UFC light heavyweight champion Jon Jones won’t be fighting close to home after all.
Jones and Glover Teixeira were initially set to square off in Newark, NJ at the UFC’s Super Bowl weekend event, UFC 169. However, according to UFC President Dana White, that announcement was apparently premature.
“Jones-Teixeira is not happening on Super Bowl (weekend),” White said on Monday. “Our people f–ked up and put that out when they shouldn’t have put that out, because that was never, ever even a done deal. Our P.R. team jumped the gun on that one.”
White refused to go into specifics, only stating that injuries weren’t at the root of the problem, and simply explaining that “the timing didn’t work out.”
“It’s not that [Jones] did or didn’t want it. It didn’t matter one way or the other with him. It was just something that didn’t work out,” White said.
“It was something that we talked about. I honestly, still to this day, right now, I don’t know how it got released. I don’t know if Joe Silva was sending an email around and somebody took it for, ‘that fight was happening,’ or whatever happened.”
According to White, a new date has yet to be finalized, though UFC officials are targeting Jones vs. Teixeira for sometime in March 2014.
A replacement main event for UFC 169 is also undecided at this point in time.