The UFC White House card, now officially known as Freedom Fights 250, made it’s debut at UFC 326 not with a bang but with a whimper. No Jon Jones. No Conor McGregor. Instead we got two normal title fights and a questionable undercard.
The general vibe on social media has been underwhelmed disappointment. There’s not even anything particularly fun or interesting going on in the undercard. Whatever excitement we had for Sean O’Malley fighting is tempered by the clear fact that it shoulda been Cory Sandhagen
fighting him, not Aiemann Zahabi. And don’t even get us started with Bo Nickal fighting Kyle Daukaus. These aren’t the fights fans are clamoring for. Why would UFC matchmakers think they’re good enough for a historic event like this?
Is it better or worse that the UFC apparently tried to do something cooler and failed? There was at least one big fight that fell through yesterday, according to Dana White. Kayla Harrison vs. Amanda Nunes also couldn’t be booked because Harrison is still recovering from neck surgery. And according to Ariel Helwani, the UFC considered putting two time Olympic gold medalist and NCAA Division I champ Gable Steveson on the card.
“Kayla should have been on the card, but she’s just not 100% and that’s a bummer,” Helwani said. “And Gable Steveson, I was told that was discussed to have him debut on this card, two-time Olympic gold medalist. He’s not on the card. That would have been kind of a great deal.”
It certainly would have been a great deal if the UFC had gone ahead with it. But they didn’t. Instead they went back to the well with ‘Dana White privilege’ guys like Bo Nickal and Diego Lopes, who inexplicably keep getting the call, possibly because the list of badasses in Dana White’s mental rolodex is ridiculously shallow.
The entire MMA scene just spent the last several months dream-matchmaking the UFC White House, and now I’m sure we’ll spend a couple of weeks learning drip by drip why all those options weren’t a possibility in today’s TKO-owned UFC. Maybe once the sting wears off, we may actually start to appreciate the Freedom Fights 250 card a little. For now, it’s what we didn’t get that’s feeling bigger, which is par for the course over the last two years with UFC.
