Even the coach of Conor McGregor doesn’t think he should fight Nate Diaz next.
McGregor’s longtime coach, John Kavanagh, admitted to The Mac Life that a trilogy fight with Diaz was appealing after UFC 202. However, with such time passing since then, the idea of doing the third fight has lost its luster over time.
He added that the fact that McGregor has continued to elevate himself while Diaz has been sitting on the sidelines hurts the chances of this fight being made.
“So definitely for the first six months I thought everybody would have saw the same as me,” said Kavanagh (transcript courtesy of MMA Fighting). “There’s just a beautiful relationship between Conor and Nate in terms of it’s just a great back and forth with them, outside the cage and inside the cage.
It’s a lovely fight. His five round rematch is still one of my favorite fights. That being said, I dd assume that Nate would be as busy or busier than Conor.
“Conor’s had an MMA fight and a boxing fight since and we haven’t seen Nate since. So I started changing and you could see it amongst the fans who are – I’ve always said and I still believe – are the most important factor in all of this because they pay for the Pay-Per-Views, and that’s what they want to see.
But you can see it was clearly becoming they wanted to see either Khabib or Tony in there rather than [Nate], probably for the same reason that we didn’t: Nate didn’t keep busy. So I don’t think it would be quite right for that to happen before the winner of [Khabib]-Tony, because Conor, [Khabib], and Tony have kept busy and Nate hasn’t.”
Diaz has not been seen in the Octagon since his rematch with McGregor back at UFC 202 when he suffered a majority decision loss which came five months after Diaz submitted McGregor in their first bout at UFC 196.
Diaz has been biding his time since a third bout has been off the table with McGregor.
If you recall, just last month, Diaz took to his Instagram account to note that “May, June” time frame could be when he returns to fighting under the UFC banner.
Diaz also mentioned in that post that he was “sick of sitting around” and told fighters to “step your games up.”
“I think Nate should get one in in the meantime,” Kavanagh said. “Him vs. Woodley, I hear there are rumors of that or him against a good lightweight, and if the MMA gods smile, it would be a victory for him. Conor fights the winner of [Khabib-Tony] and then you’ve got this amazing superfight for New Year’s Eve.”
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