Earlier this month, Dana White claimed that UFC was competing with the NFL, MLB, and NBA, all the major sports leagues in the country. This was because he wanted to cement how the world views UFC, which is his brainchild. His thoughts have been even more firm ever since UFC secured its reported $7.7 billion media rights deal with Paramount.

While it was a monumental deal in combat sports, the UFC CEO has not hesitated to discuss what he believes was the NFL’s reaction to the blockbuster agreement.

“What I’m talking about is, and the NFL, they’re animals, man,” White said this week. “These guys are, as an organization, what they’ve done and what they’ve built, and I don’t know this to be true, but I absolutely positively know this to be true. When we announced our Paramount deal, the NFL must have got together the next day and said, ‘There was $8 billion sitting over at Paramount. We didn’t get it? We’ll put games on f—ing Tuesday, Friday, Saturday.’ So, all of those guys are going to be gunning for our deal.”

There could be several reasons why Dana White would think the NFL is going to be gunning for UFC’s deal. For starters, the NFL’s regular season games and the Ultimate Fighting Championship often overlap, especially on the weekend during the September through early February window. Second, Paramount is already one of the league’s biggest partners.

For broader context, the NFL currently has media rights agreements worth more than $100 billion with its broadcast partners, including FOX, ESPN, NBC, CBS, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and others. The UFC, meanwhile, signed a seven-year, $7.7 billion media rights deal with Paramount last August, valued at roughly $1.1 billion annually.

The UFC’s latest deal allows all 13 numbered UFC pay-per-view events to move to Paramount+, and around 30 Fight Night events annually also stream on Paramount+. The NFL, on the other hand, has CBS (owned by Paramount) broadcasting the AFC Sunday afternoon games, playoff games, and the Super Bowl on a rotating basis.

And that’s where Dana White’s claim comes in. Considering the NFL games consistently generate the highest television ratings in the United States, every network competes aggressively for them. White’s point is essentially simple. If Paramount had nearly $8 billion available for UFC, perhaps it also had more financial flexibility than the NFL’s partners realized. And it’s not the first time he has argued about that.

“Without sounding too arrogant, people always ask me about, oh, you’re competing with this, you’re competing with this guy,” White said on June 7. “Right now, at the level that we’re at, we’re competing with the NFL. We’re competing with the NBA. We’re competing with Major League Baseball and with the NHL.

“You got to imagine the way in the United States the powerhouse over there is the NFL, and I’m sure when the NFL, when they were sitting in their executive offices and they saw the deal that we got with Paramount they had to be thinking, ‘Wait a minute, there was $8 billion sitting over at Paramount that we didn’t get. We’ll start putting games on ‌Tuesdays.”

The NFL has had a decade-long relationship with CBS. So, it won’t be wrong to say that seeing Paramount suddenly spend another $7.7 billion on UFC naturally demonstrated the company’s willingness to invest heavily in live sports. That said, the league will soon negotiate its next series of broadcasting deals. Whether the UFC’s latest deal will affect the NFL’s next broadcasting deal remains to be seen.