Nate Diaz had a chance to return to the UFC but instead took a fight against Mike Perry on the upcoming Ronda Rousey vs. Gina Carano card on May 16 with the event airing on Netflix.
After the fight was announced, UFC CEO Dana White revealed that the promotion had been in talks to bring Diaz back but he believed Jake Paul’s Most Valuable Promotions just made him “an offer he couldn’t refuse.” When he addressed the situation publicly, Diaz later claimed the UFC actually offered him more money to make
his return for a trilogy fight against Conor McGregor and he turned it down.
Diaz stated that he wasn’t interested in facing McGregor on his “last dying f*cking leg” after being out of action for the past five years. But retired UFC welterweight Matt Brown just isn’t buying it, especially knowing that Diaz has been one of the smartest fighters out there when it comes to maximizing his value to make the most money possible during his career.
“Money talks,” Brown said on The Fighter vs. The Writer. “He’s making more money with this Netflix fight than he would with the UFC. That’s why he’s not fighting Conor in the UFC. I lean towards believing Dana on this. He got an offer he couldn’t refuse. Now how Nate’s spinning it with the way the contract is structured, maybe there’s something behind the scenes under some layers that we’re not privy to just yet. But there’s no way he’s not making more money.
“I don’t believe it for a second that he’s not making more money with this Netflix deal, however that plays out, his bank account ends up with more money from this fight than it does in the UFC or he doesn’t take the fight. He’s going to pick the highest bidder. I don’t think that’s unique to [Nate Diaz], but I think he understands this is prize fighting. He’s fighting for money. He’s going to take the highest pay.”
During that same interview, Diaz said he was only interested in facing the best of the best and Perry qualified, especially after he’s gone on truly monumental run as the face of bare-knuckle fighting in BKFC.
On the MMA side, Perry left the UFC on a 1-4 skid before becoming a superstar in BKFC. In a strange twist, McGregor actually fought in MMA more recently than Perry but the “King of Violence” has obviously been very active over the past few years with his bare-knuckle career not to mention taking a boxing match against Jake Paul.
Maybe Diaz just genuinely wants to face the best possible competition at this stage of his career but Brown argues that every fighter should be seeking the biggest pay regardless of the opposition. In this particular case, Brown agrees that Perry is a tougher fight than facing McGregor but that logic also doesn’t convince him if the UFC really was making him a more lucrative offer.
“Nate’s a hittable guy. I don’t think that’s an insult to him. I think he knows that himself. But he gets hit in fights and Mike Perry hits very hard. He’s going to have to withstand those shots to be able to keep peppering him [late in the fight]. That’s Nate’s path to victory on paper. We know fights never play out the way that the paper says it will, but on paper, that’s the narrative I think we would see.
“Whereas Conor, dude you already beat him twice, you know what to do. I think he won the second fight, too, but it’s neither here nor there. It’s a way, way bigger fight. Whether the viewership numbers reflect that or not, the actual fight and the media, the attention, the fight fans that care, even mainstream, Diaz and Conor is probably the biggest fight the UFC could even make right now outside of maybe [Alex] Pereira-Jon Jones and honestly Conor-Diaz is probably bigger than that just because of the publicity.”
Obviously the door isn’t closed for Diaz to still return to the UFC one day, especially knowing that his deal with MVP is only for the upcoming fight against Perry.
That said, Brown truly believes Diaz probably wanted to control his own destiny moving forward and perhaps the UFC’s offer came along with conditions like signing a multi-fight deal to return to the octagon.
Whatever the reason, Brown just doesn’t see Diaz passing on a bigger payday because he preferred fighting Perry over McGregor.
“Either there’s something more to this like potentially he didn’t want to sign another contract with the UFC or something along those lines,” Brown said. “When they say an offer he can’t refuse, maybe that wasn’t just money. Maybe there’s something else behind the scenes with that. When he says they offered him more money, up front they offered him more money — is there some backdoor thing going on? It doesn’t make sense to me that he would just simply accept lesser pay for what is probably going to be a tougher fight for him.
“There’s something where the math is not adding up. There’s some things that are going behind the scenes, behind closed doors that we don’t know about. Consolidating the whole thing down to just one sentence, which is Nate’s style and part of why they’re so popular [the Diaz brothers] and why they’re such good at talking publicly and saying things. The way he put it was ‘I beat Conor’s ass easy, I don’t want to do that to him.’ There’s more to it than that. That’s all there is to it. I don’t know what it is. You don’t know what it is. But there’s more layers here that we’re just not able to uncover.”
