‘Stay Ready For The Date’

There’s still no sign of McGregor being back in the USADA drug testing pool, and ‘The Notorious’ is joking about it on his Twitter account while enjoying Easter weekend.

Conor McGregor is supposed to fight Michael Chandler sometime in late 2023, but before that happens he needs to re-enter the USADA drug testing pool. According to people keeping a close eye on the drug testing database, that hasn’t happened yet.

In fact, McGregor hasn’t been tested at all in 2023.

For most fighters, you need to spend six months in the pool getting randomly tested before you’re allowed to resume competition. For “The Notorious,” an exemption may be granted allowing him to compete without waiting six months. It’s still unclear whether this will happen; but if it doesn’t, it means McGregor vs. Chandler can’t happen until October.

In some new posts on Twitter, Conor McGregor joked about all the interest in his USADA status, tweeting that he was “in the pool.” Unfortunately, he’s just talking about an actual physical pool full of water.

“We are in the pool!” he wrote on Twitter. “Happy Easter everybody!”

“Ah, the pool,” he wrote in another tweet. “I am long in the pool.”

He then followed that up with a somewhat reassuring message to his fans.

“Stay Ready for the date,” he wrote.

The only date we have now is for the premiere of the upcoming season of The Ultimate Fighter: Team McGregor vs. Team Chandler. That debuts on May 30th on ESPN and ESPN+. The show wraps up on Aug. 15th, and UFC would undoubtedly prefer to have the coaches fight at some point near that date in order to carry momentum from the show.

What do you think, Maniacs? Is all this pointing towards McGregor getting an exemption from the six month rule, or are we going to be left waiting until the very end of 2023 before seeing the Chandler fight materialize?