Moicano replaces Tsarukyan; will face Makhachev in new UFC 311 main event

LOS ANGELES — With a deep, talent-laden card headlined by title fights in two of the promotion’s most competitive divisions, UFC 311 was always bound to get 2025 off to a dramatic start. But no one expected it to be like this.

Friday morning, with only a half hour remaining in the official weigh-in window and Arman Tsarukyan yet to step on the scales, UFC president Dana White announced via Instagram that the No.-1 ranked lightweight was out of Saturday’s title fight with Islam Makhachev due to injury. Stepping in to take his place? Veteran fan favourite Renato Moicano.

In hindsight, it makes a great deal of sense that Moicano cut an extra pound and weighed in at championship weight Friday morning. White said the UFC received a call from Tsarukyan at 1 am PT, informing the company “that he was experiencing significant back pain (and) due to the injury, he feels like he is not healthy enough to compete.”

Moicano was quickly contacted and naturally agreed to step in on less than two days’ notice. The fighter with everything to gain is always the easy side of these situations. The challenge is the fighter with everything to lose. But White said that when he spoke to Makhachev, the 26-1 lightweight told him, “Brother, I am the champion. I don’t care who it is. I will fight anyone.”

If you ever had any doubt as to Makhachev’s pound-for-pound status — and you shouldn’t have — it’s surely erased now. This is the second time in a three-fight span that he’s put his title on the line at the last minute against a dangerous challenger after he agreed to fight featherweight great Alexander Volkanovski on 10 days notice at UFC 294.

Volkanovski, a tactical savant who was then regarded as one of the pound-for-pound best in the sport, obviously posed a much graver threat to Makhachev’s title reign than Moicano will Saturday night. But less risk doesn’t mean no risk. This is MMA at the highest level — we love it for its unpredictability. We watch because the unexpected happens. There are no sure things.

Makhachev could have easily declined the last-minute switch and faced zero repercussion to his reputation or standing as the best fighter in the sport. He’d still be a champion, he’d still hold leverage. He could have said that Tsarukyan deserved the shot and was opting to wait for the fight to be rebooked. The UFC would have been fine — there’s a second title fight on the card that could have been bumped up into the main-event slot.

But that isn’t the path Makhachev chose. And while the looming start of Ramadan on Feb. 28 — a month-long Islamic observance during which Makhachev doesn’t train or compete — likely had something to do with his decision, the Dagestani veteran could have still pushed the rebooking to April or May. The first time Tsarukyan and Makhachev fought was April 20, 2019.

There’s no two ways about it — this is a greatly suboptimal decision for a fighter who spent the last several months training and preparing for a different opponent, particularly considering how critical well-crafted gameplans and thorough auditing of upcoming opponents are for Makhachev and his team more broadly. Now, they must crush film on Moicano, a multi-skilled fighter who’s leaned both on his boxing and his grappling at times in his career and is riding a four-fight win streak against tough opposition.

The beneficiaries of that decision? Well, all of us for starters — we still get to watch Makhachev compete Saturday night. But moreso Moicano, the bombastic, entertaining veteran whose late-career renaissance has taken another unlikely turn.

It was only a few years ago that Moicano’s prospect rise was derailed when he reached the ranked heights of UFC’s featherweight division. He was well on his way to gatekeeping at best and crashing out of the company at worst, being fed to young up-and-comers on UFC Apex cards before ultimately being cast off to lesser promotions.

But in 2020, shortly after the birth of his son, Isaac, Moicano arrived at a eureka moment in which he overhauled his entire game, both tactically inside the octagon and theatrically outside of it. He jumped up to lightweight and began stacking victories, earning himself tougher and tougher opponents. Along the way, he attracted greater and greater fanfare with each rollicking post-fight interview that brought down packed arenas from Houston to Paris.

He created his own luck. And this Saturday it’s paying off as he’s placed himself in the right place at the right time to seize an opportunity no one could have imagined when he went 3-3 from mid-2017 through late 2020. Somehow, someway, Moicano’s about to fight for a UFC title. Just look at this guy:

Are the odds in Moicano’s favour? Of course not. The odds have never been in Moicano’s favour. And he ranged from a +550 to +720 underdog shortly after the new fight was announced.

But he’s overcome the odds before. It wasn’t long ago that Moicano was written off as a contender. But over his last four fights we’ve seen him defeat highly touted prospects in Jalin Turner and Saint Denis, not to mention heavy-handed veterans in Brad Riddell and Drew Dober.

While preparing for his original opponent on this card, Beneil Dariush, Moicano worked extensively with Dustin Poirier at American Top Team in Coconut Creek, Fla. Perhaps you remember Poirier pushing Makhachev to his limit during their instant classic last June. That’s a pretty good training partner to have been learning from over the last several months.

Of course, there’s no reason to expect anything other than a Makhachev victory here. As fun as these storybook possibilities are, it would be a shocking outcome for Moicano to take this fight — a truly jarring result that would necessitate an immediate rematch. Anything’s possible in championship MMA. But not much is this improbable.

And yet, if he can’t pull off one of the biggest upsets in recent UFC history, Moicano still stands to gain plenty Saturday night. He’s won favour with his company and fans by stepping into this bout; if he’s even reasonably competitive, he’ll draw acclaim for fighting well against the toughest matchup in the sport. Moicano often likes to say he can’t afford to lose. Saturday night, he simply can’t.