Coach Reveals Sean Strickland Was Nearly Pulled From UFC 293 Title Fight
Things worked out quite well for Sean Strickland and his team at UFC 293 last weekend, but apparently his coach Eric Nicksick thought that the middleweight was going to be pulled from his bout with Israel Adesanya during fight week.
Strickland landed in Australia as a massive underdog to Adesanya at UFC 293 and walked away from the event as the promotion’s new middleweight champion after he comprehensively out struck the former kickboxer over five rounds.
The 32-year-old was already an unexpected challenger for Adesanya’s title after Dricus Du Plessis was unable to fight in Sydney, but this week Nicksick revealed to Ariel Helwani that Strickland’s extracurricular activities during fight week almost caused him to miss out on his first UFC title shot.
“I thought we were gonna get pulled. I really did,” Nicksick explained on The MMA Hour. “Sean basically incriminates himself during fight week, the presser. He’s like ‘Yeah, this guy comes up to me talking trash and I punched him in his belly.’ And apparently the Australian government or whoever heard this, they got word of this. And it went downhill from there. It got to the point where they were flying John Crouch out from Arizona from MMA Lab to corner Jared Cannonier…I heard that, I was like ‘Ah bro, we’re off. They’re gonna pull us from this card.'"
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Strickland’s very forthcoming admission about punching a fan came as little surprise to most members of the MMA community considering the middleweight’s colorful personality. If the interaction had gotten him pulled from the card, Jared Cannonier would probably have been happy to step in after he successfully weighed-in as the backup fighter for the UFC 293 main event.
As eager as Cannonier would have been to get a second crack at Adesanya, the idea of a rematch between the two men might not have exactly fired fans up for UFC 293 considering the relatively lackluster unanimous decision that “The Last Stylebender” took over the Alaskan at UFC 276.
“The Killa Gorrilla” is still the UFC’s #4-ranked ranked middleweight contender and actually holds a victory over Strickland within the last year, which Cannonier made sure to mention when he recently asked Dana White for the division’s next title shot.
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