UFC Fight Night 68 is scheduled for June 6, and the UFC announced hometown fighter Dustin Poirier will return on a relatively short turnaround time to face Yancy Medeiros in a lightweight, three-round bout that is expected to be on the main card.
Medeiros has been with the UFC since April of 2013, and he had a rocky start going 0-2 with a No Contest in his first three fights. He has since righted the ship, scoring two wins in a row. In his last outing, he used a guillotine choke to finish Joe Proctor in the first round, and his first UFC win also came by submission against Damon Jackson. With Poirier getting the respect he does, this is a step-up fight for Medeiros.
Poirier is coming off a decisive April 4 win over Carlos Diego Ferreira where he ended the fight in the first round with punches. For Poirier, the match was significant for several reasons. In the outing prior to that win, he had lost to Conor McGregor in a fight where the results seem magnified now by what McGregor has become.
Poirier went into the match with a confident swagger, but less than two minutes into the fight, it was over and people were explaining to Dustin what had happened. The McGregor fight came at featherweight, and his April return was at lightweight. At a new weight class and coming off an embarrassing loss, Poirier showed that he had the mental toughness to bounce back from adversity.
Now Poirier gets another potential boost as he has a chance to fight in front of his hometown and earn another momentum building win. It will be interesting to see if Poirier continues to build steam, as his vanquisher McGregor has talked about moving up to the lightweight division after his featherweight run, and you can be sure Poirier would love another chance at the Irishman and would relish meeting him at 155 pounds.
The Fight Night 68 card is headlined by the light heavyweight bout between Daniel Cormier and Ryan Bader, and also features heavyweights Ben Rothwell and Matt Mitrione and middleweights Dan Henderson and Tim Boetsch on the main card.
Five more fights are expected to be added to the live event, but the card so far is shaping up to be one of the stronger Fight Night offerings of 2015.
