While it may be too soon to crown Francis Ngannou as the new UFC heavyweight king without first seeing what champion Stipe Miocic has to say on Saturday, the red-hot title challenger already has his dream opponent in mind.
Ngannou (11-1), the destructive slugger who enters a title shot in the main event of UFC 220 in Boston just 46 days removed from his knockout of the year against Alistair Overeem, talked about his future plans during Monday's appearance on WFAN's "Outside the Cage" podcast.
"As a challenger, I need and want to fight some people because that would give me the opportunity to get to the title shot," Ngannou said. "[But] as a champion, I think you are going to see them come. Also, I think the fight that I would like to see is Ngannou against Brock Lesnar. It's not my deal, it's the UFC's deal. He's a very huge guy and seems like a very powerful guy. I want to test him."
While the idea of a Lesnar-Ngannou fight might seem unlikely for various reasons, let's not forget that the UFC was publicly considering a Lesnar comeback against Jon Jones until the former light heavyweight champion failed a drug test after defeating Daniel Cormier at UFC 214.
The 40-year-old Lesnar (5-3, 1 NC) hasn't fought since 2016, when he snapped a four-plus year retirement to outpoint Mark Hunt at UFC 200. The win was eventually taken away after Lesnar, a formerd UFC heavyweight champion, failed a pair of pre-fight drug tests for steroids.
Lesnar, who returned to his part-time schedule with WWE immediately after, eventually announced his retirement and removed himself from the United States Anti-Doping Agency's testing pool. Should Lesnar gain WWE approval to ever fight in the UFC again, he would need to declare his intentions to USADA and finish out the one-year suspension he received.
Ngannou, of course, would also have to defeat Miocic (17-2), who believes he has been disrespected despite entering the fight on his own five-fight knockout streak. Not only have oddsmakers installed Ngannou as the favorite but Miocic feels that even his own employers are not behind him.
As far as what goes into making Ngannou such a powerful striker, the 6-foot-5 native of Cameroon believes that has more to do with how quickly his punches land.
"Speed is something that in the heavyweight division we don't have a lot of," Ngannou said. "Watching some heavyweights like Mike Tyson, he inspired me to work with my speed because he beat people with power but most of the time he beat people with speed."
While Ngannou certainly respects Miocic, he doesn't fear him. In fact, there is only one person in the UFC who scares him.
"The one who intimidates me is myself," Ngannou said. "I'm scared to fail. That is the thing that makes me the most afraid, to fail. Just to think that I can do a mistake and lose the fight scares me so that is why I work out a lot to bring more chance to my size and less chance to my opponent."