Why Doesn't Anyone — Dana White Included — Seem To Know Ufc 332 Headliner Wang Cong?

UFC CEO Dana White seemed a little confused about Wang Cong this week, which is weird, considering that she's one half of the UFC 332 main event. Is that a worrisome sign for Saturday night's show in Salt Lake City?

Plus, how should we think of Raoni Barcelos' bizarre and concerning loss in a fight he was winning right up until it got scary out of nowhere? All that and more in this week's mailbag. To ask a question of your own, hit up @BenFowlkesMMA on X or @Ben_Fowlkes on Threads.

@Beastin364: Here's one for you. Do you think Dana had any idea who Wang Cong was before this week?

It didn't seem like it when he was talking to the media on Thursday. But then, I don't know if that makes him so different from the majority of MMA fans. Why should they know Wang Cong? Her entire four-fight win streak has come in prelim bouts. She's been in the UFC just a little over two years and has only had one fight on a main card — her lone professional loss to Gabriella Fernandes in 2024.

Nothing about how the UFC has positioned her has suggested that it thought she was headed for a title fight any time soon. It's made no real effort to highlight or specifically promote her before this. I know this matchmaking was essentially the work of necessity and opportunity, but you can't just flip the switch on a prelim fighter and make them instantly a household name when you need them to be.

So it didn't surprise me that White had so little to say about Wang at the press conference, or even that he appeared to confuse her with Natalia Silva when talking with reporters afterward. He's been so preoccupied with this Tyson Fury vs. Anthony Joshua fight and the war of words with Eddie Hearn, so maybe a UFC prelim fighter doesn't rate highly on his list of priorities.

What surprised me was that he wasn't prepared to fake it any better than that. You have a whole staff to get you up to speed on your own fighters! He was clearly consulting notes about these people at the press conference. And even with all that help, he couldn't be bothered to come up with a halfway decent sales pitch. It screams apathy and complacency.

@MMAMATLOCK: I keep thinking about when Cub Swanson said he was taking fights hurt so he could get the promoter's health insurance, then claim the injury happened in the fight and get surgery afterward.

Question: Could someone at TKO/UFC be pushing Foster to ban oblique kicks as a way to lower insurance or medical costs, with fighter safety being the public rationale?

Hunter Campbell has publicly said Foster was his first call when UFC was trying to establish regulation for Power Slap. Could there be a similar relationship at work here?

You're working overtime here trying to find the conspiracy theory that explains it all, when the reality is probably a lot simpler and lot more boring.

First of all, how many knee injuries is the UFC really seeing from those oblique kicks? How many surgeries and insurance claims is that one move responsible for over the years? I'm going to say not that many. We're seeing way more broken hands. We're seeing more poked eyes! We're probably also seeing more torn knee ligaments just from the generally dynamic movement inherent in the activity of fighting than we are as a result of oblique kicks. So I don't think there's any chance that this is all about lowering medical costs.

My theory? Andy Foster is pushing for this because he actually believes in it. He's the rare state athletic commission head who was an MMA fighter (and is still a menace on the jiu-jitsu mats, from what I hear). All of my experience with him over the years suggests he genuinely cares about fighters.

I think the UFC executives don't feel terribly strongly either way, but would support Foster if he decided to make it a priority. I also don't feel it's really needed, and that we'd just be giving the refs one more rule to not really enforce. But hey, that's me.

@EyeofMihawk: Raoni Barcelos fought one of the most skilled fights I've ever seen through four rounds at 39, and Yoel Romero arguably should have beat Darren Till in his mid 40s. Before that Pantoja fought his ass off against Van. What's the most impressive performance in a loss you've seen?

I'll answer your question, but can we talk about Raoni Barcelos first? He was on a five-fight win streak coming into last weekend's headliner against Raul Rosas Jr. He was winning handily on every scorecard headed into that fifth round. If things don't get totally weird at the end, he's sitting here right now with six straight wins in a very tough division, all while closing in on his 40th birthday, which isn't something you see often at this level.

Officially, it goes down as a slam knockout for Rosas. I didn't see any slam, though. I didn't see him do anything that clearly caused that knockout. I understand that it has to count as a loss for Barcelos, but it sure doesn't feel like a win for Rosas. It also doesn't make me think Barcelos is any less of a threat to the other young bucks at bantamweight going forward, assuming he can get this issue sorted and return to competition.

As for your actual question, I'll say Rory MacDonald in that loss to Robbie Lawler at UFC 189. It was one of the greatest fights I've ever seen live, and also maybe the most brutal. He brought himself and his opponent to the absolute brink. He paid a heavy price for it, too.

@CharlyOlovesyou: Which mma fighter had the most obvious style shift, for better or worse from their original game?

Somewhere out there is another universe where Diego Sanchez never started brawling it out with every opponent late in his career and instead just stayed the course as a high-output wrestler with good ground-and-pound. Maybe things turned out differently for that version of him. Maybe not everything, but maybe some things.

There are also plenty who changed for the better when they had to. Alistair Overeem once had a very effective but fairly limited game. As he got older and slower, he also got smarter. That prolonged his career, and he won a lot of fights that you wouldn't think a heavyweight his age had any business even being competitive in.

@michael_sobek: With Jiří Procházka's next fight finally officially announced, was the way he lost to a one legged Ulberg the biggest blunder in UFC history, given the fact that it was for the title? And what do you think about his fight against Sterling?

In terms of objective strategy decisions, sure, it was not smart for Jiri Prochazka to stand in front of a hobbled Carlos Ulberg and give him the only chance he had to win that fight. But you also have to remember that this is Jiri we're talking about. There is nothing conventional about him. It almost makes more sense for him to get knocked out that way than it does for him to win by just waiting carefully for the round to end and the injury to get diagnosed.

As for the UFC Qatar fight against Navajo Stirling, I'm into it. It's a good fight to find out where both guys are at this point in their careers.

@dgleeballs6: Is red panty night still a thing? Given the absence of PPVs now

If you mean that in the sense of fighters getting huge paydays for their cut of an especially successful pay-per-view, nope, that's gone. In asking around about this, I've learned that most managers don't see it as a huge loss because the pay-per-view business was in such a decline that the payouts hadn't been worthy of any special undergarments in quite some time. This way, they say, at least fighters have a clearer understanding of exactly what they're making without any false hope.

Still, it does represent one more potential revenue stream that has been diverted away from fighters and toward the corporate overlords. TKO, the UFC's parent company, got paid handsomely to move away from that pay-per-view model. The fighters have, by all accounts, seen no more than a very modest increase in pay and bonuses that barely even beats inflation. So maybe those red underthings are still making an appearance somewhere, but it's not the fighters doing the celebrating.

@LaManchaMMAx: Is there a chance that boxing media can overcome what happened to MMA media?

I think the UFC understood early on that having leverage over the narrative was key to its longterm success. I feel that boxing taking a "victory" lap over Dana White the last couple of days has made them miss the forest for the trees.

I don't think Turki hired Dana for his promotional skills, but to be louder than the media.

I think that's what he did to MMA media and he succeeded because for as great as some are in that space. They don't really affect what the UFC does.

I think boxing will find out why Turki actually hired Dana.

There's a little bit of revisionist history here. For many, many years the UFC chased after mainstream media coverage, not only to get the word out about the company and its events, but also because it wanted the legitimacy that came with that. I remember listening to UFC PR staff rolling their eyes while they talked about Lorenzo Fertitta's enduring love of print media and the pressure he put on them to get the UFC in newspapers at every possible opportunity.

But I do think there's a difference between how the UFC saw mainstream legacy media and the almost entirely online MMA media, even back then. The UFC's view on us was that we'd keep covering this no matter what, since that was our whole deal. And the people we reached would be people who were already MMA fans, so why spend the time and effort to preach to the choir? The goal was creating new fans and growing the audience.

Some of that has changed since then. Growth is less a priority now than monetizing the fanbase that already exists. But for this particular boxing match, one of the things Dana White brings to the table is his talent for being an attention lightning rod.

This whole beef with Eddie Hearn? It's only helping the promotion of the fight. It's the main thing that has expanded the conversation around this fight to include MMA fans, many of whom wouldn't know or care about it otherwise.

White gets people talking and forces them to choose a side, whether it's for him or against him. And if people are against him, that makes them for Hearn, who is also promoting this fight. At the end of the day, it's all free advertising serving the same goal for the same event.