The UFC has a serious problem on their hands with Nate Diaz and it has gotten progressively worse over the last year. Everything peaked on Tuesday when Diaz appeared on the MMA Hour to make his complaints known more publicly and in detail. If you follow the MMA news cycle, you already knew a lot of what was said, but having it come from his mouth on a show that gets as much run as that is always going to get more people talking than some anonymous reports and his cryptic tweets. Taking this into the court of public opinion is probably the biggest move that Diaz had left and he finally made his move. The timing for this was really perfect for some other reasons that I will get into later. I just want to give a brief run down of what is going on and then inject my thoughts and opinions where they fit in.
At the core of this issue is Nate Diaz's contract. Despite what they'll try to say, the UFC knows that Diaz is one of their most popular fighters and can make them boatloads of money while fighting virtually anyone on the roster. Because he is such a cash cow for the company, they don't want to let him go. All of this makes sense so far. After Diaz fought current title challenger Leon Edwards last June, he had only 1 fight remaining on his deal. The UFC is interested in extending Diaz and making sure he continues to fight under their banner. The issue is that Diaz simply isn't interested in returning to the UFC after his contract is up. Diaz wants to explore his options outside of the UFC, namely a potential boxing match with Jake Paul. This has left the UFC in a spot that they aren't in very often and they want to find a way to maximize value for Diaz if this is indeed his last fight. This is just sort of the outline of events, but lets get into why this has gotten so dirty and been made worse than it needed to be.
The one thing that the UFC needs to do before one or both of them either retire or leave the UFC is to finish off the Nate Diaz vs Conor McGregor trilogy. This is what has really led to them not giving Diaz an opportunity to fight out his deal. If Diaz really is leaving the UFC, they aren't going to let him go out without the final McGregor fight. The UFC has tried to extend Diaz's deal by a fight or two to allow him to fight now, but also keep him under contract for that McGregor fight. Of course, an added layer of complexity was added when McGregor suffered a severe leg injury in his trilogy fight with Dustin Poirier last July. McGregor hasn't fought since and the current rumor is that he won't be returning until the first quarter of next year. Had McGregor lost to Poirier in a way that allowed him to return on a somewhat normal schedule, I think we would have seen him fight Diaz already. This has put the UFC in a spot where they want to keep Diaz until Conor is ready, but they also have to fulfill their contractual obligations to him by offering him fights.
They start off by offering him fights that they know he doesn't want and will turn them down, which extends his contract, usually by 6 months at a time. This has become a pretty standard UFC practice at this point, so if you keep in tune with the contractual side of the sport, this is nothing new to you. If you don't, the UFC does this all the time as a way to get fighters into the matchups that they want them in. Most fighters just don't have the pull or the financial stability to really do anything about it. My guess is that they planned to continue to offer Diaz fights that were bad matchups without the level of star or challenge that he wanted, specifically Khamzat Chimaev. What I don't think that the UFC considered is that Diaz is just a different kind of guy and he said that he eventually accepted a Chimaev fight. Whether he actually did, we'll likely never know, but Diaz typically isn't the guy who would reject a fight just because it is hard and his strength of schedule says as much. In the interview, Diaz went on to say that he has requested a handful of opponents, including Tony Ferguson and Vicente Luque, which seem like reasonable requests to me. Fans that don't like Diaz and now, Dana White, are so quick to bring up his career record and his last win and all of that stuff, but no one seemed to care about any of that when he was fighting Leon Edwards or Jorge Masvidal. That really gets me into my next point.
The UFC is trying to play both sides and get everything they want without any give and I don't think it is a very good look. Their whole play here basically relies on fans getting their UFC news directly from the promotion itself, which I'm sure a lot of people do. If you only follow UFC affiliated accounts and Dana White, then this situation may seem like Diaz is being unreasonable. For those that follow MMA reporters who work for third party sites that aren't afraid to tell things like they are, the UFC looks a bit hypocritical here in my opinion. Dana White has no problem taking an unranked Nate Diaz and matching him up against a top 3 ranked Leon Edwards in an effort to put Edwards over with the fans to drum up more interest for the Edwards vs Usman title fight. However, now that Diaz isn't giving him what he wants, he is the first one to talk about how Diaz has 1 win in 6 years. Somehow, that wasn't an issue when Diaz was doing what the UFC wanted, but now that he wants something different, he's being unreasonable. Now that Nate is on his last fight, Dana brings up Nate's wins and losses as if he is just some run of the mill fighter, but we all know that if Diaz signed a 2 fight extension tonight, they would announce his fight with top 5 ranked Dustin Poirier tomorrow. It all just strikes me as being really stupid because we all know what both sides actually want and think, but then they bring up all of this superfluous information.
I guess what I don't really understand is what Dana's point actually is. He'll go on whatever his Barstool interview is (I don't know the name of the podcast) and say how Nate should look to box Jake Paul, but then block exactly that from happening. He would somehow rather try to diminish Nate's career and send him out on a loss to box Paul than to be a part of it. He's already drawn a line in the sand with the Paul brothers and his ego wouldn't let him work with them, even if it was the best thing for business. I get that being a promoter at the highest level requires a bit of an ego, but it is certainly getting the best of him here. If he would just sign on to copromote a Paul vs Diaz fight, I think Nate would probably resign. Nate has said that he isn't opposed to signing a new deal with the UFC after he reaches free agency. He just wants the freedom to explore his options and see what is out there for him.
What I think is being overlooked is that Nate and even Nick are very in touch with everything that goes on in the world of MMA. They may say some outlandish things and often do. Obviously Nate isn't going to be fighting Israel Adesanya or Francis Ngannou at any point in the near future. However, the Diaz brothers know what their value is and at least have a plan on how to maximize that value. I think Nate knows that he is most valuable inside the UFC for the most part. Outside of that Jake Paul fight, I don't think Nate makes more money outside of the UFC than he does inside of it and I'm pretty sure he's aware of that. Even if he could get the biggest fights in the entire sport of boxing, I don't think they do as well in terms of general interest as Diaz vs Poirier, Diaz vs McGregor 3, Dias vs Ferguson, or even Diaz vs Luque. I think all of those fights generate more interest than Diaz vs Canelo and Diaz isn't getting that fight in the first place. My point is that I think Diaz wants out just so he can box Jake Paul and if that is the only reason he wants out, why wouldn't Dana just be involved and make the fight happen?
The final part that makes all of this just look a little worse is Dana and the Nelk Boys. Now, I'm on the younger side of the millennial generation, but I genuinely had never heard of The Nelk Boys before they started getting involved with the UFC, so keep that in mind as to my mindset on the whole situation. I don't think what happened between them and Dana is actually that big of a deal, but the optics of the whole situation isn't great. Nate has come out and said that it isn't about the money and they're offering him more than he's ever made. However, to be in a huge dispute with one of your most popular fighters ever, while having fighter pay a part of the weekly news cycle probably isn't a good thing. To have all of that and then willingly post a video of you giving $250K to some kid just isn't the best look. I thought Ariel Helwani had the best take that I had seen on this on Wednesday's version of the MMA Hour. Dana is his own person and has his own money and if he chooses to gift it to someone, that doesn't have a ton to do with fighter pay as Dana's money isn't the same thing as the UFC's money. I guess someone could argue that Dana can give away that much money because he is pocketing way too big of a cut and more should be going to the fighters, so he shouldn't have that much to just gift to someone, but I think that slightly diminishes what Dana has actually done for the UFC and MMA in general. Dana took on a lot of the risk and put in a ton of work in those early years and even if he is sort of mailing it in these days, he has more than earned the opportunity to be extremely wealthy. I think this situation happening when it did just sort of adds fuel to the fire that didn't need to happen. It is also just a very unsettling video to watch. Dana White is in his 50s and he's either actually hanging out with kids in their 20s or he's pretending to hang out with kids in their 20s and I'm not really sure which would be worse. They bring out a box for whichever of the kids' birthday it is and when he opens it, it's just a ziplock bag full of cash, which is just a weird thing in itself. It was like he forgot he had to get him something, so he took his reserve fund out from under his mattress and was scrambling to package it 5 minutes before he walked out the door to go to the dinner. Also, if you can just give someone $250K, why wouldn't you just buy them something cool? The whole situation just reads like a group of people who are so far removed from the realities of the world that they have forgotten how normal humans act.
To me, the situations are almost entirely unrelated, but it just isn't the best look when two things like that are overlapping. I also don't really get why, even if you wanted to give him that gift, you would record it to put it out on social media, but that is just a me thing. I don't really like putting my personal life out there, so I guess I would just never fully understand the influencer life. Anyways, I think this situation is just so stupid. I don't think it needed to get to this point, but here we are. I think, if he could remove his ego from the situation, it would would be best for Dana to allow Diaz to box Jake Paul. Dana would serve to make money off of it and then would have Nate return and put him in the big fights that they want to make. Instead, Dana is going to be so focused on trying to minimize Nate's value before he walks out the door. It just really doesn't make sense to me. Everyone knows that outside of Paul, all of Nate's biggest fights come within the UFC, so why not just let him go do that one thing and then come back for Poirier, Conor, Tony, and whoever else? I just don't see who doesn't benefit from that situation.
What do you guys think? What should we even make of all of this? What is the biggest thing for Nate Diaz going forward? What would you do if you were him? What would you do if you were Dana? What do you make of Dana and The Nelk Boys birthday party? Leave any and all thoughts you have in the comments. Thanks for reading and have a good one.
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