Jon Jones Reacts With One Word as Stipe Miocic Calls Francis Ngannou the ‘Best Heavyweight in the World’

Everybody needs a bit of validation, but it seems Jon Jones does more so than most. Despite UFC President Dana White constantly reaffirming his status as the greatest of all time, Jones seems to be bothered by what his former nemesis Stipe Miocic thinks of him. And what does Miocic think? The former world champion simply favors Ngannou over Jones. 

Recency bias is a huge factor in MMA, which also helps Ngannou out massively. But it’s also true that over the past few years, he has been way more active than Jones, and that too, across two sports. Ngannou was the UFC heavyweight champion before leaving the company. He has since become the PFL heavyweight champion.

Now, because, the UFC belt was never taken from him, this makes him the lineal heavyweight champion of the world. Not to forget, he also took on Tyson Fury on his boxing debut and almost defeated the world champion. That is an impressive list of achievements! So, it doesn’t come as a surprise that when The Schmo asked Miocic who the ‘best heavyweight‘ on the planet was, his go-to answer was Ngannou.

“I’ll go Francis just because he is tearing it up and doing great. I’ll go Francis”, Miocic confidently said. 

Jones who came across this on social media, shared a sarcastic response to the interview on his Instagram story. He said, 

“Of Course.”

Unfortunately for fans, we will never find out the real answer to this question. A super fight between Jones and Ngannou is something that was said to be in the talks a lifetime ago. However, Jones remained out of action for the entire duration of Ngannou’s heavyweight reign in the UFC.

Ngannou left the UFC in January 2023 after contract negotiations with the brass went sour. Co-incidentally, Jones made his comeback two months later in March 2023 and took the title by defeating Ciryl Gane. 

However, all that is in the past because given Ngannou’s relationship with the brass, a super fight with Jones is never going to materialize, at least under the UFC banner. Fortunately, Jones has another way to prove his greatness.

Betting odds favor Aspinall over ‘Bones’

Aspinall, who won the interim heavyweight title by beating Sergei Pavlovich in November 2023, has been calling for a fight with Jones ever since. As the interim champion, he has every right to demand a title unification fight with Jones. 

However, after Jones returned from an 18-month injury layoff to fight Stipe Miocic in mid-2024, he insisted on fighting Miocic. The whole situation was a little more complicated than this.

In the lead-up to the Miocic fight, Jones tried to put his own spin on his supposed title unification fight with Aspinall. In a matter of days, he went from asking Aspinall to prove himself by getting more fights under his belt to claiming he would only fight someone like him if the payout was big enough to not care about winning or losing anymore.

However, the public support seems to have been overwhelmingly in Aspinall’s favor, making him the gambling man’s favorite to win the duel.

Aspinall hasn’t fought since July when he defeated Curtis Blaydes at UFC 304 to defend his interim title. But he’s already back in training, despite the uncertainty of a title unification match with Jones. Aspinall says that he’s not sure when the fight will be scheduled but expects to get a date soon. 

Now, if Jones signs on the dotted lines and defeats Aspinall, he will have undoubtedly proven Miocic wrong. So the question that needs to be asked is, is Dana White willing to spring the money for the fight to materialize?