Friday evening, Brett Okamoto of ESPN broke the news that featherweight champion Max Holloway will move up a division to face Dustin Poirier for the interim UFC lightweight title in the main event at UFC 236 on April 13 at State Farm Arena in Atlanta, Georgia.
The news comes just a handful of days after the promotion announced that Kelvin Gastelum and Israel Adesanya would battle it out for the interim middleweight title on the same card, which didn’t have a location or venue announced at the time. With Friday evening’s news, UFC 236 instantly enters the history books as the first UFC event to feature twin interim title fights.
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First things first: Holloway and Poirier is one hell of a fight and it will be amazing to see the two men in the cage together again, given how far they’ve both come since they shared the cage at UFC 143.
They are two of the most composed, punishing strikers in the business and while Poirier got the better of a not-yet-21-year-old Holloway in their first encounter — which was the Hawaiian’s UFC debut — “Blessed” has blossomed into a dominant force at featherweight since. Meanwhile, the Louisiana native has returned to lightweight, harnessed his energy and gone unbeaten in his last five fights, including consecutive stoppage wins over Anthony Pettis, Justin Gaethje and Eddie Alvarez.
It's a festival of violence and just like everyone else, I already can’t wait to see what happens.
However …
As great as this matchup is from an entertainment standpoint, it sure doesn’t make a lot of sense when you look beyond the understandable excitement that comes with knowing Max Holloway and Dustin Poirier are going to share the Octagon together in a five-round main event fight on pay-per-view in (pulls out calendar, carry the one) exactly 50 days!
The first elephant in the room that needs to be addressed is Tony Ferguson.
He has been the No. 1 contender for the last several years and while the fates have conspired to keep him from ever locking horns with current champion Khabib Nurmagomedov, it’s difficult to comprehend how an interim title fight can happen without the unquestioned No. 1 contender involved.
UFC President Dana White told ESPN that Ferguson was offered an interim title fight against Holloway, but turned it down and it’s hard to blame him. After all, Ferguson won an interim title by submitting Kevin Lee in the main event of UFC 216, but was stripped of the belt and shuffled back into the queue of contenders when he got injured a week prior to his schedule unification bout with Nurmagomedov last April.
Having subsequently gone out and finished Anthony Pettis to extend his winning streak to 11, Ferguson’s hesitancy to face anyone but Nurmagomedov for anything but the undisputed title is completely understandable.
Which brings us to the second elephant: the UFC’s decision to include an interim title here.
Chances are that adding the placeholder belt into the mix was the only way to get Holloway and Poirier to agree to square off since both are likely banking on the fact that winning and holding the interim title will put them in line to face Nurmagomedov when he’s ready to fight again in the fall.
In theory, that’s true, but as both Ferguson and Colby Covington know all too well, interim titles don’t guarantee you anything these days, so why add the belt into the mix in the first place when all it does is back you into a corner?
Adding the interim belt into the mix only creates more potential for chaos because there is only one logical way to move forward once an interim title is introduced — a title unification bout — and countless situations and scenarios where that could be prevented from happening, which then only complicates things further.
From my column on the interim title fight between Gastelum and Adesanya: “Rather than creating a situation where a title unification bout is the only option, the UFC should leave itself some outs just in case someone gets injured, suspended or — heaven forbid — Whittaker is sidelined even longer and a new middleweight champion needs to be crowned.”
Change the champions and the divisions and it’s no different.
The only worse thing than introducing interim titles when they’re not truly necessary is watching them vanish into thin air when things invariably go sideways in the future.
The third elephant in the room is a slightly smaller one, but it still needs to be addressed nonetheless: What’s happening at featherweight?
This one isn’t as pressing at the moment because Holloway just waxed Brian Ortega in December and there isn’t a collection of contenders stacked up, waiting for the chance to challenge “Blessed” for his belt.
However the UFC needs to build itself a flowchart and start booking fights that work regardless of whether Holloway wins or loses at UFC 236 because one way or another, there needs to be a featherweight title fight in the summer or fall and figuring out who should take part isn’t exactly straightforward.
Ortega and Jose Aldo are probably at the top of the list, even though both have lost to Holloway recently, while Frankie Edgar was supposed to challenge for the featherweight title last year before the champion got hurt, which led to “The Answer” getting erased by Ortega at UFC 222.
Alexander Volkanovski is 6-0 in the UFC, 19-1 overall and riding a 16-fight winning streak. Last time out, he smashed two-time title challenger and perennial contender Chad Mendes, who up and retired after the loss. The former rugby man should absolutely be in a part of whatever pairings are made with an eye to the future of the featherweight division.
Personally, I would match Aldo against Ortega and Edgar against Volkanovski, with both fights serving as five-round main events and taking place somewhere around UFC 236, so that the two winners and Holloway can all be on the same general timeline heading into the second half of the year.
If Holloway beats Poirier, he’s unlikely to return to featherweight, where the cut down to 145 pounds has become increasingly difficult and he’s already accomplished just about all that he can accomplish.
Should that come to pass, match up the winners of the two fights to crown a new featherweight champion.
If Holloway loses and returns to defend his title, the winner of the Edgar-Volkanovski pairing makes the most sense as the next challenger, since neither has faced the ultra-talented 27-year-old yet.
Either way, the UFC needs to get moving in terms of booking fights for the rest of the ranked talent in the featherweight division because the Holloway-Poirier fight complicates things and it’s better to be prepared than to be caught flat-footed and have to hastily cobble something together this summer.
Which brings us to the final elephant in the room.
Thursday afternoon in Montreal, Georges St-Pierre announced his retirement, citing an inability to secure a fight with Khabib Nurmagomedov as a large part of why he was opting to walk away from the sport at this time.
A day later, we get an interim title fight featuring a featherweight champion — who has never fought at lightweight in his UFC career — and a surging contender who has half as many wins consecutive victories as the last man to wear the interim lightweight title.
We can get Holloway versus Poirier, but we can’t get St-Pierre versus Nurmagomedov?
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There are myriad of reasons for not having St-Pierre fight Nurmagomedov, but we’re clearly knee-deep in the “Make Cool Fights and Figure It Out Later” era, so why not just green-light that one too and collect all the money?
Sure, it brings more chaos to the lightweight title picture, but at this point, can things really get any more discombobulated?