MMA Fighting - Reaction: Nate Diaz vs. Tony Ferguson New UFC 279 Main Event, Khamzat Chimaev Misses Weight

Episode Date: September 9, 2022

MMA Fighting's Mike Heck and Shaun Al-Shatti react to Dana White's announcement of the new top-three fights of Saturday's UFC 279 main event, headlined by Nate Diaz vs. Tony Ferguson after Khamzat Chimaev misses weight. Follow Mike Heck: @MikeHeck_JR Follow Shaun Al-Shatti: @ShaunAlShatti Subscribe: http://goo.gl/dYpsgH Check out our full video catalog: http://goo.gl/u8VvLi Visit our playlists: http://goo.gl/eFhsvM Like MMAF on Facebook: http://goo.gl/uhdg7Z Follow on Twitter: http://goo.gl/nOATUI Read More: http://www.mmafighting.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Mike Heck here for MMAfighting.com. there's a lot going on today. If you've been following along on this adventure, not only has a lot been going on today, but a lot has been going on for the past 24 hours, a little bit more than that. And in the end, ladies and gentlemen, we just found out moments ago

from UFC President Dana White that we have a brand new main event for UFC 279 going down tomorrow. It is Nate Diaz versus Tote Ferguson. That is the main event. That is now going down. Hamzat Shamaev missed weight by a lot this morning. Shuffled up the deck.

We have a brand new top three fights moving forward tomorrow. We have Nate Diaz versus Tony Ferguson, five-round main event. We got Kevin Holland versus Hamzat Samayev. And then we got Li Jhing Liang taking on Daniel Rodriguez. And this is absolute insanity. This whole day has been absolute insanity. And with that, let us bring in my main man, Shaheen Al-Shadi. We were just talking about this on the end.

fighting Twitter spaces and now here we are just a few moments later we are live on YouTube and we have a whole new UFC 279 final three fights to talk about your reaction to I mean not just Data White's reaction and just this new announcement because you figured

this is all going to happen and just took some time to get there but have can you remember a more Eve to a fight card that was crazier than this? No man no I mean this is this is absolute chaos we were we were saying it earlier in the day, but just a lot of, there's a lot of factors to this, right? One, I've been in

this industry a long time. I've been in this industry 10 years, at least minimum. UFC 200 was a crazy, you know, things happening the day or two before type of situation when DJ Dillishaw fought Joe Soto for the title. That was, again, a very late sort of noticing UFC 151 is something I've seen a couple people bring up as well. That was a week out before. I can't remember ever seeing a confluence of events like what we just saw over the last 24 hours that has completely, taken UFC 279 apart and rearranged it in a way that is by far like a much more interesting and compelling card, the card that I think a lot of people came into this week were calling for of we have these permutations of these fights. Why are we not doing them differently?

Like what we ended up with, the UFC sort of fell ass backwards into, in my, one of my eyes, and I think a lot of people eyes, is the much more interesting, the much more compelling, the much better card overall. And just the way that this has all played out, the way that we've reached this point, it's utterly poetic, right? Because there's a lot of elements to this whole event. You have Nate Diaz, a guy who is an absolute superstar for the company, who's been in the company for a long, long time, over a decade, and has just always been sort of at odds with the UFC,

even going into this last one, we sort of saw what the UFC was setting up here with the Hamzat Shmaa fight, the motivations that they were setting up. And now all of a sudden he comes into a position, he lucks into a position where he has the most leverage he has ever had in his entire career. This is a guy who seven years ago was making 16K to fight Halfield Dosanos on the co-made event of a Fox card. The fight before Halfield de Sos was about to become lightweight champion. Nate Deals was making 16K and he had obvious grievance with the promotion. And now all of a sudden he is leaving in a way where he comes out looking like the ultimate professional,

the guy who has just, again, the most leverage he has ever had in his career. And then on the other side for Tony Ferguson, we were saying this on Twitter. Twitter earlier today in spaces. But just, if you look at the arc of Tony Ferguson, this has been one of the unluckiest men in the entire sport just throughout the last several years. This is someone who had an unprecedented winning streak in this division who, I should say in the lightweight division, who never ever actually got his big fight, who never got the big fight he was supposed to get.

He never got the Connor McGregor fight. He never got the fight against Habib for the actual lightweight title. He ended up becoming this savior in the pandemic, the first pandemic show, braving all of those circumstances to put his spot on the line against Justin Gachie, he loses it and ever since then. It's just been all downhill. And now all of a sudden, with 24 hours notice, Tony Ferguson gets the biggest fight of his career, the biggest payday probably of his career, and really the big fight that he should have gotten a long time ago. It is all so poetic. The elements of all of this. And then you add the brawl yesterday with the press conference and all of a sudden we're

getting hands at Shemaya versus Kevin Holland, which by the way, great job booking that at 180 pounds, which absolutely saved the day. If that was not a 180-pound fight, a catch weight, we would have been having a different conversation entirely today. And also, you can't forget the Leach Jing Long, as well as Daniel Rodriguez, who made the best of a bad situation. Leach in particular, who is now taking on a man who is significantly heavier than him, like basically 10 pounds heavier than him on 24 hours notice. Everyone involved. Kudos to you guys. I help you all negotiated massive, massive pay bumps. And again, we end up with a UFC 279 that, to me is a far superior product than what we were going to get.

And it's just the way we got it. This is the most MMA day possible. Like this is just absolute chaos. We love chaos in the sport. We thrive in it. And this has been the most chaotic thing I have seen in a long time. It's just so weird that we're going through this way and process. We're thinking about just how badly this could all go.

And in the end, pretty much everybody won here. Because, yeah, I mean, Shemayev loses, obviously, in the Court of Public Appeals right now. but he also gets a five-round fight still. He gets to fight a guy that's been kind of busting his chops all week. So he gets to sort of negate that. He loses out on pay-free points. Tony gets the bum. Nate gets the fight that he should have gotten in the first place.

Kevin Holland is a freaking G. Win or lose no matter what happens here. And then Li Jing Liang is a freaking G too. Not only does he dress like a couple Billy, and no one really got to see it. But now I hope he's making a couple Billy because now he's fighting a guy weighed in almost 10 pounds heavier than he did. It's just crazy how this all played out.

So I just hope that pretty much everybody involved, especially the Leach and D-Rod, I don't want them to get kind of forgotten about all of this because they are now fighting each other instead of the opponents that they had, which are, to be honest, bigger names than they're fighting now. But now you got Diaz and Tony Ferguson. This just weirdly shaped out great for everybody

that it probably should have shaped up great for. 100%. I mean, if you're Nate Diaz, this is the best possible outcome you could have possibly gotten, right? Like, you didn't want, he said it himself to begin this week. He didn't want the Hamzat fight at a certain, he petitioned for months to fight anybody else. He asked for Tony Ferguson. He asked for Dustin Porier, Vicente Lucay. Like, he was just trying to get out on some sort of fun fight and the UFC was very much stalwart of just, hey, you are going, or staunchly,

I should say, saying you are going to fight this Hamza fight or you're not going to fight anybody. And so eventually it's just like, whatever, I'll just do this. Let's get out, get done with it, move on to whatever's next. And now, I mean, again, he was a giant underdog in that hamlet fight for a reason. I think a lot of us assumed that we sort of had a good read on that fight of what was probably going to happen in that fight. And now, I don't know, man, there is a complete, in total world where Nate Diaz exit the UFC on a very big win and rides off into free agency, again, off a big win, having basically

saved the entire pay-per-view, making far more money, I would imagine, than whatever he was about to make. and just again, smelling like roses. Like this is the best possible outcome for Nate Dias possible, probably the best possible outcome for Tony Ferguson possible. Again, all these guys are making so much more money right now than they were. I would assume considering all the negotiations that had to have taken place over the last six hours, it's all just crazy.

It is absolutely crazy. But days like this are why you love the sport, right, Mike? Like, this is why we do this. These are just insane days where you're just hanging on every single moment. But this is why this sport is so great because, again, I said it on Twitter spaces earlier, but like in the NFL, if you cover the NFL, the NFL is just not going to take the Kansas City chiefs out of the Super Bowl, the night before the Super Bowl. Like that's just not a thing.

This is only possible in fight sports and in particular at MMA. It's wonderful. All this is beautiful. I can't believe we ended up here. But wow, what a day. What a day indeed. And we're just getting started, honestly, because Jose Young's in Las Vegas will have your ceremonial weigh-ins on the website.

website coming up at the top of the hour. And then right after that is over, we're going to be back here. We're going to be back here. We're going to be breaking these fights down a little more in depth. Obviously, it's going to be a much different preview show that I anticipated when I woke up this morning. But I think we're going to have a lot more fun. I think we're going to be a little more free. We're not going to have any sort of bad juju attached to, especially the top two fights like we may have had this morning. But all in all, we're still getting UFC 279. We're still getting these three, all six of these fighters competing, and we're actually getting a better lineup than we had yesterday,

a better lineup than we had when we woke up this morning. So, Shaheen, I needed to get my voice a little bit of a breather right now. I've been talking for like 48 hours straight. So let's take a little break. Ceremonial's coming up, M.AFighting.com. You can watch those. It will be back a little bit later on for a live UFC 279 preview show. So get ready for that.

Shaheen, let the games begin, baby. We're just getting started. Just getting star, baby. Let's do it. All right. See you later on, everybody. You're listening to the Vox Media Podcast Network.