Dan Hardy thinks UFC 326 is too weak to be considered a proper numbered event.
UFC 326 takes place Saturday at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas (Paramount+) and is headlined by a BMF title fight between Max Holloway and Charles Oliveira. In the co-main event, top middleweight contenders Caio Borralho and Reinier de Ridder will look to rebound from losses.
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While the pay-per-view model no longer exists in the U.S. under the new Paramount deal, the likes of the U.K., Canada, and Australia still have to pay for numbered events. This shouldn’t be one of them, according to Hardy.
“It definitely doesn’t look like a pay-per-view card, absolutely not,” Hardy told Submission Radio. “I think there’s some fun fights on it. For me, I think the most interesting one, the most probably well balanced and well matched one is the Drew Dober-(Michael) Johnson fight. As soon as I saw that, I thought to myself that is just a fireworks fight because they both take a lot of chances and sometimes make bad decisions, and that could backfire. But for me, that’s a really interesting matchup.
“Some of the other ones, I’m interested to watch it, but it’s an odd one for a pay-per-view, really interesting. And a couple of fights where, like, Rob Font finds himself in that same situation again where he’s kind of holding off another one of the young ones and kind of playing the gatekeeper role again. I don’t know. It’s an interesting card. I’ll be watching, of course, but I won’t be quite as pay-per-view excited as normal.”
Hardy takes issue with the pay-per-view main card opener between Gregory Rodrigues and Brunno Ferreira. The pair already fought at UFC 283, where Ferreira knocked out Rodrigues in Round 1.
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“The other one that stood out to me, the first middleweight fight on the main card,” Hardy said. “Didn’t Brunno knock out Gregory Rodrigues? Did he not just dead him with a left hand? That’s a rematch, I’m sure it is. I remember Brunno Ferreira being backed up against the fence and he kind of – I’m playing it in my head, I might be wrong, but I feel like Rodrigues steps in, and he just pings him with a left hand and drops him back dead. That seems like an odd one to run back to me, to be honest.”
This article originally appeared on MMA Junkie: Analyst: UFC 326 too weak to be pay-per-view card
