Add Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) Bantamweight champion, Aljamain Sterling, to the list of people wondering what Conor McGregor is doing (or isn’t doing) while enjoying his time outside the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) pool.
McGregor admitted in late 2022 that he had removed himself from UFC’s mandatory drug-testing program to ensure he’d make a full recovery following a bad leg break suffered in July 2021. In the meantime, he’s clearly been working hard at the gym. Between that and whatever doctors have him on, he’s looking massive in recent Instagram photos … not all of which are particularly sane.
“I feel like he’s been posting a lot of odd pictures, like the one [him choking himself],” Sterling said in a new YouTube video. “I think he may have deleted it. Because I’m like, ‘What is going on with this guy?’ Only Conor McGregor could post a picture like these awkward selfie pics and get away with it because anyone else did anything like that would would get looked at like a creep or weird. But Conor does what Conor wants, he’s Conor McGregor.
“There’s the one where he’s showing the Rolex, cheesing, and I’m like what am I looking at?” Sterling continued. “Yeah, he deleted it. Probably a good idea because it just looked creepy and maybe he was tuned up a bit? Maybe?
“I’m going through his pictures right now,” Sterling continued. “The guy is jacked as ever. I’d like to know what he’s on, because his arms are ginormous. His head, his chest. He’s jacked bro. He’s looking like a bodybuilder now. But I can imagine what it’s like to just be jacked and happy, not really cutting weight.”
Sterling then pivoted to McGregor’s former weight cutting habits.
“Remember he used to cut to 145 and how awful he looked?” he asked. “I don’t know if you remember that era of Conor, but if you go back you’ll see that he would just look like death. So, I think when you start to look into that weight cutting aspect … Conor would always make the weight, he’d always show up bigger. He was for the most part faster, longer, more powerful with his range and length. He had the optimal body type for fighting at 145.
“Look at Jose Aldo, who now fights at 135, who was reigning champion for such a long time,” he continued. “You have to remember these things and the sequence of how they went. Conor then moved to 155, he doesn’t have the same success. He beat Eddie Alvarez, but outside of that who else has he beaten at 155? He moved to 170, he beat ‘Cowboy’ Cerrone, but then you look at Cerrone, goes up and down, fighting right after he just fought.
“There’s a lot of little nuances that go into the game and go into the decision making of taking fights,” Aljo concluded. “I try to explain that to people, you don’t just fight to fight, because you can put yourself in a bad predicament mentally, physically. You have to analyze the entire game. Conor did that very well: picking the right fights at the right time, the right opponents, the right times for his weight cut, even though he was super dialed into it, he looked horrible when he got on the scale. When he screamed, he poker faced it, because I know when I do that it hurts internally.”
Sterling tied it into his own situation, where 135-pound contender, Marlon Vera, accused him of “cheating” by cutting so much weight.
“Conor always made the weight, and for me, I’ve always made the weight,” he declared.
Conor McGregor looking Jacked pic.twitter.com/5Sbg7l9861
— Lugh Tuatha Dé (@phawat17539736) December 4, 2022
Sterling remains in a bit of limbo as we await news as to when he’ll fight next … and who. His talk of a fight against Henry Cejudo have cooled despite UFC President, Dana White, suggesting it’d be a good match up. Lately, “Funkmaster” has been throwing Sean O’Malley and Marlon Vera’s names into the mix.
Considering Cejudo retired from the sport in response to low pay, we can only speculate that the hold-up is at the negotiating table and UFC may be looking to pit the many worthy contenders at 135 pounds against each other to make the best deal possible for the organization.
That process leaves Sterling more than enough time to record lengthy YouTube videos, but are we getting close to the point where he needs to be in camp making sure he’ll make it back to 135 pounds in time for an early 2023 fight? As he said, he always makes the weight.
But, it’s a very exact process that takes a specific amount of time.