Rising star Brian Ortega becomes the first man to knocked out Frankie Edgar in the first round at this past Saturday’s UFC 222 pay-per-view in the co-main event at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas.
Ortega took a featherweight title shot away from Edgar, who was originally slated to fight champ Max Holloway for the belt before a Holloway pulled out due to an injury. Edgar took the fight with Ortega, instead, and he paid for it with his consciousness.
Former UFC heavyweight champion Frank Mir who spoke about this fight and said Frankie Edgar’s camp shouldn’t agree upon to this fight:
If I was Frankie Edgar’s manager and he wants to take this fight, I’d be like ‘No, Frankie, we’re not taking this fight,” Mir said on his Phone Booth Fighting podcast (transcript courtesy of Bloody Elbow). “Why? Because this is a dangerous fight. This guy is big, he hits hard, he’s knocked out everybody he’s fought so far in the UFC, and if you go out there and just barely beat him, it makes us look worse going into our Max Holloway fight.”
“We’re also gonna take the time off. You’re an older athlete, you’ve been fighting for a long time, you’ve earned your title shot. You’ve earned your place in UFC lore, you’re gonna be a f—king Hall-of-Famer. We don’t need to give a hand out to this kid Ortega and help him out.”
“You taking this fight is not what’s best for you,” Mir continued. “You have nothing to gain, the other kid Ortega has everything in the f—king world to gain. Even if he fights you in a close war, his stock goes up and your stock drops. Who wants those kinds of fights?”
Frank Mir further added that Edgar would have further excelled if the promotion adds another weight class between featherweight and bantamweight:
“I think Edgar is just screwed that 135 is too difficult of a cut for him, and (at) 145, he still looks small against everybody he fights at featherweight,” Mir said. “He almost has the length of a guy who is at the bantamweight weight class, but just can’t quite cut the muscle tissue to get down there and effectively be able to perform.”
“When guys are smaller in correlation to their size and percentage, it’s a bigger difference,” Mir added. “Someone being 20 pounds bigger than me at 260 to 280, that’s the difference of like a five-pound difference down there at the 130’s.”
“I can lose five pounds by skipping breakfast. (But) tell Demetrious Johnson ‘hey, we need to drop five pounds in the next hour.’ He can’t just skip breakfast, he’s gonna be bouncing around for a while, because (it’s) five pounds in percentage to his weight.”
Do you agree with Frank Mir’s comments on Frankie Edgar?