Kevin Lee explains why he missed weight for bout with Edson Barboza

Kevin Lee could not have looked much more impressive in his Saturday night defeat of Edson Barboza. Regrettably, there’s an ever-so-small asterisk attached to his victory, as he narrowly missed weight for the bout.

Speaking on the MMA Hour on Monday, Lee explained why he believes he missed weight. The main factor, as he said in a quick statement issued right after his weigh-in miss, was simply a shortage of time. He just couldn’t get the remaining weight off in the time he had.

“I think there could’ve been some adjustments that I could’ve made, especially on the timing,” Lee said (transcribed by Shaun Al-Shatti for MMA Fighting). “I think I just had the timing [off]. The timing was off a little bit too much, and my scale was a little bit different too. When I weighed myself on my scale upstairs, I was almost a pound-and-a-half heavier than what I thought. So it just was minor technical difficulties really when it came down to it. My body never reached a point where it was breaking down. It just became that I ran out of time.”

Lee added that he was hindered by the fact that the New Jersey Athletic Commission doesn’t allow additional time to cut weight if a fighter fails their first attempt. Apparently, the fighter hotel also had inconvenient sauna hours.

“I felt like I could’ve still pushed,” he said. “I felt like I still I could’ve went. The New Jersey athletic commission for whatever reason doesn’t allow that extra hour, which I wasn’t really clear on, and the hotel that we were staying at, they wouldn’t even let us in to use the sauna until like 5:45, something like that, when they promised that they’d let us in at 5:00.

“When you’re going to these new commissions, you don’t really know the rules until you get there. When I talk about a weight cut as big as mine, it takes weeks and weeks and weeks to plan. Even if they tell me the day of, it’s like, okay, well, I’ve been planning for six weeks, I’ve been cutting this weight to get down to a certain level, and I feel like I have it down to a very scientific spot, because I try to spend as little amount of time dehydrated.”

Lee then divulged that he’ll probably re-enlist a nutritionist for his next cut, but that he has no plans of leaving the 155-pound lightweight division.

“Especially for the week of [the fight],” Lee said when asked about bringing a nutritionist on board again. “I’m definitely going to need one just to get that extra little stress and that extra little load off me, and not have me doing it. A lot of the notes that I look at and things are from old weight cuts, and I’m just getting bigger. So there’s definitely going to be some adjustments that could be made. But 155, I’m here to stay.”

What do you think the future holds for Kevin Lee?

This article first appeared on BJPenn.com on 4/24/2018.