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At UFC 300 this April, the BMF title will be on the line when Justin Gaethje defends against former featherweight titleholder Max Holloway.
There’s absolutely no doubt that this fight will be a wildly entertaining one. Gaethje is widely considered one of the most exciting fighters in MMA history, while the number of dull bouts involving Holloway can probably be counted on one hand.
What does this fight mean to the bigger picture, though? And what will it do for the legacy of Holloway, who will be moving up to 155 pounds for just the second time in his 12-year UFC career?
It’s a question that’s well worth asking.
Is Max Holloway already a UFC legend?
Before exploring what a win in his upcoming BMF title bout with Justin Gaethje would do for Max Holloway’s legacy, it’s worth asking exactly what that legacy is in the first place.
Debuting in the octagon in 2012 as a fresh-faced 20-year-old, it was clear that ‘Blessed’ had raw talent. However, it took him some time to really hit his stride, and by the end of 2013, his overall record in the UFC was a middling 3-3.
Few fans could’ve predicted the meteoric rise of the Hawaiian as 2014 dawned, though. Beginning with wins over lower-level foes like Will Chope and Clay Collard, Holloway reeled off an incredible ten wins in a row. This run culminated in a victory over Anthony Pettis for the interim featherweight title at the end of 2016.
From there, ‘Blessed’ went from strength to strength. He defeated Jose Aldo to unify the titles and become the UFC’s undisputed 145-pound champion in 2017. He then defended it successfully against the Brazilian in a rematch before also turning back the challenge of Brian Ortega.
2019 saw Holloway fail to become a dual-weight champion when he was edged out by Dustin Poirier in his first bout at 155 pounds. When he dropped back to featherweight to defeat Frankie Edgar, though, talk of him challenging Aldo’s legacy as the GOAT at 145 pounds quickly restarted.
Enter Alexander Volkanovski. ‘Alexander the Great’ stunned everyone by dethroning ‘Blessed’ at UFC 245 and then defeated the Hawaiian in a rematch, too.
Since losing that rematch, Holloway has won four of five bouts, looking phenomenal against the likes of Arnold Allen and Yair Rodriguez.
Unfortunately, his lone defeat came to Volkanovski in a third bout, making him one of the only fighters to lose every bout of a UFC trilogy.
Those three losses have utterly quelled the idea of Holloway as the featherweight GOAT. Given his accomplishments, though, it’d be hard to consider ‘Blessed’ anything other than the third-best featherweight of all time.
In that sense, the Hawaiian’s legacy is definitely a great one. For a fighter with standards as high as Holloway, though, it may not be enough – hence his latest venture to 155 pounds.
What does the UFC’s BMF title really mean?
It’s fair to say that nobody needs an explanation as to what the ‘BMF’ acronym refers to, but what exactly is the UFC’s BMF title really worth? That’s debatable.
Introduced in 2019 for a main event clash between Jorge Masvidal and Nate Diaz – a fight between two ultra-popular stars that didn’t really need a title – most observers saw it as little more than a gimmick.
That feeling only increased when, after beating Diaz, Masvidal never defended the title and in fact, lost his next four bouts before eventually retiring in 2023.
After all, how could a fighter who didn’t win fights be considered the baddest man in the UFC?
At any rate, when ‘Gamebred’ hung up his gloves, it looked like the BMF title would go with him. However, just three months later, the UFC announced that the title would be making a comeback and would be on the line in a lightweight bout between Justin Gaethje and Dustin Poirier.
If the title hadn’t been considered a gimmick before this, the decision to put it on the line in this bout cemented it.
Nobody could dispute the “bad” nature of Poirier or Gaethje, but neither man had any links to Masvidal per say, and the title had also randomly jumped weight division, too.
Gaethje’s eventual head kick knockout of ‘The Diamond’ was one of the most stirring of 2023, but while it was still cool to see ‘The Highlight’ with gold around his waist again, it’s still hard to take the title seriously.
In essence, then, is Max Holloway wasting his time in chasing after it? Not exactly.
For Max Holloway, Justin Gaethje should be the title
Regardless of what Dana White might claim, the UFC’s BMF title is, in essence, worthless. The UFC promotes the baddest fighters on the planet anyway, and naturally, the baddest of them all are those who hold the promotion’s undisputed titles.
That means that at 155 pounds, the baddest man on the planet is Islam Makhachev, who smashed Charles Oliveira, not Justin Gaethje, who lost to ‘Do Bronx’ in 2022.
Despite this, ‘The Highlight’ is still one of the best lightweights in the world. Ranked at No.2 in the division, he’s given every opponent he’s ever faced – including the great Khabib Nurmagomedov – serious trouble.
On his best day, he’d have a shot at taking out either Oliveira or Makhachev, in fact.
When that is considered, a win over Gaethje, rather than the BMF title itself, should be the goal for Max Holloway in their upcoming fight.
Sure, ‘Blessed’ was beaten by Dustin Poirier in his previous foray as a lightweight, but that fight was razor-close, and – even ignoring his losses to Alexander Volkanovski – Holloway has improved greatly since then.
If he can use his incredible pressure-striking style and toughness to get past Gaethje, then suddenly, he wouldn’t be seen as only the third-best featherweight ever.
Instead, he’d have achieved something that always eluded both Volkanovski and Jose Aldo – concrete success in a different weight division.
More to the point, for the Hawaiian, the BMF title could act as a ticket to a shot at the lightweight title itself.
In that scenario, things could become very interesting. Holloway already holds one semi-controversial win over Oliveira. While he wouldn’t be favored to beat ‘Do Bronx’ in a rematch – and would be more of an underdog against Makhachev – it would be unfair to count him out of either fight.
Could Max Holloway still surpass the legacies of Alexander Volkanovski and Jose Aldo?
As the old saying goes, there’s more than one way to skin a cat, and this should ring true for Max Holloway.
While he’ll probably never climb above them in the pantheon at featherweight, if he could become a two-division champion, the Hawaiian will have arguably achieved more than his two great rivals, Jose Aldo and Alexander Volkanovski.
The only way that the Hawaiian will get that opportunity, though, is to defeat Justin Gaethje at UFC 300 to claim the BMF title.
Therefore, this fight is about far more than being considered the UFC’s baddest MF’er. For Holloway, his entire legacy is probably on the line – making this one of 2024’s most pivotal bouts.
