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After Sean Strickland was thoroughly outclassed by Dricus Du Plessis the pair’s middleweight title fight at UFC 312, Strickland’s coach Eric Nicksick was quick to call out the Xtreme Couture fighter. Nicksick said that he felt Strickland didn’t put everything necessary into either the fight camp or the fight itself in order to become a UFC champion. But now he’s walking back those comments after an awkward back and forth between the two.
“I think he needs to evaluate what he wants to do in this sport,” Nicksick initially said of Strickand on “The Ariel Helwani Show.” “If it’s just to make money, then that’s great, let us know. I want to coach world champions, so my motivations are different. I think that just to show up and do that and not really back it up, to me was just kind of uninspiring.”
Strickland, however, didn’t see things quite the same way. While he didn’t exactly fire back at his coach, he did state that Nicksick was unlikely to continue to corner him for fights.
“I like Eric,” Strickland said “He’s a friend of mine and he’s going to continue to be a friend of mine. Will he probably be in my corner? Probably not. We have so many great guys at Xtreme [Couture]. … We have so many savages that I would love to corner me.”
Now it appears that Nicksick is walking his initial stance back.
“I agree, Matt, looking back at it I made a mistake. My true intentions were to try and motivate him publicly, and that was a miscalculation on my part,” Nick said in an Instagram reply to comments from former UFC fight Matt Brown.
Whether or not that’s enough to mend fences between the two moving forward remains to be seen. Strickland doesn’t have a reputation as the most measured human being on the planet. But it appears that, at the very least, Nicksick is hoping to remain in the corner of the former champion.