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As the world’s biggest MMA promotion, the UFC’s titles have always been seen as the pinnacle of a fighter’s career. Few fighters can become UFC champions and plenty of great ones miss out on gold.
Over the years, though, the UFC has sometimes devalued their championships by creating interim titles, often putting them on the line in questionable fights.
With the UFC recently booking yet another interim title fight for next month, it’s worth looking back at their history with these kind of clashes and asking why they’ve been put together.
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So here are five of the most questionable interim title fights in UFC history.
#5. Petr Yan vs. Cory Sandhagen – UFC 267
The UFC’s latest questionably booked interim title fight is set to involve Petr Yan and Cory Sandhagen.
The two 135lbers will battle for the interim UFC bantamweight title at UFC 267 this October. The bout was made after reigning champion Aljamain Sterling was forced out of his rematch with Yan due to an ongoing spinal problem. However, there are a number of issues with the booking of this fight that make it a genuine head-scratcher.
Firstly, did the UFC really need to book an interim title fight at this stage? Sure, Sterling was unable to make the October booking, but according to a recent Instagram post by ‘Funk Master’, he initially wanted the fight pushed back to December anyway.
So given UFC 267 already has a main event, Jan Blachowicz vs. Glover Teixeira, surely the UFC could simply have waited for Sterling to return.
More to the point, while it’s understandable that Yan would be involved in any UFC bantamweight title bout due to the controversial way he lost his title, the same can’t be said for Sandhagen. ‘The Sandman’ actually lost his last fight to T.J. Dillashaw, making it extremely difficult to justify his position in any kind of title fight. In fact, this fight is the first instance in UFC history to see two fighters coming off losses fighting for a title.
Yan vs. Sandhagen will undoubtedly be a thriller of a fight, but that doesn’t make it any less questionable.
#4. Andrei Arlovski vs. Justin Eilers – UFC 53
One of the first times the UFC introduced an interim title was back in 2005. Reigning UFC heavyweight champion Frank Mir had been sidelined following a motorcycle accident and so the promotion decided to crown an interim champion by matching Andrei Arlovski and Tim Sylvia. Arlovski duly won the fight. To be fair, it wasn’t exactly a bad thing for the UFC to have an active heavyweight champion at the time.
However, Arlovski’s first title defense was genuinely bizarre, to say the least. After failing to find him a viable opponent for the main event of UFC 53 when Ricco Rodriguez reportedly withdrew, the UFC inexplicably decided to match him against Justin Eilers.
Eilers was seen as a solid prospect at the time, but he was also coming off a somewhat embarrassing knockout loss at the hands of Paul Buentello. Given the UFC had never really put a fighter coming off a loss into a title fight before, to say the move made no sense was an understatement.
Worse still, Buentello was actually booked to compete at the event too, albeit in the opening fight against newcomer Kevin Jordan. Naturally, tthedecision instantly made fans question the whole thing even further.
In the end, Arlovski vs. Eilers proved to be just as fruitless a fight as everyone expected. ‘The Pitbull’ stopped his challenger inside the first round. He then went onto defend against Buentello just four months later. Quite why the UFC booked the fight in the first place remains a mystery over 15 years on.
#3. Tony Ferguson vs. Kevin Lee – UFC 216
The period between 2016 and 2018 was a strange time for the UFC lightweight division. The strangest point was probably UFC 216’s interim lightweight title fight between Tony Ferguson and Kevin Lee.
It made sense for the UFC to introduce an interim title at the time. After all, champion Conor McGregor was just coming off his mega-money boxing match with Floyd Mayweather and there were all sorts of questions swirling around his future with the UFC.
It also made sense for Ferguson, who was on a nine-fight winning streak at the time, to be involved in any title fight in the division. Despite his own five-fight streak, it made very little sense for Lee to be challenging for the title. At the time, ‘The Motown Phenom’ was only ranked at No.7 by the UFC and the best opponent he’d beaten was probably Michael Chiesa.
Sure, some of the fighters ranked above him were already booked, but quite why the UFC didn’t just wait for Khabib Nurmagomedov to return for a clash with Ferguson was a real head-scratcher. After all, ‘The Eagle’ fought just two months later, beating Edson Barboza, who, in fact, was also ranked above Lee at the time and would’ve been a more viable fight for Ferguson too.
Lee actually acquitted himself well in the clash, only falling to a third round triangle choke. However, realistically, the fight never made sense from the word go and ended up being a weird stopgap when Ferguson never defended his interim title anyway.
#2. Justin Gaethje vs. Tony Ferguson – UFC 249
Tony Ferguson’s brush with the interim UFC lightweight title in 2017 wasn’t the only time that ‘El Cucuy’ was involved in a largely questionable interim title clash. The same thing happened in 2020, but didn’t end quite so well for him.
In this instance, the issue was purely with the UFC and their impatience. Ferguson was booked to challenge Khabib Nurmagomedov for the UFC lightweight title at UFC 249. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the show was postponed. When the promotion was able to rebook it a month later than planned, Nurmagomedov was unable to fly from Russia to the US, putting the fight on ice.
The most sensible thing to do would’ve been to wait until the fight could be re-booked later down the line, particularly as UFC 249 was already a loaded card with another title fight on tap.
However, desperate to headline with a lightweight title clash, the UFC booked Ferguson into an interim title bout with Justin Gaethje. And, of course, ‘The Highlight’ then smashed ‘El Cucuy’, breaking his 12-fight winning streak and ruining any idea of a fight between Ferguson and Khabib.
Not only did this rob the fans of the one fight they’d been dying to see for years, but it wasn’t even like Khabib was out for a long time. He ended up fighting Gaethje just five months later. He then retired after beating him, making a fight between the Dagestani and Ferguson one of the UFC’s ultimate lost dream matches.
#1. Ciryl Gane vs. Derrick Lewis – UFC 265
While it turned out to be an excellent fight and may well lead to an even better fight down the line, the recent interim UFC heavyweight title fight between Ciryl Gane and Derrick Lewis made practically no sense at all. Essentially, the promotion only booked it because they were desperate for hometown fighter Lewis to headline UFC 265 in Houston, Texas.
The original plan was for him to challenge Francis Ngannou for the UFC heavyweight title. However, reportedly, ‘The Predator’ wasn’t ready to fight just four months after defeating Stipe Miocic for the gold.
However, Ngannou never intended to sit out for an undetermined amount of time. He outright stated that he was more than willing to defend against Lewis in September, making the UFC seem both petty and impatient.
In particular, it felt baffling that Ngannou was never given a shot at an interim title when Miocic was on the shelf for the best part of a year between 2019 and 2020. Yet the UFC were willing to introduce one within a matter of months of him winning the title in his own right.
In the end, the big loser turned out to be Lewis. ‘The Black Beast’ fell to a third round TKO at the hands of Gane. While a clash between ‘Bon Gamin’ and Ngannou sounds like the best heavyweight title fight in a long time, the fact remains that introducing an interim title was still a hugely questionable decision from the UFC.
