You can pinpoint the exact moment when the UFC peaked. It happened 15 months ago in Madison Square Garden when Conor McGregor mounted the cage with a belt in each hand, a shining vision of what the UFC machine can produce when it’s pumping on all cylinders.
Since then, nothing has really gone right for mixed martial arts’ premier promotion. The company’s three established superstars — McGregor, Ronda Rousey and Jon Jones — failed in one way or another. Fans tuned out and ratings slipped as the UFC diluted itself by putting on events nearly every weekend. The resulting cards were a hodge-podge of no-name combatants brutalizing each other in meaningless blood sport. Worse still, the UFC’s organizing principle of forcing the best fighters to face each other failed to produce any new stars.
Some of this was undoubtedly the UFC’s fault but there are some gigantic caveats in the narrative that the sky is falling on the UFC. The sport as a whole is still a baby at 25 years old. When the NBA was the same age, it signed a contract that would put the NBA Finals on tape delay. The UFC’s youth is exacerbated by the fact that its relatively new owners, WME-IMG, are still trying to find their footing, which is to be expected. The new owners have barely completed their renovations of the UFC’s backroom staff. They still have to negotiate a new TV deal and refine their stated plan of producing three to four super pay-per-views per year with another eight to 10 designed for hardcore fight fans.
Making WME-IMG’s job even harder is the fact that it can’t look to the history of other leagues for guidance because the UFC is unique. It’s the scaffolding which holds together its roster of 600-plus fighters who are independent contractors. Finally, there are the state athletic commissions which make all of the UFC’s problems worse because they can have slightly different rules and slightly different scoring systems. Thus, the UFC doesn’t even have the power over what can and can’t happen inside the cage.
Youth, ownership and regulations are one thing. However, when it comes to the UFC’s recent troubles, the biggest caveat of all is with the supposed collapse of its star system. Since McGregor climbed the cage at MSG, the UFC has done everything in its power to pump up new names. Fighters haven’t held up their end of the deal. Over and over again, when a fighter with an impressive winning streak has gotten into position to take the next step up, they’ve failed.
Consider the case of Cody Garbrandt. He is young (26), handsome and earns consistent B+/A- grades on the mic. Garbrandt was also an 11-0, freshly minted champion coming into 2017 having destroyed Dominick Cruz, the greatest bantamweight of all time, in December 2016.
All signs pointed to Garbrandt being the next big thing. UFC president Dana White explicitly said so. Then Garbrandt got injured, which meant that the world had to wait 11 months to see him defend his belt, and when he finally got back in the cage he blew it. Having rocked TJ Dillashaw at the end of the first round of their fight at UFC 217, Garbrandt let loose with his trademark showboating — which fans love — but then got soundly shellacked in the second round.
The knockout loss, and the subsequent dulling of Garbrandt’s star, was not the UFC’s fault. It was Garbrandt’s. The UFC gave him the biggest platform possible — Madison Square Garden. It gave him a co-headlining spot on a stacked card that garnered 875,000 pay-per-view buys, the most of any UFC event in 2017. The UFC even built him a “they plain don’t like each other” storyline, complete with a stint coaching on “The Ultimate Fighter,” despite the fact that Garbrandt and Dillashaw aren’t actually blood rivals anymore.
Garbrandt couldn’t cash in. He’s hardly alone. Holly Holm was gifted two chances to elevate herself above “Ronda Rousey’s destroyer” status. She didn’t rise to the occasion either time. Instead, she turned in turd-in-the-punch-bowl performances in featherweight title fights first against Germaine de Randamie and then Cris Cyborg.
Speaking of Cyborg, on paper she should be one of the UFC’s biggest stars. However, she’s such a physical outlier that there’s literally nobody out there who can match her. Thus, every time she gets in the cage, she destroys her competition to such an extent that it’s hard to know how good she actually is. The UFC can’t fix this problem. It can’t wave a magic wand and pluck another 5-foot-8 mauler who walks around at 170 pounds out of thin air.
Francis Ngannou and his UFC 220 dance partner, Stipe Miocic, are another pair of fighters who could have taken a step up the ladder toward stardom in 2017. Miocic opted instead to leverage his moment at the top of the heavyweight division in a failed effort to renegotiate his contract, which reportedly paid him significantly less than the opponents he slaughtered on the way to becoming the best heavyweight of all time. While Miocic undoubtedly deserves more, angling for more money is never the way into fans’ hearts.
Unlike with Miocic, the UFC did the best that it could with Ngannou. It got his incredible life story out there and built him up with six increasingly difficult fights over the course of two years, which culminated in a one-punch uppercut destruction of Alistair Overeem. Ngannou stumbled at the final hurdle when Miocic schooled him. But Ngannou will be back, he just needs time.
Time is what the UFC needs. It needs it so that fighters like Ngannou and Garbrandt can build up their reputation. It needs it so a Cyborg super-fight with bantamweight champion, Amanda Nunes, one which would almost certainly birth a star, can materialize. Brazil is one of the biggest MMA hotbeds worldwide and there’s a pay-per-view event in Rio de Janeiro coming up in May that needs a headliner. Nothing sells quite like a patriotic battle of Brazilian champions.
There are plenty of other fighters out there with win streaks and storylines that are the long-standing prerequisites for stardom in the UFC. Colby Covington (13-1-0) has upped his profile by insulting women, throwing boomerangs and spewing racist garbage both on Twitter and inside the cage. At the opposite end of the spectrum are skyrocketing featherweight Brian Ortega (14-0-0) and women’s strawweight champion Rose Namajunas (8-3-0) who genuinely want to make the world a better place. There’s also a trio of champions — featherweight Max Holloway (19-3-0), bantamweight TJ Dillashaw (16-3-0) and flyweight Demetrious Johnson (27-2-1) — who are so inherently talented that they could break through to the mainstream if they just put together a string of impressive finishes like Dillashaw’s knockout of Garbrandt or Johnson’s insane flying armbar.
Of course, there’s also the little matter of McGregor’s return. The Irishman has been making all the right noises of late and interim lightweight champion Tony Ferguson is set to take on Khabib Nurmagomedov in Brooklyn at the beginning of April. McGregor will almost definitely be sitting cageside because his best friend, Artem Lobov, is fighting on the undercard, which sets up the beautiful possibility of either a McGregor cage invasion — one of his new go-to moves — or an impromptu old-school stare-down against whomever wins between Ferguson and Nurmagomedov.
In short, the UFC is going to be fine. Just give it a little time.