UFC contender Kamaru Usman is still getting grief about that '30 percent' comment

Kamaru Usman is surging up the welterweight ranks and eying a potentially explosive grudge match with Colby Covington, yet a recent post-fight comment is all anyone seems to want to discuss.

Usman (12-1 MMA, 7-0 UFC) continued his undefeated UFC run with a recent unanimous-decision victory over Emil Meek in January. Afterward, Usman suggested he was operating at just 30 percent in the fight.

As you might imagine, those comments didn’t exactly go over well.

“To this day, I hear ’30 percent’ for everything,” Usman said after MMAjunkie caught up with him immediately after Saturday’s UFC 222 event in Las Vegas. “I post me drinking a shake, and they’re like, ‘Is that 30 percent shake in there?'”

This would probably be a good time to revisit what precisely Usman said after his UFC Fight Night 124 victory over Meek.

“I fought this fight sitting at about 30 percent,” he told interviewer Paul Felder in the cage. “Everybody knows what I’m capable of. That was 30 percent right there, and I still dominated a tough so-called ‘Viking’ – dominated him, and that was at 30 percent.”

If you watch the video with the actual comments, it’s fairly clear Usman was doing some winning-fighter bravado. And in the current era of MMA, closed mouths don’t get fed, so he was probably also just assuring he wouldn’t go unnoticed in a crowded welterweight division. Unfortunately, Usman’s comments also riled UFC President Dana White, and well…

“Dana kind of amplifies everything,” Usman said. “Once he took it that way, the fans kind of started taking it that way.”

Still, what exactly did Usman mean?

“See, when I go into a fight, I have the utmost respect for my opponent – even though I may feel like they may not belong there, that they’re not on my level,” he said after UFC 222. “It doesn’t matter. A fight is a fight. I always have respect for them.

“What I meant by my 30 percent that people took the wrong way, I meant I had a lot of things going on – things that lesser fighters would have pulled out for. My leg, my calf was damaged really bad. I couldn’t really move the way I want. That’s a big part of my game. But I didn’t want to pull out of the fight because the guy (Meek) had made such a big fuss and FOX was really kind of pushing him, pushing this guy as the next big thing. But I knew I could beat that guy at even at 10, 20 percent. So I decided to stick out the fight, and the most important thing is to win, and once I stated that, people took it the wrong way.”

Usman, who’s No. 8 in the USA TODAY Sports/MMAjunkie MMA welterweight rankings, may not be much of a fan favorite these days, thanks in part to those “30 percent” comments, but if he gets his preferred fight, that could change. After all, as much as Usman may have riled fans, it’s nothing compare to what No. 4-ranked Covington (13-1 MMA, 8-1 UFC) has done recently to anger the masses.

But as much as Usman – and fans – want that fight, it’s no closer to reality.

“When a guy completely doesn’t even acknowledge you – I mean doesn’t acknowledge you – I can’t even go through my Twitter feed with how many people want to see that fight,” Usman said. “But he’s not acknowledging me, which means that’s probably not a fight he wants, so we’ll see how thing shake out.

“I’m just sitting here waiting.”

For more on the UFC’s upcoming schedule, check out the UFC Rumors section of the site.