Two pay-per-views, one stage, eight fighters, and zero guarantee anybody behaves. Championship Rounds reported on X Tuesday that UFC 335 and UFC 336 will hold a press conference this Friday, then listed the names: Charles Oliveira, Diego Lopes, Alex Pereira, Sergei Pavlovich, Joshua Van, Manel Kape, Carlos Prates and Michael Morales.
That’s a lot of chairs. I’m already rooting for a microphone shortage.
The anchor is UFC 335, where Oliveira meets Lopes on Dec. 12. Oliveira (37-11) sits at No. 4 in the Knockout Daily lightweight rankings, holds the symbolic BMF title, and owns a stack of UFC records: most submission wins in company history at 17, most finishes at 21 and most bonuses at 21. His last fight was March 7. Lopes (28-8) is our No. 4 featherweight and hasn’t fought since June 14. Brazilian versus Brazilian, both ranked fourth in their divisions, and one of them is about to look a lot more ranked than the other.
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Oliveira also arrives with some fresh heat on his phone. Championship Rounds posted a clip Monday night of him getting baited on TikTok Live by a user in a gingerbread man avatar who wouldn’t leave his stream, and Oliveira responded with a profanity-heavy blast about clout chasing. If a cookie can get under his skin, imagine what a live crowd and a press row can do.
The rest of the table belongs to UFC 336, and the sources don’t spell out the matchups, so I won’t pretend they do. The names alone carry plenty. Pereira has been posting sparring footage that Championship Rounds called sharp, and Dovy Simu shared a separate clip of him working on his defense, which is the most terrifying sentence you can write about Alex Pereira. Prates, meanwhile, has spent the week in India, where Dovy Simu posted video of local fans losing their minds over him and another clip of him smoking a cigarette with Anthony Pettis. That’s the most Carlos Prates travel diary imaginable.
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Pavlovich, Van, Kape and Morales round out the group. Kape on a mic is a reliable source of chaos, and putting him in a room with this many personalities feels like the UFC knows exactly what it’s doing.
Friday’s presser is the first time this whole crew shares a stage. Oliveira and Lopes then have four weeks before they settle it for real on Dec. 12.
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