Filed under: Featured, News, UFC

A curious thing happens when you go to the UFC website and click on the rankings for the women’s featherweight division. Instead of a list of the top 15 fighters in the weight class, you get a brief message: “No rankings available for this selection.”

That’s it. No mention of the division’s champion, Cris Cyborg. Also no mention of Holly Holm, her challenger at UFC 219 on Dec. 30. (At least, not unless you click on women’s bantamweight, and then you see Holm sitting in the No. 2 spot.)

As of this writing, women’s featherweight is the only division in the UFC to have a champion but no rankings. Even women’s flyweight, the organization’s newest weight class, has a full top 15 to compliment the inaugural champion (Nicco Montano) that it crowned earlier this month.

But for women’s featherweight, where the first UFC title fight happened nearly a year ago, apparently we still can’t get a list of names of the people who matter in the division.

That could be because the list is only one name long, and everybody knows it.

Even before she had the UFC belt – even before the UFC had one – Cyborg (19-1 MMA, 3-0 UFC) was the whole ballgame at women’s featherweight. By not establishing and maintaining a division around her, the UFC seems to be more or less admitting that fact, at least for now.

But can you really do it this way, just promoting a series of one-off title fights with contenders plucked from other divisions or promotions – or, in the case of Tonya Evinger, both?

If nothing else, it’s an interesting experiment. Instead of building up contenders and letting them prove their worth against one another, the UFC’s matchmakers seem to be asking themselves only two questions when it comes to Cyborg: 1) Who’d be fun, and 2) Who’d agree to do it?

It’s not even necessary that they be featherweights. As long as they’ll say yes and actually show up on fight night, featherweight adjacent is good enough.

The former 135-pound champ Holm (11-3 MMA, 4-3 UFC) is as good an example as any of this strategy in practice. She’s had one featherweight fight, for the inaugural UFC belt, which she lost via a somewhat controversial unanimous decision. Then she went back down to bantamweight and knocked out former title challenger Bethe Correia in the third round of an otherwise-forgettable fight.

So what did she do to get this title shot? For starters, she agreed to it, which right there isn’t a given when it comes to Cyborg. But mostly what she did is present herself with an air of possibility. She just sort of seems like someone who might have a chance against Cyborg.

She’s done this before, after all. She beat the unbeatable once, so that’s encouraging. Plus, while Holm sometimes struggles when she has to provide all the offense in a fight, she tends to do really well against opponents who agree to come right after her. It just so happens that that’s pretty much Cyborg’s whole deal.

UFC title fights have both been built on frailer ground than that. Still, it’s hard not to look past this fight to the bigger picture. Regardless of who’s wearing the women’s featherweight belt on Sunday morning, what’s the next move for the one weight class that isn’t?

Can the UFC just keep plucking challengers out of thin air? Will people still care about the champ if there are no contenders? Does the answer change if it’s anyone other than Cyborg at the top?

For the moment, it feels like the UFC is content to find out right alongside the rest of us.

For more on UFC 219, visit the UFC Rumors section of the site.

Filed under: Featured, News, UFC