Saturday night in Abu Dhabi, Daniel Cormier put the microphone in front of bantamweight champion Petr Yan and asked him what comes next. One name came back, and it belonged to Song Yadong, who happened to be sitting in the building. Sean O’Malley, the former champion at 135, was waiting to hear his own name. He didn’t.
My take is simple. The snub itself was minor, O’Malley’s handling of it was the smartest move anyone made all week, and his coach deserves a little credit for being loud enough to force the cleanup. Everybody got what they wanted out of this, which almost never happens when a commentator and a fighter’s camp start trading shots.
The Coach Fired First
On October 26, O’Malley’s coach went public and accused Cormier of bias. MMA Junkie’s headline had him taking umbrage with DC pushing Song for the title shot, and Sportskeeda reported he wondered whether Cormier had something against O’Malley. According to Bloody Elbow, this wasn’t the first time the coach has had a problem with Cormier, so the grudge question didn’t come out of nowhere.
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And you know what? The coach had a point worth raising. When the guy holding the mic is also the guy steering the champion toward a callout, every name that doesn’t come up feels like a vote. Cormier’s broadcast was already read as leaning toward Song before Yan ever opened his mouth. That’s a lot of influence for one headset in Abu Dhabi.
Suga Played It Cool, and It Worked
Here’s where O’Malley outsmarted the room. Instead of piling on, he went on The Ariel Helwani Show and calmly explained that Cormier had already reached out. Per O’Malley, DC messaged him on Instagram with this: “Hey, I do think that you should fight for the title.”
O’Malley’s response was the move of a guy who has been famous long enough to know which fights to pick. “Hey bro, I don’t take anything personal,” he said he wrote back. Then he went further: “Even if Daniel Cormier thought Song was deserving, I wouldn’t care.”
The two talked again on Monday night. O’Malley said Cormier told him he thinks Suga is deserving and should be next. “It was good. It was cordial,” O’Malley said.
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What I respect most is that he didn’t pretend the old tension never existed. He admitted it straight up. “I definitely have felt before that DC had a little bias against me,” he told Helwani. “Coming up, it felt like he kind of wanted to see me lose a little bit.” Then he closed the book on it: “At one point I felt like that. Now I don’t feel like that.”
That’s a fighter getting the good-cop role while his coach plays the bad cop. The coach drags the issue into the headlines, O’Malley shows up as the reasonable adult, and suddenly the conversation about who fights Yan next has Suga’s name in every sentence. You couldn’t script it better if you hired the guys who write the Fast and Furious sequels.
DC Had a Rough Week
Cormier, for his part, caught heat from more than one direction after UFC 333. Dominick Reyes, fresh off a win on the card, ripped him for not doing his research and for being biased toward Russian fighters. Reyes partially walked it back on Helwani’s show. “I did come off a little hard on Daniel, and I’m sorry for that,” he said, adding that calling him low IQ was “the heat of the moment.” He still stands by the rest.
Two bias accusations in one week is a pattern worth noticing, even if neither one proves Cormier is running some hidden agenda. O’Malley actually gave him the most generous read of anyone. “At the end of the day, commentating is a hard job. You’re not always gonna say the right thing,” he said. That’s more grace than most fighters extend to the media, and it’ll age well if Suga gets the call.
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I usually can’t stand manufactured beef that evaporates the second two guys are in the same room. This was the opposite. There was a real grievance, a real admission and a real conversation, and nobody had to pretend to hate anybody to sell it.
The Sit-Down
Cormier didn’t just send a DM and move on. He booked O’Malley for a special episode of The Daniel Cormier Show, where the pair planned to discuss the Yan post-fight interview and why O’Malley believes he deserves a championship opportunity next. It went live Tuesday at 5 p.m. Eastern on Cormier’s YouTube channel.
That’s the correct fix. If your broadcast left a former champ’s case out of the conversation, give him an hour on your own platform to make it. Song still has his name in Yan’s mouth, but O’Malley now has DC on record, twice, saying he should be next. In a title race at 135, that’s a better position than he had when the cameras cut away in Abu Dhabi.
