Floyd Mayweather Jr. is planning on making it an offensive fight against Conor McGregor on August 26. Mayweather says he owes it to the boxing fans to pay them back for his fight against Manny Pacquiao in 2015, which the fans weren’t pleased with. The fans were upset at both fighters for their lack of aggression.
Mayweather says he’s not going to make it defensive against the 29-year-old McGregor when he meets him on Showtime pay-per-view at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Even if Mayweather does fight offensively, it’s still not going to be a great fight if McGregor doesn’t have the boxing skills to deal with him. The fans will STILL be upset if Mayweather nails McGregor at will with punches, exposing him for what he is – a novice inside the boxing ring. Mayweather is in a no-win situation. The only way the boxing and MMA fans will go home happy is if McGregor pulls off an upset. The chances of that happening are quite low to say the least.
“This can’t be a defensive fight,” said Mayweather to ESPN in talking about the McGregor fight. “I got to go down. I go to him. I got to do what I got to do, because I owe the public for the Pacquiao fight. They weren’t pleased with the Pacquiao fight. They’re going to be pleased with this fight right here,” said Mayweather.
Mayweather can say whatever he wants, but his track record is not good when it comes to him promising an exciting fight. If Mayweather opens on McGregor full bore with his offensive right away on August 26, he’s very likely going to knock him out right away. Mayweather can knock out a novice fighter. Say what you want about Mayweather’s habit of fighting in a safety-first manner, but he’s capable of destroying guys that are out of his league.
If you look back at Mayweather’s fights against Victor Ortiz, Ricky Hatton and Arturo Gatti, he took care of those guys in beating them soundly to get stoppage wins. McGregor isn’t even in the same class as those guys were when they fought Mayweather. McGregor is at the beginner level in boxing. It’s crazy to even think of beginner going into the ring to fight Mayweather on PPV.
The fight is selling for $89 to $99 on PPV. That is insane. The MMA and boxing fans are willing to pay just because of McGregor being a very good UFC fighter. They’re going to find out quickly on August 26 that being a good UFC fighter means absolutely zero inside a boxing ring. McGregor isn’t going to be fighting an out of shape, retired Paulie Malignaggi. He’s going to be facing the best fighter in boxing. Mayweather is going to be an enormous difference from the guys that McGregor has been sparring in getting ready for the August 26 fight.
It doesn’t matter if it’s 49, 50 or even if it’s isn’t on my boxing record. Just give me the check,” said Mayweather.
Mayweather could have done without this last comment from him about the McGregor fight being just about him getting a paycheck. That’s not the kind of thing that the boxing fans like to hear from a fighter. By Mayweather confessing to the public that he’s only fighting McGregor for the money, it reaffirms the opinion that a lot of boxing and MMA fans have that the Mayweather-McGregor fight is just an “circus event” and not a real fight.
If Mayweather wants to squeeze a few more PPV buys out of the public, saying that the fight is just about him getting a paycheck is not the ideal thing to be talking about. Mayweather’s honesty is not a good thing in this case. Fortunately for Mayweather, few casual boxing fans will likely see his interview with ESPN, so they won’t know what he said.
As far as Mayweather’s record is concerned, his fight with McGregor shouldn’t count as a professional fight due to him being a UFC fighter and not a true boxer. McGregor has a 0-0 record in boxing. It’s completely unheard of for a high-quality fighter to be facing a novice with a 0-0. It happens occasionally. I’ve seen fights involving high caliber former Mexican world champions taking on novices in rebuilding after a loss.
I’ve never seen an unbeaten fighter with a record anywhere close to Mayweather’s fighting a guy just starting out in boxing. The fans are going to be paying top dollar to see Mayweather beat up a fighter with no experience. The Nevada State Athletic Commission is fine this fight. They could have rejected the fight to protect McGregor and save the boxing public from seeing what shapes up to be a mismatch. The Nevada Commission likely only agreed to sanction the Mayweather-McGregor fight due to McGregor’s high degree of talent in the UFC.
”I just didn’t like when he called us monkeys,” said Mayweather about McGregor. ”I think that was totally disrespect. Yes, he called us monkeys. It didn’t push a button to make me go crazy, but I didn’t like it. The same way he called us monkeys, I’m going to see if he says hat on August 26th. It’s no different [from any other fight], but this is for a cause. This is for the American people. This is for all the blacks around the world.”
If Mayweather is looking for another reason to pound McGregor, he’s now got it with his above comments about McGregor allegedly calling Mayweather a monkey. The fight is such a mismatch that Mayweather doesn’t need any additional reasons for him to beat McGregor badly in this fight. He’s always going to do it. I don’t think Mayweather needs extra motivation for what he’s already planning on doing.
Hopefully, Mayweather doesn’t choose to keep repeating McGregor’s comments and using that as a selling point for the fight. I don’t think it would be a good look for Mayweather to sell the fight that way. The only thing that would lead to is a lot of angry fans being totally turns off by McGregor, and they might choose to not pay to see the fight.
”If you look at everything on paper, it leans towards Conor McGregor,”
Mayweather probably didn’t realize when he said that McGregor should be the favorite, he was coming across as desperate looking in trying to sell the fight to the boxing and MMA public. Few fans are going to agree with Mayweather that McGregor should be the favorite. It’s too obvious that he’s not skilled enough to be viewed as the favorite. Mayweather should tell the boxing public the reality about what his fight with McGregor is all about and that’s money. Mayweather wants his big paycheck and he’ll get it by fighting McGregor.
“You have Floyd saying, ‘He’s bigger, he’s younger, he’s stronger, he’s quicker, I’m not the same guy I was.’ He went so far as to quote his knockout percentage, how it’s dropped in recent years. Floyd was never a knockout puncher when he went up to welterweight, which is where he spent the second part of his career,” said ESPN analyst Max Kellerman. He was never really a huge puncher, but he was a sharper puncher, and could that could score stoppages when he was at junior lightweight. I didn’t know when he was talking 90 percent knockout percentage. It must have been very earlier in his career. He was never the devastating puncher. He was a sharp puncher. Even as a welterweight, he was a sharp puncher. He could keep guys honest. He’s never been in recent years a huge knockout puncher,” said Kellerman.
Kellerman sees it as obvious what Mayweather is trying to do in talking up McGregor’s chances of beating him. Kellerman sees Mayweather trying his best to sell his fight by letting the fans know that McGregor should be the favorite. It’s not the best way to sell a fight though. Mayweather would be better off having more face to face meetings with McGregor in front of large audiences like they did during their press tour. Those kinds of things sell the fight.
Mayweather telling fans that McGregor should be the favorite is not an effective way to get the fans to purchase it. Mayweather looked desperate when he was saying that McGregor should be the favorite, and that’s not a good way to look if you want to make the boxing and MMA public believe this is a good enough fight for them to pay their hard earned money on.
”So, he brings something like this up shows that he knows what he’s doing,” said Kellerman about Mayweather. ”He’s selling a fight in which he’s going to make an 8-figure payday fighting a guy that normally wouldn’t be a sparring partner for him, and he’s got to figure out a way to make the public believe that his opponent has got a shot.”
Kellerman is really letting Mayweather have it by saying he’s fighting a guy that wouldn’t even be his sparring partner. Unfortunately, I think that’s true. I’ve never heard of Mayweather signing up MMA fighters to be his sparring partners for his fights. Very few of them have well enough boxing skills for them to be useful. Nate Diaz is said to have boxing skills. But he’s also a big guy, and he wouldn’t be useful for Mayweather. Mayweather and McGregor need to make sure they give a reliable performance. This could hurt boxing PPV for quite a long time if this fight turns out to be as much of a disappointment as Mayweather’s last two fights against Pacquiao and Berto. Mayweather fought like he had already had his paycheck from the fight, and he wasn’t going to put out any effort.
Mayweather blamed his less than stellar performance in the Berto fight on him getting older. It didn’t look like it was a case of age. It just looked like Mayweather was sparring a hand-picked opponent that he didn’t want to hurt. You must remember that it was Maywather that picked Berto out of the bunch. Mayweather skipped over arguably far more deserving fighters like Keith Thurman, Shawn Porter, Amir Khan and Danny Garcia. At that time, Errol Spence was just a contender and not a world champion.
”He’s saying it’s not going to be a defensive fight, it’s going to be an offensive fight, you’re going to bring it to him to make up for the Pacquiao fight that people were disappointed,” said Kellerman in continuing to rip Mayweather. ”Let me just tell you. A defensive fight favors Mayweather. An offensive fight favors Mayweather. There is no kind of fight in a boxing ring that doesn’t favor Floyd Mayweather, and Conor is going to give Floyd plenty of opportunities to hit him. This is going to be a very bad for Conor. It’s going to be great because he’s going to make a ton of money. It’s going to make Conor a very rich man, but there is no competition in the ring,” said Kellerman.
Poor McGregor is up the creek without a paddle no matter what Mayweather does. The only thing McGregor can do is try and rough Mayweather up by grabbing him and using his MMA tactics on him. I don’t know if the referee is going to put up with the UFC stuff from McGregor for long without him stepping in and stopping the contest by disqualifying McGregor. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if that’s what happens. What a way for the fight to end. It would be a terrible way for Mayweather’s career to come to an end. It would be his third consecutive dud fight. If you’re keeping count, Mayweather has fought 3 straight boring fights against Marcos Maidana in the rematch, Manny Pacquiao and Andre Berto. The first Mayweather-Maidana fight was an exciting one for the first 6 rounds. It became boring in the last 6 rounds.
Conor is going to get pounded no matter what Mayweather does. Mayweather can fight defensively, and McGregor is going to get slowly picked apart. It’ll be more embarrassing for McGregor if Mayweather schools him for 12 rounds. If Mayweather fights aggressively, then this match isn’t going to see the 6th round. Mayweather has likely heard what Paulie Malignaggi said about how he was able to wear McGregor down with body shots in his second sparring session with him.
Mayweather will go to the body of McGregor with stabbing jabs and have him ready to quit early in the fight. One would hope that the shots aren’t borderline body shots like the ones that Andre Ward landed against Sergey Kovalev in their second fight. The boxing public doesn’t need a controversial stoppage for Mayweather. That would be about as bad as a boring fight. The ending of the Ward-Kovalev 2 fight was a horrible one, and not just because of the low blows. But also because of how the referee handled it, by jumping in and quickly stopping the fight before it had a chance to play out. It was a PPV fight. With the huge amount of money, the boxing fans will be paying to see the Mayweather-McGregor fight on Showtime PPV. The referee needs to make sure he bends over backwards to let the fight play out until the bitter end instead of choosing to stop the fight prematurely.
