Just how badly did Francis Ngannou mess up by not taking that Jake Paul fight and letting Anthony Joshua have all the glory (and money)? Which current UFC event champ is the safest bet to end 2026 still in possession of the belt? And it turns out maybe Andrew Tate isn’t a great fighter after all. Who knew?!?
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.
@Beastin364: Do you think Francis watched AJ make a buttload of money for beating up Jake Paul and realized he’d screwed up big time turning that fight down?
Short answer: Definitely. Because not only did Anthony Joshua bank millions upon millions of dollars for what was an objectively easy night of work in which he faced no serious physical peril, he also became a hero to a lot of people who’d never heard of him before.
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Seriously, I looked around the various social medias in the aftermath of the Jake Paul fight and saw many, many posts from non-fight fans learning Joshua’s name for the first time. A fair amount of those posts were by women lusting after the man, but even those worked in some appreciation for his work as an influencer-wrecker.
It makes sense. Paul’s whole deal is forcing people to form an opinion about him against their will. Many of those people will form negative opinions, so they long to see him get a violent comeuppance. Being the man who delivers such just desserts is an instant popularity boost, which Francis Ngannou could have used right now.
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Also? The numbers coming from Netflix claim some 33 million people watched this fight. That’s many times greater than the viewership peak for any of Ngannou’s UFC fights. It’s also proof that, whatever you think about what Paul has done to/for boxing, he’s still one of the hottest tickets in the sport — at least on streaming TV.
@Derekrva: You’ve got $20 you never want to see again. Which current UFC champion would you bet on to hold their title through 2026?
It’s a two-man race between Islam Makhachev and Khamzat Chimaev. If you forced me to choose between them, I’d go with Chimaev as the safer bet. You look at the UFC’s middleweight division right now and you just don’t see anyone with the specific skill set that seems like it might give him problems.
Over at welterweight, you at least have the possibility of a guy like Shavkat Rakhmonov, who seems like he could maybe, possibly be a bit of stylistic kryptonite for Makhachev. You also have the outside chance that Makhachev will drop back down to lightweight or even just up and retire suddenly, like his mentor.
@nickj812: What are your hopes & fears for the new era of UFC (main) event coverage?
No numbers has me worried everything will just morph together & become basic content filler with the supposed White House event the exception.
I share that fear, to some extent. We’ve seen how the UFC is at its best when it is pushed by some external force, whether that’s a would-be competitor or the insatiable hunger for that sweet legal tender. Here it has a massively lucrative broadcast deal with Paramount, which, according to Warner Bros, overpaid for the UFC rights. That money spends whether people watch the UFC on Paramount or not, which might leave the UFC lacking in incentives to put out the best possible version of its product.
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You’d think that Paramount, having paid roughly $1 billion per year to air UFC events, would have enough incentive on its end. Paramount needs this deal to result in a lot of new subscribers. That means it has a very good reason to use all of its vast media empire to make the UFC more broadly popular. What it needs from the UFC are good fights and good events that people want to see.
The UFC can absolutely do that when it wants to. Paramount just needs TKO to want to, without getting distracted by boxing and slap fighting and everything else.
@EyeofMihawk: Does the “man in the arena” quote work if actual pro fighters, who have gotten in said arena, are calling you a fraud?
As misguided as I think it was for Misfits Boxing to get into business with Andrew Tate, thereby transforming from the brand from “stupid but fun” to “stupid and gross,” the whole thing did teach us a couple things. The first is that, as suspected, Tate is not the alpha dog badass he’s been portraying himself to be. That puffed up fight record got exposed by a guy from “Too Hot To Handle,” so that’s done.
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The other thing we learned is that Tate is extremely basic. He loses a fight and goes right to the most clichéd moves in the book. Making excuses. Posting that Teddy Roosevelt “man in the arena” quote (while making zero effort to attribute it to Roosevelt, leaving some of his less educated followers to assume he wrote it himself). Telling us all that he’s still better than everyone else because at least he tried (despite saying, on multiple prior occasions, that losing is for losers and no one cares if you tried your best). He’s been basically running every play in the losing fighter playbook, oblivious to how stale and obvious it is.
In a way, this whole thing has reminded us what can, at times, be truly great about fight sports. At its best, it’s a truth machine. You can fake your way through a lot of aspects of life. You can curate an image and trick some people into thinking you’re a person you aren’t. It’s arguably easier to do now than at any prior point in history. But once you get in that ring or cage? You can’t hide from yourself anymore. And once you get out of there, win or lose, your reaction to what happened will tell us even more about who you really are.
@bear_reynolds: Happy Christmas Ben! Have watched ufc since 2005. So many characters over the years I couldn’t miss their fights. Struggle to watch anything but highlights these days. At what point does UFC’s lack of making stars/promoting people come back to bite them? 2033?
The UFC’s thinking seems to be that it needs to focus on only the brand and the stars will make themselves. There’s some truth to that. You put on enough fights and keep the cameras rolling through it all and eventually some personalities will rise above the rest to grab the attention of fans. But it does require some effort to: A) make sure people are still watching for those moments when stars arise, and, B) keep shining the spotlight on them even when they aren’t physically in the cage.
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That last part is the tough one. How many great fighters have we seen who seem to completely disappear outside of fight week? They don’t build anticipation for their next fight because we don’t even think about them until we hear Bruce Buffer calling out their names. That’s where the promoter should step in and do some, you know, promoting.
@BanginChains13: Should Ariel be allowed for MMA media awards when he covers so many other things?
They don’t stop you from winning an Oscar just because you also won a Grammy. The big homie Ariel Helwani doesn’t need me to make his case for him. And I frankly shouldn’t be doing it at all, since I am (ahem) also nominated for the Journalist of the Year award.
But if you want to know how vital Helwani is to the MMA media ecosystem, just look around at all the other websites that mine his shows for material. They rely on it. The interviews he does and quotes he gets are grist for their mills. When he takes a vacation, they’re scrambling for content. That tells you something. Even if I think it wouldn’t exactly kill us all to let someone else win the award once in a while. Maybe someone on the writing side of things. Who lives in Montana. And is currently writing this column.
