The UFC makes its second trip to Edmonton on Saturday night, as Alberta’s capital plays host to UFC 240.
And a city noted for legendary hockey champions such as Wayne Gretzky and Mark Messier welcomes noteworthy fighting champions to town.
That includes both main eventers: featherweight champion and honorary Canadian Max Holloway and former lightweight champion Frankie Edgar. It also includes former women’s featherweight champ Cris Cyborg.
Other than the Holloway (20-4 MMA, 16-4 UFC) vs. Edgar (23-6-1 MMA, 17-6-1 UFC) championship main event and the Cyborg (20-2 MMA, 5-1 UFC) co-main against Felicia Spencer, though, we’re not going to pretend like this is the deepest card the UFC has ever presented.
The drop-off is so pronounced that fans will have to decide whether this is worth spending another $60 during the same billing cycle as the blockbuster UFC 239 just three weeks ago.
But there’s still enough going on to keep things interesting, so let’s jump into the five biggest burning questions heading into UFC 240.
What would win mean for Frankie Edgar’s legacy?
Remember back when winning UFC championships in two different weight classes was a nearly insurmountable feat, obtained only by Randy Couture and B.J. Penn? In MMA time, that may as well have been the Dark Ages.
In this current day and age, the expansion of weight classes, proliferation of interim belts, and over-reliance on champion vs. champion fights as marketing gimmicks has diluted the impact of winning more than one belt, whether champ-champ style or over the course of one’s career.
But Edgar winning a second title in his UFC career would be something different.
It’s been more than seven years since Edgar held the UFC lightweight belt, a memorable run as an undersized competitor who didn’t cut weight. Since then, he’s had a highly respectable second run as a featherweight who’s been just one step short of championship glory.
He has another chance to fix that, and, according to our own Mike Bohn, a victory would mark the longest stretch between title reigns in UFC history. That would be a tremendous testament to Edgar’s longevity, a final push to Hall of Fame status in case there are any remaining skeptics.
It would also be a nod to the fact that belts still mean something, even as the UFC keeps finding new ways to dilute their value.
Can Max Holloway get back on track?
There’s little doubt Max Holloway has been the greatest featherweight on the planet in recent years. He’s the UFC’s 145-pound champion, after all, and he’s won 13 consecutive fights in the division.
But the road has been a little rocky over the past year-and-a-half or so. There was the time he had to pull out from his scheduled title defense against Edgar at UFC 222 due to a leg injury. Then, just over a month later, he agreed to fight Khabib Nurmagomedov for the UFC lightweight title on just six days’ notice at the infamous UFC 223 in Brooklyn, only to have the overly meddlesome New York commission pull him from his weight cut.
He was then pulled from a UFC 226 fight with Brian Ortega during fight week due to showing concussion-like symptoms.
And most recently his wandering eye for lightweight glory struck again, as he showed toughness, but took a beating, in a five-round unanimous decision loss to Dustin Poirier for the interim lightweight title UFC 236.
Somewhere the middle of all that, he picked Ortega apart at UFC 231 to retain his featherweight crown. Will “Blessed” return to peak featherweight form when he faces off with Edgar, who’s won three of his past four fights? Or might this be the night we end up wondering if heath issues and ambitions outside the division finally caught up to “Blessed?”
Is this Cris Cyborg’s UFC swan song?
Cris Cyborg has held featherweight titles just about everywhere: UFC, Strikeforce, and Invicta. One big name missing from that list? Bellator, where champion Julia Budd – one of the few remaining major names Cyborg has not yet defeated in her weight class – is on a major run, having not lost since a 2011 fight against Ronda Rousey. Viacom, Bellator’s corporate parent, hasn’t been afraid to spend money to make a splash, either.
Which makes Cyborg’s co-feature bout Saturday night against Felicia Spencer all the more intriguing. Cyborg is coming off her 51-second knockout loss to Amanda Nunes, at UFC 232, the one in which bantamweight champion Nunes added Cyborg’s featherweight belt to her collection.
So will Cyborg, in the last fight of her UFC contract, revert to the Cyborg of old (and by “of old,” we mean “the Cyborg was saw in every fight of her career before the Nunes fight seven months ago”) against Spencer (7-0 MMA, 1-0 UFC)? If that Cyborg shows up against Spencer, then the Nunes-Cyborg rematch, already the biggest women’s fight the UFC can sell, becomes an even bigger deal, but with Cyborg in the free agent position. But if she loses to Spencer or even struggles in victory, that weakens her bargaining position.
UFC president Dana White told MMA Junkie on Wednesday in Las Vegas he was open to a (sort-of) one-fight deal for a bout with Nunes. Cyborg, for her part, didn’t answer questions at Wednesday’s open workouts, adding a further air of mystery to one of the sport’s most intriguing storylines.
Is Felicia Spencer the real deal?
Montreal native Felicia Spencer has experienced both the benefits and the drawbacks of being in the shallowest weight class, in terms of depth of talent, in either gender on the UFC roster.
The good part of being in UFC featherweight division? She’s already made her way into the co-feature of a pay-per-view, and is one win away from a potential shot at champion Amanda Nunes.
The downside? Spencer finds herself fighting the consensus second-best women’s competitor in MMA history in Cris Cyborg, who has something to prove coming off her first loss since 2005.
That’s about as big a sink-or-swim moment as you can possibly find in this sport. Imagine someone with seven pro fights being thrown into the cage with Jon Jones or Daniel Cormier in just their second UFC bout?
On the other hand, Megan Anderson was the one who was supposed to be the next serious contender at featherweight, and Spencer absolutely handled her, showing poise and maturity beyond her experience level in the pressure cooker that goes with making her UFC debut. Maybe the UFC matchmakers know what they’re doing, after all.
Can Gavin Tucker face down his past and win?
The last we saw of Gavin Tucker was also in Edmonton, and it wasn’t a pretty sight.
The Nova Scotia-based featherweight was matched up with Rick Glenn at UFC 215 and took an absolutely hellacious beating in the fight, which he lost on scores of 30-24, 30-25, and a 29-27 from a judge we’ll assume was too busy eating poutine to actually watch the fight.
It was a horrific spectacle overseen by local ref Ryan Cardinal, and it came in the wake of the death of former UFC fighter Tim Hague in a boxing match in the city.
But Tucker (10-1 MMA, 1-1 UFC), if nothing else, proved his toughness in the fight, and now he wants to bounce back and prove his resilience. Nearly two years after one of the worst-officiated fights we’ve ever seen, Tucker returns to fight Seung Woo Choi (7-2 MMA, 0-1 UFC), and says he wants to make a point returning to Edmonton and erasing a bad memory.
No disrespect to Tucker’s foe, but it’s hard not to root for a guy willing to go back to the scene of the worst moments of his life and try to make things right.
UFC 240 takes place Saturday at Rogers Place in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. The main card airs on pay-per-view following prelims on ESPN and UFC Fight Pass/ESPN+.
For more on UFC 240, check out the UFC schedule.
