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Eric Nicksick was one of the few people that knew about Francis Ngannou's knee injury heading into UFC 270. Nicksick is Ngannou's head coach and has been doing great work with the heavyweight champion.
It seemed like everyone was telling Francis Ngannou to pull out of UFC 270. The heavyweight champion and his team had a choice to make before Saturday night.
“I was a nervous wreck,” Nicksick told MMA Junkie Radio. “I think a lot of the things that my head was telling me was to pull out of the fight, and I just didn’t like the way that the knee injury was and the situation that the opponent that we had with the particular injury that we had. Obviously we did want to get into some wrestling, but I didn’t know how we were going to be able to wrestle without having the cardio the last three-and-a-half weeks, as well as the stability of the knee, and I’ve just got to give all the credit to Francis. That guy’s will power, his mental capacity, what he wanted to do, he just unwavered the entire camp.”
UFC 270 was creeping up on them and the team had a tough choice to make. Take the risk of making the knee injury worse in order to defend the heavyweight title, or sit out and heal up.
“We had kind of that come-to-Jesus moment last Friday before we left,” Nicksick said. “We got word from a second opinion doctor out here in L.A. that he was adamant that Francis should pull out. He thought that he could ultimately lose a year-and-a-half to two years after a full knee reconstruction surgery if that leg would have gone wrong, something would have gone wrong. So we got that word last Friday. We had practice that day so we all met at the (UFC Performance Institute), and that’s kind of when I just said, ‘Dude, what are we doing here? I love you, bro. You’re my brother. But as your coach, I do have to tell you what I think is right, and this is what I feel is right in this situation.’
“‘But if you as the fighter say that you’re going to fight, I’m going to have your back 110 percent. But I can’t live with myself without telling you how I truly feel. This isn’t about anything other than your safety and your legacy, in my opinion.’ So we agreed upon what we were going to do was, we were going to come to California fight week, (and) we were going to meet with the doctor out here in L.A. The moment we landed, we went right to his office and basically waited outside and he came out and I could tell by his face, I’m like, ‘Oh, we’re fighting.’ Once we knew that, I didn’t bring his knee up once. I didn’t say anything about it. I didn’t want to talk about it anymore because that, as far as I was concerned, was behind us. We’re going to fight with what we’ve got.”
The game plan at UFC 270 changed once they had a surprising advantage with the wrestling. Francis Ngannou was able to get Ciryl Gane down and beat him on the ground.
“Right away when I saw Gane’s reactions to the ground control, his defensive things, I knew we had something there,” Nicksick said. “It was actually funny at the end of Round 3. I was walking in the corner and I was putting the stool down and I looked at Francis and I go, ‘We’ve got something now, don’t we?’ and Francis shook his head and was like, ‘We sure do.’ I was like, ‘All right, let’s get back to it then.’
“So by being able to score that takedown in Round 3, I really wanted a lot of level-change motion because I knew that the level changes now had some validity. He had to worry about getting taken down, so that should open up some more of our strikes, meaning the overhand or the level-change feints to overhands, as well as, again, our ground game stuff. So we got right back to it in Round 4 and then obviously in Round 5 there was that sequence with the sweep, but we knew that. We knew if we could keep him on the ground, that we had a path to victory then.”
