Conor McGregor – The Last Star Standing?

There’s no belt on the line at UFC 202. However, for the UFC at least, this fight could represent something more important than a belt.

Shattering disruption has been the norm in the upper levels of the UFC lately. The only champions who held their belts a year ago are Joanna Jedrzejczyk, Dan Cormier and Demetrious Johnson. This matters less than it might, at least to the organization. What is more is important is what’s going on in the UFC’s small stable of major stars.

One of the primary advantages of the UFC is how strong it is as a brand. A Google Trends search shows that there’s an overall rise in the popularity of the “UFC” term over the years, while “MMA” stays fairly static. The organization has a consistent presence and a “basement” of hardcore fans which can be relied upon to consume almost everything it puts out.

Beyond the basement, there are a selection of upper-level draws, and then an elite group of a few fighters who have made massive, disproportionate contributions to the organization. The best times in the sport have been delivered by these fighters, who aren’t necessarily champions. The future of the UFC’s current crop of these elite draws is in trouble.

Brock Lesnar failed a drugs test

In terms of the raw ratio of cards featured to money generated, there’s still no-one with the same clout as Lesnar. It’s taken a hit since his first stint (from the looks of things, UFC 200 didn’t draw Peak Lesnar numbers), but Brock was and is money in the bank.

Not many people expected him to last long in his second time around, and perhaps that means it stings less. Failing his out-of-competition and in-competition tests means that he’s almost certainly facing a two year layoff. Given that the sport was never something he needed in the first place, he’ll likely just shrug, take the money and move on.

Jon Jones failed a drugs test

Although he says otherwise, Jon Jones is likely looking at a lengthy suspension, and is gone from the UFC’s rankings. The standard time for a drugs test failure is two years, although he may conceivably be able to lessen that by informing on other fighters, or with a high quality tainted supplements defence. He’ll probably have the dubious honour of being the first man to be stripped of both a major and an interim belt.

While his ability to construct savior narratives insulates him from both introspection and the more damaging effects of guilt in equal measure, it’s easy to see him doing something self-destructive in the time that he’s on the shelf.

Jones was the UFC’s biggest star in the dead zone between GSP’s departure and Silva’s injury, and the rise of McGregor and Rousey. He’ll no longer be around as a tertiary option.

No return scheduled for Rousey

Rousey’s potential return to the UFC remains in doubt. Even if she does return, she’s unlikely to dominate as she did before. Women’s bantamweight has always been a weak division, but technical development since it was introduced into the UFC has been uneven and herky-jerk, but very quick in places.

There’s an approximate shift away from meeting in the center of the cage and dominated by the strongest clinch fighters, and towards distance management and striking; the same development the men’s game underwent in its more passable weight classes. There it took years, but the women’s side now has the benefit of hindsight, experienced trainers and pre-built development tracks. This matters very much for someone who’ll come back and immediately find herself thrust into the divisional elite.

It also matters because Glendale Fight Club has an abysmal record of technical improvement among its fighters, and Rousey has indicated that she has no intention of leaving the gym. There’s a tendency to overfit data with respect to camps and fighters- blaming camps for losses which are as easily attributed to fighters who are individuals, with all the flaws, idiosyncracies and inconsistencies which come along with that. This being said, GFC has been almost unique in how consistently poorly its fighters have performed.

There’s a solid chance that Rousey comes back to the division she once ruled as a technical relic, if she comes back at all. When she picks up another loss, she’ll likely be gone. The upper bound for the number of remaining Rousey fights is probably around three. The lower bound (considerably more likely), is zero.

Wide open

There are other stars, of course: Silva is slowly sliding out of the sport, and GSP seems to be eternally flirting with a return, but the last and the biggest generator of pay-per-view numbers in recent memory is of course McGregor.

To give an idea of how much of a difference Rousey and McGregor have made, take a look at the google trends map from earlier with their names layered over it.

They truly have been something different. They came up outside of the more well-known camps and stayed with them with a fierce loyalty. They didn’t train like anyone else, fight like anyone else, or promote like anyone else, and their common factors were less in the stunning violence they dealt and more how open they were.

Others who have achieved long-term success and stardom in recent years have tended to armour themselves from the weirdness and the pressures of the sport- Anderson did it with eccentricity; GSP in robotic strictures about the greatest test of his career, while keeping his private life guarded; Jones was “fake” and Aldo was a case study in deflection.

McGregor and Rousey were wide open, “what you see is what you get.” They defied the rules in getting less conservative rather than more over time, finishing opponents faster and faster and continuing to build vital connections to jaded insiders and indifferent outsiders, convincing them they were watching something inexorable and historic. This made the eventual losses that much more shocking, centered as they were around reasonably basic tenets (“no-one can rely on knocking out everyone” / “grapplers are bad against outfighters”).

Everything old is new again

Disruptors are a tricky thing to evaluate as a whole. When someone or something comes comes screaming through the old systems, it can be hard to tell where the real differentiators lie with respect to the old ways.

Look at McGregor’s use of Ido Portal as a movement coach. This generated some transitory hype about how movement coaches might be the future of MMA. Following his loss to Diaz there was a sharp, twanging backlash and the #touchbutt memes were out in force.

The truth is somewhere in between the two extremes. It’s neither revolutionary nor stupid to focus on a training method which emphasizes flexibility and movement. It has been done before, though. GSP spoke about the benefits of gymnastics in statements which slid almost directly under the radar. Gymnastics is a prosaic sport of folk in leotards, with over a hundred years of boringly effective competition and fine-tuning behind it. It lacks the catchy mystery of movement training.

There’s always value in looking at the past. Disruptors, no matter how smart or confident, tend to fall into the patterns of those who came before them, because those who came before them were smart and confident too, and they had reasons for what they did.

In this case McGregor is becoming and must become a more “normal” and more closed fighter. Kavanagh spoke about how they’ve dropped the strategy of not training for specific opponents to focus on a Diaz-centric training camp. The Conor who pounced on every promotional opportunity and accepted every short-notice change in opponent became the one who refused to fly out for promotion for UFC 200, in order to train instead. The promises of an active champion who’d defend his belt 4 times a year have fallen by the wayside. At this level, there’s a lot of risk and a lot of preparation. Wedging promotion and training into the same short period of time is a tough ask.

From must-win to can’t lose

McGregor has still never been compelled to adapt to the specific mindset shift from being a challenger to being the defending champion. Nate Diaz seems uniquely suited to providing that kind of test while not actually representing a title fight. It comes in the change from “must-win” to “can’t lose” normally necessary to beating the Diaz brothers. Those who have gone toe to toe and tried to bang it out with Nick or Nate have almost invariably ended up battered into a wheezing heap, or strangled. To beat them has meant sticking to a gameplan, putting pride aside and doggedly trying to ignore the raised middle fingers, slaps and verbal abuse.

On the technical level, much of the fascination with this fight is rooted in this way that Nate is not a sealed puzzle box, and in the way that those gameplans have been so successful against both Diaz brothers in the past.

Simultaneously, the question remains more complex than just following what other fighters have done. Along these lines, McGregor’s loss sometimes gets attributed to hubris, but his game doesn’t quite seem to compose of quite the right key pieces to easily exploit the Diaz style. Leg kicks? His long, bladed stance doesn’t lend itself to landing them with pop. Top position wrestling? While McGregor was able to sweep Diaz, choosing to repeatedly grapple with him would likely be recipe for disaster.

Instead it’s McGregor’s approach which seems more at risk. At featherweight he always held a significant reach advantage, and the open stance of southpaw vs orthodox often made for a useful void between the fighters. Opponents would run in of their own accord, or be ushered into the open space like metal carried along a conveyor belt, to be concisely stamped down by the hydraulic ram of McGregor’s left fist.

Diaz’ size and active lead hand ask subtle and difficult questions. Cross countering will be hard due to the Diaz unwillingness to chamber when opening. The oblique kicks favoured by McGregor would be more likely to work on the swarming elder Diaz than his quicker, longer younger brother.

As Connor Ruebusch has said in his superb follow-up to the Puncher’s Path, this is a fight which will show how great Conor really is. We know that he can be great; he’s shown more than knockouts and power in the eternally impressive and almost ego-less win where he outwrestled Max Holloway on a torn ACL. The question is, then: is he great enough to beat Nate Diaz?

Doom and ash

For McGregor, Diaz started off as a diversion from a path which has always been moving towards bigger, better, and more. With another loss the diversion becomes a cul-de-sac, McGregor goes two down in a series, and he loses a great deal of leverage. The UFC will probably attempt to force him back down to featherweight, to a division which looks frankly unhealthy for him, where he’d have to rematch one of the best fighters to ever lace UFC gloves in his first defense.

As with Rousey, McGregor may be less able to take the brunt of crushing losses. He’s spoken before about how he planned to get out of the fight game early, and threatened retirement during the UFC 200 negotiations.

The potential “doomsday scenario” then: McGregor loses and retires (or loses, fights Aldo, loses again, and retires). Rousey never comes back. Jones is on the shelf for at least two years. Brock is gone.

It’s not too bad, as doomsday scenarios go. The days of the sport being in jeopardy with a potential downturn are long gone. Even in its low periods, it has that basement of success which keeps it stable. There are no existential risks here.

However, it’ll be less fun. People will miss those fighters, and the sense of scale they bought and the mainstream media attention. The fans and the people who write about the sport will find themselves a bit more dissatisfied. If you sift the strata of the blogs and podcasts around 2012-13, there’s an unmistakable layer of complaining mixed in, like volcanic ash.

There are rich and fallow times in the sport, and if Conor McGregor loses again on Saturday, it’s worth recognizing that thinner times may be on the horizon.

There’s no belt on the line at UFC 202. However, for the UFC at least, this fight could represent something more important than a belt.

Shattering disruption has been the norm in the upper levels of the UFC lately. The only champions who held their belts a year ago are Joanna Jedrzejczyk, Dan Cormier and Demetrious Johnson. This matters less than it might, at least to the organization. What is more is important is what’s going on in the UFC’s small stable of major stars.

One of the primary advantages of the UFC is how strong it is as a brand. A Google Trends search shows that there’s an overall rise in the popularity of the “UFC” term over the years, while “MMA” stays fairly static. The organization has a consistent presence and a “basement” of hardcore fans which can be relied upon to consume almost everything it puts out.


Beyond the basement, there are a selection of upper-level draws, and then an elite group of a few fighters who have made massive, disproportionate contributions to the organization. The best times in the sport have been delivered by these fighters, who aren’t necessarily champions. The future of the UFC’s current crop of these elite draws is in trouble.

Brock Lesnar failed a drugs test

In terms of the raw ratio of cards featured to money generated, there’s still no-one with the same clout as Lesnar. It’s taken a hit since his first stint (from the looks of things, UFC 200 didn’t draw Peak Lesnar numbers), but Brock was and is money in the bank.

Not many people expected him to last long in his second time around, and perhaps that means it stings less. Failing his out-of-competition and in-competition tests means that he’s almost certainly facing a two year layoff. Given that the sport was never something he needed in the first place, he’ll likely just shrug, take the money and move on.

Jon Jones failed a drugs test

Although he says otherwise, Jon Jones is likely looking at a lengthy suspension, and is gone from the UFC’s rankings. The standard time for a drugs test failure is two years, although he may conceivably be able to lessen that by informing on other fighters, or with a high quality tainted supplements defence. He’ll probably have the dubious honour of being the first man to be stripped of both a major and an interim belt.

While his ability to construct savior narratives insulates him from both introspection and the more damaging effects of guilt in equal measure, it’s easy to see him doing something self-destructive in the time that he’s on the shelf.

Jones was the UFC’s biggest star in the dead zone between GSP’s departure and Silva’s injury, and the rise of McGregor and Rousey. He’ll no longer be around as a tertiary option.

No return scheduled for Rousey

Rousey’s potential return to the UFC remains in doubt. Even if she does return, she’s unlikely to dominate as she did before. Women’s bantamweight has always been a weak division, but technical development since it was introduced into the UFC has been uneven and herky-jerk, but very quick in places.

There’s an approximate shift away from meeting in the center of the cage and dominated by the strongest clinch fighters, and towards distance management and striking; the same development the men’s game underwent in its more passable weight classes. There it took years, but the women’s side now has the benefit of hindsight, experienced trainers and pre-built development tracks. This matters very much for someone who’ll come back and immediately find herself thrust into the divisional elite.

It also matters because Glendale Fight Club has an abysmal record of technical improvement among its fighters, and Rousey has indicated that she has no intention of leaving the gym. There’s a tendency to overfit data with respect to camps and fighters- blaming camps for losses which are as easily attributed to fighters who are individuals, with all the flaws, idiosyncracies and inconsistencies which come along with that. This being said, GFC has been almost unique in how consistently poorly its fighters have performed.

There’s a solid chance that Rousey comes back to the division she once ruled as a technical relic, if she comes back at all. When she picks up another loss, she’ll likely be gone. The upper bound for the number of remaining Rousey fights is probably around three. The lower bound (considerably more likely), is zero.

Wide open

There are other stars, of course: Silva is slowly sliding out of the sport, and GSP seems to be eternally flirting with a return, but the last and the biggest generator of pay-per-view numbers in recent memory is of course McGregor.

To give an idea of how much of a difference Rousey and McGregor have made, take a look at the google trends map from earlier with their names layered over it.


They truly have been something different. They came up outside of the more well-known camps and stayed with them with a fierce loyalty. They didn’t train like anyone else, fight like anyone else, or promote like anyone else, and their common factors were less in the stunning violence they dealt and more how open they were.

Others who have achieved long-term success and stardom in recent years have tended to armour themselves from the weirdness and the pressures of the sport- Anderson did it with eccentricity; GSP in robotic strictures about the greatest test of his career, while keeping his private life guarded; Jones was “fake” and Aldo was a case study in deflection.

McGregor and Rousey were wide open, “what you see is what you get.” They defied the rules in getting less conservative rather than more over time, finishing opponents faster and faster and continuing to build vital connections to jaded insiders and indifferent outsiders, convincing them they were watching something inexorable and historic. This made the eventual losses that much more shocking, centered as they were around reasonably basic tenets (“no-one can rely on knocking out everyone” / “grapplers are bad against outfighters”).

Everything old is new again

Disruptors are a tricky thing to evaluate as a whole. When someone or something comes comes screaming through the old systems, it can be hard to tell where the real differentiators lie with respect to the old ways.

Look at McGregor’s use of Ido Portal as a movement coach. This generated some transitory hype about how movement coaches might be the future of MMA. Following his loss to Diaz there was a sharp, twanging backlash and the #touchbutt memes were out in force.

The truth is somewhere in between the two extremes. It’s neither revolutionary nor stupid to focus on a training method which emphasizes flexibility and movement. It has been done before, though. GSP spoke about the benefits of gymnastics in statements which slid almost directly under the radar. Gymnastics is a prosaic sport of folk in leotards, with over a hundred years of boringly effective competition and fine-tuning behind it. It lacks the catchy mystery of movement training.

There’s always value in looking at the past. Disruptors, no matter how smart or confident, tend to fall into the patterns of those who came before them, because those who came before them were smart and confident too, and they had reasons for what they did.

In this case McGregor is becoming and must become a more “normal” and more closed fighter. Kavanagh spoke about how they’ve dropped the strategy of not training for specific opponents to focus on a Diaz-centric training camp. The Conor who pounced on every promotional opportunity and accepted every short-notice change in opponent became the one who refused to fly out for promotion for UFC 200, in order to train instead. The promises of an active champion who’d defend his belt 4 times a year have fallen by the wayside. At this level, there’s a lot of risk and a lot of preparation. Wedging promotion and training into the same short period of time is a tough ask.

From must-win to can’t lose

McGregor has still never been compelled to adapt to the specific mindset shift from being a challenger to being the defending champion. Nate Diaz seems uniquely suited to providing that kind of test while not actually representing a title fight. It comes in the change from “must-win” to “can’t lose” normally necessary to beating the Diaz brothers. Those who have gone toe to toe and tried to bang it out with Nick or Nate have almost invariably ended up battered into a wheezing heap, or strangled. To beat them has meant sticking to a gameplan, putting pride aside and doggedly trying to ignore the raised middle fingers, slaps and verbal abuse.

On the technical level, much of the fascination with this fight is rooted in this way that Nate is not a sealed puzzle box, and in the way that those gameplans have been so successful against both Diaz brothers in the past.

Simultaneously, the question remains more complex than just following what other fighters have done. Along these lines, McGregor’s loss sometimes gets attributed to hubris, but his game doesn’t quite seem to compose of quite the right key pieces to easily exploit the Diaz style. Leg kicks? His long, bladed stance doesn’t lend itself to landing them with pop. Top position wrestling? While McGregor was able to sweep Diaz, choosing to repeatedly grapple with him would likely be recipe for disaster.

Instead it’s McGregor’s approach which seems more at risk. At featherweight he always held a significant reach advantage, and the open stance of southpaw vs orthodox often made for a useful void between the fighters. Opponents would run in of their own accord, or be ushered into the open space like metal carried along a conveyor belt, to be concisely stamped down by the hydraulic ram of McGregor’s left fist.

Diaz’ size and active lead hand ask subtle and difficult questions. Cross countering will be hard due to the Diaz unwillingness to chamber when opening. The oblique kicks favoured by McGregor would be more likely to work on the swarming elder Diaz than his quicker, longer younger brother.

As Connor Ruebusch has said in his superb follow-up to the Puncher’s Path, this is a fight which will show how great Conor really is. We know that he can be great; he’s shown more than knockouts and power in the eternally impressive and almost ego-less win where he outwrestled Max Holloway on a torn ACL. The question is, then: is he great enough to beat Nate Diaz?

Doom and ash

For McGregor, Diaz started off as a diversion from a path which has always been moving towards bigger, better, and more. With another loss the diversion becomes a cul-de-sac, McGregor goes two down in a series, and he loses a great deal of leverage. The UFC will probably attempt to force him back down to featherweight, to a division which looks frankly unhealthy for him, where he’d have to rematch one of the best fighters to ever lace UFC gloves in his first defense.

As with Rousey, McGregor may be less able to take the brunt of crushing losses. He’s spoken before about how he planned to get out of the fight game early, and threatened retirement during the UFC 200 negotiations.

The potential “doomsday scenario” then: McGregor loses and retires (or loses, fights Aldo, loses again, and retires). Rousey never comes back. Jones is on the shelf for at least two years. Brock is gone.

It’s not too bad, as doomsday scenarios go. The days of the sport being in jeopardy with a potential downturn are long gone. Even in its low periods, it has that basement of success which keeps it stable. There are no existential risks here.

However, it’ll be less fun. People will miss those fighters, and the sense of scale they bought and the mainstream media attention. The fans and the people who write about the sport will find themselves a bit more dissatisfied. If you sift the strata of the blogs and podcasts around 2012-13, there’s an unmistakable layer of complaining mixed in, like volcanic ash.

There are rich and fallow times in the sport, and if Conor McGregor loses again on Saturday, it’s worth recognizing that thinner times may be on the horizon.