UFC Paris Post Show<\/a>. \u201cWe\u2019ve been making comparisons between him and Conor McGregor, and I expected that from Ruffy. I said this guy, especially fighting a guy that gets wild like Benoit Saint Denis, I thought he would be able to pick him apart. I thought he was going to do something fascinating tonight, and the first body kick shook Ruffy up. Then the head kick shook him up. And I think that took Ruffy so far out of his game, he did not want to fight anymore.\u201d<\/p>\nRuffy entered the UFC from Contender Series last year, scoring wins over Jamie Mullarkey and James Llontop before his breakthrough performance in March where he knocked out King Green with a spinning wheel kick at UFC 313.<\/p>\n
His breakout was not unlike Saint Denis\u2019s own rise up the lightweight rankings, before stumbling against Dustin Poirier and Renato Moicano in back-to-back fights. And after Saturday, Thomas admits to being wrong about both men.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe didn\u2019t want to be out there anymore, and it surprised me,\u201d Thomas said. \u201cHe made me eat my words. And I\u2019m always happy when these guys can make me eat my words, because that means there\u2019s something that I don\u2019t know. I own up to it. Benoit Saint Denis made me eat my words tonight. I was uncomfortable talking to Benoit Saint Denis about the fight, because I thought he was going to get beat up. Tonight he made me eat my words.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd Mauricio Ruffy also made me eat my words. Maybe he\u2019s not as good as we thought he was. Yet. He\u2019s still got some work to do. But tonight he did not show up and he did not look like he wanted to be out there.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is not the first time Thomas has been critical of Ruffy. \u201cOne Shot\u201d did not dazzle in his win over Llontop at UFC 309, prompting Thomas to suggest the moment was too big for the Fighting Nerds product.<\/p>\n
Fortunately for Ruffy, he rebounded from that listless win with his Knockout of the Year contender over King in his next fight, so perhaps the Brazilian fighter\u2019s next bout will see him back on track quickly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mauricio Ruffy had a tough night. So tough that veteran MMA analyst Din Thomas is questioning how good…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":125564,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[570],"tags":[64,63,786,1347,785,85,787,1396],"class_list":{"0":"post-125563","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mma","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-fighting","11":"tag-latest-news","12":"tag-mma","13":"tag-sports","14":"tag-ufc","15":"tag-ufc-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125563"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125563\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/125564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}