6:13 PM ET Two long-standing championship rivalries will be settled at UFC 272 in March, UFC president Dana White told ESPN on Wednesday. Featherweight champion Alexander Volkanovski will meet Max Holloway in a highly anticipated trilogy bout, while bantamweight champion Aljamain Sterling will look to unify his title against interim champ Petr Yan. Contracts have
MMA
7:46 AM ET The next 12 months could be some of the most interesting in MMA history. Conor McGregor is set to return from a broken leg. Jon Jones, who hasn’t fought since February 2020, could finally get a heavyweight title shot. Kamaru Usman is closing in on Anderson Silva‘s record of 16 straight UFC
8:28 AM ET Jeff Wagenheim The shiny brass-and-leather belts worn by UFC champions do not merely signify achievement and ascendance. For the select few fighters who earn them, these esteemed titles can bestow an aura of invincibility. Yet nothing is forever. Among the 12 weight classes in the UFC, seven fighters now wear championship belts
4:38 PM ET The UFC has booked a flyweight matchup between Askar Askarov and Kai Kara-France to a UFC Fight Night on March 26, sources confirmed to ESPN on Monday. The 125-pound contest will likely produce the UFC’s next flyweight title challenger, although the promotion has not officially made that distinction. The UFC has also
8:00 AM ET Every year in every sport brings ups and downs, memorable performances, the emergence of new stars. In mixed martial arts, the leading fight promotion, the UFC, has eight weight classes for men and four for women and ran 43 fight cards in 2021, making plenty of room available onstage for athletes to
Dec 12, 2021 Jeff Wagenheim Julianna Peña believed. She might have been the only one. Peña entered Saturday night’s UFC 269 co-main event as a 6½-to-1 betting underdog against Amanda Nunes, and who could argue with that? She was up against the greatest fighter in the history of women’s MMA, and a two-division champion. Amanda
1:48 PM ET USADA, the UFC’s anti-doping partner, has suspended fighter Michel Prazeres four years because of a second doping violation, the agency announced Thursday. According to a USADA press release, Prazeres tested positive for multiple prohibited substances: anti-estrogen agent clomiphene, metabolites of the steroid oxandrolone and the exogenous administration of testosterone “and/or its precursors.”
8:00 AM ET Since it first opened its doors in 1999, Staples Center has played host to seven NBA Finals, five WNBA Finals, four UFC pay-per-view cards, two Stanley Cup Finals and countless championship boxing matches. It was the home of the Pac-12 men’s basketball tournament for a decade and has seen multiple All-Star games
2:08 AM ET UFC Hall of Famer Rashad Evans is returning from retirement — and now his opponent is set. Evans, the former UFC light heavyweight champion, will face Gabriel Checco on the Eagle FC United States debut card Jan. 28 in Miami, sources told ESPN on Wednesday night. Eagle FC is the MMA promotion
9:00 AM ET This has been one of my annual columns for ESPN for a while now, and it’s always fun to look back at the previous year’s list to see which prospective fights, if any, came to fruition. So, before getting into the MMA fights I want to see in 2022, let’s take a