Norma Dumont vs Ailin Perez is a prelim at UFC Fight Night 289

The UFC runs Fight Night 289 out of the Meta Apex on Saturday, September 26, prelims at 5 p.m. ET and the main card at 8 p.m. ET. The main event is Raul Rosas Jr. against Raoni Barcelos at bantamweight. That is a fine fight. It is not the best fight on the card, and it is not close.

The two highest-ranked fighters in the building will walk out before the main card starts.

Norma Dumont is the number two women's bantamweight on our divisional board. Ailin Perez is number four. They fight each other on Saturday, at 135 pounds, with a top-three position in a division that has exactly one champion and about nine credible contenders sitting on the result. And they are on the prelims, somewhere between Christian Edwards and Vanessa Demopoulos, on a Saturday afternoon in Las Vegas.

Here is the whole card, sorted by where our current boards have each fighter, so you can see the shape of it:

That is three ranked fighters on the prelims and one on the main card, with the man headlining the show absent from a fifteen-deep bantamweight board that currently runs down through Bryce Mitchell and Montel Jackson.

The prelims are carrying the actual fights

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Dumont is 13-3. Before she lost a unanimous decision to Joselyne Edwards in April, she had won four straight: Chelsea Chandler, Germaine de Randamie, Irene Aldana, and a split over Ketlen Vieira. That is not a padded run. De Randamie is a former champion, Aldana fought for the belt, Vieira has beaten most of the division at one time or another. Dumont built a top-three ranking by beating the people directly above and beside her, which is the only honest way to do it in a division this shallow.

Perez is 13-2 and has won five in a row: Lucie Pudilova, Joselyne Edwards, Daria Zhelezniakova by submission in under four minutes, Karol Rosa, and Macy Chiasson in February. Note the second name on that list. Perez beat Joselyne Edwards in June 2024; Edwards beat Dumont in April 2026 and now sits at number one. So the woman who beat the current number one contender is fighting the woman who lost to her, and the winner has a straightforward argument for the next shot at Kayla Harrison. Put that fight anywhere on a pay-per-view and nobody blinks. It is on the prelims.

Further down, Montel Jackson at number fifteen fights Ricky Simon, who is 22-7-1 and has been in the UFC since 2018. Rodolfo Bellato, 13-3-1, fights Christian Edwards at light heavyweight. John Castaneda is 21-8-1. The prelims of this card are three deep in fighters who have spent five years or more proving they belong.

The main card is carrying projects

Below the headliner, the main card runs Rodolfo Vieira against Robert Bryczek, Brady Hiestand against Rinya Nakamura, and then two fights that would be prelims on any card the UFC cared about. Mehemmedeli Osmanli is 22 years old, 12-1, and from Azerbaijan. Ilimbek Akylbek Uulu is 23, 10-3, and out of Tiger Muay Thai. Melissa Amaya is 8-0 and making her debut. Valesca Machado is 15-4 and 0-1 in the promotion.

I have nothing against any of them. Osmanli at 22 with twelve wins is exactly the kind of signing that turns into a contender in three years, and Amaya arriving undefeated is a reason to watch. But a main card is a statement about what the promotion wants you to see, and this one says the UFC would rather show you two fighters it is building than two fighters it already has.

The economics are not mysterious. Rosas Jr. is 21, Mexican, undefeated in his last five, and the UFC has wanted him to be a star since it signed him at 17. Barcelos is 22-5 and has won five straight, including decisions over Cody Garbrandt, Payton Talbott and Ricky Simon, and he is the opponent in this equation rather than the attraction. Putting that fight last is a marketing decision, and marketing decisions are allowed. The part worth arguing about is what gets pushed down to make room.

The one ranked man on the main card is the B-side

Barcelos is 39 years old and having the best run of his career. Since February 2024 he has beaten Cristian Quinonez by submission, then Payton Talbott, then Cody Garbrandt, then Ricky Simon, then Montel Jackson by split decision in April. Four of those five went to the judges and he won every one of them. He defends 87 percent of takedowns attempted on him, which is the highest figure on this card by a distance, and he lands 4.65 significant strikes a minute while absorbing 4.24, which tells you exactly what kind of fights he has: close, busy, and decided on the cards.

Rosas Jr. is 12-1 with five straight wins of his own, four of them decisions, and he takes down 6.10 opponents per fifteen minutes at a 54 percent clip. He is also 21, which is the whole story. He was 17 when the UFC signed him and 18 when he debuted, and the promotion has spent four years arranging the conditions under which he becomes a star. A headlining slot against the number eight bantamweight is one of those conditions.

So the main event is a legitimately good fight with a legitimate ranked fighter in it. It is just that the ranked fighter is the one being fed to the story, and the two ranked fighters with a title shot on the line are downstairs.

Ranked fighters on prelims is not new, it is just getting worse

Photo: ASG Jordan / Public domain

The Apex cards have always been the place where the UFC spends its roster rather than its budget. Nobody buys a ticket, the building holds a few hundred people, and the fight order is set almost entirely by what the broadcast wants to lead with. That was true when Fight Nights were on Fox and it is true now. Ranked fighters have ended up on prelims for a decade.

What is different here is the scale of the gap. This is not a number fourteen in a stacked division getting bumped for a fun heavyweight fight. This is the second and fourth ranked women's bantamweights, fighting each other, for a position that leads directly to a title shot, placed below a main card whose fourth fight is a debutant against an 0-1 fighter. The women's bantamweight division has been criticised for years for having no depth and no bouts that matter. When one of the few bouts that does matter gets made, it goes out at 5 p.m. on a Saturday, opposite nothing, in front of whoever remembered it was on.

If you want the defence, it is that the prelims and the main card are on the same service, at the same price, forty minutes apart, and the distinction is mostly ceremonial. Fine. Then make the ceremony match the fights, because the ordering is the only signal the promotion sends about what it thinks is important, and this week it is pointing at the wrong end of the card.

Watch the prelims.