Gillespie is now 35 years old and 7-1 in the UFC. Did not fight in 2020 and took one fight in 2021 and got the biggest win of his career over a top 15 ranked LW, the first and only big win of his career. That was eleven months ago so he will now go another year without fighting after he just took 1.5 years off after his last fight.
So in the last of what he has left of his prime he has fought 1 fight in 2.5 years.
Who knows maybe is doing one of these two year long Jon Jones training camps Chael was talking about yesterday.
Makhachev got the same number of UFC wins in the past year that Gillespie has in the past 4.5 years.
Undisclosed injuries… is that the story here? Has to be.
He had pretty much no chance to get that fight while the Chandler Tony fight was getting put together.
When you look at the history of the LW division…Tony, Lee, Conor, Oliveira, Poirier, Chandler, Gaethje, Khabib, RDA etc… they got world and int. title fights by being active and winning. UFC is not just gonna hand it to Gillespie fight 1x a year with a single top 15 win while he just got KOed by a guy they cut two fights ago. Sure hardcore fans want to see him in the mix with the rest of the top 10 but the UFC don’t need him.
