Cory Sandhagen was on the verge of securing a crack at the UFC bantamweight championship. All he had to do was beat former 135-pound titlist TJ Dillashaw at the end of July.
After getting off to a hot start, Dillashaw came on in the later rounds to earn a narrow split-decision nod. Hopes of UFC gold looked to be on the backburner for Sandhagen. But fate was on Sandhagen's side.
Current bantamweight champion Aljamain Sterling had to bow out of his scheduled title defense with Petr Yan at Saturday's UFC 267 due to lingering issues from neck surgery. So the UFC looked around to see who would be the most suitable opponent for Yan. That person was the 29-year-old from Colorado, who will meet Yan in the co-main event for the interim bantamweight title from Fight Island in Abu Dhabi.
Ahead of his first UFC title shot, Sandhagen talked with DAZN News about the process of getting to UFC 267, what he learned from the Dillashaw fight and if the winner is the undisputed bantamweight champion.
(Editor's note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
DAZN: Do you feel like that when you really sit and think about it, you may have an L on your record, but at the end of the day, you came up short, but you still won because you're still going to fight for the UFC title?
Cory Sandhagen: Yeah, man. It makes it really sweet to go through a couple of months of tasting the loss and having to deal with that, which is never a fun process. Then have to things just really take a full 180 and be able to fight for the title next. So it's a very, very sweet feeling.
DAZN: Can you explain Cory how it led to the UFC calling you and your team to see if you were interested in this fight on October 30?
CS: Sure. So TJ is out because of injury caused by the submission that he didn't tap to in our fight. So he's out because of that surgery. Then Aljamain, I suppose, is having health issues as well. So I figured that Aljamain was having some type of issues only because I know that when they first talked, he said he wanted to fight in November. So when I saw that the fight was announced in October, I thought that was interesting. So I had a belief that Aljamain wasn't going to be healthy for the fight anyways. So I had kind of always had in the back of my head, like, ‘I'm going to be training for this. I'm going to semi-pretend this could be a real possibility. And then it turned into a real possibility. I got a call from my agent saying they need someone to replace Aljamain and if I want to fight for a world title? And I said, ‘Absolutely, I do. Do you think that the odds of that are very high? He listed a couple of other names in the division that he thought might have an argument for it too. And I was the one they chose, or the stars lined up for me better than they lined up for the other people because I am the guy they're doing that for now.
DAZN: You're coming off a very difficult fight and one that could have gone either way. What positives do you take from the fight with TJ that will help prepare you for UFC 267?
CS: I learned a lot of lessons. Of course, in that fight, I think the main takeaway from that fight is that I need to be viewing these five rounds as five individual fights that I need to win and not one over-encompassing fight because that's the way that they're judged. That's the way that the sport is set up right now. So I think that's definitely the major key thing that I've taken away from that fight. I just need to make sure that I'm winning the five individual fights.
DAZN: Are you open to the idea of the fact that maybe there should be open scoring because I know fighters, depending on who you talk to, would like to know how they're doing round by round by round?
CS: I am totally on board and pro-open scoring. I think that it is really silly to not have that be the case. I guess I haven't ran through or maybe heard all of the arguments against it. But I think if we go to open scoring, and then in five years, we look back and say, ‘Hey, remember when we were doing things where no one really knew who won the rounds, and they kind of just had to cross their fingers at the end and hope that they were doing all the right things. Remember when we didn't know the score of the game that we were playing in, and we just decided on a winner at the end’? I think that we would look back and think that we were very silly and semi-foolish for operating in that way.
DAZN: There's been a narrative from fans that have said the winner of this fight will be the undisputed 135-pound champion because no one knows how long Aljamain’s going to be out for as neck injuries are very tricky to deal with. Do you feel the winner of this fight is going to be the undisputed bantamweight champion?
CS: I would definitely agree with that. The only thing that makes that a little bit tricky is that Aljamain has a win over me. So there's definitely going to be talk in arguments of that, of course. But I definitely think everyone sees Yan as the real champ, including myself, saw how that fight with Sterling was going and how it wasn't going Sterling's way. So I think Yan’s performances in the UFC have been great. I think that he's definitely seen as the best guy in the world. So if I can take him out, I think that I definitely in my eyes, and I think in a lot of eyes from the fans will be that person will be seen as the best in the division.
DAZN: How do you envision beating Petr Yan to become the interim UFC bantamweight champion?
CS: I know that if I can go out there for 25 minutes, work my ass off, stay focused and stay more skilled than I think I leave with the gold belt. I think that if I do those three things, I'm going to be a champion.