Nate Diaz and Conor McGregor are fighting the middleman as much as each other

The fibs and fabrications are still thick in the air, but what’s funny is the fight within the fight to face Conor McGregor has rapidly boiled down to two names, and neither of them are Frankie Edgar or Rafael dos Anjos — dudes he was supposed to be (or should be) fighting. It’s come down to Nate Diaz, who stepped in for the injured RDA and dealt McGregor his first UFC loss to record-breaking numbers at UFC 196, and Floyd Mayweather, the collective sigh heard drifting over from the boxing world. The latter borders on bad fiction, and continues to make no sense from a fight perspective. It is money fascination between fun-loving mercenaries that would end up making one or the other look foolish, depending on which rules are in play (…and, on second thought, might be all the allure we need). The other is a reluctant, grudge-laden, do-over job between Diaz and McGregor that people began to get on board with after much grumbling when it was dangled for UFC 200. After Wednesday, though, Diaz has got to be the leading candidate out of any possible opponent for McGregor. Make the damn rematch, already. Diaz appeared on a special edition of The MMA Hour for an actual hour-long conversation that serendipitously ended at exactly 2:09 in the afternoon on the west coast. Diaz said his share of f*ck words, but many of them were tied to pretty intricate thoughts patterns, some of which made sense. And in the end, Diaz somehow ended up making more sense than the fight ever has. How does that work, you …

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