Conor McGregor Coach John Kavanagh: My Reputation at Stake at UFC 202

As if the stakes weren't high enough in the main event of UFC 202, a coach just tossed his own credibility into the middle of the table.

John Kavanagh, head coach to Conor McGregor and others at SBG Ireland in Dublin, wrote Monday that his reputation will be on the line when his prized pupil faces Nate Diaz on August 20. It's the second go-around for the two, with Diaz submitting McGregor in their original contest in March.

"This is a very important fight for Conor, but I also feel that my own reputation as a coach is at stake," Kavanagh wrote in a column for The 42, an Irish sports website. "This contest can be a bit of a game-changer for us all."

To hear Kavanagh tell it, Team Conor made two key changes for this training camp.

The first was establishing and adhering to a daily routine—something Kavanagh suggested does not come naturally to McGregor, especially as his fame grew and those trappings absorbed more bandwidth:

"

We basically did the same thing every day since we arrived in Vegas: Leave the house to go to the gym for a skill session at 1pm, before working on cardio in the evenings. We’ve been following that pattern now for what feels like a long time — about 19 weeks in total come fight night.

...I can’t stress enough how different this has been. As many of you will probably already know, routine hasn’t been something you would have associated with Conor’s preparations in the past.

But this has been like nothing we’ve done before and it’s going to be a massive help for his next number of fights. ... I strongly believe that will manifest itself in Las Vegas in 12 days’ time. 

"

The second is formulating a detailed game plan for Diaz. This is standard operating procedure in many top MMA gyms, but apparently not at SBG Ireland. In his column, Kavanagh noted his fighters typically stayed prepared in their own areas of strength, under the presumption they could always be ready for more or less any opponent. But with UFC 202 looming, McGregor and Kavanagh departed from that strategy and honed in specifically on Diaz.

As Kavanagh wrote in his column:

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Anyone who knows about the history of SBG Ireland will be aware that we were always regarded as the last-minute gym—the guys who would be ready to step in at short notice. Our mentality reflected that so all you can do in those circumstances is try to get your skillset to such a high level that the opponent doesn’t matter.

I believe that worked well for us and the results were proof of that, but I also feel that when you’ve done that for so long, you can end up getting caught out against certain styles of opponent. This has provided us with an opportunity to experience the other method of extreme gameplanning and being very opponent-orientated.

It’s been a new approach for me, and for us all. ... In every other fight it’s been a fun approach because we’ve been figuring the guy out in the first round. With this one, I really feel like I can describe — technique by technique, round by round — what’s going to happen.

"

Fans will certainly be interested to see how these changes manifest themselves later this month in Las Vegas. It will also be interesting to see how McGregor handles the size difference between himself and Diaz. In their first fight, McGregor, the UFC featherweight champion, competed for the first time at welterweight—two classes above the one where he holds the gold.

The result was McGregor's first loss under the UFC banner and first overall defeat since 2010. In the wake of the defeat, McGregor essentially demanded and received an immediate rematch. McGregor-Diaz 2 was originally scheduled for UFC 200 in July, but was scuttled after Team McGregor (Kavanagh included) waged a public battle with UFC brass over terms and conditions for the fight.

Now, with McGregor seemingly operating at full tilt in preparation for the rematch, and with Kavanagh diving deeper on his own coaching capacities, UFC 202 may be all the more compelling because of the delay.