The UFC won’t be going to Cowboys Stadium in 2015.
UFC president Dana White told UFC.com on Monday that UFC 194 on Dec. 5 will not be at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas. Instead, it’ll be at the UFC’s usual home of MGM Grand in Las Vegas.
The statement came in reference to comments made by Tito Ortiz on Friday night to Inside MMA. Ortiz said the UFC offered Cris Cyborg the fight with Ronda Rousey at AT&T Stadium in December. White said that is categorically untrue.
“To show you that Tito Ortiz has no idea what he’s talking about, we’re not even doing the fight in Dallas, Texas,” White said. “The fight is going to be in Las Vegas at the MGM. Just to show you that Tito is absolutely talking out of his ass.”
It’s unclear if Rousey will be fighting on that card. Her likely next opponent is Miesha Tate for a third time.
White admitted that the UFC did indeed reach out to Cyborg following Rousey’s 34-second knockout of Bethe Correia at UFC 190 on Aug. 1. White said he asked matchmaker Sean Shelby to call Cyborg to see about her status moving down to 135 pounds. White said the inquiry was about the weight and not to offer a fight with Rousey.
“The deal we have with her is that she’ll make the weight and fight at 135,” White said. “We said to her: ‘What’s going on? Are we going to do this?’
“She was never offered a fight with Ronda anywhere. She has to make the weight, and then fight, and then we know she can do it and we do the fight with Ronda.”
Cyborg is currently the Invicta FC featherweight champion, but her contract is with UFC parent company Zuffa. If she can make 135 pounds, the UFC has said all along that it would put her into a fight with Rousey, the UFC women’s bantamweight champion. But neither Rousey nor the UFC is interested in a catchweight or fight at 145, because of Cyborg’s past history with performance-enhancing drugs.
George Lockhart, Cyborg’s nutritionist, told Ariel Helwani on Monday’s The MMA Hour that Cyborg could “absolutely” make the weight and, he believes, in a healthy way.
White said he has expected to hear from Cyborg directly about this manner, but has not.
“I thought it was weird that she wasn’t screaming for this fight – that she wasn’t trying to make the weight and trying to make this fight happen,” White said.
Any UFC event at AT&T Stadium, which has a capacity of 80,000 for football, would likely feature both Conor McGregor and Rousey.