It’s the only weight class in which the UFC has a champion but no contenders, no rankings, effectively no division. It’s also the weight class in which even the all-female fight promotion Invicta FC has a hard time booking bouts.

In Bellator, where women’s MMA has seen a fairly recent resurgence, the division saw a total of eight bouts in 2017 – the most of any major fight promotion – even if many of them ended up as online prelims or unaired “postlims,” taking place after the evening’s main event.

So what’s the problem with women’s featherweight? Why is the division that once played host to marquee bouts like Cris Cyborg vs. Gina Carano on Showtime now struggling just to fill the ranks? Is it a lack of talent, a lack of interest, or something else?

It’s a question that Invicta FC President Shannon Knapp has asked herself many times. Even back when she worked for Strikeforce, which promoted the Cyborg-Carano bout in 2009, the women’s 145-pound division was consistently the toughest division to consistently book.

“I honestly don’t know why that is,” Knapp told MMAjunkie. “Trust me – I look all over the world for them. We’re looking every day to try to build these rosters and fill them out, and that one’s difficult. It’s always been difficult. There’s a handful (of female featherweights) out there, but nothing like the other divisions.”

Invicta FC promotes women’s bouts in five divisions. On any given fight card you might see multiple fights in divisions like strawweight and atomweight, where Knapp said there are plenty of fighters to choose from, but it’s increasingly rare to see more than one featherweight bout per event.

Several Invicta FC events have featured no featherweight bouts at all, especially now that the former champion Cyborg has made the move to the UFC.

Some of the problem, according to Knapp, is that the division isn’t one that can afford to be spread so thin across multiple promotions.

“Right now, I have 145-pounders, Bellator has them, and now the UFC,” Knapp said. “It’s not a division that you can really split three ways.”

Officials from both Bellator and the UFC declined to comment for this story.

According to Robert Sargent, who has maintained consistent women’s MMA rankings and coverage on his website MMARising.com, spreading the talent pool too thin has had a negative effect in more ways than one.

With female featherweights competing separately in three different promotions, Sargent said, “it’s difficult for female featherweights to develop their skills by consistently competing against higher-level opposition.”

Plus, that lack of opportunity has other consequences as well. Getting fights already is a major challenge for many female fighters. Making it even tougher at featherweight may serve as an extra deterrent to some athletes who might otherwise end up as active fighters in the weight class.

As for how we got to that state of affairs, Sargent points to timing. The UFC was slow to adopt the women’s 145-pound class, which meant that many potential featherweights faced a choice between dropping down to bantamweight or giving up on any hope of fighting in a major organization like the UFC. That left the door open for Bellator.

Under that promotion’s previous leadership, it had begun to move away from women’s MMA. But when former Strikeforce boss Scott Coker took over as Bellator president, he saw an opportunity to sign talent in the women’s weight class that the UFC seemed intent on ignoring.

“The UFC waited too long to pull the trigger on creating a women’s featherweight division, which allowed fighters time to sign elsewhere, and it does not appear that they are now willing to commit to anything beyond one-off fights for Cyborg,” Sargent said. “And let’s also not forget that some UFC fans will forever dislike Cyborg, no matter how many fights she wins or how impressive her performances are, because UFC President Dana White spent years publicly bashing and mocking her before finally relenting and signing her.”

It’s true that before the UFC embraced Cyborg, White often dismissed her attempts to challenge former UFC bantamweight champion Ronda Rousey. Back then, Rousey was the UFC’s golden goose. Cyborg was, according to White, “Wanderlei Silva in a dress.”

But Cyborg’s years-long domination over the division has had other effects, too. While Knapp said she has some young featherweights on her radar, she acknowledges that “no way are they ready to compete with a fighter like Cyborg.”

That could be a problem, since any featherweight who rises through the ranks could quickly become a potential opponent for the UFC champ, who is seemingly always in need of new challengers she hasn’t already throttled.

Her reign as UFC champion has even reportedly motivated more than one female fighter to choose Bellator over the UFC, since at least there a featherweight has some hope for a path to the title that doesn’t run through Cyborg.

But one retired female featherweight sees other forces at work, too. Marloes Coenen fought at both bantamweight and featherweight during her well-traveled career, competing in multiple title fights in both divisions and winning the Strikeforce bantamweight title in 2010.

At 5-foot-9, Coenen said her frame made her a more natural fit at featherweight, and she doesn’t buy the explanation that just aren’t enough talented women big enough to compete in the division.

After all, you look around at other women’s sports and you see plenty of gifted athletes who meet the size requirements – and, as the Olympic Games confirm every four years, many compete in sports that pay even less than MMA.

Instead, Coenen suspects that the reluctance to promote and accept larger female fighters is rooted in deeper issues.

“Women are forced by society to move within a certain frame to be seen as a ‘full woman,'” Coenen said. “Step out of it and you become an outcast – see the rough UFC path that Cyborg had to climb, as an example.”

According to Coenen, a lot of it may have to do with MMA’s male-dominated fanbase. A woman of Cyborg’s stature and skill could be too intimidating for some.

“So if you have a cute girl like Paige VanZant that kicks ass, she is not a threat,” Coenen said. “That is OK. Gabi Garcia, however …”

Whatever the root cause, women’s featherweight faces an uncertain future. Invicta FC does what it can with the division, but its champions are often spirited away by the UFC, which may soon happen with current Invicta FC women’s champion Megan Anderson.

Bellator operates the most active version of the weight class, but its roster of women’s 145-pound fighters is still largely inexperienced and unknown, with the possible exception of champion Julia Budd.

In the UFC, Cyborg already struggles to find quality opponents her own size, and her bosses don’t seem interested in building a talent pool around her.

Plus, even Cyborg, as invincible as she seems, can’t fight forever. Once she’s gone, it’s hard not to wonder what will become of the weight class she calls home.

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