Conner McGregor seems to be settling in to his position as a commentator pretty nicely as since he was one of the people to announce this, it went viral pretty quickly. While I'll save this in its entirety for another time, I think that it would serve Conor the best if he were to just accept that this is where he belongs now, and to try to rehash another comeback would only further tarnish his legacy, which for the most part still remains intact and his last loss via horrible leg break is probably the best way that he could have gone out.
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So in case you know absolutely nothing about this tournament here are the brief details:
- it is going to start in March of 2026
- it will feature 32 fighters in a traditional "bracket style" single-elimination tournament plarform
- No specific weight classes enforced between fights. All fighters can be between 185 and 265 lbs
- it will take place over the course of 12 months in order to accommodate for injury recovery
- first event will take place in Los Angeles and the final will take place in the Middle East at a yet to be determined location
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Conor made the announcement on Thursday although this has been rumored for quite some time. I don't know how heavily invested Conor is in the promotion, but I am sure it is more than a little bit. McGregor said "I'm going to announce the most lucrative tournament in all of combat sports." and well, he isn't wrong. The winner of the entire thing will get $15 million and the 1st runner up will get $1 million, 3rd and 4th will get $500k and on and on it goes down the line until we get $100k for anyone that is in the tournament at all.
In the past various organizations tried to have tournaments on the same night but this isn't going to work very well for obvious reasons such as fighters trying to use as little energy as possible if they were hoping to make it to the end or to also have people get injured badly and being unable to continue to the next fight even if they won the previous one.
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Presuming that the first fight in Los Angeles has 8 fights and then following one, which could be the next month, have another 8 fights, that's the "first round of the tournament" then on the 3rd time, which could be several months later, they would have round 2 of 8 fights for the remaining 16 fighters.
There are of course a lot of things that could go terribly wrong and someone in the ranks would end up getting a "bye" where they don't even have to fight. However, if the tournament is truly set up in a randomized way, then nobody would really be able to predict who is more likely to end up with the older fighters who if biology continues to be pretty consistent across various people, would be the most likely to get injured badly enough that they couldn't continue.
At the moment we have almost no details at all about this and perhaps that is why the tournament isn't slated to happen until nearly a year from now. No names have been selected but BKFC has certainly gotten a lot of attention for this and will likely end up signing some older UFC and Bellator talent into their ranks in the next year, which might have been the plan all along.
The only recent sign-up that I am aware of is Yoel Romero and Tiego Santos, who ironically, have already faced one another in recent years.
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I haven't really had a lot of interest in BKFC over the years because the absence of gloves really does make a difference in how exciting a fight can be. I'm pretty limited in my gloveless strike experience, but it really hurts the other guy but it also hurts the guy who threw the punch. This isn't a movie set.
I hope they can pull it together and then maybe other promotions will follow suit because this sort of format is really interesting and it could actually make stupid belts like the BMF belt actually mean something. Whoever emerges victor at the end of this grueling tournament, will be very believable as one of the toughest or perhaps THE toughest person on the planet.