Ben Askren on his first UFC opponent: ‘It’s probably Robbie Lawler’

Freshly signed welterweight power wrestler Ben Askren made an appearance Saturday night at UFC 230, and he brought all that wild attitude he’s been using to blow up Twitter since word first began to circulate that he was finally arriving in the promotion. During a backstage interview with Megan Olivi, he shared his thoughts on who he thought he’d end up facing first, and if I’m Robbie Lawler, I’m hoping he’s wrong.

”If I was the boss, I’d go Georges [St-Pierre], Khabib [Nurmagomedov], then we’ll see from there, right?” Askren said. “If Tyron wasn’t going to beat up Colby [Covington], then I’m taking him first.”

”So now we’ve got three guys off my board,” he continued, referencing a Twitter post with his ‘Death List 5’ of potential opponents. “So we talk about who’s really available at the welterweight division that’s highly ranked, we have three people: we have [Darren] Till, we have [Robbie] Lawler, and we have [Stephen] Thompson.”

”Till learned I was coming to the welterweight division, he starts eating and says ‘I’m moving to middleweight.’ He’s done, he’s done with welterweight. He heard I was coming and was like ‘Nah, I don’t want any of that.’ So we have two left. There’s only two people left. There’s Stephen Thompson and karate doesn’t work on me so he’s out. So who knows? It’s probably Robbie Lawler. But we’re not really sure, we’re down to two. Thompson or Lawler. We’ll find out.”

Lawler certainly ticks the boxes as a high ranked welterweight that isn’t currently booked. He’s spent all of 2018 thus far on the sidelines recovering from an ACL tear suffered in his loss to Rafael dos Anjos back in December of 2017. But is the UFC interested in putting one of their crowd pleasing brawlers in the cage against a human blanket like Askren?

Dana White said he’d put Ben in the cage against a top five opponent, and with #3 dos Anjos facing #6 Kamaru Usman, it does seem like things boil down to Thompson or Lawler. Style-wise, that’s bad news for either guy … not like it’s much better for many of the other fighters at 170.