Conor McGregor was not impressed with the MMA action he saw on Saturday night while watching PFL’s “Battle of the Giants” event. And that was before he lost a half-million dollar bet on the Francis Ngannou vs. Renan Ferreira main event.
“The Notorious” wrote a scathing tweet on the state of MMA following Johnny Eblen’s grappling-heavy (and let’s admit, boring) win over Fabian Edwards on the PFL PPV undercard.
”Act like yous aren’t fed up and over this bulls— all yous want, but I won’t,” McGregor declared in a since-deleted post on X (formerly Twitter). “It’s just become the norm nowadays. The product is suffering because of it. If it wasn’t for the brand name already well established, it would be well in the bin by now.”
“It’s in the bin in the mainstream. That’s a fact. There is no mainstream, casual audience here. It needs calling out. Adjusting. A full review. MMA is better than what it has become recently imo.”
McGregor then pushed bare knuckle boxing as the antidote to all this boring mixed martial arts business.
“Bare Knuckle is where it’s at,” he wrote. “The future! And the future is now. There is zero feeling of an event dragging on that is ever so prevalent in today’s MMA. More intense. More deadly. More blood. No room for stalling or escaping collision/impact.”
“It’s sink or swim time in bare knuckle. Nowhere to hide. The nastiest, craziest, wildest sport in today’s market.”
It’s unsurprising to hear McGregor talk down on grappling — the ground element of MMA has never been his realm, and he’s suffered defeat there in high profile losses to Nate Diaz and Khabib Nurmagomedov. If he ever returns to MMA, the ground is where he’ll likely lose again, although Dustin Poirier has proven Mac’s ability to take a punch at higher weight classes is questionable as well.
Can grappling-heavy MMA matches be boring? Sure. But this is by no means a new thing. Longtime fans of MMA will remember entire eras of the sport where wrestlers and jiu jitsu fighters ruled supreme — until strikers learned how to stuff their takedowns and took the sport back.
Now we’re seeing the strikers struggle to deal with Caucausus-level wrestling, but that’s just the back and forth you’ll see when determining which style is most powerful and who is the best in the world under as few rules as possible.
