UFC light heavyweight Ryan Bader wrapped up his latest UFC contract in the best way possible, scoring impressive stoppages over Ilir Latifi and Antonio Rogerio Nogueira. With these wins, which reaffirmed his status as one of the world’s top light heavyweights, Bader made himself a valuable commodity not only in the eyes of the UFC, but also in the eyes of other top promotions like Bellator and Rizin Fighting Federation.
On the most recent episode of Submission Radio, Bader gave an update on his current situation. The light heavyweight explained that he’s still in the earliest stages of his free agency.
“I’m still a free agent right now,” he said on the show. “Over the next week or so, we’re gonna see kind of what we’re doing and whatnot, as far as if we’re going to take any offers elsewhere, getting offers from the UFC, all that kind of stuff. So we haven’t gone there yet, we’re in the preliminary stages of it. So just kind of waiting right now and we will see. We were gonna wait for that light heavyweight title fight [between Daniel Cormier and Anthony Johnson] to happen, but obviously that’s pushed back, so we started the process a little earlier than expected.”
Bader also explained why he elected to fight out his UFC contract, rather than sign the contract renewal that was offered to him by the organization.
“[The UFC] usually come to you with one fight left,” he explained. “So they offered us something and we looked at it and we didn’t even really counter, we just looked at it and said we’re gonna fight it out because it’s pretty much the same contract that we had, a little bit more. So we just said, hey why not, let’s just fight it out. So it was our decision. So we’re just in the process right now of just kind of figuring out what we’re going to do.”
While Bader is far from making any major decisions as far as his fighting future goes, he did admit he’s already received interest from other organizations.
“Without getting into specifics or anything like that, there’s been interest, for sure,” he said. “I can’t really talk much about it until this stuff is all done and finalized and what not, but there’s definitely interest out there. So like I said, we’re in the preliminary stages right now, we’re talking to the UFC. It’s one of those things where we get an offer from the UFC or we go out and test free agency. So we’re in that stage right now.“
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