John Kavanagh: Conor McGregor could beat Floyd Mayweather with three more weeks of training

The official announcement of UFC lightweight champ Conor McGregor’s boxing match with undefeated defensive great Floyd Mayweather Jr. is now several weeks old. As such, McGregor’s training camp is now well underway.

While McGregor is still a significant underdog heading into this fight, his head coach John Kavanagh has suggested that things are going very well as the Irishman prepares for the monumental challenge ahead. In fact, Kavanagh feels McGregor would be ready to fight Mayweather in three weeks – far less than the eight weeks he actually has between now and fight night.

“We have two more weeks in Ireland, then the guys will head to Las Vegas,” Kavanagh said on Monday’s edition of The MMA Hour (h/t MMAMania). “We’ll then have six weeks in Vegas before the fight, but I watched the session today and said we would be ready in three weeks.”

Kavanagh then explained that he feels McGregor and his team are at their best when they’re being counted out.

“We’ve always done best when everybody is just mocking the idea of an unknown Dublin guy saying he’s going to take on the whole UFC roster and win the belt,” he said. “Those challenges seem to bind us even closer than we already are. I’m really seeing that spirit lit up in the team. It’s always there, but for whatever reason, because we’re being laughed at, because we’re being mocked, it’s making us even stronger.”

When we last saw McGregor in the Octagon, he authored an artful knockout of Eddie Alvarez to win the UFC lightweight title. Given that he still owned the UFC featherweight title at that time, this made him the first fighter in promotional history to hold titles in two weight classes concurrently. He is 21-3 as a pro mixed martial artist, and 0-0 as a pro boxer.

Mayweather, meanwhile, is a sparkling 49-0 as a pro boxer. After his last fight, a 2013 decision defeat of Andre Berto, the boxing legend elected to hang up the gloves. Yet this lucrative crossover fight with McGregor, which is supposed to see both men pocket more than $100 million, was apparently enough to pull him back to the ring.

How do you think Conor McGregor will do against Floyd Mayweather?

This article first appeared on BJPenn.com on 6/27/2017.