UFC welterweight champion Belal Muhammad wouldn’t hesitate moving up to middleweight to fight Sean Strickland.
Muhammad (24-3 MMA, 15-3 UFC) is not fond of Strickland (29-6 MMA, 16-6 UFC) or his fighting style. He’s confident he’d have his way with him if they ever fought and thinks the former middleweight champ is all bark, no bite.
“I slap him around,” Muhammad told Submission Radio of Strickland. “I literally go in there, and I slap him around. When I think of tough fights, Sean’s not one of them. I think he would be an easy fight for me. He beats a lot of guys with cardio; I have better cardio than him. He beats a lot of guys with jabs; I have better boxing than him. He beats guys with teeps, but those guys, they fight him a certain way. They don’t fight him smart. Costa backed up the whole time, and then he just took those teep kicks. Even with Adesanya, he backed up the whole time for the most part.
“And then even in that fight, it wasn’t that great of a fight, right? If Sean never landed that cross, he could have lost a boring decision, even with his coach in his corner telling him, like, ‘Sean, you’re about to lose a boring decision’ even though he landed that cross. So, I think people just think about his last 10 seconds of every fight, and he goes crazy and people are like, ‘Oh, Sean is wild, man, and he says wild things.’ But he fights safe, and he fights to not get hit, and he fights to not lose. So, I think I go in there and I break him with pressure, and honestly I’ll make it look easy.”
Muhammad wants to clear out his division first, and whether or not Strickland manages to reclaim the middleweight title, he’d jump at the opportunity to fight him.
“Oh man, I would love to fight Sean,” Muhammad said. “It doesn’t even have to be belts on the line. I would just fight him just to fight him at 185 because he ain’t coming down to 170 anymore. But, yeah, that would be the fight I would want at 185. I think for myself now, it’s building a legacy now. So when you look at the names that I have in my record and you look at the guys that I fought, I have a lot of the big name veterans, right? You got ‘Wonderboy,’ Maia, Gilbert Burns, Luque, even Randy Brown, Sean Brady, and now Leon Edwards. I think maybe two more. These young guns, right? You’ve got Shavkat (Rakhmonov) then I think Ian Garry or (Jack Della Maddalena). One of those guys is going to go ahead.
“One of those guys either have to fight each other or get a win against a Kamaru (Usman) or somebody. Or it could be Kamaru, and then I think I could start talking about somebody else because I had to take the long road to get here, right? I had to go through so many big-name guys, and like I said, I have four top-five wins that, when you look at it, it’s going to eventually be like, now I’m gonna have to do a rematch. Now there’s gonna be another rematch. But I think after two I can start talking about it. I think it just depends on who’s the champion or who’s up there, right? Because if it’s Sean, I would definitely want that fight, and I would beg for that fight. But I don’t think he’s going to be touching gold anymore. Dude sucks.”
