Jose Aldo has a proposal for the UFC, and it’s a cold one. If Movsar Evloev comes up short against Alexander Volkanovski in the UFC 333 main event, Aldo thinks the promotion should let him go. Bloody Elbow pushed the comments out on X, and the line leading the post didn’t leave much room for interpretation: “A guy who puts on boring fights.”
Aldo is a former featherweight champion, so he gets a seat at the table when 145 is the topic. On this one, though, he’s wrong, and I say that as someone whose blood pressure spikes every time a main event drags through 25 minutes of nothing.
A title shot shouldn’t come with an ejector seat
Walk through what Aldo is actually asking for. Evloev earned a crack at the belt. He’s headlining a numbered pay-per-view. He stepped on the scale and hit 145 on the nose, half a pound heavier than Volkanovski’s 144.5, per the official weigh-in results Championship Rounds posted. He did everything a contender is supposed to do.
View post on X
And the reward for losing to the champion would be a pink slip? That logic eats itself fast. If falling short in a title fight gets you released, every challenger in the building starts asking whether the shot is worth it. Matchmakers would spend half their week convincing people to take the biggest fight of their lives. Losing to the champ shouldn’t become a firing offense because a legend finds the challenger’s fights dull.
Calling a fighter boring is a taste call. I have plenty of my own. But taste is what the fans vote on with their money and their remotes, and what matchmakers act on when they decide who headlines and who opens the prelims. Cutting a guy is a different lever entirely. You pull it for missed weight, for no-shows, for a fighter who’s clearly done. You don’t pull it because a title challenger lost to the champion in a style you didn’t enjoy.
The guy Aldo calls boring had a very fun fight week
Here’s where the boring tag really falls apart for me, because Evloev spent fight week being one of the most entertaining people in the building.
Start with the press event. The crowd started chanting his name while Volkanovski was answering a question, and Evloev shut it down himself, telling them to “respect the champ,” according to Championship Rounds. A challenger quieting his own fans so the champion can finish a sentence? That’s a guy who would touch gloves, and I’ll take that over the trash-talk merchants who refuse to every single time.
View post on X
Then there was the Nina Drama interview. She covered up before sitting down with him, and the clip Will Harris shared has her asking, “Wait, can I look at you?” Evloev’s answer: “Yea of course. I can’t look at you if you weren’t wearing this.”
The backstory is even better. Evloev later explained, in comments shared by Adam Zubayraev and reposted by Championship Rounds, that he never wanted to do the interview at all. “Honestly, I couldn’t have cared less about that interview. I wanted to turn it down, so I just set a condition I thought she would refuse,” he said. The plan backfired beautifully. “I said, ‘if she wears a hijab, I’ll agree’ so I wouldn’t just refuse outright. She agreed, so then I had to sit there and do the interview.”
That’s a man who tried to dodge a media obligation with a loophole, got called on it, and then sat there and did the thing anyway. The whole story is a little sheepish, and it’s funnier than most scripted fight-week bits.
And when someone asked which UFC fighter he would least want to be stranded on an island with, he picked Alexa Grasso, per Championship Rounds. No explanation came with it in the post, which somehow makes it better.
View post on X
Let the fight decide what the fight is
None of this means Evloev gets a free pass inside the cage. If he grinds through five rounds against Volkanovski and loses without ever making the champion uncomfortable, fans will say so, and I’ll probably be one of them. That’s fair game. Criticism is how fighters hear that they need to open up.
A release goes way past criticism, though. It’s an execution, and Aldo is calling for it before a single punch has been thrown. Evloev made the weight, sold the fight with more personality than he gets credit for, and earned his spot opposite the champion. The UFC 333 main event is official at 144.5 and 145. Let the five rounds play out, and save the guillotine talk for someone who actually deserves it.
