UFC 240 just went down from Edmonton, Alberta and for a pretty weak card on paper the fights certainly delivered. That’s not going to help the UFC much when it comes to pay-per-view buys, if we’re still calling them that now that they’re more of an ESPN+ subscription / event purchase bundle. For those numbers to kill, you need bigger fights than Max Holloway vs. Frankie Edgar (no disrespect to those two warriors, check out the highlights from their fight here).

One such fight will be Khabib Nurmagomedov vs. Dustin Poirier, set to go down at UFC 242 in September from Abu Dhabi. Even bigger will be the return of Conor McGregor. But who knows when that will happen? UFC president Dana White himself doesn’t know, and keeps pushing back the Irish superstar’s potential comeback. He’s been telling MMA media lately that ‘early 2020’ is most likely, but during the UFC 240 post fight press conference he voiced the tantalizing possibility that “The Notorious” could step in last second should anything happen to Khabib or Poirier.

“Yeah, I talked to him last week, he wants to come back.” White said about McGregor. “Really what he’s doing is looking to see how everything plays out in September. I was just thinking out there, as of right now ... Khabib and Poirier are fighting. You know how this business works: anything can happen and usually does. So I think he’s just sort of waiting to see how it all plays out and does he have an opportunity somewhere to jump in and make something happen.”

White certainly isn’t exaggerating when he says anything can and usually does happen. Khabib Nurmagomedov has been pretty unreliable when it comes to making it into the cage for his scheduled fights in the past. Most famously he fell out of UFC 209 against Tony Ferguson after a bad weight cut, but there were numerous other instances and injuries that resulted in a two year stretch between 2014 and 2016 where he didn’t fight at all.

Dustin Poirier is much more stable but even he pulled out of his big UFC 230 fight against Nate Diaz with a hip injury. So while there’s no reason to assume one of the two may not make it to Abu Dhabi, s**t certainly does happen ... and with the UFC’s luck, it often happens with the big fights.

Would McGregor actually step in and face either men last second? He certainly talks a big game on social media and has recently been turning reality on its head justifying his last loss to Nurmagomedov. But with a slow healing thumb injury and so much at stake with his career right now, we do have to wonder whether this is a real possibility or just a bit of fantasy to keep things spicy leading up to September.