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“The Motown Phenom” weighs in on Michael Chandler’s chances in the UFC.
As if the UFC lightweight division couldn’t get any more stacked with talent, former Bellator MMA champion Michael Chandler has officially signed with the promotion and may even be in an immediate title fight should something happen to either Khabib Nurmagomedov or Justin Gaethje prior to UFC 254.
Chandler has widely been considered one of the top lightweights in the world regardless of promotion, and now he’ll get the chance to prove himself against the cream of the crop in the UFC. One person who’s complimentary of Chandler’s skills but not necessarily his prospects of achieving high-level UFC success if former interim title challenger Kevin Lee.
In an interview with SiriusXM’s Fight Nation, “The Motown Phenom” believes that the bigger stage of the UFC compared to Bellator may be hard for Chandler to adjust to at this stage of his career.
“I think it’s more than just who he’s fought, I look at his skills too,” Lee said (via MMA Fighting). The kid can fight. I’ve been studying him for a long-ass time, and he’s trained with a lot of UFC guys, a lot of top-level guys. You can see, he posts online a lot of his scrambles that he gets into and when you break it down technique for technique, you’re like, man, this kid is really good, but I think it’s more the magnitude of the fights. I think that might be why they’re putting him into such a big fight right out of the gate.
“You talk about Gaethje and Khabib and being on Fight Island and on ESPN for the first time, no matter what you do in your training or any of these other fights – and he’s had a lot of five-round fights, a lot of title fights – but nothing of that magnitude, with that many eyeballs on you. You get like this microscope on you almost. Those lights gets to beaming on you and it’s a little bit different. My brother fights for Bellator, he just fought this last weekend, won a great fight, but even just being there, you could see that the lights are a little bit different. They’re a little dimmer. If you watch it on TV you can kinda tell, the lights are a little dimmer. On the big stages like that, I think that’s where it might catch up to him, because he can fight, he’s good enough to be top five, but I don’t know if he’s good enough, especially at 34 years old, if he has the time to kind of adjust to them bright lights.”
A perhaps more interesting statement from Lee is that he’s of the opinion that Chandler, who’s a career lightweight (apart from a couple of catchweights in the 160s at the start of his MMA career), is actually undersized for the division.
“Against Gaethje he might stand a chance, but against Khabib he’s just way too small,” Lee said. “I think Chandler’s way too small for this whole division. I actually hope he gets the fight. Then once he loses, then it might be him in the middle of next year. You never know how things are going to play out. I’ve been looking at Chandler for a long-ass time. That’s going to be a good fight.”
Lee is on the shelf for at least the rest of 2020 after tearing his ACL while recovering from surgery on his other ACL. He’s coming off a submission loss to Charles Oliveira at UFC Brasilia in March, and while he is obviously angling for possibly fighting Chandler, he knows it’ll be a long time before he can make his return to the Octagon.