The Bottom Line: Fool’s Gold

Since the Ultimate Fighting Championship became the unquestioned top promotion in mixed martial arts a little over a decade ago, it has received sporadic criticism over its booking of championships. Fans and journalists have lamented fighters receiving unearned title shots, and some feel the overabundance of championships has watered down the meaning of individual titles; others feel the more divisions, the better. More recently, there has been backlash against the preponderance of unnecessary interim titles created when the regular champion is healthy and ready to defend.

At the heart of the frustration over some of these moves is the fact that UFC titles do have meaning. They have on balance been protected well and fans accept them as defining the best fighters in each division. Fans don’t want the titles to just be trinkets used as gimmicks to sell fights like they have been for other combat organizations over the years. Boxing’s sanctioning bodies make ridiculous, unjustifiable decisions regarding their titles seemingly every week, but they are greeted with a collective shrug from boxing fans because they don’t put any real stock in those once prestigious accessories.

If the UFC isn’t careful, the creation of a women’s featherweight title for UFC 208 could represent a tipping point in the transition from fans getting worked up over the booking of titles to simply not caring. The move is so obviously and cynically designed as a stunt to sell a pay-per-view that didn’t have a main event that it’s hard to even devise a rationalization for it. The danger is that fans recognize this so clearly that they react with a simple shrug and accept that titles are marketing props not worth getting worked up over.

It isn’t as if fans were clamoring for the creation of a UFC women’s featherweight division. It’s a thin division, for starters. To make matters worse, many of the best fighters in the division are under Bellator MMA contract. Bellator is creating its own women’s featherweight title and is surely invested in locking up top talent in that division. The capper is that the most well-known fighter in the division was Cris Cyborg, who failed a drug test that will keep her out of action for an extended period of time; and she had talked of not wanting to continue to cut significant weight anyway. However, none of this is even central to the real issue. The true problem isn’t fan perception of the division or the division’s potential; it’s the circumstance behind its creation.

The flyweight division hasn’t been a roaring success, but at least when the UFC created that division there was a tournament that added prestige to the championship. The tournament featured two elite bantamweights, as well as two flyweight champions from top organizations. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a solid setup. Even with that help, fans never fully embraced the flyweights. It’s difficult to create a division built around fighters who fell short in a different weight class.

By contrast, the UFC women’s featherweight title seems to have no rhyme or reason behind its creation. There isn’t a tournament featuring top featherweights from outside the UFC, like Megan Anderson in Invicta Fighting Championships. There isn’t the time for that. The UFC wanted a title for the Brooklyn, New York, show on Saturday, and because there were no options, it needed to create one out of the air in a hurry. It selected what felt like simply two random bantamweight fighters. Holly Holm has lost her last two fights but now receives a title shot at a higher weight class because she offered more star power than any other alternative. Germaine de Randamie is just a middle-of-the-road bantamweight fighter with a 6-3 record and no wins over top contenders. Absolutely nobody is fooled into thinking this determines the best 145-pound female fighter, which is what UFC titles should symbolize.

Making the UFC’s decision even more perplexing is that this new championship isn’t likely to sell the show anyway. The ploy is so superficial that it’s hard to imagine Holm-de Randamie means any more than it would without the title. If the UFC is dead seat on creating a 145-pound women’s crown, it would have been better off using this as a quarterfinal or semifinal in a tournament. By the time they got to the finals, hopefully there would be a sense that the two best women’s featherweight fighters -- besides “Cyborg” and maybe the Marloes Coenen-Julia Budd winner at Bellator 174 -- were facing off. If the goal is just to maximize revenue, building UFC 208 around Anderson Silva is the better bet anyway. Legends often continue to draw well past their athletic primes.

By the time UFC 208 arrives, it will be interesting to see how fans greet the new women’s featherweight title. The UFC is likely hoping for nothing too notable, a sort of tacit acceptance of what has been done. However, there’s no mistaking even to the most casual observer what’s going on. The UFC might be wiser to hope this new title is greeted with some semblance of derision, at least at the start. That, in contrast to apathy, would at least signal that fans who place real meaning in UFC titles still care.