Sean Strickland has received a lot of criticism for his lackluster performance in his middleweight title rematch with Dricus du Plessis at UFC 312 on Saturday night, and even his own coach Eric Nicksick has spoken out about his disappointment with how he fought on the night.
“It was just uninspired fighting, to me,” Nicksick stated on the Ariel Helwani Show. “It just seemed like he was sleepwalking. It was tough, man. I was trying to dig him out of it through the rounds. I didn’t know if he was trying to collect data in the beginning, or if it was just a slow start or what was going on, but as the rounds began to progress, I could just tell. I just didn’t feel like that he was in it the way most of the times that he is.
“It was tough, man. It was a tough 25 minutes to travel all the way out there. Let’s not forget, this was a title fight. I take these title fights very seriously, and I don’t know. I was just very disappointed, man. I was disappointed with the whole entire outcome and the whole fight as a process. I just thought it was kind of flat.
“The jab and the teep aren’t going to win the fight,” Nicksick continued. “It’s like if you have a predictable offense and you run this slow-paced offense in football and you get down by 30, you don’t have the ability to come back and win those games.
“… You have to take risks. You have to make something creative happen. Just jabbing and teeping your way to a comeback win wasn’t there. So, it’s like dude, find a same-side head kick, throw some knees up the middle. Throw something different that’s not predictable to what Dricus has seen for the last nine rounds, you know? You have to mix it up.”
The reality is that’s the way Strickland always fights, although there’s no doubt that he seemed particularly passive in his approach at the weekend, and that left Nicksick feeling the need to apologize to du Plessis for how his rival performed.
“I even said to Dricus after the fight, ‘Man, I wish he would have given you a better fight. You deserved a better fight than that. He didn’t have to do much. I felt like Dricus saw how Sean was fighting and minimized every risk that he had to take, and just did his job and got out of there 25 minutes scot-free.”
Pulling no punches, Nicksick went on to suggest that if Strickland is unwilling to change then they may have to part ways.
“There’s people in this sport that never even realize that potential to ever even be in the opportunity to fight for a championship,” Nicksick said. “That should be enough to get you motivated to get you off the couch. To me, we didn’t perform. It’s on all of us; it’s on me as a coaching staff, it’s on Sean.
“I think he needs to evaluate what he wants to do in this sport. If it’s just to make money, then that’s great. Let us know. I want to coach world champions, so my motivations are different. So I think that just to kind of show up and do that, and not really back it up, to me was just kind of uninspiring.”
