Sean Strickland was irked by coach Eric Nicksick’s public criticism of his performance on this past Saturday’s UFC 312 title-fight rematch with Dricus Du Plessis.
Nicksick, the top coach at Xtreme Couture in Las Vegas, has been the chief cornerman to Strickland (29-7 MMA, 16-7 UFC) during his rise as much as the middleweight division and into his championship victory over Israel Adesanya at UFC 293 in September 2023. He helped guide Strickland to the highest again for a rematch with Du Plessis (23-2 MMA, 9-0 UFC), but it surely didn’t unfold as he intended.
After Strickland, who endured through a broken nose for the latter half of the fight, turned in a reasonably lackluster performance over five rounds in a unanimous decision loss, his coach didn’t hold back on his feelings when chatting with “The Ariel Helwani Show.”
“I believe he needs to guage what he desires to do on this sport,” Nicksick said. “If it’s simply to make cash, then that’s great. Tell us. I would like to educate world champions, so my motivations are different. So I believe that simply to sort of show up and do this, and probably not back it up, to me was just sort of uninspiring.”
The comments from Nicksick were enough for Strickland to issue a public response on social media. The previous UFC champ detailed the numerous issues he experienced leading as much as stepping within the octagon at UFC 312, but briefly spoke on the fallout of what his coach needed to say.
Strickland indicated a private relationship between them will proceed on a friendship level, but so far as their skilled relationship, it appears that evidently the 2 sides may splinter in the intervening time.
“I like Eric,” Strickland said. “He’s a friend of mine. He’s going to proceed to be a friend of mine. Will he probably be in my corner? Probably not. We now have so many great guys at Xtreme. … We now have so many savages that may corner me. But that entire fight camp was only a struggle. It was a f*cking struggle, and all of us have excuses as to why we didn’t win, or why we won or we shouldn’t have won. All of us f*cking have excuses, and so they don’t f*cking matter.”
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