Dana White: “I didn’t prevent Conor McGregor from fighting at UFC 200”

By Jamie Penick, MMATorch Editor-in-Chief

Dana White (photo credit Gary Vazquez © USA Today Sports)

“First of all, I didn’t prevent Conor [McGregor] from fighting at UFC 200. I did not. Everybody if you look at the press conference, Joanna Jedrzejczyk flew in from Poland, Claudia [Gadelha] flew in from Brazil, [Jose Aldo] flew in from Brazil and then came here. People came in from all over the world. Frankie [Edgar] is just getting home and hasn’t seen his family… There were things Conor needed, I was willing to make sure that Conor had the things that he needed when he landed in Vegas or landed in New York or wherever else we went. This isn’t just ‘hey you have to do this.’ I will bend and I will do things to make it work for these guys and girls and Conor didn’t do it. That’s the truth, the whole truth and that’s the way it is… Conor’s going to fight again. He’s going to fight at [UFC] 201, 202, 203, whatever the deal might be. We’ll see what’s next when that plays out. [UFC] 200 is the fight everybody’s been looking forward to for a long time. It is what it is and the show will roll on and Conor will fight again. We’re in the fight business. Fight’s fall out and things happen and we roll on. That’s the way that it works. The Conor thing has been crazy and it is what it is.”

-Dana White continues to argue his side of the Conor McGregor/UFC 200 fiasco during the UFC 200 press conference in New York earlier this week (transcribed by FoxSports.com).

Penick’s Analysis: Again, the argument is that McGregor is in a very different spot than the rest of the fighters who flew in. No one else flying in from far out was re-matching someone who just beat them after a long undefeated run. Aldo’s the one closest to that situation, but he beat Frankie Edgar when they fought the first time and thinks he can do so again; McGregor and his team felt they needed to do what they were doing to beat Nate Diaz. Of course, the other flip side of the entire argument is that the UFC already made a huge concession for McGregor in booking the Diaz rematch at 170 lbs. to begin with, because he should have been defending his Featherweight Title on this card after losing that fight at UFC 196. There are a lot of different angles to it, and the UFC’s hardline stance on things – and the fact that Jon Jones-Daniel Cormier became available – led to McGregor overplaying his hand a bit.

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