Mailbag: Is Henry Cejudo’s career on the line at UFC Seattle?

What’s really on the line for Henry Cejudo in Saturday’s UFC Seattle main event? How did Jared Cannonier manage to pull out a win at the ripe old age of 40 last weekend? And will the addition of Chael Sonnen and Daniel Cormier be enough to revive viewership for the UFC’s long-running reality show?

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

First of all, let’s pause the Cejudo bashing to remind ourselves that the two fights he’s lost since returning from retirement were against current UFC bantamweight champion Merab Dvalishvili and former champ Aljamain Sterling. Losing to those guys does not make you a garbage fighter. They are both, in fact, really good. I would also argue that the Dvalishvili fight was pretty fun to watch, mostly because of him picking Cejudo up and carrying him around like an unruly toddler. But still.

Cejudo’s initial retirement never seemed all that sincere to me. He walked away as double champ and almost immediately started dropping hints that the UFC could entice him back with more money. Trouble is, the UFC never seemed interested in getting him back. UFC CEO Dana White sounded like he’d already moved on by the time he showed up to the post-fight press conference.

So of course he was always going to come back. And when he did, he got two very tough bookings right in a row. Now he’s 38 years old and a long way from title contention. He’s also, for the first time since returning, facing an opponent who doesn’t have a super strong wrestling background. That should be an opportunity for him — if he’s still got anything left in the tank.

Don’t get me wrong, Song Yadong is a good all-around fighter and a talented young athlete. But the Cejudo of five years ago would have run through him. If he can’t do that now, he should probably consider returning to the rocking chair.

Absolutely not, but I will watch some highlights. That is to say, highlights of Daniel Cormier and Chael Sonnen coaching and quipping and doing all the other stuff. It’s just the show itself I have no interest in, mostly because it’s always the same thing we’ve already seen a million times.

I actually really like the decision to have Cormier and Sonnen coach this season of “The Ultimate Fighter,” though. For one, they both have a real interest in coaching. It’s not just something they’re being forced to do in order to promote an upcoming fight. They’re also both charismatic and fun to watch, so that helps.

But also? This way we don’t take two top fighters out of the rotation for the sake of some reality series, all to build up to a fight that may or may not even happen. That alone is a win for “TUF.”

As a gentleman of a certain age, I love seeing fighters turn back the clock with a little of that veteran savvy. If you stay in this sport long enough, you’re going to watch some of your physical abilities drain away or at least diminish. That’s just the facts. Unless you can replace that with knowledge earned through experience, you won’t last.

I think of late-career Alistair Overeem as a good example. He couldn’t get by just on physical ability anymore. His game had to change, and it did. He became a more well-rounded fighter and a much smarter fighter. He won more fights than a man his age had any right to — even if they weren’t quite as exciting as they had been in his younger years.

If Dricus du Plessis can get through Khamzat Chimaev — and that right there is one big if, not just for him but for anybody in that division — then we will have to start seriously talking about him as the greatest middleweight of the post-Anderson Silva era. And that is so, so wild to me.

As for your question, I think both Alexandre Pantoja and Merab Dvalishvili could be settling in for long title reigns. Pantoja is already running short on challengers. Dvalishvili just schooled his biggest threat. So now what?

Also, if Ilia Topuria weren’t eyeing a weight class jump, I’d say he keeps the featherweight title for as long as he wants it. And if Alex Pereira can knock back the challenge from Magomed Ankalaev, I don’t see there being anyone at light heavyweight who can seriously challenge this version of him.

Fedor Emelianenko and Mirko “Cro Cop” Filipovic and it’s just an hour of them staring at each other before nodding respectfully and leaving.

About 4,000. But they have to come in the form of red wine.

We still don’t even know for sure whether or not the GFL will manage to put on a single event. Everything about it at this point remains purely speculative. Let’s see if anyone actually puts on GFL gloves and gets into a GFL cage. Then maybe we’ll get some sense of where it’s going.

I’m so old that I rented the first couple UFC events on VHS from the local Blockbuster Video some time around 1997. I was instantly captivated by the very concept of Brazilian jiu-jitsu and wanted to learn it. I finally got a chance when I went away to college at San Diego State a couple years later, and that proved to be my gateway drug to the world of MMA.

I got into a little kickboxing and boxing, but grappling was always my first love. I moved to Montana for grad school in 2004 and started training with a local MMA team. I later wrote a story for the weekly newspaper about our town’s first MMA event. That was the first piece of MMA-related writing that I ever got paid for. I think I got about $250, which I was pretty thrilled about.

At the time I didn’t think it was the start of a career because there really were no careers writing about MMA. The major sports outlets mostly chose to ignore it. I remember I once wrote an email to ESPN asking why they didn’t cover MMA and they sent me back the late-night schedule for old kickboxing matches and karate demos. I was very lucky that I was sort of around and already writing about it for my own enjoyment just as media outlets started to wake up to the existence of MMA. I continue to be really lucky to still have a job writing about it. Some days I can hardly believe it.