Joe Rogan has called more title fights than most of us have watched on purpose. So when he picks out one guy on the planet who doesn’t work for the UFC and says that guy belongs in the championship conversation, I listen. Then I check the timing, because this compliment landed right before Usman Nurmagomedov turned an Abu Dhabi trip into a detention story.
On the latest episode of the JRE MMA Show, with Paddy Pimblett sitting across from him, Rogan asked whether the UFC had signed Usman yet and said he knew the two sides were in talks. Then he added, “God, I hope they sign him.” He went further and called Usman the one fighter outside the UFC he considers “world championship caliber.” He also slotted him into the lightweight elite with Pimblett, Arman Tsarukyan and Charles Oliveira.
Then came Wednesday. Bloody Elbow reported that Nurmagomedov was filmed attacking Merab Dvalishvili in Abu Dhabi, and both men ended up detained. Fighters and fans piled on. Adam Martin posted on X that the UFC “should pass on signing Usman Nurmagomedov. More trouble than he’s worth.”
My take: Rogan was right about the fighter, and the brawl doesn’t make him less right. It makes the signing louder.
The Resume Came First
Take the Abu Dhabi footage out of it and look at where Usman sits. He’s the PFL lightweight champion. He’s a former Bellator star. He closed out his PFL contract in August by knocking out Archie Colgan, which is about the cleanest exit a free agent can write for himself. Plenty of guys coast through the last fight on a deal. He went out with a finish and walked straight onto the open market with his price going up.
The PFL’s exclusive negotiating window has now closed, so the UFC is free to make its pitch. That makes Usman the hottest free agent in MMA, and he happens to be a lightweight, which is the division where every booking feels like a pay-per-view argument. Free agents who actually move the needle almost never exist in this sport, because the UFC already holds most of the talent worth fighting about. When one shows up with a belt and a fresh knockout, you don’t let him sit in a waiting room.
The last name helps the math too. Usman is Khabib Nurmagomedov’s cousin. The UFC knows exactly what that family name sells, and it knows what that team looks like once the cage door shuts.
The Mess Is Real
I’m not going to pretend Wednesday was fine. Putting hands on someone outside a sanctioned fight and getting detained for it is a terrible look for a man in the middle of contract talks, and the outrage was earned.
The defense from his own camp didn’t help much. Islam Makhachev, the UFC welterweight champion, put the blame on Dvalishvili, pointing back to Merab slapping a friend of Umar Nurmagomedov this past summer. Tsarukyan shrugged the whole thing off as “part of the sport.” That’s thin cover. A summer slap doesn’t turn a November attack into self-defense, and the sport part only counts when there’s a referee and a cage involved.
Still, Martin’s line misreads what the UFC actually does for a living. The company finds the best fighters, puts them in a room together and charges you to watch. Heat is the product. I love a good villain, and right now Usman has more heat than anybody at 155 pounds without having thrown a single punch in the Octagon. Every one of his future opponents now has a press conference question ready to go before the poster is even printed.
Rogan Already Wrote the Matchmaking Memo
Look at the names Rogan rattled off. Pimblett, Tsarukyan, Oliveira. Every one of those fights comes with a storyline already attached.
Tsarukyan just publicly downplayed the Merab incident, so he gets to answer, every week until fight night, whether he’d lock horns with a guy he went out of his way to defend. Pimblett sat on a podcast as the guest of honor and listened to Rogan anoint somebody else as championship material. If that doesn’t sting Paddy even a little, he’s calmer than he lets on. And Oliveira against a Nurmagomedov is a matchup fans would buy without asking what else is on the card.
The worst outcome here is the UFC flinching. If Usman spends another year beating names nobody can place while the best lightweight division in the sport wonders about him, everybody loses, the fans most of all. You’d get the same tired cycle where a fighter’s reputation grows in the dark and the promotion acts surprised when people stop believing the rankings.
The smart outcome is simple. Sign him, let whatever discipline comes from Abu Dhabi play out, and book him against one of the three names Rogan said out loud. Usman already has the belt from one promotion, a knockout of Archie Colgan on the way out the door, and the UFC’s own color commentator telling a UFC lightweight to his face that the outsider is championship caliber. The only fighter missing from that conversation is the one the UFC hasn’t signed yet.
