VIDEO | BJ Penn – Greg Jackson and Jason Parillo are not to blame for Yair Rodriguez booking

BJ Penn – Greg Jackson and Jason Parillo are not to blame for Yair Rodriguez booking

UFC legend BJ “The Prodigy” Penn will return to the octagon on June 25 in Oklahoma City to battle fellow veteran Dennis Siver on the main card of UFC Fight Night 112.

In his last fight, Penn was TKO’d by Yair Rodriguez in the second-round of their ‘UFC Fight Night Phoenix’ main event bout this past January in Arizona.

BJ recently released the above video where he explained his decision to accept a fight with Yair Rodriguez this past January and why his coaches (Greg Jackson and Jason Parillo) were not to blame for the booking.

“One more thing that I wanted to talk about was that Greg Jackson and Jason Parillo, both of them, didn’t want me to fight a top-ten guy (in my return fight). You know they wanted me to fight a guy my age. They wanted me to fight Dennis Siver, which was all setup but then Siver ended up hurting his shoulder after everything had been pushed back, with all the stuff that was happening. And yea, they (Jackson and Parillo) didn’t want me to fight a top-ten guy right off the bat and this and that.”

BJ continued:

“We were offered Siver. But when the new UFC guys who bought the UFC came in, you know they are not about wasting money and whatever. You know I really see a lot of the cutbacks they are doing, of course they’ve got to, business is business. And yea, those were the fights I was getting offered (Ricardo Lamas and Yair Rodriguez) and I am a fighter, I’m not going to turn the fights down. That was never really my style (to turn down fights). So if anybody is wondering like why would Greg Jackson or (Jason) Parillo or any of them tell BJ to fight those guys, because I had one fight in the past five years – that fight with Frankie Edgar. So you know my experience is definitely going down, even though I have been fighting so long, it’s just not enough experience to only have one fight in the last five years. So we will see how this fight goes with (Dennis) Siver and then we will see what happens next from there.”

Do you think BJ Penn will return to the win column when he squares off with Dennis Siver on June 25? Sound off PENN Nation!