Daniel Cormier sees one willing UFC lightweight who would deliver the goods against Justin Gaethje.
Gaethje (25-5 MMA, 8-5 UFC) needs a new opponent after Dan Hooker withdrew from their five-round co-main event March 8 at UFC 313 (pay-per-view, ESPN, ESPN+) due to a fractured hand. Cormier reached out to the former UFC interim lightweight champion, Gaethje, who told him he absolutely plans to remain on the card.
“Justin Gaethje is still fighting,” Cormier said on his YouTube channel. “I called him this morning, and my immediate question was, ‘Do you have any plans to not fight this weekend?’ He goes, ‘Are you f*cking crazy?’ That’s Justin Gaethje. He goes, ‘Are you crazy? Of course I’m fighting.’ I say, ‘What’s up, JG? What are you doing?’ He goes, ‘I’m sleeping. It’s 7:30 in the morning here.’”
The likes of Rafael Fiziev, Renato Moicano and Mateusz Gamrot offered to step in and replace Hooker. If it were up to Cormier, he’d like to see Gaethje fight Moicano, who’s coming off a short-notice title loss to Islam Makhachev at UFC 311.
Cormier says history proves that Moicano (20-6-1 MMA, 12-6 UFC) is the right man for the job.
“So I asked JG, ‘Who do you want?’ He goes, ‘I don’t care who I have to fight. I’ll fight any of those guys,’” Cormier said. “I said for me, ‘I want you vs. Renato Moicano.’ I think that that’s a fun fight. I think that that fight looks more to people like the fight against Dan Hooker, what we were all expecting. I get it, Moicano just lost to Islam Makhachev in the way that he did, but JG is coming off a loss, too. He got beat by Max Holloway in brutal fashion.
“We learned that Moicano couldn’t compete with Makhachev. There’s no knocking him for that. Why not match these two up? We know that ‘Money’ Moicano is always there to fight. We know that he’s willing to stand and trade with the best of them. We know that he possesses submission ability. We know Moicano can do anything in the octagon. We know that he’s going to bring the show, and we know Moicano is willing.”
For more on the card, visit MMA Junkie’s event hub for UFC 313.
