UFC exec believes Nick Diaz might fight again

It has now been almost three years since Nick Diaz’s last fight, a January 2015 no contest with middleweight legend Anderson Silva. That said, there is still widespread hope that he will one day return to the cage.

While UFC President Dana White isn’t optimistic we’ll ever see the older Diaz brother back in the Octagon, UFC VP of athlete health and performance Jeff Novitzky believes we might. He thinks the fighter just needs to work through the issues stemming from his failure to report his whereabouts, as required by USADA.

“Nick was our first fighter that ran into the whereabouts issue,” Novitzky explained on Joe Rogan Experience (h/t MMAJunkie.com) “So he got three whereabouts failures in a rolling 12 months, so he’s currently going through that process. It’s a tough one.”

“I think he does [want to fight],” Novitzky continued. “I think he does. I’ve sat down with him over the past couple months trying to resolve this whereabouts issues. The unfortunate thing there is, look, the whereabouts failures are there to catch people that are cheating and trying to avoid testing. I just think Nick’s lifestyle led to those three whereabouts, not that he was trying to avoid testing. We’re trying to work through that.”

As aforementioned, Novitzky’s optimism is not shared by UFC President Dana White, who has long questioned the Diaz brothers’ desire to fight.

“I highly doubt it,” White told MMAJunkie mid-way through 2017. “I don’t know. I honestly don’t think that, and I can’t speak for him, you’d have to speak with Nick himself, but if you ask me – people ask me, ‘Do you think Ronda (Rousey) is coming back?’ No. I think Ronda’s going to retire. Ronda hasn’t retired, but my opinion is, I think she will. I don’t think Nick Diaz will ever fight again. I just don’t think he has the desire anymore.”

Do you think Nick Diaz will ever fight again?

This article first appeared on BJPenn.com on 1/4/2018.