It’s tempting to focus only on how much Holly Holm lost at UFC 196.
Holm’s stunning fifth-round submission defeat by Miesha Tate Saturday night obviously cost her the UFC women’s bantamweight title she won just a few months ago. It also ruined her undefeated MMA record and—at least for the moment—likely spoiled the big-money rematch against Ronda Rousey we all knew was coming later this year.
It exposed Holm’s apparent deficiencies on the ground and robbed her of much of the political capital she’d banked, especially with mainstream fans who likely knew her only as the woman who dethroned the UFC’s biggest star.
Yet in a bigger-picture context, it’s worth wondering if Holm’s loss—late in a fight she seemed on the verge of winning—might turn out to be a good thing for the women’s bantamweight division.
Sure, it means in the very short term Holm-Rousey II is off. Company president Dana White said at the UFC 196 post-fight press conference that the next likely move is to book a third meeting between Tate and Rousey, while Holm seems bound for a rehabilitative matchup against another top contender.
If you don’t understand why that’s happening, you haven’t been paying attention during the short history of the 135-pound division. Since its beginning, UFC executives have promoted it as a one-woman weight class, and the fact it would move as quickly as possible to try to get the gold back around Rousey’s waist should come as no surprise.
But it also doesn’t mean Holm is dead in the water, and that’s where things might take a turn for the better at women’s bantamweight—because perhaps three UFC stars are better than one.
We have Rousey, Tate and Holm now, and all of them seem like relatively exciting commodities, especially in the unavoidable series of bouts they’re about to have against each other.
It seems like great fun, and it constitutes a necessary and welcome 180-degree turn from how the UFC has promoted women’s MMA thus far.
From its inception in 2013 until the moment Holm shattered her aura of invincibility at UFC 193, women’s bantamweight was the Ronda Rousey show. Business consisted almost exclusively of lining her up against an interchangeable and increasingly doomed series of foils. It was a gambit that made Rousey a significant crossover star, but it did little to create a healthy, viable division around her.
Even Tate, a former Strikeforce champion who for years has qualified as WMMA’s second-biggest star, routinely got short shrift from the fight company. The UFC, it seemed, was too busy building Rousey up as a once-in-a-lifetime fighter to pay much attention to anyone else.
Tate’s frustrations came to a head in late 2015, after the UFC gave Holm the shot at Rousey’s title that had originally been promised to her. Finally, after a career of being overlooked, she appeared on The MMA Hour with Ariel Helwani to air her grievances.
"I just got really depressed, honestly ...,” Tate said (h/t MMA Fighting.com Shaun al-Shatti). “I need to know for myself, for my career, what my next move is going to be. I have a tremendous fanbase, and I don't think any of us really want retirement to be the situation. So the UFC needs to kind of wake up and smell the coffee and make something work."
And the company’s response?
"In this sport, when you start thinking about retiring, you should retire,” White told Australia's Submission Radio at the time, via MMA Fighting's Marc Raimondi. “Miesha probably should retire if that's what Miesha is thinking right now. It's probably a good idea."
That was less than four months ago.
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s simultaneously hilarious and troubling that this is how the UFC treated the woman who is now its 135-pound champion. It speaks not only to the iron-fisted way the company typically responds to labor issues, but also to the little concern it showed for any bantamweight not named Rousey.
Then, Holm inescapably changed the game.
And Tate changed it again last weekend.
End result? The UFC could go back to business as usual, promoting Rousey at the expense of everyone else. Or, it could turn this solo act into a three-horse race.
The latter has to happen eventually. We’ve known all along that one day Rousey will leave MMA for good. Either she’ll do it for a more lucrative, less taxing career in movies, or she’ll do it because she can’t reclaim the status she once enjoyed as champion.
When that day comes, it’s going to be imperative that there are other women’s bantamweight fighters who can seize the mantle and carry the division forward.
During the last few months, Holm and Tate made serious inroads toward becoming those fighters.
It’s easy to imagine now that Tate vs. Rousey III will wind up on the gala UFC 200 card in July. This week, Rousey opened as a sizeable favorite, according to Odds Shark. After watching their first two fights—in Strikeforce back in 2012 and then at UFC 168 in October 2013—it’s understandably difficult to imagine a path to victory for Tate, unless Rousey returns in the wake of the Holm loss as a broken fighter.
No matter who wins, however, the UFC suddenly has a number of interesting options. More, in fact, than if Rousey had just carried on with her dominant run.
Imagine Tate, Rousey and Holm engaged in a round-robin tournament of sorts as they decide the championship pecking order and jockey for position behind the fighter with the belt.
If such an exercise began tomorrow, I’m not sure anyone could say with any certainty which one of them would emerge with the upper hand.
It might not be the pristine and easy-to-hype dominance of Rousey’s first six fights in the Octagon and might not be the direct path to the Rousey-Holm rematch the UFC first envisioned.
But it might be something even more interesting.
And as a fan, I’ll take that every time.
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