A pair of newly crowned champions will make their first title defenses Saturday night at UFC 248 against challengers who are no strangers to main-event spotlights.
There will be an international flavor in Las Vegas as New Zealand’s Israel Adesanya puts his UFC middleweight title up for grabs against Cuban native Yoel Romero in the main event, and China’s Zhang Weili makes her first defense of the strawweight title against former titleholder Joanna Jedrzejczyk of Poland.
Beyond that, there’s the usual potpourri of interesting items that you’ll find up and down a card of this magnitude.
UFC 248 takes place at T-Mobile Arena. The main card airs on pay-per-view following prelims on ESPN and UFC Fight Pass/ESPN+.
Without further ado, then, here are six burning questions heading into UFC 248.
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Can Israel Adesanya finish Yoel Romero?
Yes, it’s true, granting Romero (13-4 MMA, 9-3 UFC) a title fight was questionable. He’s coming off two straight losses and three in his past four fights, and that’s supposed to merit if there are merit-based title shots.
Adesanya (18-0 MMA, 7-0 UFC), however, was the one who requested this fight after it became apparent the next in line, Paulo Costa, would be on the shelf with a bicep injury.
And that leads us to why this is still very much an intriguing fight despite the rankings optics: All three of those Romero losses were decisions. In all three, you could make a case for a Romero victory. And never once in his 17-fight career has Romero been stopped.
Adesanya doesn’t just want to defeat Romero. He wants to be the first to finish him. That’s a bold and brash goal – and exactly the sort of thing which would help elevate Adesanya, who gets closer and closer to becoming the next MMA megastar with each fight.
Will Yoel Romero make weight?
It kind of sucks that we even have to make this one of the questions, but here we are.
Twice in 2018, Romero was slated to fight for versions of the middleweight title. At UFC 221, he missed championship weight by 2.7 pounds and thus was ineligible to win the interim title when he subsequently knocked out Luke Rockhold. At UFC 225, he was given a shot at then-champion Robert Whittaker anyway and missed weight by 0.2 pounds.
At UFC 241, Romero made weight at 184.5 for what turned into a “Fight of the Night” tussle with Costa, which seemed to be a deliberate statement, given he could have weighed as much as 186.
Still, though.
We’re reasonably certain Romero will put on an exciting and compelling fight on Saturday night, win or lose. But we have no such certainty he’s going to make weight until the morning before the fight, and as such, if he’ll be eligible to win the belt. As long as that’s the case, that’s his biggest question mark.
Will coronavirus-related camp disruptions affect Zhang Weili?
Simply getting to Las Vegas was a bigger challenge for newly minted strawweight champion Weili (20-1 MMA, 4-0 UFC) than anything that’s been thrown her way in her perfect UFC career.
It started in October before her fight with Jedrzejczyk was even announced, as her U.S. visa was denied by the bumbling incompetents in the Trump administration.
Then coronavirus hit China. The combination of her visa issues and travel restrictions meant she couldn’t come straight to the U.S. So she bounced from Beijing to Thailand to Abu Dhabi before finally being cleared to come to the States, where she finished her training at the UFC Performance Institute in Las Vegas.
Will this disjointed camp mean Zhang is off on fight night? Or did it simply cause her to double down on her fight focus? We’ll find out.
Is this Joanna Jedrzejczyk last shot at reclaiming champion status?
Few people celebrated Rose Namajunas’ strawweight title loss like Jedrzejczyk (16-3 MMA, 10-3 UFC).
Sure, the title has since bounced from Jessica Andrade, who defeated Namajunas, to Zhang. But the point is, Jedrzejczyk, who remains the most dominant 115-pound titleholder in UFC history, had a career-altering roadblock finally removed when Namajunas, who ended Jedrzejczyk’s reign and then won an immediate rematch, was out of the way.
This is looking like “Joanna Champion’s” last chance at making that nickname ring true. She lost to Valentina Shevchenko at UFC 231 in a fight to fill the vacant flyweight title, but few are holding that loss against her, as Shevchenko went down in weight and Jedrzejczyk up in order to make that fight happen.
More important is how she’s fared in her recent strawweight bouts. That included a 30-27 across-the-board win over Tecia Torres and a 50-45 win over Michelle Waterson. Those results indicate that Jedrzejczyk is still an elite fighter and that she’s earned this shot regardless of past title fight results. Now it’s on her to snap a three-fight losing streak in title bouts, or else a fourth chance might never come.
Who will take a sneaky-hot fight between Beneil Dariush and Drakkar Klose?
There are no lack of intriguing subplots in the lightweight division, and the main-card bout between Beneil Dariush and Drakkar Klose is no exception.
In the case of Dariush (17-4-1 MMA, 11-4-1 UFC), who has been with the UFC since 2014, it seems he was written off awhile back. He won five straight fights between 2014-15, before losing to Michael Cheisa. That kicked off a 2-3-1 run.
But the Kings MMA competitor has rebounded for three straight wins, and he’s taken home “Performance of the Night” for finishes in each of his past two.
Klose (11-1-1 MMA, 5-1 UFC), meanwhile, has been quietly racking up the wins. He, too, is on a three-fight winning streak and is 6-1 in the UFC. But all his wins have gone the distance.
For Dariush, a win here bumps off an up-and-comer and announces he’s back. For Klose, going against a vet with a knack for interesting fights win or lose is a chance to say this is his time, and that he’s a fighter worth watching.
Can Neil Magny regain past momentum?
We haven’t seen Neil Mangy in the cage since his knockout loss to Santiago Ponzinibbio in Nov. 2918.
That’s in part because of a U.S. Anti-Doping Agency test which took Magny (21-7 MMA, 14-6 UFC) out of a scheduled fight last May. In the long run, that was good for the sport, because his tainted supplement case was so egregiously off-base that it spurred changes to the UFC’s program, so that fighters like him who have done nothing wrong don’t get caught in a needlessly large dragnet.
But Magny’s also 32 and the fact he did nothing wrong doesn’t undo the chunk of his career lost due to this escapade. He likes to stay active — he once won five fights in a calendar year — and he’s never gone this long in his career without a fight. Can he pick up the pace against a fighter as Li Jinliang (17-5 MMA, 9-3 UFC) , who is coming off back-to-back “Performance of the Night”-winning TKO victories? This fight will go a long way to determining where Magny stands.
