With a rare heavyweight headliner scheduled for Saturday's UFC Nashville event, it's worth asking where all the big fighters of note have gone.
Credit to the big fella, Tom Aspinall, newly promoted UFC heavyweight champion. He put it about as honestly yet diplomatically as anyone could.
“The heavyweight division’s not exactly on fire at the moment from a name point of view,” Aspinall said in a recent interview. He pointed to the state of things in the not-so distant past, back when the ranks of the big men were populated by the likes of Stipe Miocic, Cain Velasquez, Alistair Overeem, Junior Dos Santos — you get the picture.
“Whereas now, even me who’s a heavyweight, I look through the top 15 and I’m like, I’ve not really seen [these guys] fight before,” Aspinall said.
Brother, you’re not alone. Intellectually, I know that guys like Mick Parkin (No. 12 in the UFC’s internal rankings) and Martin Buday (No. 14) are real people. I suspect I have even watched them fight. I just can’t remember a single thing about the experience. Even the fighters whose names we do know and remember, it feels like their appearances are sporadic and of unclear importance.
Take a fighter like Derrick Lewis, for example. You remember him, right? Funny guy, good at knocking people out, suffers from a rare condition that sometimes forces him to remove his shorts in public to prevent testicular overheating? Anyway, he’s fighting for the first time in over a year on Saturday. He’s the main event, in fact, headlining a UFC Fight Night show in Nashville. Real quick, without looking, can you tell me who he’s fighting? Or who that person fought in his last fight?
The answer to the first question is Tallison Teixeira, by the way. And he knocked out Justin Tafa in his UFC debut back in February. He might even be good, too. He sure is big, anyway, which has historically been a pretty reliable way to at least draw some initial curiosity in this division. For the moment, he’s also undefeated, which doesn’t hurt either.
But even Lewis couldn’t really tell you why he’s fighting this guy except for the fact that he needed to fight somebody and he knew he wasn’t in title shot territory and maybe didn’t particularly care to be.
“I want to just continue fighting taxi-cab drivers right now,” Lewis told Uncrowned's own Ariel Helwani last month. “Then we can start talking about title shots.”
A big part of the problem at heavyweight in recent years has been just how impossible it’s seemed for anyone to realistically talk title shots. Francis Ngannou defended the belt in 2022, then walked away when he couldn’t come to terms with the UFC on a new contract. That left the promotion without any champion, a problem it tried to solve by having Jon Jones fight Ciryl Gane for the vacant title in 2023.
Jones won that fight easily, then kept the belt safely at home for the next year and a half. When he did finally put it up for grabs again, it wasn’t against any current, active contender. Jones had decreed that he would only face former champ Stipe Miocic, who he basically plucked out of retirement just so he could style on him, only to then spend the next six months dithering before finally retiring himself.
In other words, it’s now been several years since the UFC heavyweight title has been in circulation, at least in any meaningful way. In other weight classes, contenders have at least some outside hope that simply winning enough fights could lead to a crack at championship gold. Not at heavyweight, though. Not really.
For a long time now the UFC’s heavyweight class has essentially been two or maybe even three different divisions. At the top you had no more than two or three fighters actually in title contention (Gane, Aspinall). Then you had the middle-class of big men who we’d at least heard of before, even if we no longer thought of them as championship material (Lewis, Alexander Volkov, Jailton Almeida, Sergei Pavlovich, Tai Tuivasa). Lastly you had the other guys, some of whom just haven't had enough chances yet to truly shine (Waldo Cortes Acosta, Teixeira), and others whom you wouldn’t recognize if they squeezed in next to you on an airplane. (You’ll just never convince me that any fight fan has ever uttered the phrase, “Oh my God, look, it’s Shamil Gaziev!”)
Saturday’s fight card is practically a UFC unicorn, with a total of three heavyweight bouts lined up. That’s probably at least something of a precautionary measure, stacking the card with backups in case someone in the main event slips on a banana peel between now and fight night, but still.
After Saturday, you have five more UFC events before you see another heavyweight fight (at least according to currently available fight cards). Saturday’s headliner is one of only two fights between ranked heavyweights anywhere on the calendar for 2025 at the moment. (The other is Cortes Acosta vs. Pavlovich on August 23, though Aspinall has said he’s agreed to a fight at an upcoming event that’s yet to be announced.)
By contrast, you can’t even throw a Modelo without hitting a featherweight or bantamweight fight on most cards. Middleweight has three headliners before heavyweight even has one more fight on the books. So what gives? Surely NFL practice squads haven’t scooped up everyone.
The good news is that there’s life at the top now. You have Aspinall out there doing his own marketing, staying visible and practically begging to stay active. But even “Gas Hands Tom” can’t do it all himself. He needs people to fight. And the rest of us need to see some action and personality in the division in order to stay interested in the meantime.
With the Jon Jones-shaped roadblock out of the way, hopefully the big fellas can get things moving again. Because it just doesn’t mean as much to be the “baddest man on the planet” if the other contenders for that title are squeezing in a fight here or there between Uber shifts.
Category: General Sports
