Julianna Pena is right, but she's wrong about the reason
The former TUF winner has been calling out "Champ-Champ" Amanda Nunes, but her approach is off-point.
Julianna Pena is right — Amanda Nunes doesn’t want to fight her — but she’s wrong about the reasons.
In the wake of Nunes successfully defending her featherweight title last weekend in a squash match against Megan Anderson at UFC 259, the Ultimate Fighter winner resumed her pursuit of a bantamweight title engagement against the dominant Brazilian now that her scheduled clash with former champ Holly Holm seems like it isn’t going to happen.
When Nunes balked at the idea, Pena chose to interpret the fact that “The Lioness” didn’t want to face her and suggested she get another win to mean Nunes didn’t want to face a grappler, and then declared herself the best grappler in the division through a combination of MMA math and the properties of transference.
“If you look at Cat Zingano, she was a great grappler, a great wrestler, and she was great in the division,” Peña told “The Schmo” in the above interview. “Then if you look at Sara McMann, a silver Olympic wrestler, a great grappler. I beat them both so I now think I hold the reins as the best grappler in the division.
“I think that her asking me to fight GDR again is comical,” continue Pena when asked about Nunes suggesting she run it back with former featherweight champ Germaine de Randamie, who submitted Pena last fall. “To me it’s clear as day she doesn’t want to fight me. She doesn’t want to fight a wrestler and a grappler. She’s been fighting nothing but pure strikers ever since she won the belt against Miesha.”
Pena continued trying to make her case for Nunes “avoiding” her by listing other woman the two-weight world champion didn’t ask to compete one more time before sharing the Octagon with them, naming Holm and the two women to challenge Nunes for the featherweight title, Felicia Spencer and Anderson.
Again, Pena is correct — Nunes didn’t ask any of those three to fight again before facing them, but they had done enough to merit a title shot through their performances inside the Octagon (and a dab of name value and reputation in Holm’s case), which is something she’s yet to do.
But if her fight with Holm is off — and it looks that way given Holm’s recent discovery that she’s suffering from hydronephrosis — Pena has a tremendous case for challenging for the bantamweight title next simply by being the best available option, which is the case she should be presenting.
Playing the whole “she’s avoiding me” thing is flawed because Nunes has won 12 straight fights, just forced Anderson to tap to a slick triangle choke / armbar combo that we didn’t talk enough about coming out of Saturday night because there were plenty of other things to fixate on, and out-wrestled the woman who snatched up Pena’s neck last fall, which, using her own logic, makes it seem like Nunes should be considered the best grappler in the division.
Instead of coming out with these “she’s avoiding me” and “you didn’t ask anyone else to fight again” tactics as if she didn’t lose to de Randamie less than six months ago, the 31-year-old Chicago-based contender should simply hold up the rankings and ask who else there is for the Brazilian champion to fight at this point.
As a point of reference, here’s what the rankings look like following the latest update and each fighter’s current situations:
Germaine de Randamie: submitted Pena in October; lost to Nunes by UD the previous December
Holly Holm: two straight decision wins; lost to Nunes by R1 TKO before that
Aspen Ladd: beat Yana Kunitskaya last time out; recovering from knee surgery, return date TBD
Irene Aldana: lost to Holm in October, the same night Pena lost to de Randamie
Yana Kunitskaya: won two straight, both by decision; most media thought she lost the last one
Julianna Pena: submitted Sara McMann; former Ultimate Fighter winner
Ketlen Vieira: lost two straight, but most feel she beat Kunitskaya earlier this year
Sara McMann: lost to Pena; 1-3 in her last four
Marion Reneau: lost three straight; booked to face Macy Chiasson later this month
Lina Lansberg: lost to McMann in January 2020; inactive as she’s pregnant
Doing the whole “Who else is there?” isn’t a super-fun argument and doesn’t provide the same kind of ego boost as suggesting the greatest female fighter in the history of the sport is ducking you does, but it has far more legs than trying to goad Nunes into a fight by suggesting she’s worried about what you bring to the table.
Kunitskaya is the only other potential option in the Top 10, but her last win was janky and her fight before that against Julia Stoliarenko is one that no one wants to revisit, while Pena is coming off a finish against a former title challenger, maddeningly inconsistent as McMann may be.
This is where she should be throwing around her TUF bona fides and pulling the old “Yeah, sure, I got submitted by Germaine, but I bounced back, I’ve got more wins in the division than anyone else and I’m the biggest name you could possibly fight right now” routine because that is begrudgingly acceptable, whereas this whole “she’s ducking me” schtick is just silly because it ignores the obvious flaws in her argument.
There are three fights (and 1,660 days) between the victories over Cat Zingano and Sara McMann cited as the reason why she should be considered the best grappler in the division and someone Nunes is avoiding; she lost two of them and got submitted both times.
Those two fights — one against Valentina Shevchenko in January 2017, the other against de Randamie last fall — were opportunities for Pena to punch her own ticket to a championship fight and she stumbled both times. She looked better against de Randamie than she did against Shevchenko, who snatched up her arm in the second round, but she still made a critical mistake, left her neck exposed, and got choked out by a woman who is known for her striking prowess more than anything.
And if part of your case for why you should get a title shot is a victory from nearly five years ago, it shows you haven’t done enough recently to actually merit a championship opportunity.
Listen — fighters are rarely going to come out and present things with complete transparency and not try to fudge the numbers in their own favor in situations like this, but when all the facts are readily available and your argument falls apart as soon as that “missing” information is added to the slate, maybe pick a better argument.
It just sounds ridiculous when someone like Pena, who has failed to clear the necessary hurdles to earn a title shot on merit, suggests that Nunes, whose unbeaten streak has now lasted longer than Ronda Rousey’s entire UFC career (see below) and has beaten everyone to wear championship gold in both the bantamweight and featherweight divisions, is avoiding her, rather than looking at Pena’s resume and wanting her to do a little more to actually earn a title shot.
I get that she’s trying to drum up interest and I suppose it worked because here I am writing about the callout, but Nunes and her wife Nina Ansaroff deadened this approach back in January immediately after Pena started it up following her win over McMann:
The ironic thing in all of this is that I actually think Pena should get the next fight against Nunes and want to see the fight, but not because I think the champion is ducking “The Venezuelan Vixen” or avoiding grapplers in general; I think Pena is the best available and most marketable option, and welcome any and every opportunity to see “The Lioness” step into the Octagon and compete.
Pena is correct in thinking that Nunes doesn’t want to fight her, but it’s because she hasn’t won the high stakes fights she needed to in order to establish herself as a true contender yet, and suggesting it’s anything else is just ducking the truth.