Mailbag: Is the Valentina Shevchenko superfight the only thing left for UFC champ Zhang Weili?

What’s next after Zhang Weili’s dominant title defense at UFC 312? Will Dominick Cruz’s retirement be the kind that actually sticks? And how might having friends high up in the U.S. government shape the future of combat sports for the UFC’s parent company?

All that and more in this week’s mailbag. To ask a question of your own, hit up @BenFowlkesMMA or @benfowlkes.bsky.social.

It definitely is, and for the simple reason that neither of them has anything else remotely interesting to do at the moment.

Seriously, who could Zhang Weili fight now? She’s beaten four of the top five women in the current UFC strawweight rankings, with lopsided wins over both of the top two fighters in her past two outings. As for Valentina Shevchenko? She got her belt back from Alexa Grasso and is now looking at a pretty uninspiring field of potential challengers. I mean, I guess you could make Shevchenko vs. Manon Fiorot next, and that would be just fine. But it would also not be anything better than just fine.

A champ vs. champ superfight, on the other hand, is always a big deal. It’s instantly a big deal, and there’s really nothing else for either of them that we could say the same about. Usually the big challenge in making this type of fight is convincing the smaller fighter to leave behind a division she’s dominated to take the risk against a larger champion. But then here’s Zhang, who seems pretty into the idea. So why not?

This is a chance to make a really big fight in the women’s divisions, and that’s something the UFC hasn’t had much of lately. Now is the time, so let’s hope it happens.

That is a very generous interpretation of Dominick Cruz’s comments about referee Keith Peterson. I can’t say you’re wrong. I can only say that Cruz was so mad about the stoppage (which was entirely justifiable under the circumstances, by the way) that he wasn’t necessarily limiting himself to olfactory facts in the moment.

As for your prediction that he’ll come out of retirement for a battle between WEC legends of a certain age, I can’t rule it out. But when a guy retires because his body simply can’t get through a training camp and make it to fight night in one piece, that’s not so much a decision that can be easily reversed as it is an admission of cold, hard realities. The spirit is willing. We know this. The flesh is almost 40 — and as you’ll recall, it struggled to stay healthy even in Cruz’s prime.

I can’t really think of much that the UFC could ask for that it doesn’t already have. There aren’t really any government restrictions on it at all. Anything it asks for from state athletic commissions, it pretty much gets. Even when the National Labor Relations Board seemed briefly willing to consider whether the UFC has been misclassifying fighters as independent contractors all these years, that too eventually got slow-played into nothing.

It’s boxing where I’d expect TKO Group Holdings Inc. to call in some favors. We just heard TKO CEO Ari Emanuel suggest that something might “happen” to the Ali Act, which currently protects pro boxers from at least some exploitative business practices. He said the Ali Act has “hurt” the sport. I find that interesting, since boxing as a sport seems to be thriving right now in a whole lot of ways.

What I suspect Emanuel means is that the Ali Act has hurt the ability of one promoter to seize control of the sport and keep all the money and talent for itself. I would say that even with a friend in the White House, it would be hard to undo a federal law that’s existed for nearly 25 years now. But then, I look around at the current functioning of the U.S. government and there’s not much I’m prepared to say couldn’t happen.

Whatever the WWE did when it showed up there and held a pro wrestling event that actually looked like an event, I’d do that. We know it’s possible now. We’ve seen it. The half-empty warehouse vibe just drains away the energy on the broadcast. It sends an instant visual message to the audience that these are not fights that matter.

That sucks for the fighters. They deserve better. And if the UFC can make an APEX event seem more like an actual event, it can only help interest and viewership. So let’s get some people in there and get to hootin’ and/or hollerin’.

One thing I took away from UFC 300 is that the UFC is still very capable of putting together a full pay-per-view event of must-watch fights. There was not one bit of filler on that lineup. Every fight was meaningful in one way or another, and almost all of them were a ton of fun to watch.

That tells you that the talent is there. It’s just being spread pretty thin by the hectic events schedule, so loading up one fight card means leaving the cupboard a little bare for others.

Take UFC 312, for example. There was an event where you definitely did not need to watch the full pay-per-view. The top two fights mattered. A scattered few on the undercard ended up being worth checking out. The rest was basically UFC Fight Night: Sydney, but dressed up as something else.

So no, you don’t need to sit there and watch every fight on every fight card. But there are still great fights happening almost every weekend. It’s just that you have to sit through a lot of filler to get there — or circle back on Sunday morning with a cup of coffee and skip to the good stuff.