By Allan Fox: UFC star Conor McGregor is confident that in a rematch with Floyd Mayweather Jr., he’d have enough stamina to do the job on him to hand him his first loss of his career. McGregor notes that he was doing well earlier in the fight by showing Mayweather things that he’d never seen before during his career. After he gassed out, the Mayweather took over and got the victory.
Mayweather stopped McGregor in the 10th round in their fight on August 26 at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada. The Mayweather-McGregor fight was televised on Showtime pay-per-view at a price of $100 per household. While some boxing fans and MMA fans thought the Mayweather vs. McGregor fight was exciting and worth the money they spent on it, many other fans felt it was a dull affair with fighting at one-quarter speed, walking around at a slow pace to keep McGregor in the fight long enough to make it somewhat entertaining.
McGregor says he’s not going to start calling out the 40-year-old Mayweather for a rematch. Instead of doing that, McGregor says he’ll wait and see how Mayweather manages his fortune. McGregor believes that Mayweather only chose to fight him due to him having money problems. If Mayweather burns through his fortune with wild spending and bad investments, he could wind up asking for a rematch with McGregor.
“I know if I went another go with him under boxing rules I’d get that win,” said McGregor via the dailystar.co.uk. ”Honestly, I feel with just a little change in certain areas of the prep, we could have built the engine for 12 full rounds under stress, and got the better result on the night,” said McGregor on his Instagram.
Given that McGregor is returning to the UFC to resume his MMA career, we’ll likely never get a chance to test his theory about him building up his stamina by improving his conditioning for another boxing match. If McGregor is only going to wait on a rematch against Mayweather, then there’s a chance that he could be waiting for a long time, because the 5-time former world champion boxer may never come out of retirement. Mayweather was bagging just this week that he’d made $1 billion in his boxing career.
Mayweather supposedly still hasn’t cashed his checks for his fights with Manny Pacquiao and McGregor. Those 2 fights alone are supposed to give him $600 million. Forbes had Mayweather’s fortune at $700 million going into his fight with McGregor. So, if you do the math, he’s got $1 billion. Will Mayweather burn though all that money in time to give McGregor a rematch? Not likely. If McGregor wants to fight again in the sport of boxing, then he needs to call out someone like Saul Canelo Alvarez or Gennady Golovkin.
“I know if I went another go with him under boxing rules I’d get that win, I know that,” McGregor said. “I know I could do it in the first place.”
If McGregor were to fight someone good in boxing and beat them, then maybe it might interest Mayweather enough to cause him to get back in training camp for a rematch with McGregor. It would have to be someone really good that McGregor beat for it to entice Mayweather to want to return to boxing and take him on again. Hand-picking former 2- division world champion Paulie Malignaggi isn’t nearly a big enough name to generate much interest in Mayweather to fight McGregor again. What’s interesting is that McGregor is already calling out Malignaggi, asking him to face him in the octagon, which would be a total mismatch.
Sadly, the McGregor vs. Malignaggi fight would likely sell over 1 million buys on PPV. I don’ think it would be a good deal for the UFC fans unless McGregor chose to stay on his feet the entire time and not kick or take Malignaggi to the mat. If McGregor just fought Malignaggi in the stand-up position, it would be fun to watch. I still think McGregor would be too big, too strong and too young for Malignaggi. With the small 4oz gloves they use in the UFC, Malignaggi likely wouldn’t last long against McGregor.
McGregor called Malignaggi “a rat” and challenged him to “bring his balls” for a fight in the octagon.
Malignaggi would be so over-matched against McGregor in a fight in the UFC. Malignaggi would need a long training camp to get him up to speed in all the different submission holds in the MMA if he agreed to take a fight with McGregor in that sport. Learning all the wrestling would take years for Malignaggi. There wouldn’t be enough time for Malignaggi to learn how to keep from getting submitted by McGregor.
“He fought completely different than he (usually) fought, he couldn’t figure out what I was doing early on,” said McGregor about Mayweather. ”And that’s it. I feel with the lessons I learned from that first fight, if I had another go around, I’d get it.”
Mayweather wasn’t throwing punches against McGregor in the first 4 rounds of the fight. It looked like Mayweather was trying to let McGregor tire himself out by absorbing his shots, and then taking advantage of his fatigue in the later rounds. That’s exactly what happened. McGregor fought well initially in landing some nice shots to the head of Mayweather. But once the fight went into the 5th round, McGregor didn’t have the engine to continue to fight hard.
Mayweather then slowly started to walk McGregor down, hitting him with single right hands and left hooks. To McGregor’s credit, he was able to battle through his fatigue until referee Robert Byrd stopped the fight in the 10th round to save the UFC fighter from getting hurt. Mayweather later said that he was worried that he would give McGregor brain damage if he really poured it on. He wanted McGregor to be able to return to the UFC and enjoy a long career in that sport.
“I’m not going to start trying to calling him out. Now, I’ll sit back at a distance. Let’s see how he manages this round of money,” said McGregor of Mayweather.
It’s going to be nearly impossible for McGregor to get Mayweather to fight him in another match under the rules of boxing without him getting into the ring and beating a top-level boxer. The problem is that the fans are not going to want to purchase another fight between Mayweather and McGregor again, considering they understand that it would be a fight that would end in a comparable way as their previous fight. The fans would feel differently though if McGregor challenged and beat a top fighter from boxing like Canelo or Golovkin.
McGregor would need defeat a big name to get the fans to want to pay to see him fight Mayweather again. If McGregor calls out Golovkin and defeats him without controversy, then he might be able to get the rematch against Mayweather so he can prove that he could beat him in a second fight. It sounds like dream stuff from McGregor. I get the impression that McGregor doesn’t entirely like the idea of him having to return to the grueling MMA sport where the paydays are smaller, and the fighters are extremely brutal, fast and painful.
It’s a different animal completely fighting in the UFC compared to boxing. If the money was equal to what McGregor just received in his fight with Mayweather, I think he’d be in a huge hurry to get back in the octagon to start fighting again in the sport, but obviously the money is nowhere near as good as what he just got against Mayweather. One of these days we’ll see the UFC fighters making the kind of money that top boxers make, but McGregor will likely be long retired by the time that happens.