Eleven months ago, well before Dennis Siver became a bizarre pit stop on the road to the MacMansion, Conor McGregor hijacked UFC 182's pay-per-view for five minutes to espouse in thorough detail what he was not only going to do to his Russian-German counterpart, but also to the rest of the featherweight division by the time the new year reached its end. It was brash. It was ostentatious. It was everything McGregor encapsulated in his pre-Mendes form.
He told us that Siver would be dispatched with a quickness. He told us that this time would be no different than the last, that the only change between then and before was expectations, and where foes were once supposed to humble him, they were now expected to lose. Then with one tick and a smirk, he called his shot for the year to come. He was the new king, he declared, and when Jose Aldo's time came -- and by God, it was going to come -- even the oddsmakers would know the true favorite by fight night. It was at once laughable and ludicrous, even for a man who lived within the absurd.
But Conor McGregor, he predicts these things. And three days before those words and threats and promises are set to vanish like smoke in the Las Vegas air, somehow the towering screens that surround the sportsbooks still ring true to the power of Mystic Mac. The Irish boy from south Dublin is a betting favorite over the legend whose personal win streak outpaces McGregor's own fighting career by two years. And even crazier, it is easy to be unsurprised.
"It would piss me off," says lightweight contender Tony Ferguson. "It would. I would be pissed. If I was Jose Aldo, I would be pissed. But I would channel it. And I know he's going to channel it, because he's a champion. He's a gamer like that. And when you've been in this division for so long, you have to stay on top of it."
"My mind is blown," echoes McGregor's featherweight running mate, Max Holloway. "I don't know. I was tripping out when I saw that (Aldo was the underdog). I think he deserves a little more respect. A lot of people have been saying that this is the most focus they've seen in Aldo in a while, so I think we might see that scary Aldo who was in the WEC days, and I can't wait to watch it."
"What Conor has done, he's ignited almost like (Barack) Obama did (in 2008), where he pulled out all sorts of voters who never voted before, and activated a crowd that hadn't been very active before in putting their opinion down," says Faber. "You've got a whole bunch of new fans who are just McGregor fans, and they're throwing their money on him. So that's how the odds keep getting skewed, is who puts their money down. More people are putting their money on McGregor. But I'm not sure how the oddsmakers made [Aldo the underdog] from the very beginning. That's crazy. That's kind of crazy to me."
LINK: Jose Aldo is an underdog and the whole world has gone the best kind of crazy - MMA Fighting
