Dana White Plans To Get Rid Of Early Weigh-Ins
UFC President Dana White has had enough and is looking to make a change.
That change is to eliminate early weigh-ins for UFC events. This has been a hot topic discussed within the MMA community since it was introduced a few years ago.
In the last month, there were two fighters who were heavily criticized for missing weight. Those fighters are Mackenzie Dern and top welterweight contender Darren Till, who came in 7 and 3.5 pounds over their weight limits in their divisions.
There was another big weight miss involving Kevin Lee for his UFC Fight Night 128 main event against Edson Barboza. We also had Yoel Romero missing weight in his interim title fight against Luke Rockhold at UFC 221.
Some fight fans could make the argument that the biggest fight that had to deal with a fighter missing weight was between Khabib Nurmagomedov and Tony Ferguson that was slated for the co-main event of the UFC 209 pay-per-view event.
If you recall, the now-UFC lightweight champion was unable to make it to the scales and the fight was called off as a result.
White recently spoke with Jim Norton and Matt Serra on the latest edition of UFC Unfiltered.
During this interview where he talked about various topics including making the big announcement that the Las Vegas-based promotion is planning to put an end to the morning weigh-ins due to the recent problems.
Thus, the promotion will go back to the old ways of doing weigh-ins, which will be at the ceremonial weigh-ins in front of a crowd.
“Yes, I do think it’s that, and guess what? We’re getting rid of it. We’re looking at taking the weigh-ins back to the way they used to be. So when the guys weigh in there at the fight, that will be it. That’ll be the real weigh-in,” White stated (transcript courtesy of MMA News).
White was also asked why he thinks to have weigh-ins in the morning have caused the issues with fighters missing weight, the UFC President stated that he thinks fighters are taking advantage of the schedule.
“I believe that any time you change something, everybody looks to take as much advantage as they can of the situation. And I think that when we started doing morning weigh-ins, it was very good. Everybody was making weight. Everything was great. But then people kept cutting it closer, and closer, and closer, thinking they can put on more weight because they have more time to recover.
And the reality is, it fucked everything up. So we’re looking to going back to, at 4 o’clock, when we do the weigh-ins, those will be the real weigh-ins.”
White added that he plans to have the promotion work with the athletic commissions around the world to get this changed but did not reveal an expected timeline for when the change will go into place.
https://youtu.be/Xb5euXZBZRg?t=3776
