Its interesting seeing all the big promotions that have HW titles get them up for grabs here after MMA is coming off one of the absolute worst years in the history of HW MMA.
Bellator- Fedor vs Bader II
KSW- De Fries vs Duffee II
UFC- Jones vs Gane
ACA- Vakhaev vs Goncharov
ONE- Bhullar vs Malykhin
Is Fedor vs Jones still in the realm of possibility?
No lmao
Fedor is fighting next Saturday and then retiring
When you look at the top 50 ranked HW’s in the world at fightmatrix you can see UFC only has 23/50 of the top ranked HW’s signed.
With everyone else spread out in Bellator, ONE, PFL, ACA etc… that just means the fights that can actually get made are very limited and you are gonna get a lot of rematches you don’t even want while you have no chance to see most of the possible fights between top fighters.
Of course in this environment the list of HW’s the UFC never signs will only continue to grow.
It was Fedor and Khaitonov after PRIDE folded. Later the UFC never got Minakov when he was wrecking everyone. Now its Moldavsky, from Fedor Team.
I noticed the 2022 PFL champ Ante Delija was supposed to fight Gane in the UFC in 2020 but the fight fell through and he returned to the PFL and made the finals in 2021 and won it in 2022.
Bellator just got the undefeated former PFL champ Isaev as well and PFL still has Goltsov too.
Buchecha of course decided to go with ONE.
This is exactly why KSW is having Duffee return out of nowhere to fight for their HW title…because they can’t have a decent HW division when UFC, Bellator, ONE, PFL and ACA have more money to secure talent.
This is also why besides in the PFL system you don’t see more than one HW fight per card anymore…talent pool got thinned out between promotions at the same time they started putting on more and more cards thanks to the utilization of WMMA fights and endless BW, FW, and LW fights able to fill the undercards.
Ali Isaev actually fights Mowry on that Fedor card next weekend. I think Isaev wrecks him.
Now Feb 4th is actually quite the anomaly by modern MMA standards… there are 4 somewhat big HW fights that night…
Fedor vs Bader II
Lewis vs Spivak
Isaev vs Mowry
Ivanov vs Tybura
Its been years since there have been four HW fights worth caring about on a single night in MMA.
2022 PFL champ Delija fights De Castro on 4/7.
Guess ONE canceled their HW title fight and said they are announcing a new date for that fight. So much for the HW title fight and 16 man OW muay thai GP in March…
Well, Bader beat Fedor as expected, De Fries beat Duffee as expected, Jones beat Gane as expected, Goncharov beat Vakhaev and fans will continue to hardly be aware ONE has a HW division.
Blaydes vs Pavlovich coming up.