Should Rory MacDonald Get the Winner of Hendricks vs. Lawler?
Carlos Condit and Tyron Woodley square off in the UFC 171 co-main event on Saturday in Dallas. The winner is in line for the first crack at the new welterweight champion after Johny Hendricks and Robbie Lawler battle for Georges St-Pierre’s vacated title in the night’s main event.
Rory MacDonald, however, is sitting on the fringe, declaring that he should be the first one to get a shot at the winner of Hendricks vs. Lawler.
MacDonald is coming off of a victorious, Fight of the Night performance against Demian Maia at UFC 170. It was a performance that the Canadian feels should put him in the catbird seat for a title shot.
“I think [the win over Maia] puts me right there for a title shot. I'm really pulling to fight the winner of the Hendricks vs. Lawler fight,” said MacDonald after his win at UFC 170.
“I think the fans want to see it, it's a big money fight, it's going to get a lot of attention, and I think that my talent is at that level. I feel that I am the best in the division and I'm ready to prove it to the fans and to the UFC.”
As you might imagine, Condit and Woodley both disagree with MacDonald.
Condit in particular has a strong argument considering he is a past interim UFC welterweight champion and has a victory over MacDonald in his pocke
“He looked great in his last fight. But I am in line before him,” Condit told MMAWeekly.com recently. “I have a win over him. I see a rematch on the horizon, but I think I’m first in line [with a win over Woodley].”
It’s been a few years, but Condit scored a TKO stoppage due to strikes over MacDonald at UFC 115 in June of 2010.
Woodley was a little more colorful in shooting down MacDonald’s line jumping.
“I think Rory needs to get out of here, to be honest,” Woodley told MMAWeekly.com. “He got finished by Carlos and he just lost to Robbie. In the event that Carlos wins or even that Robbie wins. Where’s he’s stanza then? He lost to both of those two guys.”
Not that Woodley wasn’t impressed by the win over Maia.
“I think that he did look good against Demian Maia. I think it was a good fight. He stepped forward,” he said, but added that he felt MacDonald should have threw his name in the hat when St-Pierre held the belt instead of constantly saying that, as teammates, they would never fight each other.
“I think that he should have took the chance when he had it,” said Woodley. “When it comes down to the fight GSP he didn’t want to do it.
“I’m pretty sure that Carlos has had some training sessions with GSP at Greg Jackson’s camp. When it came time to fight him, he stepped up to the plate and he was trying to take his head off. I think that’s where the ball kind of dropped in his court.”
Now, just one victory removed from his loss to Lawler, Woodley believes there’s some humor in MacDonald trying to position himself at the head of the class.
“I think it’s kind of comical that he thinks all of a sudden he’s going to jump in front. Same as [Nick] Diaz, he’s just trying to jump in front. I think they share the same bag of weed.”
