Watching Sean Strickland on social media whining about criticism from his coach, Eric Nicksick, brought to mind the old adage: “Never meet your heroes and you’ll never be disappointed.”
I can’t even imagine how many of his usually rabid fans Strickland alienated with his petulant diatribe he delivered a few days after he’d lost his middleweight title fight to Dricus Du Plessis in the main event of UFC 312.
He moaned about training camp difficulties, injuries, and cracks in his confidence.
He got a staph infection. He injured his arm. He flew to Colombia for stem cell treatment. He has more excuses than Diddy has girlfriends.
The most in-your-face guy on the UFC roster didn’t get into the face of the one guy he should have — Du Plessis — when it mattered most.
Du Plessis brought the fight to him, but Strickland didn’t return fire and the result was a largely uninspiring bout that Du Plessis won going away.
To his credit, Strickland likely wouldn’t have said anything about his bleh performance had Nicksick not appeared on The Ariel Helwani Show and roasted him.
Nicksick didn’t lay into Strickland simply for failing on technical details. He did that in great detail on fight night, pleading with Strickland to up his output and become the rabid dog he often is with a microphone in his face.
Strickland talked a great game, and was so outrageous that an Australian tabloid newspaper referred to him as the “UFC’s biggest imbecile” and pleaded “Will Someone Please Knock This Guy Out?”
— Sean Strickland (@SStricklandMMA) February 12, 2025
Nicksick unloaded on Strickland for the way he fought, but he excoriated him for his bold pre-fight talk and utterly failing to deliver.
“Let's fight to the death,” bellowed Strickland, who talked like Tarzan but fought like Jane when it counted most.
“Just to kind of show up and do that and not really back it up, to me, was just kind of uninspiring,” Nicksick said to Helwani.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is what got Strickland to pull his phone out and respond.
Nicksick appeared on Helwani’s show on Feb. 11. Later that night, during a YouTube livestream I was hosting, a fan asked a question about Nicksick’s comments toward Strickland. The fan was referring to his appearance on Helwani, but at that point I hadn’t heard it. So I texted Nicksick and got him to briefly join my stream.
And he made similar critical comments.
The next day, Strickland’s “response” video came out, and I couldn’t help but think if he had responded in the cage, none of this would have been necessary.
That should have been the end of it, but today, Nicksick released a video. And he kind of, sort of walked back his criticism and it left me wondering whether this was all a set-up in some way.
Nicksick is a blessing for reporters. He’s highly accessible, scrupulously honest and rarely sugarcoats things. He admitted to a mistake by agreeing to go on Helwani’s show.
A half-hour before the fight, when one would think Strickland’s head would have been filled with nothing but images of the ways he was going to pummel Du Plessis, Nicksick said Strickland was talking about his mindset. That ruined the coach’s headspace, and for more than a few days.
“I should’ve known better,” Nicksick said. “I took that energy and had to process that while I go on Ariel’s show. I f-cked up. I f-cked up.”
In sports, it’s the coaches, not the players, who take the fall when things go south. The Patriots fired Jerod Mayo so fast after the team’s final game that the showers were still running.
A coach can devise the right plan no matter the sport, but if the players don’t execute it, he’s at fault. The more often they fail to execute, the closer the coach’s termination becomes. Coaching in the modern era is as much about motivation as it is about Xs and Os.
In what we’ll call the excuse video, Strickland says “probably not” regarding whether Nicksick will return as his coach.
So now Nicksick’s subsequent comments make one wonder if he were just singing for his supper, looking to save the job, or if his emotions got the best of him after a disappointing defeat.
“Am I to shoulder some of that blame [for Strickland’s performance]?” Nicksick said. “100 percent. I said that as a staff, it’s on us. I’ve always said that. But his output, his body language, his demeanor, all those things, it did not feel like Sean.”
As Yogi Berra once said, 90 percent of sports is half-mental, or something like that. Fighting one of the most dangerous men in the world can put some strange thoughts in the heads of even the world’s finest fighters. Having a bit of a meltdown before a huge fight isn’t that shocking, or uncommon.
Nicksick is a sharp and insightful coach who rarely says anything publicly that he hasn’t thought out carefully in advance.
By apologizing and walking back what appeared to be a fair, accurate and on-the-money critique, Nicksick could be setting himself up for failure with other fighters.
At the very least, it dilutes the message he delivered to Strickland during an eight-week camp and then very forcefully between rounds during the title fight.
He’s arguably the best coach in MMA, and at the worst, one of the top five or so. If Strickland fires him, there will be 10 others standing in line begging Nicksick to coach him.
Eric Nicksick is a total class act, and a fantastic coach. But apologizing for a fair and accurate criticism seems like a bad miscalculation.
For their own good, Strickland and Nicksick should cut the talking and let this die.
Strickland talked like a madman and fought like a librarian. Nicksick called him out—then apologized. The fight itself was underwhelming. This mess? Exhausting.