Two former UFC champions with everything to prove meet Saturday night at the Paycom Center in Oklahoma City, and the oddsmakers have made their preference clear.
Second-ranked middleweight Dricus du Plessis opens as a -205 favorite against Kamaru Usman (+170) for the UFC Fight Night main event, per DraftKings Sportsbook. The over/under sits at 3.5 rounds. The five-bout main card streams on Paramount+.
Du Plessis (23-3) is 32 years old and coming off a unanimous decision loss to Khamzat Chimaev at UFC 319 in a middleweight title fight. Before that, the first South African to win a UFC title had won 11 of 12, with victories over Robert Whittaker, Israel Adesanya, and Sean Strickland on his résumé. He tipped the scales at 185.5 pounds at Friday’s weigh-in.
Usman (21-4) is 39 and fighting uphill. He snapped a three-fight losing streak in June with a unanimous decision win over Joaquin Buckley — his first victory in nearly four years. He weighed 186 pounds. The former welterweight champion defended that belt five times between 2019 and 2022 and still holds the UFC welterweight records for longest winning streak (15) and takedown defense percentage (97.3).
That takedown defense number is the kind of stat that’ll make a coach stop and pay attention. You don’t stuff 97 out of 100 takedown attempts by accident. The film doesn’t lie.
But Usman’s only previous trip to 185 pounds came on 10 days’ notice against Chimaev in October 2023, and he lost that fight by majority decision. Saturday gives him a full camp at middleweight for the first time.
During media day, Usman laid out exactly what he wants if his hand gets raised: a title shot against either current middleweight champion Sean Strickland or welterweight champion Islam Makhachev. He beat Strickland by unanimous decision at UFC 210 back in April 2017, when both men campaigned at welterweight. Strickland has since moved up and reclaimed the 185-pound belt with a split decision over Chimaev at UFC 328 in May.
“I mean, that makes sense. That’s pretty easy,” Usman said of the Strickland rematch, per MMA Fighting. “It’s either Sean Strickland or Islam, if Islam is still the champion, which I assume he will be.”
Usman called for the Makhachev fight after the Buckley win, but the UFC steered him toward du Plessis instead. “The company kind of has a say, a big say, in this, and they felt this was an opportunity,” he said.
The champ-champ club is what drives him. “There’s still one club I can’t get into yet,” Usman told TMZ Sports. “You want to be remembered as not, ‘Oh, that guy was a champion.’ No, you want to be remembered as that guy that was a champion here and a champion there.”
Du Plessis has his own rebuilding to do. The Chimaev loss cost him the belt, and at 32, he’s young enough that a win over a name like Usman puts him right back in the title conversation at 185.
The rest of the main card features Jared Cannonier (+310) against Christian LeRoy Duncan (-395), Chase Hooper (-375) versus Mitch Ramirez (+295), Tabatha Ricci (+360) against Fatima Kline (-470), and Tommy McMillen (-175) versus Alberto Montes (+145).
Sources: CBS Sports, Yahoo Sports