Dana White Confirms Conor McGregor Is Officially Off UFC 200

UFC President Dana White may have repeatedly stated that his relationship with superstar featherweight champion Conor McGregor is not strained by the Irishman’s recent refusal to attend to today’s (Friday, April 22, 2016) UFC 200 press conference and subsequent short-lived ‘retirement,’ but that apparently doesn’t mean he’s going to lift his decision to remove him from the midsummer blockbuster.

At the press event today, White was asked nonstop questions about McGregor’s availability for the card. He responded by noting all of the high-profile fighters wanted to be doing training rather than promoting, but that’s just not how the game works:

“Listen, I just don’t see how that’s fair, you know what I mean? He came in from Stockton day ago, Poland, Brazil, and the list goes on and on from where these fighters have come from all over the world. And I get it; it’s tough when you have to leave everything you got going on. The fight is three months away; the fight’s still three months away. That’s why we do it this early, so we try not to interfere with their training and their lives and everything else. It’s just part of the deal; these guys came. Listen, I was talking to some of the guys backstage, the fighters, they would like Conor to fight on the card too. People want Conor to fight – so do the fans, the media, you think I don’t want Conor to fight? Of course I do. But it’s just not right. You can’t not show up for this stuff. You can’t do. It’s not right.”

Continually prodded to confirm McGregor was truly out of arguably the biggest card in UFC history, a clearly annoyed White finally confirmed it:

“Yeah. Yes, Holy s***”

As for the reported news that longtime former welterweight champion Georges St. Pierre was offered a fight with top-ranked lightweight Khabib Nurmagomedov, White said he hadn’t heard of anything like that:

“To the best of my knowledge, that is completely inaccurate. Yeah, I wasn’t in that meeting.”

But the discussion predictably went back to McGregor, and White was none too pleased that those asking the questions didn’t grasp the unfairness or the UFC’s desire to not set a precedent of one fighter calling the shots.

Read on to find out what the steaming executive had to say about McGregor to the media….

The media stayed on the topic of McGregor, with little attention going to the participants already scheduled for the event who had actually showed up. when MMAFighting.com’s Ariel Helwani asked White if the Diaz rematch was now a bigger fight with all of the social media buzz, he couldn’t deny it. But again, he stuck to his guns as he went back to the fact that what wasn’t fair wouldn’t work:

“No, I don’t disagree with that, but Conor will fight again. Is it fair to everybody that’s sitting up here? I mean, people came in from Poland and Brazil. I mean, how many times I gotta say that? Is that fair.”

Helwani then noted that people get exceptions everyday, to which White got a bit perturbed and replied it just wasn’t right, as the promotion was now unable to film a commercial with the event’s biggest fighter due to McGregor’s absence:

“But it’s not right. It sets a bad precedent. It’s not the deal. It’s not the deal, man. These guys came in from all over the world and they’re here, and it’s been this way for 16 years. People have been doing their P.R. And they just said, we’ve had our moments. You asked me, so we’re spending $10 million dollars, we put up all the money, we’re spending $10 million dollars in promotion on this fight, and we can’t even film a commercial with the main event?”

White then touched on whom McGregor would face next, and he tabbed the winner of UFC 200’s interim featherweight title fight as the next opponent:

“Frankie and Jose are gonna fight, and Conor will fight the winner.”

Finally, as far as the plans for Diaz, White admitted they hadn’t worked that out, but were in the process of doing so because he didn’t want to deny the Stockton bad boy his day on the biggest card of the year:

“We’ll talk and we’ll figure it out. I didn’t want to screw him out of UFC 200, you know what I mean? If he wanted to be a apart of this thing and he wanted to fight, then I wanted to give him that opportunity.”