With Nevada Up In Air, UFC Eyes Arizona For May 30th

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With their three event run in Florida a seeming success, the UFC is hoping to return to Las Vegas … but are prepared for anything.

The UFC may be back, but certain elements of their upcoming schedule remain unclear.

Following a three event run in Jacksonville Florida, the UFC is returning to their home in Las Vegas … or at least that’s what UFC president Dana White is hoping to do. The Nevada Athletic Commission still hasn’t re-opened the state for combat sports, and while the UFC is hopeful that will change by the time their next event on May 30th goes down, they’re not putting all their eggs in one basket.

“If we can’t get May 30 at the Apex, it’s going to be super disappointing,” White said at the post-even press conference following their final event in Florida. “But we will go somewhere else.”

White said Arizona is “100% where I’ll go.”

With states in America following widely different plans to re-open in the face of the Coronavirus pandemic, it’s by no means certain that Nevada will clear the UFC to use their own private facilities (previously used for Dana White’s Tuesday Night Contender Series) for future events.

While White has said the UFC will be officially ‘back on schedule’ following their May 30th event, only the May 30th UFC Fight Night 176 event and June 6th UFC 250 event have fights officially announced. UFC Fight Night 176 will be headlined by a welterweight battle with title ramifications between Tyron Woodley and Gilbert Burns, while UFC 250 is headlined by Amanda Nunes vs. Felicia Spencer for the UFC women’s featherweight championship.

According to White, the UFC will sit down for matchmaking meetings on Tuesday May 19th and cards will start filling up. They’ll be busy enough filling those two events up, but the fun won’t stop there. More Fight Night events were previously scheduled for June 13th in Kazakhstan and June 20th in Saskatchewan, Canada. Will these events end up becoming the first mythical Fight Island cards? Or will they be Nevada or Arizona?