It’s been the better part of a week now, and still none of this is sitting right.
The UFC announced last week UFC 208 would feature a women’s featherweight title fight, a concession to the excellence on display when Cris Cyborg, the greatest female combatant to ever throw hands, hits the cage at her natural weight of 145-pounds.
She can’t make 135-pounds, and she screeches in agony and skirts death to make 140-pounds for special attraction bouts. She’s under UFC contract and has actually proven to be a draw for them after a couple of bouts in 2016.
So the UFC is giving creating her weight class and a title to go along with it.
And she’s not included in the fight.
Holly Holm, 0-2 since her stunning defeat of Ronda Rousey last year and having never fought at featherweight, will meet Germaine de Randamie, who hasn’t fought in the class in nearly five years.
It’s the type of decision the UFC makes from time to time, slapping an unforeseen or outright undeserving contender into a title fight simply because there isn’t anyone else available or they’ve talked the most trash—and that often equals dollars.
But this decision? This is ridiculous to the point that it may actually buoy a couple of different conspiracy theories.
The most obvious is that the UFC simply doesn’t like Cris Cyborg.
No amount of cash she’s producing for them or fan support she’s garnering is going to undermine that idea. Dana White has long been hostile and aggressive towards her, continually casting her down and mocking her while also enabling Rousey to do the same at every turn. Propping up UFC 208 with random featherweights participating in a division created on an apparent whim is the exact type of slap in the face to Cyborg that’s in line with that history.
Even White’s logic—that Cyborg would be ready in March, the promotion needed her in February and you don’t get to choose when you play in “the pros”—is faulty enough to warrant conspiratorial consideration. After all, the UFC very much needed their golden goose Rousey for both UFC 200 and 205 when they were booking those events, and she very much chose when she would play.
Others have chosen their timelines as well. Max Holloway is doing it as we speak, and Conor McGregor is too, and you could create a list longer than Mike Beltran’s moustache of fighters who have called the date of their next fight for the promotion. The whole thing reeks of the arrogance and ignorance that White has directed towards Cyborg in his representation of the UFC since their earliest engagements.
But let’s say you don’t like that conspiracy. Let’s say you think Cyborg should show up for work as soon as the phone rings. Well there’s an even bigger conspiracy out there that you’ll probably be into instead.
Rousey returns in a little over a week to challenge for the bantamweight title, and based on the promo material, it’s pretty clear how the UFC wants that to turn out. It’s probably hard to blame them for that though, as “bombastic, headline-grabbing movie star” makes for a more saleable champion than “polite Brazilian lady who smiles a lot”.
Still, the long-term path the promotion may be fleshing out over these two events is hard to ignore.
Say Rousey wins at 207 and Holm wins at 208. The promotion instantly has a chance to book Rousey vs. Holm II in a clash of champions, giving Rousey a chance at redemption while also allowing her to become the second person to ever hold titles in two weight classes simultaneously—something McGregor did in November, and something the promotion seems keen to gloss over given how he’s been pushing for a bigger financial cut and how quickly they stripped him of one of this belts afterwards.
Say Rousey wins at 207 and Holm doesn’t. De Randamie can defend against Cyborg and if she loses the promotion gets Cyborg vs. Rousey, which has been in development for years and would be the biggest women’s fight in history. While they’re waiting for de Randamie and Cyborg to flesh itself out, Rousey can defend the 135-pound strap or take a warmup fight at featherweight (where she competed for the first year of her career) to set up a bigger summer blow-off.
And if Rousey loses at 207, or doesn’t want to move up? Well then, the UFC can still give Cyborg a featherweight title shot, which she likely makes good on, and they still have a ready-made dominant champion they can sell to the masses.
By creating a belt out of the blue, the avenues to make a fortune with a few lucky breaks become both clear and relatively plentiful.
There was a time when a tree with so many conspiratorial branches would be out of place in discussing the UFC. While it’s naive to think the promotion has historically not had best laid plans and rough maps of the months ahead, under the Fertitta regime, those wishes seemed less transparent than they are now.
However with new ownership standing on a foundation of shaky financing, such conspiracies deserve more attention than ever before. They want their money and they want it now, and if that means gambling by creating meritless titles and hoping they pay off in the form of big money fights down the line, then that appears to be the game to be played.
That’s how we got to this point and, even if it seems more suited to discussion from beneath a tinfoil hat, it’s hard to ignore the dots available to be connected in this particular instance.
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