A victory like that could’ve earned a $50,000 bonus for Dariush, but Dariush missed weight for the bout and believes the bonus money should go to Holtzman.
“I missed weight, so I don’t deserve it,” Dariush said after the event (via Dave Doyle & Ken Hathaway of MMA Junkie). “That’s perfectly fine. If anyone deserves it, it’s Scott. He came in for the kill and he took the fight. I missed weight, man. He didn’t have to take the fight. I’m not a walk in the park. I’m not trying to sound cocky, but it’s not like he’s taking an easy fight, you know?”
The weight miss was the first time in Dariush’s decade-plus professional MMA career that the fighter missed weight for a fight.
Dariush does say that the reason for missing weight against Holtzman was due to poor planning on his end.
“It was poor planning on my part,” Dariush said. “Typically, I have a little bit more freedom, because typically we don’t have the COVID protocols. So I didn’t take those protocols into consideration and I just didn’t do things the way I should have. I had about an hour left with the two pounds and I was doing the bath and the weight didn’t come off. I did the bath and I only lost .4 (pounds). I said to myself I’ll just go to the sauna at the (UFC) Performance Institute, but at that point they said, ‘You can’t go.’ That’s my fault. That’s not their fault. I didn’t even listen to the protocols.”
There was more than one weigh-in miss for the event, as Laureano Staropoli missed weight for a bout against Tim Means.
