Unlike his fighter, Eric Nicksick didn’t hold back.
Nicksick was in Sydney this past Saturday to coach and corner Sean Strickland in the main event of UFC 312, which ended with Strickland delivering a dud of a performance en route to a unanimous decision loss to middleweight champion Dricus du Plessis.
Strickland has faced an avalanche of criticism for his listless outing, especially in the wake of his usual pre-fight bravado in which he claimed he was willing to fight du Plessis to the death. On Wednesday, Nicksick appeared on The Ariel Helwani Show to address the criticism, some of which he agrees with.
Has the criticism been fair?
“We have to be real,” Nicksick said. “It just was a very underwhelming performance in an opportunity fight for a title. There’s people in this sport that never even realize that potential to ever be in the opportunity to fight for a championship, that should be enough to get you motivated to get you off the couch. It just to me was he didn’t perform.
“It’s on all of us. It’s on me as a coaching staff, it’s on Sean, and I think he needs to evaluate what he wants to do in this sport. If it’s just to make money, then that’s great, let us know. I want to coach world champions, so my motivations are different. I think that just to show up and do that and not really back it up, to me was just kind of uninspiring.”
Nicksick welcomes a conversation with Strickland about the former UFC champion’s future goals and whether he is serious about challenging for the title again. He also praised Strickland for still showing up to the gym this week and being a good teammate.
But the fallout from Strickland’s loss is likely to be felt for some time and Nicksick still isn’t exactly sure what went wrong on fight night.
“It was just uninspired fighting to me,” Nicksick said. “It just seemed like he was sleepwalking. It was tough, I was just trying to dig him out of it through the rounds. I didn’t know if he was trying to collect data in the beginning or if it was just a slow start or what was going on, but as the rounds began to progress, I could just I didn’t feel like he was in the way most of the times that he is. It was tough.
“It was a tough 25 minutes to travel all the way out there and let’s not forget, this is a title fight. I take these title fights very seriously. I was just disappointed. I was disappointed with the whole entire outcome, the whole fight as a process, just thought it was just kind of flat.”
Luke Rockhold, another former middleweight champion, spoke to Helwani on Monday and he called Strickland “fake” for talking such a big game and falling so flat when the bell rang. Though Nicksick doesn’t dispute the harsh words being thrown his fighter’s way, he still believes Strickland wasn’t himself at UFC 312.
“[Rockhold is] right to say that in this particular fight,” Nicksick said. “I think that it’s a broad brush to paint after one fight. It wasn’t our night, it was very flat, very uninspiring night, but I don’t think that’s necessarily Sean as a fighter.
“We’ve seen him in these wars, we know he’s capable of it. So just to say that ‘He’s not that guy,’ yeah, he wasn’t that night, that’s for sure.”
