What if we had gotten Whittaker-Gastelum?

In case you've forgotten, UFC 234 in February 2019 was supposed to see then-champion Robert Whittaker defending his middleweight title against challenger Kelvin Gastelum, who'd gotten the title shot off of wins against Michael Bisping and Ronaldo Souza. Hours before the fight, however, Whittaker pulled out due to emergency surgery. 

It's pretty safe to say that UFC 236 nine weekends later wouldn't have seen Gastelum-Adesanya for the interim middleweight title in the co-main. 

Let's say that Whittaker beats Gastelum at UFC 234. The UFC opts to have Whittaker-Adesanya as the co-main for UFC 241 in August 2019, which of course was headlined by Cormier-Miocic 2 for the heavyweight title. We can assume, as well, that Nate Diaz wouldn't have competed there- Dana White wouldn't want one of his top PPV needle-movers playing second fiddle to the co-main and would instead book McGregor-Diaz 3 at lightweight for the October 2019 PPV main event at UFC 243. Think it's a coincidence that this is the month after Khabib-Poirier at UFC 242? Absolutely not- Dana, as we all know, was hell-bent on Khabib-McGregor 2 after two million pay-per-view buys in the first bout in 2018. With McGregor and Diaz capping their trilogy at UFC 243, the BMF match probably wouldn't happen, as if Diaz takes a three-month sit his return bout would be January 2020 at the earliest- more in another post.