A welterweight fight between bitter rivals Colby Covington and Jorge Masvidal will headline UFC 272 on March 5th at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas.
This is a fight that’s long been talked about as Covington and Masvidal are former friends, teammates and even roommates for a long-time, but their relationship has soured in recent years.
Covington in particular has been vocal about wanting to fight ‘Gamebred’, and recently Masvidal had indicated he was willing too, which paved the way for the fight to become a reality.
It comes at a time when the 33-year-old Covington is seeking to rebound after a second unsuccessful attempt to dethrone Kamaru Usman from the top of the welterweight division, losing out by unanimous decision at UFC 268 in November.
Beyond those two losses to Usman, Covington has won eight other fights against the likes of Tyron Woodley, Robbie Lawler, Rafael dos Anjos and Demian Maia to name but a few, and still remains the No.1 contender in the weight class.
As for Masvidal, he is in a somewhat similar position to Covington in that he too has now suffered two losses against Usman, having fought him in back-to-back title encounters, being outwrestled in their first short-notice meeting in 2020 and then suffering the first clean KO loss of his career in the rematch.
Prior to that Masvidal had become a major draw for the promotion after an attention-grabbing three-fight winning streak in 2019 during which he KO’d Darren Till, then also knocked out Ben Askren in a record-breaking time of just 5 seconds and followed it up by TKO’ing Nate Diaz for the one-off ‘BMF’ title.
The rivalry between Covington and Masvidal should spark a lot of headlines pre-fight and resulted in the UFC breaking from recent tradition to make it the main event even though it’s a non-title fight after a previously scheduled bantamweight title rematch between Aljamain Sterling and Petr Yan was pushed back to UFC 273.
