One former UFC champion believes he should be next in line for Robert Whittaker.
That fighter is former UFC middleweight champ Chris Weidman, who gave his take on the title picture in the division over the weekend.
It’s been well documented by now that Yoel Romero battled former UFC middleweight champ Luke Rockhold this past Saturday night (February 10, 2018) in the main event of the UFC 221 pay-per-view event to find out who would be the interim champ as well as the #1 contender for Whittaker.
The original main event of this show called for Whittaker to make his first title defense against Rockhold. However, those plans got scrapped once Whittaker went down with an injury and thus the fight that fans saw over the weekend.
Despite the fact that Weidman has been out of action for several months now as he nurses a bunged up thumb injury when he picked up an impressive win over Kelvin Gastelum last July, he believes he should be next in line.
Weidman wanted a good seat for this interim title fight, and so he decided to fly over to Australia for UFC 221 where he got to see the fight play out from a nice seat at cage side.
”I think it’s good that the division will be less chaotic, less weird, so you’ll have just a straight up champion, no interims,” he told Submission Radio (transcript courtesy of MMA Mania). “As for who should fight Whittaker? I don’t know, I think I should. I just beat – what is Gastelum ranked, top five? He’s ranked fifth? I just finished him, he’s never gotten finished in his career. He just had a loss to Whittaker,” Weidman argued.
”There’s still pain, I’m able to punch decent,” he said regarding his ongoing thumb problems. “But still if I clip the thumb it still hurts. But it’s more the grappling right now, when I go to grab or do any movement I get little sharp pains so I’m not able to squeeze like I’d like. And so I’m at about the six month mark, Khabib says it takes about eight months, so maybe another two months or maybe less.”
”I’m going to go see a doctor in Las Vegas coming up here and get some injections and hopefully speed up the process.”
What are your thoughts on Weidman thinking he should be next in line to challenge Whittaker for the middleweight title? Sound off in the comment section below.
