Sean O’Malley suffered a convincing bantamweight title loss to Merab Dvalishvili in the main event of UFC 306 on Saturday night and it seems he’s not in a hurry to get back to winning ways.
Instead, O’Malley has revealed that he doesn’t intend to return to action until the summer of 2025 at the earlier, and may even take a full year out.
“I probably won’t fight for nine months, 10 months. Maybe a year. It’s gonna be a while,” O’Malley said on his YouTube channel. “People are gonna have to watch the UFC without the ‘Suga Show’ for a little bit… I feel like it’s gonna feel good to take a legit break to get fully healthy. Because you always have little f—-ing whatevers. But it would be nice to take a legit full-on break without something like, ‘Oh this is next, this is next.’ Right after the Aljo fight I knew I had the ‘Chito’ fight, right after the ‘Chito’ fight, I knew I had the Merab fight. Now after this fight nothing’s scheduled.
“I don’t want even – it’s like no one’s next. I gotta get healthy and that’s it. I’m gonna actually heal up from injuries, take my time and come back… I probably won’t fight until June-July next year… Now I have surgery in two weeks, then I’ll be out for probably two months.”
That news will no doubt disappoint other bantamweight leading bantamweight contenders like Henry Cejudo, Petr Yan and Cory Sandhagen who all called him out after his loss.
Meanwhile, O’Malley also made a point of stating that he won’t be wheeling out the usual list of excuses fans have been accustomed to hearing from well-known fighters when they lose in the Octagon.
“Great fight week, best weight cut, felt good, no excuses,” O’Malley said. “My mom, too, she says, ‘You just weren’t the same, what was wrong?’ Nothing. I jut got beat. There was nothing. Everyone keeps asking me, ‘Something seemed off, something different, you were flat-footed,’ I was like, there was nothing. Zero excuses. Nothing. Had a good fight camp, good weight cut.”
“I feel like I got outstrengthed. I knew what to do in certain positions, I just felt like he was just stronger. I felt outstrengthed, I didn’t feel too outskilled, I felt speed, I felt cardio was good.”
O’Malley also admitted that he’ll rue the fact that he wasn’t able to find a finish in the final round after visibly hurting Dvalishvili with kicks to the midsection.
“That fifth round? That stings,” O’Malley said. “That definitely f*cking stings.”
More than anything though it seems that O’Malley is just frustrated that he missed out on the chance to take his rising stardom to the next level.
“F*ck. Literally, I’ve probably said f*ck 4,000 times. F*ck, that was such a massive opportunity, the eyeballs that were there — I was looking at Snapchat… like f*ck, all of those things could’ve been ‘The Suga Show,’… but it’s funny because none of those are [about] Merab. A couple of them were about me losing, but nothing about Merab winning. No one gives a f*ck. Not a hater, just saying.”
