Morning Report: Eddie Alvarez says Conor McGregor ‘can’t fight for sh*t’ and thinks fans are ‘deluded’ about how good he is

Eddie Alvarez is really angling for that fight with Conor McGregor.

Since Alvarez won the lightweight title last month, he has been pretty adamant about getting a big money fight and the biggest money fight in MMA today is UFC featherweight champion Conor McGregor. But recently, with Tony Ferguson being booked against Rafael dos Anjos, it’s started to look like the UFC is pushing for Alvarez’s first title defense to be against number one ranked contender, Khabib Nurmagomedov. Perhaps in an effort to dissuade this notion and land himself the bigger payday, yesterday the lightweight champ did several interviews with various media outlets and in each one of them he made a point to go after McGregor.

“I don’t know him personally, but thank God he’s good at talking because he can’t fight for shit,” Alvarez told CBS Sports Radio’s Tiki and Tierney. “Look, in this sport – the good thing about the UFC and MMA in general is a lot of it’s based on perception. They’re very good at tweaking this perception. If I can put the right guy with the right mouthpiece in front of the right opponents, we can build a champion, but he doesn’t really have to beat the best guys; we just have to give him the right match-ups. This is what this guy’s been given. Any real fighter, anybody who knows the sport of MMA, sees the style match-ups that he picks and understands this guy is not putting himself in any danger. He’s not fighting anyone who he feels he can lose to.

“Diaz is a great style matchup for him. The reason he originally picked Diaz is he believed that was a great style matchup for him because Diaz only punches, he don’t kick, he don’t take down – he does everything Conor wants to do. Conor wants to box. He don’t want to be involved in the sport of MMA.”

Claims of “cherry picking” opponents have followed McGregor for most of his meteoric rise through the UFC. McGregor is primarily a striker and up until his victory of late replacement Chad Mendes at UFC 189, he didn’t fight any grappling-first fighters in his run through the featherweight division. That win did little to silence McGregor’s critics who saw Mendes’ early success against McGregor as proof positive of his deficiencies in MMA grappling.

Alvarez himself seems to be one of these critics. After his interview with CBS Sports, Alvarez did a brief interview with TMZ where he continued down this line, mocking McGregor for his recent decision to call out the entire world of professional wrestling.

“The only wrestler that Conor is going to actually challenge is a fake wrestler. That’s the only one he’s ever gonna challenge. A fake one.”

In actuality, McGregor did in fact challenge lightweight champion Rafael dos Anjos who has the fourth most takedowns landed in UFC lightweight history and also holds victories over Mendes – tied for third most takedowns in UFC featherweight history and is third in takedown accuracy – and Diego Brandao – tenth in takedowns landed and first in accuracy – (all stats per FightMetric).

But Alvarez wasn’t quite done yet. The lightweight champ also paid a visit to Norton and Friends on SiriusXM radio where he delved into who he is so adamant about a fight with McGregor.

“This is what happens. You win a world title, you beat the best guys in the world, and a lot of these fans are kind of misconstrued about who are the best fighters in the world. They think that because guys are the most popular that means they’re the best fighters. So I’ll beat a bunch of good guys and then I’ll get a ton of fans come up to me and go, ‘Do you think you can beat Conor McGregor?’ And I’m like, ‘Oh my God. You guys are disillusioned.’ They think because this man’s popular he’s good. And neither one of them have anything to do with each other.”

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