“He should have went back to the drawing board and gotten better, but he talked his way into an ass-whooping.”
There was a lot of trash talk and bad blood between T.J. Dillashaw and Cody Garbrandt in the lead-up to their back-to-back championship fights at UFC 217 and UFC 227.
Much of the antagonizing came from Cody Garbrandt, who took deep offense to Dillashaw leaving Team Alpha Male (TAM) and joining Duane Ludwig at Elevation Fight Team in Colorado.
Although Dillashaw scored back-to-back KO wins over ‘No Love’, the reigning UFC bantamweight champion still has some animosity towards his ex-teammate.
Speaking to MMA Junkie in a recent interview, Dillashaw took delight in the sentiment that he ‘ruined’ Garbrandt’s career at UFC 227.
“Hell yeah I’m cool with how it unfolded,” Dillashaw said. “It’s exactly as I said it was going to go down. I told you I was going to knock him out in the first round, I did. I said I’d ruin his career, I’m doing it. The guy is screwed at 135. He should have went back to the drawing board and gotten better, but he talked his way into an ass-whooping.”
Dillashaw, who came under fire from several other members of Team Alpha Male including head coach Urijah Faber, is ‘happy’ to have finally shut up his former teammates.
“I’m happy,” he said. “It’s not only him, it’s the whole team. The whole team needed a (expletive) ass-whooping. They talked all that crap, they want to accuse me of a bunch of bull(expletive). That’s the game. Karma’s a (expletive).”
With Garbrandt and TAM in the rear-view mirror, Dillashaw is looking to become the UFC’s first ever simultaneous bantamweight and flyweight champion by dropping down to 125 to challenge Henry Cejudo.
“I guarantee you Cejudo is just as big as me right now,” Dillashaw said. “I don’t want the excuse of me beating Cejudo’s ass and (him saying), ‘Oh, it’s because he’s bigger than me. (Expletive) that. I’m not. I’ll be at 125. There’s no excuses.”
Dillashaw is currently ranked at #3 in the official UFC pound-for-pound rankings and may have surpassed Dominick Cruz as the best bantamweight champ in UFC history.