The UFC wasn’t leaving Diego Lopes’ December to chance. Bloody Elbow reported on X on Saturday that the promotion had a backup plan ready for the featherweight contender in case Charles Oliveira turned down the BMF title fight being pitched for the end of the year. The post didn’t say who the alternate opponent would have been, and no report so far has named that fight.
It never came to that. Oliveira took the bout, and he’ll defend the BMF belt against Lopes in the main event of UFC 335 on Dec. 12 at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. Alex Pereira’s return against Sergei Pavlovich sits right underneath as a five-round heavyweight co-main, so the year-end pay-per-view has plenty of weight on it.
The backup-plan report fits with something Lopes has talked about himself. A recent story carried the headline that Lopes revealed two fights he’d agreed to before Oliveira landed on his schedule. Put those two items side by side and you get a fighter who was willing to take more than one road into December, and a promotion that kept a second door open while the Oliveira negotiations played out.
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How Lopes got here
His last swing at real gold didn’t land. Lopes fought Alexander Volkanovski for the vacant featherweight title at UFC 314 and lost, and Volkanovski now counts Lopes as a two-time victim on his résumé. Movsar Evloev, the unbeaten Russian at 20-0, also owns a win over him.
Those two are about to settle the division between themselves. Volkanovski (28-4) defends the 145-pound title against Evloev in the UFC 333 main event in Abu Dhabi on Oct. 24, a fight Petr Yan called “55/45 in favor of Volkanovski” in an interview with UFC Eurasia. Whoever walks out of Abu Dhabi with the belt has already beaten Lopes, which turns a straight featherweight rebuild into a very long walk.
Oliveira, meanwhile, gave fans a laugh this week. ESPN MMA shared a clip via UFC Brazil about the moment he realized he had to lock in after spotting Kaka watching one of his fights live.
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My take: the backup plan tells you exactly how the UFC values Lopes right now. With both men at the top of his division holding wins over him, there’s no title shot at 145 waiting anytime soon, yet the promotion still wanted him headlining in December no matter what Oliveira said. That’s a company betting on the fighter rather than the ranking. The BMF belt is the perfect lane for a guy like that, and getting Oliveira in it instead of the fallback is the best possible outcome for everybody buying the Dec. 12 card.
