Combat sports in the 2020s got off to a rough start. For that matter, so did the landscape of the entire world at the outset of the current decade. After the World Health Organization (WHO) had spent the early weeks of 2020 tracking the threat of the coronavirus (COVID-19), the organization moved to declare COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11, 2020.
In the days that followed, all sporting competitions across the planet were either suspended or, in the case of the NCAA inside the United States of America, ended for the remainder of the then-ongoing academic term.