One Championship – Weight Division Confusion

Due to a weight cutting death, One Championship rolled out changes to their weigh-ins and divisional ranges at the start of 2016.

Although online literature suggests they still do weigh-ins, I can’t find any legitimate pre-event weigh-in results since they rolled out this new program.  As far as I can tell, they come up with a fight-ready, perhaps slightly dehydrated weight for each fighter and put them in whatever division they fit.

What makes it more confusing is how they structure their ranges:

The upper-limit of Heavyweight remains unchanged, while all of the other divisions are staggered by one, with the exception of Light Heavyweight, which basically equates to a “Light” Heavyweight.  So, they tried to make the common naming convention “work” with their altered methods.

To incorporate a real-world example, Bibiano Fernandes is the promotion’s 145-pound champion.  In a fight-ready, perhaps slightly dehydrated state, he probably is about 145 pounds and as far as I can tell, this is where he is expected to weigh under their strange conditions — so this is pretty clear so far.

To OneFC, he is a “Bantamweight”, but at where he’s expected to weigh, he’d be considered a “Featherweight” to the rest of the MMA world.  However, in the rest of MMA, he would not be exempt from cutting an additional 10 or so pounds of water weight, so in all likelihood, he’d weigh-in at 135 prior to the event — a “true” Bantamweight.

As you may have noticed, our divisional limits are slightly higher than the standard limits, to accommodate for slight variances historically in organizations shifting things a bit, deciding to use the metric system and with another pound or two on top of that to allow for small weigh-in misses.  However, they aren’t so much higher to allow for OneFC fighters to be slotted in their “true” MMA divisions without breaking our own rules and ignoring actual weigh-in results.

Hopefully this clears things up.