Frankie Edgar has been trying to hustle himself a fight for a while now.
But Chad Mendes? Not sure anybody totally saw that one coming.
Sure, the UFC’s announcement on Tuesday that Edgar and Mendes will headline The Ultimate Fighter Season 22 finale on December 11 makes sense on a lot of levels.
Taking place just a day before Conor McGregor and Jose Aldo are scheduled to finally settle their featherweight title feud at UFC 194, this fight could act as a cable TV main event, a title eliminator and a backup plan all in one.
It’s just that we initially thought Edgar and Mendes might be headed in different directions.
Edgar enters this booking flying high on a four-fight winning streak. He might rightfully already have No. 1 contender status wrapped up if either he or the UFC had the patience to let him cool his heels for the Aldo-McGregor winner.
If Edgar was going to fight again at all this year, it seemed likely the UFC would hand him a tuneup opponent such as Jeremy Stephens or an up-and-coming contender such as Max Holloway.
Both those guys had called him out recently, and Edgar made it clear he was ready to entertain either:
Mendes, meanwhile, is just 1-2 since the end of 2013. He has lost to Aldo twice already, most recently at UFC 179 in October 2014. The last time we saw him, he put up a spirited but futile effort as a short-notice replacement against McGregor at UFC 189.
On the heels of that relative adversity, it felt natural to put Mendes into rebuilding mode. The most likely option appeared to be facing off with another top contender coming off a loss: Cub Swanson, the recently defeated Charles Oliveira or maybe Dennis Bermudez.
Instead, he and Edgar will both be playing a much higher-risk, higher-reward game.
Make no mistake, these are the two biggest stars at 145 pounds not named Aldo or McGregor. Putting them together gives the UFC a perfect headliner for a TUF 22 finale where the season’s two coaches—McGregor and Urijah Faber—won’t fight. This is the sort of matchup we’re lucky to get for free and one likely to solicit zero complaints from fans.
The winner—especially if the winner is Edgar—becomes the obvious next pick as No. 1 contender.
The loser—especially if the loser in Mendes—takes the sort of step back that will require some time to return from.
In that way, this is a piece of throwback-style matchmaking from the world’s biggest MMA promoter. For many of its formative years, the UFC prided itself on having the best constantly fight the best, without thought for nurturing personalities or protecting stars.
Anymore, that has changed ever slightly. To see an example, one must look no further than McGregor, a fiery and charismatic young star who seemed to face a carefully selected string of opponents during his march to the interim championship.
Mendes and Edgar will apparently receive no such consideration. Perhaps they don’t want it.
In recent months, Edgar had adopted a more shoot-from-the-hip style of career management than we were used to seeing from him. His two years as lightweight champion cast him as a gritty, unassuming competitor—the kind of plucky little guy who preferred to do most of his talking in the ring.
Lately, he’s been a lot more outspoken. He vocally volunteered himself to step in for Aldo after the champ dropped out of UFC 189. When the spot went to Mendes instead, Edgar took to social media to accuse the UFC of protecting the Irishman:
After McGregor knocked Mendes out in the second round, Edgar could be seen jumping on the lip of the cage to exchange words with McGregor. As noted, he appeared ready this week to fight either Holloway or Stephens.
But Mendes? That’s a pretty tough draw.
The 30-year-old Californian clearly did the UFC a favor stepping in to face McGregor with just a couple of weeks’ training at UFC 189. Once there, he performed well enough under disadvantageous circumstances to stoke interest in an eventual rematch.
If both guys were afforded full training camps, there’s no telling what might happen. That makes a second meeting with McGregor a real possibility, even if they both lose these upcoming fights.
On the topic of short-notice replacements, it’s also pretty clear the UFC has other motives booking this exact fight at this exact time.
You could tell the fight company felt sideswiped when Aldo pulled out of UFC 189 with a broken rib last month. It had to scramble to get Mendes in and put an interim title on the line. The event still garnered 825,000 PPV buys, according to an estimate from MMAFighting.com’s Dave Meltzer, but that fell short of what the UFC might have expected if Aldo vs. McGregor had gone off as planned.
This time, perhaps bets are being even more securely hedged. It’s obviously no accident that Edgar and Mendes are booked to fight the night before UFC 194.
If Aldo is forced out again—or if McGregor is suddenly waylaid by injury—the fight company will already have two stellar options waiting in the wings, this time with the benefit of full training camps under their belts. Either Edgar or Mendes could easily step in, with minimal changes to their training or weight cut schedules.
That would leave Khabib Nurmagomedov’s recently announced comeback bout against Tony Ferguson as a potential main event for the TUF 22 finale.
Thinking of making either of those switches is certainly not ideal, but if indeed the dominoes start to fall, they’re nice fallback options to have.
All told, it may not be exactly what we expected, but Edgar vs. Mendes is a fight that works.
It’s also a fight that wears many hats.
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