After 14 months as champion, TJ Dillashaw conclusively proved his case as the best men’s bantamweight fighter in the world on Saturday at UFC on Fox 16.
His fourth-round TKO of former champ Renan Barao made his argument airtight, reaffirming the dominant performance he used to take the title last May. It took more than a year and two previous false starts to put together this rematch, but Dillashaw used the opportunity to emphatically close the door on Barao for good.
This was one of those fights we simply needed to see again. Barao had just been too dominant and Dillashaw too unproven prior to their initial meeting at UFC 173. Despite the fact that he took the gold from Barao last spring with an equally dominant performance, this weekend’s victory was essential for Dillashaw to truly cement the changing of the guard.
Now the really hard part begins.
The bantamweight landscape Dillashaw inherits isn’t exactly brimming with exciting, big-money opportunities. One of the likely reasons matchmakers were so adamant about rematching him with Barao was that there simply weren’t many other immediate options.
Despite the fact that Dillashaw brings unprecedented star power to the top of the UFC’s 135-pound class, establishing him as a dependable PPV draw is a long shot. If he has any chance to take the division to the next level, it’s going to mean finding him salable fights and compelling feuds.
There aren’t a lot of those hanging around bantamweight right now—and those options that do exist seem either underwhelming or will take considerable finagling to make reality.
Though it’s a favorite of hardcore fans, the lion’s share of paying UFC customers are slow to embrace the men’s bantamweight division. As evidenced by Dillashaw and Barao fighting over the title on free network television, previous attempts to put the little guys in pay-per-view main events resulted in fairly disastrous buyrates.
Dillashaw may have the best opportunity since Urijah Faber to bring dependability and marketability to the bantamweight class. Five years and 14 fights into his MMA career, he’s experienced a remarkable and unexpected evolution from college wrestler and unsuccessful contestant on Season 14 of The Ultimate Fighter to one of the best pound-for-pound fighters in the world.
It’s a joy to watch the guy fight—but he’s not a knockout artist like new featherweight golden boy Conor McGregor or a blistering trash talker like, uh, Conor McGregor. During his own time as champion, Barao notched three straight stoppage victories and amassed an outlandish 32-fight career win streak, yet the UFC still struggled to prop him up as an attraction fans would pay to watch.
Even though the brand of fighting Dillashaw offers is thrilling to fight aficionados, he’s still going to need a lot of help to make an impression on the masses. That makes the next—and, really, the first—step of his title reign a critical one.
Rafael Assuncao is the presumptive No. 1 contender. He’s won seven fights in a row since dropping to bantamweight in August 2011. One of those victories—in September 2013—came via split decision over a still-developing Dillashaw. But the problems with Assuncao are self-evident. He’s the No. 3 135-pound fighter on the UFC roster, but he got there while remaining almost entirely anonymous to anyone but the most strident fans.
On top of that, he’s injured and hasn’t fought since October 2014. Assuncao reportedly broke his ankle in training last December and was slow enough to heal that it scuttled plans to put him in a bout with Faber in March. Considering his relatively low profile, it might actually behoove the UFC to skip over the 33-year-old Brazilian for now, even though Assuncao tweeted his eagerness on Saturday:
Faber remains perhaps the best-known men’s bantamweight on the planet, though he’s now 36 years old, is coming off a loss in a featherweight bout against Frankie Edgar and is 0-6 in his last half dozen UFC/WEC title fights. He’s also currently booked opposite McGregor to coach the next season of TUF, though management says those two won’t fight each other at the end of the show’s run.
Perhaps the biggest sticking point of all is Faber and Dillashaw are longtime cohorts at Team Alpha Male in Sacramento, Calif. Faber has said he’d take the fight if Dillashaw wanted him to do it, but it seems like a fairly awkward pairing all the way around.
Perhaps Dillashaw’s best chance for both a promotable fight and a stiff challenge from inside the bantamweight division would be against former champion Dominick Cruz. Cruz never lost his title, but he was stripped by the UFC in January 2014 after more than two years of injury-related inactivity.
A fight between Dillashaw and Cruz would be an MMA fan’s dream and would come with the added marketing benefit of functioning as a title-unification bout. It’s also the one that most strikes the champion’s fancy.
“That’s the biggest fight,” Dillashaw said on Saturday, via MMA Junkie. “That’s what’s going to make my name the biggest at this weight class, fighting Cruz as soon as he’s able to come back.”
Unfortunately, it still remains unclear if that pairing will ever be possible. Last December, Cruz announced he’d suffered a torn ACL and is expected to miss most of 2015.
If and when he does return, it seems like an awfully big task to toss Cruz directly into a championship fight against a version of Dillashaw that is firing on all cylinders and seems to get better each time we see him. Surely for all his troubles, Cruz will have earned a tuneup fight. That makes a contest between the two sort of a long-term plan, if not an out-and-out pipe dream.
Oddly enough, in the wake of Dillashaw’s victory over Barao, several UFC employees thrust forth Edgar as a potential next challenger. The former lightweight champion would certainly make an interesting stylistic matchup and bring arguably more name recognition than either Faber or Cruz.
It was an idea that appeared to strike UFC President Dana White’s fancy when amateur matchmaker Khabib Nurmagomedov brought it to him on social media:
Even a potential bout with Edgar, however, would be fraught with complications.
Edgar has always seemed amenable to fighting at 135 pounds, but he hasn’t done it yet. At the moment, he’s in the thick of the featherweight title hunt alongside McGregor and champion Jose Aldo. Last we saw him, he was jumping up onto the lip of the Octagon to challenge McGregor immediately following the Irishman’s victory over Chad Mendes at UFC 189.
Perhaps the idea of cutting the championship line at 135 pounds—and maybe a few extra dollars—would be enough to entice Edgar to drop another weight class, but there is no guarantee of that. Again, the idea of matching him with Dillashaw seems entirely theoretical as of this writing.
Other potential challenges for Dillashaw could come from outside his division. John Dodson and Demetrious Johnson are scheduled to fight for the UFC flyweight title at UFC 191 in September. Either one of them could make a compelling foe for the bantamweight champion.
It was Dodson who handed Dillashaw his other professional loss, in the final of the TUF 14 tournament. Both guys have improved immeasurably, and a rematch against the likable and promotable Dodson would be a fairly attractive option for everybody.
As champion at 125 pounds, Johnson is on the verge of cleaning out his division. If he emerges from his second bout against Dodson with the title, he’ll need new challenges. Himself a former bantamweight, it seems likely the idea of a superfight could turn his head.
Still a lot of hurdles need to be cleared before either Dodson or Johnson could step up to fight Dillashaw.
And therein lies the rub.
The bantamweight division has its champion, and on Saturday night he proved his point in impressive fashion.
But no matter which way the UFC turns, finding Dillashaw his next big fight could take some considerable shuffling of the deck.
Read more MMA news on BleacherReport.com