Past his prime? Striking coach says Conor McGregor beats any version of Floyd Mayweather

Conor McGregor’s striking coach has the utmost faith in his student’s ability to shock the world on Aug. 26, and it doesn’t matter if Floyd Mayweather is still in his prime or beyond it.

Mayweather (49-0 boxing) will end a two-year retirement later this month when he meets McGregor (21-3 MMA, 9-1 UFC) in the pay-per-view headliner at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. At 40, the undefeated former multi-weight champion has admitted he’s not what he once was but still believes he’s good enough to handily defeat “The Notorious.”

McGregor’s coach, Owen Roddy, is assertive in the team-wide prediction of an early knockout win, but he said it has nothing to do with the version of Mayweather that will show up on fight night. Roddy said the matchup is tailor-made for McGregor, and regardless of whether it’s a peak Mayweather or not, the expectations are the same.

“He’s one of the best to ever do it, but it doesn’t matter what Floyd comes,” Roddy told MMAjunkie. “The Floyd from 10 years ago or the Floyd today, it doesn’t matter. Conor will still do the same thing to either one of them. Conor just brings too much to the table.

“Every fight camp Conor improves so much. We’re in a boxing camp now, but it’s the same old story. Day by day he improves so much, he becomes twice the competitor he was the day before. It’s always an enjoyable process to watch him and watch him develop.”

With the fight two weeks away, most of the hard work in training camp has been done. Roddy and the rest of the team have strategized and refined a gameplan, but still new information can be gained as the days wind down.

Mayweather’s open workout earlier this week was somewhat serviceable, Roddy said. McGregor put in 12 rounds of bag work during his Friday workout, but Mayweather’s was far more reserved. Roddy said that’s somewhat telling.

“For me, honestly, I thought it was a little bit messy,” Roddy said of Mayweather’s display. “He didn’t do much. He hit a bag a couple times and talked. He did a couple of pushups and talked. It wasn’t very structured or anything like that. It’s similar to what he’s done every other time. At the end of the day, we’ve already watched everything we need to watch on Floyd. We watched hundreds of hours of tape, and we’ve got what we needed.”

Although McGregor has already reached, by most measures, unthinkable heights during his combat sports career (such as becoming the first to simultaneously hold two UFC titles), pulling off a win against Mayweather would be his crowning achievement. Roddy believes that high will only be temporary, though, because he expects McGregor’s next career move to supersede everything he’s done to this point.

“The exciting thing is after Conor does what he does: What is the next adventure? I don’t know, is the answer,” Roddy said. “I don’t know what he’s going to do next. It could be mixed martial arts. It could be boxing. It could be anything. But it’ll be exciting and it’ll be more exciting than the last thing, most definitely.

For more on “The Money Fight: Floyd Mayweather vs. Conor McGregor,” check out the MMA Rumors section of the site.