After an unimaginable series of twists and turns, the UFC returns to action Saturday night with the two-title-fight extravaganza that is UFC 249.
This is the first UFC card since March 14, as the entire sports world has been shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
UFC 249 was originally slated to take place in Brooklyn, N.Y., on April 18, and feature the long-awaited lightweight title fight between Khabib Nurmagomedov vs. Tony Ferguson.
The New York location was scrapped when the state shut down due to the coronavirus. The UFC then made an ill-advised attempt to run the card on tribal land in California, but the card was shut down due to political pressure.
Now, the state of Florida has greenlit the event, which will be held behind closed doors in Jacksonville, Fla., and will be headlined by Ferguson (25-3 MMA, 15-1 UFC) vs. Justin Gaethje for an interim lightweight title, while Henry Cejudo puts his bantamweight title on the line against former UFC and WEC champ Dominick Cruz.
UFC 249 takes place Saturday at VyStar Veterans Memorial Arena in Jacksonville, Fla. The main card airs on pay-per-view following prelims on ESPN and ESPN+.
Without further ado, then, here are eight burning questions leading into UFC 249.
Can Justin Gaethje get his signature win?
Call Gaethje (21-2 MMA, 4-2 UFC) the former World Series of Fighting lightweight champ. Call him the people’s champ. Call him the “Fight of the Night” king.
All these titles would be true. But the validation of wearing a UFC championship belt in the sport’s deepest weight class, even if it is of the promotionally convenient interim variety, would be the long-sought validation that he’s not just an extra tough brawler but, in fact, one of the truly elite mixed martial artists on the planet.
Gaethje has racked up a ridiculous seven post-fight bonuses in six UFC fights, and he’s won three bouts in a row, all via first-round knockout.
But the very top of the division, from a marquee perspective, consists of champion Khabib Nurmagomedov, Ferguson, and Conor McGregor. And until recently, Gaethje was boxed out of dates with the big three.
That changed when Nurmagomedov had to withdraw from UFC 249 due to travel restrictions and Gaethje had his chance to step up. It’s almost needless to say, but if Gaethje can end Ferguson’s eight-year-long win streak, he won’t have a problem getting the biggest fights for a long time to come.
Will a Tony Ferguson win finally get us a Khabib Nurmagomedov fight, once and for all?
I mean, if you’re on this website, you probably already know the Khabib vs. Tony story, but on the odd chance you don’t: Five times the matchup many consider the best potential fight in the entire sport was booked, and five times it has fallen out.
The curse started with standard fight-fallout stuff like training injuries, then got absurd, with Ferguson pulling out after tearing his knee tripping over a production cord at the FOX lot on attempt No. 4, and then a worldwide pandemic causing the most recent fallout.
And yes, in theory, if Ferguson won the interim lightweight title, that would mandate a bout with champion Nurmagomedov next. But we’ve been down that road, too, and the UFC simply made Ferguson’s interim title vanish without a trace when it was expedient to do so.
On paper, the timing would be right this time. Nurmagomedov, a devout Muslim, would have enough time to get back up to speed after the holy month of Ramadan, and Ferguson, with the big if of getting through a fight with Gaethje unscathed, could step back into the fray.
But given what’s already taken the fight down, would you put your money on that?
Will the quality of these fights be worth spending $65 at a time millions of people are on unemployment?
This is not a flippant question. On your ordinary fight card, sure, you’ve got your fair share of short-notice fights, fighters who go into the cage after horrible weight cuts, and all sorts of circumstances under which fighters compete under less-than-ideal situations.
But there’s never been a disruption anything like COVID-19. Gyms all over the country had to shut down to slow the spread of the virus. Undoubtedly many of the fighters had hush-hush arrangements to continue quietly training with their usual partners that we’ll never hear about.
But the show’s also been a shotgun arrangement, as the UFC had to pick up the pieces after a month and a half of events were wiped off the schedule. Some fighters are going on short notice, some have been in start-and-stop patterns for months.
The bottom line is, there’s an even wider range of preparedness or lack thereof than you’ll find on a typical event. It could make for a night of subpar, sloppy fights, or, conversely, a night of wildly entertaining scraps. But it’s a fair bet this won’t be an ordinary evening of action, one way or another.
Will the UFC prove anything about sports in the age of COVID-19?
One way or another, yes. But we won’t know right away.
UFC 249 will leave one indelible impact: It will go down in the record books as the first major sporting event held in the United States since the sports world shut down in response to the pandemic and most of the nation went under stay-at-home orders. You can rest assured UFC president Dana White, with his us-against-the-world mentality, will no doubt crow about sticking it to all his imaginary haters for pulling this show off.
That’s the short term. In the long term, there are two ways this could go: The worst-case scenario is an asymptomatic coronavirus carrier spreads the disease during fight week, and within two weeks, there is an outbreak of the disease among the families and friends of the fighters, cornermen, UFC staff, cameramen, officials, and so on. No one is rooting for this, but we can’t pretend this isn’t a possibility. In any case, UFC would be tagged as the entity that took the viral spread and made it worse by starting too soon.
Then there’s the other outcome: The UFC goes ahead and produces UFC 249, and next week’s two Jacksonville events, the events run smoothly, and no one gets sick. The UFC is clearly doing everything in their power to assure this is the case, going so far as to nix the usual postfight octagon interview and pre-fight faceoffs. In that case, UFC could go down as the sports promotion which got the ball rolling again and led the way for other sports to follow suit, and figure out their own paths back to competition. In that scenario, the UFC wins big.
Regardless of whatever comes right out of fight night, it will be some time before we get a definitive answer.
Does Dominick Cruz still have it?
If Cruz (22-2 MMA, 5-1 UFC) didn’t have years stolen from his prime by injury after injury, he’d likely be name-checked at this point alongside the sport’s all-time great talents, the Demetrious Johnsons, Georges St-Pierres, and Jon Joneses of the world.
As is, Cruz’s record remains sterling as the man who bridged the bantamweight division from the WEC to the UFC, where he became a two-time champion, and to this day, he’s only lost once at 135 pounds.
Cruz is being gifted a title shot against Cejudo (15-2 MMA, 9-2 UFC) on Saturday night based on his impressive resume. But he hasn’t fought since Dec. 30, 2016, where he lost in one-sided fashion to Cody Garbrandt, ending his second title reign.
That fight was the first time Cruz looked like something less than himself. That was more than three years ago. Cruz isn’t old by any means at 35, but he’s going to have a hell of a lot of ring rust, and he has a tall order in Cejudo, who is fighting as well as anyone in the sport these days.
Give Cruz this: He’s diving straight into the deep end, and has the opportunity to convincingly prove everyone wrong.
What does Cejudo get out of a win over Cruz?
The Olympic wrestling gold medalist and former UFC flyweight champion joined the shortlist of “champ-champs” when he defeated Marlon Moraes to win the vacant bantamweight title last June. Cejudo has been a killer in the cage, everything he was projected to be when he first signed up for this sport. He deserves every accolade that’s been tossed his way.
Since winning the title, though, Cejudo’s angle has been tough to figure. There’s no lack of deserving talent at 135 pounds. But first Cejudo was scheduled for fight longtime former featherweight champion Jose Aldo, who was coming off a loss in his first bantamweight fight. Now he goes against Cruz, who hasn’t competed since 2016.
Maybe it’s about the resume. Cejudo clearly places a higher and more conscious priority on his legacy than most fighters during their primes. Cruz or Aldo mean more for his legacy than, say, Aljamain Sterling. But there hasn’t been a bantamweight title fight between a defending champion and a challenger who has been active in the division since T.J. Dillashaw defeated Garbrandt in a rematch at UFC 227 nearly two years ago, and it’s well past time to get the line moving again.
Will the Francis Ngannou-Jairzinho Rozenstruik winner sneak into a title shot?
If it feels like we’ve been talking about Francis Ngannou vs. Jairzinho Rozenstruik forever, well, we kind of have. Rozenstruik (10-0 MMA, 4-0 UFC) asked for this fight shortly after knocking off Alistair Overeem in December. Ngannou (14-3 MMA, 9-2 UFC) wasted little time obliging. This was originally scheduled to headline UFC Columbus on March 28, which was the first domestic event the promotion had to cancel during the pandemic.
While we’ve had to wait longer than expected for this bout, we suspect it will be worth the prolonged anticipation. These two fighters’ circumstances haven’t changed: Ngannou is looking to cap his rags-to-riches-back-to-rags-back-to-riches tale by knocking off Rozenstruik and presumably getting the next title shot. Rozenstruik burst onto the scene last year and won four times to put himself in the spot Ngannou occupied about three years ago.
And with UFC president Dana White beginning to show impatience with champion Stipe Miocic, who has made it clear his firefighting job is going to be his priority so long as coronavirus is a thing, the winner of this bout could find themselves in a title situation sooner rather than later.
Does “Cowboy” Cerrone have another ride left in him?
Relatability has been a large part of Donald Cerrone’s enduring popularity. You can admire the pure skills of someone like GSP, but few of us possess his otherworldly talents, so you don’t really know what it’s like to be in his shows.
Someone like Cerrone, though, is someone we’ve all watched through his high and lows over the years. There have been plenty of both. He’s had thrilling finishes and big win streaks. He’s also had some of his worst moments in his biggest fights. Either way, he picks himself back up and gets back at it again, and that’s something your ordinary fan who watches the fights to blow off steam can appreciate.
This time feels a little different, though. Cerrone himself admitted he didn’t really show up for his swift loss to McGregor in January in his biggest career spotlight.
That was Cerrone’s third straight stoppage loss. Granted, they’ve been a murderer’s row in McGregor, Gaethje, and Ferguson. But Cowboy is 37, it’s unclear how much tread he has left on the tires, and takes on a man who has already finished him and has something to prove in his own right in Anthony Pettis.
Maybe Cowboy will kick off another of his legendary runs. Maybe Pettis (22-10 MMA, 9-9 UFC) gets a rejuvenating victory. Either way, we bet this one won’t be boring.
