Conor McGregor got a measure of revenge on Nate Diaz when he defeated him by majority decision at UFC 202, but brother Nick Diaz believes Nate would’ve won the fight if he were allowed to corner his brother at the event.
"Just one inch, that's the difference between how that fight could've gone," Nick said on Opie Radio. "They just wanted to keep me out of there. They know that it would've definitely helped him out a lot. I was seeing things in that fight that I would've called and told him. I was seeing things that he wasn't seeing, because I do these things and I know how they work out for me. It's kind of like a formula, you know what I mean? And I'm like, hey look, this is what you do. Come the third and fourth round, I think if I would've been there, we would've been able to put it together and got that guy (McGregor) out of there."
Nick was serving a suspension after a failed drug test in 2015, which was the reason he wasn’t allowed to corner his brother. The suspension was actually up, but Diaz had yet to pay his fines. Teammates Jake Shields and Gilbert Melendez were in Nate’s corner.
"The thing is, Melendez is there," Nick said. "The thing about Melendez is, he's great. He knows what he's looking at. But they're training partners, and so they're like kinda opposites stylistically, because he's more of a wrestler and he goes on top. So the things that Gilbert would tell him to do is more of like what Gilbert would do, and what I would tell him to do is more of what [Nate] would do. I'm not saying that it wasn't helping having Gilbert there telling him to do the wrong stuff -- Gilbert wasn't necessarily telling him to do the wrong stuff, he just wasn't going to see the things that I was seeing. So that was kinda rough. It's hard enough to watch being there, and I'm watching on TV, I can't do anything. I thought he had [McGregor] out of there, for sure, at one point in time. The third round, I guess. I was like, there's just no way you're coming back from that."
A potential rubber match between McGregor and Nate may happen down the line, but Nick already has some advice he would give his brother.
"I would've told him not to throw punches at that dude at all, because he's going to sit there and watch you and try to counter everything," Nick said. "So all you do is fake at him and flick at him and f-ck with him. He just didn't have it together in the first round, and I think I could've clicked him into the right mindset. Plus, me standing in front of him, fooling around with him and standing in front of him with my right hand forward -- all three of us stand the same way, so he doesn't have anybody else like that to kinda work with him, and I just think that it would've definitely helped out having me there a little bit."
Neither of the Diaz brothers have any fights lined up in the future, while McGregor isn’t expected to compete until May 2017 due to the impending birth of his first child.
