The fight world spent the day watching a video it wasn’t supposed to see. Ilia Topuria put up footage that, according to a widely shared post from @SpinninBackfist, shows Usman Nurmagomedov’s crew jumping Merab Dvalishvili. Fighters lined up to weigh in. Here’s who said what, ranked by how much noise each post made on X.
Sean Strickland
Strickland got the most traction of anyone, with more than 43,000 engagements, and he opened exactly how you’d expect. “Usman Nurmagomedov is the definition of a bitch..” he wrote, then accused the whole group of acting like dogs that wait to attack you when you’re not looking. Then he went somewhere he didn’t need to go. He followed up by asking whether this was tied to the religion of Islam, which turned a fair shot at one guy’s crew into a swipe at millions of people who had nothing to do with it. Strickland had a solid point about ambushes and buried it under a cheap one.
Conor McGregor
McGregor didn’t name anybody, which for Conor counts as restraint. “I’m loving the #CONORWASRIGHT #CONORWASRIGHTALLALONG trending right now!” he posted, adding, “It’s all love, keep your eyes on the prize!” Whatever fans were pinning to that hashtag today, he was happy to sit back and soak it in. Nobody in this sport takes a victory lap without running a single step quite like him.
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Ilia Topuria
Topuria is the reason the rest of this list exists, since he’s the one who posted the video. “You’re a bunch of cowards, and you’ll be held accountable for what you’ve done. You’re anything but real men,” he wrote on X. That’s a fellow Georgian coming to Merab’s defense, and the phrase “held accountable” reads like a guy who intends to follow up. Topuria tends to mean what he says, so I wouldn’t file this under internet noise.
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Gaston Reyno
The Argentine broadcaster went for the laugh and got it. “El amigo de Merab Dvalishvili quiere pasar a las MMA… si la pelea de hoy era en UFC, se llevaba el Bono de Performance de la Noche,” Reyno wrote. Translation: a friend of Merab’s apparently wants to make the jump to MMA, and if today’s scrap had been on a UFC card, he’d have walked away with a Performance of the Night bonus. If the guy really did hold his own, someone at the UFC should at least take down his name.
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Darren Till
Till skipped the insults and went full philosopher. “It’s always the guys who act the most humble who are not the most humble,” he wrote, then added a warning: “And always watch out for guys who walk in numbers / It screams weak to me.” He finished by citing Mike Tyson on Muhammad Ali versus Floyd Mayweather, writing that “Muhammad was accepted by the people not guarded by the people like Floyd.” It was the most thoughtful post of the day, and it came from Darren Till, which I did not have on my bingo card.
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Kenny Florian
Florian quote-posted the @SpinninBackfist clip and called it a bitch-made attack, putting those first two words in quotation marks for extra emphasis. Then he asked whether anyone keeps stats on how often Russian fighters throw punches outside the cage, listing weigh-ins, post-fight scenes and random hotel lobbies as spots where it keeps happening. That’s a pretty broad brush for a guy who usually stays measured on the mic. Even so, the random hotel lobbies line is going to stick around.
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Drew Dober
One guy stayed out of it completely. Dober is three days out from fighting at Madison Square Garden and posted about media day in Times Square and a Dave & Buster’s run for Embedded, plus a training session he said left him feeling fantastic. He described the Garden as an iconic stop. While everyone else spent the day yelling, Dober was playing Skee-Ball and making weight, and he’ll be the one getting paid at MSG this weekend.
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