At any point in their respective careers, people would have been happy to see Donald Cerrone and Jorge Masvidal square off. They’re two of the more aggressive action fighters in the game, wild men of competing backgrounds and lifestyles who have been anywhere between respected and beloved for the better part of a decade.
Cerrone is a former UFC title contender who was also one of the hottest commodities in the WEC back in the day, where he fought for a world title on three occasions. People love that he’s either windsurfing or whooping opponents and that he’s pretty much in a permanent state of readiness to throw down.
Masvidal is, for all intents and purposes, Kimbo Slice without the beard. He was game-bred in Florida backyards, where he learned to ply his trade against some of the toughest guys you’ve never heard of. He’s done well in Sengoku and put together a little tournament run back when Bellator was into that kind of thing, and he fought for titles in almost every promotion that’s ever booked him.
And all of that, for both guys, happened at 155 pounds.
That’s pretty remarkable.
Each man’s resume is sparkling overall, but particularly excellent in the lightweight division. In the UFC alone they’ve combined to vanquish 20 foes in the class—twenty. It’s that combined excellence that made a move north for each man so surprising.
After a late-2015 loss to Rafael dos Anjos, Cerrone bounced back within a couple of months by taking a welterweight fight and winning it handily with a triangle choke over Alex Oliveira. He racked up three more wins in 2016—all by (T)KO—over notoriously durable tough outs Patrick Cote, Rick Story and Matt Brown.
Almost nobody stops any of those guys, and Cerrone stopped all of them, in a row, within a few months of one another.
Similarly, after a frustrating split-decision loss to lightweight-turned-realtor Al Iaquinta in 2015, Masvidal headed up to 170. He, perhaps surprisingly, obliterated hulking welterweight Cezar Ferreira and has also taken wins over Ross Pearson and Jake Ellenberger.
Though he’s dropped a couple of fights, to Benson Henderson and Lorenz Larkin, both were narrow split decisions against top-10 opponents—hardly the type of losses to force a man into irrelevance.
Cerrone is 4-0 at his new weight and Masvidal, with a couple of bounces, could be 5-0 there. These men are undeniably the welterweight elite, but for much of the time they were known they were known as lightweights.
It speaks to the nature of the sport that athletes find a weight class and become obsessed with the number on the scale instead of the number in the win column, but more directly it speaks to how good a fighter can be when s/he ignores convention and focuses on challenges and testing their skills.
Neither Cerrone nor Masvidal is the biggest welterweight out there, and neither has been in on title discussions. Tyron Woodley has called out Conor McGregor, Nick Diaz and Georges St-Pierre while signing on to fight Stephen Thompson, and Demian Maia is lurking in the shadows for a crack at the belt, but through gumption and performances to back it up, they’ve become beyond ignoring.
Would it be overly surprising if WME-IMG chose to give the winner of this fight a title shot? Cerrone is as marketable and popular as anyone in the sport, and Masvidal is the type of nasty, streetwise trash-talker who might just lip his way into the mix if he dispatches Cerrone convincingly and says the right things with a mic in front of him.
It’s pretty clear UFC ownership is interested in making money at the behest of competitive merit these days, and it’s a safe bet that either of these guys is going to sell harder than the kindly, respectable Maia.
And were it to come, that opportunity—just as the opportunity to co-headline this weekend’s Fox event—came only because two very good lightweights were tired of being lost in the shuffle at 155 and turned their attentions to a new challenge.
Not everyone would do that. Not everyone is cut out to take on all comers, fighting bigger opponents on any amount of notice just to get in the cage and perform.
These guys are, and it’s serving everyone interested with a bounty of rewards, entertainment and possibilities as a result.
Follow me on Twitter @matthewjryder!
Read more MMA news on BleacherReport.com