More turmoil allowed Amanda Nunes to headline UFC 215 event just two months after UFC president Dana White said she never would headline again (h/t CBSSports.com’s Brian Campbell). The rematch with Valentina Shevchenko would give her a platform to rede…
More turmoil allowed Amanda Nunes to headline UFC 215 event just two months after UFC president Dana White said she never would headline again (h/t CBSSports.com’s Brian Campbell). The rematch with Valentina Shevchenko would give her a platform to redeem herself, but not everything went as planned.
The most important plan for Nunes did come through—she retained the UFC bantamweight championship by split decision. She just didn’t get back in the good graces of MMA fans.
Rafael dos Anjos made a statement in the co-main event with a first-round submission over Neil Magny. The former lightweight king looked outstanding and every bit of a welterweight contender.
Those are just the big stories exiting Edmonton and UFC 215. There were plenty of other winners and losers when the cage door closed.
Wondering who are those fortunate, and unfortunate, souls? Here are the real winners and losers from Edmonton.
Full UFC 215 fight card results appear at the end.
If there existed a Promoter’s Rulebook, somewhere among the first few rules listed would be:”Do not bury your athletes, no matter how angry they make you.*”And down at the bottom of the page, in a tiny yet readable font, you’d find:*especially if they …
If there existed a Promoter’s Rulebook, somewhere among the first few rules listed would be:
“Do not bury your athletes, no matter how angry they make you.*”
And down at the bottom of the page, in a tiny yet readable font, you’d find:
*especially if they hold a championship in your organization.
Back in July, Amanda Nunes and Valentina Shevchenko were set to do their thing at UFC 213.
Nunes was, from a promotional sense, hotter than she’d ever been. She’d won five straight in the Octagon, including two dominant victories over Ronda Rousey and Miesha Tate. She was good at everything in the Octagon and a force of nature on her feet. She is openly gay, giving the UFC a brand new group of fans to market to. With a little effort, the UFC had a chance to create a new star, something it needs these days.
But then, a day before the fight, Nunes got sick and withdrew from the card.
How sick? It depends on who you talk to. Nunes said she’d been stricken with sinusitis. That seems like a pretty good reason for not going in the Octagon against someone who’s trying to take your head off.
“I have chronic sinusitis, I have fought with it before but this time it didn’t work out,” Nunes said in a statement issued to the media. “During the weight cut I was unable to breathe and felt off balance from the pressure in my sinuses. I was taken to the hospital after the weigh-ins and they only checked my blood and dehydration and only cleared me based on that.”
Of course, UFC President Dana White, relying on his years of medical training, threw Nunes under the bus and implied that Nunes could’ve fought if she wanted to…she just didn’t want to.
“It’s not like she was like ‘I’m absolutely refusing to fight’,” White said. “She said ‘I don’t feel right, I don’t feel good.’ I think that it was 90 percent mental and maybe 10 percent physical. I think a lot of fighters have had times where they don’t feel right.”
The fans who somehow still believe the words that come out of White’s mouth (despite years of alternative facts and failed promises) followed along, parroting White’s words. In the blink of an eye, Nunes was branded a coward. Someone who didn’t want to fight. Someone who was scared. Which is ridiculous, of course, as it has always been ridiculous when White has turned on one of his athletes in the past.
“I don’t know why people are thinking I am scared,” Nunes recently said on a conference call.
We know why.
My argument at the time was the logical one: Despite its dude, bro roots, mixed martial arts is a professional sport. Today’s fighters are professional athletes who must look out for themselves. The idea that the UFC will show any loyalty to those who do them a “favor” is an outdated one, a part of a time gone by. In the modern UFC, under the watchful eye of WME-IMG, there are no permanent post-career desk jobs waiting for favored athletes.
“When you’re starting to see what this life can do for you, and your family has had nothing, you realize ‘Why risk it?'” Nina Ansarofftold ESPN.com this week. “No one puts anything out there for you until you reach a certain level, so why take that risk for them? No one is going to pay our bills or take care of our family. [Without a title], you’re going from potentially $1 million per year to $60,000 per year. And you want to put that on the line when you’re feeling 50 percent?”
Which leads us to this weekend and to UFC 215, where Nunes and Shevchenko will finally fight.
Outside of the devoted hardcore fans who will watch everything the UFC broadcasts, nobody cares. With a win over Ray Borg, Demetrious Johnson is going to set a record for the most consecutive UFC title defenses.
It is a historic moment, and nobody cares.
Two of the best women’s bantamweight fighters on earth are clashing. Nobody cares.
I’m sure it is a coincidence that White has buried both Johnson and Nunes in recent months. Right?
I understand why White offloads blame when something like UFC 213 happens. Since the earliest days of the Fertitta brothers/White reign, the promotion has always placed itself above all else.
Those three initials are the most important thing; the athletes are secondary. They are cogs in a wheel, replaceable and forgotten. It was a fine strategy for many years, enabling the UFC to keep athletes in their place, to keep pay low and to place their brand above all else.
But a sea change is occurring in mixed martial arts. We are beginning to see more emphasis placed on the athlete. Only ConorMcGregor can get away with it right now, but others will follow through the hole he has created.
With this sea change must come a change in the way White operates. His days of reacting badly and creating fan backlash towards UFC fighters he is angry with must come to an end.
Otherwise, he’ll continue to be nothing more than a hindrance to the growth of his company, his athletes and the sport as a whole.
Provided he defeats Ray Borg on Saturday in the main event of UFC 215, Demetrious Johnson will finally break Anderson Silva’s longstanding record for consecutive UFC title defenses.
This milestone obviously means a lot to Johnson.
The men’s flyweight c…
Provided he defeats Ray Borg on Saturday in the main event of UFC 215, Demetrious Johnson will finally break Anderson Silva’s longstanding record for consecutive UFC title defenses.
This milestone obviously means a lot to Johnson.
The men’s flyweight champion has been citing it as a motivating factor since at least before his second win over John Dodson two years and four fights ago. Beating Borg this weekend will give Johnson 11 straight defenses, moving him out of a tie with Silva and into uncharted waters of historic dominance for a UFC titlist.
Considering the turnover at the top in many of the rest of the fight company’s weight classes over the last couple of years, it will be a doubly amazing feat—and “Mighty Mouse” says he’s still a long way from satisfied.
“I hope I can get to 20,” Johnson told ESPN.com’s Brett Okamoto recently. “I’m on pace to get two or three fights per year, and I think I’ve got five or six years left in me. Maybe I’ll get to something like 18 and walk away from the sport—retire as champion. I think 15 to 18 title defenses is something that would be in the record books forever.”
There’s no mystery in this record’s appeal to him. As of Saturday, Johnson will have been 125-pound champ for a staggering 1,808 days, and he’s set to go off as a 9-1 favorite over Borg, according to OddsShark. Since winning the flyweight belt at UFC 152 in September 2012, he’s been so far ahead of his competition there isn’t much for him to focus on besides immortality.
But exactly what this record (and Johnson breaking it) means to anyone outside of the fighter and his inner circle is a matter of opinion.
You might not even know Johnson was on the cusp of history unless you’ve had your ear pressed firmly to the ground of hardcore MMA circles.
It’s not as though the UFC has been shouting Johnson’s potential achievement from the rooftops. UFC 215, in fact, will be a fairly low-profile pay-per-view event headlined by a pair of champions who’ve found themselves in the fight company’s doghouse in recent months.
Women’s bantamweight champ Amanda Nunes cast herself in hot water after pulling out of a UFC 213 title defense against Valentina Shevchenko the week of the fight in July. A do-over of that bout will now serve as UFC 215’s co-main event.
Johnson himself—normally a drama-free workhorse for the UFC during his championship run—publicly clashed with the organization in June over his next opponent. The UFC wanted Johnson to fight former men’s bantamweight champ T.J. Dillashaw, but Johnson insisted on breaking this record against an actual flyweight before entertaining the idea of fighting men from other weight classes.
The public tiff has put the fighter and his bosses uncharacteristically at odds headed into this matchup.
“You want Ray Borg, we’ll give you Ray Borg,” a sarcastic UFC President Dana White told MMAjunkie’s John Morgan and Ken Hathaway recently. “I’m sure the fans will be clamoring, and ticket sales will be through the roof and pay-per-views will be off the charts.”
Ticket sales and PPV buys have been the only real problem for Johnson for some time now.
If you’ve watched him fight anytime during his five-year reign, you already knows he’s an incredible champion and perhaps the most complete MMA fighter of all time. Since dropping from bantamweight in the wake of a loss to Dominick Cruz in late 2011, he and head coach Matt Hume have polished his skill set to the point of near flawlessness.
If anything, the 31-year-old is still getting better. Johnson’s most recent run of victories against Wilson Reis, Tim Elliott, Henry Cejudo and Dodson has been increasingly stellar—arguably all the more so given that Elliot pushed him in unexpected ways during their fight in December 2016.
Yet, this old refrain is becoming fairly well-worn in fight circles: Johnson has been a revelation in the cage but hasn’t done particularly big business at the box office.
This weekend marks the first time he’s headlined a pay-per-view since the Dodson fight—when UFC 191 pulled down a meager estimated buyrate of 115,000, via MMA Payout. Roughly half of his title defenses have been relegated to free network TV broadcasts, where he also fetches unremarkable ratings.
For unknown reasons, most fans have decided they’re disinterested in Johnson’s brand and that makes him breaking Silva’s record a somewhat slippery accomplishment.
It’s not meaningless by any stretch. Eleven title defenses is still 11 title defenses—a run of sustained success unequaled in the near 25-year history of the UFC. It’s a terrific accolade for Johnson, who is the only flyweight champion the Octagon has ever known.
But it’s not exactly a hallowed number, either.
This isn’t Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hit streak, Wilt Chamberlain’s 100 points in a game or even Tom Brady’s five Super Bowl rings. MMA is a different sport, with a different business model and different values. Johnson’s longevity is a wonder, but it’s not as though fans have been on the edge of their seats for years, waiting to see who—if anyone—would ever break Silva’s record.
And while discussions over who is the greatest of all time are constantly swirling, MMA is too young for any kind of meaningful historical reverence.
The UFC flyweight division, for example, has only existed since early 2012. Johnson has obviously been the very best of the company’s top of 125-pound fighters, but his is a comparatively new and comparatively shallow weight class, even by MMA standards.
It’s impossible to argue against his skill set, but we likely won’t know where he fits in among MMA’s all-time greats until the sport itself has enough history for fans to revel in it. Not to mention, enough years removed from which to view his greatness.
For now, it’s hard to compare feats in different weight classes and across the sport’s many flash-in-the-pan eras. Who’s to say that Johnson surpassing Silva—whose run as middleweight champ spanned from 2006-13—makes him any better or worse a champion than Silva, Georges St-Pierre or even Jon Jones?
Who’s to say Johnson’s current run of 13 straight victories is any more or less impressive than Silva’s 17 during his heyday, St-Pierre’s 17-1 UFC mark from 2005-13 or the streak in 2011-12 where Jones effortlessly defeated five former light heavyweight champions in a row.
We can’t.
Not really.
So, while it will be incredible to see Johnson set a new standard for UFC championship tenure, it’s probably not going to change anyone’s mind about him.
For Johnson himself, that’s beside the point, though the fact he will break the record against a virtual unknown in Borg and on what will no doubt be one of the UFC’s lowest-selling PPVs of the year seems like a useful microcosm for the rest of the man’s career.
Chances are, if you’re a Demetrious Johnson fan, the new record will mean a great deal to you.
Dear Jon,
I don’t feel good. Not too many people feel good, actually.
Not after you’ve failed your second drug test in as many Daniel Cormier bookings, and not in light of some of the things that have led us to this point.
It’s not even that fans …
Dear Jon,
I don’t feel good. Not too many people feel good, actually.
Not after you’ve failed your second drug test in as many Daniel Cormier bookings, and not in light of some of the things that have led us to this point.
It’s not even that fans are mad anymore. There’s not much outrage; there isn’t even much surprise.
People just don’t feel good. They’re either flustered, baffled or downright disappointed. Even Cormier, who you’ve handed the only two losses of his professional career, doesn’t know what to think.
It’s like when you were a kid and you’d do something wrong. Your parents would say “We’re not mad, we’re just disappointed,” and you’d feel even worse than if they had yelled at you. That’s kind of where you are.
They want so much from you. They want what you’re capable of giving because you’ve given it to them since before you could legally grab an ale at a local watering hole.
They want to see you be the best to ever compete in this sport because that’s what you were long before things went off the rails. They want to watch you dismantle foes with systematic ferocity only ever seen in the absolute greatest to fight for sport.
They want to watch you excel. And, outside the cage, you haven’t.
It’s disappointing because your fans have stood by you through it all, arguing you’re just a man and your imperfections are shared by so many others who are fortunate enough not to have cameras and media magnifying them at every turn.
It’s disappointing because you’ve said, time and again, that this time is different and this mistake is the one you’ve learned from. Then you go and shout with your actions to dwarf what you said with your words.
It’s disappointing because this ridiculous carnival sport needs you, needs a name other than ConorMcGregor to garner attention amid the sea of faceless fighters signed to fill up a UFC Fight Kit on a Saturday night.
But it looks like that disappointment is all that’s left. It’s the only thing that matters, particularly if the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency has its way.
This is not to shame you.
The independence and stubbornness you’d have needed to achieve such heights in MMA are the same traits that would surely have you not care what this letter suggests.
This is about understanding what you’ve meant to this sport and what you should mean to it going forward.
You’re not, as Joe Rogan so eloquently put it, the “number one f–kup of all time” because your story isn’t yet fully written. You are, in parts, the worst aspects of what Rogan and other detractors suggest because you have the track record to prove it, but it’s not uniform and it’s not a lost cause.
There is plenty of greatness that warrants attention in your legacy, and there’s room for more.
Inside the cage, even with serious USADA punishments potentially coming, you’ll be back should you choose to be. You’ll be back at an age when the great Anderson Silva was just starting to take off on his unstoppable run. If you move to heavyweight, you’ll be back right as you’re hitting peak age to take over the division.
You’ll have a chance at a redemption story unlike any in combat sports history because your path to that redemption has been equally unlike any in combat sports history.
Outside the cage, you’ll have a chance to be a champion for awareness of the pitfalls of fame and fortune at a young age. You’ve been there and handled it as problematically as anyone could have expected, and you can speak about it and mentor those coming behind you in hopes of saving them from themselves.
You’ll have a chance to follow many combat sports greats who have made a graceful transition into their late careers and retirements after rocky periods as competitors. After all, if Mike Tyson can rebound from notoriety to produce a respected one-man show and lovable cartoon character, why couldn’t your image one day rebound as well?
So, Jon, all is not lost.
These are bad times for you, for the UFC, for the sport.
Few people wanted this for you, and few want this for you now. Friend or foe, all most people ever wanted was to see you perform at the highest level of the game—either to watch you be unbeatable or to watch the next guy in line and see if he was the one to do it.
Turns out the one to do it was you. Dana warned us it might be this way (though he also called your much-respected head coach a “sport-killer” once, so it’s easy to see why you might dismiss some of his bluster as promotional hyperbole).
Now you turn this corner into the final leg of your career. Maybe—hopefully—you’ll be exonerated and back in action; maybe you’ll have to wait a while to throw hands professionally once again. Either way, though, it’s the leg of your career that will afford you the chance to set many things straight and get out of the game the right way.
That’s what people would feel good about. It’s what people want.
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.
If there existed a Promoter’s Rulebook, somewhere among the first few rules listed would be: