A little bit of chaos can be fun.
For eight months or so, it was pretty easy to make the case that the UFC women’s bantamweight division was benefiting from its recent bout of unpredictability.
Holly Holm’s upset knockout of Ronda Rousey at UFC 193, for example, may have been painful for the fight company’s bottom line, but it also established Holm as a star and set the stage for a big-money rematch.
Likewise, Holm’s subsequent title loss to Miesha Tate at UFC 196 did little more than give the organization a three-headed monster to plan the future around. Add the arrival of Cris “Cyborg” Justino to the mix and it seemed hot times were upon us at 135-pounds—give or take a few marks on the scale.
But then Tate lost the belt to Amanda Nunes at UFC 200. And last Saturday at UFC on Fox 20, Holm suffered her second straight defeat, this time at the hands of the relatively unknown and unheralded Valentina Shevchenko.
Suddenly the division’s volatility no longer feels like such a boon—unless the prospect of a Nunes-Shevchenko title bout gets you in a lather.
No, it appears there is a specific point of diminishing returns on disorder and disarray, and women’s bantamweight just blew past it last weekend. As we watched Shevchenko methodically pick Holm apart over the course of five rather painstaking rounds, the point was clear:
This isn’t fun anymore.
Late Saturday night, the Twitter account @MMA_GIFS_ summed up the feeling perfectly:
From a matchmaking perspective, it’s tough to say where exactly to go from here.
We’re all still waiting for Rousey to wrap up the months-long soul-searching mission she embarked on in the wake of her aura-shattering defeat by Holm. Conventional wisdom says when she does show her face again, the UFC will install her directly into a title fight.
If that’s the case, then rematches with either Holm or Tate are off the table for now. It’s possible that someone like Nunes or Shevchenko might unexpectedly end up winning the Rousey comeback fight sweepstakes by virtue of sheer proximity to the belt.
All of that remains guesswork, however. We still have no idea when or if Rousey will return. Aside from debuting a new Reebok ad during UFC on Fox 20, we haven’t seen much from her at all since she walked away from the sport last November. She’s still set to star in the remake of Roadhouse and has yet to make any return to the cage even close to official.
About the only thing we can say for sure at this point is that the women’s bantamweight division is in desperate need of a stabilizing force.
Could that new force be the same as the old force?
That all depends on Rousey, obviously, and what kind of schedule she envisions for herself if she ever does come back.
Independent of any intervention from her, however, the former champ’s prospects have actually improved in her absence. Seeing Holm fall in back-to-back fights makes the somewhat dire pronouncements made about Rousey’s MMA skillset in the wake of her UFC 193 loss now seem kind of silly.
Frankly, it’s not out of the question she might come back and whoop up on the entire division, just as she did during her initial reign as 135-pound champion from 2013-2015.
The question is, will she want to?
Rousey has never seemed like a UFC lifer. Her unique celebrity and innate charisma have always made her fighting career feel like a springboard to bigger things. If she can hack it in Hollywood—or anywhere else the job description doesn’t involve getting punched in the head every day—it would be hard to blame her for choosing a different path in life.
All things considered, it’s hard to believe she would ever return to the UFC on a fulltime basis. Even if she comes back to reclaim her title as recent interviews suggest she might or to avenge that loss to Holm, it feels like a long shot that Rousey will go back to being a dependable anchor of UFC content.
Her days of pulling full media tours and defending her title twice a year might already be over.
If that turns out to be the case, then it leaves the women’s bantamweight division—already experiencing the same uncertainty that plagued the light heavyweight class between the reigns of Chuck Liddell and Jon Jones—in an awkward situation.
Who will save the 135-pound division from completely cannibalizing itself?
At first glance, it doesn’t appear either Tate or Holm are all the way up to the challenge, and Justino may not be able to make the weight.
One problem with trying to figure out who else might ultimately become the savior of bantamweight is that we don’t know much about the cast of supporting characters there.
Witness the rises of Nunes and Shevchenko as reminders of how little we grasp about this class.
Not that you can really blame us.
For the entire first two years of the bantamweight division’s history in the UFC, the focus was entirely on Rousey. That single-minded promotional effort left nearly all the rest of the division in the dark. The other athletes there were established only as foils for the dominant champion, if anyone bothered to establish them at all.
So now that Rousey has been defeated and disappeared into the ether of her own fame—and now that the woman who beat her and the woman who beat her are both in rebuilding mode—nobody is sure where to turn.
Until Rousey comes back or someone else seizes control of the division, the only certainty will go on being uncertainty.
Read more MMA news on BleacherReport.com