Three Potential Opponents for Kamaru Usman Before Retirement

Before the losses, there was the streak. Kamaru Usman took the welterweight title from Tyron Woodley at UFC 235 in March 2019 and then made it boring to bet against him. Colby Covington twice, Jorge Masvidal twice, and Gilbert Burns once. That was five defenses, a 15-fight UFC winning streak, and more than 1,200 days as champion. For a stretch, he was the pound-for-pound No. 1.

Then came Salt Lake City. At UFC 278 in August 2022, Usman was up three rounds to one against Leon Edwards and cruising, with under a minute left in the fifth. One left head kick from out of nowhere turned out the Nigerian Nightmare's lights and ended the UFC's most dominant championship reign in years. Seven months later in London, he dragged Edwards to the mat repeatedly, but it wasn't enough as he lost a razor-thin majority decision, 48-46, 48-46, 47-47. "I'm not done," Usman said that night. "I'll see him again."

What followed those back-to-back title defeats deserves more credit than it gets. Usman took on the fearsome and then unbeaten Khamzat Chimaev at middleweight on roughly 10 days' notice and gave the Chechen all he could handle before dropping another majority decision. After almost two years away, he came back and beat Joaquin Buckley despite being a mighty betting underdog. And on July 18 in Oklahoma City, at 39, he went back up to 185 to face Dricus Du Plessis in another clash in which he was heavily bet against.

The Lucky Rebel UFC and MMA odds on fight night listed Usman as a +200 outsider for his clash with former middleweight king DDP, and admittedly, this one was more one-sided. The South African won a wide unanimous decision by scores of 50-45, 49-46, 49-46, with Usman absorbing 132 significant strikes, 102 of them to the head. Days later, on their Pound 4 Pound podcast, co-host Henry Cejudo let it slip: Usman had fought with a torn pec. "I didn't like you taking this fight," Cejudo told him.

At the post-fight press conference, Dana White got the question everyone was thinking, and he didn't rush the answer. "Yeah, I don't know. Obviously, a great fight," he said. "He's still got it. It's not like, 'Oh, Usman's done, and he should retire.'" Ali Abdelaziz went further in August: "Kamaru Usman is not gonna retire. He's not losing, nobody is whipping Kamaru's ass, he's always in the fight."

Usman sounded less certain. He said he needed to sit with his team and decide "whether it's worth continuing to put them through that." That's the tension. The people around him won't say it's over, and the man himself isn't sure. His manager's plan is already on the record: back to 170, where three names make sense.

A year ago, this fight was a punchline. Their feud goes back to a 2024 taping of Usman's own podcast — an episode that never aired — where, by Cejudo's account, "hands were thrown. Slaps were given." Muhammad has spent the time since telling anyone who'll listen that he made Usman cry. Usman's reply last October was pure contempt: "I just think he's a dork, and what you do with a dork is you ignore them. I have nothing to gain from fighting Belal Muhammad." If he held the title and Muhammad was next, he added, "I'd love to kick his head in."

"Nothing to gain" doesn't hold up anymore. Muhammad lost the belt to Jack Della Maddalena, dropped a decision to Ian Machado Garry in Doha, then got shut out 50-45 on all three cards by Gabriel Bonfim in June. That's three straight losses. He's seventh in the rankings and Usman's ninth. They're equals now, whether they like it or not.

Then there's the awkward part: Abdelaziz manages both of them. In April, Muhammad claimed he'd been offered Bonfim or Usman, knew which one he'd get, and accused his own manager of protecting Usman. Now Muhammad says he'd go to 185 for it, and that an Usman return to 170 "definitely makes the most sense." On paper, it's wrestling against pressure and probably a grinding decision. The grudge is what fans would pay for.

There's no venom here. There never was. Before their 2022 rematch, Leon Edwards joked he'd told his management to stop messaging him "unless it was Kamaru." After the knockout, he wrote that it was "an honor to run it back." Usman won the first fight in 2015, and Edwards took the next two, both of which went deep into the fifth round. The second was swung by a single point.

Edwards has fallen just as hard. He lost the title to Muhammad at UFC 304, was choked out by Sean Brady in the fourth round in London, then was knocked out by Carlos Prates in the second at UFC 322 in November. That's three straight losses, no fight since, and he's 35. 

These are two men who've shared 13 rounds and a mountain of respect, each needing one meaningful win. So why isn't anyone booking it? Neither camp is pushing, and Edwards hasn't announced a return.

This one nearly happened already. In late 2024, Jack Della Maddalena reshared a post pairing him with Usman at UFC 312 in Sydney. Usman said he'd "jump in there" as long as he was prepared. Then a reporter shot it down, and it went nowhere. Usman fought Buckley instead.

He took the title from Muhammad at UFC 315 in May 2025, holding him to just three takedowns, and lost it to Islam Makhachev over five rounds six months later. Then Prates chopped him down in the third round in front of his hometown crowd in Perth. When the post-mortems ran, Usman's name was already among the possible next opponents.

It's old guard against new guard, and the stylistic blueprint is Makhachev's. Muhammad couldn't drag Della Maddalena into deep water. Makhachev, a lightweight moving up, did it in almost every round, racking up more than 18 minutes of control on the way to 50-45 on all three cards. Can a 39-year-old coming off a torn pec do what Muhammad couldn't? That's the whole fight.