Belal Muhammad didn’t think much about Colby Covington heading into UFC 296, but he somehow left Las Vegas with even less respect for the three-time title challenger.
Muhammad kept a close eye on Covington and reigning UFC welterweight champion Leon Edwards as a backup for the title fight, hoping he would face the winner in 2024. It didn’t matter who came away with the title, because he just wanted his chance to become champion.
But then Covington launched an ill-advised insult aimed at Edwards’ deceased father during the pre-fight press conference that even had Muhammad feeling bad for a potential future opponent.
“Honestly, it was pathetic,” Muhammad said about Covington in an interview with MMA Fighting. “It shows you what his real character is. People were like, ‘He’s playing a role,’ but when you go that low, that’s not playing a role. That’s what you have truly inside of you. You’re soulless. You’re really a disgusting person – a disgusting human being, true to the core.
“I think for him to do that, he had do that because he wasn’t reaching Leon with any of his normal trash talk. He wasn’t affecting him in any way, so he’s like, ‘I have to level up.’ He probably has a writer who does research, and he’s like, ‘If we’re going to go low, low, let’s do this one right here. This one will get him.’ He thought that would strike him emotionally, and it probably did, but he thought that it would affect him in the fight, and I don’t think it affected him in the fight the way he thought it was.
“He probably thought Leon would run out real quick and try to go crazy from the start. Just the fact that you’re doing that, saying that, it’s pathetic.”
The abhorrent comment made just about everybody uncomfortable — including UFC CEO Dana White — but Covington still had to back up his words in the cage. The only problem was his performance was largely muted as he failed to engage with Edwards, spending most of the fight backing up toward the cage.
Edwards continuously sniped away from the outside, and he even managed two takedowns against the former All-American wrestler from Oregon State. When it was over, he won a fairly lopsided decision; White later said Covington looked “slow and old” after making his first UFC appearance in nearly two years.
“There was no pressure from Colby,” Muhammad said about the performance. “There wasn’t the same relentless wrestling that he always did, because I don’t think Leon gave him the chance to. Leon is very good at using his distance.
“I think Leon’s mistake in that whole time was realizing, ‘Colby took me down once, I popped right back up, he took me down again, I popped right back up,’ so there was nothing to fear from Colby’s end. Leon should have went for the kill more.”
That said, Muhammad had a gut feeling Covington wouldn’t live up to expectations, especially after he spent the better part of the past two years analyzing him as a potential opponent.
“He looked terrible,” Muhammad said. “It was one of those things where I’ve said from the beginning that Colby would be my easiest matchup in the top 10. I knew what his style was, and how to beat him, and Leon did a good job of just putting him on his backfoot, making him uncomfortable.
“Colby, his striking, I always said was amateurish, and every punch he landed, none of it hurt. The punches he was throwing were like cardio kickboxing punches. Leon would just wait for it and then counter off it right away. Then once he started countering off it, Colby got afraid.”
With Covington falling to 0-3 in undisputed title fights, and a 2-3 resume in his past five fights, it’s going to be a very tough road back into contention.
Covington will also turn 36 in February. Age remains one of the biggest obstacles in a division where only Kamaru Usman and Tyron Woodley held the title past 35.
In other words, Muhammad believes we’ve seen the last of Covington as a legitimate title challenger. He may stick around for a few more fights — Covington already tried calling out Stephen “Wonderboy” Thompson — but he expects the Edwards loss to serve as Covington’s final chance at becoming UFC champion.
“For sure, I think he’s done with,” Muhammad said. “There’s really nothing else left for him. If I’m ‘Wonderboy’ there’s way better fights out there for him, especially now that Michael ‘Venom’ Page is in the UFC now. He’s going to go against a striker. The way that he lost that fight [against Shavkat Rakhmonov], [Thompson is] only fighting strikers from now on. Colby’s looking for that fight, somebody he can wrestle and try to get a win so he can get another mic time.
“But the game’s over. People realize that you’re not going to fight one of these really good top 10 guys. Any of the top 10 guys will beat him right now. So he’s going to try to pick and choose his next opponent. Maybe he’ll go down to [lightweight], maybe he’ll try to call out Dustin Poirier, try to pick at that. But his title reign days are over with.”
