Opinion: The UFC’s 2019, Just More Business as Usual?

Editor’s note: The views and opinions expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Sherdog.com, its affiliates and sponsors or its parent company, Evolve Media.

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After the usual, brief lull in the MMA schedule to start a new calendar year, we’re now headed into fight week as the Ultimate Fighting Championship on Saturday in Brooklyn, New York, gets its 2019 started with its debut on ESPN and possibly the symbolic end to the flyweight division. There, bantamweight king T.J. Dillashaw seeks to become a two-division champion, moving down to challenge flyweight titleholder Henry Cejudo. On the surface, it seems like things are in flux. Are they really?

As the UFC has pieced together its cards for the first half of the year, there’s certainly a lot to look forward to. We have four title fights firmed up, five if you include Jon Jones being in to defend against Anthony Smith pending his licensure. Cain Velasquez is finally returning, and Ben Askren is finally making his long-awaited UFC debut. Yet as the year has gotten rolling and we’re starting to look ahead, it strikes me that there is a superficiality to an allegedly shifting, changing UFC atmosphere. ESPN deal or not, it seems like business as usual.

Look at the stories we’ve gotten so far in 2019. It was announced that Jones’ UFC 232 rematch win over Alexander Gustafsson drew an estimated 700,000 pay-per-view buys, making it easily the second-biggest PPV of 2018, trailing only Khabib Nurmagomedov and Conor McGregor at UFC 229, which did two million buys. The promotion’s seven PPV cards averaged just under 450,000 per show, but if you eliminate UFC 229, that number drops to 286,000 or so. Suffice to say, the UFC is going to continue to hang its hat on the scant few major draws it has despite steadily putting together 13-fight cards with talented prospects mired on the prelims. True to form, Jones has already kept his enfant terrible act, bragging about not flunking his UFC 232 drug test, getting preferential treatment from commissions regarding skirting some punishment by opting to participate in a Voluntary Anti-Doping Agency program and doing his best to shame a would-be challenger in Smith, making the fight look as unappealing as possible. He’s already talking about fighting Daniel Cormier again. Well, of course he is.

On the topic of recycling fighters as cravenly as possible, the ESPN-televised mid-card portion of UFC Fight Night 143, Donald Cerrone is of course in the featured bout. When UFC 234 rolls around, we’re going to end up with an unpromoted middleweight title fight in the headliner, with Robert Whittaker facing Kelvin Gastelum. It’s a fight we’ve been waiting half a year for because of the two fighters coaching on “The Ultimate Fighter,” a dead-and-decaying program that UFC President Dana White has been adamant that the promotion is dead-set on keeping. Casual viewers will likely be more intrigued by a 43-year-old Anderson Silva fighting for the first time in two years. Despite being lined up to face a dynamic, unbeaten striker in Israel Adesanya, how has “The Spider” spent his time promoting the fight so far? By no-selling Adesanya, saying he would’ve preferred to fight Nick Diaz again and that he thinks the UFC should sanction testosterone replacement therapy, as it did in years past.

Speaking of the Diaz brothers, Nick and brother Nate Diaz remain in the MMA headlines and generate more interest and excitement despite the latter not having fought in two and a half years and the former not having set foot in the cage in four. True to form, two of the UFC’s biggest stars essentially don’t fight for the company and garner the vast majority of their media and fan attention for trashing the promotion. Again, it’s a holding pattern.

Speaking of that “Groundhog Day” kind of feeling with fighters making their reputation by dumping all over the company, every day we wake up and read headlines about Colby Covington saying something inflammatory and acting a fool. Ironically, it’s the UFC that has given him the ammo this time around by stripping him of the interim title he won last year and installing Kamaru Usman -- who has fought on one PPV card in his entire 9-0 Octagon run -- as the next challenger for welterweight champion Tyron Woodley. The 36-year-old Woodley has struggled to emerge as a star for the UFC, drawing a paltry 130,000 buys for his headlining win over Darren Till at UFC 228. Woodley being almost willfully put in positions to fail promotionally? Again, more of the same.

Last year did see the emergence of Rose Namajunas as someone the UFC could aggressively promote and build around. What did “Thug Rose” draw as her second title defense? The worst style matchup for her at 115 pounds right now: Jessica Andrade. It will come in Andrade’s native Brazilian state of Parana, with slim odds that the UFC 237 card will get the extra star power to help put more eyeballs on her. It’s increasingly rare with the way Endeavor does business that the UFC targets specific fighters for particular geographical locations, yet when it does, it somehow seems weirdly prejudicial.

Speaking of bittersweet Brazilian headliners, the UFC burying Raphael Assuncao by having him headline a minor Fight Night bill against Marlon Moraes, a man he defeated less than two years ago? Well, that’s just the theme of poor Assuncao’s career at this point.

B.J. Penn being non-committal about retiring knowing the UFC will still trot out his corpse to suck whatever star power is left inside him? When I have heard that one before? You know, other than annually for the last 15 years.

The first trip of the year to London being two months away and having no ostensible main event? Well, you know how British UFC cards tend to get booked in recent memory. We’re a long way from the salad days of UFC 70 and UFC 75 coming to Britain, as the company’s fondness for the British market continues to wane, ironically, at a time when Bellator MMA is investing heavily in the market and expanding its roster of British talent.

Junior dos Santos headlining a card in Kansas against Derrick Lewis and the event featuring one heavyweight bout with two fighters -- Blagoy Ivanov and Ben Rothwell -- dos Santos already pummeled in the last three years? Heavyweight is the ultimate repetitive and circular division in MMA, and frankly, it has me terrified that Cain Velasquez is going to get hurt before or during his forthcoming bout with Francis Ngannou.

Because of stories like the ESPN deal, the potential dissolution of the flyweight division and a willingness to embrace champion-versus-champion superfights, I see people proffering the notion that the promotion is somehow on the precipice of a new frontier. It’s not. The UFC is run like a machine, and while that has some benefits, it also has a tendency to stick the promotion in a series of uncreative and desperate holding patterns. So, around and around we go, where we land, nobody knows, but whenever we get there, the sights will likely be highly familiar.