The UFC's Next Three Nights Are No Longer Too Good to Be True

Squeezed into a baby blue polo buttoned to the top and with his hair product-free, Conor McGregor showed an uncharacteristic sartorial restraint at yesterday's joint press conference for UFC 194 and The Ultimate Fighter 22 Finale. He shared the dais with Jose Aldo, the often expressionless champion whom he'd been slated to fight for damn near a year. On their flanks, there were UFC 194 co-main eventers Chris Weidman and Luke Rockhold as well as TUF 22 Finale headliners Frankie Edgar and Chad Mendes. Elsewhere, 115-pound female upstarts Paige VanZant and Rose Namajunas drew out the last few ounces ahead of weigh-ins.

"I am in a state of Zen right now," McGregor, the interim featherweight champion, said at the presser's outset. "My mind is calm, composed. I am prepared. And I am happy—I am happy we are here. This must be close to 15 press conferences I've done without getting to fight [Aldo], so I am happy we are here now."

In channeling his relief, McGregor could have been speaking for all of us on the outside watching this week unfold. We're on the cusp of three meaningful UFC events tonight, Friday, and Saturday: UFC Fight Night 80 followed by The Ultimate Fighter Finale 22 followed by UFC 194, all in one less-than-72-hour stretch in Vegas. This is a rare occasion when you could be forgiven for hyperbole—not just because of the sheer volume of title fights and contenders' bouts and slobber-knockers, but because the glue that held it all together didn't come undone. For all the headaches and heartbreak and frustration to which fight fans have grown accustomed, these next three nights are restitution.

And when you follow this sport long enough, you get familiar with disappointment. You see cascades of injuries fell fighters like dominoes, turning fight cards into hollowed-out versions of themselves. You watch main events falling apart because of fight-week concussions and too-steep weight cuts, paper-thin bout orders fall flat on fight night, and the UFC 151s and 176s of the world straight up vanish. You get burned enough times by acts of god and man, and you see that setting up a specific combination of two fighters to fight each other on a specific evening is a precarious business with pitfalls you never even considered.

The arrival of these three events is a welcome aberration: Khabib Nurmagomedov's rib injury aside, these fights are basically the same ones we were promised months ago. Tonight's highlights: Namajunas versus VanZant, Sage Northcutt versus Cody Pfister, Jim Miller versus Michael Chiesa. Tomorrow's: Edgar versus Mendes, Edson Barboza versus Tony Ferguson, Joe Lauzon versus Evan Dunham. And Saturday's main card has the strongest collection of five fights a UFC event has seen in years: Aldo versus McGregor, Weidman versus Rockhold, Ronaldo "Jacare" Souza versus Yoel Romero, Demian Maia versus Gunnar Nelson, Max Holloway versus Jeremy Stephens.

Some of these fights—namely Aldo versus McGregor and Souza versus Romero—were booked long ago and thwarted by injury. And in reality, the UFC's contingency plan of dealing with the menace of torn ligaments and broken ribs by booking compelling replacements backfired in the best way: instead of re-slotting Edgar in for Aldo or Jacare in for Rockhold, the absence of injuries—again, aside from Nurmagomedov's—means the major fights have remained intact. As a result, instead of swapping fighters to plug leaks in main events, these three events comprise a mix of champions, contenders, veterans with marquee names, and fresh faces with promise.

Photo by Josh Hedges/Zuffa LLC

This dense weekend comes at a cost, however. The UFC has yet to book a single fight for its Superbowl weekend card in February, and it's hard to see its depth rivaling anything we'll see in December. And layering these events right on top of one another means the fights themselves have less room to breath—by Saturday morning, the impact of Friday's fights will overshadow tonight's simply because they'll be freshest, by Sunday morning we'll be thinking of Saturday. After Rafael dos Anjos and Donald Cerrone fight for the 155-pound strap next weekend, much of these three days will be a vague, distant memory. And still, even with so little time between today and the McGregor-Aldo showdown that ends this thing, there's no way to quiet fears of an 11th-hour weight cut gone awry or a fighter slipping and hitting his head on the concrete floor until the principals are literally standing in the Octagon.

But if you've been following this sport for any length of time, you've already crossed your fingers enough. You've already assumed the worst is about to happen. You've already lived with disappointment. Now, you can look at the next three nights and muster the same enthusiasm that got you watching MMA in the first place.

Still, you can't be too careful. At the end of yesterday's press conference, a reporter asked UFC President Dana White whether it's been difficult to promote so many attention-worthy fights scheduled in such a short period of time. "Surprisingly, it hasn't," White said. "This thing has really come together perfectly, and it's been a much easier week than I would have anticipated so far." Without missing a beat, he knocked his knuckles on the podium two times—for all of us.