Stephen Thompson Surprised by Preliminary Card Placement at UFC 307

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.

“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.