The UFC White House card, now officially known as Freedom Fights 250, debuted at UFC 326 with a whimper rather than a roar. No Jon Jones. There is no Conor McGregor. Instead we got two normal title fights and a questionable undercard.
The overall tone on social media was one of overwhelming disappointment. Nothing particularly fun or interesting happens in the opening. Our excitement for Sean O’Malley’s fight is tempered by the obvious fact that he would have to fight Cory Sandhagen and not Aiemann Zahabi. And don’t get me started on Bo Nickal fighting Kyle Daukaus. This is not the fight the fans were demanding. Why do UFC matchmakers think they are good enough for such a historic event?
Is it better or worse that the UFC clearly tried to do something cooler and failed? According to Dana White, there was at least one big fight yesterday. Kyla Harrison vs. Amanda Nunes was also unbookable as Harrison is still recovering from neck surgery. And according to Ariel Helwani, the UFC has considered putting two-time Olympic gold medalist and NCAA Division I champion Gable Steveson on the card.
“Kayla should have been in the cards, but she wasn’t 100 percent and that’s disappointing,” Helwani said. “I heard there were discussions about Gable Steveson debuting on this card as a two-time Olympic gold medalist. He’s not on the card. That would have been a really big deal.”
It would have been really great if the UFC had pursued this. But they didn’t. Instead they went back to the well with ‘Dana White privileged’ people like Bo Nickal and Diego Lopes. They keep answering the phone inexplicably. Perhaps it’s because the list of bullies in Dana White’s mental Rolodex is ridiculously shallow.
The entire MMA scene has spent the last few months dreaming up matchmaking in the UFC White House, and I’m sure we’ll now spend weeks learning one by one why all of those options were impossible in today’s TKO-owned UFC. Maybe once the sting wears off we’ll actually start to appreciate the Freedom Fights 250 card a little more. As of now, we don’t have a bigger feel for the UFC than we have over the course of the last two years.