Nearly two years in, the UFC’s Cyborg experiment still hasn’t quite found its stride.
In some ways, Saturday’s UFC 222 main event pitting women’s featherweight champion Cris “Cyborg” Justino against newcomer Yana Kunitskaya represents an unprecedented high note in the relationship between the organization and MMA‘s greatest female fighter.
From another angle, it’s just business as usual: one more bout where the uber-talented Justino will spin her wheels against an unknown and overmatched opponent. As she approaches her 33rd birthday, it’s worth wondering if Cyborg is doomed to waste the best years of her career on these one-off squash matches.
To avoid that fate, something needs to change—and fast.
First, however, a bit more on the positive developments here:
UFC 222 gives Justino the rare chance to play hero, stepping in on short notice to save this weekend’s pay-per-view event after men’s 145-pound titlist Max Holloway dropped out with an injury in early February. Her makeshift bout against Kunitskaya may even fetch UFC 222 a decent buyrate—especially if Justino can replicate a semblance of the box-office success she had against Holly Holm at UFC 219 on Dec. 30.
On Tuesday Cyborg told MMAWeekly.com’s Damon Martin she hopes the move will usher in a new era of mutual respect and easier negotiations between herself and the fight company.
“There are not a lot of fighters who are willing to put their championship belt on the line with three weeks notice,” the native of Curitiba, Brazil said. “I am hoping that my actions will show the UFC that I am willing to do what is good for the company and that because of this we will see me get a little bit more of the marketing and exposure I have been campaigning for.”
If true, that would be a welcome departure.
Cyborg’s UFC career has been hamstrung by false starts, bad feelings and a lack of vision. Even before she arrived in the Octagon in 2016, she’d spent years feuding in the press with UFC President Dana White and former bantamweight champion Ronda Rousey. At times, White’s comments and Rousey‘s pot shots about Justino strayed over the line into bad taste.
In June 2017, White admitted to MMA Junkie’s John Morgan that the UFC had “made some mistakes” in its handling of Justino.
The Kunitskaya bout could signal a fresh start for all parties, which could only be a good thing.
On the other hand, to truly get Cyborg’s career out of the doldrums, the organization will have to demonstrate a cohesive plan for her moving forward. It has felt as though the world’s largest MMA promotion doesn’t really know what to do with the most dominant female fighter in the world.
After two fights at 140-pound catchweights during 2016, the UFC finally has Justino ensconced as its 145-pound champ. Unfortunately, it hasn’t yet built a legitimate featherweight division around her, so it’s left to scrounge up opponents from scratch each time matchmakers need to find her a fight.
Including Kunitskaya, three of Justino’s last four foes have been UFC debutants. That means she’s taking on opponents with little to no profile with UFC fans. Justino is carrying the entire promotional load into fights that offer her very little in return—besides a few easy paydays.
At least the risk has thus far also been minimal.
Justino, for example, is going off as a whopping -2000 favorite (bet $2,000 to win $100) over Kunitskaya among some oddsmakers, according to OddsShark. Also like many of Justino’s recent opponents, the 28-year-old Russian fighter is coming up from bantamweight, where she was most recently the Invicta FC champion.
That means nearly everyone expects Kunitskaya to be both outsized and outgunned in her short-notice bout against one of the sport’s most feared fighters. It could turn out to be a beatdown of historic proportions.
For Justino fans, perhaps part of the appeal is seeing her mow through a list of interchangeable nobodies, a la Mike Tyson in his prime. But from the standpoint of building an actual featherweight division or adding to her legacy as one of the Octagon’s all-time greats, it’s hard to see how any of these matchups help her.
The one exception in Justino’s recent past has been Holm. At least in that fight, Justino fought a woman of comparable size and star power. Cyborg won the fight via unanimous decision, while she and Holm reportedly scored some of the UFC’s best PPV numbers in 2017.
But Justino vs. Holm was also the highest-profile matchup the UFC could make at 145 pounds. Now that it’s over, the champion is once again at loose ends.
She accepted this quick turnaround against Kunitskaya because she’ll be paid handsomely for what she believes will be a light night’s work. Simultaneously she can make the case to the UFC that any hard feelings that used to exist between them are now gone.
But what will become of Cyborg after this fight? What’s next? How can the UFC chart a meaningful course forward for a fighter who is well on the way to being one of the company’s biggest draws?
The obvious answer is that the UFC should take an active interest in signing more featherweights and in cultivating legitimate challengers for Justino’s belt. The Holm fight proved people will tune in to watch Cyborg when she has an able B-side. Replicating the success of UFC 219 two or three times a year would be huge not only for Justino, but for the UFC’s own slumping ratings and PPV buys.
There has been some talk of a potential Justino superfight against current bantamweight champion Amanda Nunes. Provided Nunes emerges victorious from her own upcoming title defense against Raquel Pennington at UFC 224 in May, it’s obviously in everyone’s best interest to make that fight happen.
If not—and if the UFC is unable or unwilling to build a 145-pound class around Cyborg—we might end up looking back on her career wondering if her prime years went to waste on overmatched, last-minute opponents.
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