Chad Mendes and Ricardo Lamas haven’t enjoyed much promotional buildup in advance of Saturday’s UFC Fight Night 63.
With Conor McGregor and Jose Aldo hogging the spotlight during their UFC 189 “world tour” this week and last, Mendes and Lamas have had to make do with scraps.
The featherweight division is white-hot right now, but all roads still lead back to Aldo vs. McGregor. Until those two settle their rapidly escalating beef on July 11, the business of deciding the next No. 1 contender will remain entirely theoretical.
UFC President Dana White stopped well short of guaranteeing the Lamas-Mendes winner next dibs during Tuesday’s scattergun Q&A session in Dublin. With Frankie Edgar and Urijah Faber meeting in a potentially much higher-profile bout on May 16, it’s understandable that the fight company is opting for a wait-and-see approach.
It’s possible this is going to take some finagling.
Best to keep the situation as fluid as possible.
All four of these potential challengers have already lost to Aldo, after all—Mendes twice and as recently as last October. Lamas fell to the champion eight months earlier, but their bout was not considered competitive, and he is far and away the lowest-profile guy of the lot.
Faber and Edgar are clearly the biggest stars, and the possibility of their fight was enticing enough to lure Faber back from bantamweight. But The California Kid more or less got obliterated by Aldo back in the old WEC days, and Edgar lost a respectable but clear-cut decision to him at UFC 156.
So, yeah, there are a lot of moving parts here. Factor in UFN 63’s oddball early start time—1 p.m. ET to steer clear of the Final Four—and you get the distinct impression Mendes and Lamas are fighting over somewhat nebulous stakes.
This has been the UFC’s new normal for a while now, obviously. There is always so much going on that sometimes its difficult to discern exactly what’s meaningful from one moment to the next. Lamas vs. Mendes is a perfect example of that ambiguity in action. It might be a No. 1 contender bout, but then again, it might not. The winner gets spoils to be named later—but winning still beats the heck out of the alternative.
That opacity certainly works to the promoter’s advantage. Even though it’s unclear what a victory means here, the fighters have no choice but to prepare as if this bout is for all the marbles because—well, you know—it very well might be.
“I feel a win in this fight will put me right back at the top and next in line for a title shot…,” Lamas told Bleacher Report’s Duane Finley this week. “Mendes is just a beast, and he took it to the champ in his last fight. A victory over him will solidify me as the No. 1 contender.”
Lamas has always been sort of a special case in the 145-pound division. Despite the fact he’d won four in a row leading up to UFC 169, he felt like a bit of an underwhelming opponent for Aldo in February 2014. Only one of his previous victories had taken place on a televised UFC main card. The rest were all preliminary affairs.
If anything, he became the perfect poster boy for why Aldo’s UFC career has appeared lackluster at times. The champ won four of five rounds against the fairly anonymous Lamas—in a fight that played second fiddle to Renan Barao vs. Faber at 135 pounds—but couldn’t finish. Instead, Aldo took his foot off the gas late and coasted to the finish line.
Weirdly, Lamas seems to have made a better case for himself as a member of the featherweight elite in the wake of that loss than he ever did before it. It sounds funny to say, since he’s only had two fights since, but his victory over Dennis Bermudez at UFC 180 last November did as much or more for his stock than any of his previous Octagon appearances.
Bermudez came in flying high on a seven-fight win-streak, but Lamas dispatched him with relative ease via first-round submission. It was a win that firmly planted a flag in the sand for Lamas among the top 145-pounders in the world.
Now, he needs to prove he can be more than just a gatekeeper.
To do that, he’ll have to beat Mendes.
The 29-year-old Team Alpha Male product is one of those unfortunate MMA cases—a guy who is so good he might already be a champion if not for the presence of an all-time great like Aldo. Mendes has amassed a 16-2 career record through nearly seven years as a professional, and both his losses are to the reigning champ.
His bout against Aldo at UFC 179 made a lot of fight of the year lists during 2014. Still, he’ll have to do something very special—and the stars may have to align perfectly for him—in order to force a third meeting with the Brazilian.
In the meantime, Mendes says he’ll approach this fight like it’s for the championship, maybe because it could be as close as he ever gets again.
“We prepared like we were fighting for a world title again,” he recently told Fox Sports’ Elias Cepeda. “It’s like we’re fighting Aldo again. We trained just as hard.”
Clearly, an upset victory by McGregor would effectively hit the reset button on all of this. Still, if the Irishman were to emerge from UFC 189 with the title, it’s hard to believe the UFC wouldn’t jump at a big-money showdown with either Faber or Edgar rather than hand the talented striker’s first title defense to Lamas or Mendes.
Yet another—and slightly more distant—possibility could take a hammer to the entire 145-pound title picture. Both Aldo and McGregor have made noise about moving up to lightweight following their showdown. If that were to happen, then all bets might be off. It could open the door for anyone, including the loser of the UFC 189 title fight, to compete again for a vacant championship.
We just won’t know until July, when all the division’s business will be settled, and we find out who will be the new face of featherweight moving forward.
Until then, we must labor under the assumption that whoever wins at Fight Night 63 will have to fight at least once more before the 145-pound carousel has an opening at the top.
So, really, Lamas and Mendes may not be competing for any sort of immediate returns this weekend.
They both just need to stay in the picture until summer.
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