EXCLUSIVE | Colby Covington says fights with Tyron Woodley, Nick Diaz were both discussed for UFC 230

From the sounds of it, UFC 230 will be headlined by a women’s flyweight title fight between Valentina Shevchenko and Sijara Eubanks. That being said, it also sounds like the card was nearly headlined by a welterweight title fight between interim champion Colby Covington and undisputed champion Tyron Woodley.

This per Colby Covington himself, who discussed his negotiations for a UFC 230 fight on episode 100 of BJPENN.COM Radio.

“I was ready to go [for UFC 230] up until, you know yesterday, until they announced that chick fight that no one knows who they are — I still don’t know who they are — but you know, no one really cares about them, but that’s besides the fact,” Colby Covington said. “You know up until yesterday I was ready to go, I was ready for ‘TyQuill’, Tyron Woodley, and the negotiations went south. He probably didn’t get a cut of pay-per-view that he was looking for, so he threw his little temper tantrums and said ‘oh, I’m gonna sit out till next year’ and ‘I need this much time recovery.’

“It’s fake news, you can’t believe anything that guy [Woodley] says, that guys is a fake news reporting machine,” Covington added.

Covington then explained that he was also briefly in negotiations for a fight with Nick Diaz, whose younger brother Nate Diaz fights Covington’s training partner Dustin Poirier in the UFC 230 co-main event.

“I was ready for Nick Diaz too, he was another option as well, he was on the table, but I guess he was scared,” Covington said. “He didn’t want to take two losses for the Diaz’s in one night. So he’s scared, he is gonna stay on the West Coast, like the little bitch that he is.”

“Even my agent Lambert had approached me about it, it was a fight that was in the works and it was a possibility, but when push came to shove, he realized that he didn’t wanna fight on the same card as his little brother,” Covington added. “He didn’t wanna take another loss like his little brother. Those little bitches in 209, they ain’t as hard as they seem on the outside. They are a fucking bunch of scared little bitches, all they do is fight girls these days.”

With these bouts with Woodley and Diaz off the table for the moment, Colby Covington says he will probably wait for Woodley to recover, and attempt to fight him on Super Bowl weekend. That being said, there are other challenges that could coax him back to the cage sooner than that — such as a potential fight with former champion Georges St-Pierre.

“Right now the plan is to wait for [Woodley], but there are some other fights that could present themselves,” Covington said. “GSP wants to act like he is all hard, like he is the greatest. He wants his legacy and money fights. He knows who the welterweight box office king is. It’s not Tyron Woodley, it’s me. Tyron Woodley did 100,000 pay-per-view buys [at UFC 228], I did 250,000 [at UFC 225], there is only one money fight in the welterweight division, and that is me right now. Anybody can get it, from Nick Diaz to GSP to Tyron Woodley, to the winner of Connor and Khabib. Those are the only fights that interest me right now, otherwise I’ll just wait. I’ll wait to unify my belt.”

Whoever he fights next, Colby Covington wants to make one thing very clear: he is still a champion. The reports that he’d be stripped after Tyron Woodley’s UFC 228 fight with Darren Till were nothing but fake news.

“I’m still the champion, no one is taking nothing from me, just like all this fake news been reporting ‘Oh Colby’s been stripped’ this and that,” he said. “These guys need to their facts right, that’s why BJ Penn Radio is the best.”

“MMAjunkie’s out there putting fake news, MMAFighting, fake news, they need to get their facts and stories straight and that is why I respect BJPenn.com, they do their homework and they get the math right.”

What do you think the future holds for Colby Covington? Who would you like to see him fight next?

This article first appeared on BJPENN.COM on 10/5/2018.