Sean Strickland details what went through his mind during altercation with Dricus Du Plessis at UFC 296

Sean Strickland had an interesting thought during his altercation with Dricus Du Plessis at UFC 296.

Strickland and Du Plessis were seated a couple of rows behind each other at last month’s pay-per-view event in Las Vegas, and as the camera panned towards them, the two started trash-talking one another. Strickland eventually jumped the row of seats separating him from Du Plessis and proceeded to unload strikes on the South African. It caught many by surprise and during the brawl, the UFC middleweight champion admitted he thought of biting the South African.

“This was my turn back moment, my moment of sanity. You get in a fight, you know it’s going to happen for a few seconds. My brain is like, how can I f**k this guy up? I just got to drop the downward strike to the f*****g spine. Maybe I can get some damage, and the video you see it,” Strickland said to ESPN.

“I grab his head and I’m about to Mike Tyson this motherf****r,” Strickland continued. “I grab this dude’s head and I even got a little hair in my mouth, there is a moment where I’m about to take a chunk from him, and I was like ‘Sean, you can’t come back from this.’ Like this is one of those things, if you do (it), there is no coming back from this. You can’t bite a motherf****r. You’ll see the video if you slow-motion it right when we break up, you will see me go down and Mike Tyson that motherf****r but it just didn’t happen.”

According to Sean Strickland, he says had the altercation not gotten broken up, he likely would have overruled himself and bit Dricus Du Plessis.

“I think if it didn’t get broken up one second later, I probably would have taken a piece of his ear,” Strickland added.

Luckily, the altercation did get broken up and no injuries were sustained by either Strickland or Du Plessis. The two will still headline UFC 297 on Saturday for the middleweight title, and since the altercation, the fight has only gotten more intriguing.

Strickland enters UFC 297 as a slight betting favorite and coming off an upset win over Israel Adesanya to win the title. Du Plessis, meanwhile, hasn’t fought since July when he scored a TKO win over Robert Whittaker.