McGregor didn’t just skip out on weigh-ins, he also didn’t show up for any of the morning practices either.
The sixth episode of The Ultimate Fighter ended with a near-brawl between Conor McGregor and Michael Chandler as Chandler chirped Mac up about being down 0-6 in the tournament. One thing that seemed to really cheese McGregor was Chandler accusing him of not being there for his team.
“I show up for my team. I’m sorry you guys are on that f—ing team,” Chandler told McGregor’s team after tempers flared. “I would have been there for you. I would have f—ing been there for you.”
“Chandler’s trying to pick at that like I wasn’t being involved,” McGregor said in a clip filmed after the altercation. “I’m setting it up, it’s me setting it up, first of all. It’s not like I just left them to their own devices. It’s quite the opposite. They were left amongst the best.”
Things hit a boiling point between the coaches tonight on #TUF31
[ Watch new episodes every Tuesday on ESPN & ESPN+ ] pic.twitter.com/yyz5iE7ft1
— The Ultimate Fighter (@UltimateFighter) July 5, 2023
Creative editing makes it difficult to pull the reality out of the reality show, so we turn to Team McGregor member Aaron McKenzie to find out what the real scoop was. He detailed to MMA Fansided’s Amy Caplan exactly when Conor McGregor was there to train everyone and when he wasn’t.
“The day after ‘Wonderboy’ was there, he was gone for three or four days for filming,” McKenzie said. “But other than that he was there every day pretty much. He was at night practices. He was there, ready to go. He was involved in practice, he was coaching, he was training with us. So he was there a lot more than the cameras are actually making him out to be.”
“But I’ll tell you straight up: he wasn’t at a lot of morning practices. You can probably count the morning practices on one hand that he was at. But they were always set up to be good with the other coaches. There was never a moment where we’re like ‘What are we doing?’ The morning sessions, we knew, were always going to be run by somebody else and he would have mostly evening sessions.”
Even though McGregor only participated in half the training sessions, McKenzie didn’t fault him for the team’s woes.
“I’m very content with his involvement level. It didn’t bother me,” McKenzie said. “The people online with their jabs, ‘Oh he didn’t come to the weigh-ins,’ honestly half the time my coaches aren’t at the weigh-ins. It happens more than people think it does because it’s tough for people to get there sometimes. And weigh-ins were during the daytimes and that’s when we didn’t see [McGregor] as much.
“I don’t know if he was filming all the time, I don’t know if he was sleeping or doing his own training. I don’t know, but daytime, we didn’t see him as much.”