If you’ve bothered to go in search of it, then you probably know that Sean Strickland is still out here doing it.
It being the sound bites, the hot takes, the controversial quips. All the stuff that helped take him from just another mid-card middleweight to known title contender to shock-the-world champ to former champ getting one more crack at it. Yep, he’s still going.
At this week’s media day to help promote his middleweight title rematch with champion Dricus du Plessis at UFC 312 in Sydney, Australia, Strickland went in on fellow middleweight Khamzat Chimaev, repeatedly calling him a “wh*re” for his association with Chechan leader Ramzan Kadyrov.
Prior to that he said in an interview with Daniel Cormier that du Plessis “fights like a r****d off the short bus.”
And just couple days before that he answered a fan question about his “least favorite race.” The fact that he was even asked that question tells you something about the public persona he’s cultivated for himself. The fact that he answered it tells you that he’s just fine with it.
But something about it this time, it’s like we barely even notice. Maybe we’re just used to it by now. Maybe it’s that, with guys like Bryce Mitchell cranking up the absurd-o-meter, Strickland’s stuff seems tame by comparison. Maybe it’s just that on a low-wattage fight card that’s competing with the Super Bowl for the sports world’s attention, it takes a lot more to get noticed.
Whatever it is, Strickland’s whole deal suddenly feels almost — and I kind of hate to say this — normal. It’s like he’s just another UFC fighter now. Another ex-champ trying to get some payback in a rematch of what was a very close but otherwise not especially remarkable title fight the first time around.
Part of the issue could be that, by this point, we know what to expect from a Strickland fight. He’s going to talk a lot beforehand about his desire for a bloodbath between modern gladiators, and then he’s going to employ a strategic, point-fighting approach in an effort to gradually, carefully win rounds.
If you only ever heard him talk, you’d think Strickland was Robbie Lawler meets the Tasmanian Devil. It’s only when you see him in action that you realize he’s about as likely to get into a wild brawl as he is to vote Democrat.
That style has been very effective for him in recent years. He’s won a lot of fights and taken relatively little damage. The downside is that when you rely on winning rounds a little bit at a time, you leave yourself vulnerable to the possibility that the judges might not appreciate the nuances of your work quite like you thought they would.
That was the difference in Strickland’s first fight with du Plessis in January 2024. While Strickland was out there hunting-and-pecking his way through each round, du Plessis threw punches like he was pulling rocks out of his back pockets. His actions looked big and obvious and meaningful — whether the strikes landed or not. He left an impression of damage, whether he was actually doing anything or not. In a close fight, that sometimes makes all the difference. Diego Sanchez practically built a career out of it.
What you have to wonder now is, what happens if Strickland, 33, can’t claw the middleweight title back from du Plessis? He’ll be 0-2 against the current champ, with a personal schtick that seems to be fading into background noise. There’s no such thing as a low-stakes cage fight, but the stakes seem especially high for Strickland at this point in his career.
If we learned anything from arc of Colby Covington, it might that the obnoxiously outspoken culture warrior act really only works when you’re winning. Once the losses go up like a road block, people lose interest. They drift away. Their attention gets dragged along on some other current, by something even more freshly outrageous.
As much as it’s a test of his skills, Saturday’s rematch with du Plessis also seems like a test of Strickland’s staying power in the UFC fan consciousness. And that can be a hard battle to win via decision.
