Joaquin Buckley is sick and tired of the UFC welterweight division going nowhere fast.<\/p>\n
\u201cNew Mansa\u201d had a huge 2024 that saw him fight and win four times, which must have made his 2025 all the more disappointing. That year featured just one fight: a decision loss<\/a> to Kamaru Usman in June. Since then, Buckley has been on the sidelines waiting for something to happen in the division.<\/p>\n Now the No. 9 ranked welterweight is throwing down the gauntlet on social media demanding fighters and matchmakers get to work because \u201cthe division is on standby.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHey, look, look, look, look, look,\u201d Buckley began. \u201cThe matchmakers know their job. They know better than me what they doing. But right now, they got the hottest division, and ain\u2019t nobody fighting. You got Islam out there playing wrestle ball. You know? You got Prates out there partying and clubbing. You got Morales out there twerking and twirling.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou got JDM still at the house crying. You got Leon missing again. You got Belal trying to sell war meals. You got Ian Gary watching in the corner \u2026 And oh, yeah, Shavkat\u2019s gone. Knocked out the ranks.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBoy, I don\u2019t know what\u2019s going on,\u201d he continued. \u201cLike, what\u2019s going on with the welterweight division? We gotta get things active. Come on now. This is true. Oh, yeah. Y\u2019all laughing. These ain\u2019t jokes. These ain\u2019t jokes, man. This s–t real. I\u2019m ready to see what we capable of doing, man, 2026. Because right now, we all wasting time. Every single person that\u2019s at the welterweight division wasting time.\u201d<\/p>\n Buckley is by no means alone in his assessment of the situation. Michael \u201cVenom\u201d Page has been complaining about the 170 situation<\/a> since arriving in the promotion, and ended up a part-time middleweight because of the lack of options at welterweight. He\u2019s finally insisted on fighting at 170, and the best the UFC could do for his upcoming UFC London opponent was the unranked Sam Patterson.<\/a><\/p>\n So who would Buckley like to fight? In a follow-up video he suggested Jack Della Maddalena was the perfect opponent for him. It probably helps that Jack is ranked No. 1 at welterweight and represents the fastest jump from No. 9 to the top for Joaquin. And that\u2019s the 170 pound division\u2019s problem: everyone only wants the best possible fight that will put them within position to fight for the title. No one wants to fight down, and everyone wants to stay on Islam Makhachev\u2019s schedule.<\/p>\n We don\u2019t blame the fighters for this. The system is set up to encourage this kind of behavior. But at a certain point UFC brass needs to get in there and make some fights happen. Will they? We\u2019ve been talking about this welterweight problem for the last couple of years, and so far there\u2019s been no change. But we can hope!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Joaquin Buckley is sick and tired of the UFC welterweight division going nowhere fast. \u201cNew Mansa\u201d had a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":465956,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[444],"tags":[49,48,641,638,82,702],"class_list":["post-465955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mma","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-fighting","tag-mma","tag-sports","tag-ufc-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=465955"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465955\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/465956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=465955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=465955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=465955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}