While the future of several of the UFC’s biggest stars remains up in the air, there’s one top pay-per-view draw we can officially cross off the list for 2017.
Brock Lesnar has informed the promotion that he is retiring from MMA competition, spokesmen with the UFC and USADA (the promotion’s drug-testing partner) confirmed with MMA Fighting’s Marc Raimondi on Tuesday. The writing was on the wall when UFC President Dana White told TMZ back in December that Lesnar’s fighting days were likely finished, and again last week when the WWE part-timer was removed from the UFC’s online roster of fighters.
Lesnar was already slated to sit out the first half of 2017 after being suspended one year for a pair of failed drug tests, but he had not given any prior indication that his career inside the cage was coming to a close. The former UFC heavyweight champion was victorious at UFC 200 after four-and-a-half years away from the sport, but had his win over Mark Hunt overturned after testing positive for anti-estrogen agent clomiphene.
The loss of Lesnar, whose fights cards average right around 1 million pay-per-view buys, comes at time when the UFC could really use him. The promotion enters 2017 needing “money fights” to headline their biggest cards, but sorely lacking the star power to do so. Only three fighters — Conor McGregor, Ronda Rousey and a returning Georges St-Pierre — can draw an audience comparable to Lesnar, and all of them are shelved for different reasons.
McGregor is likely taking paternity leave through the fall, and his #1 priority has become a boxing match vs. Floyd Mayweather. White thinks that Rousey is ready to hang it up, but even if she isn’t, the women's MMA pioneer probably wouldn’t come back for awhile. GSP’s management has been in talks with the UFC for months with no resolution in sight.
The landscape for tier 2 draws, fighters that can top half a million buys, is not much better. An untrustworthy Jon Jones is also suspended until July, the money-hungry Diaz brothers continue to turn down the UFC’s offers and Anderson Silva is no longer the world beater he once was.
If they’re willing to get creative, though, the UFC brass does have one ace in the hole to boost PPV sales. Coincidentally, it's a guy Lesnar once feuded with, albeit in a far different setting than the UFC's Octagon.