After taking out Megan Anderson at UFC Rochester, Spencer finds herself at the front of the line to fight Cyborg.
Canadian featherweight fighter Felicia Spencer made her UFC debut on Saturday night at UFC Rochester, taking out highly touted Megan Anderson on the main card with relative ease. Anderson simply didn’t have the grappling chops to hang with Spencer, who took Anderson’s back early and sunk a rear naked choke in just 3:24 into the first round (watch the finish here).
With that win, Spencer moves to the front of a pretty sparse pack at 145 pounds. For the longest time, women’s featherweight was the Cris Cyborg division. Now even that anchor is gone after bantamweight champ Amanda Nunes moved up in weight and took the belt of her. Nunes is now back at 135 pounds, where she’ll defend that belt against Holly Holm at UFC 239 in July.
That leaves Spencer and Cyborg free, and without much else going on in the division there’s already been talk of the two fighting. TSN’s Aaron Bronsteter asked Felicia if she’d be willing to take on Cris and she sounded down.
”It would be an honor,” Spencer replied. “Absolutely.”
It didn’t take long for Cyborg to get wind of that response, and she just sounded excited at the prospect of getting back in the cage against anybody, really.
July 27th Edmonton Canada. ?? I have had one @ufc fight in 15 months. Challenge accepted. #CyborgNation https://t.co/tkioMul271
— BEKENI Batwa video in bio (@criscyborg) May 19, 2019
”July 27th Edmonton Canada,” Cyborg wrote on Twitter with a heart emoji. “I have had one UFC fight in 15 months. Challenge accepted.”
Now before you book your plane tickets to UFC 240 in Edmonton, keep in mind Cyborg loves to try and book her own fights, picking an event and hammering away at the UFC to set it up. That rarely pans out for whatever reason, and in this case we can understand why the UFC may not want to feed the 1-0 UFC (7-0 MMA) Canadian to Cyborg at this point in Spencer’s career.
But Cyborg does deserve to stay active while waiting for the inevitable rematch with Nunes later in 2019, and who else is there? Until the UFC puts some serious effort into building up the women’s heavyweight division, the ladder from joining the women’s 145 pound division to fighting Cris Cyborg is going to be a short one. The rare times it exists at all.