Saturday marks Yair Rodriguez’s first time in a UFC main event.
If things go even remotely according to plan, it won’t be his last.
Rodriguez’s clash with veteran Alex Caceres at UFC Fight Night 92 constitutes a significant milestone in the career of the 23-year-old blue-chip prospect. Less than two years and five fights into his run inside the Octagon, Rodriguez is already tabbed as a star in the making for the featherweight division.
As a native of Parral, Mexico—a city of about 100,000 people roughly 375 miles from the Texas border—Rodriguez’s allure should be obvious. The UFC’s international expansion efforts have cooled a bit in recent years, but with new ownership making an investment that can only be returned by new revenue streams and new markets, you can bet it’s going to heat up again.
The fight-happy Mexican market has proved a surprisingly tough nut to crack for the UFC thus far. You’d think it would be an easy sell—just shuttle the Octagon south of the border and let the best MMA fighting in the world sell itself to a presumably captivated fanbase.
But the UFC has always relied on homegrown superstars to spread its gospel. Like Georges St-Pierre in Canada, Vitor Belfort in Brazil and Conor McGregor in Ireland, the fight company needs a local product to carry its eight-sided flag into Mexico.
To date, finding that person has proved difficult.
UFC brass tried pretty hard to make it Cain Velasquez at first. Despite the fact the former heavyweight champion was born in California, the company cast Velasquez as a proud son of Mexico and set him opposite Fabricio Werdum as coaches on the inaugural season of The Ultimate Fighter: Latin America in spring 2014.
That gig was meant to lead to a title fight between the two at UFC 180 in Mexico City, Mexico. Unfortunately, a knee injury forced Velasquez out of the bout, and Werdum had to resort to defeating Mark Hunt in an interim championship match.
Almost eight months later, the organization finally got Velasquez and Werdum in the cage together for a title unification bout at UFC 188.
Somehow, however, the plan backfired in fairly spectacular fashion.
Velasquez showed up woefully unprepared to fight at altitude. Werdum, already with one local win under his belt and having spent considerable time in Mexico during his two training camps, garnered most of the support from the crowd inside the 23,000-seat Mexico City Arena.
He also won the title, choking out an obviously exhausted Velasquez in the third round.
And thus, what looked like a slam-dunk effort to establish Velasquez as an international star first misfired, then fizzled out completely.
Coincidentally, it was Rodriguez who won the 145-pound tournament on the season of TUF: Latin America where Velasquez and Werdum served as coaches. Since then, he’s gone 4-0 in the UFC while establishing himself as an exciting striker with enormous upside.
Might El Pantera now hold the key to the UFC finding a foothold in Mexico? Might he be the one? Right there under officials' noses this whole time?
Maybe.
Possibly.
But at least some of that potential will depend on how things go against Caceres this weekend.
Here’s Patrick Wyman, Bleacher Report’s senior fight analyst, on what Rodriguez brings to the cage:
Rodriguez has emerged as both a potential future champion type of prospect and the type of talent the UFC needs to break into the market of Mexican combat sports fans. Rodriguez is an extraordinary athlete blessed with exceptional speed and explosiveness. He's also huge for the division at 5'11", and his game relies on the twin pillars of size and physical gifts.
That combination of length and speed melds beautifully with Rodriguez's rangy kicking game, the basis of his approach to striking. He fluidly switches stances and circles through the space of the cage, cutting angles and then delivering a bewildering array of side, oblique, front, round and spinning kicks.
According to an interview with former UFC fighter-turned-commentator Brian Stann this week, Rodriguez might also have a fairly wild personal story to go along with his in-cage abilities:
A highlight-reel knockout of Andre Fili at UFC 197 in April may prove to be Rodriguez’s true breakout moment, but Saturday marks his debut as a marquee attraction in the Octagon.
Depending how you look at it, it’s either on odd place for the Mexican fighter to make his first appearance as a headliner—or a low-pressure baby step toward fashioning him into a potential promotional juggernaut.
After all, if you made a list of places Rodriguez was likely to end up batting cleanup for the UFC, Salt Lake City probably wouldn’t have been right at the top.
The organization has had a bit of a troubled history in SLC, too. The UFC’s initial attempt to land there during August 2010 turned out to be a disaster. A scheduling snafu initially placed the event—featuring Jon Jones vs. Vladimir Matyushenko as the top attraction—on a Sunday.
In notoriously religious Utah, that just didn’t fly, and the fight card ultimately had to be relocated to San Diego due to low ticket sales.
With that in mind, you can’t blame the UFC for approaching this return trip to the city nicknamed the "Crossroads of the West” with a bit of caution. Even still, Fight Night 92 might go down as the most anonymous televised UFC fight card of the entire year.
Just as this is Rodriguez’s first time as a headliner, it’ll also be the first marquee slot for Caceres. That’s sort of hard to fathom, once you consider the former Ultimate Fighter Season 12 competitor has been in the UFC for five years and 15 fights.
So the main event of Fight Night 92 has a bit of a low-profile feel—even if it is an important step forward for Rodriguez. Beyond that, the card doesn’t bring much name brand recognition to the table.
Ratings probably won’t be stellar, so the card stands as most notable for what it might mean in the long term. It either establishes Rodriguez as a bona fide main eventer or proves to be too much, too soon.
Luckily for him, he’s going off as about a 3-1 favorite over Caceres, according to Odds Shark. Entering with the No. 13 spot in the UFC’s official featherweight rankings, a victory here likely puts him in position to begin matching himself against the better-known mid-level contenders at 145 pounds.
Another item of potentially extreme interest to Rodriguez:
The fight company just announced a bout between lightweight contender Tony Ferguson and former champion Rafael dos Anjos as the headliner of a November event in Mexico City.
Should Rodriguez get through this bout against Caceres unscathed, it’s a good bet he might show up as the co-main event attraction on that fight card.
If that happens, we may begin to see if he can be the key to the UFC’s success in Mexico.
In order to be in the running as one of the fight company's most lucrative assets moving forward, however, he first needs to beat the wily but likely overmatched Caceres.
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