Tyron Woodley Goes Off On ‘Joke’ Interim Titles
Tyron Woodley goes off on the current situation plaguing MMA. That’s the situation where the UFC seems to have the mentality that if an event doesn’t have a title on the line, then they’ll create one. This would be in the form of an interim title.
In the past, if a champion was out of action for a year or longer, then that would be an appropriate move. However, that has changed now.
The UFC 236 pay-per-view event is a good example of that. An interim lightweight fight between current featherweight champ Max Holloway and Dustin Poirier will headline. Israel Adesanya meets Kelvin Gastelum for the interim middleweight title in a fight that will serve as the co-main event.
Woodley sounded off on how devalued titles are because of the interim craze.
“This is the funny thing to me,” Woodley told MMAJunkie. “The interim belt is the biggest joke on earth. Ooh, a stacked card! A double interim belt. I’m not trying to hate, because I’m not trying to get my ass back in the dog house. But when you think about it, you’ve got a current champion, which out of all champions, Max Holloway may be our favorite champion. If you ask all the champions who their favorite champion is, we might all say Max Holloway. He don’t have to go up to fight for an interim belt. Unless he’s fighting for an actual lightweight belt, it doesn’t make sense.”
“In my situation, there was no need for an interim belt,” Woodley said. “I hadn’t even been out eight months, and I would’ve fought the person maybe the next month. I think when you do an interim just to do an interim, it takes away the juice from having a real belt.”
Woodley will make his next title defense against Kamaru Usman on Saturday at the UFC 235 pay-per-view event.
