The closing combating Championship isn’t having a banner week with an superb deal of drama and adjustments surrounding Saturday’s UFC 279 PPV, principally launched on by headlining welterweight Khamzat Chimaev. The Swedish fighter couldn’t wait till he entered the octagon to throw arms, first getting proper into a verbal altercation with middleweight Paulo Costa on Wednesday. He topped that by getting proper into a backstage brawl with Kevin Holland on the UFC 279 pre-battle press convention.
As a trifecta of fucking up, Chimaev missed weight by 7.5 kilos on Friday, an astronomical quantity for a pay-per-view essential event fighter that’s had months to rearrange for the bout. Switching an whole card the day earlier than fights is unprecedented as battle camps specialize for weeks on opponents’ tendencies and solutions on how to cease particular combating types like jiu-jitsu and kickboxing.
Chimaev was scheduled to battle Nate Diaz in UFC 279’s essential event, the final battle on Diaz’s current UFC contract. It’s unclear what would happen contractually, as Diaz is scheduled to be a free agent after this weekend, if he doesn’t compete on Saturday. That led to drastic adjustments being proposed to the cardboard. No official adjustments have been introduced to the current but, nonetheless the proposed adjustments could be Nate Diaz dealing with Tony Ferguson, Khamzat Chimaev actually combating Kevin Holland contained in the octagon, and Li Jingliang squaring off with Daniel Rodriguez.
The information convention the place Chimaev fought Holland was canceled, the second such incident to happen on the planet of fight sports activities this week. On early Monday, members of the All Elite Wrestling locker room, collectively with former UFC competitor CM Punk, allegedly bought proper into a backstage brawl, after Punk insulted a quantity of AEW wrestlers at a put up-current scrum. everyone involved inside the battle was suspended by agency CEO Tony Khan. The proposed adjustments to Saturday’s UFC card haven’t been introduced by the agency as of late Friday afternoon.
Chimaev was a -a thousand favourite to beat Diaz, per Caesars Sportsbook, and is seen as a rising star inside the UFC. the agency seemingly booked the 28-12 months-outdated him in direction of Diaz to assemble Chimaev’s profile on the expense of a departing former star. At Friday’s weigh-in, Chimaev solely shrugged his shoulders about coming in at 178.5 kilos. The UFC’s welterweight restrict is 171.
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