UFC Oklahoma City Preview Show: Are Dricus du Plessis and Kamaru Usman fighting for a title shot?

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**Jed Meshew** (1:37)
Mixed martial arts. Mixed martial arts. How do we lack on martial arts?
Yes, that is right, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for joining me. Hello, my name is Jed Meshew, mmafighting.com. Probably know that if you're here, I'm here to chat with you as I turn this music very slightly down because it's getting a little bit loud.
To chat with you about UFC Oklahoma City this weekend, Dricus du Plessis taking on Kamaru Usman in a battle of former UFC Champions. Some other stuff going on in this card as well that we will get to. And I am running solo today. So this is a bit of an extended pre-fight Q&A to some extent. I'm going to merge it with some other things, but Mike Heck is on location for the RAF event that goes down tomorrow. So he has a press conference. He is attending right now. Jose Young is also on location at FanFest. And the wonderful Alexander K Lee is taking a much deserved vacation despite this weekend being full of mixed martial arts action. I can't blame him. I took one last weekend for 329 So running it solo is going to keep it pretty tidy today. So get your questions in now. But also going to talk about this card, maybe even talk a little PFL. And sort of, since I did not do a No Bets Barred this week, as time just got away from me, gonna combine that with a little bit of my No Bets Barred sort of breakdowns for this fight as well. So let us dive right into this as this song, oh, song's about wrapped, dope. So let's dive right into this right now. The OKC card is, I mean, tell me what y'all think. I think this is a pretty weak effort as far as the road show goes. This main event is, I'm very interested in. It is a fascinating matchup. It's weird. I don't entirely know what it means for Kamaru Usman to be fighting Dricus du Plessis. We talked about a little on BTL. If Usman wins, he is sort of in the mix to fight for a belt either at 185 or welterweight. We'll see how that ends up going. If Dricus wins, I find it hard to believe that he gets the next title shot at middleweight, given how bad his loss was, but he does also have two wins over the current champion. So like, it's a weird fight from a Dricus standpoint. I know this week he said he wanted to do this fight because he wanted to show that he shored up the wrestling issues that he showed in his last one.
I guess if you want to believe that, but it is not like Kamaru Usman and Hamza Chamayev are the same sorts of control grapplers. So, I don't personally take that from here, but you set aside sort of what it means if this fight makes sense.
This fight is pretty interesting, right? Because Usman, how old is Kamaru Usman? Actually, let me look this up right now. 39, so just turn 39 a couple months ago. Pushing 40, not usually an age in which people succeed, particularly unless they're at heavyweight or maybe light heavyweight.