Mailbag: Who’s the biggest draw at UFC 315 in Montreal

Who (if anyone) is the main draw at UFC 315 in Montreal on Saturday? Who should be next in line in the UFC’s bantamweight division? And why can’t the PFL do more with signees like Francis Ngannou and Jake Paul?

All that and more in this week’s mailbag. To ask a question of your own, hit up @benfowlkesmma or @benfowlkes.bsky.social.

@shadore66: Who is the draw in the main or co-main to convince people to pull 80 dollars out of their pocket and buy this ppv? Belal? Valentina? Just because they have belts doesn’t mean their fights are worth 80 bucks right?

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It has to be Belal Muhammad. Has to be. Valentina Shevchenko has had a great career and deserves to be regarded as one of the best to ever do it in women’s MMA, but at this point she couldn’t move the needle with a bulldozer and 10 pounds of dynamite.

That’s not me trying to insult her as a fighter, you understand. Athletically, she’s not quite what she once was (which is fair, considering that she first won the UFC flyweight title seven years ago), but she’s still one of the WMMA greats in terms of overall achievements. It’s just that people do not seem to care right now. Somehow, even as champion, she feels like just another fighter who disappears entirely from the conversation the Monday after each title fight and doesn’t occupy any space in fans’ minds until she shows up at weigh-ins again.

So that leaves Belal. The good news for UFC 315 is, this is an interesting fight for a few different reasons. For one, I think Muhammad is still making his case to be taken seriously as welterweight champ, and the skepticism tinged with disdain that some fans regard him with could translate to a rooting interest for Jack Della Maddalena. I think this fight also has the potential to be a pretty fun clash of styles.

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Plus, if Muhammad loses, it could shake up not just welterweight but also lightweight. A lot may be riding on Saturday’s main event. And fight fans love those first hints of chaos.

@Munabear007: When it comes to who’s next at 135, what is more important a) head to head: Yan beat Sandhagen or b) record vs common opponents: Cory finished Figgy and hasn’t lost to Sugar or Merab?

Choosing between just those two options, I’d have to say the most important factor is previous record against the champ. Which is to say, Cory Sandhagen has the edge simply because he’s never fought Merab Dvalishvili or Sean O’Malley, while Petr Yan has lost to both. The UFC tends to prefer fresh matchups over reruns in title fights, and it helps even more that Sandhagen has a recent win and a finish in a UFC Fight Night main event.

But you know what tends to be the single most important factor in these decisions, overriding all others when the choice is even a little bit close? Scheduling availability. Once the UFC has picked a date on the calendar for a UFC bantamweight title fight, whichever guy picks up the phone and says yes first to that specific day and location is likely to be the next challenger. The best Sandhagen or Yan can do is position themselves to be at the top of that call list.

@NeedXtoseePosts: Are we MMA fans in danger of falling into the old boxing trap of

“They lost their 0, they must be washed / fraud”

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That’s always a risk in all combat sports. We’re an excitable bunch. And there are relatively few actual competitions to base our overly broad and utterly certain conclusions on. It’s not like the NBA, where there will another game tomorrow. It’s not even like the NFL, where you only have to wait until next Sunday to see if your quarterback is really as terrible as everyone said while filing out of the stadium last weekend.

In MMA, 15 or 20 fights could easily be the entirety of your UFC career. So if you lose one, yeah, it’s kind of a big deal and people will inevitably overreact. But not all losses (or wins) are created equal.

In Bo Nickal’s case, I think we’re looking at a young fighter who just had some of the holes in his game exposed by a good opponent who was bigger and far more experienced than him. That’s not a disaster. It’s a part of the growth process that many fighters go through early in their careers. It’s just that they don’t usually do it on ESPN in the co-main event of a UFC Fight Night.

Let’s remember that Nickal is fewer than 10 fights into his pro career. Most of those didn’t go past one round. A lot of them didn’t go past one minute. That’s really not much cage time. This loss to Reinier de Ridder shows us Nickal still has a lot of growing and learning to do before he’s ready to be in those big fights, but that’s fine. He has time. We don’t know all we need to know about him as a fighter yet. Sometimes we just have to remind ourselves that just because these fighters are on TV that does not necessarily mean we’re seeing a finished project out there.

@OntologicalTaxi: The PFL has the lineal heavyweight champ (Ngannou) and the highest profile boxer of the current era (Jake Paul). Why does their second place feel so much further back then Strikeforce, or even 2015 Bellator?

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Whoa, there. I simply cannot let you come in here and call Jake Paul the “highest profile boxer of the current era.” Absolutely not. He might have gotten a lot of attention in his last fight, but Mike Tyson and Netflix did a lot of the heavy lifting there. His next fight against the husk of Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. isn’t going to touch those viewership numbers, so let’s not get carried away.

But what I think you’re getting at here is something a lot of MMA promoters have had to learn the hard way. Opening up the wallet and signing one big talent only does so much for you. That’s because: A) that person can only compete, at most, a few times per year, and, B) that big talent still needs people to fight, or else what does it matter?

If you have the world’s best heavyweight but your competitor has the entirety of the rest of the division (or at least those precious few souls in it who really matter), you can only generate so much interest in a series of Champion vs. TBA fights.

But really, the bigger problem is that giant gulf in brand awareness. The UFC spent years making its brand a bigger star than any individual fighter. There are some definite drawbacks to this (note the lack of UFC stars at the moment, which leaves a lot of the events feeling like blandly interchangeable content for the sake of content), but the upside is that competitors can’t gain ground easily just by picking off free-agent fighters.

@WorldsWorstHero: What time is your nap time?

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As a father of two, my nap game is pretty strong. It has to be. You don’t make it through the baby and toddler years intact if you don’t learn how to grab some sleep whenever an opportunity appears, however briefly.

I’ve given this matter of the ideal nap time a lot of consideration over the years. For me, the perfect nap window is 2-2:30 p.m. — but please note I am absolutely NOT saying you should nap for that full half-hour. That would be a fool’s gambit. You’d wake up groggy and useless rather than rested and refreshed. Worse, you might even mess up your sleep for that night.

No, what you want to do is lay down for a nap some time within that window, but set an alarm so you do not sleep longer than 10-13 minutes. If you’re really tired, 15 minutes. But that’s the maximum. Any more than that and you’re playing with fire.

But a good 12-minute nap in those doldrums of the afternoon when there’s not much going on anyway? You can wake up feeling energized and ready to do something with the remainder of the day. It’s perfect and I highly recommend it.

@JedKMeshew: Is your mailbag column vs. my mailbag column the DDP vs. RDR of MMA media mailbags?

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I think it’s more like Minowaman vs. Butterbean. In order to know who is who we first must determine which one of us looks better in a plain red Speedo.

@jmprobus: Why does RDR vs Anthony Hernandez make so much sense?

I’d watch that for sure. Though I do wonder if the UFC has some plan for de Ridder, and whether that plan may have changed after he had himself a big moment in the win over Nickal.

“RDR” got on the mic afterward and called out Sean Strickland, which just in terms of profile would probably do a lot more for him than a very tough but still somewhat under-the-radar fight against “Fluffy” Hernandez. I think de Ridder has a lot of the ingredients necessary to turn into a valuable asset for the UFC at middleweight, where there’s a need for fresh faces whom people care about.