Tyler Durden 
Over the past two years, Tom Aspinall has racked up an impressive 3-0 record but he’s only spent a total of 3 minutes and 22 seconds in the octagon thanks to a series of rapid-fire first-round finishes.
Right now, Aspinall is sitting in the sidelines awaiting his next assignment with hopes that he’ll get a title unification bout against Jon Jones but July would mark one year since his last appearance in the UFC. The 32-year-old interim champion has grown agitated while playing the waiting game with no clear indication on when Jones might decide he wants to fight again or not.
That’s why retired UFC welterweight Matt Brown would offer Aspinall the same advice he gave to Michael Chandler when he spent two years out of action waiting for a fight against Conor McGregor that ultimately never happened.
“I look at that just like the [Michael] Chandler situation with Conor [McGregor]. Just go fight, bro,” Brown said on The Fighter vs. The Writer. “Keep your name out there. Keep showing that you are the man to fight him. Keep building your legacy. Keep your name out in the news. Keep showing the world that you the guy that should be fighting him.
“If it’s true, then your case is going to get stronger and stronger. If you’re sitting on the sidelines, it doesn’t really help your case as much.”
Brown believes inactivity really is the worst enemy for any fighter because time is the one luxury nobody gets back.
In Chandler’s situation, he never regretted his decision to sit and wait for McGregor because he received constant assurances from the UFC that the fight was going to happen. When it was clear that McGregor wasn’t coming back in a timely fashion, Chandler moved onto a different fight but he’s since gone 0-2 with lopsided losses to both Charles Oliveira and Paddy Pimblett.
Of course, Brown understands the magnitude when it comes to a potential showdown against Jones, who is arguably the greatest fighter in MMA history, but he also knows Aspinall gains nothing by just holding out hope that the fight might happen.
“I just come from a different school [of thought],” Brown explained. “Maybe it’s an old school thing just me personally, when I was fighting or what I would suggest for others to do is go ahead and fight as much as you can, fight the best guys you can and see how things work out. That’s not always the best way to go about business and necessarily the best way to make money but look you only live once. You’re going to [look back] at 50 or 60 years old, retired and be like ‘that whole year I was out or the two years I was out, I wish I would have fought.’ I think about stuff like that.
“That’s why I would advise something like that but I totally get the business side, too. You’ve got to get the biggest fight you can and not take all the risk to get there necessarily.”
As much as the UFC maintains control over the fighters and the fights that get made, Jones is in unique situation where he actually commands a lot of power right now as the heavyweight champion and one of the biggest draws left in the promotion.
There have been calls for Jones to get stripped of his title but he’s currently only been out of action for six months so unless he’s truly done with fighting, it seems unlikely the UFC would take the belt away from him.
The uncertainty is troubling but Brown feels like that’s a situation of the UFC’s own making, especially without any sort of precedent set up to explain why Jones is allowed to sit and wait without any repercussions.
“They’re not going to strip him either,” Brown said. “I wish there was just a rule set in stone. Like if you don’t defend in this amount of time, you’re stripped. That’s the way it should be. Unfortunately, it’s just up to the PR guys and Dana [White] and I’m sure they sit down and have meetings and talk about it. There’s just no standard. No guidelines.
“We’re all living in the UFC’s world and it just kind of goes the way they want it to go. You could make an argument either way whether he should be stripped or not but it’s like ultimately the UFC just decides. The argument is almost irrelevant.”
If Aspinall chooses to fight rather than wait for Jones, he has options available to him even if the matchups aren’t as quite as compelling.
That’s not the case for Jones, however, as Brown argues the biggest factor working in Aspinall’s favor right now is that if the UFC heavyweight champion ever fights again, there’s only one fight in his future and that’s it.
“As long as he fights Aspinall, if he keeps fighting,” Brown said about Jones. “However long he waits, we can talk about that game all day but if he comes back and fights again, it just has to be Tom Aspinall. I don’t think we’re going to really respect any other fight than Tom Aspinall at this point.
“That’s kind of the situation we’re in. You are stuck with Tom Aspinall if you’re going to keep fighting. Some people are saying he’s ducking or whatever, well if he was ducking him, we’re going to find out because there’s no other fight out there.”
Listen to new episodes of The Fighter vs. The Writer every Tuesday with audio only versions of the podcast available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and iHeartRadio
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