Coach: Conor does mad things, that’s why we love him

Conor McGregor’s striking coach Owen Roddy appeared recently on The BBC MMA Show and said all signs point towards the former UFC lightweight champion fighting the current title holder, Khabib Nurmagomedov. There are also signs of course that McGregor should be thrown out of the UFC like anyone else in the company would have been, including president Dana White. However, firing McGregor would lose fortunes, and the UFC is in the business business.

There’s been a lot of talk about this Khabib fight and it seems to be brewing towards this one, said Roddy, as transcribed by Jed Meshew for MMA Fighting. You earn the chance to fight Conor. You have to be worthy to fight him. Khabib is doing very well fighting-wise. I see holes in his game but he’s building a big ruckus. He’s calling [Conor out] now and people are getting behind him and it’s starting to build, and once it gets to that tipping point, I’m sure we’ll see that fight.

Conor’s bus attack on Nurmagomedov was apparently sparked by ‘The Eagle’ having words a few days previously with McGregor’s SBGi teammate Artem Lobov. However, Roddy thinks things had been building for a while.

Conor’s a mad thing, said Roddy. Conor turned around to me just after the Mayweather fight and said, ‘There’s talk of me fighting Khabib. I might do it in Russia.’ Then he says to me, ‘We’ll do it like Rocky. We’ll go to Siberia and we’ll train in the snow. I’ll get one of those yokes to put on my shoulders to get the lats’. I was crying with laughter. He was serious. Dead serious. Conor does mad things. That’s what we love him for. There’s not many people who would do that. It would be an exciting fight. I don’t know what’s going to happen next but I would like to see it.

At the end of the day, Khabib hasn’t finished many fights lately. Now he always says he does that on purpose, but I don’t think so. If you’re going to go in and finish somebody, you go in and finish them. He says, ‘I like punish people for five rounds.’ I always say, if you’re going to give Conor McGregor five attempts to land a shot on you, so even if he went in and didn’t land the first round, or the second, or the third, or the fourth, he has five attempts to land one shot.

I’ve seen Conor McGregor go in and land within the first 30 seconds of the first round. You see that against every person he’s fought – MMA fighters, boxers, everybody. He’s so elusive, he’s so good at maintaining the range, he’s so good at giving people shots that they think they can land and then setting up everything off that. I just see him land and not many people can take it. I don’t know if Khabib can take it either.

While McGregor should be fired, instead he’s going to get the biggest fight in the sport’s history, because money always matter in MMA. Nurmagomedov says he wants to defend his title in November. If McGregor’s is ready or allowed, there are several other worthy fighters circling, including Tony Ferguson, Kevin Lee, Eddie Alvarez, and Dustin Poirier.