Owen Roddy, the striking coach of UFC superstar Conor McGregor, believes his fighter would defeat any version of Floyd Mayweather Jr. (49-0, 26 KOs).
On August 26th, McGregor will make his professional boxing debut against Mayweather at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas.
He won't be facing the Mayweather of year's past. He'll be facing a 40-year-old Mayweather who is coming off a two year retirement.
In several interviews, Mayweather has made admissions that it's much harder for him to go through those tough workouts that he's known for and his body is no longer reacting the same.
He admitted to ESPN's Stephen A. Smith that he's "slipping" and no longer that same fighter that was, even from his form of two years back.
Mayweather even claimed that McGregor held the advantage in the fight.
McGregor, even against an aging Mayweather, is widely viewed as a massive underdog.
“He’s one of the best to ever do it, but it doesn’t matter what Floyd comes,” Roddy told MMAjunkie. “The Floyd from 10 years ago or the Floyd today, it doesn’t matter. Conor will still do the same thing to either one of them. Conor just brings too much to the table.
“Every fight camp Conor improves so much. We’re in a boxing camp now, but it’s the same old story. Day by day he improves so much, he becomes twice the competitor he was the day before. It’s always an enjoyable process to watch him and watch him develop.”
Roddy, like McGregor, was not very impressed with Mayweather's open workout from last Thursday.
“For me, honestly, I thought it was a little bit messy,” Roddy said. “He didn’t do much. He hit a bag a couple times and talked. He did a couple of pushups and talked. It wasn’t very structured or anything like that. It’s similar to what he’s done every other time. At the end of the day, we’ve already watched everything we need to watch on Floyd. We watched hundreds of hours of tape, and we’ve got what we needed.”
Although McGregor has already reached, by most measures, unthinkable heights during his combat sports career (such as becoming the first to simultaneously hold two UFC titles), pulling off a win against Mayweather would be his crowning achievement. Roddy believes that high will only be temporary, though, because he expects McGregor’s next career move to supersede everything he’s done to this point.
“The exciting thing is after Conor does what he does: What is the next adventure? I don’t know, is the answer,” Roddy said. “I don’t know what he’s going to do next. It could be mixed martial arts. It could be boxing. It could be anything. But it’ll be exciting and it’ll be more exciting than the last thing, most definitely.