Mailbag: Conor McGregor claims his UFC contract is essentially voided — is he right?

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Conor McGregor thinks his UFC contract should be voided now that pay-per-views are a thing of the past. Does he have a point? (Maybe.) Plus, is there any meaningful different between UFC 324’s interim title fight and the last lightweight title fight for a vacant belt? (Yes.) And what happens when a lineal champ retires, anyway? (Depends.)

All that and more in this week’s mailbag. To ask a question of your own, hit up @BenFowlkesMMA on X or @Ben_Fowlkes on Threads.

@justlikelasagna: Is Conor right? Does not having PPV void certain fighters contracts? I’m sure the UFC has a fair and balanced attack to make sure the fighters are taken care of.

Void is a very strong word here, and it would probably take a long time and a lot of money to find out whether or not a court would agree. But I think we can all agree that, especially for a fighter like Conor McGregor, the move away from pay-per-view drastically changes what his UFC contract is worth in practical terms. It’s the question of what to do about it that gets tricky.

We had a situation similar to this once upon a time when Eddie Alvarez wanted to make the leap from Bellator to the UFC. Bellator had matching rights on his contract, so it responded to the UFC’s offer by basically swapping out UFC for Bellator but otherwise keeping the exact same contract language. Problem was, the UFC was offering Alvarez a potential cut of pay-per-view money. Bellator was too, but at the time it had never put on a single pay-per-view. So what did that offer really mean? What good does it do you to be promised a percentage of something that does not exist and may never exist?

But the UFC has pulled this off before. When it went from the sponsor era to the Reebok era, some fighters lost a lot of money. Some of them were still under contracts they’d signed after being assured by the UFC that their placement on fight cards would bring in lots of sponsor pay. So UFC executives basically changed what those contracts were worth without offering new ones. They got away with it too, because most fighters didn’t feel like they had the leverage to really push back and achieve anything beyond pissing the UFC off.

McGregor is different, though. He’s nowhere near the fighter he once was, but he’s still probably a draw. He also doesn’t need the money and does have the resources to challenge the UFC in court over this. Maybe his goal would be to get free and clear and go box Jake Paul or whatever. (You have to admit it’s shockingly plausible right now.) I think the UFC will want to come to some new agreement with him, but I also think McGregor shouldn’t expect to make the kind of scratch he did for fighting Khabib Nurmagomedov ever again.

@TylerJayAmos: what do you currently love most about the MMA landscape. We hear a lot about the negatives what's something that you currently love or you feel the wider audience loves.

For all the sport’s many, many problems, there is still nothing in the wide world of sports that beats a really big fight night. Nothing at all. The build-up and anticipation. The electricity in the air. The knowledge that it could be a bloody war to the final bell or it could end in 30 seconds. And then — except in those rare and unsatisfying occasions — the finality of it all.

This is what fight sports give us in a way that is conspicuously absent in much of the rest of our culture. There is this sense of an inescapable truth. You can say whatever you want before that cage door closes. You can get hyped up by good marketing and friendly matchmaking. But at some point it’ll just be you, the other guy and the truth. Wealth and privilege don’t exist then. It doesn’t matter who your friends are or who your daddy is. There is an honesty then that cannot be avoided.

That is the whole promise of the fight game, but especially title fights. Two people want something that only one person can have. They both believe themselves deserving of it. They’ve both told us why. And on Saturday night we’re going to find out who’s right and who’s wrong.

Where else do we get that in American life? What else distills the metaphor of sports into something as plain and obvious as single combat? When it’s good, there’s nothing better.

@AaronWHoward: What is the difference between the Interim LW title this weekend and the current Undisputed LW championship? Illia won a vacant title against Chuckie Olives who was 2 and 4 going into that fight. Feels like Islam is still champ until whichever LW belt is defended first.

By that logic, any fight is as good as any other and we can slap a UFC title on whatever and call it a title fight. Ilia Topuria was the featherweight champ. He gave that up to go up a division and fight the lightweight champ. It’s not his fault the lightweight champ also went up as soon as he got there. So he did the next best thing and fought a former champ. Not ideal, but still a decent backup option.

In UFC 324's main event we have No. 4 going up against No. 5 in the lightweight division — No. 2, by the way, is the guy Topuria knocked out cold — but we’re somehow calling it a title fight? We skipped right over the top contender! There were other options that would have made more sense, but this was the one the UFC chose.

All that said, it’s not a bad fight. It’s interesting, for a couple different reasons. I’m looking forward to watching it. But it’s a title fight in name only. The UFC just decided it needed this to be a title fight, and so it is. We ought to be able to admit that to ourselves and still enjoy it for what it actually is.

@shadore66: There's some long betting odds this weekend. If you had to pick an underdog to win from either Arnold Allen, Thug Rose, or Derrick Lewis - who would you pick?

With heavyweight being heavyweight, Derrick Lewis is probably your best choice among those options. When those big guys square up and throw, sometimes it just comes down to who lands first. “The Black Beast” has built his entire career on winning more of those than he loses. Plus now he’s feeling good on those peptides. Sorry, I mean “injectable compounds,” according to UFC VP of athlete health and performance Jeff Novitzky.

(Side note: Have you ever seen a more intentionally vague phrase than “injectable compounds”? That could mean A LOT of different things. And if you’re Waldo Cortes-Acosta, you ought to be on the horn to the UFC to ask where your injectable compounds are, assuming you’re not already on them.)

But also, when I saw those underdog odds on Arnold Allen I felt a twinge of riverboat gambler stirring deep within. He’s a solid technical fighter and here he’s up against a wildman coming off a knockout loss. I could absolutely see Allen picking apart an increasingly desperate Jean Silva. That’s why 3-to-1 odds going the other way seems wild to me.

@EyeofMihawk: Volkanovski is on the cusp of being 145 GOAT; the biggest knock on him vs Aldo is that he hasn’t faced the same variety of opponents. Has Dana (or any UFC official) offered any actual reasoning for the horrific Lopes rematch besides “if you don’t like don’t watch?”

If not for Alexander Volkanovski’s knockout loss to Topuria, I think it would be pretty easy to consider him the featherweight GOAT. He might still get my vote even with that. I think it’s mostly nostalgia fueling the argument for Jose Aldo. Volkanovski fought and beat much better opponents than what Aldo was up against for most of his prime. And I say that with nothing but respect for Aldo.

As for the Diego Lopes rematch, all I’ve heard from Dana White is that this was the fight that “made sense.” He did not elaborate on why it made sense or explain the reasoning or logic behind it at all. I don’t know if that’s because he knows it would be unconvincing or just because he can’t be bothered anymore.

@Mikewilliams450: If Francis retires without losing again in MMA, how do we decide who the lineal champion is?

First of all, I think it’s honestly pretty likely that Francis Ngannou retires without ever having another MMA fight. I wouldn’t be surprised if he fights one or two more times in boxing and then calls it a career, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

As for your lineal champ question, this has happened before. The lineal heavyweight title in boxing, at least in the gloved era, can be traced from John L. Sullivan all the way through Jack Johnson and eventually Jack Dempsey. Where it stops is when Gene Tunney beat Dempsey in back-to-back fights (shouts out to The Long Count Fight), and then had one more fight and retired in 1928. By a strict definition of lineal titles, the chain was broken right there.

But, as will happen as the years pass, eventually some fighters emerged who seemed worthy of being considered the best in the world, so they fought each other for the honor. You could argue that this didn’t happen again in boxing until Max Baer lost the title to James J. Braddock in 1935, only for Braddock to turn around and lose it to Joe Louis in 1937. In other words, lineal doesn’t have to mean passed from one fighter to another with no gaps in ownership. If it did, boxing would be coming up on a century with no lineal heavyweight champ. And what fun would that be?