The Bottom Line: Unappetizing Visions

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It’s virtually impossible to find a combat sports fan who isn’t captivated by the explosive knockout. It lays bare the stakes of the competition and brings the bout to a sudden end. While MMA’s heavyweight division features the largest fighters and does produce higher knockout rates on average than lower weight divisions, more often than not over the years it has been dominated by fighters who rely on different skills than fearsome knockout power.

There have been wrestlers like Mark Coleman, Randy Couture and Cain Velasquez taking down opponents and dominating on the ground. There have been submission artists like Frank Mir, Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira and Fabricio Werdum similarly keen on looking to exploit their ground technique. Heavyweight champions relying primarily on their background in striking have been the exception, not the rule. Of those strikers, rarer still have been regular one-blow knockout artists. Francis Ngannou is a bona fide unicorn: The scariest fighter in the sport is also his division’s best. There aren’t many historical precedents for knocking out Velasquez, Curtis Blaydes, Junior dos Santos, Jairzinho Rozenstruik and Stipe Miocic consecutively in under two total rounds of time. As such, we should appreciate what we have right now, particularly since we may not have it for much longer.

Ngannou’s rampage through the heavyweight division has been defined above all by violence. However, there’s good reason that it’s rare to see elite fighters in any division knocked out in quick order fight after fight. You don’t tend to get to that level without being defensively stout and without the ability to neutralize opponents’ greatest strengths. The rarity of heavyweight stars scoring so many quick and overwhelming knockouts against top foes speaks to the difficulty Ngannou will face in continuing to dominate.

Next up: Ngannou has another high-end kickboxer who knows his tendencies and is both unbeaten and hungry. The fact the oddsmakers have made Ciryl Gane the favorite against Ngannou in the UFC 270 main event on Saturday while knowing the way the Ultimate Fighting Championship heavyweight titleholder has looked in recent fights speaks to what a dangerous challenge “The Predator” has in front of him. What’s more, the reasons to doubt how much longer we will get to see Ngannou laying waste to the world’s best MMA fighters reside more outside the Octagon than inside it.

The greater concern for Ngannou fans is the ongoing cold war between his management team and UFC management, representing bitter talent agency rivals. Neither side seems particularly keen on working with the other. Ngannou has publicly voiced his interest in boxing, clearly thinking—and he is almost certainly correct on this account—that a fight with Tyson Fury would net him significantly more money than any fight he might take in the UFC. The UFC for its part has in recent years showed an increased proclivity for simply waiting out fighters that want to negotiate hard for higher pay, with Jon Jones and Henry Cejudo being two of the most prominent examples.

If Ngannou loses against Gane, his contract will have expired and the odds of him rejoining the UFC anytime soon seem low. That’s not inherently a bad thing from a fan standpoint, but there just aren’t that many attractive options for Ngannou outside the UFC. A boxing bout would be similar to what happened with Conor McGregor: a fighter trading in on his fame to take a match with a rule set not in his favor. Deontay Wilder built up a 42-0-1 boxing record to go with his explosive power, and Fury still destroyed him. The odds would be stacked even higher against Ngannou.

Heavyweight MMA outside the UFC is also at a low ebb. Ngannou’s best options after a novelty boxing match or two would likely be the likes of Valentin Moldavsky, Vitaly Minakov, 46-year-old Cheick Kongo or 45-year-old Fabricio Werdum. That’s not an enticing set of options for Ngannou, which is a problem given that the Frenchman and the UFC don’t seem terribly interested in negotiating a new contract at this time.

Should Ngannou defeat Gane, things might actually end up even worse. The positive result is it would put pressure on the UFC to negotiate with Ngannou. However, the UFC’s recent tendency to play hardball, when combined with Ngannou’s strong desire to get a boxing clause and the acrimony between the parties, makes one pessimistic they can come together. If they can’t, the UFC will invoke the champion’s clause to say Ngannou needs to continue fighting for the company, and his team may be the one to finally challenge the legality of those clauses. For all the abundant positives of litigation in the United States, speedy resolution is not one of them and a protracted court battle seems all too possible.

All of this is a terribly unappetizing vision of the future. Hopefully it doesn’t come to fruition and fans get to see Ngannou continue to do what he does best against top-flight opposition. Either way, the looming uncertainty that surrounds the heavyweight kingpin should at least make us more appreciative of the more certain near term: another big fight against another dangerous opponent with the ever-present probability of fireworks.