McGregor: I’m going to kill entire lightweight division

UFC featherweight champion Conor McGregor challenges lightweight champion Eddie Alvarez at UFC 205. If he succeeds, he will become the first fighter in UFC history to hold two belts at once. Then he will have to give one of them up.

The odds are, it will be the featherweight belt that he abandons. The cuts to 145 left McGregor looking cadaverous.

On the latest Mac Life vlog, ‘Notorious’ detailed his plans for lightweight.

I’m going to kill them all, he said, as transcribed by Steven Marrocco for MMAjunkie. Very excited and at the same time calm. Calm and excited. We’re going to go out there and put on a showcase. Stake my claim. What can they say now? Two belts. What I said, I did. We’re very excited about the future. We’re only starting here. There’s a lot more coming.

I only had a five-round war with a guy three times the size of me, and now I’m back again, and all I hear is complaining, f@@$%ing, moaning. You want this money? You want this? You want what I got? You got to put in the f@@$%ing work. And as far as I’m seeing, nobody’s putting in the work. Everybody’s talking. Everybody’s thinking, ‘Just because Conor has it, I should have it.’ No, no. I didn’t always have it. There’s a reason why I have it. I had to work my F@@$%ing bollocks off to get it, and here I am still working while they’re talking..

Who is going out there, time and time again, back to back to back to back, putting it all on the line and continuing to show up? They all say I’m all talk. I look at them and say they’re all talk because I’m the one in here fighting every week.

McGregor was asked about how the scientific approach to training has worked out for him.

“All you have to do is look at the results,” said McGregor. “From the first Diaz fight to the second Diaz fight, took me three months to get there. It took three months to not last three rounds, to outlast a triathlete over five rounds who has 30 pounds on me.”

The remark about their weight difference engendered some derisive remarks on the Internet but it is not absurd. Diaz has said repeatedly that he walks around at 190-195. Further, he said he was 200 two weeks before the fight with McGregor. Notorious weighed in at 168 for the 171 limit fight at UFC 202, so it is not inconceivable that Diaz, who weighed in at 170.5, was close to 198 during the fight.