Former UFC champion Michael Bisping questioned Khabib Nurmagomedov’s MMA GOAT status.
Shortly after winning his final UFC fight, Khabib Nurmagomedov was hailed as MMA’s greatest of all time by UFC president Dana White.
This, however, has got a lot of eyebrows raised, primarily because of the fact that Nurmagomedov only defended his UFC title three times.
Among the famous MMA personalities who touched the subject once again was former UFC middleweight king Michael Bisping.
According to “The Count,” Nurmagomedov’s name should not be put on same breath as Georges St-Pierre, Jon Jones and Anderson Silva as he chose not to prolong his dominance the way the aforementioned UFC icons did.
“He took himself out of [the GOAT list] it,” Bisping recently said on “The Pain Game” podcast. “And if you look, yeah, he didn’t fight the best until the end of his career. When you compare that with GSP [St-Pierre] or [Jon] Jones or Anderson [Silva], their run against world-class competition was far longer. But for Khabib, I know it was because of his father passing away, and he made a promise to his mother. So, it’s different circumstances.”
In the end, Bisping cleared the air and stressed that he’s just basing his comments on the list of Nurmagomedov’s UFC accomplishments and is not intending to “downplay” his illustrious career.
“But for those reasons, I think when you look at the resumes, even though he was undefeated, the resumes don’t really stack up,” he explained. “And I say that with tremendous respect to Khabib – Far being from me to downplay his career because I would never dream of doing that.”
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