Since capturing the women’s bantamweight championship from Ronda Rousey at UFC 193, much of the discussion about Holly Holm has focused on how much she now has to lose.
Conventional wisdom dictated that Holm should wait for Rousey to lick her wounds and return before taking another bout. A rematch with Rousey—most likely at the enormous UFC 200 event scheduled for July—would be so lucrative that Holm wouldn’t want to risk losing it by accepting a different fight in the interim.
Her bosses appeared to agree.
“If we didn‘t make the [Holm vs. Rousey] rematch, [we] should probably lose our promoters’ license,” UFC President Dana White said on ESPN’s Mike and Mike in early December (via MMAFighting.com’s Hunter A. Homistek). “That fight’s going to happen. I don’t know when, but that’s the fight that will happen.”
Credit Holm, then, for sticking to her guns. The new 135-pound champion said all along she didn’t want to sit on the sideline waiting for Rousey, and now she won’t. We learned this week Holm will instead take on former Strikeforce champion and longtime Rousey nemesis Miesha Tate at UFC 197 on March 5, according to an initial report by Bleacher Report’s Jeremy Botter.
Their matchup will be the co-main event of the Las Vegas-based card, along with Conor McGregor’s bid to move up to lightweight and take the 155-pound crown from Rafael dos Anjos.
So, all in all, not a bad landing spot.
UFC 197 was originally scheduled for HSBC Arena in Rio de Janeiro, with a rematch between Brazilian stars Anderson Silva and Vitor Belfort rumored as the main event, according to the Jornal O Globo‘s Lauro Jardim (via Bloody Elbow’s Nick Baldwin). But then Silva unexpectedly got booked to fight Michael Bisping at UFC Fight Night 83 and spilled the beans during a recent conference call that UFC 197 in Rio had been canceled.
We didn’t know if the event had any future at all until Botter broke the news of Holm’s and McGregor’s returns last week. In one fell swoop and on very short notice, the promotion turned a struggling, possibly doomed pay-per-view into an out-and-out blockbuster.
And maybe—just maybe—all the chaos surrounding UFC 197 worked in favor of Holm and McGregor, too. Perhaps the company’s desperate need to book promotable fights on a more or less emergency basis left UFC brass with no choice but to give them both exactly what they wanted.
And you know what? It seems like it’s going to work out just fine.
Now that we all sit back and squint at this thing a little bit, maybe it’s not quite as big a risk for Holm as we first thought.
For starters, some of us have come around to the new champ’s way of thinking. Maybe fighting Tate actually makes more sense than sitting around waiting for Rousey to decide when and where (let alone if) she ever wants to come back.
At 34 years old, Holm entered the MMA ranks fairly late in her athletic career. She’d already had an entire career as a professional boxer before ever donning four-ounce gloves. She’s not exactly dealing with an unlimited window of opportunity here, and that was sort of her point all along.
“The only thing about July is that it’s eight months away from my last fight,” Holm told MMA Junkie’s Steven Morrocco in December. “That’s the biggest thing. I don’t like to wait that long. … A fight in between now and then, I feel like, yes, let’s stay active. In boxing, I did 10 years straight of having four fights a year, and so to wait eight months, it’s out of my norm.”
The prevailing logic said a potential bout with Rousey at UFC 200 would be worth so much money—to Holm, to Rousey and to the UFC itself—that it didn’t make sense for Holm to jeopardize it with any other booking. With the top of the revamped UFC 197 card now looking the way it does, that’s not entirely true anymore, either.
Teaming up with McGregor is as close to a guaranteed financial windfall as there is in this sport right now. His battle with dos Anjos is going to be huge in its own right. Having Holm on the card as well makes UFC 197 a bona fide mega-event. It’s not going to be as big as UFC 200, but it stands to be among the organization’s top-selling PPVs of the year.
If Holm can catch a piece of that, then it will be worth her while.
Also, this fight with Tate? Early indications from oddsmakers are that Holm is probably going to win it.
She opened as more than a 3-1 favorite, according to Odds Shark. While Tate has the tools to be a handful for anyone in the division, if the version of Holm who dropped Rousey in November also shows up to this fight, it’s a good bet the belt is staying right where it is.
Lastly, let’s discuss Holm’s doomsday scenario, which—now that we really think about it—doesn’t seem all that bad after all.
Let’s pretend she loses her shiny new women’s bantamweight title to Tate at UFC 197.
Cue dramatic music.
What happens then?
Our previous way of thinking led us to believe this would be a disaster, but maybe that’s not the case in practice. Losing to Tate wouldn’t be as good as beating her, but it might not be the end of the world.
There is plenty of evidence—in the form of two previous fights—to suggest that Tate most likely turns around and loses the title right back to a returning Rousey. If that happens, what opponent immediately makes the most sense for Rousey as she begins her second reign atop the division?
Why, Holly Holm, of course.
In any world where both Holm and Rousey go on being active fighters in the same organization at the same weight, they’re going to fight again. Nothing Tate can do to Holm on March 5 likely changes that.
In fact, once you consider the entire equation here—Holm, McGregor, Tate, the odds and inevitability of a Rousey rematch no matter what happens—it starts to feel like we have focused too much on what Holm has to lose and not nearly enough on what she has to gain.
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