Roundtable: Mackenzie Dern vs. Virna Jandiroba and the best of the UFC’s least meaningful title fights

UFC 321 will go down as one of the more maligned pay-per-views of 2025, and there was already negative buzz even before its disastrous main event result played out.

Before the Oct. 25 show, analyst Dean Thomas took a shot at the card’s co-main event, a matchup between Virna Jandiroba and Mackenzie Dern for a vacant strawweight title. With previous champion Zhang Weili having vacated that belt in favor of a superfight with flyweight queen Valentina Shevchenko, it was understandable that Jandiroba and Dern’s championship clash wasn’t exactly viewed with reverence, but Thomas calling it “insignificant” definitely seemed harsh.

That said, you can’t force people to care about something, and even after Dern won a hard-fought decision over Jandiroba to officially become UFC champion, the importance of the win and what this means for Dern’s overall standing remains up for debate.

We here at MMA Fighting don’t consider Dern vs. Jandiroba to be anywhere near the most meaningless title fights the UFC has put on, so with that in mind, our crew of Alexander K. Lee, Mike Heck, Damon Martin, and Jed Meshew got together to stroll down memory lane and pick out our favorite UFC championship fights in which little appeared to truly be at stake.

The best of the least, if you will.

Nicco Montano vs. Roxanne Modafferi at The Ultimate Fighter 26 Finale

Lee: Look, I love The Ultimate Fighter. And I love Roxanne Modafferi and everything she stands for.

But when “The Happy Warrior” received an unexpected opportunity to become the UFC’s first women’s flyweight champion, the circumstances were dubious, to say the least. Let’s recap:

Having a world champion or even a No. 1 contender determined by a reality show is always going to be a tough sell and then you add in that they were launching a new division, and this title fight was dead on arrival even before Eubanks’ withdrawal. Montano won, despite having just a handful of pro and amateur bouts on her résumé, which could have made for a nice story… except this led to a regrettable saga in which she eventually failed to make it to a fight against Shevchenko, the UFC stripped her of the title without a single defense, and we all just kind of agreed to pretend that all never happened.

But hey, look at any official list of UFC champions, and Montano is there.

Holly Holm vs. Germaine de Randamie at UFC 208

Heck: This is the correct answer for several reasons, and it’s a memorable one for me as it was the first UFC pay-per-view card I ever covered as a credentialed media member. And it just so happened to be one of the worst PPV cards of the past decade (thank God for Dustin Poirier vs. Jim Miller or it would’ve been even worse).

For those who remember, the original UFC 208 was slated for January 2017 in Anaheim, but it was cancelled because there wasn’t a solid main event to throw in there. So UFC 209 in Brooklyn became UFC 208, and the “in the works” main event was Jose Aldo vs. Max Holloway in a featherweight championship unification bout, but Holloway had some nagging injuries that thwarted a quick turnaround. To avoid possibly cancelling another PPV card, the UFC introduced the women’s featherweight title, with former bantamweight champ Holly Holm facing Germaine de Randamie. We all knew why this division was created, because Cris Cyborg was likely coming in, yet she didn’t compete for the belt; she just sat cageside.

And then the damn bell rang, and it was Slog City, with the only notable things that happened being de Randamie cheating her ass off, hitting Holm after the bell — not once, but twice (and no points were taken. Shocking, right?). De Randamie went on to win a somewhat controversial decision. It was an insignificant fight in the lead-up because of the Cyborg factor, and it became even more insignificant later when de Randamie straight up refused to fight Cyborg and was then stripped of the title.

It was probably the second-worst title reign in UFC history behind Montano, but at least Montano’s title win had a journey to get there, unlike this one, which was two darts landing on two different names to make sure 2017 didn’t start as a complete disaster.

Andrei Arlovski vs. Justin Eiliers at UFC 53

Martin: If you think the UFC heavyweight division is bad right now, go back and look at the roster in 2005 when Andrei Arlovski was the interim champion while Frank Mir was sidelined with a broken leg suffered a motorcycle accident.

After dispatching Tim Sylvia in just 47 seconds to win the interim belt, Arlovski was booked for his first defense against Justin Eilers at UFC 53. The fight didn’t make sense on a lot of levels, but none worse than this — Eiliers was not even four months removed from getting knocked out badly by Paul Buentello.

So why did he get a title shot? Because there was literally no one else.

Eilers entered the octagon as a heavy underdog, and it showed.

Arlovski absolutely picked him apart and dished out a whole lot of damage, with Eilers basically surviving on guts and toughness. He took so much punishment that Eilers ended up suffering two broken hands, a torn ACL in his knee, a broken nose, and a sprained ankle — and that all happened before Arlovski put him away with a TKO just over four minutes into the opening round.

It was an absolutely brutal performance in a fight that should have never happened. Afterwards, Arlovski wasted no time booking his next title defense after he was officially promoted to undisputed champion when he needed just 15 seconds to knock out Buentello after he finally got his chance to fight for the title four months later.

That was a remarkably tough time for the heavyweight division, but Arlovski feasted on lesser competition with back-to-back knockouts before he lost his next two fights to Sylvia, because clearly options were still incredibly limited.

Michael Bisping vs. Dan Henderson 2 at UFC 204

Meshew: It appears my colleagues have all gone for some low-hanging fruit here, picking a pair of regrettable women’s title fights that were more opportunistic than earned, and a heavyweight title fight from the dark ages of the UFC. All of them are objectively worse than Dern-Jandiroba, but I think I’d have to argue on the “best” part of them. I’ve watched all of those fights. No one had a good time with any of them, save maybe the Arlovski one.

What I’m in the market for is a fight that was clearly worse than Dern-Jandiroba from a merit standpoint, but still kinda slapped. That’s a narrow window to hit, but I’ve done it, and it’s going to make a lot of you furious: Michael Bisping vs. Dan Henderson II at UFC 204.

The point of title fights is to determine who is the best in the world in a particular weight class. You can quibble with Dern and Jandiroba being called the best at strawweight, but Zhang Weili left the division, and they’re undoubtedly Top 5 women, so it’s a pretty valid belt. Bisping vs. Hendo II ……….. less so.

Let’s be clear, Bisping was the true and honest middleweight champion. He beat Luke Rockhold to claim the belt fair and square. It doesn’t matter that he shouldn’t have beaten Anderson Silva to get the title shot, and it doesn’t matter that there were probably eight other dudes who would have beaten him if they had fought. He won it fairly; he’s a real champion.

HOWEVER, once he defended the belt against Dan Henderson, the title became a sham. I love Hendo (and at the time, I was even adamantly for doing so because it was fun), but that is one of the most fraudulent title fights in the history of the UFC. Hendo was 2-2 since returning to 185 and was brutally KOed in the first round a year before. He knocked out the faded Hector Lombard to “earn” his title shot, and it was transparently given to him because Bisping was a guy the UFC liked, they had history, and it was a fight Bisping could win in England. AND THEN HE ALMOST DIDN’T!

Add in the aftermath of it, and this fight becomes even more fraudulent in hindsight. Bisping getting revenge against Henderson would be cool if he then goes and dumps the belt to Yoel Romero, or Jacare Souza, or Robert Whittaker, or any of the other deserving middleweight contenders. But instead, the UFC took another cash grab with Georges St-Pierre, that held the division up forever and was a colossal waste. (I very nearly chose that title defense as my choice, but on the whole, at least it had GSP involved, even though he was coming off his worst performance, a four-year layoff, and moving up to a new weight class.) That really makes this title defense indefensible.

But if you are going to defend it, the selling point is that the fight was fun as (Mike) Heck! Despite being a shell of himself, Henderson nearly got Bisping out of there early, and the “champ” had to battle through a ton to edge out a decision I still kind of think he should have lost. It was a lot of violence and high drama despite being for a title that lost its meaning by virtue of being on the line in this fight. It’s definitely the best of the least.