BTL | Reaction to UFC 331 Announcements, Usman Nurmagomedov’s free agency, UFC Belgrade, and more

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Live from MMA Fighting Studios, this is Between the Links.

**Jed Meshew** (1:04)
Happy Thursday, everybody. And as you might be able to tell from my voice, I am not Mike Heck. I am Jed Meshew, mmafighting.com.
Thanks for joining us for another edition of Between the Links. Mike Heck is off today. He is not on vacation, but he is off. And he hit me up this week and was like, what if I actually take a day off and you handle this? Especially he has been doing double time as the great Jose Young was on vacation. So Mike had to do a little more social work. And so I've got the reins between the links. But don't you worry, never you fret nor fear. I am not alone to answer your questions as we've done a couple of times over the past few weeks with people taking vacations and going about their business. I have a co-host with me.
He's known by many as the King in the North. He's known by Mike Hek as his best friend. And I just know him as the most handsome man in MMA media, Alexander K. Lee. AK., how are we doing?

**Alexander K. Lee** (2:06)
I'm doing great. And let me assure the fine listeners of Between the Links and MMA Fighting. No more vacations, Jed. There's going to be no more vacations ever. I took a vacation. I think you believe you took a vacation as well. Jose took a vacation. We all kind of like took July. We took some time off in July and a little bit into August. And you know what? I said, no more back into the MMA content minds with you and with me.
This is why we're here, Jed. We are we are we owe the people. We owe the people time. We owe the people content. We got a lot to talk about. Fortunately, I'm actually really happy that I got to be in this episode between the lights because stuff went down on the weekend. Stuff went down last night. Stuff was going down this weekend.
I mean, we can look ahead to next weekend. We got there's a lot of business, man. There's a lot of business going down, so I'm excited. Very happy to be here with the listeners. I'm already seeing some lively comments from the usual MMAniacs.

**Jed Meshew** (2:59)
Nice. Yeah.
It's one of those weird weeks, AK, where a lot has happened. None of it is just like the, hey, this is what has to lead thing. When I was talking on the mic about what would the graphics be, what would the headline be for this week, it was, as you can see, sort of a mix, right? It was like, well, we got PFL New York and the fallout from that. We probably don't speak too much about UFC Belgrade, but that just happened and a couple of big things that happened there. We have an event, we're back in the Apex on Saturday, there's a PFL tomorrow. So there's this pile of things. We officially got the Noche announcement, which everyone had heard and had been rumored for some time. And then AK, yesterday, late yesterday evening, right around the time I was getting off work, so like 7.30ish or whatever, we finally, finally get an announcement for UFC 331 AK, I do want to pull up this card, so I have it, because I'm sure we'll get questions about this, but I figure we'll just lead with talking about that, since it feels like the biggest thing that happened, because in what's, this is the first week of August, so five, six weeks, something like that, UFC 331 We'll go down to the Crypto Arena in Los Angeles, California, and we have the full card. Now, we knew some of these before, some of these have been rumored, but your main event, the rematch between Joshua Vann and Alejandro Pantoja for the UFC Flyweight title, the title that Vann won after an injury, 10 seconds into their fight in December. Your co-main event, AK, and you can see it above the graphic for us here. A bit of a surprise as Armand Sarukian takes on Mauricio Ruffi, a different fight had been heavily rumored. And instead we get a pivot to this, the return of Gable Stevenson. I'm sure Mike Kek will love that for his fantasy teams. He takes on Sean Sharraf. This broke yesterday before the main event was announced, but Rebellis de Spain tied to Ivasa.