Yair Rodriguez has been on the UFC roster for more than a decade now, but there was a time in between where the Mexican star wasn’t.
The former UFC Interim Featherweight Champion signed to the big show in 2014, winning his contract on the premiere season of ‘The Ultimate Fighter Latin America’.
Chihuahua’s Yair Rodriguez won six-straight fights in the Octagon and at the age of 24, he had already headlined back-to-back events. The top-10 contender was given a shot at former lightweight champion Frankie Edgar after styling on another Hall of Famer in BJ Penn.
Edgar disrupted Rodriguez’s taekwondo flow with his wrestling, dominating the prospect with ground and pound for a TKO by way of doctor’s stoppage. This was Rodriguez’s first-ever UFC loss.
A little less than a year later, the KO artist’s name was nowhere to be found in the UFC featherweight rankings.
Dana White had ‘no use’ for Yair Rodriguez in May 2018
In May 2018, UFC CEO Dana White released Yair Rodriguez from the promotion for allegedly refusing fights with MMA’s biggest what-if Zabit Magomedsharipov at UFC 227 and Ricardo Lamas.
“The guy’s off a year, rejects a fight with Lamas and then doesn’t want to fight a guy below him in the rankings?” White told LA Times in 2018.
“He can go somewhere else. We have no use for him.
“He calls that [Zabit] fight fake news. This is real news,” White said of Rodriguez tweeting ‘#fakenews’ at a report of him turning down a fight against Magomedsharipov.
Rodriguez was sidelined with injuries following his fight with Frankie Edgar and after a few weeks into free agency, the Mexican ironed things out with the UFC brass and was back on the roster.
What led to Yair Rodriguez’s brief UFC departure?
Telling his side of the story on The MMA Hour, Rodriguez says he initally accepted a fight with Ricardo Lamas before Lamas signed to fight Mirsad Bektic instead. During this time, Rodriguez was open to fighting the likes of The Korean Zombie, Josh Emmett, Jeremy Stephens and Frankie Edgar again.
Rodriguez said he asked for more money to fight Magomedsharipov at UFC 227 because of ‘how big of an event’ it was in Los Angeles.
Rodriguez said the UFC rejected the pay bump, even offering to fight Magomedsharipov in his home country of Russia.
“I know the potential of this fight and that’s why I was asking for more money,” Rodriguez said of his fight with Magomesharipov.
“That was the main problem about it. Not because I didn’t want to fight, not because I was scared of no one… I said no to fight him in LA for the same amount of money.”
When Rodriguez eventually returned to the UFC, his first fight back was supposed to be Zabit Magomedsharipov at UFC 228.
However, the fight wouldn’t take place after all with Rodriguez withdrawing due to a injury.
Yair Rodriguez currently has a record of 10-4-1 in the UFC and went on to become the interim champion in 2023 in the featherweight absence of Alexander Volkanovski.
Coming off two losses to Brian Ortega and Volkanovski, ‘El Pantera’ is set to welcome former two-division Bellator Champion Patricio Pitbull to the Octagon at UFC 314 this Saturday.
