At UFC 309’s media scrum, UFC heavyweight champion Jon Jones said that after his fight on Saturday with Stipe Miocic, Jones will be seeking to compete in “fun fights” with athletes who are similar in size to him.
Jon Jones did a scrum with media and emphasized that his priority going forward should he fight beyond Saturday is to compete in “fun fights” with athletes who are roughly his size.
He mentioned Alex Pereira and Jamahal Hill as names that interest him. pic.twitter.com/YeqE5hAOuv
— Aaron Bronsteter (@aaronbronsteter) November 13, 2024
This assertion caused some consternation in the MMA community; Jones is already fighting a 42-year-old coming off a three-year-layoff and now is saying he wants to fight light-heavyweights, even though he just moved up to heavyweight.
Refusing to fight the current interim heavyweight champion under any circumstances is not a good look, but doubly so when he is actually a similar size to Jones, despite Jon saying that Jamahal Hill and Alex Pereira are more appropriate.
First off, if Jones wanted to fight light-heavyweights then he should never have spent four years ‘bulking’ and moving up in weight. Second, Tom Aspinall is 6’5″ with a 78″ reach and weighted in at 251 lbs for his last fight, vs Curtis Blaydes. So, he is one inch taller than Jones, with six inches less in reach, and weighs three pounds more than did Jones for his last fight vs Ciryl Gane.
Yet somehow Jones thinks its appropriate for him to fight Hill, a fighter coming off of a brutal knockout loss, or Pereira, a fighter who has already moved up in weight once, from middleweight to light-heavyweight.
Perhaps Jon is just messing with fans and using this controversy as a way to drum up interest in a future fight with Aspinall. If so, it is absolutely working, as the MMA community spends a lot of energy each day asking for that fight to happen.
If it does happen then Jones vs Aspinall will be a great heavyweight title unifier, almost a superfight the likes of which we missed out on when Jon Jones moved up to heavyweight too late to face a departing Francis Ngannou. First, however, ‘Bones’ has to get through legend Stipe Miocic at UFC 309.
