Ostensibly, this is a story about Jose Aldo and Frankie Edgar.
That pair of veterans will fight over the interim featherweight title Saturday at UFC 200, in what might be the most legitimately competitive and compelling bout on a megacard full of them.
It’s not as though they don’t deserve it, either. Aldo spent nearly six years as the consensus best 145-pounder on the planet, and Edgar, the former lightweight champion, is riding a five-fight win streak since really making himself at home at the lower weight in 2013.
But let’s also not kid ourselves.
This fight wasn’t UFC matchmakers’ first draft for the future of featherweight.
It’s happening only because Conor McGregor’s impromptu, 170-pound feud with Nate Diaz got held over for a second performance after Diaz upset McGregor in March. Until that nastiness is settled—hopefully in their rematch at UFC 202—McGregor will continue to cast an awfully long shadow over 145 pounds.
For now, the rightful champ is still saying all the right things, insisting he’ll return to the featherweight division someday soon.
"Make no mistake, I am the undisputed 145-pound UFC champion and that is my division—a division I have destroyed...,” McGregor said at a press conference Thursday to hype his rematch with Diaz. “I am the world champion at that weight and I will continue to dominate that division."
Should we believe him? Impossible to know.
Conventional wisdom has long held that the weight cut to featherweight is a tough one for McGregor. His coach has said he doesn’t want the fighter to make the drop ever again. So while Aldo and Edgar are officially fighting for a temporary version of the title this weekend, it’s also possible the winner gets promoted to undisputed champion at some point in the near future.
But all that depends on what happens next for McGregor, and right now it still looks and sounds like he’s calling his own shots.
“Let all those featherweights know that are praying I don’t come back,” McGregor said at the presser. “I really—I swear to God—don’t even understand how they could say I’m not coming back.”
At times like this it bears repeating that the Irishman has been mostly good to his word since coming to the UFC three years ago. On the other hand, McGregor is far, far too business savvy to tip his hand if a featherweight return doesn’t figure into his immediate plans.
The moment he admits he’s forsaken 145 pounds for the bigger paydays and more comfortable poundage of lightweight and welterweight, the UFC title he won with a shocking 13-second KO of Aldo at UFC 194 fades from the photograph like a scene in Back to the Future.
That would mean a downgrade of his political capital. It would mean diminishing his bargaining power. As we all know by now, McGregor is just too smart to let that happen.
The man’s 32-month rise through the featherweight ranks might someday be remembered as the division’s salad days. Long the home to some of the fight company’s best pound-for-pound athletes, 145 pounds had never really found purchase with fans until McGregor swaggered onto the scene.
For a short time while he was rolling through it, there seemed like no more vital or interesting weight class in the UFC. No sooner had he defeated Aldo, however, than it felt as though he outgrew the division.
McGregor was scheduled to fight Rafael Dos Anjos for the lightweight title at UFC 196 before Dos Anjos pulled out with an injury. If things hadn’t gone horribly wrong for him in that hastily made replacement bout against Diaz, there had even been some idle talk of him squaring off against welterweight champ Robbie Lawler.
Even now, in the wake of his first defeat inside the Octagon, McGregor remains such a big catch that the first thing newly crowned lightweight champion Eddie Alvarez did after winning the title on Thursday night was call him out:
Alvarez would like an easier fight next, "like Conor McGregor." He considers that a gimme fight.
— Ariel Helwani (@arielhelwani) July 8, 2016
If Diaz defeats McGregor again, it’s possible he’ll have no choice but to go back to 145 pounds and defend his belt. But if he wins? It’s a good bet McGregor will continue to chase those monster paydays at higher weights. We just won’t know for sure what’s next until UFC 202 is over.
So you see what just happened there?
In a story that’s supposed to be about Aldo and Edgar, we perpetually end up talking an awful lot about McGregor. It’s still his world. The rest of the featherweight class is just renting space.
That’s great news for him, but it leaves all of 145 pounds—including the title he just won last December—on awfully unstable footing.
For now, this division has little choice but to move on without its biggest star. It’s sort of a messy situation, but at least featherweight has two fighters as good as Aldo and Edgar who can pick up the pieces.
The 29-year-old Brazilian ruled the division with a decidedly iron fist before McGregor arrived. Aldo hadn’t lost in more than 10 years headed into their disastrous meeting at UFC 193. He’d beat the rest of the best 145-pounders on the planet and made it look relatively easy.
That made it all the more astonishing when McGregor knocked him cold with a short left hand just as their long-awaited grudge match was getting under way. It was unthinkable, maybe a little bit fluky, and now the question mark hanging over Aldo’s head in regards to how he will rebound from it.
At least one person—Edgar—wonders aloud if the once-great champion can return to form, as he told Fox Sport’s Damon Martin this week:
It has to mess with you. Close losses mess with you, never mind getting knocked out with one punch. Especially to a guy like Conor, who is going to relish in it the way he does and talk about it the way he does, no one's better than him with that. I don't want to say it was embarrassing because it can happen to anybody, but for Aldo, I think it was a little embarrassing. To be on top for so long and then have it happen like that to that guy. That's definitely got to mess with him.
Edgar meanwhile has been riding fairly high since his own loss to Aldo at UFC 156. Their bout was the former 155-pound champ’s first after dropping to featherweight. It was competitive but ended in a clear-cut win for Aldo.
At the time, Edgar was coming off two close lightweight losses to Benson Henderson and maybe was still trying to figure out the best way to make the cut to featherweight, too. He hasn’t lost since, capping his current run with a first-round knockout of Chad Mendes last December.
If you ask Edgar, there will be a big difference between the guy Aldo fought three years ago and the guy he’ll fight this weekend.
"When we fought the last time, I was coming off a two-fight skid at lightweight and when you have two close fights, you start to second-guess yourself a little bit …," Edgar told Martin. "I had to forget about that."
Aldo, however, begs to differ. He said he fully expects the 34-year-old Edgar to roll into this fight looking exactly the same as he did in their first.
"I don’t see evolution in him. He has adapted to the division, but I don’t see an evolution," he said during a recent media day in Rio de Janeiro, via MMA Fighting.com’s Guilherme Cruz. "He continues doing the same game, same movement. I respect him, but I’m capable of getting there and winning."
No matter who comes out on top in this one, however, the story always turns back to McGregor. All roads still lead to him.
Even though the interim gold will be on the line, the biggest prize of the weekend for either Aldo or Edgar would be a lucrative potential future bout against the champ. Again, there’s no guarantee that’s ever going to happen.
If McGregor keeps pursuing opportunities at other weights, it might end up leaving the featherweight division and the winner of this bout in the lurch.
Still, being champion isn’t a terrible consolation prize.
