The post-Conor McGregor UFC will finally round into shape Saturday night, and though it is high on talent, it is equally lacking in drama. That is because the featherweight division the Irishman conquered and then immediately abandoned is a convoluted mess of missed weight cuts, tainted interim titles and fallen all-time greats.
Oh, and both Jose Aldo, 30, and Max Holloway, 25 — who are fighting Saturday night at UFC 212 to unify the featherweight title, which was stripped from McGregor — share a common badge of dishonor. They’ve both been dismantled by McGregor in completely different, equally devastating fashions.
The Irishman’s 13-second knockout of Aldo is the one everyone remembers and for good reason. Aldo was 25-1, on a nearly 10-year unbeaten run, and near the top of the pound-for-pound rankings heading into the 2015 fight. McGregor was a largely untested loudmouth who many believed would get his comeuppance at the hands of the Brazilian. Instead, McGregor vampirically sucked all the legitimate greatness out of Aldo and transformed it into the lifeblood of his ascension to worldwide superstardom.
Holloway was one of the speed bumps that McGregor drove over on his way to the Aldo fight. Fighting as an injury replacement in front of an extremely partisan Boston crowd in 2013, Holloway received a 15-minute lesson in the difference between being a prospect and a title contender. Having soundly won the first round with his fan-friendly striking style, McGregor tore his ACL, MCL and meniscus in the second round, yet gritted his way to a decision victory with some rarely seen takedowns.
The defeat turned out to be a turning point in Holloway’s career. The Hawaiian is 10-0 since the loss, has beaten four of the current top 10 fighters in the division and is fighting like a man on a mission. He claimed the interim title in odd and deflating fashion last December after Anthony Pettis had weighed in a full six pounds over the 145-pound limit. If Pettis won, he’d get nothing; if Holloway won — which he did — he’d get the belt, but would be followed by the specter of what might have happened in a legitimate title decider.
Aldo’s interim title is heavily disputed as well. Out of respect, and because they didn’t know what else to do, UFC gave Aldo a “title shot” against perennial contender Frankie Edgar at UFC 200, though McGregor was still the featherweight title holder. Aldo recorded an utterly uninspiring win over Edgar, and definitely didn’t prove his loss to McGregor had been a fluke. With McGregor off on his Nate Diaz/lightweight title adventure and unwilling to fight in the featherweight division anymore, the “interim” eventually was dropped from Aldo’s title and here we are.
Interim-champion-in-all-but-name Aldo versus interim-champion-by-default Holloway. The winner gets to sit atop the featherweight throne, yet the title still will be rightly disputed by McGregor, even though he’s unlikely ever to return to the weight class.
McGregor is in a similarly dominant position in the lightweight division, where he actually holds the title. Like the featherweights, the lightweights are a disaster zone in the post-McGregor world. As much as Holloway was screwed by Pettis, so was Tony Ferguson denied by Khabib Nurmagomedov, who “almost died” during his weight cut. The fight was called off, and UFC 209 was ruined. The division descended further into chaos at UFC 211 in mid-May, when Eddie Alvarez, of getting-knocked-out-by-McGregor fame, landed a near-illegal knee to the face of an almost grounded Dustin Poirier. The bout was controversially ruled a no-contest — many believe Alvarez should have been disqualified for the knee — which provided less than no clarity to one of the UFC’s most talent-heavy divisions.
The future of the lightweight division, just like the featherweight, thus remains a total mystery and still completely dependent on what McGregor decides to do. Amazingly, it looks as if the Irishman will be able to take all of 2017 off from MMA, box Floyd Mayweather for tens of millions of dollars and then return to the UFC as if he never left.