All we needed was one fight to get the division back on track, and UFC CEO Dana White swore he\u2019d give it to us. At one point he said it was 100% certain<\/a> that we\u2019d get Jones vs. Aspinall for the UFC heavyweight title.<\/p>\n Advertisement<\/p>\n \u201cI think it\u2019s probably the biggest fight in heavyweight history,\u201d White told reporters at the end of 2024. \u201cAnd it\u2019s a massive fight in the history of the company, too,\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s also pure fantasy at this point. The monster fight that wasn\u2019t. The unfulfilled promise of the year. What a letdown.<\/p>\n Maybe it wouldn\u2019t have been so bad if we hadn\u2019t spent the first half of 2025 being reassured, over and over again<\/a>, that this fight would happen. Even as, in public, Jones kept side-stepping the matchup, UFC executives like White kept insisting all would work out in the end. And it almost did. Jones is said to have requested some extra millions tacked on to his usual fee in order to make the fight happen. With the help of Saudi oil money, the UFC is said to have added those millions. ($30 million to be exact, as reported by Uncrowned’s own Ariel Helwani.) Then, his demands met, Jones about-faced and retired from the entire damn sport instead<\/a>.<\/p>\n Advertisement<\/p>\n Talk about a heavyweight letdown. All that build-up. All those promises and guarantees. All for nothing.<\/p>\n So fine, we moved on. How about a consolation prize? We\u2019d do Aspinall vs. Ciryl Gane instead. It wasn\u2019t the fight anyone had been asking for, but it was certainly a fight that could be made, so it was. And for all of about four minutes at UFC 321 in October, it looked like it might actually be a good one. Then Gane went and treated Aspinall\u2019s whole skull like a bowling ball, giving him the full “Three Stooges” treatment in both eyes, and that was that.<\/p>\n A no-contest finish to the year\u2019s only UFC heavyweight title fight. Can you even imagine? For as bad as the years of Tim Sylvia vs. Andrei Arlovski over and over again were, at least they saw it through to the end. This was a backup plan that no one wanted and in the end we didn\u2019t even get that. It felt like someone turned out the lights and hung a great, big sign on the UFC heavyweight division: Closed For Repairs.<\/p>\n Advertisement<\/p>\n At least Jon Jones was having fun.<\/p>\n (KENA BETANCUR via Getty Images)<\/p>\n But wait a minute, you might be saying, the UFC isn\u2019t the only MMA promotion that features heavyweights. Maybe things went better for the big men elsewhere?<\/p>\n Nope, they sure didn\u2019t. Ngannou, who won some version of the PFL\u2019s confusingly-named titles back in 2024, didn\u2019t fight at all in 2025. PFL finally got around to creating a new heavyweight title by the end of year, which former light heavyweight Vadim Nemkov won<\/a>. The fact that he beat Renan Ferreira, who was last seen getting pummeled into a dreamless sleep by Ngannou, didn\u2019t exactly give the whole affair a “baddest man on the planet” vibe. Instead it felt like backup plans and consolation prizes had become the trend even outside the UFC.<\/p>\n Advertisement<\/p>\n There was one bright spot, though. Only one, but still. Waldo Cortes-Acosta.<\/a> In 2025 he emerged as the lone pirate roaming the heavyweight waters, always ready to say damn the maneuvers and head directly toward any challenge.<\/p>\n Cortes-Acosta fought five times in 2025, an absolutely scorching pace for a heavyweight. He won four of those, including a weird one against Ante Delija that saw him nearly stopped by an illegal eye-poke<\/a> only to come back and win by TKO almost as soon as the fight was restarted. If that wasn\u2019t pleasing enough for you, he came back later that same month to beat Shamil Gaziev in enemy territory on short notice<\/a>.<\/p>\n That right there essentially made Cortes-Acosta heavyweight’s fighter of the year. No one else in the top 10 of the UFC heavyweight division fought more than twice this year. Of the five fighters ahead of Cortes Acosta on the list, including the champ Aspinall, only Sergei Pavlovich fought more than once in 2025.<\/p>\n Advertisement<\/p>\n Activity is always issue with the big fellas. In 2025, the UFC put on just 34 heavyweight bouts across 42 total events. Many\u2019s the time we went two or three or even four events in a row without a single heavyweight fight. Just in terms of output, it\u2019s the most anemic weight class in the entire sport. And yet it still holds this strange grip on our imaginations. As many times as we\u2019ve been burnt by heavyweight MMA, we never fully lose interest.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s to a better heavyweight year in 2026. One hates to imagine how it could possibly get worse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This time of year, everyone gets around to compiling their best-of lists. It\u2019s inevitable. Best fight. Best fighter.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":373511,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[570],"tags":[793,64,63,786,29825,8812,11877,785,85,787],"class_list":["post-373510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mma","tag-aspinall","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-fighting","tag-francis-ngannou","tag-heavyweight","tag-jon-jones","tag-mma","tag-sports","tag-ufc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373510","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=373510"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373510\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/373511"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=373510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=373510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=373510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"US](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/71f45b60-e286-11f0-8dfd-a7d8d56b765e.jpeg\"\/)
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