Conor McGregor is slated to fight Rafael dos Anjos for the UFC lightweight title at UFC 197 on March 5. Assuming the UFC meets McGregor’s enormous financial demands, the fight will go ahead. It will be the first matchup of reigning champions under the UFC banner since BJ Penn and Georges St-Pierre met at UFC 94 almost seven years ago.
The newly minted featherweight champion will move up to 155 pounds, or to be more precise, he will cut a slightly less drastic amount of weight. The Irishman was one of the biggest featherweights in the division and walked around at over 170 pounds between fights.
The move up could be permanent, or it could be a sometime thing, and in either case the stacked lightweight division offers him a cornucopia of interesting challengers. How do the 155-pound elite stack up with the featherweight champion? Steven Rondina and Patrick Wyman will break it all the way down.
Patrick Wyman: Barring McGregor asking for the actual moon to go along with the boatload of cash he’ll presumably make, the new featherweight champion will move up to 155 pounds to face reigning champion Rafael dos Anjos.
We previously wrote about what a ballsy move this is for McGregor: Dos Anjos is a scary dude, and on first glance, seems like a tough matchup for the Irishman. Who wins that one and why?
Steven Rondina: Well, my conclusion in that roundtable still stands. My head says dos Anjos has this without much difficulty.
RDA has long been a smart fighter with a big toolbox. Over the last 18 months, though, he has established himself as a smart fighter with legitimate knockout power and an oppressive wrestling game. I can’t see any 155-pounder beating him, nevermind a featherweight doing it.
My heart, though? That’s telling me this is McGregor’s fight to lose. Jonathan Snowden and Jeremy Botter discussed “New Thought philosophy” and the “Law of Attraction” relative to Mystic Mac ahead of UFC 194.
While I’m not going to say he is flat-out bending reality to his will, I’m probably not going to take issue if you imply that he is!
Patrick: I favor dos Anjos in that fight. He’s a huge lightweight with real pop in his strikes, great pressure footwork to push his opponent toward the cage and functional wrestling skills, particularly near the fence. Most of all, though, he fights smart, with unbridled aggression and a nasty edge that suit his skill sets.
I could easily see him walking through McGregor’s counters, kicking the crap out of his legs and body and then taking him down and beating him up from the top. Nobody has ever succeeded in walking McGregor down, but if anybody can do it, a pressure fighter of dos Anjos’ caliber will be the one to do it.
Alternatively, McGregor’s power, which will probably translate to lightweight, could dent the durable dos Anjos on the way in. If McGregor can keep the fight in open space and keep his back off the fence, the size difference and depth of his striking skill could come into play.
The former scenario seems a little more likely to me. Even in that case, however, there would still be lucrative and interesting fights for McGregor at lightweight. What would you think of a matchup with Anthony Pettis, assuming the former lightweight champion gets past Eddie Alvarez this weekend?
Steven: McGregor vs. Pettis would be a pure striking contest against a similarly sized opponent and, honestly, I’m struggling to envision him losing under those circumstances.
That isn’t to say Pettis would be a cakewalk for McGregor (Pettis is just too dynamic a finisher to be considered an easy out), but Pettis wouldn’t be able to physically bully him and would be forced to absorb some of those deadly left hands. That’s not a recipe for success.
The most intriguing hypothetical matchups, for me at least, are when we start looking at McGregor against the bigger lightweights, guys like Donald Cerrone and Nate Diaz.
Diaz looked better than ever against a dangerous Michael Johnson at UFC on Fox 17, and I’d love to see how McGregor adjusts to that Stockton Boxing style. While he lost to dos Anjos in devastating fashion, I would absolutely love to see Cerrone try to work his knees and clinch strikes against McGregor. The thought of a UFC 189-style world tour certainly doesn’t hurt, either.
I’d have to sit back and watch a lot of tape to venture a pick for either of those fights, but those are easily the most exciting and most competitive opponents for McGregor at 155 pounds in my mind.
Patrick: I’m with you in that I can’t really see Pettis having much success against McGregor. The kind of smooth pressure the Irishman showed against Dennis Siver and Chad Mendes would probably be enough to pin Pettis against the cage, where he struggled so badly against Rafael dos Anjos.
That problem is endemic to Pettis’ game: He had trouble there against Gilbert Melendez before he found the guillotine in the second round, and McGregor does that better than anyone he’s fought except for dos Anjos.
I don’t buy Cerrone as a particularly competitive matchup. Like Pettis, Cerrone is a defined out-fighter, which means he needs space and his opponent’s respect to work his preferred game. Dos Anjos didn’t give him either both times they fought, and neither will McGregor. He would crowd Cerrone, take away his kicks and drop a steady diet of left hands until the referee stepped in.
Nate Diaz, though. Now we’re cooking. I’m not saying I think Diaz would win that fight, but I’d certainly be down to watch him try. He’s long and rangy, more so than anybody McGregor has ever fought, and can match him for volume and cardio. Against a puncher like the featherweight champion, durability is also a factor, and we know Diaz has that.
All of those three would be intriguing stylistic matchups, and McGregor could bring the promotional heat to any of them.
Who at 155 pounds do you think could really give McGregor problems? My vote is for the long-sidelined Khabib Nurmagomedov, but does anybody else stand out to you?
Steven: While we’ve moved past the time where “Well, what happens when Conor fights a wrestler?” is a serious discussion, McGregor’s defensive grappling skills remain something of a mystery. That, of course, makes any fight with a formidable wrestler a dicey endeavor, and Nurmagomedov was a few steps past “formidable” before destroying his knees.
The 2014 model of dos Anjos wasn’t as good as 2015’s, but he was still a very solid, very smart fighter. The pre-injury Nurmagomedov flat-out dominated him, though, and dos Anjos wasn’t undersized at 155 pounds. I could see Conor getting the better of him with a Holm vs. Rousey-like “stick him with a left and then slip away” strategy, but the margin for error there feels very small.
The good thing for McGregor is that, outside Nurmagomedov, there aren’t too many of those smothering wrestlers who are on-paper nightmares for him. It wasn’t all that long ago that the lightweight division’s top 10 was overrun with Clay Guidas and Gray Maynards.
Today, however, the lightweight division has a really interesting mix of styles at the elite level. Because of that, I could easily foresee McGregor having sustained success at 155 pounds.
Patrick: You’re right. There are far fewer of the big, overpowering top-control guys who once populated the lightweight ranks. It’s a division populated mostly by slick strikers, and that type of opponent is much more favorable for McGregor.
The exception is Nurmagomedov. He’s athletic, enormous and a once-in-a-generation kind of control-wrestling talent. He’s the worst-possible matchup for the Irishman: Unlike Chad Mendes, McGregor won’t be getting back up if gets caught underneath the Russian.
Whether he beats dos Anjos or not, there are many compelling matchups waiting for McGregor at 155 pounds. You certainly have to respect his chutzpah.
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