At this point, Francis Ngannou has been waiting to fight Stipe Miocic for the UFC’s heavyweight title for a while.

Ngannou last fought in May, defeating Jairzinho Rozenstruik in 20 seconds to cement himself as the number one contender. Before that, he beat Junior Dos Santos, Cain Velasquez and Curtis Blaydes. The entire time spent in all four of those fights was 2 minutes and 41 seconds.

And yet, he’s still waiting.

First of all, he had to wait for a trilogy fight to take place between Miocic and rival Daniel Cormier. Since that fight, it appears Miocic is still recovering in the wings, leaving Ngannou without a contest or a title shot.

It’s starting to get on his nerves.

“I’m in my prime age and I’m wasting time without fighting, so it’s kind of frustrating,” Ngannou said, speaking to Morning Kombat. “We have to get something to motivate us. We have to make money. We have to do something for fighting. Sometimes when you wake up, it’s really hard to go to the gym and train because you need that motivation. Like, ‘OK, I’m training, but for what? When will I fight?’ I don’t know. So you have no clue about anything and it’s tough to find motivation.”

The main issue, Ngannou says, is the title at heavyweight simply isn’t defended frequently enough. While some of that comes down to the dominant champion suffering a lengthy eye injury, Ngannou believes protocols should be in place to keep things moving.

“If things were moving on, this wouldn’t be an issue,” Ngannou said. “Many divisions have three or four title defenses a year. We’re talking about a division where there’s been one title defense a year, so it gives a lot of complicated positions for contenders. And then they get lined up and lined up, but no one really moves.

“I think if there would be three, four title defenses a year, everybody would fight for the title. It’s never over the limited amount of title defenses that have to be set – it just needs to keep on going. What they should do is find a way to make the heavyweight division move on again because right now, it’s stuck.”