Jake Paul spent the weekend trading insults with Tommy Fury over a haunted house. Somewhere between rounds he found time to try to broker the heavyweight fight MMA never made. On Monday he posted on X asking whether Jon Jones could “request a release like Shakur Stevenson” so Jones and Francis Ngannou could finally share a cage. He tagged both men and signed off with “Please and thank you,” which is the most polite thing he wrote all weekend.
On its own, that’s a Jake Paul post, and I’ve learned to price those near zero. Jones is the reason it’s a story. Within hours, Championship Rounds flagged that Jones had reposted it. He didn’t add a statement or a caption that anyone reported. He just hit the button and let the internet do the rest.
I want this fight. I’ve wanted it for years, the way you want a horse you saw win a maiden race to someday run in the big one. But Paul’s case collapses on its own logic, and the hole is in the sentence he leaned on hardest.
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The line that sinks the pitch
“They already said they are never working with Francis,” Paul wrote. He didn’t say who he meant or where it was said, so treat it as his claim. Take it at face value anyway. If the UFC has shut the door on Ngannou for good, then Jones is the only half of this matchup the promotion controls. Releasing him means handing the whole thing (the gate, the buys, the promotional run, the headlines) to somebody else, for free. Paul framed it as giving the fans what they want. From the UFC’s side, it’s asking the house to pay out on a ticket it never sold.
And Jones is the kind of ticket a house keeps. Jose Aldo, of all people, made the case this week. Talking to MMA Fighting, Aldo compared Jones to Maradona, a guy who does dumb things away from the sport and then destroys people once he’s inside it. “He’s a guy who sells,” Aldo said. “Everybody wants to watch him fight.”
Aldo was using Jones as the counterexample to Movsar Evloev, who is 10-0 in the UFC with 10 decisions and gets Alexander Volkanovski in the UFC 333 main event in Abu Dhabi. Aldo said that if he ran the company, he’d wait for Evloev’s first loss and cut him because he doesn’t sell. MMA Fighting also noted the ongoing chatter that the promotion is leaning toward fighters who stand, trade and finish. A company tilting that hard toward attraction value does not release the attraction.
The division can’t spare him
The heavyweight picture doesn’t help Paul either. MMA Fighting’s weekly mailbag asked its writer to describe each division in one word, and he picked “Catastrophe” for heavyweight. The headline story up there lately is Alex Pereira losing to Ciryl Gane at UFC White House, complaining about shots to the back of the head, and now getting booked against Sergei Pavlovich. That’s a division running on fumes and Poatan’s grievances. Letting your biggest name walk out the door to a rival in that environment would be malpractice.
As for the Stevenson comparison, Paul offered nothing on how a UFC contract would mirror whatever Stevenson asked for in boxing. It’s a reference point picked because it sounds like precedent, which is how a lot of bad parlays get built. One leg looks good, so you assume the next one hits too.
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Follow the pronoun
The word I keep circling in Paul’s post is a small one, the first-person plural. His pitch was that freeing Jon would let him and everybody else give the fans what they want, and he wrote himself right into the middle of that sentence. Paul hasn’t fought since Anthony Joshua knocked him out last December and broke his jaw, a detail Fury gleefully threw back at him on Saturday. His résumé before the Fury loss was 6-0, padded with Anderson Silva, Tyron Woodley and Ben Askren. Paul knows exactly how to turn ex-UFC names into an event. That’s useful context. He has a motive here beyond fan happiness, and it’s the oldest one in combat sports.
None of that makes him wrong about the demand. Jones reposting it tells you the interest runs both ways, or at least that Jones enjoys watching the UFC squirm a little. A repost costs nothing, though. Sharp money doesn’t move on retweets, and neither do I. If I had to hang my own number on Jones actually getting a release off this, it would be a long shot I’d only touch for laughs, the kind of ticket you buy at the window and show your friends afterward like a souvenir.
The UFC holds every card here, and Paul’s own sentence explains why it won’t fold them. If anybody gets Dana White on a mic before UFC 333 on Saturday, Oct. 24, the question writes itself. I’d bet the under on how long his answer runs.
