Also the actual simple answer is that Jon has always simply wanted to beat Stipe because Stipe is the only other man who's defeated Cormier and that Ngannou is really pretty irrelevant to all this.
- Jon dropped his LHW title and announced he wanted to move to HW 2 days after Stipe won the trilogy over Cormier
- - While they were negotiating that Stipe rematched Ngannou and lost and Jon lost interest in moving up again or hell even competing
- Ngannou refuses to fight Jones or Lewis and gets stuck with an interim champ and Jon does nothing because HW's tied up regardless
- Ngannou gets injured and his contract is up and Jon is back saying he wants to fight Stipe by December 2022 even if it means he doesn't get a HW title shot first as Ngannou is out until March 2023 regardless
- Jon accepts HW title matches against Ngannou, Gane, and Stipe for March 2023 and it goes to Gane
- Jon wins the belt and books a title defence against Stipe
- Jon spends an entire year holding out on that same title defence against Stipe even at the expense of an interim champ
- Jon has said this entire time he wants to beat Stipe
Stipe's the commonality in all of this going back to 2020 when Jon first made his move of dropping his LHW title after Stipe beat Cormier again. People throw Ngannou, or lately Aspinall, into the mixture when it's an irrelevant distraction and because they hate Jones. Jon simply wants Stipe and has always wanted him going back to 2020 when Stipe won the trilogy over Cormier. And yeah, I'm 100% sure he really wants Stipe so that he can beat the only other man who's beaten Cormier and rub that in Cormier's face.
It amazes me that people will call Jones a genuine psycho in one breath and then not apply that to his other actions. He's not ducking Ngannou or anybody, that's not how a psycho thinks and acts. Jon's relentlessly targeting Stipe because he's a psycho and has a psychotic goal in doing so:
He wants the pleasure of beating Stipe in front of Cormier while Cormier's forced to commentate on it.
