Max Kellerman went from doubting Conor McGregor to giving him praise. Kellerman went as far as to say McGregor wouldn’t land a glove on Floyd Mayweather. “Notorious” landed a number of clean shots and made his bout with “Money” more competitive than many were expecting. Even Kellerman was impressed. On an episode of “First Take,” […]
Max Kellerman went from doubting Conor McGregor to giving him praise. Kellerman went as far as to say McGregor wouldn’t land a glove on Floyd Mayweather. “Notorious” landed a number of clean shots and made his bout with “Money” more competitive than many were expecting. Even Kellerman was impressed. On an episode of “First Take,” […]
Should he or shouldn’t he?
The UFC’s biggest superstar, Conor McGregor, just pocketed $30 million for one night of work as a professional boxer.
Taking home at least 10 times what he’s ever made in a UFC fight by switching over to boxing begs the …
Should he or shouldn’t he?
The UFC’s biggest superstar, ConorMcGregor, just pocketed $30 million for one night of work as a professional boxer.
Taking home at least 10 times what he’s ever made in a UFC fight by switching over to boxing begs the question for Team McGregor: Should Conor ditch MMA for boxing?
What He Learned in The Fight
Make no mistake: The novice professional boxer needs to shore up his game in a few particular areas if he hopes to compete against elite fighters and continue to rake in millions.
McGregor most assuredly learned valuable lessons facing the top fighter of a generation. Mayweather’s Round 10 knockout win over McGregor highlighted the areas McGregor should focus on moving forward.
First, McGregor had no hope on Saturday of landing any significant punches when fighting on the inside. He lacks the natural intuition a pure inside fighter possesses, and while he’d need to augment his skillful counterpunching with some kind of inside game, it’d probably be best for him at this late age to focus on keeping his opponents at the end of his long punches.
It’s been done before. Recently retired longtime heavyweight champion WladimirKlitschko enjoyed one of the better careers in heavyweight history after he ditched his inside efforts for a long-distance technique.
McGregor could easily follow suit. Like Klitschko, McGregor possesses an excellent jab to go along with tremendous power in his other fist. Many a fighter has made a career out of the jab-cross combo and McGregor has the tools to do it, too.
Second, many were surprised at the lack of pop on McGregor‘s punches, especially after the first couple of rounds. While conditioning was probably a factor, McGregor‘s lack of zip probably had more to do with balance and stance than anything else.
Boxers and MMA fighters fight out of different stances with different techniques and footwork. While an MMA fighter has to be prepared for knees, elbows, tackles and kicks, a boxer is free to focus his defense on just his opponent’s fists.
McGregor is a world-class puncher by any standard. How many times have we seen the boisterous knockout artist drop an opponent while moving backwards? Only a born puncher like McGregor can do something like that.
But against Mayweather, McGregor just seemed to be out of his element. He couldn’t plant his feet well enough to drive through his punches using his legs, and for some reason, he was hesitant through much of the fight to put full force behind his punches.
To be an elite boxer, McGregor would need to find a top-notch boxing trainer to shore up his footwork and balance—someone who could teach him the subtle nuance he lacked against Mayweather.
The next area of concern for McGregor was his lack of conditioning. He appeared noticeably tired after Round 3, and by Rounds 9 and 10, McGregor could hardly hold himself up.
That just won’t work.
McGregor would be wise to hire a boxing-oriented strength and conditioning coach before his next 12-round fight. He was woefully underprepared to fight 12 three-minute boxing rounds on Saturday, so at least adding someone to his current teamwho understands the rigors of the sweet science would be well-advised.
What He Learned From His Paycheck
Elite boxers make as much as or more than any other professional athlete in the world. There are no salary caps and no teammates with which they must share revenue. Boxers enjoy the status of being the attraction of the sporting event.
The fighter is the team. McGregor is already one of the most popular fighting teams in the sport right now.
Given the difference between boxing and the UFC’s payment structures, McGregor has every reason to believe he could make a successful transition over to the business of boxing. As a professional boxer, McGregor would be able to negotiate for a larger portion of fight revenues than can under the current UFC umbrella. Seven-figure paydays are common in the sport of boxing for main-event fighters, especially those fighting on premier cable destinations like HBO and Showtime. Meanwhile, it has been a rare occurrence for UFC fighters. In fact, according to CBSSports.com’s Brandon Wise, only five UFC fighters in history have ever earned purses over $1 million.
Ditching the UFC and attaching himself to a boxing promoter like Mayweather Promotions or Top Rank would truly give McGregor the bargaining power he has thus far lacked with Dana White and Co.
A certain A-side against any other boxer in the sport, McGregor could call his own shots and make his own mark on the fighting world in any way that suits him.
Being already established as one of the historically great and immensely popular MMA stars, McGregor‘s move into boxing could garner him a further foothold as a household name. He could simultaneously hold the title of most popular fighter in two different sports markets: MMA and boxing. Should that occur, who knows what kind of sponsorship opportunities McGregor could land moving forward?
And the $30 million McGregor just made versus Mayweather is only the beginning. That number should skyrocket after the final pay-per-view numbers come in from last weekend, potentially tripling McGregor‘s earnings toward $90 million.
How exactly is McGregor supposed to go back to making comparative peanuts as a UFC fighter? If White hopes to keep McGregor around as a fighter on his roster, he better be ready to pony up more dough than ever before. Even that might not be enough.
Potential Big-Money Bouts
Bleacher Report’s Lyle Fitzsimmons suggested several noteworthy crossover options for McGregor, should he continue boxing. The No. 1 fight on the list would be an easy sell PPV bout against former sparring partner Paulie Malignaggi. The two men’s bad blood spilled over into the promotion of Mayweather-McGregor, so they already have a leg up in selling the fight.
A former world champion, Malignaggi is long past his best days as a professional fighter and would probably net McGregor a payday purse a few times greater than what he earns in the UFC.
Moreover, the light-hitting Malignaggi would be a fair testing ground for McGregor as a boxer. Should he win, which he’d likely be favored to do, exponentially bigger fights with huge paydays would reveal themselves on down the line.
The most intriguing names include Miguel Cotto, Canelo Alvarez, GennadyGolovkin and Manny Pacquiao. Even secondary opponents like former middleweight champion “Irish” Andy Lee and current junior welterweight titleholders JermellCharlo and Erislandy Lara would do big numbers with McGregor.
McGregor would be wise to at least ponder the move from MMA to boxing. He is 29 years old and the clock for a successful transition is ticking loudly.
Tick-tock, Conor. It’s time to choose.
With Mayweather now allegedly retired and McGregor‘s good-enough debut in the can, the boxing PPV throne is vacant and ripe for the taking.
When it was over, Floyd Mayweather Jr. admitted that his plan all along was to let Conor McGregor punch himself out.
Mayweather had just scored a 10th-round TKO victory over McGregor in last Saturday’s much-hyped junior middleweight boxing match at T-M…
When it was over, Floyd Mayweather Jr. admitted that his plan all along was to let Conor McGregor punch himself out.
Mayweather had just scored a 10th-round TKO victory over McGregor in last Saturday’s much-hyped junior middleweight boxing match at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. Fielding a post-fight question from Showtime Sports interviewer Jim Gray, the veteran pugilist explained why he’d started the bout so slowly and allowed McGregor to build an early lead before roaring back for the finish.
“Our game plan was to take our time, let him shoot all his heavy shots early on and then take him down at the end, down the stretch,” Mayweather said. “We know in MMA he fights 25 minutes real hard and after that he starts to slow down.”
If this was indeed Mayweather’s strategy, it was an effective one.
It was also well-informed.
Those familiar with McGregor’s body of work as a two-division UFC champion already knew the swaggering Irishman’s one Achilles’ heel—aside from perhaps his submission defense—could be his endurance.
If you count Saturday’s match against Mayweather, McGregor is now 11 fights into his run on the worldwide stage. He’s fought in two different sports, four total weight classes and against a very disparate group of opponents. All told, the results have been overwhelmingly positive. McGregor is 9-2 since 2013 (again, counting Mayweather), has won titles in two weight classes and set box office records in both MMA and boxing.
On the rare occasions things go wrong for him, however, there appears to be one constant: McGregor gets tired.
After both of the fighter’s high-profile losses—first to Nate Diaz at UFC 196 in March 2016, then to Mayweather—McGregor has at least partially blamed his own gas tank.
Case in point: Following Saturday’s referee stoppage, the 29-year-old Dublin native steadfastly maintained that Mayweather never really hurt him. The real problem, McGregor insisted during his own interview with Gray, was that he got too winded.
“I was just a little fatigued,” he said. “I get a little wobbly when I’m tired. It is fatigue. The referee could have let it keep going, let the man put me down. I am clear-headed. Where were the final two rounds? Let me wobble to the corner and make him put me down.”
On Thursday, McGregor essentially doubled-down on that assertion. He detailed his training for the fight in a lengthy Instagram post, going so far as to say he might have won if he’d made a couple of minor tweaks to his preparations:
Of course, there are a lot of other perfectly good—and arguably unavoidable—reasons why McGregor might have slowed down against Mayweather.
Boxing provides a different cardiovascular challenge than MMA, and by the time Mayweather ended their fight with strikes, the two had been battling for just over 28 total minutes. That made it the longest bout of McGregor’s career.
Both fighters also had relatively short training camps between the bout’s announcement in June and fight night. Factor in the otherworldly level of competition McGregor faced in his first boxing match, the magnitude of the event itself and Mayweather’s consistent work to the body during the fight and perhaps anyone would’ve been fatigued by the end.
Then again, we’ve seen endurance be a factor in McGregor’s MMA bouts as well.
In the wake of that second-round submission loss to Diaz, McGregor told the UFC’s Megan Olivi he’d been “inefficient” with his energy. He also promised to go back to the training room and figure out how to solve the problem.
“I lost in there,” McGregor said. “There were errors, but errors can be fixed if you face them head on.”
A bit more than five-and-a-half months later, he and Diaz rematched at UFC 202 and it was obvious McGregor had indeed taken steps to address the issue. He was noticeably more reserved during his walk to the cage and introductions and appeared more deliberate once the fight started.
He began by feeding Diaz a steady diet of low kicks to supplement his normal left-handed power punching. The strategy seemed to work early on, as McGregor dropped Diaz to the canvas with strikes three times during the fight’s first seven minutes. As the second round wore on, however, McGregor began to lag—just as he had in their first fight.
The third round was a borderline 10-8 win by Diaz. Though McGregor rebounded during the championship fourth and fifth frames and ultimately squeaked by with a majority decision victory, a profile of him began to emerge.
Perhaps McGregor is a competitor who comes out of his corner fast but fades the longer his fights go on.
Mayweather clearly knew this headed into their boxing match and used it to his advantage.
McGregor knows it too, but implied during a post-fight interview with ESPN.com’s Brett Okamoto that the situation is under control. He also noted he thinks it may be more a psychological problem than physical.
“I don’t know what it is; it’s a mental thing or something,” McGregor said. “It happened in the Diaz 2 fight as well. I had a little stage at the end of the second round and end of the third, but then look what happened in the fourth and then the fifth—I came back. I overcame it.”
In fairness, he has a point.
So far, McGregor’s endurance hasn’t exactly derailed his rise. He did win the second fight against Diaz, after all, and in his only other UFC fight to go the distance—a three-rounder against a very green Max Holloway in August 2013—he didn’t appear to suffer from fatigue at all.
More often than not, McGregor has ended his fights so quickly that he hasn’t had to test his energy reserves. Of his 21 professional MMA wins, 19 have been first- or second-round stoppages.
It’s not at all unusual for MMA fighters to struggle with their cardio, either. The sport is so grueling that even top professionals are spent after 15-25 minutes of competition. For someone who typically starts as fast and throws as hard as McGregor does, there are bound to be hurdles.
Still, McGregor’s conditioning issues appear more obvious than most—maybe because he’s been so good in every other aspect of the fight game. It’s striking to watch a guy who is otherwise so mentally and physically sound consistently encounter the same problem.
It’s also an awkward look for someone who spent much of the lead-up to the Mayweather bout hocking his new for-purchase “McGregor Fast” conditioning program.
McGregor is so meticulous and calculated that it’s hard to believe he’ll let such an obvious flaw hang around for long.
But if Mayweather knew the correct strategy was to weather McGregor’s early storm and start to pressure him later in the fight, McGregor’s future MMA opponents will know it, too.
The blueprint of how to beat him is out there now. You can bet guys like Diaz, Tony Ferguson, Kevin Lee and Khabib Nurmagomedov all took note.
But if McGregor’s biggest weakness to this point has been his endurance, one of his biggest strengths has been his analytical nature.
As he moves forward, he’ll know he needs to adapt and close the holes in his game.
UFC lightweight champion Conor McGregor may have lost to Floyd Mayweather by tenth-round TKO in their massive boxing match last Saturday night (August 26, 2017) from the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nev., but the vast majority of the combat sports world agrees that Mayweather would lose quite handily if the two were to reverse venues and […]
UFC lightweight champion Conor McGregor may have lost to Floyd Mayweather by tenth-round TKO in their massive boxing match last Saturday night (August 26, 2017) from the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nev., but the vast majority of the combat sports world agrees that Mayweather would lose quite handily if the two were to reverse venues and compete in McGregor’s UFC octagon.
While Mayweather may be one of the best boxers ever, he’s been able to focus his entire career on the minute of boxing in terms of footwork, angles, and timing, among other things, and obviously has had no requirement of training any sort of wrestling and grappling. That would suggest McGregor would be able to take him down and submit him within in the first minute, even if “The Notorious” is mostly known for his striking as well.
But McGregor himself doesn’t necessarily believe that would be the case, posting a long post on his official Instagram that addressed Mayweather’s rep as a fighter and his future prospects in MMA:
“He is a heck of a boxer. His experience, his patience and his endurance won him this fight hands down. I always told him he was not a fighter but a boxer. But sharing the ring with him he is certainly a solid fighter. Strong in the clinch. Great understanding of frames and head position. He has some very strong tools he could bring into an MMA game for sure.”
So McGregor has his praise for Mayweather, a far cry from the bad blood displayed (or manufactured) during their racism and homophobia-laden world press conference tour last month. It’s no surprise, as McGregor showed the same reserved mood in the moments and days following his somewhat shocking submission loss Nate Diaz at UFC 196.
That’s part of his ability to stay gracious in defeat, which he did by rematching and defeating Diaz in 2016’s most anticipated UFC bout. He could be headed for the foregone conclusion that is his trilogy match with Diaz very soon – if the UFC is willing to meet Diaz’ lofty pay demands, that is.
But he could also be sowing the seeds for a rematch with Mayweather, this time in the octagon.
Now that the dust has settled on last weekend’s (Sat., August 26, 2017) massive Floyd Mayweather vs. Conor McGregor boxing match from the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nev., the collective mixed martial arts (MMA) world can finally get back to the kind of fights they love most after a brief foray into the so-called sweet […]
Now that the dust has settled on last weekend’s (Sat., August 26, 2017) massive Floyd Mayweather vs. Conor McGregor boxing match from the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nev., the collective mixed martial arts (MMA) world can finally get back to the kind of fights they love most after a brief foray into the so-called sweet science.
Sure, the drawn-out, overhyped media spectacle was guaranteed to be a huge financial success, and with UFC President Dana White recently claiming that the event had pulled a record-smashing 6.5 million pay-per-view (PPV) buys, it obviously brought a ton of eyeballs and attention to the UFC and the sport of MMA as a whole.
That’s something that was only amplified when McGregor put on an absolutely surprising and impressive performance against an all-time great with zero pro boxing bouts on his record. Many combat sports fan who would not have considered watching the UFC may certainly tune in now.
But despite the huge cash windfall new UFC owners WME-IMG are about to receive from the boxing match, there are some disturbing signs that may suggest the fight wasn’t that great for the long-term prospects of the UFC and MMA despite them needing a huge fight during a subpar 2017.
Let’s break them down here.
Photo by Joe Camporeale for USA TODAY Sports
6.) The UFC’s Biggest Fight Of 2017 Wasn’t In The Cage:
Mayweather vs. McGregor was huge – that much is true.
But even though its scope and overall coverage brought the UFC into mainstream sports media like never before, it was a spectacle that cannot be topped by anything in MMA this year and perhaps ever, meaning the fact will always remain that 2017’s biggest fight involving the promotion took place in a boxing ring.
If you were told that even say, two years ago, you probably would have laughed in whoever told you that’s face, because the previous UFC regime under the Fertitta brothers was adamant they didn’t co-promote. But with billion-dollar loans outstanding, WME-IMG decided they wanted the biggest payday out there, and they had to work with SHOWTIME Sports (and on the B-side, no less) to get it.
Whether or not that affects the UFC’s reputation remains to be seen.
Justin Gaethje has made it perfectly clear that he wants to fight UFC lightweight champion Conor McGregor. The problem is, everyone else in the lightweight division wants a piece of McGregor. However, unlike the other fighters who want a piece of McGregor, Gaethje has a plan for making the fight happen. Gaethje’s plan is to […]
Justin Gaethje has made it perfectly clear that he wants to fight UFC lightweight champion Conor McGregor.
The problem is, everyone else in the lightweight division wants a piece of McGregor. However, unlike the other fighters who want a piece of McGregor, Gaethje has a plan for making the fight happen.
Gaethje’s plan is to score a vicious knockout of Eddie Alvarez at The Ultimate Fighter 26 Finale on Dec. 1. If he can be able to do that then he believes it will get McGregor’s attention.
For those who might not know, Gaethje and Alvarez are coaching opposite one another on this season of TUF, which has already premiered on FOX Sports 1. The latest season of the reality show will crown the UFC’s first women’s flyweight champion.
“McGregor, when he comes back, he’s gonna pick whoever he wants,” Gaethje said Wednesday at a media lunch in Century City (transcript courtesy of MMA Fighting). “As the competitor that I see him being, he’s gonna want the most dangerous guy. When I finish Eddie Alvarez quickly, that’s gonna be me.
“On paper and on TV, I’m the most dangerous, violent guy in this division. Most hittable guy. So that’s probably someone he’d want to fight. As long as I knock out Eddie Alvarez quickly, that’s my goal — to get that fight.”
It’s believed that if or when McGregor returns to the UFC, he will fight the interim champion upon his return. That will either be Tony Ferguson or Kevin Lee, who fight for that belt in the main event of UFC 216 on Oct. 7 in Las Vegas.
“[McGregor] has to come back and he’s not gonna want to fight Tony Ferguson or Kevin Lee,” Gaethje said. “Being the crazy person I am, Eddie Alvarez and Conor make me nervous and make me lose sleep at night. I don’t lose any sleep when I think about Tony Ferguson or Kevin Lee. Not saying they can’t beat me or wouldn’t beat me. They just don’t do it for me. I would want someone who did it for me. It would be Khabib [Nurmagomedov] or Conor. I would love to go to Ireland.”
“He don’t give a f*ck about his belt, which is fine,” Gaethje said of McGregor. “Whatever. I don’t know. He loves it,” Gaethje said of McGregor. “He f*cking loves it, and he’s crazy like I am about this sport. It has to do it for him. Obviously, the pay has to be big, he’s a businessman. Smart businessman. But I don’t think that Ferguson or Lee would do it for him.”
Should he or shouldn’t he?