Gaethje’s post-mortem on his UFC 300 loss boils down to underestimating the amount of physical damage Holloway could inflict on him in their wild firefight.
Justin Gaethje is going over his UFC 300 loss to Max Holloway and trying to determine what went so wrong.
Gaethje and Holloway engaged in a Fight of the Year contender that ended in round five with “The Highlight” facedown on the canvas (watch the finish here). There was just one second left on the clock, and while the scorecards were set to hand Gaethje a loss anyway, the knockout will keep him out of the cage for a good portion of 2024.
“We’re talking about metaphorical and physical,” he said during an interview on The Dan LeBatard Show. “Like, metaphorical, I could be ready tomorrow. But physically, I do want to take care of myself. I do think that repeated concussions with me going to sleep like that, me receiving that shot, it would be foolish for me to to jump back into training anytime before 180 days.”
“I could do cardio. I could stay in shape. That’s what I wanna try to do, especially the older I get, the harder it is to get back to the best shape of my life. So I wanna stay active. But obviously, the physical contact is gonna be limited for quite some time, just because I wanna preserve preserve myself. I think six months at least before I get back to taking shots, but that doesn’t say that I won’t be training the whole time.”
Gaethje believes his big mistake leading up to the fight was underestimating Holloway as a physical threat. Justin has been in some wars, and always prepares himself to die in the cage. But he just didn’t expect Max could hurt him as badly as he did.
“I think if I made a mistake, the biggest mistake was not realizing or understanding through the camp how much danger I was in,” he said. “I know that was a mistake now. I think it was more difficult for my body to go to a primal state because of my lack of awareness of the danger that that my body was in.”
“Not that I didn’t give Max respect. It was more the fact that I never in my life saw Max as an opponent that I would potentially fight. He was always in a different weight class. I never was like, ‘This is a guy I wanna fight.’ There’s never been another fight in my career where I’ve been like, ‘I didn’t expect to fight this guy,’ or ‘I have too much respect for this guy.’”
“Not that I didn’t wanna hurt him, I was willing to hurt him,” Gaethje clarified. “But the lead up was very different — even Donald Cerrone was my friend back in the day, but he he knocked me out in a practice in, like, 2010. So I was like, I wanna get that back. The competitor of me wants to get that back. There was nothing, that fire wasn’t there. And I think that was probably the biggest mistake that I made going into this fight. It’s something that I that I’m gonna learn from.”
“But again, all credit to Max for for the way that he fought. I think he fought so perfect.”