Hot take, post-'Money Fight': Skip Bayless says ref saved Floyd Mayweather from Conor McGregor

There weren’t too many people complaining about how Floyd Mayweather stopped Conor McGregor in Round 10 on Saturday night.

Sure, McGregor (21-3 MMA, 9-1 UFC, 0-1 boxing) said after the fight he wished referee Robert Byrd would have given him just a little bit longer. He’d have preferred to have the fight stopped when Mayweather (50-0 boxing) put him on the canvas, not while he was still up against the ropes. But by and large, by that point in the fight, most people believed letting McGregor go any longer wouldn’t have changed the outcome and only would’ve opened the door for him to take unnecessary damage from an all-time great.

But FOX Sports’ Skip Bayless, co-host of “Skip and Shannon: Undisputed” on FS1 with NFL Hall of Famer Shannon Sharpe, believes that’s not necessarily the case. The veteran print and broadcast journalist, whose resume includes a stint at ESPN for a dozen years, as well as the Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, Chicago Tribune and Dallas Morning News, said after the fight he thinks Byrd saved Mayweather from McGregor, not the other way around.

In a nearly 30-minute selfie video posted to his Facebook page in the moments following the fight, Bayless breaks down what he thinks happened in the fight. The Bayless haters and McGregor haters and boxing fans will call it a masterful troll job. The McGregor fans might find themselves going back to find a replay.

“My initial biggest takeaway is, Conor McGregor just put up a hell of a fight,” Bayless says. “I think he gave Floyd a lot more than Floyd thought that he was going to get. I think Floyd was in trouble on the scorecard, number one, for a while.

“… Floyd Mayweather was in trouble several times in this fight. But the turning point for for me came in Round 9. … Conor, coming off his best round of the fight, a bounce-back round in Round 8 – in my card, I had Conor ahead. I had him a round ahead at this point with the bounce-back in 8. In 9, he comes right out, aggressively, and he stunned Floyd. He hit him with a hard left, buckled him, and Floyd’s in trouble in the corner, and Conor tries to go in for the kill.

“And it happened so fast – I need to see a replay, and you Conor fans know what I’m talking about – but he had him, and Robert Byrd pulls him away and saves Floyd. … Then he was forced to back off into the middle of the ring, and it’s like he had spent himself on that salvo. … I swear, Robert Byrd saves the fight. He saved it. I think he gave Floyd Mayweather a big break in that fight that he didn’t deserve.”

McGregor won the first three rounds on one judge’s scorecard, then lost the next six before the TKO in the 10th. But with the two other judges, he won just the first frame and lost the next eight – including 10-8 rounds in Round 9.

Check out the video above. Then sound off in our poll below. Does Bayless have a point? Or is he out of his proverbial mind?

For complete coverage of “The Money Fight: Floyd Mayweather vs. Conor McGregor,” check out the MMA Events section of the site.

The Blue Corner is MMAjunkie‘s official blog and is edited by Mike Bohn.