Holly Holm names ideal weight class for Amanda Nunes title shot

Former UFC bantamweight champion and two-time UFC featherweight title challenger Holly Holm is set to return to the cage at UFC 235, where she’ll battle red-hot prospect Aspen Ladd. If Holm wins this fight, she’ll be one of the frontrunners for a shot at Amanda Nunes — whether it’s for Nunes’ bantamweight or featherweight belt.

Speaking to MMA Fighting recently, Holly Holm divulged that she’d prefer to get a shot at Nunes’ bantamweight belt, rather than her featherweight belt

“I think that bantamweight is probably where we would fight, I think that would be the case,” Holm said. “Who knows really how the future goes, but I definitely think that bantamweight is what we would fight at. I’ve been wanting to go to bantamweight for a while, but that doesn’t mean that I’m so focused on it that I’m not open to other opportunities at ‘45. I’m just taking each fight as it comes. Aspen Ladd is at 135, so that’s where I’m going.”

Having watched Amanda Nunes unseat Cris Cyborg in December, and battled Cris Cyborg herself, Holly Holm as some interesting perspective on a fight with Amanda Nunes.

“It just shows how styles make a difference,” she said. “So Amanda can’t look at a fight with Cyborg and say, ‘Well, I beat Cyborg, and Cyborg beat Holly, so I can beat Holly.’ It’s just styles make a difference. You look at the fight with [Valentina] Shevchenko and Nunes. It was more of a battle, more of a death match, more of a game like that. And Nunes had a hard time with Shevchenko, who is now a 125-pound champ, but she was able to knock out a 145-pound champ. You look at there’s a 20-pound difference in between that and when they fought at 135 it was just a whole other game.

“And a fight with Amanda and I would never be how it went with her and Shevchenko, it’s not going to be how it was with her and Cyborg. Every fight makes a difference because styles make a difference, but with that being said, you can always look at fights and everybody has tendencies and habits and things like that. But that just brings me back to one of my main points that anything can happen in there. There’s no promise of any victory. You have to get in there and work hard and anything can happen.”

How do you think Holly Holm would fair against Amanda Nunes?

This article first appeared on BJPENN.COM on 1/23/2019.