48 Hours From McGregor Cancellation To New UFC 303 Card

It’s been a wild two weeks of speculation, but we finally have a firm timeline that shows who knew what when, and what the UFC was doing behind the scenes.

The UFC has finally announced that Conor McGregor is off UFC 303 with an undisclosed injury, and now that the cat is out of the bag we are starting to get details on what has been going on behind the scenes surrounding the big June 29th card.

The event, which anchors International Fight week, has now been completely reworked with a new main event: Alex Pereira vs. Jiri Prochazka will rematch for the light heavyweight title in the main event slot. Brian Ortega and Diego Lopes serve as the new co-main. And Carlos Ulberg will now fight Anthony Smith due to another undisclosed issue with Jamahal Hill.

MMA Fighting’s Ariel Helwani has been at the forefront of reporting on the McGregor situation, and he went in-depth on how events shook out.

“Conor McGregor suffered an injury about a day before that scheduled press conference in Dublin,” Helwani revealed in a new X (formerly Twitter) video. “And that’s why there wasn’t a press conference. Now the reason why they didn’t want that [injury news] to come out was there was hope that the fight would still be on and that it would be all good and salvaged. And so you obviously don’t want your opponent to know that you are hurt. Understandable.”

“Initially there was some anxiety over the injury, then there was optimism, and they started to re-promote [the fight], and Michael Chandler did an interview about it and all this stuff. But then at the beginning of this week the pessimism started to creep in. And about 48 hours or so ago, the realization was that this fight wasn’t going to happen. So the UFC went into overdrive, and this was led by [CBO] Hunter Campbell who has become quite known now in the MMA community due to that UFC Fight Inc. docu-series on Roku.”

“They reached out to a bunch of people,” Helwani continued. “And the issue, the main one, is there aren’t a ton of options right now just given the schedule, given who’s just fought, who’s scheduled to fight. The top choice from the beginning was Jiri Prochazka and Alex Pereira for the light heavyweight title. Rematch. There were some other feelers sent out to names like Max Holloway, there was some talk of a replacement for McGregor. Not a lot of options as far as a brand new fight was concerned.”

“Finally around 24 hours ago, they zeroed in on Prochazka vs. Pereira. Prochazka was in from the start. When he announced a fight at the Oktagon show [on Saturday] he was not referring to this, he was referring to perhaps the Perth card later this summer. Alex Pereira was the main hurdle because he’s in Australia doing a seminar tour, taking some time off, but has continued to train, I’m told. He also has those two broken toes, one suffered before UFC 300 and one suffered during his win over Jamahal Hill at UFC 300. But the man is stepping up again.”

To lay out the timeline more explicitly: McGregor suffered an injury around Saturday, June 1st. Around Tuesday June 11th the fight was dead and UFC started seriously looking for a replacement. On Wednesday June 12th they zeroed in on Pereira vs. Prochazka 2, and on Thursday June 13th they announced the new re-jigged UFC 303 card.

There was a lot of delay and uncertainty over the past week and a half as McGregor struggled to stay on the June 29th card, but the UFC acted pretty quick once the realization was made that he couldn’t fight. While there’s no fight that can equal a McGregor fight, pulling a whole new card out of thin air on such short notice is pretty impressive.

The new McGregor-less UFC 303 card still goes down June 29th from Las Vegas, Nevada. Let us know what you think of it in the comments below, Maniacs.