It may not be official, but Nate Diaz is rumored to rematch featherweight champion Conor McGregor in the main event of July’s blockbuster UFC 200 from Las Vegas, Nevada.
Since that somewhat surprising news broke last week, there has seemingly been an uproar from MMA fans given that Diaz wholly destroyed McGregor in the second round of their massive main event at March 5’s UFC 196, rocking him with a crisp combo and a flurry of follow-up strikes that lead to a shocking rear-naked choke submission win.
There are also, on the other hand, of course the voracious McGregor faithful who contend that their man was lighting up Diaz on the feet in the first round, bloodying him at two weight classes above his normal 145 pounds. And they’d be right, at least in a certain sense, because ‘The Notorious’ did apparently win the first round before appearing to tire from fighting at 168 pounds when originally signed on to fight injured lightweight champion Rafael dos Anjos at 155.
Of course the counterargument (and they could go on for days in this electric rivalry) is that Diaz took the fight on only 11 days’ notice when ‘RDA’ broke his foot, and he was still able to rock, throttle, and submit McGregor even though he was on a yacht sipping tequila in Cabo barely two weeks before the fight. That’s the stance that Diaz’ boxing coach Richard Perez took in a recent appearance on the Deep Waters Podcast (via FOX Sports), noting that a rematch with Diaz would be even worse for McGregor after the popular Stockton persona had ample time to prepare:
“It would be better because we only had 11 days and we only trained for nine. Usually, when someone gets two weeks’ notice, chances are they are going to lose. But I had a lot of confidence in Nathan and Nathan had a lot of confidence in the way we train, and in the way he trains — he does bicycle riding, running, swimming.”
Well known for always staying in some kind of fight shape thanks to his competing in triathlons and vegan lifestyle, Diaz said that he would have been next to flawless if he had a full camp to train for McGregor, and obviously Perez agrees. He predicted that the rematch will be much more in favor of Diaz, so he and his team should perhaps reconsider:
“If I were McGregor’s trainer, I’d say, let’s go back to 145,” Perez continued. “You’re awesome there. Fight Frankie Edgar or some top guy like that. But I guess they want a rematch. That’s going to be different. In a full camp, Nathan don’t mess around.”
Indeed the odds would dictate that Diaz would thoroughly control the rematch based on how he opened up McGregor’s glaring weakness on the ground with his black belt Brazilian Jiu-jitsu pedigree. McGregor could easily much better at his original home of 145 where he holds a monstrous size advantage, but his head coach John Kavanagh has repeatedly stated he doesn’t want the Irish superstar putting his body through the depleting cut down to featherweight anymore. Indeed, he looked a bit different at his last two respective weigh-ins:
If that is the case, however, many of the fans who are in opposition rematch think that McGregor should be forced to vacate the featherweight belt if he can’t defend it. Of course, the active Irishman hasn’t fought at featherweight for a grand total of three months and 11 days, hardly holding the division in limbo after Jose Aldo’s illustrious but inconsistent reign where he defended much less frequently.
If he does rematch Diaz, it’s going to get a lot longer than that, so the UFC obviously has a lot of thinking to do. Do you think that this would be a fight should go down in the supposed biggest card of arguably the UFC’s biggest year, and if so, is that because you believe McGregor would lose even worse?
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