TJ Dillashaw is currently the seventh-ranked pound-for-pound MMA fighter in the world. He’s the UFC Bantamweight Champion. Or, at least, he was before today. As most of us did, I got a news update on my phone soon after I woke up. TJ was relinquishing his title after an adverse finding in a doping test. Dillashaw got ahead of the news and decided to release a statement. He’d give up his belt before the UFC would strip him.
It reminded me of an employee quitting before he got fired. I respect that he’s giving up his belt and getting ahead of everything. However, as I said, he would’ve had the title stripped anyway. This news was shocking to most MMA fans. TJ has always been so open about recording everything he puts into his body and getting daily blood tests. So, for him to say his team is working to understand what happened is almost hard to believe. He’s the guy that always told us he knows everything that’s going into his body.
In these cases, when the fighter is saying he doesn’t know how a certain substance entered their body or how they failed the test, I go back to the words of Michael Bisping while he was on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. He told Joe that he doesn’t believe when fighters say they don’t know how a substance got into their body. He said that, in his career, he never read a label and was never cautious about what he put into his body, and he never failed a test. Bisping said if these people fail tests because they didn’t check what they were taking that he would’ve been popped a long time ago. He doesn’t buy that excuse.
So do we believe TJ but not Jon Jones? Or, since it’s TJ’s first failed test, do we give him a pass? I don’t think it’s a pass that he gets but simply our forgiveness. He’ll take his suspension and lose his belt, and when he comes back he deserves for us to put the drug test in the past and accept him back as one of the best fighters in the world, as we’ve done with a number of fighters over the years.
We all know whatever happens that TJ will be back. So, the real question right now is what to do with the bantamweight title? With no champion, Dana White will need to choose two fighters to contend for the belt. There’s one obvious choice in Marlon Moraes who’s currently ranked first in the bantamweight division and was waiting for TJ to get done with Cejudo to fight for the belt. So, is Cejudo the next obvious choice? I think so.
To me, the clear choice to decide who’ll win the vacant bantamweight title is to have the flyweight champion, Henry Cejudo, fight the #1 ranked bantamweight, Marlon Moraes. The talk was already for Cejudo to come up and fight TJ for the belt, so I’d imagine he still wants a shot. Who he’s fighting to become double-champ is irrelevant to him, I’d assume.
Now, we play the waiting game. The only thing we can do is wait to see how long TJ gets suspended, and what the UFC decides to do with the vacant title. One thing we know for sure is there will be a new champion, and TJ Dillashaw will have to work his way back to the belt once again.