Colby Covington is confident that whenever he faces welterweight champion Leon Edwards, he’ll leave the octagon with the title around his waist. When that happens, “Chaos” will look to further shake things up.
Covington has been named the No. 1 contender for Edwards and tells MMA Fighting that he hopes the matchup can take place in August. As far as future aspirations go outside of welterweight championship gold, Covington is still hopeful that he will get the chance to face current middleweight champion Israel Adesanya — a bout he was interested in taking following his victory over Jorge Masvidal at UFC 272 over a year ago.
“Absolutely [I’d still love that matchup], I think that’s a huge fight and it’s a fight of high magnitude,” Covington told MMA Fighting. “I like the matchup, to be honest. I don’t think he can hang with me. I think I take him down, I beat him from pillar to post and I just break him inside that octagon. He can’t hang with the cardio king. He’s not ready for all-American steel and twisted sex appeal.”
“I would love that fight, champion vs. champion, USA vs. wherever he’s from New Zealand or whatever, let’s get this going.”
Adesanya recently regained the middleweight title with a second-round knockout of Alex Pereira at UFC 287 in April. According to White, the winner of the upcoming UFC 290 tilt between former champ Robert Whittaker and Dricus Du Plessis will likely face “The Last Stylebender” for the title later this year.
If future timelines sync up, Covington feels he could shut down Adesanya, but that the middleweight titleholder won’t want the fight due to Covington’s pace and style.
“I don’t think he wants to fight a high-level wrestler like me, someone that can just keep up and be in his face the whole entire time, pressuring him,” Covington said. “I’m not just going to shoot one takedown, I’m going to shoot 5,000 takedowns and be in your face and break you.
“If that’s what the UFC wants to do, I’m here. I’m a company man, I’m a businessman so I care about the company and whatever the company wants to do, I want to do the biggest and best business for the company, the UFC, the greatest organization in the world.”
Should Covington win the undisputed welterweight title, there is another potential matchup with a current champion that piques his interest — lightweight champion Islam Makhachev.
Covington has brought up a potential matchup with Makhachev before, but when asked if that’s a fight that he and the UFC have discussed in the past, the 35-year-old says that it has been brought up — whether it be at welterweight, or lightweight.
“I think it’s a very realistic possibility,” Covington said of a fight with Makhachev. “There were conversations backstage in the past that we had about [a fight with Makhachev], and if I could make 155 because I’m not a big 170 [pounder]. I don’t cut much weight – 15-20 pounds max if I’m just completely eating as much as I can stuff in my face.
“So I know we probably walk around at the same weight, he’s just a weight bully. He’s cutting all that weight to get the advantage at lightweight because there’s no wrestlers, there’s no guys that can give him any trouble. So of course, he wants to be in that division, the same division his daddy Khabib [Nurmagomedov] used to own.
“There’s a reason Khabib never came to 170, fought at welterweight because King Colby’s here and he knows I’ll stop his wrestling and punch him in the face until he quits.”
