WWE Universal Champion Brock Lesnar attended UFC 226 on Saturday night and appears destined for a return to the sport to face the new UFC heavyweight champion.
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Lesnar came out to witness first hand the fight for the UFC heavyweight title between Daniel Cormier and Stipe Miocic. Cormier was victorious in the fight and became the new heavyweight champion in the first round of the fight. Cormier now holds the UFC’s light heavyweight and heavyweight titles and is now only the second person to ever hold two titles simultaneously in the UFC.
Prior to the fight, Joe Rogan heard Lesnar tell Dana White that he wanted the winner of the fight. Lesnar is a former UFC heavyweight champion and has been heavily rumored to be entertaining the idea of a return to MMA. Prior to Lesnar’s appearance on Saturday night, Fightful.com’s Sean Ross Sapp noted on Twitter that he had been told Brock would be at the show for the main event. Sapp also noted that he was told Lesnar had re-enterted the USADA drug testing pool.
Re-entering the drug testing pool is critical due to the test failure Lesnar had back in the summer of 2016 following his last UFC fight. Lesnar must be in the pool again for six months before he is allowed to compete again with UFC, so if he has indeed re-entered that testing pool again, his return to UFC is most certainly on.
Had a source tell me that Lesnar will be on the UFC show tonight, has entered the USADA pool and is hidden. I guess we’ll find out tonight. I reached out to people within WWE and UFC for answers, but they’re both running shows, so I’ll not get word until after it happens anyway
— Sean Ross Sapp of Fightful.com (@SeanRossSapp) July 8, 2018
It seems all but confirmed that UFC is now headed to a UFC heavyweight title fight between Cormier and Lesnar, which would be a big time draw on PPV. Jeremy Botter of Bleacher Report and CNN reported on Saturday night that Lesnar will face Cormier for the title at UFC 230 in November at Madison Square Garden, which means Lesnar re-entered the USADA drug testing pool in May.
Brock Lesnar will fight the winner of tonight’s main event in November at Madison Square Garden for the UFC heavyweight championship, multiple sources confirm.
— Jeremy Botter (@jeremybotter) July 8, 2018
Following Cormier’s first round victory to capture the heavyweight title on Saturday night, he did call out Lesnar during a post fight interview. This caused Lesnar to actually enter the octagon as the two trash-talked. This would not have happened unless a fight is in the works.
DC calls out Brock Lesnar!
LESNAR IS IN THE CAGE!! #UFC226 pic.twitter.com/XTz7q16GJo
— UFC (@ufc) July 8, 2018
Where this leaves WWE is anyone’s guess, though the company obviously needs to get their Universal Title off of him (which has actually been the case for months given Lesnar’s lack of a presence on WWE television).
All signs still point to Lesnar dropping the belt at SummerSlam or shortly thereafter. There were some recent reports indicating Lesnar may actually not work SummerSlam, though that seems incredibly unlikely given it is the second biggest WWE event of the year.
The current storyline is that WWE and Lesnar have been unable to reach a contractual agreement on a title defense. The story is designed to make Brock look as if he is actually holding the championship hostage so that whoever ends up facing him will get a babyface reaction when going up against a heel Lesnar.
That strategy didn’t work for the company when Lesnar was portrayed as someone who didn’t care about the wrestling business or its fans heading into WrestleMania 34 against Roman Reigns, so we’ll have to see if a ramped up version of the same story works here. If it’s for a match against Reigns once again, the simple answer is that it probably will not.
