Jake and Logan Paul will never compete for UFC because promotion president Dana White doesn’t want to be arrested on murder charges. So the closest the YouTube brothers will ever get to a UFC fight is their eventual bum-rush inside a Las Vegas nightclub.
Let’s face it, finding White in “Sin City” is not a difficult task.
But just because Team Paul is not welcome in UFC doesn’t mean either brother has to abandon his aspirations of becoming a successful cage fighter. In fact, Bellator MMA president Scott Coker is ready to put pen to paper just as soon as they’re available.
And there will be no shortage of opponents.
“I always said, ‘Look, these guys are real athletes, and they’re young, they work hard, they’re grinding it out,” Coker told MMA Junkie. “They’re putting in the work. You can’t take that away from them, and they’re getting better and better and better. What you saw with Woodley, that’s a lot of hard work to get to that point. I’ve never seen Woodley get knocked out like that, right? And so, is it just boxing? Yes. So, I always said, ‘Look, man, don’t underestimate these guys,’ and this was like a year-and-a-half ago.”
Of the two, the 24 year-old Jake is the more accomplished fighter, racking up a 5-0 record with four brutal knockouts, including last month’s destruction of former UFC champion Tyron Woodley. As for Logan, 26, he’s just 0-1 and got boxed up by Floyd Mayweather during their exhibition bout last June.
Jake, a D-1 wrestler out of Ohio, is expected to train at the AKA gym in San Jose.
“If you want to come into MMA, we would gladly do it,” Coker continued. “Think about this: [Jake’s] not saying, ‘I’m going to go train here. I’m going to go train there.’ He’s going to come to one of the best gyms in the planet, where Khabib is, where Daniel Cormier is still training, where Cain Velasquez is teaching there now, and he’s going to go into an environment that he is going to flourish, and he has a wrestling background already. He has great striking, obviously. You’ve seen it, and so this guy is just going to get better and better and better. The days of him fighting basketball players or whatever, those days are over.”
And new?