Demetrious Johnson has spent the past week handing out takes the way a casino hands out free drinks, and most of them have gone down rough. Kayla Harrison told Ariel Helwani she’s over his attitude. Josh Barnett spent a few hundred words on X picking apart his heel hook logic. So it’s a little funny that the one Mighty Mouse line that holds up under the math is the one aimed at the UFC itself.
Here it is, from a clip bjpenndotcom posted Thursday after Michael Page landed with Misfits Boxing: “Don’t tell me that you’re going to have the best athletes on the roster when you’re going to let the best athletes go.”
I’m a numbers guy, so let’s run them.
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The ledger on Venom
Page arrived in the UFC in March 2024 as one of the bigger free-agent pickups of the decade, a Bellator fan favorite at welterweight. He went 5-1 in the Octagon. He fought twice a year, which is about as active as anyone gets now. His contract ran out this past September and the UFC didn’t offer a new one.
Then he went on The Ariel Helwani Show and laid out what Misfits gave him: three fights, boxing or MMA, each with a seven-figure payday, inside an 18-month exclusive deal that still lets him do Real American Freestyle wrestling on the side. Yahoo Sports put the floor at $3 million. Page said that beats everything he made in the UFC, combined.
A 5-1 fighter walked out the door and immediately got paid more for three fights than for his whole run. That’s a pricing error. If a sportsbook hung a line that soft, the sharps would have it bet into the ground by lunch.
I’ll give the UFC its best argument, since nobody from the promotion is making one in these sources. Page is 39. The 5-1 run was, by Yahoo’s own description, lackluster. You can squint and see a front office deciding that a fighter pushing 40 at short odds on a new deal is bad business. I hate paying for an aging fighter’s name too. But the UFC didn’t get outbid in a bidding war it lost by a nose. By Page’s account it never put a number on the table, and Misfits found three seven-figure fights for him within about a month of his contract ending.
What Page actually said
Page didn’t sound bitter. He sounded like a guy reading the room correctly.
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“We’re in a very different time. There’s no pay-per-views anymore,” he told Uncrowned. He called the current product “a little bit of a factory line, and we’re just catering for the bar casuals that just want blood.” He also passed along a friend’s line that MMA “is probably the only sport where you could win and move backward and lose and progress forward.”
That last one is the part that stings, because the 5-1 record is the proof. He won and got shown the door. Johnson’s quote works because it’s pointed at that exact contradiction: you can’t sell the roster as the best in the world and also let a guy with that record become a free agent nobody in the building fought to keep.
The asterisk on Mighty
Now the grumpy part. Johnson spent the same week telling Sean Strickland to stop complaining about his pay.
On Helwani’s show, DJ said he fought through his own contract as champion because the UFC wouldn’t give him more money. He framed Strickland’s fight with the promotion as a yes-or-no question: “Do you want to fight, yes or no? That’s just how I do business.” He pointed out Strickland signed the deal. “I’m a black and white type person, right? He signed a contract and he’s got 5 fights left in his contract,” he said, and suggested Strickland just relinquish the belt and go chase Francis Ngannou money in boxing.
MMA Mania noted that DJ’s memory of fighting out his deal is a little generous, since at the time his contract appeared to get traded to ONE Championship for the rights to Ben Askren. Fair hit.
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So which Mighty Mouse do we believe? The one who says the UFC is bleeding top talent, or the one who says fighters signed the paper and should quit whining? I think both are true, and he hasn’t connected them. Strickland’s title defense against Nassourdine Imavov at UFC 335 never happened, and he’s floating a move to light heavyweight just to burn off his contract before boxing. Page is already gone. Same pay structure, two exits, one completed and one in progress. Johnson is right about the outcome and too quick to blame the fighter for the process.
He should have kept going. A champion stalling over money and a 5-1 welterweight leaving for a seven-figure deal elsewhere point at the same problem in the same ledger.
Page wants one more fight before 2027 and says he’ll definitely do an MMA fight under the Misfits banner. He’s floated Darren Till, whom he believes has a fight left on his old Misfits deal, plus Tommy Fury in a boxing ring, and Nate Diaz or Tony Ferguson if they step up. If Misfits books Venom against Diaz before New Year’s, the promotion that let him walk will be watching a fight it could have made itself.
