Joe Rogan won’t be cageside in Abu Dhabi this weekend, and the chair next to Jon Anik and Daniel Cormier now belongs to Paul Felder. MMA Junkie, citing a person with knowledge of the plans, reported Tuesday that “The Irish Dragon” will handle color commentary for UFC 333 on Saturday, Oct. 24, at Etihad Arena on Yas Island.
Anik runs play-by-play from cageside, as he usually does, with Cormier, the UFC Hall of Famer, and Felder, the retired lightweight contender, splitting the analysis between them.
Rogan’s absence comes as no shock. He doesn’t travel overseas for the UFC, which leaves the promotion to fill that third seat for every international card. Felder has been a familiar answer. Since he stepped away from competition after his Fight of the Night with Rafael dos Anjos in the UFC Vegas 14 main event in late 2020, he has called select Fight Night cards at the Meta Apex and beyond. A numbered pay-per-view with two title fights at the top is a bigger room than a Saturday at the Apex, though, and this is the kind of assignment that tells you how the company sees him.
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The rest of the crew is set, too. Brendan Fitzgerald anchors and hosts the desk, with former middleweight champion Robert Whittaker and Din Thomas working as analysts through the event and on the post-fight show. John Gooden takes the backstage interviews and real-time updates, a job Megan Olivi normally fills. Bruce Buffer, as he has for longer than some of the fighters on this card have been alive, handles the introductions and the official results.
What they’ll be calling is a heavy card. Alexander Volkanovski defends the featherweight title against Movsar Evloev in the main event. In the co-main, Petr Yan puts his bantamweight belt on the line against former 135-pound champion Merab Dvalishvili in a rubber match. The entire card streams on Paramount+ in the U.S., with prelims at 10 a.m. ET and the main card at 2 p.m. ET.
Not everyone is excited about three voices in the booth. Jesse Holland of MMA Mania wrote that he’d be perfectly happy with Anik and Cormier alone, without the “incessant yammering of a three-man squad,” before conceding that his preference won’t change anything at the UFC.
I’ll take Felder. He’s about six years removed from his last fight, close enough to remember what the fifth round of a war feels like in the legs, and he talks like a guy who still watches tape for fun. Pairing him with Cormier gives the broadcast two men who spent their careers in deep water, which matters on a night built around a featherweight title fight and a third meeting between Yan and Dvalishvili, two bantamweights who already know each other’s habits better than anyone in the building. The first prelim goes off at 10 a.m. ET Saturday.
