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The UFC is apparently still fielding ideas for Conor McGregor, the latest being another coaching stint on ‘The Ultimate Fighter’ opposite his nemesis Khabib.
The UFC is once again going back to the well with The Ultimate Fighter, despite the show’s ratings circling the drain for over a decade now. But that hasn’t stopped UFC president Dana White from consistently trying to draw some of his biggest fighters into a process that locks them into a long and tedious process that keeps them out of the cage for valuable extra months.
White made it clear that he had hoped to have Israel Adesanya and Paulo Costa coach the revival season. And now he’s tried again to get some big guns in, reaching out to … Khabib Nurmagomedov and Conor McGregor.
“Last week Dana White called me,” Khabib’s manager Ali Abdelaziz told TMZ Sports. “And he said ‘Ali, what do you think about Khabib and Conor doing The Ultimate Fighter on ESPN?’ One, this is breaking news. And I said ‘Man, you know what? I don’t know. I’ll think about it’ and he said ‘Of course, vice versa if Justin wins, right?’ Khabib vs. Conor on The Ultimate Fighter, coach, he would have probably went to the hospital because we’d beat his ass in front of his whole team. Or Justin Gaethje versus him, right?”
“I talked to Khabib yesterday and he said ‘This man is human trash, he’s like garbage,’” Abdelaziz continued. “He said ‘When you touch s**t, you smell s**t.’ He said ‘[McGregor] hasn’t earned to fight me. He hasn’t earned to fight me.’”
“You can f**king forget about doing The Ultimate Fighter with Khabib,” he said. “It’s over. Khabib is like ‘How do you guys ask me? How can I even be in the same room as him? I said Khabib turned it down, he’s not going to do The Ultimate Fighter with him any more.”
Abdelaziz made it clear the refusal was just for Khabib. His other clients would be happy to coach opposite McGregor.
“Hey, if you want to do The Ultimate Fighter against Kamaru Usman, you can,” he concluded. “If you want to do it with Khamzat Chimaev you can. And if Justin choose to, you can to. You can forget about Khabib, you can forget about the rematch. It’s done, dead, never.”