You’ll be doing well to find a more reasonable summation of Conor McGregor’s recent clash with the UFC than that of Rich Franklin.
UFC 200 won’t feature the promotion’s biggest star because the Notorious refused to take part in the media obligations, threatened to retire, came back out of “retirement” and then lied about being put back on the card through Twitter.
Despite this, UFC president Dana White has admitted the big wigs are still on good terms with the featherweight champion and he expects him to fight again very soon.
Happy to announce that I am BACK on UFC 200!
Shout out to @danawhite and @lorenzofertitta on getting this one done for the fans. #Respect— Conor McGregor (@TheNotoriousMMA) April 25, 2016
To say that it’s a unique situation would be the understatement of the century, and a lot of people are wondering exactly how it managed to happen.
Former UFC middleweight champion and current ONE FC vice-president Rich Franklin may have the answer. He explained his theory to ESPN. He feels that McGregor’s use of social media was a means of making sure that the amount of time he took out of his training camp remained at a minimum.
“Obviously, there are certain media days you have to attend, but we live in a social media age where there are creative ways to do things. I’ve been on those media tours where you’re flying from city to city and it’s not easy and it can derail your training. You just have to creatively think of doing things in ways that minimize the amount of time he has to spent out of camp. There has to be flexibility.”
Although he understands what McGregor was trying to accomplish, Franklin is siding with the promoter. He thinks that the UFC sticking to their guns and keeping McGregor off UFC 200 is the right thing to do as it will be a learning experience for the Dubliner.
“Now, I don’t know the terms of Conor’s contract and I don’t know the conversations that were had but if I, as a promoter, had an agreement with a fighter to do a certain set of media and as the fighter got to thinking about it and said, “I don’t want to disrupt my camp,” then we’d have an issue.”
“The way Conor went about it, basically announcing his retirement — once the UFC pulled him and made that statement as the promoter, it’s kind of like disciplining a child. Once you’ve made a statement, consistency is probably the most important thing.”
