Poirier and Diaz, those guys started a speculation and I think that it had legs and I hope that
it gets revisited, and that is, “Hey, we're going to go ahead and fight, but guess what?
We're not going to go ahead and fight for five rounds.
So for all you people that wanted to see Dustin and I fight or Nick and I fight, we are going
to do it, but now we're going to give you almost double the time.
Oh, and by the way, in exchange for giving double the time you're going to put a title
up known as a 165-pound championship.”
I love that.
I don't know why this has been resisted so much.
And you guys love it, too.
You guys agree with me.
We're all in the same page.
The fighters want to do it.
Kevin Lee’s called for it.
Georges St.-Pierre has got no problem with it.
Conor McGregor has been discussing it.
I don't know what the pushback is.
That's the part of the scenario that as we play—
I don't know what the pushback is.
I'll offer you one piece.
This hasn’t been stated by anybody, but I'll state it for you.
I think the problem with coming up with this 165-pound championship is that now you're
only 5 pounds away from the welterweight championship.
That's just not enough.
That's not enough discrepancy.
Now you got guys that could drop down, guys that could go up.
I understand that for fighters wanting to hold multiple titles that that's a really
cool thing.
I understand that.
I'm one of them.
I get it.
I ask that you understand that for a promotion it can be a problem should the guy succeed.
We're seeing that right now.
As great of a moment as it was for Daniel Cormier to go out there, two champions, belt
and belt for Stipe’s belt, as awesome of a moment as that was, Conor McGregor walking
out the 145-pound champion to take on Eddie Alvarez, belt and belt, as cool as that is
for a poster, what do you do once the guy succeeds?
We saw what happened with Conor McGregor.
He left the sport.
He got stripped at 145.
They got to wait a few months, let him get through some—they stripped him at 155.
It becomes a little bit of a logjam.
The fans start to get confused.
The fighters in the back start to go, “Well, what about my dreams?
What about my goals?
What about the whole reason that I'm in this sport?”
The promotion itself is going, “Look, we've laid out all this material with a belt over
this guy’s shoulder and now I guess we got to Photoshop that out or maybe we should just
do a…”
There are just a lot of problems with it.
So what I'm presenting for you, do the 165-pound title.
I don't think this is going to happen for Poirier and Diaz, but I do think that there's
a little bit of time, if we all get on board and we all make enough noise, I do think that
there's some opportunity here.
And if not for them, down the road—let's do it.
The promotion and the sport love belts.
We know that.
Vince McMahon loves belts.
Boxing loves belts.
But we’re starting to see that and that's starting to get exemplified through the interim
championship.
Many people push back on that.
Some people are like me – I love it.
But I love those belts.
I get it.
I get from the marketing standpoint.
I get that something has to be on the line.
You guys got to understand, when you're fighting [00:02:59] in the mixed martial arts, by the
way, when you're fighting in the mixed martial arts, it's not like why people used to have
to fight.
If you guys will understand, if you lose a mixed martial arts fight, maybe you lose a
little prestige, maybe your ego takes a little bruise, maybe you lose a little bit of money.
But back in the olden day, it was important that you had people in your village that could
fight because if you couldn't it cost you your life, it cost you territory, it cost
you beliefs.
There were real things that people were fighting for.
Because those real things are gone and because this is unarmed combat, because this is a
sanctioned sport with competition, we got to dangle something out there that they’ll
fight over because you're not really fighting over land anymore.
You're not fighting for territory and family and life.
So we created something known as a title belt.
Great.
It worked.
But I think that those belts are important.
I think that that piece of marketing really works.
So I like that a championship is up.
But what I'm offering for you, if we can all concede how important this is to promotions,
if we can see that boxing loves it and Vince McMahon loves it and Kocher loves it and Dana
loves it, all I would suggest is now, let's just make it real championships.
I don’t like the real versus the—I think they're all championships.
But what I'm saying is, you have more weight classes, all of a sudden you don’t have
the same name for the interim title.
All of a sudden, that narrative and that dialogue goes away.
If you have a 165-pound title, one of the pushbacks has been, “What do we do about
the 170-pounders?
They're all going to want to drop down and the 65-pounders are going to want to move
up and the divisions are just too close.”
Hey, 170 becomes 175 and don’t even fight for it.
We don’t go, “Okay, new division, what are we going to do here?
Tyron Woodley, you're now the 175-pound champion.
Number 1 contender at 170 pounds, you're now #1 contender at 175 pounds.”
This has been done before.
This was done by the NCAA.
When the NCAA came in and they did weight-changing rules, and I've talked to you guys about that
extensively in the past, but one of the other things that they did aside from the one-hour
weigh-in is they added 7 pounds to every single weight class.
I ended up being a 197-pounder.
I had started out that season at 190 pounds.
One-ninety goes away, it becomes 197.
So this has happened before and I think it's a way to solve the problem.
We then have also seen today—this is all in conjunction with simply trying to figure
out the goddamned mystery of who's going to headline Madison Square Garden, which is on
November 3rd, and you can't keep the mystery a secret for too long.
It's not just a marketing ploy.
This is not just a way to build anticipation.
There are licensing issues and the guys had to get on with it, and whoever you're going
to—I'll step into a fight anytime you want me to, and there are a few guys in the back
that are just like me.
When you're asked to step into a main event, it is a little bit different.
I'd still do it and there are boys in the back like me, but it's a little bit different
because now you're talking about a five-round atmosphere.
Every day matters.
When you got to get in five-round shape as opposed to three-round shape, every single
day matters.
Every day that you got to get out of bed earlier than you want to, put on your shoes, go out
that front door and get your miles in, when you're looking at a five-round atmosphere,
it's different.
So the athletes have to be contacted.
They’ve got to be given enough time.
They then have to go through the licensing requirements.
So each and every day matters.
What I'm speculating towards—and I was right, by the way.
I realized that I was wrong, that Jon Jones versus Gustafsson isn't going to headline
that show.
But guys, in many ways I was right.
That's exactly what they tried to do.
They tried to do it and when Jon said, “No, I'm refusing to do it,” or whatever happened,
however that went, they then tried to put Gustafsson [00:06:30] in.
So I was right.
I had both guys.
I had my bulls and my bears on that.
I also was wrong, for anybody that wants to give me a hard time, in that that fight isn't
going to happen, and now we're being told that that fight may happen, Jones versus Gus.
This is breaking news.
I'm talking moments ago.
Gus versus Jones, December 31st.
So it's the same fight.
We're only talking about just over a month later.
But for some reason, it looks like it's not going to come together.
So what’s the new prediction?
That's my whole point of all this.
What’s my new prediction?
As we're running out of time, I'm starting to think we’re probably going to have a
scenario where we elevate Dustin Poirier and Nate Diaz to the main event.