Colby Covington is fully expected to be Kamaru Usman’s first challenge for his Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) Welterweight title sometime this year. The only problem is, the promotion is having trouble locking down a date since “The Nigerian Nightmare” is currently sidelined with injury.
According to “Chaos,” though, Usman is just trying to delay the inevitable by coming up with something new each week to not take the fight. In other words, Kamaru is now Tyron Woodley 2.0.
His words, not mine.
“The thing with him is, he’s trying to find a different injury each week,” Covington said in an interview with MMA Junkie. “One week it’s his hernia, the next week it’s his leg, now he’s trying to say some other stuff. He’s literally the Woodley 2.0. He’s taking all of Woodley’s tricks,” he added.
“Fake injuries, look for easier opponent, look for easier matchups. That’s kind of what he’s doing. He’s hoping another contender arises that he can fight because he knows if he fights me, it’s an automatic ‘L.’ He doesn’t want to lose everything he’s worked for against me. He knows I’m going to embarrass him and expose him in front of the world.”
According to Colby, the promotion was seemingly interested in having the title fight co-headline UFC 242, which is set to feature a lightweight title fight between division champion Khabib Nurmagoemdov and Dustin Poriier this September.
Since that fell through “Chaos” is eying the title fight to headline UFC 244 inside Madison Square in New York in November.
“You need to spread out the title fights. You have pay-per-views every month, so it didn’t really make sense from the get-go. It doesn’t matter where the fight’s at. That fight did get serious talks about Abu Dhabi, but I think they want to do New York now.”
Usman dethrone the aforementioned Woodley back at UFC 235 with a rather dominate outing (see it), setting up a potential beef-settling bout with Covington. But as we’ve seen in the past, just because a fight has a lot of traction, heat and built-in rivalry, doesn’t mean it will actually go down.
That was the case when a bitter rivalry between Covington and Woodley never came to fruition, and all of the drama and trash talk was all for naught. So until the fight is signed, sealed and delivered, it’s best we don’t hold our collective breaths.
Especially with this man lingering in the background.