At the post-fight press conference for UFC 187, Ryan Bader and Daniel Cormier planted the seeds for a potential a championship fight with a heated back-and-forth.
That type of exchange doesn’t really match up with Bader’s reputation thus far in his career, but the culmination of several of factors created the confrontation.
“I’ve never had any animosity towards anybody at all,” Bader said on Inside MMA this past week. “We were supposed to be fighting here in June, and I knew after my fight after Phil Davis, so I had five-plus months to prepare and think about this guy again.”
“When you have a fight like that, it’s all you care about. He called me disrespectful at the press conference when the week of his fight on a Tuesday or a Wednesday, he came out and did a little interview and said I didn’t deserve that Anthony Johnson fight because I haven’t beaten anybody in the light heavyweight division.”
The questioning of his qualifications has drawn the ire of Bader, and he’s a proponent of a fight with the champion. Contrasting his resume with other top light heavyweights, Bader believes he has the best case for a title shot.
“[We’re] two guys that want to fight each other,” Bader said. “We were scheduled to fight already. He went out there, I’ll give it to him, he did a great job, he got that belt. Now let’s make the third time the charm. I have four straight wins, the last three were top ten guys.”
“If you look at the new rankings, I’m number 3 right now. People ahead of me is obviously Cormier, but there’s Anthony Johnson who just got finished in the title fight, and there’s Alexander Gustafsson who just got knocked out by the guy who just lost in the title fight. It’s got to be me right?”