The UFC has an insurance policy in place for Kayla Harrison vs. Amanda Nunes. Joselyne Edwards will weigh in as the official backup fighter for the bantamweight title fight at UFC 334, MMA Fighting’s Guilherme Cruz reported, citing multiple people with knowledge of the situation. Bloody Elbow’s coverage noted that Ailin Perez missed out on the spot.
The card lands at Madison Square Garden in November, though the outlets can’t agree on the night. MMA Fighting lists it as Nov. 12, while the SI FanNation report carried by Yahoo has it on November 14. Either way, Ciryl Gane vs. Josh Hokit for the undisputed heavyweight belt headlines, and Harrison vs. Nunes is the co-main on Paramount+.
This fight was supposed to happen 10 months ago. It was booked for UFC 324 on January 24 as the opening act of the UFC’s Paramount deal, then Harrison needed surgery on her neck and the whole thing got shelved. Nunes, who un-retired specifically to fight her former teammate, had the option of taking someone else for an interim title. She passed and waited.
Harrison is 3-0 in the UFC since coming over from the PFL in 2024. The Olympic gold medalist won the 135-pound title against Julianna Peña at UFC 316 and hasn’t fought since, so she’s now more than a year removed from her last appearance, with a surgically repaired neck in between.
Nunes is 23-5 and hasn’t competed since June 2023, when she beat Irene Aldana at UFC 289 and left both her gloves and her belts in the cage. She turned 38 in May. By fight night, that layoff will be well over three years long, and she walks in as a UFC Hall of Famer and former two-division champion challenging for a title she never lost.
Edwards earned the backup gig the hard way. She opened her UFC run 1-2, then had a three-fight win streak muddied by back-to-back fights where she came in over the bantamweight limit, then dropped two more to Nora Cornolle and Ailin Perez. Since a win over Tamires Vidal to close out 2024 (another missed weight, for the record), she’s won five straight. Four of those were stoppages, two in the first round, and the last one was a unanimous decision over Norma Dumont in April.
The stylistic question everybody’s asking is whether Nunes’s hands or Harrison’s judo decides it, and I think the bigger factor is time. Nunes has been out over three years. Harrison has been out over a year and is coming back from neck surgery, which is a strange thing to carry into a fight where your whole plan is clinching, throwing and grinding someone into the mat. I’ve lost money on long-layoff favorites more times than I’d admit to my accountant, so if the books hang Nunes at a short price on nostalgia alone, I’m not touching it. If Harrison’s neck holds up through the first clinch exchange, the pressure and the size should matter more than the highlight reel from 2019. And somewhere at the Garden, Edwards will be standing on the scale, which for her has been its own adventure.
