto while McGregor deliberated his next move. “If he wants to come back after that loss to Nate and prove the doubters wrong, silence these rumblings about his ground game? He’ll fight me.”
Meanwhile, Aldo took his threats—or were they pleas?—to social media:
Alas, all that bluster fell on deaf ears. McGregor, it seemed, was more interested in avenging his UFC 196 loss to Diaz than defending the featherweight title he unified in December 2015 with a 13-second knockout win over Aldo.
Not that we should be particularly surprised. Any thought the heartsick McGregor had of defending his title in the immediate aftermath of his first Octagon defeat turned out to be fleeting. Fast forward a month or so, and he’s full steam ahead toward tangling with Diaz a second time.
The last time he appeared to engage seriously with the idea of returning to 145 pounds was a few days before UFC 196. When asked about the possibility by Fox Sports’ Damon Martin, McGregor seemed unimpressed, like a rich man squinting at his tiny childhood home from a great distance and with no small amount of disdain.
“Who is there [to fight], though?” he said. “Let me see some of these damn [featherweight] bums gear up and fight and make some noise. … I’m sitting pretty over here. They need to make me stand up and say ‘OK, I’ll take him.’ That’s what I need to see.”
We thought his embarrassing loss to Diaz might change McGregor’s idea of who was sitting pretty, or perhaps alter his perspective on who was and wasn’t a “bum” ripe for the plucking. In a tweet last week marking the three-year anniversary of his entrance to the Octagon, however, he appeared as unrepentant as ever. He also reaffirmed his single greatest motivating factor: Money:
Now Edgar won’t get the chance to prove he’s the worst style matchup for McGregor in the entire 145-pound division. Now Aldo won’t get the opportunity to show that initial, embarrassing loss was just a fluke—and that when things go on longer than a few seconds he’s a bad matchup for McGregor, too.
Instead, the two men content to carry the flag for the featherweight division will have to settle for each other. At least for now, they’ll also have to reconcile themselves with the idea of an interim title and a rematch of their own UFC 156 fight from February 2013.
But you know what? As consolation prizes go, this one isn’t half bad.
For starters, Edgar and Aldo both still get a spot on the UFC 200 main card—exactly where they were angling to land against McGregor in the first place. Also, if the Irishman can get back on track and resurrect his rise through the company’s heavier weight classes, it still seems unlikely he’ll return to featherweight in a timely fashion.
That means the sour-tasting interim title Aldo and Edgar are fighting for at UFC 200 could become the real, bona fide belt in a big hurry.
UFC President Dana White has already promised McGregor will face the winner of the Aldo-Edgar bout. Indeed, the whole idea of this interim title appears to be a ploy to keep Aldo and Edgar happy and give McGregor a guaranteed next step should he lose to Diaz a second time.
“Win, lose or draw against Nate Diaz,” White said on ESPN Radio (via Okamoto) last month, “he will go in and he will fight either Jose or Frankie.”
But we all know what promises are worth in the UFC, right? Ask anyone who has ever been assured they’ll be next in line for a title shot. Roughly half of them likely came away disappointed.
Smart money still says McGregor is only going back to 145 pounds if he absolutely has to do it, regardless of what White promised on an afternoon radio show. As far back as his victory over Aldo, McGregor’s head coach John Kavanagh said he didn’t want his fighter trying to make the difficult weight cut again.
To hear UFC bantamweight champion and burgeoning fight analyst Dominick Cruz tell it, McGregor’s decision to stay at welterweight may also be a calculated one. If we may read between the lines of what Cruz told the UK Daily Star’s Chisanga Malata recently, it also doesn’t sound like we should hold our breath waiting for McGregor to return to featherweight:
Conor’s going up to fight Diaz at 170 again, leaving the featherweight belt for Jose Aldo and Frankie Edgar to fight for. Okay, what if Conor McGregor goes back down and fights Frankie Edgar at 145lbs? Which is an extremely terrible style match-up and a hard fight and then he loses?
Now he’s lost all his push, whereas if he stays at 170, fights Diaz and he happens to lose again, he still has it because he’s like, ‘Well, but it was at 170.’ So there’s still excuses to make for it, to say why he’s the best. If he loses to Frankie Edgar at 145, you pretty much kill the excuses. It doesn’t necessarily take away legitimacy but it buys time.
So, perhaps Cruz’s opinion is that McGregor is avoiding more than just the weight cut?
Regardless of the actual reasoning—whether he’s “obsessed,” as White noted, or scared, as both Aldo and Edgar suggest, or just playing out the string, as Cruz said—we still have little reason to believe featherweight will be McGregor‘s long-term home.
That means neither Aldo or Edgar is going to get his wish, but they might get to fight for the soul of 145 pounds all the same.
The first time they met, Aldo took a competitive but clear-cut unanimous decision over the former lightweight champion. At the moment, however, the Brazilian may represent a more unknown commodity than Edgar.
Aldo is just 29 years old, but with a UFC career slowed by injuries and the recent knockout loss to McGregor, there is some concern over which version of him will show up to fight for the championship in July. Can he still be the dominant force that lorded over the division from 2009-14?
Meanwhile, the American is cruising on a five-fight win streak, but he is also now 34 years old. Perhaps one of the reasons both Edgar and Aldo pushed so hard for a McGregor fight was to secure one more big payday as they enter the twilight of their respective careers.
At this rate, they might never get the chance.
But if McGregor sticks to his plan to keep testing the waters at heavier weight classes, their runner-up finish could still turn out to be a sweet gig after all.
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