At this point in his career, Stephen Thompson isn’t a fighter who’s accustomed to being on the prelims.
Barring a late change, that will be the case at UFC 307, when “Wonderboy” squares off against Joaquin Buckley in a welterweight bout at the Delta Center in Utah on Oct. 5. As it currently stands, Thompson vs. Buckley is slated to be the evening’s featured preliminary bout on ESPNEWS and ESPN+. For pay-per-view events, the promotion typically offers at least one marquee fight on the earlier portion of the card.
“I’m so used to being on the main card, but hey, wherever the UFC puts us, we’re going to go out there and put on a show no matter what. We’re going to show everybody that we deserved to be there,” Thompson recently told Bodog Canada. “We should have been on the main card. But yeah, a little weird at this point knowing what kind of a fight this is going to be. You would figure that they’d want to have all eyes on it.
UFC 307: Pereira vs. Rountree Jr. Saturday at 10 ET on ESPN+. Order Now!
“Now, I’m not sure if it was because, you know, the last time I was supposed to fight in Salt Lake City my opponent didn’t make weight. But Joaquin Buckley is notorious for making weight, so I know he’s going to be a professional and we’re going to go out there and have fun but yeah, it was a little disappointing like, what’s going on now?”
Thompson hasn’t been on a preliminary card since September 2014, when he bested Patrick Cote at UFC 178.
“It’s wild,” Thompson said. “I don’t know why they put that on the [preliminary] card. I mean, there’s some fights on the main card that I think should be on the prelims but, you know, it is what it is.”
Thompson last appeared at UFC 296, where he suffered a second-round submission loss to Shavkat Rakhmonov. “Wonderboy” has lost three of his last four fights in the Octagon.
