The Bottom Line: The Elephant in the Room

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The UFC 212 main event on Saturday is a juicy matchup for MMA enthusiasts. It pits the greatest featherweight of all-time, returning from handing the great Frankie Edgar his first loss since 2013, against a surging 25-year-old on one of the longest winning streaks in Ultimate Fighting Championship history and looking to prove he is now one of the sport’s elite competitors. It’s a worthy pay-per-view main event and easily one of the best fights of the year thus far.

Unfortunately for Jose Aldo and Max Holloway, a conspicuous cloud will hang over the proceedings in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It’s a boisterous, brash Irish cloud from which Aldo and Holloway will struggle to escape. There’s a featherweight championship and an interim featherweight championship being merged, but they are unable to fully obscure the reality that they are fighting to capture a title that Conor McGregor won in 13 seconds and then elected not to defend. The lineage of the UFC titles is one of the reasons championships hold the prestige they do. The UFC isn’t like boxing, where titles bounce around with no apparent rhyme or reason. Champions by and large defend until they no longer can. This over time enhances the perception that the UFC champion is the best fighter in each division.

There are of course reasons that occasionally a title has to be vacated, but to this point, those have been anomalies and have come up only for five narrowly prescribed reasons: severe injury, steroids, UFC departure, retirement and Jon Jones-related nonsense. Dominick Cruz and Frank Mir had to vacate their titles due to severe injuries. Sean Sherk, Josh Barnett and Tim Sylvia vacated due to drug test failures for anabolic steroids. Jens Pulver, B.J. Penn, Randy Couture and Murilo Bustamante were stripped when they left the UFC for other promotions. Bas Rutten, Frank Shamrock and Georges St. Pierre vacated due to retirement. Jones was stripped of a title twice for Jon Jones -related nonsense.

The situation with McGregor and the UFC featherweight title is unprecedented. Never before has a UFC champion vacated a title simply because he or she wanted to take different fights more than defend that title. There’s good reason that this is unprecedented: It does a real number on the perception of the title. Sometimes that’s unavoidable, but it’s strange for it to come by choice. After all, how important can a title be to the average fan if a fighter gives it up voluntarily to take fights elsewhere? That’s particularly pronounced when that former champion has defeated both of the individuals now competing for that title.

There was only so much UFC could do to prevent this situation. McGregor wields enormous power in the sport and is willing to exercise that power. Part of the cost of doing business with a moneymaker like McGregor is that he is able to dictate terms. The UFC has to pick its battles. McGregor desires challenges as a fighter, and the idea of winning titles in two weight classes was irresistible to him. What became of the featherweight division after he left was not his concern. After all, he made Aldo plenty of money before departing.

While the McGregor situation was easy to understand, it’s harder to reconcile why the UFC appears to be allowing this to become precedent moving forward. The most logical story for St. Pierre’s return was to go after the welterweight title he never lost in the Octagon. Instead, the UFC announced St. Pierre would fight Michael Bisping for the middleweight title. It was likely a bigger fight in the extreme short term but presented obvious potential problems after that.

St. Pierre was favored by the oddsmakers to defeat Bisping, and if GSP won, it’s hard to imagine he would defend that title against top contender Yoel Romero, given that he fought at 170 pounds in every other UFC fight he ever had. The likely result would have been St. Pierre vacating the middleweight title and creating the exact same situation we now have at featherweight. There’s also the matter of the UFC women’s featherweight title, which was apparently created without securing a commitment from both competitors that they’d defend against the obvious top contender for that crown if they won.

It’s always nice when a big fight can be made, but one of the reasons the UFC has thrived over the years is that it has been savvy about protecting its champions and the basic competition to prove which fighters are the best. Aldo and Holloway are great fighters and worthy of fighting for a major championship. It’s unfortunate that they have to compete not only against a world-class opponent but against a ghost they’d love to rematch.

Going forward, the UFC ought to adhere to the basic principle that if a fighter isn’t willing to defend a championship, he or she shouldn’t be allowed to compete for it. Call it the McGregor Rule. Great fighters should enhance the prestige of titles, not enhance their own prestige at the expense of the titles and their lineage. The featherweight division and its championship deserve better.