Kenny Florian Talks McGregor’s Chances Against Mayweather and His Possible Future

UFC on Fox analyst and color commentator Kenny Florian has been around the block a few times. He may have never won a title, but he spent six years fighting the best the UFC had to offer, including our own BJ Penn. Before that, he was grappling dangerous dudes all over the mats at the highest levels. In other words, the guy knows fighting. You’ve heard him talk in bits and pieces before about Conor McGregor and his upcoming boxing bout iwth Floyd Mayweather on UFC Tonight, but he recently got a chance to say a lot more to the guys at Submission Radio.

“I give Conor about a 10 percent chance. I would love for him to knock out Floyd Mayweather. I think that it would be yet another milestone for our sport, I think it puts us on the map that much more, I think it gives us that much more respect, but it is an extremely, extremely tall task for Conor McGregor who has never competed in pro boxing to go against one of the best boxers of all time and beat him. Can he knock him out? Yes, absolutely, it is combat, anything can happen. But I still think Floyd is going to win that fight.[…] You know, there have been some amazing upsets in sports history, this could be another one of them. But when I look at the stats, when I look at the approaches, when I look at the way that Mayweather fights compared with the way Conor fights, yeah, Floyd should win every single time.”

“Listen, if I’m Conor McGregor and I get the win over Floyd Mayweather, I say good bye to everything, I never step into a ring or a cage ever again, I blow my kisses and I say, “thank you, I’m the greatest of all time, you guys take it easy, I have a hundred million in my bank, I’m going to go buy an island”. But you know, I think if he loses, I think we’ll definitely see him back. If he wins, does he come back to the UFC? I don’t know. I don’t see – I mean, what else? What’s bigger than that? What is bigger than that? He’s won two belts in the UFC and then just knocked out or beat the best boxer of all time. I don’t think he would come back. I think it would harm his legacy. I think he’d be a fool to come back. He already has all the money in the world and he just climbed Mount Everest without any experience, so I think he should retire if he wins.” — Kenny Florian via Submission Radio.

Of course, if Conor McGregor were to ‘climb Mount Everest’ by beating Floyd Mayweather, he absolutely should retire from fighting. He’s already got his hands into hundreds of different investment cookie jars, but if he wanted to continue in the fight game he should then switch to promoting. The fact is, even if he doesn’t beat Mayweather, his options are both plentiful and limited. After tasting the kind of prize money boxing offers, even the largest fights possible in the UFC simply don’t add up. According to McGregor, it’s not even about the money anymore. We’ll see how true that statement is sometime after August 26th.

This article first appeared on BJPenn.com on 8/17/2017.