I'm writing this on Tuesday, a couple of hours after Khamzat Chimaev vs Nate Diaz was announced as the main event for UFC 279 in September and I am having trouble finding the words for how bad this fight is. This is so inexplicably stupid that it is quite actually infuriating. The UFC is so petty and run with the mindset of a 13 year old sometimes that they'll make fights like this out of spite. Of course, the UFC is a very successful business, which doesn't happen on accident, so obviously there's more than a few people who are quite smart. This decision threw all intelligence and nuance out the window in favor of petty bullshit. The UFC would actually rather lose money on this PPV (well, not "lose" in a sense, but leave money on the table) than to put together a decent fight. I just wrote something about Nate Diaz last week after his interview on the MMA Hour, but we're back with more because this is the dumbest thing I've seen in awhile.
I'm not going to rehash all of the details here, but if somehow you haven't been following or come across the details of the story, I'll quickly summarize it here. Essentially, Nate Diaz is on the final fight of his contract and he wants to have that last fight and see what free agency has to offer. Diaz is a pretty big star and one of the most consistent draws that the UFC has, so obviously they don't want to let him go. They've tried to get him to extend his deal and have offered him boat loads of money in order to do so, but Diaz doesn't want to sign an extension right now. He simply wants to see what is available on the open market. At some point, the UFC came to the realization that Diaz isn't going to sign, so they've taken to other methods of trying to keep him around as long as possible. They offered him fights that they knew he didn't want so that they could extend his contract a little longer with each declined fight. The general belief is that the UFC had hoped that they could extend him long enough in order to make the trilogy fight with Conor McGregor, but Conor isn't likely to be ready to fight until early next year and the deadline was quickly approaching of when they needed to offer Diaz again. That is sort of where things left off. Diaz wanted to leave and the UFC didn't want to let him go. That all came to a stop this afternoon.
I'm not sure who was first, but I think it was Brett Okamoto that first reported that Diaz vs Khamzat was agreed upon to go down at the September PPV as the main event. The logical questions that most people were asking are "how did this happen?" and "why did this happen?" Those answers are somewhat simple, but that doesn't make them any less stupid. The general reason why this happened is because the UFC had to offer Nate a fight by a certain date. They are contractually obligated to offer him fights, so they could only wait so long before they had to offer him someone. From the Diaz perspective, he simply didn't care. He wanted out and to reach the open market and was going to do whatever it took to get there. Diaz received the offer and accepted it, like he would have for any other fight. The "why" to this is enough to make my head explode. From the UFC's perspective, at the point they realized that Nate wasn't going to sign, they had to decide on who to offer, knowing Nate was going to accept no matter what. They had no shortage of options as Diaz fights at both 155 and 170. The popular names floating around out there were Dustin Poirier and Tony Ferguson, both fights that made varying degrees of sense. Tony made sense because he seems to be on the decline and is at a point in his career as Diaz and they're close in age. That sort of made the most sense in my opinion. There was also the Poirier fight, which had a greater gap in terms of skill. While that is true and Poirier is one fight removed from a title shot, it would have been a fun fight stylistically and had history as the two were supposed to fight at one point in the past before the fight fell apart. In that MMA Hour interview that I mentioned earlier, Diaz added that he requested Vicente Luque, which I would have been down for as well. However, the UFC decided it was more important to try and diminish Nate's value as much as possible on his way out instead of putting on an amazing event for what could be his last fight with the promotion. That is their decision to make, but I just think it is an awful look and not a great business move either. The Diaz side is simple. He doesn't care and is doing whatever he needs to do to finish his contract.
I think what bothers me the most is this literally does not benefit anyone involved. The UFC is losing out in my opinion because there's so many better fights they could have put on that people would be interested in. Diaz vs Tony and Diaz vs Poirier would have generated significantly more interest than this and you can't convince me otherwise. Not only did they leave better fights on the table, they refuse to give champions PPV points because Diaz generates a lot of interest, so they made this a main event. I can already tell that the rest of this card is going to be awful. It is already set up to be a failure of an event. I don't even know what the co-main could be for something like this. The biggest non-title fight that I could think to make as the co-main is Poirier vs Chandler and if they put that on the same card as this when they could've just made Poirier vs Diaz, I'm going to lose my mind. The way this is shaping up, I don't even think I want to buy this event. The main event already sucks and we're going to get a main card with like Amanda Ribas vs Tecia Torres, Irene Aldana vs Macy Chiasson, Rob Font vs Adrian Yanez, and Chris Daukaus vs Marcin Tybura. This doesn't benefit Khamzat either because he is coming off of a literal fight of the year candidate against Gilbert Burns and is being given an unranked opponent that everyone knows he should beat. He's already listed as a -1100 favorite, which isn't far off of where Amanda Nunes was in her first fight against Julianna Pena. Nate obviously doesn't benefit from this, which is what the UFC wants.
The mindset that UFC uses in these situations can only be compared to that of the people who say "If mama isn't happy, no one's happy". It is just so egregiously stupid. Diaz wouldn't give the UFC what they wanted, so as a result everyone else has to suffer. While I don't think it is the best business plan, I can almost understand "punishing" Nate on his way out. If Nate isn't going to do what the UFC wants him to do, the UFC has no inherent reason to help Nate out as he exits. However, I think this is an odd way to publicly conduct yourself in front of all of the independent contractors that they hire. The message is that the UFC loves you while you're falling in line, but the second you want something that they don't, they'll go above and beyond to make your life as difficult as possible. I find it very comedic that this happens literally right on the heels of Paddy Pimblett and Molly McCann defending the UFC on their fighter pay. Two fighters who aren't even close to the title take the UFC's side while they're making the promotion a boat load of money have no problem defending the promotion now, until they're on a 2 fight losing streak and all of the sudden instead of getting gift matchups in front of their home country, they're given incredibly hard fights at the empty apex, then it will all be different. It is truly mind blowing to me that the UFC would actively choose to make less money all in an effort to make Nate look as bad as possible as he goes to fight Jake Paul.
What actually pisses me off about this whole thing is that in order to fully comprehend what is happening, you have to come to the realization that the UFC has to believe that their fans are all idiots for this plan to work. Dana will use all of these ridiculous arguments about how Nate has only won one fight in the last 6 years as a reason that he shouldn't be fighting Dustin Poirier because he is a top 5 guy. However, the fact that he's only won a single fight in the last 6 years completely qualifies him to fight a top 5 guy in a different division. They are also making this fight with Khamzat to send him out on a loss to diminish his value as much as possible, but just by virtue of this fight even happening, they are admitting that a loss doesn't diminish his value. Nate has a single win in 6 years, yet they consistently give him top 5 opponents. That only proves that sending him out on a loss doesn't matter because if it did, he wouldn't have been fighting the opponents that the UFC has been consistently giving him. Either wins and losses matter for Nate or they don't. The losses didn't matter when the UFC could put him in matchups that benefitted them, but now that he is going elsewhere, all of the sudden his wins and losses are the only thing that matters. What a joke that is. If you're following along, this makes this matchup make even less sense. The UFC is putting this fight together because they know Nate's losses don't matter and they want him to put Khamzat over (he's already way over by the way). They deny Nate's requests for other fights because he loses too much though. However, they're giving him this opponent specifically because they know he will lose and they want to diminish his value on the way out, even though the pure existence of this fight acknowledges the fact that his wins and losses don't matter. That all leads us to the single conclusion that wins and losses don't matter for Nate Diaz. If that is the case, then that only makes this fight make even less sense. If the UFC is itself acknowledging that sending him out on a loss doesn't change anything, then what is the reason for this fight?
If Nate was the kind of guy where losing actually mattered, then, while still being stupidly petty, I would at least understand it as a negotiating tactic. However, as I just established, the UFC is acknowledging that losing doesn't change anything for Diaz. That means that the UFC willingly booked an event that will make less money for literally no reason. The only person who benefits here is Khamzat and not even in the way you think. Khamzat simply gets a main event, which means more money for him, in a fight that he should win somewhat easily. The UFC made a fight that the didn't want to make for one of their biggest stars, who also doesn't want this fight. They sell this product to fans, who also don't want to see this fight and make it the headliner of an event that we have to pay extra for. They made this shitty main event for a shitty card that is going to be the worst PPV of the year. They did all of this for the equivalent of giving one of their most popular fighters they've ever a middle finger as he walks out to make more money by boxing a 5-0 YouTuber and former Disney Channel child actor than he did from fighting trained killers. If this isn't a bad look for the UFC then I don't know what is. You guys know I'm not one of those people that harps on the negative sides of the UFC too much. I acknowledge them when they come up, but I try to focus on the reasons why we love this sport as much as possible, but this is just ridiculous. The fact that the Poirier fight has been sitting there since Dustin lost to Oliveira in December makes this so much worse and honestly feels like it is going to turn my brain into a milkshake if I think about this any longer.
Oh, and there's one other thing that I have to talk about. There's people saying that the UFC wants Khamzat to "get the rub" from Diaz with this win. What rub is he getting? What rub does Nate Diaz really have that Khamzat hasn't already gotten. Khamzat is a top 3 welterweight and has a top 2 fight of the year contender in 2022, what else is left? What does a win over Nate Diaz actually provide? All of this nonsense about "the rub" he's getting is just a justification for this nonsensical fight to be taking place. Sure, will a few more casual fans see him because they buy the Nate Diaz PPV's? Yea, probably. However, are they going to see Khamzat run over Nate and then buy the PPV where he fights Kamaru Usman? Maybe? I don't think the fans who only buy the Diaz PPVs and the Conor PPVs are all of the sudden going to be so captivated by the way Khamzat beats Diaz that they're going to add him to this list of fighters they want to see.
I guess I just have to come to grips with the fact that we live in a universe where the UFC actively sabotaged their own event just to prove a point to a fighter that doesn't want to be there anyway. If this is indeed the last time we ever get to see Nate in the UFC or potentially even the last time we see Nate fight an MMA fight, it should be a grand event and a celebration of one of the most iconic fighters the UFC has ever had. Not one of the best or most skilled or most dominant, but one of the guys that we, the fans, chose as our guy. We elevated him to a status that the UFC is on record saying they didn't believe he was at. Instead of getting to celebrate our guy in one of, if not his last, fight, we get this nonsense. We get him in a horrible matchup that no one wants to see on a card that no one wants to watch. What a truly unfortunate situation for everyone.
I don't think I need to go into too much detail for this final part, but the biggest reason this fight sucks is because of the matchup. Even if all of the other stuff held true, the fact that they gave Nate this fight in particular makes it bad at it's core. We all know Nate is a boxer and wants to stand and fight it out. They give him Khamzat so that he can take Nate down and pound him out. They're trying their best to give him literally the worst fight possible in an effort to embarrass him.
What do you guys think? Do you actually care about this fight? What thoughts do you have on the situation as a whole? Leave your comments below. Thanks for reading and have a good one.
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