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#2 UFC 232 doesn’t even need Jon Jones
Even if UFC 232 was being looked at as a “one-fight card” as some UFC pay-per-views have been previously, moving the show to another state would still look shady. But in that case, it’d be slightly more understandable, as cancelling a card causes a lot of chaos and a big loss of money, as we saw when 2012’s UFC 151 and 2014’s UFC 176 had to be scrapped due to the loss of their main events.
In this case, though, UFC 232 isn’t a “one-fight card” by any stretch of the imagination. Not only is it pretty deep in terms of talent, but in the form of Cris Cyborg vs. Amanda Nunes, it also has a perfectly acceptable main event should Jones/Gustafsson not take place.
Cyborg is even a proven pay-per-view draw for the UFC – an extremely late fight against the unknown Yana Kunitskaya drew 260,000 buys in March and her fight with Holly Holm last December did 380,000 buys – a figure higher than Jones drew against Gustafsson in their first meeting in 2013.
It’s doubtful that Cyborg/Nunes would draw as well as Jones/Gustafsson today, but it certainly wouldn’t be a pay-per-view disaster. And what’s more, the image that the promotion would give off by removing Jones for the card would be more of a positive than the extra few thousand buys that his presence will pull in.
The show wouldn’t have needed to have been cancelled and the UFC’s PR wouldn’t be taking the hit that it’s taking today.
