What's going on with Carla Esparza and UFC?

If you are a fan of the sport and especially if you bother with the women's division you probably know the Cookie Monster, AKA Carla Esparza. She is kind of overlooked when it comes to the establishment of the women's division because everyone was focused on Ronda Rousey. However, Esparza has been around in UFC since 2014 and although she did have some hiccups for sure, she was champion twice and holds the record for the longest stretch of time between championships of any fighter to ever enter the Octagon.

Unfortunately she is also known for being a willing participant in what most people consider to the "The most boring fight of all time in UFC" when she won the belt back from "Thug Rose" in 2022.

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That's Esparza on the right and if those two look a bit too far away from one another to be in a fight you would be correct and this is how most of the 25 minutes in that fight went. Almost nothing happened and when the belt was put around her waist at the end the crowd booed her.

She went on to defend her title 6 months later and was easily dispatched by Zhang Weili in the 2nd round. Then she just kind of vanished.

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What she did during those nearly 2 years is anyone's guess and there isn't really any good information online as to what she was up to. One thing is for sure, she wasn't fighting and I think there was some bad blood behind the scenes because UFC went and did something I have never seen them do before: The scrubbed her image and most of her information from their own website.

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If you did a bit of digging you could find her results but UFC had removed her profile photo and replaced it with a generic silhouette of a dude. This is what it looks like in all of her past fights with UFC.

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It's just odd because the only time you ever really see this happen with UFC is when a fighter is being used on a trial basis and only has a 1-fight contract. Carla has been with UFC for a decade and I wonder if something really awful happened between her and the management of UFC after that horrible fight with Thug Rose and they decided to get their revenge on her by eliminating her from the history books as much as possible.

This comes at a time when she has announced that she is going to retire and even though there is almost no fanfare or publicity about it, her final fight is going to take place next month against Tecia Pennington. This has been revealed that it is her retirement fight. She is the first fight on the card and I can't tell if this is the main card or the prelims. It's probably the prelims because she is 10th from the top as far as the order the fights are going in. Normally there are only 6 fights on the main card so this placement put her unceremoniously near the bottom of the undercards.

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At least they gave her a profile picture but this website attribute is apparently only used for this one thing because it is not updating all of her past fights. I wonder what happened there but the fact that it happened right after that absolutely horrible fight between her and Rose can't be a coincidence can it? Perhaps she attempted to defend her in-ring performance a bit too adamantly and Dana really doesn't like it when someone defies him. That's all I can guess.

I hope the fans can treat her well in her retirement fight because yes, her last performance was abysmal, but we need to look further than that and realize that she was absolutely instrumental in why we have a women's division in UFC at all these days.