Ronda Rousey’s Coach Makes Excuse For UFC 193 Loss

Following Ronda Rousey losing her UFC bantamweight title to Holly Holm at UFC 193 in devastating fashion, there were many who called for Rousey’s longtime trainer Edmond Tarverdyan to be fired for bad advice between rounds of her fight with Holm. In the fight, fans could hear Tarverdyan giving Rousey bad advice and saying that she was doing great even though she was losing.

Tarverdyan recently did an interview with ESPN and explained that he doesn’t see Rousey fighting at UFC 200 in July against Holm.

“I don’t see it in July at this point,” Tarverdyan said. “Ronda did three fights last year. I think she deserves time off. That’s what [UFC president] Dana [White] said, too. So we’ve spoke about that. You know Dana judges things very fairly, and he completely understood.”

“If you watch her career, she was fighting back-to-back,” he said. “Even her amateur fights, she took a lot of fights back-to-back. Of course, she got [quick] finishes, but it’s not only about the ring time, it’s about the training. She’s trained very hard to give it 100 percent every day, so you know, that’s hard for the body. Ronda has been through a lot. She’s had knee surgeries … and we don’t want to end up with the same thing, having another knee surgery, so we need to relax a little bit, take our time and get her in better shape slowly and mentally and physically.”

Tarverdyan explained that this was his biggest loss of his career and plans to work harder so when Rousey is set to return, he’ll be ready.

“It was the biggest loss of my career,” he said. “You know you won’t ever want that to happen again. So what that means is, I’ve got to work harder. Every little thing I’ve got to be honest with and make sure that we’re ready to go.

Tarverdyan then addressed the criticism that he has received about UFC 193. According to Tarverdyan, he believes that Rousey got caught in the fight, but doesn’t plan to make significant changes to Rousey’s game or bring in new trainers.

“Yeah there was a lot of criticism afterwards about adding a boxing coach. MMA is not a boxing game, but Ronda got caught, and we will be taking advice from boxing trainers. I don’t think it’s going to be a situation about adding a boxing coach, it’s about getting more thoughts from boxing trainers.

“I will be speaking to them and getting in the best advice. And if I feel it’s necessary we will bring them in. But besides boxing, even the wrestling, the judo, the grappling aspect of it — just approaching the fight, in general, there will be a bit of things that we could add.

“We’re not going to sit here and change everything that we’ve done, we’ve done stuff that I think is working, it’s been great. We’re not going to have something so much different for Ronda. Have we been doing everything wrong? No, that’s not the situation. It’s a fight, Ronda got caught with a shot, and it was a little bit of a roller coaster from there.”

Holm will be fighting Miesha Tate in the co-main event of UFC 196 in her first women’s bantamweight title defense.

It’s expected that Rousey will return to the world famous Octagon later this year to fight the winner of that UFC 196 title fight.